Читать книгу Below the Salt - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 10

The guide raised a forefinger and pointed ahead of them. John saw the crenelated top of a round tower protruding above the wooded line of the hills. “That’s it, mister. That’s where the big boss likes to go so he can give them all the slip. Ye’ve made it, mister. Ain’t ye proud?”

John was both proud and relieved. He was helped down from the saddle and found the muscles of his legs so stiff that he could barely walk. He hobbled across a gravel drive and, obeying a flicker of his guide’s thumb, entered the tower through an open door. There was plenty more to the house than the granite-like tower but he was too concerned with the difficulty of controlling his legs to take much in. He got a general impression that the place had a medieval look about it.

Inside, however, this impression faded. The walls were high and of stone, the floors were also of stone and they looked so old that he half expected to find his feet in rushes. The ceilings were massively beamed. At the same time, the interior had a modern note. The fireplaces were not planned for the twelve-foot yule logs which required a whole parcel of varlets to drag them in; they were comfortably small. The furniture was mostly new and well upholstered. The stone walls carried a few fine paintings of early days in the West.

A manservant in a white jacket bowed to John and smiled approvingly. “The senator will be glad you decided to make it tonight,” he said in a voice as modern as Times Square. “Dinner has been held up on the chance you would arrive. He’s outside, watching the sunset. Come this way, sir.”

John found himself on a flagged terrace facing straight into the west. An old man with silver hair was filling a massive chair, his legs stretched out in front of him and his carpet slippers failing to conceal the fact that his feet were bare.

“Is it the young fellow, Peterkin?” asked the old man in a magnificently deep voice. “Ah, it is you, John. Come over here, if you don’t mind. I’ll have to get up for dinner soon, so I’ll stay put for the moment. I’m an old man, John, and getting up out of these deep chairs has become an ordeal.”

John felt his hand engulfed in a powerful grip and saw a pair of bright blue eyes studying him from under unruly white brows.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long, sir,” he said. “We were slow getting over. It was my first experience on horseback.”

“And how did you make out?”

“Well, sir, the best I can say for myself is that I didn’t fall out of the saddle.”

The old man continued to stare at him. “I need no proofs of your identity, John,” he said finally. “You take after your grandmother. In many ways. Draw up a chair and we’ll talk until the chuck wagon is ready.”

By this time John had absorbed a closer picture of his host. Richard Jeffrey O’Rawn had once been a handsome Goliath of a man and he could still sit for a picture of the twilight of a modern god. His shoulders were the broadest John had ever seen and a strong column of well-tanned neck rose from an open collar. His age was unmistakable and yet there remained something almost youthful about his face. This was contributed perhaps by a twinkle in the blue eyes and the unruliness of his ample thatch of hair. There was a great sense of relief for the visitor in his immediate realization that he was going to like his host.

The old man had a long glass in which ice tinkled. “Peterkin says he’s sure you don’t drink, my boy. How right is he?”

“Entirely right, sir.”

“Is there anything you would like while I finish this off?”

“No, sir.”

There was a long pause. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” said the senator, “if you’ve come here carrying a good, solid grudge against me. Because of what happened. Back there so long ago.”

John hesitated. “No, sir,” he said finally. “All I know is that you were going to marry my grandmother and that it was broken off. If she felt any sense of wrong, she never let me see it. I—I’ve thought about it a great deal, sir. But I can understand how reluctant you may be to reopen the past.”

“My engagement to your grandmother, my boy, was broken for a very strange reason.” The senator’s eyes were seeing something from the past quite different from the brilliant sunset on which they were fixed. “You would think me mad if I told you what it was. My sweet and lovely Lucy had the courage to believe it. Ah, how brave and wonderful she was! I thought of her continuously afterward. Even now, my boy, after all these years, she is often in my mind.”

The old man turned slowly and with obvious bodily reluctance so that he could look straight at his youthful visitor.

“I have never told anyone the reason,” he said. His voice was cast in a lower tone but it still carried the suggestion of a lion-like rumble. “But I am going to tell you. That’s what I brought you out for. I want to explain everything—for reasons you’ll understand when you’ve heard. But not yet. This is the queerest and blastedest story that any human being has ever told; and every word of it as true as though it came right out of the pages of Holy Writ. It—well, it must be led up to. You need to be put into the mood for it. I’ll have to give you a bit here and an inkling there. There are some places and things I want to show you first. And then, finally, I’ll let you have the whole thing, like a salvo of sixteen-inch guns. Even at that, it will rock you to your foundations, my boy.”

“Everything you say, sir, makes me prouder than ever of my grandmother. I think she had to face this broadside without the benefit of these preparations at all.”

“That is true, John. Ah, that sweetly staunch, that loyal little soul. When I had belated word of her death—not more than a month ago—I broke down and wept. I assure you that I did, and yet I have been what they call in the West a tough hombre. I hadn’t had a glint of moisture in my eyes for half a century.”

Peterkin appeared in the door. “Dinner,” he said.

Senator O’Rawn may have reached the stage where certain kinds of physical effort were avoided but there were many things he still insisted on doing. He liked to carve the roast at dinner. As he wielded the knife with ease and skill and piled up a substantial mound of slices, ranging from the crisp outside to the pink of the rare center, he talked to his guest.

