Читать книгу Sarah of the Sahara - George S. Chappell - Страница 5

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“Dr. Traprock?”

She held the card which had preceded me. Saluting in the continental manner, I bent over her extended hand, noting the strong, square nails with their perfect crescent moons at the base.

“Lady Wimpole.”

She motioned me to a complicated wicker chair of Malaysian make which brought back vividly my years in Mindanao.

“You were splendid the other night,” she said. Her voice surprised me. It was harsh, like the note of a grackle or the cry of a sea-bird, full of strange breaks, guttural depths and moving dissonances.

As we talked I took in the details of our surroundings. We were seated in the morning-room of the Villa Bianca, an exquisitely appointed mansion of lemon-yellow stucco embowered in a riot of roses, bougainvilléa and flowering bugloss-vines. From beyond the walls of the formal entrance garden the noises of the town reached us faintly. The Monocan populace were celebrating the fête of St. Yf whose favor is supposed to bring good luck at the gaming tables.

Glancing at my hostess I re-experienced the conviction that she was a surprising woman. Odd indeed was the contrast she made with her surroundings. The room was of an indescribable daintiness. Overhead arched a pale blue plaster dome upon which painted birds flitted among fleecy clouds or perched upon blossoming branches. The side-walls, except for door and window openings, were covered with coral pink studded regularly with small crystal buttons, the spacing being accentuated by a connecting diaper-design of silver thread.

From the cornice, at the beginning of the dome, hung a deep valance of white lace which was repeated in the long window curtains and innumerable cushions on chairs, chaise-longue and foot-stools. The whole room, in fact, seethed with a sort of suds of lace and chiffonerie like an old-fashioned valentine in the midst of which Lady Sarah sat enthroned in a curious chair contrived to represent a sea-shell.

Her costume, as nearly as I could make it out, was a voluminous silk prowler or slip-cover of silk matching the walls, and like them, edged with lace. An intricate mob-cap covered all but a severe bang of red-brown hair which shrieked at its dainty surroundings as loudly as the green parrot who, raucous and unconfined, swung acrobatically about his perch.

“Shut up, Selim,” commanded the bird’s mistress; then, having noted my looks of appraisal, “Isn’t this place hideous? I hate a room that foams at the mouth. My husband takes it for the season. Poor creature, his taste is ghastly; he was born in Nottingham. This house was built by the government for one of the old king’s mistresses. It gives Wimpole a thrill merely to rent it.”

She sank back languidly into the recesses of her shell, suppressing a yawn and I could see the faint lines running from the corners of her eyes to the lobes of her ears, lines of disillusionment, of hunger denied, of ...

During the interval since our meeting at the Casino I had learned something of her tragic story. Born amid the highest and most refined nobility, the daughter of Sir Rupert Alleyne and Mary, Lady Beaverboard, she had seen her ancestral fortune lost by her father in speculative adventures induced by the old taint of the Alleyne madness. In his fifty-third year Sir Rupert inherited by the laws of succession the estates and titles of the Beaverboard interests, becoming subsequently Duke of Axminster. These honors marked the beginning of the end.

The final crash came with Sir Rupert’s attempt to corner the Italian antique market together with all the important trans-atlantic steamship lines, his idea being to completely control the American demand for ancestral portraits and objets d’art. The stately halls of Alleynecourt were thronged with continental adventurers freighted down with spurious Botticelli, Allegretti and other masters.

When the Duke, raving, was carted away to Old Drury, his daughter sought refuge with her uncle, Egbert Alleyne, whose scientific works on graptolites and stromatoporoids kept him impoverished and ill-at-ease in a tiny cottage in Gloucestershire.

Here Horace Wimpole found her. He was at that time senior partner in the firm of Wimpole & Tripp, laces, of Nottingham, with a peerage in view and an o’er-vaulting snobbery which he saw prospects of gratifying by an alliance with the penurious but well-connected Sarah Alleyne. On her side it was a bitter bargain,—her youth, her rugged beauty, her hopes of romance in exchange for wealth and comfort for herself and her crazed sire. She accepted.

A week after the Westminster Gazette announced the bestowal of a title upon Horace, Lord Wimpole, the ennobled merchant led his aristocratic bride from the church portico. Blithely rang the bells of St. George’s and lustily rose the cheers of the bluff English onlookers whose worship of nobility and all the panoply thereof is the enduring wonder of the world. Wimpole promptly did his duty by his father-in-law and had the ancient zany removed from Old Drury to a private padded-cell in a fashionable asylum. The old man’s last whimsy was that he was Admiral Napier and he was given the run of a small garden where, in full uniform and spy-glass in hand, he made observations and issued authoritative commands.

