CHAPTER XIII.

CAPTAIN TALHAM PROPOSES.

Talham had proposed to Yvonne Yale. It had followed many meetings, many calls at the house in Upper Curzon Street, many lengthy orations on the future of applied mechanics delivered to Mrs. Yale, who took what might be termed a shareholder’s interest in such matters, and the end of it was that Talham, after a sleepless night, called upon the Yales at five o’clock in the morning.

This statement is made in all seriousness, because it is true. At this outrageous hour Captain Talham, a tall, handsome figure of a man, tanned and debonair, knocked at the door of the Yale ménage.

He had knocked half a dozen times before the shuffling of slippered feet told him that his efforts had succeeded. A sleepy servant admitted him, albeit reluctantly. She asked him to stand in the hall while she went to arouse her mistress.

“Remember,” said Talham, solemnly, “that it is only Miss Yvonne that I wish to see.”

The servant came down again in her wrapper and led him to the drawing-room.

Talham, with deplorable familiarity, pulled the blinds up.

In five minutes the girl came in. She wore a long kimono of dark blue, edged with Russian embroidery, and she had hidden the glory of her hair under a boudoir cap.

She looked singularly beautiful--he had never seen her more so.

She was worried, too. Naturally, she could only interpret this unexpected call into a recurrence of the perils which she had already experienced.

“I have called to see you, Miss Yale,” said Talham, gravely, “on a most important matter.” She nodded and waited.

“Last night, or, rather, in the early hours of this morning, I had an interview with a Mr. de Costa,” said Talham.

He went on to give particulars of that interview. She seemed more than ordinarily interested. It was rather as though she were eager for all he could tell her. The light of sympathy was in her eyes. She sat on one of those hard, straight-backed chairs which are to be found in London drawing-rooms, and are designed to discourage lengthy visits, her hands clasping her crossed knees, as step by step, concealing nothing, exaggerating nothing, omitting nothing--except, perhaps, his own foresight and resourcefulness--Talham took her through the act of his “just piracy,” as he described it. He went on to tell the full story of the Emperor’s tomb. When he had finished, there was a pause. Then she said gently:

“I understand, Captain Talham, and I appreciate your confidence. I am glad you have told me, because Mr. de Costa himself sent me a version last night which was not as complimentary to yourself as you have made it.” She frowned a little as at some unpleasant memory. De Costa had threatened her--she did not tell him this. Now, in a panic, she realised that the information for which the old man had asked and which she had not at the moment possessed, was now hers!

“Why, oh why, have you come?” she asked.

“You are entitled to know that,” said Talham. “I must hurry forward all my arrangements and go back to China. I cannot go back until I know one thing. I cannot wait a day,” he said, vehemently, “with one doubt in my mind. Miss Yale----”

He leant forward, his hands tightly clasped, his face tense and drawn, a new Talham, and a Talham she had never seen before--the strong, clean soul of the man shone in his face.

“I want a partner,” he said. “I want--you!”

He jerked the last word.

She rose slowly, and looked down at him still in the same attitude in which he had made his plea--and a look of pity and something else came over her face.

“I am sorry, Captain Talham,” she said in a low voice. “I cannot agree, though I recognise how great an honour you have done me.”

He got up and drew a long breath.

“You cannot agree,” he repeated.

She did not trust herself to speak, but shook her head slowly.

Then a pause--one of those seemingly interminable pauses so trying to the nerves. Neither of the two spoke. Talham’s eyes were on the floor; hers, filled with pity, were on his face. It seemed that five minutes passed like this, though, as a matter of fact, the period was less.

Then Talham said, “Oh!”

That was all he said. It was not an “Oh” of pain, or an “Oh” of surprise, or “Oh” of indifference; it was just “Oh!”

When Talham left the house that memorable morning to return to the hotel after his fantastic and fruitless quest, Yvonne Yale sat for quite a long time in the little drawing-room.

It was not an apartment which shone in the merciless grey light of early morning. At such an hour you saw the mark of the cleaner’s vacuum-brush--the discolourations where an amateur varnisher had endeavoured to renovate the chipped chairs--the thinness of the carpet here and there, and, most appalling of all, the blatant artificiality of the “Gloire de Dijon” roses which Mrs. Yale had brought back from Ostend with her the previous year.

Yvonne had taken a seat by the window and was sitting on it sideways, one arm thrown across the back and the other twisting and untwisting a piece of loose embroidery upon her kimono.

She was thankful, at that moment, that her mother was a heavy sleeper and had not been aroused by the summons.

Yvonne Yale hoped that she was a dutiful daughter. There were times when she came perilously near being glad that she was not. This was a moment when the presence of her mother would have sent her to her room.

It was good to be here alone, in the silence and in the sweet light of the early day, to think this problem over--for Talham had become a problem.

A fortnight ago, she would have dismissed his proposal with a laugh--and found relief in the sight of his disappearing back.

But now, this tall, brown man, with his obvious sincerity, his interminable speeches, his earnestness, which verged upon pomposity, had taken a place with her.

He filled a niche no other man had occupied, could occupy, to do Talham justice, for Nature does not create duplicates of his quality.

Exactly where was that niche? This speculation puzzled her. If she could have answered that question after long deliberation and self-analysis, the problem was a problem no longer.

Where did he stand? At that moment of time she had no feeling of love, as young people understand love, no quickening of the pulse at his approach, no blotting out of her soul’s sun at his departure--no gnawing ache or unsatisfied voidance of soul at his continued absence.

Indeed, she had none of the conventional symptoms, and might be excused the belief that, so far as love was concerned, there was no bond between Talham and her.

And yet----

She walked to the French windows and, opening them, stepped out on to the little stone balcony. She looked up and down the street; there was nobody in sight; it would be little short of a social crime for any of the inhabitants of Upper Curzon Street to be seen abroad at that hour, save in evening dress.

Insensibly, she found herself looking long, and a little wistfully, in the direction which she knew Talham must have taken.

He was something more to her than a friend, though he was not even a friend in the accepted sense. The confidences, which mark the growth of friendship, had been all one-sided. It had been Talham who had talked--be sure of that. She had listened excellently.

Talham’s passion was an inspiration, a thing born of a momentary glance--love at first sight, though the term is hateful.

To fulfil the requirements of the ideal, those two souls should have leapt together to light, as two chemical elements dormant apart, will, on impact, forsake their independent properties and mingle riotously in the creation of a newer element.

But Talham had done all the leaping. The girl had been but the passive agent, a screen to reflect his brilliancy--Talham was a dazzling searchlight that played on Yvonne Yale. She, herself, produced no increase in the power of illumination.

It was absurd to say that she was cold. All women are cold--just as all men are liars. In a dark room a diamond is undistinguishable from half a brick. People who, when groping in the gloom of ignorance, in a vain search for the furnace, which they felt must burn within the heart of the girl, not infrequently came up against the refrigerating plant, and retired in disorder, composing wicked little epigrams.

She stood for a long time on the balcony--then returned to the room.

The servant, who had admitted her, still waited resentfully. Her name was Martha Ann, and she had in her colourless composition no romance. Her hour for rising was seven, and she had risen at five. That was all.

“Do you want me, miss?” she asked, with offensive patience.

Yvonne shook her head, and the girl went off.

“I don’t suppose I shall get to sleep now,” she said bitterly. “A nice time in the morning for a gentleman to call.”

She said many other things, but was careful to wait until her voice was only represented to the girl below by a succession of incomprehensible sounds, the tenor of which might be grasped from the fact that each sentence ended on a high note.

When Martha came down at the conventional hour she found her young mistress fully dressed, moreover, dressed for the street.

“I am going to Covent Garden to buy some flowers, Martha,” said Yvonne.

Martha tightened her lips and said nothing until she heard the door close behind the girl.

“What a house!” said Martha, and raised her eyes to the ceiling.

It was a glorious morning. The air was sweet and clean; the flood of golden sunlight which bathed the green spaces of the city squares and made ornate avenues of the long orderly streets, was a veritable elixir of life.

There was a spring even in the hard, asphalt pavement that morning, and the girl found herself singing quietly to herself as she walked along.

Covent Garden Market was no great distance from the hotel which housed Talham. An hour later she was standing in the Strand, her arms filled with dewy blooms, looking with a thoughtful eye upon the great block of buildings which constituted the caravanserai.

Breakfast was seldom a pleasant meal in Upper Curzon Street. The urbanity, the graciousness, and the Foreign Office manner of Mrs. Yale were never on view at so early an hour. The great hostess of eleven p.m. became the vinegary housekeeper of nine a.m.

It was as though Nature had reversed her processes, and had evolved from the overnight butterfly a most business-like grub.

There was a pile of letters by the side of Mrs. Yale’s plate when she came down to breakfast. Yvonne had already begun her meal, and the elder woman gave her a slight peck in the region between the eye and the _superior maxilla_, which signified the automatic continuance of her devotion.

She flounced into her chair, unfolded her napkin, glanced at her papers, and criticised the bacon at one and the same time.

Yvonne glanced at her idly. Instinctively, she had closed all the sound-proof doors of her mind on her stepmother’s entrance.

“Bills,” said Mrs. Yale grimly. “We shall have to draw in our horns.”

Yvonne had never completely satisfied herself as to what were the horns to which Mrs. Yale invariably referred. If it was the cornucopian horn, it was generally drawn in empty.

“Here’s this exasperating broker of mine,” said the elder woman, looking at a long statement of account. “I told him particularly not to sell Long Island Gas until it reached eighty-four--and here he has sold it at eighty-one!”

