Читать книгу They Wouldn't Be Chessmen - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 6

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NAHENDRA NAO, Prince of Chitipur, walked home no doubt on that early morning, and walked home soberly; and an instinct of common sense made him tuck his pearls into the big pocket of his overcoat. These details are certain. For he found himself standing in his drawing-room at the Ritz Hotel with the dust of the street upon his shoes, and the great rope of disfigured pearls on the table in front of him.

"I wonder," he was saying in a harsh whisper. "I think I left it in London. Carruthers was careful about it. Yes, I left it in London."

He was not very coherent, but it was just as well that Carruthers had made him leave "it" in London. "It" was a small black automatic pistol, and had he brought it, he would surely have blown out his brains that morning in his apartment at the Ritz. And not now in fear of his father, but from the intensity of his humiliation.

"A coloured boy—who had bored her stiff—and disgraced her into the bargain."

The words, even in the memory, seared him like a hot iron. He took off his overcoat and folded it neatly, and laid it upon a chair. Then he sat at the table with his head between his palms. He was very young, and the tears ran out between his fingers and rolled down the backs of his hands.

A long while after—for the daylight was flowing into the room at the edges of the blinds—a door was opened and a man came into the room. He too was wearing a dinner jacket, buttoned across his breast, and he carried an overcoat over his arm. He was a man of forty years, and of the middle height, clean-shaven, not ill-looking, not good-looking. It was easier to remember the clean cavalry man's cut of his figure than to carry in the mind any picture of his face. This was Major Scott Carruthers, a retired officer of Indian horse, secretary to His Highness the Maharajah of Chitipur, and temporary bear-leader to Nahendra Nao on his first visit to Europe. He stared in astonishment at the boy for a few seconds. Then he closed the door, laid down his hat and coat, and moved to the boy's side. He was very neat and quiet in all his actions.

He looked down at Nahendra Nao with a little smile of amusement.

"Well, the affair would have had to end one day," he reflected. "On the whole, it was for the best that it should end in a blazing row."

He raised his hand above Nahendra Nao's shoulder, but he did not let it fall. His eyes had noticed the great chaplet of pearls tossed upon the table. What was it doing there? Why had it been brought out from the strong-room of the hotel? And when? There would have been no one able to open the safes at that hour of the morning. The young fool must have taken it out before, to show it to Elsie Marsh. Then he drew in a breath.

There was something wrong with that great chaplet. The pearls were dead. Their sheen had gone. There were discolorations.

"Natty!" he cried, and now indeed his hand fell heavily upon the boy's shoulder.

The Prince sprang to his feet, startled and ashamed to have been caught in this moment of weakness.

"I was waiting up for you," he stammered. "But I thought that I should hear you come in!" And he turned away while he wiped his eyes and face.

"And that?" asked Carruthers. There was disaster for him too in that irreplaceable wrecked jewel upon the table. His face showed it as clearly as his stifled voice. He had aged by ten years.

"Yes," said the youth, nodding his head. "I was waiting up to tell you at once."

"Wait a moment!" Scott Carruthers went to the windows and drew back the yellow curtains, and raised the blinds. The daylight flooded the room. He sat down again at the table.

"Now!"

Nahendra Nao told him the truth quite simply, and without an excuse for himself.

"I lost my head. I'm not the first man, of course, who has made a fool of himself over a girl, but I don't think many can have behaved so much like a fool as I did. I was complete from A to Z. I was proud, insanely proud I thought it was me—just me, in capital letters—whereas it was—well—just what I brought."

Nahendra Nao did not have to underline his words for his companion to understand them. It was as well, for he would sooner have died than repeat to man or woman the sneers he had listened to. That they had been used seemed to contaminate him.

"She was wild to wear them," he continued, pointing at the chaplet on the table. "She was—I mean, she pretended to be thrilled by their history. Oh, I was mad to describe them to her. I was madder still to lend them to her."

"How long has she been wearing them?"

"Let me see!...Yes...Six weeks!"

"My God!" Scott Carruthers jumped in his chair.

"She might have been murdered any night," he cried. "You, too, if you were with her. Many a girl has been, for nothing more than a few cheap trinkets."

"I told her so. But she wouldn't listen. She said that none of her friends would believe for a moment that they were real. She was going to say herself that they were false—"

Carruthers interrupted violently.

"She was going to boast to every rotten one of them that she was wearing the Luck of Chitipur. That's what she was going to do."

