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 the 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.
