Читать книгу The Last Adventure and Other Stories - Edgar Wallace - Страница 7

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WHEN John Calthorpe’s shabby two-seater reached the lodge which guarded the entrance to the park the iron gates were closed. He sounded his klaxon and waited patiently for the appearance of the one servant of the house who shared his stepmother’s hatred of him.

Li Sawder, with his bushy black beard, was one of the unhappy memories of his childhood; it was Li Sawder who had, by his stepmother’s orders, administered the most painful flogging he had ever endured. John was a boy of fourteen at the time, and his offence had been a trivial one. His father was lying dangerously ill; there was no appeal from Caesar’s wife. He had taken his beating without a murmur. A hint to his uncle would have sent Elijah Sawder packing; if he had complained to the groom, or to Fisher, the head gardener, Sawder would have had blow for blow; but he said nothing, nursed his hurts, and bore no more resentment towards the brutal lodge-keeper than he felt towards his dentist. But Li Sawder’s dislike of the boy grew on the fear which the years brought that one day Master John would repay his thrashing with interest.

John sounded his signal again. Li knew he was there; John had seen the white curtains move at the first raucous notes. He got down and walked to the gate, and was trying the lock when the man appeared. There were streaks of grey in his beard, and the little boy to whom he had taken the strap towered head and shoulders above him. “Didn’t hear thee,” growled the lodge-keeper.

He came from a line of Quakers and grafted to his west-country speech not a few of their idioms.

John accepted the fiction with his wintry smile.

“His lordship’s getting married,” said the man, as he leisurely fitted a key to the gate. “There won’t be any room at the hall for thee, Master John, when the babies come along.”

“I shall have to turn you out of your lodge and live there,” said John with a quiet laugh, and the man accepted the jest literally.

“Ay! That’s the way of the rich—to turn the poor into the kennels!” He glowered round at the hated figure. “Keep us in the mire so thee can walk on us and keep thy feet clean!”

“You’re a cantankerous old gentleman,” said John good-humouredly. “I was merely joking—open the gate, Sawder, I’m in a hurry.”

But by mischance the lock had jammed. It was a genuine accident, though, from the satisfaction on the bearded face, Li Sawder might have planned it all.

“Thee’ll have to go out by Bailiff’s Gate, young master. Thicky old lock’s g’in me trouble afore. I’ll get the village smith up; must have the gate open in time for the bride. A grand lass, master, like ripe picking. A firm-figured lass—”

“Sawder.”

John Calthorpe’s voice was never so soft, yet in that one word the man heard warning and threat, and he scowled into the young man’s face with the resentment which a bitter insult might have aroused.

“You will not discuss Miss Predelle with me or with anybody else—that way! Is there a short cut to the Bailiffs Gate? I have forgotten. How are your children, Sawder?”

Li was breathing heavily, and it was some time before he could find his voice.

“My children are in good work and none the better for thy curiosity, Master John.”

It was curious how the mention of the children John had known when he was a child of six invariably aroused the old man to wrath. Sometimes his piercing eyes would search John’s face as though he suspected an ill-timed jest.

He swung the car about.

“Is the dyke bridged?” he asked.

He did not wait for the answer, but sent his machine along the rough cart-track that ran parallel with the high wall, and soon there was no need for an answer. A tiny stream tumbled down the sloping lands of Heverswood Castle and had its overflow under the wall. And the deep gully where he had sat as a boy and dreamed and planned and given rein to his imagination was unbridged. He sent the car sharply up the slope until he came to a place where he knew the stream was fordable. Five minutes later he came in sight of the Bailiff’s Gate, which was no more than a big wooden door which gave access from the road to the home farm. Turning on to the gravelled drive, he saw over his shoulder a big limousine sweep down through the elms that hid the house and follow behind him. It overtook him just as the gate was opened by the keeper’s wife, and he turned his head to meet the smiling eyes of Mary Predelle. As the car came abreast she leant over the side.

“Won’t you come up to Feathers and meet my father?”

The invitation staggered him.

“I’d be delighted, Miss Predelle—but I’m due in London this afternoon——”

“This afternoon?” she scoffed. “London is only an hour’s run—and you have to pass the house. Will you follow? I promise we will not go too fast.”

Johnny chuckled.

“You cannot go too fast for my chariot of fire,” he said, and had reason to regret his boast, for it required the most careful nursing of his old machine to keep her car within sight.

Feathers lay eight miles away on the London road—a sprawling red building that had once been a farmhouse, but which now, with its marble swimming-pool and Italian garden, was one of the show places of the county.

He swung through the bronze gates and reached the portico in time to see the car turning towards its hidden garage. Mary was talking to a stout and florid man, who he guessed was her father. Paul Predelle was an English-born American subject, who had been wealthy before the discovery of oil on his Texan properties made him one of the ten richest men in the world.

“Daddy, this is John Calthorpe—Selwyn’s brother.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Calthorpe. As we are coming into your family I guess we shall see a whole lot of each other. Mary, love, get Mr. Calthorpe a long drink. I admire your family, Mr. Calthorpe ... been reading Timm’s History of the Old British Nobility ... you go way back to the Fulkes of Normandy....”

He talked rapidly, firing questions and statements in a staccato rattle of speech, waiting neither for answer nor agreement. A flabby man, thought John, and lethargic. He had the manner and the abrupt decisiveness of the successful American industrialist, but that was a trick he had acquired by association. Beneath the energy and vigour of his Americanism was a deep layer of fatty bourgeoisism of the most pronounced British type.