He broke off abruptly. This line of talk was no good. Recriminations would land them nowhere. The girl wasn't murdered, though if it could have been done without scandal, he would have been quite glad that she should have been. And there was the rope of pearls upon the table, dull and lustreless as the eyes of a dead fish, but there it was. Yet he himself must, even while he deprecated reproaches, try to affix a blame.

"It was a pity they were brought away from London."

"Yes...yes," the youth agreed with surprise. He added timidly, for he assuredly had no wish to transfer to other shoulders his own transgressions: "But that was your idea, wasn't it?"

Major Carruthers looked up, finding the statement difficult to believe.

"Mine, Natty! Was it?"

"Yes. You thought they would be safer under our hands in the hotel strong-room."

"Did I? I don't remember it. But if I did, I should be responsible for the whole disaster."

But the lad would not hear of any such argument.

"No," he said stubbornly. "It's my doing. Mine alone."

But that line of talk, again, took them nowhere. Blaming themselves was no more helpful work than blaming each other—all the less helpful, indeed, since the light was broadening through the room, losing its pallor, carrying with it warmth and a promise of gold. The day was here. Something had got to be decided.

"I shall go home," said Nahendra Nao. He stood up straight, rather like an undergraduate confessing to his tutor some inexcusable folly. There was now neither drama nor hysteria in any accent or word. "I shall give that necklace back to my father. I have thought it all out whilst I sat here waiting. I shall tell him how I lent it and to whom I lent it. It will be the end of me, of course—" For a moment his voice broke, and his eyes closed, and his fingers were clenched on his palms, as he imagined his father, girt about with the trappings of his authority, listening to the story of how his son had lent the supreme jewel of the treasury to a little trumpery harlot of the music-halls, so that she might flaunt it on her shoulders before her gaping friends. The Maharajah had never been in Europe. He had never been young and ignorant and flattered, with money to burn; in Paris; and all the pleasures of the world his for less than the asking. His father would never understand, never forgive. But the moment passed.

"I shall tell him every least little thing, and take what comes."

Scott Carruthers said quietly:

"You won't go alone, Natty. I shall lose my job, of course. And I'm sorry. I loved the life in Chitipur." He touched the pearls upon the table. "I have lost it now, in fact. I ought to have exercised more control. But I shan't leave you to go back and face the Maharajah alone."

The boy, generous by nature himself, was quick to appreciate generosity in others. Carruthers's words moved him and lifted him, even if ever so slightly, from the depths of humiliation into which he had fallen. It was certain that Carruthers's occupation would not continue for an hour after the Maharajah had heard their story. He had a friend, too, to keep him in Paris. That he should take the long pilgrimage to the northern edge of Rajputana merely to stand by his side for five minutes and then suffer the ignominy of a brief dismissal—that was a fine thing for a friend to do.

"I oughtn't to allow it," he said, with a little catch in his voice. "But it would mean a great deal to me. All that way alone—into disgrace and punishment—almost impossible."

"That's all right, Natty."

There was the touch of impatience necessary to check a scene. Nahendra Nao was brought a little sharply to remember that emotion between men was a breach of the code. He said:

"I'll go to bed. I'm tired out. We can look up ships to Bombay later on this morning."

Carruthers did not answer. He sat at the table with his attention arrested as though by some new thought, and as the young Prince crossed behind him to the door, he said very quickly:

"Wait a bit, Natty!" and in his voice there was a little lift of hope. "I'm not quite so sure that the game's up. Pearls go sick. There they are in front of us, sick to death. But I think pearls can heal." He beard a gasp behind him, and Nahendra Nao was back at the table.

"If that were possible!"

"We ought to make sure."

Major Carruthers took a cigarette from his case and lit it deliberately, and smoked a quarter of it in silence.

"Let us see! We are in any case to be back in Chitipur before the end of October. We've retained cabins on the Naldera, which leaves London on the twenty-ninth of August. We're now in March. We have heaps of time to give the pearls a chance to get well again. We ought to take that time."

For the first time since the two men had been talking together in the room, the boy sat down. He drew in his chair to the table, all eagerness, perhaps now a trifle hysterical in his eagerness.

"I tell you what we'll do, Major Carruthers. We'll take that rope this morning round to old Tabateau in the Rue de la Paix; and..." He saw Carruthers jerk up his head in alarm. "Why?...I'm told he's much the best jeweller in Paris. He's supposed to have a wonderful knowledge of precious stones—more knowledge than almost anyone. I believe he has got a daughter, too, who knows as much as he does. Tabateau's our man."

"No!" Nothing could have been more decided than that quiet refusal.

"Tabateau won't do?"

"No."

Nahendra Nao leaned back in his chair, his enthusiasm chilled, his sudden hopes falling.

"Why?"

