Читать книгу Diana of Kara-Kara - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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One day Diana came back from a conscientious tour of the stores and found a thin and middle-aged lady sitting in the drawing-room. She greeted Diana with a deferential smile. She was such a middle-aged lady as might have stepped from the pages of a late Victorian novel, and Diana regarded her steadily, for she wore no hat, had the skimpy beginnings of a purple wool jumper on her knees, and in her hands two knitting needles that seemed to be operating of their own volition all the time she talked.

“Good afternoon! You’re Miss Ford, aren’t you, my dear? I’m Miss Staffle, and I do hope we are going to be good friends!”

“I hope so,” said Diana. “We’ll be better friends when I understand. Are you a guest of ours?”

Click-flash-flicker went the needles. Diana looked in awe. She was the only woman in the world who had never knitted a jumper.

“Well ... yes. Mr. Selsbury thought you would be rather lonely. It doesn’t do for us girls to be too much alone. We brood.”

“I’m brooding at this minute.” Diana was very incisive in business hours. “Do I understand that you have been engaged as a chaperone?”

“Companion,” murmured Miss Staffle.

“That makes it easier,” Diana opened her pocket-book. “Your salary is——?”

Miss Staffle murmured the amount.

“Here is two months’ pay,” said Diana. “I have decided not to engage a companion.”

She rang the bell; the needles became stationary.

“Eleanor,” to the svelte parlourmaid, “Miss Staffle is leaving before tea. Will you see that her boxes are brought down, and tell Trenter to have a nice clean taxi waiting?”

“But, my dear”—Miss Staffle’s voice was slightly acidulated—“Mr. Selsbury engaged me, and I am afraid....”

“Mr. Selsbury doesn’t want a companion,” said Diana. “Now, my angel, are you going to give me trouble, or are you going to be a sweet little cherub and fly?”

Gordon came home prepared to face a storm and ready to present a rocky face either to the waves of her wrath or the drizzle of her tears. He found her trying a new record on a brand-new gramophone, her feet moving lightly to the magical rhythm of “I Ain’t Nobody’s Darling.” He resented the gramophone, but had other matters of greater moment to discuss. There was no sign of the excellent Miss Staffle.

“Anybody been?” he asked carelessly.

She stopped whistling.

“Nobody except an elderly lady who made the curious mistake of thinking I wanted a companion.”

“Where is she?” asked Gordon, his heart sinking.

“I didn’t trouble to take her address,” said Diana. “Why—did you want her?”

“You sent her away?”

Diana nodded.

“Yes; her industry was appalling.” And then, as a thought occurred: “Was the jumper for you?”

“You sent a—er—um—person I engaged away from my house?” sternly. “Really, Diana! This is a little too much! Let’s have this out, my dear.”

Diana changed the record.

“Tea will be served in ten minutes,” she said. “And Gordon, my dear, your shoes are muddy. Run up and change them.”

Revolt flew red signals on his cheeks.

“I will do nothing of the kind!” he said sharply. “I will not be ordered about in my own house. Diana, you have gone too far! This intolerable situation must end here and now.”

He brought his hand slapping down on the back of the easy chair. He was determined.

“Either you or I leave this house to-night,” he said. “I have had enough! Already the servants are talking. I saw a particularly sinister smile on Trenter’s face when you came down to breakfast in your negligee this morning. I have a position, a reputation, a name in the City of London—I must guard my interests against the thoughtless, selfish folly of reckless adolescence!”

“What a name to call a lady!” she said reproachfully.

“I will not temporise; I will not allow a very serious situation to be turned into a jest. Either you leave Cheynel Gardens or I.”

She thought a moment, then walked out of the room. Gordon heard her at the telephone in the hall and smiled. A little firmness was all that was required.

“Is that the Morning Telegram? This is Miss Diana Ford speaking. Will you send a reporter to 61 Cheynel Gardens——”

In two seconds he was in the hall and had covered the transmitter with a frantic hand.

“What are you going to do?” he asked frenziedly.

She shrugged a shoulder.

“Life without you is insupportable, Gordon,” she said brokenly. “You are the only relation I have in the world, and if you turn me out what is there left but the river?”

“You’re mad,” he wailed.

“The coroner will take that charitable view, I hope—don’t interrupt me, Gordon. They want to speak to me.”

By sheer force he lifted her away from the instrument and took the receiver in his own hand.

“Don’t bother to send anybody ... she is quite well ... alive. I mean, there’s no suicide ...”

Out of breath, he strode back to The Study.

“Your conduct is abominable! You are shameless! I can well understand why your wretched Dempsi ran away, preferring to die in the bush than be any longer associated with such an infernal little termagant!”

The Selsburys were a courtly people, but there was a limit to their patience. He was savage, cruel, and knew he was behaving unpardonably before the words were out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

Her face was set, a mask that showed nothing of her thoughts.

