The tomb of Ts'in
came down to breakfast. Yvonne had already begun her meal, and the
elder woman gave her a slight peck in the region between the eye and
the _superior maxilla_, which signified the automatic continuance of
her devotion.
She flounced into her chair, unfolded her napkin, glanced at her
papers, and criticised the bacon at one and the same time.
Yvonne glanced at her idly. Instinctively, she had closed all the
sound-proof doors of her mind on her stepmother’s entrance.
“Bills,” said Mrs. Yale grimly. “We shall have to draw in our horns.”
Yvonne had never completely satisfied herself as to what were the
horns to which Mrs. Yale invariably referred. If it was the
cornucopian horn, it was generally drawn in empty.
“Here’s this exasperating broker of mine,” said the elder woman,
looking at a long statement of account. “I told him particularly not
to sell Long Island Gas until it reached eighty-four--and here he has
sold it at eighty-one!”
“It is now seventy-six,” said Yvonne, drily. “If you had waited for
your eighty-four you might have lost much more money.”
She had taken to a study of the Share Market and its report from sheer
self-defence.
Mrs. Yale opened another letter. It was very short and, apparently,
unpleasant.
“Good heavens!” said she.
Her language at breakfast was generally violent. It was, in a sense,
an act of devotion, since it had been acquired from her militant
husband, who long since had carried his sword to heaven.
“What is the matter? From the bank?” asked Yvonne.
Mrs. Yale invariably kept her most violent expletives for the bank.
“He says I am eighty pounds overdrawn--will I put this right at once!”
Mrs. Yale glared at her unoffending stepdaughter.
“It’s absurd,” she said, “ridiculous! Eighty pounds overdrawn! Why,
I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life.”
Yvonne smiled. She, at any rate, had had this experience before.
“I know what it is,” said Mrs. Yale, with sudden decision. “They’ve
got one of those wretched horse-racing bank clerks who is robbing the
bank. He’s filching my account because he knows I am so careless. I
suspected it all along!”
“The last time, mother,” said Yvonne quietly, “you thought Martha had
been using your blank cheques. Why don’t you fill up your
counterfoils, and then you would know how much money you had?”
Mrs. Yale offered no reply. She made a further rapid survey of the
morning’s post without finding satisfaction. She reserved two
obviously private letters for the last. These she opened and read
carefully. Then she folded them up, placed them in their envelopes,
and slipped them into a bag which hung at her side--for all the world
like a sabretache.
She scrutinised Yvonne with a long and approving scrutiny.
“My dear,” she said finally, “you’ve got to make a good marriage.”
“Have I?” said the girl coolly. “I thought only people in novelettes
made good marriages. What do you mean by making a good marriage,
exactly?”
“Now, don’t be tiresome, Yvonne,” said Mrs. Yale. “I’ve been a good
mother to you. I’ve done my best to bring around you the most eligible
men in London. I’ve spent money like water--which reminds me, we shall
have to have that kitchen range seen to; Martha tells me it’s smoking
again, and she can’t get the oven hot. Where was I?--Oh, I was saying,
I have spent money like water, and I think I am entitled to some
return. Not,” she hastened to say, “that I expect any monetary reward
for my sacrifices----”
Yvonne had heard all this before. In one form or another this
conversation was almost a daily feature of her life.
“I can’t help thinking, my dear,” said Mrs. Yale, putting her head on
one side and looking at her stepdaughter with her pale blue eyes
opened to their widest extent. “I cannot help thinking that you have
not always appreciated my efforts. That new dress, for instance, which
I bought at the summer sales--you have never worn it.”
“It’s totally unsuitable for me, mother,” said Yvonne. “I thought I
told you so. It’s not the kind of dress that I should care to be seen
walking in. I’d always much rather choose my own.”
“That’s pique,” said her stepmother. “That’s naughty pique.”
Yvonne made no reply. It was useless to argue the point.
“Then, the other night, when Mr. de Costa called to congratulate you
on your rescue from those horrid China people”--Yvonne’s lips curled
scornfully--“you came down absolutely without a jewel on. Yet, in your
room, on your own table, for you to wear, are my own pearls--my own
bangles.”
Yvonne smiled.
“My dear mother,” she said, “I will not wear imitation pearls, even to
please you, and most certainly I will not wear any kind of jewel which
everybody, who is in the habit of coming to this house, has seen round
your neck at least a dozen times. You see they are rather
unmistakable,” she said carefully. “If they were real, they could not
be worth less than fifty thousand pounds.”
“There is a certain finesse in these things,” said Mrs. Yale vaguely;
but she did not pursue the topic.
She waited until her own meal was nearly at an end, and the girl was
folding her serviette preparatory to leaving the table, before she
returned to the attack.
“What about young De Costa?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“Has he proposed to you?”
“I really forget,” said Yvonne carelessly. “These people do propose in
a way--almost mechanically. I don’t like him--he is rather a worm.”
Mrs. Yale frowned.
“A most unkind description,” she said severely. “His father is
immensely rich. He gave you a beautiful bangle which I never see you
wearing, by the way.” She paused for an explanation, but Yvonne
offered none. “And what of Captain Talham?”
Yvonne rose from the table.
“I don’t propose to discuss these matters at breakfast, mother,” she
said. “You know, it takes all the romance out of a thing. It reduces
love and marriage to the level of cold bacon.”
