Читать книгу Grit Lawless - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 4

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“This job has grown. There has got to be a fourth in it, and the fourth must be a man.—You understand?”

The speaker, who was known as the Colonel, took the cigar he was smoking from his mouth the better to emphasise his words, and looked gravely into the serious faces of his audience. It comprised a man of middle-age, bearded, secretive, calculating; and one other. The other was little more than a boy. By profession he was a mining engineer, by disposition a scamp, ready to plunge into any undertaking that promised adventure. The boy’s head was bandaged where recently it had been broken for him, and he sat very quiet and silent, which was unusual; as the Colonel was wont to remark, he frequently talked too much. But he was not proud of his broken head and its consequences, so he held his peace.

“Do either of you know of a man likely to suit? He must be possessed of a good nerve and a none too tender conscience. He’ll have to put himself outside the law—the business is outside the law. And he must be a man we can trust.”

The Colonel looked sharply from one to the other of his listeners, but neither answered. The young engineer was sulkily examining his finger-nails, displaying the same air of detachment that he had shown throughout. He had received so severe a reprimand over the affair of his broken head that he had felt strongly tempted to sever his connection with the Colonel. Only that spirit of adventure that had led him into it, and an unnatural greed of gain, prevented him from cutting the concern.

“I want a man with grit,” the Colonel said slowly. “There must be plenty such men in Africa, if I could only put my hand on one.”

As he paused the older man looked up suddenly. Something in the Colonel’s speech had jerked into his mind a name he had almost forgotten.

“I knew a man once,” he said, and hesitated because he was not quite sure whether his knowledge of the man justified a recommendation. The acquaintance had been of the slightest; his opinion of his character was based more upon hearsay than deduction, but he believed it was not at fault.

“Well?”

The Colonel threw in the interjection with sharp impatience, and the other added briefly:

“He might not be sufficiently discreet. I know little of him... I did him a service once.”

“What are his qualifications for this job?” the Colonel asked, passing over the half-implied doubt as to discretion. “Let us get hold of facts; we can deal with surmises later.”

“Your saying you wanted a man with grit brought him to my mind,—that’s what the fellows called him—Grit. And, upon my word! though I suppose I’ve heard his real name, I can remember him by no other. Nobody ever called him anything else. He was a lean chap, with an ugly scar down one side of his face. I met him first up in Rhodesia. He was mining then. But I saw him recently in Cape Town.”

“How did he earn the name of Grit?” the Colonel inquired, showing an increasing interest; and the boy left off biting his nails and looked up with a half-resentful scowl, as if jealous of the unknown man’s qualifications for a mission he knew his chief would not entrust to him.

“I don’t know whether he earned it on a particular occasion, or if it was only a general recognition of the chap’s pluck. They said of him at the mines that he was a man who did not know fear.”

“Pshaw?” The Colonel struck the arm of his chair impatiently with his open palm, and jerked one knee over the other. “I thought you had found me my man,” he said irritably, “a man with coolness and nerve. I don’t want any braggart with a school-boy hero reputation. Tell me something he has done beside boast of his courage.”

The other man smiled. He rolled a cigarette and stuck it between his teeth. Then he struck a match and lighted it.

“I can’t tell you much,” he said. “I know little of him, but I never heard him boast. He was a reserved fellow with a sort of hard recklessness of manner that gave one the impression that life hadn’t used him well. I remember one night, some fellows, in illustration of his almost incredible lack of any sense of fear, telling a yarn of how during one of the punitive expeditions after some native rising—he was in the Cape Police then, or some force, I don’t remember the details rightly—several of the boys surrounded a hut in which six of the rebellious ringleaders were hiding. They wanted to take the blacks alive and not lose any of their own men over the business. Grit originated a plan, which they carried out, very successfully too, foolhardy though the undertaking seemed. He climbed on a comrade’s shoulders, dropped through a hole in the grass roof right into the midst of them, and he kept those six armed niggers at bay, fighting with a naked sword and his back against the mud wall. And when the other chaps rushed in they declare he was smiling quietly and seemed to be enjoying himself. He never bragged about it, and he never turned a hair. He simply hadn’t felt fear.”

“Then there was no particular credit due to him.”

“Exactly. Nevertheless, it proves the possession of nerve.”

“Oh, dash it all!” the boy, who was called Hayhurst, exclaimed suddenly. “Give the fellow his deserts. It was a damned plucky thing to do.”

The Colonel smiled drily.

“It’s the kind of hare-brained escapade that appeals to youth.”

“Call it hare-brained, if you like. How would you have got at them, sir?” Hayhurst asked brusquely, resenting the other’s speech.

“In exactly the same manner, if I could have found anyone fool enough to volunteer.”

He pitched the end of his cigar out through the open window and sat up straighter.

