Читать книгу The Phantom Car - Fred M. White - Страница 5

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Sebastian Wilde had turned away from Peggy and Trevor Capner in the garden at Long Elms and had steered his way along the road in the direction of his own house with a little frown between his brows and a rather puzzled expression on that fine, leonine face. It was as if he was working out some problem in his mind, for the veins on his forehead had swollen and there was a sort of baffled look in his eyes. So deeply intent was he upon his thoughts that a little way further down the road he almost collided with a passing car and only by a dexterous swerve into the ditch saved himself from what might have been a serious accident. The owner of the car shouted some abuse over his shoulder, but Wilde was too busy extricating himself to take any notice. Then, just as he had swerved on to the roadway again, a voice from the other side of the hedge accosted him. He looked up to see a keen pair of dark eyes in a humorous face regarding him half seriously.

"That was a pretty narrow squeak," the man behind the hedge said. "I dared not cry out, Mr. Wilde, because I might have startled you. Let me congratulate you on the strength of your arms. At any rate, there is nothing the matter with them."

"Yes, my arms are all right," Wilde admitted. "If my legs were half as good, I should not have much to grumble about. But where have you been lately, Mr. Manthon?"

The man with the humorous face and the keen, penetrating eyes bent over the hedge with a pipe in his mouth. The two seemed to be on fairly good terms and had been ever since Wilde had come into the neighbourhood, but for some reason or another he was not enamoured of Roy Manthon, the novelist and psychologist, whose intimate studies of the workings of the human mind had brought him fame and fortune at an age when most authors are still struggling for recognition. But he was famous now, and on the way to fortune, perfectly happy in that quaint old bungalow of his, which he had adapted out of a pair of workmen's cottages. Most of his time was spent in the village of Lincombe, where he had made a few friends, which included Peggy Ferris and Trevor Capner; indeed, there were shrewd observers who had been heard to declare that if Capner had been out of the way, Peggy would have had no need to look further for a husband. But whether that was true or not, that secret was locked in Manthon's breast and none could question his loyalty towards the lovers.

He looked down at the man in the invalid chair with that quizzical gaze that, for some reason of other, always seemed to disconcert the eminent man of science. It was as if this master of introspection was gazing into his soul, or analysing his thoughts through a mental microscope. It was a feeling Wilde could never rid himself of. Not that he was a man to shirk an issue of that sort. On the contrary, he rather cultivated Manthon's acquaintance and had made him free of the old half-ruined priory called Monkshole which he had purchased when he came to the neighbourhood a year or two before. Manthon was free to come and go as he pleased, and there they discussed such occult matters that their minds mutually delighted in.

But, behind it all, there was ever that feeling on Wilde's part that the younger man was holding him in balance and weighing him. It was a new sensation for Wilde and one that annoyed him, because he had been accustomed to a monopoly of that sort of thing himself. It was a case of opposites attracting one another and, for the moment, Wilde was content to let it go at that. He smiled up into the face of the man standing above him and murmured some commonplaces about the beauty of the morning. Manthon smiled in response.

"Lovely morning indeed," he said. "But where, may I ask, have you been so early?"

"I have been as far as Long Elms," Wilde explained. "Taking some books which I promised to Miss Ferris."

"Oh, indeed?" Manthon observed. "Do you find her interested in your sort of work? I have known her pretty intimately for a long time now, but I have never detected any scientific leaning on her part. But then, a many sided man like you has divers interests—the psychic, for instance. I should not be at all surprised to find that Peggy Ferris is attracted by that."

There was almost a challenge in Wilde's eyes as he looked up. Was this man a thought reader, he wondered?

"What make you think that?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Miss Ferris is a bit of a dreamer, despite her outdoor activities. Her's is a perfect specimen of the normal mind in a sound and healthy body. But there is an Eastern strain in her blood somewhere, a certain mystical vein that shows itself to observing eyes on occasions. I have seen it more than once. In fact, I have seen it every time she speaks of her dead brother. Have you noticed that?"

Wilde hastened to say that he had not. All the same, he was not telling the truth, and both of them knew it. Then Wilde switched off the conversation abruptly to something else and, a moment or two later, was propelling his way along the road in the direction of Monkshole. Manthon watched him until the old man was out of sight.

"A most fascinating enigma," he told himself. "The sort of character that Robert Louis Stevenson would have delighted in. Not the Jekyll and Hyde business exactly, but something suggesting that dual psychology. On the whole, the most interesting bit of character study I ever encountered."

