Money in the Bank (26 page)

CHAPTER
XXIV

It was Lord Uffenham who broke the silence which followed her departure. He had been sitting for some moments with wrinkled brow, in his eyes that thoughtful look which was always a sign that his great brain had found something to engage it. "'Were,' surely?" he said.

Jeff shook off that numbed feeling, so apt to come to young men on hearing loved lips utter words like those to which he had just been listening. That odd, dreamlike sensation of having been hit on the base of the skull with half a yard of lead piping slowly left him,

"'Were'?"

"Not 'was.' 'I wouldn't marry Mr. Miller if he were the last man on earth.' Dash it," said Lord Uffenham, driving home his point, "the thing's a conditional clause."

Not since the November afternoon at school when, in the course of a heated house-match, the opposition scrum-half had sprung upon him and twisted his neck into a spiral, when he was nowhere near the ball, had Jeff experienced so strong and sudden an urge to break the sixth Commandment. Then he reminded himself that this man loved him like a son and meant well.

"Postponing the lesson in Syntax for just half a minute," he said, almost gently, "what do I do about this?"

"Hey?"

"What would you do, if you were the last man on earth and the girl you loved wouldn't marry you?"

Lord Uffenham dismissed the thing with a jerk of the hand, as if brushing away a fly.

"No need to worry, my boy---"

"Don't tell me. Let me guess. Because she'll come round?"

"Exactly."

"You still feel that she will?"

"Of course."

"I had an idea that that last crack of hers sounded a bit final."

"Nothing of the kind. Girls never mean ten per cent of what they say.   Go after her, and talk to her."

"And when she merely looks at me as if I were—not was—something the carrion crow and brought in? I did mention, didn't I, that she was inclined to be a little on the silent side with me just now?"

"Laugh her out of it."

"I see. Laugh her out of it."

"You can do it, if you try. Got a very keen sense of humour, that girl. Chaff her. Jolly her along, as Mrs. Molloy would say. I know what you're thinking. You're saying to yourself 'What would a Troubadour do in my place?' and you've got an idea that you ought to grovel. I do beg and beseech you, my dear feller, to forget all that Troubadour nonsense. Be gay. Be airy. You've got the gift of the gab. I've had to complain about it. Use it. Don't crawl up to her, looking crushed and tragic like a dashed black-beetle that's just had insect powder sprinkled over it by the cook. Shove your chin out and stick your thumbs in your waistcoat. It's obvious that she's crazy about you. If she isn't, why did she give that lavatory inspector the push? I told you kissing her would do the trick, and it did. You fold her in a close embrace, and
—
bingo
—off she rushes and breaks her engagement. What more do you want?"

A little breathless after this powerful exordium, Lord Uffenham paused and refilled his glass. He was pleased to observe that his words had caused his young friend to brighten considerably.

And, indeed, it did seem to Jeff that they had been such as to encourage hope. Plainly, something had influenced Anne to break her engagement. It could scarcely be mere coincidence that the change of heart should have occurred right on top of his activities in the rhododendron walk. Pleasanter to believe that Lord Uffenham's advice on tactics had proved itself sound.

And if the old maestro had been right then, there was every reason to hope that he was right now.

"Well, I'll go and see what happens," he said. "I'm bound to say I feel a little as Commander Peary must have felt on approaching the North Pole, but I will go and see what happens."

"That's the spirit," said Lord Uffenham, sipping port at him encouragingly. "I shall expect yer back in ten minutes, to tell me that everything is hunky-dory."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Another of Mrs. Molloy's expressions," explained Lord Uffenham. "Sweet little woman."

It is proof, if proof were needed, of the wholeheartedness of Jeff's great love that, as he went in quest of Anne, his mind did not occupy itself with this further evidence of the intimacy which existed between the susceptible peer and a woman whose every move he had come to view with alarm. He was thinking of what Lord Uffenham had said about the small importance to be attached to the utterance of girls in moments of wrath.