“Do you think you could find your man, Simmonds?” he asked. “And if you found him could you persuade him to come and see me here? It would be safer than my going to him. He had better come at night so as to avoid detection. We don’t want him to be spotted as in with us at all. If he isn’t marked he stands a better chance of success.”

“I can find him, right enough,” the other answered.

“Then do so with as little delay as possible. You needn’t mention what the job is he will be wanted for, but let him know that however valuable his time is it will be paid for well, and give him thoroughly to understand the necessity for secrecy.”

The man addressed as Simmonds nodded without speaking; and the boy, muttering something about a headache, got up, and with a brief good-night passed out through the French window, and swinging himself off the stoep was swallowed immediately in the heavy blackness without. The two men smoked in silence while they listened to the crunching of his footsteps on the gravel path, until the sound died away in the distance and only the stirring of the trees as the fitful wind swept through their branches broke the silence of the night. Then Simmonds looked round sharply at the man who sat near the opening, his strong brows drawn together in a frown of balked annoyance, his eyes still turned in the direction whence Hayhurst had disappeared.

“What on earth induced you to enlist that young fool?” he asked.

The heavy brows contracted yet more fiercely as their owner answered, without moving his position:

“Not such a fool as you fancy. And his youth is—or rather, was—an advantage; it put others off their guard. He was smart enough in getting on to the right trail.”

“And then bungled the business, and gave away the whole show.”

“Many an older man,” the Colonel answered tersely, “has been outwitted by a woman.”

He mixed himself a whisky and soda, and talked of other matters until, close upon midnight, Simmonds took his leave.

“Better send your man to me, not bring him,” the Colonel said as he was departing,—“safer. And be careful not to mention what I am likely to want of him. I prefer to judge a man for myself before engaging his services.”

Then he wished his companion good-night, and held a lamp for him to light him to the gate.

A few nights later the man whom other men called Grit, the man who was credited with being entirely devoid of fear, presented himself at the bungalow that the Colonel had rented furnished during the owner’s temporary absence in England. The bungalow was on the outskirts of Cape Town, and the Colonel had chosen it for its proximity to the city and its lonely situation. It stood back from the road in an ill-kept, overgrown garden that was a wilderness of trees and vine-tangled shrubs and palms. Tall straggling gum trees, with their bare untidy trunks and ill-shaped limbs, towered above the one-storied building and shaded the Dutch stoep built on to the front of the house. Oleanders, pink and white, grew to an immense height, lending their fragrance to the heavily perfumed air, rich with the mingled scents of nicotine and gardenia, and the strong cloying sweetness of the orange tree, the dark green of its foliage starred with the matchless beauty of its blossoms. Date and other palms, the prickly cactus and aloe, grew in a wild confusion; and enclosing the whole, undipped, neglected, yet glorious in their disorder, were tall hedges of the blue plumbago, whose pale flowers swept the ground.

The Colonel was seated on the stoep when his visitor arrived. He was alone, and thinking about the man though he was not expecting him. The stranger advanced rapidly, with a trained regular step that caught the listener’s attention. Instinctively he sat up straighter, and peered forward into the darkness, curious to behold who it was who approached along the winding path from the gate. When the new-comer stepped into the patch of light below the stoep he recognised him for the man Simmonds had spoken of by the scar on the left side of his face.

He mounted the steps and came on to the stoep, a tall spare man with muscles of iron, the set of whose shoulders suggested, as his footstep had, a military training. He was fair, with a long lightish moustache, a face that was tanned almost copper-coloured, and a pair of dark grey eyes. The eyes were the keenest and the most sombre the Colonel ever remembered to have seen. They were extraordinarily expressive, and yet bafflingly reticent. A woman would have called them beautiful. They conveyed so much of sex, pride, power, of cool aloofness, and at the same time of an almost startling concentration, that their gaze was somewhat disconcerting. The Colonel when he encountered them fully for the first time was conscious of their influence; for quite ten seconds he looked steadily into their inscrutable depths without speaking. Then he tilted the shade of the reading lamp at his elbow the better to see his man, and, perfectly understanding the reason of his action, the stranger advanced a few paces and stood where the light fell more directly on his face.

“I don’t know whether Simmonds prepared you for my visit,” he said; “but I am here in accordance with your wish.”

“Thank you. I am obliged to you for your prompt response.”

The Colonel had risen. He led the way into the house through the open window at his back, and carefully closed the window behind his visitor.

“I am fond of trees,” he remarked, “but I distrust them. I prefer to hold this interview between walls. We have no occasion to fear the keyholes, for there is not a soul besides ourselves beneath this roof.”

