Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online Page A

ape.
    “A remarkable performance, Tadema. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
    Sir Geoffrey had often wanted to kick Evans but never more than now.
    “Come, Tadema, was it because of Lady Chloe? You’ve seen the papers, of course. What poor devil did you lend your clothes to?”
    They were jostling him; hectoring him. His mind shuttered.
    “We’ll let you down lightly. It was the engagement, of course?”
    “Gentlemen?” Tadema raised a protesting hand, “—just a moment. Just a moment, please.”
    The sound of his own voice gave him confidence. It always did; it was so absolutely right.
    “Since you’ve hunted me out—I almost said hounded me down—” the easy, rounded phrases slipped out softly, “—I suppose I must tell you the truth.”
    “I should say so. I’m holding a line,” muttered someone and was instantly suppressed.
    Tadema went smoothly on.
    “Lady Chloe Staratt has said that our engagement was broken off the day before yesterday. Lady Chloe is a very sweet and charming girl but she is not quite accurate. Our engagement was broken off last Sunday—”
    “Why? The whole story. We must have the whole story.”
    Tadema shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands. A faint smile which was not wholly assumed played round his lips.
    “Even an actor has private affairs, gentlemen,” he murmured. “And yet—well—since you’ve come for the truth—”
    Turning swiftly like a conjurer he took Miss Dilling’s quivering hand.
    “This is Miss Chrissie Dilling,” he said simply. “My first love and my last. This evening she has honoured me by accepting the proposal I made her when I first arrived in this town yesterday morning.”
    He paused for the announcement to sink in and then, when he was sure he had all their attention, added superbly and with great dignity: “Even at my age, gentlemen, romance is not wholly dead. There is always one woman—somewhere.”
    He watched them scribbling and his smile widened. Inspiration had arrived.
    Chrissie Dilling, that rare woman, did not speak.
    Some days later Sir Geoffrey Tadema turned away from the contemplation of his wedding presents to glance at the proofs of an interview which his fiancée had granted to a woman’s magazine. Chrissie had brought it to him and now stood at his side while he ran a pencil along the lines.
    “Christiana Dilling glanced at me and I thought I saw something very charming in her wistful blue eyes. ‘Of course, I always hoped he’d come back,” she confessed.” Tadema lifted the pencil.
    “We’ll take out that ‘hoped”, my dear,” he said, “and put ‘knew”. It’s better publicity.”

The Perfect Butler
    Knowles was the perfect butler, and, since the word knows no qualification, he was only that; yet there were some who would have stretched the point and claimed that he was more than perfect, inasmuch as the very art of buttling achieved under his hand a flowering, a golden renascence it never before had known.
    At the moment he was in his pantry at the back of a great Georgian house in Berkeley Square, considering the polish on the Georgian spoons. His son, young Harold, was attending to the spoons, his face pink and absorbed as he rubbed away with the leather.
    Young Harold was his father’s only anxiety. The boy came from an unbroken line of butlers as ancient as the family which they served.
    When the present Knowles looked at young Harold and realised everything the lad had to live up to he trembled. The past can be a cruel master, especially when legend has strengthened its hand, and Knowles feared for Harold. Could Harold make the grade? There were times when his father lay awake wondering.
    When they were alone, as now, in that blessed interval when tea is a thing of the past and dinner only a partly realised dream in the chef’s mind, Knowles would talk to young Harold and impart the deeper secrets of his calling.
    Since young Harold was only fifteen and still human, and Knowles was