Pop Bassett intervened, speaking at his sniffiest. Her comparison of him to a buzzard, though perfectly accurate, seemed to have piqued him.
‘We were savagely attacked by your dog.’
‘Not so much attacked,’ I said, ‘as given nasty looks. We didn’t vouchsafe him time to attack us, deeming it best to get out of his sphere of influence before he could settle down to work. He’s been trying to get at us for the last two hours, at least it seems like two hours.’
She was quick to defend the dumb chum.
‘Well, how can you blame the poor angel? Naturally he thought you were international spies in the pay of Moscow. Prowling about the house at this time of night. I can understand Bertie doing it, because he was dropped on the head as a baby, but I’m surprised at you, Uncle Watkyn. Why don’t you go to bed?’
‘I shall be delighted to go to bed,’ said Pop Basseit stiffly, ‘if you will kindly remove this animal. He is a public menace.’
‘Very highly-strung,’ I put in. ‘We were remarking on it only just now.’
‘He’s all right, if you don’t go out of your way to stir him up. Get back to your basket, Bartholomew, you bounder,’ said Stiffy, and such was the magic of her personality that the hound turned on its heel without a word and passed into the night.
Pop Bassett climbed down from the chest, and directed a fishy magisterial look at me.
‘Good night, Mr. Wooster. If there is any more of my furniture you wish to break, pray consider yourself at perfect liberty to indulge your peculiar tastes,’ he said, and he, too, passed into the night.
Stiffy looked after him with a thoughtful eye.
‘I don’t believe Uncle Watkyn likes you, Bertie. I noticed the way he kept staring at you at dinner, as if appalled. Well, I don’t wonder your arrival hit him hard. It did me. I’ve never been so surprised in my life as when you suddenly bobbed up like a corpse rising to the surface of a sheet of water. Harold told me he had pleaded with you to come here, but nothing would induce you. What made you change your mind?’
In my previous sojourn at Totleigh Towers circumstances had compelled me to confide in this young prune my position as regarded her cousin Madeline, so I had no hesitation now in giving her the low-down.
‘I learned that there was trouble between Madeline and Gussie, due, I have since been informed, to her forcing him to follow in the footsteps of the poet Shelley and become a vegetarian, and I felt that I might accomplish something as a raisonneur?’
‘As a whatonneur?’
‘I thought that would be a bit above your head. It’s a French expression meaning, I believe, though I would have to check with Jeeves, a calm kindly man of the world who intervenes when a rift has occurred between two loving hearts and brings them together again. Very essential in the present crisis.’
‘You mean that if Madeline hands Gussie the pink slip, she’ll marry you?’
‘That, broadly, is about the strength of it. And while I admire and respect Madeline, I’m all against the idea of having her smiling face peeping at me over the coffee pot for the rest of my life. So I came along here to see what I could do.’
‘Well, you couldn’t have come at a better moment. Now you’re here, you can get cracking on that job Harold told you I want you to do for me.’
I saw that the time had come for some prompt in-the-bud-nipping.
‘Include me out. I won’t touch it. I know you and your jobs.’
‘But this is something quite simple. You can do it on your head. And you’ll be bringing sunshine and happiness into the life of a poor slob who can do with a bit of both. Were you ever a Boy Scout?’
‘Not since early boyhood.’
‘Then you’ve lots of leeway to make up in the way of kind deeds. This’ll be a nice start for you. The facts are as follows.’
‘I don’t want to hear them.’