He turned up the lamp as he spoke, and again peered closely at the stranger. By the brighter light in the room he observed the disfiguring scar more clearly. It ran a deep seam slantwise down the lower half of the face. At some time or other a bayonet had slashed the man’s cheek open and laid the jawbone bare.

“You’ve been in the Service?” he said.

“Yes.”

The answer, brief, uncommunicative, almost curt, told the Colonel among other things that this man with the ugly scar and the strange unfathomable eyes would brook no catechism in regard to his private affairs. If he wanted his services, he must be prepared to take him on trust. He stared once again into the grey eyes and sat down.

“Take a seat,” he said. Then with a motion of his hand to the decanter of whisky that stood on the table between them: “Do you drink?”

The stern mouth behind the heavy moustache relaxed slightly; its owner realised that a negative answer would have been welcomed by his host, who, though he drank himself in moderation, preferred in the present business the services of an abstainer.

“On occasions—yes,” he replied as he sat down.

The Colonel pushed the decanter towards him and a glass.

“Help yourself,” he said briefly; and the stranger deliberately half filled the glass with spirit and added a dash of soda. His host watched him curiously, and, reversing the quantities, mixed himself a glass.

“The business for which I shall require you, if we come to an understanding,” he began, with a formality and stiffness which he had not displayed before, “needs absolute discretion as well as coolness and courage. I do not doubt for a moment,” he added hastily, meeting the piercing gaze of the grey eyes, “that your discretion is equal to your courage. I have heard tales of the latter. They tell me fear is unknown to you. I have heard your courage spoken of in terms of the highest admiration.”

The grey eyes smiled suddenly.

“I’ve heard a lot about that too,” their owner said. “It’s mostly from youngsters, though.”

“My informant was no youngster.”

“Ah! you mean Simmonds. His knowledge isn’t first hand. He’s been listening to the youngsters probably. It doesn’t amount to much, a reputation like that.”

The Colonel sat back in his chair and sipped his whisky meditatively.

“You disclaim then the reputation you have gained?” he said.

The other shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

“Does any man actually deserve the admiration accorded him?—or the discredit? Such things have their fashion.”

“Then, you would not, perhaps, describe yourself as absolutely fearless?”

The man flushed darkly, hesitated for an instant, and then touched the scar on his face deliberately.

“That marks a moment of absolute terror,” he said quietly. “Thank God! the fear of being a coward made me receive it in the face instead of the back. Courage is only a matter of control. The hero differs from the coward by the smallest accident of temperament. If self-control were appreciated rightly and made a particular part of the education of the race, the term coward would be seldom applied, and then only to the person it fitted.”

The Colonel leant forward suddenly, resting his arms on the table, his glance still searching the thin, inscrutable face that puzzled and yet attracted him.

“It is men like you we want... Why did you leave the Service?” he asked abruptly.

His hearer stiffened visibly.

“Need we go into that?” he said.

“Not if you prefer to keep your own counsel.”

There was a barely perceptible pause. The younger man broke it.

“My objection to speak has probably led you to a fairly correct inference,” he said. “I was cashiered from the Army. But for which stroke of fortune I should not now be offering my services to you.”

He lifted his glass, put it to his lips, and draining the contents, set it down again empty.

The Colonel remained silent, regarding him with freshly awakened distrust. By his own showing the man was an adventurer. Despite his first prejudice in his favour he began to wonder whether after all it were wise to place confidence in him. He knew nothing of him. There was to his credit merely a few garnished tales of daring which, either from modesty or a knowledge of their exaggeration, he had himself practically disclaimed,—and to his discredit the ugly truth he had just heard from his own lips. He sat up suddenly. In the piercing eyes that met his own steadily he perceived the flicker of a smile.

“You haven’t committed yourself, sir. There is time to draw back.”

But at the half-mocking speech, the almost insolent challenge of the tone, the doubt in the Colonel’s mind suddenly vanished. What if the man were an adventurer? Were not his services required for an adventurous undertaking? The balance sheet of his past life was no concern of his. He wanted courage, daring, and intelligence; he was prepared to pay for them; and he believed that the man before him possessed these qualifications.

“You are not the first man who has gone under who in happier circumstances would have been a credit to the Service,” he said gravely, and having said it dismissed the subject almost it seemed with relief. It did not do to be over particular in regard to a man’s past with great odds at stake.

“I have mentioned what the business I wished to see you about demands of the man who undertakes it,” he added, without pausing, “but I have said nothing about the business itself as yet. Briefly, it is the recovery of certain letters and incriminating papers—some of them, I believe, forgeries—that are being now used for the purposes of blackmail.”

“Half a moment, please. Is this a personal matter, or are you merely negotiating for someone else?”

“It is not a personal matter. It affects someone of greater importance. I have been sent out here to get hold of those papers at any cost. We have offered a big sum down for them, but the rogues who hold them won’t part. Their game is to keep on squeezing. They believe they have an inexhaustible mine.”

