Читать книгу The Face in the Night - Edgar Wallace - Страница 14

Table of Contents

AUDREY BEDFORD held the soddened slip of paper nearer to her eyes to assure herself of the address. The writing, in pencil, was worn now to a faint and almost indecipherable smear. In the failing light of a grey December afternoon it would have been difficult enough to read, but to all other disadvantages was added the drive of wind and sleet. Her old coat was already saturated. It had been wet before she had walked a mile; the brim of her black velvet hat drooped soggily.

She put the paper back in her pocket and looked a little fearfully at the grim door of No. 551 Portman Square. This forbidding house, with its dingy stone front and blank, expressionless windows, might hide interiors of comfort and luxury, but there was little promise in the outward appearance.

What would be the end of this essay, she wondered, with a calmness which seemed strange, even to herself. Would it go with the others and end in dismissal, or, what was worse, an engagement on terms unspoken but none the less clearly understood?

Portman Square was empty of pedestrians. Down one side of the open space the great red buses rumbled and closed taxis and cars sped past at intervals. Drawing a long sigh, she walked up the two steps and looked for the bell. There was none. The door was innocent of knocker—she tapped gently with her knuckles.

"Who is there?"

The voice seemed to come from the side stone doorposts. "Miss Bedford," she said. "I have an appointment with Mr. Malpas."

There was a pause, and then, as the door opened slowly: "Come upstairs—the room on the first landing," said the voice.

It came from a small grating let in the wall. The hall was empty. One yellow globe supplied the illumination. Whilst she was looking around the door closed again, by no obvious agency. For a second she was seized with a sudden unaccountanle fear. She sought the handle of the door: there was none. The black, heavy portal was closed upon her irrevocably.

Audrey's hands were trembling; cold and fear combined to break her courage—cold and fear and hunger, for she had taken nothing that day but a piece of bread and the remains of a coffee left over from the previous night.

She looked around the hall. Of furniture there was none except an old chair against the wall. The marble floor was thick with dust, the discoloured walls innocent of pictures or hangings.

With an effort she controlled her shaking limbs and walked up the stone stairs. On the first landing was a polished rosewood door—the only interior door she had seen—and, after a pause to summon the reserves of her courage, she knocked.

"Is that Miss Bedford?" This time the voice came from over her head. Looking up, she saw a second grating in the recessed doorway. It was placed so that any visitor knocking would stand immediately underneath.

"Yes," she answered, holding her anxiety in check. Instantly the rosewood swung open, and she passed into a broad, well-lit hall. Facing her was a second door, ajar.

"Come in, please." This time the voice spoke from the room; it was less distinct.

She hesitated, her heart thumping painfully. The room seemed to be in darkness save for one faint reflection. Pushing open the door, she walked in. It was a large room, about thirty feet in width, and almost twice that length. The walls, so completely draped by velvet curtains that it was impossible to tell where the windows were hidden, ran up into gloom; the visitor must guess where the black ceiling began and the walls ended. Under her feet was a rich, deep carpet, into which her halting feet sank as she took three steps, stopped and looked open-eyed.

In the far corner of the room a man sat at a desk, on which a green- shaded lamp afforded the only illumination the gloomy chamber possessed.

A strangely revolting figure. His head was narrow and bald; his yellow face, innocent of hair, was puckered in a thousand wrinkles and seams; the nose was big and pendulous. His long, pointed chin moved all the time as though he were talking to himself.

"Sit in that chair," he said hollowly.

The chair she saw when her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness: it stood behind a small table, and slowly and painfully she sat down.

"I have sent for you to make your fortune," he said, in his mumbling voice. "Many people have sat in that chair and have gone away rich."

In the green light that fell athwart his face from the lampshade he looked like some hideous imagining of a Chinese artist. She shuddered, and gazed steadily past him.

"On the table—look!" he said.

He must have pressed some button on the table, for instantly she found herself sitting, the focus of a powerful yellow light that fell from a bell-shaped shade above and threw a circle of bright radiance on the floor around her. And then she saw on the table a thin package of money.

"Take it!" he said.

After a second's hesitation she stretched out her hand and took the notes, shivering from head to foot. The light above was slowly dimming. Presently it faded altogether, and she sat in the darkness, her hands unconsciously gripping the wealth that had come to her. And a key—she did not realize that until, later, he referred to the fact.

"Audrey Bedford. That is your name?"

She made no reply.

"Three weeks ago you were released from prison where you served a sentence of a year, or nine months of a year, for being accessory to a robbery?"

"Yes," said the girl quietly. "I should have told you that in any event. I have invariably told that when I have applied for work."

"Innocent, of course?" he asked.

There was no smile on his expressionless face, and she could not judge whether his tone was ironical or not. She guessed was.

