Nothing Venture

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

Nothing Venture

Patricia Wentworth

I

“You were saying?” said Mr Page.

At the moment, Mr Ambrose Weare was not saying anything at all. He had been speaking, but had fallen silent. His bed had been pushed close to the big jutting window, and his eyes had gone from his solicitor to the green lawn and the lilacs, white and mauve and purple, and beyond the lilacs to the bright, glittering blue of the sea. It was a May day. There was a wind blowing, and small white clouds raced before it across a rain-washed sky. Ambrose Weare sat propped up in his bed. He was dying, for no very discernible reason except that, having lived eighty-seven years with energy and a masterful disregard of everything except the whim of the moment, he had now taken it into his head to die.

Mr Page tapped upon his writing-pad.

“You were saying?” he repeated.

Ambrose Weare turned his head. The eyes, under shaggy grey eyebrows, still held a spark of malicious fire.

“I wasn't saying anything. What you mean is that you want me to get on with it.”

“Well—” said Mr Page.

Ambrose Weare laughed. It was not a very pleasant sound.

“
Lord
, Page! What a bedside manner you've got! You're thrown away on the law! Why can't you say straight out that I've no time to waste, and that even if I had, it's the deuce of a fine afternoon and a pity to spend it in a sick-room, when you might be a great deal more pleasantly occupied in having tea over there by the lilacs with the young people?”

Mr Page experienced a faint resentment. He had managed Ambrose Weare's affairs for some thirty-five years without ever becoming accustomed to his habit of tearing away those decent veils by which we hide from one another such feelings as distaste, boredom, and ennui. It was true that he had been thinking that it would be pleasant in the garden when he had got through the business which had brought him down to Weare; but, put as Mr Weare had just put it—well, what was one to say? His bedside manner became a little accentuated. He smiled and said nothing.

“Well, let's come to the point,” said Ambrose Weare. “The legacies stand as they were, but Rosamund only gets five hundred. She can buy her trousseau with it. If she weren't going to marry Jervis, she'd have had three hundred a year, but since they're engaged, that comes out. It keeps a girl steady having to come to her husband for money.” He drew in his thin lips and chuckled. “Jervis shall have the purse-strings—but she'll get round him and help herself to as much as she wants! Hey, Page?”

“Miss Carew is very charming.”

“So was her grandmother,” said Ambrose Weare—“prettiest girl in the county, if she
was
my sister. And what good did it do her? She might have had Croyston, or Ledingham, or half a dozen others—and she chucked her cap over the windmills and bolted with a penniless artist like Carew!”

“Mr Jervis is to be congratulated,” said Mr Page.

“Well, well,” said Ambrose Weare. “Who's getting off the point now? Restrain your enthusiasm for Rosamund and let's get back to my will. After the legacies—you've got 'em down?—everything to Jervis, lock, stock and barrel. Securities, house, property, and family temper to my grandson, Jervis Weare,
on condition
—”

Mr Page lifted his fountain pen from the writing-pad. His look of serious inquiry was met by a keenly mocking one.

“You're thinking now what the deuce has the old devil got up his sleeve? Hey, Page?”

Mr Page reddened. He was comfortably stout and comfortably ruddy, with a fringe of thick grey hair about a round bald patch. The ruddy colour deepened quite perceptibly. One didn't say things like that—one really didn't.

“What is the condition, Mr Weare?”

Ambrose Weare looked out upon the lawn. Two figures were crossing it as he looked—Jervis checking that impatient stride of his to keep pace with his companion. Rosamund never hurried. She wore a lilac dress. The sun touched her corn-coloured hair, and the light wind ruffled it. Anyone might have thought that they made a handsome couple. What Ambrose Weare thought, no one could tell but Ambrose Weare. He watched for a moment, saw Jervis lift that black head of his and throw out his arm with a vigorous sweep, saw Rosamund look up at him smiling, and then he turned again to Mr Page.

“Well, Page? You're on hot coals? Well, here's the condition—provided he marries within three months of my death. Put that into your infernal legal jargon, and don't leave any loopholes.”

Mr Page was looking relieved. He did not know quite what he had expected, but with Ambrose Weare it might have been anything. He was certainly relieved. He said with a smile,

“Almost a superfluous condition, Mr Weare, since he is engaged.”

The hawk nose above the thin mouth twitched a little.

