Читать книгу Stolen Idols - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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“Steward,” Gregory asked him, standing up in the centre of his stateroom, his hands behind his back, “do I look drunk?”

The steward was used to eccentric passengers and answered as though the question were an entirely reasonable one.

“For a young gentleman as hasn’t moved out of his stateroom for two days, and ’as had a good deal more to drink than to eat,” he pronounced, “you look wonderful, sir.”

“Fetch me a whisky and soda, then.”

“Certainly, sir.”

The man withdrew, closing the door behind him. Gregory drew back the curtain of his upper bunk and again, with tireless eyes, he stared at the treasure which had cost him his friend’s life, and, as it seemed to him sometimes now, especially in those horrible watches of the night, his own honour. Always there was the same fascination. Every time he looked, he fancied that he discovered some fresh horror in that grim yet superbly bestial face.

“You are ugly,” he said softly, as he dropped the curtain. “You are damnably ugly! I wish you were at the bottom of the sea, and yet I can’t part with you.”

The steward brought him the whisky and soda. He paused for a moment before drinking it.

“What’s your name?” he demanded.

“Perkins, sir.”

“Well then, Perkins,” he directed, “please see the second steward for me. Try to get me a small table in the saloon, alone in a corner, and I will go in to dinner to-night.”

“Very good, sir,” the man replied, as he made his exit. “There will be plenty of room to sit just where you please until we get to Bombay.”

Once more Gregory pushed aside the curtain, raised his glass and drained its contents, his eyes fixed all the time upon the Image. He set down the empty tumbler.

“That’s what you like; to see me drink, isn’t it?” he murmured softly. “You’d like the whole world to be as foul as the things some devil has carved into your face. Yet I suppose I would forgive you if only you would give up your secret.”

For the hundredth time he passed his fingers over the carved head; fingers which were long and slim and sensitive of touch. Nowhere, however, could they discover the slightest sign of any join or any possible aperture, however cunningly concealed. The wood had become as smooth and hard as marble, black as jet, shining as though with generations of polish. Gregory drew the curtain and turned away, baffled once more. With his back turned to the Image he made a long and deliberate toilet. Afterwards he lit a cigarette and for the first time since he had boarded the steamer, ventured on deck to find only a few people promenading, a dozen or so drinking cocktails in the smoking room. There was no sign of the person he longed yet dreaded to see. The heat was great but it was not unusually oppressive. In the west, a blood-red sun, pencils of black cloud surrounding it, seemed almost to be falling into the ocean. Gregory loitered about until long after the bugle had sounded, and then, summoning up all his courage, descended to take his place in the saloon. The second steward hurried forward to meet him and showed him his table. He breathed a sigh of relief as he realised its isolation.

“I have given you a table to yourself, sir, as Perkins seemed to think you wanted it,” he announced, “but if you would care for a seat at the captain’s table—that was where we had intended to put you—it could be arranged now, if you preferred it.”

“Not on any account,” Gregory begged earnestly. “I’ve been laid up. Must be quiet. This exactly suits me.”

He continued a conversation for some minutes, accepted the wine list, studied the menu, gave his orders, and finally ventured to look around. She was there, seated on the right hand of the captain, her inevitable place under the circumstances. Their eyes met. Without hesitation she smiled a greeting. Gregory half rose in his place and bowed. When he sat down he realised that both his hands were clenched, the white of the knuckles showing through the skin. His breath was coming a little quickly. It was an absurd thing but he had a feeling that he had passed through one of the crises of his life. There had been no message then from her uncle—no wireless. She knew nothing.

Afterwards he came across her on deck, talking to an elderly woman whom he realised must be the Mrs. Hichens of whom she had spoken as a possible chaperone. She turned round at once and welcomed him smilingly. There was a shade of reproach in her tone.

“I was beginning to wonder what had become of you, Mr. Ballaston,” she said. “Let me present you to my chaperone, Mrs. Hichens.”

Gregory acknowledged the introduction and spent the next few minutes searching for and arranging their chairs.

“I suppose I have been outrageously lazy,” he confessed, when at last he had installed them. “That trip of mine into the interior, which you heard me speaking of with your uncle, was rather an exhausting affair.”

“Some day you must tell me the whole story,” she begged. “The snatches I heard of it were most romantic. You came back in Wu Ling’s trading schooner, didn’t you?”

“Wu Ling,” Gregory confided, “saved my life, and brought me back to the city. I got into trouble. I was certainly somewhere where I had no right to be, and I was handed over to Wu Abst, the famous pirate, by a couple of fanatical priests, with instructions that I was to become nourishment for the alligators. Wu Ling heard about it at one of the villages where he was trading and released me. It sounds like a page from somebody’s novel, doesn’t it? It was all very real at the time, though.”

They both looked at him curiously, but the older woman had lived for some time in a country where few questions were asked, and Claire was more concerned with the shadow of either pain or sleeplessness which seemed to darken his face.

“I can quite understand your feeling like a rest,” she said sympathetically. “I thought you looked terribly ill the day we met in the warehouse.”

