Читать книгу The Fourth Plague - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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MARJORIE turned with a start.

"Five hundred pounds?" she repeated.

Vera nodded.

"I want that sum," she said, "for a purpose. You understand that this is confidential?"

"Oh, quite," said Marjorie, "but it is a lot of money. Couldn't you get it from Uncle Ralph?"

"Uncle Ralph," repeated the other, contemptuously. "He wouldn't give five hundred potatoes! A demand for five hundred pounds would estrange us for the rest of our lives."

She gave a bitter little laugh.

Marjorie knit her pretty brows in thought.

"I can't think of anybody," she said slowly.

"Then don't," said Vera, briskly. "I don't know exactly why I asked you."

Further discussion of the subject was made impossible by the arrival of Sir Ralph himself.

He had evidently forgotten that any strained relations existed between himself and his wife, or that her iniquitous extravagance in prepared oats had ever come between them.

"Vera," he said, going towards her, "did you notice a man in the court to-day, a peculiarly foreign-looking man?"

She thought a moment.

"Yes, there was a person sitting near—" she nearly said Hilary George, but deemed it tactful to mention another barrister who had been engaged in the case.

"How did he impress you?" he asked.

"I should like to say that he did not impress me at all," she said, with a smile. She was most anxious to restore him to good humour. "But unfortunately, I did take particular notice of him; rather a distinguished-looking man, clean-shaven and with a lined, thoughtful face."

Sir Ralph nodded.

"That's the man," he said. "I've just had a note from him. I didn't know he was in Burboro'. That is Tillizini."

He said this impressively. At the moment, Tillizini's name was in the mouth of half the population of England.

He nodded.

"None other," he said. "I had a note from one of the under secretaries of the Home Office saying that he was coming down. I don't know why our little burglary should have attracted his attention, but at any rate he could not have been very interested, for he did not turn up until to-day. He has just sent a note to tell me that he is staying at the George, and I have written to ask him to come up to dinner to-night."

She made a little face.

"He's a detective or something, isn't he?" she asked.

"More than a detective."

Sir Ralph was rather inclined to be irritable if you did not rise to his values. It was better to over-estimate them than to under-estimate them in any case.

"Surely you have read the papers?" he went on, with his best magisterial air. "You couldn't very well escape his name nowadays. He is the man whom the English Government brought over as a sort of consultant, to deal with this terrible outbreak of crime."

"I've heard something about it," said his wife, carelessly. "The 'Black Hand' or the 'Red Hand'—I forget exactly what colour it is."

Sir Ralph frowned.

"You must not treat these matters frivolously, Vera," he said, coldly. "I've had reason to speak to you before on similar occasions. The 'Red Hand' is a very mysterious organization, which is striking at the very heart of our domestic security. Any man, and I may add any woman, should be extremely grateful to those who, by their gifts of divination, are endeavouring to shield the innocent victims of a band of organized criminals."

Vera hated her husband when he made speeches to her. She knew more about the "Red Hand" and its workings than she was prepared to discuss with Sir Ralph.

It was a pose of hers, as it was a pose of certain members of her class, to profess a profound ignorance upon matters which were engaging the attention of newspaper readers. The pose of ignorance is a popular one with members of the leisured classes; popular, because it suggests their superiority to the influences which surround them; because it signalizes their independence of chronicled facts, and because, too, it is the easiest of all poses to assume and to sustain.

Vera had caught the trick and found it a profitable one. It lent her an overpowering naivete, which had a paralysing effect upon the better-informed but socially inferior members of the community, and it precluded one being bored by a long recital of the news which one had read in the morning papers in a more concise or a more accurate form. Her interest in the great Italian detective for the moment was a conventionally domestic one, for she rose from the music-stool.

"I shall have to tell Parker to set another place," she said.

"If he accepts," interjected Marjorie.

Vera raised her eyebrows with a little smile.

"Don't be absurd, Marjorie, of course he will accept."

"What do we call him—Inspector or Sergeant or something?" she asked of Sir Ralph.

The spirit of revolt was stirring within her, and she permitted herself a facetiousness of attitude which ordinarily she would not have expressed. And this, despite the subconscious desire to soothe him into a complaisant mood.

She never for one moment imagined that he would advance her the money she required, but he might let her have a portion of it if she could only invent a story sufficiently plausible. The truth was out of the question. She smiled to herself at the thought. She was an imaginative woman but not sufficiently so to picture Sir Ralph in that moment of confession. She needed the money as she had never needed money before. It was not for herself—her own wants were few and her tastes simple. She might, perhaps, induce her husband to let her have a hundred if she could invent a good reason—and it would have to be a superlatively good reason to induce Sir Ralph to part with his money.

