Читать книгу The Green Archer - Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace - Страница 22

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Garre Castle, with its gaunt keep and its crenellated walls, offered little hint of the comfort it held. Forbidding and gloomy of exterior, no ray of light shone from its loopholed walls and turrets. The mullioned windows of Mr. Bellamy's library looked out upon the green lawn of the inner ward, and from these windows one wall of the Sanctuary Keep rose in a stark, unbroken, and seemingly endless line.

There were people who wondered why this man, who never read a book and to whom history made no appeal, should have bought, at a big figure, this home of the dead and gone lights of chivalry. Knowing him, they would not have wondered. It was the strength of it that thrilled this old builder.

There was something in these stones that was in tune with the latent ferocity in his cruel nature. The lightless dungeons with their foot-thick doors, the worn chain-rings fastened to pillars rubbed smooth by the shoulders of tortured humanity, the power and majesty of Garre Castle spoke to the primitive in him and awakened in his soul an atavistic devil that found joy even in the contemplation of forgotten suffering. It was this that made the first appeal when he had seen it twenty years before on a visit to England. Later, Garre Castle figured in such dreams as he had; finally the place became necessary. He had bought it at a heavy figure and had never regretted his purchase.

The castle was the light of his eyes. He was least objectionable here; was, on occasions, almost human. He never slept a night away. If he was in town he did not sleep there. Only the hotel servants and Julius knew this. However important the business might be that brought him to London, he was back at the castle by night, even if he left again in the morning before the world was awake. The castle was his one recreation. He would spend days wandering around the walls, hours in speculation upon some stone. Who placed it there? What was the man's name, what life did he live, what was he paid? Always it came back to that question. There were no unions in those days, no walking delegates. If a labourer got fresh they took him out and hanged him. High from the walls of Sanctuary Keep a stout oak beam projected. Beneath was a narrow doorway. Through this slit men had been pushed, with a hempen collar around their necks, fastened to the beam above. That was the way to deal with workmen who got fresh. And the Green Archer who had stolen his lord's good venison. He had died on that beam. It was proper that he should, thought Abe Bellamy. People who go thieving should hang. That ought still to be the law.

He sat that evening before the huge stone fireplace in the library, watching abstractedly a fire of logs that crackled and spluttered. The room was a handsome one, expensively and usefully furnished. The walls were panelled from floor to raftered ceiling, and over the recessed windows heavy blue-velvet curtains had been drawn. From the fire Mr. Bellamy's eyes roved up to the stone shield above the fireplace, with its rampant leopards, which the action of time had almost obliterated. Beneath, and more distinct, was carved the de Curcys' motto: