EX MACHINA

Miss Joan Gaymer, pleasantly fatigued after last night's dissipation, reclined in a canvas chair on the lawn at Manors. She had just finished reading a letter which had arrived by the afternoon post. It was from her brother Lance, and conveyed, probably a good deal more fully than Hughie himself would have done, the reasons for Hughie's absence on the previous evening. Joan's brow was puckered thoughtfully, and she surveyed the tips of her small shoes, which were cocked at an unladylike altitude upon a stool in front of her, with a profundity of maiden meditation which was perhaps explained by the fact that she had received a proposal of marriage the evening before, and was expecting the proposer to come and second his own motion at any moment.

To her entered suddenly Jno. Alex. Goble.

"Yon felly!" he intimated austerely.

"Mr. Haliburton, do you mean, John?" inquired Miss Gaymer, hastily letting down her feet.

"Aye. Wull I loose him in here?"

"Yes, please. No—I mean—"

But Cupid's messenger was gone. Presently he returned, and, with the air of one introducing the Coroner to the foreman of the jury, announced Mr. Haliburton.

That ardent suitor advanced gallantly across the lawn, and taking Joan's hand with an air of respectful rapture, endeavoured to draw its owner into the shade of the copper beech. Joan forestalled his intentions by saying at once,—

"Come along into the library, Mr. Haliburton, and we'll see what my guardian has to say to you."

Mr. Haliburton hinted that there was no hurry, and made a pointed reference to Amaryllis and the shade; but his unsentimental nymph marched him briskly across the lawn, round the corner of the house, and in at the front door.

They crossed the cool, dark hall, and Joan tapped at the oaken door of the library.

"Come in," said a voice.

The lovers entered.

"I have brought Mr. Haliburton to see you, Hughie," remarked Miss Gaymer, much as one might announce the arrival of a person to inspect the gas meter.

Mr. Haliburton, who was not the man to show embarrassment, whether he felt it or not, advanced easily into the room. Joan surveyed his straight back and square shoulders as he passed her, and the corners of her mouth twitched, ever so little.

Then she looked at Hughie. It was her first meeting with him since his return home that morning. He had answered her note by another, saying that he would be in the library at five o'clock. There was no twitching about his mouth. It was closed like a steel trap; and he stood with his back to the wood-fire which glowed in the grate—it was getting on in September, and cold out of the sun—with absolute stolidity. Joan saw at a glance that, whatever the difficulties of the position, her guardian's line of action was now staked out and his mind made up—one way or the other.

She dropped into an arm-chair.

"Now, you two," she remarked encouragingly, "get to work! I want to hear what each of you has got to say about my future. It will be quite exciting—like going to a palmist!"

The two men turned and regarded her in unfeigned surprise. They had not expected this. Haliburton began swiftly to calculate whether Joan's presence would be a help to him or not. But Hughie said at once:—

"You must leave us alone, Joan, please! I can't possibly allow you to remain."

Joan lay back in her chair and smiled up at him, frankly mutinous. She had never yet failed, when she so desired, to "manage" a man. Hughie was regarding her stonily; but two minutes, she calculated, would make him sufficiently pliable.

She was wrong. At the end of this period Hughie was still rigidly waiting for her to leave the room. Joan, a little surprised at his obstinacy, remarked:—

"If you are going to object to—to Mr. Haliburton's suggestions, Hughie, I think I ought to hear what the objections are."

"Before you go," said Hughie in even tones, "I will tell you one thing—and that should be sufficient. It is this. There is not the slightest prospect of this—this engagement coming off. My reasons for saying so I am prepared to give to Mr. Haliburton, and if he thinks proper he can communicate them to you afterwards. But I don't think he will. Now will you leave us, please?"

Joan was genuinely astonished. But she controlled herself. She was determined to see the matter out now. All the woman in her—and she was all woman—answered to the challenge contained in Hughie's dictatorial attitude. Besides, she was horribly curious.

She heaved a sad little sigh, and made certain shameless play with her eyes which she knew stirred poor Hughie to the point of desperation, and surveyed the result through drooping lashes with some satisfaction. Hughie's mouth was fast shut, and he was breathing through his nose; and Joan could see a little pulse beating in his right temple. (Both of them, for the moment, had forgotten the ardent suitor by the window.) She would win through in a moment now.

But alas! she had forgotten a masculine weapon against which all the Votes for Women in the world will avail nothing, when it comes to a pinch.

Hughie suddenly relaxed his attitude, and strode across to the door, which he held open for her.

"At once, please!" he said in a voice which Joan had never heard before, though many men had.

Without quite knowing why, Miss Gaymer rose meekly from her chair and walked out of the room. The door closed behind her.

When Joan found herself on the lawn again she gasped a little.

