Читать книгу The Flying Fifty-Five - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4
ОглавлениеII. — THE NEW HEAD LAD
SHE heard a chuckle of laughter and the man came back to her, holding out the whip.
"I'm very sorry to bother you," he said. "It was quite an unexpected meeting, I assure you. I left them on the Cambridge road and never expected to see them again. They must have stolen a ride on the rail."
His voice was pleasant, the voice of an educated man, and yet the dirty trousers, the worn boots and the tattered shirt open at the throat, to show the mahogany-coloured breast, were the clothes of a tramp. He would have been good-looking in spite of his unshaven face, if it had not been for a black eye and a swollen lip, and seeing her curiously surveying this evidence of battle, he explained:
"I had a little fight with two of them at Cambridge—the third is a reinforcement they picked up on the road. They stole my shirt. This," he pointed to the disreputable garment he wore," belongs to the fat man. I hammered him until he pulled it off, and it took me a whole day to wash it."
He was searching his pocket as he spoke and presently he found what he sought. A limp cigarette and a box of matches, and she watched him, amused and interested, as he solemnly tapped the end of the cigarette until it was more or less rigid and applied a light to its end.
"Are you 'on the road'?" she asked, using the term that implied a tramp.
He looked at her and at the road. "At present," he said. "I ought really to be in the ditch and should have been but for your kind help. I beg your pardon! You mean am I a tramp? I am." His one undamaged eye was smiling at her. She had never met so friendly and self-possessed a tramp before.
"You speak like a gentleman—were you in the war?"
He nodded.
"An officer?"
He nodded again and she frowned.
"It is not nice to see people like you 'on the road'—but I know how hard it is just now——"
"Have you the time?" he interrupted her, and she looked at the watch on her wrist.
"Ten o'clock," she said, and he drew a long breath.
"I've got four hours," he said. "I'm sorry I interrupted you. Yes, I'm afraid many good chaps are having a pretty thin time of it, but personally sympathy is wasted on me. I'm enjoying myself."
He did not look as if he had been enjoying himself.
"Where have you come from?" she asked.
"Edinburgh," was the startling reply. "I left last Thursday."
She gasped. "You walked?"
He nodded again and she saw the amusement in his eyes.
"My name is Willie the Walker. It's a fact; all the fraternity know me by that name, and the rum thing is that they've hit upon my real name, which is William to my maiden aunt and Bill to my friends."
All the time he was admiring her and wondering who she was. Her beauty, face and carriage had taken his breath away, and he thought he had never seen a woman who sat a horse so gracefully as she. Stella, for her part, was thinking rapidly. Her heart bled for the gallant soul whom competition had forced to the highway; she knew the type so well. They were men who were by temperament and training wholly unfitted for business pursuits.
"Are you going to Crayleigh?" she asked.
Crayleigh was the mecca of impecunious ex-soldiers, for it was the seat of the Earl of Fontwell.
"Ye-es," he replied, and she understood.
"Lord Fontwell is very good to service men," she said. "They say he never turns an old soldier away—though you're not very old. Do you know anything about horses?"
"Everything," replied Walking Willie immodestly.
"Dare she do it?" she asked herself, and took the plunge. "I want a head lad," she said rapidly. "I own a small training stable and my head lad has left. The pay, I'm afraid, is very poor, but I can give you comfortable quarters."
He shifted uncomfortably on his feet. "Shall I—or shan't' I?" He was speaking to himself.
"Yes, I'll do it! And thank you, Miss——"
"Barrington," she said. Already she was regretting her impulsive offer. What would Aunt Eliza say?
"Come along," she said briskly, and walked her horse in the direction of Fenton Manor, and Bill strode out by her side, smoking valiantly and stopping now and again to laugh to himself.
"Why are you laughing—William?" she asked as they turned through the gateway that led to the stables.
"Bill—call me Bill," urged the tramp; "don't be a domineering aunt, Miss Barrington!"
"Don't say 'domineering aunt,'" said Stella a little grimly. "I've got to interview one in a few seconds."
* * * * *
Aunt Eliza looked out through the open window and sniffed. She did not sniff from necessity, for her annual influenza cold had come and gone; nor did she sniff from appreciation, though the old garden across which she looked was dappled red and white and lemon yellow with the fragrant flowers of early summer. Nor was Nature's masterly construction of the background a piece of handiwork at which Aunt Elizabeth, being a God-fearing woman, would sniff in any event.
But Aunt Eliza sniffed and sneered at something almost as beautiful, A chestnut horse ridden by a small boy had passed into her field of vision, a clean-limbed colt that stepped as mincingly as a dainty lady and turned his intelligent head toward the house as he passed, as though he sensed the disapproval of Aunt Eliza and was curious to see what manner of human could look contemptuously upon a son of Starshine and an own grandson to the mighty Ormonde.
"Horses and betting!" said Aunt Eliza bitterly, plying her broom.
She was a small woman, lean and wiry, and her mind was in harmony.
The room was speckless and the broom roused nothing more than Aunt Eliza's temperature. Fenton Manor was a five-hundred-year-old farmhouse that had been polished and scrubbed and dusted and rubbed until its floors shone like coach-work, and the aged brasses and warming-pans that decorated mantelpiece and wall of the oak-beamed sitting-room were glittering mirrors that caught and reflected the faintest light.
Stella Barrington surveyed her aunt from the open doorway, and in her grave young face there was a hint of guiltiness.
She came slowly across the room and pushed back the round velour from her forehead with a gesture of desperation.
"Auntie, I've fired Jebson," she blurted. "And I've hired a man to take his place--that man!" She pointed through the open window with tragic defiance.
Aunt Eliza fixed her glasses and peered across the garden, and she gasped.
"My God!" she said.
When Aunt Eliza was profane she was, as a rule, deeply perturbed.
"Why... why, he's a tramp! Look at his eye!... Stella, you're stark staring crazy! We shall all be murdered in our beds!"
Stella smiled. "He's a gentleman," she said," an officer who has fought in the war, and he understands horses."
Aunt Eliza turned her gloomy face to the girl. "That's what horse-racing and betting brings you to," she said ominously, but did not particularise whether these evil practices were responsible for Bill's black eye or Stella's lamentable lack of judgment.
