Читать книгу The Hand of Power - Edgar Wallace - Страница 7

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BENSON gave a final and an approving glance at the tea-table, filled a silver cigarette box from a carton he took from the sideboard cupboard, lit a tiny spirit lamp and drew back the velvet hangings a little farther so that the scarlet geraniums in the window-boxes could be seen with better effect. One casement window was open and a soft breeze played with the silken curtains.

Clive Lowbridge strolled in as his valet-butler was at the window.

"That will do very nicely, Benson."

He looked at his watch.

"Miss Carew is coming immediately after the matinee. You will see that the car is ready to take her home?"

"Yes, my lord." He paused by the door. "With reference to the young man Holbrook, of whom your lordship spoke: he is an American, born in Dayton, Ohio, and he was for some years on the staff of the London Dispatch-Herald. He is now a junior partner in Pawter's Publicity Agency, being a relative of the principal shareholder. He lives in Paddington and is unmarried. So far as I can ascertain, he has written two books which were published by a firm in Boston, but he has no other peculiarities."

Lowbridge looked hard at his servitor, but Benson's face betrayed not so much as a trace of a smile.

"Thank you, Benson. You have settled down to your new job?"

"Yes, my lord."

"You like this a little better than working in a club?"

"Much better, my lord—" he hesitated.

"But it isn't such a good job as you thought, eh? Well, mine isn't either, Benson. I thought I should be spreading myself in Park Lane. My uncle left very little money." Benson inclined his head respectfully.

"I am not surprised, my lord. The late Lord Lowbridge was known to me—I have never ventured to inform your lordship before. I used to work at his club in the West End, and I saw a whole lot of him. He spent money like water, and I've known him to lose as much as twenty thousand pounds in one night at baccarat. The Glebe Club is noted for high play. A very affable gentleman. So was his son, who died so suddenly."

"You knew my cousin too, did you?"

"Yes, my lord. Without wishing to alarm your lordship, there seems something constitutionally wrong about the family. The Honourable John died of heart failure, and you could have taken a lease of his life; Lord Lowbridge a good-living gentleman and as hard as nails, went off in exactly the same way a year after—nobody would have dreamt that his lordship was so near to death. And both were under the care of a clever doctor—Dr. Laffin."

He dusted an invisible speck from the back of a chair. "You know Dr. Laffin—was he a member of the Glebe?"

"Yes, my lord."

A buzzer sounded in the hall, and he went, without unseemly hurry, to admit Betty.

"How serious you look, Clive! Has anything happened?" she asked after the greetings were over.

"No—no! Benson is a queer chap."

"Benson—your servant?"

"Yes. I find that he knew my uncle, and I guess he knew Laffin too; they were both members of the Glebe. That is where my relative dissipated the family guilders. I shouldn't be surprised if the doctor hadn't lost a considerable portion of his assets under the same roof."

She sighed as she settled down to pour the tea.

"Dr. Laffin has always been poor," she said, "and yet he owns things that are worth thousands of pounds. One day I went into the study without knocking, and he had on his desk a most beautiful piece of jewellery—a great golden clasp studded with diamonds. He was very angry that I had seen it, and told me that it was only a worthless replica of the Buckle of Isis. But I am sure it was real." Clive bit his lip, and in his fine eyes was the shadow of trouble.

"When did you see this?" he asked.

"Over a year ago—about a fortnight after we had had the strangest adventure in Devon. Do you remember my telling you about the monks who stopped the car?"

He nodded.

"At least, I suppose they were monks," she went on. "I don't know why, but I associated the gold clasp—and it was gold, Clive, in spite of what the doctor said—with that meeting."

"On the moor?"

She nodded.

"Yes: we were very poor at the time, and the doctor was short of ready money, though he used to hint of a huge fortune which was coming to him. I'm certain he could not have had the buckle before. I think they gave it to him." Clive Lowbridge looked at her thoughtfully.

"I don't understand him," he said. "But he was good to me as a boy, and I cannot quite share your dislike for him. For all the years of tutorial work he gave me, he did not charge a penny."

Betty could have pursued the subject, but refrained, understanding his reluctance to speak against the man she hated. And she remembered, on the way to the theatre, the circumstances that had made it necessary for Clive's mother to enlist the services of the family doctor as an unpaid tutor. She had been left a widow with a microscopic income; three lives had stood between her boy and the title, and the prospect of his inheriting the mythical wealth of the Lowbridge estates was a remote one. Laffin had come to the rescue—which was not like him.

She could never associate the doctor with generosity; there must have been some quid pro quo. She wondered what it was.

