Читать книгу The Deductions of Colonel Gore - Lynn Brock - Страница 9

MRS MELHUISH had switched off all the lights in the drawing-room save two beside the fireplace when her husband re-entered the room, and was lingering, he perceived, merely to say good-night. She turned at his entrance, smiling through a little yawn.

‘Well … what do you think of Wick? Quite a dear, isn’t he?’

Melhuish nodded.

‘I like Gore very much indeed,’ he said sincerely. ‘I wish that we could have provided a rather more amusing evening for him.’

‘It was not exactly a giddy party,’ Mrs Melhuish confessed. ‘However, we’ll get something a little brighter for him next time. Are you sitting up, dear? I hope not, after your wretched night last night. I heard you coming in at a quarter-past four … bad boy.’

‘A hæmorrhage case … one of Mrs Ashley’s maids.’

‘Oh.’

There was a little pause. He wondered if tonight again she would contrive to evade the good-night kiss which was for both of them, now, an ordeal dreaded and avoided when avoidance was with even a pretence of decency possible. But he stood between her and the door. Tonight no escape was possible; the ignominious, hateful farce of their day must terminate in that elaborately casual contact of her cheek with his, cold as ice, burning like hell’s fire. He read the pitiable hesitation in her eyes, yet, even in his pity of it, would not spare her or himself. His cold scrutiny rested mercilessly on her face until it was raised to his.

‘Good-night, Sidney.’

‘Good-night.’

‘You are quite pleased with everything? Sir James’s congratulations upon my cook were really quite embarrassing.’

‘Everything was admirable—as it always is.’

She swept him a little mocking curtsey, and was gone.

He stood where she had left him until he heard her bedroom door close remotely, then glanced at his watch and moved to the fire, to stand before it, considering. Five minutes to twelve. How long would he wait tonight?

It had been a little before one when he had heard her go downstairs that night—the Monday night of the preceding week—that seemed to him countless centuries ago. The hour of meeting had been altered for Friday night to a quarter-past one. At least a whole hour lay before him—a whole hour to watch drag by, minute after minute, listening in the darkness, writhing in self-contempt, aware that beyond the wall that separated her room from his, she, too, was waiting and watching and listening in the darkness—hating him because, on his account, she must lie there for that never-ending hour before she could safely creep down the stairs. Yes, he reflected grimly, at moments she must hate him. Hate him because she feared him, because he stood in the way of her pleasure, because he was what he was—her husband. That thought still appeared to him ludicrous, though for a whole week now he had known beyond all doubt the amazing truth of her treachery to him. Even at the end of that week of devastating certainty he was still unable to look at her face without stupefied wonder at its self-control. It seemed impossible that a spirit so courageous as hers, so defiant of obstacles, so intolerant of pretence, could conceal a bitter hatred so smoothly. And yet … what hatred could be imagined more bitter than that of a woman for a man who stood between her and the man of her—

Of her … what?

Desire … Passion …? His soul laughed at the bare thought of the words in connection with her. Caprice? A prettier word—probably a more appropriate one. At heart he guessed and dreaded a stronger and more dangerous driving-force than these behind her betrayal of him—a craving for the things he himself had proved incapable of giving her—the gaiety and grace and thousand dancing, laughing sympathies of youth. From the very beginning she had teased him on the score of a seriousness which, he was himself well aware, was prone to heaviness. From the very beginning he had seen that inevitably his professional work must separate them—seclude him from great tracts of her life, as it must seclude her from the principal business of his. Youth for Sidney Melhuish had been a phase of single-minded purpose and strenuous preparation for its achievement. Youthfulness he had laid aside deliberately at the threshold of a career which for him, over and above the possibilities of material advancement, was a mission—a consecration to the grimmest, most desperate of crusades against the most ruthless and invincible of enemies. Gaiety and grace were for those others, he had told himself, who neither saw nor heard nor heeded … until they had need of him and his kind. He had envied them a little at odd moments—pitied them a little—wondered at them a little—been always much too busy to feel the need of attempting to imitate their decorativeness. The attempt in any case would have been, he knew, a futile one. His lips twisted wryly now as, staring down into the fire, he recalled his wife’s efforts, in the first tentative days of her life with him, to teach him to dance—

