Читать книгу Envoy Extraordinary - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 8

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Matresser, at the close of the last partridge drive before luncheon on the following morning, waited for Andrews, who was struggling along in the rear, and who hurried up full of apologies.

“Terribly sorry to have missed a slice out of the morning, Matresser,” he apologised. “I simply couldn’t help it.”

“My friend who got into trouble on his way down was not responsible, I hope?”

“No, it was an outside patient altogether,” the doctor confided. “A man who brought a small private yacht into the harbour last night. He seems to have twisted his ankle, and one or two of the crew had cuts and bruises. I didn’t know how serious it might have been so I felt obliged to go. I called in to tell Humphreys on the way down. I hear you have had a thundering good morning.”

“I forget what we get here generally,” Matresser admitted, “but everyone seems to have been shooting very well. The pheasants flew really high over the home woods. You arrived here in time for that, I was glad to see.”

“Best shooting I ever had in my life,” Andrews declared enthusiastically.

“Who is this new patient of yours on the yacht?” Matresser enquired.

“Tells me that he is a Dutchman and that his name is 47 Jan van Westrheene. He is a perfect giant of a fellow—pretty glum, with the air of trying to make himself amiable all the time.”

“I caught a glimpse of him bringing the boat in,” Matresser observed. “He looked like a Viking who had taken the wrong turn. Nothing serious the matter with him, I suppose?”

“Bruises and a slight sprain, that’s all,” the doctor confided. “He must be something of a seaman to have brought in a boat that size. The pier master told me that he was at the helm all the time and that he never saw a finer piece of work.”

“What brought him into these parts at this time of the year, I wonder?” Matresser speculated.

“Just what I wanted to ask him myself, but he didn’t give me any encouragement.”

“Did he say how long he was staying?”

“Not for very long, I gathered, but he can’t leave the harbour just yet. The wind’s only fallen on the land. Just one of those extraordinary Norfolk tempests, yesterday’s seems to have been, that blow themselves out and then fade dead away. It is as still as possible everywhere here but there’s a swell out at sea and will be for days in these narrow approaches. A boat like his would be almost unmanageable by the estuary.”

“And how is your home patient?” Matresser enquired, glancing across at the village.

“To tell you the truth,” the other confessed, “I have not been in to see him this morning. I should think you will be able to get him away whenever you want. The only thing that puzzles me is where and how anyone could have taken that letter away from him.”

The two men looked round at the sound of galloping 48 hoofs coming down the ride. Lady Ann and Elisabeth Stamier cantered up to them.

“We have come to lunch, Ronnie. Is that all right?” the former called out.

“I should say so,” her brother assented hospitably. “Your mother may be coming down. Mrs. Humphreys is getting the best parlour ready I know.”

He handed his gun to his loader and crossed to Elisabeth’s side.

“I’m afraid you find this branch of our English sport rather tame, Mademoiselle Stamier,” he remarked.

“But on the contrary I love it,” she assured him. “There are so many other things beside the actual shooting. A morning like this when there are so many changing lights and colourings, your country is very beautiful—and your home and its entourage reminds me, except that we have not the sea, of some of our own country châteaux as they used to be when I was a child.”

He lingered by her side, although he found conversation with her difficult.

“Do you ride a great deal when you are at home?” he asked her.

“I have no home nowadays,” she told him. “Both our winter and summer places were given up for hospitals and then convalescent homes and finally those in the cities for Bureaux of Public Works. It was a great thing for me that although my uncle is, of course, a Royalist, the government always keep him working for them. That is why I am able to travel, why I was in Paris when I met your mother and Ann.”

“You have been here long?” he asked.

“Here and in Paris. My uncle’s French is not very good and owing to the frequent changes of government 49 we are never properly represented in any place. My uncle has often been sent to France on special missions and then I go with him. Those are not very often joyous expeditions. Paris is less like itself since the war than any other city.”

“It is unfortunate,” he agreed, “but it is very true. At the present moment there is no country which is expressing itself so feebly as France.”

“It brought me one happy adventure at any rate,” Elisabeth said with a smile. “I met your mother there and she asked me to come and stay with Ann for a time. That has been altogether delightful.”

“You will find it restful here, at least. You are young, though, to need rest.”

“If I am sometimes fatigued,” she answered, looking upwards through the stark branches of the leafless trees, “it is because I spend myself in useless efforts.”

“You should avoid that at all costs,” he told her. “There may be great work to be done before very long but just now one needs to be very careful. To help France especially is extraordinarily difficult. France is like a hydra-headed monster. It is so easy to pat the wrong head and to be drowned in the storm of that man’s failure.”

