TELL ME MY FORTUNE
Mary Burchell
With one exception, all the members of the impoverished Greeve family built their futures round the name of Great-Aunt Tabitha and the fortune she was expected to leave them.
The exception was Leslie Greeve, for whom the future meant only Oliver Bendick a man she had loved for longer than she could remember and who she would one day marry.
But when Great-Aunt Tabitha died, a stranger burst into their lives: Reid Carthay, self-confident, cynical, thirty-eight a disturbing stranger within whose power it lay to affect all.
CHAPTER ONE
“SOMETIMES,” remarked Katherine, regarding herself in the drawing-room mirror with something between satisfaction and regret, “sometimes I can’t help reflecting how extraordinarily useless I am, and it depresses me. Then I think how decorative I am, and it seems to even things up a bit, so I suppose it’s all right.”
“Extraordinarily illogical reasoning,” replied her brother Morley, from the wheeled chair to which he had been condemned ever since a car crash some time before. “But, in any case, there is always Great-Aunt Tabitha. Why, after all, should you toil usefully but revoltingly when, by the thoughtful dispensation of Providence, we have a Great-Aunt Tabitha whose large and solid fortune will inevitably come to us round about the time our papa has finished living on his own diminishing capital?”
“But we can’t be absolutely sure about Great-Aunt Tabitha dying at the right moment,” put in Alma, with all the cheerful and unmalicious callousness of twelve years. “Someone in the reign of James the First lived to be a hundred and twenty.”
“This,” Morley pointed out unanswerably, “is not the reign of James the First.”
And Alma sucked her under-lip and thought again.
“Still,” Leslie, the second daughter, spoke rather soberly. “I know what Kate and Alma mean. It doesn’t seem quite decent to plan one’s life entirely on the prospect of someone else dying. Even,” she added apologetically, “if one has never seen that person.”
Her brother, however, brushed that aside easily.
“Decency, my pet, is a question of geography and history,” he reminded her. “Transport someone in the normal beachwear of Honolulu to the drawing-room of Queen Victoria, and you have a case of gross indecency. But by the same token or, probably, a rather different one, now I come to think of it among certain savage tribes, I don’t doubt that to bank on Great-Aunt Tabitha’s decease, or even to hasten it, would be considered not only perfectly decent, but even desirable.”
“We aren’t a savage tribe, though,” objected Alma, who liked to bear her part in any family discussion.
“There have been times,” Morley replied, “not unconnected with your own activities, when that has been open to doubt.”
The others laughed, and Katherine, bunking her gold-tipped lashes, and running an absent hand over her fantastically beautiful chestnut hair, said reflectively,
“I don’t know quite what started me on such an uncomfortable topic.”
Morley grinned at her.
“I do. You probably heard Father telling Mother that the quarterly bills, like all other quarterly bills before them, were larger than ever, and that starvation stared us in the face and we should all have to retire to the two rooms over the stables if we continued to live at our present rate. Or whatever new flight of fancy his immediate annoyance prompted him to.”
“What do you mean by flights of fancy?” demanded Alma, regarding her brother severely, though she adored him. “Don’t you believe what Father says? D’you think he tells lies about his money?”
“What have we ever done,” enquired Morley resignedly, of no one in particular, “to have this dreadfully literal-minded child thrust into the bosom of our unrealistic family? No, Alma, of course I don’t think Father tells lies. Or, if I do, I didn’t mean to convey that impression. But, like most people who live beyond their incomes, he frequently indulges in financial prophecy of the most sanguine where his own wishes are concerned, and of the gloomiest when it comes to supplying the wants of someone else.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t believe you do either,” asserted Alma. “And, anyway, I hope Katherine’s only speaking for herself when she talks about being useless. I work hard enough at school, goodness knows!”
“But with what result?” enquired her brother unfairly. “With what result?”
“And Leslie isn’t useless either,” pursued Alma, refusing to be drawn on the awkward subject of school results.
“No.” Morley cast a half-humorous, half-affectionate glance at his second sister, who was sitting in a low chair, sewing, with an industry which certainly lent colour to Alma’s claim for her. “No, Leslie really isn’t a useless person although, according to Katherine’s argument, she is sufficiently decorative to warrant her being so. If we were all cast away on a desert island which Heaven and Great-Aunt Tabitha forbid Leslie is, of course, the one who would discover edible and nourishing shell-fish nestling among the rocks, a spring of fresh water conveniently near at hand, and some method of weaving the surrounding vegetation into shelter for the night.”
“All of which simply means,” Leslie said, smiling but not looking up, “that a passion for home comforts is stronger in me than in the rest of you, and I should therefore hustle around in search of them while you were still lying on the beach thinking things over.”
Though few might have recognized the fact, probably the most unfortunate thing ever to happen to Richard Greeve was to be left, on his father’s death, with a comfortable fortune over which he had complete control.
He was already married at the time to the pretty, affectionate wife who had passed on her dark eyes and her flawless complexion to each one of her four children, and she had certainly not been the one to provide him with a sensible purpose in life, still less to curb his extravagant tendencies.
