Читать книгу Sinister Island - Cecil Bernard Rutley - Страница 3

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The March evening was drawing in, and a slight mist was hanging over land and sea, as Dawn Cheverill drove home along the fenland road. Dawn was an orphan, having, at the age of five, lost both her parents in an aeroplane accident, and since then she had been brought up by the man who had been her father’s greatest friend. Stanford Wright, Uncle Stan as Dawn called him, was a well-known yachtsman, and he had imbued Dawn with his own love of deep waters.

The girl looked anxiously seaward, but the weather showed no signs of improving. Dash the mist! For three days it had persisted, and she was aching to try out the cutter which Uncle Stan had given her on her nineteenth birthday only the day before. Dawn’s lips parted in a smile as she recalled incidents of that birthday. Uncle Stan was a born courtier. What had he said? “Your parents showed remarkable foresight when they called you Dawn, my dear.” He was a pet, and certainly it had been a happy choice. Dawn was by no means conceited, but she could not help knowing that her curling golden hair and deep violet eyes matched her name, and that when to these attractions were added a perfect mouth, firm rounded chin, and a tall, slim, beautifully formed figure, she presented a picture it was easy to look at. Suddenly the smile developed into a laugh.

“You’re getting swollen headed, my child,” she remarked to herself, “and you know that’s a thing you hate, so you’d better——”

Dawn’s soliloquy ended in a sharp cry, and with a wrench of the wheel she sent the car swerving across the road, narrowly missing a huddled figure lying directly in her path. What was it? It had looked like a man. Dawn rammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a screeching halt, and a second later she was out on the road and racing back the way she had come.

It was a man, an old man dressed in ancient and none too clean clothes. The girl spoke to him; then, as he made no reply, she dropped to her knees beside the recumbent figure. Whoever he was he was quite unconscious, and his breathing was coming and going in harsh, rasping gasps, yet there was no sign of injury. Had he fainted? There was a hot flush about his face which frightened Dawn, and after glancing up and down the road, she returned to her car and backed it till it was standing alongside the motionless form. Now for it. Dawn opened the door of the seat next to the driver’s, then placing her hands under the unconscious man’s arms she essayed to lift him. He was lighter than she had expected, and now she saw how loosely the clothes hung about the thin, emaciated body. Why, he must be starving! But there was more than mere starvation behind that flushed face and harsh breathing. Dawn got the old man inside the car and lifted his legs, and with a final heave, she managed to drag him up on to the seat. Done it! But he looked horribly ill. Was he dying? For a moment terror gripped the girl, but the next she brushed it aside, and seizing a rug she wrapped it as well as she could round the inert form, having done which she sprang into the driver’s seat and slammed in the clutch. There was only one place for her passenger, the hospital, and she must get him there just as quickly as she could.

“It is a bad case of pneumonia.”

Miss Maitland, matron of the Fenham Cottage Hospital, had just entered the room where Dawn had been waiting to hear the doctor’s verdict.

“Will he live?” asked the girl with the suspicion of a quiver in her voice.

“I’m afraid there is little hope. He is terribly emaciated and must have been starving for some time. But you can never tell with these cases, Miss Cheverill, and, of course, we shall do our best.”

Dawn nodded her head.

“Please do,” she answered. “My guardian, Mr. Stanford Wright of Newland’s Grange, will be responsible for all expenses. Have you discovered who he is?”

“No. There were no papers in his pockets or anything by which he might be identified.”

“I see.” Dawn picked up her bag from the table where she had placed it. “Well, thank you very much, matron, and I will come early to-morrow morning to inquire if I may.”

“Certainly, Miss Cheverill.” Suddenly the elder woman smiled, and her voice lost its aloof, business-like quality. “My dear,” she went on, “I think you have behaved splendidly. Not many girls of your age would have acted with such prompt decision, and if the old man does recover, it will be as much due to you as to anything we shall be able to do. Now good-bye. I must go and see how our patient is getting on.”