She leaned towards him.

“You are not talking,” she said, “like the Earl of Matresser of the Great House, Chief of the Bench of Magistrates and soon to be Lord Lieutenant of this County!”

“I am not,” he admitted, “and I have said more to you than I would say to any other person alive. Is there any return you can make me?”

She waited, but purposely he asked no more questions. 50 She leaned forward and patted her mare’s neck, bringing her to a standstill for a moment. She pointed down one of the cross drives.

“Your woods are so beautiful,” she said, “even now in winter when the trees are bare and one can see so much of the sky. In spring they tell me the undergrowth is full of bluebells and primroses. That must be lovely.”

“You will be here to see them, I hope.”

“Do you really hope that, Lord Matresser?” she asked, a faint wistfulness in her tone.

“I do,” he answered. “I think that you are much better here than in Paris, for example.”

“I am not sure,” she murmured. “Just now the whole world is so unsettled. England alone remains calm and composed. It rests one to be here. Germany terrifies me. My own country is a country of sad-eyed toilers with broken ambitions and broken hearts. France, still powerful, is like a mighty anthill of nerves. Oh, I do not know! I think England is the most peaceful country.”

“I suppose that depends upon what one seeks in life. You have, I should imagine,” he meditated as they rounded a corner and came within sight of the others, “a somewhat restless disposition.”

“Do not tell your mother that,” she begged. “I think that was her only fear when she brought me here. Of course it is true. I cannot help feeling the fever sometimes. You, too—yes? You are what they call in your own language something of a fraud. You do not lead the quiet life of the English nobleman who loves only his country sports and his home politics. That is not your entire rôle in life, although you would have others believe it!”

“A counter attack,” he observed smiling.

“In your mind you probably add to yourself an impertinence,” she sighed. “You are perhaps right but I should like you to be fair to me.”

“I should be miserable if I were anything else,” he assured her.

“You are not an easy person to understand,” she went on. “Even your mother admits that. You are silent because there is a great deal at the back of your mind that you could share with no one, but I should like you to have just enough feeling for me—enough faith, shall I say?—to remain oblivious to anything which troubles you.”

He looked down the avenue for a moment, without speech, to the meadow at the opening of the woods and the gamekeeper’s lodge beyond, on the lawn of which the beaters were busy laying out the game. In the background, the Great House dominated the landscape, somewhat grim in the clear winter light with its lordly towers and long rows of mullioned windows, an incongruous and yet in a way a harmonious structure.

“Well, I’ll try,” he promised. “I am not really so suspicious as I seem but I have not quite forgotten, you know, that chance meeting. You were with your uncle—you remember it?—somewhere in North Africa.”

“Yes, I remember it,” she answered unwillingly.

“Cannot you see how difficult that makes it for me to look upon you as an ordinary member of my household?” he asked.

She was silent for a moment. Her left hand suddenly rested upon his shoulder. It stayed there scarcely a second but he seemed to feel the thrill of its caress through the leather patch on his heavy shooting jacket.

“We should never be enemies,” she told him softly. 52 “We have both of us too much the spirit for right living. All that I ask of you just now is that you remain a little tolerant. Do not think of me as even a possible enemy. That could never be. Talk with me sometimes. Please try to know me a little better. I have no evil thoughts in anything I do but the greatest passion in my life is my love of my country. If something should arrive which made it possible for me to help her, I should do it, but I would do nothing to harm anyone like yourself under whose roof I am living.”

Her last words, although in a sense consolatory, left him with a faint feeling of uneasiness which lingered with him more or less throughout the day. Nevertheless, he performed flawlessly his duty as host to a very distinguished gathering of sportsmen. He shot very little himself after lunch but he was always on the spot to comment upon the prowess of others of the party or to change a place which had been indifferently chosen. It was not until his guests from other parts of the county had taken their leave and the house party had changed into slacks and smoking suits and settled down to tea or bridge, that he felt able to slip quietly away.

In the library of his private suite, Matresser found waiting for him the man whom he had often declared in various places to be the only person he had ever known in any walk of life who had never made a mistake. He was engaged at the moment of his employer’s entrance in manipulating with the fingers of one hand only but with incredible speed a noiseless typewriter. He rose at once to his feet, an undersized man, frail, with a short brown beard streaked with grey and wearing thick glasses.

“Good evening, Henry,” Matresser greeted him as he took up a position on the hearthrug with his back to the log fire. “Heaps of news for you. Anything happened here?”

“A note from the gentleman who arrived in the harbour during the storm of last night,” Henry Yates reported. “You would like, perhaps, to glance at it yourself.”