Time ago, and that not very long since, the house called Monkshole has been little more than a mediaeval ruin. There were ruins about it now, the remains of a chapel, a few stones standing where a great monastery had once been, and in the centre of it the Prior's residence, which had withstood the assaults of time. A rambling house with one great sitting room, now turned into a library, a bedroom or two, with part of a ruined tower overhead and certain domestic offices. Here Wilde had established himself with a man and his wife to look after his comfort, and for the rest, his secretary, James Ebbsmith, who was, in his way, almost as remarkable a character as his employer.

In the great library Wilde had placed his books. It was lighted by a big dormer window at the one end and lined throughout with wonderfully carved panelling, relieved here and there by slender oak pillars that rose up to the roof twenty feet overhead. A wonderful room, and eminently suited to the personality of the man who occupied it.

In the centre of one of the walls was a broad, deep fireplace with its enormous chimney and its two great powder closets on either side. Everything there was exactly as it had been three hundred years before, save for the carpets on the floor and the comfortable chairs scattered around the room.

Apart from the well-lined bookshelves, there was little else to indicate that here was the workshop of a great scientist. There was no machinery or mechanical appliance of any sort, nothing to suggest a laboratory of a man who was deeply engaged in new discoveries or inventions. From one point of view, it was rather a disappointing room, save for its air of repose and quiet dignity which impressed itself at once upon the most casual observer.

At a small table under the big window the secretary, James Ebbsmith, sat writing. He was a little man with sharp, rather irregular features, and quick, evasive eyes which seemed to elude, rather than avoid, the look of anyone who was addressing him. In a queer way, he suggested flexibility, much as if he had been constructed out of india-rubber, which was not remarkable, considering that he had started life, many years ago, as a circus contortionist and conjurer. How and where Wilde had found him nobody but that strangely assorted couple ever knew. But he was the ideal secretary that Wilde had been searching for for years, and the understanding between them was complete.

Not that Ebbsmith had the smallest claim to call himself a scientist. It was his nimbleness of body and quick apprehension of mind on the part of others that was the chief asset in his usefulness to Sebastian Wilde. Mentally, they were as far apart as the poles, but that did not prevent a perfect understanding between them.

Ebbsmith looked up quickly as his employer entered.

"Well?" he demanded. "Well?"

"Oh, not so fast, please," Wilde smiled. "I have been as far as Long Elms with those books for Miss Ferris. I suppose you marked the passages I spoke about?"

"Yes, I did all that, boss," Ebbsmith said. "I suppose you didn't happen to see young Capner there?"

Wilde smiled approvingly at his subordinate.

"You are really getting on, James," he said. "That telepathic complex of yours is getting more marked every day. As a matter of fact, I did happen to see Trevor Capner. There is something wrong between those two young people."

"What, do you mean they have had a quarrel?"

"I won't go as far as to say that, but there is a rift in the lute somewhere. Mind you, Trevor is not the easy-going sportsman that we take him for. He resents the friendship between Peggy Ferris and myself. Just fancy a handsome young airman with his reputation being jealous of a poor, miserable paralysed man like Sebastian Wilde."

For some reason or another, this remark seemed to strike Ebbsmith as being particularly humorous, for he threw back his head and filled the room with cackling laughter.

"Oh, yes, I see your point of view," Wilde smiled tolerantly. "But there are other things. James Ebbsmith, what is it that I want more particularly than anything else at the present moment?"

"Well, I should say £50,000," Ebbsmith grinned.

"At the very least," Wilde went on. "And I want it in cash, where I can handle it as required. The great invention stands still for need of a sum like that. Why is it that all we scientists are so poor?"

"Well, you haven't done so badly without money."

"That is true enough, yes. But consider the months of maddening weary waiting between the supplies. Five hundred here and a thousand there, and then weeks doing nothing. I tell you, if I could put my hand upon a round sum in cash, I could startle the world, within a year. They talk about their television, which I am not denying is the opening up of a wonderful new field, but I could take it a great deal further than flashing photographs across the Atlantic and showing a lot of gaping fools a theatrical performance on a white screen. I am talking now, James, as I have never talked to you before. What would you think if I told you that I am within striking distance of making myself invisible."

"Coo," Ebbsmith purred. "Great, boss. Invisible, eh? My sacred aunt! Mean to say you could walk about the world without anybody seeing you, as they did in the fairy stories?"

"Yes, I mean even that," Wilde declared. "The thing is possible. Anything is possible now that a man can sit in a room believing himself to be in utter darkness when he is really in the centre of a blaze of light."

"You are not pulling my leg?" Ebbsmith asked.

