Читать книгу The House of Spies (Historical Novel) - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Jasper Benham lay on the couch under the window and watched the dawn come up over the sea.

It was a stealthy creeping of tawny light into the sky, a rising of blue hills and headlands, dim, huge, and distant against the broadening East. The vague grey sea became a sheet of amethyst crossed by a band of gold. Birds were piping in the ragged thorn-trees upon Stonehanger Hill. A sense of wonder seemed to sweep across the land, touching the hills with splendour, and leaving the valleys full of a shadowy awe.

The breaking of the day was a relief to Jasper after a restless and pain-haunted night. He had come by odd snatches of sleep, but the starting of the broken arm had always awakened him, and left him at the mercy of his thoughts. The great, grey room, lit by the faint glow of the dying fire, had filled him with restless and unreasoning distrust.

He raised himself slowly on the couch, and his head swam with the fall of the previous night when Devil Dick had thrown him in the lane. Yet faint and dizzy as he was, the view from the window astonished him. From the Stonehanger uplands, wild, furze-clad slopes melted into the green-tinged browns of the April woods. Nearly the whole coast from Hastings to Beachy Head was visible. Pevensey Bay was a great half-moon of silver cutting into the green flats of the Level. The dim blue sky met the dim blue sea. Along the rim of Pevensey Bay were dotted little round pillars, the distant martello towers with the black mouths of their twenty-four-pounders waiting for Napoleon and the French.

Benham knelt on the couch and gazed. He had heard vague movements about the house. A door had opened somewhere, and footsteps descended the stairs.

Then a girl's voice sounded out yonder amid the furze.

"Coop—coop—come along."

Jasper saw her drifting against the dawn, her black hair doubly black, her forearms bare to the elbow, her short skirt showing her feet and ankles. A kind of rough terrace garden, half grass, half paved path, ran along the front of the house. There were rose-beds in the grass, and the two old yews rose blackly above the parapet of the terrace wall. Nance was on the furze-land beyond, where the ground fell away toward the south.

A brown cow came into view. It passed Nance, and, like a creature of habit, followed a path that led to the yard. The girl had turned, and was looking at the windows of Stonehanger. A flight of rough steps went up to the terrace. She mounted them, and crossed the grass toward the windows of the parlour.

Benham, kneeling there, unfastened the lattice and thrust it open. Nance Durrell was quite close, and a kind of warmth went over her face. Her eyes had the dewiness of the dawn.

"You are awake."

"The morning is worth it."

She rested her hands on the window-ledge, and looked in at him with frank intentness.

"I'm sorry."

"Sorry!"

"You have had a bad night of it. I can see that. The arm has been hurting you."

"A little."

"More than a little. Perhaps I did not bind it up tightly enough."

To Jasper Benham her compassion seemed very wonderful. What did it matter to her that he had suffered.

"You could not have done more for me. To tell the truth, I am glad that fellow shot me under the yew."

"How do you manage to be glad?"

"Well—otherwise, I should not have spent a night at Stonehanger, and come by such a friend."

Her red mouth smiled at him, and her eyes were the eyes of a tease.

"If you set out to make all your friends by being shot at—or getting hurt——!"

"I should not go as far as that—for most people."

He laughed, to carry off his rush of earnestness.

"You see, some things are worth bearing. I am not a fool. I say what I mean."

Nance looked at him as though she were puzzled. She dropped her hands from the window-ledge, but her eyes did not avoid Benham's.

"We have sent David off to Rush Heath. I must go and milk Jenny."

He was about to ask her to let him join her when he remembered the locked door. The memory jarred the impulsive delight of the moment. Nance had turned, and he saw her clear profile against the sky. He could find nothing to say to her, and that short silence seemed the fatal break between an enchanted dawn and the prosaic day.

Overhead the lattice of an attic window had been opened noiselessly, and a man's head thrust out. He had been listening to Nance Durrell and Jasper talking at the window below. Nor had the incident pleased him, to judge by the stiff and cynical smile upon his face.

Jasper Benham was still kneeling on the couch when he heard footsteps in the hall, and the sound of the key being turned cautiously in the lock. The door opened, and Anthony Durrell's white head and thin, visionary face appeared in the opening.

"Good morning, Mr. Benham."

Jasper had turned with a queer feeling of distaste.

"Good morning, sir."

Durrell moved in, glancing about the room, and rubbing his hands together.

"I hope that you have had a passable night?"

