Читать книгу The Serpent In The Garden - Ethel M. Dell - Страница 4

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Pierre Ronceau inhaled a deep breath from his cigarette and slowly puffed forth a series of small smoke clouds. He was gazing out from under an awning at a perfect summer sea. His attitude was one of deliberate repose, but behind it there seemed to be an intense concentration of activity that was like a coiled spring awaiting release. His eyes were half-closed, but the mobile black brows above them gave an impression of mental agility that could leap to its full height at the briefest notice. His mouth with its curt moustache, though humorous, was not without severity. He had the look of a ready swordsman, and the whole of his trim, well-balanced person bore out the analogy. Even as he sat, he flickered his fingers deftly at a fly, that had ventured to settle on his knee, in a fashion that deprived it of any power to settle anywhere but in the dust forevermore.

“Well hit!” commented a sleepy voice beside him. “A jolly neat execution!”

Pierre smiled—his quick pleasing smile. “So you are awake, mon ami! I hope my energy did not disturb you.”

“It’s rather like a dynamo, isn’t it?” returned his companion. “But you’ve kept it under control very well for the past hour. And anyhow there’s one fly less in the world now, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.”

He yawned with the words and turned a very English face upon Pierre. There was not the faintest physical resemblance between the two, and yet in some wholly inexplicable fashion they had a look of kinship. The youth who lay by Pierre’s side had a loose and almost clumsy appearance in comparison. He was twelve years his junior, a lad of twenty-four, with fair hair and somewhat lazy blue eyes. He had none of the taut alertness that characterized Pierre, but there was a sort of sporting athleticism about him that was not without its charm.

Pierre looked at him with cocked eyebrows. “You know, Peter,” he said, “when you are a grandpère, you will be—very stout.”

“Don’t mention it!” said Peter equably. “You—de l’autre côté—will be exactly like a dried lemon—very spare and very acid.”

The Frenchman laughed. “Me? I wonder! Perhaps I shall never reach that stage! There are so many knives that would like to taste my blood.”

“They won’t get the chance with me anywhere around,” rejoined Peter. “But I could wish you followed a more peaceable profession. Brave homme as you are, it is time you settled down.”

Pierre raised his shoulders. “What could I do with myself now? Surely—even my profession is better than none at all!”

“You could come and live with me,” said Peter, “and break all the hearts in the neighbourhood. They’d take some breaking too, I can tell you. They’re most of ’em hard-boiled.”

Pierre’s eyes twinkled. “Have you tried them all, my dear fellow? Then how should I succeed where you have failed?”

“No, I haven’t tried.” Peter’s voice was gruff and contemptuous. “They’re all after me—naturally. I’m the golden plum of the district. But a chap like you—well, that’s different. Someone might want you for yourself.”

“You think that possible?” Whimsical incredulity sounded in Pierre’s rejoinder. “A man who—if he lives—will one day become a dried lemon—very shrinkled—very sour!”

Peter gave a snort of laughter. “Pierre, you’re beyond price—and always will be, however shrinkled you get! But, after all, it hasn’t set in yet. And you might spot a winner if you gave your mind to it. Who knows?”

“Who knows indeed?” said Pierre. “And what would the winner say when she found me out, and saw in her imagination all those bloody knives that wait for me?”

“Pierre! You’d better stop!” declared Peter. “Or say it in French! It would sound better—anyhow in the winner’s ears. I think it’s high time you gave up this exceptionally unpleasant job of yours and took to something decent and aboveboard for a change.”

“Something decent!” said Pierre, and drew another deep breath through the end of his cigarette before he pitched it away. “Then this work of mine—this great work to which I have devoted myself—is to be thrown away—pouf!—like that? My little brother, if you think that, then you know neither me nor my work. Voilà!”

He smiled as he said it, but his black eyes held a protest that was genuine, and the boy by his side frowned in answer.

“No, really I’m in earnest. We’ve always got on all right, and I’ve got money enough for the two of us. I hate these underground, creeping sort of jobs. You’ve made a name for yourself—too big a name for your own peace and comfort. Why can’t you rest on your laurels now and let the hate die down? They’ll have you sooner or later, sure as a gun, if you don’t.”

Pierre Ronceau spread out his hands with a quick, delicate movement of disdain. “Let them try!” he said. “I am not afraid. You think this work of mine unclean—evil? But you are wrong. I work for good things. I work to remove the evil, to cleanse the world. To my mind”—his dark eyes flashed suddenly round upon his companion—“that is a better thing than the easy life that does neither harm nor good. I could not lead that sort of life—even with you, Peter. I have a brain that must work and work perpetually. A holiday—that is different. But to cease to work——”

Peter showed his teeth in a broad grin. “Leave that sort of thing to the brainless, what? Compritt—quite compritt! But we mustn’t be bitter about it, you know. The little ne’er-do-weels have their uses, even if only as a foil to the great. When you’ve finished cleansing the world, you can come to me for a well-earned rest. You may be glad of it by that time. Who knows?”

Pierre smiled at him at once—his quick ungrudging smile. “If it were not for the danger, I could wish that we were partners,” he said. “You have a brain too, mon ami; but you keep it always curled up in its little box. You never give it exercise, and so it will not grow. But you are English, and the English are different. It is not for me to judge.”

“Damn it, man! You’re half English yourself,” protested Peter. “You can’t deny our mother’s blood in you.”

