T HE Efficient Baxter prowled feverishly up and down the yielding carpet of the big drawing-room. His eyes gleamed behind their spectacles, his dome-like brow was corrugated. Except for himself, the room was empty. As far as the scene of the disaster was concerned, the tumult and the shouting had died. It was going on vigorously in practically every other part of the house, but in the drawing-room there was stillness, if not peace.
Baxter paused, came to a decision, went to the wall and pressed the bell.
“Thomas,” he said when that footman presented himself a few moments later.
“Sir?”
“Send Susan to me.”
“Susan, sir?”
“Yes, Susan,” snapped the Efficient One, who had always a short way with the domestic staff. “Susan, Susan, Susan. . . . The new parlourmaid.”
“Oh, yes, sir. Very good, sir.”
Thomas withdrew, outwardly all grave respectfulness, inwardly piqued, as was his wont, at the airy manner in which the secretary flung his orders about at the castle. The domestic staff at Blandings lived in a perpetual state of smouldering discontent under Baxter’s rule.
[p. 240]“Susan,” said Thomas when he arrived in the lower regions, “you’re to go up to the drawing-room. Nosey Parker wants you.”
The pleasant-faced young woman whom he addressed laid down her knitting.
“Who?” she asked.
“Mister Blooming Baxter. When you’ve been here a little longer you’ll know that he’s the feller that owns the place. How he got it I don’t know. Found it,” said Thomas satirically, “in his Christmas stocking, I expect. Anyhow, you’re to go up.”
Thomas’s fellow-footman, Stokes, a serious-looking man with a bald forehead, shook that forehead solemnly.
“Something’s the matter,” he asserted. “You can’t tell me that wasn’t a scream we heard when them lights was out. Or,” he added weightily, for he was a man who looked at every side of a question, “a shriek. It was a shriek or scream. I said so at the time. ‘There,’ I said, ‘listen!’ I said. ‘That’s somebody screaming,’ I said. ‘Or shrieking.’ Something’s up.”
“Well, Baxter hasn’t been murdered, worse luck,” said Thomas. “He’s up there screaming or shrieking for Susan. ‘Send Susan to me!’” proceeded Thomas, giving an always popular imitation. “‘Susan, Susan, Susan.’ So you’d best go, my girl, and see what he wants.”
“Very well.”
“And, Susan,” said Thomas, a tender note creeping into his voice, for already, brief as had been her sojourn at Blandings, he had found the new parlourmaid making a deep impression on him, “if it’s a row of any kind . . .”
“Or description,” interjected Stokes.
“Or description,” continued Thomas, accepting the[p. 241] word, “if ’e’s ’arsh with you for some reason or other, you come right back to me and sob out your troubles on my chest, see? Lay your little ’ead on my shoulder and tell me all about it.”
The new parlourmaid, primly declining to reply to this alluring invitation, started on her journey upstairs; and Thomas, with a not unmanly sigh, resumed his interrupted game of halfpenny nap with colleague Stokes.
*       *       *       *       *
 
The Efficient Baxter had gone to the open window and was gazing out into the night when Susan entered the drawing-room.
“You wished to see me, Mr. Baxter?”
The secretary spun round. So softly had she opened the door, and so noiselessly had she moved when inside the room, that it was not until she spoke that he had become aware of her arrival. It was a characteristic of this girl Susan that she was always apt to be among those present some time before the latter became cognisant of the fact.
“Oh, good evening, Miss Simmons. You came in very quietly.”
“Habit,” said the parlourmaid.
“You gave me quite a start.”
“I’m sorry. What was it,” she asked, dismissing in a positively unfeeling manner the subject of her companion’s jarred nerves, “that you wished to see me about?”
“Shut that door.”
“I have. I always shut doors.”
“Please sit down.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Baxter. It might look odd if anyone should come in.”
[p. 242]“Of course. You think of everything.”
“I always do.”
Baxter stood for a moment, frowning.
“Miss Simmons,” he said, “when I thought it expedient to install a private detective in this house, I insisted on Wragge’s sending you. We had worked together before . . .”
“Sixteenth of December, 1918, to January twelve, 1919, when you were secretary to Mr. Horace Jevons, the American millionaire,” said Miss Simmons as promptly as if he had touched a spring. It was her hobby to remember dates w............