When, that night, Betty Carew strolled on to the stage of the Orpheum, only the pilot lights were glowing in the battens, for Van Campe was an economist, and there was urgent need for economy, as she was to learn.

From behind the heavy tableau curtains came the sound of tuning fiddles. Three shivering chorus girls, wrapped in light shawls, stood in the wings, looking dejectedly at the worn scene that, in the bright lights, would be the Terrace at Monte Carlo. A stage hand was propping up a flimsy balustrade, and the property man, with a clothes basket full of toy balloons, was waiting patiently, smoking a surreptitious cigarette.

It was very cold and very miserable, and Betty wandered disconsolately to the little peep-hole in the curtain and stared into the deserted auditorium. There were seven people in the stalls, obviously "paper." The pit held a fringe of audience—the first two rows were hardly filled, though the doors had been open for half an hour. The young assistant stage-manager joined her.

"Looks lively, doesn't it?" he asked bitterly. "I've seen a bigger audience for a troupe of performing fleas!"

"It isn't very hopeful," she said, and he laughed sardonically.

"It is hopeful," he said. "That is all we've got left—hope! A musical comedy that hasn't any music worth whistling, and not enough comedy to raise a ha-ha from start to finish, naturally starts handicapped. The notice goes up to-night—you've seen it?"

She nodded.

The Girl from Fez had run for a fortnight. There had been seven weeks' rehearsal, and on the notice-board had appeared a typewritten slip. She had seen "the notice" before, but at the end of a long and successful run. Now this intimation that the play would be taken off in two weeks' time brought a little heartache. The last lines of the notice were even more alarming:

"The provisional notice given to artistes on the first night will operate as stated."

"Does that include me, Mr. Tillett?" she asked, recalling this ominous warning.

"I'm afraid it does, Miss Carew," said the manager. "The governor knew he had a flivver before he read the criticisms in the morning papers—he dashed in and got himself on the safe side. La Florette isn't a friend of yours, is she?"

Betty shook her head. La Florette, the thin-lipped French dancer, was not in the cast. Van Campe seldom played her, but she sat by his side at rehearsals, and in her strange French criticised and sneered and laughed derisively, and told Van Campe how much better these things were done in France; and Van Campe, who was her slave, cut and pruned, until authors were in despair, and the cast in a state of mutiny.

"Well"

The manager opened his mouth to speak, when the pass door connecting the stage with the front of the house opened, and a fluffy figure floated through; from the crown of her waved and henna'd hair to the tips of her jewelled shoes she was a triumph of the human dollmaker's art.

She picked a dainty way through the debris of the stage, and stood before the girl, surveying her through a pair of unnecessary lorgnettes. Under her make-up Betty grew red at the insolent scrutiny.

"Ah, you are Carew, yes? I wanted to speak to you. 'Ow do you do your 'air? It is not peroxide, no? I 'ave admire it. You are a bad actress, and your voice, mon Dieu! it is awful, but your 'air is lovely! You 'ave puzzle me, so I promised Charles I would ask."

"And now you have kept your promise, Miss Florette," said Betty, striving to tune out the anger from her voice.

"You tell me—no?"

"There is nothing to tell you. My hair is as the Lord made it." Betty smiled in spite of her annoyance. "I thought I had told you that before."

La Florette shrugged her thin shoulders.

"But that is what you would call—a lie, eh? A little story?"

Betty's eyes snapped fire.

"It is what you would call a lie too, I think," she said, with ominous calm; "for if you are not pure unadulterated Limehouse, I have never met a lady from that district! Your broken English may sound pretty to a Dutchman or a Greek, but, unfortunately, I speak the language rather well, and I know that, beyond a smattering of Montmarte argot, you are as ignorant of French as I am of Chinese!"

"Oh, I am, ami?"

La Florette, shocked out of her pose, dropped her hands to her hips, and her shrill voice rose to a scream.

"I'll teach you to insult an artiste of my standing, you—you chorus girl! Limehouse, am I...?"

The flow of expletive which followed supplied the answer to her question.

"... and I'll have you fired out of this theatre, Miss, before you're a minute older. I've got an international reputation to keep up, I have! I don't allow no gutter-bred—"

Mr. Van Campe appeared, an agitated and rotund man whose hands flashed gay lights as he waved them in expostulation and protest.

"Put her understudy on," he roared. "Pay her salary and throw her out!"

Betty went up to her dressing-room, hot, angry, but triumphant. She had prayed for the courage to say all that she had said to Florette. She would go to De Fell—the urbane young manager, who had offered her a part in his new production. She grew cheerful at the thought. It was at that moment that her dresser knocked at the door "Dr. Laffin, Miss," she said.

Betty sighed heavily. Here was a shadow not so easily dispelled.