Читать книгу The Crime Club - W. Holt-White - Страница 4

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Captain Melun was a man used to being hard hit. He was steeled against cunningly and swiftly-dealt blows, such as he himself administered, but this declaration of Sir Paul Westerham, that he intended to marry the Lady Kathleen, took him quite aback.

“Oh!” he exclaimed softly, and his voice had a certain note of puzzlement and anxiety in it. “Oh!” he repeated, and again he said “Oh!”

The baronet smiled a little grimly in his red beard, but his duck's-egg green eyes were as serene and as cold as ever.

The three gently ejaculated “Ohs” of the captain had told him much. His quick brain realised that he had dealt the captain an exceedingly well-landed blow. Then the baronet's smile died, for, following the train of his suspicious thoughts, he instinctively grasped and held on to the idea that just as Melun had been searching his kit-bag for the purpose of blackmail, so that individual purposed marriage with the Prime Minister's daughter to the same end.

This notion disquieted him greatly.

It disturbed him so much that the hard eyes hardened. Only the baronet's friends knew that they sometimes hardened because of the softness behind their gaze.

Westerham's heart, indeed, rose in revolt against the suggestion that this man, spurned of the Army, suspected of the clubs, distrusted by every honourable man, should for a moment presume to reach out and touch the hand of Kathleen Carfax. Not for such a man as Melun was the girl with the calm yet, at the same time, troubled face, that had looked out from the tattered picture and drawn him back to England.

Westerham's brain worked as swiftly as the brain of a woman, as do the brains of men who, cut off from the electric-lift side of civilisation, day by day face Nature in its true, maternal, and therefore its feminine aspect. It was a long guess, but a shrewd guess, and a true guess, that if Melun had his hopes set on Lady Kathleen, the girl with the dark hair and steadfast eyes stood in some peril.

The mere thought of it quickened Westerham's blood, and the quickening of his blood livened his brain still more, so that he watched, almost cat-like, the glance of Melun's eyes as they followed the placing of the Lady Kathleen's picture in his pocket.

For a couple of minutes nothing was said. Each man knew instinctively that he must move to the attack, but realised that a mistake at the opening of the game might possibly spell disaster.

It was the baronet who broke the silence—it is always the man who has least to fear that recovers first.

Westerham had pursued a train of thought as bold as it was unerring. It had come home to him that Melun was not merely a blackmailer, but a prince among blackmailers. With infinite speed of thought he followed out his idea, and came to a conclusion which at once suggested and vindicated his next remark.

“I have never realised before, Captain Melun,” he said, “what a pleasure it was to meet a perfectly-unqualified villain.”

Captain Melun raised his black eyebrows a shade more obliquely, and his eyelids flickered. He was, however, equal to the situation.

“Indeed?” he said coolly, though he passed his tongue along his upper lip beneath his carefully-trimmed moustache. “Indeed? I shall be glad if you will explain.”

Westerham took a deep breath and laughed almost gaily. “I shall be charmed,” he said.

He paused a little and then continued: “No man, except one with such a reputation as yours,” he said, “would dream of regarding Lady Kathleen Carfax as a possible wife unless he were so equipped with all the arts of blackmail that he had some reason to hope for his success.”

By this time Captain Melun had got back his composure.

“You seem,” he said casually, “to endow Lord Penshurst with an exceedingly poor character.”

“Not exactly,” said Westerham. “I endow you with an exceedingly dangerous one.”

There was another pause, and the two pairs of eyes sought each other, and the heavy-lidded, slumberous eyes of Melun flickered and faltered beneath those of the man who had so correctly jumped to a menacing conclusion.

“I am about to present to you an argument,” continued the baronet, “which unswervingly follows my present conception of yourself. Long experience of this wicked world—by which I mean that particular kind of vulture-like humanity which preys upon better men than itself—enables me to assume that you are without question a blackmailer, a bad blackmailer, and a blackmailer of no common type.

