Grey Timothy/Chapter 6
VI.—THE RACE AT WINDSOR
Pinlow, calling that night, did not see her, guessed from the lame apologies offered by his prospective father-in-law the reason for her absence, and was amused.
“I like ’em with a little fire,” he laughed; “don’t bother, Callander. She’s a bit annoyed; I ought to have asked her first.”
“If she does not marry you,” said Mr Callander, “she is no daughter of mine.”
It might have been an embarrassing meal but for Pinlow’s good spirits and, to employ Mr Callander’s words, ‘his generous magnanimity’.
Half-way through dinner Pinlow interrupted a learned forecast as to the future of Penang Rubbers—his host had been buying these shares—with an inconsequent piece of information.
“By the way, Callander, I’ve arranged to worry that nephew of yours”—this was Pinlow’s heavy form of pleasantry—“he’s running a horse at Windsor on Saturday. I’ve got a man down at his training quarters and I’ve found out the strength of the trial.”
“And you will publish the facts, of course,” said Mr Callander, who had the haziest ideas about racing, and only imagined that his nephew had been detected in some act of gross dishonesty.
“Not exactly,” laughed Pinlow, and condescended to explain.
Pallard’s horse was entered in a sprint race. The horse had been galloped at the training quarters with another which was a well-known public performer, and in this gallop Fixture—such was the horse’s name—had beaten the known performer easily.
“My tout had a deuce of a job to witness the trial,” said Pinlow. “Pallard has taken a big park at Wickham; it is surrounded by a high wall and there is no way of seeing what goes on except by climbing over the wall. But he saw the trial all right.”
“Well, what does all this mean?” asked Callander a trifle impatiently.
“It means that Pallard will take his horse to Windsor, and, adopting the tactics he employed yesterday—oh, I forget you aren’t a regular reader of racing news! Well, to put it briefly, he will wait till a market is primed for something else, then he will step in and back his own horse at a good price.”
“I see,” said Callander, whose Stock Exchange experience enabled him to grasp the significance of the manœuvre. “But, exactly, how can you worry this man Pallard?—and please do not refer to him as my nephew.”
“I can worry him by stealing his market,” replied Pinlow, smiling; “whilst he is waiting for the psychological moment my commissioners will step in and back it. By the way, you have never been on a racecourse?”
“Never,” said Mr Callander emphatically. “It is a sport of which I cannot say I approve. It has perhaps ruined more homes than drink; it attracts the most disreputable”
“Ease your arm,” said Pinlow coarsely; “there’s no need for us to talk that sort of rot—we’re all friends here.”
Mr Callander was ruffled by the rudeness of the interruption, and showed it.
“After all,” Pinlow went on, “we’re men of the world: Est modus in rebus, as dear old Horace said, eh? You needn’t approve of everything you witness. Come down to Windsor on Saturday and approve of that infernal brute’s discomfiture.”
Pinlow left Hill View that night, having extracted a half-promise that the immaculate Mr Callander would, for the first time in his life, visit a racecourse.
“And bring Gladys,” he said, as a brilliant afterthought.
He left Mr Callander, shaking his head doubtfully. Gladys was in disgrace for two days. She sat under the shadow of her father’s displeasure, and, what was harder to bear, her amiable brother’s pity. There was something very annoying in the sorrow of Horace. He passed the butter with hateful solicitude, and his very matutinal greeting was as cheerful as a French éloge.
“Gladys,” he said on the Friday morning, after her father had gone, “the governor is taking you to the races to-morrow.”
“What!”
She stared at him in open-eyed wonder, amazement and incredulity stamped on her beautiful face.
“Now, don’t kick up a row about it,” he said crossly. “Father is only going to oblige Pinlow—we’ve had enough scenes here during the past month to last a lifetime. It puts me off my work, Gladys; really, you’re most awfully selfish. Willock was saying yesterday that my work has gone all to pieces lately, and it’s all your fault.”
His artistic deterioration did not interest her, but the proposed visit to the racecourse did. Perhaps she would see. …
She went red suddenly, and was angry with herself.
“Pinlow has got some game on,” continued Horace; “he is going to get even with this Pallard chap.”
“How?”
She was interested now.
“Oh, I don’t understand much about it,” said Horace carelessly. “By the way, Gladys, I suppose you never saw father about that money?”
She made a wry little face.
“We haven’t been exactly on borrowing terms lately, have we?” she asked dryly. “I have a little money of my own—I received my dividends this week; but, then, so did you.”
