Читать книгу Last Train Out - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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“This,” Patricia told Mildenhall as he took his place in the high-backed chair next to her at the dining table, “is what Mr. Benjamin’s industrious librarian calls in his guide to the house ‘the smaller banqueting hall.’ The fact that there is room for eighty to sit at this table he carefully ignores. One of Mr. Benjamin’s visiting friends called it ‘The Room of Faded Splendours.’ ”

“He was probably not a person of observation,” Mildenhall remarked. “A few hundreds of years only added subtlety to the colouring of Gobelin tapestries and the wonder of the world is still the freshness of these Renaissance paintings. I have never dined before facing a genuine Andrea del Sarto.”

“And what do you think of your servitors?” she asked smiling.

He glanced round the table. Behind every chair, in plain but attractive costume, stood a Viennese parlourmaid. With the exception of Heinrich, the butler, there was only one manservant in the room—the wine seneschal—and he stood immovable behind his master’s chair.

“To tell you the truth,” Mildenhall confided, “it was the strangeness of the—er—domestic staff which I noticed even before I realized the wonder of the picture.”

“The service is an old feature of the housekeeping here,” Patricia said. “It was like this in Mr. Benjamin’s father’s time and his grandfather’s.”

“To me it always seems,” the Baroness remarked from his other side, “that, notwithstanding all its treasures, the most wonderful thing in the house is its owner.”

“This is only the second time I have seen him,” Mildenhall observed, “but I should think you are probably right.”

“If he were not a Jew,” she went on, “if he had been able to give his whole attention to politics, he would without a doubt have led the country. I do not think that it would have been in its present unhappy state. I think it would still have been a monarchy with a court the most brilliant in Europe.”

“It is an interesting speculation,” Mildenhall admitted. “I doubt, though, whether the bourgeoisie of any country would submit to a revival of monarchal rule in these days.”

“England, my friend! England!”

“The only exception,” he agreed, “and Cromwell wasn’t much of a dictator, was he? England is a difficult problem for any historian. When I was at Oxford the professors told us that the Stuarts had murdered the bourgeoisie just as the Pitts crushed labour.”

“The English tolerate Jews as we do, don’t they?” Patricia asked.

“Rather,” he answered. “I should imagine that it is to the Jews England owes her financial prosperity. Except for Disraeli they have never been a success in politics. They may even have made us a nation of shopkeepers, but they are the greatest and most vital force in the country now. It is in the professions, too, that they have triumphed so completely. If Leopold Benjamin had been an Englishman, he would have been Prime Minister, beyond a doubt.”

“There is one thing I do not like about this evening,” Dr. Schwarz remarked, leaning forward in his place. “It is the silence in the streets. When the Viennese is gay he sings; when he is sad he shuts himself up at home. To-night he does not make the promenade. Even the cafés are half empty.”

“Does anyone know,” the Princess Sophie, an ample lady who wore a single eyeglass and was scarcely ever a moment without a cigarette between her lips, asked, “whether the Von Liebenstrahl ball has been postponed?”

“I called at the Embassy on my way down,” Charles Mildenhall confided, “and everyone was preparing. Lady Tremearne is giving a large dinner for it.”

“You are going to the ball afterwards?” the Baroness asked eagerly.

“I believe so,” he answered.

“Fortunate man!”

“It is doubtless quite a spectacle, but there are still far more wonderful things to be seen in this house.”

“That depends, my friend,” she said. “For a woman, a great feast of colour, the latest models of all the dressmakers in Europe, a wealth of jewellery that is only seen once a year, the handsomest of all our men who put on their uniforms and deck themselves out for this one occasion—oh, it is a great sight!”

“You may be disappointed this time,” he remarked. “I came from Bucharest here. Two years ago special planes brought down the King and some of the Court. Nothing of that sort is happening now.”

“The old Prince,” she reflected, “is as stubborn as a mule. I think everyone hoped that it would be postponed. I do not like our lovely music here played to the accompaniment of bombing planes. The joys of peace and the horrors of war and revolution should be kept, I think, a long way apart.”

Mildenhall turned to the girl on his other side.

“They told me at the Embassy, Miss Grey, that the wonderful galleries here were closed for the present. Is that true?”

She looked at him a little doubtfully.

“I’m afraid so,” she answered. “It nearly broke my Chief’s heart, but they all thought that it was necessary.”

Mr. Benjamin leaned across the table.

“Is it true that you wished to see my pictures?” he asked.

“Indeed it is, sir,” Mildenhall acknowledged. “Believe me, though, I quite understand. You are the custodian of such beautiful things that for the sake of the next generation, as well as for the rest of ours, you must keep them without risk for saner times.”

Mr. Benjamin shook his head sorrowfully.

“It is not the mad people who parade the streets whom I fear,” he said. “Not even the worst of them would damage my home or do harm to my treasures. It is a colder, more calculating business altogether which places them in danger. I have been obliged to take steps—”

Patricia leaned across the table.

“Mr. Benjamin!” she begged.

He smiled at her gently.

“But, my dear,” he remonstrated, “to-night we are just a party of friends—so few of us—not a single stranger.”

“Mr. Benjamin!” she pleaded once more.

He glanced round the table.

“But, my dear Patricia,” he repeated, “I admire your zeal and you know that I appreciate your care for everything that is so precious to me, but my little explanation of why I have to refuse so simple and gracious a request was necessary. Surely I may exonerate myself?”

