Читать книгу Jeremiah and the Princess - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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Downstairs in the lounge Jere hesitated for a few minutes as to his destination. Evidently a fresh party of revellers had arrived, for the orchestra was playing and there was the sound of gay voices and shuffling feet upon the terrace. One of the countless myrmidons of the place, however, solved his indecision by hurrying forward with a message.

“Mr. Hansard would like to see you, sir, in his den,” he announced.

Jere made his way to the small room at the back of the house which his host claimed entirely as his own. Hansard was stretched out in an easy chair with his hands in his trousers pockets, smoking a pipe. A few feet away from him stood one of the menservants of the place, a man who had appeared to Jere to exercise the functions of the old-fashioned private maître d’hôtel.

“Come in, Jere,” Hansard welcomed him. “Close the door behind you. What about a highball now?”

“I’ll have a spot,” the former assented, helping himself at the sideboard.

“This is going to be between ourselves, if you please, Jere,” his host went on. “You know as well as I do what a lot of guests we have here sometimes in the summer—often seventy or eighty—and what an unprotected house this is. Alice’s jewels are insured all right, but there’s always a fuss when you make a claim. Anyway, for the last two seasons I’ve had a man down recommended by Pilkington’s—given him a sort of superior job as the nominal head of the staff, you know. Here he is. Brodie, this is Mr. Strole whose rooms were gone through this afternoon.”

The man made respectful salutation.

“Well, of course I told him about this little affair, and he takes the matter rather seriously,” Hansard continued. “Just repeat to Mr. Strole what you were telling me, Brodie.”

“It’s like this, sir,” the man explained. “In an establishment of this size, where there are a great many menservants and a sprinkling of what I should call supers, who are only here for the summer season, there are bound to be a few doubtful ones. I have been running through the list and there are three here I don’t fancy at all. One is an Italian, the other’s a Roumanian, and the third comes from a small country in Central Europe one doesn’t often hear of—Jakovia. Now, all these three men are on your floor, and the one I like least was on duty just at the time your room was gone through. Might I ask, sir, whether you had any valuables that remained undiscovered?”

“Nothing whatever,” Jere declared. “My jewels and the wad of bills were the only things worth lifting, and the fellow didn’t touch either.”

“I gather that you’ve been in the diplomatic service, Mr. Strole,” Brodie continued. “There’s some question of your taking a post in Europe, isn’t there?”

“There is a possibility of it,” Jere assented.

Brodie hesitated for a moment. He was a long, thin man, pale, hatchet-faced, with restless dark eyes. He looked apologetically across at Jere. He spoke with a distinctly foreign accent, but with an American intonation.

“I don’t want to be indiscreet, sir, but anything that’s said to me professionally goes, as it were, into the grave. This coming appointment hasn’t been ratified yet, has it? You wouldn’t have received any papers from Washington that you would be likely to be taking over to the other side pretty soon?”

Jere shook his head.

“You’re dead off it, Brodie,” he assured the man. “I haven’t received any appointment and I don’t possess a single Government paper.”

The detective inclined his head meditatively but showed no sign of disappointment.

“One more question, Mr. Strole,” he begged, his dark eyes fixed upon Jere. “Do you happen to be acquainted with a Colonel Grogner who has been staying in these parts?”

“Very slightly,” Jere acknowledged. “I was introduced to him at the Racquets Club by young Mr. Dimsdale a day or two ago, and met him again at dinner here. Why on earth are you asking about him?”

The man hesitated.

“Well, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s likely to be anything in it, sir, but I’ve had my eye on this valet I was speaking of—Sachs, he calls himself—and I saw him talking to Colonel Grogner the night the Colonel was here for dinner, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the house.”

“I’ve just told Brodie that I’m afraid there isn’t much in that,” Hansard put in. “They both come from the same bit of a country—Jakovia.”

“And so far as that goes,” Jere remarked, “you were talking to him yourself, weren’t you, Brodie, the same night? I thought I saw you as I was coming out of the billiard-room.”

The man for a moment made no reply. It almost seemed as though he was considering how to deal with Jere’s question.

“I did have a word with him, sir,” he admitted at last. “You probably know yourself, sir, that Colonel Grogner has recently resigned a high command in the army to become Chief of the Police in Pletz. I took the liberty of speaking to him about Sachs.”

“Does he know the fellow then?” Hansard asked.

“Apparently not,” Brodie replied. “Sachs seems to have just asked the Colonel whether conditions were any better in Jakovia. He confessed to feeling homesick here and wondered whether there was any chance of returning.”

