OCR Text |
Show . $ WHERE'S NORHEYS? SYNOPSIS. In London the teller of the story of the adventures adven-tures of "Kins Tommy," and known hereafter as "Uncle Bill," is Informed by Lord Norheys, son of an old friend, that Lord Troyte. head of the British foreign for-eign office, Norheys" uncle, has a scheme to make him (Norheys) king of Lystria, in central Ku-rope, Ku-rope, through marriage to Calypso, Ca-lypso, daughter of King Wladis-laws, Wladis-laws, deposed monarch of that country. A financier, Procophis Cable, knows there is oil in profusion pro-fusion in Lystria,' and with an Knglish king on the throne the output could be secured for England. Eng-land. Norheys, in love with a stage dancer, Viola Temple, is not enthusiastic over the proposition. propo-sition. The patriarch, Menelaus,. highest ecclesiastical dignitary in Lystria, is heartily in favor of the restoration of the monarchy, and Cable has generously financed the sentiment. Calypso is making mak-ing a living dancing in the "Mas-cotte," "Mas-cotte," Berlin cabaret. Norheys refuses to entertain the idea of giving up Viola Temple, to whom he is secretly engaged. "Uncle Bill's" sister Emily urges him to secure a passport from Lord Troyte for a certain Janet Church, strongminded female who wants to visit Lystria in the interests of a society for world peace. Janet Church leaves for Berlin. "Uncle Bill" is again appealed to by his sister to find a certain curate (name not given) giv-en) who has left his parish in ' Ireland for a visit to Berlin, and cannot be found. CHAPTER V Continued ' 4 "Viola threw Ills dirty money in By George A. Birmingham Copyright by Bobbs-Merrill Co. W. N. U. Service ing all ttiat happened during the war, that Berlin is a place a clergyman ought to go to for a holiday, not a good clergyman. It seems to me a callous thing to do. scarcely what I should call Christian. Anyhow, he went there. At least he said he was going there, and I suppose he really did, for tin) t is where the postcard came from. He left his address before he started, in case anything went wrong in the parish and we wanted him back. Directly the poor canon broke down Mrs. Pyke telegraphed to Berlin, Ber-lin, but no answer came. Then I telegraphed. tel-egraphed. When I got no answer I telegraphed again to the manager of the hotel. I got a reply saying that he had left two days after he arrived ar-rived and not given any address. "Now I know that with your influence influ-ence and all your London friends I am sure Lord Edmund Troyte could do something to help us " Apparently I was to set our consular con-sular service to work to find a curate who was rampaging about' Central Europe. I should look a nice fool if I went to the Foreign office with a request like that. I was inclined to agree with Emily. That curate of hers should never have been a clergyman. clergy-man. I sympathized with her, and with Canon Pyke, and with the parish. par-ish. I even sympathized slightly with the curate. But I was not going to do anything. I slipped Emily's letters into the "Unanswered" basket on top of her earlier letter about Janet Church. But 1 I! f basket on my desk was becoming large. Then my servant brought me In some letters which bad just arrived by post. I glanced at the envelopes anxiously, fearing that either Emily or her dear Canon Pyke had written again. I was relieved to find that the only real letter was addressed in Edmund Troyte's writing Along with it was a postcard. 1 began with Edmund Troyte. He invited me to dine witn him that very evening. "You and I," lie wrote, "nobody else. I want to talk to you about Norheys." I was gettmg a little tired of being be-ing talked to about Norheys. I admit ad-mit that I am that young man's godfather, god-father, hut that does not make me responsible for all his actions. Lord Edmund ought to be capable of looking look-ing after his own nephew. Then it occurred to me that if Edmund Troyte went on worrying me I might as well have the satisfaction of worrying wor-rying him. I would tell him the story of Emily's curate and see how he liked being consulted about business which is none of his. I telephoned my acceptance of his invitation and then went back to the postcard. It came from Janet Church and announced that she had got as far as Berlin and meant to go farther. Janet was staying in the Adlon hotel. ho-tel. The address reminded me of Emily's curate and a really brilliant idea occurred to me. I would give her a little in return. I wrote her a long letter in which I explained that a really valuable curate had