Читать книгу The Grey Woman - Fred M. White - Страница 4

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It was an hour later that Pamela drifted into the palm lounge of the Cosmopolis with a weary air of one who has been surfeited on Dead Sea fruit. She wanted a watching world to know that she had been everywhere and done everything, that she had shed all her illusions at the early age of twenty-three. There are lots of Pamelas like that in these times, but very few carry it off in the finished way peculiar to our particular Pamela.

She looked so exceedingly pretty and alluring, with her slim boyish figure, the liquid grey eyes, and the rebellious brown-bronze hair clustering round her shapely head. With it all, she had that semi-insolent, semi-patronising air which proclaims breeding all the world over. She seemed to carry all the insolence and courage which go with a score of sheltered generations and the subsconsciousness of race, with it all a sense of power and knowledge, because there were few things that Pamela could not do, and do well. She rode like Diana of the Chase, she could handle a gun with the best of them, and at tennis and golf she was to be taken almost religiously. Small wonder, then, that this spoilt child of the gods should carry herself before the eyes of men and women as if she were the heiress of the ages.

But, to put it quite plainly, she was an exceedingly spoilt young woman, allowed to go entirely her own way since her school days, with more money to spend than was good for her, and only casually looked after by that snuffy old guardian of hers, who sat in Lincoln's Inn Fields amongst the dusty cobwebs, like some bloated old spider whose whole life is devoted to the guardianship of family secrets. Thus, Pamela, as she drifted into the lounge, conscious, as always, of the sensation she was creating.

As a matter of fact she did not want to be there at all. At the last moment she had dragged herself to the hotel, more out of loyalty to Joe Musgrave than anything else, because she had been out in the open all day and had driven herself back to town in her two-seater at a speed which more than once had threatened to land her in serious trouble. Then, tired as she was, she flung herself into the flimsy sketchiness which modern fashion calls an evening frock and had come round to the Cosmopolis, feeling rather more dead than alive.

She dropped wearily into a seat and nodded to her companions who had been patiently awaiting her coming. She was half asleep and made no effort to conceal the fact.

"Cheerio, people," she drawled. "Cheerio. But, tell me, why this atmosphere of gentle melancholy?"

"You are jolly late," Musgrave ventured almost timidly.

"Is that all? I call half an hour's grace a miracle of punctuality. I motored back from Haddon without any tea and when I got home I was almost too exhausted to change. What an ungrateful beast you are, Joe. Daphne, you look topping. Wearing the family pearls, and all."

Daphne Lyne expanded under the compliment. She was much of the same type as Pamela on a less rapid scale. Pretty and rather clinging, the stamp that settles down eventually in some country home to a life of placid domesticity. But she was not insensible to the compliment Pamela paid her.

"Perhaps I ought not to have worn the pearls, Pam," she said. "But in honour of Joe's birthday, don't you know. I shouldn't have had them if mother had been at home, but I happen to know where she keeps the key of her safe, and I—well—I sneaked them. Positively for one appearance only."

"Anyhow, they go jolly well with that coral frock of yours," Pamela said. "Oh, do wake up, some of you. What are you dreaming about, Joe? A nice host you are. If I don't have a cocktail I shall never get as far as the dining-room."

Musgrave summoned the hovering waiter grudgingly. This was the sort of thing in Pamela that he hated. He knew well enough that she possessed a sound mind and a sound body, and that the cocktail business was all part of the pose which she had been assuming for a good many months past. He knew perfectly well that if Pamela never saw another cocktail in her life, it would not cause her so much as a passing pang. And yet—and yet in public places like this she invariably assumed the suggestion that a cocktail to her was as the breath of life.

The discreet waiter stood there non-committally.

"Dry Martini for me," Pamela drawled.

"Oh, all right," Musgrave growled. "Waiter, dry Martini for four. Not that I want it—I hate the confounded things myself. However——"

"Not for me, thanks," Daphne protested.

"Our pure bride to be," Pamela scoffed. "Carry on, Joe. In my alarming state I can do with two."

There was a frown on Musgrave's brow as they drifted in to dinner. As a healthy-minded sportsman, he detested this cocktail habit, especially in the woman he loved and hoped, at long last, to make his wife. It was all very well now and then, as part of Pamela's pose, but that sort of thing can be so easily overdone, and is a habit that grows, especially with a girl who burns the candle at both ends as Pamela was doing day by day, or rather night by night. If he only had the right to stop it!

But it was not the time or place for moralising. He would take a more favourable opportunity of expostulating with Pamela, and, in the meantime, make the best of the passing hour. The idea, as he explained to his guests, was to dine regally and do some sort of a show afterwards, winding up at a dance club.

"Good egg," Jimmy Primrose declared. "Give Daphne a chance to see beyond the convent walls once more."

"Of come, mother isn't as bad as all that," Daphne protested. "Of course, if she were at home I shouldn't be allowed to go to a night club, but she needn't know anything about that."

"She's a regular ogre," Pamela laughed. "It's lucky for her that she hasn't got a daughter like me. Daphne, you are going to shirk the best part of the evening are you?"

"Of course, she isn't," Primrose declared stoutly.

"It's the Puritan blood in her veins holds her back," Pamela scoffed lightly. "The same complaint you suffer from, Joe. Some ancestor of yours must have been a friend of Oliver Cromwell."

"Don't let's quarrel," Daphne smiled. "I don't mind, especially if Joe takes the blame."

"Oh, I'm quite willing to do that," Musgrave said. "It isn't the night club I object to so much as the atmosphere of it. Pamela wanted to go, and, of course——"

"Now, look here, Joe," Pamela said, "you can drop that parental attitude. If I want to go to a night club, well, I go to a night club. And that's that. And if I choose to go alone, that's that again. What's the harm in it."

"None," Joe admitted. "But I hate the idea of you and girls like you rubbing shoulders with the scum of the universe which you find in every night club. I don't care where it is and which it is. Of course, I don't mean burglars and that class of criminal, because I am alluding to much more dangerous entities than that. Men who started life with every advantage. Public school and 'varsity and so forth. The most dangerous scoundrel on earth is the pigeon turned hawk. I know lots of them. Well dressed, beautifully turned out, charming manners and all that sort of thing, but under their feathers they are birds of prey of the most diabolical kind. Swindlers and blackmailers. Oh, I know. And Jimmy Primrose knows too."

"Pretty hot stuff, some of 'em," Jimmy agreed. "Of course, it doesn't matter so much with us men, because we can be outwardly friendly and keep 'em at a distance at the same time. But when they get round some of our womankind, as a lot of them have done, then it is a different matter altogether. I hate to say it, Pamela, but if I happened to be your brother I'd stop you going to a night club alone, if I had to lock you in your bedroom."

Pamela smiled in her most patronising manner.

"Listen to Jimmy," she said. "The softest innocent in our set. Can't you see Jimmy as a sort of St. George protecting confiding women from the wolves? Oh, come along; if we're going to do a show first we must get a move on. And, Joe, look a bit more cheerful. Anybody would think that it was your funeral instead of your birthday. Smile, smile, smile."