She had striven, too, to teach his mind to dance, he knew, in those first days—striven to infuse him with some tinge of the agreeable ephemeral interests which were the life of the set from which he had isolated her temporarily during their brief engagement, but which, he had quickly perceived, would always remain her tribe and her world. But he neither shot nor fished nor hunted. Theatres and novels held for him the faintest of appeals. The allusive tittle-tattle of her friends—light-hearted young people of both sexes possessed of an abundance of money and of leisure, who visibly resented his silent seriousness—bored him. At the end of a year his wife had frankly confessed him, as a social ornament, hopeless.

‘I do believe, Sidney,’ she had said one afternoon, when his unexpected intrusion from the consulting-room had dispersed one of her bridge-parties precipitately, ‘that the only purpose for which you believe human beings are provided with tongues is as an aid to medical diagnosis. Do you know that for seven minutes you stood here, in your wife’s drawing-room, without speaking, or even attempting to speak, one single word? I timed you by the clock.’

‘Well,’ he had urged, ‘they wanted to go on playing bridge.’

‘No. They had stopped—when you came into the room.’

‘Well, why did they stop when I came into the room?’

‘Because they all think you disapprove of women playing bridge in the afternoon.’

‘I do,’ he had said simply.

At that she had laughed until her eyes had streamed tears. But there had been no more afternoon bridge-parties at 33, Aberdeen Place. That incident, he supposed, had marked in all probability the definite point at which she had admitted to herself that her marriage had been a mistake …

That had been two years ago. Had this business with Barrington been going on then, for two whole years—unsuspected for all that time—so unsuspected that in the end they had thought it safe enough to risk these meetings at night in the dining-room of his house. A serious risk—since she must have realised that at any moment a telephone-call might awaken him and bring him downstairs to discover them. But no doubt they had long grown to believe that there was no risk whatever—no need for even the most elementary precaution against surprise.

How many nights had they met so before that Monday night of the preceding week on which, by the merest of chances, their secret had been revealed to him? The tyre of a belated taxi-cab had happened to burst just outside the house, and the report had awakened him—to hear, a few moments later, the door of his wife’s room open softly and her footsteps steal past his door. Minute after minute he had waited, at first drowsily, then with surprise, until at length uneasiness had induced him to go downstairs in search of her. Fortunately, his slippers had made no noise on the thick carpet, for they had come out of the dining-room as he reached the drawing-room landing. A man’s voice, unrecognised at first, had brought him to abrupt halt.

‘Friday, then. Same hour?’

‘A quarter past one,’ his wife’s voice had answered cautiously. ‘A quarter to is too early.’

The man had laughed.

‘Your dear hubby has forbidden me late hours, you know. Bad for dicky hearts. However—’

He had recognised the voice then. Barrington. While he had stood in stupefaction the hall door had been shut stealthily. In an instant his momentary fury had chilled to ice. The brain and nerves that had never failed him had recovered their aplomb, had decided upon the simplest, surest road to vengeance. He had turned and crept barefooted back to his bedroom—to lie awake till dawn, perfecting his plan, devising means against all possible mischance.

And yet his plan had miscarried. On Friday night Barrington had come tiptoeing along Aberdeen Place at the appointed hour, clearly visible from the upper front windows of the house to eyes that watched for his coming. He had come up to the hall door, but had gone away again almost immediately, pulling the door to behind him cautiously—it had been left ajar for him, evidently. No footsteps had crept from the adjoining bedroom. There had certainly been no meeting that night.

Nor on the next, nor on any of the following nights—unless one had taken place last night during his absence on the case to which he had been called out a little before two o’clock in the morning. Six nights of fruitless waiting, of coldly-raging fury that listened in the darkness until the silence of the house was as the roar of thunder. There was no certainty that he would come tonight, either—that he would come for a month of nights. No matter. On the night on which he did come he would pay for all those others …

Clegg’s respectfully reproachful cough behind him roused him from his thoughts. He bade the man good-night and went upstairs slowly to his room. Did the servants know? Had they, too, grinned and leered at him all that time behind his back for a poor blind simpleton? Probably. In Clegg’s eyes, too, he told himself now—too late—he had detected the question that had lurked in his mistress’s. ‘Does he suspect? Does he know?’

