Читать книгу In the Dead of Night (Vol. 1-3) - T. W. Speight - Страница 14

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"Shall I shut the window, sir? The evening is rather cold."

It was Pierre Janvard, the body-servant of Mr. Kester St. George, who spoke. The place was a room at Park Newton, for Kester had come there on his promised visit. The same suite of rooms had been allotted to him that had been his during his uncle's lifetime--the same furniture was still in them: everything seemed unchanged. "Do you hear the bells, sir?" continued Pierre. "The village ringers are having their Wednesday evening practice. They always used to practise on Wednesday evenings, sir, if you remember. It seems only like yesterday since you left Park Newton."

To all this Mr. St. George vouchsafed no reply. He was dressing for dinner, a process to which he always attached much importance, and was just at that moment engaged with the knot of his white tie. He was evidently in anything but an amiable mood--a fact of which Pierre was perfectly aware, but did not seem to mind in the least.

"Do you remember, sir, talking to me one evening when you were dressing for dinner, just as it might be now, of what you would do, sir, and what alterations you would make, when Park Newton was all your own? You would build a new wing, and a new entrance-ball, and cut a fresh carriage-drive through the park. And then the stables were to be rebuilt, and the gardens altered and improved, and----"

"Pierre, you are a fool," said Mr. St. George, with emphasis.

The ghost of a smile flickered across the valet's staid features, but he did not answer.

Mr. St. George looked at his watch. It still wanted half an hour to dinner-time. He felt in no humour for seeing either Osmond or his cousin till they should all meet at table. He would stroll as far as the little summerhouse on the Knoll, and look once more on a scene that he remembered so well. He put on a light overcoat and a soft hat, and, going leisurely downstairs, he went slowly through the picture-gallery and the conservatory, and let himself out by a side door into the grounds at the back of the house. Every step that he took was haunted for him with memories of the past. His heart was full of bitterness and resentment that Fate, as he called it, should have played with him at such a terrible game of cross purposes, and have ended by winning everything from him. "If I had never been brought up to look upon it as sure to be one day my own," he said, "I could have borne to see it another man's without regret. Pierre is right: I did dream and plan and say to myself that I would do this thing and that thing when the time came for me to be master here. And now I, Kester St. George, am nothing better than a pauper and a blackleg, and am here on sufferance--an invited guest under the very roof that ought in justice to be mine!"

He took the winding path through the plantation that led to the summit of the Knoll. The summerhouse was unlocked as usual. He went in and sat down. The scene before him and around him was very pleasant to look upon, lighted up, as it was just then, by the fading splendours of an April sunset. The Hall itself, clasped tenderly round with shrubberies of softest green, lay close at his feet. Far and wide on either side stretched the Park, with its clumps of noble old trees that had seen generation after generation of the St. Georges come and go like creatures of a day, and still flourished unchanged. Away in the distance could be seen Highworth and other prosperous farms, all part and parcel of the Park Newton estate.

"All this belongs of right to me," muttered Kester to himself, as his eyes took in the whole pleasant picture; "and it would have been mine but for----"

He did not finish the sentence even to himself, but the gloom on his face deepened, and for a few moments the unhappy man sat with drooping head, seeing nothing but some terrible picture which his own words had conjured up.

He roused himself from his reverie with a sigh. The sun was nearly lost to view. Eastward the glooms of evening were beginning to enfold the landscape in their dusky wings. Blue curls of smoke wound slowly upward from the twisted chimneys of the Hall. A few belated rooks came flying over the Knoll on their way to their nests in the wood. The picture was redolent of homelike beauty and repose. "Only one life stands between me and all this," he muttered, as his eyes drank in the scene greedily. "Only one life. If Lionel Dering were to die to-night, I should be master to-morrow of all that I see before me."

He rose and left the summerhouse. He could hear the clanging of the dinner-bell. It was time to go.

"Only one life. And what is the value of any one particular life among the thousands that are born and die every day? Who would miss him--who would regret him? No one. He is an isolated link in the great chain of humanity. He might die to-night, or to-morrow, or next day. Stranger things than that have happened before now."

