Читать книгу The Golden Beast - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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Judith, who had been a little restless in her movements during a morning of singular and tense unreality, finally pitched her shooting stick by Freddy Amberleys' side. He signalised the occasion by bringing down a very creditable right and left of high-flying cock pheasants. She decided to remain.

"I don't really enjoy watching shooting," she confessed, "but if I must I prefer to see it well done. I suppose you are a good shot, Freddy?"

"One of the best in the county," he assured her, with cheerful vaingloriousness.

She sighed gently.

"This confidence," she murmured, "is one of the most pleasing characteristics of extreme youth. Ignore me, please, and mark over on your left."

Again, her companion did his duty satisfactorily and Judith smiled approval upon him.

"Tell me," he enquired, a few minutes later, "what is that heap of ruins just outside the covert. I noticed them last time I was here."

A shade of rather sombre concern darkened Judith's beautiful face.

"Those stones," she explained, "are the remains of a tragedy which occurred here thirty years ago—long before I was born, and when you, I should think, were in your cradle."

"I've never heard about it," he observed curiously. "What was it?"

"It happened," she continued, "on the eve of a shooting party, just like this one. My father's youngest brother, Cecil, who was rather by way of being the family favourite, was murdered by the head keeper."

"I remember now," he acknowledged. "I heard the whole story in the smoking room last night."

"There was a girl, of course," she proceeded, "and the usual sordid business. You probably heard as much about it as I know. The tragedy, however, consisted in the fact that, without a doubt, the keeper never meant to kill my uncle, but was disturbed and threw him backwards so that he hit his head upon the stone floor."

"What happened to the keeper?" Amberleys asked.

"He was hung," was the quiet reply.

"The devil! It doesn't sound like anything more than manslaughter."

"The man was arraigned for murder and found guilty with a strong recommendation for mercy," Judith went on. "No one doubted but that he would get off with twenty years' penal servitude, but my grandfather—Israel Fernham, who was an old gentleman of singularly unforgiving temperament—had great influence with the Government at that time and he moved heaven and earth to prevent any reduction of the sentence. In the end he succeeded, although there was a terrible scandal, and the Home Secretary very soon afterwards resigned. Those ruins you were asking me about are the remains of the keeper's cottage. My grandfather had it razed to the ground on the day the man was hanged, and would never allow it to be rebuilt."

There was a brief interlude, whilst Judith's companion added to his bag. Then the beaters appeared at the end of the wood and the two young people strolled off together to the next stand.

"That old grandfather of yours must have been quite a character," Amberleys remarked.

"I suppose I'm wrong," she confessed, "but I admire him immensely. He was a strict Jew, a follower of the Mosaic law. He never smoked or touched wine or indulged in any of the modern luxuries. There were no rules in his household. Every one did as they chose, but he himself lived the most austere and simple life. He never failed a friend, and he never forgave an enemy. Cecil's death, however, broke his heart. He only lived for a very short time afterwards.

"It is curious," she continued, with a little tremor in her tone, "that you should have asked me about those ruins to-day. Do you know what my Uncle Samuel told me this morning? Cecil was fetched out from the dining table to see the keeper about the morrow's shooting exactly in the same way that Ernest was sent for last night. My mother and father and Uncle Samuel were there, of course. Can't you imagine how it must all have come back to them last night—the horror of it, the same message, the same hour, Ernest, again the youngest of our family—and now, this disappearance of his?"

"Most amazing coincidence I ever heard of in my life," the young man admitted. "Quite enough to upset any one!"

"Of course," she went on, "there couldn't be any possible connection between the two things. Middleton, this present keeper, as it happens, is a bachelor, and Ernest, I believe, is a remarkably moral young man. All the same there's something almost morbidly horrible——"

"I think it's unspeakable," Amberleys interrupted. "Your father must be an awfully good sport to have gone on with to-day. I wonder he didn't send us all home till things were cleared up, anyhow."

She shook her head. There was a dreamy look in her velvety eyes.

"I think that we Jews are all fatalists," she said. "Father and Mother and Uncle Samuel are of course unbalanced by memories and associations. I cannot think it possible that anything could have happened to Ernest."

