Читать книгу The Cup of Fury - Hughes Rupert - Страница 7

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The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows opaque with fog. The gardens she usually looked over, glistening green all winter through, were gone, and in their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton packed so tight against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to the sill.

Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air. He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into his study, where he confided to her great news:

“Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of America. Big business he has done. He cannot come yet by our house, for even servants must not see him here. So you shall go and meet him. You take your own little car, and go most careful till you find Hyde Park gate. Inside you stop and get out to see if something is matter with the engine. A man is there––Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in and drive slowly––so slowly. Give him this letter––put in bosom of dress not to lose. He tells you maybe something, and he gives you envelope. Then he gets out, and you come home––but carefully. Don’t let one of those buses run you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most important.”

Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the place. But Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and pain that she yielded hastily, took the envelope, folded it small, thrust it into her chest pocket and went out to the garage, where she could hardly bully the chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine. There was something of the effect of moving along the floor 38 of the sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but everything was a blur.

Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over. But she was so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so damp, so chilled, and so uneasy with the apparitions and the voices that had haunted him in the fog that he said nothing more cordial than:

“At last! So you come!”

He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran the car a little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave him the letter from Sir Joseph and took from him another.

Nicky did not care to tarry.

“I should get back to my house with this devil’s cold I’ve caught,” he said. “Do you still have no sun in this bedamned England?”

The “you” struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent on years spent in German banking-houses.

“How did you find the United States?” Marie Louise asked, with a sudden qualm of homesickness.

“Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!”

“I think you can get along better afoot,” said Marie Louise, as she made a turn and slipped through the pillars of the gate.

“Au revoir!” said Nicky, and he dived out, slamming the door back of him.

That night there was one of Sir Joseph’s dinners. But almost nobody came, except Lieutenant Hawdon and old Mr. Verrinder. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling seemed more frightened than insulted by the last-moment regrets of the guests. Was it an omen?

It was not many days before Sir Joseph asked Marie Louise to carry another envelope to Nicky. She went out alone, shuddering in the wet and edged air. She found the bench agreed on, and sat waiting, craven and mutinous. Nicky did not come, but another man passed her, looked searchingly, turned and came back to murmur under his lifted hat:

“Miss Webling?”

She gave him her stingiest “Yis.”

“Mr. Easton asked me to meet you in his place, and explain.”

“He is not coming?”

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“He can’t. He is ill. A bad cold only. He has a letter for you. Have you one for him?”

Marie Louise liked this man even less than she would have liked Nicky himself. She was alarmed, and showed it. The stranger said:

“I am Mr. von Gröner, a frient of––of Nicky’s.”

Marie Louise vibrated between shame and terror. But von Gröner’s credentials were good; it was surely Nicky’s hand that had penned the lines on the envelope. She took it reluctantly and gave him the letter she carried.

She hastened home. Sir Joseph was in a sad flurry, but he accepted the testimony of Nicky’s autograph.

The next day Marie Louise must go on another errand. This time her envelope bore the name of Nicky and the added line, “Kindness of Mr. von Gröner.”

Von Gröner tried to question Marie Louise, but her wits were in an absolute maelstrom of terror. She was afraid of him, afraid that he represented Nicky, afraid that he did not, afraid that he was a real German, afraid that he was a pretended spy, or an English secret-service man. She was afraid of Sir Joseph and his wife, afraid to obey them or disobey them, to love them or hate them, betray them or be betrayed. She had lost all sense of direction, of impetus, of desire.

She saw that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were in a state of panic, too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear. She caught them whispering often. She saw them cling together with a devotion that would have been a burlesque in a picture seen by strangers. It would have been almost as grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate cowering hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace of a lightning-storm.

Marie Louise came upon them once comparing the envelope she had just brought with other letters of Nicky’s. Sir Joseph slipped them into a book, then took one of them out cautiously and showed it to Marie Louise.

“Does that look really like the writing from Nicky?”

“Yes,” she said, then, “No,” then, “Of course,” then, “I don’t know.”

Lady Webling said, “Sit down once, my child, and tell me just how this man von Gröner does, acts, speaks.”

She told them. They quizzed her. She was afraid that 40 they would take her into their confidence, but they exchanged querying looks and signaled caution.

