Читать книгу The Forger - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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"Have you seen Peter to-day?"

John Leith looked up from his evening newspaper as the question followed on chance thought.

"No, daddy."

Mr. Leith resumed his study of the day's news. He was a hearty man, with a long beard that had once been golden and now was completely grey.

The walls of the lofty room in which they sat would have proclaimed his calling even had not the long windows said "studio." Every inch of wall space was covered with his landscapes, his studies, his copies of the great masters. It was his wont to confess plaintively that comfortable circumstances had ruined him as an artist. After a while he put down his paper and came to this favourite topic of his.

"Without the spur of poverty a man is just a loafer after his fancies. It is when a man has to paint what the public wants that he growls himself to greatness. All the masters did their best work to order—Murillo, Leonardo, Bellini, Michaelangelo—chapel-hacks every one of 'em! Greuze painting like the devil to keep his extravagant virago of a wife supplied with money; Morland and his public-house signs; Gainsborough with his duchesses—when an artist can afford to choose his own subjects he's finished!"

But she was not interested in artists. Her legs doubled under her, she reclined over the bulbous end of a settee, her face in her hands, her grave eyes fixed on the one being in the world she loved without reservations.

"We are awfully well off, aren't we, daddy?"

He pursed his bearded lips.

"Tolerably, my dear——"

"Then, why must I marry Peter? I know that he is hideously rich—and I really think I am fond of him, though there is a look on his face sometimes that scares me . . . and I do think I could be much fonder of him, if—well, if there wasn't such a violent hurry."

He reached over lazily and caught her hand.

"My dear—I wish it. I want to see you settled down."

She looked at him, startled.

"You're not ill, daddy——?"

His loud laugh was a reassuring answer.

"No, I'm not ill," he said good-naturedly. "I'm keeping nothing from you. Only I want to see you married. He's a good fellow, and, as you say, enormously rich."

"Where did he make his money?" She had asked this question before. "He never speaks about his relations—he couldn't inherit an enormous fortune unless everybody knew about it. Basil says——"

"Basil says a lot that Basil shouldn't say." Mr. Leith's voice was quiet, but she gathered that at the moment Basil was unpopular. "You haven't heard from Peter, eh?"

"Yes—I've heard from him. He telephoned. Some police officer has been to his house about a fifty-pound note that was forged, and it had Donald Wells's name stamped on it, and Peter was quite agitated—you know how his voice goes, all funny and high?"

"A forged fifty-pound note—there's some reference here to the fellow they call the Clever One." Mr. Leith had returned to his journal. He both read aloud and pursued his private thoughts. "Rascal! They'll catch him!. . . um, about Peter. Clever chap, Peter. He's cursed with money, too—he might be as great as Zohn. Really, Peter's etchings are marvellous. Do you remember those beauties he did for you——"

"And which you lost," she accused, and he grumbled, in his middle-aged way, about his failing memory.

"Where the deuce I left them I can't think—I was going somewhere and I put them in my pocket—left them in the train, I'll swear."

She let him go on, her interest being completely self-centred.

"And, talking of things one loses," she nodded, "daddy, don't you realise that I shall be married in forty-eight hours! And I don't want to be a bit—isn't it awful?"

The bearded man put down his newspaper and, leaning over, flicked open a cigar box and took the first cigar that came. He bit off the end and lit it almost simultaneously.

"There are nine and seventy cardinal illusions of youth." He pulled strongly at the cigar. "Maybe there are two or three more. But an important one is that all brides-to-be are deliriously happy and impatient for the last forty-eight hours to pass. That all brides are confident of the future, that no brides, or only a miserable few, have any serious misgivings about the future."

He was looking at her over his glasses.

"They do, my dear—the nice ones. The young people who love each other with equal desperation are the exceptions."

"In fact the position is horribly normal?" She nodded agreement to this possibility. "Well, it—it isn't pleasant. I have a feeling that I ought to say something—tabulate my emotions and inhibitions and have them witnessed before a commissioner of oaths. In other words, I want to be fair to Peter, and I'm not being."

She looked round as the door handle turned, and slid down to a more graceful pose. Mr. Leith raised his head to stare at the visitor.

"I want to see you, Basil," he said.

"Sounds like a row—what have I done?"

There were times when Jane decided that she loathed Basil: usually, such is the contrariness of women, these were the occasions when Basil Hale made a very special effort to please her.

He had a round, fresh face; his hair was reddish and he smiled all the time. There was a period in their acquaintance when his assurance was a source of irritation to Jane Leith, an irritation in which was a spice of uneasiness. Instinctively she knew that there were no boundaries to his audacity, that he was cast in the mould of the brigand who takes what he wants, asks no man's permission and fears no man's resentment. He was as unlike her mental picture of a Lothario as any man could be. Handsome he was not; he was inclined to chubbiness; but his vitality was immeasurable. He drew something from every man and woman who fell under its spell, and left them at the end inert and exhausted.

