“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t have met her,” said Joe defiantly. “I’m not old—not much more than fifty.” He flung the challenge at Cliff’s head, but it was not taken up. “There’s a lot of people that don’t believe I am fifty.”
“You’re a hundred in sin and ten in wisdom,” said Clifford, smiling good-humouredly. “Who was she, Joe?”
“I don’t know. A well-made, nice-looking girl. A bit redheaded, but that shows spirit. What a girl!” He waggled his head ecstatically.
“Well-made—do you mean fat?” asked Clifford brutally.
“Well-made,” evaded the other, “and young. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. And a wonderful complexion, Cliff. Roses!”
“Rather red?” asked his unromantic companion, and chuckled. “Did you ask her her name?”
“No, I didn’t!” Joe Bray was on his mettle. “It is not good manners askin’ people their name–-“
“If you had, she would have answered ‘Mabel Narth.’”
The older man’s jaw dropped.
“Mabel Narth?” he asked in a hollow whisper. “What, my own niece!”
“She is no more your niece than I am your uncle,” said Clifford. “The tables of consanguinity do not apply. She’s your twenty-third cousin nineteen times removed. She is such a distant cousin that you’ll find it difficult to see her relationship through an ordinary telescope. But, Joe, at your time of life!”
“Fifty,” murmured Joe. “Men of my age are more steady than you young ones.”
“I presume you did not tell her who you were?”
“No; I merely hinted that I’d got a bit of stuff put by!”
“That you were rich, in fact? Did her eyes light up?”
“What do you mean?” demanded Joe, on the defensive.
“You’re a queer devil,” said Clifford. “How is that coolie boy?”
“Almost well. He has been praying all day to be let out, but I didn’t want to let him go before you came.”
“He can skip tonight—he makes me feel homesick for a bamboo rod and the floor of the Yamen! I suppose you know his job was to stifle us? This morning I found the bag of sulphur he was trying to put down the chimney.”
Clifford strolled out to the locked scullery to interview the crestfallen warrior. He did not look very warlike as he sat there with an old blanket round his shoulders. Lynne examined his wound and in a few words dismissed him, and to his surprise the man showed every evidence of relief.
“Let me go before the sun goes down,” he begged, “for I am a stranger in this country, and it is hard for such a man as I to find my way to the great town.”
Something in his manner aroused Clifford’s suspicion, and he remembered Joe’s words.
“Man, you are anxious to leave my house,” he said. “Tell me why.”
The man dropped his eyes sullenly.
“You are afraid.”
Still the native did not look up.
“You are afraid of death—tonight!”
This time his shaft got home, and the Chinaman jerked up his head, blinking at his interrogator with frightened eyes.
“They say of you that you are a devil and read the hearts of men. Now what you say”—there was a certain desperation in his tone—“is very true, for I fear death if I stay in this house tonight.”
Clifford whistled softly.
“At what hour would you die, man?”
“At the second hour after moonrise,” replied the coolie without hesitation, and Clifford nodded.
“I think you can go,” he said, and gave him directions as to how he could travel to London.
Returning to Joe, he repeated the gist of the conversation.
“The grand attack comes tonight. Now what are we to do? ‘Phone into Aldershot for half a battalion, cover ourselves with ignominy, notify the local police and be responsible for the death of these respectable, middle-aged men; or shall we stand the racket ourselves and have a nice, quiet fight?”
The humour of it overcame him, and he sat down laughing silently, his face red, tears in his eyes, and when Clifford Lynne laughed that way there was trouble coming for somebody.
The Slaters’ Cottage and Sunni Lodge were a mile out of Sunningdale and remarkably isolated, though they were a few hundred yards from the Portsmouth Road, which was never wholly deserted. Mr Narth’s nearest neighbour was the Earl of Knowesly, who, however, was only in residence for a little over a month in the year, for he was a northerner who loved Lancashire and was happiest amongst his own people.
Beyond the Slaters’ Cottage in the other direction was the undeveloped property of a land company which was exploiting a new golf course and a residential estate.
“I have an idea they’re going to take a leaf out of my book. Joe. It will be a fight with silencers if Spedwell is in command, and I know now that he is the chief of military staff.”
The evening had turned close and oppressive, and the sun set behind towering masses of cloud. Clifford Lynne employed the last hours of light in paying a visit to Sunni Lodge. He did not go to the house; in the circumstances he thought that Stephen Narth would not be particularly anxious to see him. Instead, he made an unauthorized circuit of the pleasure ground, having caught a glimpse of the girl walking at the far end of the tennis lawn.
Briefly he told her the arrangements he had made for her protection.
“The crisis will be over in a week, I think. I have mildly interested the Foreign Office, and thank heaven I have got Scotland Yard thoroughly worked up!”
She shook her head helplessly.
“I only understand dimly what is the cause of all this trouble,” she said. “It is about the share which Fing-Su wants, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Why is that so very important? Mr Narth tried to explain but I am as dense as ever.”
They were pacing through a thin belt of pines that fringed the western boundary of Mr Narth’s little demesne, and were free from the possibility of observation from the house. In a few words he told her of the forty-nine shares.
