But as all things come to an end more or less, so did Sam’s career with me actually terminate. My wife and family came ‘out’ from England. The ‘Mem Saab,’ sometimes even the ‘Missee Saab,’ took bazaar ’count; the current bachelor rates for chillies, cocoa-nuts, first and second sorts _wrice_, gram, and such-like necessaries underwent a fall. Sam’s occupation and gain were gone. He quitted my homestead under this new and unprofitable régime. ‘I discharge you, sar!’ said he; and away he went, I know not where.
The _De Vere Arms_ at Pebworth, fourth-rate hotel though it necessarily was in a place where any hotel of the first or even of the second magnitude would have been as an oak in a flower-pot, was well and neatly kept. There was the commercial connection, and there was the county connection, both dear to the landlord, but on grounds wholly dissimilar. Biggles had been butler to the present, under-butler and knife-boy to the late Earl of Wolverhampton; and had he but had his own way, the _De Vere Arms_ would have been strictly the family hotel which its address-cards proclaimed it, and the obnoxious word ‘commercial’ would have found no place there.
Mr Biggles, however, was in the position of one of those unfortunate managers of English country theatres who tell their friends, perhaps truly, that they would play nothing, save the legitimate drama, if they could help it. They cannot help it, and scared by the dismal spectre of Insolvency, they shelve Shakspeare in favour of newer idols of the public. So did Biggles and worthy Mrs B. to boot lay themselves out in practice to secure the lucrative custom of the ready-money, constantly moving, commercial gentlemen, while in theory devoting all their loyalty to those of their patrons who came in their own carriages, with armorial bearings on their panels and liveried servants on the driving-seat.
To this hostelry was borne, in Sir Gruntley Pigbury’s carriage, the insensible form of Jasper Denzil, supported by the sturdy arm of Captain Prodgers, while little Dr Aulfus, on the opposite seat, kept the patient’s nerveless wrist between his own thin fingers all the way from the race-course to the inn. Then Jasper, amidst spasmodic gaspings from the landlady and sympathetic exclamations from the chambermaids, was carried into the _De Vere Arms_ and established in one of the best rooms, whence were summarily dislodged the effects of some well-to-do customer who had had a horse in the race, but who was unlikely under the circumstances to resent the invasion of his apartment. Jack Prodgers and the doctor seemed to have taken joint possession of the invalid; the former as _prochain ami_ (and it is to the credit of such ne’er-do-wells as Captain Prodgers that the very wildest of them never do leave a friend untended in a scrape), and the other professionally.