IN WHICH LOVE FLIES OUT OF THE WINDOW

Hughie closed the door on Joan, and breathed a gentle sigh of relief. He was spoiling for a fight, and he had just got his hands free, so to speak. Brief but perfect satisfaction lay before him.

He resumed his position in front of the fire. Mr. Haliburton sat on an oak table and swung his legs.

"Now, Marrable—" began the latter briskly.

Hughie interrupted him.

"Mr. Haliburton," he said, "you heard my intimation to Miss Gaymer just now?"

"I did," said Mr. Haliburton.

"Well, I should like to repeat it to you. The marriage which has been arranged—by you—will not take place. That's all."

"That," replied Mr. Haliburton easily, "is a matter for Joan and myself—"

"We will refer to my ward as Miss Gaymer for the rest of this interview," said Hughie stiffly.

"Certainly. To resume. You see, Marrable, although you were appointed Miss Gaymer's guardian by the eccentric old gentleman who bears the same name as yourself, your authority does not last for ever. I understand that the lady will shortly become her own mistress."

"She will."

"In which case she will have the control of her own property."

"That is so."

"Well,"—Mr. Haliburton paused, and flicked the ash off his cigarette,—"don't you think that this display of authority on your part, considering that it is subject to a time-limit, is rather ridiculous?"

"I have only one observation to make on that point," said Hughie coolly, "and that is, that I have made no display of authority of any kind."

"My dear sir," said Mr. Haliburton, raising his histrionic eyebrows, "aren't you forbidding the banns?"

"I have never forbidden anything. I have merely stated that the match will not come off."

"Don't let us quibble, man!" said Haliburton impatiently. He got off the table. "Look here, Marrable, there is no need for you and me to be mealy-mouthed in this matter. Let's be frank. You want this girl: so do I. She can't marry both of us, so she must pick one. She has picked me: I have her word for it. She says she cares for me more than any man in the world, and would tramp the roads with me. And I with her! Why, man—"

As he uttered these noble words Mr. Haliburton struck an attitude which many young women in the front row of the pit would have considered highly dramatic, but which merely struck the prejudiced and unsympathetic male before him as theatrical in the extreme.

"Drop it!" said Hughie. "You make me quite sick."

He spoke the truth. He did not know whether Haliburton's rhapsody rested on any assured foundation or not. But in any case Joan's fresh and innocent youth was a very sacred thing, and even the suggestion that she could have anything in common with this glorified super made him feel physically unwell.

Mr. Haliburton broke off, and smiled.

"Marrable," he said, almost genially, "we understand each other! I see you want plain English. I said just now that we were both fond of the girl. So we are. But I fancy we are both a bit fonder of her little bit of stuff—eh? Now, you have been handling the dibs for a matter of eighteen months, I understand. You have feathered your nest pretty comfortably, from all I hear. Don't be a dog in the manger! Let your friends into a good thing too!"

The mask was off with a vengeance. Hughie swallowed something and thanked God that, if his wanderings among mankind had taught him nothing else, they had taught him to hold himself in till the time came. He said:—

"Haliburton, I have told you several times that I do not forbid this engagement; because, as you have very acutely pointed out, my veto does not last for ever; but the match is not coming off, for all that. Before you go I will explain what I mean. I don't want to, because the consequences may be serious, both for Miss Gaymer and myself; but it will show you how absolutely determined I am to make a clean sweep of you.

"I should like to say in the first place that I should never have stood between Miss Gaymer and any man, so long as I honestly thought he could make her happy—not even a man whom I personally would regard as an ass or an outsider. But there are limits to everything, and you strike me as being the limit in this case. I have been making inquiries about you, and I now know your antecedents fairly well. You apparently are an actor of sorts, though all the actors of my acquaintance look distinctly unwell when your name is mentioned. However, whatever you are, I should be sorry to see any woman in whom I take an interest compelled to spend even half an hour in your company. In fact, if you had not originally come down here as a friend of Lance Gaymer's,—over whom, by the way, I find you once had some hold,—I should have asked Captain Leroy's permission to kick you out of the place some time ago!"

Mr. Haliburton looked a little uncomfortable. He held a good hand, but Hughie was obviously not bluffing. He had an uneasy feeling that there must be an unsuspected card out somewhere.

"To come to the main point," continued Hughie, "I want this engagement to be declared off by you, not by me. What is your price?"

Mr. Haliburton breathed again. Bribery? Was that all? He replied briskly:—

"How much have you got?"

"Is a thousand pounds any use?" asked Hughie.

"Twenty might be," replied the lover.