“But I have also learnt this, that no blackmailer can stand alone. His offence is the most cowardly offence in the world. A blackmailer is always a coward, and a coward is invariably afraid of isolated action. I am therefore very certain that you do not stand alone in this attempt to blackmail me.”

Captain Melun's eyes left those of Westerham and studied the white-painted panel behind the baronet's head.

Sir Paul went steadily on with his pitiless and logical argument.

“I am persuaded,” he said, “that your only motive in leaving New York was to sail on the same ship as myself, and, if possible, find an opportunity of buying my silence on some point.

“Possibly you think that in the discovery which we have mutually made in the past few minutes you have unearthed a fact which may be much to your advantage. You are wrong.

“On the contrary,” Sir Paul continued, “it is I who have unearthed a fact which may be much to my benefit, and with your permission I will proceed to explain to you why.”

Captain Melun slowly shrugged his shoulders and slightly bowed his head. He realised that it was the baronet's move, and did not propose to hinder him in the making of it, inasmuch as until he could correctly grasp Westerham's intention he could make no counter move himself.

“Following therefore,” continued Westerham, “my original line of thought, I should say that you were the headpiece, the brain-piece, of a well-planned scheme of crime.”

The faint colour in Melun's face became fainter still. Westerham knew he was pursuing the right trail.

“Now with such men as yourself—mind, I am not speaking so much from knowledge as from an intuition as to what I should do myself were I placed in similar circumstances—it is probable that you have sufficient intelligence, not only to rob your victims, but to rob your friends.

“Another piece of life's philosophy that roughing it has taught me is that the robber is always poor. I come, therefore, to the natural deduction that you are hard up.”

Westerham's whole expression of face changed suddenly. The coldness left it. The sea-green eyes smiled with a smile that invited confidence from the man before him.

“Well?” said Melun. “And what of it?”

Westerham knew that the battle was won.

“Then,” Westerham continued coolly, “such a sum as a hundred thousand pounds would not come amiss to you. Such a sum I am prepared to pay you—under certain conditions.”

He paused suddenly in his speech with the intention of catching the very slightest exclamation on the part of Melun; nor was he disappointed. A quick indrawing of Melun's breath told Westerham that he was hitting him hard.

All the pleasantness in Westerham's face vanished again, and he looked at the captain with narrowed eyes.

“I realise that in offering you such a sum,” he said, “it will, of course, cost you something to earn it. A man who speculates must spend his own money to gain other people's. A criminal—you must forgive the word, but it is necessary—who seeks to make a great coup at the expense of others must put up a certain amount of money to bring it off.

“I think, however, that I am offering you quite enough to enable you to buy either the silence or the inactivity of your fellow criminals. A hundred thousand pounds is a good deal of money, and your gang cannot be so large that you will not be able to afford a sufficient sum to render them your servants.”

“Exactly,” said Captain Melun.

“Ah!” exclaimed Westerham. “Then you acknowledge what I say to be true?”

“Sir Paul,” answered Melun, “you may take my word at what you judge it is worth, but none the less I, for my part, am prepared to take the word of a gentleman. Do you give me your word of honour that the offer—I take it such is meant—is in all sincerity?”

“It is meant in all sincerity,” said the baronet, “because I am following out my own particular ideas, and I know that you have neither the capacity nor yet the opportunity of saying me nay.”

No man was quicker than Melun to seize an advantage. He saw that Westerham read him through and through, and that acknowledgment of his own baseness would be the surest way of obtaining some small measure of the baronet's confidence.

No man lies to his doctor, and at the moment Melun stood in the presence of a pitiless diagnosis of his soul.

“Yes, Captain Melun,” the baronet proceeded, “I admit that you have had bad luck, but your bad luck places you in my hands. In short, you can be delivered up to the captain of this ship as a common thief, or you can do as I tell you.”

For a moment Melun hesitated, then he laughed.

“I never realised before,” he said steadily, almost with insolence, “that the blackmailer could be blackmailed.”

