Читать книгу The Man Who Changed His Plea - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 5

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It seemed rather a curious coincidence that Lady Diana Malladene should have chosen the same day to open the new premises of her famous night-club as that on which Martin Brockenhurst rejoined that mighty army of men who do their best to support law and order in the great city. It was some time before she recognized the solitary stranger to whom her maître d'hôtel had given one of the best tables in the room, and even then it was still longer before she could believe her eyes. She sought help from one of her old friends, Ronnie Foster, who was reputed to know every man and woman in town by name, reputation, or lack of reputation. The young man in question was seated on a stool at the American bar, engaged in the somewhat melancholy consumption of a whisky and soda.

"Ronnie," she said, "don't look just now, but who is that man seated by himself at Number Three table? He signed in as Martin Brockenhurst, but it can't be the Martin Brockenhurst we used to know."

"God, I should hope not," was the scared reply. "I heard he'd joined the police and afterwards gone out to Kenya. That was a long time ago."

"There are a good many of us," Diana said, pulling a little viciously at the petals of a flower someone had left upon the counter, "who will wish that he had stayed there. But I can't get away from it. I'm good at recognizing people, you know, and I believe that's Martin Campbell Brockenhurst."

"What's he doing here?" the tired-looking young man, with crow's-feet about his eyes, and at that moment a somewhat startled expression, asked nervously.

She shook her head.

"I don't know," she answered. "All I can tell you is that I shall go crazy in a few minutes if I don't find out whether it's he or not. Why, I was desperately in love with him for a week or so when we were children."

"Go and ask him," her companion suggested anxiously. "You're hostess here. What the hell they let him in for I can't imagine, if it's he."

She indulged in a little gesture of contempt.

"He'd get in wherever he wanted to," she answered. "All the same, I'll go. If I faint, come to my assistance."

"Anything you like," was the gloomy reply. "But unless he's spotted me already, don't tell him I'm here."

There was a lull in the dancing. Diana glanced at herself for a moment in the mirror which she had drawn from her handbag, accepted and swallowed the aspirins which the barman handed to her in a silver spoon, took a long drink from her wineglass, and crossed the dance-floor. Brockenhurst watched her speculatively as she approached. He gave no sign that he expected her to pause at his table or address him; he just looked out at her with the bland, incurious regard of a polite stranger. But when she came to a standstill he rose slowly to his feet, knocked out his cigarette and deposited it in the ashtray.

"Lady Diana Malladene, I believe," he said with a slight smile.

"Whatever are you doing here?" she gasped.

"No harm, I hope," he answered. "Won't you sit down?"

She sank into the place opposite to him and he resumed his seat.

"No harm," she repeated, almost under her breath.

"Do I look like a destroying angel?" he asked. "There was a time, wasn't there, when we had many mutual friends, and there was a time when we knew a good deal more of this side of London life, Diana, than anyone of your tender years—you were very young then, you know—ought to know."

"You disappeared," she muttered.

"I disappeared," he echoed.

"Why? You were still going strong; you weren't like most of us, half broke."

"No," he admitted thoughtfully, "it wasn't that. I'd just had enough of the life. I wanted something—what shall I say?—cleaner."

"There were a hundred different stories about you," she went on, her voice gradually becoming a little steadier. "Most people declared that you had gone to the Colonies, then a lot of people said that you were working as a farmer on one of your own estates. Rumours—never anything came except rumours. You were the mystery of the London we used to fool about in; everyone asked for months and even for a year after, 'What has become of Martin Brockenhurst?'"

"Most of the time I haven't been so very far away," he assured her pensively.

"Why did you disappear?" she asked. "Was it...?"

There was a queer but commanding flash in those steel-grey eyes. She hesitated.

"Not my business, of course," she murmured. "I'm sorry, Martin, but I couldn't help asking a question that all London asked itself for so long a time. It was in Ascot week, and your horse, Golden Lass, won the Gold Cup. You weren't there; nobody knew where you were; the Gold Cup is still in the safe."

He looked thoughtfully ahead of him, at the gaily painted walls and the crowd of well-dressed visitors. Perhaps he saw farther than just across that heated, fashionable dance-club.

"No," he reflected after a moment or two, "I wasn't so very far away. May I follow the custom of the place, Diana? Will you drink a glass of wine with me?"

"Will I—? Oh, Martin, I don't think I can bear it. You know that this is my club—I am the hostess."

"Isn't it the correct thing to do to ask your hostess to drink a glass of wine? Antoine," he went on, summoning the maître d'hôtel who was standing close by, "open my bottle of wine, please. A glass for Madame."

The man was swift to obey. She glanced at his own glass.

"You have drunk no wine."

"Not yet," he replied; "but I am going to join you now and, believe me," he went on with the merest touch of sarcasm, "I may be still a very good customer. I have ordered and paid for a case to be kept in my locker, also a few bottles of what Antoine has told me is your priceless brandy."

"Don't make fun of me, please," she begged, and there was something very human in her quiet voice and drooped eyes.

"I didn't come here to do that, Diana," he assured her kindly. "Look up at me; you need not be afraid."

She raised her eyes, but nevertheless she was afraid. It was a queer thing, but they drank to one another in silence and without any toast—it was rather difficult to find an appropriate one.

