Ten Star Clues (4 page)

He paused and looked round with a kind of sly triumph, and there came into Sophy's mind a sudden, sure conviction that the man was a liar and an impostor, and that he had put forward this story to explain a probably soon apparent ignorance of things he ought to have known, that a genuine Bertram would certainly have known. No one made any comment. The story had been too crude, its intention too evident. Even Bertram himself seemed to feel its reception unsatisfactory. He stared around with what Sophy felt was an insolent defiance, challenging them, as it were, to express disbelief. He drank up his tea and handed the cup to the silent and the watchful Anne.

“May I have another, Cousin Anne?” he asked, and, addressing himself for the first time to the impassive, sombre Ralph, he said:—“Cousin Ralph I hardly remember at all, but then we never saw much of each other, did we? Only in the hols., and not always then.”

“I never saw you before to-day,” Ralph answered slowly; “and please don't call me your cousin. I believe you to be a liar and an impostor.”

“Now, now, now,” protested Bertram. “I can make allowances for the way you feel about it, but what's the good of taking it bad? You heard what grand-pa said. I ask you, is it likely grand-pa would accept me as his grand-son and heir if he wasn't satisfied?”

“Have you seen the Countess?” asked Arthur abruptly.

“I have so,” Bertram answered readily. “Dear old grand-ma.” He shook his head. “Made me go all queer like, here,” he said, tapping the spot where he—erroneously—supposed his heart to be. “She just simply couldn't believe it at first, but bless the old dame, she came round as soon as we had talked a bit. Knew me at once then. ‘Bertram, my dear boy,' she said, ‘this is the happiest day of my life. Now I can depart in peace, same as the Bible says.' The very words she used,” he added defiantly, aware that all this was being received with some incredulity since his listeners knew very well that old Countess Wych was extremely unlikely to have said anything even remotely resembling such expressions as he reported. He went on a little quickly as if anxious no more should be said about his interview with the Countess:—“You know, I can quite understand the way you feel; just the way I should myself in your place, if you see what I mean. I shan't take offence. A bit thick to call the old boy a liar. But you can trust me. I'll tell him to forget it. I realize Cousin Ralph is a bit upset. Any one would be. What I say is, let's all shake down together and try to make the best of it. I know just how Ralph's feeling. Natural. But there it is. I've come back and here I am, and I'm more than willing to be friends. What say, Ralph?”

“I say,” answered Ralph in the same quiet, conversational tones, “that you're a barefaced and impudent fraud, that I intend to prove it, and I don't think it will be difficult either. I saw you when you got here. I saw the way you looked round. You had never been in the place before. Everything was strange.”

“Well, of course, so it was,” agreed Bertram easily. “Likely to be after ten years. I went away a boy of nineteen. I come back a man of twenty-nine. I don't feel the same person. In a sense I'm not the same person. Same thing here. It's all the same, but it's all different. Things I remember aren't there any longer and things I don't remember are there instead. Strange isn't the word.”

“Do you remember whose portrait used to hang in the library over the fireplace?” Ralph asked.

“Oh, well, if we are going to play the memory game,” Bertram answered promptly, “I'll agree at once there are probably a whole heap of things I've forgotten—I daresay that's true of you, too. Do you remember what happened that day we tried to cook a hedgehog gipsy fashion?”

“I don't know what you are talking about,” Ralph retorted.

“There you are, you see,” smiled Bertram. “It just shows. Clear in my mind as if it was yesterday and gone clean out of yours. Funny, isn't it? I daresay we could go on asking each other things like that all day. Only where would it get us? Likely as not, now I've reminded you, you'll remember all about that hedgehog business and what happened afterwards. When we got together those days you were always the leader, and likely the things you did made more impression on me than they did on you because I admired them so. I remember when we were playing Indians—”

“We never played Indians,” interrupted Ralph.

The other shook his head doubtfully.

“Well, what did we play at, if it wasn't Indians?” he asked.

But this time Ralph saw the trap.

“Don't talk about ‘we',” he snapped. “There's no ‘we' in it.”

