Appleby Talks Again by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

grand relations simply leading a fashionable life. But he liked his picture of the head of the family with his back to the ancestral wall, and holding out against the degeneracy of the modern world.
    “Well, here I was in a false position, and there was only one factor which might possibly save me from disgrace. Hiram’s English visit was drawing to an end. And he was so shy – so reluctant to move in any sort of strange society – that he was quite unlikely to hear anything of the true situation here at Water Poole unless I told him myself. But of course there was a snag.” Richard Poole paused, and then appealed to Appleby. “You can see what it was?”
    “It was hardly decent not to invite him here.”
    “Exactly. When Hiram took his leave of me after that luncheon party it was impossible for me not to say something to that effect. To avoid it would have been utterly indecent. Of course I can see now things that I could have said. I might have declared that some theatrical tour was carrying me off to Brazil next morning. But no ingenuity of that sort came into my head. I did the only conceivably proper thing, and said that I hoped within the next few days to have some suggestion for his coming down to the old place. I could see that he was overjoyed. And as he went away he did, in his diffident fashion, say something quite positive. He would rather his visit didn’t take the form of an active social engagement. His health was as I knew it to be, and his remaining vitality was sufficient for spectatorship rather than intercourse. That gave me my idea.”
    “Was it quite a new venture?” Appleby asked the question curiously. “Or are you in the habit of organising elaborate hoaxes?”
    “I’ve never done anything of the sort before – and as a matter of fact it took some time to come to me. At first my only notion was of some procedure amounting to a confession, with the addition of anything I could think of to soften the blow. I’d have Hiram down, show him the place as it is, and say how much I hoped to get back one day. What prevented me from doing this was a scruple.”
    “I’d call it the honest course to have pursued.”
    “It would have been a sort of begging.” Richard Poole spoke with sudden heat. “Don’t you see? Hiram is a tremendously wealthy man. Showing him Water Poole in its decay would simply be asking him to put his hand in his pocket. I found I couldn’t do it.”
    “I don’t believe him!” Once more the force of her emotions constrained Miss Jones to intervene. “And I shan’t believe another word he says. It is perfectly obvious that Mr Poole contrived some disgraceful mercenary plot against his relative – his distant relative-and that now he is perverting the whole matter.”
    “Didn’t I say I’d meet with incredulity?” The owner of Water Poole appealed this time to Judith. “But that is the simple fact. I had reached a position at which it became a point of honour to exhibit this house as a going concern, standing in no need of the wash-tub millions. I had a good idea, by the way, to what purposes Hiram was proposing that those millions should in fact be devoted, for he had spoken to me, very briefly, of his philanthropic interests and – as he called them – testamentary dispositions. But that’s by the way. Here I was, thinking up some means of pleasing Hiram and getting myself out of a ridiculous scrape.
    “Nothing at first came to me, and I let the matter rest for longer than I intended. Then I got a note from Hiram, telling me when he was due to sail for New York. He said nothing about Water Poole, of course, but in the circumstances this intimation of his departure could not be other than an implicit reproach. I was rather desperate. And then I noticed the date on which he was sailing.
    “It was, as a matter of fact, today’s date – and at that I had my inspiration. I became a demon – perhaps Mr Buttery would say a goblin – of energy, and by that