Indeed, she belonged to that fast disappearing race of women—the attractively helpless. And, like the chameleon, she took her “colour” and character from her surroundings.
If her husband had happened to be a big, common-sense, practical creature, she would probably have clung to him, but been a reasonably practical and common-sense partner. As it was, however, her husband was a big, handsome, unpractical creature, with flamboyant ideas and extravagant notions. And she fluttered happily in the bright, ephemeral world which he created for her, adoring him for his often spectacular follies, and encouraging him just when he needed a little tactful restraint.
Whenever Leslie queried their position which she had done occasionally since she had come to understand the essential insecurity of their lives, her mother would assume a sweet, vague, but curiously obstinate expression, and say:
“It’s difficult for women to understand these things, dear. Your father must know best. It stands to reason.” She would also add, like Morley—indeed like all of them in moments of crisis over the years—“And there’s always Great-Aunt Tabitha.”
For as long as the younger Greeves could remember anything, Great-Aunt Tabitha had been an almost legendary figure in their lives. Incredibly, she had survived to the age of ninety-six, living in a magnificent villa near Biarritz, from which, it appeared, neither invader nor liberator had been able to eject her.
Indisputably, she was one of the few really wealthy people left in that part of Europe, for her husband—a fabulously shrewd merchant who had died at least fifty years before—had invested his fortune so cleverly and in such various concerns that not famine, pestilence nor wars appeared to alter Great-Aunt Tabitha’s income to any appreciable degree. Or, at least, so the family legend went.
Richard Greeve was her heir, for he and his children wer
e her sole blood relations. And on his own diminishing capital and the golden prospects of hers had he existed for the last twenty-five years.
On this particular afternoon, when the young Greeves were all gathered in the long drawing-room, lazily pursuing the discussion which Katherine’s remark had prompted, it was hard to imagine that drama could hover anywhere near their lives.
The room in which they were, with its gracious proportions, its mellow tints of brown and soft gold and green, its long, beautiful windows, looking on a flower-garden and lawn, at the foot of which a little stream bubbled—this was hardly the setting for drama. And the young things idling there, in their youth and their beauty and their confidence, might have seemed to the fanciful like beings who inhabited some tranquil world where it was always afternoon, and where one was completely and safely insulated from the shocks and trials of everyday life.
Katherine was, perhaps, the supremely beautiful one of the family, with her chestnut hair, her velvety brown eyes and her almost apricot-hued complexion. But Morley was extraordinarily handsome in his thin way, and Alma, though given to ruminating in a slightly cow like manner when any thought possessed her completely, was a good-looking child.
Leslie was the least obviously beautiful. She had the same velvet brown eyes as the others, with the same curious gold-tipped lashes. But her hair, which was soft and fair and cut rather long, lacked the dramatic colouring of the others, and her complexion, though palely beautiful, was almost colourless beside the gorgeous tints of Katherine’s.
She had, however, an admirably proportioned forehead and very beautifully set eyes, which combined to give her glance an essential candour and openness that was sweet and endearing, and, at the same time, carried with it a promise of extreme reliability.
They made a charming picture, scattered about the gracious, faintly shabby room. But, as the door opened and their father came in, they immediately became, not a picture in themselves, but merely the background to a portrait.
Richard Greeve, now nearing sixty, was still good-looking in a rather florid, obvious way, but that was not the quality about him which arrested immediate attention. What made him the unquestioned centre of the scene—any scene, was his absolute and unshakable conviction that this was his position by right.
He was a big man, with a splendid, organ-like speaking voice, on which he played with a shameless, but most effective, virtuosity. In a selfish way, he was extremely fond of his, family who, in looks at least, did him great credit. But it is doubtful if he would have been either a kind or an understanding parent to any child who could not add some distinction to his own role as head of the house.
He was being very much head of the house at the moment. Indeed, he addressed them commandingly, and in a manner which gathered everyone’s attention to him instantaneously as “Children.”
It was a term which could hardly be applied with accuracy to any of them except Alma, but it was uttered with such conviction that no one could have dreamed of querying it.
“Children,” Richard Greeve said, in the tone of one opening Parliament at a solemn moment in the country’s history, “I have news for you.”
“Good or bad?” interjected Alma quickly, instinctively sensing a peroration and anxious to settle that point before her father embarked on what he had to say.
She received a quelling glance which told even her that her intrusion was ill-judged.
“In one sense it is sad news,” her father conceded, and Morley declared afterwards that he bowed his head as he said this, “for death, though splendid, is always sad. But it is news for which we have been prepared a long time, and which will make a great difference in the lives of all of us. It is, I might say, momentous news. Your Great-Aunt Tabitha is dead.”
“At last? I mean, oh, dear!” Katherine flushed at her unfortunate choice of exclamation. “We were just talking about her when you came in,” she added, obviously with some faint feeling of guilt.
“Then we’re all rich now,” said Alma crudely and with no saving expression of regret.
“That, my dear, is not the most suitable comment to make upon your Great-Aunt’s death,” her father told her reprovingly. But Morley said indulgently,
“Well, Father, we’ve been expecting this most of our lives, you know, and it isn’t as though we’ve ever seen the old lady. Besides,” he added reflectively, “I dare say, come to that, one isn’t unwilling to go, at ninety-six.”