Patience. His turn to laugh would come—if not tonight, one night.

For a little while he moved about his room, making the noises for which her ears listened. He caught a glimpse of his face in a mirror as he switched off the lights—absorbed, the eyes narrowed, nose and lips pinched, a crease between the eyebrows—a tell-tale face, the face of a watching, waiting sneak. He swore viciously beneath his breath, and in the darkness began to tear off his clothes. Damn them—let them go their way. They should not pull him down with them.

He groped for his pyjamas, and remembered then that the night before the cord had slipped through at one end and that in his impatience with it when he had returned in the small hours of the morning he had pulled it right through and tied it about his waist on the outside. But it had been restored, he found, to its proper place—almost certainly by her hands. The same misadventure had befallen him on his honeymoon, one night in Venice. He remembered the adoration with which he had watched her little fingers rescue the errant tape with a hairpin, deftly …

He seated himself on the bed with smarting eyes and strangled throat. Was it—could it be too late? Was nothing left of the dream? Had he lost her utterly? Impossible—impossible—impossible. He didn’t—he couldn’t believe it. In the morning, before she went downstairs, he would go into her room and face the thing with her—holding her hands—smiling at her—her friend and confidant. Even if she loved this other man—he could bear to know that, he told himself, if she did not conceal it from him—even if she loved him, they would face the difficulty together—talk it over—calmly and wisely. Somehow the trouble would pass, if they faced it together …

Presently, shivering in the damp air that came in through the open windows, he got into bed. But the sirens were busy now on the river, as boat after boat hooted its slow way down the tortuous, narrow channel on the tide. He lay there, wide-awake, listening to them, wondering if she, too, heard them.

He had not heard the door of her room open, nor any sound of her passage across the landing—merely the creak of a stair—a stair, it seemed to him, of the second flight from the landing. The tiny noise, almost imperceptible, awaited for so many nights, stopped his heart for a beat. The guile that had once more all but eluded his vigilance shocked him violently, hardened his mood to stone again. What stealthy pains must have gone to the noiseless opening of her door, the crossing of the landing, the descent of the stairs, step by step—until that small, dreaded sound had brought her to abrupt halt, listening with straining ears to discover if it had betrayed her. How had she learned this minute, patient cunning? How had she concealed it from him?

He was out of bed now. When he had opened the door and listened for a moment, he switched on a light and dressed himself in the clothes which lay always in readiness against a night-call. His long fingers adjusted his collar and tie with the careful neatness with which they performed the task every morning. He smiled sardonically at the thought that without his collar and tie, a husband, however injured, started at a disadvantage if his wife’s lover happened to wear one at the moment of dénouement.

He felt no anger now, none of those vague, futile emotions which were the stock-in-trade of the wronged husbands of convention. His mind held but one thought, one desire—the successful accomplishment of that entry of absolute surprise. He switched off the light again and went softly down the stairs.

On the drawing-room landing he paused to lean over and look down into the hall. The subdued radiance of the light in the fanlight, left on always at night, showed him the lower portion of the dining-room door. As he had expected, the door was shut, though already, at the distance of two flights of stairs, the subdued murmur of voices was audible through it. He went down another flight, with increased caution, and on the first landing—that outside the morning-room—came in view of the dimly-lighted hall. To his amazement he saw, standing just inside the open hall door, Cecil Arndale.

He halted, dumbfounded. Was it possible that he had been mistaken? Had it been Arndale’s voice which he had heard that Monday night? Had it been Arndale whom he had seen come and go on Friday in the moonlight? No. There was no likeness whatever between the voices of the two men—no likeness whatever between their figures—no possibility of such a mistake. Besides, at that moment, a man’s voice was speaking in the dining-room. Arndale obviously could hear that voice too. He was listening to it, his eyes fixed on the dining-room door, so intently that not even for a moment had they turned towards the darkness of the staircase. For that moment of surprised surmise, Melhuish made no movement forward or back. The maddest, most ludicrous of conjectures had flashed into his mind. Was it possible that there were two of them—and that somehow they had both come on the same night?

