Printed Buttertlies

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 977, 21 May 1930, Page 5

Printed Buttertlies

Published by Special Arrangement.

By

MRS PATRICK MACGILL

Author at *' Dancer* to tlw Dark." " Tke Ukelele Girl." " The Flame ol Life. - etc ole

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS CHAPTERS I. and ll.—Jennifer Lome, fashion artist at “Elise, Ltd.,” is sent for by Madame. She has only come for a month on trial, and fears dismissal. She is small, pretty and popular. Madame informs Jennifer that Miss Russell, their smallest mannequin, has had to go home ill. Would Miss Lome be willing to take this mannequin’s place and show Miss Creighton’s dress at her house at five o’clock that afternoon. Jennifer consents gladly. She taxies to Chester Square. The butler doubts whether his young mistress will see Miss Lome. She has sprained her ankle and will not be able to show off her new frock at the ball tonight. Miss Creighton sends for Miss Lome, Jennifer finds her in a luxurious boudoir, nursing her ankle. Her uncle, James Read, and a young man with whom she is in love, are with her. His name is Frank Yardley. He is the son of Sir Ralph Yardley, Bart. Adela Creighton orders Jennifer to go into her dressing room to put on the new dress. She obeys and emerges in a black gauze frock covered with hundreds of painted butterflies. grouped in their natural order. Enormous butterfly wings spring from her shoulders. She holds a bulb in each hand, rnd, when the lights are turned off, Jennifer presses these. Hundreds of tiny lights spring out all over the frock. Adela is certain it would win the diamond bangle if it were exhibited, and, being crippled herself, she wishes Miss Lome to act for her. Jennifer promises to be at the ball at 11 p.m. Arrived at home in Camden Town. Jennifer finds her brother Jack grousing as usual. CHAPTER IV. —(Continued.) With a promise that she would do all she possibly could, Jennifer literally put her brother to bed, and dosed him with aspirin in the hope that the tablets would help him to sleep. At half-past eight the following morriing, after a wretched night, having looked up his number in the telephone directory, Jennifer was ringing up James Read’s private house from a call-box in the High Street. As she put two pennies into the box, she had the feeling that she had only experienced once before in her life; it was when the words, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” had been intoned over her father’s grave.

Her voice was strained and tense as it vibrated along the wire. “Is Mr. Read at home? Will you please tell him that I would like to speak with him a moment.” Acting under instructions, James Read's servants never inquired the fcames of his women friends, for always, if they rang him up at his home, their calls were expected. It seemed as if time merged into eternity while Jennifer stood waiting at the telephone. The wretched boy at home, with the prospect of imprisonment confronting him, was happy compared with the miserable girl who had pledged him her word that she would try to help. “Yes?” came the thick, not too Pleased voice of the man she instinctively feared, yet wanted above all things to placate.

“It is Jennifer Lome speaking, Mr. Read. I —i want to see you very urgently at the earliest possible moment,” said Jennifer, in a voice that Yas so strangely, coldly clear that she might have been in the same room as the man listening so intently at the other end. There was a moment’s delay before Janies Read answered. Usually, he had a little more difficulty than this. Somehow, he was conscious of a sense

of disappointment. Jennifer had really seemed a different type. “Can you make an appointment to see me, Mr. Read?”

Something of her keyed-up emotions crept into Jennifer’s voice, causing her hearer to make up his mind rapidly, and in Jennifer’s favour. “Yes, I’ll see you if you like—but not here,” he added, hastily. “Where, then?”

Jennifer’s voice was a mere strangled wisp of sound, and there was a singing in her ears, preventing her from hearing properly. “I’ve an office in No. 1 Laburnam Mansions, Pratt Street, Earl’s Court. Shall we say half-past nine?” On the surface it was just an ordinary business appointment. Pratt Street turned out to be a very quiet, discreet, middle-class thoroughfare, consisting entirely of blocks of flats, and Laburnam Mansions was the first block.