Matresser drew a blue sheet of note paper from the square envelope which Yates handed to him, and read the few lines:

Yacht Daphne.

My Lord,

A stranger driven into your harbour by distress of weather would esteem the honour of paying his respects to you at any suitable hour.

Faithfully yours, Jan van Westrheene.

“Foreign trick, that, isn’t it?” Matresser remarked, tapping a cigarette against his case and lighting it.

“I suppose it is a foreign habit, sir, to call first upon any person of distinction. In any case, I thought you might like to see him. I ventured to tell him six o’clock.”

“Excellent.”

“Furthermore,” Yates continued, “I noticed through my glasses at luncheontime that the yacht is flying the ensign, which apparently is out of order as Van Westrheene is not a member of the Squadron or of the Royal Thames Yacht Club.”

“He must be a bit of a seaman all the same,” Matresser observed. “All the more so if the yacht is a chartered one. I saw him bring her in himself last night. That reminds 54 me, Yates. You will have to look out for yourself. Seems to me we are drifting back into prehistoric times. You heard part of my conversation with Sir Francis Tring last night. Someone had a whack at that poor chap who is lying at the doctor’s with concussion. Someone near here, too. He was carrying a letter addressed to me which is missing.”

“I understood, of course, that something of the sort had happened,” Yates acknowledged, “but I was hoping that the letter itself would turn up. Have you any idea of the nature of its contents, sir?”

“Not exactly,” Matresser admitted. “I fancy that Tring is coming down. The most disquieting thing is that it should have happened at all. Who can there be in this neighbourhood who has us under observation?”

“Has your lordship enquired into the credentials of Mademoiselle Stamier?” Yates ventured.

Matresser nodded frowning.

“I am in rather an awkward position about that young lady,” he admitted. “Apparently she is here as a sort of companion to my sister, her credentials are official and beyond dispute. She may be working for France, as I daresay she is, and I will admit that we are not quite ready to take France into our whole confidence on certain matters, but that will all be explained so soon that I do not want any trouble. You know how anxious I am that not a soul in our household—”

“Will you pardon my interrupting,” Yates begged, “but the situation is perfectly clear to me. I think it would be unwise to interfere with the young lady in any way. She will be continually under our observation and I do not look upon her as a possible source of danger.”

“You mean,” Matresser remarked, “that she may be more useful than dangerous to us now that she is under surveillance. Besides, in the present instance it is quite impossible that she could have committed a personal assault upon the messenger.”

There was a knock at the door. A footman appeared ushering in a visitor.

“Mr. Van Westrheene to see your lordship,” he announced.

Matresser stepped forward with a word of welcome. Henry Yates, from behind the typewriter, ventured to gasp. The visitor was a man considerably over six feet and a half. He was splendidly proportioned and, although his fair hair and short pointed beard were streaked with white, his tanned complexion gave him the appearance of extraordinary health and vigour. He carried a stick in his left hand, however, and limped slightly.

“I have the honour of addressing the Earl of Matresser?” he said, holding out his hand and bowing in severe military fashion. “It is very good of you to receive a chance visitor.”

Again at the touch of the man’s fingers—cold, hard and with a grip suggesting neither cordiality nor friendship—Matresser felt that wave of dislike sweep over him. There was something of evil both in the man’s expression and in his bearing. The smile, which was meant to express courtesy, was an unpleasant contraction of ill-shaped lips. Even Matresser, whose natural bearing was so entirely courteous and distinguished, felt some difficulty in receiving his visitor with his usual suaveness.

“Very happy to make your acquaintance, Mijnheer 56 Van Westrheene,” he replied formally. “My secretary and I were just speaking of your skill in handling your boat last night. No easy waters, ours, for a stranger.”

“I have encountered worse,” the Dutchman confided. “In Sweden, where I often cruise, the currents are not only difficult but dangerous.”

Matresser indicated an easy chair and seated himself opposite.

“I must apologise for fixing so late an hour for your visit,” he said. “I have just returned home after a somewhat prolonged absence and we have had a fairly large shooting party here to-day. I was sorry to hear from our local doctor that some of your men got knocked about in the storm.”

“Nothing serious arrived,” the visitor assured his host. “I myself took a slight toss. This I may explain,” he added, touching his foot with his stick, “is not a permanent—what is the word?—infirmity. Your little doctor soon set us all to rights. An amiable person wildly anxious to get back to his sport, I think.”

“He is a good chap, Andrews, and a country doctor gets a pretty dull time of it. You shoot yourself?”

“I have some thousands of acres preserved on my own land,” the other admitted. “I do not often shoot, however. I prefer the sea.”

Matresser looked over his shoulder to where Yates was seated, an immovable figure, behind his machine.