Both brother and sister had money bequeathed from their mother.
“Yes,” said Horace reluctantly. “I had mine, but it was swallowed up; could you lend me fifty pounds?”
She shook her head.
“I could let you have twenty,” she said, “and really, Horace, I can’t understand why you want money.”
He was silent for awhile.
“Look here, Glad,” he said at last. “I don’t want you to tell anybody, but a fellow in the City and myself have been speculating in Russian butter. You know there was a scare that butter was going to be high owing to the drought. Well, we bought a lot for delivery hoping to make a ha’penny a pound profit.”
“Well?”
“Well, we sold at a ha’penny a pound loss and were lucky, for big supplies came on the market from Canada, and it nearly crippled us.”
“But I don’t understand,” she said, bewildered. “How much did you buy?”
“About a hundred tons,” said Horace ruefully. “We lost about five hundred pounds between us.”
“But isn’t it gambling?”
“Don’t talk rot!” he answered, roughly for him. “It is business. All businesses are speculative. You buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. If you make a mistake and buy in the dearest and sell in the cheapest, you lose money. That is a law of commerce.”
He was so glib in his explanation that she suspected him of having used the argument before.
“Anyway, I’ll borrow the twenty pounds for a week or so,” he said. “I can fix up the people I owe the difference to; they’re pretty accommodating.”
Gladys Callander was no business woman, but she understood that her brother had been venturing in realms with which she had only the faintest acquaintance.
“Now what about Saturday?” he demanded. “Are you going to make a fuss, or are you going to be a sensible girl?”
“I am going to be a sensible girl,” she said meekly.
Mr Callander accepted her agreement to accompany him to Windsor as a sign of grace.
“I am pleased to see that Gladys is recovering her reason,” he said to her. “Very glad, very gratified. She has distressed me greatly, given me many bad nights, robbing me of sleep which I can ill afford to lose.”
It was a confirmed belief in his mind that he was a martyr to insomnia, though, in truth, he slept very well.
Gladys said nothing. She was engaged in the elucidation of a problem which will appeal to every woman. She was deciding the knotty question summed up in the words, “What shall I wear?”
It was in a costume of dove-grey and pearl-pink that she found herself in her father’s car on the Saturday morning, and Mr Callander ventured the opinion that she looked very charming.
Even to the artistic eye of Horace she was pleasing; to Pinlow, who awaited his guests on the little members’ lawn, she was a vision of loveliness. Neither of the men exaggerated her beauty, for she added to the symmetrical beauty of her face the buoyant carriage of a healthy body.
“I have ordered lunch,” said Pinlow. The bruise on his face had almost disappeared, she observed. The members’ luncheon-room was crowded, for it was he Windsor meeting which follows Ascot, and the greater portion of the Ascot crowd had come in preparation for Ascot Sunday on the river. As she sat at table her eyes wandered over the gaily-dressed throng that filled the room. She hoped, or feared, to see Brian Pallard, but she was disappointed—or relieved—to find he was absent. As if guessing her thoughts, Pinlow turned to her.
“You won’t see Pallard here; he doesn’t come racing for the fun of it, you know. With him ‘it’s your money we want’.”
He had hardly spoken the words when the object of his sneer came in through the door.
She felt the colour go to her face, for she liked the young man—in a sense.
She placed that reserve upon her liking. In a sense, of course, he had behaved abominably and was unworthy of her second thought. And yet how had he behaved badly? He could do no more than what he had done at dinner that night. She did not believe Pinlow’s account of the meeting. She wanted very badly to hear from an independent source the true story of that encounter in the dark.
He was dressed in grey, and wore the lightest of grey Terai hats. The broad-brimmed headgear suited him; she had time to notice that before his hat came off.
Horace had seen him too.
“Who is the lady, I wonder?” he said, sotto voce. Brian had paused at the door, and, after consulting the head waiter, had beckoned to somebody outside. There had entered in response a girl and a man. The girl was very pretty, Gladys observed, and seemed on excellent terms with him; the man was about the same age as Brian.
Brian’s character was unexpectedly defined in the mind of Gladys. Swaying this way and that, now to his favour, now to his disadvantage, it was as last permanently and irrevocably fixed.