She picked up a book, merely with the idea of giving him an opportunity to pass on if he cared to, but after strolling about the deck aimlessly for a quarter of an hour, he returned to find her with her book still unopened, her mind, as a matter of fact, occupied with him and his story. She accepted immediately his invitation to walk. They went on to the upper deck and looked down together at the oily water with its streak of phosphorescence. They talked of the ship, of such of their fellow passengers as they had observed, and of the route home, with a certain obvious attempt at casualness; conversation of little import, yet almost a necessary stepping-stone to more intimate understanding. Claire’s perceptions were keen enough for her to realise that this young man was scarcely in a normal condition.

“You have had no wireless from your uncle or from the firm since you left?” he asked, a little abruptly.

She shook her head.

“You asked me that before,” she reminded him. “Why on earth should I? We said good-by early in the morning after the night you dined with us. Uncle would never dream of coming to see me off. He hates steamers and he hates what he calls ‘looking westwards.’ How he will survive life in England I am sure I can’t imagine, except that he does sometimes still admit that English country life is wonderful.”

“He really means to come then?”

“Why, surely.”

“And you? Shall you like it?”

She assented a little doubtfully.

“I think I would rather live in New York,” she confessed, “but I can’t fancy Uncle there. I think that would be expecting a little too much of him. He still has friends and a few relatives in England.”

“Pretty sporting of him to break away at all,” Gregory observed, “after all these years.”

“I think it is marvellous,” she agreed. “I am sure if I hadn’t come, he’d rather go on living in that strange, smelly little house of his and read Chinese manuscripts and interpret Chinese hieroglyphics round old ornaments, and talk Chinese literature with some of the quaintest-looking people you ever saw up at the University, than do anything else in the world.”

“All the same,” Gregory remarked, “they say that a man should always return to the country of his birth to end his days. Besides, China is no place for an Englishman after a certain number of years. He’d become nothing but an old fossil without the society of his own kind.”

“What a nice, consoling person you are,” she declared. “Sometimes I’ve had it on my conscience a little that I’m taking him away from the things he likes best in life.”

“I shouldn’t worry about that,” he told her. “He’ll be better at home amongst some of his old cronies, and for you—well, of course, China would be utterly impossible.”

“I am very happy to be going to England,” she assured him. “I am looking forward to the country life immensely.”

“Fond of games?” he asked her.

“Riding and tennis are the extent of my accomplishments,” she replied. “I like those. And then, after a year or so, I shall hope to travel on the Continent. My aunt still has a great many friends in Paris.”

“One meets so many American women and girls in France and Italy,” he observed, “and so few men. Why are they such stay at homes?”

“They aren’t,” she explained. “They travel, but they want something out of it. They either prospect for mines, or look for markets, or something of that sort.”

“In a way then, they too have the adventurer’s instinct. I haven’t any head for business. When the war ended—I had been wounded twice and transferred into the Intelligence Department—it chanced that I was in Palestine, and I went on from there to Abyssinia. From there I visited some friends in Bombay, and when I got home my father and I planned my little adventure in China.”

“You certainly are some traveller,” she admitted smilingly.

“So was my father before me,” he confided. “He was in the Diplomatic Service for some time, and lived in Pekin during the days of the Monarchy.”

She suddenly looked around and saw the rising moon, a blood-red circle emerging with incredible swiftness from the edge of a black sea. She crossed the deck swiftly, waving to him to follow her. Halfway there he paused. She was standing full in the light shining through the uncurtained window of the Marconi room; tall, slim and white in the windless night—a curiously and wonderfully desirable vision. She turned and waved to him impatiently, a smile of invitation upon her lips, her eyes full of eager delight.

“Hurry!” she cried. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

He came slowly across the deck, and a little puzzled frown took the place of her smile as he drew near.

“Why do you look at me as though you had never seen me before?” she asked, as he took his place by her side.

“I never have, with the same eyes,” he answered uneasily.

“Idiot!” she laughed. “Well, you’ll have to put up with me for at least six weeks like this. Don’t you love the stillness with just the throb of the engine?”

“I’d like it better without the engine,” he observed. “It is beautiful enough here to make one believe that we are on our way to paradise, and that wretched throb keeps on reminding us that our next stop is Bombay.”

“Aren’t you just a little inclined to be cynical to-night?” she asked.

“I don’t know quite what’s the matter with me,” he answered restlessly. “I think that terrible country behind has broken my nerve, or——”

His thoughts flashed back to his stateroom. She was suddenly intent upon listening. From away upon the lower deck they could hear the sound of the orchestra. Her face lit up with pure joy.

“Dancing!” she cried. “I believe they’re dancing. Why, I haven’t even heard the music since I left New York! Come along!”

She had reached the companion ladder before he could catch her up. Already her feet were moving to the music.

“Look here,” he confided doubtfully, “remember I’ve been out of England for a very long time. I’m not at all sure that I can manage these new steps.”

She slipped her arm through his in friendly fashion.

“You’re the only man on board I know, and you’ve got to,” she declared imperiously.