Читать книгу Tragedy at Beechcroft - A. Fielding - Страница 5

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NEXT morning, Santley was at the Victoria Air Terminus station when a hand touched his arm. It was Lavinia Moncrieff. She had a small package, obviously from a confectioners, dangling in her hand from a pink and silver ribbon. Across the top, also in pink and silver, was the name of a very smart sweet-shop.

"I wondered if you would be kind enough to take this to Brussels for me. You know the Hotel Adolphe Max? Yes, I thought you would be going there as you're flying over. Will you give this to the head porter? It's for his little daughter. See, I've written her name on it. She's learning English, and I promised her some English chocolates last time I was over there."

Santley saw the name Gudule Broukere in Lavinia's small writing, and below, "English sweets to help with English verbs." Privately, he thought that sending chocolates to Brussels was like taking coals to Newcastle, but he said he would take charge of the little box with pleasure.

"It's under a pound," she went on, "so even if you have to pay duty it won't be much. Let me know if you do, won't you?" She left him almost immediately with a charming smile and wave of her hand.

Santley put the box in the pocket of his summer overcoat, which he hung over the back of his seat in the air-liner. Then he got out some papers and looked at designs. He felt something twitch him as they were nearly in. He looked around. Two men were in the seat behind him, one was leaning forward, apparently trying to see something of the Belgian coast far below, the other appeared to be asleep. But he had drawn the end of Santley's coat over his knees and this was what had roused the artist from his study of an old Flemish border design.

Santley saw no reason why the man needed a rug, nor even so, why his coat should serve for one, and picking up the overcoat, he laid it folded beside him. But there was no box of sweets in the pocket. He sat around instantly, saw the box on the floor, made a long arm, and picked it up, looking indignantly at the sleeper who, apparently, was quite oblivious of it.

Santley was well known to the douaniers of the Brussels Aerodrome, and with a smile they waved the little box of chocolates aside as of no importance. Arrived at his hotel, after securing his rooms, he asked for Monsieur Broukere, the head porter, saying that he had a little box of sweets for his daughter sent her by an English lady.

He was told that the man had had an accident only this morning. A car had run him down in the Avenue outside, and he was now in the hospital of St. Jean Tenoode near by, with a broken arm. Santley decided to go to the hospital, which was only a few minutes' drive away, and hand him the box personally. Visitors' hour at the hospital for the private rooms was from four to five, he was told. It was now just past three. His head weaver would be at the hotel at five for the alterations and dye patterns...Santley thought that he could fill in a half-hour very nicely by a nap on his bed. He fell asleep almost instantly, and woke with a start to see his door gently closing. He had asked the chambermaid to call him at a quarter to four without fail. Probably some servant had strayed in, found a visitor in occupation, and retired. Santley watched the door being closed with elaborate caution. The hand that was drawing it shut was a man's hand, brown and muscular, with a nail on the first finger which had evidently been crushed many years ago and still showed as an oval of corrugated blue and purple.

Santley looked at his watch. He had been asleep only twenty minutes, but he felt refreshed, and getting up, went downstairs into the cool and airy garden room, where he ordered a cocktail and had a glance at the papers. At five to four he asked for a taxi, and went up to his room again for the box of chocolates, which he had put on a side table when he first went in.

It was not there. He rang for the maid. She had not been near the room after knocking—futilely—at a quarter to four. The floor waiter was summoned. He knew nothing about the box, he said. Santley, ruffled, reported the loss downstairs, explaining whose loss it really was. The manager could only look his vexation, and assure him that he would keep an eye on the chambermaid, though both he and Santley agreed that it might have been some wandering child who, stepping in by accident, had succumbed to temptation. At that, Santley recalled the incident of the closing door. He described the broken nail, or rather the crushed nail. No one in the hotel staff had such a deformity. The manager and Santley, both half annoyed, half amused, at the absurdity of the theft, were talking by the reception clerk's desk. It was a quiet hour, and they had the corner to themselves. At the description of the nail, the clerk had started.

"On his right hand? But that is droll! An Englishman called in here about half an hour ago who had a nail just like that. He took a room, signed his name, here it is, 'Alfred Green, Lordship Lane, London,' and went upstairs, promising to let me have his passport later, but instead when he came down, he said that he had decided to go on at once to Waterloo, and not put up here till his return, to-morrow. He offered to pay for the room, but of course, we refused. He seemed, however, Mr. Santley, the last sort of man one would associate with an interest in a box of chocolates! A business man, I should have said. Or very likely connected with railways. He may have made a mistake in the number of his room, and you may have seen him stepping out again, but I really think that it a mere coincidence about the sweets being gone."