“I had always realized the possibility of Joe’s doing something eccentric with his money, and the founders’ shares, as we call them—though in reality it would be better to call them the management shares—were issued to keep the control of the business, whatever happened. The original plan was that I was to have twenty-five and Joe was to take twenty-four, and an agreement was drawn up by which it was mutually agreed that the survivor should inherit the shares of the other partner. I had to go to Peking on business; whilst I was there I got a wire from Joe asking if I minded the old man Fing-Su having a few shares. Unfortunately, before I left Siantan I had given Joe a general power of attorney, and I returned to discover that this wicked old man had not only given the chief nine, but he had divided the other forty equally.”
She nodded, at last understanding.
“But sorely, Mr—Clifford, that trouble is over? You have the majority of the shares and you need not sell or give away the one which makes all the difference?”
Clifford smiled wryly.
“Joe, with the greatest ingenuity, maintained the clause which provided that if either of us died his shares should go to the survivor,” he said significantly. “Fing-Su has a double chance. He may induce me, by methods which I have anticipated, to part with the share which gives him control of the company; or he may–-” He did not conclude the sentence.
“He may bring about your death,” she said simply, and he nodded.
“He has reached the point now,” he went on, “where he cannot succeed, because, if I were to be killed this night, Fing-Su would be automatically arrested tomorrow. But, clever as he is, he is a Chinaman and reasons like a Chinaman. That is why he will fall down. He has great visions toned with a sense of infallibility—he cannot imagine failure.”
They paced in silence for fully a minute, and then she asked:
“If he managed to get me…in his power—that sounds awfully m
elodramatic, doesn’t it?—what difference would that make—really?”
“I should pay,” he said quietly, “and he knows I should pay.”
She felt the blood come into her cheeks and tried to appear unconcerned.
“You are under no obligation to me, Mr Lynne,” she said, in a low voice. “I had already decided to tell you…now that Mr Bray is alive… that I do not wish to marry you. I promised Mr Narth because—well, it was necessary for him that I should be married.”
It required a great effort for her to say this, a greater effort than she had ever dreamt. The discovery struck her with a sense of dismay. To rehearse such a speech in the privacy of her room was an easy matter, but now as she spoke, it was as if every word cut away from her the newly built foundations of life. She looked up at him; he was searching her face.
“And there is no need—for you to marry, either.”
She shook her head in anticipation of his answer.
“‘To carry on the line’—no,” he said, and her heart sank. “To satisfy the curious mind of Joseph Bray, Esquire—no! Not one of the arguments remains which brought me on this mad trip to England and turned me from a decent member of society into a bearded hobo! You’re right there. But there is yet a very excellent reason why I should marry you.”
He put his arm round her gently, and drew her towards him, and yet he did not kiss her. His grave eyes were looking into hers, and she read the words he did not say, the thought he did not utter, and found she was trembling from head to foot. A deep rumble of thunder came from the distance and that broke the spell. With a sigh he stepped back, dropped his hands on her shoulders and held her at arms’ length.
“There will be a marriage in this family on Friday,” he said briefly, and only then did he stoop and kiss her.
The first ghostly gleam of lightning paled the pine tops as he came whistling down the drive to the Slaters’ Cottage.
“A night of storm, Joseph?” he said cheerfully, as he came into the sitting-room. “Have you turned loose the hired assassin?”
Joe hastily concealed the paper he had been writing.
“Making a new will?”
Mr Bray coughed, and a horrible suspicion came to his partner; a suspicion that amounted to a certainty.
Once, many years before, Joe, with great humming and hawing, had confessed a gentle weakness and had even offered for his criticism an exercise-book stained with his fancy.
“You’re not writing poetry, are you, Joe?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“No, I’m not,” said Joe loudly. “Gosh! That was a good one!”
The crash of thunder overhead set the little cottage shivering, and even as he spoke the blue flicker of lightning hit the woods.
“The very heavens are aflame,” said Joe poetically.
“It is your turn to fry the sausages,” retorted his more practical friend, and they adjourned to the little kitchen together to prepare the evening meal.
The storm lasted an hour, but it was evident that what they had experienced was merely the forerunner. By nine o’clock it was black as a winter night, and every horizon was lit with distant lightning. Clifford had fastened the shutters, and four sporting rifles were at hand on the sofa.
“Reminds me of one of them storms you get up there on the lake,” said Joe, “and the worst I was ever in was up in Harbin in ‘86—before any of you birds had poked your nose outside the reservations.”
He looked at the writing table where he had been engaged in his literary labours and sighed heavily.
“As far as I can make out, she is a third cousin,” said Joe. “Her father’s sister married my aunt’s son.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” asked Clifford in astonishment.
“Her,” said Mr Bray briefly.
It was evident that Mabel had made a very deep impression upon this susceptible heart.
“I hope this storm won’t frighten her—girls get scared with storms…”
“For my part, I would rather have it tonight than tomorrow,” said Clifford as he made for the kitchen. “If we are to be drowned, I would rather be drowned by moonlight!”
Joe Bray came after him to the kitchen.