“Nevertheless,” said Westerham, “such is the case.”

“It is with every confidence,” the baronet continued, “that I make you my present offer. You have divined my secret just as I have divined yours; it would, however, be just as well for both if I explained every motive of my action.”

He paused and looked for a moment almost shyly out of the port-hole, which swung up and down between sea and sky.

“Where I have been,” he said, “women are few and far between. I never cared for any of them—until—until—I saw this picture.”

He tapped his breast lightly.

“Do you think,” he continued, his voice rising louder again, “that I should ever have set out for England if I had not been drawn back by this?”

He tapped his breast again. Then his eyes grew wider and his nostrils distended.

“I suppose,” he cried, with a certain tone of irony in his voice, “that I am a poet. But I am a poet of the open air. Do you think that I care a glass of barbed-wire whisky for all the scented drawing-rooms in the world? I began life, as they call it, in England, when I was young. What do you think I care for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the open prairie land, the tall, blue grass, the open sky, the joy of the weary body that has ridden hard after cattle all the day!”

He laughed shortly.

“Do you think,” he continued, extending an almost melodramatically gesticulating hand towards the astonished captain, “that there is any soft, silk-bound pillow in Mayfair that could appeal to me when I could sleep under the stars?”

“Heavens!” He reached out his arms and brought them to his sides again with a strenuous motion, all his muscles contracted. “I have learnt,” he cried, “the lesson that life is not only real and earnest, but that life is hard, that life is a battle—a battle to be won!”

His eyes fell upon his strong, sinewy, brown hands, and he clenched his fists.

“I am not going back to England to make pleasure, but to fight—to win the girl of the picture—from you!”

But now, to Westerham's surprise, Melun had turned to sneering. The baronet was a breed of man the captain did not understand; no man that he had as yet been acquainted with loosed his heart in this wild manner. It seemed to him that Westerham was but a romantic child.

But there was no childhood, no romance, in the bitter gaze he lifted his eyes to meet.

“Listen,” said Westerham, quietly, “for a hundred thousand pounds I expect you to place yourself at my disposal. For a hundred thousand pounds I expect not only your services, but the services of all those whom you employ. And the greatest of these services will be silence.

“I am going back to England as Sir Paul Westerham, Baronet, the richest man in the world. Thanks to the prying of the New York reporters I have had to sail on this ship in my own name. I did not wish it, and I have no intention of ever being discovered in London in the same character as I left New York.”

Westerham laughed a little to himself.

“No reporters at the dock-side for me,” he said. “No triumphal entry into London. No account of what I eat and do, and how many hours a night I sleep. I am going back to London to do precisely as I choose.”

Melun was very quiet. He knew he had met a stronger spirit than his own. For all the bleak chilliness of the eyes of the man who talked to him, he knew that he had to deal with the fierceness of a wild animal which feels the cage opening before him, that Westerham was seeking to evade the bars of a social prison.

“In three days' time,” Westerham went on, “we shall be in Liverpool. I shall leave the ship in such a dress that no man will recognise me. I shall go straight to London and put up at Walter's Hotel in the Strand. It is a little place, where not even journalists will look for a millionaire.”

“You forget,” said Melun, “that if you disappear in that manner there will be an awful outcry over your disappearance.”

“That matters nothing,” said Westerham. “Disappear I shall, to pursue my own ends as I choose to follow them. For once I am going to prove that money has the power to hide a man. Do you agree to my bargain?”

Melun nodded his head.

“I agree,” he said, “because I must. The day after you land in Liverpool I will meet you at Walter's.”

“You tell me,” said Westerham, “that you agree. Yet I doubt your word. There is something which I have not yet fathomed. You are still thinking of Lady Kathleen?

“Lie to me if you dare!” he added with brutal emphasis.

“I am not such a fool as to lie to you,” answered Captain Melun. “I am still thinking of the Lady Kathleen.”

“Then you make a vast mistake,” said the baronet.

He rose and opened the door for Melun to pass out.