She hated Brian. He had behaved disgracefully and had only himself to blame for any disaster which might come upon him. Let him take that wretched woman into his ring and shout ‘A hundred and eight’ at her. She was very pretty—Gladys conceded this regretfully. She could see her from where she sat. She had ‘large, languishing eyes’, Gladys told herself angrily—the very kind of woman that she would expect a man of Brian’s class to be on terms of friendship with. “A racecourse woman,” she said to herself, and shrugged her shoulders. Henceforth she saw Windsor racecourse from a superior plane.
It is a pleasant sensation, this of superiority. It enables one to mix freely with inferior humanity and take no hurt.
So Gladys thought as she made her way to the little stand to watch the first race. All this sort of thing bored her, so she told herself, but in truth she was interested; interested in the beautiful horses that seemed to be on springs as they prinked and pranced or went bounding over the soft turf on their way to the post.
Pinlow found an apt pupil in her. He explained many things which had been so many mysteries to her. She found that the monotonous cry, which came from the crowded ring on her left, was quite intelligible. ‘Seven to one, bar two’, meant that, with the exception of two horses, you could find bookmakers who would lay you seven to one—and probably more—against any other horse in the race. There were curious inconsistencies. ‘Seven to four the field’, meant those odds against the favourite, but ‘a good field’ did not mean a good favourite, but a large number of runners. ‘Field’ was an elastic term; she made a note on her programme to that effect, and was annoyed with herself for having done so. After all, these racing terms were of no interest to her. She did not doubt that the girl with languishing eyes knew them by heart just as a common person like Charles would know them.
“You don’t mind my running away, do you?” asked Pinlow, and Mr Callander gave a courteous little jerk of his head. “I dare say I shall be able to resist the wiles of the devil in your absence,” he said humorously.
Horace had disappeared—Pinlow caught a glimpse of him in the paddock as he went hurrying through.
The two men who awaited him were of that nondescript class from which the ‘horse-watcher’ is drawn. The one was stout and red-faced, the other thin and hungry-looking.
“Good day, my lord,” said the stout man, touching his hat, and the other followed suit.
“Now you are perfectly certain about this trial, Coggs?” asked Pinlow.
“Certain, my lord. I saw it, an’ Gilly saw it, didn’t you, Gilly?”
“I did with me very own eyes,” said the thin man slowly and emphatically.
“Did you find out anything from the lads?” asked Pinlow, and his servant shook his head.
“Can’t find anything from them, sir. He’s got Mr Colter for his private trainer, and the closest lot of stable lads you ever struck. He keeps men to ‘do’ the horses, old cavalry men, used to groomin’ an’ the like, an’ the boys do nothin’ but ridin’. But about this trial, my lord. Fixture, Telbury, an’ Cunning Lass were in it. The filly jumped off an’ took the lead from Telbury till about a furlong from home, when Fixture raced up an’, goin’ to the front, won anyhow.”
“You’re sure of the horses?”
“Certain, my lord. I’d know Telbury anywhere by his white face, and Cunning Lass is one of those bright bays you can’t mistake.”
“How did you find out the name of the other—it hasn’t been raced in this country?”
“I found that, my lord,” said Gilly in sepulchral tones, “after the gallop; they came near the bushes where me an’ Mr Coggs was hidin’, an’ one of the lads said, pattin’ the horse’s neck, ‘Bravo, Fixture, you’ll make ’em gallop on Saturday’.”
Pinlow nodded.
He drew a five-pound note from his pocket and handed it to the stout man.
“Split that between you,” he said.
Returning to the stand, he came face to face with Pallard. They met in the narrow paddock entrance and, after a moment’s hesitation, Brian drew back to allow him to pass.
They were well matched, these two. Neither showed sign of embarrassment, and they passed without exchanging a word.
Making his way up the stand, Lord Pinlow found his guests where he had left them.
“I shall have to leave you again in a little while,” he said; “but I have found out all I want to know.”
Mr Callander smiled. “Gladys and I were saying,” he said, “that if you wanted a thing, we did not doubt that you would get it.”
As a matter of fact, Gladys had taken a very passive part in the conversation—the part of a listener who was not very greatly interested.
“I am not easily baulked,” admitted Pinlow modestly.
He told them what he had learnt, and the girl was all attention in an instant.
“As soon as they start betting,” said Pinlow, “I shall step in and take the cream.”
“But how will that affect Mr Pallard?” she asked.
“Well,” he smiled, “he will have to take what I leave.”
“But is that fair?”
“Everything is fair,” he said generously.
