They had never met. He had seen a photograph of the old man, grim and grey and hard, and it was probably this picture which had inhibited those appeals for further help which he so glibly claimed to have sent.
Perkins, his clerk, came in with a letter soon after five.
“Miss Joan came this afternoon, sir, whilst you were at the board meeting.”
“Oh!” replied Stephen Narth indifferently.
Here was a Bray that represented a responsibility, one of the two members of the cadet family he had known about until old Joseph’s letter came. She was a distant cousin, had been brought up in his home and had received the good but inexpensive education to which poor relations are entitled. Her position in his household he would have found it difficult to define. Joan was very useful. She could take charge of the house when the girls were away. She could keep accounts and could replace a housekeeper or, for the matter of that, a housemaid. Though she was a little younger than Letty, and very much younger than Mabel, she could serve to chaperone either.
Sometimes she joined the theatre parties that the girls organized, and occasionally she went to a dance when an extra partner was wanted. But usually Joan Bray remained in the background. There were times when it was inconvenient even that she should join one of his select little dinner parties, and then Joan had her meal in her big attic room, and, if the truth be told, was more than a little relieved.
“What did she want?” asked Mr Narth as he cut open the flap of the only letter that counted.
“She wanted to know if there was anything to take back to Sunningdale. She came up to do some shopping with Miss Letty,” said his old clerk, and then: “She asked me if any of the young ladies had telephoned about the Chinamen.”
“Chinamen?”
Perkins explained. There had appeared that morning in the grounds of Sunni Lodge two yellow men, “not wearing much clothing either.” Letty had seen them lying in the long grass near the farm meadow—two powerful-looking men, who at the sight of her had leapt up and had fled to the little plantation which divided Lord Knowesley’s estate from the less pretentious domain of Mr Narth.
“Miss Letty was a little frightened,” said Perkins.
Miss Letty, who lived on the raw edge of hysteria, would be frightened, undoubtedly.
“Miss Joan thought the men belonged to a circus which passed through Sunningdale this morning,” said Perkins.
Mr Narth saw little in the incident, and beyond making a mental note to bring the matter to the notice of the local police, dismissed from his mind all thought of Chinamen.
Slowly he tore open the flap of the envelope. The cheque was there, but also, as he had realized when he handled the package, a letter of unusual length. Joe Bray was not in the habit of sending long epistles. As a rule, a sheet of paper bearing the inscription ‘With Comps.’ was all that accompanied the draft.
He folded the purple-coloured draft and put it into his pocket, and then began to read the letter, wondering why this relative of his had grown suddenly so communicative. It was written in his own crabbed hand and every fourth word was mis-spelt.
Dear Mr Narth (_Joe never addressed him in any other way_). I dare say you will wonder why I have written to you such a long letter. Well, dear Mr Narth, I must tell you that I have had a bad stroke, and am only getting better very slowly. The doctor says he can’t be sure how long I’ve got to live, so I thought I would fix up the future and make a will, which I have now done, through Mr Albert Van Rys, the lawyer. Dear Mr Narth, I must tell you that I have got a great admiration for your family, as you well know, and I have been long thinking how I should help your family, and this is what I have done. My manager, Clifford Lynne, who has been with me since a boy and was my partner when I found this reef, is a good young fellow (Clifford Lynne, I mean), so I have decided he should marry into my family and keep the name going. I know you have several girls in your house, two daughters and a cousin, and I want Clifford to marry one of these, which he has agreed to do. He is on his way over now and should be with you any day. My will is as follows: I leave you two thirds of my share in the mine, one-third to Clifford, on condition that one of these girls marries him. If these girls refuse, all the money goes to Clifford. The marriage is to occur before the thirty-first of December of this year. Dear Mr Narth, if this is not agreeable to you, you will get nothing on my death.
Yours sincerely, Jos. Bray.
Stephen Narth read the letter open-mouthed, his mind in a whirl. Salvation had come from the most unexpected quarter. He rang a bell to summon the clerk and gave him a few hasty instructions, and, not waiting for the lift, ran down the stairs and boarded his car. All the way to Sunningdale he turned over in his mind the letter and its strange proposal.
Mabel, of course! She was the eldest. Or Letty—the money was as good as in his pocket…
As the car went up the drive between bushes of flowering rhododendrons he was almost gay, and he sprang out with a smile so radiant that the watchful Mabel, who saw him from he lawn, realized that something unusual had happened and came running to meet him, as Letty appeared at the big front door. They were handsome girls, a little plumper than he could wish, and the elder inclined to take a sour view of life which was occasionally uncomfortable.
“…Did you hear about those horrid Chinamen?” Mabel fired the question as he stepped from the car. “Poor Letty nearly had a fit!”
Ordinarily he would have snapped her to silence, for he was a man who was irritated by the trivialities of life, and the irruption of a yellow trespasser or two was not a matter to interest him. But now he could afford to smile indulgently and could make a joke of his daughter’s alarming experience.