“You mean it was you all alone?” smiled Bertram. “I expect you just thought I didn't count. Well, what did we play at? Indians if you ask me. All boys play Indians.”

Ralph made an angry step forward, his fists clenched, his eyes blazing, and Bertram's expression of a smug complacence was crossed by a quick look of apprehension. Sophy noticed that he even edged his chair a little nearer Anne, as though he felt safer closer to her. Sophy was sure, too, that Anne also had noticed that instinctive movement, and that in some odd way Anne was not displeased by it. This puzzled Sophy enormously. Impossible to suppose that Anne wanted her newly-returned cousin to be a coward—if he really were a coward, that is, which Sophy found a surprising idea. Because she had always taken it for granted that all men were always enormously brave just because they were men, and just as she knew herself to be a dreadful coward, because, she supposed, she was only a girl. Cows, for instance—a painful line of thought Sophy did not attempt to follow up. Of course, Ralph had looked very dreadful, almost for the moment as if he could have killed the other. No wonder perhaps, after all, that Bertram, though a man, and therefore strong and brave, had looked quite frightened. Anyhow, that slight movement towards Anne could not have been an instinctive seeking protection from her vicinity, because as Sophy knew, it was against the nature of things for a man to seek protection from a woman.

Such thoughts flashed swiftly and confusedly through her mind, and it was only later that she understood them clearly. At the moment her chief impression was of relief that that terrible look passed from Ralph so quickly, the ancient look of the man who sees before him his enemy and thinks only of instant attack. A momentary throwback to primitive emotions inconsistent with twentieth century tea tables nicely laid with cake and cream, and with civilized, cultured people gathered round. 

Anyhow, it was a considerable relief when Ralph's hands dropped to his side and he turned away. He felt he had nearly made a fool of himself. For the moment he had seen red. It passed, but he still had the sensation of having been trapped. That insidious use of ‘we', for example. His own remark ‘We never played Indians' that might so easily be twisted into an avowal that they had played together at other things. Why hadn't he said instead: ‘We never played at anything because you were never there to play with', or something like that. For the first time he was conscious of what was almost fear. Was it like this, he wondered, that the fly felt when the first invisible threads of the spider's web began to entangle it? He found that Clinton Wells, the lawyer, who hitherto had been silent, watchful and eager indeed but silent, was at his side.

“Ralph,” he said, “this is serious. You must be careful. It's no good doing anything rash.”

“The fellow's an impostor, a rank impostor,” Ralph said. “I ought to have kicked him out at once.”

“Can't do that,” Clinton answered dryly. “Can't kick people out of other people's houses.”

“The fellow's a rank impostor,” Ralph repeated.

“I know he is,” Clinton answered. “I am as certain of that as you are. But both Earl Wych and the Countess have acknowledged him as their grandson and heir.”

“Yes, I know,” Ralph said, and stood still. “Well, why?” he asked. “Why? what's it mean?” he asked again, bewilderedly, in the utter blank bewilderment only those can feel who see all their familiar accustomed world vanish at a touch. “Why?” he repeated.

“I don't know,” Clinton answered. “Only there it is. We must face facts. If you'll let me say so, it doesn't help to call your great-uncle a liar.”

“Did I do that?” Ralph asked. They had walked away from the tea table group and now had reached the end of the terrace, where stone steps led down to the grounds.

Ralph came to a halt there. He said:— “So I did, didn't I? Well, he is.”

“No,” Clinton declared. “Not consciously at least. It's their sub-conscious longing for their grandson to return that's done the trick. Natural enough in a way. Probably in secret, almost without knowing it, they've been longing for a direct heir. Thinking if only Miss Anne were a boy, if only one of the boys had lived. They've had a tough time, you know. Their own three sons killed in the last war, two grandsons killed in a motor accident, the third dying as a child. It's a tragic record. You can't wonder if two old people, their age telling on them, brooding very likely over their losses, should be only too willing to be convinced by the first fellow who comes along with a plausible story. And it is plausible—as plausible as butter. He had it all pat as you please. Most convincing.”

“Do you mean?”