disappeared, having been last heard of at the Adlon hotel in Berlin. I said that foul play was suspected, which I am sure was true. Emily evidently thought that the young man had gone off on a disreputable disrep-utable spree, which would have been foul play on his paj-t. Canon Pyke feared that he had been decoyed into a den of infamy and there robbed foul 1 play on the part of someone else. I asked Janet to stay a few days longer in Berlin to go Into the matter thoroughly. It was just the sort of thing she ought to do. "The curate's name," I wrote, "has unfortunately not been told me. But that won't be any real obstacle. There cannot be many English curates at large in Berlin. If you find one at all, he'll probably be me one we want. He has a hearty manner, man-ner, is full of energy and good spirits. In all probability his face is round and plump. My sister Emily is most anxious about him, so I'm sure you'll do your best." Then I wrote to Emily. "I'm delighted to help in any way I can in the good work of finding your lost curate. I am dining with Edmund Troyte this evening and intend to put the whole case before him. You can confidently count on everything possible pos-sible being done. I have also written writ-ten to Janet Church, who is in Berlin. Ber-lin. She is just the kind of woman who will find a curate however carefully care-fully he is hidden or, if your suspicion suspi-cion is' justified, however carefully he has hidden himself. It would be a thousand pities if he were permanently perma-nently lost. But we need not anticipate antic-ipate that. Give my kind regards to the canon." CHAPTER VI Troyte and I dined very comfortably comfort-ably and, being wise men, talked about nothing unpleasant until the business of eating was over. When I had finished my second glass oi port we went into the library for our coffee. A servant put a small table before us, set coffee, cognac and cigarettes on it and then wen away. I was just about to begin the ta'ie of Emily's lost curate when Troyte asked me an abrupt question. "Do you know where Norheys is?" "At this hour," I said, "he's generally gener-ally in the Belvedere." The Belvedere is the theater In which Miss Temple dances. Norheys unless lie lias some important en gagement elsewhere, hangs about her dressing room until her turn is over. Then he drives her home. "He's not at the Belvedere tonight," to-night," said Troyte. "In fact, he's not in town at all." "lie didn't say anything to me about going away," I said, "hut then I haven't seen him for the last two days." "Nobody has seen him for the last two days," said Troyte. "I wanted to speak to him today and I telephoned tele-phoned to his rooms. His man told me that he went away the day he-fore he-fore yesterday. lie left no address, j so his letters aren't being forwarded. I made inquiries at his clubs, but he left no address at any of them. All his man could tell nie was that he went off with two suitcases and the taxi man was ordered to take him to j Charing Cross." Well, in th circumstances it does seem a bit important to know where is Norheys Hes he skipped out or eloped? (TO BE CONTINUED 1 his face," said Norheys, "and you'd have thought that would have been enough for him. But it wasn't. When he saw she wasn't going to be bribed he took a high moral tone with her, talked about ruining the prospects of a bright young life mine, the beast meant, not hers. There'd have been some sense in talking about getting married ruining her prospects considering consid-ering the way she dances. But what was the good of talking about ruining ruin-ing me? All the same, that's what he did. He told her all about that Calypso girl and what a scoop it would be for me to marry her. Now, what do you think of that, Uncle Bill?" "Did she promise to give you up?" "Of course she didn't. And what the devil good would It have been if she had? I wouldn't have given her up. What I always say is this : If a fellow won't give up a girl, there's no use the girl's trying to give up the fellow, especially if. she happens to be fond of him. You see what I mean, don't you, Uncle Bill? Well, after making Viola cry, which is a thing no man would do unless he was an actual devil, that octopus took to threatening her. He said that, being a princess, the Calypso girl could marry me if she chose ; only had to say the word and there we were. Viola doesn't know much about princesses, prin-cesses, but she' didn't believe that. All the same, it made her more than n bit uncomfortable." It seems, as I heard afterward, to have roused