Читать книгу The Man Who Loved Lions - Ethel Lina White - Страница 5

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She sat at a small table in the crowded lounge, wedged in her place by a pack of occupied seats, while a continuous procession of people streamed past in search of a vacancy. Beside her was an elderly man who had come down from Lancashire on business. A keen judge of values, he had noticed her at breakfast and was struck by the force of character evident in her steadfast eyes and resolute lips.

He was engaged in reading through his list of future engagements and he snapped the band around his book at the same moment as Ann closed her diary. Their eyes met and they smiled at the duplicated action. He had noticed previously that to her, a stranger was just another human-being and not a possible plague-contact, so he risked speaking to her.

"We both seem to be checking-up on our dates. Are you in business?"

She hesitated because the reunion was her secret; but since the shadow of the tremendous event was beginning to sag over her, she looked at his shrewd kindly face and was tempted to talk.

"My date isn't business. I'm meeting people I've not seen for ages."

"Friends?" he asked.

"No...It's queer, but really I know nothing about their private lives. I can't think how we ever got together. We were students at a college in London and we attended the same biology lectures."

"Did you form a club?"

His interest was so kindly that it redeemed his questions from curiosity and Ann was encouraged to expand.

"It was more like a cult. Richard wanted devil-worship but no one would back him up. So we used to meet secretly and discuss world affairs. Richard was always planning purges and he kept a list of victims. He called us 'THE SEVEN SULLIED SOULS.'"

"And were you sullied?" asked the Manchester man, smiling at the pompous title.

"I can only speak for myself," Ann told him. "I was sixteen and very pure. But I kept quiet about my age and all that. As a matter of fact, I can't believe that anything could happen to either James or Victoria. James was one of those vague people you forget and Victoria was wrapped up in her work. But John and Isabella were so glamorous that I don't think they could stop affairs...And I could believe anything of Richard."

Even in the heat of the lounge, she shivered at the recollection of his face—intermittently revealed in the leaping firelight—as they sat in the darkened tower-room. Deep lines gashed it from his extravagantly-arched nostrils to his mouth. She remembered too the corpse-like pallor of his skin, the shining black hair and the sinister upward slant of his brows.

"We were all of us rather afraid of Richard," she confessed. "He was older than the rest of us and not a regular student. He was just rubbing up biology and he used to sneer at the lecturer. He thought it funny to say hurtful things."

"Why didn't you kick him out?"

"Because, in a way, he helped to make the thrill. He seemed a sort of distorted genius. Besides, to be honest, we wanted to meet at his house. He lived with a wealthy uncle and there were always refreshments and drinks."

The marble pillars and gilded walls of the hotel lounge faded out as Ann thought of the last session in the tower-room. She remembered the roaring wind and the trails of ivy which tapped on the window-panes.

"We'll hold a reunion here, seven years from to-night," declared Richard. "By then, my old uncle should be hanged and I shall be lord of the manor. Possibly one of you may be successful, and damned, but I promise the rest of you jobs. Something in the Hercules tradition."

"I bar elephant-stables," said one of them. "Otherwise, count me in. Already I feel a man with a future."

Of course it was Stephen who spoke—Stephen who was merely amused by Richard and whose laughter could extract the sting from the most envenomed remark.