“What did Colonel Grogner tell him?” Jere inquired.

“He advised him very strongly to stay where he was, sir. It appears that conditions in Jakovia are very bad.”

Tom Hansard nodded.

“Well, I don’t know that we need keep you any longer, Brodie,” he said. “I needn’t advise you to keep a strict look-out on this fellow Sachs.”

“I shall be sure to do that, sir,” the man promised, as he took his leave....

Jere leaned back in his chair and pulled at his pipe meditatively.

“Odd idea having a detective on the premises like that,” he observed. “Where did you say you got him from, Tom?”

“Someone from Pilkington’s recommended him,” Hansard replied. “He was not on their staff but he had done some foreign work for them.”

“I suppose he’s all right,” Jere went on.

“Oh, cut it out,” his host enjoined. “I’ll tell you, Jere, in the middle of the summer when the house is full I bet there’s thirty or forty million dollars’ worth of jewellery here. We have to take a lot of extra servants on. Alice likes plenty of them about and so do I. If there wasn’t someone of experience to look into their credentials we might find ourselves the victims of one of the greatest hold-ups of modern times one fine night. As we are now we know there are only one or two wrong ones that could get in, and we could deal with them.”

“I guess you’re right,” Jere agreed.

“What shall we do about it?” Tom Hansard asked, glancing at the clock. “Shall we go and play with the little nosegay of buds the Mellons have brought over, shall we join the gamblers, or would you like to play billiards?”

“Honest Injun I should like to go to bed,” Jere confessed.

“Then hop it, young fellow,” his host assented. “I’ll just go and have a couple of dances with Louie Mellon and see what the crowd’s like.”

There was something sinister about that cold and deadly-looking Smith & Wesson which Jere found upon his dressing-table, a box of shells by its side. Behind it was propped up a card on which was written:

Sorry I forgot to bring one, sir. I borrowed this from the gun-room.

Sam.

Like most young men twenty-four years old Jere was perfectly well accustomed to firearms, but something about the appearance of this one, set out on a fragment of lace-edged fine linen and surrounded by his tortoiseshell-backed toilet articles, seemed particularly menacing. He swung open the breech, however, slipped in the shells, closed it and set the catch at safety. Then he undressed slowly, smoked a last cigarette in his pyjamas upon the balcony, turned out the light and crept into bed....

He must have slept for several hours before the shock came. Ping! The echo of that singing, serpent-like sound was still throbbing in his ears as he sat up in bed. He was suddenly intensely awake, his apprehensions quickened, his entire nervous system responsive to the note of danger. The report came, he realised at once, not from the inside corridor but from the open window leading out on to the balcony. He sprang out of bed, threw his dressing-gown around him, caught up the revolver which Sam had thoughtfully provided, and, stepping out into the darkness, glanced swiftly up and down. There was no sign of any disturbance. A nightingale was singing from a thicket close at hand, otherwise there was silence. The room next to him on the left was the end one which was occupied by his servant. The window was closed and, as he very well knew, nothing but the morning alarum ever awakened Sam Clowes. He glanced to the right. The windows were closed for at least a dozen yards, both suites being unoccupied. The next were the Princess’ rooms. Two windows were open there. It was from one of these that the sound had issued....

Jere had long legs, and half a dozen strides took him to the first open window. He had no need to travel any farther. Before him was a scene which he never forgot, which was to haunt him indeed through days and nights crowded with more serious happenings. The room into which he looked was the Princess’ salon, and on the threshold of the doorway communicating with her bedroom stood Marya, clad in some strange white robe, with white fur around the neck, which covered her from her throat to her feet. Her eyes were ablaze and there was a glow of fierce and angry colour in her cheeks. She held a weapon of some sort in her right hand, and a few paces away from her a man in the livery of the house lay doubled up upon the floor. Anna Maria, her Jakovian maid, had thrown the bedclothes from a couch set against the wall and, with her hands upon her knees, was rocking backwards and forwards. There was a slight odour of gunpowder in the air, a faint spiral of blue smoke crawling towards the ceiling. Of sound there was nothing, not even a gasp from the doubled up figure upon the floor.

“What is it?” Jere asked quickly, as he stepped across into the room.

The Princess pointed to the floor.

“I woke up suddenly three minutes ago,” she confided. “I heard sounds in the salon here. I came through the door. My secretaire has been broken open. This man was examining its contents!”