“It is now seventy-six,” said Yvonne, drily. “If you had waited for your eighty-four you might have lost much more money.”

She had taken to a study of the Share Market and its report from sheer self-defence.

Mrs. Yale opened another letter. It was very short and, apparently, unpleasant.

“Good heavens!” said she.

Her language at breakfast was generally violent. It was, in a sense, an act of devotion, since it had been acquired from her militant husband, who long since had carried his sword to heaven.

“What is the matter? From the bank?” asked Yvonne.

Mrs. Yale invariably kept her most violent expletives for the bank.

“He says I am eighty pounds overdrawn--will I put this right at once!”

Mrs. Yale glared at her unoffending stepdaughter.

“It’s absurd,” she said, “ridiculous! Eighty pounds overdrawn! Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life.”

Yvonne smiled. She, at any rate, had had this experience before.

“I know what it is,” said Mrs. Yale, with sudden decision. “They’ve got one of those wretched horse-racing bank clerks who is robbing the bank. He’s filching my account because he knows I am so careless. I suspected it all along!”

“The last time, mother,” said Yvonne quietly, “you thought Martha had been using your blank cheques. Why don’t you fill up your counterfoils, and then you would know how much money you had?”

Mrs. Yale offered no reply. She made a further rapid survey of the morning’s post without finding satisfaction. She reserved two obviously private letters for the last. These she opened and read carefully. Then she folded them up, placed them in their envelopes, and slipped them into a bag which hung at her side--for all the world like a sabretache.

She scrutinised Yvonne with a long and approving scrutiny.

“My dear,” she said finally, “you’ve got to make a good marriage.”

“Have I?” said the girl coolly. “I thought only people in novelettes made good marriages. What do you mean by making a good marriage, exactly?”

“Now, don’t be tiresome, Yvonne,” said Mrs. Yale. “I’ve been a good mother to you. I’ve done my best to bring around you the most eligible men in London. I’ve spent money like water--which reminds me, we shall have to have that kitchen range seen to; Martha tells me it’s smoking again, and she can’t get the oven hot. Where was I?--Oh, I was saying, I have spent money like water, and I think I am entitled to some return. Not,” she hastened to say, “that I expect any monetary reward for my sacrifices----”

Yvonne had heard all this before. In one form or another this conversation was almost a daily feature of her life.

“I can’t help thinking, my dear,” said Mrs. Yale, putting her head on one side and looking at her stepdaughter with her pale blue eyes opened to their widest extent. “I cannot help thinking that you have not always appreciated my efforts. That new dress, for instance, which I bought at the summer sales--you have never worn it.”

“It’s totally unsuitable for me, mother,” said Yvonne. “I thought I told you so. It’s not the kind of dress that I should care to be seen walking in. I’d always much rather choose my own.”

“That’s pique,” said her stepmother. “That’s naughty pique.”

Yvonne made no reply. It was useless to argue the point.

“Then, the other night, when Mr. de Costa called to congratulate you on your rescue from those horrid China people”--Yvonne’s lips curled scornfully--“you came down absolutely without a jewel on. Yet, in your room, on your own table, for you to wear, are my own pearls--my own bangles.”

Yvonne smiled.

“My dear mother,” she said, “I will not wear imitation pearls, even to please you, and most certainly I will not wear any kind of jewel which everybody, who is in the habit of coming to this house, has seen round your neck at least a dozen times. You see they are rather unmistakable,” she said carefully. “If they were real, they could not be worth less than fifty thousand pounds.”

“There is a certain finesse in these things,” said Mrs. Yale vaguely; but she did not pursue the topic.

She waited until her own meal was nearly at an end, and the girl was folding her serviette preparatory to leaving the table, before she returned to the attack.

“What about young De Costa?” she asked.

“What about him?”

“Has he proposed to you?”

“I really forget,” said Yvonne carelessly. “These people do propose in a way--almost mechanically. I don’t like him--he is rather a worm.”

Mrs. Yale frowned.

“A most unkind description,” she said severely. “His father is immensely rich. He gave you a beautiful bangle which I never see you wearing, by the way.” She paused for an explanation, but Yvonne offered none. “And what of Captain Talham?”

Yvonne rose from the table.

“I don’t propose to discuss these matters at breakfast, mother,” she said. “You know, it takes all the romance out of a thing. It reduces love and marriage to the level of cold bacon.”

“But has he?” persisted Mrs. Yale.

“Has he what?” the girl evaded.

“Has he proposed to you, my dear? Let me impress upon you this fact--that though Captain Talham is not enormously wealthy, he has prospects, and he is enormously generous. I hope you have not forgotten the fact that he rescued you from the hands of those terrible persons.”

“He has proposed,” interrupted the girl, “if that is what you mean. In fact, he called this morning at five o’clock to make his proposal.”