“But has he?” persisted Mrs. Yale.
“Has he what?” the girl evaded.
“Has he proposed to you, my dear? Let me impress upon you this
fact--that though Captain Talham is not enormously wealthy, he has
prospects, and he is enormously generous. I hope you have not
forgotten the fact that he rescued you from the hands of those
terrible persons.”
“He has proposed,” interrupted the girl, “if that is what you mean. In
fact, he called this morning at five o’clock to make his proposal.”
CHAPTER XIV.
AND RECEIVES HIS ANSWER.
Mrs. Yale gasped.
“Proposed this morning!” she repeated incredulously. “At five
o’clock!”
“He called at five this morning,” said the girl, “as Martha Ann will
tell you, if you have any doubts.”
“Why was I not aroused?” asked Mrs. Yale, with a sense of grievance
that she had missed something.
“Because he wasn’t proposing to you,” said the girl calmly. “It was my
affair entirely.”
Mrs. Yale got up from the table, a little hurt.
“I think, Yvonne,” she said, with a sort of stagey gentleness, “that
you might remember my anxieties and sacrifices.”
“I do not forget them,” said her stepdaughter; “only, unfortunately,
this is my anxiety and my sacrifice.”
Mrs. Yale sniffed, and searched aimlessly for her handkerchief, but
thought better of it. After all, Yvonne was not the sort of girl to be
moved by tears. She did not need to have this fact again impressed
upon her. She was hard. The dear colonel, her father, had shown
similar callousness of tears, and had laid down the perfectly dreadful
theory that the more one wept the less one perspired. And indeed, he
had written a paper on the subject, and had invited the Royal Society
to allow him to read it--a request which was respectfully declined.
The subject of her marriage, as Yvonne had so truly said, had formed a
periodic matter for argument--only unfortunately, in the present
instance, it was absolutely necessary that Mrs. Yale should know where
she stood.
She had hinted as much--indeed, had said as much--before; but now she
could say so in very truth. The eccentric behaviour of Long Island Gas
was as nothing to the monstrous conduct of an oil well in Southern
Russia.
Quite a lot of Mrs. Yale’s money had gone from time to time towards
the sinking of a bore hole upon what the directors invariably and
carefully referred to as “The Property.”
When they wrote to Mrs. Yale they referred to themselves as “Your
Directors.” It gave the good lady the comforting feeling that they
were distant relations--though what satisfaction accrued to her from
that, Heaven only knows.
“Your Directors,” who had started out on their career joyful and
optimistic, making conservative estimate of future profits, which were
beyond the dreams of avarice, had grown rather gloomy of late. “Your
Directors” had been probing the bowels of the earth without any great
profit to themselves, and apparently without any great inconvenience
to the earth. The oil, in its furtive, sneaking way, seemed to have
got wind of “Your Directors’” intentions, and moved off to a
neighbouring oil field.
“Your Directors”--sharp and cunning fellows--were not to be evaded.
They purchased the neighbouring oil field, and told Mrs. Yale, by
private letter, that the prospects were of the brightest, and they
hoped soon to make a definite statement.
After six months they made a definite statement--but the prospects
were no longer of the brightest. The oil, in a panic, had retired some
thirty versts.
“Your Directors” were considering their position. Mrs. Yale was
impressed by the whole-hearted devotion of “Your Directors” to her
interests, and the employment of the blessed word “versts” brightened
her up. After all, it looked as if there was a mine somewhere, and
undoubtedly it was in a foreign country where “miles” had a special
name of their own, and so many other extraordinary things happened.
In one way or another, as a result of poetic folders and disinterested
advice from Mr. Macdougal and other outside brokers with names
reminiscent of the Old Testament, Mrs. Yale had lost some eight
hundred pounds; not a considerable sum to most of the people who lived
in Upper Curzon Street, and not one to bother even a woman
circumstanced as Mrs. Yale was--the morning after the loss.
Yvonne knew nothing of her stepmother’s folly, or she would have
worried much more than did Mrs. Yale. As a matter of fact, that
amiable lady did not greatly distress herself. She was obsessed with
the idea that she was a born financier. She adjusted things. She had
learnt the financier’s trick--which is, not to borrow from Peter to
pay Paul, but to borrow from Peter, pay half of Paul’s demands, and
utilise the other half for playing margin on sure enough stock.
In this way the debt both to Peter and Paul may be discharged with a
bit of luck, and anyway Paul has had something on account.
Mrs. Yale spent the day shopping pleasantly; Yvonne dreamt away the
hours in reverie. She thought of Talham, that first meeting in the
park, the adventures that followed her parting with the jade bracelet,
and all he had said that morning. She acted on a sudden impulse and
sent him a wire.
So the day wore on, bringing Mrs. Yale back from her precious bargain
sales, weary but triumphant, and the possessor of many articles for
which she had no particular use, but which were undeniably cheap.
Just before dinner the second visitor was announced.
Yvonne read the card and frowned. “Mr. Raymond de Costa,” said the
pasteboard elaborately. He had called for an answer to his letter.
It was not the hour that visitors usually called, unless they were
invited to dinner, and, as Martha Ann can testify, the dinner that
night was of significant frugality. Mrs. Yale, dining alone (and it
was tantamount to dining alone when she had no other companion at the