Читать книгу Run! - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 5

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They waited the full half hour by James’s watch. It seemed longer. At least it seemed longer to him. He had no means of knowing what the girl felt about it. After letting off what he firmly believed to be the cock-and-bull story about her Aunt Clementa’s diamond necklace, she had bombarded him with questions until it was less trouble to answer them than to sit there in the hay and say nothing—“How old are you?” “Have you got any people?” “Is your father alive?” “What does he do?” “What do you do?”

To this questionnaire James replied in due order, “Twenty-five.” “Yes.” “Very much so.” “Commands a regiment, and his family.” “I demonstrate cars. I hope I’ve just sold one.”

He heard her laugh. He thought she tried not to, but it got away.

“Why didn’t you go into the Army? If your father’s that sort, he wanted you to, didn’t he?”

James remembered the Great War, not the paltry European fracas of 1914-18, but the long, stubbornly contested struggle over the question of whether he went to Sandhurst or not. If Colonel Elliot had put his foot down a little less firmly, or had occasionally stopped bellowing when the subject came up, James might conceivably have wanted to go into the Army, but every time his father roared at him he reacted vigorously in the direction of civil life. James made much less noise, but he was more really obstinate, and in the end he got his way and a mechanical training which he hankered after. His mother, the sweetest of women, maintained a surprising calm. She had a talent for tête-a-têtes, and whether she was talking to an infuriated husband or to an exasperated son, her response hardly ever varied from a simple but effective “Oh, yes, darling—I do see what you mean.”

James did not, naturally, explain all this to a total stranger in a hay loft. He said moderately, yes, his father had wanted him to go into the Army, and no, he, James, hadn’t wanted to. He had had a small legacy from a great aunt, and had used it for a premium. It was very important to get into a good firm. He was with Atwells. They were very good people.

He looked at his watch and said abruptly,

“We’d better be getting along. Anyone who was going to clear off must have done it by now. If there is still anyone there, we shall probably get shot at again. A nice crew you keep in these parts, I must say! What we ought to do is to go straight to the police.”

“You said that before. I’m not going to.”

“That’s because you know who the fellow is.”

She must have got up, because he heard her stamp her foot in the hay. He heard her stamp, and he heard her wince. Then he heard her catch her breath.

“I say, have you got a handkerchief?” she said.

“It’s got petrol on it. What do you want it for?”

“My foot’s cut. If I go dripping blood all over everything, it’ll be a give-away.”

“How did you cut it?”

“How on earth do I know? That blighted bicycle, I shouldn’t wonder. You don’t mind if I tear the rag, do you? Because I must hitch it on to my ankle somehow.”

She hitched it, and they came down the ladder and back to the house. The bicycle lay sprawling where it had fallen. The door was shut and fastened. The fog brooded over all. Miss Aspidistra Aspinall produced a key, opened the front door, and was gone. It was exactly like a disappearing trick on the stage. One minute she was there with her shoulder practically touching his, making little clinking sounds with a key-ring, and keys, and the lock which one of the keys was supposed to fit, and the next there was neither sound nor feel of her.

He listened, and got nothing at all from the silence. He called to her under his breath, using a slightly conventionalized variant of the “Hi, you there!” type of address, and still he got nothing. He raked out his torch and switched it on. She said she had left her shoes just to one side of the stair foot. Well, she might have been telling the truth, or she mightn’t, but it was a bed-rock cert that there were no shoes there now.

He slid the beam to and fro and looked most carefully. He found a little smudged space on the dusty floor behind the right-hand newel-post. The shoes might have stood there, but they certainly weren’t standing there now.

He went to the top of the stair and flicked about with his torch. The main flight divided half way up, and led on either side to dark, empty-feeling corridors which ran away to the right and to the left.

James called into the empty-feeling space, “Are you there?” but nobody answered him. He began to experience symptoms of the parental temper. If this dashed girl thought he was going to search this dashed house for her, she could just start thinking again. It probably had twenty bedrooms, to say nothing of garrets, and cellars, and what house-agents call offices. He was prepared to let her collect her shoes and then give her a lift to wherever she might be staying, but he was hanged if he was going to play hide-and-seek with her in this mouldy house.

He scowled at the left-hand passage. And then, from the hall below, he heard a sound. He leaned over the gallery, and an uprush of cold air came to him. He had left the hall door shut, but it was certainly open now. The sound he had heard was the sound of shod feet treading lightly. Miss Aspidistra Aspinall was evidently no longer shoe-less. The crocodiles had been recovered. Her voice came up to him in a faint, floating “Coo-ee!” He stared down, and could see nothing. The smell of the fog came drifting up. The girl’s voice came with it.

“Good-night, James Elliot.”