Читать книгу The House in Lordship Lane - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 7

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ON that afternoon, Mr. Horbury, Member of Parliament for the Kempston Division of London, walked from the House of Commons to his office at a few minutes after four. He had done two useful things certainly for himself, and perhaps for his country. He had asked a question and he had voted in a division. The division took place on the Government’s need to occupy the whole time of the sitting, and was a daily affair, occurring just after questions were concluded. Thus a shrewd man, and no one had ever denied shrewdness to Mr. Horbury, could well within the compass of an hour establish proofs of his stern determination to fulfil his duties towards his constituents and the State. That the division was a formality, mattered nothing; that he would not be present to vote upon the serious question for which the Government claimed the whole sitting, mattered less. He had had his name duly noted down on the division list, and it was the division a day which kept the opponent away and confirmed the constituents in the belief that they had chosen the best sort of man to represent them.

Mr. Horbury, having thus done his duty, ambled across St. James’s Park to his office in King Street. He was a heavily-hipped, short-legged, obese man who walked like a pigeon, crossing his toes. He was not noticeable indeed unless he raised his head, and then the big red face on its bull neck startled one. For his head, down to a line just below the eyes, was massive as an emperor’s, and the strong eyes were noble. But below the eyes a curious blend of the animal and the insignificant disgraced his features. His nose, for instance, was small and round, his upper lip long, and the swollen jaw not so much massive as brutal—the jaw of a great ape welded to the brow of a Cæsar, set upon a torso of so slovenly a vulgarity that the man almost escaped the curiosity of the passers-by. But there were some to whom he was unknown, people no doubt a little more sensitive than their neighbours, who felt a chill if he approached, like that cold aura which, in the legends of the Sabbaths, enfolded the person of Satan. Mr. Horbury walked clumsily and slowly, round the water where the pigeons imitated his progress, to the Marlborough Gate, through a dark and exclusive arcade, and so to his fine panelled offices in King Street.

Mr. Horbury was uneasy. There was a certain danger to be eliminated. Not so very serious a danger. Daniel Horbury was accustomed to navigating shoals still more menacing than the shoals of Lezardrieux. But, in order to eliminate the danger of this afternoon, Horbury would have to relinquish a victim, a victim plump and ripe, the fruit of a golden tree, and Mr. Horbury had the greatest detestation of such sacrifices. He went through the outer office into his own sanctuary. It was panelled with rosewood. The deep arm-chairs were cushioned with a dark red damask. A great walnut writing-table, shaped in an arc and fashioned in the days of Queen Anne, with the carved pigeon-holes and little doors of its period, decorated the centre of an Aubusson carpet.

Mr. Horbury paused for a moment upon the threshold, consoled for his uneasy reflections by the sheen and costliness of his surroundings.

“Not many offices like this, Foster,” he said to a clerk who was reading out a list of names at his elbow.

“No, sir.”

Foster was an old-fashioned clerk from Gracechurch Street and knew Big Business to be more generally associated with worn linoleum, upright Victorian chairs, and ink-stained writing-tables.

“Will you see Mr. Ricardo at five-thirty?”

“Mr. Ricardo?”

Horbury became very still. Mr. Ricardo! He had never heard of a Mr. Ricardo. And the unknown was always dangerous.

“It is not convenient,” said Horbury. “This afternoon I don’t wish to be disturbed.”

Horbury shut the door. On the writing-table lay the last edition of the Evening Standard. He approached it with a careful carelessness, for there are times when a prudent man will play-act even to himself alone. He turned the pages as though they were of little interest, and came willy-nilly to the shipping news. There, at the very head of the column, the announcement stood:

“El Rey from South American ports passed Prawle Point at 6 a.m.”

Mr. Horbury expected the announcement, yet he was taken aback. Providence should have intervened, as Providence had often dutifully done, in Mr. Horbury’s affairs. There were, however, occasions when Providence, though willing, wanted just a trifle of help. Horbury must, in the parliamentary phrase, explore the avenues. He went to a cupboard and opened it. Two shelves were disclosed. On the first stood half-a-dozen glasses and a small wire-cutter; on the lower half a dozen swelling bottles with a golden-yellow foil guarding the mushroom-headed corks and a famous year on a printed strip.