"Yes: I was innocent," she said evenly.

"Faked charge... a frame-up, eh? Elton had it all fixed for you. You knew nothing of the robbery? Just an innocent agent?"

He waited.

"I knew nothing of the robbery," she said quietly.

"Did you say that at the trial?"

She did not answer. He sat so still that she could have believed that he was a waxen figure, worked by some drug-crazy artist.

"You are badly dressed... that offends me. You have money; buy the best. Come this day week at this hour. You-will find a key on the table: this will unlock all doors, if the control is released."

Audrey found her voice.

"I must know what my duties are," she said, and her voice sounded dead and lifeless in that draped room. "It is very good of you to trust me with so much money, but you will see how impossible it is to accept unless I know what is expected of me."

Famished as she was, with the prospect of a supperless night, and before her eyes the drab ugliness of her little room and the reproachful face of her landlady, it required more than an ordinary effort to say this. Hunger demoralizes the finest nature, and she was faint for want of food.

He spoke slowly.

"Your task is to break a man's heart," he said.

She almost laughed.

"That sounds... rather alarming. You are not serious?"

He offered no reply. She felt a cold draught behind her, and turning, experienced a little thrill of fear to see the door opening. "Goodnight."

The figure at the end of the room waved a hand towards the door. The interview was over.

She had put one foot on the stairs when the door closed again, and she went down to the hall, her mind in a state of chaos. The front door was not open: evidently he expected her to use the key. With trembling fingers she tried to press it into the microscopic slit which, after a search, she discovered. In her haste the key slipped and fell. It was so small that she could not find it at first. The force of her pressure had sent it into a corner of the hall. She found it after a search, and found something else too—a pebble, the size of a nut. Attached was a blob of red sealing-wax and the clear impression of a tiny seal. It was so unusual an object that she forgot for the moment her very urgent desire to get out of the house. The bizarre has a fascination for the young, and there was something very unusual about that common piece of stone so carefully sealed...

Audrey looked up the stairs, hoping to see the old man and ask him if this queer find of hers had any interest for him. Then she remembered that she would see him again in a week, and she dropped the pebble into her little handbag.

So doing, she became aware that one of her hands was' gripping a package of notes. Six hundred pounds! There were three of a hundred, four of fifty, and twenty of five.

Audrey drew a long breath. She thrust the money out of sight and turned the key in the lock—in another second she was facing the realities of a blizzard. The taxicab that was crawling leisurely towards her had no significance at first. Then it came upon her that she was an enormously rich woman, and, her heart beating a little faster, she put up her hand to signal the cab, walking rapidly to meet, it as it drew in to the kerb. "Take me to —?"

Where? First food; then, in the sanity which food might bring,-a few minutes of quiet contemplation.

"She's had one over the eight," grinned the driver.

Audrey's first impression was that the man was speaking of her, and she wondered what he meant. But he was looking beyond her, and, following the direction of his eyes, she saw a sight that first sickened and then moved her to pity. Clinging to the rails that bordered the area was a woman. She held tight with one hand, swaying unsteadily, whilst with the other she was manipulating the knocker of the front door of the house next to that place of mystery which she had left.

Her pathetic finery, the draggling imitation paradise plume of her hat, the wet and matted surface of her fur coat, ludicrously fashionable in cut, made an unforgettable picture. Drunkenness was loathsome to the girl; she realized its horror to the full when she saw it in a woman. Somehow the fighting viragos of Gray's Inn Road were infinitely less repulsive than the spectacle of this poor creature with her red, swollen face and her maudlin mutterings.

Audrey had withdrawn her foot from the step of the cab, intending to go to her, when the door was flung open violently, and she saw a thin, elderly man appear.

"Here—what's the row? Coming here making this fuss at a gentleman's house. Go away or I'll send for a copper!"

Tonger's voice came down to the girl through the shrill whistle of the wind.

"Going in—" gasped the wreck, and lurched towards the open doorway.

Audrey, watching, saw him try to hold her, but she collapsed on to him.

"Here, hold up!"

There was a little struggle, and suddenly Tonger jerked the woman into the hall and the door slammed.

"That's Mr. Marshalt's house," said the cabman. "He's the African millionaire. Where did you say you'd like to go, miss?"

She was inspired to name a little dressmaker's shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, a shop before whose windows she always lingered when her search for work brought her westward. Later, she would consider the propriety of spending this terrible old man's money. For the moment her creature needs dominated. Opposite the dressmaker's was a shoe shop; two blocks away was a snug hotel.

"I'll come out of this dream some time," said Audrey, looking through the blurred windows at the shops that flashed past, "but I'm coming out with dry clothes and a bed that isn't nobbly!"