Tell Me My Fortune

by Mary Burchell

  “I didn’t realize that it would be quite such a shock.” He was looking down at her with some concern.

  “No. How could you?” She looked round helplessly on a world from which the benevolent security of Great-Aunt Tabitha’s influence had departed for ever. It was difficult, in face of the bright, slightly puzzled glance of this stranger, to explain how completely they had all left everything to chance and Great-Aunt Tabitha. But she felt bound to try.

  “We have always depended on her, you see. On the belief that our futures were secure because we should inherit. We built our lives on the expectation one shouldn’t, of course but we never thought of anything else. We never imagined there could be anyone else. We just knew, quite simply, that we were her only real relations.”

  “Yes. I do see. My people come from the other side, of course. Great-Uncle Leopold’s side.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Where the money really came from.”

  “All right. I suppose that is literally true,” he agreed. “Though anything there was had belonged to the old lady for nearly half a century.”

  From the house came the tinkling sound of the tea-bell, and she dragged herself to her feet.

  “We shall have to go in. I suppose you want me to explain things?”

  He seemed surprised.

  “You? Certainly not. You’ve had enough shock and nerve-strain already,” he said. “I’ll tell your father, and he can break the news to the rest as he pleases.”

  “It will be a fearful shock for him.” Her mouth trembled suddenly. “Please be as gentle as you can about it.”

  He smiled rather wryly.

  “Gentleness isn’t much in my line, but I’ll do my best.”

  “Perhaps I’d better do it, after all.” Once more she tried to force herself to the task. But he refused to hear of it.

  “No, no, you leave that to me. I’ll attend to it.”

  “When?” she asked huskily.

  “As soon as tea is over, arid I can have a few minutes’ private talk with him.”

  “Very well.”

  She wondered how she was to get through tea without betraying her agitation, and perhaps he wondered too, because, as they went back into the house, he said,

  “You’d better go and fix a bit of colour, hadn’t you? They’ll notice, if you look as white as that, and think that I’ve been ill-treating you or something.”

  She gave a ghost of a laugh.

  “Do I look as bad as that?”

  He gave her that peculiar, flashing glance of appreciation.

  “You look swell,” he told her, with the faintest suggestion of a drawl in his voice. “But you need the illusion of a little red blood in your cheeks.”

  She said nothing to that, and went away upstairs to her room, leaving him to find his own way back to the drawing-room.

  In her bedroom she stood before the mirror and stared at her white reflection, while she tried to take in what had really happened. As the realization of the disaster stabbed her afresh, one or two sobbing gasps of sheer fright and distress escaped her.

  Then she pulled herself together and told herself not to be a coward. And after touching her cheeks with colour and adding a little lipstick to her mouth, she deliberately assumed an air of casual unconcern.

  “There’s always Oliver,” she told herself, leaning on that final security with infinite relief. “I’ll think of something for the family. Poor darlings, it’s going to be fearful for them. But at least I have Oliver. What should I do, if I hadn’t him?”

  As soon as tea was over, their visitor got up and said to his host,

  “May I have a word or two with you, sir, in private?—It’s a matter of business.”

  “Of course, of course.” Richard Greeve, who had never done a stroke of business in his life, always assumed an air of importance and understanding when the word was mentioned. And he led the way to his study rather, Leslie thought with pity, like a very large and inoffensive lamb leading the way, unknowingly, to the slaughter.

  The door closed behind the two men, and Alma said, in a tone of enjoyment,

  “I bet he’s going to talk to Father about the will, and tell him how much money there is.”

  Leslie bit her lip at the grimly unconscious truth of that. But her mother said placidly,

  “He wouldn’t know about that, dear.”

  “Mother, what makes you think so?” Leslie’s voice was a little breathless, but she felt impelled to say something, anything, which might in some small way prepare them for the shock that was coming.

  “Why, as your father said, he isn’t really in the family, Leslie. He wouldn’t know anything important. He seems an agreeable sort of man, though inclined to throw his weight about a little. He wouldn’t be likely to know anything about Great-Aunt Tabitha’s really private affairs. Your father said not.”

  Leslie wanted to say that Father didn’t know everything that it was useless to quote him, in face of the advancing tide. But she restrained herself, and only said quite quietly,

  “I think we must accept the fact that Mr. Carthay knew Great-Aunt Tabitha a great deal better than we did. He actually lived in the same place, remember, for something like a year. She may have grown very fond of him, and felt he was the only member of her family she had near her.”

  “And he is rather nice, anyway,” Alma remarked judicially.

  “Old ladies would adore him, I’m sure.” Morley rubbed his chin meditatively. “Masterful is, I believe, the word which would describe him in their vocabulary.”

  “And suppose she did adore him” Leslie looked straight across at her brother, her eyes. wide in her pale face. “What would she be most likely to do?”

  “I wouldn’t know the answer to that,” her brother replied regretfully, “never having been an old lady’s darling.”

  But Alma, with the awful simplicity of the completely literal-minded, said,

  “She might leave him her money, I suppose.”

  “Exactly,” Leslie agreed. And silence fell like a stone among them.

