Читать книгу The Million-Dollar Story - Edgar Wallace - Страница 5

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IN the meantime John Sands had plodded steadily through the rain in the direction of Berkeley Square. From that aristocratic and exclusive place ran Davis Street, a thoroughfare partly made up of small but expensive shops. It was above one of these that Marcus Leman had his modest flat. Leman lived with his niece in a style which might properly be described as frugal. He had hired the maisonnette furnished, and had been content to live in this place for the past five years.

He was lying on a sofa which was drawn up close to the window when John Sands, who had admitted himself with a key, entered the room. The room was illuminated only by a solitary candle reading-lamp placed on a small table near the head of the sofa. The tiniest of fires glowed in the grate. At sight of the visitor Mark Leman withdrew his eyes from the uncurtained window and rose slowly. He was a tall man and painfully thin. His black suit hung on him like a sack, and his shrunken neck was encircled by a straight white collar which had the appearance of being at least three sizes too large for him. The face was small and yellow, and at that moment covered by a two days’ growth of grey bristles. The only article of jewellery on his person was a large gold chain which ran from the top waistcoat pocket on the one side to the bottom waistcoat pocket on the other. His shirt cuffs were frayed but clean, and his shoes were cracked to the toes but brightly polished, as well they might be, because Marcus Leman, five times a dollar millionaire, had made it a practice of his life to polish his own shoes every morning.

He must have been six feet two in height, for he overshadowed Sands by head and shoulders.

He nodded toward the sideboard. Two liqueur glasses filled with golden-brown old brandy had been placed on a tray. Sands handed one glass to his host and tossed down the other. It was a queer little ceremony which was invariably carried out.

“You are ten minutes late,” said Leman, wiping his lips. “Get the cards.”

“And lights too, I think,” said Sands, snapping a switch on the wall.

He walked to a small cabinet, took out two packs of cards and a scoring-board, and brought them back to the table.

“What do you see out of the window that interests you?” he asked curiously, for the night was dark and thick.

“I was watching that reporter at work on the other side of the street.”

“Reporter!” said John in surprise.

Leman grunted.

“He’s got an apartment over there. He’s one of Holland Brown’s boys, the New York Mail Advertiser.”

“How do you know?” asked John, more interested than was his wont.

“Because he came over and wanted to interview me to-day,” said the other carelessly. “When was I going back to New York? Was it true I was married?”

He chuckled again.

“I suppose that sort of thing interests the American reader,” said John as he shuffled the cards.

“That sort of thing!” snarled the other. “Why, I’m the big story! Say, Sands, it would pay Holland Brown to keep a man to specialise on me. Don’t you read the papers? Interesting! I should say! I’m the biggest news story in America.”

“And is he—specialising on you?” asked John Sands carelessly.

The old man grinned.

“I know as much about him as he knows about me, I guess,” he said. “He’s going back to New York by the next boat, with a grip full of new Leman stories, some I’ve told him and some Faith gave him, I guess.”

“Faith?” Sands raised his eyebrows.

“Sure, Faith,” said Marcus Leman.

“But you don’t allow your niece to associate with that kind of fellow?”

“Why not?” asked the old man. “She ain’t any better than him. In fact, he’s better. He’s earning his fifty dollars a week. She has nothing—and will get nothing.”

“What will you take, senior or junior?”

They were playing piquet—a game which was Mark Leman’s one relaxation and passion. It was a game which accounted to some extent for the strange friendship which existed between these two. John Sands was a master player with an intuition—and piquet is half intuition—that defied the probabilities, and Mark Leman was probably the only man in England who was in the same class.

“I will take the senior,” said John Sands. “What shall it be for?”

“A hundred thousand dollars a point and a million on the rubber,” said Mark Leman glibly.

“That means a cent point and a dollar on the rubber, as usual,” said John without the ghost of a smile, and began dealing the cards.

“Where is Faith?” he asked.

“In her room improving her mind,” said the old man.

“It’s a hell of a life for a girl,” said John.

The elder man grinned.

“Faith will move mountains, eh?” he said. “But Hope, John Sands, Hope! The hope of my dying someday and leaving her a million! They seem to think that I’ve got a weak heart. That’s her.”

There was a tap at the door.

“Come in,” snapped Mark, and a girl entered.

John rose and offered his hand.

“Hullo, Miss Leman! I haven’t seen you for a week,” he said.

He admired Faith Leman with her big grey eyes and her pink-and-white complexion. He admired the vigour and youth of her carriage, the pride of her bearing.

The effect of her coming upon the old man would have been extraordinary to anyone but John Sands, who had so often witnessed such scenes. A dark frown gathered on Mark Leman’s face, and he rasped:

“Well, what do you want?”

She also was used to greetings of this kind, and she took no offence.

“I just looked in to see if there was anything I could do for you,” she said.

“There is nothing you can do for me,” said the old man, “except go to bed. I don’t want a hot-water bottle, or my pillows smoothed, or my hand held, or any of the attentions which the beautiful heiress pays to her dying uncle.”

She lifted her brows slightly, and with a nod to John Sands left the room.

“If you hate that girl, why do you have her round?” asked Sands.

“Mind your own business!” growled the other.

“If there is anything more astonishing than your treatment of her,” said John Sands, “it is that the girl stands for it.”

