Читать книгу The Face in the Night - Edgar Wallace - Страница 5

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"Peter and Paul fetched four shillin's each," reported old Mrs. Graffitt, peering near-sightedly at the coins as she laid them on the table. "Harriet, Martha, Jenny, Elizabeth Queenie and Holga—?"

"Olga," corrected the girl sitting at the table, pencil in hand. "Let us be respectful, even to hens."

"They fetched half a crown each from Mr. Gribs the butcher. It's unchristian to call hens by name, anyhow."

Audrey Bedford made a rapid calculation.

"With the furniture that makes thirty-seven pounds ten shillings," she said, "which will about pay the hen-feed man and your wages, and leave me enough to get to London."

"If I had my rights," said Mrs. Graffitt, sniffing tearfully, "I'd get more than my wages. I've looked after you ever since before your poor dear mother died, obliging you as no other mortal woman would. And now I'm cast aside without a home, and I've got to live with my eldest son."

"You're lucky to have an eldest son," said Audrey, unmoved.

"If you gave me a pound for luck... ? "

"Whose luck? Not mine, you dear old humbug," laughed the girl. "Mrs. Graffitt, don't be silly! You've been living on this property like a —a fighting cat! Poultry farming doesn't pay and never will pay when your chief of staff has a private sale for the eggs. I was working it out the other day, and I reckoned that you've had forty pounds' worth of eggs a year."

"Nobody have ever said I was a thief," quavered the old woman, her hands trembling. "I've looked after you since you were a bit of a girl, and it's very hard to be told that you're a thief." She wept gulpily into her handkerchief.

"Don't cry," said Audrey; "the cottage is damp enough."

"Where will you be going, miss?" Mrs. Graffitt tactfully passed over the question of her honesty.

"I don't know; London, perhaps."

"Got any relations there, miss?"

Perhaps, at this the last moment, the late owner of Beak Farm would be a little communicative. The Bedfords always were closer than oysters.

"Never you mind. Get me a cup of tea and then come for your wages."

"London's a horruble place." Mrs. Graffitt shook her head. "Murders and suicides and robberies and what-nots. Why. they robbed a real queen the other night!"

"Goodness!" said Audrey mechanically. She was wondering what had happened to six other chickens that Mrs. Graffitt had not reported upon.

"Robbed her of hundreds of thousan's' worth of diamonds," she said impressively. "You ought to read the papers more—you miss life."

"And talking of robbery," said Audrey gently, "what happened to Myrtle and Primrose and Gwen and Bertha—?"

"Oh, them?" For a second even Mrs. Graffitt was confused. "Didn't I give you the money? It must have slipped through a hole in my pocket. I've lost it."

"Don't bother," said Audrey. "I'll send for the village policeman —he's a wonderful searcher."

Mrs. Graffitt found the money almost immediately.

The old woman shuffled into the low-roofed kitchen and Audrey looked around the familiar room. The chair on which her mother had sat, her hard face turned to the blackened fireplace, Audrey had burnt. One charred leg still showed in the fire.

No, there was nothing here of tender memory. It was a room of drudgery and repression. She had never known her father, and Mrs. Bedford had never spoken of him. He had been a bad lot, and through his wickedness had forced a woman of gentle birth to submit to the hard life that had been hers.

"Is he dead, Mother?" the child had asked.

"I hope so," was the uncompromising reply.

Dora had never asked such inconvenient questions, but then she was older, nearer in sympathy to the woman, shared her merciless nature and her prejudices.

Mrs. Graffitt had brought her tea and counted her money before she wailed her farewell.

"I'll have to kiss you before I go," she sobbed.

"I'll give you an extra shilling not to," said Audrey hastily, and Mrs. Graffitt took the shilling.

It was all over. Audrey passed through the December wreckage of the garden, opened a gate, and, taking a short cut to the churchyard, found the grave and stood silently before it, her hands clasped.

"Good-bye," she said evenly and, dry-eyed, went back to the house.

The end and the beginning. She was not sorry; she was not very glad. Her box of books had already gone to the station and was booked through to the parcels office at Victoria.

As to the future—she was fairly well educated, had read much, thought much, and was acquainted with the rudiments of shorthand —self-taught in the long winter evenings, when Mrs. Graffitt thought, and said, that she would be better employed with a knitting- needle.

"There's tons of time," growled the village omnibus driver as he threw her bag into the dark and smelly interior. "If it wasn't for these jiggering motor-cars I'd cut it finer. But you've got to drive careful in these days."

A prophetic saying.

The girl was stepping into the bus after her bag when the stranger appeared. He looked like a lawyer's middle-aged clerk, having just that lack of sartorial finish.

"Excuse me. Miss Bedford. My name is Willitt. Can I have a few words with you this evening when you return?"

"I am not returning," she said. "Do I owe you anything?"

Audrey always asked that question of polite strangers. Usually they said "yes", for Mrs. Graffitt had the habit which was locally known as "chalking up".

"No, miss. Not coming back? Could I have your address? I wanted to see you on a—well, an important matter."

He was obviously agitated.

"I can't give you my address, I'm afraid. Give me yours and I will write to you."

He carefully blacked out the description of the business printed on the card, and substituted his own address.