Lady Wimpole was now free, except for the encumbrance of her low-bred husband who had virtually retired, master of a colossal fortune by means of which he proposed to live up to his new estate.

LORD HORACE WIMPOLE

“As a business man he was a success, for he ran true to type,

but as an aristocrat he was a hopeless false-alarm.”

Lord Horace Wimpole

It was here he made his fatal error. As a business man he was a success, for he ran true to type, but as an aristocrat he was a hopeless false-alarm. Contrary to previous statements, in matters of breeding kind hearts can not compare with coronets, particularly when the latter have been in the family for ten generations.

Finding himself a failure in the fields of sport, riding to or from the hounds, cricket and the active exercises, intellectually unable to compete in cultural pursuits such as the writing of memoirs or the collecting of sea shells and butterflies, Wimpole was thrown back on the last recourse of affluent ignorance, travel and dissipation.

In the latter field he showed a natural aptitude which, had it been caught and cultivated in some previous generation, might have made him a rather attractive rake. But it came too late; he was merely beastly. Lady Wimpole was quite frank about it.

“Your husband,—is he with you?” I asked.

She raised her beautiful pinkish eye-lids toward the ceiling. “Still asleep ... he was unusually crocked last night. You know he has taken up the vices. He tries to be brutal.”

“Does he beat you?” I put the question frankly because I knew it was the traditional thing and I felt that she would appreciate a direct method.

“No,” she said simply. “He would like to but he doesn’t dare. He does his worst however. He bites.”

She slipped back the soft sleeve of her gown and extended an arm. I shrank back in horror. The dog! A semi-circle of teeth-marks marred the salmon-silkiness of the loveliest fore-arm in the world.

Involuntarily I paled and yet felt curiously relieved. This proof of dastardly conduct on her husband’s part seemed to make easier the thing I knew I should eventually have to do, namely, take this gorgeous creature from him.

Turning toward the parrot to hide my emotion I said “Madame,—I am sorry to bring you bad news ... but we are both summoned to appear before the local police magistrate the day after tomorrow. The charge is murder. You are a material witness. The affair is entirely technical, but there are unseen influences at work. The young man,—the scoundrel who attempted to steal your gold, was well-connected, of an old Peruvian family. They have cabled representations to the Monacan government. The whole affair has the look of a nasty, political embroglio. It may last some time. I was once called as a witness to a trolley accident in Jerusalem and six months afterward....”

“I will hear all that later. Today is Tuesday. Call for me Thursday morning—what is the hour? eleven? Good—be here at ten-thirty: I will not fail you. Adios.”

Again saluting her à la française, I departed.

For two days I carried her image in my heart. I know not how it is with others but when I have once decided to love a certain person I find it a simple matter to do so. At the first glimpse of Lady Wimpole my heart, had, so to speak, assumed a crouching posture. It only remained for me to tell my emotions what to do, just as I might direct my great police dog, Graustein, to stop a suspicious character. By now I was thoroughly aroused. The memory of those atrocious teeth-marks and that blemished fore-arm were fresh fuel.

At exactly ten-thirty on the appointed Thursday I approached the villa. It was close shuttered and wore a vacant, deserted look at which my heart sank. The gate was locked and the bell jangled noisily among deserted rose bushes.

“Curses!” I ground out between clenched teeth. “She was toying with me!”

A step on the gravel interrupted my bitter reflections. It was the old gardener.

“Madame est partie,” he announced, “et Monsieur aussi ... sur le yacht ... ce matin.”

A glance toward the bay confirmed his statement; the slim white shape of Wimpole’s yacht, the Undine, was no longer in sight.

“But did they leave no message?” I demanded.

He turned aside smiling.

“Un mot? Sais pas ... c’est-à-dire ... peut-être ...”

I saw what he was driving at. Damn the baksheesh hunting tribes!

“Here,” I said, thrusting a crisp bank-note through the bars. Seizing it he fumbled in his blouse and produced a large envelope which I clutched eagerly, tearing it open as the bearer disappeared into the depths of the garden. Beneath the now familiar crest, in a bold masculine handwriting, I read the simple words, “Meet me in the desert, S. W.”

This thwarting of my desire, this baffling of my purpose—was the one thing needed to set my blood on fire. On the instant I turned and ran down the hill toward the water-side, all thought of Monacan courts-of-law completely forgotten. At the precise moment when the stately judge-advocate in his purple and green laetitia or official robe opened the Monacan Court, the little Kawa was slipping over the Southern horizon toward the African mountain wall beyond which lie the limitless sands of the Sahara.

“Meet me in the desert,” she had said. No desert on earth could be big enough to hide her. My emotions were up, and in full cry!