“My dear, there was nothing to be afraid of—yes, Perkins told me all about it. The poor fellows were probably as much scared as Letty! Come into the library; I have something rather important to tell you.”
He took them into the handsomely appointed room, shut the door and told his astonishing news, which, to his consternation, was received silently. Mabel took out her perennial cigarette, flicked the ash on the carpet and looked across at her sister, and then:
“It’s all very fine for you, father, but where do we come in?” she asked.
“Where do you come in?” said her parent in astonishment. “Isn’t it clear where you come in? This fellow gets a third of the fortune–-“
“But how much of the third do we get?” asked Letty, the younger. “And besides, who is this manager? With all that money, father, we ought to do better than a mine manager.”
There was a dead silence here which Mabel broke.
“We shall have to depend on you for the settlement, anyway,” she said. “This old gentleman seems to think it quite good enough for any girl if her husband is rich. But it wouldn’t be good enough for me.”
Stephen Narth turned suddenly cold. He had never dreamt that opposition would come from this quarter.
“But don’t you see, girls, that unless one of you marries this fellow we get nothing? Of course I would do the right thing by you—I’d make a handsome settlement.”
“How much is he leaving?” asked the practical Mabel. “That’s the crux of the whole question. I tell you frankly I’m not going to buy a pig in a poke; and besides, what is to be our social position? We’d probably have to go back to China and live in some horrible shanty.”
She sat on the edge of the library table, clasping her crossed knee, and in this attitude she reminded Stephen Narth of a barmaid he had known in his early youth. There was something coarse about Mabel which was not softened by the abbreviation of her skirts or by the beauty of her shingled head.
“I’ve had enough scrimping and saving,” she went on, “and I tell you honestly, that so far as marriage with an unknown man is concerned, you can count me out.”
“And me,” said Letty firmly. “It is quite right what Mabel says, there is no position at all for this wretched man’s wife.”
“I dare say he would do th
e right thing,” said Stephen Narth feebly. He was entirely dominated by these two daughters of his.
Suddenly Mabel leapt to her feet and stepped down to the floor, her eyes shining.
“I’ve got it—Cinderella!”
“Cinderella?” He frowned.
“Joan, of course, you great booby! Read the letter again.”
They listened breathlessly, and when he came near to the end, Letty squeaked her delight.
“Of course—Joan!” she said. “There’s no reason why Joan shouldn’t marry. It would be an excellent thing for her—her prospects are practically nil, and she’d be an awful bore, father, if you were very rich. Goodness knows what we could do with her.”
“Joan!” He fondled his chin thoughtfully. Somehow he had never considered Joan as a factor. For the fourth time he read the letter word by word. The girls were right. Joan fulfilled all Joe Bray’s requirements. She was a member of the family. Her mother had been a Narth. Before he had put the letter down, Letty had pressed the bell on the table and the butler came in.
“Tell Miss Bray to come here, Palmer,” she said, and three minutes later a girl walked into the library—the sacrifice which the House of Narth designed to propitiate the gods of fortune.
CHAPTER FOUR
Joan Bray was twenty-one, but looked younger. She was slim—Letty was in the habit of describing her as ‘painfully thin’, without good reason. The Narths were full-faced, full-chinned people, fair-headed and a trifle lethargic. Joan was supple of body and vital. Every movement of her was definite, intentional. In repose she had the poise of an aristocrat. (“She always knows where to put her hands,” admitted Letty reluctantly.) In movement she had the lithe ease of one whom movement was a joy. Ten years of snubbing, of tacit suppression, of being put away and out of sight when she was not required, had neither broken her spirit nor crushed her confidence.
She stood now, a half-smile in the grey eyes that laughed very readily, looking from one to the other, realizing that something had happened which was out of the ordinary. Her colour had a delicacy that the bold beauty of her cousins could not eclipse, nor yet set off, for she was as a picture that needed no lighting or contrasts to reveal its wonders.
“Good evening, Mr Narth.” She had always called him by the formal title. “I’ve finished the quarter’s accounts, and they are terrific!”
At any other time Stephen would have writhed at the news, but the sense of coming fortune made the question of a hundred pounds, more or less, a matter of supreme indifference.
“Sit down, Joan,” he said, and wonderingly she pulled up a chair and sat sideways upon it, resting one arm on the back.
“Will you read this letter?” He passed it across to Letty who handed it to the girl.
She read in silence, and when she had finished, smiled.
“That’s awfully good news. I’m very glad,” she said, and looked quizzically from one girl to the other. “And who is the lovely bride to be?”
Her unconquerable cheerfulness was an offence in the eyes of Mabel at the best of times. Now the cool assumption that one or other of them was to efface herself in the obscurity of a Chinese town, brought the red to her full neck.