He pulled his hat over his brows and went slowly down the pathway, and was presently lost to view among the gloomy depths of the plantation.

Left alone, Pierre Janvard settled himself comfortably in an easy chair to enjoy the perusal of one of Mr. St. George's yellow-backed French novels. He was a thin, staid-looking man of fifty, decidedly more English than French in appearance. He was partially bald, and was closely shaven, except for two small whiskers of the kind known as "mutton chop." What hair he had was thickly sprinkled with gray, and was carefully trained and attended to. He had a good forehead, a rather large aquiline nose, and thin, firmly-cut lips. In his suit of well-brushed black, and his spotless white tie, he looked the model of a respectable and thoroughly trustworthy servant. He looked more than that. Had he been set down at a public dinner among a miscellaneous assemblage of guests, a stranger would probably have picked him out as a banker or a rich merchant, or might even have asked, and have been pardoned for asking, whether he were not some celebrated lawyer, or member of the Lower House. He spoke English with a French accent as a matter of course, but he could express himself as readily in one language as the other. He had a particularly quiet, noiseless way of going about his duties that many people might have liked, but which would have been intolerable to others. You never seemed to know that he was near you till you found him at your elbow.

Such as he was--this smug, respectable-looking valet--his antecedents were somewhat peculiar. His grandfather had been one of the sub-executioners of Paris during the terrible days of the Great Revolution. Later on, his father had for many years held the post of public executioner in one of the large towns in the south of France. Pierre himself had been intended for the same profession, and had, when a youth, assisted his father On more than one occasion in the performance of his ghastly duties. But the death of Janvard père brought a change of prospects. The widow was persuaded to come over to England and invest the family savings in the purchase of a small blanchisserie at the West End of London; and from that date Pierre's connection with his native country was a broken one.

Kester St. George's tastes were all luxurious ones. One of the first things he did after he came of age was to look out for a valet. Pierre Janvard was recommended to him by a friend, and he engaged him at once. The Frenchman had served him faithfully and well, had travelled with him, and had lived with him at Park Newton up to the date of Kester's quarrel with his uncle. But when the whole of Kester's income was swept away at one blow, and he was thrown on the world without a sovereign that he could call his own, then Janvard and he of necessity parted. Their coming together again was quite a matter of accident. It so happened that, a few days after Kester had won heavily on a certain race, he encountered Janvard in the street. The Frenchman touched his hat, and Kester stopped and spoke to him. The result was that Janvard, who was out of a situation at that time, was re-engaged by St. George, whose old, luxurious tastes cropped up the moment he found himself in abundant funds. Those funds could not last for ever, and a season of impecuniosity had again set in; but the bond between master and man had not again been broken.

Janvard stayed on with Mr. St. George. He was thoroughly trustworthy, or so Kester believed; and he probably knew more of his master's secrets--more of certain shady transactions that were never intended to bear the light of day--than any other man living.

Janvard had one relation in England--a sister--with whom he was on terms of close and affectionate intercourse. Both he and his sister were unmarried, and they both intended to remain so. Madame Janvard--she was called madame out of compliment to her age, which was nearer fifty than forty--kept a small boarding-house for her countrymen in a narrow street no great distance from Leicester Square. She had saved money, had madame. So had her brother. And the secret ambition of the two was to unite their fortunes, and start together as proprietors of a first-class hotel.

