скачать книгу бесплатно
‘But you’re not married either,’ said Sir Algernon to Lampson Lake. ‘Are you looking for the perfect woman, too?’
‘It is no good my looking,’ he replied. ‘No woman will marry a failure—a specialist in failures, that is.’
‘On the contrary,’ interposed Robinson, ‘some of the most shocking failures I know are married.’
‘Yes, but they married first,’ explained Lampson Lake, ‘they became failures afterwards. It is a great consolation for a man, who has made a muddle of his life, to throw the blame on his wife, especially if he can get his wife to believe it.’
‘A perfectly trained wife will believe in anything,’ was the architect’s comment.
‘Except in her husband,’ corrected Robinson, who, not being married, knew all things about wedlock.
‘A woman wants to marry a man who will succeed or who has succeeded, and I think most women prefer the first. It is surely the greatest privilege of her life to accompany the man she loves from poverty to riches, from obscurity to fame.’
‘No doubt,’ answered Lampson Lake. ‘But I am not in a position, and I never have been in a position, to give a woman the chance. I am one of Nature’s failures. And, mind you, I’m not complaining. The world has need of failures. It is a great pleasure to any K.C. who was called to the Bar at the same time as myself to realise that no sane solicitor would ever give me a brief. Besides, people are kind to me because they are not jealous. They give me their best in the way of food and wine because they know I am not too busy to notice such things. They trust me with their wives because they know I am not ambitious, with their daughters because I am too poor to marry. Oh, I have an excellent time, thank you.’
‘Then, Lampson,’ asked the K.C., ‘you really enjoy not being a…success?’
‘Well, I shouldn’t like to be a failure…as a failure. I am, at any rate, the leading failure of this club. But that’s not saying much, because we’re all famous here; except, of course, Robinson. He is merely notorious.’
‘Thank you,’ replied Robinson, smiling. ‘I know you meant to be rude, but you failed even at that. Fame is what we call the reputation of people who are dead, of great men who are dead. Notoriety is the reputation of great men who are alive.’
‘What,’ asked Lampson, ‘would you call Clifford Oakleigh? Is he famous or is he notorious?’
‘As he is alive,’ replied Robinson, ‘he is notorious. When he is dead he will be famous.’
Harding shot a keen glance at him. He was on the point of speaking. But his lips shut tight.
‘He is a most extraordinary man,’ said Sir Algernon. ‘You know I built that house for him in Pembroke Street, No. 69. He gave me an absolutely free hand to do anything I liked, and I must say I was pleased with what I did. Everything went well until the house was almost finished, and then suddenly Clifford, who is one of the best chaps in the world as we all know, began taking a very great personal interest in the details. So keen was his interest that it became very awkward for me, as a professional man. And, mind you, I discovered that he knows a great deal about architecture. In fact, I have never come across anything that he doesn’t understand. Well, we had a sort of amicable quarrel. We agreed to differ. And the result of the whole thing was that the completion of the building was taken out of the contractor’s hands and he gave the job to some tenth-rate builder that he had discovered in Hammersmith.’
Harding had listened in astonishment to the statement made by Sir Algernon. He had never heard that his friend was building a house in Pembroke Street. Yet another house!
He turned to the architect.
‘You surprise me, Sir Algernon. Clifford and I, as you know, are old friends, and he never mentioned to me the fact that he was building a house. The ordinary man can’t buy a motor without boring his friends to death with the subject. It is very strange that Clifford should not have mentioned to me a little thing like that. How long has it been built?’
‘Oh, about six months!’
‘Six months!’ exclaimed the other. ‘But he doesn’t live there?’
‘No,’ replied Sir Algernon, ‘I don’t think he intends to. I think the idea was to let it furnished. It is one of his hobbies, I think.’
‘A very expensive hobby,’ interposed Lampson Lake.
‘Fortunately, he can afford expensive hobbies,’ said the architect. ‘I understand that it is superbly furnished. And now I come to think of it I remember he said that if he let it he would expect to get £2000 a year. No. 69 is one of the smallest houses in Pembroke Street. The idea of £2000 a year is absolutely preposterous.’
To the barrister’s thinking, the whole scheme was preposterous. No matter what Clifford Oakleigh’s fortune might be, it would not stand a habit of building and furnishing houses on which a prohibitive rent was placed.
‘I should like to have a look at the place,’ continued Sir Algernon. ‘But he made me understand,’ he added laughing, ‘that he would never receive me in the house…so as to avoid painful memories as to my professional pride. However, he gave me an excellent dinner at the Savoy the other night. He is a very curious man; certainly, he is a very curious man.’
‘Not for a genius,’ interposed Harding.
