Читать книгу A Shadowed Love - Fred M. White - Страница 7

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Dick Stevenson nodded approvingly.

"I shall make a capital story out of this," he said. "One smiles at this kind of thing in books, and yet more remarkable events are chronicled in the papers every day. But isn't she lovely, Molly?"

Molly laid the photograph carefully on the table. The more she looked at it the more she was drawn and fascinated.

"It is a pretty episode," she said, "but only an episode, after all. I don't see how you are going to follow up the acquaintance, Dick. The poor girl is blind, and never goes out; the way you were dismissed was a pretty strong hint not to call again. And yet I should like to see Mary once more."

In his heart of hearts Dick was telling himself that this thing should be done. What was the use of being an author with all a novelist's imagination if one could not scheme some ingenious plan or other? He lighted a cigarette over the evil-smelling lamp with a thoughtful air. Somebody was knocking at the door.

"Come in," Molly said; "it can be nobody but Herr Greigstein."

A small, stout man, with close-cut hair and enormous moustache came into the room. He had a high, broad forehead and a magnificent pair of flashing eyes that seemed to be marred by spectacles. There was a suggestion of power about this man of strong intellectual force and determination. For the most part he was smiling and loquacious; he possessed a boyish flow of animal spirits, belied now and again by a quick-flashing glance, and a gathering of deep-set eyebrows. For the rest, Max Greigstein was a lodger on the top floor of the Pant-street house, and he was generally supposed to be a German master in a North London school.

"I am late," he said, breezily, "but I come with news of the best. You remember, Herr Dick, I give you certain information about German anarchists in London. You put him in the form of some articles for a friend of mine, who has a paper in Berlin. My friend, he sends me eleven pounds for those pen pictures and asks, like Oliver Twist, for more, therefore, we divide the money as arranged, and when landlord he come to-morrow he grovel and eat dust before you. Behold, the little fairies that make sad hearts light!"

With something of the air of a conjurer and something of his swiftness, Greigstein laid some gold coins on the little table. His tongue had no pause, his restless dark eyes seemed as if seeking for something. For all his friendship and his many little kindnesses, Dick rather disliked Greigstein. He admitted the fact with shame, but there it was. He knew the little German scientist to be miserably poor; still he had played the good fairy like this often before.

"Here is the beginning of fame and fortune," he cried. "You grow rich, you marry a beautiful and talented young lady, and in the course of time—Gott in Himmel, what is this? where did it come from?"

The man's whole manner changed, there was quick command in his tone. He laid a strong brown finger on the photograph lying upwards on the table. He might have been a general who finds a fault in some strategic scheme, a lawyer who at length finds the weak spot in the witness's armor. His eyes flashed with strange brilliancy behind his glasses.

"I cannot tell you," Dick said coldly. "That proof came into my hands by the merest accident. It is no business of mine—or yours."

Greigstein waved the whole thing aside with a quick motion of his hand. The next moment he was chatting gaily of moths and butterflies. It was his own great hobby—that and science. There was a new moth that Dick must see, a new moth captured in the gardens of a London square.

"I catch him in a square," he cried excitedly. "I make friends with all the square keepers for miles around, and they let me go into the gardens when the world is dark and quiet. And I get my new moth. I take him to South Kensington, and they say he is but, Callimorpha Lecontei. Ach, the fools!"

Dick listened more or less vaguely. He had heard all about those nocturnal rambles before.

"Some day you listen to my theories," Greigstein rabbled on. It seemed to Dick that he was keeping his eyes too scrupulously averted from the table and the photograph. "Again there was the new clouded moth which I found at Stanmere. Some day, if I am lucky, I retire to Stanmere. It is the paradise of the entomologist. Herr Dick, do you know that I was at Stanmere last week?"

"You were lucky," Dick said, with a sigh.

"Even so, I was on the lake. The family were away from home. Strange that I should come and take rooms under the very roof of young people who had been born and bred at Stanmere. There are no dragon-flies like those on the lake yonder. I should never tire of Stanmere."

"I may never see the dear old place again," Dick said, regretfully. "I'd give a great deal to have a month there now, to lie in the bracken under the old park oaks, or to drift amongst the water-lilies in a punt. Fancy having a day with those trout once more! My good friend, if you don't stop talking about Stanmere at once, I shall be constrained to throw a book at you."

Greigstein would take himself off at once. It was getting very late, and he had some work to do before he went to bed. Meanwhile, would Herr Dick do some more of those brilliant articles? In a whirl of words the German departed, leaving his spectacles behind him. Dick noticed them presently.

"I don't believe he wants glasses at all," he said. "He is a Socialist. Meanwhile, I'll take his glasses, lest he should come back again. I'm too tired to swim in another sea of words to-night."

Dick slipped quietly up the stairs of the quiet house. Greigstein's bedroom was slightly open, and Dick looked in. The gas was lighted by the dressing-table. The German stood there in immaculate evening dress, his moustaches waxed. To Dick's utter astonishment he saw that across the broad glistening expanse of shirtfront was a riband, and round the powerful throat a jewelled order was suspended. A silk-lined evening cloak lay across a chair.

Dick softly retired with the spectacles in his pocket. He heard the front door close presently, and footsteps going down the street. And on the table lay the photograph of the girl with the sad blue eyes!