Pierre's holidays and leisure time, when he was in town, were always spent with his sister, in whose house one little cockloft of a room was set specially apart for him, and was full of his property. Here he kept a few boxes of choice cigars for his own private smoking, and a varied assortment of French novels and plays, together with sundry articles of bric-à-brac which he had picked up during his travels. But, in addition to these articles, the room contained several remarkable mementoes of the Great Revolution, which had come down to Pierre from his grandfather. In one corner hung the veritable pair of shoes worn by Charlotte Corday on the day that she stabbed Marat. In a little glass box on the chimney-piece was a lock of hair shorn from the head of Marie Antoinette after execution. Near it was a handkerchief that had belonged to the Princess de Lamballe. On a bracket opposite the window stood a life-size bust of Marat himself, the hideous head crowned with the bonnet rouge, and inscribed below, Le Génie de la Révolution. Near at hand was a working model of the guillotine, made by the redoubtable hands of old Martin Janvard, and close by it a model of one of the tumbrils in which the condemned were conveyed to the Place de la Grève. In this room Pierre and his sister had many pleasant little banquets all to themselves, and many a long chat on matters past, present, and to come. Not having her to talk to to-night, he was going to write to her, which was the next best thing he could do. So when he had yawned through a couple of chapters of the novel, he took pen and paper, and sat down at Mr. St. George's table, being perfectly aware that he was safe from interruption for another hour at the least. Judging by what Pierre Janvard wrote, there would seem, this evening, to have been a strange similarity in the trains of thought at work in the minds of master and man.

"We are once again back in the old place, chère Margot," wrote the Frenchman. "Was it only yesterday, or is it more than a year ago, since we were in these rooms last? Everything seems as it used to be, except that the old master's voice is heard no longer. He lies cold and quiet in the churchyard. Nothing else seems changed, and yet how changed is all! For a new master now reigns at Park Newton, and that master is not Monsieur Kester St. George. Of course we have known of this all along, but not till we came here did we seem to realize all that it means. One man, and one man only, stands between my master and all this vast property. That man, as you know already, is his own cousin. He is not married, but he may be before long. If he were only to catch a fever and die--if he were only to commit suicide--if he were only to fall into the river and be drowned--ah, my faith! what luck would then be ours!

"And yet, somehow, little one, I feel as if I should hardly like to change places with this Monsieur Dering. I don't know why I feel so, but there the feeling is, and I tell you of it. Life is so strangely uncertain, you know; and it seems to me more uncertain still when you stand so terribly in the light of another man. Perhaps you will say that I am superstitious. So be it. But can any man say where superstition begins and where it ends, even in his own mind? I can't. All I know is this: that if I were Monsieur Dering, the last man in the world whom I would ask to cross my threshold would be Monsieur Kester St. George."

A fortnight had come and gone since the arrival of Kester St. George and Percy Osmond at Park Newton. Another week would bring their visit to an end, and Lionel Dering was fain to confess to himself that he should not be sorry when that time had arrived. This was more particularly the case as regards Osmond, of whose company he had grown heartily tired. There was, indeed, about Osmond little or nothing that could have any attraction for a man like Lionel Dering. The points of difference between them were too great for any hope to exist that they could ever be bridged over. Friendship between two such men was an impossibility.

With Kester St. George the case was somewhat different. Lionel would gladly have clasped his cousin's hand in friendship, but he had begun to find out that beneath all Kester's geniality, and easy laughing way of dealing with everything that came before him, there existed a nature cold, hard, and cynical, against which the white wings of Friendship or of Love might beat in vain for ever. He was always pleasant, always smiling, always good-tempered: yet it seemed impossible to get near him, or to feel sure that you knew him better at the end of a year than on the first day you met him. Then, too, Lionel was not without an uneasy sense that not only the servants at the hall, but his own social equals in the neighbourhood, looked upon him in some measure as an interloper, and seemed to think that he must, in some inscrutable way, have defrauded his cousin out of his birthright. No wonder Lionel felt that it would be a relief when the visit should have come to an end.

He took an opportunity one day, when Kester seemed in a more confidential mood than usual, of again hinting at the pleasure it would give him if his cousin would only accept that three thousand a-year out of the estate which it had been his grandfather's manifest wish should be Kester's share of the property. But Kester froze the moment the subject was broached, and Lionel saw plainly how utterly useless any further persistence in it would be.

Both Squire Culpepper and Mr. Cope had called at Park Newton as soon as they heard that Kester St. George was down there on a visit, and a day or two later Lionel invited those gentlemen, together with several other old friends of his cousin, to a dinner at the hall, in honour of the occasion. Three or four return dinners had been given by different people, and now the day was come when they were all to go and dine with the squire at Pincote--Lionel, Kester, and Mr. Percy Osmond.

