Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 24

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Meanwhile, the coal-merchant, starting in to dictate rapid-fire instructions to the spectacled Tillotson, had not quite forgotten the attractive picture made by his wife. Consciously, in self-discipline’s despite, he remembered the darkness of her hair falling loose over the peacock-blue bed-jacket, a certain quick turn of the head that was characteristic of her when interested, the faint French perfume which she affected.

But three minutes’ work sufficed to banish the memory; and by the time that, at nine o’clock to the second, Tillotson limped after him into the waiting car, Gerald Cranston was his old, super-concentrated, pre-marriage self.

“Aldford Street!” he told Havers (Lees and the Rolls were temporarily allocated to Hermione), “and be sharp about it.”

The Clement-Talbot shot forward; and—Berkeley Street, Berkeley Square, Mount Street, and South Audley Street being alike empty of traffic—made No. 15-A within six minutes. There, punctual as his employer, Harrison the architect, a short, clean-shaven bulldog of a man, already waited under the square stone porch. Behind him, the open front doors revealed painters in smocks, ladders, pails, paint-drums—the usual higgledy-piggledy of a domicile in the making. From above came the sharp banging of parquet-layers’ hammers, the fret of saws in wood, the intermittent clink of steel on iron-work.

“More trouble,” said Harrison laconically, as his employer, telling Havers to wait, stepped from the car. “The district surveyor’s been round again.”

“About that down-stairs bath-room?”

“Yes. We’ll either have to scrap it or rebuild the wall.”

“Rebuild the wall, then. How’s the rest of the work going?”

“Pretty well. You’ll look round, I suppose?”

“Yes.” Mr. Harrison’s client pulled out his watch. “I’ve got exactly twenty minutes.”

The pair of them, Tillotson at their heels, passed into the house; through the higgledy-piggledy of the square marble-tessellated hall, into the low westward-aspected dining-room, which gave, through double French windows, upon an exiguous Roman garden, bounded by a high ornamental wall from the Lane and the Park.

“My wife’s found you a sun-dial and a statue,” said Cranston. “They’ll be delivered to-morrow.”

“I’ll make a note of that.”

Harrison, drawing a stumpy memo-book from the pocket of his overcoat, scribbled a line or so; and the three of them passed back through the hall into the morning-room. Here one of the foremen joined them. “Paint’s set well, sir,” remarked he, testing the duck’s-egg green and old gold of the panels with his thumb. “Wish we had a bit more time, though. This weather don’t do no good to paint-work.”

“You’ve got a full fortnight more,” remarked Cranston; and proceeded on his inspection.

Beyond the morning-room, through a door paneled to match its eighteenth-century walls, lay his private sanctum. In the big bay window opposite the fireplace a silver-badged telephone installer, busy among his wires, knelt on white-wash-spattered dust-sheets.

“Is that the private line from Pinner’s Court?” Cranston asked him.

“Yes, sir. And this is the extension from the switchboard in the basement.”

“Good. You’re an ex-soldier, eh? Well”—Cranston drew the note-case from his hip-pocket and extracted a couple of pounds—“make a decent job of things.”

“Trust me, sir.” The silver-badger knelt, brad-awl in hand, to his work, as architect and secretary followed the ex-major of gunners out of the room and up the main staircase. To both of them—good enough men at their own particular jobs—the ex-major’s general knowledge was an amazement. Here to a plumber or a painter, there to a paper-hanger or a fitter, he spoke as if their especial tasks had been his own. No minutest detail escaped his inspecting eye. He noticed a split runner in the drawing-room parquetry, a chipped mosaic-stone in the wall of a bath-room, a crack in a skirting-board, a missing embellishment. “Make ’em put this right,” “Make ’em put that right,” he kept on saying to Harrison; and the architect, with a smile at the secretary—for to a professional there is always some humor in a layman’s comments—kept on scribbling cabalistic notes in his stumpy pocket-book.

Finally, inspection concluded, they returned to the hall.

“And how about money?” asked Cranston. “Isn’t it about time these people had another check?”

“I was just going to speak to you about that.” Harrison’s bulldog under jaw protruded. “In my opinion we’ve been paying a bit too fast. Provided the work’s well forward, they’re entitled to another two thousand on the first of March—that’s in three days’ time. But if I were you I’d hold it back. Make the penalty clause an excuse! We don’t want them to let us down over the time-limit.”

“If they’re entitled to the money under their contract,” Cranston’s tone was enigmatic, “it’ll have to be paid, in the same way as they’ll have to pay forfeit if they infringe the penalty clause.”

“Just as you like, Mr. Cranston.” The architect smiled again. “I’ll post you my certificate for the two thousand to-night. Only—if we are a fortnight late, and we can’t collect under the penalty clause, because by paying this two thousand we’ve admitted ourselves satisfied with the progress of the work—don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“When I said the twelfth of March, I reckoned we’d be lucky if we got through by the twenty-fifth. You needn’t, though, mention that to Warings.”

Now it was Cranston’s turn to smile; and he did so, a trifle more broadly than his wont, as—leaving the bluffed architect staring under the porch—he stepped deliberately to his car through the commencing rain-drizzle.

“Tell him—Pinner’s Court,” said Gerald Cranston to his obedient secretary.