“Ah! C’est vrai!” The Frenchman smiled again. “But nevertheless—I am not even half English. That blood has given me the power to understand you, mon demi-frère. But no more than that. I am Ronceau—Ronceau all through. Our mother was only a child herself when I was born. She left no stamp upon me that was of her. Afterwards—when she married her own countryman and gave birth to her second Peter—she was a woman, and you bear her traits as well as those of her second husband. She knew it herself. That was why her younger son was so far her best-beloved.”

“That’s not fair,” protested Peter.

“But true,” said Pierre gently. “I never felt resentment. I always understood. She was so very British—her French marriage so brief, perhaps mercifully so. They would not have been happy together. It was a dangerous mating, he so much the elder, so passionate, so dominating. It might have led to tragedy had he lived.”

“Well, you don’t seem to have inherited anything of that sort from him, praise be!” commented Peter.

“Me!” Pierre stretched forth a slender finger and touched his arm. “You do not know me,” he said. “I have always been kind to you—yes, I know it. Even that day ten years ago when I beat you for throwing stones at the gardener—do you remember?—I was not unkind or really angry, because I understood.”

Peter grinned again. “Yes, I do remember. A judicial punishment and well earned—though the gardener was an old brute all the same! Pretty grim to be driven to steal your own apples, what? But I knew your heart wasn’t in it, old bird, though it was quite a decent strapping. But that only bears out what I say. I’ve never seen you in a blazing, honest-to-goodness passion in my life. I sometimes think there may be more in you than meets the eye—but nothing like that.”

“You don’t know me,” said Pierre, faintly smiling. “Not as I know you. You are so very English. You could not understand.”

“Why not say half-witted at once?” suggested Peter. “I’m very forgiving. Come on! Let’s go and swim! The greatest brain in the French Secret Service s’amuse avec his one-way traffic, footling half brother, Peter Dunrobert—the rich English bachelor whom no one loves! Isn’t that how the French papers would express it—or words to that effect?”

“I do not think so,” said Pierre and he got up, still smiling, and looking up at his young English brother who was nearly half a head taller than himself with a sort of affectionate tolerance.

It had been a day of intense heat on the Riviera, and they had idled most of it away since the early morning bathe with books and papers and desultory talk. Pierre’s spare time was of so brief and uncertain a nature that Peter had come south to join him. Peter was not in actual fact greatly addicted to travel. He had been round the world once to please Pierre, but had raced home again for the latter part of the hunting season, and after that had been absorbed in salmon and trout fishing on his own estate in England and he harboured not the faintest desire to encircle the globe again. He believed himself to be of the very straight and simple type of Englishman and so far his life had run on fairly straight and simple lines. He was rich and he had inherited one of the few remaining ancestral homes of the land which were without the usual embarrassments. His chief desire was to maintain his heritage in the state of prosperity in which it had come to him. He was an ardent lover of the country and would have made as good a farmer as he was a landlord. There was nothing dilatory or unbusinesslike about him. Ever since his coming of age he had held the reins with a firm and understanding hand. In some ways he was older than his years, and already all who came into contact with him knew that Peter Dunrobert was a man of his word. He was thorough in all that he did and he looked for the same quality in others. At twenty-four he had gathered a not unnatural touch of cynicism, having encountered a good deal of artificiality and egotism in those around him. But it had not spoilt his serenity. He contemplated the world with a detachment which was his safeguard. He also bred horses—a pursuit which, as he said, filled up every spare cranny of his time. He was quite sociable but he was inclined to despise the froth of life, and the wild orgies of modern desperadoes held no attraction for him. To many of his contemporaries he seemed dull and unresponsive, but his restraint was not mainly due to shyness. He had a wholesome dislike for any form of insincerity or uncleanness, and his position had almost inevitably bred in him a deep-rooted suspicion that sprang from the instinct of self-preservation. He shrank almost too obviously from what he called “painted glamour.”

All this Pierre understood—Pierre Ronceau with his wide knowledge of the world and its evils; and he rather admired Peter for his solitariness. He had been appointed the boy’s guardian twelve years before by the English mother who had given birth to them both and he had faithfully carried out his trust. The two were close friends, though circumstances did not permit of their spending much time together. Their interests were widely severed. Pierre stood high in his country’s Secret Service, and his calling carried him to many parts of the world. His life was of necessity a cosmopolitan one, and the exact ingredients which went to its general composition were known only to himself. Peter took him for granted in a large-hearted, generous fashion and he had never paused to ask himself if he were justified in so doing. Pierre was Pierre, the shrewd, light-hearted mentor of his youth, the one man above all to be trusted, piquantly foreign yet strangely sympathetic, once the big brother and for all time the cheery comrade.

They went off together down the blazing front to the beach, and Peter’s arm was thrown carelessly yet half-protectingly around the Frenchman’s shoulders. If any of those secret enemies of whom Pierre spoke were anywhere in sight, let them know that he was there to shield him, whatever the odds might be!

But that he could be in any real danger he naturally, with British inconsistency, refused to believe. It never occurred to him that hostile eyes might actually be looking forth from the white, green-shuttered villas that gleamed among the pine trees that bordered the sapphire sea, or that any of the varied crowd who lounged in and out of the great hotels and greeted himself with casual friendliness might regard his companion with suspicion and even a certain amount of animosity.

Peter was not accustomed to intrigue of any description, and his affection for Pierre was based upon complete confidence. In his opinion Pierre was just a jolly good sort with a complex for detective work which was superfluous and by no means an essential part of the man’s character. That this same complex could by any far-stretched chance be the electric driving force that was Pierre himself was a possibility that had never occurred to him; nor would he have entertained it for a moment if it had. Pierre was just Peter’s brother and simply not to be viewed in any other light.