"My limit," said Hughie, who was not a man to haggle about what Mr. Mantalini once described as "demnition coppers," "is five thousand pounds."

"Talk sense!" said Mr. Haliburton briefly.

"The offer," continued Hughie steadily, "is open for five minutes. If you accept it I will write you a cheque now, and you will sit down and write a letter formally breaking off, on your own initiative, any engagement or understanding you may have entered into with Miss Gaymer, and undertaking never to come near her again; and I will see she gets it. If not—well, you'll be sorry, for you'll never make such a good bargain by any other means."

Haliburton eyed him curiously.

"Is this your own money you are offering me?" he said.

"It is," said Hughie, looking at his watch. "Three minutes left."

"Won't it make rather a hole in your capital account?"

"It will. In fact, hole won't be the word for it! But it will be worth it."

Intelligence dawned upon Mr. Haliburton.

"I see," he said slowly. "You expect to recoup yourself later, when—when the marriage settlements are drawn up, eh? Or perhaps," he added sarcastically, "eighteen months of careful trusteeship have put you in a position to afford this extravagance!"

Hughie was surprised at his own self-control. Only the little pulse which Joan had noticed beat assiduously in his right temple.

"Fifteen seconds!" he said. "Do you take this offer, Mr. Haliburton?"

"No."

"Right!" Hughie put his watch back into his pocket and regarded the misguided blackmailer before him rather in the manner of a benevolent policeman standing over a small boy with a cigarette.

"Your last few remarks," he said, "have been so offensive that I know you would not have had the pluck to make them unless you thought you had me absolutely under your thumb. But I may as well proceed to my final move, and terminate this interview. I am very averse to taking this particular step, because its results may be awkward, as I said, for Miss Gaymer. That is why I offered you practically all the available money I have to call the deal off. But I see I can't help myself. Now, Haliburton,—by the way, I forgot to mention that your real name is Spratt: you seem to have become a big fish since you took to fortune-hunting,—I am going to make you break off your engagement. I am going to pay you a high compliment. I am going to give you a piece of information, known only to myself and Miss Gaymer's banker, for which you will ultimately be very grateful, and the knowledge of which will cause you, when you get outside (which will be very soon now), to kick yourself for a blamed fool because you did not accept my first offer."

Mr. Haliburton-Spratt shuffled his feet a trifle uneasily, and Hughie continued:—

"You seem to be suffering from an aggravated attack of the prevailing impression that Miss Gaymer is an heiress. Her fortune has been variously estimated by tea-table experts at anything from forty to a hundred thousand pounds. I will now tell you what it really is. Get off the table: I want to open that dispatch-box."

Mr. Haliburton, conscious of a slight sinking sensation just below the second button of his waistcoat, moved as requested, and Hughie took out of the box a bank-book and a bulky letter.

"When I came home from abroad," he said, "I found this letter awaiting me. It is from my uncle. The following passage will interest you: '... I have realised practically all my personal estate, and have placed the cash to your credit on Joey's behalf'—Joey is the name," he explained punctiliously, "by which Miss Gaymer is known to her intimate friends—'at the Law Courts Branch of the Home Counties Bank.... The rest of my property is set down and duly disposed of in my will, and cannot be touched until my death is authenticated.'"

"I hope there was a respectable sum in the bank," said Mr. Haliburton, his spirits rising again.

Hughie opened the pass-book.

"When I went to the bank in question," he said, "and asked to be allowed to see the amount of my balance, I was handed this pass-book. From it you will gather the exact value of Miss Gaymer's fortune at the moment when I took over the management of her affairs."

He handed the book to Mr. Haliburton. That devout lover glanced eagerly at the sum indicated on the balance-line—and turned a delicate green.

"You see?" said Hughie calmly, taking the book back. "One hundred pounds sterling! A poor exchange for five thousand, Mr. Haliburton!"

"Where is the money?" said Haliburton thickly.

"That I can't tell you. But you will see by the book and this duly endorsed cheque,"—he picked a pink slip out of the dispatch-box,—"that the sum of thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred pounds—the amount he had put in a few days before, less one hundred—was drawn out of the bank, in a lump, by my uncle himself the day before he sailed. Why he did it, I can't imagine. He must have changed his plans suddenly. All I know is that he has put me in a very tight place as a trustee, and you in a much tighter one as a suitor, Mr. Haliburton!"

He took the cheque from the hands of the demoralized Haliburton, and closed the dispatch-box.

There was a long silence. At length Hughie said:—

"I presume I may take it that you now desire to withdraw from this engagement?"

"You may!" said Mr. Haliburton emphatically. He was too deeply chagrined to play his part any longer.

Hughie surveyed him critically.