“Mr. Benjamin,” she said firmly, “the words you were about to utter should not be spoken. Everyone at this table is, of course, above suspicion. That does not matter. The words should not be spoken.”

Mr. Benjamin remained for a moment in a state of distressful indecision. Mildenhall leaned across to him.

“My dear host,” he begged, “I wish, if you please, to withdraw my thoughtless request. I have read what a very great man who stayed with you for a month wrote of your pictures and statuary, and his book is one of the few classics of my life, but believe me I should be perfectly miserable if I induced you to change any decision you have come to about your treasures or to alter your arrangements in any way. I have been perfectly honest. If you offered me your keys and yourself as cicerone I should put on my hat and walk out of the house for fear you would imperil the safety of any one of your—”

Mildenhall broke off in his speech. Louder than ever before that night they could hear the booming of heavy guns. Nearer at hand the rifle fire had become more persistent. For a moment a blaze of light filled the room so that the delicately shaded lamps seemed to exist no longer, and everyone covered his eyes. There was the sound of an explosion. Then silence. Mr. Benjamin smiled and patted the Princess Sophie’s hand.

“That mine,” he told her, “was at least ten miles away. It is our own people who are making all the disturbance. If the Germans enter the city to-night, believe me, they will do so in orderly fashion. They will be disciplined troops and we shall have nothing to fear from them except what we feel inside—the humiliation, the sorrow,” he concluded, with his hand over his heart, “which comes with the passing of a great nation. If all negotiations fail, if the Germans enter the city, we must face what lies before us, but for the moment, believe me, we are in no danger.”

“All the same,” Mrs. Schwarz said, wiping her eyes and rising to her feet, “I think we must go. The streets soon will not be safe.”

The Baroness pushed aside her ice and lit a cigarette.

“My car is not yet here,” she confided. “I agree with Mr. Benjamin. We are as safe here as anywhere. There will be no fighting in this quarter. If the Germans enter it will be as the result of negotiations.”

“Negotiations or no negotiations,” the Princess declared, “I should like my car, Leopold.”

“And I,” Mrs. Schwarz demanded.

The single manservant disappeared. The sound of the cars outside was heard almost at once. Coffee was served and, in the temporary absence of disturbing interruptions, everyone seemed to recover himself a little. Very few noticed the quiet entrance of Marius Blute through a door just behind the banker. He pushed a slip of paper into Mr. Benjamin’s hand and was gone in a moment, slipping behind the screen and out through the door. Leopold Benjamin, with a word of excuse to Mrs. Schwarz, with whom he had been conversing, read the single line, half closed his eyes and then looked across to where Patricia was watching him. The slightest inclination of his head was sufficient. In a moment she was standing by his side. He handed her the slip of paper. She read it and they passed out into the hall together.

Heinrich, the single manservant who had been visible during the service of dinner except for the seneschal and aide from the wine cellar, threw open the door.

“The automobiles await Her Highness the Princess von Dorlingen, the Baroness von Ballinstrode and Dr. and Mrs. Schwarz,” he announced.

The Baroness glanced around the room.

“But our host?” she exclaimed.

“I rather fancy that was an urgent message he received,” Mildenhall confided. “I saw that funny little man Blute slip in from behind the screen with a note.”

“We’d better wait for a short time, I suppose,” she suggested. “I will show you the music room. It is very famous but there are no treasures there.”

Outside in the great hall Heinrich was standing by the opened door and the cars were in line. There was no sign of Patricia.

“The little girl secretary seems to be a sort of hostess,” Mildenhall reflected. “Perhaps we ought to see if she is about.”

“I do not see any necessity,” the Baroness declared, as one of the maids brought her cloak. “I think we go together—you and I. I drop you where you like. You change your clothes, perhaps, before you go to the ball?”

“I must,” he assented. “For that I shall have to go to the Embassy.”

“Would you like to drive with me, or would you rather walk?” she asked.

“I should not feel in the least happy,” he assured her, “if I let you go alone. There are all sorts of wild people in the streets.”

“Perhaps you had better take me to my apartment first, then,” she proposed.

“It will give me great pleasure.”

“Come then.”

“Mr. Mildenhall!”

He turned around. Patricia was coming towards him across the hall.

“Could you please come with me for a moment or two? I have a message for you.”

“Of course.”

He glanced towards the Baroness with a gesture of helplessness. The latter looked across at Patricia.

“The little lady can give you her message quickly,” she suggested. “I will wait.”

Patricia turned to her courteously.

“I cannot ask you to share in the message,” she explained, “because it is rather important and very private, but if Mr. Mildenhall is driving you home, would you mind waiting in the dining-room? Heinrich will look after you.”

“Thank you,” the Baroness said. “Heinrich can show me into the car. I shall sit there and await Herr Mildenhall. Do not keep him too long. He has to change into uniform and make himself very beautiful for the ball.”

She wrapped herself a little more closely in her ermine cloak. In the soft gleam from the shaded electric light near which she stood her anxious expression of a few minutes ago seemed entirely to have passed. There was something Grecian about her beauty, her superbly graceful pose as she stood there smiling with her eyes fixed upon Mildenhall’s.

“You will not be long?” she asked.

“A minute or two only,” he promised.