Читать книгу Nighthawks! - John G. Brandon - Страница 10

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OF the two other men, the second, Mr. ‘Chick’ Devlin, was also, in a sense, a man of mystery; but the mystery about him lay only in speculation as to where the burly New Yorker got the money he spent with such delightful freedom. For the man himself, despite his complete and utter lack of any breeding, as Diantuolos understood that quality in this England (he had been, it was understood, a glove-fighter at one time, and certainly bore one remarkable ear as a souvenir of that strenuous profession), he was a jolly fellow and one of the most popular members of the cercle. To-night, Mr. Devlin was piloting a newcomer, a fluffy little yellow-haired thing of French nationality who, for some reason not apparent to Diantuolos, appeared to be scared to death of something or some one. She reminded him of a frightened canary.

But about the third of this trio, Captain, The Honourable Lawrence Fitzgerald Adair (‘Larry’ to his hosts of friends and acquaintances; and they embraced every social stratum from the flower-sellers of the Circus to the elect of the land), there was no mystery that could not be at once solved by a simple query put to any of the very best people.

A rich and debonair young Irishman with more money than he knew what to do with. A member of all the best clubs—and by which Diantuolos did not mean night-clubs, but those exclusive establishments along Piccadilly and in St. James’s Square, wherein none but the ultra-exclusive were permitted to sojourn even temporarily. What a high-spirited gentleman like the Captain could find to amuse him in such dismal-looking places remained for Diantuolos a matter of amazed conjecture.

However, at the present moment Captain, The Honourable Larry Adair was finding, if not actual amusement, then engrossing interest, in contemplating the thoughtful features of his, Diantuolos’, own especial mystery—the incomparable Jetta Marcein.

Then, simultaneously, as though each read the thought in the other’s mind, two of them stared towards her—Captain Larry and the tall stranger who called himself Count Eugene Ferrondo. It was the Irishman who reached her side first and stood smiling down upon her. The other halted abruptly, and after one long look at them through narrowed eyes, retraced his steps to his own table. But in that look the watching eyes of the Greek caught something—a gleam of deadly menace. And that sudden red light behind the black eyes brought their owner’s features much nearer to touching that spot in the memory of Diantuolos than all his mental wanderings about this terrestrial sphere.

‘I’m wondering,’ began Captain Larry with that charming naïve smile that generally made him instant friends with everybody, and in his voice just a pleasant touch of the ‘comether’ inherited from his Kerry forbears, ‘I’m wondering, gentle lady, if you’ll take compassion upon a poor divil with the pip, and take supper with him?’

Slowly, very slowly, she lifted her eyes to his. Upon her lips broke an enigmatic smile which might have been that of the Mona Lisa herself.

‘And suppose,’ she returned slowly, ‘that I, too, am in a mood to make me the poorest of company for a fellow-sufferer? Always assuming it possible to take Captain Adair seriously when he speaks of being anything but the very moving spirit of irrepressible gaiety.’

‘Ah, now,’ he deprecated with a grimace, ‘I should have thought that a wise woman who knows her world wouldn’t make the mistake of taking an Irishman’s grin at face value. Didn’t some one write “Laugh and the world laughs with you”? It’s poor company a chronic sad heart gets on this earth—or deserves.’

‘A pleasant philosophy, but difficult at times to live up to,’ she said with a little sigh. ‘There are moments when gloom will persist. Captain Adair, no matter how bravely the will may determine otherwise.’

‘Sighs are only a form of indigestion, so I’ve read,’ he told her informatively. ‘Like most ailments in the world, mental or otherwise, the stomach is at the root of all the evil. And as every one well knows there’s more indigestion caused by going over-long without meals than anything else. And that brings us back to where we started—supper. Come now,’ he cajoled. ‘I have the most comfortable table in the room reserved. Diantuolos, for all the Greek pirate he is, knows how to cater for depression such as has us in its grip. And, besides ... I’ve had the longing to talk with you from the first night you shed your lustre upon us ordinary night-club mortals.’

A sudden cold, proud aloofness showed in her calm face.

‘One of the rich Captain, The Honourable Laddy Adair’s whims, which all women—women who earn a living in such places as this—are expected by the Diantuoloses of this world to humour.’

For a moment he did not answer her. A frown formed between eyes suddenly gone clouded.

‘Ye want spanking for that,’ he said quietly. ‘Because you know it isn’t true, either of myself or Diantuolos. I may be a fool, but I’m not a cad. And, come to that, the fat little Greek doesn’t happen to be that kind of an animal either. I’ll say that much for him.’

‘No, no,’ she interposed quickly, ‘I shouldn’t have said that: he has been kindness itself, and treats me——’

‘As the lady he or any other man here recognizes you instantly to be.’

