Читать книгу The Light Beyond - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 6

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There was a brief period of horrified silence—the girl leaning against the side of an easy-chair with her head turned away, clearly on the point of a breakdown, Felix Dukane standing like a statue with his under lip thrust out, Mark, dumb as much from sheer surprise at this unexpected termination of his little adventure as from any sense of shock. But only a few feet away, lay without a doubt damning evidence as to the truth of Felix Dukane’s confession. Mark found himself dwelling curiously upon unimportant details; the neat patent shoes, the monogrammed socks, the carefully pressed trousers of the prostrate figure. He roused himself at last to speech.

“Look here,” he expostulated, “you’re not serious? You may have hurt him. He can’t be dead.”

“I tell you that he is dead,” Dukane insisted harshly. “I did not mean to strike so hard, but he had made me very angry. I struck him on the side of the head behind the ear, and he went down like a log. It is the second time he has tried to blackmail me. This time I lost my temper.”

“But what are you going to do about it?” Mark ventured. “Have you rung up for a doctor, or for the police?”

Dukane scowled contemptuously.

“What would be the good of that?” he demanded. “The doctor could tell me no more than I know—that the man is dead. As for the police they are the last people to be dragged in. Do you suppose I want to be marched off to the Courts, and charged with manslaughter or murder?”

“Is there any other way?” Mark asked bluntly.

“Of course there is,” was the angry rejoinder. “If the person whom my daughter went to fetch had not by some evil chance left for Paris this afternoon, he would have done everything that is necessary. The question is, are you man enough to take his place?”

“What do you mean?”

Dukane suddenly gripped his arm and Mark realised the other’s enormous muscular strength. The fingers seemed to crumple up the flesh and almost crush the bone beneath. He turned him towards the window.

“Look there,” he pointed out hoarsely. “You see what’s coming?”

Mark glanced towards the river. Already the lamps across the bridge were shining dimly through a bank of yellow-black fog. Patches of it hung over the water, and even in this narrow thoroughfare the opposite houses were barely visible. Dukane pointed upwards. Above the roofs it hung like a descending curtain, solid and fearsome.

“In half an hour,” the latter continued, “no man in the streets will see another. Think! You drive a little way in the car below—where you will. You take—it—with you—anywhere, away from here. Who is to know? You look strong. You could lift a thing like that with one hand. What about the bridge, the river?”

“Say, is this a serious suggestion?” Mark gasped.

“Of course it is. Do you think I want to go into the dock and be charged with killing a creature like that. They might not punish me. The man is scum, I tell you, but I am in the midst of negotiations upon which the future prosperity of Europe may depend. If I am interrupted now it may mean ruin to thousands. I tell you that it is the work of my life, which draws near to the end,” he went on, his voice suddenly strident. “Every hour of my time is pledged. Besides, my name! The thing might not be properly understood. There are risks I can’t speak of.”

Involuntarily Mark turned his head, and as he did so the girl came towards him. All that wonderful light, the expression which had played like some inner sunshine around her lips and eyes, had gone. The life was drained from her. There remained still, however, the nameless unanalysable appeal which seemed to have drifted to him from the moment of her entrance across the crowded restaurant.

“Of course this must all sound like madness,” she said, “but help us—oh, help us, if you can.”

“I should very much like to,” he assured her gravely.

“A scandal just now would mean such terrible things for my father,” she went on, “and it would do no good. The man is dead and there is an end of it. You will not run a great risk. If you are discovered you can say that you were on your way to a hospital, and we will tell the truth. But you will not be discovered. You will save us from a great disaster, and you will do nobody any harm.... It is so much to ask of a stranger, and yet, when I saw you in Pall Mall just now I remembered what you said to me an hour or two ago. I remembered——”

The pause was unaccountably eloquent, thrilling in a mysterious unexpected way. She was offering nothing, promising nothing, and yet he felt an overmastering impulse to do her bidding, to run any risk, to establish himself in her life—her benefactor, the man who had not failed her in this terrible moment.

“If you are Mark Van Stratton,” her father intervened, “I cannot bribe you. You must have all the money you need in life, but if there is any other way——”

“You cannot bribe him, father,” she interrupted. “He is going to do this for us, for my sake. Will you render me this great service and become my friend for always, Mr. Mark Van Stratton? I have faults—many—but no one in the world has ever called me ungrateful.”

Her hand had slipped from his shoulder and her soft, caressing fingers lay upon his. Her eyes now had lost the glaze of horror. They had opened. They were full of appeal. They pleaded and promised at the same time. Mark had no more thought of hesitation.