“No, I don't,” Clinton interrupted quickly. “I'm a trained lawyer remember. The story is full of holes to me. But I can see how a jury might react, and your great-uncle and aunt—well, with them it's just wishful thinking. They wanted a grandson. A grandson appears. They fall on his neck. There you are.”

“Well, I'm not going to fall on his neck,” Ralph growled. From where they were standing together at the end of the terrace, he looked back towards the tea table. Anne was in the act of handing cakes to the claimant. Not falling on his neck, of course. Indeed, she was showing no more than the bare civility due to a guest introduced by the head of the house. All the same, Ralph scowled. He would rather have seen the plate of cakes smashed on Bertram's head. “Making himself at home already,” he said angrily.

“Very wise on Miss Anne's part, too,” declared Clinton, who had detected the note of resentment in Ralph's voice. “For the moment, the only thing to do is to go softly. Remember he's been accepted and introduced by Earl Wych himself.” 

“Look here,” Ralph said. “All that sub-conscious stuff and wishful thinking is all very well. Only Uncle Ralph”—Ralph was the traditional name of the first born in the Hoyle family, it was why Ralph himself had been given it—“only Uncle Ralph's not like that. There's precious little wishful thinking about the old man. He knows that fellow's an impostor as well as I do.”

But Clinton shook his head again.

“My dear fellow,” he protested, “Earl Wych is the very last man to welcome an impostor. Why should he? Why should any one? Inconceivable, doubly inconceivable in your uncle's case. You know his family pride. No one could possibly think Earl Wych would knowingly and deliberately, of malice aforethought so to say, accept as his grandson someone he knows to be an impostor? You can't really think that?”

“Only I do,” Ralph answered. “Uncle lied, and he knew it, and knew that I knew it.”

Clinton Wells shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, don't say that to any one else,” he advised. “Blind credulity in a very old man—that's natural. Wilful deceit is out of the question. Wishful thinking, that's all. Remember Lady Tichborne. She accepted as her own son—not grandson—a blatant, obvious fraud. This fellow at least is plausible. Arthur Orton wasn't. But look what it took to prove the truth. All because Lady Tichborne wanted her son back so badly she was ready to believe anything. Every lawyer knows there's nothing more difficult to prove than the truth. If you've a lie to prove, you back it up with other lies, and that's all right. But the truth has to stand on its own legs, and sometimes they're pretty shaky legs, too. And if you aren't careful you may prejudice your case from the first. What do you mean to do?”

“I suppose I can bring an action—”

“What about?” interposed Clinton. “I suppose in theory you could apply for an injunction to prevent this fellow putting forward his claims or your great-uncle from acknowledging them. But I certainly never heard of such an action, and I don't know quite whether it would stand. You see, the point is this. Courts of Equity will redress any wrong. That's what they're for. If you have suffered any wrong, the courts are open to you and it's for them to find a remedy. But at present you've suffered none.”

“What—” Ralph was beginning in something like a roar but Clinton stopped him with a lifted hand.

“In the eyes of the law,” he said quietly, “your position is exactly what it was. That is, you had no rights before and therefore they have not been affected. While the holder of the Wych title and estates is alive, the heir has no rights whatever—except that under the entail he could stop any sale of land or other goods covered by the entail. But no such sale is contemplated. On the death of the holder naturally any claimant can petition for his rights to be acknowledged. But at present you are, so to say, an uninterested party. In theory, Countess Wych might die, Earl Wych might marry again and might have a son. Then both you and this impostor fellow would be out of it. I believe it's not a physical impossibility for a man of that age to have a son. Of course, it won't happen, but the courts can't act on the ‘it won't happen' idea.”

“Do you mean there's nothing I can do about it?” demanded Ralph, looking very much as if he very firmly intended to do a good deal about it.

“I've been giving you my opinion,” Clinton answered, “my un-considered opinion though. I mean, it's a new point. I can't remember anything of the sort before. I didn't bother to look it up, because, when I brought the fellow here, I fully expected your uncle to ask a few questions and then clear him out for the obvious fraud he seemed to me—he still seems to me. But it didn't turn out like that. The fellow rolled out his yarn and your uncle took it all in. You must see that makes his position immensely strong.”