Читать книгу The Crime Club - W. Holt-White - Страница 3

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Hearing the sound of lightly-falling footsteps behind him, Captain Melun ceased his investigations of Sir Paul Westerham's kit-bag and cautiously turned his head.

As he did so, the captain experienced a painful sensation. He felt a little cold ring of steel pressed against his right temple, and from past experience, both objective and subjective, he knew that a Colt cartridge was held, so to speak, in leash within five inches of his head.

It was very still on board the Gigantic. The liner rose and fell easily on the long, oily Atlantic swell of the Bay of Biscay. Moreover, there was upon the entire vessel that peace which comes between the post-prandial exercises, such as deck quoits, of Atlantic passengers and the comparative bustle which arrives with tea-time. In short, the hour was half-past three o'clock.

Captain Melun for several infinitely long seconds was offered an opportunity of enjoying the supreme calm of the liner. But he did not entirely revel in the moments so offered to him.

It was, indeed, with some relief that he heard a distinctly pleasant, though slightly mocking, voice break the accentuated silence and say:

“Don't be alarmed, Captain Melun. I mean you no harm. I am simply psychologically interested in your movements. The fact that I am attempting to protect the contents of my kit-bag from your attentions is of comparatively small importance.”

The captain drew a little breath of relief, not the less sincere because he was conscious that the nozzle of the revolver was withdrawn from his temple.

He heard the door of the state-room close softly; then the pleasant voice spoke again, though with a slightly harder ring in its tones.

“Stand up, Captain Melun,” said the voice, “and be seated. I have a good deal to say, and it is not my habit to talk to any man when I find him on his knees.”

Captain Melun rose a little unsteadily and faced about, to find the most disconcerting eyes of Sir Paul Westerham bent full upon him.

Still retaining the revolver in his hand, the baronet seated himself upon the edge of his bunk and then motioned to Captain Melun to sit down upon the only available couch.

For a few minutes the two men gazed at each other with curiosity and interest; and it would have been hard to find a greater contrast in physique and physiognomy.

Captain Melun had an olive face set with dark, almond-shaped eyes beneath a pair of oblique and finely-pencilled brows; his nose was aquiline and assertive, his mouth shrewd and mean and scarcely hidden by a carefully-trained and very faintly-waxed moustache. He was exceedingly tall and astonishingly spare in build. Indeed, his whole aspect suggested a man who brooded over defeated ends. For the rest, his dress was unmistakably associated with that service to which he had never been a credit and which he had left unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

Sir Paul rivalled the captain in inches. Indeed, he must have overtopped him by half a head. He was spare, too, as Melun was, but his was the leanness of a man who has been worn fine by activity. His hair was undeniably red in tint, and his face had that pronounced ruddiness possessed only by red-haired folk. His nose was inelegantly short and emphasised the length of his upper lip, which was, however, covered, as indeed were both his face and chin, with a short, crisp auburn beard.

Strong though it was, his face, under the covering of its beard, would have lacked both distinction and power but for the amazing eyes. These, beneath brows which were rather beetling for so young a man, were of a shade which can only be described as of duck's-egg green. They gave the man an aspect of superhuman coldness and at times an air of almost superhuman cruelty. They were the eyes of a man who could look unmoved upon a sea of troubles or survey with untouched heart a panorama of undeserved suffering.

Sir Paul was, in fact, no uncommon man. Leaving a wild youth behind him, he had for ten years which followed his landing in the United States pursued the hard and humble and most exacting calling of miner in the West. Life he had always held cheap, not only as it touched others, but as it touched himself. He had learnt a hard lesson in the school of life, and taking it hardly had become a hard man. So inured, indeed, had he become both to suffering and to danger that, when at length a greedy lawyer had tracked him down, he had at first resented bitterly and blasphemously the fate which made him the richest man on earth.

For his uncle, from whom he inherited the baronetcy, had been a rich man when he died; and for five years his well-invested fortune had lain in the hands of able men, slowly accumulating still greater wealth, which a crowd of secondary relatives had striven to prove did not belong to the vanished and scapegrace nephew.

At first the fact that he was the undisputed owner of quite as many millions as would have justified an American plutocrat in being jealous had annoyed the new baronet more than he could tell.

Week after week the lawyer, mindful of his fees, had pleaded with the new baronet to return to England and enter into possession of his own. Week after week Westerham had hesitated to return, for, in spite of the hardships which he had undergone, there lived with him still sufficient of the old life to tell him that the possession of millions would entail the labour of a social treadmill which he not only dreaded but despised.

There had, however, come to him quite by chance a motive for returning. On thinking it over he had come to the conclusion that it is not, after all, so bad a thing to be able to indulge a whim. And the secret of the whim he meant to follow lay, he knew, within the kit-bag which he had found Captain Melun ransacking.

Utterly cut off from the world as he had been, the names which mean so much in Society in London, Paris, Vienna, and even in New York, had been lost to him. The faces of the great men of those great cities were to him as a closed book. The faces of their womenkind were as dreams which he had long since forgotten. But there was a dream in the kit-bag.

