Читать книгу Children of the Wind - Matthew Phipps Shiel - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The next day Cobby duly flew Rolls over London; after which the relation between the two became more established. Rolls spending several evenings at Cobby's chambers, bringing along his own peach-brandy—for himself to sip, alcohol being not often good enough for Cobby; and it was when Cobby was one evening expecting Rolls for the fifth of these visits, that he heard his door-handle wrenched, his door slammed, and on rushing out to his hall, found Rolls there standing with his back on the door, short of breath, and blanched.

"Hurt, Rolls?" Cobby cried out.

"Don't think so," Rolls answered on a pant. "They got me on the stair—rushed me from No. 7 door.... Two I treated with the naked mauleys—the third chased me up—fired twice—air-gun—tore my sleeve, see—they wear silent shoes—I hadn't time to draw...."

Indignant blood rushed to Cobby's forehead. "We'll do the attacking!" he cried, running in, to return with a small Colt's.

"You keep out of it"—Rolls held his sleeve.

"This is intolerable!" Cobby said, with a florid forehead—"come on—rout 'em out."

But Rolls held him. "They are under cover—it's no chop fighting on ground chosen by the enemy. Wait—wary's the word. I reckon they'll be getting me in the end, but let that cost them something.... How would they have got into No. 7?"

Cobby explained that No. 7 had been unoccupied, and must now have been taken by, or for, one of the gang; but complaint at the Inn-office the next day would rid the Temple of them. Meantime the police ...

But these, bespoken over the telephone, failed to find anyone at No. 7; and Cobby, nervous for Rolls' life, would not let him go; so Rolls, for the first time, slept that night in the chambers.

That was the night of the 2nd August.

On the night of the 7th, Rolls was "got," as he would have said.

Near nine he was walking up Essex Street—his usual route for Cobby's—lonely at that hour, obscure at some points—when he was stabbed in the abdomen—mysteriously, for not a living thing did he see near him. Any nerve less trained in alertness than he, any adventurer less veteran in the trick and luck of escape, would doubtless have been laid dead at once; but something or other caused him suddenly to spring upward, and, instead of in the breast, he was hit below.

He contrived to rise, to stagger and drag himself to the Temple not far, to knock at Cobby's "oak," as formally as if nothing had happened. But as he knocked, he fell; and some moments afterwards, before the door was opened, Cobby, who had been out, darted up the stair, and there before the door saw the poor man prostrate in sorry case. Rolls sighed: "I think I'm done for."

The effect of this upon Cobby, who was hot-headed and full-blooded, was to cause him to dash into a passion at outrages of this sort done in his own London; and he vowed vengeance. But for days Rolls could give no lucid account of what had taken place, the police appeared to be beaten, and no vengeance was taken. Indeed, during two whole days Rolls was delirious, the doctors anxious; but he was too tough a catgut to snap at one tug, and the days of danger passed.

Soon after which he breathed feebly to Cobby: "I've brought no end of a bobbery upon you, haven't I?—coming here. You were so much nearer—and I reckoned you'd want me to."

"Good Rolls," Cobby answered, pressing his hand, "that's right: there's no bobbery."

Cobby, busy as he was by nature, would stay an hour by the bedside, and himself help in Rolls' nursing, till the evening when Rolls was wheeled out to the work-room, when he said to Cobby: "Aye, I think I can drop now to it how they got me. From a motor-car. A rod running in sockets to push out, and a spike or two on the rod to stab with ... I think I remember a car passing, and I distinctly remember making a spring: I must have caught half a glimpse of something in the half-dark—I can't swear. Well, in the end they'll do me in, no doubt, since they're so down on it."

"Miscreants!" Cobby muttered, running his fingers through the backwoods of his hair: "if we could do them in ... But, as we seem unable to, you cut and run, Rolls. That will be horrible, if, when you get well, you are again——"

"I have always stood up to my man so far," Rolls said, "and am not for turning tail now. The worst of my trouble is that I've brought you, too, into it. Promise me now that you'll not go out unarmed."

"That is foreign to me, Rolls," Cobby answered, looking not unlike the boy in "Bubbles," robed in a camel-hair dressing-gown, and launching into the air a bubble bigger than a trunk, a great globe of glories and glamours, gas-blown, he then experimenting on the surface-tension of bubbles at a lengthy table littered with a tangle of apparatus under bright lamplight: "I don't want to go armed in God's good Fleet Street, nor do I yet understand why these clowns should wish to meddle with me."

Reclined under a rug in a lounge-chair on the other side of the table, Rolls answered: "You see, they pan it out that I'll never play it a lone hand, undertaking a trek to that country so far in the interior without one white companion; and if Douglas Macray once reckons that you are wiring in with me, his cutthroats will sure be after you, too."

"But am I wiring in with you?" Cobby demanded. "You see that I have interests here."

With eyes trained sidewards upon him, Rolls watched a little that dainty handicraft before replying: "The thing's worth doing. Seven millions sterling: of which I reckon upon one for me, and one for you, if we put it over."

"How? Tell me now," said Cobby, pausing in the work to stand with his arms akimbo.