“Ring for Burrows, will you, Henry,” he enjoined. “What can I offer you, sir—a cocktail, sherry, whisky?”

The Dutchman beamed.

“It would give me great pleasure to drink a cocktail with you. You say that you have just returned from abroad?”

Matresser nodded.

“I have been out of the country for some time.”

“It is good to travel now and then,” his caller observed. “I understood, or did I see it in your newspapers, that you have been big-game shooting in Africa?”

Matresser scarcely heard. The problem of his late whereabouts seemed without interest to him.

“A handy little ketch that of yours,” he remarked. “I had a good view of her whilst I was shaving this morning.”

“She is of the type usually built in my own country,” Van Westrheene confided. “A craft of that sort does not make much speed but it is very good in rough weather. My engines need attention, otherwise I am very well satisfied with the way she stood the storm. I must wait a few days until this swell goes down, then I think I shall probably extend my cruise.”

“Rather an unusual season of the year for this part of the world,” Matresser observed.

“I shall go southwards. If the weather should be propitious, perhaps you would care for a sheltered cruise one day. Your car could meet you anywhere you chose.”

Matresser’s smile carried with it a world of meaning which only Yates, however, was able to appreciate.

“My dear fellow,” Matresser said, “I would not trust myself on board for anything in the world. The fact is, I love the sea but I am a rotten sailor. You will find this cocktail pretty good,” he added. “I have really, as Yates himself knows very well, not enough work for a secretary, but every time I hint as much, he makes a fresh cocktail and when I have drunk it I know that I can never part with him.”

“Mixed, shaken and poured out, too, with one hand,” 58 Van Westrheene remarked, with a note in his voice which was probably as near sympathy as he was ever likely to get. “You type also with the same disadvantage,” he added as he accepted a beautifully frosted glass. “It was the war perhaps—yes?”

“It was the war,” Matresser acquiesced. “He would not tell you so himself—infernally modest fellow he is—but he was a great little man in those days. I believe that he possesses more medals than anyone else in the house at the present moment.”

“You were yourself engaged without a doubt?” the visitor asked politely.

“I went out with the Yeomanry, a branch of the service which was hopelessly muddled up at the commencement of the war. We were too large a force to form an independent unit and after we were disbanded they scarcely knew what to do with us. They took me on in the Artillery at last, but it was a dreary business. If you stay here long enough, Mijnheer Van Westrheene, would you care for a small shoot one day, or a larger one perhaps next week?”

“Any form of shooting would give me great pleasure,” the visitor assented. “I have weapons of a sort on board and I would despatch a man to Norwich in search of the requisite ammunition.”

“I beg that you will do nothing of the sort,” Matresser protested. “We can fit you out with anything you require here.”

The caller accepted another cocktail, holding his glass with steady fingers until it was completely filled.

“You have the reputation, Lord Matresser,” he said, “of being a great traveller.”

“Then my reputation belies me,” was the dry response. 59 “English country life becomes at times monotonous and one is glad then to disappear for a time, but my journeyings are all within a certain orbit. I have never climbed an unknown mountain or named a newly discovered lake.”

Mijnheer Van Westrheene stroked his sharply pointed beard thoughtfully. His blue eyes were fixed upon his host.

“You have not then, I gather, the same tastes as your father,” he observed. “If my memory serves me he was Ambassador at St. Petersburg in the old days and after that at Rome.”

“My father was considered a brilliant diplomat,” Matresser replied. “He was also a considerable figure in the political world, which I could never be. I had a brother with brains who might have gone in for that sort of thing, but we lost him during the war.”

Van Westrheene rose to his feet. He bowed to Yates, who took his glass from him.

“My congratulations to you,” he said. “I have never tasted a better cocktail.”

“You are very kind, sir,” was the gratified reply.

“I will give myself the pleasure of returning your call within the next few days,” Matresser said. “We have rather a houseful now and it is difficult to get away. Thursday, if you can shoot, I will send a car for you at ten o’clock. You will dine with us afterwards, I trust. My mother, I am sure, would be delighted.”

Van Westrheene did not hesitate for a second. He accepted promptly.

“It will give me great pleasure,” he said solemnly, “to meet her ladyship your mother.”

He crossed the room towards the door—a huge, impressive 60 figure dwarfing in his progress all the contents of the room. On the threshold he turned and bowed again. The footman who had been summoned closed the door. Matresser remained for several moments silent, listening to his firm footsteps upon the hard oak stairs. He turned to Yates.

“What about that, my astute secretary?”

“I think that before he leaves,” Henry Yates replied, “he will give us something to think about.”