29 Three Men and a Maid

“Hullo, Sam!” said Eustace.

There was a brief silence. The conversational opening had been a little unfortunately chosen, for it reminded both men of a painful episode in their recent lives.

“What are you doing here?” asked Eustace.

“What are you doing here?” asked Sam.

“I came to see you,” said Eustace, leading his cousin out of the lobby and onto the bleak esplanade. A fine rain had begun to fall, and Bingley looked, if possible, worse than ever. “I asked for you at your club, and they told me you had come down here.”

“What did you want to see me about?”

“The fact is, old man, I’m in a bit of a hole.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s rather a long story,” said Eustace deprecatingly.

“Go ahead.”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Have a dash at starting at the beginning.”

Eustace stared gloomily at a stranded crab on the beach below. The crab stared gloomily back.

“Well, you remember my telling you about the girl I met on the boat?”

“Jane Something?”

“Jane Hubbard,” said Eustace reverently. “Sam, I love that girl.”

“I know. You told me.”

“But I didn’t tell her. I tried to muster up the nerve, but we got to Southampton without my having clicked. What a dashed difficult thing a proposal is to bring off, isn’t it! I didn’t bring it off, and it began to look to me as though I was in the soup. And then she told me something which gave me an idea. She said the Bennetts had invited her to stay with them in the country when she got to England, Old Mr. Bennett and his pal Mortimer, Bream’s father, were trying to get a house somewhere which they could share. Only so far they hadn’t managed to find the house they wanted. When I heard that, I said ‘Ha!’”

“You said what?” asked Sam.

“I said ‘Ha!’”

“Why?”

“Because I had an idea. Don’t interrupt, old man, or you’ll get me muddled. Where was I?”

“I don’t know.”

“I remember. I’d just got the idea. I happened to know, you see, that Bennett and Mortimer were both frightfully keen on getting Windles for the summer, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it and gave them both the miss- in-baulk. It suddenly occurred to me that mother was going to be away in America all the summer, so why shouldn’t I make a private deal, let them the house, and make it a stipulation that I was to stay there to look after things? And, to cut a long story short, that’s what I did.”

“You let Windles?”

“Yes. Old Bennett was down on the dock at Southampton to meet Wilhelmina, and I fixed it up with him then and there. He was so bucked at the idea of getting the place that he didn’t kick for a moment at the suggestion that I should stick on at the house. Said he would be delighted to have me there, and wrote out a fat check on the spot. We hired a car and drove straight over—it’s only about twenty miles from Southampton, you know,—and we’ve been there ever since. Bennett sent a wire to Mortimer, telling him to join us, and he came down next day.”

He paused, and looked at Sam as though desiring comment. Sam had none to offer.

“Why do you say you’re in a hole?” he asked. “It seems to me as though you had done yourself a bit of good. You’ve got the check, and you’re in the same house with Miss Hubbard. What more do you want?”

“But suppose mother gets to hear about it?”

“Well?”

“She’d be sorer than a sunburned neck.”

“Probably. But why should she hear of it?”

“Ah! I’m coming to that.”

“Is there some more of the story?”

“Quite a lot.”

“Charge on,” said Sam resignedly.

Eustace Hignett fixed a despondent gaze on the shingle, up which the gray waves were crawling with their usual sluggish air of wishing themselves elsewhere. A rain-drop fell down the back of his neck, but he did not notice it.

“It was the weather that really started it,” he said.

“Started what?”

“The trouble. What sort of weather have you been having here?”