Dawn drove home slowly through the darkening mist. To her there was something infinitely sad and pathetic in the thought of that old man dying in the midst of strangers without a single human being by his side to whom he belonged, and she could not get him out of her thoughts. Who was he? Where had he come from, and what sort of life had he led? Probably they would never know. He would just come into her life for a day or two, and the lives of the matron, and doctor, and nurses at the hospital, and then he would pass out a nobody, not even a name, and yet, for all they knew, as a strong man he might have experienced adventure and excitement such as rarely fell to the lot of better-known people. She would like to know. Somehow she had a feeling—— Dawn caught sight of a line of trees looming up out of the mist on her left, and turning off the road, she passed through a gateway and up a drive until she came within sight of a long, low, gabled house, the ancient brickwork of which on bright days glowed rosily in the sunshine. Lights were already gleaming from many of the downstairs rooms, and having driven her car to the garage, Dawn mounted a flight of steps to the terrace, which ran the whole length of the house, and entered a high, handsome room by the open window.

It was the room of one who was essentially an outdoor man. Trophies of the chase, fishing rods, a pair of sculls, and several similar things covered the walls, and the tall, lean, bronzed man who was sitting in an arm-chair by the fire, reading a newspaper, fitted the room.

“You’re late, Dawn,” he said, looking up as the girl entered. “Anything wrong? Had a breakdown?”

“No, but I’ve had an adventure.” Dawn closed the windows and drew the heavy curtains, then crossed the room and perched herself on the broad leather arm of her guardian’s chair. “Fancy having those windows wide open with all this mist about, Uncle Stan,” she admonished. “If you knew how the maids grumble when they have to clean those cups of yours you’d be more careful.”

“Should I, my dear. Well, anyway they’re paid for it.” Brown eyes twinkled up into blue. “What about this adventure now? Don’t keep me on tenter-hooks.”

The smile died out of Dawn’s face.

“It wasn’t much of an adventure, really,” she began; “in fact, it’s something very sad,” and Dawn went on to tell of the old man she had found, and how she had taken him to hospital, and the doctor’s verdict. “I wonder who he is,” she concluded. “I’d like to know.”

“Some old tramp, most likely. Poor old chap. I’m glad you found him, Dawn. He’d probably have been there all night if you hadn’t.”

The girl nodded, and sat gazing thoughtfully into the fire for some seconds before she spoke again.

“I don’t think he is a tramp,” she said at last. “At least, not a real tramp.”

“No? What do you think he is?”

“I think he is or was a sailor.”

“A sailor! Why?”

Dawn grinned.

“Now don’t start asking for reasons and things like that, Uncle Stan,” she answered, rumpling her guardian’s hair. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t any, not proper ones. I just feel that he’s a sailor. Call it womanly intuition, if you like, and please don’t laugh, because I’m serious. Yes, I am,” seeing the smile hovering on her companion’s lips. “And I’ll tell you something more, you disbeliever. I’ve had a queer sort of feeling growing on me ever since I left the hospital that things are going to happen to you and me, exciting things, and that somehow or other they are all bound up with that old man. Now what have you to say to that?”

“I say that it’s time you went and changed for dinner,” laughed Dawn’s guardian. “I’ve often noticed that the young female of the species does get strange feelings when she is hungry. So hurry up, my dear, for there’s no knowing what may happen to us if you get really famished.”

Dawn stood up and crossed the room, but at the door she stopped and made a face at her companion.

“Right-o, doubter,” she said, “just you wait and see. I know I’m right. When I dragged the old man into the car one sleeve of his coat pulled up, and there was a mermaid tattooed on his arm, and——”

“A mermaid!” came a shout from the arm-chair. “And you don’t call that a reason. Intuition, my hat! Get out, you young baggage, or——”

A magazine came hurtling across the room, but Dawn dodged it with a laugh and shut the door, and a second later she was running up the stairs. But once in her bedroom she became serious again. Uncle might laugh but really this feeling she had of something about to happen was very queer. It was almost a premonition. Could there be anything in it? Mother had been Highland, and Scottish people were sometimes gifted that way. Perhaps she had inherited something. Perhaps! Dawn tossed her clothes on to a chair and ran into the bathroom. “Don’t be a fool,” she chided herself as she turned on the taps. “Uncle Stan’s right. You’re hungry, also you’re a bit upset and sorry for the old man, that is what’s affecting you, and the sooner you realize it the better.” She grinned at herself in a mirror. “Premonition, indeed! Gosh!” As a matter of fact, however, Dawn’s intuition was not so wide of the truth after all, and the old man, lying at that moment so near to death’s door in the Fenham Cottage Hospital, was, had she and her guardian only known it, a messenger of fate.