A Night of Errors Read Online Free PDF Page A

Greengrave – if it were got out into the open. And I think it would help Oliver. Won’t you try?’
    ‘You like finding out about people. I can see that.’
    ‘Try, Lucy?’ The vicar was startled.
    ‘I don’t at all like doing anything of the sort. It is apt to seem officious and impertinent, even in a priest.’
    ‘Yes, I know that too. You find personal relationships rather a trial. But you happen to have the sort of brain that does eventually piece people together and see what a thing is all about.’
    Mr Greengrave laughed. ‘You seem already to know much more about me that I can ever hope to learn about you – let alone about this rather hypothetical skeleton in Lady Dromio’s cupboard. But of course if I could help it would be my duty to do so. And I should be very pleased to help you, my dear. I am afraid I spoke to you rather crudely at the beginning of our walk.’
    ‘Not a bit of it,’ Lucy sighed. ‘Well, I hardly suppose you can come back to the Hall now and begin turning out the cupboards straight away. Still’ – her voice took on a resigned tone – ‘there’s plenty of time. We take our tempo from Swindle, I think. There’s always oceans of time with the Dromios.’
    But in this, as it happened, Lucy was mistaken.

 
     
2
    To talk in one’s sleep is common enough, and only occasionally dangerous. To walk in one’s sleep is a frequent vagary, much exploited by sensational writers long before Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone . To drink in one’s sleep is an accomplishment altogether more unusual, and one the possibilities of which fiction has left unexplored. Swindle, the ancient butler at Sherris, was said to do all three of these things.
    Swindle was sleeping now. A cheerful fire burnt in his sanctum; every now and then it was noiselessly replenished by one of the two able-bodied young men whom Swindle kept in thrall. Before this the feet of Swindle, unprofessionally encased in felt slippers, comfortably toasted. His snowy head reposed upon a handsome cushion which Lady Dromio had for some time missed from her favourite corner of the drawing-room. Beside him was a decanter and a glass of port. From this, and without calling upon the unnecessary intervention of the conscious mind, Swindle recruited himself as he slept.
    Port wine has long since ceased to be regarded as a normal before-dinner drink. But Swindle – apart from the half-pint of sherry which he always consumed after his morning stroll in the park – drank nothing else, and this for a curious reason. Fifty years ago it had been discovered that of all those who served the then vast and ramifying Dromio interests it was Sir Romeo’s butler who had the most exact and finely discriminating palate for wines. As the years passed, and Swindle’s experience and virtuosity grew, he had become increasingly without challenge the firm’s final court of appeal, being often whirled away to pronounce, before an anxious board of directors, a verdict upon the Beaune of Les Fèves, Les Grèves, or Le Clos de la Mousse. And Swindle, holding to the persuasion that if one is to taste wines one must certainly not acquire the habit of drinking them, confined himself to the exports of Jerez and Oporto. It is possible that had Swindle regularly allowed himself recourse to the mollifying and mundifying influences of one of the grand crus classés his character would have resisted that corruption which – the historian tells us – all power brings. As it was, Swindle’s was not an amiable disposition. By Pride or Covetousness he was not notably distinguished. But of the five remaining Deadly Sins he was a very sufficient licentiate of four, while to the fifth it was believed that he had said good-bye only round about his eightieth birthday. And chiefly Sloth and Ire struggled for the master-hand within him. If Lucy Dromio for her own convenience wished his slumbers shorter the menials subordinate to him heartily wished them conterminous with