Читать книгу White Face - Edgar Wallace - Страница 5

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IN his rare moments of leisure Dr. Marford was wont to stand in his surgery, behind the red calico curtains which were stretched across the big window level with the bridge of his thin, aristocratic nose, and muse, a little sourly, upon Tidal Basin, its people and its future.

He had material for speculation on those summer evenings, when the light of the brazen day still persisted in the western skies, and when every dive and tenement spilt the things that were so decently hidden in the cold days and nights of winter. On such nights the sweltering heat forced into the open the strangest beings, creatures which even the oldest inhabitants could not remember having seen before and the most hardened could hardly wish to see again.

The red calico curtain was strung across the window of the large room which was his surgery. It had been a boot store and a confectioner's parlour. Loucilensky, of infamous memory, had housed his "club" in it and found the side door which led to the little yard a convenient exit for his squalid patrons.

It was a derelict property when Dr. Marford came to found his practice here. All Tidal Basin knew that the doctor was so poor that he had painted, distempered and scrubbed the place from top to bottom with his own hands. He had probably sewn his own curtains, had certainly collected from the Caledonian Market, where you may furnish a house for a few pounds, such domestic equipment as was necessary for his well-being. Tidal Basin, which favoured those cinemas which featured pictures of high life, had despised him for his poverty. A consumptive plumber had fixed the huge sink, which was an unsightly feature of one corner of the surgery, and had received, in return, free treatment and medicine until he went the dingy way of all consumptive plumbers.

Tidal Basin had known and still knew Dr. Marford as the "penny doctor." They knew him better as the "baby doctor," for, after he had been in Tidal Basin a year, by some miracle he succeeded in founding a free clinic, where he gave ray treatment to children. He must have had influential friends, for on top of his other activities he founded a small convalescent home at the seaside.

His work was his obsession, and not a penny of the money which came to him went to his own advantage. The drab surgery remained as shabby as it had always been—a very dreary place compared with the spick and span little palace of white enamel and glass where the children of Tidal Basin were made acquainted with artificial sunlight and the beneficent quality of strange rays.

He saw Janice Harman pass the window and went to open the door to her. It was not true that this preoccupied man was hardly aware of her loveliness. He used to sit at his desk and think about her for hours on end. What strange dreams came to disorder the tidiness of his methodical mind was known only to Dr. Marford; and now, when she told him awkwardly, a little disjointedly, of her future plans, he showed no evidence of the sudden desolation and despair that crushed him.

("The oddest people fall in love with Janice," said her best friend.)

"Oh!" he said, and bit his thin lip thoughtfully. "That is very unfortunate—for the clinic. What does Mr. Quigley say to all this?"

Hitherto he had felt an unreasonable antipathy to the young reporter, who had been a too frequent visitor to the clinic, and had written too much and too enthusiastically about Dr. Marford's ventures to please a man who shrank instinctively from publicity.

"Mr. Quigley has no right to raise any objections whatever." There was a note of defiance in her voice. "He is a very good friend—or was."

There was an embarrassing pause.

"But isn't any longer," said Dr. Marford gently.

He experienced an inexplicable sense of kinship with Michael Quigley.

Her native loyalty made her modify her attitude.

"I like Michael—he is extraordinarily nice, but very domineering. He was awfully good to me the other night, and I was a beast to him. I was in the Howdah Club when that dreadful man came."

He turned an inquiring face to her.

"Which dreadful man?"

"The robber—White Face."

He nodded.

"Yes, I know. I read the newspapers. I was talking to Sergeant Elk about him. There is a theory that he lives in this neighbourhood, a theory for which I am afraid your young friend is responsible. Are you wise?"

He asked the question suddenly.

"About—my marriage? Is any girl wise, Dr. Marford? Suppose I'd met this man every day of my life for years, should I know him—I mean, as one knows one's husband? Men always put on their best appearance for women, and unless one lives in the same house with them it is impossible to be absolutely sure."

Marford nodded, fondling his bony chin.

There was a long silence, which he broke.

"I shall be sorry to lose you; you have been a most enthusiastic helper."

Now she came to a delicate stage of the interview—delicate because she knew how sensitive he was on the point.

"I'd like to give the Institute a little present," she said jerkily. "A thousand pounds—"

He raised his hand; his expression was genuinely pained.

"No, no, no; I couldn't hear of it. You asked me once before if I would. No, I am satisfied that I have not paid you for the help you have given us. That is your splendid contribution to the clinic."