Miss Temple to simple but effective action. I do not know whether she told Norheys what she had done. If she did, he did not con- fide in me. "So you can tell Uncle Ned," he said, "to keep that disgusting Semitic Semit-ic toad of Ills chained up for the future. fu-ture. If I catch him fooling round Viola's Vio-la's flat again there'll be murder done." "I'm afraid," I said, "that this will be a disappointment to your uncle. He's rather set his heart on seeing you king of Lystria." "I haven't the slightest objection to being king of Lystria." "But you can't be If you won't marry mar-ry the princess." "I'm not so sure about that," said Norheys. "After all, if a thing can't be done in one way it generally can In another. Just you try and make that clear to Uncle Ned. Tell him I'm an uncommonly dutiful nephew and all that, as keen as nuts on bucking buck-ing up the family and pouring oil all over the good old empire; but there's one thing I can't and won't do." "Marry the princess?" 1 "No. I'll marry her if I have to, but I won't go back on Viola." I never made all that clear to Troyte. Indeed, I never tried to. But Norheys succeeded in explaining himself, him-self, more or less, to his uncde, and I heard no more of the matter for some little time. Another worry a small, even a ridiculous ri-diculous one came to make my life uneasy. My sister Emily wrote to me that she lost a curate. She wanted want-ed me to set the whole machinery of the British empire to work to find the creature for her. He was not, It appeared, ap-peared, a particularly valuable curate. Emily admitted that she did not like him. She went so fur as to say that he was not the sort of man who ought to have been In Holy Orders. But he was the only curate there was in Emily' parish and they could not get on without him because the rec- tor. Canon Pyke, had fallen suddenly 111. , The curate had gone off on a hol iday, which, according to Emily, he did not deserve. Almost Immediately Immediate-ly after his departure Canon Pyke ban broken down. "All we've- neard from him since he itn is one postcard which" came from Berlin and has a picture of a mu-Kuiu mu-Kuiu on It. I don't think, consider- Then My Servant Brought Me in Some Letters Which Had Just Arrived by Post. I was not allowed to dismiss the matter mat-ter from my mind. I got another letter let-ter the next day. "I'm afraid I forgot to mention," she wrote, "that the address he gave us was the Adlon hotel. He said that if anything went wrong in "the parish he would come back at once." She had not forgotten to give me that address. What Emily had forgotten for-gotten to tell me was the curate's name. That rather tied my hands, or would have tied them if I had meant to do anything. Next day I got a fourth letter from Emily. In It she enclosed twelve penny stamps. "Please get our ambassador in Berlin Ber-lin to telegraph," she wrote, "as soon as he finds out where our curate is. I don't know what it costs to send a telegram to Berlin, but I send twelve stamps which ought to be enough considering the present state of the exchange. Besides, an ambassador probably gets his telegrams sent cheap." That letter joined the others in the basket. By the same post came one from Canon Pyke himself written in pencil pen-cil from his bed. lie began apologetically. apolo-getically. He would never have dreamed of troubling me with bis private pri-vate affairs had not his friend Mrs. Chambers (my sister Emily) urged him to write to me on a subject very near to his heart at the moment the lost curate. "The dear fellow," he went on. "is not in all respects exactly what a clergyman ought to be. At the same time, he is a worthy young man. full of heartiness and energy. What makes us fear that he may have involved in-volved himself in some serious difficulty diffi-culty is that he is by natural disposition dispo-sition both daring and adventurous, more so perhaps t'lan one of our younger clergy ouglvt to he. If you can" He, too. seenvd to think that I ought to get the Foreign office to send out a search party to Berlin or perhaps to get the ambassador and the bead of the Inter-Allied Mission of Control to take the matter up. His letter Joined Emily's in the basket. Then Emily took to telegraphing to me. She is a frugal woman whose spare money goes to missionary societies, so-cieties, but she spent a lot on telegrams. tele-grams. They kept getting longer and longer. There was no doubt that she was in earnest about finding that curate. I disposed of the fourth telegram In the usual way. The pile in the |