"Nothing of the sort, James. What I speak of has been done. It is done every day. If I wanted to televise you, I should place you in front of a simple apparatus and reproduce your features, yes, even your cigarette and the smoke from it, on a screen a thousand miles away. And you would sit in the operating room under the impression that you were in pitch darkness, but you wouldn't be. You would be in the centre of an illumination from which everything but the infra-red rays of light would be abstracted. I don't want to go into technical details, but in my workshop overhead I have satisfied myself that the thing can be done. Indeed, the Scotch inventor, Baird, has already told the world as much. Now, listen. If I can make you believe that you are sitting in a ring of electric light when, so far as your eyes are concerned, you are in absolute darkness, then I can invert the process. My experiments with those rays tell me that I can so manipulate light within a radius of a few feet from my own person that you, or anybody else, could stand, say two yards away, and never know that I was present. That is what I am going to do."

Wilde had sunk his voice almost to a whisper. Ebbsmith regarded him with open mouth and staring eyes.

"You absolutely mean that, boss," he gasped. "My word, if you can do that, then you don't want to go plunging about looking for money. You could go and take it. You could walk into a big house in the West End, when the family sat at dinner, and help yourself from my lady's jewel case, even when her maid was actually in her dressing-room."

A tolerant smile crossed Wilde's lips.

"Yes, I could do that," he said. "And I should be perfectly safe so long as nobody touched me, or came within a few feet of my aura. I could walk behind one of the counters of the Bank of England and get away with banknotes to a fabulous amount, as easily as you could cross this room. But, my dear James, a lot has to be done before we reach that stage. I want all sorts of things. To begin with, I need radium. I could do with a bit, not much more than a pin's head, but even that would cost something like £10,000. And that is only one of the items. If I am going to succeed in what I have set myself out to attain then I need £50,000."

"And you think that Miss Ferris——"

"Ah, there you go again, James, with your telepathic vision." Wilde interrupted. "Yes, she could do it easily enough. And she would not miss it, either. I suppose she must be worth at least four times that amount. And the man she is going to marry is rich. I am wondering——"

"Yes, that is all very well," Ebbsmith cut in. "But isn't the mere fact that Capner is a wealthy man rather a stumbling-block, eh? He would certainly have something to say in the matter. And so long as the girl is under his influence——"

"Yes, but how long will she be under his influence? She is very much in love with him I know, but I can see signs of trouble in that direction. I saw them this morning. There is something going on which I cannot quite fathom. It may be mere imagination on my part, but it seems to me that Capner is contemplating something to which the girl objects. And if he goes on with it, there will be complications. What the trouble is I don't know. You will make it your business to find out. You can go and see Capner this afternoon and take him that last pamphlet I had from Germany. I mean the one that Professor Hindrich sent me. There it is, on the table. I have not looked at it myself, but it has something to do with ballistics. It is a subject which doesn't intrigue me, but naturally appeals to an enthusiastic airman like Capner. Give it to him with my compliments. And then, if you are the clever man I take you to be, you will be able to find out what is the cause of the little misunderstanding between Miss Ferris and her lover. Of course, I don't want to do anything underhanded——"

"No, you wouldn't," Ebbsmith said dryly.

"I am glad you understand me so well," Wilde went on smoothly. "But if those two agree to part, then I don't see why I should not take Miss Ferris into my confidence. She is more than interested in my work already, especially the psychic side of it. And if she and Capner drift apart, then she will want something to occupy her mind. She is a far cleverer girl than she takes herself to be. But for the fact that she was born with a gold spoon in her mouth, she might have gone a long way. She may go a long way yet, if she consents to help me to perfect my greatest discovery."

"Aren't you taking a lot for granted?" Ebbsmith asked..

"Quite right, James, quite right," Wilde agreed. "I was carried away by my imagination. Now, I want you to go as far as Capner's place somewhere about teatime, and take that pamphlet. Find out what you can and let me know. And now I think I will get on with my work."

It was shortly after four o'clock the same afternoon before Ebbsmith finished his correspondence and strolled quietly out of the big library, leaving Wilde alone there. Half an hour later, the telephone bell rang and Wilde propelled his chair across the floor to answer it. He took the receiver down and placed it to his ear and called the speaker at the other end.

"Yes, it's Wilde," he said. "Who are you? Oh, Prosser, eh? I have been expecting to hear from you all day. What's that? You can't get it. Why? Oh, I understand. Well, tell them that they shall have a cheque by the end of the week. Impress upon them that I must have those chemicals by return of post. What's that? Martin's address. Why do you particularly want it? Oh, I see. Well, I can't give it to you now, because I am alone here and it is upstairs in my workroom. Eh? Are you there? Well, if it is as urgent as all that, give me another call in an hour and I will manage to get it for you. All right. Ring off. Good-bye."