"Ooh!" she said breathlessly. "I—I feel just as if I'd been hit in the face by a big wave! This game is not turning out quite as you expected, Joey, my child: the man Hughie is one up! Still, I'll take it out of him another time. But—heavens!"—She was staring, like Red Riding-Hood on a historic occasion, at a recumbent figure in her canvas chair beneath the copper beech—"Who on earth is that in my chair? It's—it's—oh! Joey Gaymer, you've got hysterics! It's—it's—Uncle Jimmy! Uncle Jimmy!... My Uncle—Jimmy!"

Next moment she was reposing comfortably, a distracted bundle of tears and laughter, in the arms of Jimmy Marrable.

"A bit sudden—eh, young lady?" enquired that gentleman at last. "I ought to have written, I suppose. But I quite forgot you would all think I was dead. Never mind—I'm not!"

He blew his nose resonantly to substantiate his statement.

Joan, satisfied at last that he was real, and greatly relieved to find that she was not suffering from hysterical delusions arising from Hughie's brutal treatment of her, enquired severely of the truant where he had been for the last five years.

Jimmy Marrable told her. It was a long story, and the shadow of the copper beech had perceptibly lengthened by the time the narrator had embarked at Zanzibar for the port of Leith. They had the garden to themselves, for the Leroys were out.

"I don't want to hear any more adventures, because I'm simply bursting with questions," said Miss Gaymer frankly. "First of all, why did you go away? You rushed off in such a hurry that you had no time to explain. I was barely eighteen then."

"It was the old failing—the Marrable wandering tendency," replied her uncle. "I had kept it at bay quite easily for close on fifteen years, but it came back very hard and suddenly about that time."

"Why?"

"Partly, I think, because the only thing that had kept me at home all those years seemed to be slipping away from me."

"I wasn't!" declared Miss Gaymer stoutly. Then she reflected. "Do you mean—all those silly boys? Was it them?"

"It was," said Jimmy Marrable. "They not only put my nose out of joint but they bored me to tears."

"You were always worth the whole lot of them put together, dear," said Miss Gaymer affectionately.

"I knew that," replied Jimmy Marrable modestly, "but I wasn't quite sure if you did. I saw that for the next two or three years you would be healthily and innocently employed in making fools of young men, and so could well afford to do without your old wreck of an uncle. The serious part would not come until you grew up to be of a marriageable age. So I decided in the meanwhile to treat myself to just one last potter round the globe, and then, in a couple of years or so, come home and assume the onerous duties of chucker-out."

"Then why did you stay away so long?" demanded Miss Gaymer.

"Because I heard Hughie had come home," said Jimmy Marrable simply.

Joan started guiltily, and her hand, which was resting in one of the old gentleman's, relaxed its hold for a moment. Jimmy Marrable noticed nothing, and proceeded:—

"I got news of him from a man in Cape Town. His name was Allerton. He seemed a bit of a rolling stone, but had lately married the proprietress of a little public-house, Wynberg way, and was living in great contentment and affluence. His wife regarded his capture as the crowning achievement of her life, and altogether they were a most devoted couple. On hearing that my name was Marrable, he said he was sure I must be Hughie's uncle, as Hughie had told him I was the only relation he had. He was a gentleman, of sorts, and seemed to regard friend Hughie as a kind of cross between Providence and the Rock of Gibraltar. They had been through some rather tough times together—on board the Orinoco. I expect Hughie has often told you all about that?"

Joan shook her head.

"No? Well, it was like him not to. However, Allerton told me for a fact that Hughie was now home for good; so I knew then that my plans had worked out right after all, and that I need not hurry back. My little girl was safe."

He sighed contentedly, and patted Joan's hand.

"I'm a happy old fossil, Joey," he said. "I've always schemed in a clumsy way to bring this about, and now it has happened. 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,' you know. And now, I suppose, you are mistress of this old house. How long have you been married?"

"We're not," said Joan in a very small voice.

"Not what?"

"Married."

She held up a ringless hand in corroboration. Jimmy Marrable inspected it.

"Where's your engagement ring?" he demanded.

Joan felt that there was a bad time coming—especially for Uncle Jimmy.

"We—we're not engaged," she faltered. Then she continued swiftly, for there was a look on Jimmy Marrable's brown and wrinkled face that frightened her, and she wanted to get explanations over: "Hughie and I didn't quite care for one another—in that way. No, I'm a liar. I didn't care for Hughie in that way."

"He asked you, then?"

"Yes."

"And you—wouldn't—?"

Joan nodded. She suddenly felt unreasonably mean and despicable. She had declined to marry Hughie in all good faith, as she had a perfect right to do, for the very sufficient reason that she did not like him—or his way of putting things—well enough; and she had felt no particular compunction at the time in dealing the blow. But none of these reasons seemed any excuse for hurting Uncle Jimmy.

Since then, too, her feelings towards Hughie himself had altered to an extent which she was just beginning to realise. Of late she had found herself taking a quite peculiar interest in Hughie's movements. Why, she hardly knew. He paid her few attentions; he was habitually uncompromising in what he considered the execution of his duty; and he had made a shocking mess of her affairs. But—he was in trouble; people were down on him; and he had been her friend ever since she could remember.