“I’m extremely sorry. I shouldn’t have said that—please forgive me.”

Still she did not speak. Her eyes were tragic in their steadfast, unwinking gaze. He stole quietly from the room, and then she spoke her thoughts aloud.

“How absurd not to have the telephone connected with the study! I’ll write to the Post Office this very night.”

A very silent dinner. Gordon was going out and was resplendent in his raiment.

“I am taking a friend to a theatre to-night,” he said.

“I haven’t seen a show for years,” she sighed.

“This would not interest you. It is a Russian play dealing with social unrest.”

She sighed again.

“I love Russian plays. All the characters die so nicely and you know where you are. In a musical comedy you can never be sure who anybody is.”

Gordon shuddered.

“This is not a play for a young girl,” he said gently.

She was unconvinced.

“If you very much wanted me to come, I could dress in five minutes,” she suggested. “I hardly know what I shall do with myself to-night.”

“Think out to-morrow’s breakfast,” he said bitterly.

Alone, she gave her mind alternately to serious thought and the new gramophone. She did think of Dempsi sometimes, and a little uneasily. Not that she had loved that strange progeny of Michael Dempsi and Marie Stezzaganni. Dempsi came into her life as an earthquake intrudes upon the domesticity of a Californian farmer. He shifted the angle of things and had been a great disturbance. She never really remembered Dempsi, except that he was very slight and very wiry and very voluble. She remembered that he had thrown himself at her feet, had threatened to shoot her, had told her he adored her and was ready to forsake his career in the church. Finally, on a hot February morning (she remembered that the roses were thick in the big garden) he had flung his worldly possessions at her feet, taken an intense and tearful farewell, and had dashed madly into the bush, never to return.

In point of fact, the nearest bush country was a hundred miles away, but he had said that he was going to the bush “to end a life already prolonged beyond the limits of human endurance and find forgetfulness in oblivion,” and he had probably kept his word. So far as the “bush” part of the contract was concerned. She did not mourn him. If she wondered at all, it was as to the circumstances in which he would reappear and claim some eight thousand pounds neatly tied in one package that it might be the more effectively and dramatically thrown at her feet, and which in truth missed her feet by a wide margin and struck the station cat, who, being newly maternal, flew at Dempsi and accelerated his wild flight. She did not tell her aunt about the eight thousand; Mrs. Tetherby being, as she had been described, “inert,” had an objection to fuss of any kind. More than this, she possessed one curious weakness—a horror of debt. The knowledge that she was under monetary obligation kept her awake. An overlooked garage account once reduced her to a state of nervous prostration. Other people’s money she would not touch, and, on an occasion when, having paid her shearers, she was requested by the men to keep the money from Saturday to Monday, she paced the verandah for two nights, a shot gun under her arm.

It was largely due to this weakness that all money affairs were in Diana’s hands from the age of fifteen. Diana put the eight thousand to her own account and spent an interesting three months planning and drawing expensive memorials to the departed Dempsi. In the back pages of a dictionary, under the heading “Foreign words and phrases,” she discovered an appropriate epitaph.

SATIS ELOQUENTIÆ SAPIENTIÆ PARUM

“He had great eloquence but little sense.”

As the years passed, and her uneasiness increased, she made half-hearted attempts to discover his relatives, though she knew that he was without so much as a known cousin. And then, gradually, Dempsi had receded into the background. She was beloved of a romantic squatter. This affair ended abruptly when the romantic squatter’s unromantic wife arrived in a high-powered car and bore him off to serve the remainder of his sentence.

Diana gave exactly five minutes of her thoughts to Dempsi. For the remainder of the evening she practised a new waltz step which had surprisingly found its way into jazz.

“What I can’t understand,” said Trenter, “is why the boss allows this sort of thing to go on. It’s downright improper, a young woman living in a bachelor’s house. It reminds me of a case old Superbus once told me about—he’s a court bailiff and naturally he sees the seamy side of life——”

“I wouldn’t have a bailiff for a friend if you paid me a million,” said Eleanor, who had been brought up in an atmosphere of financial embarrassment. “I’d sooner have a burglar. Don’t you worry about our young Di, Arthur. She’s all there! Personally speaking, I’m glad she’s arrived. What about me—haven’t I any morals? Hasn’t me and cook—cook and I, that is to say—lived in the same house with a bachelor for a year?”

“You’re different,” said Trenter.

“Guess again,” said Eleanor.

“The house hasn’t been what it was.” A touch of sadness in Trenter’s voice had its origin in obscure sources.

Methodical as Gordon was, he never counted his cigars. Diana, on the other hand, had an eye for quantity. It was she who asked delicately whether he thought there were mice in the house, and, if so, did he think that they preferred Coronas to cheese.

“There’s a big change coming—a terrific change. I feel it in my bones,” he said. “And I know! I’ve always had second sight even as a boy.”

“You should wear glasses,” said Eleanor.