"I am obliged by all your kindness."

"Do not speak of it, Mr. Benham. In half an hour we will bring you some breakfast. My man has gone off to Rush Heath. If you will excuse me, I will light the fire."

He disappeared, and returned with a bundle of wood, a lighted candle, and some paper. Benham sat on the edge of the couch and watched him. He had grown intensely curious about Mr. Anthony Durrell. The man seemed part and parcel of Stonehanger, with his restless reserve and his sidelong glances.

Durrell knelt down by the hearth.

"A scholar, Mr. Benham, has to do many things with his hands. We who are wedded to knowledge have to serve as menials, not only as priests."

Jasper eyed him reflectively.

"You find Stonehanger a quiet place?"

Durrell glanced over his shoulder, and his pointed chin looked sharp and forbidding.

"Exquisitely quiet, sir, for me and my books. And the rent is low, a matter of consideration to a scholar. I have tried many places in my time—towns, villages, watering-places. Pah! Distractions everywhere. One of the most difficult things in the world, sir, is to get away from noise and from fools."

He had lit the fire when Nance came in carrying a tray full of breakfast things. Anthony Durrell looked at her with a morose hardening of the face.

"Nance, I will set the table. Go and look after the milk and eggs."

He wanted Nance and Jasper Benham apart. The Chevalier de Rothan's hint had been sufficient.

It was nine o'clock when Jack Bumpstead brought the light wagon into Stonehanger yard, with two of Farmer Crowhurst's horses borrowed for the morning. David Barfoot climbed out. The bottom of the wagon was littered with straw.

When Jasper appeared in the yard, with Durrell walking beside him, Jack Bumpstead joggled his hat, and grinned like a man who had had the best of a bargain.

"Mornin', master; glad I be to see ye alive!"

They had helped Benham into the wagon when Nance came into the yard, carrying a faded, chintz-covered cushion. Jack Bumpstead's blue eyes fixed her with the true Sussex stare.

"You must take this cushion. You can put it under your head when you are lying down."

She tossed it into the wagon, and Jasper caught a glimpse of her father's sulky face.

"I'll take the cushion, and return it."

"It's not very new."

"A piece of rubbish, sir. Never waste a man's time sending it back to Stonehanger."

"I may bring it back myself, some day; and this scarf, too."

Durrell looked at him with a grim twinkle.

"I am a bit of a character, Mr. Benham. When I am among my books I sometimes stay among them for days. I have a prejudice against being interrupted, nor can I promise you my company if you call."

It was a blunt hint, bluntly given. Durrell was not fool enough to pretend that a young man would ride five miles to chop logic with a scholar. Nor was Benham fool enough to miss the elder man's meaning.

Jack Bumpstead turned the horses, and the wagon jolted over the stones of the yard. Benham leaned forward as he sat in the straw, and looked at Nance over the lowered tail-board of the wagon. Her eyes seemed to follow his, and she was smiling.

"Good-bye. I shall always be grateful."

He could say no more, because of the sour face of her father.

A dormer window projected from the northern slope of the roof of Stonehanger, and at the window, whose dusty glass rendered anything inside it invisible from without, stood the Chevalier de Rothan. He had cleansed one diamond pane with the tip of a long forefinger, and was looking down with cynical amusement at the scene in the yard. He watched Nance Durrell and he watched Benham, and the ends of his mouth lifted contemptuously.

"Good-day, Mr. Jasper Benham. It may be an unlucky chance that brought you to Stonehanger. Well, we shall see!"

He took a silver snuff-box from his pocket, lifted the lid, and took snuff with elaborate unction, flickering his fingers under his nose.

"If young fools get in a great man's way, they must suffer. Stuck like a lark on a spit, eh! Be damned to you, my Sussex squireling! My pretty Nance, too! I had my eyes on her long before you, my friend. You know me, and yet you do not know me. You may know me better some day, not far hence!"

The man Jerome rose from the edge of a truckle-bed, and came yawning to the window.

"I wonder when the old philosopher will be able to smuggle us up some breakfast. What's all the talk about, monsieur?"

"Jerome, you are a greedy animal. One seldom has a chance to talk to a genius in this world. That is why I so often talk to myself."

"What's that? A wagon going out of the gate."

The Frenchman had spat upon the window, and was cleaning a peep-hole with his thumb.

"Yes; taking a calf home. Do you like veal, Jerome? I have an idea that the calf yonder will never make good beef!"