“She has to, hasn’t she?” growled Mark Leman. “Don’t I keep her mother, and wouldn’t she be in the poor-house but for me?”

“You will have to leave your money somewhere, anyway,” smiled John.

“It won’t be to her or to her fool mother, do you hear that?” roared Mark. “I have told her so. I’d rather get married. I told her that too. In fact,” he chuckled, “I told her I was going to get married.”

“And it’s not for the first time you’ve passed along that information,” said John.

“Did you bring in a paper?” asked the old man after a few silent hands had been played.

“I have an evening paper, yes,” replied John.

“Let me look at it.”

John went to his overcoat and took the paper from his pocket, and the old man turned the pages eagerly.

“Good! Good!” he said. “Mexican Consolidated are up two points. I bought 100,000 on Monday.”

John laughed.

“What the devil are you laughing at?”

“It is amusing, that is all,” said John. “Here you are straining every nerve to increase a fortune which is quite big enough for you or for any man, and not an ounce of pleasure does the extra money give you.”

“How do you know?” asked Mark Leman. “Don’t you understand that there is as much pleasure in preventing other people getting money as there is in getting money for yourself? It isn’t what I have, it’s what the other fellow doesn’t get. That tickles me. That is half the fun of the game. The real pleasure of battle lies in the defeat of your enemy.”

“And who is your enemy?” asked John curiously.

“The other fellow,” replied Mark vaguely. “Any old fellow that gets up against me on a deal of this kind.”

They played three games, Mark Leman’s nightly allowance, and the old man won. He walked to the sideboard, and poured out a glass of colourless liquid.

Sands laughed good-humouredly.

“I sometimes wonder why I stand for you myself,” he said. “I suppose there’s something you like about me.”

“There is,” said the old man.

Sands looked him straight in the eye.

“Have I ever tried to get money from you, Mark?” he asked.

“No; but that doesn’t mean you are not going to try,” said old Leman briskly. “You are one of the patient sort. It is because I admire your patience, and I am mighty curious to know what your game is, that I stand for you!”

They both laughed together.

“Why don’t you get married?” asked John Sands suddenly.

Leman eyed him with a look of suspicion.

“You haven’t a sister you want to be married off, have you?” he asked. “That isn’t your game, eh, Sands?”

“No, I haven’t a sister I want to marry off,” replied the other carelessly, “but it strikes me you are developing a grouch against the world that marriage might correct. And you have so often talked to me of getting married so as to put one over on your relations, that it has occurred to me to wonder why you haven’t carried your threat into execution.”

“I haven’t any relations, as I have told you before,” said Leman sharply. “There’s only that girl and her mother. The mother is a poor weakling who married my brother Tom, who got through life without worry by telling the waiter to keep the change. What could I do with a wife now?”

“What could she do? That’s the question,” said Sands. “How does the idea strike you? Suppose you found the right kind of accommodating woman, who would marry you and just hike off to the Continent and live around?”

“It strikes me as the most foolish suggestion you ever put forward,” said Mark. “Now get off; I want to go to bed.”

John Sands went to the hotel where he had booked a room by telephone, and spent the greater part of the night sitting up in an arm-chair before the fire, turning certain matters over in his mind.

He had met Mark Leman on a transatlantic voyage, and the pair had struck up a curious kind of friendship, which was primarily based upon the fact that John Sands possessed a very equable temper and played an excellent hand of piquet. He had inherited a small property in his youth, and had invested his money a factory in Connecticut which earned a sufficient dividend to enable him to live comfortably in London. He had known Leman by name—as who did not?—as one of the innumerable oil kings who have been dutifully crowned by the Press in the past twenty years. He knew of his extraordinary passion for publicity, his no less extraordinary meanness and his reputation as a misogynist. It irritated John Sands to see a man so rich and so void of all outward and visible signs of happiness. Mark Leman’s food cost him less than a dollar a day. He smoked cheap cigars and boasted that he had not had a new suit of clothes for fifteen years. When he crossed the Atlantic he, who could have afforded a royal suite three times over, was content to share an inside cabin with whomsoever happened to be billeted by the purser in the berth above.

John Stands, who had one of the best cabins on the ship, and who had never had less than twelve lounge suits a year, was first irritated and then amused—and then thoughtful.

He lived up to every penny of his income, and every dollar earned for him some pleasant experience. Lately the production of his factory had fallen off and he had had to sacrifice his chauffeur and the two horses he kept in training at Newmarket. Gone, too, was his pleasant dream of some day winning a Futurity, because Futurity winners are not easy to come by, and you may breed from twenty strains and still miss getting a horse guaranteed to show his nose first under the wire at the proper and appropriate moment.

So John Sands sat before the fire in his bedroom in a small hotel in Tavistock Square, dreaming dreams which were hampered at moments by the one unexpected reality which had come into his life.

And as he dreamed his rosy visions, some half a dozen rain-soaked policemen were searching the plantations north and south of Whitecross Hill, stopping now and again to curse Margaret.

“I’ll bet some fellow’s got her away,” said a stout sergeant, stopping under a dripping tree for shelter and unscrewing the top of his flask. “She wasn’t a bad-looking dame by all accounts. Have a nip, son.”

The constable took the flask and tilted it.

“Well, if any man’s got her away, I can only hope she serves him as she served her husband—here’s how!” said he.