“I shall do what you ask me,” he declared, taking her other hand for a moment into his. “Only not in the river. That seems too horrible. I will find a safe, quiet place somewhere.”

“You will never regret it,” she whispered.

“I am to take your car?”

“Why not? You say that you can drive it, and it will save time. There are piles of rugs and the seats are very low. Even when you drive you seem to be lying down.”

“And from here to the street?”

“The lift we came up in is a private one,” Dukane explained. “No one else is allowed to use it. These few rooms are my haven of escape from people whom I do not wish to see. The commissionaire outside I have sent away. All you have to do is to carry him down, cover him up in the car, and drive off. You will be perfectly safe. Look outside.”

Mark glanced through the dripping windows. The atmosphere was becoming denser, the street lamps diffuse patches of sickly yellow. There were shouts in the street, and the roar of the traffic had subsided into a rumble, almost a silence. Even inside the room little tongues of fog seemed to have found their way.

“What I am asking you to do,” Dukane repeated, “is not only for my sake. It is for the sake of millions of others. My work cannot be stopped.”

“I will do it,” Mark promised. “The sooner I start the better. If the fog becomes worse I may not be able to drive the car at all. Is there petrol?”

“Full up,” the girl answered.

“What shall I do with the car afterwards?”

“Leave it in any garage you like,” she begged. “I can send for it.”

Within the room now the darkness was becoming every minute more dense. Mark stooped down and lifted the man from the floor; a slight frail creature he seemed. His complexion was fair, almost sandy, his features insipid, his mouth twisted as though in pain. There was a cruel wound at the back of the head with a few drops of blood. Nothing more. His weight to Mark was negligible. Dukane held open the door whilst the girl looked out. She crossed the passage, held her finger upon the knob and the lift came rumbling up.

“There is no one whom you could possibly meet,” she whispered. “This part of the premises is completely cut off. Even my maid is at the hotel where we have rooms—not here.”

He nodded and stepped into the lift carrying his burden, nerved for his task by her final glance of gratitude. Down below all was as Dukane had said; an empty passage, the car waiting at the kerb, its lights throwing strange little ineffective halos across the gathering wall of darkness. Mark laid the recumbent figure upon the seat, covering it to the throat with rugs, and climbed over the other side into the driver’s place. Dukane, who had followed him down, stepped back coughing heavily.

“I have a private wire here, 1000 Y Gerrard, if it should be necessary to communicate with me,” he confided.

“I’ll remember,” Mark promised.

“You will never regret this, Van Stratton,” were Dukane’s valedictory words.

“I hope not,” the young man answered....

And then the drive commenced which Mark remembered for the rest of his life. Choosing the side streets he crawled down on to the Embankment, up Northumberland Avenue, there to find a holocaust of motionless traffic, men shouting, women crying with fear, shadowy figures waving torches passing here and there, escorting a string of taxicabs and cars. Somehow or other he reached Pall Mall and crept up St. James’s Street into Piccadilly, only to find things worse. He had finally set his mind against Dukane’s first suggestion. The river was too terrible a thought. He would carry this thing through according to his own ideas. Slowly he felt his way down to West Kensington, and there a sudden slight uplifting of the fog enabled him to pass through Hammersmith and over Hammersmith Bridge at a reasonable speed. Round Ranelagh and Barnes, though, the darkness was almost impenetrable. Twice he was obliged to get out to locate with difficulty the kerb-stone. At the crossroads by Roehampton Lane he turned to the right. Things were a little better here and in the course of time he reached the entrance of Richmond Park. To his immense relief the gates still stood open and, unobserved by anyone, he stole in, travelled on towards the Kingston Gate for about a mile, and then brought the car to a standstill by the side of the road. There was not a visible object anywhere and scarcely a sound, until a deer, attracted by the lights, came close up and then cantered off. Otherwise it seemed as though he had wandered into a new and strange world, peopled by an unimaginable silence. Mark was a young and strong man to whom nerves were a thing unknown, but for a moment, as he sat there, he shivered. The completion of his task seemed grotesque, like a hideous fragment of nightmare. The thing had to be faced however. He descended, stumbled round to the other side of the car, lifted out his burden, carried it a little way across the turf, and finally rested it with its back to a tree. When he stood away he was surprised to find that although the exertion had been slight enough there were drops of sweat standing out upon his forehead. He thrust his hand into his pocket, found his case and lit a cigarette, clambered round the car and opened the door. Then he stood suddenly still, for of all the horrors of the day the one he had now to face seemed to him the greatest and most incredible. From a few feet behind him, out of the darkness, came the sound of a feeble voice.

“Don’t leave me here. Give me some brandy. Oh, God, my head!”