Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 4

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Once upon a time, and not so very long ago at that, before Major Gerald Cranston, D.S.O., Royal Field Artillery, had transformed himself into Gerald Cranston, Esquire, of Studley Farm, Leicestershire, the Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly, and Pinner’s Court, Old Broad Street, E.C., more than one hard-bitten horseman in war-soiled service-kit, sucking disgruntled at his unlit pipe as the six-gun column jolted slow through darkness toward a flash-stabbed horizon, had been wont to remark: “He’s a devil about his march-discipline, mate. But give the devil his due! I’ve been in this blinkin’ battery ever since he took over; and—facts is facts, mate—though I’ve seen every kind of hell in it, I’ve never yet seen the kind that’d put the wind up our Major Gerry.”

A similar remark—transmuted into the Scotch of his native Kirkcudbrightshire—ran through the canny mind of Christopher Rennie, sometime the major’s batman and now the esquire’s valet, as, tea-tray in hand, he opened the outer door of Gerald Cranston’s first-floor suite on the morning of the day which was to see him married to the Lady Hermione Cosgrave, and realized, with one swift glance at the fanlight over the bedroom door, that his master still slept.

“He’s a calm deevil!” thought Christopher Rennie.

With which, he closed the door of the suite behind him, pushed on the light in the exiguous “hall,” set down his tea-tray, and, drawing his silver watch from his pocket, passed into the sitting-room to compare it with the electrically controlled clock on the white-paneled wall. The watch and the clock synchronized to a second; but, since both agreed that it still lacked two minutes to seven, Christopher Rennie passed back into the hall and waited.

Waiting, he continued—his dour gray-eyed clean-shaven face wrinkling with perplexity—to think about his master. Certainly, his master was a “calm deevil.” An exacting “deevil,” too; more Scotch than English, in his precision, in his punctuality. Yet a “deevil” whom, quite apart from his money, one could respect. And, “It was a lucky day for me,” thought Christopher Rennie, “when he picked me for his batman—a luckier still when I left the army to enter his sairvice.” Then, with a last look at his watch, he picked up the tea-tray and tapped three times on the closed door of the bedroom.

At the third tap, a wide-awake decisive voice called the one word, “Come.”