“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 the 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.
