Grey Mask (3 page)

“There is no proof even of that,” said Mr. Hale.

Margot burst out laughing.

“Oh!” she said. “How frightfully funny that sounds! Why everyone knows I’m his daughter! How frightfully funny you are! Who do you think I am, if I’m not Margot Standing? Why, it’s too silly!”

Mr. Hale frowned.

“Miss Standing, this is a very serious matter, and I beg that you will treat it seriously. I do not believe that Mr. Standing made a will. I know that he had not made one six weeks ago, for he paid my father a visit on the twentieth of August, and after he had gone my father told me that he had been urging upon Mr. Standing the necessity of making his will. My father then used these words: ‘It is a very strange thing,’ he said, ‘that a man in Mr. Standing’s circumstances should have deferred such a simple and necessary action as the making of a will. And in his daughter’s peculiar circumstances he certainly owes it to her to make sure of her provision.’ Now, Miss Standing, those are the exact words my father used, and I take them to mean that he was cognizant of some irregularity in your position.”

Margot opened her eyes very wide indeed.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“In the absence of any information about your mother, and in the light of what my father said—”

“Good gracious! What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Mr. Hale, “that it is possible that there was no marriage.”

“But good gracious, there’s me!” said Miss Standing.

“It’s possible that you are illegitimate.”

Miss Standing gazed at him in silence. After a moment she repeated the word illegitimate in a tentative way; it seemed to touch a chord. She brightened visibly and said in a tone full of interest,

“Like William the Conqueror—and all those sons of Charles II?”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Hale.

“How frightfully thrilling!” exclaimed Miss Standing.

When Mr. Hale had finished explaining the exact legal position of an illegitimate daughter whose father had died intestate, Miss Standing’s eyes were round with indignation.

“I never heard anything so frightfully unjust in all my life,” she said firmly.

“I’m afraid that doesn’t alter the law.”

“What’s the good of women having the vote then? I thought all those frightful unjust laws were going to be altered at once when women got the vote. Miss Clay always said so.”

Mr. Hale had never heard of Miss Clay, who was in fact an undermistress at Mme. Mardon’s. He himself had always been opposed to women’s suffrage.

“Do you mean to say”—Miss Standing sat bolt upright with her plump hands clasped on her blue serge knee—“do you actually mean to say that I don’t get anything?”

“You are not legally entitled to anything.”

“How absolutely disgraceful! Do you mean to say that Papa had millions and millions, and I don’t get any of it at all? Who gets it if I don’t? I suppose somebody does get it. Or does Government just steal it all?”

“Your cousin, Mr. Egbert Standing, is the heir-at-law. He will—er—doubtless consider the propriety of making you an allowance.”

Miss Standing sprang to her feet.

“Egbert! You’re joking—you must be joking!”

Mr. Hale looked the offence which he felt.

“Really, Miss Standing!”

Margot stamped her foot.

“I don’t believe a single word of it. Papa didn’t even like Egbert. He said he was a parasite. I remember quite well, because I didn’t know what the word meant, and I asked him, and he made me look it up in the dictionary. And he said he didn’t know what he’d done to deserve having Egbert for a nephew. He said it was a great pity someone hadn’t drowned his brother Robert when he was a baby, because then he couldn’t have had Egbert. That’s what Papa said, and do you suppose he’d want his money, and all his things, and his pictures to go to someone he felt like that about? Papa simply adored those horrible gloomy pictures, and he’d hate Egbert to have them. Egbert adores them too—I can’t think why—and that used to make Pap angrier than anything else. Aren’t people funny?”

When Mr. Hale had taken his leave, Margot continued her letter to Stephanie.

Oh, Stephanie, he’s been! Mr. Hale, the lawyer, I mean. He’s the most frightful old stiff, with the sort of boring voice that makes you go to sleep in church when a parson has it. Only I didn’t go to sleep, because he was saying the most frightfully devastating sort of things. There are a whole heap of the most frightful family secrets, and he says he thinks I’m illegitimate like the people in history. And I didn’t know anyone ever was except in history books. But he says he thinks I am, because he doesn’t think my father was ever married to my mother. And I don’t understand about it, but he says there isn’t any certificate of their being married, and there isn’t any certificate of my being born. And doesn’t that just show how stupid the whole thing is? Because if I hadn’t been born, I shouldn’t be here. So I can’t see what on earth anyone wants a certificate for. And he says I shan’t have any money…

Mr. Hale returned to his office, where he presently interviewed Mr. Egbert Standing. He had not met him before, and he looked at him now with some disfavour. Mr. Hale did not like fat young men; he did not like young men who lolled; he disapproved of bow ties with loose ends, and of scented cigarettes. He regarded the curl in Egbert’s hair with well-founded suspicion. For a short moment he shared a sentiment with Miss Margot Standing—he did not like Egbert. The young clerk who took notes in the corner did not like him either.