‘My God!’ his senses asked of themselves, ‘am I mad? Is this I who am standing here on this landing outside the morning-room thinking this thing?’

He heard his throat produce a dry, inarticulate gasp—an attempt to call out Arndale’s name—as he began to descend the stairs towards him. At that moment, however, without having heard him, at all events without a glance towards him, Arndale went out, leaving the hall door ajar behind him. The murmur of the voices in the dining-room had risen abruptly in pitch. Almost instantly its door opened and Barrington came out into the hall.

‘Absolutely out of the question, my dear child, I assure you,’ he was saying, as he drew on a glove. ‘I’d do it if I could—for your sweet sake … But in times like these I simply can’t afford philanthropy. A thou. That’s the best I can do for you, my dear. Come—it’s well worth the money—a clean sheet—no skeleton in the closet to worry about, eh? Think how nice that would be to waken up to in the morning.’

Melhuish had retreated stealthily the two or three steps which he had descended towards the hall, and stood flattened against the portière of the morning-room door, the glowing end of his cigarette concealed behind him. His wife had come out from the dining-room now, though, since she stood facing towards the hall door, he could not see her face. But her voice, when she spoke, contained a hard, desperate anger of which he could not have believed her even serenity capable.

‘What a scoundrel you are,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I wonder how many unfortunate women you have played this game with …’

‘Well’—Barrington shrugged smilingly—‘that is really beside the point, isn’t it. Think it over, my dear. I’m quite sure that if you think it over, calmly and without temper—temper, by the way, does not become you, little Babs. You look quite thirty-five tonight—’

He paused abruptly, went to the hall door, opened it, looked out for a moment or two, closed the door almost to, and came back towards her.

‘Bit risky leaving that door ajar,’ he said easily. ‘The bobby on the beat might be curious enough to come in and have a look round. Awkward, that. Better have the hinges, or whatever it is that makes the row when you close it, attended to, hadn’t you, before our next midnight conference … Or better still, come across with that thou … and let us cut the midnight conferences right out.’

‘You promised—you gave me your solemn word that if I made you those four payments of a hundred and fifty, you would give me back my letters and the other things—’

‘I know. I know, my dear. Why remind me of my absurd impulsiveness. Forget what has been said—concentrate on the fact that what I say now is … a thou.’

‘You never meant to keep your promise then?’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Until I realised how foolishly impulsive I had been in asking for six hundred when I might have asked for ten.’

‘I see. And so it will go on, you think. You think you will always be able to bleed me—that I shall always be coward enough and fool enough to pay this blackmail?’

‘Hush, my dear child … Hush, hush.’

‘It is blackmail … nothing more or less … You are nothing more or less than a common blackmailer—a blackguard that preys on wretched, foolish women who—’

He held up a hand, unruffled, smiling, yet menacing.

‘My darling child … what an ugly vocabulary you have acquired of late. No, no, no. Let us be polite. Let us not be melodramatic. Let us be quite sensible. Above all, let us not shout … at half-past one in the morning. Besides, we really have nothing more to say to one another, tonight. I feel that. I am very sensitive to such impressions. You require, I feel, time to reflect. Tomorrow—or perhaps next day—when you have thought things over quietly and sensibly, you will send me a good-tempered little message to say that—’

‘No,’ she cried vehemently, forgetting caution. ‘This is the end of it. I will have nothing more to do with you. I knew that you were a scoundrel—an unscrupulous blackguard. I know now that you are a liar and a cheat as well. I will have nothing more to do with you. Do your worst—I don’t care what it is. Nothing could be worse than what I have gone through already.’

