I heaved a silent sigh, thinking of what might have been. The garbage I had had to insult the Wooster stomach with at the pub had been of a particularly lethal nature. Generally these rural' pubs are all right in the matter of browsing, but I had been so unfortunate as to pick one run by a branch of the Borgia family. The thought occurred to me as I ate that if Bingley had given his uncle lunch there one day, he wouldn't have had to go to all the bother and expense of buying little-known Asiatic poisons.
I would have told the old relative this, hoping for sympathy, but at this moment the door opened, and in came Jeeves. Opening the conversation with that gentle cough of his that sounds like a very old sheep clearing its throat on a misty mountain top, he said:
'You wished to see me, sir?' He couldn't have had a warmer welcome if he had been the prodigal son whose life story I had had to bone up when I won that Scripture Knowledge prize. The welkin, what there was of it in the drawing- room, rang with our excited yappings.
'Come in, Jeeves,' bellowed the aged relative.
'Yes, come in, Jeeves, come in,' I cried. 'We were waiting for you with... with what?'
'Bated breath,' said the ancestor.
'That's right. With bated breath and-'
'Tense, quivering nerves. Not to mention twitching muscles and bitten finger nails. Tell me, Jeeves, was that you I saw coming away from 5 Ormond Crescent about an hour ago?'
'Yes, madam.'
'You had been seeing Bingley?'
'Yes, madam.'
'About the book?'
'Yes, madam.'
'Did you tell him he had jolly well got to return it?'
'No, madam.'
'Then why on earth did you go to see him? '
'To obtain the book, madam.'
'But you said you didn't tell him-'
'There was no necessity to broach the subject, madam. He had not yet recovered consciousness. If I might explain. On my arrival at his residence he offered me a drink, which I accepted. He took one himself. We talked for awhile of this and that. Then I succeeded in diverting his attention for a moment, and while his scrutiny was elsewhere I was able to insert a chemical substance in his beverage which had the effect of rendering him temporarily insensible. I thus had ample time to make a search of the room. I had assumed that he would be keeping the book there, and I had not been in error. It was in a lower drawer of the desk. I secured it, and took my departure.'
Stunned by this latest revelation of his efficiency and do-it-yourself-ness, I was unable to utter, but the old ancestor gave the sort of cry or yowl which must have rung over many a hunting field, causing members of the Quorn and the Pytchley to leap in their saddles like Mexican jumping beans.
'You mean you slipped him a Mickey Finn? '
'I believe that is what they are termed in the argot, madam.'
'Do you always carry them about with you?'
'I am seldom without a small supply, madam.'
'Never know when they won't come in handy, eh?'
'Precisely, madam. Opportunities for their use are constantly arising.'
'Well, I can only say Thank you. You have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.'
'It is kind of you to say so, Madam.'
'Much obliged, Jeeves.'
'Not at all, madam.'
I was expecting the aged relative to turn to me at this point and tick me off for not having had the sense to give Bingley a Mickey Finn myself, and I knew, for you cannot reason with aunts, that it would be no use pleading that I hadn't got any; but her jocund mood caused her to abstain. Returning to the subject of L. P. Runkle, she said this had made her realize that her luck was in, after all, and she was going to press it.
'I'll go and see him now,' she yipped, 'and I confidently expect to play on him as on a stringed instrument. Out of my way, young Bertie,' she cried, heading for the door, 'or I'll trample you to the dust. Yoicks! ' she added, reverting to the patois of the old hunting days. 'Tally ho ! Gone away ! Hark forrard ! '.
Or words to that effect.
CHAPTER Twelve
Her departure -- at, I should estimate, some sixty m.p.h. -- left behind it the sort of quivering stillness you get during hurricane time in America, when the howling gale, having shaken you to the back teeth, passes on to tickle up residents in spots further west. Kind of a dazed feeling it gives you. I turned to Jeeves, and found him, of course, as serene and unmoved as an oyster on the half shell. He might have been watching yowling aunts shoot out of rooms like bullets from early boyhood.
'What was that she said, Jeeves?'
'Yoicks, sir, if I am not mistaken. It seemed to me that Madam also added Tally-ho, Gone away and Hark