Everything else apart, Mr. Egbert Standing was a most difficult person to do business with. He lolled, and yawned, and ran his fingers through the artificial waves of his mouse-colored hair. He had a round featureless face with light eyes, light lashes, and no eyebrows. Mr. Hale disliked him very much indeed. It seemed impossible to get him to take any interest either in Miss Standing’s predicament or his own position as heir-at-law.

Mr. Hale repeated Mr. Hales senior’s remarks very much as he had repeated them to Margot.

“My father left me in no doubt that there was some irregularity in Miss Standing’s position. He pressed Mr. Standing to make a will, but Mr. Standing put the matter aside. I am quite sure that my father knew more than he told me. I believe that he was in Mr. Standing’s confidence. May I ask whether your uncle ever spoke to you on the matter?”

Egbert lolled and yawned.

“I believe he did.”

“You believe he did!”

“I have some slight recollection—I—er—I’m not a business man. I—er—don’t take much interest in business.”

“Can you tell me what your uncle said?”

Egbert ran his hands through his hair.

“I—er—really I have a very poor memory.”

“Mr. Standing, this is a very important matter. Do you assert that your uncle spoke to you in such a sense as to lead you to suppose that your cousin was illegitimate?”

“Something of that sort.” Egbert’s voice was languid in the extreme.

“What did he say?”

“I—er—really can’t remember. I don’t take much interest in family matters.”

“You must have some recollection.”

“My uncle was, I believe, excited—I seem to remember that. He was, in fact, annoyed—with me—yes, I think it was with me. And I have some recollection of his saying” —Egbert paused and regarded his right thumb-nail critically.

“Yes? What did he say?”

“I don’t remember exactly. It was something about his will.”

“Yes? That is important.”

“I don’t remember really what he said. But he seemed annoyed. And it was something about making his will, because he’d be hanged if he’d let the property come to me. But he didn’t make a will after all, did he?”

“We haven’t been able to find one. Was that all he said, Mr. Standing?”

“Oh no, there was a lot more—about my cousin, you know.”

“What did he say about your cousin?” Egbert yawned.

“I didn’t take any interest in her, I’m afraid.”

Mr. Hale strove for patience.

“What did your uncle say about his daughter’s position?”

“I don’t remember,” said Egbert vaguely. “Something about it’s being irregular—something like he said before, when he wrote to me.”

Mr. Hale sat bolt upright.

“Your uncle wrote to you about his daughter’s position?”

Egbert shook his head.

“He wrote to me about the club I was putting up for—said he’d blackball me.”

Mr. Hale tapped on the table.

“You said he wrote to you about his daughter.”

“No, he wrote to me about blackballing me for the club. He just mentioned his daughter.

“In a letter of that sort? Mr. Standing!”

“Come to think of it, it wasn’t that letter at all. I told you my memory was awfully bad.”

“Oh, it was another letter? And what did he say?”

“I really can’t remember,” said Egbert in an exhausted voice.

“Have you got that letter—did you keep it?”

Egbert brightened a little.

“I might have it, but I don’t know—I’m so awfully careless about letters. I just leave them about, you know, and sometimes my man throws them away, and sometimes he doesn’t. I could ask him.”

“He’d be hardly likely to remember, but perhaps you will have a search made.”

“He reads all the letters,” said Egbert thoughtfully. “He might remember.”

Years of self-control do not go for nothing. Mr. Hale merely pressed his lips together for a moment before saying:

“Will you kindly ask him to make a thorough search? This letter may be a very important piece of evidence. Indeed, if it contains Mr. Standing’s own admission that his daughter’s birth was irregular, the whole question would be settled.” He paused, and added, “In your favour.”

“I suppose it would,” said Egbert vaguely.

Mr. Hale shuffled some papers.

“It is, perhaps, a little premature to raise the point, but if you succeed as heir-at-law, you will, I presume, be prepared to consider the question of some allowance to your cousin. I mention this now, because if we had your assurance on this point, we should be prepared to make her a small advance. She appears to be entirely without money.”

“Does she?”

“Entirely. She in fact asked me for some money to go on with only this afternoon.”

“Did she?”

“I am telling you that she did, and I should be glad to have your views on the subject of an allowance.”

Egbert yawned.

“I don’t go in for having views. Art is what interests me—my little collections—a bit of china—a miniature—a print—Art.”

“Mr. Standing, I must really ask you whether you are prepared to guarantee a small allowance to your cousin.”

“Why should I?”

Mr. Hale explained.

“If you succeed to the late Mr. Standing’s fortune, you will be a very wealthy man.”

Egbert shook his head again.

“Not after everybody’s had their pickings,” he said.