And then Wilde proceeded to do a strange thing. With his long, powerful arms, he levered himself out of his invalid chair to the floor. Once there, he flung his body and legs over his head and proceeded to propel himself across the floor until he reached one of the slender oak pillars that divided the panelling into sections. With the use of his arms alone, he climbed up the pillar, hand over hand, much as some great ape might have done, at the same time displaying a muscular strength and grip which was amazing in a man of his years.

Once at the top of the pillar, he reached out and pushed back a trap in the ceiling. Then, as if he had been a giant spider, he flung himself clear of the pillar and raised himself bodily through the open trap on to the floor above. Here he paused a minute for breath, and, after putting a little address book in his pocket, surveyed the scene around him.

If there was no machinery in the room below, there was a plethora of it in the great loft, which was lighted by a glass roof. There was something weird and uncanny about those spidery brass and steel wheels and the great discs that looked not unlike a sheet of parchment which had been removed from the head of a drum. A sort of robot arrangement, much as if the studio had been intended to take a futurist film.

But Wilde was not concerned with that for the present. He regained the library by the same means and he had reached the loft and waited for the telephone to ring again. There was a light ladder in the corner of the library, obviously used for the purpose of reaching the loft above; but with his paralysed lower limbs, it had been impossible for Wilde to use that in the absence of Ebbsmith. Then he unlocked the door, the key of which he had carefully turned before he started on his amazing expedition, and lighted a cigarette.

"So that's that," he muttered. "Just as well to know that the old training has not been altogether wasted. A sort of triumph of a body over its infirmities. All the same, I don't think I should cut a very pretty figure if I walked down the village on my hands, though I can use them for locomotion as well as many people manipulate their legs. However——"

While he was still ruminating, Ebbsmith returned. There was a grin on his face and a smile on his flexible features.

"It's all right, boss," he said. "I have not been wasting my time. I have quite a lot to tell you."

"Oh, then you did manage to see Capner?"

"Yes, I saw Captain Capner all right. I gave him the pamphlet with your compliments and he told me to give you his best thanks. But he didn't seem to worry much about the pamphlet. He seemed to have something very different on his mind."

"Did you manage to find out what it was?"

"Well, indirectly. It's like this, boss. Capner has practically given up flying. I know that because he told me so a couple of months ago. But he is interested in a new type of plane which the Air Ministry have adopted. He didn't hope that they would do anything of the sort, and, anyway, he was expecting the usual official delay. But some big bug in the Ministry happened to get sight of the thing and took it in his head that it must be tested without delay. So they carted Capner's plane to one of the big aerodromes and put it in commission. I think the idea was to fly round the world or something like that, and, of course, the inventor was asked to take charge."

"You mean he was to fly the machine?"

"That was what I said, wasn't it, boss? That is what I meant, anyhow. It is only natural that the man who invented it should be commanded to give it a real test."

"Which means, of course, that Capner is going?"

"Well, there you have me, boss. I can't say. He wants to go, and yet he doesn't want to go. I didn't ask him any questions on the subject because it is as plain as the nose on my face. But if you ask me what my opinion is, I should say that if the young lady wasn't in the way, Capner would be off like a shot."

"And she doesn't want him to go, I suppose?"

"I am quite sure she doesn't," Ebbsmith went on. "He promised her he would send in his papers a long time ago. You know that as well as I do."

"Now I come to think of it, I do," Wilde said. "He mentioned his intention to me in the presence of Miss Ferris, and she was more than delighted with what he said."

"Of course she was. You seem to have forgotten what happened to her brother."

"So I had," Wilde cried. "Stupid of me. Of course, I remember now that she hates flying. Natural enough, considering that she lost her brother, to whom she was passionately attached. Look here, Ebbsmith, it is quite plain. There is trouble between those two because Capner can't make up his mind to carry out his promise to Miss Ferris. It is quite natural he should hesitate, because people will say unpleasant things about him if he declines to back his invention personally. On the other hand, if he goes on with it, then he will have the lady to reckon with."

"That is precisely how I look at it," Ebbsmith grinned. "Of course, neither of those young people know that we are in the least interested in them; indeed, how should they know?"

"Ah, indeed," Wilde said thoughtfully. "Well, James, you have not been wasting your time and it looks to me as if it is in our hands to expedite things to racing pace. I think I will take my chair down into the village presently and drop in casually on Miss Ferris for a little chat."

An hour or so later, the invalid chair was propelled into the garden at Long Elms, where Wilde was pleased to see Peggy sitting thoughtfully on the seat by the side of the lawn.

She smiled pleasantly as he came near, but he did not fail to notice the look of distress on her face and traces of recent tears in her eyes. She wiped them furtively and then turned to Wilde with a gaiety that deceived him not at all.