They were standing at the end of a glade and from some distance away came the sound of the tapping of trees, the shouts of the beaters, occasionally the keeper's whistle. They drew a few yards apart; Amberleys mechanically on the qui vive, Judith lost in a little sea of drifting impressions. It was a still day towards the end of October, fine and warm, but with the colours fading now from the clear sky. There was a queer smell of rotting undergrowth mingled with the odour of a recently kindled bonfire of weeds in the corner of an adjacent field. The air was becoming a little chilly, the trees beginning to take to themselves more definite shape. A promise of frost was in the air; the twigs broke crisply under the feet of the advancing beaters. The sound of firing all around was now much more frequent, and, her companion's attention being fully engaged, Judith found herself suddenly studying, with a curiously detached interest, the man whom she knew that she was expected to marry. Against his personal appearance there was not a word to be said. He was tall, inclined to sturdiness, but after all it was a man's figure. His features, without being regular, were good enough, his slightly red hair had a tendency to curl in a becoming fashion, his expression was frank and even amiable. He had sat in the House of Commons for two years and had made one or two speeches with moderate success. His politics were stereotyped but sincere. His outlook upon the wider subjects of life, considering his upbringing and characteristics, not intolerant. Judith permitted her thoughts to dwell deliberately upon the prospect of becoming Lady Frederick Amberleys, and afterwards Marchioness of Holt. There was a town house, and a country estate, of course. Her own great fortune might provide also a flat in Paris, a palace at Venice or a Villa on the Riviera. She might count upon retaining a certain measure of the more intellectual life to which she was already becoming accustomed, but a measure which would have its limitations. Nothing, for instance, could interfere with the shooting. The hunting would follow. A grudging month in town for the season, perhaps. A month for a flying visit abroad. Then the cubbing.—Supposing she decided to strike out a line of her own? She was the wrong woman to do that, she thought, with a faint smile. Life and heredity had given her an amazing temperament; the fervid, almost passionate imagination of the gifted of her race. She was an unfaltering judge of herself and her weaknesses. Venice with its traditions, Florence with its art, Paris with its nameless sense of excitement, were no places for her to visit as a wanderer alone. Realising this, was it wise for her to marry at all a man of Amberleys' type?—She found herself watching the rabbits and an occasional hare as they rushed through the undergrowth, pausing for a moment at the sight of her, and either dashing back again, or taking their chance of safety—a poor one, as it happened, for both Amberleys and the gun on either side were shooting well. One hare in particular almost sat up and looked at her, ran this way and that, dumb terror in its eyes, and finally scurried by her, only to be sent head over heels in a lifeless heap when it had reached the line of safety. She gave a little shiver. After all, it was death. She found herself thinking of Ernest—an absurd connection, she told herself, and yet there it was. The sense of foreboding, which she had carried with her all day, was suddenly redoubled. As they walked homeward across the park her feet scarcely seemed to touch the turf with its little crackling hardness of frost. Amberleys, struggling to keep up with her, handed his gun at last to his loader who was following behind.

"You say that you are no athlete," he remarked good-humouredly. "I shouldn't like to take you on at a walking match."

"I want to know if there is any news," she confided. "Somehow or other I have managed so far to keep all anxieties at the back of my mind, but the day has been rather a nightmare, hasn't it? I hoped we should have heard something by this time."

Her companion nodded sympathetically.

"It's one of those things which must be cleared up before long," he observed. "A young fellow like Ernest can't vanish into thin air, and he can't go far in a dress suit and dancing pumps. There are no secret wells or chambers at Honerton, are there?"

"None that I ever heard of," she replied.

"Then don't you worry," he begged. "Time enough, if you've got to, when you hear something definite. And—er—Lady Judith, you've got enough to think about and worry about just now, but I don't like to go away without telling you that there was something I had it in my mind to say—that I wanted to say up in town—but one gets so little chance to see you alone there."

"As you aren't going to say it," she rejoined, with a faint note of warning in her tone, "let us leave it alone altogether, for the present, shall we? I feel that I have more than enough to think about just now—that I couldn't consider anything rationally until we at least understand something about Ernest."