“Don’t be stupid, Joan,” she said sharply. “This is a very serious question–-“
“My dear”—Stephen saw the need for tact—“Clifford Lynne is a very good fellow—one of the best,” he said enthusiastically, though he had no more knowledge of Clifford Lynne’s character, appearance or general disposition than he had of any labourer his car had passed that afternoon. “This is one of the greatest chances that has ever—er—come our way. As a matter of fact,” he said very carefully, “this is not the only letter I have had from dear old Joseph. There was another which—urn—put his view more clearly.”
She looked as though she expected him to pass this mysterious letter to her, but he did not, for the simple reason that it had no existence except in his imagination.
“The truth is, my dear, Joseph wishes you to marry this man.”
The girl rose slowly to her feet, her thinly pencilled eyebrows gathered in a frown of amazement.
“He wishes me to marry him?” she repeated. “But I don’t know the man.”
“Neither do we,” said Letty calmly. “It isn’t a question of knowing. Anyway, how do you know any fellow you are going to marry? You see a man for a few minutes every day and you haven’t the slightest idea what his nature is. It is only when you are married that his real self comes out.”
She was not making matters any easier for Mr Narth, and with a nod he silenced her.
“Joan,” he said, “I have been very good to you—I’ve given you a home, and I’ve done something more than that, as you well know.”
He looked at the girls and signalled them out of the room. When the door had closed on Letty:
“Joan, I am going to be very frank with you,” he said.
It was not the first time he had been frank, and she could guess what was coming. She once had a brother, a wild, irresponsible youth, who had been employed by Narth Brothers, and had left hurriedly, carrying with him the cash contents of the safe—a few hundreds of pounds. He had expiated the crime with his life—for he was found on a Kentish road dead by the wreckage of the car in which he was making his way to a Channel port. And there was an invalid mother of Joan Bray’s whose last years of life had been supported on Mr Narth’s bounty. (“We can’t let her go to the workhouse, father,” Mabel had said; “if it gets into the newspapers there will be an awful scandal”—Mabel was Mabel even at the tender age of sixteen.)
“It is not for me to remind you of what I have done for your family,” began Stephen—and proceeded to remind her. “I have given you a home and a social life which ordinarily would not have been yours. You have now a chance of repaying me for my generosity; I particularly wish that you marry this man.”
She licked her dry lips, but did not raise her eyes from the carpet on which they were fixed.
“Do you hear me?”
She nodded and rose slowly.
“You really want me to marry him?”
“I want you to be a rich woman,” he said emphatically. “I am not asking you to make any sacrifice. I am putting in your way an opportunity that nine girls out of ten would jump at.”
There was a tap at the door: it was the butler and he bore on a silver salver a brown envelope. Mr Narth took the telegram, opened it, read, and gasped.
“He’s dead,” he said in a hushed voice. “Old Joe Bray!”
Swiftly he made a mental calculation. It was the first day of June. If he could get her married within a month he could stave off the ruin that threatened Narth Brothers. Their eyes met: hers calm, steady, questioning, his speculative and remorseless.
“You will marry him?”
She nodded.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said quietly, and his sigh of relief brought the first twinge of bitterness that her heart had known.
“You are a very sensible girl, and you’ll not regret it,” he said eagerly, as he came round and took her cold hands in his. “I can assure you, Joan–-“
He turned his head at the knock. It was the butler.
“There is a gentleman to see you, sir.”
He got so far, when the visitor pushed past him and walked into the room. He was a tall man, dressed in a stained, ill-fitting suit of rough homespun. His shoes were of undressed leather and apparently home-made. He was collarless. A soft shirt, opened at the throat, a battered hat in his hand almost completed the picture. But it was at his face that the girl was gazing.
Joan could only stare in amazement, for never had she seen his like before. His hair was long and brown and wavy. He wore a long, straggly beard that came down to his breast.
“Who the devil–-” began the astonished Mr Stephen Narth.
“My name is Clifford Lynne,” said the apparition. “I understand I’ve got to marry somebody. Who is it?”
They stare
d at the uncouth man, and then Letty, who had followed him in, began to laugh hysterically.
“Mr Lynne–-” stammered Stephen Narth.
Before the man could reply, came a dramatic interruption. There was a whispered colloquy between the butler and somebody in the hall outside. Looking past them, Mr Narth saw a maid holding a square box.
“What is it?” he asked sharply.
The butler reached out of the door and came back with the box in his hands. It was a new box with a sliding lid, about a foot square.
“Mr Lynne?” he said awkwardly, like one who found himself in a situation which he did not fit.
“Yes?”
The bearded man spun round. All his movements, Joan noted unconsciously, had a certain abruptness.
“For me?”
He put the box on the table and frowned at it. Painted neatly on the top in red letters were the words:
CLIFFORD LYNNE, ESQ. (to await arrival)
As his hand went out to slip back the lid, a cold shiver ran down the girl’s spine. She had an unaccountable premonition of some terrible danger, she knew not what.
“What the devil is this?” demanded the amazing stranger.
The lid was off; there was nothing to be seen but a mass of fleecy cottonwool…but it was moving in weird undulations.
The Yellow Snake Page 2