And Rolls, after some hesitancy, remarked: "Nurse will be still asleep ... Very well, we'll talk of that country.... You know that your mother's two sisters married two brothers. Jane marrying James Macray, and Ismene marrying Rob Macray. Rob being considerably the elder, his rascal of a son, Douglas Macray, was nine or ten before James married your aunt Jane—I know the whole jimbang of it, for about then I was well in with James in the Witwatersrand, where he laid the foundations of his fortune. Rob, he never had much wealth—once went bankrupt in Chicago—and our swell Douglas Macray would be a nobody to-day, if he wasn't in possession of somebody else's money. Aye, somebody else's, look—not his own—the money of Spiciewegiehotiu."

"Ah! Hot Spice," went Cobby.

"Hot spice—that's pepper—is what she is. Eh, she'd have that rascal's head off as sweet and clean——"

"But how was it? Tell me."

"You remember the loss of the Florida?"

"Let me see—Yes, yes, of course—I was eighteen—she vanished—my aunt Jane was lost——"

"And your uncle-in-law, James Macray, and his daughter, your cousin, Flora Macray: the Florida being James Macray's 5,000-ton yacht, in which, with a party, he was globe-trotting, going to Japan; but after touching at Somaliland they were caught in one of those easterly Indian Ocean storms, to which they had to turn tail; and to this day the timbers of the wreck of that craft remain on the African coast, for I've seen them."

Cobby lowered himself to sit, saying: "I gather, then, that this Hot Spice is Flora Macray?"

"That's so. James Macray's dollars, inherited by his brother Rob, and then by Rob's son, Douglas, whose name, too, should be Rob, for 'tis his nature too—those dollars now being spent to murder me for knowing too much—are dollars of Spiciewegiehotiu, every cent, by her father's will——"

"He was drowned, then—and my aunt?" Cobby asked eagerly.

"No, not drowned, I think. The Florida grounded inside a half-harbour, and probably all hands were saved. They were received, and not badly treated for some weeks, by Daisy, King of M'Niami, a man still alive, for I've done Konza to him, and given the beggar ivory—this Daisy being the neighbour to the north-east of Spiciewegiehotiu, and now lives in terror of her sceptre and butting horns, though twelve years ago she was a kid of six in his hands, and with a wink he could have sent her to the kingdom of heaven.... Well, sir, after the Florida lot had been with Daisy some weeks, Daisy suddenly receives a request from the King of Wo-Ngwanya to hand over to him the white child then in Daisy's great-place, in exchange for five hundred Wo-Ngwanya cattle. Now, this was an all-out rum request; and, as at that time Daisy's M'Niami were considered a more powerful crowd than the Wa-Ngwanya, Daisy scratched his wool and demurred—couldn't drop to what the bobbery was about! the real reason being, that a certain woman of the Wa-Ngwanya, named Mandaganya, had months before had some sort of premonition that a 'lamb coming up out of the water' would make Wo-Ngwanya great—that being what 'Spiciewegiehotiu' means, 'Lamb come up out of water.' This Mandaganya, too, I know, by the way—a remarkable woman, I assure you—big, grand being—highly intelligent—and if ever there was a medium, or 'sensitive,' or 'psychic,' as you call 'em here, it is that woman. That woman has outraged the moral sense of all Wo-Ngwanya, all her fifteen children, except two, having different fathers—a capital offence there—yet her influence in the State remains immense, she being the chief of the College of Doctors—a triumph of personality. Her two children by one father are Sueela and a little brisk beast, sharp as a needle with two points, who is the executioner—a little ink-black beast whose limbs seem oiled, whose close acquaintance I almost made, by George. The flash of that falchion of his will have a head pitching away in one swift swish, and then, his right leg bent before him, his left leg stiff behind him, he'll glance up sharp, as if asking everybody 'how's that for a wonner?' and then the next, and the next—brisk as a flea! and his sister Sueela is Spiciewegiehotiu's pet and weakness; sprig of seventeen, Sueela—ah! you must see Sueela—Venus, my boy—Venus is the thing's name, not Sueela. Spiciewegiehotiu's fondness for her is a scandal in Wo-Ngwanya, by the way, for Sueela's mother, the inyanga, comes from the dregs of the people, so——"

"But about the Florida people," Cobby interrupted, glancing at the clock.

"Aye, that's the point," Rolls said: "pull me up when I get long-winded. I have a soft spot for that country, and no doubt am apt to gas about my memories of it—'Children of the Wind' I name 'em, dwelling there in this twentieth century among the wrecks of a civilization ancient as Abraham, maybe—relics of pyramid, temple—and, the sweet winds that sweep them—I might do worse than sleep eternally under the turf of those uplands, if those that sleep can be hearing the breezes breathe through the trees at midday and at midnight. But I was telling you—the King of Wo-Ngwanya, panning it out that the white child at Daisy's great-place was the 'lamb come up washed out of the water,' demands her of Daisy; Daisy, for his part——"

But at this point a nurse looked in to claim Rolls, and would not be disobeyed. "Here's another Spicey," muttered Rolls, moving out with her, while another moon covered over with Constantinoples of topaz and opal floated aloft from Cobby's bubble-blower.