"Now then!" called the aggrieved driver. "If you wait any longer you'll miss that train."

She jumped into the bus and banged the door tight.

It was at the corner of Ledbury Lane that the accident happened. Coming out on to the main road, Dick Shannon took the corner a little too sharply, and the back wheels of his long car performed a graceful skid. The bump that followed was less graceful. The back of the car struck the Fontwell village omnibus just as it was drawing abreast of the car, neatly sliced off the back wheel and robbed that ancient vehicle of such dignity as weather and wear had left to it.

There was a solitary passenger, and she had reached the muddy road before Dick, hat in hand, had reached her, alarm and penitence on his good- looking face.

"I'm most awfully sorry. You're not hurt, I hope?"

He thought she was seventeen, although she was two years older. She was cheaply dressed; her long coat was unmistakably renovated. Even the necklet of fur about her throat was shabby and worn. These facts he did not notice. He looked down into a face that seemed flawless. The curve of eyebrows or set of eyes perhaps, the perfect mouth maybe, or else it was the texture and colouring of the skin... He dreaded that she should speak, and that, in the crude enunciation of the peasant, he should lose the illusion of the princess.

"Thank you—I was a little scared. I shan't catch my train." She looked ruefully at the stricken wheel.

The voice dispelled his fears. The ragged princess was a lady.

"Are you going to Barnham Junction? I am passing there," he said. "And anyway, if I hadn't been going that way, I must go to send relief for this poor lad."

The driver of the bus, to whom he was referring in such compassionate terms, had climbed down from his perch, his grey beard glittering with rain, his rheumy eye gleaming malevolently.

"Why don't you look where you're going?" He wheeaed the phrases proper to such an occasion. "Want all the road, dang ye?"

Dick unstrapped his coat and felt for his pocket-book.

"Jehu," he said, "here is my card, a Treasury bill and my profound apologies."

"My name's Herbert Jiles," said the driver suspiciously; he took the card and the money.

"Jehu is a fanciful name," said Dick, "and refers to the son of Nimshi, who 'driveth furiously'."

"I was nearly walking," said the indignant Mr. Jiles. "It was you as was driving furiously."

"Help will come from Barnham," said Dick. "Now, young lady, can you trust yourself alone with me in this car of Juggernaut?"

"I think so," she smiled, and, rescuing her bag from the bus, jumped in at his side.

"London is also my destination," said Dick, "but I won't suggest that you come all the way with me, though it would save you a train fare."

She did not answer. He had a feeling that she was being prim, but presently she cleared away that impression.

"I think I will go by train: my sister may come to meet me at the station."

There was no very great confidence in her tone.

"Do you live hereabouts?"

"At Fontwell," she said. "I had a cottage there. It used to be mother's, until she died. Have you ever tried to live on eggs?"

Dick was startled.

"Not entirely," he said. "They are extremely nutritive, I understand, but —?"

"I don't mean eat them; I mean, have you ever tried to get a living by poultry-farming?"

He shook his head.

"Well, don't," she said emphatically. "Hens are not what they used to be. Mrs. Graffatt—she kept house for me and absorbed my profits —says that a great change has come over hens since the war. She isn't sure whether it's Bolshevism or Spanish influenza."

He laughed. "So you've given it up?"

She nodded several times.

"I can't say that I've sold the old home; it was sold by bits in the shape of mortgages. That sounds pathetic, doesn't it? Well, it isn't! The old home is ugly and full of odd comers that bumped your head, and smells of a hundred generations of owners who never took baths, except when the roof leaked. And the drainage system goes back to the days of the Early Britons, and none of the windows fit. My sympathies are entirely with the grasping mortgagee—poor soul!"

"You're lucky to have a nice sister to meet you at the station," he said. He was thinking of her as seventeen or perhaps a little younger, and his manner was a trifle paternal.

"I suppose I am," she said without enthusiasm. "This is the beginning of Barnham, isn't it?"

"This is the beginning of Barnham," he agreed, and a few minutes later, brought the machine before the station entrance.

He got down after her, carrying her pitiably light baggage to the platform, and insisted upon waiting until the train came in.

"Your sister lives in London, of course?"

"Yes: in Curzon Street."

It was queer that she should have told him that. Nobody in the county was even aware that she had a sister.

Dick did not show his surprise.

"Is she... " It was a delicate question. "Is she—er—working there?"

"Oh, no. She is Mrs. Martin Elton."

She wondered at herself as she said the words.

"The devil she is!" he was startled into saying.

The train was signalled at that moment, and he hurried off to get her some magazines for the journey.

"It is Awfully kind of you, Mr.——? My name is Audrey Bedford."

"I shall remember that," he smiled. "I've a wonderful memory for names. Mine is Jackson."

He stood watching the train until the dull red of the tail-lamps swung round a curve out of sight. Then he went slowly back to his car and drove to the police station to notify his accident.

Mrs. Martin Elton, and that was her sister! If he had given her his real name, and she had gone to Curzon Street and told pretty Dora Elton that she had passed the time of day with Captain Richard Shannon, the harmonies of the bijou house in Curzon Street might very well have been disturbed.

And with good reason. Dora Elton was the one crook in London that Dick Shannon was aching to trap.