Читать книгу Prodigals of Monte Carlo - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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It was the one hour of the day when a gleam of cheerfulness seemed to relieve the gloom of the murky thoroughfares notwithstanding the muddy crossings and the rain-splashed pavements. For the majority of the tired world work was over for the day. The crowd of shoppers had departed; the streams of pedestrians left were either homeward or on pleasure bent. Lights flashed from the restaurants outside which commissionaires, umbrellas in hand, were taking their stands. Cinema palaces and eating houses seemed more than ever havens of refuge full of the promise of warmth and comfort, a shelter from the dreariness they flouted. A meretricious garishness had transformed Piccadilly Circus into a nightmare of blazing sky signs and turned the dripping mist above into a golden haze. Violet, notwithstanding her shabby mackintosh and doubtful hat, excited more than one glance of interest as she passed with flying footsteps up Regent Street, across the Circus and turned into Shaftesbury Avenue. For the first time for many weeks, there was something outside the dreary day-by-day routine to think about; a dream, perhaps utterly impossible, but something the mere thought of which had reacted upon her warm, fresh youth and brought the colour into her cheeks and the light back into her tired eyes. The young man whom she met at the corner of one of the streets near the Palace stared at her.

“Why, what’s the matter, Violet?” he demanded. “Any one left you a fortune?”

She thrust her arm through his. He was wearing a threadbare overcoat, which bore the hall-mark of the ready-made tailor’s appeal to the would-be smart youth of a few seasons ago. His turned-up trousers displayed exceedingly muddy boots and he carried neither stick nor umbrella. His features were without distinction, but fairly good of their sort, although his mouth was querulous. His tone indicated ill-temper.

“No one has left me anything,” she declared, “but I have had a good tip and I have five and seven-pence halfpenny left of my week’s money. No tea and toast to-night, Robert. We are going to the Café Rose.”

“Can’t be done,” he replied gloomily. “You know jolly well it’s a two-shilling dinner and I can’t afford it. I’ll go on to my rooms and get Mrs. Smith——”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Violet interrupted. “As though I should leave you alone! Didn’t I tell you I’d had a good tip? It’s my treat. It’s a filthy day, and a filthy climate, and a filthy life, but we’re going to forget it for half an hour.”

“Whom did you get a good tip from?” he demanded suspiciously.

“A regular customer,” she assured him. “Only he happened to come in twice to-day. Don’t be absurd, please, Robert. I’m so hungry.”

He was easily persuaded. He generally was when it was a matter which ministered to his physical comfort. He even breathed a sigh of relief as they sat down in the stuffy little restaurant and studied the menu.

“Hot soup!” he exclaimed. “That’s good, Violet. I wonder——”

He felt in his pockets. Violet held out her hand.

“I told you that it was my treat,” she insisted.

“That’s all right,” he repeated. “As a matter of fact it would have to be. I was just wondering whether I could raise the price of two gins and bitters.”

“You don’t need to,” she replied, promptly ordering them. “I’m rolling in money. Didn’t I tell you that I actually got a tip to-day like the other girls get sometimes.”

“Not for the same reason, I hope,” he grumbled.

“As you very well know, so shut up,” she retorted calmly.

The gin and bitters came. He began to crumble his bread.

“Will you hear my news first?” he asked.

“All right,” she agreed. “Mine wants a lot of talking about.”

“Mine doesn’t,” he rejoined. “I’ve got the sack.”

“Robert!” she exclaimed.

“No fault of mine,” he assured her. “I’ve got a good recommendation, if that’s anything. It’s the firm that’s doing no good. I’ve been expecting it for a long time. I knew some of us would have to go, and the others had all been there longer than I had. The manager of our department came and told me himself that he was sorry.”

She was thoughtful. It was rather a shock, but in one respect it simplified matters. She glanced at the menu.

“After the soup,” she said, “there’s fish, and some beef. When we’ve had the soup and the fish, and when we begin the beef and when you’ve finished your gin and bitters and drank your first glass of claret, I’ll tell you my news.”

He was curious, but even his curiosity could not prevail against his hunger. She watched him, pretending not to notice, but she knew and her own resolution every moment became stronger. The lack of food to a woman so often seems to her nothing but an inconvenience; to a man she esteems it a tragedy.—She found occasion to transfer a little of her own fish to his plate—they had over-served her, she assured him. She ordered recklessly a further supply of rolls and butter. Then the beef appeared and she leaned forward.

“Robert,” she began, “what I am going to tell you sounds incredible, but you must believe it exactly as I tell it to you. You may wonder and speculate just as I do, but you must please believe that everything happened exactly as I tell it.”

She knew him so well—jealous even in their misery, grudging her the slightest attentions from others, jealously insistent always upon his rights as her fiancé—he who had nothing to give, whose strongest claim was upon her pity.

“Ever since I have been there,” she went on, “and for a very long time before, I believe, a gentleman has been coming to Tremlett’s to have his hair done and to be manicured afterwards. Somehow or other he drifted into being my customer, and it is he whom I have always told you about who gives me such a large tip.”

“I know,” Robert remarked suspiciously. “You’ve always said that he behaved as though you scarcely existed. What about him?”