She knew he would be adamant on this point and had already decided that if he refused her gift it should take the form of an anonymous donation on her wedding day. Michael, in one of his more cynical moods, had once accused her of being theatrical, and the charge was so ridiculous that she had laughed. Yet there is a touch of theatricality in every sentimentalist, and Janice Harman was not without that weakness.

Unexpectedly the doctor put out his thin hand and took hers.

"I hope you will be happy," he said, and this was at once a benediction and a dismissal.

She crossed the road at Endley Street. At the corner stood a tall, good-looking man, with greying hair at his temples. To her surprise he was talking to a woman, talking confidentially it seemed. Presently the woman walked away and he came, smiling, to meet the girl.

"What a ghastly place, darling! I am so happy you're leaving it."

"Who was that woman you were speaking to?" she asked curiously.

He laughed—she loved that laugh of his.

"Woman? Oh, yes." He looked round and nodded towards a slim figure walking ahead of them on the opposite side of the road. "It was rather odd —she thought I was her brother, and when she saw she'd made a mistake she was a little embarrassed. Rather a pretty girl."

Her car was in a near-by garage—in the early days she had driven up to the clinic, which was at the far end of Endley Street, but the doctor had advised her against the practice—advice well justified, for in a week everything that was movable in the car had been stolen by the parents of the children she cared for.

She seated herself at the wheel, a radiant figure of youth, he thought, more beautiful than even he in his wildest imaginings had dreamed. The car came down the slope of the road; she saw the shabby figure of the doctor watching them, and waved her hand to him.

"Who was that?" he asked carelessly.

"That was Dr. Marford."

"Your boss, eh? I'd like to have had a look at him. He's a big noise around here."

She laughed at this.

"There isn't a tinier murmur in Tidal Basin," she said. "But he's marvellous! I sometimes think he starves himself to keep his clinic going."

She rhapsodised all the way through the City. In Cranbourn Street they were held up by a traffic block. By this time he had gained command of the conversation and the excellences of Dr. Marford were relegated to a second place. He was talking of South Africa and his two farms, one in the wilds of Rhodesia, the other amidst the beauties of Paarl. He liked talking of the Paarl property.

"It's going to be terribly slow for you, though there is some sort of social life at the Cape. I'm pretty well known—"

"There's somebody who knows you," she laughed.

He turned his head quickly, but could distinguish amongst the hurrying throng on the sidewalk no familiar face.

"Where?" he asked.

"There—that dark man." She looked back. "He is standing by the hosiers."

He looked round and frowned.

"Oh, yes, I know him—not very well, though; I got the better of him in a business deal, and he hasn't forgiven me." He uttered an exclamation. "Darling, I can't take you to the theatre to-night: I've just remembered. Will you forgive me?"

She was too happy, too completely under the fascination of this exalted adventure, to resent the missed engagement. This good-looking stranger who had come from the blue, whose name she could hardly use without an unaccountable sense of shyness, was Romance—the fulfiliment of vague and delightful dreams. He was still outside the realms of reality.

She had known him for ten days; it seemed that it was a lifetime. Once or twice during the journey she was on the point of telling him of the surprise she had for him. He was a great home-lover; his self-confessed sin was that he coveted his neighbour's land. There was a farm adjoining his at Paarl that had come into the market, could be had for a mere £8,000. He waxed enthusiastic on the advantage of having this additional property—vine-yards and orange groves, new pastures for his cattle.

He returned to the subject as the car was crossing Piccadilly Circus.

"You've made me ambitious, you angel," he said. "I'm a poor farmer and can't lay my hands on a fortune, so the farm will have to go."

Again she was nearly telling him. She had a friend in Cape Town, a young lawyer, a Rhodes scholar, whom she had met at Oxford. That very morning she had wired to him, asking him to buy the property.

He parted from her at the door of her flat in Bury Street, and her chauffeur, who was waiting, drove him to his modest hotel. At parting: "I hate the thought of losing that farm—if I could cable four thousand pounds to-morrow morning I could clinch the bargain."

She smiled demurely and went up to her room to daydream of green slopes and high, sun-baked mountains where the little baboons chatter all day and night.

At ten o'clock that night, when she was undressing for bed, came a cablegram which left her white and shaking. It was in one sense remarkable that the first person she thought of to help her in her necessity was Michael Quigley; but when she reached for the telephone with a trembling hand it was to learn that Michael had left the office on a hurry call. She looked at the clock; it was by then half-past ten. She changed her mind about going to bed and began to dress quickly.