“From what you tell me I should say their belief was justified. Since they won’t sell, how do you purpose getting hold of the papers?”

“We must take a leaf from their book and steal them back.”

There was a momentary silence during which the grey eyes looked straight into the brown eyes with a hard, unflinching gaze.

“And that’s where I come in,” he said, completing the Colonel’s sentence.

The Colonel nodded.

“That’s where you come in—if you do come in, that is... There is a certain danger attaching to the enterprise, but that I needn’t mention to you. You will have determined men to deal with, and, unfortunately, men who are in a sense prepared. The plan has been attempted already—and bungled.”

“I should like,” Grit interposed, “to hear about that, if you please.”

The Colonel briefly narrated the story of young Hayhurst’s successful tracing of the incriminating papers, of how he managed to get hold of them, and how he lost them again through blabbing of the affair to a woman.

“That woman is in it, take my word for it,” the Colonel said.

“What’s her name?” inquired the man who had listened quietly to the recital without once interrupting or even moving his position. At the abrupt question the Colonel looked across at him sharply. He had purposely omitted the mention of any names; he intended to secure his man before going into particulars; but now that the question was put to him point blank he felt that he had not sufficient reason for withholding the information.

“Her name is Lawless—Mrs Lawless, living at Rondebosch.—You know her?” he asked, seeing the unmistakable start his companion gave on hearing the name.

“Know her!—Yes, I suppose I do.”

The Colonel did not appear greatly surprised.

“It’s likely you would. She is somewhat notorious, I believe.”

“In what way?”

“Oh! nothing actually against her that I know of. A beautiful woman living alone, and much admired. ... Rumour has it that she’s a widow, and again has it that she is not. I’ve got beyond the age when a man troubles to find out.”

“What causes you to imagine she is in with the other side?” inquired his hearer, a shade of impatience in his tone.

“The boy—”

“Hayhurst?”

“Yes. Hayhurst declares that she induced him to go home with her, that she pumped him, and then signalled to a man who must have been hiding on the stoep, and who sprang in through the window behind him and knocked him senseless with a blow over the head. When he came to himself he was lying in the gutter near his lodging and the papers were gone. My God!” wound up the speaker savagely, “to know that that young fool had in his possession what I’ve been months scheming to get hold of, and lets a woman Delilah him out of his prize! I could cheerfully have slain him when he brought the tale of his failure to me.”

“Lucky for him it was not to me he brought it,” the other said grimly; “I should probably have done it. You don’t reckon yourself over credulous, I suppose, in accepting his tale as it stands?”

“No. I might have questioned it; but it seems probable enough in face of the fact that the fellow who holds the papers has been paying marked attention to Mrs Lawless for some time, and she certainly does not discourage him. Cape Town couples their names together, I believe. One can credit anything about a woman who will listen to the suit of a rogue like that,—a damned swindler, with a reputation for being bigamously married already in another country!”

“His name?” the man with the scar asked sharply, leaning half-way across the table.

“Van Bleit.”

Grit sat up.

“God! man, I know him intimately. We were in Rhodesia together.” He laughed harshly. “It is to him I owe the nickname that has stuck closer than my own. The former acquaintance may prove helpful.”

The Colonel peered at him closely.

“You have just reminded me that the nickname is all I know you by,” he said. “Simmonds could not recall your rightful title.”

“He is not singular in that respect,” was the curt response. “My name is Lawless.”

The Colonel stared at him blankly, his jaw fallen.

“Lawless!” he repeated, and for the life of him he could not prevent the sudden freeze in his manner. It even occurred to him at the moment that he was the victim of a trick. If so, he had walked into the trap fairly easily.

“It is a somewhat uncommon name,” he added. “Are you by any chance related to the lady of whom we have been speaking?”

The man he addressed returned his suspicious scrutiny with careless indifference.

“By marriage only,” he answered briefly.

The Colonel was only partially relieved.

“I have confided in you so much, Mr Lawless,” he said, “that you will readily understand how unwelcome this intelligence is. Had I known of the connection sooner I should have hesitated to speak so freely of a matter that is as a sacred trust to me—”

“You need not let what you have just learnt trouble you, sir,” the other returned carelessly. “Nothing that you have told me so far would be news to the other side. As for the connection!”—he flicked his fingers scornfully,—“it need weigh with you no more than that... The lady disapproves of me. We have not met for years.”

“Perhaps, though, since a connection of yours is mixed up in this affair you might not care to go on with it...”

“It makes no difference,” Lawless answered.

The Colonel reached across the table.

“You are throwing in your lot with me?” he asked quickly.

The other’s hand met his.

“I’ll get those papers back for you, or I’ll kill your man,” he said.