Her lips twisted into a wry smile. ‘Am I the subject of conjecture?’ she asked.

‘Could it very well be otherwise?’ he counter-questioned pointedly.

She glanced about her.

‘There are more than one woman of obviously birth and breeding earning a living here,’ she reminded him.

‘True enough,’ he acquiesced readily, following her glance; ‘and the Lord forbid that I or any other man should overlook it. But—there are degrees in everything, and their degree is not yours.’

‘You have the true Celtic imagination, Captain Adair,’ she said lightly.

‘I have the true Celtic intuition, lady,’ he corrected. ‘And that’s as certain as the next thing in this uncertain world. It doesn’t let us down. And,’ he added, with a whimsical twist of his quick, sensitive mouth, ‘playing with fire is still the favourite sport of most Irishmen born south of Sligo Bay.’

Again she shot that quick questioning glance at him.

‘Fire?’ The word came from her in a low, strangely tense voice.

‘Fire. I see the deep red glow of it over you as you sit, lady.’ He bent lower towards her and continued in a voice almost as earnest as her own last utterance had been. ‘Though, maybe, if I had the gift of my ould grandmother in the County Kerry, I could make it out to be of a deeper, even uglier colour than that.’

The faintest shiver rippled over her perfect white shoulders.

‘Are you—are you “dreeing my weird,” as the Scotch say?’ she asked, and the shiver was, for the fraction of an instant, discernible in her voice too, for all that she still smiled amusedly at him.

‘The Highlanders,’ he corrected her. ‘ ’Tis only the true-blooded Celt or Gael who has the gift of second sight. The others——’ He dismissed them with a gesture.

‘And what, do you think, would that wonderful grandmother of yours in the County Kerry—wherever that may be—perhaps have to tell me?’ she asked.

He noticed the tiniest tremor in the long, white fingers turning the jade cigarette-holder idly.

‘Well, now,’ he responded with a twinkle. ‘I have the idea that I could conjure up the old lady better at a table with supper before me. All that I can remember of her in my present hungry state is that she had wild red hair at fifty odd, and the divil’s own temper.’

‘More red,’ she laughed; then, as if upon sudden impulse, rose and moved in the direction of the table he had indicated.

‘I see red all about you, lady,’ he said quietly. ‘Take that from the grandson of a Macgillicuddy o’ the Reeks.’

‘And do they know everything?’

‘Their women do,’ he assured her, bowing her into her chair; then added whimsically: ‘At any rate they know far more than is good for them—or any one else, for the matter of that.’

It was quite an hour later when, indeed; she was gliding about the floor in his arms that, without warning, she shot at him a question.

‘Has your supper brought the red-headed witch of the County Kerry any nearer to your memory? And, if so, may I now ask just what you think she might unfold to me?’

It was a moment or two before he made any response, and the eyes that looked down upon her upturned face had gone strangely grave.

‘Sure, now,’ he began uneasily, ‘that would be hard to tell, for she was by way of being an outrageous old person herself, for all her wisdom. But I think she’d start something like this: “Princess,” she’d say ...’

‘And pray why “Princess”?’ she interjected quickly.

‘Because that’s just the impression you create,’ he answered simply. ‘Just that. An old-world princess in—in trouble.’

‘Old world,’ she jested, ‘in these surroundings!’

‘They’re not yours,’ he told her with finality. ‘You’re here in them for good reasons of your own, but you’re not of them. As the Americans say, you “don’t belong”!’

‘But isn’t one forced to belong just wherever one has to get a living?’ she asked, again with that curious, elusive smile.

‘There’s that,’ he conceded grudgingly. ‘But, somehow, it doesn’t just ring true. You’re here, there’s no arguing that, anyway. But the why of it ...’ He broke off with a long, dubious shake of his curly head.

She ignored the interrogation in his voice.

‘I’m still waiting to hear what Madame the red-haired grandmamma would have had to tell me?’ she reminded persistently.

‘I think,’ he answered slowly, ‘she would have told you that it’s not always wise for a woman, especially a woman like yourself, to play too much of a lone hand in the big games of life.’

‘And why should you surmise that there is any big game in my life?’ she asked, pertinently enough.

‘A woman without any profession, or even business ability, must earn her living, if it becomes necessary, by such social attainments as she has. I can’t do typewriting or shorthand or any of those clever things women nowadays can do, but I can dance and I can put my clothes on sufficiently well to make men wish to dance with me. Therefore M. Diantuolos is pleased to give me employment—just as the others—for the convenience of his unattached patrons. Where is that “big game” you have conjured up for me out of a vivid imagination, Captain Adair?’

He glanced down at her sideways.

‘Specious,’ he smiled back, ‘but not convincing. You’ll probably quarrel with me when I say that I’ve taken the quite unwarrantable liberty of watching you a good deal. There’s something in me that responds instantly to something there is in you.’