If girls really never meant ten per cent of what they said on such occasions, it might be that they meant only—say fifteen per cent of what they looked—in which case, it seemed to him that there were grounds for optimism.

Nevertheless, when, passing through the green baize door, he heard someone playing the piano and recognized Anne's touch and made his way to the drawing-room, whence the sounds were proceeding, he was aware of a definite sinking of the heart. If Commander Peary had come along at that moment, he would have, shaken him by the hand and told him he knew just how he had felt.

It was in the hope of soothing her ruffled nerve centres that Anne, on sweeping from the pantry, had hurried to the drawing-room piano. Most girls, who can play the piano at all, like to play it at times of spiritual storm and stress, and recent events, culminating in that meeting of the mutual admiration society, had left her feeling as if her soul had been passed through the wringer.

She had been relieved to find that the beauty of the evening was keeping Mrs. Cork's guests out of doors and that she had the drawing-room to herself. If she had known that this solitude was shortly to become a
tete-a-tete
her relief would have been less pronounced. But she did not know it. She sat down at the piano, and healing music began to pour from her fingertips.

It may seem strange, considering the testing experiences through which she had passed this evening, but what had upset her most had been those last words of hers in the pantry. She was, as Lord Uffenham had said, a girl with a keen sense of humour, and girls with a keen sense of humour do not like to think that they have been guilty of trite and pompous
cliches.
If there was anything more banal, she felt as her fingers strayed over the keys, than saying that you would not marry a man, if he were the last man on earth, she did not know what it was.

And yet, hackneyed though the words were, she told herself that they had exactly expressed her meaning. As far as actual lucidity was concerned, she had no complaints to make. It was only that she wished that she could have hit on something which, while making her attitude equally clear, would have been fresher and more original. And the reflection that, even if inspiration were now vouchsafed to her and she thought of the ideal phrase, it was too late to say it, was a bitter one.

The result of these meditations was to leave her more coldly hostile to Jeff than ever, and the latter could hardly have selected a less fortunate moment for entering the room. The look which she flashed over her shoulder gave him some inkling of this. Even if you wrote off eighty-five per cent of its austerity on the Uffenham system of book-keeping, it was not an inviting look, and it was only by a strong exercise of will power that he was enabled to continue his advance across the floor.

He came to a halt at her side, looking down at her with eyes in whose intent gaze, he hoped, devotion and remorse were neatly blended.

"Hullo," he said. "Playing the piano?" and was immediately conscious of not having found the ideal conversational opening. It was not gay. It was not airy. It was not even reasonably intelligent. He would, he realized, have to do much better than this.

Anne made no reply. The question which he had propounded was one which could have been answered with a verbal affirmative, but it is much simpler if, when you are playing the piano, a man you dislike extremely asks you if you are playing the piano, to go on playing the piano, so that he can see for himself. She did so, and as Jeff had not yet thought of the bright remark which the situation demanded, the conversation waned.

It was still flagging, when Mrs. Cork came into the room.

Mrs. Cork had been looking for Jeff, for she had just met Lionel Green in the hall and heard his momentous news. And now, as her eyes fell on him, drooping beside the piano, there sprang into them that stern gleam which so many a giraffe and antelope had seen there just before qualifying for the obituary column.

In the statement of Lionel Green, made under the stress of strong emotion, there had been much which Mrs. Cork had found confused and rambling, and she was still at a loss to understand the motives which had led him to preserve silence until now on a subject calling, one would have supposed, for instant ventilation. But the main point or gist of it had got across nicely, and there was in her voice, as she spoke, a throaty growl which any leopard would have been proud to include in its repertoire.

"Your name is J. G. Miller," she said, with that avoidance of polite preliminaries which was so characteristic of her direct nature.

A certain something in her manner, as she bore down upon him, had warned Jeff that for some reason his charm had become diminished in his hostess's eyes: and her words, though they came as a shock, did not come with all the shock of the unexpected. Mindful of Lord Uffenham's excellent advice, he thrust his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He also smiled a pleasant and, he hoped, ingratiating smile.