He stood now by the door, a delighted grin on his glowing face, in no wise abashed by the ominous note in her father's voice or the disapproval in her eye. From his burnished head to the tip of his shiny shoes he was resplendent. There was a glittering diamond point in the onyx buttons of his white waistcoat, two larger scintillations from his shirt; even the gardenia in the buttonhole of his dress coat had an ultra-exotic quality.

"What's the trouble and why the chilliness? I'm going to the Arts Dance. What about it, Jane?"

"Jane is not going to any dance, artistic or otherwise. I want a few words with you, Basil."

Leith got up from his chair and nodded to his study, which opened from the studio.

"O Lord! You're not going to rag me, are you?" Basil had a gurgling little giggle of a laugh. "Stop him, Jane! I'll stand anything if you'll come and dance. Dash up and climb into something simple an' expensive. Jane, you look divine to-night—you do, by Heaven! It's a desecration marrying that dull monument of virtue——"

"Hale!"

When Mr. Leith called him by his surname, Basil seldom argued.

As the study door closed on them, Jane heard the purr of the front door bell and crossed quickly to the large window. A big Rolls stood in Avenue Road before the door. Was it dismay she felt, apprehension? For some reason which was not to be analysed she was irritated. She could not allow herself to believe this—nor could she wholly hide from realisation the devastating discovery. The man to whom she would be married in forty-eight hours bored her already!

She tried hard to simulate pleasure at seeing him, gave a warmth to her greeting that surprised and pleased him. She hated herself for the deception. He wore his shabbiest suit and was unusually nervous and tongue-tied. She had not sufficient self-conceit to realise that he had a palpable excuse.

When Cheyne Wells had said that she was the most beautiful woman in London, he had been daring rather than extravagant. She had all that regular features and a faultless skin could lend to natural charm of expression and grace of figure. But there was something that had neither form nor shape, an elusive glory which dwelt somewhere behind the grey eyes—a visible fragrance like a tropic dawn, like daffodils growing on a field sloping to the sea.

"I didn't expect you."

It sounded terribly trite.

"No"—he was a little hoarse. "I didn't expect to come. But I've been thinking out—things. You know the sort of thing——"

With Peter, tautology was the forerunner of incoherence.

"What things?"

"You, mostly. I'm afraid I've been rather a—what shall I say—you know——"

She knew, but would not help him. She found an ugly satisfaction in her cruelty.

"Well—you and everything. Whether it is the game to marry you when you aren't frantically keen I mean—well, you're not, are you?"

For one wild moment she was urged to tell him the truth, tempering the blow with protestations of her friendship.

"You haven't come to break it off, have you, Peter?"

What a liar she was! She was aghast at the duplicity of the concern in her voice.

"Er—no. I thought I'd like you to say—you know?"

"You'd like me to break it off?"

Then the danger of this drift came to her. In consternation she realised that the return of her father would precipitate this cloudy mixture of hint and half-dissolved intention into a definite separation.

"Don't be silly. Of course I wouldn't dream of doing anything so——" She paused here for a word, rejected "absurd" as ill-fitting. Happily he filled the gap. If a large, relieved sigh can fill a gap.

"Sorry—I'm rather worried to-night. A fellow from Scotland Yard has been to see me. I told you that. I have a sneaking admiration for Scotland Yard—I was in the Rhodesian police when I was a kid."

"Did you find a gold mine in Rhodesia?"

She smiled the question, but there was purpose in it.

His confusion dumbfounded her.

"No. I—er—inherited it from—from my father."

She could have sworn that the hand that went up to his face was shaking; he seemed to realise that his agitation needed explaining.

"How abruptly you asked that question! You made me feel as if I had stolen the money!"

Her steady eyes were fixed on his.

"I didn't even ask you about money—I was joking—I don't even know whether one does find gold mines in Rhodesia."

She was lying at the rate of one every few seconds, she noted, through the awkward silence which followed.

He was the type of man (she decided) that would make most girls envious of her fortune. She would give him full points for his looks—ordinarily that kind of face fascinated her. The straight nose and firm chin and the big, rather deep-set eyes. A good figure too—an athlete of a man. If he would only talk! If he had the aplomb of Basil or the worldliness of Donald Wells!

There he sat, the most obviously ill-at-ease visitor that had ever come to the studios; literally twiddling his fingers and trying, in his disjointed way, to make conversation about the weather and etching.

John Leith led the way out of his study, and a somewhat chastened Basil followed. Not so chastened that he could not wink at Jane as he caught her eye. Nor completely squashed either.

"I say, honestly, Jane—what about this last spinster fling? Here's the Arts Ball calling, and it won't take you a minute to dress. Old Peter won't mind. I'll bet he wants to talk business."

She looked expectantly at Peter. His brows had met: for the first time since their acquaintance began. That decided her.

"I think I'll go, daddy," she said.

Mr. Leith shrugged his shoulders. When Jane came down, a beautiful, ethereal thing in green, Peter had gone.

Somehow she did not enjoy the evening.