Читать книгу The Hand of Power - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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BETTY CAREW listened, aghast. In that gloomy, dusty room, ill-lit, badly ventilated, redolent of musty paper and ancient leather bindings, she had heard many fantastic views and commands expressed by Dr. Joshua Laffin, but never one so bizarre as this.

"I don't quite understand." She was speaking no more than the truth. "Why do you wish me to do this?"

He took a pinch of snuff from a tortoiseshell box, replaced the box on the table and leant back in his high-backed chair, his dark eyes fixed on hers. He wore his customary black, and in the candle-light and against the dark background he was just a long, yellow face and a pair of lined, thin hands that moved restlessly.

"I give you neither 'why' nor 'wherefore'," he said, in a queer voice that had something of the softer notes of an owl in it; the whoo-ing of a man who habitually spoke through lips that were pursed as if to whistle. "I command. You know me, Elizabeth. I will have my way. Especially now. One has had disappointments; certain plans have miscarried. In this last matter there must be no hitch. As you know, I am but the servant of others—not of this plane."

He waved his hand to the shadowy corners of the room, and the girl experienced all the old terror that this gloomy house had inspired in her during the fourteen years she had been an inmate.

"Here is Kama, the tamed Nemesis, vitalised by my genius. Here the great Manasuputra, divine force of beneficence," he said. "You, who might have become acquainted with these mysteries, preferred the transient pleasure of sense."

An old story and an old reproach that left her unperturbed.

"My immeasurable superiority to the world," he went on, "and, therefore, to its opinions, should have helped you to overcome any stupid qualms. You are vain, you are conceited, just as all girls with a title to prettiness are vain and conceited. Your ego is distorted. Contact with me, which would have humbled most people, has merely puffed you up with pride. I am not even flattered. I would wish that my greatness abashed you. But no! Charity child, workhouse child, though no decent man or woman could know the truth about you without shrinking in horror, you persist in opposing your wishes, your 'whys' to my instructions. Gutter brat, gallows child, scum of the very dregs, I cannot teach you humility!"

He did not raise his voice in anger; the epithets fell in his cold, finicking tones, like the tappings of cold rain upon glass.

She was neither distressed nor amused. The candlelight played upon the mouldings of a spiritual face, singularly lovely. Another mystery than that he spoke about was in the shadowed eyes, mystery in the dusky shadings of her throat. Only the glory of her hair persisted, as superior to the meagre illumination as Dr. Laffin was to the world.

Dr. Laffin saw nothing of beauty in her through his hard, brown eyes, that glared without winking, vulture-like in their dispassionate intensity.

"I may be all these things," said Betty calmly, "and yet feel a natural diffidence at sitting in a shop window for people to gape at me. I see no sense in it. I don't profess to be a great actress—I know I'm not—but I love my profession too much to let it down in the way you suggest. What am I supposed to advertise?"

A gesture answered her.

"That doesn't matter, I suppose? Well, I'll not do it."

She got up slowly from the side of the worn writing-table, resolution in the poise of her head, the set of her fine mouth.

"Good night," said Laffin, not rising. "You will find your way out. I am going to take my ten. Close the door carefully."

She never expected him to say any more than this. For a second she looked down at him, her lips curled, a bitter loathing in her heart for the man who had tortured her childhood with fear, and had blasted her future to humour his whim. His head was drooping—the "ten" had overtaken him—that ten minutes of sleep so profound that nothing had ever awakened him. How helpless he was now! For one wild, mad moment she stood over him, her hands clenched, trembling in her impotent anger, and then, wrenching herself free from the hate that gripped her, she ran out of the room, down the uncarpeted stairs and into the street. The door boomed behind her.

"I hope he heard it in his dreams," she said.

The tall man who had been waiting for her at the garden gate laughed softly.

"That sounds vicious," he said.

"You like him, Clive?"

Clive Lowbridge chuckled as he helped her into the little coupé that had been waiting outside during the interview.

"Yes—in a way. His pomposity doesn't annoy me, because he is sincere. He really does think he is the greatest man in the world. And in many ways he has been helpful to me."

"How did you come to know him?"

Clive did not answer until he had brought the car on to the main road and had dodged a fast-moving tramcar.

"That fellow is exceeding all road-car limits," he growled savagely. "What were you saying? I've known him all my life. He was the family physician. The home of our illustrious family used to be in Bath, and the Laffins have been our doctors for hundreds of years. It is a sort of tradition. He was my tutor—did you know that? Laffin's clever. Most of these weird birds are. You're glad to be away from that ménage, aren't you, Betty?"

"Yes."

In her attitude there was no encouragement to continue his questioning.

"He's a queer devil. My uncle used to swear by him, and so did my great-uncle, the seventh baron"

She interrupted him, obviously anxious to turn the subject.