Carruthers got up and walked over to the window. He played for a moment or two with the tassel of the blind. He flung up the sash. The sun had risen. The piping of birds filled the room with music. When Carruthers came back to the table, it seemed to his companion that his face was white.

"I felt a little cheap," he explained with a laugh. "I'm not so young as you are, you know. It means a lot to me, Natty, to lose my job in Chitipur. I liked the work. I had made my home there. I meant to live and die there—oh, with an occasional holiday in Paris—yes." And he laughed again. "And the fear that I was going to lose it and would have to start looking for another job—and then the reaction when there seemed a possibility—do you see?"

Nahendra Nao saw, or thought that he saw.

"Of course," he said sympathetically.

Carruthers resumed in a voice of indifference.

"If you are set on Tabateau, why, we'll go and see him. It's up to you to decide. But I fancy I've got a better plan. What I'm afraid of here is the gossip. It'll get out. Everything gets out in Paris, and pretty quickly. We shall have it in the newspapers, names and all. 'Why did the famous pearls of Chitipur go sick?' Can't you see the headlines? Pretty fatal, what? How long would it take for the story to reach Chitipur?"

The boy shuddered.

"Yes, that mustn't happen," he whispered.

"We'd do better to rush back and tell the story ourselves first, wouldn't we?"

"Yes." And once more the Maharajah, thousands of miles away, dominated that room in Paris and made of it a place of terror and menace. "Yes, there would be a better chance of forgiveness." The boy looked up at Carruthers. "What do you propose?"

"That we should bolt back to England to-day. Crevette in Bond Street knows just as much about precious stones as your friend Tabateau."

"He's not my friend," Nahendra Nao interposed. "It's only what I've heard. I've never been in his shop."

Carruthers drew a deep breath of relief.

"I'm glad. I thought you were set on him. Crevette, too, knows these particular pearls. He insured them for us when we first came to London; whereas Tabateau, I take it, has never seen them."

It was a question rather than a statement, and Nahendra Nao answered it at once.

"Never."

"Good! Then if we go back to London to-day, whatever talk we leave behind us here, the spoilt pearls won't figure in it. Elsie Marsh isn't going to say anything about them, you may bet your life. She'll have to invent quite a different story."

And for the first time in the course of their relationship, the Prince saw a Major Scott Carruthers who was more than a little boisterous. He was in his habit a quiet, reticent man, with manners which were colourless. Now—well, he had just won the High Jump. Nahendra Nao was amazed, and his face showed his amazement.

"Besides," Carruthers continued in his more usual voice, "you'll be glad for other reasons to get away, I should think, as soon as you can."

"Yes. Very glad."

"What I was thinking was, that with a push we might catch the midday aeroplane. Your valet could bring the luggage along by the boat."

"Too early," replied the Prince. "I have still some things to do. We can go in the afternoon."

He picked up the great chaplet of pearls. He had been wise enough in the midst of his folly not to lend with it its proper case. He locked it away now in his bedroom and returned to the drawing-room.

The things which he had still to do before he could leave Paris were to write a difficult letter and collect his clothes from the apartment in the Avenue Matignon. He sat down at once to write the letter. It contained neither reproaches nor regrets. It stated in the simplest way that he was leaving for London, that the rent was paid to the end of the half-year, and that the furniture was hers. It ended with his good wishes for her future, and he enclosed a cheque. It was still early when he had sealed up his letter. He left it on the table with a note to his servant to take it round to the Avenue Matignon at a reasonable hour, and at the same time, to collect his belongings. Then he went to bed, and slept from the moment his head touched the pillow.

When Nahendra Nao began to write his letter, Scott Carruthers went quietly away to his own bedroom and locked the door. His windows were on the garden side of the hotel, and there was no one to overlook him. From a locked trunk, he took a locked box. He unlocked it, and lifted from the bed of black velvet on which it lay, a big rope of pearls which for weight and shape and size was the twin of that spoilt chaplet now lying in its own case in the young Rajah's bedroom. He carried it to the window and examined it for the hundredth time. The colour of its stones was perfect, like still water in moonlight, their sheen soft and delicate and lovely. He laid it upon his dressing-table, and filling the box with the velvet lining with letters, he replaced it unlocked in the trunk. It would travel with the rest of the luggage in the charge of the servant, and it would be examined at Victoria Station. He took the big chaplet into his bed with him, and later on that morning, when he rose, he slipped it into a long silk sheath which was made to hold it, coiled it about his waist, and strapped it tight. Wearing a thick overcoat, he crossed that afternoon with Nahendra Nao in the aeroplane to London.