She pointed to the writing-table and to the heap of scattered letters and objects surrounding it.

“And your maid?”

“She woke only when I came in. The man worked silently. It was as well! He will be silent now for always.”

Anna Maria, groaning audibly, staggered to her feet. Her mistress waved her back again.

“Stay where you are, Anna Maria,” she commanded. “The alarm shall be given when I am ready. The danger is past.”

The arm which still held the weapon extended dropped stiffly to her side as though indeed she had been some sort of a wooden puppet in a ballet. Jere took a step towards the fallen man. There was a small hole on the left-hand side of his shirt front, and it seemed to Jere that he was stiffening.

“We’d better call some people up,” he suggested, turning to Marya. “You were quite all right to shoot him. There will be no trouble.”

Her eyes blazed. She was furiously angry.

“You fool!” she burst out. “No trouble! Do you realise that we are in America, that we are in New York State? I—the Princess Marya of Jakovia—I have shot a man after midnight in my suite! Can you see the newspapers? Can’t you imagine those hideous headlines? There will be no trouble indeed! If they appear I am ruined!”

Jere listened intently. It was just the first hour’s silence after the departure of the visitors, and everyone seemed to be sleeping profoundly. He crossed the room with swift footsteps, softly opened the door and listened. Not a sound. He returned to his place.

“Princess,” he murmured, “you’re worrying yourself needlessly. You will be acclaimed as a heroine. This man is without a doubt a criminal.”

She wrung her hands.

“Why are people so stupid?” she exclaimed. “Can you not see, Jere Strole, that acclamation would be just as bad?”

He looked at her for a moment in puzzled fashion. She seemed very small and terrified, but oh—how beautiful, as she strained towards him!

“The man is dead,” she cried. “What does it matter who killed him? He was a thief, a criminal.”

Light broke in upon Jere’s clouded understanding and a smile lit up his face.

“What a mutt I am,” he apologised. “Don’t you worry. I’m in command now—if you don’t mind.”

He held up his finger. Marya and he listened intently. Anna Maria listened. It seemed almost as though the dead man were listening too.

“Good,” Jere murmured. “There’s nobody astir. How long will it take you to put that secretaire in order?”

Marya threw a swift glance towards it.

“Five minutes.”

“I’ll give you ten,” he told her. “You must deal with your maid. She seems to me to want a firm hand. There may be watchmen in the garden. I’m going to take that—” he pointed to the floor—“down to my room. In ten minutes’ time you will probably hear the report of my revolver. I shall have killed a burglar. After that I shall set the bells ringing.”

There was a transforming and transfiguring expression of relief in her face. Every one of those unnatural lines of fierce anxiety seemed to fade away. There were even the beginnings of a smile upon her lips as she looked across at him.

“It will not mean trouble for you?”

“Not a chance,” he answered. “Anyone’s at liberty to kill a burglar at any moment in his room. The fellow’s carrying his gun—you can see the shape of it in his pocket.”

“If you will do this for me,” she said, and there was even a little break in her voice, “I shall be for ever grateful. You think I am foolish, I know, but it is how I am made and how my spirit speaks to me. I could not endure the hundred rumours that would arise from the fact that a murdered man was found in my suite in a country house on Long Island in New York where people live lightly. I have been so very, very careful. I have chosen the places where my feet shall fall, always thinking of the future. I may be called to the throne of my country any day, and there must be no fear that at any time one should be able to say this thing of me.”

Jeremiah Strole stood for a moment at his full height. Whatever the message of his eyes might have meant to her it was a message before which her own drooped. ... His words may have sounded banal and ordinary but they were like a whisper from heaven to her.

“You don’t need to worry any more about this.”

He stooped down and doubled his handkerchief over the tiny spot on the dead man’s shirt front, lifted and threw the body over his shoulder and crept towards the door. He opened it and looked up and down the corridor searchingly. There was still neither sound nor movement. He passed swiftly along to his room and laid his burden in front of his desk. Afterwards he drew out the dead man’s revolver and laid it by his side, disarranging his clothing a little as he did so. Then, with a curious little instrument which he found in the opposite pocket to the one that had concealed the revolver, he prised open with scarcely an effort the lid of the desk. Again he listened and again he thrust his senses only against a background of deep and intense silence. After that he simply watched the clock. At the appointed minute he fired his revolver vaguely in the direction where an intruder might have loitered. Thirty seconds afterwards his thumb was pressed upon the onyx bell over which was painted in luminous letters “Night Alarm.”