Even Westerham's roystering had not been ill-spent. His knowledge of the world, which, after all, means a certain cognisance of the evil that men do, had taught him that Captain Melun was not a man to perpetrate a common theft.

Long years spent in a land peopled practically by Ishmaelites had taught him deep distrust of the stranger—particularly distrust of the stranger who would be friendly.

So, many hours had not passed on board the Gigantic before the shrewd inquiries that followed on his suspicions had laid bare before him, as far as could be unfolded, the history of Captain Melun.

The captain, it seemed, moved in the best society in London and New York; none the less, he was not liked. There was no actual charge against him, but there appeared to have been bound up in his career in America a number of unpleasant episodes. The record of the episodes was vague, but that suspicion of them was justified lay in the fact that whereas Captain Melun had landed in the States poor he was leaving them enriched. And to lend colour to this justification was the captain's exceedingly unfortunate reputation as a card-player.

Now Westerham, if truth must be told, loved play, and high play. In the old days he had not cared for what stakes he played against men so long as they were honest men; but now he resented as an insult to his good sense the suggestion that he should play, despite the resources at his command, for high stakes against a man who, by some subtle means, seldom, if ever, lost.

It was with these things in his mind—a mind active and of great intelligence, a mind moreover sharpened by adversity—that he looked stonily at Captain Melun.

It had almost become second nature for Westerham to draw a gun upon a man whom he had caught apparently intent on theft. Swiftly, however, it came to him that a man in Melun's position was not likely to be engaged in theft. There sprang into his brain the notion that Melun was simply searching through his belongings with the idea of blackmail.

It almost made Westerham laugh to think that any man should attempt to blackmail him. He had nothing to disguise, nothing to hide.

Indeed, as he sat easily on the edge of his bunk looking at the dark, disconcerted face before him, Westerham had half a mind to throw his weapon aside and to tell Melun to go his way in peace. Then there came to him a certain recollection, and the blood crept into his face so that it seemed to burn, and his sinister eyes gleamed beneath his brows, bright and green and dangerous.

His control over himself was, however, perfect, and still in the soft, smooth voice, which long absence in the West had not robbed of its initial and birth-given refinement, he asked:

“What did you find?”

Captain Melun did not even blink his heavy-lidded eyes.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Yet,” rejoined Westerham, almost meditatively, “you must have been here at least five minutes before I arrived.”

“I tell you,” said Melun, almost earnestly, “that I found nothing.”

“That is to say,” said Westerham, “nothing which you could turn to your own good account.”

Melun smiled a sour yet demure little smile.

“Precisely,” he said evenly.

“Permit me,” said the baronet, just as quietly, “to inform you that you are a liar. If you will be good enough to turn over the bundle of socks which you will find in the right-hand corner of the kit-bag as it faces you now, I think you will be able to hand me something that is of interest to us both.”

“I was not aware that I could,” replied Captain Melun with a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

Westerham picked up again the six-shooter which he had laid carelessly at his side.

“Have a look,” he said, and his voice was gently persuasive.

Just a flicker of vindictiveness crept into Melun's eyes, and under the suasion of firearms he turned again to the bag.

After a few moments Westerham, now schooled to infinite placidity, inquired for the second time if he had found anything.

“Only a few papers,” said Captain Melun, crossly.

“Pardon me,” said the baronet, “if I am not mistaken you have found only one paper. Be kind enough to hand it to me.”

The captain turned about, and with a carefully-manicured hand offered Westerham a slip of paper which had evidently been torn from some English periodical.

Westerham took it and looked at it casually, though the muscles on his closed jaws stood out in a manner that was not wholly pleasant to look upon. It was, however, with unfathomable eyes that he surveyed the scrap of paper before him. It revealed the portrait of a girl with an astonishingly quiet face. Her cheeks were round and soft, and her chin was round and soft too, but her mouth, a little full and pronounced, was distinctly sad and set. A pair of large dark eyes looked out upon the world unwaveringly and serenely, if a little sorrowfully, beneath a pair of finely-pencilled, level brows, which formed, as it were, a little bar of inflexible resolve. A mass of dark hair was coiled upon the girl's head after the manner of early Victorian heroines. It was a face at once striking and wistful in its splendour.

The piece of paper had been torn with a jagged edge across the girl's throat, so that the inscription which would have borne her name was lacking.

Westerham looked up from the picture to Melun.

“You,” he said simply, “go everywhere and know everybody. Therefore I feel confident that you will be able to tell me the name of this girl. That is all I ask you—at present.”

Captain Melun laughed and then checked his laughter.

“The lady,” he said, “is Lady Kathleen Carfax, the only child of the Earl of Penshurst, who is, as even you are probably aware”—there was a covert sneer in his tones—“Prime Minister of England.”

“So!” murmured Westerham, and he nodded his head.

“Yes,” said Captain Melun, “and if it is of any interest to you to know it, I propose to marry Lady Kathleen.”

“Indeed,” said Westerham.

He folded the paper and placed it carefully in his breast-pocket.

“You must forgive my being rude,” he added, “but I should not now be on my way to England if I had not every intention of marrying the lady myself.”