“Engaged isn't married,” said Ambrose Weare. “He's been engaged for six months, and when I talk to him about getting married, he doesn't want to hurry her. And when I talk to her, she thinks being engaged is so delightful that she'd like it to go on for ever. Damned nonsense! Not want to hurry her? I'll see to it that he hurries her! He'll have to if he doesn't want to go to her for pocket money!” Mr Weare chuckled. “If he don't marry before the three months is up, she gets the lot.”

Mr Page was plainly startled.

“Miss Carew?” he exclaimed.

“My great-niece, Rosamund Veronica Leonard Carew. What any man or woman wants with more than one name, is beyond me. Pack of nonsense! But take 'em down—Rosamund—Veronica—Leonard. If Jervis isn't married in three months and a day—we'll throw in the day for luck—she comes in instead of him and gets the lot.”

“But, Mr Weare—”

“Get along and write it down!”

“Mr Weare—I must point out very seriously—”

A look of fury passed over the face against the high white pillow. The right hand lying on the crimson eiderdown clenched and lifted.

“Write what I tell you! It's my will isn't it?”

“Mr Weare, I must point out—”

The clenched hand fell, the head tilted a little. Mr Page, alarmed, broke off.

Ambrose Weare shut his eyes.

“Write-what-I-told-you,” he said in a changed, fluttering voice.

Mr Page wrote with a reluctant and disapproving pen.

II

Nan Forsyth looked up from her typewriter and dropped her hands from the keys. He was coming out. Half an hour—twenty minutes—ten..… She really did not know how long it was since he had come in with his frown and the jerk of the shoulders which said, as plainly as any words, “For heaven's sake let's get this over!”

He always came in like that; and men, after ten—twenty—thirty minutes, out again, with his black head up and the frown gone, as if he had got rid of something, for the moment at any rate. He never spoke to her except to ask for Mr Page, and then he might as well have been speaking into a telephone. Even on the day when Mr Page had been kept by old Sir Elphinstone Brady, who never stayed less than an hour, Jervis Weare had merely stood by the window drumming on the sill with a lean brown hand and frowning, as Nan put it, like a complex depression likely to break at any moment into local thunder.

It was a false alarm. He wasn't coming after all, though she had certainly heard him push back his chair a minute ago. This was his last visit. She and Miss Villiers had been called in to witness his signature to the deed of settlement. Miss Villiers, who had typed the deed, had been loud in praise of its generosity—“
My
, dear! She's a lucky girl! Five hundred a year just to spend on herself! And just as likely as not she'll have no idea of how to do it justice. Why, some of these high-up people are right down dowdy, and not half the looks of others that's got to dress themselves and pay their board and maybe help to support a poor invalid mother on three pound ten a week and no pickings.” After which Miss Villiers surveyed herself in a pocket mirror and began absently to touch her lips with a Coraline caress-proof lipstick.

“If Mr Page catches you using lipstick in the office—” said Nan warningly.

Miss Villiers sighed.

“Sorry dear, I forgot. A perfect beast—isn't he?” She wiped off the Coraline, took a last lingering look at her pretty peaked features and rolling blue eyes, and slipped the glass back into her hand-bag. “Well, she's a lucky girl, money or no money. I'm crazy about him myself. Aren't you, dear? I do like a man that looks as if he could just strike you down with one blow of his fist and scarcely know he'd done it, so to speak. Don't you?”

Nan burst out laughing.

“What an ass you are, Villiers!” she said. “Look here, have you found that mortgage Mr Page was asking for?”

“
My!
No! I clean forgot.”

“Then you'd better go and look for it.”

Villiers went reluctantly.

“And as likely as not I'll miss him when he goes, and next time—if there is a next time—he'll be a married man.” She paused with her hand on the door which led into the room sacred to deed-boxes and office files. “Are you going to the wedding?”

Nan shook her head. The keys clicked under her fingers.

“I'm going,” said Miss Villiers. “I shall wear my new hat—you know, the one I got for two and eleven pence halfpenny in the Sales, and I'm sure it looks like a three guinea model. P'raps I'll get taken for a bridesmaid—I shouldn't wonder if I did. Yes, I'm going. I say, dear, if there's one thing I envy that girl besides the money and the man, it's her name. Rosamund—Veronica—Leonard—Carew. Fancy being able to stand up in church in a gold tissue that cost goodness knows what, and a
point d'Alençon
train, and a halo of orange-blossom, and say, “I, Rosamund Veronica Leonard, take thee, Jervis! Funny, his only having one name—isn't it?”