John neither liked nor disliked him. He could picture this clean-shaven face, minus the cigar, beaming across the counter in a bacon store—why bacon, he could not for the life of him understand.

“It is certainly an elegant family.” Mr. Predelle’s eloquence flowed like a shallow stream above a pebbly bed. “Now, in our country we pretend all that family stuff is bunk. And yet we are proud of our own aristocracy. Now, Mary’s father was one of the grandest Southern gentlemen—”

“Mary’s father?” John was surprised into blurting the question.

“That’s so. Lady Heverswood, your respected ma-in-law, knows. Mary’s my adopted daughter. Never had any children—never married. In our country adoption is a legal process....”

Johnny listened for ten minutes to an exposition of the laws governing the State of Idaho, and during the recital made his slow way to the prettily furnished drawing room.

At last, silenced and a little depressed by the eloquence of his host, he was left alone with the girl. She had been watching him throughout his ordeal, sympathy and mischief in her eyes, and when Mr. Predelle’s dynamic force was spent and he had disappeared to recuperate (as John gathered) at the billiards-room buffet, Mary took the young man’s arm and led him to a deep window-seat that overlooked the terrace, gay with golden daffodils and the purple and white of hyacinths.

“Do you mind? Daddy is rather an enthusiast ... but I am not apologizing for him so much as for this familiarity of mine. You’re my dream come true I”

He stared at her open-mouthed, and she laughed into his crimson face.

“Poor man ... he thinks I am making love to him!”

“I think nothing of the kind I” he protested indignantly, growing redder than ever.

“You’re my dream come true,” she nodded soberly. “The big little brother I have always wanted and that money couldn’t buy!”

The relief which his sigh revealed made her sway with silent laughter.

“It was too bad of me to shock you that way.” A pause, and the smile left her face. “How do you think you will like your new sister?”

He nodded.

“You’re also my dream come true,” he said solemnly. “I’ve always wanted a pretty sister.”

“That’s not fair.” She held up her hand in protest, and John saw the flash of a large emerald on her third finger, and for some reason or other felt a little twinge at his heart. She was so lovely, so unspoilt. An Easter lily of a girl, too delicate a thing for the coarse hands of a man whose love affairs were the talk of theatrical London. “Johnny—I’m going to call you Johnny—do you mind?” He shook his head. “Shall I be terribly happy? Daddy thinks I will. He sees me in a coronet and robes and is aching to instruct the servants to call me ‘my lady’—but shall I be happy?”

He did not answer. The glib platitudes to which his brain gave shape were beyond the power of utterance. She was looking at him, searching his very soul with those truth-compelling eyes of hers. There was a tenseness in her attitude, in the sudden anxiety of expression, which stilled the light-hearted equivocation which came to his lips. It would have been easier to jest with a dying man.

“Shall I?”

“Is that fair? I do not know your capacity for happiness. I know nothing of what you require in a man, Mary. Selwyn”—another pause—”has his points.”

For the life of him he could not think of one.

“Are they ‘points’ which would make a woman—me —happy? I’m dreadfully worried, John. It seemed so easy to say yes, and daddy was so pleased about it. And there is nobody I can ask—except you. I knew, the moment I saw you to-day, that—well, that I had a friend —a good brother.”

He was silent—hating himself because his very silence was a disloyalty to the House. The money was needed if Heverswood was to recover its glories. He had spoken hastily of money he could bring into the estate in two years—in a year. But there were many “ifs”. He had discovered an unsuspected source of revenue, but its continuance depended upon so many contingencies. The three estates of the family were heavily mortgaged. He had freed the home farms; was in a fair way to releasing the tentacles that were strangling Heverswood itself. It would be years, however, before he could clear the estate of its debt, for there were current demands which ate into the profits of his business. The money was necessary. Heverswood came first in all his considerations. It was his fetish, his obsession. Pride in the House, a passionate love for the fair lands that men of his name had lorded for centuries ... he looked, and his heart ached for her.

“I don’t know. Men—are queer. All men are queer in some respect. Selwyn is neither worse nor better than the average man in his position—and with his limitations. You know men, Mary? They are careless, happy-go-lucky creatures. The drones of the world who gorge themselves with the honey of life. God made them that way. They flit from flower to flower and think no wrong of it.” He was basely libelling his sex, but Selwyn must be excused in advance.

“I see,” she nodded slowly. “One does not expect an angel from heaven. I suppose a past is indispensable in a man. I take that for granted. But the drones are killed after a year of riot and looting, and man lives on. Does he stay a drone, or does he give up his wanderings from flower to flower? That is what I want to know, Johnny—I’m growing terrified—terrified!”

Johnny drew a long breath.

“He will settle down—marriage changes a man—and children,” he added awkwardly.

Her eyes were on his, searching, probing. She was biting her red lower lip thoughtfully.

“I wonder,” she said; and then Mr. Predelle came in with a pink cocktail in either hand.

All the way to London the girl’s face showed dimly through the windscreen; she appeared on the hoardings, incongruously intruding into flaming advertisements. He saw her on the gold-fretted waters of the Thames as a dinghy brought him to the weather-stained side of the big black tramp. He had lied to her—wickedly, treacherously lied to her. He was thrusting her into the slow fire that would burn out her heart and shrivel her youth.