“Bad precedent, my dear,” suggested Everest. “If we start paying clients out of our own pockets — nevertheless, we’ll have a go at it — and see what we can do for you.”
The girl nodded, but her eyes held a worried look.
“It isn’t for myself,” she said, “it’s that poor dear old man. I hate to think of him, seventy-five years of age — just going to retire — his wife waiting for him — Darby and Joan for the rest of their days. Oh, there must be a solution!”
All the same, after the lapse of a week, during which she had thought of a hundred schemes and had rejected each one of them, it began to dawn upon her that what her colleagues had told her was right.
Yet she refused to give in, though by now the thing had well-nigh become an obsession with her. For hours together she would sit in her room puzzling to find a solution, unconsciously drawing figures on her blotting pad — but always the same figures — £10,004 7s 6d.
III
She had been doing it one afternoon and was sitting staring abstractedly at the pad before her, covered as it was with those eternal figures which now never seemed to leave her.
“You know,” she murmured to herself, “I shall have to stop this. It’s getting on my nerves. If I go on like this, that infernal thousand and four pounds, seven and sixpence will drive me into a lunatic—”
And then suddenly she stopped — stopped with a little quick cry wherein amazement, incredulity, hope, delight were all blended.
“Oh!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “I believe — I do believe—”
Her hand flashed out to the electric bell on her table and in a minute Carlton appeared.
“Carlton!” Daphne’s eyes were sparkling like an excited schoolgirl’s. “Carlton! I can’t see any one this afternoon? Not a soul of any sort — no callers — telephones — or anything! Don’t come near me for at least an hour. I’ve got—”
She stopped abruptly, flushing up in pretty confusion. Then, with equally pretty demureness, “I believe I’ve got a brain-wave, Carlton.”
“Very good, miss.”
As he closed the door and walked back to his table, there was something resembling a twinkle in the stalwart commissionaire’s eye.
Yet on the next afternoon the Daphne Wrayne who faced her four colleagues once again in that plainly furnished office whose outer door bore the inscription “The North Western Trading Syndicate,” showed not the slightest trace of excitement.
That something unexpected was coming those four men knew well enough — for they knew Daphne. Daphne never summoned them at a moment’s notice like this, without good and sufficient reason. Besides, her nicely assumed air of indifference, her airy nonchalance, even though it was amusing them, was certainly not deceiving them.
So, as if by tacit consent, they all waited interestedly for her to begin.
“Well, have any of you found the solution to the Merryweather case?” she queried with a fine assumption of carelessness.
Martin Everest, leaning forward on the table, answered:
“One of us has, Daph.”
“Which one?” quickly.
“You, my dear.”
Her pretty lips quivered.
“How do you know?”
“We know you! Let’s have it.”
Daphne lighted a cigarette, smiled at them all now. She saw they had guessed.
“Let me put a hypothetical case to you all,” she began. “Each one of you try to imagine that you are liable to some one — in equity, not law — for the sum, let’s say, of £1,004 7s 6d.
“Each of you is a wealthy man, but an unscrupulous one — and because you know the law can’t touch you, you tell your creditor to go to the devil” — she paused fractionally — “same as Horatio Merryweather did!”
The smile had gone from the faces of the four men. She was interesting them now and they were waiting for her to continue.
“Now, supposing,” she went on, gaining confidence as she noticed how they were hanging on her words, “that suddenly those figures began to descend on you like autumn leaves. Supposing that wherever you went, whatever you did, you found them confronting you at every turn? Stretch your imagination a little, and suppose — for the sake of argument — that you couldn’t get out of bed in the morning — couldn’t come down to breakfast — couldn’t go to your office, your club — couldn’t open a letter, a book, a newspaper — couldn’t move hand or foot from morning till night without those hideous figures rising up from somewhere and confronting you!
“And to add to the torture of it all, though you knew well enough who was engineering it, yet so cleverly was it done that you hadn’t a hope of proving it. What would you, wealthy men to whom a thousand pounds was nothing, do in order to rid yourselves of that insidious torture that was well-nigh driving you crazy — as it would drive you crazy if properly carried out? Wouldn’t you pay — and be darned glad to be quit of it all?”
At the sheer, undisguised admiration that was on the faces of her four colleagues she flushed up in obvious delight.
“Well,” she said smiling, “is it any good?”
“By Heavens, Daph,” exclaimed Trewitter, “it’s marvelous — it’s absolutely it!”
“And the law can’t touch us,” murmured Everest.
“Gee, but we’ll give him hell!” chuckled Williamson.
“How on earth did you hit it, dear?” queried Sylvester.
But the girl shook her head.
“I don’t think I did, Alan, it just hit me. You see, I’d got to the stage where those figures had become such a nightmare to me that I was really prepared to put down a thousand pounds out of my pocket in order to get rid of them. To apply the idea to Merryweather was a natural transition, I fancy!”
Martin Everest lay back in his chair, eyes on the ceiling, chuckling broadly.
“It was Schopenhauer who said,” he remarked, “that when in doubt consult a woman. She invariably sees what lies in front of her nose, while a man misses it because he is looking ten miles beyond. We’ve all been busy constructing the most elaborate and ingenious financial schemes to— Daph, I congratulate you! Once more you’ve put us right.”
“Just a bit of luck, Martin. Still, I knew you’d jump at it, and in order not to waste any time I’ve made a start.”
“How?”
“I went straight up and saw Horatio.” Surprise now — obvious surprise on every face. Almost a shade of anxiety, too, as they gazed at her.
“Whatever for, Daph?” asked Trewitter.
“It seemed to me that it was the first thing to be done.” She leaned forward on the table, slim hands clasped. A minute before she had been a laughing, blushing little girl — now she was a serious-eyed young woman who was almost laying down the law to these four men.
“In order that whatever we do shall carry real weight with Merryweather,” she said, “it is necessary to fix those figures in his brain. Everything we do from now onward is going to haunt him a million times more if he knows who is engineering this and why it is done.”
“Daphne’s right there,” nodded Sylvester. “If you’re warned of something that’s going to happen, it impresses you far more when it does happen than if you could assign no reason for it. That was your idea, wasn’t it, Daph?”
“Exactly, Alan. Therefore I got an interview with him and told him straight out who I was and why I had come.”
“And what did he say?”
“What I expected he’d say. I could see that he wanted to tell me that I was a silly little girl; first, for coming up at all and putting my cards so plainly on the table; and, secondly, for being stupid enough to imagine that merely at my request he would dream of paying Captain Marriner his thousand and four pounds, seven and sixpence.