The pop of the cork was heard by the clerks and no longer provoked even the office humorist to imitate the sound of liquid hissing into a glass.

Horbury, in his sanctuary, drank half of his bottle. He lifted the receiver from the hook of his telephone and dialled LED 0045. In a little while he heard a door close noisily and, upon the closing of the door, an eager, wooing voice.

“Is that you, Beautiful?”

Mr. Horbury smiled, showing all his teeth to the gums, but he used a pleasant voice.

“No, not more so than usual. It’s just plain Daniel Horbury speaking.”

At the other end of the line there was silence. Daniel Horbury really smiled this time as he pictured to himself a man shocked into speechlessness and grey with fear.

“You got my message?” Horbury continued.

“Yes.”

“Sorry I used your private number.”

“Who gave it to you?”

Horbury made a joke. At least it seemed a joke at the time.

“Mr. Ricardo,” he returned. It was the last name which he had heard when he entered his office, and he rang off before another question could be put to him.

Mr. Horbury finished off his bottle of champagne, leaning back in his chair with his short legs crossed under his walnut table. He was tempted, indeed, to commemorate the name of Mr. Ricardo with a second bottle. After all, he was wont to argue, as long as you don’t begin before eleven o’clock in the morning, champagne can’t do you much harm. It gives a sparkle to your plans and delays their over-hasty execution.

But to-day execution was needed. He pushed his chair back, unlocked a drawer and lifted out of it a small chart set flat with drawing-pins upon a thin ebony board. Five black pins were stuck in the chart, and now Horbury added a sixth, just seven miles west of Start Point where, at six o’clock on that morning, El Rey had lumbered past the Prawle Signal Station on her journey to Thames’ mouth. Horbury replaced the map in the drawer. He then called up his flat in Park Lane. He asked for his wife, and when she spoke to him there was suddenly another man at Horbury’s desk, one with a laugh in his eyes as well as on his lips, and even a throb of music in his voice.

“Olivia—that’s you? Yes, and the sound of you drives everything else out of my head—listen now, it’s urgent—oh, by the way, I heard you called beautiful less than half an hour ago—oh, I needn’t have rung you up to tell you that?—you haven’t got it at all—I heard you addressed as Beautiful over a private line,” and he chuckled comfortably. There came back to him a tiny cry.

“You’ve been reading my letters!”

“Would I?” cried Horbury indignantly. “The number was given to me by a Mr. Ricardo.”

“Who?”

“A Mr. Ricardo. But don’t go away. This is serious. We must go down to Lordship Lane to-night. At least, I must, and I do hope you will. We are free to-night, aren’t we?”

In a room overlooking Hyde Park a woman half the age of the obese Romeo in King Street listened and smiled.

“Yes, I’ll come,” and again Romeo was talking.

“We might sleep there, don’t you think? It’ll be the full moon. You know how the big oaks with their black shadows make crazy patterns on the meadow; and all the birds aren’t dumb at the end of August when you’re near.”

It was commonplace raillery, but whoever had seen Olivia Horbury, with a tender smile trembling upon her lips, might well have addressed her as “Beautiful.”

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“Will you drive the small car and pick me up here at seven-thirty? We might dine at the Milan Grill, and get to the house at half-past nine. And somewhere about half-past ten I’ll lock the front door, and we shall be alone in that lovely silence—Beautiful.”

He could hear the deep breath she drew and wanted no other answer. He rang off and settled himself to compose a speech for the September rally in his constituency. Then he bathed, shaved, and dressed for the evening in a dinner jacket. He was hardly ready before Foster announced to him that Mrs. Horbury was waiting for him. He sent the commissionaire out to the car with the chart, bidding him ask Mrs. Horbury to take care that the pins were not displaced; and he took from a secret drawer in the Queen Anne bureau a large sealed envelope which just fitted into the inside pocket of his jacket.

He slipped on his overcoat and stood once more upon the threshold, looking here and there about the room. He was merely admiring its sheen and costliness. It did not occur to him that he would never see it again.