I might have risked a fiver on this at say twelve to eight, but it didn’t seem fitting. But telling Jeeves the facts was a good idea, and I did so without delay, being careful to lay a proper foundation.
‘Jeeves,’ I said.
‘Sir?’ he responded.
‘Sorry to interrupt you again. Were you reading Spinoza?’
‘No, sir, I was writing a letter to my Uncle Charlie.
‘ ‘Charlie Silversmith,’ I explained in an aside to the ancestor. ‘Butler at Deverill Hall. One of the best.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I know few men whom I esteem more highly than your Uncle Charlie. Well, we won’t keep you long. It’s just that another problem presenting certain points of interest has come up. In a recent conversation I revealed to you the situation relating to Tuppy Glossop and L. P. Runkle. You recall? ‘
‘Yes, sir. Madam was hoping to extract a certain sum of money from Mr. Runkle on Mr. Glossop’s behalf.’
‘Exactly. Well, it didn’t come off.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, sir.’
‘But not, I imagine, surprised. If I remember, you considered it a hundred to one shot.’
‘Approximately that, sir.’
‘Runkle being short of bowels of compassion.’
‘Precisely, sir. A twenty minute egg.’
Here the ancestor repeated her doubts with regard to L. P. Runkle’s legitimacy, and would, I think, have developed the theme had I not shushed her down with a raised hand.
‘She pleaded in vain,’ I said. ‘He sent her away with a flea in her ear. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he laughed her to scorn.’
‘The superfatted old son of a bachelor,’ the ancestor interposed, and once more I shushed her down.
‘Well, you know what happens when you do that sort of thing to a woman of spirit. Thoughts of reprisals fill her mind. And so, coming to the nub, she decided to purloin Runkle’s porringer. But I mustn’t mislead you. She did this not as an act of vengeance, if you know what I mean, but in order to have a bargaining point when she renewed her application. “Brass up”, she would have said when once more urging him to scare the moths out of his pocketbook, “or you won’t get back your porringer”. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly clear, sir. I find you very lucid.’
‘Now first it will have to be explained to you what a porringer is, and here I am handicapped by not having the foggiest notion myself, except that it’s silver and old and the sort of thing Uncle Tom has in his collection. Runkle was hoping to sell it to him. Could you supply any details?’ I asked the aged relative.
She knitted the brows a bit, and said she couldn’t do much in that direction.
‘All I know is that it was made in the time of Charles the Second by some Dutchman or other.’
‘Then I think I know the porringer to which you allude, sir,’ said Jeeves, his face lighting up as much as it ever lights up, he for reasons of his own preferring at all times to preserve the impassivity of a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s.
‘It was featured in a Sotheby’s catalogue at which I happened to be glancing not long ago. Would it,’ he asked the ancestor, ‘be a silver-gilt porringer on a circular moulded foot, the lower part chased with acanthus foliage, with beaded scroll handles, the cover surmounted by a foliage on a rosette of swirling acanthus leaves, the stand of tazza form on circular detachable feet with acanthus border joined to a multifoil plate, the palin top with upcurved rim?’
He paused for a reply, but the ancestor did not speak immediately, her aspect that of one who has been run over by a municipal tram. Odd, really, because she must have been listening to that sort of thing from Uncle Tom for years. Finally she mumbled that she wouldn’t be surprised or she wouldn’t wonder or something like that.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said.
‘I fancy it must be the same, madam. You mentioned a workman of Dutch origin. Would the name be Hans Conrael Brechtel of the Hague? ‘