Читать книгу Juggernaut - Alice Campbell - Страница 7

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"I say, have you got any matches anywhere?"

Esther jumped at the sudden sound of a man's voice close to her ear, and looked up from the accounts she was writing. She had heard someone moving about in the salon, but she had thought it must be Jacques, who a few minutes before had been cleaning the brass on the front door. The voice, which addressed her casually and without any preliminary greeting, stirred something in her memory. She rose from her desk by the window and shot the intruder a glance, at the same time reaching the matches from the sideboard.

"Here you are," she said, holding out the box.

The visitor, cigarette in mouth and hands in pockets, sauntered into the room and took it from her. He was young, English, immaculately dressed, except for a rather baggy Burberry, worn loosely over his tweed suit, and he carried a pair of very smart motoring gloves, which he cast upon the table. His manner was at once hard and immature, languid and curiously restless. A second glance assured Esther that her first suspicion was correct. Undoubtedly he was the young man she had seen on several occasions, notably with the Frenchwoman at the Restaurant des Ambassadeurs.

Puffing contemplatively, he let his eyes roam about the room.

"Doctor still out?" he inquired in a vacant tone.

"Yes, but he'll probably be home in a few minutes. It's nearly lunch-time."

She was going to ask if she could do anything for him, but she decided the question was superfluous. He had the air of a friend, not a patient, of an intimate dropping in for an informal call. It came to her that she must amend her opinion that Dr. Sartorius was quite without social ties. She was about to return to her work when the young man's roving eyes reached her in their tour and rested upon her face for several seconds, their vacant gaze giving way to speculative attention.

"You have a familiar look, you know," he remarked. "I seem to recall seeing you somewhere. Where was it?"

Esther met his scrutiny for a moment, then slowly shook her head.

"Odd. You've not been here before, have you? With Sartorius, I mean?"

"No, never."

He carefully flicked an ash upon the rug, then looked at her again.

"Yet I'm positive I've seen your face somewhere about Cannes." The problem appeared mildly to interest him. "Have you any idea where it could have been?"

She regarded him for some seconds, considering what to say.

"Yes," she replied deliberately. "I can tell you where it was. At least, I believe I know."

"Where?"

"In the grill-room of the Carlton. About a fortnight to three weeks ago, at lunch."

"Oh!"—he weighed the suggestion for a moment. "You may be right. I daresay."

Resolved not to mention that other encounter when he had been with Lady

Clifford, Esther grew bolder.

"Weren't you there with two ladies, rather Spanish-looking, one much older than the other?"

He raised his brows and blew out a cloud of smoke.

"I shouldn't wonder," he assented, and seemed to dismiss the subject from his thoughts.

While Esther resumed her task he roamed aimlessly about, winding up again in the salon, where she heard him rustling a newspaper. Jacques, coming in to lay the table for déjeuner, glanced across the hall and whispered to Esther.

"That capitaine will stay for déjeuner. It is good I have a ragoût to-day, there will be assez for three. I need only to put another egg in the omelette."

He laid three places, then from the recess at the bottom of the sideboard he produced a cocktail shaker and a variety of bottles.

"That young man he stay here once for three weeks," remarked Jacques. "Always he mix the cocktails, many different kind. But to-day he will not like it that I have no ice."

A latch-key grated in the outer door, the doctor's heavy step resounded along the hall, pausing at the salon.

"Ah, Holliday," he said without surprise. "I saw your car outside."

"About the last you'll see of it, doctor," the visitor replied, joining him. "I'm going to sell it. Know anybody who wants a decent little car cheap?"

The two entered the salle à manger together. Esther saw the doctor give his friend a slow ruminative glance before inquiring:

"Why do you want to get rid of it?"

"Oh, I'm thinking of leaving this part of the world in a few weeks' time. No good carting a car as far as I'm going—too damned expensive."

"And where are you going?"

The doctor stood blinking down on the young man with his odd, sluggish little eyes. He appeared tired and not specially interested, yet there was a sort of negative friendliness in his attitude which Esther had not seen before.