“What’s this stuff about getting drowned?” he asked nervously. “Where are we going?”
“Down to the sea in a ship,” said Clifford as he speared a sausage from the pantry slab.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Miss Mabel Narth was not the kind of girl to be frightened by a thunderstorm. Whilst her more sensitive sister cowered in the coal-cellar, Mabel knitted furiously in the drawing-room, confiding to her companion the curious adventure of the morning.
“Some people would say he was old, but I would call him a fine figure of a man, and he is enormously rich, my dear.”
Mabel professed to be twenty-five. She was plump, and not especially popular with the bright young men who danced with her, played tennis with her, sometimes dined with her, but studiously refrained from asking her the all-important question. In her life she had had two proposals: one from an impossible young gentleman to whom she had been introduced at a dance, and who subsequently proved to be an actor who played very small parts in very important West End musical comedies, and the other from a business associate of her father’s who was still in mourning for his second wife when he made a timid bid for a third.
“I like men who have sown their wild oats, Joan,” said Mabel firmly, blinking rapidly as a vivid flash of lightning momentarily blinded her. “Will you pull the curtains, my dear?”
Joan had never known her so affable, and was curious to discover the identity of the stranger who had made so deep an impression.
“Young men you can never trust; they’re so thoughtless. But a mature man …and fearfully rich! He told me he tried to buy up Lord Knowesley’s estate. He is negotiating for a house in Park Lane, and he has three Rolls cars, my dear—just think of it, three!”
“But who is he Mabel?”
Here Mabel was at a loss, for in her maidenly modesty she had not pried too closely into the identity of her pleasant acquaintance.
“He is living somewhere in the neighbourhood. I think he must have rented a house at Sunningdale.”
“How old is he?”
Mabel considered.
“About fifty,” she said, unconsciously giving support to Mr Bray’s miscalculation. “Bless this storm!” She did not mean ‘bless’! “Do, please, run down into the cellar, Joan, and see if that foolish child is all right.”
Joan found the ‘foolish child’ sitting in a basket chair with a newspaper over her head, and Letty refused either to be sensible or to change her habitation.
When she got back to the drawing-room Mabel greeted her with a staggering question.
“Has that awful boy of yours got a visitor?”
For a second Joan did not understand her. She had never thought of Clifford Lynne in these terms.
“‘Boy’? You mean Mr Lynne?”
And then she gasped. Mabel had been talking about Joe Bray! She was too startled to laugh, and could only look open-mouthed at the plump girl. Happily, the eldest daughter of Stephen Narth, intent on her knitting, did not observe the sensation she had caused.
“I wondered, because he walked off in the direction of the Slaters’ Cottage. It struck me afterwards that it was quite possible he was staying with this Lynne man, who is rich, I suppose, and must have a lot of rich friends.”
Joan did not venture an answer. She could not tell the girl who was her newly-discovered interest without betraying Clifford, but she wondered what would be Mabel’s attitude if she knew the truth.
It was nearly ten o’clock and Mr Narth had not yet returned from town, when they heard a gentle tap at the door. The storm had subsided, though the thunder was still growling, and Joan went out, to find a rain-spotted envelope in the wire letterbox. It was addressed to ‘Miss Mabel,’ and she carried her find back to the girl. Mabel seized the letter, tore open t
he envelope and extracted a large and considerably blotted sheet of paper. She read and her eyes sparkled.
“Poetry, Joan!” she said breathlessly.
“How strange is life! We come and go, And the nicest people we do not know, Until they dorn like the beautiful sun, An experience which comes to everyone. Even to a man of fifty-one.”
There was no signature. Mabel’s eyes were gleaming.
“How perfectly terribly romantic!” she exclaimed. “He must have dropped it in the letterbox with his own hand.”
She sprang up from her chair, went into the hall and opened the door. It was very dark, but she thought she saw a figure moving down the drive. The rain had ceased. Should she run after him? Would it be a ladylike action, she wondered? Would it not indeed come within the category of ‘chasing,’ literally and figuratively? The excuse was ready made for an excursion down the drive, for at this hour Joan usually went out with the letters—there was a postal box just outside the gate.
Hesitating no more, she walked quickly down the path, her heart beating pleasurably. Turning the elbow of the little road, she stopped. Nobody was in sight; she must have been mistaken.
And then there came to her an eerie sensation of fear that made her flesh go cold. She turned to run, and had taken two steps when a fusty blanket was suddenly thrown over her head, a big hand stifled her screams, and she fainted…
Joan waited in the drawing-room until the slamming of the door brought her into the hall. The wind had blown the door close, and she opened it wide and peered out into the storm.
Two successive flashes of lightning showed her that the drive was empty.
“Mabel!”
She called the girl at the top of her voice, but no answer came.
Joan’s heart sank.
She ran back to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the butler; he was a slow-moving man, and as she waited patiently for his coming she remembered the black ‘plum’ that Clifford had given to her. It was a weapon of some kind, and she flew up the stairs and was back by the time the servant had arrived.
“Miss Mabel gone out? She’ll come back, miss.”
The Yellow Snake Page 13