She had only the vaguest idea of what it all meant. She realized in some way that the effect of Lord Pinlow’s action would be to injure Brian—and it was very unfair.
Pinlow was trying to persuade her father to venture a sovereign, and there was a good-natured exchange of banter.
Then a brilliant thought was born in her mind. The numbers were going up for the race, there was plenty of time.
“Which is the paddock?” she asked, and Pinlow pointed out the entrance.
“I am going to look at the horses,” she announced.
Mr Callander looked dubious; he had no desire to enter the paddock himself. He was anxious to avoid publicity as far as possible. Already he imagined that the presence on a racecourse of the head of the reputable firm of Callander & Callander had found sensational copy for the newspapers—he had no mean views concerning his own importance—and he dreaded meeting any of his City friends.
“Will she be all right alone?” he asked.
Pinlow nodded.
“Nobody will bother you,” he said. “You will find your brother there.”
She tripped down the steps of the stand with a heart that beat rapidly. She crossed the slip of lawn that separates the paddock from the members’ enclosure and passed through the gates. Would she find Brian there?She had an idea that this was the most likely place. She walked about the paddock like a lost sheep—so she told herself. There were little groups of men round each horse, watching the saddling operations. Suddenly she came upon Brian and stopped dead. He was watching a horse being led round in the ring, and with him was the pretty girl in blue.
She hesitated for a moment, then Brian saw her and came with quick steps toward her.
“I saw you before, but I dare not face the bodyguard,” he laughed, and gripped her hand tightly. “You must meet Dr Crane and his fiancée”—flick! a big feather-bed of doubt was lifted from her soul—“and”
“I haven’t time,” she said hurriedly. “Father would be very angry if he knew I came, Mr Bri—Mr Pallard,” she went red; “but I felt that I ought to tell you—Lord Pinlow knows all about your horse.”
“Fixture?” There was an amused glint in his eye.
She nodded.
“He knows the trials, or whatever you call them, and if you’re not careful he’ll get the—the cream of the market.”
“He’s welcome,” responded Brian.
“It is all gibberish to me,” she was half laughing; “but I didn’t want—oh, you must think I’m horribly forward to come to you like this; but, you know, I didn’t want a—a relative to suffer”
She held out her hand impulsively, and he took it in his strong grip.
“Good-bye,” she said incoherently. And gently releasing her hand, she half walked, half ran, back to the stand.
Pinlow was there, rather red, very triumphant. He had taken much more champagne with his lunch than was necessary.
“Hark at ’em!” he chuckled exultantly. From the ring came the cry.
“I’ll take six to four—I’ll take six to four!”
“That’s Fixture,” said Pinlow, “he’s an odds-on favourite, and I brought him there before Pallard’s men came into the ring.”
“What does that mean?” she asked in perturbation. She had not succeeded, then, in saving Brian—what she was saving him from she did not know.
“It means that I’ve got the greater part of a thousand pounds on his horse,” said Pinlow. “I’ve taken all the eights, the sixes, the fives and fours, and I’ve let the little punter into the secret. He’s so well backed that Pallard will not be able to get a shilling on him.”
Up the stairs came Pallard, his prismatic glasses slung about his neck. Apparently not seeing the party, he took up his place a little to the front of them.
An acquaintance hailed him from a higher tier.
“Hullo, Pallard!” he said. “Your horse is favourite; I suppose you know all about it?”
Brian smiled, and shot a swift glance at the field, now lined up before the quivering tapes of the starting gate.
“I know it is favourite,” he said, “and I think I know why.”
Pinlow was listening attentively.
“We’ve been bothered by touts at Wickham,” said Brian slowly, “and although I’ve given instructions that horse-watchers are to be given every information and every facility for seeing the gallops, two of the gentry preferred to climb over the wall.”
Pinlow was all attention now.
“So we got up a spoof trial for them,” drawled Brian. “They had been shadowed to some bushes, and the head lad, leading the horse past, let drop the name of the trial winner.”
“Wasn’t it Fixture?”
Pinlow listened with clenched teeth.
“Fixture?” Brian laughed. “Why Fixture wouldn’t beat a ’bus-horse. You can buy Fixture if you will give me fifty pounds for him and promise to treat him kindly!”
“They’re off!”
It was too late now. Pinlow’s shaking hands raised his glasses. He sought the horse carrying the diagonal-striped jacket. It was toiling in the rear from the very start, and finished last.