Mr. Hale understood him to refer to the death duties.

“There will be a good deal left,” he said drily. “An allowance to your cousin—”

For the third time Egbert shook his head.

“Nothing doing. If there’s a will, or if it turns out that my uncle really married her mother, would she make me an allowance? Not much.”

“The positions are hardly analogous.”

“There’s nothing doing,” said Egbert—“not in the way of an allowance. Someone”—he ran his hand through his hair—“someone suggested we might get married. What do you think of that?”

“It is rather a question of what Miss Standing would think of it.”

“Why? It would put her all right, wouldn’t it? I thought it was rather a bright suggestion myself—puts us both right, don’t you see? If there’s a will or a certificate, it makes it all right for me. And if there isn’t a will or a certificate, it makes it all right for her. I thought it was quite a bright suggestion.”

“It would certainly be a provision for Miss Standing.”

“Or for me,” said Egbert.

That evening Mr. Archie Millar fulfilled his deferred dinner engagement. He and Charles had a small table in a corner of the huge dining-room of The Luxe. Archie was in very good form—full of virtue, full of bonhomie, full of real affection for Charles.

“I am The Virtuous Nephew out of Tracts for Tiny Tots. This is the seventeenth time this year that I have been summoned to my Aunt Elizabeth’s death-bed. She’s no end bucked because I always come. She isn’t goin’ to die for the next hundred years or so, but it keeps the old dear no end amused to go on sendin’ for me, and alterin’ her will, and givin’ good advice all round. She always tells me about all my little faults and failin’s, and I say ‘Righto’ and she’s no end bucked. Her doctor says it’s a splendid tonic. But I wish she didn’t always send for me when I’m dinin’ with a pal.”

Charles was debating the question of just how much he was going to tell Archie. Margaret—hang Margaret! She did nothing but get in the way. He frowned and broke in on Archie’s flow of conversation with an abrupt question:

“Tell me about the Pelhams. Are they still in 16 George Street?”

Archie laid down his fish-fork.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Not a word since I left.”

“Mrs. Pelham died six months ago.”

Charles was shocked. Margaret adored her mother. If he had sometimes thought she adored her too much, he admitted the temptation. Esther Pelham, beautiful, emotional, with a charm as potent as it was difficult to define, and never lacked adorers. Charles himself had bent the knee. Unfair, therefore, to complain if Margaret did so too. He was shocked, and showed it.

“Poor old Freddy was awfully cut up. Bit of a bore Freddy Pelham, but everyone’s awfully sorry for him now— no end of a facer for him after takin’ her abroad and all—rotten for him comin’ home alone, poor chap.”

“Did she die abroad?”

Archie nodded.

“Freddy took her off for a long voyage. No one thought she was really ill. Beastly for poor little Freddy comin’ home alone.”

Charles told himself just what he thought of an idiotic reluctance to speak Margaret’s name. He spoke it now:

“Wasn’t Margaret with them?”

“No—it was an awful shock to her.”

Charles prodded himself again.

“She’s married, I suppose?”

“Margaret! Who told you that yarn?”

“No one. I just thought she’d be married.”

“Well, she isn’t—or she wasn’t the last time I saw her, and that was about ten days ago. She isn’t livin’ with Freddy, you know.”

“Why isn’t she?”

“Nobody knows. Girls are so dashed independent nowadays. She went off on her own when Freddy took her mother abroad—and she’s stayed on her own ever since—works for her livin’, and doesn’t look as if it agreed with her. I think it’s a pity myself.” He looked at Charles apologetically. “I always liked Margaret, you know.”

Charles laughed.

“So did I. What’s she doing?”

“Job in a shop—low screw, long hours. Rotten show I should call it. Fancy workin’ when you don’t have to. Girls don’t know when they’re well off.”

“Where’s she living?”

“She told me,” said Archie, “but I’m hanged if I remember. Sort of minute flat affair. She had a little money from her own father, didn’t she?”

“Yes—nothing to speak of.”

“You’re such a beastly plutocrat!”

“She couldn’t live on it.”

“She’s livin’ on it, plus a pound a week.”

Charles exclaimed:

“A pound a week!”

“That’s her screw.”

“Impossible!”

“I told you you were a beastly plutocrat. Pound a week’s her market value. She told me so herself.”

“It’s sweating! What’s her job?”

“Tryin’ on hats for ugly old women who can’t face ’emselves in the glass. Margaret puts on the hat, the old woman thinks she looks a bit of a daisy in it, pays five or ten guineas, and goes away pleased as Punch. Give you my word that’s how it’s done. Amazin’—isn’t it?”

Charles frowned.

“What’s the shop?”

“Place called Sauterelle in Sloane Street—frightfully smart and exclusive.”