The afternoon was cold and gloomy, with frequent showers of rain. Luncheon was just over, and Kester St. George, who had been out riding all the morning, was sitting alone before a cozy fire in his dressing-room, keeping the unwelcome company of his own thoughts. In his hands was a cheque, which Osmond, who had just left him, had given him, in settlement of a long-standing debt at cards.

"The greedy hound!" he muttered to himself. "It was like drawing blood from a stone to get even this paltry strip of paper from him. And yet if this were made out for eight thousand pounds instead of for eight only, it would be honoured. Ay, if it were for six times eight thousand pounds, and there would then be a little fortune left. One thing's very certain. I must raise a couple of thousand somewhere before I'm many hours older, or else I shall have to make a bolt of it--have to put salt water between myself and the hounds that are for ever baying at my heels. If Nantucket had only pulled off the Chester Cup, I should have landed three thousand at the very least. Just like my luck that she should fall lame twelve hours before the race. I must have two thousand," he went on as he rose and began to pace the room, "or else submit to be outlawed. Osmond could lend it to me and never feel the loss of it. Shall I ask him? As well try to move a rock. He knows that I'm poor already. If he knew that I was a pauper he'd cut me dead. No great loss as things go; still, I can't afford to lose him. Shall I ask Dering to help me out of my difficulties? No, never! never! Let ruin--outlawry--suicide itself come, rather than that!"

He sat down again, still twisting and turning the cheque absently between his fingers. "Only a miserable eight pounds! It's like offering a quarter of a biscuit to a man who is dying of starvation. Mr. Percy Osmond doesn't seem to have paid much attention to the art of calligraphy when he was young. Upon my word I never saw a signature that it would be easier to imitate. All that a clever fellow wants is a blank cheque on the same bank. With that, what wonders might be wrought! I've heard Osmond say that he always sleeps with his keys under his pillow. Once obtain possession of them, the rest would be easy. But how to get them? Suppose he gets drunk to-night at Pincote, as he is nearly sure to do--why then----"

His pale face flushed, and a strange light came into his eyes. He mused for a minute or two, then he got up and rang the bell. Pierre answered it.

"Ascertain at what hour the next train starts for London."

In a couple of minutes Pierre came back. "The train for London passes Duxley station at four thirty-six," he said.

"Good. You will just have time to catch it," said Mr. St. George. "You will reach London in two hours and a quarter after you leave Duxley. Take a cab. Find out Boucher. Tell him to telegraph me first thing to-morrow morning, so that the message will reach me here not later than eight o'clock. His telegram must be to this effect: You are wanted in town immediately on most important business. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"An hour in London will be enough for you. You will be able to catch the eight o'clock down train, and ought to be back in this room by eleven at the latest. In fact, I shall expect to find you here when I return from Pincote."

"Yes, sir."

"And don't say a word to any one about your journey."

Pierre bowed and left the room.

"Invaluable fellow, that," said Kester aloud.

The excitement that had stirred his blood so strangely a few minutes before was still upon him. He was like a man who had screwed himself up to some desperate resolve which he was determined to go through with at every cost.

He began slowly and deliberately to dress himself for dinner.

"There's an old saying, 'Nothing risk, nothing have,'" he muttered to himself. "The risk, in this case, seems to be nothing very desperate. If I fail, I shall be no worse off than I am now. If I succeed----" His face blanched as suddenly as if he had seen a ghost.

"I forgot that!" he whispered. "Dering sleeps in the next room to Osmond. What if he should be awake? Even when he does sleep, I've heard him say that the noise of a strange footstep is enough to rouse him. That is a difficulty I never thought of--the biggest difficulty of all."

He was still pondering over this difficulty, whatever it might be, when Osmond burst suddenly into the room.

"Not ready yet?" he said. "What a dilatory fellow you are! We shall have Dering in a devil of a temper if you don't make haste. I'll wait for you, if you don't mind my having a whiff meanwhile."