Edgar Wallace - The Yellow Snake

“If you had, she would have answered ‘Mabel Narth.’”

The older man’s jaw dropped.

“Mabel Narth?” he asked in a hollow whisper. “What, my own niece!”

“She is no more your niece than I am your uncle,” said Clifford. “The tables of consanguinity do not apply. She’s your twenty-third cousin nineteen times removed. She is such a distant cousin that you’ll find it difficult to see her relationship through an ordinary telescope. But, Joe, at your time of life!”

“Fifty,” murmured Joe. “Men of my age are more steady than you young ones.”

“I presume you did not tell her who you were?”

“No; I merely hinted that I’d got a bit of stuff put by!”

“That you were rich, in fact? Did her eyes light up?”

“What do you mean?” demanded Joe, on the defensive.

“You’re a queer devil,” said Clifford. “How is that coolie boy?”

“Almost well. He has been praying all day to be let out, but I didn’t want to let him go before you came.”

“He can skip tonight—he makes me feel homesick for a bamboo rod and the floor of the Yamen! I suppose you know his job was to stifle us? This morning I found the bag of sulphur he was trying to put down the chimney.”

Clifford strolled out to the locked scullery to interview the crestfallen warrior. He did not look very warlike as he sat there with an old blanket round his shoulders. Lynne examined his wound and in a few words dismissed him, and to his surprise the man showed every evidence of relief.

“Let me go before the sun goes down,” he begged, “for I am a stranger in this country, and it is hard for such a man as I to find my way to the great town.”

Something in his manner aroused Clifford’s suspicion, and he remembered Joe’s words.

“Man, you are anxious to leave my house,” he said. “Tell me why.”

The man dropped his eyes sullenly.

“You are afraid.”

Still the native did not look up.

“You are afraid of death—tonight!”

This time his shaft got home, and the Chinaman jerked up his head, blinking at his interrogator with frightened eyes.

“They say of you that you are a devil and read the hearts of men. Now what you say”—there was a certain desperation in his tone—“is very true, for I fear death if I stay in this house tonight.”

Clifford whistled softly.

“At what hour would you die, man?”

“At the second hour after moonrise,” replied the coolie without hesitation, and Clifford nodded.

“I think you can go,” he said, and gave him directions as to how he could travel to London.

Returning to Joe, he repeated the gist of the conversation.

“The grand attack comes tonight. Now what are we to do? ‘Phone into Aldershot for half a battalion, cover ourselves with ignominy, notify the local police and be responsible for the death of these respectable, middle-aged men; or shall we stand the racket ourselves and have a nice, quiet fight?”

The humour of it overcame him, and he sat down laughing silently, his face red, tears in his eyes, and when Clifford Lynne laughed that way there was trouble coming for somebody.

The Slaters’ Cottage and Sunni Lodge were a mile out of Sunningdale and remarkably isolated, though they were a few hundred yards from the Portsmouth Road, which was never wholly deserted. Mr Narth’s nearest neighbour was the Earl of Knowesly, who, however, was only in residence for a little over a month in the year, for he was a northerner who loved Lancashire and was happiest amongst his own people.

Beyond the Slaters’ Cottage in the other direction was the undeveloped property of a land company which was exploiting a new golf course and a residential estate.

“I have an idea they’re going to take a leaf out of my book. Joe. It will be a fight with silencers if Spedwell is in command, and I know now that he is the chief of military staff.”

The evening had turned close and oppressive, and the sun set behind towering masses of cloud. Clifford Lynne employed the last hours of light in paying a visit to Sunni Lodge. He did not go to the house; in the circumstances he thought that Stephen Narth would not be particularly anxious to see him. Instead, he made an unauthorized circuit of the pleasure ground, having caught a glimpse of the girl walking at the far end of the tennis lawn.

Briefly he told her the arrangements he had made for her protection.

“The crisis will be over in a week, I think. I have mildly interested the Foreign Office, and thank heaven I have got Scotland Yard thoroughly worked up!”

She shook her head helplessly.

“I only understand dimly what is the cause of all this trouble,” she said. “It is about the share which Fing-Su wants, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Why is that so very important? Mr Narth tried to explain but I am as dense as ever.”

They were pacing through a thin belt of pines that fringed the western boundary of Mr Narth’s little demesne, and were free from the possibility of observation from the house. In a few words he told her of the forty-nine shares.

“I had always realized the possibility of Joe’s doing something eccentric with his money, and the founders’ shares, as we call them—though in reality it would be better to call them the management shares—were issued to keep the control of the business, whatever happened. The original plan was that I was to have twenty-five and Joe was to take twenty-four, and an agreement was drawn up by which it was mutually agreed that the survivor should inherit the shares of the other partner. I had to go to Peking on business; whilst I was there I got a wire from Joe asking if I minded the old man Fing-Su having a few shares. Unfortunately, before I left Siantan I had given Joe a general power of attorney, and I returned to discover that this wicked old man had not only given the chief nine, but he had divided the other forty equally.”

She nodded, at last understanding.

“But sorely, Mr—Clifford, that trouble is over? You have the majority of the shares and you need not sell or give away the one which makes all the difference?”

Clifford smiled wryly.

“Joe, with the greatest ingenuity, maintained the clause which provided that if either of us died his shares should go to the survivor,” he said significantly. “Fing-Su has a double chance. He may induce me, by methods which I have anticipated, to part with the share which gives him control of the company; or he may–-” He did not conclude the sentence.

“He may bring about your death,” she said simply, and he nodded.

“He has reached the point now,” he went on, “where he cannot succeed, because, if I were to be killed this night, Fing-Su would be automatically arrested tomorrow. But, clever as he is, he is a Chinaman and reasons like a Chinaman. That is why he will fall down. He has great visions toned with a sense of infallibility—he cannot imagine failure.”

They paced in silence for fully a minute, and then she asked:

“If he managed to get me…in his power—that sounds awfully melodramatic, doesn’t it?—what difference would that make—really?”

“I should pay,” he said quietly, “and he knows I should pay.”

She felt the blood come into her cheeks and tried to appear unconcerned.

“You are under no obligation to me, Mr Lynne,” she said, in a low voice. “I had already decided to tell you…now that Mr Bray is alive… that I do not wish to marry you. I promised Mr Narth because—well, it was necessary for him that I should be married.”

It required a great effort for her to say this, a greater effort than she had ever dreamt. The discovery struck her with a sense of dismay. To rehearse such a speech in the privacy of her room was an easy matter, but now as she spoke, it was as if every word cut away from her the newly built foundations of life. She looked up at him; he was searching her face.