It seemed to him uncanny that these four men should be sitting up at night talking of a dead man as though he were alive. Two or three times it had been on the tip of his tongue to tell them of the tragedy that had just occurred. Had it not been for the fact that Reggie might be hopelessly involved therein, he would have spoken. Another reason that kept him silent was the incongruity of his position. His best friend was dead, and he was taking supper at the Gridiron. Why was he taking supper at the Gridiron? He himself hardly knew. His nerves had been shattered by the events of the night.
‘You think he is a genius?’ asked Robinson.
‘Certainly he is,’ Harding replied. ‘Ever since I have known him he has been a genius. He was a genius at Eton, he was a genius at Oxford, and he has been a genius in London. He has one of the largest practices of any physician in London, and what is more he hardly ever has a failure. Then look at “Baldo”. That was really one of the greatest inventions of the age.’
He was alluding to a preparation invented by Clifford that consisted of a white cream which one applied to one’s face in the morning and it instantly removed the night’s growth of hair. By this useful device, a complete substitute for the razor, Clifford Oakleigh had already made nearly half a million.
‘A slight application of “Baldo” to your whiskers, Sir Algernon, would, I am sure, be efficacious,’ said Robinson.
‘Oh, damn my whiskers,’ replied the architect.
Robinson politely responded: ‘My sentiments entirely.’
‘Directly Robinson begins to talk about whiskers, I go home,’ said Lampson Lake, rising.
‘I, too.’
Harding paid his bill and, incidentally, Lampson Lake’s, and left the club.
CHAPTER VI (#ulink_cba8755c-824e-5e50-95f1-ab6b6ef34dbc)
THE TROUBLE WITH MINGEY (#ulink_cba8755c-824e-5e50-95f1-ab6b6ef34dbc)
THE next morning, when Harding reached his chambers in King’s Bench Walk, he noticed that his clerk, Mingey, was looking more dismal and lugubrious than usual.
Were it not that the man was so excellent at his business, Harding could not have tolerated the presence of so lamentable a figure. Mingey was six feet tall, intensely lean, with a dank, black, uncharacteristic, drooping moustache, and a pallid face that looked as if it required starching. He always wore shiny black clothes, and presented the appearance of an undertaker with an artistic taste in his calling. Today there were red rims round his colourless eyes.
‘Cheer up, Mingey,’ said Harding, heartily,
‘this is not your funeral, is it?’
‘Excuse me, sir, but something terrible has happened…my daughter, sir.’
‘Ill, is she?’ inquired Harding. ‘I’m very sorry…’
He went to the table and cast his eyes over his briefs.
‘Worse than that, sir,’ replied the clerk, ‘she has disappeared.’
‘Disappeared!’ echoed the K.C. ‘Perhaps she has eloped,’ he suggested.
‘No, sir, she is not that sort of girl. She never had, to my knowledge, any love affairs. She once did show a sort of feeling for one of our ministers, but he turned out to be engaged to a lady in Scotland, so nothing came of that.’
‘Tell me all about it,’ said Harding, seating himself at his table and preparing to listen.
Succinctly the clerk made his statement. His experience of the Law courts enabled him to do a very unusual thing. He told a simple story in a simple way. It appeared that Miss Mingey was devoted to the creed which her father had discovered was, of all creeds, the most suited to his spiritual wants. [Mr Mingey was, by persuasion, a devout Particular Strict Baptist: an intensely select creed with only two places of worship, one in Peckham and the other in Monmouth Road, Bayswater.] An entirely good girl. She took no interest in clothes or young men. She was, as her father put it, ‘an intellectual girl much given to book-learning.’ As to her appearance, even paternal pride would not enable him to say that she was good-looking.
‘Here is her photo, sir,’ he added to prove his statement.
But the photograph did not quite bear out his contention.
Harding gazed at it intently.
It represented a girl of about twenty—nineteen Mingey maintained was her actual age. Her features, so far as one could judge from a full-face photograph, by a cheap and inadequate practitioner, were regular; she wore spectacles; her hair was done in an unbecoming way; her dress was abominable. It was rather clothing than clothes. With no evidence as to her complexion and her figure one could not say whether the girl was good-looking or plain; but the fact that she took no trouble with her hair, that her dress stood in no relation to the fashion—even, so far as he knew, to Bayswater fashion—that she was photographed in spectacles, proved that she regarded herself as unattractive. A girl who takes this view is almost certain to be right.
He handed the photograph back.
According to the father’s story, after a meat-tea with her mother she had gone out to post a letter. She did not return.
‘She was happy at home, Mingey, was she?’
‘Perfectly, sir. She always attended service twice on Sundays. No, I have never known a girl who was happier, or who had more reason to be happy.’
‘Quite so,’ said the K.C. ‘And no affair of the heart, you say?’
‘Certainly not, sir.’
‘But as to the minister who married the Scotch lady?’
