The Return of the Prodigal Part 28

The word took Straker's breath away.

"You didn't like the way I did it. I can't help that. I had to use the means at my disposal. If I hadn't led him on how could I have got hold of him? If I hadn't led him further how could I have got him on an inch?"

"So that," said Straker quietly, "is what you did it for?"

"You've seen him," she answered. "You don't seriously suppose I could have done it for anything else! What possible use had I for that young man?"

He remembered that that was what she had said about Mr. Higginson.

But he confessed that, for a lady in a disconcerting situation, she had shown genius in extricating herself.

f.a.n.n.y's house party broke up and scattered the next day. A week later Straker and Will Brocklebank saw Furnival in the Park. He was driving a motor beyond his means in the society of a lady whom he certainly could not afford.

"Good G.o.d!" said Brocklebank. "That's Philippa."

By which he meant, not that Furnival's lady in the least resembled Philippa, but that she showed the heights to which Philippa had led him on.

X

Brocklebank agreed with Straker that they had got to get him out of that.

It was difficult, because the thing had come upon Furnival like a madness. He would have had more chance if he had been a man with a talent or an absorbing occupation, a politician, an editor, a journalist; if he had even been, Brocklebank lamented, on the London Borough Council it might have made him less dependent on the sympathy of ruinous ladies. But the Home Office provided no compet.i.tive distraction.

What was worse, it kept him on the scene of his temptation.

If it hadn't been for the Home Office he might have gone abroad with the Brocklebanks; they had wanted him to go. Straker did what he could for him. He gave him five days' yachting in August, and he tried to get him away for week-ends in September; but Furnival wouldn't go. Then Straker went away for his own holiday, and when he came back he had lost sight of Furnival. So had the Home Office.

For three months Furnival went under. Then one day he emerged. The Higginsons (Mary Probyn and her husband) ran up against him in Piccadilly, or rather, he ran up against them, and their forms interposed an effective barrier to flight. He was looking so wretchedly ill that their hearts warmed to him, and they asked him to dine with them that evening, or the next, or--well, the next after that. He refused steadily, but Mary managed to worm his address out of him and sent it on to f.a.n.n.y Brocklebank that night.

Then the Brocklebanks, with prodigious forbearance and persistence, went to work on him. Once they succeeded in getting well hold of him they wouldn't let him go, and between them, very gradually, they got him straight. He hadn't, f.a.n.n.y discovered, been so very awful; he had flung away all that he had on one expensive woman and he had lost his job. Brocklebank found him another in an insurance office where f.a.n.n.y's brother was a director. Then f.a.n.n.y settled down to the really serious business of settling Furnival. She was always asking him down to Amberley when the place was quiet, by which she meant when Philippa Tarrant wasn't there. She was always asking nice girls down to meet him. She worked at it hard for a whole year, and then she said that if it didn't come off that summer she would have to give it up.

The obstacle to her scheme for Furny's settlement was his imperishable repugnance to the legal tie. It had become, f.a.n.n.y declared, a regular obsession. All this she confided to Straker as she lunched with him one day in his perfectly appointed club in Dover Street. Furny was coming down to Amberley, she said, in July; and she added, "It would do you good, Jimmy, to come, too."

She was gazing at him with a look that he had come to know, having known f.a.n.n.y for fifteen years. A tender, rather dreamy look it was, but distinctly speculative. It was directed to the silver streaks in Straker's hair on a line with his eyegla.s.ses, and he knew that f.a.n.n.y was making a calculation and saying to herself that it must be quite fifteen years or more.

Straker was getting on.

A week at Amberley would do him all the good in the world. She rather hoped--though she couldn't altogether promise him--that a certain lady in whom he was interested (he needn't try to look as if he wasn't) would be there.

"_Not_ Philippa?" he asked wearily.

"No, Jimmy, not Philippa. You know whom I mean."

He did. He went down to Amberley in July, arriving early in a golden and benignant afternoon. It was precisely two years since he had been there with Philippa. It was very quiet this year, so quiet that he had an hour alone with f.a.n.n.y on the terrace before tea.

Brocklebank had taken the others off somewhere in his motor.

She broke it to him that the lady in whom he was interested wasn't there. Straker smiled. He knew she wouldn't be. The others, f.a.n.n.y explained, were Laurence Furnival and his Idea.

"His Idea?"

"His Idea, Jimmy, of everything that's lovable."

There was a luminous pause in which f.a.n.n.y let it sink into him.

"Then it's come off, has it?"

"I don't know, but I think it's coming."

"Dear Mrs. Brockles, how did you manage it?"

"I didn't. That's the beauty of it. He managed it himself. He asked me to have her down."

She let him take that in, too, in all its immense significance.

"Who is she?"

"Little Molly Milner--a niece of Nora Viveash's. He met her there last winter."

Their eyes met, full of remembrance.

"If anybody managed it, it was Nora. Jimmy, do you know, that woman's a perfect dear."

"I know you always said so."

"_He_ says so. He says she behaved like an angel, like a saint, about it. When you think how she cared! I suppose she saw it was the way to save him."

Straker was silent. He saw Nora Viveash as he had seen her on the terrace two years ago, on the day of Philippa's arrival; and as she had come to him afterward and asked him to stand by Furnival in his bad hour.

"What is it like, Furny's Idea?" he asked presently.

"It's rather like Nora, only different. It's her niece, you know."

"If it's Nora's niece, it must be very young."

"It is. It's absurdly young. But, oh, so determined!"

"Has she by any chance got Nora's temperament?"

"She's got her own temperament," said f.a.n.n.y.

Straker meditated on that.

"How does it take him?" he inquired.

"It takes him beautifully. It makes him very quiet, and a little sad. That's why I think it's coming."

f.a.n.n.y also meditated.