Part 30 (1/2)

Algy's remarks, coming on top of the Wally Mason episode, had shaken him. The London in which he and Derek moved and had their being is nothing but a village, and it was evident that village gossip was hostile to Derek. People were talking about him. Local opinion had decided that he had behaved badly. Already one man had cut him.

Freddie blenched at a sudden vision of streetfuls of men, long Piccadillys of men, all cutting him, one after the other. Something had got to be done.

The subject was not an easy one to broach to his somewhat forbidding friend, as he discovered when the latter arrived about half an hour later. Derek had been attending the semi-annual banquet of the Wors.h.i.+pful Dry-Salters Company down in the City, understudying one of the speakers, a leading member of Parliament, who had been unable to appear; and he was still in the grip of that feeling of degraded repletion which City dinners induce.

Yet, unfavourably disposed as, judging by his silence and the occasional moody grunts he uttered, he appeared to be to a discussion of his private affairs, it seemed to Freddie impossible that the night should be allowed to pa.s.s without some word spoken on the subject. He thought of Ronny and what Ronny had said, of Algy and what Algy had said, of Wally Mason and how Wally had behaved in this very room; and he nerved himself to the task.

”Derek, old top.”

A grunt.

”I say, Derek, old bean.”

Derek roused himself, and looked gloomily across the room to where he stood, warming his legs at the blaze.

”Well?”

Freddie found a difficulty in selecting words. A ticklish business, this. One that might well have disconcerted a diplomat. Freddie was no diplomat, and the fact enabled him to find a way in the present crisis. Equipped by nature with an amiable tactlessness and a happy gift of blundering, he charged straight at the main point, and landed on it like a circus elephant alighting on a bottle.

”I say, you know, about Jill!”

He stooped to rub the backs of his legs, on which the fire was playing with a little too fierce a glow, and missed his companion's start and the sudden thickening of his bushy eyebrows.

”Well?” said Derek again.

Freddie nerved himself to proceed. A thought flashed across his mind that Derek was looking exactly like Lady Underhill. It was the first time he had seen the family resemblance quite so marked.

”Ronny Devereux was saying....” faltered Freddie.

”d.a.m.n Ronny Devereux!”

”Oh, absolutely! But....”

”Ronny Devereux! Who the devil _is_ Ronny Devereux?”

”Why, old man, you've heard me speak of him, haven't you? Pal of mine.

He came down to the station with Algy and me to meet your mater that morning.”

”Oh, _that_ fellow? And he has been saying something about...?”

”It isn't only Ronny, you know,” Freddie hastened to interject. ”Algy Martyn's talking about it, too. And lots of other fellows. And Algy's sister and a lot of peoples They're all saying....”

”What are they saying?”

Freddie bent down and chafed the back of his legs. He simply couldn't look at Derek while he had that Lady Underhill expression on the old map. Rummy he had never noticed before how extraordinarily like his mother he was. Freddie was conscious of a faint sense of grievance. He could not have put it into words, but what he felt was that a fellow had no right to go about looking like Lady Underhill.

”What are they saying?” repeated Derek grimly.

”Well....” Freddie hesitated. ”That it's a bit tough.... On Jill, you know.”

”They think I behaved badly?”