Читать книгу The Green Archer - Edgar Wallace - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Green Archer
Garre Castle, with its gaunt keep and its crenallated walls, offered little hint of the comfort it held. Forbidding and gloomy of exterior, no ray of light shone from its loopholed walls and turrets. The mullioned windows of Mr. Bellamy's library looked out upon the green lawn of the inner ward, and from these windows one wall of the Sanctuary Keep rose in a stark, unbroken, and seemingly endless line.
There were people who wondered why this man, who never read a book and to whom history made no appeal, should have bought, at a big figure, this home of the dead and gone lights of chivalry. Knowing him, they would not have wondered. It was the strength of it that thrilled this old builder.
There was something in these stones that was in tune with the latent ferocity in his cruel nature. The lightless dungeons with their foot-thick doors, the worn chain-rings fastened to pillars rubbed smooth by the shoulders of tortured humanity, the power and majesty of Garre Castle spoke to the primitive in him and awakened in his soul an atavistic devil that found joy even in the contemplation of forgotten suffering. It was this that made the first appeal when he had seen it twenty years before on a visit to England. Later, Garre Castle figured in such dreams as he had; finally the place became necessary. He had bought it at a heavy figure and had never regretted his purchase.
The castle was the light of his eyes. He was least objectionable here; was, on occasions, almost human. He never slept a night away. If he was in town he did not sleep there. Only the hotel servants and Julius knew this. However important the business might be that brought him to London, he was back at the castle by night, even if he left again in the morning before the world was awake. The castle was his one recreation. He would spend days wandering around the walls, hours in speculation upon some stone. Who placed it there? What was the man's name, what life did he live, what was he paid? Always it came back to that question. There were no unions in those days, no walking delegates. If a labourer got fresh they took him out and hanged him. High from the walls of Sanctuary Keep a stout oak beam projected. Beneath was a narrow doorway. Through this slit men had been pushed, with a hempen collar around their necks, fastened to the beam above. That was the way to deal with workmen who got fresh. And the Green Archer who had stolen his lord's good venison. He had died on that beam. It was proper that he should, thought Abe Bellamy. People who go thieving should hang. That ought still to be the law.
He sat that evening before the huge stone fireplace in the library, watching abstractedly a fire of logs that crackled and spluttered. The room was a handsome one, expensively and usefully furnished. The walls were panelled from floor to raftered ceiling, and over the recessed windows heavy blue-velvet curtains had been drawn. From the fire Mr. Bellamy's eyes roved up to the stone shield above the fireplace, with its rampant leopards, which the action of time had almost obliterated. Beneath, and more distinct, was carved the de Curcys' motto:
RYTE YS RYTE.
"They spelt pretty badly in the old days," thought Abe complacently. He was not much of a speller himself. "Right is right!" A fool thing to say, anyway. Like saying that "black is black" or "water is wet."
It was late, and his evening task had been completed, but he was loth to leave the deep armchair in which he sat. At last he rose, pulled back the curtain which covered the door and unlocked it. Then he returned to the fireplace and pulled a bell-cord. Julius Savini answered the summons.
"You can take all these letters on the table, draft answers, and let me have them in the morning," he growled. "I shall be here for the next month, so if you want any time off you had better tell me."
"I have an engagement on Wednesday," said Julius promptly, and the old man muttered something under his breath.
"All right, you can take it," he said.
His secretary was at the door when Bellamy called him back.
"Savini, you asked me the other day whether I'd made a will. At the time I had an idea that you felt you were doing your duty as a secretary. I've been thinking it over since, and it has struck me that you're not the kind of man that would ask a question like that unless there was something in your mind."
"There was nothing at all," said Savini airily. "I'm supposed to be your secretary, and I ought to know something about your affairs—nothing more."
The old man looked at him from under his shaggy brows.
"That will do," he said gruffly.
When the man had gone he began to pace the room restlessly. There was an uneasiness in his mind which he could not understand, and for which he could find no reason. He went back to his desk, took a key from an inside pocket, and unlocked the lower drawer. He did this almost mechanically, and the leather folder was on the desk before he realised the cause of his restlessness.
"You are a fool," said Mr. Bellamy calmly. "You're lovely, but you're a fool. My God! What a fool you are!"
He had opened the folder and was looking down at a large cabinet portrait of a woman. She was wearing the costume of twenty years before, and it looked singularly old-fashioned and quaint; but the face was very young and sweet, and the calm eyes, that seemed to be searching his, had a beauty that was almost unearthly. Abe Bellamy licked his dry lips and gazed at the picture through narrowed lids. Then he turned it over calmly.
The second photograph was of a man of between thirty and forty.
"A fool," said Abe calmly; "you were just that, Mick."
The third photograph was of a child, little more than a baby. This he turned in his hand. At the back was pasted a newspaper cutting:
"The undermentioned officer was killed in air fighting on or about May 14, 1918. Lieutenant J. D. Bellamy, United States Army."
He turned the photograph over again and was closing the folder when something attracted his attention, and he bent his head closer to the desk. Ash—cigarette ash! Mr. Bellamy did not smoke cigarettes. Julius Savini, on the contrary, did. He stretched out his hand for the bell, but thought better of it. After all, it was his own fault; he knew the character of the man, and if he could not keep his private documents from the curious eyes of a lock-picking crook he only had himself to blame. Before he left the library that night he put the folder in a wall-safe that the panelling hid and locked the door. He did this every night. For the space of two hours nobody could enter the library.
Julius, working in a room at the other side of the entrance-hall, had his door ajar and saw his employer come out and turn the switches that extinguished the library lights.
"You can go to bed," said Bellamy gruffly.
It was the nearest he ever approached to saying "good-night."
His bedroom was the one apartment that looked outwards from the walls of the castle, for it was situated in the angle of what was known as the Hall Chamber—a great room, darkly panelled and seemingly bare of furniture. There were two doors to the room, an outer of stout oak and an inner a framework covered with ancient leather. To this latter was attached a steel latch, which was connected by means of a silken cord to a pulley within reach of Mr. Bellamy's hand when he was in bed. By this means it was possible for him to keep his door fastened during the night and to lift the latch in the morning to his servant without getting out of bed. He closed the outer door and locked it, shut the leather door and slipped the latch in its socket. Then he undressed and went to bed by the light of a candle. His last act before retiring was to take from an inner pocket a long, narrow key, which he put under his pillow. He had followed the same routine for eight years.
He was a man who slept well but lightly, and instantly he was asleep. Three hours later he was as instantly awake. He never drew his curtains at night. A full moon was shining in a cloudless sky, and though the rays did not fall upon the window there was sufficient reflected light in the chamber to enable him to see clearly what was happening. The leather door was slowly opening—inch by inch, noiselessly, steadily.
He waited, moving only to thrust his hand beneath his pillow and grip the butt of the automatic which he had planted there in preparation for some such contingency as this.
The door was now wide, and he expected every second to see the intruder pass into the room. Rising stealthily in bed and resting his elbow on his knee, he covered the edge of the door.
A minute passed, and there was no sound or sign of the intruder, and, throwing back the bedclothes, he leapt to the floor and ran out through the door, pistol in hand. The moon was streaming through the windows of the corridor, flooding the hall with light.
At first he saw nothing, and then it seemed that the Thing moved from the shadow into the full light.
A tall, thin, green figure, with a dead white face, that stood stiffly facing him, bow in hand. Green from head to toe, a vivid, startling skin-tight green that could not be mistaken. Green everywhere, save that white face that stared blankly.
For a second only the old man stared spellbound, and then his pistol jerked up and he fired twice.