"That's all right," Amberleys assented with resignation. "I only thought that I'd give you an idea that it had been in my mind, so that you knew what to expect, eh?" he added a little nervously. "I see the family omnibus is there waiting, with all the luggage, so I expect that means we're booked to take our departure."

A sharp turn and a few minutes' climb had brought them into sudden view of the house. To Judith's intense sensibility there was something almost sinister in its great unlit front with the smoke ascending straight from many chimneys, and a faint mist rising in the park on either side. Several cars were standing in the sweep before the hall door. The shiver of a new and more poignant anxiety chilled Judith.

"Evidently there is no news, then!" she exclaimed.

They hurried on, only to find that her surmise had been correct. Incredible though it seemed to all of them, not the slightest trace of Ernest had been found, nor had any word come from him; a condition of affairs which could no longer be regarded as anything but gravely portentous. Most of the local guests had slipped quietly away. Judith enquired for her father.

"His lordship is in the library with the gentlemen from Scotland Yard," Martin told her. "Her ladyship is there, too."

Judith bade a few more adieux, and hastened to join her parents. Two visitors of unmistakably professional appearance were seated at the table, her father was standing on the hearthrug, Rachel was seated in an easy-chair, bolt upright, with her hands upon her lap.

"My daughter, Lady Judith," Joseph muttered, in a drab tone.

Both men rose at once to their feet.

"Is there really no news?" Judith asked almost incredulously. "Haven't you discovered anything at all?"

"We have had no success up to the present, Lady Judith," the detective who seemed to be in charge of the affair, confessed. "Your brother appears to have left the house last night immediately after his visitor, Middleton, the keeper. He walked down the back avenue, sometimes on the avenue itself and sometimes on the turf, as far as a gate which leads on to a very rough road, which Lord Honerton tells me is seldom used except for carting timber. From there we have lost all traces of him, but there are some indications of a car having been down the road. My men are searching it thoroughly now."

"And this is all you have discovered?" Judith exclaimed. "We still haven't the faintest idea where Ernest is?"

"Not the faintest," was the somewhat curt reply. "Disappearances as a rule," the detective went on, "are easily classified. They arise from loss of memory, fear of apprehension for some crime or misdeed, or an affair in which a woman is concerned. Loss of memory in this case seems scarcely feasible, as this would certainly not drive the young man out of the house. Your father insists upon it that the regularity of your brother's life renders the other two impossible. We seem, therefore, to be up against an entirely novel problem."

"This gentleman is Inspector Rodes," Joseph intervened, addressing Judith. "Mr. Rodes has had charge of most of the famous disappearance cases for the last ten years. There is not one of them, he tells me, which he has failed in the end to clear up."

"One may meet one's Waterloo at any time, of course," Rodes observed, "but I must admit that I do not look upon absolute disappearances as possible in these days. We have scarcely one record upon our books where we have failed to locate the missing person in time. And I am bound to say," he went on, with a slightly apologetic smile, "that we have invariably found the information given us by relatives entirely misleading. That is why I shall be forced, if I continue the conduct of this case, to make my own enquiries into your son's life and habits. Motiveless disappearances do not afford us a practical problem."

"You can do as you choose," Joseph declared brusquely. "All that I want is my boy."

The telephone bell commenced to ring. The instrument stood upon the table by the side of which Judith was seated. She picked up the receiver and listened indifferently. Suddenly her whole expression changed. Her eyes flashed. She threw out her arm.

"Ernest, Ernest!" she cried. "Go on, dear. Where are you? It is I, Judith!"

There was a moment's pause. Every one in the room was breathless with excitement. Rodes stole closer to the instrument.

"Ernest!" Judith pleaded. "Go on, go on! Tell me where you are."

Again she paused, and this time there was something like terror in her face. She handed the receiver to the detective.

"I heard his voice," she faltered. "He asked if this was Honerton Chase. Then he never spoke again. It seems all dead."

Rodes held the receiver to his ear.

"Hullo!" he shouted. "Hullo!"

There was no response. He rang up violently and held the receiver once more to his ear. The slightly cynical expression had left his face. He was genuinely interested. He turned to the little company.

"The line is dead," he announced. "Either the wire has been cut or there has been some accident!"