“The three years that I spent at St. Helen’s seem, even now, like a beautiful dream. I was happy, I made many friends, and my whole outlook on life changed. The year I left, Mr. Trasmere came down to our Commemoration and saw me acting in a play which the school dramatic society had produced, and from what he saw, was evolved this extraordinary arrangement. Knowing what I do, I know he was not wholly disinterested. It was his practice to take up projects and finance likely people. Once he told me that he had intended settling in this country and living the life of a gentleman—to use his own words—but that he was so unutterably bored, that to give himself an interest, he took up the most extraordinary of schemes.
“Do you know at one time he financed twelve tea-rooms and collected his share of the takings every day? Do you know that he was behind three doctors and took his profits from each? He was Yeh Ling’s backer, and in time he came to be mine. I was with him six months, acting as his secretary in a tiny office he hired for the purpose, and to which he never came until five o’clock in the afternoon.
“Then it was, that he suggested that I should go on to the stage and sent me away with a touring company. Of course, he was financially interested in it and it was my duty to send him a daily return showing the amount of money we took every night. On Saturdays I paid the salaries and expenses and remitted the remainder to him. When the tour was finished I came back to town to find that he had already made arrangements in his furtive, secretive way, to start a season with me as the principal attraction. My salary! You would laugh if I told you. It was hardly enough to keep body and soul together, only, as an excuse for his parsimony, he agreed that he would pay me one half of the profits over a certain amount.
“To my astonishment, as well as to his, I became not only a respectable success, but a great financial success. The profits on my seasons were enormous, they exceeded to an incredible extent the amount he had fixed. And, of course, he paid. Jesse Trasmere’s word was more than his bond. It was his oath.
“His code was the code of the Chinese business man. When you know what that means, Tab, you will realise how very punctilious he was in such matters. He made exactly the same arrangements with Yeh Ling. There was the curious bond which bound us together, Yeh Ling and I—our shares were enormously in excess of his estimate. But he paid loyally. Between him and me there was never an agreement of any kind. In the case of Yeh Ling there was an agreement, as you know. But the most bizarre aspect of my success was that I was compelled to continue as his secretary. Every night when the theatre was closed, I motored to his house, dealt with his correspondence and answered his letters. Sometimes I was so weary after a heavy evening, that I could scarcely drag myself up the steps of Mayfield. But Jesse was inexorable. He never let up on any bargain he made, any more than he evaded the terms of any agreement which proved adverse to him.
“When I began to get talked about, he insisted upon my making a ‘show’ as he called it and brought a lot of jewels which he told me should be mine at his death. Whether he bought them—they did not look new to me—or whether he acquired them in one of those deals of his which nobody knew anything about, I am unable to say with certainty. They were beautiful—but they were not mine until his death. Every night I dined with him at Yeh Ling’s, and he handed to me the jewel-case which he had taken from his bag, and every night I carried those jewels back to the house and gave them into his care.”
“Did the old man ever tell you how he came to seek you out?”
She nodded and a faint smile came and went.
“Jesse Trasmere was very frank. That was one of his charms. He told me he knew my deplorable history and he wanted somebody about whom he knew a few discreditable facts! He said that in almost those identical words: ‘You’ll have to go along as I want you,’ he said, ‘and the higher you get, and the more successful you become, the less you will want the news published that your father was a murderer.’ And yet, curiously enough, he never objected to my taking my own name, for Ardfern is my name, for professional purposes. I don’t suppose anybody at that dingy Institute associates me with the skinny little girl who used to scrub and peel and toil at uninteresting lessons from morning until night.”
“What was your father?” asked Tab with an effort, for he expected that any reference to her parents must still wound her.