  “What do you mean?” Slowly Katherine turned and stared wide-eyed in her turn. “Why do you say ‘exactly’ in that Greek tragedy tone? You don’t mean that you think Great-Aunt Tabitha might have left him her money?”

  “I mean that I know she did,” Leslie said, and expelled her long-held breath in a sigh which almost hurt.

  “What?” they all chorused, except for Mrs. Greeve.

  “What Leslie says is perfectly true,” Reid Carthay’s voice said dryly from the doorway and turning, with one accord, they found him standing there, surveying the scene with bright, hard eyes and a rather grim expression.

  He came slowly forward into the room then, seeming to dominate the situation without any apparent effort.

  “I’m sorry” He looked round on them all, but even when his glance rested on Mrs. Greeve, it did not appreciably soften. “I understand that this must be a great shock for you all. But let us have it quite clear from the beginning there has been no dirty work on my part. You are perhaps a little more closely related to the old lady than I am. I am perhaps a little more closely related to the money than you are.” A faint, sardonic smile just touched his lips. “When all is said and done, however, she was entitled to leave her money exactly as she pleased. I never discussed it with her. For all I knew, she had left the lot to a home for canaries—”

  “Was there an awful lot of money?” interrupted Alma, who could not suppress a sort of gloomy curiosity about it, even though it had ceased to concern them personally.

  “Not so much as your father seemed to expect.”

  “Oh, poor Richard!” His wife sprang to her feet. “This will be worse for him than any of us. I must go to him.”

  With a glance of unmerited reproach at their guest, she brushed past him and out of the room. As she did so, the telephone bell rang shrilly in the hall.

  Leslie supposed it was cowardly of her to seize this chance of escape from a scene which
was becoming unbearably tense. But, before anyone else could move to do so, she went to answer the telephone. And, as she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear, to her immeasurable relief it was Oliver’s voice which said,

  “Hello. Is that you, Leslie?”

  “Oh, yes, Oliver!” She didn’t attempt to keep the relief and delight out of her voice. “I wasn’t, expecting you home yet. I’m so glad you’re here. There’s some news, and I want to tell you about it.”

  “Well, that’s a coincidence.” Oliver was smiling, she could tell from his tone. “I have some news too, and I want to tell you about it.”

  “My news isn’t very nice.”

  But, even as she uttered this piece of under-statement, she felt her spirits rise. No news could be quite so terrible if Oliver were home and in such obviously good spirits.

  “I am sorry. What’s happened? May I come over?”

  She started to say, “Yes, of course,” and then she changed her mind, for there was going to be little chance of a private chat with Oliver, or anyone else, in the house that evening.

  “I’ll walk over to meet you,” she said quickly. “Come by way of the woods, and I’ll meet you at the crossroads.”

  “The old spot?” He laughed and added, “That’s rather appropriate somehow,” before he rang off. For the “crossroads” in the woods an open space where two paths met had been a favourite meeting-place of the young Greeves and Oliver Bendick when they were schoolchildren, and a good many confidences had been exchanged there over the years.

  Leslie replaced the receiver and cast a glance towards the closed drawing-room door, from behind which came a murmur of voices. There were the characteristic, full overtones of the family, mingling in such a way that it was difficult to distinguish one from another. And then, almost symbolically, there cut across the hum that cool, incisive, alien tone, carrying with it the suggestion of authority which she had noticed before.

  Leslie could not distinguish any actual words, but whatever Reid Carthay had said reduced the others to silence. And, fearing for some new development which might interfere with her meeting Oliver, she hastily slipped out of the house, having paused only long enough to leave word with Jessie, their elderly and devoted maid, that she had gone across to the Bendicks’ place and might not be in to supper.

  Although she had walked rapidly, Leslie saw, as soon as she came in sight of their meeting-place, that Oliver was before her. He was sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, which had been there and made a rough seat for them all almost since she could remember. But, at the sight of her, he sprang to his feet and came towards her.

  In that moment he epitomized for Leslie all which was still secure and familiar and worthwhile. Dark and rather slight, but with an intelligent head and the strong, beautiful hands of a born surgeon, Oliver Bendick had that indefinable something which we call personality.

  And, as he took both her hands in his light, firm clasp Leslie gave a quick sigh of relief and felt the last of her dark apprehensions slide from her.

  Indeed, when Oliver said, “Come and tell me what the trouble is,” it seemed absurd to spoil the radiance of the evening and the joy of their meeting by going over the melancholy story again. Her instinct was to thrust all recollection of Great-Aunt Tabitha and Reid Carthay from her, and she exclaimed,

  “No. Tell me your news first. I think I’ve been exaggerating the gloom of mine. Let’s talk of something nice.”

  “Sure?” He looked at her, amused and questioning, but with an air of suppressed excitement too, which told her how eager he was to talk of his own affairs.

  “Quite sure. Let’s sit down.” And they retraced their steps to the fallen tree-trunk and sat down side by side he still holding one of her hands, she noticed.

  “It’s all happened so suddenly, Leslie, I can hardly believe in it even now.” His dark, lively face was lit up by enthusiasm and pleasure. “You remember the Frentons.”

