RICH RELATIVES
By COMPTON MACKENZIE

L O N D O N :   M A R T I N   S E C K E R
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI MCMXXI

TO ALICE AND CHRISTOPHER STONE
THIS THEME IN A MINOR

NOVEMBER 15TH, 1920

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve

Chapter One

IT may have been that the porter at York railway station was irritated by Sunday duty, or it may have been that the outward signs of wealth in his client were not conspicuous; whatever the cause, he spoke rudely to her.

Yet Jasmine Grant was not a figure that ought to have aroused the insolence of a porter, even if he was on Sunday duty. To be sure, her black clothes were not fashionable; and a journey from the South of Italy to the North of England, having obliterated what slight pretensions to cut they might once have possessed, had left her definitely draggled. Although the news of having to wait nearly five hours for the train to Spaborough had brought tears of disappointment into her eyes, and although the appeal of tears had been spoilt by their being rubbed off with the back of a dusty glove, Jasmine's beauty was there all the time—a dark, Southern beauty of jetty lashes curling away from brown eyes starry-hearted; a slim Southern charm of sunburnt, boyish hands. Something she had of a young cypress in moonlight, something of a violoncello, with that voice as deep as her eyes. But for the porter she was only something of a nuisance, and when she began to lament again the long wait he broke in as rudely as before:

"Now it's not a bit of good you nagging at me, miss. If the 4.42 goes at 4.42, I can't make it go before 4.42, can I?"

Then perhaps the thought of his own daughters at home, or perhaps the comforting intuition that there would be shrimps for tea at the close of this weary day, stirred his better nature.

"Why don't you take a little mouch round the walls? That's what people mostly does who get stuck in York. They mouch round the walls if it's fine, like it is, and if it's raining they mouch round the Minster. And I've known people, I have, who've actually come to York to mouch round the walls, so you needn't be so aggravated at having to see them whether you like it or not, as you might say. And now," he concluded, "I suppose the next thing is you'll want to put your luggage in the cloak-room!"

He spoke with a sense of sacrilege, as if Jasmine had suggested laying her luggage on the high altar of the Minster.

"Well, that means me having to go and get a truck," he grumbled, "because the cloak-room's at the other end of the station from what we are here."

The poor girl was already well aware of the vastness of York railway station, a vastness that was accentuated by its emptiness on this fine Sunday afternoon. Fresh tears brimmed over her lids; and as in mighty limestone caverns stalagmites drop upon the explorer, so now from the remote roof of glass and iron a smutty drop descended upon Jasmine's nose.

"Come far, have you?" asked the porter, with this display of kindly interest apologizing as it were for the behaviour of the station's roof.

"Italy."

"Organland, eh?"

The thought of Italy turned his mind toward music, and he went whistling off to fetch a truck, leaving his client beside a heap of luggage that seemed an intrusion on the Sabbath peace of the railway station.

From anyone except porters or touring actors accustomed all their lives to the infinite variations of human luggage, Jasmine's collection, which alternately in the eyes of its owner appeared much too large and much too small, too pretentious and too insignificant, too defiant and too pathetic, might have won more than a passing regard. But since the sparse frequenters of the station were all either porters or actors, nobody looked twice at the leather portmanteau stamped SHOLTO GRANT, at the hold-all of carpet-bagging worked in a design of the Paschal Lamb, at the two narrow wooden crates labelled with permits to export modern works of art from Italy, or at a decrepit basket of fruit covered with vine leaves and tied up with bunches of tricoloured ribbon; and as for the owner, she was by this time so hopelessly bedraggled by the effort of bringing this luggage from the island of Sirene to the city of York only to find that there was no train on to Spaborough for five hours that nobody looked twice at her.

Somewhere outside in the sheepish sunlight of England an engine screamed with delight at having escaped from the station; somewhere deep in the dust-eclipsed station a retriever howled each time he managed to wind his chain round the pillar to which it was attached. Then a luggage train ran down a dulcimer scale of jolts until it finally rumbled away into silence like the inside of a hungry giant before he falls asleep; after which there was no sound of anything except the dripping of condensed steam from the roof to the platform. Jasmine began to wonder if there would ever be another train to anywhere this Sunday, and if the porter intended to leave her alone with her luggage on the platform until to-morrow morning. Everything in England was so different from what she had been accustomed to all her life; people behaved here with such rudeness and such evident dislike of being troubled that perhaps ... but her apprehensions were interrupted by the whining of the porter's truck, which he pushed before him like a truant child being thumped homeward by its mother. The luggage was put on the truck, and the porter, cheered by the