Santley, too, saw no reason to credit the unknown Green with an illicit passion for boxes of confectionery, and after a joke or two on the subject he went off to buy little Gudule Broukere a substitute for the lost treasure. He would explain the affair to Lavinia when he went down to Beechcroft.

He bought a magnificent coffer with a doll on top, for Gudule was just nine, he was told, and drove off to St. Jean, a huge gloomy building, with endless narrow corridors which suggested that the building dated from the Middle Ages. He found Monsieur Broukere, the injured head porter, to be a stout man with a very intelligent look in his dark eyes. Santley thought that he stared rather hard at him when he explained that he came with a little present from Mrs. Moncrieff for Gudule, that it had unfortunately been lost on the way, but he hoped that the English verbs would be sweetened nearly as pleasantly by Belgian chocolates.

The man sitting in a chair with an arm in plaster strapped to his side, pressed his lips together, and raised his eyebrows until they almost touched the bandage across his forehead. He looked like a man who has to make up his mind about quite a knotty point.

"I cannot accept your very kind present. Monsieur," he said finally—to Santley's great surprise. "You say the English chocolates from Mrs. Moncrieff were stolen! As it happens, my daughter is no longer here in Brussels. She is in school in Switzerland, and on a walking tour at the moment. I cannot send them on to her. They would spoil before she got them. Also the school does not like sweets sent to the girls. It is severe. An Ursuline convent, you see. The Ursulines are like that." And all the time his shrewd eyes, the eyes of a very experienced head porter, Santley imagined, were raking him from head to foot, in a searching way that seemed to the artist very funny. Had he another daughter, Santley wondered, who was eighteen rather than eight, and who gave him a good deal of trouble with hotel guests and chocolates—or flowers...whose good graces were often wooed through the means of the little one?

"Yes," Broukere now said finally, "I am much obliged, but as you see, grateful though I am for the kindness intended, I cannot take the box," and he handed it back to Santley with an air of pushing him out of the room.

Santley left immediately. He stepped in at a sort of inquiry office beside the front door, where a very charming young nun had directed him to Broukere's room, Number 33, and asked her if she would accept the box for some of the children. She thanked Santley, and the artist, charmed with the sweet face in its white setting, stood talking to her about the hospital. Suddenly through the open door bustled a sister whom Santley had met before being allowed into Broukere's room. She smiled at him, handed a paper to the younger nun and scuttled off.

"A telegram—to go at once—" repeated the sister, mechanically moving towards the telephone. Then her brow—what was visible of it, wrinkled in perplexity.

"What writing! Oh, of course, he wrote it with his left hand. In French I might make it out, but it is in English! You will perhaps be kind enough to look, monsieur. Is this an f or a p? And what are these letters d g e...is that possible? Would you perhaps write it down for me to spell through the telephone to the cable office?"

Santley took the paper. It was laboriously printed in characters hard to decipher. But he wrote it down for Sister Genevieve and went his way very puzzled indeed. For the cable ran:

"Moncrieff. Beechcroft, Totteridge, England. Box of chocolates lost by carrier. Broukere."

Santley thought of the park bench...the cable was to either of the Moncrieffs apparently...he recalled the glance which Lavinia had sent her husband last night when she heard that the artist was going on to Brussels so soon...He telephoned Lavinia an account of what had happened. He received a reply from her assuring him that the loss was of no consequence whatever, and that he was not to give the matter a second thought. For a minute this assurance in its turn puzzled Santley. If of no importance, and her voice had a genuinely indifferent ring, why had he been asked to carry the box across, why Broukere's refusal to accept a substitute, why...but he gave it up, and devoted his mind to colours and patterns.

He returned to London by 'plane late on Wednesday, rang up Goodenough, and suggested their going down to Beechcroft together. Something about the other's rather silent personality made Santley like him for a companion. Also Goodenough interested Santley, because the artist never felt quite sure what he was thinking behind that wooden face of his. The artist did not feel by any means sure that Goodenough's thoughts as spoken by him always represented Goodenough's thoughts as thought by him. That he was all but engaged to Ann Bladeshaw surprised Santley. Ann was so straight, so transparent, so "young," so easily impressed by others, that he could easily understand the attraction Goodenough would have for her, but what the rather cold, stiff, man of the world saw in the ardent enthusiastic young reformer was the puzzle. Just lately, Santley had thought that Goodenough too, was beginning to ask himself that fatal question. Now had it been Flavelle Bruton! Goodenough had not met her yet. Well, he would do so shortly. They ought to get on well.