Now Joan Gaymer, if she was nothing else, was loyal; and loyalty in a woman rather thrives on adversity than otherwise. And a woman's loyalty to a man who is her friend, if you endeavour to overstrain it or drive it into a corner, in nine cases out of ten will protect itself, Proteus-like, by turning into something entirely different, a something which is quite impervious to outward attack and can only be strained to breaking-point by one person—the man himself; and not always then, as countless undeserving husbands know. Joan's loyalty to Hughie was in some such process of transition. She thought about him a good deal, but she had never once faced the question of her ultimate relations with him. The modern maiden is not given to candid analysis of her own feelings towards members of the opposite sex,—she considers these exercises "Early Victorian," or "sentimental," or "effeminate"; and consequently Joan had never frankly asked herself what she really thought about Hughie Marrable. At times, say when she heard people speak ill of her deputy-guardian behind his back, she had been conscious that she was hot and angry; at others, when something occurred to bring home to her with special force the tribulations that Hughie was enduring, she had been conscious of a large and dim determination to "make it up to him," in some manner as yet undefined and at some time as yet unspecified. In short, like many a daughter of Eve before her, she had not known her own mind. She knew it now. Her heart smote her.

Suddenly Jimmy Marrable's voice broke in with the rather unexpected but not altogether unreasonable question:—

"Then if you aren't either engaged or married to Hughie, may I ask what the deuce you are doing in his house?"

"It isn't his house," replied Joan, recalling her wandering attention to the rather irascible figure by her side. "He has let it to the Leroys, and he and I are both staying here as guests just now."

"What on earth did the boy want to let the place for? Why couldn't you and the Leroys come and stay here as his guests?"

"I think," said Miss Gaymer delicately, "that Hughie is—rather hard up."

"Hard up? Stuff! He has eight hundred a year, and enough coming in from the estate to make it pay its own way without any expense to him. How much more does he want?"

"I don't think Hughie is a very good business man," said Joan.

She made the remark in sincere defence of Hughie, just as a mother might say, "Ah, but he always had a weak chest!" when her offspring comes in last in the half-mile handicap. But Jimmy Marrable, being a man, took the suggestion as a reproach.

"Nonsense!" he said testily. "Hughie has as hard a head as any man I know. What do you mean by running him down? Have you any complaint to make of the way he has managed your affairs—eh?"

"None whatever," said Joan promptly.

"But—bless my soul!" cried Jimmy Marrable; "I forgot! You haven't got—" He paused, and appeared to be working out some abstruse problem in his head. "Look here, Joey," he continued presently, "if you aren't married to Hughie, what are you living on?"

Joan stared at him in astonishment.

"On the money you left behind for me," she said. "What else?"

The old gentleman regarded her intently for a moment, and then said:—

"Of course: I forgot. I suppose Hughie pays it to you quarterly."

"Yes—into my bank account," replied Miss Gaymer with a touch of pride.

"How much?"

"Is it quite fair to tell?" inquired Joan, instinctively protecting her fraudulent trustee.

"Of course. It was my money in the first instance. Go on—how much?"

"Four hundred a year," said Joan. "It was three hundred at first. Hughie told me you hadn't left as much as he expected, and that I should have to be careful. But Ursula Harbord—she is the girl I share a flat with: she is frightfully clever about money and business—told me to ask Hughie what interest I was getting on my capital, or something. I found out for her—four per cent, I think it was—and she said it wasn't nearly enough. There were things called preference shares, or something, that pay ten or twelve per cent; and Hughie must sell out at once, and buy these instead. What's the matter?"

Jimmy Marrable had suddenly choked.

"Nothing! Nothing!" he said, in some confusion. "A smart girl, this friend of yours! Takes a large size in boots and gloves, I should say, and acts as honorary treasurer to various charitable organisations! Twelve per cent! Aha!" He slapped himself feebly. "And what did Master Hughie say to that?"

"I could see he didn't half like it," continued Joan; "but Ursula had declared that if I wouldn't allow her to speak to him, she would consult some responsible person; as she was sure Hughie was mismanaging things disgracefully. So to keep her quiet I let her. I think Hughie saw there was something in what she said, though; because he immediately agreed to give me four hundred a year in future instead of three. Is it enough, Uncle Jimmy, or has poor Hughie really made a mess of things, as people say? Say it's enough, Uncle Jimmy! I know he did his best, and I'd rather go without—"

"Enough?"

Jimmy Marrable turned and scrutinised his ward closely, as if appraising her exact value. Certainly she was very lovely. He whistled softly, and nodded his head in an enigmatical manner.

"I'd have done it myself," he murmured darkly. "Enough?" he repeated aloud. "My little girl, do you know how much capital an income of four hundred a year represents?"

Joan shook her head. Her experience of finance was limited to signing a cheque in the proper corner.

"Well, about ten thousand pounds."

"Hoo!" said Miss Gaymer, pleasantly fluttered. "Have I got all that?"

"No."

"Oh! How much, then?"

Jimmy Marrable told her.