Читать книгу The Books of Bart - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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FAY MILTON was tall and dark. “A typical Rossetti girl,” Bart had described her. Her hair, of which she had masses, was of that deepest shade of brown which nearest approaches black, and is indistinguishable from that colour at a short distance. Her eyebrows were pencilled, and here there was no compromise as to colour, for they were of jet. Black, too, were the long lashes which never showed to advantage, for she was one of the open-eyed sort. Nature had tinted her cheek with the clear pink and white of health, and her complexion was voted flawless. The shape of the face left something to be desired, yet it would be a captious and hypercritical person who ventured on the ungracious task of criticism. It was a thought too long, and the lips just a little too straight—but that was all. For the rest she was almost beautiful. Her eyes were violet blue, so dark as to appear black in some lights, her nose straight and well placed, her chin prettily moulded. When she laughed, which she rarely did—more’s the pity!—you saw two straight rows of teeth unblemished and of a porcelain whiteness. Even in repose the face was pleasant to look upon, and people wondered amongst themselves why a woman possessed of such superlative qualities remained single. The answer was the very simple one which might be offered in a hundred such cases—she had never met anyone for whom she entertained the least affection.

She was something of a student of affairs, wrote clever articles in The Woman’s Age, and was voted eccentric by some, as unwomanly by others, and as somewhat unapproachable by most people. Only in books and stories are very pretty women, who are also very rich, surrounded by crowds of suitors. Men, on the whole, are too vain to crowd a woman, however much in love, or in debt, they may be. Pique jerks the bridle of perseverance, and the haughty spirit of young manhood shrinks from the revelation of conscious rivalry. From the man’s point of view, the “rival” is the other fellow—he never sees himself at any other place than at the apex of the triangle.

The main consequence, so far as Fay was concerned, was that she had had in her life two proposals: one from Andrew Gillboy, the “Car King,” who was forty years her senior, and one from Bray Sunley, who drank whisky before breakfast, with breakfast, and, with intervals for sleep, until his next breakfast.

They were both wealthy men and were, from certain points of view, excellent matches, but Fay had the right of choice—and remained a spinster at twenty-three.

Her attitude toward her cousin requires explanation. Fay had inherited a large fortune—Bart had inherited nothing from their uncle’s will. When he said he did not care he was sincere. There was neither envy nor meanness in his composition. She did not know him well enough to believe him. She did not trust him—that was the impression she gave.

In the first year of his guardianship she had seen little of him; in the second year she had seen enough. When she was sixteen he was too old to be taken into her confidence—at twenty he was too young. She thought his appointment absurd, and longed for her twenty-fifth birthday which would free her from the obligation of sharing the same house—another absurd provision of her mother’s will. He was quick to detect the antagonism, and his patience, never a limitless quantity, was as quickly exhausted. From being the tender and considerate guardian he became the casual friend. He treated her as he would treat a man with whom he had little in common, but respected. Curiously enough, he never thought of changing his abode. They had lived together since her mother died, and he had neither the desire nor the thought of changing his mode of life, for in some things he was conservative.

That they remained good friends was less a tribute to his self-discipline than to his marvellous power of shrugging his cares to the devil.

They had developed away from one another, as twin trees will develop, irrespective of prevailing winds. She made no attempt to come to any better understanding, though she gave much of her spare time to evolving a solution to her problem. He gave no time at all, considering the position insusceptible to improvement.

If she had learned to respect him, she might have revived the old affection between them, but he seemed determined to frustrate the growth of any such sentiment. She had been taught, first by her mother, and then by Uncle Banter, who had assumed responsibility for her on her father’s death, that there were twenty shillings in every pound, and she had, at her fingers’ tips, most of the familiar adages which go to the encouragement of thrift.

Since “thrift” was a word which Bart had deliberately ruled out of his lexicon, such adventures as she made into the mazy jungle of his finances were as irritating as they were bewildering. She helped him at times when financial depression made him unbearable, but she was helping herself more, for the gloom which came upon him in these moments of crisis was communicated to the rest of the household, and 23, Colholm Place produced in Fay a sensation which, paraphrasing a well-known advertisement, she described as “that Morgue feeling.”

She admired him up to a point. There was a certain noisy chivalry about him which was effective. He made sacrifices, and explained them in such detail, yet withal with such modesty of language, that you might be deceived into the belief that you had discovered the measure of his altruism without aid.

He was generous and kindly, yet his generosity was never wholly uncontroversial, nor his kindliness without injustice. He had a sense of humour, which enabled him to see his own shortcomings in a favourable light, and a breadth of vision which found something admirable even in his own faults. He was charitable to all who saw eye to eye with him, and he hated the intolerance of those dogmatists who found themselves in uncompromising opposition to his point of view.

Fay knew him for an egoist. He had no stability of purpose—this distressed her, as did a certain unscrupulousness where money was concerned. He had never asked her for money, and had resisted with solemn indignation her first effort to help him—it was after the failure of the Foreman Vacuum Pump. She had found an unusual pleasure in the thought that she could help him. She knew that in some way she had failed him; here was an opportunity to recover some of the ground she had lost. His refusal (accompanied by a long homily, elegantly phrased and punctuated) on the character of men who accept financial help from women, even though they were his sisters, had created a new sense of respect for him. She had left his study considerably impressed by the loftiness of his views. There was something particularly wholesome and clean about them, she told herself. When, two hours later, without any evidence of embarrassment, he came to her room and accepted her offer, justifying the volte-face in some twelve-hundred well-chosen words, she was a little bewildered.