"I may go out to the Argentine. There's a job offered me out there."

"South America!"

The sleepy gaze flickered over the whole slight, dapper person of the captain, betraying frank scorn.

"So that's it, is it?" He began feeling in his pocket for a cigarette, adding as an after-thought, "I suppose you've made up your mind about it?"

"Not entirely. But there's no point in sticking around here … as things are. There's precious little, I want to tell you, between me and starvation. Still, I'm taking a few weeks to think things over."

"Won't you lose the post if you let so much time go by?" inquired the doctor, with the heavy air of making conversation.

His friend's lip curled in easy contempt.

"Not this post," he answered laconically, and turned his attention to the sideboard. After a brief inspection of the array of bottles he called through the little passage that led to the kitchen:

"Jacques! Here then! Got any lemons?"

"Des citrons? Oui, monsieur, j'en ai."

"Squeeze a couple and bring me the juice."

"Entendu, monsieur."

With a thoughtful face Holliday measured equal parts of gin and Cointreau into the shaker. Esther found herself watching the operation with interest. Still busy, he remarked without turning:

"Old Clifford seems a bit seedy."

The doctor had sunk heavily into a chair at the top of a table with a sigh of relaxation. He replied:

"Yes, so his wife mentioned to me a few days ago, but I have not seen him."

"I have. Last night. I was there to dinner. The old boy was quite off his feed, and pushed off to bed about nine o'clock. I daresay you'll be hearing from him before long."

Sartorius yawned. "I daresay," he agreed, and broke off an end of the long stick of bread before him. It occurred to Esther that it was the first time she had seen him sit down properly at the table for a meal.

The lemon-juice arriving at this point, the expert added it to the contents of the shaker and agitated the whole violently.

"It's a long, long way to that Argentine ranch," he remarked pensively. "See here, doctor, you're a farseeing man. On general principles, what would you advise?"

The doctor looked up from his contemplation of the mustard-pot, and it seemed to Esther that his dull eyes met and held the young man's shallow hazel ones for an appreciable space of time.

"Well," he said at length, "do you particularly want to go?"

"Like hell," was the brief reply.

"H'm! In that case I should certainly leave the decision till the last possible moment. There's always some slight chance of something's turning up."

"No! Do you think there is, though?" demanded Holliday eagerly, stopping with the shaker in his hands.

"On general principles."

The visitor's face brightened noticeably. Whistling a bar or two of

"Gigolette" he poured out two glasses of a pale straw-coloured liquid,

then with the shaker poised over a third glass looked inquiringly at

Esther.

"What about you?" he invited.

Esther hesitated and succumbed to the temptation. After all, why not?

"As a resident of a dry country," she said, smiling, "I can't refuse."

He filled the glass and handed it to her just as Jacques entered, bearing the hot and savoury omelette aux champignons.

"Well!"—and Captain Holliday raised his glass and his left eyebrow simultaneously with easy nonchalance, "may we all get what we want!"

"Hear, hear," murmured the doctor mechanically, and drank his cocktail at a gulp.

Esther sipped hers, finding it a subtle and delicious concoction. Later she decided it was a potent one as well. Soon she observed that a hint of unwonted animation crept into the doctor's manner and indeed as the meal progressed he became almost gay, though how much of the change was due to the cocktail and how much to the company she could not tell. Moreover he ate steadily and voraciously. She thought she had never seen a man eat so much, it was like stoking an engine. Holliday, on the contrary, had little appetite for the excellent meal and seemed strung up with a kind of nervous excitement.

Afterwards this scene recurred to her more than once, showing to her imagination like a close-up on the screen. In the light of subsequent happenings it held for her a curious fascination. She could at any time shut her eyes and see the three of them, so ill-assorted, sitting around the table in that bourgeois dining-room, eating and conversing, herself one of the party by accident and virtually ignored by the other two, yet linked with them in a sort of casual camaraderie that was somehow established when she accepted the cocktail. Out of all that followed, no incident remained for her so sinister and at the same time so paradoxically trivial and absurd as this chance gathering at déjeuner.