Читать книгу Midnight House - Ethel Lina White - Страница 5

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The empty house was listed in the postal directory as No. 11 India Crescent, Rivermead, but it was a dead address. Its absentee owner and his wife were reported to be living abroad; but it was so long since they had been seen in the town that few people remembered them. During the years there had grown up a new generation who were too accustomed to the blinded building to be curious.

Occasionally strangers asked questions about it, only to be told that it was just another of those deserted homes sprinkled about every country—shrines to memory. Only a few residents remembered its tragic story of domestic tyranny, ill-starred love and early death.

Mr. Spree, the lawyer, knew more than any outsider, but as representative of legal caution his lips were sealed. He used to walk to his office and had been accustomed to pass No. 11 four times daily without giving it a thought. Towards the middle of November, 1938, his interest in it was revived by the calendar.

He was a healthy, well-preserved man of sixty, wearing the conventional clothes of his profession while resembling the traditional farmer. Doomed by inheritance to a sedentary life, he spent his leisure in chopping wood and cutting lawns. He was also a keen gardener and specialised in yellow tomatoes.

It gave him a pang to remember that he was still in the forties when he had been responsible for sealing up No. 11 India Crescent. This house had been the property of General Tygarth, who lived there for many years with his wife and two children. Mrs. Tygarth was a silly, snobbish woman, who got the sort of husband she deserved, for the General—irritable, eccentric and tradition-bound—pushed her about remorselessly.

The children were gentle, listless and apparently of poor stamina. The daughter, Madeline, married a local doctor who—in spite of his youth—was considered destined for the first flight. Her parents were glad to be rid of her, for they concentrated on their son—Clement.

In spite of their devotion they were deeply disappointed in his character. He was delicate, dreamy and devoid of the requisite lethal instincts. The sporting community had a name for him. Yet during the War of 1914-1918 he ran away from Oxford and enlisted as a private. He became a prisoner of war in Germany—escaped, only to be recaptured—and finally, after the Armistice, returned to his family as a total disability.

Three years later, the next-door house, No. 10, was bought by a retired sanitary-engineer. He was an excellent plumber and his drains remained after him as a valuable legacy to future tenants; but the other residents resented his connection with trade.

As leader of the opposition, the General did his utmost to freeze out the newcomer. However, he met his match in the plumber, for Alexander Brown had dug in his heels.

"I'll live to see you move out first," he prophesied to the General. "Then I'll clear out—and glad to leave the stinking place."