Somehow the old weariness of it all, the old distaste for the life she was living, came over her, and induced her to treat the subject in a manner in which she knew her husband would heartily disapprove.

"You will call him Doctor Tillizini,' said Sir Ralph sternly. "He is a professor of anthropology in the Florentine School of Medicine. He is a gentleman, Vera, and I shall expect you to treat him as such."

Marjorie, who had been an interested spectator of the passage between husband and wife, had discreetly withdrawn to her book and her chair by the window. As Sir Ralph turned to go, she rose.

"I say, what fun," she said. "Is he really coming, Uncle?"

Sir Ralph nodded.

"I hope so. I can do no more than invite him, but he is such a busy man that he may probably have to go back to town. At any rate, I am certain," he said, a little pompously, "that he will approve most heartily of my treatment of that rascal to-day. I think it is monstrous the way Hilary George went on..."

He was still sore over his treatment by his whilom friend, and he launched forth into a sea of explanation and justification, and, incidentally, gave the girl a fairly garbled version of the scene which had occurred outside the Session House—a scene in which he had played, by his account, a dignified and proper part, and in which Hilary had lost his temper to a distressing degree.

The fire of Sir Ralph's eloquence burnt itself down to glowerings and splutterings of incoherent disapproval.

"Hilary George," he said, "will regret this." He spoke in the satisfied tone of one who had made special arrangements with Providence to that end.

Marjorie was following her uncle from the room, when a glance from Vera brought her back. The older woman waited until the door had closed behind her husband.

"Marjorie," she said, in the mild and honeyed tone which the girl recognized as her "At Home" voice, "I want you to do something for me."

"With pleasure, dear," said the girl warmly.

Lady Morte-Mannery fingered the little silver ornaments on one of the tables which abounded in the drawing-room, and placed them as though they were pawns in a new game she was playing. She seemed to be concentrating her attention upon this pastime as she spoke.

"I want you to do something very special for me," she repeated. "Of course, I know I can trust you about that money, and now I want to ask you to help me with a little ruse. This man who is coming to-day," she said, "this Italian person, is really not the kind of man I want to meet. I hate detectives and all those crude, melodramatic individuals. They talk about crime and things, and besides," she hesitated, "I can trust you, can't I?"

She looked up sharply.

"Yes," said the girl gravely, wondering what was coming.

"Well, you know, dear," said Vera slowly, and still playing her mysterious game with the comfit boxes and Dutch silver, "I'm a member of a club. It's a ladies' club; you won't find it in Whittaker because we do not care to advertise our existence, although of course we are registered. Well, we had rather a bother there, two or three months ago. We—we. Why should I deceive you?" she said in a burst of confidence, and with her rare smile. "We were raided! You see, dear, we played rather heavily. We did not confine ourselves to the prosaic game of Bridge. Some woman—I forget her name—introduced baccarat, and we had a little wheel too; you know."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It was awfully fascinating, and one lost and won quite a considerable sum. And then there was a bother, and the police came in one night quite unexpectedly. Your dear Uncle Ralph was in town for the May Meetings, and I had quite a lot of time on my hands.

"It was very fortunate I escaped any serious consequences of my rashness. I gave a false name, and was brought up the next morning at Bow Street with the rest of the women—you remember, the case created quite a sensation—and I was bound over in a false name. Nobody recognized me and nobody but you is any the wiser."

She stopped again, and shot a swift, side-long glance at the girl.

"Oh, you needn't be shocked," she said, the acid in her tone asserting itself. "It wasn't so very dreadful, only this Tillizini man was in court that day, and I think he may have recognized me."

"How awkward!" said Marjorie. "Really, Vera, I'm not a bit shocked, and it's not for me, any way, to sit in judgment on your actions. What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to help me when I tell Sir Ralph that I am too ill to entertain this person. I'll go straight away to bed, and I want you, like an angel, to do the honours."

"Why, with pleasure," said Marjorie, with a little smile.

"Anyway," said Vera, a little hardly, "Ralph won't bully you before visitors, nor will he refer pointedly to your needless extravagance in potatoes. Ralph is rather a fanatic on the question of potatoes," she said. "There is a standard by which he judges all phases of domestic economy."

Marjorie was filled with an infinite pity for the girl. She was not more than seven or eight years older than herself, still young enough to find joy in the colour and movement of life.

"I will do anything I can," she said. For the second time that day she laid her hand upon the other's shoulder.

"Don't paw me, dear," said Vera, with sudden asperity, and the warm, generous heart of the girl was chilled. Vera saw this, and tried to make amends.

"Please don't bother about me, dear," she said, in a softer tone. "I am rather jagged; too jagged, indeed, to meet this—"

At that point the door of the drawing-room was opened, and William, the butler, came in importantly. He stood by the open door.

"Professor Tillizini," he announced.