Читать книгу Dead Man Manor - Valentine Williams - Страница 8

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But he had reckoned without the rather primitive lighting arrangements at the camp. On reaching his hut and seating himself at the table, the stamps spread out before him, lens, perforation gauge, and catalogue within reach, he soon discovered that the electric light was much too feeble for his purpose. He noted, however, that the three Confederates included a five-cent green-and-carmine Bâton Rouge issue which was new to him, and that among the Canadians was the seventeen-cent blue with the Jacques Cartier head—an issue of the sixties—which was missing from his very comprehensive British Empire collection.

Locking the stamps away again, he took from its hook his old brown Inverness cape, which he had purchased on a shooting holiday in Scotland a good fifteen years before, and throwing it about his shoulders, went out into the cool, bright evening. It was not yet eight o’clock and still daylight. He strolled out on the landing-stage, smoking his cigar and watching the sun sink behind the lake.

He was presently joined by Wood. The Tisserands had settled down to pinochle, the doctor announced, and the others were playing bridge. ‘The Rees woman wanted to rope me in,’ he remarked rather ruefully. ‘But that husband of hers handed me a dirty look, you know, like a traffic cop that’s going to give you a ticket—Montgomery told me that his wife and Adams and the Reeses have made a four for the last two nights—so I scrammed. Don’t you play bridge?’

Mr. Treadgold shook his head warily. ‘Not with retired British Generals!’

The doctor laughed and shrugged. ‘There’s not much else to do in the evenings, is there?’

‘I’m going down to the village presently to call on the curé. He’s promised to show me some of the old registers. Want to come along?’

‘Will it mean talking French?’

‘I shall be surprised if the Abbé Bazin knows any English!’

The young man’s head-shake was exceedingly positive. ‘Not me! But I don’t mind walking with you as far as the village!’

‘It’s eight miles by the road. By the woods it’s a lot shorter, but you don’t catch me going near the Manor again. I shall take my car.’

‘Okeh.’ The doctor paused. ‘Just where is this haunted house of yours, anyway?’

Mr. Treadgold stopped dead in his tracks. ‘You don’t propose to go there, I trust?’ he said gravely.

His companion laughed. ‘Why not?’

‘And risk running into this dangerous lunatic?’

‘Oh, shoot! The fellow’s probably perfectly harmless. You heard what Adams said?’

With his casual, jesting air he began cross-examining Mr. Treadgold about his encounter.

The big, gray coupé slid to a halt before the presbytery. The hands of the church clock pointed to twenty minutes to nine. Mr. Treadgold switched off the lights, stepped sedately to the ground and tugged the iron bell-arm under the porch.

‘You may as well come in, old man,’ he encouraged his companion, who stood at the foot of the steps. ‘I’ll do the talking. We needn’t stay long, you know!’

But the American was not to be persuaded. ‘I’ll hang around for a bit. If you don’t see me when you come out, don’t wait!’ The door opening at that instant, Mr. Treadgold’s attention was momentarily diverted. When he turned round to look for his companion, the latter had disappeared.

The Abbé Bazin was in his study. It was a little room, smelling of wax polish, with a bookcase of religious books and crudely coloured pictures of sacred subjects on the walls. Above the littered writing desk was a large portrait of Pope Pius XI, his hand raised in blessing: below it, an eighteenth century print of St. Florentin, showing the church.

The priest presented the visitor to the woman who had ushered him in: ‘My sister, Mademoiselle Bazin, who keeps house for me! Perhaps, my dear Agathe,’ he went on, ‘these gentlemen will take a glass of whisky, unless they would prefer to try your cherry wine!’

Mr. Treadgold now perceived that the curé had another caller, a jerky, rather corpulent, little man in black, who with his restless black eyes and silky moustache had a vaguely swashbuckling air. He proved to be Maître Boucheron, the village notary. Maître Boucheron declining a drink, Mr. Treadgold agreed to sample the cherry wine which he found not dissimilar to the ginger and cowslip wines made by the cottagers in the England of his youth. He and the curé had a glass apiece, served very genteelly by Mademoiselle Bazin on a tray with a view of Lourdes, flanked by a plate of sweet biscuits.

Both the priest and the notary seemed well versed in the history of the parish, from its earliest beginnings in the seventeenth century, when Governor de Lauzon, on His Most Christian Majesty’s behalf, granted the seigneurie of Mort Homme to Charles Ferdinand de St. Rémy, officer in the Carignan Regiment. Maître Boucheron, who had obviously been bidden there to help entertain the English visitor, had brought some documents of interest with him in his shabby portfolio—an old treaty with a local Indian chief, some ancient parchment deeds. The curé, warming to his subject, went repeatedly to the shelf where the oldest registers were kept, to come back with a tattered volume and show an entry in the fine, spidery hand of the parish clerk on the age-yellowed paper.

The Englishman was too interested in his surroundings to be bored; but he found his attention frequently wandering. Here, he mused, was a civilization which in its fundamentals had been static for centuries—it made things like the tailoring business, the stock market, taxes, bad debts, seem of little account. He saw St. Florentin as the type of hundreds of other tiny French Canadian parishes—a self-contained community with its own little niche in the history of the country which its forefathers had hewed for it, just as with their axes they had hewed the original settlement out of the virgin forest. Nothing ever happened at St. Florentin and so its inhabitants were supremely unconcerned with what took place elsewhere. Empires might rise and fall, but these people went on. It made Mr. Treadgold feel very far from home.