“Are you going over to France for the funeral, Father?” enquired Leslie hastily, hoping to distract his attention from Morley’s ill-chosen remarks.
But her choice of distraction was not a happy one, it seemed, for her father frowned.
“Unfortunately, no. Although I should certainly have wished to pay my last respects to Tabitha, the opportunity has been denied me. I learn, to my extreme annoyance, that the funeral has already taken place before I had even been informed of her, death. An extremely disrespectful and high-handed way of doing things, and one for which I hold her legal advisers greatly to blame.”
“But they couldn’t have advised her about her own funeral,” protested Alma, who had been following all this very closely. “It’d be too late, you know.”
Richard Greeve looked at his youngest child with a certain lack of favour.
“I am assuming that, in accordance with the usual custom when no immediate relative of the deceased is available, her legal advisers took over the duties”—his voice dropped a couple of notes—“the sad duties of arranging the funeral and informing the relations. y quarrel with them is that they should have attended to these matters in the wrong order. I should have been informed immediately, and I should then have flown over to make suitable arrangements.”
“But don’t forget the cousin, dear.” Mrs. Greeve, who had slipped into the room almost unnoticed and now stood rather like a beautiful wraith beside her husband softly entered the discussion. “The cousin probably attended to everything.”
“Then he greatly exceeded his rights and position,” retorted her husband firmly. “What is he, anyway?” The question was evidently rhetorical as well as contemptuous, because he proceeded to answer it himself immediately. “Merely a third, fourth or fifth cousin by marriage. Some hanger-on—some remote connection of poor Tabitha’s late husband. My Uncle Leopold,” he added, in case anyone was getting mixed about relationships.
‘But I didn’t know there was any cousin,” exclaimed Leslie, with interest. “I didn’t know Great-Aunt Tabitha had any relations except us.”
“One would hardly count so remote a connection as a relation, my dear,” her father said, smiling faintly and scornfully. “And by marriage, too,” he added, as though marriage were a dishonourable state.. Though, in point of fact, he had a groat and solemn regard for the bond.
“He must be very, very old, if he’s a cousin of Great-Aunt Tabitha,” Alma said thoughtfully.
“He seems to feel young enough to undertake the journey to England,” Mrs. Greeve said doubtfully.
“In any case, cousinships are such queer things when you begin to get into the third and fourth dimension,” Morley pointed out. “I never can remember if second-cousins are the children of first cousins, or whether the children of one are second cousins to the original cousin and third cousins to the children.”
“Say that again, slowly,” Alma begged, concentrating almost audibly.
But her sisters cried, Oh, no! in chorus, and Leslie added,
“What did you say about this cousin coming to England, Mother? You said he felt young enough to undertake the journey. Here, do you mean?”
“Yes.” Her mother nodded. “He proposes to come here, to Cranley Magna. He wants to make our acquaintance. I thought”—she glanced doubtfully at her husband—“it was rather nice and friendly of him.”
“Did you, my dear?” said her husband with deceptive mildness. “Personally, I asked myself if he were not merely following Tabitha’s money to England. But perhaps I am of a nasty, s
uspicious nature.” And he gave a beautiful bass-baritone laugh which invited everyone else to join in mirth over such a preposterous suggestion.
“Perhaps,” said Alma, and the moment lost much of its value.
“When is this old man coming?” enquired Katherine.
“Within the next few days, I imagine. I must speak to Mrs. Speers about having a room ready,” murmured Mrs. Greeve. And, with a faint, sweet smile round on her family, she drifted out of the room again, in search of her very efficient housekeeper.
Almost immediately her husband followed her, for one of the simple and really endearing things about him was that, although he might pontificate and bluster in her presence, he thought her the loveliest thing in the world, and was never happy long away from her. One could forgive him much for that, Leslie had often thought.
Left to themselves once more, the young Greeves broke into animated discussion. All except Morley, that is to say, who leant back in his chair once more and listened amusedly to what his sisters had to say.
“This really is going to make a difference to us, as Father says,” Katherine observed. “Being really rich is quite a different thing from merely having prospects, however good. I wonder if Father will let me go to Italy now and study?” For Katherine had singing ambitions, though so far of a rather dilettante quality.
“Curb your notions of our probable worth, my pet,” Morley advised her. “The money comes to Father and, by the time he has taken toll of it for what I trust will be a very long life, we shall probably all have to ‘turn to and earn our own living in advanced middle-age.”
“You do think of the most disgusting things,” declared Alma, giving her brother a small thump. “And, anyway, I mean to be married long before I’m middle-aged.”
“Opportunity is a fine thing, as the offensive old saying has it,” Morley reminded her.
At this, however, Alma looked scornful and said,
“I should make an opportunity, stoopid.”
“I wonder how long this old cousin of Aunt Tabitha’s will stay,” exclaimed Katherine, who had been following her own thoughts all this time. “Maybe Father is right, and he just, wants to park himself here.”
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