  She searched her memory and recalled the family of an elderly doctor, with whom Oliver had made friends during his time as a locum.

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  “Well, I was there last weekend, and I had a long talk with old Dr. Frenton. We’ve had many talks, of course—more than I realized—and he’d drawn me out a good deal on my various theories and intentions. Again more than I had realized. And then he told me, Leslie, that he’d been turning over in his mind for some time the idea of taking me into partnership, and he’d finally decided to do so.”

  “You mean just like that?” She was as astonished and delighted as any news-bringer could wish.

  “Well,” he laughed, “there are some conditions and arrangements to discuss, naturally. But it is virtually settled, and I feel I can already look forward to building the exact type of future that my heart was really set on. You see, it’s a big and varied practice. So many opportunities for following up the ideas I’ve been working on for years. Such a chance—”

  He broke off and, smiling thoughtfully, looked away from her through the trees, as though already he saw vistas of absorbing work and heart-warming achievement. Until now the choice for him had lain simply between a regulation, government appointment or the taking over of his father’s diminishing country practice in a sparsely populated neighbourhood where another youngish doctor was already the really important figure.

  “It would mean living in town, of course, in Pencaster,” Leslie said quietly and thoughtfully, because she did not want to disturb his happy reflections. At the same time, she was longing to hear more of something which, she felt, must so closely affect herself.

  His eyes and his attention came back to her.

  “Yes, in Pencaster. And that brings me to the second part of my news.”

  “Oh, there is some more?” Her lips parted in eager interest, and he laughed aloud.

  “Leslie, you’re marvellous!” he declared. “The best audience anyone ever had.”

  She laughed too then, pleased and indefinably excited, because she sensed considerable excitement in him.

  “You’re just like a sister listening to a favourite brother’s airy-fairy plans.” Oliver looked at her affectionately. “Except, I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that most brothers don’t appreciate sisterly interest as much as I appreciate yours. Maybe that’s because I have no sisters.”

  She smiled but a little doubtfully that time, for the brother-sister relationship was not one that she herself had ever thought of in connection with Oliver and herself. It was true, of course, that he had been like one of the family for so long that the expression did describe their degree of intimacy. But she wished he had used some other term, and she said rather quickly, “Well, go on. Tell me the rest.”

  “I haven’t told anyone else yet except Mother,” he said earnestly. “But I’d like you to be the first to know, outside my own family, Leslie. I’m going to be married. And one of the nicest things about it all is that Caroline is old Dr. Frenton’s niece—it was through her that I met him so everything has worked in together in the most wonderful way.”

  Leslie thought there was an odd little silence, then, to her surprise, she heard someone say, “Why, how splendid!” And, to her further surprise, she realized that it was herself.

  She didn’t really think at all in the next few moments. Not with the surface of her mind, that was to say. Only, deep down in her subconscious, some instinct prompted her to say, “Tell me some more about it. What is she like?” Because those words would force him to further speech, and so put some sort of shield between any perception of his and her own naked, appalled dismay.

  His voice went on and, to the best of her belief, she smiled and looked attentive. But nothing which he said really reached her. It was as though some small, vital connection were broken, and she sat there, isolated from the rest of the world by the immensity of what had just happened. Only some obstinate core of pride some instinct of self-preservation helped her to play her role so that Oliver should never, never guess what a f
ool she had been, or what a blow he had dealt her.

  But she dragged her mind back from such reflections as that. Unless she kept every scrap of her remaining attention on what Oliver was saying, she would betray herself. And so, while part of her seemed to stand aside in stunned and leaden detachment, the rest of her played perhaps slightly over-played the role of the interested, sisterly confidante.

  He was not, however, as she guessed, in a mood to be critical of a good audience. He wanted to talk of his happiness, and if she would listen and smile and put in a word here and there, that was all he needed. Indeed, it was not until she rose finally, and said that she must be going home, that he recollected affairs other than his own, and exclaimed,

  “Good lord! I’ve done all the talking, I’m afraid. What was it that you were going to tell me, Leslie?”

  “Tell you?” She looked vague for a moment, for she could not imagine there was anything she could have to tell the stranger that Oliver had become.

  “Yes. You said you’d had some bad news at home or something.”

  “Oh—Great-Aunt Tabitha died.”

  She made the statement almost indifferently, for Great-Aunt Tabitha and her place in the scheme of things had shrunk all at once to inconsiderable proportions.

  But Oliver was impressed. Living so close to the Greeves, and being so much one of them, he naturally knew all the implications which this announcement carried with it.

  “It’s not exactly bad news, surely? I mean the old lady was a stranger really. And even the most tenderhearted and disinterested person never minded inheriting a fortune.”

  “We haven’t inherited a fortune, after all.”

  “What!”

  “There’s a nephew or cousin or something.” Oh, she couldn’t go over it all again, she felt. Not now. With every feeling raw and protesting. So she compromised, hastily if a little untruthfully, by saying, “We don’t know the exact position yet. But we think it’s going to be rather disappointing financially.”

  “Leslie, I am sorry!” He looked grave, and obviously made a valiant attempt to subdue his own radiant spirits to a level more in keeping with the misfortune of his friends.