CHAPTER TEN
Fing-Su’s embarrassment was only of the shortest duration. The folded arms came apart, the shrinking figure gained a new and sudden poise, and Grahame St Clay was his European self again. Into the dark eyes came a malignant fire which made him of a sudden a figure of terror. Only for the fraction of a second did the beast in him raise his head. The light died; he was his old pedantic self.
“This intrusion is perfectly unwarrantable,” he said in a^ queer, staccato tone which in any other circumstances would have been ludicrous.
Clifford Lynne’s eyes were on the white table with its silver, glass and flowers, and then they slowly strayed to the girl, and he smiled. And this strange man had the most beautiful smile the girl had ever seen.
“If you can endure me through a meal,” he said, “I should like to be your host.”
Joan nodded.
She was frightened in a breathless, pleasant way, but immensely interested. She would not have been human had she been otherwise. These two men were enemies, bitter and remorseless, and now she understood, as clearly as though the story had been told to her, the significance of the snake which had wriggled from the box in the drawing-room at Sunningdale. St Clay had sent it. This suave Chinaman whom Clifford Lynne had called Fing-Su! And as this realization came to her, she turned pale, and moved unconsciously nearer to the intruder.
“Mr Narth!”
Fing-Su was speaking with difficulty. The rage in him was boiling up through the veneer which the university had given him, and his voice was tremulous, almost tearful.
“You have invited me—to lunch with this lady. You are not to allow this–-” Here he choked.
Stephen Narth felt it was a moment when he might at least attempt to assert his personality.
“Joan, you will stay here,” he commanded.
That was easy enough to say. What tone he must adopt to the man in the doorway was another and more difficult matter. If the odd-looking apparition of Sunningdale had been difficult to deal with, this cool and debonair man-about-town was much more of a problem.
“Um—Mr Lynne–-” he began, mildly enough. “This is extremely awkward. I have asked Joan to lunch with our friend–-“
“Your friend,” said Lynne quickly, “not mine! It might occur to you, Narth, that I should wish to be consulted before you issue invitations to my future wife, and ask her to lunch with a man who regards assassination as a remedy for most difficulties that come his way!”
He beckoned Joan to him with a slight jerk of his head, and meekly she went to him. Mr Narth had not even the courage to be angry.
Lynne stood aside for a moment to let the girl pass into the outer office, then he turned.
“Three of you people are playing with fire, and one of you is playing with hell,” he said slowly. “Spedwell, you were once an officer in the British Army, and presumably you have the atrophied qualities of a gentleman somewhere in your composition. I am not going to appeal to that tattered remnant, but to your sense of self-preservation. There’s a gallows ahead of you, my man—fifty seconds’ walk from the condemned cell to eternal damnation!”
He ignored Narth, but his long finger stretched out, pointing to the Chinaman.
“Fing-Su,” he said, “for the third time I warn you! The Joyous Hands will need a new chief, and that fine factory of yours will go up in smoke, and you with it!”
Turning, he walked out and slammed the door behind him.
The girl was waiting in the corridor outside the office. She was bewildered, excited, and running through the web of her emotions was a thread of faith in this strange man who had come so unexpectedly and so violently into her life. She turned as he closed the door and responded to his smile.
“Let’s go to the Ritz,” he said brusquely. “I am a very hungry man; I’ve been up since four.”
He said no word as they went down in the lift to the ground floor, and not until the taxi he called was threading its way through the tangle of traffic at the Mansion House did she speak.
“Who is Fing-Su?” she asked.
He started as though she had aroused him from a reverie.
“Fing-Su?” he said carelessly. “Oh, he’s just a Chink; the son of an old Chinese go-getter who wasn’t a bad fellow. The old man was missionary-educated, and that, of course, spoilt him. No, I’m not knocking missionaries; they cannot perform miracles. It takes nine generations to make a black man think white, but ten thousand years couldn’t change a Chinaman’s mentality!”
“He talks like an educated man,” she said wonderingly.
He nodded.
“He’s a Bachelor of Arts of Oxford. Old Joe Bray sent him there.” He smiled at her gasp of astonishment. “Joe did some queer, good-hearted, silly things,” he said, “and sending Fing-Su to Oxford was one of them.”
She could never remember exactly what happened at luncheon. She had a dim recollection that he talked most of the time, and only towards the end of the meal had she an opportunity of expressing her fears as to Mr Narth’s attitude.
“Don’t worry about him. He’s got his troubles, and they’re pretty bad ones,” he said grimly.
But there was one matter upon which she must speak. He had ordered a car to be waiting, and insisted upon seeing her home to Sunningdale, and this gave her her opportunity.
“Mr Lynne–-” She hesitated. “This absurd marriage–-“
“No more absurd than other marriages,” he said coolly, “and really not so absurd as it seemed when my whiskers were in full bloom. Do you want to get out of it?”
Joan was pardonably annoyed at the hopefulness in his tone.
“Of course I don’t want to get out of it!” she said. “I’ve promised.”
“Why?” he asked.
The colour came to her cheeks.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why did you agree so readily? That rattles me rather,” he said. “You’re not the kind of girl to take the first man who came along. You’re quite different from the stout and sentimental Mabel and the highly-strung Letty. What pull has Narth?”
The question silenced her.
“He has a pull, hasn’t he? He said to you: ‘You’ve got to marry this queer bird or else I’ll’–-what?”
She shook her head, but he was insistent, and his keen grey eyes searched her face.
“I was ready to marry anything when I came along. But I didn’t expect—you!”
“Why were you ready to accept anything?” she challenged, and a faint smile showed in his eyes.
“That’s fair,” he admitted; “and now I’ll tell you. I loved old Joe; he saved my life twice. He was the dearest, most fantastical old romance-hound that ever lived, and was mad keen that I should marry one of his family. I didn’t know this until he told me he was dying—I didn’t believe him, but that crazy Dutch doctor from Canton confirmed the diagnosis. Joe said that he’d die happy if I’d carry on the line, as he called it, though God knows he has no particular representative of the line worth carrying on—with the exception of you,” he added hastily.
“And you promised?” she asked.
He nodded.
“And I wasn’t drunk when I promised! I’ve a horrible feeling that I’m sentimental too. He died in Canton—that’s where the cable came from. How like Joe to die in Canton!” he said bitterly. “He couldn’t even die normally on the Siang-kiang!”
She was shocked by his callousness.
“Then what do you expect me to do, now that I know you are only marrying me to keep a promise?” she asked.
“You can’t take advantage of my frankness and sneak out,” he said a little gruffly. “I saw old Joe’s will after I’d arrived in England, when it was too late to alter it. Your marriage before the end of the year makes a million pounds’ difference to Narth.”