"You're a direct rascal, Spratt," he said; "you are no more hypocritical than you need be. But you're a rascal for all that. Well, I won't keep you. Good afternoon!"

But Mr. Haliburton's quick-moving brain had been taking in the altered situation, with its strong and weak points so far as he himself was concerned. He had not lived by his wits twenty years for nothing.

"I suppose," he observed, reseating himself on the corner of the writing-table, "it would be indiscreet to inquire from what source the young lady, with a capital of one hundred pounds sterling, is at present deriving an income of apparently three or four hundred a year?"

"Not only indiscreet, but positively unhealthy," said Hughie, turning a dusky red. His fingers were curling and uncurling.

Mr. Haliburton directed upon him what can only be described as a depredatory eye.

"Don't you think, Mr. Marrable," he said, "that it would be a good thing to—square me? I could do with that five thousand. This is a censorious world, you know; and scandalous little yarns are apt to get about when a young lady accepts—Hrrrumph!"

It was the last straw. Hughie's iron restraint snapped at last. Both his and Mr. Haliburton's impressions of the next few moments were distinctly blurred, but at the end of that period Hughie, breathing heavily and feeling as if he had just won a valuable prize in a consolation race, found himself facing Jimmy Marrable, who had entered the door just as Love (as represented by Mr. Haliburton) flew out of the window.

"Hallo, Hughie!"

"Hallo, Uncle Jimmy! Half a mo'!"

Mr. Haliburton, seated dizzily in a rose-bed in the garden, heard Hughie's step returning to the French window above his head. A walking-stick suddenly speared itself in the soil beside him, and a pair of gloves and a Homburg hat pattered delicately down upon his upturned countenance; while Hughie's voice intimated that there was a swift and well-cushioned train back to town at six-twenty.

Then, closing the window and leaving Mr. Haliburton to extract himself tenderly from his bed of roses, cursing feebly the while and ruminating bitterly upon the unreliability of proverbial expressions, Hughie turned to the room again. It had just occurred to him that in the heat of the moment he had been a trifle cavalier in his reception of a relative whom he had not seen for ten years, and who he imagined had been dead for four.

Half an hour later Jimmy Marrable enquired:—

"Would it be too much to ask whom you were throwing out of the window when I came in?"

"Friend of Joey's," said Hughie briefly. "And now, Uncle Jimmy," he added, with clouding brow,—the joy of battle was overpast, and the horizon was dark with the wings of all kinds of chickens coming home to roost,—"I should like to inform you that you and your financial methods have put me in a devil of a hole. I want an explanation."

"Right. Fire away!"

"Well, when I took on the job bequeathed to me by you of administering Joan's affairs, I discovered that instead of being an heiress, the child was practically penniless. For some idiotic reason best known to yourself, you no sooner put money into the bank for her than you dragged it all out again. Consequently I discovered that I was booked to manage the affairs of a girl whom everybody thought to be the possessor of pots of money, but whose entire capital"—he picked up the pass-book—"amounted in reality to one hundred pounds sterling."

"Correct!" said Jimmy Marrable. "Proceed!"

"If," continued Hughie in an even and businesslike tone, "Joan had been prepared to marry me, the money wouldn't have mattered, as she could have had mine. Unfortunately that event did not occur."

"Did she know she hadn't any money when you asked her to marry you?" enquired Jimmy Marrable.

"No."

"And did she go on refusing you after you had informed her she was a pauper?"

Hughie had seen this question coming from afar. He turned a delicate carmine. His uncle surveyed him, and nodded comprehendingly.

"Quite so!" he said. "Quite so! You never told her."

"No," said Hughie, "I hadn't the heart. It seemed like—like trying to coerce her into marrying me. No, I just let her imagine that she had a tidy little fortune invested, and that she could live on the interest—three hundred a year. I—I found that sum for her, and she took it all right. After all, she was a woman, and women will swallow almost anything you tell them about money matters. If they jib at all, all you have to do is to surround yourself with a cloud of technicalities, and they cave in at once. I think Joey was a little surprised at not getting more, for she had thought herself a bit of an heiress; but she never said a word. In fact, she was so kind about it that I saw she was convinced I had made a mess of things somewhere, and must be protected accordingly. She put it all down to my usual incompetence, I suppose,—as far as I can see, she considers me a born fool,—and accepted the situation loyally."

"She would do that," said Jimmy Marrable.

"Well," continued Hughie, "Joan was all right, but everybody else was the devil. An awful girl friend of hers, called Harbord—"

"I know—twelve per cent!" gurgled Jimmy Marrable.