‘Am I,’ she asked politely, ‘to consider that as a preamble to your making love to me?’

He laughed; a frank, jolly and infectious sound.

‘Absolve me from any such idea,’ he declared, and added: ‘And that’s the rudest thing I’ve ever said to any beautiful woman. But that wasn’t in my mind at all. You’re what I’d call, for want of a better word, one of the uncapturables. For all your sweet graciousness there’s a wall of aloofness around you that would take a thicker-skinned man than myself to attempt to penetrate. No, it wasn’t that.’

‘Then what?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Because,’ he assured her, ‘there’s in you what there is in me—the spirit of high adventure. Only that yours is finding some outlet in something you’re engaged in, while mine is repressed, stifled down to live this humdrum existence; life après la guerre. Since the day I was demobbed in 1919, I haven’t known what to do with myself—except to spend money and act like a fool to convince myself that I’m contented. The older people say we young ones are all standing on our heads since the war. They’d be nearer the mark if they said that we’re all standing bogged in the mud, up to our knees in the clay of luxury-living and inaction. The war killed most things, but it gave us something to do, an ideal to fight for and think about. The peace has killed the rest—and left us with idle hands and not a decent cause under the sun, that an incurably unrestful being like myself could fling himself into for either occupation or diversion.’

‘A cause that would only be diversion to the Honourable Mr. Adair, might be life or death to—to other people,’ she observed sombrely.

He seized upon her words with avidity.

‘You were going to say life or death to you,’ he asserted quietly. ‘I know you were. And then you thought better of it—because you don’t trust me.’

She lifted a quick, deprecating hand.

‘Ah, now, let’s be fair and honest with each other for a commencement. After all, why should you trust me in anything that’s big—vital? You know nothing of me, and the little you do wouldn’t inspire much confidence.’ He smiled down upon her ruefully. ‘That’s rather Irish, I’m afraid, but it’s what I mean.’ He picked up his original thread again. ‘But it only goes to show—your natural hesitation, I mean—that what I thought I saw in you was right: in some cause or other you’re here, in London, because desperate needs drive. Needs’—he dropped his voice—‘that, I quote you, may mean life or death to—to other people.’

She laughed nervously. ‘You are taking me very literally—and seriously, Captain Adair.’

‘Which, again, is just evasion,’ he retorted quietly; then altered his tone to one of complete seriousness. ‘I was watching you a little while ago as you sat at that table. You were a woman who, or I’m no judge, could see disaster, or at any rate a big check to some project dear to your heart. You were down in the dumps with a vengeance, and women, women of your qualities, don’t lose heart for trifles.’

She glanced at him out of the corners of her big, dark eyes. A demureness, more elusive than any side of her had yet shown him, came into her voice.

‘You are perfectly right, el Capitan,’ she agreed seriously. ‘A new frock not sent home that had been promised without fail is no trifle. Not to a vain woman who had particular reasons for wanting to look at her best upon this particular night.’

He stopped so suddenly as to almost cause a collision with a couple immediately behind them.

‘Ah, now, there it is again,’ he said with a reproachful shake of his head and the soft Kerry brogue strong in his earnestness. ‘You’re determined to keep me at arm’s length and any cheap subterfuge will serve to do it. I’m sad at ye.’

Instantly the long, white hand closed about his sleeve in a quick, spontaneous pressure and the brown eyes lit with a deep, warm glow.

‘Please don’t say that,’ she begged softly. ‘You are one to be trusted to any length, Captain Adair. Any one would know that; would feel it instinctively of you in an instant. But a woman’s secrets aren’t always hers alone to be parted with on impulse—no matter what the instinct behind that impulse might be. Don’t think lightly of me because many bitter disillusionings have made me doubt almost my own self. Please, please, don’t.’

The earnest entreaty in her low voice touched him, clearing instantly any lingering trace of ruffled serenity at what he had thought to be her most palpable distrust of him. He smiled down upon her in entire friendliness.

‘Is that likely,’ he reassured her heartily. ‘When it’s myself that’s been poking my nose into what, after all, is your business and yours only. But I beg you to believe that it wasn’t just the itch of impertinent curiosity behind it. I somehow had the feeling that there were things to happen, big things, that you and I would have our share in together. Rightly or wrongly, I still have that feeling—the Celt in me tells me that it will come true.’

‘Who can tell?’ she murmured in a voice that came to him as though from a long way off.

‘Not “who,” lady—what. Time can tell; sooner or later it tells everything.’

But it was not until much later on that night, long after he had left Diantuolos’ for his Jermyn Street rooms that a sudden recollection came back upon him.

‘El Capitan’ she called me. That’s Spanish. Now, I wonder,’ he mused, ‘if that’s any traceable clue to her own identity.’