‘Worse for yourself, you mean, my little Babs—don’t you? But what about poor hubby? What would poor straight-laced, stick-in-the-mud hubby say, suppose someone were spiteful enough to—’

His suave, sneering voice was silenced abruptly. Mutely, savagely, she had struck him a swinging buffet on the mouth that had jerked his head back and sent him stumbling against the long oak settle at the opposite side of the hall.

‘Damn you, you little devil—you’ll pay for that.’

He stooped to pick up his fallen hat, tossed it on to the settle, and turned then again to her threateningly. She made no attempt to retreat from him as he moved towards her, but stood against the wall beside the door of the dining-room defiantly, one hand behind her.

‘You horrible cad,’ she panted, ‘how dare you even speak of my husband? How dare an evil, hateful thing like you even think of him? Listen … I have done with you. I don’t care what happens. Before you leave this house you shall give me those letters … or I swear to you I will take them from you. Mind … I have warned you … Don’t tempt me too far …’

He eyed her for a moment, calculatingly, from behind his insolent smile.

‘Sorry, eh? Threats, eh? I see. Well—’

He turned, as if to pick up his hat, but swung round again instantly with such treacherous swiftness that she could not elude him. His hand caught her wrist, twisted something from her grasp. He released her again then, stepping back and watching her warily as he laughed derisively.

‘Take care, my dear … take care. That temper of yours will get you into serious trouble if you don’t keep it under. Ugly words are hard enough to bear, but I draw the line at poisoned knives absolutely. I take it that you realise that this interesting little instrument is—or was at one time—poisoned … and that you realised, therefore, that if you had succeeded in giving me a jab with it, as you attempted to do just now … I say, as you attempted to do just now—’

He glanced over his shoulder quickly towards the hall door, then turned back to her again.

‘I thought that door moved. The wind, I suppose. Yes, my dear. You must try to keep that temper of yours under control. Nasty thing, murder, you know—or even attempted murder. You don’t deny, then, that you knew this knife was poisoned—that the slightest prick from it would probably do me in in a few minutes? You understand, don’t you, why I am impressing these facts on you—facts which, I am afraid, it is going to cost you a great deal more than that thou we spoke about just now to induce me to forget … after all. Meanwhile—until that happy termination of a really quite seriously unpleasant incident is reached—I think I shall keep this little plaything as a souvenir. You’ll remember that I have it, won’t you? And what it means? Good-night, my dear. Think over things calmly—take two days to it—three if you don’t feel sensible enough at the end of two—and send me a little message to say that you feel disposed to talk business—not sentiment. Shall we say now—in consideration of the little occurrence just now—two further instalments of two-fifty, eh? Good-night. My love to hubby. Think how nice it will be to have no more secrets from him—to feel that you are really and truly worthy of his love. Sweet dreams …’

He slipped the knife, which he had inserted carefully in its beaded sheath, into an inner pocket, kissed hands to her airily, and went out.

One thing only was clear to Melhuish, as he watched his wife rouse herself after a moment and shut the hall door with elaborate pains to subdue the protest of its stiffness; she must tell him her story unasked—without compulsion—without the least suspicion that he had spied upon the secret which she had chosen to keep from him. The very caution with which, after that display of reckless bravado, she strove to stifle the sound of the door’s shutting was eloquent enough, significant enough. Already, rather than face his discovery of her secret by him, she had resigned herself again to the indignity and misery of purchasing this scoundrel’s silence with regard to it. That alone was certain and definite—she desired … as strongly as that … that he should not know.

In the astonishing impressions which his ears and eyes had conveyed to his brain during those five or six minutes, tortured doubt still writhed hideously. But the fierce words which had followed that furious blow had assured him of one thing at least—not all of her was lost to him. His mind, agile and decisive in all other emergencies and dilemmas of his life, in this, the gravest of them, refused to move, refused to formulate any coherent thought or purpose save that one immediate need. She must not find him spying on her, lurking there in the darkness. He must have time to think, to realise, to recover judgment and balance, before her eyes met his. She had gone into the dining-room, to extinguish the lights there probably. Before she came out again he must reach his bedroom. The third stair up from the drawing-room landing had creaked as he had come down. He must be careful when he came to it.