Kate plus 10 — Story, Setting & Ideas

EE PEARLS ON A STRING

The Earl of Flanborough pressed a bell push by the side of his study table and, after an interval of exactly three seconds, pressed it again, though the footman’s lobby could not have been far short of fifty yards from the library and the serving man was never born who could sprint that distance in three seconds.

Yet, in such awe was his lordship held that morning by his man-servants, his maid-servants and everything within his gates, that Sibble, the first footman, made the distance in five.

“Why the dickens don’t you answer my bell when I ring?” snapped the Earl and glared at his red-faced servant.

Sibble did not reply, knowing by experience that, even as silence was insolence, speech could be nothing less than impertinence.

Lord Flanborough was slightly over middle age, thin, bald and dyspeptic. His face was mean and insignificant and if you looked for any resemblance to the somewhat pleasant faces of the Feltons and Flanboroughs of past generations which stared mildly or fiercely, or (as in the case of the first Baron Felton and Flanborough, a poet and contemporary of Lovelace) with gentle melancholy from their massive frames in the long hall, you looked in vain. For George Percy Allington Felton, Earl of Flanborough, Baron Felton and Baron Sedgely of Waybrook, was only remotely related to the illustrious line of Feltons and had inherited the title and the heavily mortgaged estates of his great-uncle by sheer bad luck. This was the uncharitable view of truer Feltons who stood, however, more remotely in the line of succession.

Lord Flanborough had been Mr. George Felton of Felton, Heinrich and Somes, a firm which controlled extensive mining properties in various parts of the world, and the one bright spot in his succession to the peerage lay in the fact that he brought some two millions sterling to the task of freeing the estates of their encumbrances.

He was a shrewd man and an unpleasant man, but he had never been so objectionably unpleasant until he assumed the style and title of Flanborough and never so completely and impossibly unpleasant in the period of his lordship as he had been that morning.

“Now, what did I want you for?” asked Lord Flanborough in vexation. “I rang for something--if you had only answered at once instead of dawdling about, I should--ah, yes--tell Lady Moya that I wish to see her.”

Sibble made his escape thankfully.

Lord Flanborough pulled at his weedy moustache and looked at the virgin sheet of paper before him. Then he took up his pen and wrote:

“Lost or Stolen: Valuable pearl chain consisting of eighty-three graduated pearls. Any person giving information which will lead to their recovery will receive a reward of two hundred pounds.”

He paused; scratched out “two hundred pounds” and substituted “one hundred pounds.” This did not satisfy him and he altered the sum to “fifty pounds.” He sat considering even this modest figure and eventually struck out that amount and wrote, “will be suitably rewarded.”

He heard the door click and looked up.

“Ah--Moya. I am just tinkering away at an advertisement,” he said with a smile.

The Lady Moya Felton was twenty-two and pretty. She re-collected in her admirable person many of the traditional family graces which had so malignantly avoided her parent. Well-shaped and of a gracious carriage, though no more than medium in height, the face with its delicacy of moulding was wholly Felton. If the stubborn chin, the firm mouth and the china-blue eyes had come from the dead and gone Sedgelys, the hair of bronze gold was peculiarly Feltonesque.

When she spoke, however, the carping critic might complain that her voice lacked the rich quality upon which the family prided itself, for the Feltons were orators in those days when a parliamentary speech read like something out of a book. Moya’s voice was a trifle hard and without body; it was also just a little unsympathetic. Lord Flanborough boasted with good cause that his daughter was a “practical little woman” and at least one man beside her father could testify to this quality.

“Dear, don’t you think it is a little absurd--advertising?” asked the girl.

She seated herself at the other side of the desk and, reaching out her hand, opened a silver box and helped herself to one of her father’s cigarettes.

“Why absurd, darling?” asked Lord Flanborough testily; “lost property has been found before now, by means of advertising. I remember years ago when I was in the city, there was a fellow named Goldberg--”