"That's right," he said. "J. G. Miller. I had been meaning to tell you."

"You will leave this house immediately," said Mrs. Cork.

The words, though powerful and forcefully delivered, caused her a passing sensation of dissatisfaction. She did not feel, like Anne in the pantry and Jeff in this drawing-room, that she could have put what she had to say better. What irked her was being compelled to confine herself to mere words. A woman who has toyed with the idea of strangling a man with her bare hands does not like to have to modify the programme to the extent of simply telling him to leave the house.

But the taboos of civilisation are rigid. Conduct, which in Africa is normal and ordinary, provokes in Kent the pursed lip and the raised eyebrow.   A woman who wishes to settle in Kent is faced by two alternatives. Either she must refrain from strangling people, or she must go somewhere else.

Jeff bowed his head. He had removed his thumbs from the armholes of his waistcoat, and his manner was now meek and conciliatory, like that of a black-beetle which sees the cook reaching for the insect powder and does its best to show her that it fully realizes that it has brought this on itself.

"I quite understand," he said. "After my behaviour in court that day you naturally wish me to leave. I suppose it is no good telling you that I am gnawed by remorse for what I did?"

"There is a train in half an hour."

"And that if I had had the slightest idea that Lionel Green was Mrs. Cork's nephew, my line of cross-examination would have been very different?"

"I have told my butler to pack your things."

" I feared as much." Jeff turned to Anne. "Good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye," said Anne.

"I shall be gone in half an hour."

"Half an hour soon passes," said Anne.

"But before I go," said Jeff, once more enveloping Mrs. Cork in that winning smile, " I have a favour to ask. Will you autograph my copy of
A Woman In The Wilds?
It has always been one of my treasures, but it lacks that final touch."

In the greatest men and women there is almost invariably one weak spot. Achilles had his heel. Mrs. Cork had her
Woman In The Wilds.
Approach Clarissa Cork with the statement that you had purchased her brain-child, and you had found the talking point. It would be too much to say that at these words she turned instantly into a thing of sweetness and light, but she unquestionably went off the boil. Her gaze, which had been one of loathing, as if Jeff had been a caterpillar which she had discovered in her bowl of native maize, softened visibly.

It is the secret sorrow of authors that they too seldom come into direct contact with their public. Her publisher's statement had told Airs. Cork that two hundred and six splendid men and women had bought
A Woman In The Wilds,
but never till now had she stood face to face with anyone on the roll of honour. She had had to satisfy herself with the thought that the
Peebles Advertiser
considered the book bright and interesting and the more reserved verdict of the
Times Literary Supplement
that it contained three hundred and fifteen pages.

True, she had seen visitors at Shipley Hall leave the house with their copy tucked under their arm, but only after she had forced it on them, in Lord Uffenham's powerful phrase, like a nurse making a child take liquorice powder. And to her sporting mind there was something about this strong-arm form of circulation building that smacked of not playing the game. She had done it, but it had given her a guilty feeling, as if she had shot a sitting hippopotamus.

"That chapter about the crocodile," said Jeff. "I don't know if you remember it. That impressed me enormously. I had always been uneasily conscious that if I saw a crocodile lying on a sand bank, I should not know what to do, and I was rather ashamed of myself, because it is a thing which every young man ought to know. You really swam across and shot it?"

"In the eye."

"That is the best place?"

"The only place."

" I must bear that in mind. And that story of the witchdoctor who swallowed the snake. Enthralling."

Mrs. Cork was now giggling almost girlishly. "You seem to know the book very well."

"Practically by heart."

"Fancy that!"

"It has been an inspiration to me. It has made me so eager to go to Africa that I shall probably start directly I leave here."

"I have been---"

"Let me see. Allowing two days for buying my outfit---"

" I have been thinking it over---"