"Cheer up, my dear," he enjoined, smiling. "You might be in the hands of a worse blackmailer. I want nothing from you; no word that I shall say will ever interfere with your complete and absolute freedom. You can continue with your bottle club, you can even crown your social success by marrying a duke, and my lips will always be closed. It's not you, Diana, I've come back to see—although if you always look as well as you do tonight a man might be excused for that—it's someone altogether different, and if you were to sit there till daylight, looking like an angel or a Delilah, you would never come any nearer to finding out who it is. If I ask you a few questions, they will be harmless ones."

She drank more of her wine, pulled out her cigarette-case and lit a cigarette.

"You are Martin Brockenhurst," she said, "but you are so far away. You've lost something, you've gained something, you've changed. I don't recognize you, Martin."

"I have been looking at a different kind of life from a new angle," he told her.

Diana Malladene was what all her friends called her, a clever, far-seeing, and shrewd young woman. That faint note of mockery in his voice penetrated through her senses.

"Tell me what you have been doing," she begged. "Have you been hiding in unpeopled deserts and filling your own mind with the ghosts and shadows of the people you have loved and hated? You have that look, somehow."

He shook his head.

"It is years," he said, "since we met, Diana, years since I have seen one of our old comrades, or enemies—what were they? One hardly knows. But during that time, I will tell you this much, I've lived amongst men and women; I've come closer to the real things in life than ever before."

She edged her chair a little closer to his. She affected not to notice how the shapely brown fingers were slightly withdrawn as hers fell upon them.

"No, Diana," he warned, "I am not going to tell you where I've been. If you find out it will be by accident, but I don't think you will find out. There are a few questions I shall ask you, and then good-night."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"You may ask questions, then, and I may not?"

"Perhaps," he rejoined, "on reflection you will admit that I have the better right."

"As usual," she sighed, "you make me feel like a squirming child at a board-school. Who gave you the rod of the master always, Martin?"

"The rod," he answered, "exists only in the guilty mind of the listener. I have nothing to speak of against you, Diana. You are still, I should think, the most beautiful woman in London."

She leaned back a little in her chair and looked at him steadily.

"I am trying to imagine that you are some famous portrait painter," she said, "and I am myself. At any rate, I am glad I wore this particular frock tonight."

"Oyster pink," he murmured.

She bowed.

"I thank you for the memory."

"It is a beautiful colour," he went on, "and you are a beautiful woman. Quite as beautiful as you were when a certain picture of you was painted."

"Have you come back to tell me that once more?" she asked, lifting her eyes.

"I am not that much of a fool," he said quietly. "I can come back or go forth to gloat again on the beauty of the Fra Lippo Lippi Madonna, and I should find it as beautiful as it seemed to me twenty years ago. The eyes of every passer-by who knew what beauty was loved her, but she has not changed."

"It appears to me," Lady Diana said, opening her bag and taking out her mirror, "that this would be a very good place for a hiatus in our conversation. You have told me that I am still beautiful; that is all that matters. My skin I know is flawless, my eyes have that little glint of the violet in their blue, and the arts of the coiffeur would only be wasted on my yellow hair. I have survived time—one triumph at any rate, Martin. So have you, for that matter; but you didn't come here to mix words with me."

He shook his head.

"I came here," he confided, "to learn something of the lives of a few of those who were our friends years ago."

"To do them mischief?"

"Perhaps."

"And why should you think that I would help you?"

"I thought you might," he admitted, lighting a cigarette for himself, but also watching her. "There are reasons, you know, Diana, why, when I ask you in a pleasant and submissive manner, it would be almost better if you yielded to my simple request."

"There's one simple request," she said, "I should love to make."

"Well?"

"Dance with me for a few minutes."

He smiled enigmatically but certainly without distaste, then he laid down his cigarette and bowed.

"Why not?"

They danced. She with the gracious sensuousness of the born danseuse, he with a sort of grim faultlessness of posture and movement that was yet in its way admirable. Now and then he leaned a little to the music and at such moments her eyes, lifted to his, shone with almost feverish eloquence. At the end of the dance he led her to her place, filled her glass with wine, pushed the cigarettes towards her and lit one himself.

"You always dance like that," she said. "If I had been a light woman or you had been in any way serious, what a nuisance I should have been to you."

"Nuisances are of different sorts," he said. "Now I am going to ask you a question."

"Do you think I don't know what it is?" she asked, lighting another cigarette.

"Well?"

"Broke to the world. No good coming here to look for him. They would never let him in."

"Oh, that one," he remarked. "I know all about Henry Guest, Diana. You see, I can utter his name quite calmly. He is, as you say, broke. Isn't that Ronnie Foster at the bar?"

The man on the stool caught Martin's eye, slipped to his feet and strolled across to them. Diana welcomed him with a friendly nod. He made no attempt to shake hands with the new member of the club, but he summoned up the ghost of a welcoming smile.

"So you're back in these parts again, Brockenhurst," he remarked. "Glad to see you, I'm sure."

"Thank you very much," the other replied. "London, as I am seeing it tonight, is a new city to me. Later in the week you must dine with me, Diana," he invited, rising to his feet, "and tell me about a few more of our old friends. I have a very small apartment at the Albany. I suppose I can find your name in the telephone book?"

"Berkeley 6699," she told him. "Don't ring up too early, Martin."

"It would give me great pleasure if you would dine with me on Tuesday evening. All our old places have gone, I suppose?"

"The Milan still retains its popularity," Ronnie Foster remarked.

"Let it be the Milan, then," Martin suggested.

"At half-past eight in the foyer?"

"I shall be there," he promised.