It was ten o’clock when he finally took out his watch. His conscience smote him at the thought that Wood might have been waiting all that time and he rose to take his leave. Maître Boucheron did likewise. The notary refused a lift, saying that he lived only just down the street, the white house next to Euclide Fortin’s, the druggist. Gravely saluting his companion, he departed. In his black felt hat, as he walked away in the moonlight, he looked more of a swashbuckler than ever, Mr. Treadgold decided.

Wood was not outside. He was not at the car, and the square, with its dramatic figure of the Christ, lay empty and still under the moon. Mr. Treadgold shrugged and got into the car. Wood had told him not to wait—he couldn’t blame the other for taking him at his word. Nevertheless, as he drove through the sleeping village, he could not help remembering that Wood had spoken of going to the Manor—he hoped nothing had happened to the young idiot!

It was ten-twenty when he got in. The doctor was not at the camp. The main hut was dark as Mr. Treadgold put his car away and so was Camp Number 3 when he reached it. He had just switched on the light when he heard a step on the duckboards and, glancing out, beheld Adams strolling up from the direction of the landing-stage.

He had not seen the doctor since dinner, Adams said. The rest of the party had gone to bed: he had been for a row on the lake—he hadn’t been sleeping very well and he thought the exercise might help. With that he bade the other good night and went on up the duckboards—he had Number 4, the camp adjoining, about fifty yards along the path.

Back in his cabin Mr. Treadgold hung up his hat and cloak and, going to his suitcase, fetched the whisky bottle to pour himself the nightcap which it was his invariable habit to take before retiring. He had the bottle in his hand when he heard, from somewhere close at hand, a raucous, muffled cry, followed by the sounds of a scuffle.

He put the bottle down and went quickly to the door. As he looked out, there was a crash as the screen door of the adjoining cabin was hurled back and Adams burst onto the verandah, lugging a supine, unresisting figure. He hauled his captive to where, halfway between the two cabins, an electric bulb affixed to a tree illuminated the path and jerked the other’s head back so as to see the face in the light, at the same time exploding in a volley of French.

‘Sacrée canaille!’ he cried. ‘Eh, salaud, je t’attrappe bien!’ And with that he banged his prisoner’s head against the tree-trunk, not once, but again and again.

Horrified, Mr. Treadgold rushed forward. ‘Stop!’ he called out. ‘Mr. Adams, for Heaven’s sake! You’ll kill him!’

In the pale rays of the solitary bulb the lawyer’s face was convulsed with anger. But on Mr. Treadgold’s shout he desisted and, with a contemptuous snort, flung his captive from him. The victim lurched sprawling against the tree, but with considerable agility regained his feet and stood there with head lowered, like an animal at bay. To his amazement Mr. Treadgold recognized the face that had peered out at him in the Manor grounds.

Le Borgne was a wild-looking apparition. He was burnt almost black by exposure to sun and wind, with a tangle of coarse, dark hair standing out round his head and an empty socket where his right eye should have been, explaining his nickname. He wore a tattered cardigan buttoned across his grimy, naked chest and patched corduroy trousers reaching only to the ankle to display sockless feet thrust into hide shoes. His remaining eye had a fitful, unstable gleam, and forehead and chin, sloping sharply back, set the whole face at a curiously vulpine angle. He paused but an instant, pawing clumsily at his head and glaring defiance about him, then, whipping round, shambled swiftly off into the darkness.

Adams did not attempt to follow. He gave Mr. Treadgold a penitent look.

‘Sorry! I’m afraid I lost my temper. I caught him in my cabin—he tried to hide in the bathroom when he heard me coming!’

‘Did he take anything?’

Reassuringly the lawyer shook his head.

‘We’d better notify the gardien, hadn’t we? He may have robbed other camps!’

Adams laughed. ‘Not he. I know what he wanted.’ He laughed again. ‘Never mind, I’ve given that gentleman something to remember me by. He won’t come snooping round after me again, I guess! And now,’ he added composedly, ‘I think I’ll turn in!’ He nodded to the other and re-entered his hut.

Adams had not seen fit to mention just what it was One-Eye was after, the Englishman mentally noted. He remembered the lawyer’s scathing condemnation of the man as a drunkard and a wastrel at dinner—One-Eye’s surreptitious visit to Adams’s hut, he conjectured, had probably to do with some old friction dating back to the attorney’s former visits to the Manor. It was none of his affair, anyway, Mr. Treadgold reflected. After convincing himself by a rapid survey that his camp had not been visited, he switched off the light and, climbing into bed, promptly dropped off to sleep.

He was roused by the turning up of the light. He opened sleepy eyes to find Wood standing by the table.

‘Whatever time is it?’ Mr. Treadgold demanded.

‘Close on midnight. May one take a drink?’

‘Help yourself!’ The other smothered a yawn. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

The doctor did not answer—with a happy, musing air he was slowly splashing whisky into a tumbler. He tossed off three fingers neat, set down the glass, rumpled his obstreperous hair and laughed aloud.

‘What’s the joke?’ his roommate demanded drowsily.

The young man started from a reverie. ‘Nothing!’ He began to peel off his clothes. ‘Treadgold, old man,’ he asked suddenly, pausing with one leg out of his trousers, ‘what colour would you say eyes were that are gray one minute and blue the next?’

Mr. Treadgold yawned again. ‘Oh, dear! I don’t know! Plaid, I should think!’ With a vast heave, he turned his face to the wall. The doctor cast him a pitying look and, perceiving that his companion was already asleep again, went on with his undressing.