Читать книгу The Gallows of Chance - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 4

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Sir Humphrey Rossiter opened his eyes and found himself in what seemed to be the unusually large cell of a prison. The floor was certainly of stone, the walls of plaster, the deal table before him uncompromising in its severity. The windows were high and barred. The furniture consisted mainly of a single bench and the only illumination was supplied by candles at the farther end of the table. Exactly opposite to him was seated a man wearing a white mask.

“Where am I?” was Sir Humphrey’s not very original but quite natural question.

“In prison,” was the brief reply. “Don’t be afraid, though; your time will soon be over. You will leave it before daylight—even before eight o’clock strikes.”

Through his tangled thoughts crept a vivid impression of something unpleasantly significant in the words. Then he remembered. It was at eight o’clock in the morning that Cecil Brandt was to die.

“Don’t be foolish,” he scoffed, suddenly realising that his hands were tied with thick cord behind his back. “I suppose there is some purpose behind this mummery. Let me know what it is at once.”

“Yes, there is a purpose,” the man at the other end of the table replied, and Sir Humphrey knew that his first idea was a correct one and that the voice, although not exactly familiar, was the voice of a well-educated person. “I can see that you are impatient. We are in the same position, therefore I will not waste words. We are here to prevent, through you, what we consider an act of injustice. If we cannot prevent it, we shall at least avenge it. The situation does not rest with us, although it might appear so. It rests with you.”

“What is this madness?” the imprisoned man demanded, tugging at the cords which bound his hands.

“It may seem like madness, but I can assure you that it is not,” the other rejoined. “This is a last and desperate effort to save the life of a man who, according to the laws of justice such as we conceive them, should not die, or if he does, to see that the person who is responsible for his death dies also.”

Sir Humphrey was recovering his self-possession. Really any one in the world ought to have known better than to have attempted such a stunt with himself as the victim.

“You have been reading too much fiction,” he said contemptuously. “How on earth do you suppose that you are going to save the life of a man condemned by the law of his country to die by this assault on me?”

“Because you are still in a position to intervene on his behalf,” was the prompt rejoinder, “and because if you do not, you will surely lose your own life.”

“I never heard such idiocy,” Rossiter scoffed. “I cannot save the man’s life and I do not intend to lose my own. Let us bring this thing to an issue. According to etiquette, I must be in my home to-night, in case the improbable should happen and it should become necessary for me to communicate with the Governor of Wandsworth Gaol. You will do no good by keeping me here. It is simply absurd for you to suppose that you can force a Minister of the Crown to betray his trust through fear of personal violence. I should be glad to be allowed to continue my journey.”

“That,” the other assured him, and there was a new and more solemn note in his voice, “it is doubtful whether you will ever be allowed to do.”

Above the howling of the wind Sir Humphrey became conscious of the sound of hammering outside. Together with his companion he listened to it for a few seconds in silence.

“What is that?”

“Just the finishing touch to your scaffold. A rough affair, I’m afraid, but the best we could do.”

“My scaffold?” the Home Secretary repeated.

His vis-à-vis nodded.

“I am anxious to impress upon you the fact,” he said, “that if Cecil Brandt dies at eight o’clock to-morrow morning, you will beat him to eternity by several hours. We have our private executioner here. He was once in the business but retired with a pension. He is preparing for you at the present moment.”

“I have come to the conclusion that you are mad,” Sir Humphrey pronounced.

“I have come to several conclusions about you,” was the calm retort. “First of all, I have decided that you have more courage than I imagined. You seem to show very few signs of alarm and yet you are extraordinarily near death. Perhaps it is because you do not realise the situation. In that case, you are not quite so quick-witted, and shall I say instinctive, as I thought. You must have failed to grasp the fact that every word I have spoken to you, and shall speak, is and shall be sober, absolute truth.”

The mock drama of the thing seemed to fade away. Even the white mask no longer appeared ridiculous. Sir Humphrey stared steadily across the table.

“My God!” he muttered.

“That’s better,” the other approved. “The sooner you appreciate the reality of the situation, however disconcerting it may be, the better. I am not going to reopen the Brandt case. You have done your duty without a doubt and studied it at first hand. Arguments between us under the present conditions would be ridiculous.”

“Presumptuous is the word I should select,” the Home Secretary remarked drily.

His vis-à-vis bowed.

“Touché, Mr. Home Secretary,” he acknowledged. “I shall only state three bald facts. A man of notoriously bad temper goes home unexpectedly and finds a person of whom he is jealous alone with his wife in his flat. There is a fight and the latter is killed. The law has decided that the husband should be hung for murder. I—you will pardon my becoming for a moment personal—have decided that he shall not.”

“And what have you to do with it?”