Sir Joseph said: “Strange how long Nicky stays sick, and his memory––little things he mixes up. I wonder is he dead yet. Who knows?”

“Dead?” Marie Louise cried. “Dead, and sends you letters?”

“Yes, but such a funny letter this last one is. I think I write him once more and ask him is he dead or crazy, maybe. Anyway, I think I don’t feel so very good now––mamma and I take maybe a little journey. You come along with, yes?”

A rush of desperate gratitude to the only real people in her world led her to say:

“Whatever you want me to do is what I want to do––or wherever to go.”

Lady Webling drew her to her breast, and Sir Joseph held her hand in one of his and patted it with the flabby other, mumbling:

“Yes, but what is it we want you to do?”

From his eyes came a scurry of tears that ran in panic among the folds of his cheeks. He shook them off and smiled, nodding and still patting her hand as he said:

“Better I write one letter more for Mr. von Gröner. I esk him to come himself after dark to-night now.”

Marie Louise waited in her room, watching the sunlight die out of the west. She felt somehow as if she were a prisoner in the Tower, a princess waiting for the morrow’s little visit to the scaffold. Or did the English shoot women, as Edith Cavell had been shot?

There was a knock at the door, but it was not the turnkey. It was the butler to murmur, “Dinner, please.” She went down and joined mamma and papa at the table. There were no guests except Terror and Suspense, and both of them wore smiling masks and made no visible sign of their presence.

After dinner Marie Louise had her car brought round to the door. There was nothing surprising about that. Women had given up the ancient pretense that their respectability was something that must be policed by a male relative or squire except in broad daylight. Neither vice nor malaria was believed any longer to come from exposure to the night air; nor was virtue regarded like a sum of money that must not be 41 risked by being carried about alone after dark. It had been easy enough to lose under the old régime.

So Marie Louise launched out in her car much as a son of the family might have done. She drove to a little square too dingily middle class to require a policeman. She sounded her horn three squawks and swung open the door, and a man waiting under an appointed tree stepped from its shadow and into the shadow of the car before it stopped. She dropped into high speed and whisked out of the square.

“You have for me a message,” said Mr. von Gröner.

“Yes. Sir Joseph wants to see you.”

“Me?”

“Yes––at the house. We’ll go there at once if you please.”

“Certainly. Delighted. But Nicky––I ought to telephone him I shall be gone.”

“Nicky is well enough to telephone?”

“Not to come to the telephone, but there is a servant. If you will please stop somewhere. I shall be a moment only.”

Marie Louise felt that she ought not to stop, but she could hardly kidnap the man. So she drew up at a shop and von Gröner left her, her heart shaking her with a faint tremor like that of the engine of her car.

Von Gröner returned promptly, but he said: “I think we should not go too straight to your father’s house. Might be we are followed. We can tell soon. Go in the park, please, and suddenly stop, turn round, and I look at what cars follow.”

She let him command her. She was letting everybody command her; she had no destination, no North Star in her life. Von Gröner kept her dodging about Regent’s Park till she grew angry.

“This seems rather silly, doesn’t it? I am going home. Sir Joseph has worries enough without––”

“Ah, he has worries?”

She did not answer. The eagerness in his voice did not please her. He kept up a rain of questions, too, but she answered them all by referring him to Sir Joseph.

At last they reached the house. As they got out, two men closed in on the car and peered into their faces. Von Gröner snapped at them, and they fell back.

Marie Louise had taken along her latchkey. She opened the door herself and led von Gröner to Sir Joseph’s room.

42

As she lifted her hand to knock she heard Lady Webling weeping frantically, crying out something incoherent. Marie Louise fell back and motioned von Gröner away, but he pushed the door open and, taking her by the elbow, thrust her forward.

Lady Webling stopped short with a wail. Sir Joseph, who had been trying to quiet her by patting her hand, paused with his palm uplifted.

Before Marie Louise could speak she saw that the old couple was not alone. By the mantel stood Mr. Verrinder. By the door, almost touching Marie Louise, was a tall, grim person she had not seen. He closed the door behind von Gröner and Marie Louise.

Mr. Verrinder said, “Be good enough to sit down.” To von Gröner he said, “How are you, Bickford?”