You know, there was a kind of rummy something about his manner.
Perfectly all right and all that, but not what you'd call chirpy. It somehow
gave me the impression that he wasn't keen on Florence. Well, of course, it
wasn't my business. I supposed that while he had been valeting old
Worplesdon she must have trodden on his toes in some way. Florence was a
dear girl, and, seen sideways, most awfully good-looking; but if she had a
fault it was a tendency to be a bit imperious with the domestic staff.... Continuar leyendo

  I had known the family ever since I was a kid, and from boyhood up this
old boy had put the fear of death into me. Time, the great healer, could
never remove from my memory the occasion when he found me -- then a
stripling 

He couldn't tell me anything I didn't know about the old boy's
eccentricity. This Lord Worplesdon was Florence's father. He was the old
buster who, a few years later, came down to breakfast one morning. Lifted
the first cover he saw, said 'Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Damn all eggs!' in an
overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France, never to
return to the bosom of his family. This, mind you, being a bit of luck for
the bosom of the family, for old Worplesdon had the worst temper in... Continuar leyendo

'Very good, sir.' He looked past me at the mantelpiece. 'That is an
excellent likeness of Lady Florence Craye, sir. It is two years since I saw
her ladyship. I was at one time in Lord Worplesdon's employment. I tendered
my resignation because I could not see eye to eye with his lordship in his
desire to dine in dress trousers, a flannel shirt, and a shooting coat

  I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that
morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had
touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with
a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The
sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and,
generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

If you would drink this, sir,' he said, with a kind of bedside manner,
rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. 'It
is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that
gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives
it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely
invigorating after a late evening.

  I'd have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he
floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That
impressed me from the start. Meadows had had flat feet and used to clump.
This fellow didn't seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had
a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the
lads.

  I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the
bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish
sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

  'I was sent by the agency, sir,' he said. 'I was given to understand
that you required a valet.'

I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the
night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was
feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence
Craye had given me. 

The thing really began when I got back to Easeby, my uncle's place in
Shropshire. I was spending a week or so there, as I generally did in the
summer; and I had had to break my visit to come back to London to get a new
valet. I had found Meadowes, the fellow I had taken to Easeby with me,
sneaking my silk socks, a thing no bloke of spirit could stick at any price.
It transpiring, moreoever, that he had looted a lot of other things here and
there about the place, I was reluctantly compelled to hand... Continuar leyendo