"How do your new honours sit upon you, Clive—heavily?"

The ninth Lord Lowbridge was mildly amused.

"The honours are a featherweight, but the mortgages—phew! How Uncle Ferrers got rid of his money, heaven knows! At least, heaven and the accountants! We always thought he was immensely wealthy. I fear it is art or nothing with me, but I shall be obliged to paint one masterpiece a year to pay the interest on the mortgages." She laughed softly.

"Your celebration party was premature."

He grinned again as he sent the car whizzing through the gates of Regent's Park, narrowly avoiding a sedate limousine "La Florette," he said tersely, as he glimpsed the woman in its blazing interior. "That woman just hates being unnoticed! Why she doesn't have her name in lights on the top of the car is a standing wonder to me. You know her, of course?"

Betty Carew made a little face in the dark. She knew La Florette very well, only too well!

"Poor Clive!" she said. "A lord without money is a pathetic creature! Not so pathetic, perhaps, as an ambitious actress who is doomed to be a showgirl—at least, that is what I'm going to be if Robespierre has his way."

"Robespierre—oh, you mean the doctor? He does look like the sea-green incorruptible now that you mention the fact. What does he want you to do?"

Betty fetched a long sigh. She had returned of her own volition to a subject that was hateful to discuss, and yet impossible to dismiss from her thoughts.

"He has one of his mad schemes—I am to accept an engagement from a man who wishes to advertise a desk. He mentioned a desk early in the conversation, so I suppose that is what it is."

"But how?"

"I am to sit in a store window for four hours a day—the window is to be built furnished like a study—wearing a green dress, and writing, or pretending to write, at the desk, on which"—she laughed in spite of her anger—"will be a jade vase with one red rose. Can you imagine it?" Clive Lowbridge did not answer for a long time.

"Do you think he's mad?" he asked.

"I'm sure—there is no question about it—and oh! there is another thing! A man will one day come to me and ask me for 'the message' and I am to give him a letter which will be kept in the top right-hand drawer of the desk."

"He is mad," said Lowbridge emphatically, "and of course you'll do nothing of the kind, Betty."

She shook her head.

"I don't know. I may be obliged—"

He snorted contemptuously.

"Obliged! Jumping cats! I'll talk to him if he starts anything of that kind. The future Lady Lowbridge isn't going to figure in a puppet show."

She squeezed his arm affectionately.

"Clive, you've other things to think about than marriage—and so have I, my dear. Do you know Pips?"

The car had pulled up before her lodging in Park Road.

"Orange or lemon?" he asked, as he helped her alight.

"Pips—Pawter's Intensive Publicity Service? They are advertisers and press agents. And they have the further handicap of employing the most insufferable young man in London. Clive, that youth haunts me! I'm sure the doctor has engaged him to shadow me."

"What is his name—I mean the objectionable young man?"

"Holbrook—W. Holbrook. I suppose that the 'W' stands for William. Mr. van Campe calls him 'Bill,' and so do most people round the theatre. If you ever have the chance will you squash him for me, Clive, dear?"

"He's squashed," said Clive solemnly, and brushed her cheek with his lips.

An hour later he was standing before his mirror, fastening his dress tie with great care, a frown on his pink face. A good-looking young man, with the classic features that the old Greek sculptors gave to the heroes of mythology, he had the clear eyes and the frame of a trained athlete. A series of accidents had brought him from the obscurity and poverty of a Chelsea apartment, where he won a precarious livelihood from painting landscapes of dubious originality, to the lordship of Lowbridge and the attenuated income of estates so heavily encumbered that it was difficult to find a labourer's tumbledown cottage that did not represent collateral security against an overdraft negotiated by his improvident uncle.

His mind alternated between Betty and the eccentric doctor, in whose house he had first met her five years before—slim, a gaunt-eyed child, watchful, suspicious, pitiably ready to shrink at a word, all too willing to humour the tyrant who was both parent and guardian to her.

Finishing his dressing, he rang the bell for his servant.

"Benson, you used to work in a club before you misguidedly accepted service with me?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Then you ought to know everybody. I want you to discover who Holbrook is—Mr. W. Holbrook of Pawter's Publicity Service. You'll find their names in the telephone directory."

"Yes, my lord."

Benson, stocky and broad of shoulder, needed no further instructions. Half his attraction to Clive was his taciturnity.

"And, Benson," as the man was leaving the room, "my cigars have been evaporating at an alarming rate. Will you order a hundred of the cheaper brand? They need not be bad cigars—get some that suit your palate."

"Yes, my lord."

Benson was unmoved, neither apologetic nor confused. He had seen Dr. Laffin slip a bundle into his pocket the last time the doctor had called, but it was not his place to report the delinquencies of a guest.