“Nothing officially. There are a few of us who think that the hanging of Cecil Brandt would be murder and that penal servitude would be a far more suitable punishment. You are the only man who could carry our opinion into effect. That is why we have decided to hang you unless you intervene.”

Sir Humphrey’s wits were by this time fully alert. He realised that the situation was far more serious than he had at first imagined. In the gloom of that terrible apartment he could make out little of his companion, save that he was a powerful man and that his voice indicated him to be a person of culture. Once or twice he had heard other voices outside. There was some one, he was sure, guarding the door. Physical resistance, especially with his hands bound, was an impossibility.

“Cecil Brandt was sentenced under a misapprehension, and I am beginning to believe that you know it,” the man at the end of the table continued. “For some reason or other, he never revealed the fact of where or how he discovered his wife and the man he killed. The jury and the general public have been led to believe that the quarrel and fight took place in a room on the ground floor, whilst Benham was waiting for Mrs. Brandt. I do not for a moment believe that that was so. I have reason to believe that the fight took place in Brandt’s own bedroom, where Benham was discovered. Under those circumstances, the fight was inevitable, and to kill a man in a fight with such provocation is not murder but manslaughter.”

“I have no doubt,” Sir Humphrey said, with a note of cynicism in his tone, “that you have studied the law and that you know what you are talking about. The fact remains that neither your opinion nor mine makes the slightest difference. It seems incredible to me, I tell you frankly, that Cecil Brandt should not have told his lawyer the truth. I honestly do not believe that there is a word of truth in what you are saying about the fight having taken place upstairs. No one who knows Katherine Brandt would credit it.”

“I believe it,” was the calm rejoinder, “and your only chance of leaving this place alive is to become converted to my point of view.”

“It seems to me that you are becoming ridiculous,” Rossiter declared. “Cecil Brandt has been sentenced to death and he will be hanged at eight o’clock to-morrow morning. If you attempt any deed of violence upon me, as is apparently your intention, well—I will admit that the odds are too great for me to make any effectual resistance, but—you will, without a particle of doubt, pay for your crime upon the scaffold.”

“You think we shall be traced, then?”

“I shall begin to think that you are really as mad as you appear to be,” Sir Humphrey observed contemptuously. “So far, your arrangements seem to have been quite intelligent, but the undetected abduction and assassination of a Cabinet Minister, even in the middle of a thinly populated county like Norfolk, is not a possible happening.”

The man at the end of the table chuckled. It was not a pleasant noise but it sounded perfectly natural.

“Like all lawyers,” he pointed out, “you rely too much on things as they seem to you. I agree that most enterprises of this sort would fail because their authors would be shortsighted or foolish people. We, on the other hand, have made our plans with the utmost care. Nothing is more certain in the world than this fact. If you do not carry out our instructions, you will be a dead man and buried before daylight, and long before the alarm can be given, every trace of what has happened will have disappeared.”

“If you believe that,” the Home Secretary replied, “I feel that I am indeed in a serious position because I must have fallen into the hands of lunatics.”

“Lunatics or not, those are our intentions,” was the grim pronouncement. “There are five of us in this house, which is otherwise deserted. We are going to take our risks and we are going to deal with you as I have said. Our telephone is at your service—subject to supervision. Will you telephone to Scotland Yard, to Windsor or direct to Wandsworth Gaol? I think, in any case, we should like you at first to telephone to the Governor of Wandsworth Gaol to authorise him, in case of further messages being held up, to hold over the execution.”

“You seem to have thought this matter out quite carefully.”

“Every detail has been considered.”

Rossiter looked coldly down the table.

“Very well, then,” he announced, “I have no wish to delay the proceedings. You can carry out your plans or remake them as you wish. I have no intention of using the telephone. I shall not speak to Windsor. I shall not speak to Scotland Yard—unless you allow me to do so privately. I shall not speak to Wandsworth. That may clear the way for you.”

“It certainly does. I was getting a trifle bored with this conversation.”

The speaker leaned forward and tapped twice upon the table with his finger. Almost immediately Sir Humphrey found his arms seized from behind and he was practically lifted to his feet. He was between two men both taller than he was.

“I regret,” his vis-à-vis declared, also rising, “that we are deficient in one or two small adjuncts to the ceremony we are about to perform. For instance, we have no chaplain. I shall walk in front, however, and conduct you to the place at which you will meet your death. I cannot say that I shall pray for you, because that is not in my line, but I shall at any rate lend an appearance of regularity to the affair. This way, please. First of all—Dick,” he added, turning round, “these fellows at the last moment have a habit of calling out and making unsettling appeals. Take his handkerchief out of his pocket and put it in Sir Humphrey’s mouth. Good. Now follow me.”