James Read’s office was on the ground floor, and there was no porter, no indication of a lift, and nobody to see Jennifer as, with a sinking heart, she. nervously pressed the electric bell.

James Read himself opened the door, explaining that he was alone, and had been waiting for 20 minutes. He showed Jennifer into a room that bore much more resemblance to a sitting-room than an office, and motioning her to a deep armchair, seated himself in another, and feasted his eyes on the beautiful but drawn face of his young visitor. “You look a bit off colour—lata nights don’t agree with you,” he remarked concernedly. Gathering all her courage, Jennifer came at once to the point, striving to keep her voice from trembling or becoming inaudible to the wealthy, complacent man on whom so much depended. “Mr. Read, I’m in desperate trouble, and I’ve come to throw myself on your mercy, .and to ask for the loan of £2OO on just my word of honour that it will be honestly repaid—every penny!” she begged passionately. The air seemed to carry the throb of the young voice long after it had died away.

James Read studied the girl’s upraised face, her parted lips, her eyes, almost black with some hidden emotion that seemingly defied her control; his mercilessly keen eye saw the white cheeks flame beneath his gaze. Jennifer was youth incarnate, looking as she looked at that moment, thought the man who treated women as he had in childhood treated his toys—as things to be played with and enjoyed, while their glamour lasted, then cast aside for the next plaything. „ But Jennifer was unlike any of the others. The honesty that looked from her eyes seemed to enwrap her whole personality with youthful starkness, was an unaccustomed reality to James Read, and the novelty piqued his jaded appetite as it lrnd not been whetted for years. No gold-digger, with a facility for piping her eye and “putting it across” men, was here. “What’s the desperate trouble, baby? Perhaps we can find a way out that does not need so much as £2OO, he suggested, his manner half-serious, ba, ‘There ß isn’t any way out without the money.” Jennifer spoke with a brusqueness purely nerve-induced. Suddenly James Read s manne. changed It was only too apparent that Jennifer was at breaking-point, and the last thing that he felt like that morning was a display ot feminine livsterin. “But if you want me to lend you all this money, you must tell me why vou want it,” he said, in a voice that was purposely drained of sentiment, his intention being that it should act

as an astringent upon the overwrought girl. If anything. more than the sheer need to be successful was required to nerve Jennifer, the altered tone of her casual admirer was the most effective means of doing it. But it increased her shame, and Jennifer choked more than once as she faltered out her reason for coming. “Nobody that I have ever known in all my life has possessed as much money as £200,” she told the man who was almost a millionaire, with a pathos that was quite unconscious. “But you seem an educated girl—your French —very English, of course, but quite correct—and your training as an artist must have cost a lot. How did you manage if your people were as poor as you say?” There was genuine bewilderment in James Read’s voice, himself the product of public school and university. Miners, navvies, shopboys. even tramps—one heard all sorts of queer yarns about some of these fellows possessing inborn genius, and rising to dizzy pinnacles of success in their chosen callings! Jolly good luck to them, he’d always said. But they were men, not slim, dainty, and infinitely desirable young girls like this one. “How old are you?” he asked suddenly. “I was twenty yesterday, replied Jennifer. Yesterday seemed a hundred years ago. James Read regarded the troubled little face with a glance into which something other than mere admiration for its physical beauty had crept. There was a faint hint of an appreciation that had no foundation in sex; it was the kind of look that he might have accorded another man who had done something to win his genuine respect. “Mr. Read, I will explain what seems to mystify you—my knowledge of another language, my correct speaking of my own and my technical knowledge of drawing,” said Jenifer, the rigid line of her sweetly-curved lips relaxing the merest trifle. “You see, Mr. Read, for boys and girls living in London there are all kinds of educational facilities which need cost nothing, except effort on their own part. I got a scholarship from the L.C.C. school when I was twelve, and went to a secondary school for two years. I could have got another scholarship and gone right on to the university, but my mother needed me to take home the washing and help her in various other ways, so I left at fourteen. But those two years had left me with a hunger to get something more out of life than poor mother had got, and it was the longing to eventually lift her out of her hard life that made me work like a slave at night school on the three nights a week that mother could spare me. I have always loved drawing for its own sake, and it was just a piece of luck that got me the position at Elise’s. I won a newspaper competition for fashion-designing, and when Madame saw it published, she wrote and offered me a post on her staff. Explaining herself had given Jennifer a few moments’ respite from her terrific anxiety, the anxiety that had its foundation in doubt about the success of her errand. “Mr. Read, I’ll work my hardest to ” began the soft, pleading voice. But something strange, and altogether foreign to his mental attitude toward women, had happened to the man who had always “taken his fun where he found it,” as he sometimes boasted to his men friends. He was 57 years of age and could easily have been Jennifer’s father. Strange as it seemed he had never thought of what it might have felt like to possess a daughter of his own. A son—in sentimental moments, yes—but in Jennifer he saw combined all the qualities, all the fineness that he would have longed for his own children to have possessed, had his one venture into matrimony proved fruitful. He felt himself all kinds of a softhearted, softer-headed fool, but if he had allowed Jennifer to have walked out of the room without her cheque, he knew that her little white face would haunt him for weeks. “I’ll lend you the two hundred, and you can pay me back when you are at the top of the fashion tree,” he told Jennifer, swallowing a little, and feeling a fine glow of self-satisfaction as he made out the cheque to bearer. Jennifer tried hard to speak, but could not; her signature on the 1.0. U.,