“You’ll hardly believe what I’m going to tell you,” she repeated, “but you’ve got to, because it’s the literal truth. To-day I was depressed. He talked to me a little more than usual. He spoke about the sunshine down upon the Riviera and how every one who could was hurrying off there to get away from this awful weather. I told him that several of the girls were going, and I suppose he couldn’t help seeing how I felt about it.”

“So he asked you to go with him, eh?” Robert demanded, with a sudden evil twist to his mouth. “A nice nerve you’ve got to come and tell me about it! Are you going?”

“You promised to listen without interrupting,” she reminded him quietly. “Please keep your word. My story is difficult enough to make you understand without your starting with any wrong ideas. Now, I tell you frankly, I don’t know whether this man is really just like all the others, or a crank, or simply the best-hearted person in the world. He has no personal interest in me; he has never even held my fingers in the way the other men do when I am at work, yet he made me an offer, and he made it in a way that no one could take exception to. You must believe that, Robert,” she added, watching his morose expression, “or I shall not finish what I have to tell you.”

“Well, go on,” he conceded.

“He has a villa at Monte Carlo and he told me that if I could find a brother or a sister to go with me, he would take us down on Thursday week for two months, all our expenses to be paid, and he would be responsible for our situations when we returned.”

The young man laughed unpleasantly.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose there are plenty of that sort of man in the West End.”

Violet looked steadily at her companion across the table. There was a delightful and very becoming firmness in her expression, the whole dignity of a scrupulously clean mind.

“There is one thing, Robert, which you may not say to me,” she reminded him, “nor may you hint at it. This man is a gentleman, as my father was, and I should trust him in the same way. Shall I go on or shall we consider the subject closed?”

“Yes, go on,” he invited, a little ashamed of himself. “It isn’t you I’m doubting, and anyway, you haven’t a brother or a sister.”

“No,” she assented, “but I have you.”

“Me!”

He stared at her in amazement. The colour rose slightly in her cheeks.

“Robert,” she said, “I’ve had two horrible years, as you know, and during the whole of the struggle I’ve kept my end up. I haven’t even told a fib. I’ve gone just as straight as any human being could. I’ve had the same chances as other girls, and I haven’t considered them. But I’m very human indeed, Robert. I hate misery and ugliness and poverty. I loathe my day-by-day life. A few more years of it would be the end of me. I have made up my mind, if you are willing, to take this chance.”

“If I am willing?” he gasped.

“To be my brother,” she explained. “That is what I propose. You see how quickly I must have made up my mind without knowing it. My first impulse was to tell him that I hadn’t a brother. I didn’t do it. My very silence suggested that I had.”

“You mean me to go to Monte Carlo too?” he muttered, in a bewildered tone.

“That is precisely what I do mean,” she acknowledged calmly. “Now, go on with your dinner, please, before it gets cold, and think for a minute or two. We’ll talk again later.”

He obeyed, and by degrees the idea began to form itself in his mind. He came of middle-class people, comfortably enough placed before the War. The idea of luxury warmed his blood, filled him with all manner of sensuous anticipations. Yet at the same time there was underneath a morbid sense of jealousy. He drank another half-glass of wine.

“Who is this man?” he asked, his tone a little thick.

“His name is Wendever,” she confided; “Sir Hargrave Wendever. He is a Baronet, and I believe very rich indeed. He lives in the country but comes to town for a night most weeks.”

“How old is he?”

“I should think from thirty-eight to forty. You will be able to judge for yourself later on, because I am taking you to see him.”

“What—to-night?”

“To-night. You see, Robert, we’ve got to accept.”

“But we’ll be found out.”

“We’re going to risk it.”

“Why not tell him the truth? Why not tell him you’re engaged to me?” he demanded suspiciously.

For a moment she hesitated. A troubled look passed across her face.

“I want to be quite frank with you, Robert,” she said. “I’m perfectly certain that this man is honest. I am perfectly certain that he has no personal feeling for me at all, except one of pity, and yet underneath you know men are all so much alike in the small things. I can fancy his being generous to me and to a brother of mine. I may be wronging him, he might feel exactly the same towards me and a fiancé, but I’m not sure—I wasn’t sure then—and I dared not risk it.”

“You think he’d back out?”

“It wouldn’t be backing out,” she reminded him, “because I should not be fulfilling the terms. It is for your sake as much as mine that I hesitated. If you say so, we’ll go to him to-night and I’ll admit that I have no brother or sister, but that I’m engaged to you, and I’ll ask him if he’ll take us both. If he says no—well, we’ve lost our chance, that’s all.”

The young man shivered at the bare idea.

“How long was it for?” he asked irrelevantly. “And what about clothes?”

“Two months,” she answered, “and as for clothes, he mentioned that himself. He has promised to arrange it all. Think what it would mean, Robert. We should leave here next week, and twenty-four hours after we left Victoria there would be the sunshine and the music and the sea, no work, nothing to do but to wander about and enjoy ourselves. We should leave behind the taste of the fog in our throats, and the sound of the rain pattering upon the windowpanes, the eight o’clock hammering at the door, the cup of weak tea with black things floating round in it, and the grey skies, the grey hours, the grey days.”

The young man moistened his dry lips feverishly, poured out the last drop of wine and drank it.

“When were we to see him?” he demanded hoarsely.

“To-night. Any time. At his house in Berkeley Square.”

“Let’s go,” he proposed. “I can’t sit still until we know whether it’s true or not.”