Rossiter, partially gagged, his hands closely bound, and with the arms of two strong men through his, passed up the side of the room. His guide threw open a thick, oaken door and they crossed a courtyard—a large, but strangely built courtyard it was, square with stables of old-fashioned design, coach houses and a large garage. At the further extremity was a perfectly new building, a shed of fresh pine board, with a flight of steps lending to a rude door. There was a smell of sawdust everywhere. The knocking inside the building continued.

“Thirty yards to the place of execution, there to hang by the neck until you are dead,” the man in front observed, turning round and raising his voice a little, that it might not be drowned by the wind. “I hope you realise now that we are in earnest.”

They crossed the yard. The man in front mounted the rudely fashioned steps and pushed open the door. Sir Humphrey’s face was splashed with the rain and the wind blew pleasantly upon his forehead. He paused for a moment but they forced him on. He too mounted the steps and then no possible effort of repression could keep the shiver from his limbs. They were in a perfectly bald apartment, smelling strongly of newly sawn wood and running across the roof of which was a stout pole. From the latter dangled a great length of rope with a formidable-looking noose. Underneath it was a trapdoor propped open. Another man, also wearing a mask, came up the rungs of a ladder from the cellar underneath and looked through the opening. He said nothing and disappeared again.

“You will have a wonderful drop,” Sir Humphrey’s guide explained. “You know the modus operandi, I suppose? You stand upon the trapdoor—I shall tell the man when to put you there—and you see we have made a rough lever which only needs a blow and the door gives way beneath. I should not wonder,” he added, “if your neck were not broken just as quickly as Cecil Brandt’s.”

The Home Secretary peered down into the chasm. A sensation of horror was beginning to creep icily into his veins. These men were in earnest. It could not be, he told himself. Such a thing in the middle of an English county, amongst civilised folk, was impossible. And yet—they were in earnest. Below was what seemed to be a cellar. His guide untwined the rope from the pole and dropped it down. It hung at least twenty feet from the bottom, the noose empty, its slight sway hideously suggestive. The man who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings looked appraisingly at Sir Humphrey.

“What are you?” he speculated. “Just about five foot ten and a half, I should say. You see, you will have at least twelve feet margin. You need not fear a breakage or anything amateurish of that sort. We have tested the drop with twenty stone taking the place of your body. Everything worked beautifully.... Dick, I see no reason for delay. The collar and tie off, if you please.”

Sir Humphrey’s négligé costume might have been donned for the purpose. The man called Dick, who had not yet spoken, stepped forward once more, and with lithe strong fingers, which had recently been washed with scented soap, divested their prospective victim of his flannel collar and tie. They unfastened the front of his shirt. Another man, who seemed to appear from nowhere, also dumb, also wearing a white mask, pulled down the noose with a roller and strengthened the slipknot.... Then fear came to Sir Humphrey Rossiter. As a pantomime, the thing seemed to fade away. It was stern reality with which he was faced and death which was hovering near. His incredulity had vanished. These men were in deadly earnest. They meant taking his life. A hideous death too—an ignominious one. The executioner, a man of coarser mould, came nearer, spanned his neck with his fingers which smelt of disagreeable things, and widened the noose a trifle.

“You’re a fool, Sir Humphrey,” his torturer-in-chief declared. “Neither you nor Cecil Brandt absolutely deserve to die, yet you are both leaving the world through the fatal quality of obstinacy. Brandt will die because, somewhere amongst his more vicious qualities, he was too great a gentleman to have the world suppose evil of his wife; and you because you are too pig-headed to perform a humane action. Have you anything to say?”

“Nothing,” Sir Humphrey replied, and was astonished at the robustness of his voice.

“This is your last chance. The noose is going over your head. If you want to say a prayer, you had better say it. If you want to live, you had better consent to be led to the telephone.”

It seemed to Sir Humphrey later on in life that the smell of that fresh hemp would linger in his nostrils till the day of his death. The man who was to play the part of executioner was standing only a foot away from him, the loop balanced in his hand, ready to slip over his neck. He wore a workman’s suit of grey tweed with marks of white paint upon it, his breath smelt like a drunkard’s. He was a horrible person. The rest seemed all alike—four of them—grim, shadowy figures. At first, he had scarcely thought of them as real; they had seemed to him like the puppets in some fantastic nightmare. Now that he knew them to be men in deadly earnest, knew that they meant to keep their word, there was something bloodcurdling in the sight of their glasslike eyes, their white masks, the quietness of their movements, their absolute silence. The lust for life was in his blood, was flowing up to his brain. If only he could believe that man’s story, believe that it was true that Cecil Brandt had been shielding his wife! The weak moment passed, however, for the choice was not his. The words were strangled in his throat. The rope fell over his head whilst he remained incapable of speech.... Then a sound from close at hand broke into the breathless drama of the intense silence. There were flying steps upon the ladder, and the man who was waiting with folded arms on the other side of the trapdoor to give the signal, suddenly leaned forward and held up his hand.

