Читать книгу Marivosa - Baroness Orczy - Страница 9

Table of Contents

It had indeed been a happy life for Tim O’Clee until that spring of 1924, when the crash came. It was a catastrophe such as Tim, even in the wildest possible nightmare, could never have conceived.

He ran up to town at the end of May, hoping to spend a month with Uncle Justin in Grosvenor Square for the Derby, Ascot, and so on. The very first day had not yet gone by before he realized that an extraordinary change had come over the old man. Something of his cheeriness had gone; he seemed at times strangely absent-minded and, when called to himself, equally strangely embarrassed. With Tim he appeared constrained, with occasional outbursts of devil-may-care joviality which were obviously forced. Tim, vaguely disturbed by what he felt was a presage of evil, groped in vain at first for the key to the mystery; but friends soon put him in possession of it. A man always has enough friends to do that job for him. Hadn’t he heard? Didn’t he know? Why, it was the talk of the town!

‘Great God! What?’ Tim exclaimed.

‘Hold-Hands Juliana! A positive infatuation, my dear fellow! Didn’t you know?’

If Tim had been told that the heavens had fallen into the middle of Hyde Park, he could not have been more dumb-founded than he was at this moment. Hold-Hands Juliana! Heavens above! And it was the talk of the town that old Traskmoore was infatuated with her! Oh! Tim knew the woman well enough. A Roumanian (or something of the sort) by birth, she was the widow of that eccentric fellow Dudley Stone, who before the war had been a good deal in the public eye through a series of wild and foolhardy adventures in which he had embarked at different times. He had flown from London to Vladivostok, had spent three months in Tibet disguised as a wandering fakir; at one time he fitted out an Antarctic expedition, at another he commanded a division of Bulgarian comitadjis during the Balkan War. It was said that he had seen the inside of eighteen different foreign prisons, including one in Siberia, all on a charge of spying. His great idea was the search for hidden treasure: he fitted out various expeditions for that purpose and went off to find the buried treasures of the Armada, of Captain Kidd, of the cities of Arabia. The ambition of his life was to find one day the land of El Dorado in the wastes of Brazil, where lay hidden the priceless treasures of the Incas of Peru.

Of Dudley Stone himself the public had heard quite a good deal in those pre-war days, but of his wife—nothing. She was not Hold-Hands Juliana then, and but few people had ever seen the pale-faced, wide-eyed young girl whom that ‘lunatic, Stone,’ had married somewhere out in the Balkans. He was in Bulgaria when the war broke out, and after that there were some very ugly stories current about him in connection with the rout of the Serbian army, due, it was said, to the machinations of an English spy. Be that as it may, Stone was never again seen in England. What became of him nobody knew and certainly nobody cared.

And then one fine day Hold-Hands Juliana appeared upon the scene—no longer pale, no longer thin—with pearls round her neck and diamonds in her ears. She gave it out that her husband had gone out to Brazil after the Armistice to find the treasure of the Incas. He had succeeded apparently, though Juliana didn’t actually say so, but she threw money about with a lavish hand in London, Deauville or Monte Carlo. Hardly a day had gone by during the last season or two without some mention of her in the Society columns of the Continental Herald. Tim had often heard her referred to by men of a certain set as ‘Hold-Hands Juliana.’ She was no longer young: she was coarse, and loud and common. She had huge, goggled dark eyes, strongly-marked eyebrows and long, curved black lashes. Her mouth was very full and her teeth very white, like a row of marble tombstones. Her hair was black and glossy; she wore it parted very much on one side with a big, unnatural-looking wave falling over her left eye. Her dresses always looked too short, and her corsets too tight. Her fingers, short and thick, were smothered in rings. When Timothy first met her—somewhere or other in London—she had appeared to him like the true presentment of a cinema vamp.

Oh, yes! Tim knew all about her. But that Uncle Justin should—

The old man had met her, apparently, somewhere this season—it didn’t much matter where—and, according to Club gossip, had at once fallen a victim to her wiles in the way that old men do when a clever adventuress sets a trap for them. Unfortunately, there was no doubt about it. Club gossip had not even exaggerated. With a sinking of the heart, which at times made him almost physically sick, Tim stood by and watched the growth of this fateful senile passion. He could note its every phase, whilst he himself was powerless in face of the coming catastrophe, which he would have given the best years of his life to avert.

It came even sooner than he expected. By the end of June, Hold-Hands Juliana gave it out that her husband had died of malarial fever at Monsataz in Brazil, the small seaport town south of Pernambuco from whence he had been on the point of starting for the land of El Dorado, where lay buried the most marvellous treasures of the earth. She was seen shopping in Bond Street clad in deepest mourning. Later on, the Society columns of the daily Press announced that Mrs. Stone would sail from Cherbourg on the French steamer Duguay-Trouin for Pernambuco, and would not be back in London before the autumn. Tim was at Traskmoore when he read of these various social events in the London papers; his hopes rose at a bound. Absence, he argued with himself, might work wonders with Uncle Justin’s infatuation for that blatant adventuress. Pity, he thought, that the hunting season was not yet on, but there was the fishing—Uncle Justin might try Norway this year—and the 12th was not so very far off now.

Tim went to bed that evening happier than he had been for weeks. He had already made up his mind to go up to London at once. But the next morning he had a letter from Uncle Justin telling him that his beloved friend Juliana, the widow of Dudley Stone, had made him the happiest of men by promising to become his wife as soon as the period of mourning was over and she could return to England from her pilgrimage to the grave of her late husband.

Well! The conventional period of mourning was apparently over the following October, for on the tenth of that month the Earl of Traskmoore was married at the registry office of St. George’s to Juliana, relict of Dudley Stone, Esquire, and daughter of Dr. Brailescu of Bucharest. Hold-Hands Juliana was now Countess of Traskmoore. Heavens above!

To Tim O’Clee the catastrophe meant the loss of that friendship which for twenty-six years had been the light of his life. For even during the three or four months preceding his marriage to Juliana, Uncle Justin had been a changed man; but at first, especially while the woman was still in Brazil, the change had been very subtle. No one would have noticed it except Tim. But Tim knew. Lord Traskmoore was no longer Uncle Justin to him.

It was after the marriage—and when the bridal pair returned to London—that the change appeared devastating. Uncle Justin, who had been Tim’s beau-ideal of a sportsman and a gentleman, was a very different man now. For one thing, he drank harder than he used to, and when in his cups was morose and irritable. Tim would hearken in vain for that cheery laugh which was wont to raise the echo of the old grey walls of Traskmoore.

Juliana, of course, hated Traskmoore. It was dull, she said, and gave her the creeps. Hunting did not appeal to her—she did not know how to ride, so it was London all the time now—theatres, dinner-parties, night-clubs. Tim carried on at the old place for a time for Uncle Justin’s sake, but presently the hunters were sold, then several of the farms. What was the good of carrying on? It was London—London all the time, or else Deauville or Monte Carlo.

Never again the meets on a cold frosty morning, with the keen air whipping your face, and a satin-skinned, iron-sinewed Irish hunter between your knees; never again the horn of the huntsman or the cry of hounds, the tramping of hoofs on the ploughed fields, the five-barred gates, the smell of earth and stables and woodland! Never again the cheery ‘Well done, lad!’ which had thrilled so that it almost hurt! Never again the Irish ballads sung out of tune to the accompaniment of a gramophone! Uncle Justin had taken to tennis and even to dancing! The gramophone these days only turned out the newest jazz tunes.