that some queer streak in her benefactor insisted upon, was shaky and a little illegible, because of the trembling of her hand, and the mist which half blinded her eyes. James Read put the slip of paper carefully into an envelope, sealed it, and he did with It Jennifer did not know, for her attention was suddenly rudely directed elsewhere, and it transpired that the placing of her 1.0. U. in a safe place was the last action that James Read was ever to perform. CHAPTER V. Without the preliminary courtesy of either knock or ring, the door was flung violently open, and a man, young, handsome, in a dark, foreign fashion, walked in, closing the door firmly behind him. Taking) not the slightest notice of Jennifer, he addressed himself to James Read, whose face had suddenly gone the colour of chalk, the loose puffs of flesh beneath his eyes standing out starkly against the whiteness, by reason of their vivid purple. “You know me?”

The words were rapped out like gun-shot; if anything, the face of the intruder was even more ghastly than that of the man who, clutching the sides of his chair, had half-risen to confront him. But in that moment of tense emotion —half dread, half fear -—Jennifer proved the falsity of the axiom that neither black nor white can be anything but themselves. The white of the ice-cold, diabolical fury in the younger man’s face was utterly different from the craven white of the man who evidently had something to fear.

Jennifer felt as if weights of enormous size were fastened around her body, paralysing movement and defying effort. Her big, dark blue eyes looked jet-black in her face, and her tongue shared in the general paralysis of her whole being, for, when she tried to call out, no sound came from her parted lips, though her breath fluttered the cheque which the man in the chair had just signed and handed over to her. “Ah!”

The paralysis fled from the body and tongue directly that protective instinct which was Jenifer Lome's most dominant characteristic was aroused.

She sprang like some outraged jungle animal to the defence of the man who, whatever his faults, and whatever might have been his motive, had certainly been willing to help her in her hour of desperate need. But the bullet which she tried to intercept had already sped on its grim mission from the revolver which the intruder had whipped from an inner pocket. But it had not touched James Read, who had fallen back, a slim, huddled heap, and lay with his arms hanging down on either side of the chair, his head sunk forward on his chest, his tongue lolling horribly from his open mouth. It had missed aim and embedded itself in the wall just above his head, and the dislodged plaster was scattered in a little white heap on the crimson pile carpet beneath. “Get out of the way!” briefly ordered James Read’s assailant—only accidentally prevented from being his murderer—and, somehow, Jennifer found herself obeying the imperative command quite meekly, as if a fierce anger at what had seemed his dastardly cowardice had not a moment previously nerved her to action.