“Wait,” he ordered.

Another of these foul figures, white-masked, clad in a long overall disguising his shape and form, came, swift-footed, up the steps into the shed. He hurried to the man who seemed to be the leader, drew him on one side and talked eagerly. Presently the latter turned around. The rope was still around Rossiter’s neck, the seconds seemed to be dripping blood.

“Sir Humphrey Rossiter.”

The Home Secretary’s eyes flickered. Was that really his name? Was it really he who stood within a few feet of a loathesome death, surrounded by this silent, unrecognisable crowd of would-be assassins? Was it he—a Cabinet Minister serving a great Power with all Scotland Yard behind him—who was passing through this terrible ordeal with death yawning at his feet? He opened his lips, but speech was still impossible.

“Practically the only thing in life which could have saved you has happened,” his arch-tormentor continued. “Cecil Brandt’s wife is now at your house in Chestow Square, waiting for you. She is prepared to tell the truth. A tardy fit of remorse, perhaps, but still there it is. Are you listening to me, Sir Humphrey?”

“Yes, I am listening,” was the half-choked response.

“If we let you go upon your journey unharmed, you will arrive at your house before eleven o’clock. Katherine Brandt is a friend of yours. You will believe what she tells you. If you discover it to be the truth—what we others have known all the time—that that fight to the death took place in Katherine Brandt’s bedroom, will you see to it that Brandt is reprieved?”

The numbness refused to pass. Sir Humphrey was willing enough to speak but his tongue was incapable of performing its office. He seemed suffocated with the smell of the rope. It was all so hideously unreal. His eyes were gazing down into the chasm and he found it impossible to look away. That was where he was to drop. He fancied that he could see a body dangling there. His fancy leaped backwards and forwards. He was dead. He was alive. He was dead. No, those were real words.

“You heard what I said, Sir Humphrey? If we let you go and pack you off to London, will you see that Cecil Brandt gets his reprieve, provided that his wife is waiting for you and that she tells you the truth—truth which will afford you ample justification?”

“Of course I will,” Sir Humphrey croaked. “Take me away from this place,” he suddenly shouted. “Take me away quickly. If Katherine Brandt is in my house when I arrive in London, and tells me the story you have told me, Cecil Brandt shall not hang. I can say no more.”

They removed the rope from his neck. The man by his side closed the trapdoor and they took him down the wooden steps. They half-carried him across the courtyard and stood silently around him in the gaunt apartment from which he had been brought. He asked faltering questions but received no reply. It was quite ten minutes before he was joined by the man who had been the ringleader in his ghastly trial. The latter still wore his mask, but he used the words of a human being, and speech was something.

“The car is being brought round for you, Sir Humphrey,” he announced. “You will be accompanied for some distance by one of my friends and for a portion of the way you will be blindfolded.”

“Are you seeking any pledge from me?” Sir Humphrey asked.

“Certainly not,” was the indifferent reply. “When you return to London, you can take precisely what steps you please concerning what has happened to-night; you can send your Scotland Yard men down to discover this house, you can endeavour to trace us by every means in your power, you can set the law in action against us. I ask for no pledge save one, and to that pledge you are already committed. Provided Katherine Brandt tells you the story I have already related, her husband is not to hang to-morrow.”

“He shall not,” Sir Humphrey promised. “But, my God, if ever you come into my hands, it will be a different matter!”

“I shouldn’t threaten too much,” the other replied coolly. “You might find it difficult to get very far with any indictable offence. Besides, there is the ridicule, you know. You would almost have to resign. We are law breakers, of course, to-night—I and my friends—but chance has spared us the grim necessity of taking your life and we had already counted the cost.”

Another of those preposterous figures appeared, carrying a tray. He poured whisky plenteously into a beautifully cut old tumbler.

“Say when,” he enjoined, in the friendly conversational tones of a fellow clubman.

Sir Humphrey gripped the tumbler. His murmured “when” was long delayed. The drink was like life in his veins. His feet were on the earth again. His brain was clearing. He had been in a hell, the flames of which would scorch his sensibilities for a lifetime to come, but the physical terror of it all was passing.

“Good-night, Mr. Home Secretary,” the man at the other end of the table exclaimed, as the bandage was placed over his eyes. “A pleasant journey to you. Don’t forget that the lady is waiting.”

Sir Humphrey maintained the dignity of silence.