Charles detached himself with a jerk from a vision of Margaret trying on hats for other people.

“The Hula-Bula Indians say that a vain woman is like an empty egg-shell,” he observed.

“Women are all vain,” said Archie. “I only once met one that wasn’t, and I give you my word she was a grim proposition. You should see my Aunt Elizabeth’s nightcaps. By the way she’s just made a will leavin’ every farthin’ to a home for decayed parrots. She says the lot of parrots who outlive their devoted mistresses is enough to make a walrus weep. She says she feels a call to provide for their indigent old age. I shall have to marry an heiress—I see it loomin’. I think I’d better make the runnin’ with the Standing girl before there are too many starters.”

“Who’s the Standing girl?”

Archie very nearly dropped his knife and fork.

“My dear old bean, don’t you read the evenin’ papers? Old man Standing was a multi-millionaire who got washed overboard in one of the late weather spasms in the Mediterranean. Beastly place the Mediterranean—nasty cold wind, nasty choppy sea—draughty sort of place. Well, he got washed overboard; and they can’t find any will, and he’s got an only daughter, who scoops the lot. I’m just hesitatin’ on the brink as it were, because they haven’t published her photograph, and that probably means she’s a bit of a nightmare—I mean, think of the photographs they do publish. And my Aunt Elizabeth might alter her will again any day if her parrot bit her, or came out with some of the swear words she thinks she’s broken him of. She told me with tears in her eyes what a reformed bird he was. But you can’t ever tell with parrots.”

Charles had not been attending. He had decided that he would tell Archie just what had happened the other night; only he would leave Margaret out of it. He interrupted an ingenious plan for priming the parrot with something really hair-raising in the way of an expletive.

“The other night, Archie, when you didn’t come, I walked down to have a look at the old house.”

“Did you? Did you go in?”

“Anyone might have walked in,” said Charles drily. “The door into the alley-way was open, and the garden door was open too. I walked in, and I walked upstairs, and I found a cheery sort of criminal conspiracy carrying on like a house of fire in my mother’s sitting-room.”

“I say, is this a joke?”

“No, it isn’t. I saw a light under the door, and I heard voices. You remember the cupboard where we used to play, across the room of the passage between the bedroom and sitting-room?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I got in there and looked through the hole we used to keep corked up, and there was a gentleman in a grey rubber mask and gloves giving orders to a very pretty lot of scoundrels.”

“Charles, you are jokin’.”

“I’m not—it happened.”

“What were they doin’—”

“Well, I rather gathered they’d destroyed a will, and it wouldn’t very much surprise me to hear that they’d made away with the man who’d made it. They seemed to be thinking about murdering his daughter if another will turned up, or some certificate—I didn’t quite understand about that.”

“Charles, you don’t mean to say you’re serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“You weren’t drunk, and you weren’t dreamin’?”

“I was not.”

Archie heaved a sigh.

“Why on earth wasn’t I there? What did you do?—bound from your place of concealment, hissin’ ‘All is discovered,’ or what?”

“I went on listening,” said Charles. He proceeded to give Archie a very accurate account of the things he had listened to and the things he had seen. He left Margaret Langton out of the story, and in consequence found himself making rather a poor figure at the finish.

“You didn’t bound from your place of concealment!” Archie’s tone was incredulous.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You let them get away and just trickled round to the police station?”

“Well—no,” said Charles, “I didn’t go to the police station.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t want to.” He paused. “As a matter of fact I used to know one of the crowd pretty well, and I thought I’d keep the police out of it if I could.”

Archie considered this.

“I say, that’s bad! I mean destroyin’ wills and plannin’ to murder people isn’t the sort of game you expect to find your pals mixed up in—is it? Did you know the fellow well?”

“Fairly well,” said Charles.

“Well, d’you know him well enough to put it to him that it isn’t exactly the sort of show to be mixed up in?”

“That’s what I was thinking of doing.”

“I see. Then there’s the girl. They won’t be getting up to any murderin’ games for the moment, I take it.”

“No,” said Charles, “that was only if this certificate turned up.”

“And you don’t know what it is? And for all you now it may be turnin’ up any day of the week. Pity you don’t know her name—isn’t it?”

“Her Christian name is Margot. I heard that.”

Archie upset his coffee.

“Charles, you’ve been pullin’ my leg.”

“I haven’t.”

“Honest Injun?”

“Honest Injun.”

“Not about the name? You swear you’re not pullin’ my leg about that?”

“No, I’m not. Why should you think I am?”

Archie leaned across the table and dropped his voice.

“You swear the girl was called Margot? You’re sure?”

“Positive. Why?”

“Because that’s the name of the girl I was talkin’ about— the Standing girl—old Standing’s daughter.”

“Margot?”

“Margot Standing,” said Archie in a solemn whisper.