Goodenough, as usual, was punctual to the minute. He looked very serious, Santley thought, and for a while, as the artist's chauffeur drove them through the London streets, only Santley talked—about Brussels—their splendid tapestry factories—their general artistic feeling—finally he turned to his companion.

"You seem very silent, Goodenough. Touch of liver?"

"How dare you jeer at my age!" came the retort. "No, it's not liver...or perhaps it is..." and with that he began to talk in his amusing, cynical way—the way of a man who had not many illusions left. Or perhaps had never had them, for Santley held that you didn't lose your trust in your fellow men. You were born "with" or "without," and you kept what you had to the end. He himself often wished he could lose some of his own, his bank balance would certainly stand higher if he did not believe every yarn told him, no matter how often he had found them to be lies.

Both men had been to Beechcroft before. It was one of those sprawling houses which take a great deal more to keep up than they are worth. Lavinia always explained that she had got the leasehold for a song, and that, as they did not have to pay for dilapidations, they were letting things look after themselves. The owner intended to pull the place down and put up a block of flats when it should come to him again. The house was shaped like a capital E without its middle projection. Only the front was used. The two wings remained unfurnished. At the back of them was what had once been really good stables and loose boxes. A few of these, quite to one side, had been turned into a garage and lock-ups for visitors' cars, but the bulk of them remained as a little block of buildings enclosing a huge stable yard, and quite private, as only the windows of the unused part of the house overlooked it.

"There's Ayres!" Goodenough said as they drew up at the front steps. Santley knew Ayres fairly well. "He says Mrs. Phillimore has been dreaming—about the drains. There's no question of Ann not being here for at least some weeks more."

A gentle-faced rather timid looking man with a diffident manner came forward now with a smile and shook hands. Then he turned and rang the front door bell for them. There was no answer. Ayres looked as distressed as though he were the host.

"I think the parlourmaid must be busy...it's a busy household...these old houses make a great deal of work...Does your chauffeur know where the garage is? I can show him the—ah, here's Mrs. Moncrieff," he finished in tones of great relief.

Lavinia welcomed them warmly, hoped they would excuse the lack of men servants, and told them that lunch would be ready in half an hour.

"What brings you down here?" Goodenough asked Ayres, as the latter volunteered to show them to their rooms. "I thought it was the tableaux, but you've evidently been installed for days."

"Well," Ayres said importantly, "I'm here really as watchdog. Young Pusey is staying down here. He wants to look into one of our patents on behalf of his firm. That's very nice, but we don't want him to learn too much," and Ayres chuckled. "Moncrieff's a clever chap, and some of his newer ideas are worth keeping to ourselves for a bit...ah, here we are, Mr. Santley."

Santley stepped into a charming sitting-room, a north room which he could use as a studio should he wish it. A very comfortable bedroom opened off it, and if the house was short of maidservants, it seemed to make up for it in electric contrivances.

Just before one o'clock Flavelle Bruton arrived. She looked magnificent, and Santley, who was in the square, ill-kept lounge, wondered what did it. She had on a black pony-skin coat with silver fox around the neck, and a frock of peacock blue which seemed to set off her dead white skin. Lavinia seemed delighted to see her; as for Moncrieff, he barely glanced at her, though he brought a chair forward and pressed the merits of some particular cocktail on her attention. Something electric seemed to have entered with her. It used to be Lavinia who had this power, but she, to-day, seemed not at all her usual gay self. So pale was she that Santley thought of Mrs. Phillimore, and wondered whether any unpleasant scenes had taken place while he was in Belgium. But the maids looked the kind to leave at any hint of that sort of thing, and they were the same ones he had seen before.

"By the way," Flavelle said in her deep throaty voice, "there are a couple of the quaintest people roaming your drive. Are they safe?" Her eyes were beautiful as she glanced around her, talking and laughing. Now the lights were blue, as though a sheet of blue crystal lay over old amber, now the blue was gone, and you saw them as sheer green. Now that too passed and left them shining hazel. She did not glance at her host, Santley noticed, though she seemed to include him in her light easy talk. She was like a jet of flame in the room, and Santley found himself wondering whether he would not break his custom and ask her to sit to him.