“Old age has many disadvantages,” he said. “In my case I am irked most by the lethargy which follows a good meal. Always before I found the hour when I smoked a cigar after dinner the pleasantest time of the day. I can no longer enjoy it. I fall asleep. And so, John, I must take advantage of the opportunity for talk which dinner affords, even though I once had a prejudice against people who chattered through meals. How do you like your beef?”

“Medium, sir.”

“Good. I prefer the two extremes.” The old man divided the slices and the manservant placed a well-filled plate in front of John.

“Now in the first place there’s the matter of money. Being confident that you and I would get along pretty well, in spite of the past, I took the liberty a few days ago of making you a loan.”

“Yes, sir. It was very generous of you. I wouldn’t have been able to get out here if Mr. Ross hadn’t had that money from you.”

“Oh, that. It wasn’t a loan. It was for expenses. Now here’s what I mean. Every so often a new stock comes on the market or some well-established firm decides on a new issue. These kinds of issues are generally oversubscribed and that makes the public hungry for them. The stock goes up immediately. It’s a well-established practice for insiders to buy in early for a quick turn. As soon as the expected advance is achieved, they sell and so pocket a neat little profit with practically no risk.”

They were deep into their dinner now and the senator was demonstrating that the advance of the years had done little to curb his appetite. Peterkin was refilling his glass with a deep ruby wine.

“Have another wedge of the Yorkshire pudding? Good, you don’t often get it as crisp as our cook makes it. Well now, there’s been an issue on the market for two days. One of these state-built tollgate jobs. Tax-exempt. A good buy for the long pull as well as for a quick turn. I took quite a slice of it and I put you in for a thousand shares. That’s what I meant when I said I had taken the liberty of loaning you some money. If it goes up, and I’m sure it will, you’ll make a nice profit on the deal.”

“And if it goes down?” John asked himself with a feeling of consternation. He would never be able to pay the losses.

The senator was studying him intently. “John,” he said, “I read all those answers you gave Jake Lynch. There was something said about you writing a novel.”

John nodded with some reluctance. “Yes, sir. I’m—I’m cutting my teeth on one. My ambition is to be a writer. I don’t want to become very rich. I suppose it’s too bad that I feel that way because my grandmother hoped I would get hold of what’s left of the Congdon business and put it back where it was in her father’s time. But I’ve known all along that I’m not capable of it.”

The old man sat back for a few moments and pondered this piece of information. “You know, John, that’s an idea. The Congdon hat was terrifically in the vogue. When I was a young buck, no one thought of wearing anything else, if they could afford it. Many’s the ten-dollar bill I invested in a Congdon when I could have had a pretty fair hat for three or four. The profits must have been enormous. But you’re right about it, my boy; you’re not the one to undertake that kind of business resuscitation. Still, I’ll think it over. I might be able to start something.” He paused and then added reflectively, “For old time’s sake, John, for old time’s sake.”

They were at their salad now. John’s taste was somewhat undeveloped in that department and he found the endive much too bitter. The old man downed great quantities of it with every evidence of enjoyment.

“Did you bring the manuscript with you?” asked the senator unexpectedly.

“Why, yes, I did. Just to be safe. I didn’t want to leave it where it might be thrown out. Mrs. Groupy is a great thrower-outer. Even though it may not deserve any better treatment.”

“Good. I would like to read it.”

“No, no!” John’s alarm over this suggestion was completely genuine. “It’s not in shape yet to be seen. I suspect it’s very bad, sir. I—I’m pretty sensitive about it.”

“I have a special reason for wanting to read it, my boy. I’ll appreciate it if you can get your courage up to the point of letting me have it. What I may think of it will be a secret between the two of us.”

“Well.” John gulped unhappily. “Just as you say, sir. But it may be pretty terrible. It may make you lose any faith you might otherwise have had in me.”

“I studied the answers you gave Lynch with great care, my boy,” said the old man, lifting his dessert spoon for a first attack on a mound of ice cream. “One thing pleased me very much: the interest you take in history. He asked you only about American history. Has your reading gone beyond that? What of English, for instance?”

“I’ve read Green and some of Macaulay. And a new man named Bryant.”

“Did you find the story of Magna Charta interesting?”

John nodded. “I found it one of the most exciting stories I’ve ever read. I suppose it was because my sympathies were so strongly aroused on the side of the barons, representing the people.”

“Well, those gallant gentlemen were representing themselves really. But their side of it was the right side. You’ll probably be surprised when I tell you that I’ve made quite a study of that period. For a reason which I won’t go into just now.... Yes, I feel that I know King John quite intimately, and Stephen Langton and William the Marshal. Those last two, what men they were!”

“Do you think their equal is to be found nowadays, sir?”

The senator had finished his ice cream and was examining the cigars in a round mahogany humidor. “My boy,” he said, “there’s one truth you ought to get out of reading history. Never undersell the present. The world has advanced. Oh, I know that pessimists sit back and complain that things are getting worse. They don’t know what they are talking about because they see only one side. What an eye opener it would be for them if they were compelled to live in the pigsty they called Merrie England in the days of Magna Charta! I wonder how they would like to live under laws which gave a king the power of life and death over them?”

“You seem to have studied that period very carefully, sir.”

“Yes,” said the old man, who was now beginning to show the first signs of the postprandial lethargy he deplored. “I have had—quite special opportunities to study the period.”