She watched, fascinated by sheer terror, as th,e young man quite coolly opened the silk shirt of his victim, and after feeling for the heart, tested his finding carefully by the pulse, and finally sickened Jennifer by deliberately spitting into the still, ghastly face.

“I’ve been saved the job I came to do; the dirty sewer rat. Shock, I expect,” he said, brusquely, turning to the horror-struck girl at his side. Jennifer seized a jug of water which stood on a small table, but James Read's assailant snatched it from her and replaced it with a bang. “He’s beyond the need of water so far as this world is concerned, but I should not be surprised if he would not welcome a glass where he has gone,” he said, with a grim, heartless levity that made Jennifer shudder. “Who are you? One of his friends?” he asked Jennifer contemptuously,

flinging the words over his shoulder as he started for the door. Even in the midst of her mental stress, Jennifer resented the tone that all men use instinctively toward women who seem to have forfeited the right to their respect. Instead of answering the question that seemed less a desire for information than a direct insult, Jennifer inquired, controlling her voice with difficulty, “You are not going to leave him alone like this, are you?” She turned her haggard face, from which all youth had fled, to the inert mass huddled in the depths of the red armchair. “I certainly am. And if you have any sense, it will tell you that it might be somewhat awkward for you to be found alone with a dead man whose walls show palpable evidence of a bullet. Get me?” Receiving no other response than a fixed stare from Jennifer's wide eyes, the fellow continued, .still in the same contemptuously familiar fashion. "Wouldn’t you like to come and have a drink? We both want bucking up.” Jennifer felt her arm being taken

between fingers tbat seemed as strong and as steady as steel; not the slightest tremor betrayed the least emotion now that the wild insensate anger ol the man had departed. “I—thank you—but I do not drink,’ Jennifer managed to reply, and somehow the London street, with its ordin ary unromantic collection of people going steadily about their various errands, all seemed unreal, part of a nightmare from which she would pres ently be roused by the ringing of the alarm clock by the side of her bed "Come and have a cup of tea, then,’ suggested her companion. They had turned out of the quiet little cul-de-sac of a street, anc were now' in the busy Earl’s Court Road, and the man’s second invitation was inspired by th< sight of a teashop near the tubs station. Jennifer allowed herself to be lec into an absolutely deserted little cafe where the waitress, with a quick, sym pathetic glance at the drawn, tragic young face, took their order immedi ately, and added, “ ’Urry up,” to he shouted instructions to the kitchen.

When the tea came, Jennifer’s hand trembled so badly when she tried to pour it out that it spilled all over the marble-topped table, and, with a short, gay laugh the man took the brown delf pot from the long, sensitive artist’s fingers, and himself did what was necessary. “Come along and we'll drink to the good riddance of the world’s w-orst rubbish,” he ordered, raising the cup of steaming liquid to his own lips. Jennifer drew her cup toward herself with her left hand, which until that moment had been clenched in tight, nervous agony. A little roll of paper fell to the floor at her side, which the waitress, coming forward quickly, retrieved and restored to the table. The keen black eyes of Jennifer’s companion snapped in unison with liis voice as, snatching at the piece of crumpled paper and smoothing it out, , he said, with a sarcastic lift of one • eyebrow. . “Two hundred? You did well! But ■ it was a pity that you did not choose yesterday instead of today. If this is j presented today there will be bound

to be unpleasant consequences, you know” There was a note of uneasiness beneath the familiarity of the man s ; tone, but it was not that which made Jennifer drop her cup into her saucer ! with a rattle. It was the recollection ; of the reason for her visit to the dead : man, which the events of the last hour had temporarily obliterated. (To be Continued Tomorrow.)