Thereafter, in all matters of finance, there was a certain formula to be observed, the offer on her part, the refusal on his, and later the reconsideration. She timed her offers to follow certain exhibitions of pessimism on his part; the gloom which found expression in locked study doors and tragic silences.

To say that Fay was contemptuous of her guardian cousin, with his mad-hatter schemes, his wild inventions, and his frantic enthusiasms, would be to employ too strong a word to describe an emotion which was not amusement, pity nor derision. She was superior, that was all. From her heights she could afford a certain mental patronage, which would have been intolerable to him, had he paid her sufficient attention to be aware of her line of thought. Once she had come near to betraying her inward feeling. It was when Bart had suddenly conceived a violent distrust for the directors of Southern Properties. Much of her fortune was invested in this concern, which owned large blocks of flats and offices in various parts of London. They paid a steady ten per cent., and her interest in the concern was safeguarded by the fact that George Waterson represented her on the board.

George Waterson was an hereditary partner in the firm of Waterson, Gasby & Quale, and, though the youngest member of that eminent firm of solicitors, he was for many reasons the dominant partner. He was a serious young man of thirty. He had been a serious young man of thirty ever since Fay could remember. When he was twenty-two and she was seventeen he had as much the air, the manner and the deliberation of thirty as he would have at forty.

He was a clean-shaven, long-faced man, of a peculiar pallor of countenance and a blackness of chin. That chin was big, and his nose was long and thin. His eyes were large and brown, and he dressed with exceptional care. Nobody had ever seen George Waterson smile, and nobody had ever expressed a desire to see him smile.

He was solid amongst solid men. His firm was so immensely respectable that nobody outside the profession and its own clientèle had ever heard of it. It was seldom mentioned in court, for it dealt, in the main, with those manifestations of law which do not figure in the daily Press, but are rather concerned with the sticking on of stamps and the signing of signatures, than with the more dramatic and alluring aspects of the legal game.

Bart hated and loathed George, with his attitude of polite antagonism, and his cold-blooded lack of enthusiasm for Bart’s schemes. George Waterson was co-trustee of the Milton estate, and as such stood between Bart and his cousin. Waterson’s main business in life seemed to be to prevent his client investing in the schemes which her cousin propounded.

Now Bart was a queer man, and in the course of his days collected a great deal of information, which was almost as queer. He heard whispers against the probity of certain directors of the Southern Properties. There was talk of their buying lands and buildings thereon, in which they were personally interested. Bart came with the revelation, and offered it dramatically to a startled Fay. If she followed his advice she would “get out” of her holdings, but she never followed his advice without consulting George, and so George had come, cold and sceptical, demanding facts which Bart was not in a position to give, names, particulars of purchase and locations of same. Bartholomew had said much, without adding greatly to the sum of Fay’s knowledge.

“I am afraid you have discovered a mare’s nest,” George had said calmly, and there the matter ended. It was an impossible position, and Bart had dropped all interest in his cousin’s affairs. He forgot her in the construction of a new three-act comedy. Then the life-saving boat had flashed across his vision, and he had hurried to America.

He had never been away so long from home, and she had time to think. She spent many hours considering his character, his life, his friends. It puzzled her to know what to do with him. Could he always be as he was now, the irresponsible hunter after chimerical fortunes? There was something in all his schemes—even George Waterson admitted as much—but if they contained the germ of a possibility, they lacked the something which made that possibility an actuality. Bart, too, was deficient in a quality or two. “He wants a shock,” suggested George with the assurance of one who stood on perfectly safe ground—the ground of long friendship and unassailable business relationship. But what would shock Bart? Death might, but who would obligingly die on the off chance of bringing an erratic genius to his senses? Certainly Fay was not so inclined. That was the horrid part of it, Bart was so impregnable. You could not hurt him, nor reason with him; he stood aloof, his great soul permanently preoccupied and refusing to be unpleasantly impressed.

Fay, turning the subject over in her mind, was inspired by a spirit of mischief to further the cause of Harold Tirrell. She did not hope that she would succeed in penetrating the armour of her cousin’s indifference, but she might at least prick him—and even a wince would be welcome from this perfectly self-satisfied man. She wrote to Agatha to come to her, and had a pleasurable conspirator-like feeling when she had written the letter.

“I want this posted at once,” she said. Packer had come noiselessly to the room in answer to her bell.

“Yes, madam.”

He glanced furtively at the address, and a look of interest came into his eyes. The precious secrets whispered behind drawing-room, doors, and scarcely more than thought about in locked studies, are public property in the servants’ hall.

“Wait,” she said, as he was going from the room.

Should she post the letter? Would it not be better to let matters take their course? After all, Bart married would be a load off her mind. She had reached that point where she felt responsibility for Bart’s life. And he was her guardian.... But would he marry? If it were “an affair” ... but Bart was not that kind. He was one of those quixotic persons, who could even walk through the fires of passion and come out in the end unscorched.

The obedient Packer stood, one eye upon the letter, conscious that “something was up” but not guessing what the something was.

Perhaps there was going to be a row. Packer loved the idea of rows—especially amongst his employers. They gave a servant certain liberties and certain freedom of expression. They even (on occasions) let the kitchen into the confidences of the boudoir. Sometimes they led to court and the joyous publicity of the evening papers. Packer would love to have seen his portrait in the Evening World as a witness in a cause célèbre.

“No,” she said, after a while, answering her unspoken question, “you may post the letter.”