"Yes. Well, she came and gave me beans to begin with. Then young Lance began to suspect me,—he never could stand me at any price,—and he came and raised Cain one day at a luncheon party I was giving—but, by the way, that's all right now; Lance has come round completely. Even the Leroys couldn't conceal their conviction that I had made a bungle somewhere—an honest bungle, of course, but a bungle. And finally an unutterable sweep called Haliburton came along. I knew something of him—so much, in fact, that it never occurred to me that there was anything to fear from him. But he got the master-grip on me when every one else had failed. Joey—our Joey—fell in love with him and promised to marry him!"

"I have heard nothing of this. What sort of fellow is he?" enquired Jimmy Marrable.

"Much the same type, I should say, as the late lamented Gaymer, senior."

"Are you sure—about her falling in love?" continued Jimmy Marrable, in a puzzled voice.

"Looks like it," said Hughie. "I was away yesterday, and got back early this morning. I found a note from Joey on my dressing-table, saying that Haliburton had proposed to her, and that she was sending him along to me to ask for my consent. She wouldn't have gone as far as that if she didn't—if she didn't"—His voice shook. "It was a pill for me, Uncle Jimmy!"

"What did you do?" said Jimmy Marrable.

"I did this. I knew quite well that if Joey—loved him"—the words came from between his clenched teeth—"she would stick to him, blackguard or not. She's that sort."

"She is. Well?"

"I came to the conclusion that if there was to be a rupture of the engagement it must come from him."

"You made him break it off?"

"Yes."

"How? By throwing him out of the window?"

"No. That would have been no good if he was really after her money. I simply told him the truth—the whole truth—about her bank balance, and so on. That did it. He backed out all right."

Jimmy Marrable rubbed his hands.

"And then?"

"And then ideas began to occur to him—"

"Exactly. He began to ask questions—to make innuendoes—"

"Yes. I then threw him out of the window. It was some consolation. That is the story."

Hughie turned away, and gazed dejectedly into the fender. Presently Jimmy Marrable remarked:—

"And meanwhile the fat is in the fire?"

"It is," said Hughie bitterly. "Uncle Jimmy, what will she think? Everything is bound to come out now,—that fellow will run about telling everybody,—and when she hears of the cruel position I've placed her in she'll never speak to me again. We shan't even be ordinary good friends now. Poor little girl! I've done her the worst turn a man can do a woman; and I would have died for her—cheerfully!"

Hughie leaned against the tall mantelpiece and dropped his head upon his arms. "Joey! Joey!" he murmured to himself, very softly.

Jimmy Marrable retired to a remote corner of the room, where he spent some time selecting a cigar from Jack Leroy's private locker. Presently he returned. Observing that his nephew was apparently not quite ready to resume the conversation, he spent some time in lighting the cigar, bridging over the silence with a rumbling soliloquy.

"It is a blessing to be back on dry land again," he observed, "where cigars will keep in decent condition. No more green weeds for me! What I like is a good crisp Havana that splits open if you squeeze the end, instead of—"

Hughie once more stood erect on the hearthrug. The fit had passed.

Jimmy Marrable eyed him curiously.

"Hughie, boy," he said, "it was a mad, mad scheme. Why did you do it?"

Hughie turned upon him, and blazed out suddenly.

"Why?" he cried. "Because there was nothing else to do! Do you think I would let our Joey—no, damn it! my Joey—go out as a governess or a chorus-girl—yes, she actually suggested that!—when I could keep her happy and comfortable by telling one little white lie? It may have been a mad thing to do; but it was a choice of evils, and I'd do it again! So stuff that up your cigar and smoke it!"

"Silly young owl!" remarked Jimmy Marrable. He lit his cigar with fastidious care, and continued:—

"I suppose you want an explanation from me now?"

"Yes."

"Well, the withdrawal of that money was an eleventh-hour notion. It suddenly occurred to me that you, with your imbecile ideas about honour and filthy lucre, and so forth, might feel squeamish about making love to a girl with a fat bank balance. So just before I sailed I drew the money out, imagining that by so doing I should be removing the only obstacle to a happy union between you and Joey. The entire affair was intended to be a walk-over for you. Between us, we seem to have made a bonny mess of things. Hughie, we Marrables are not cut out for feminine fancywork."

"What is to be done now?" said Hughie gloomily.

"I have thought of that," said Jimmy Marrable. "When a man gets in a hopeless tangle of any kind, his best plan is to ask a woman to help him out. That is what we shall have to do. Wait here a few minutes."

He turned towards the door.

"Mildred Leroy won't be in for half an hour yet," called Hughie after him, "so it's no good looking for her."

"All right!" replied Jimmy Marrable's voice far up the stairs.