"Those will be the 'Mishes,'" Lavinia said laughingly. "Friends of Ann Bladeshaw. You haven't met her yet? Oh, a charming girl, trying out some wonderful theories of education on Dolly and Dilly."

"And on other people," breathed Goodenough half to himself, half to Santley.

"She'll probably bring them in shortly," Moncrieff said, "when the glasses are out of the way."

"Twins? Yours?" Flavelle looked smilingly at Lavinia.

"No. They're distant little cousins of my husband's. But the Mishes—that's the name the twins give them, and it's too good not to use—are coming to lunch too. You don't mind—" to Moncrieff, whose brow had darkened. "They're not coming down again. This is their final visit to Ann. By chance, I too, met them in the drive, and I really couldn't help asking them to the one meal."

"Am I expected to ask him to say grace?" Moncrieff demanded in a tone that made them laugh.

Almost on the instant Ann and the twins came in followed by a prim looking couple. The woman was young and not bad looking, but as atrociously dressed as was her husband whose clothes seemed to have been made about the year the Prince Consort died. Glancing at them now and again at lunch, Santley did not care for either face. Both were absolutely vacant, as far as showing character was concerned. That meant, in his experience, that they had either purposely kept their faces blank, which was not likely in the case of missionaries or, they had such feeble characters that no records showed. But missionaries—among the islands to which they seemed to have been sent, many of whom were inhabited by cannibals...surely courage, and devotion to duty, and love of God, and a contempt for comfort, and even for life, should all be recorded. Yet not one of these qualities showed. The woman, when she smiled—that drawer aside of veils as a rule—merely looked sly. But the man looked like a fat lug, Santley thought. Yet both the children seemed devoted to them. Santley told himself that he must be unjust.

The usual skirmish between the twins took place as they were leaving, after having been quite remarkably good during the meal itself.

"I saw Dod this morning," Dilly announced with understandable pride in her tone.

"You didn't! You never did! No one never did!" came from Dolly in tones that were indignant, yet just a trifle awed.

"Saw God?" Moncrieff repeated, grinning, "What was He like?"

"Just an eye in the clouds—like on the nalter cloth—Ann told us that meant Dod—'broidered on the nalter cloth. Well, I saw, the same eye in the clouds looking down at me."

"That wasn't God," Dolly said contemptuously now, "God isn't just an eye! He looks like Great Uncle John."

"Dod isn't old," Dilly said to that. "Great Uncle John's ever so old."

"Yes He is. He's lived ever since—oh, ever since ever!" Dolly said firmly. "Hasn't He, Mr. Mish?"

"Since the beginning of time," came in a sonorous, pulpit-like tone from the missionary, who was eyeing his refilled glass with a look of ecstasy.

"So He's older than Great Uncle John!" Dolly said triumphantly. "Lots!"

"But, Mr. Mish was all wrong about David and Jon'than. Ann said so. He's wrong now!" Dilly said, uncrushed.

"I said YOU were all wrong," Ann explained promptly.

"'Muddied up with Cain and Abel,' you said, but it was Mr. Mish was muddied. I told you 'xactly what he told me. All 'bout how they fought, and how David killed Jon'than with a stone!"

Mr. Mish spluttered into his wine glass and all but choked at the laughter that swept round the room. Mrs. Mish gave Dilly a look which, to Santley, suggested a fondness for skinning small children. That look seemed to Santley oddly out of place. Every one was laughing at the child. Now Mrs. Mish was laughing too. As was her husband. But why that look of real fury and of something rather horrid...vindictive...? Santley told himself that he was getting to read all sorts of black things into the simplest expressions, just because he disliked the couple.

But they were not coming down again. They spoke of a fortnight in town to let Mr. Mish work at the London Library and then they expected to return to Galapagos.

"What a life for a pretty girl!" Flavelle said, as Ann vanished from sight a few minutes later with the Mishes and the children.

"And with missionaries thrown in," Goodenough said rather sourly. "But if a wilful woman maun hae her way, what of a wilful girl?"

"Rather a dreadful couple..." Flavelle went on slowly. "Forgive my criticising your guests, Lavinia—" Lavinia's smile gave her the 'Mishes' to say what she liked about, "—but personally I should count the spoons. He has a taking eye."

"The poor chap shows how frightfully fattening bananas and breadfruit and cocoanuts are." Goodenough looked with pardonable complacency at the reflection of his own spare frame in the glass opposite.

"I'll put Harry on it," Lavinia said promptly. "He's getting so thin that I'm worried every time he walks over grating." And the talk became frivolous.