‘Sarah had too much self-respect, sir, to get mixed up with a married man. Directly Mr Septimus Aynesworth married, she—so to speak—cut him out of her life.’
‘Did you go to the police-station?’
‘First thing this morning, sir.’
‘Well, my dear Mingey, I shouldn’t be alarmed if I were you,’ he said, trying to administer consolation. ‘It may be some curious freak…some girlish whim. You will probably find her at home when you get back.’
Mingey shook his head.
‘I’m afraid not, sir. You’ve noticed there have been two mysterious disappearances lately of young girls. They both met their death. There are always three of these things! Sarah will be the third.’
Shaking with grief, he shambled to the door.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ cried the banister.
‘Surely, surely it was to her that I gave a letter of introduction to Sir Clifford Oakleigh the other day. What did you say the matter was? Her nerves, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir, nerves. It was wonderful the way he put her right then and there. And no charge, sir, to a friend of yours, sir. He’s a wonderful man, sir. She only paid one visit and he cured her completely.’ Woefully he added, ‘And to think it was all no good.’
Then he went out of the room.
CHAPTER VII (#ulink_3bc14bbd-0a77-5b1f-973e-a3439cbb1bb0)
MAINLY ABOUT LOVE (#ulink_3bc14bbd-0a77-5b1f-973e-a3439cbb1bb0)
THAT night Harding fell in love.
It came about quite suddenly.
At first he did not know what was the matter with him, but gradually the conviction forced itself upon him that he, George Berkeley Harding, had fallen in love at first sight, just as a boy at Eton falls in love with a Dowager-Duchess.
It was during dinner at the Savoy that he became aware of his condition.
As the Courts did not sit on Saturday afternoons, he had walked up to King Street and inquired of Reggie for any news of Clifford Oakleigh.
Reggie had answered in the negative. He had suppressed the servant girl’s story, because he had not been convinced in his mind that she was a witness of truth. She might only have been making fun of him—a course of conduct which he would have resented. If, in very truth, Clifford had left the house drunk with a ‘creature’ he would certainly return, and he would not like the disagreeable fact recounted even to his best friend.
Harding had been in two minds. It was obviously his duty or Reggie’s to inform the police of the mysterious occurrence. But, at the same time, as the story was so completely incredible and rested solely on the evidence of Reggie, he thought it might be wise to wait another day. In the meantime, Clifford might return, or Reggie might develop some conspicuous symptom of insanity.
Throughout the afternoon he had vainly puzzled his brain for a solution.
With a clouded brow he had driven up to the Savoy to dine with old Mudge, the eminent family solicitor—solicitor incidentally to Clifford and himself.
From Mudge’s company or from the guests likely to be invited by Mudge he did not expect much amusement.
He found his host and hostess in the hall waiting for him.
Mrs Mudge was obviously Mrs Mudge. She had no figure, no individuality, and no features. Neither had she any colouring. She was, indeed, so colourless as to be almost invisible. When she was with Mr Mudge one could recognise her as his wife. Apart from Mr Mudge one would never have seen her at all.
Harding’s heart fell. He had expected, at worst, a party of men. However large the actual party was to be, Mrs Mudge’s presence would cast a gloom over it. A skeleton at a banquet would be the ‘life and soul of the party’ compared with Mrs Mudge. Horror of horrors, Mr Mudge announced that he was only waiting for one lady.
It flashed through Harding’s mind that it might be possible to say that he had suddenly been called to Scotland, or to state on oath that he was dead, or to tell some other monstrous lie and leave the building.
Then it was that the thing happened.
Sumptuously gowned, magnificently jewelled, a figure glided across the red velvet carpet. Her hair of deep brown was arranged in the French fashion, which on an English woman generally produces the effect of an over-elaborately dressed head, but was particularly becoming to her. Her profile was almost Greek, her violet eyes shone bewitchingly under long eyelashes. But the greatest beauty she possessed was her wonderful complexion like peaches and cream; it was daintily tinted, obviously caressing to the touch. Harding noticed that her figure was in keeping with her other gifts. She walked with all the grace and confidence of an American woman, and she could not be—well, she could not be more than twenty. Oh, if only he was to dine with her!
To his surprise she approached Mr Mudge. This marvel of grace and beauty deliberately went up to the old man with the snow-white Father Christmas beard—a polar beaver of the first water, to be technical—and said:
‘Mr Mudge, I think. Mr Mudge, I’m sure.’
‘May I introduce my wife…Miss Clive. Mr Harding…Miss Clive.’
When the introduction was effected the old man asked:
‘But how did you recognise me?’
‘Ask yourself, Mr Mudge,’ she replied, smiling.
‘Look round this room. Are there any other solicitors here? Obviously you are the only eminent family solicitor present. And you are clearly…oh, so clearly Mr Mudge.’
This little speech had revealed to Harding the additional fact that she was possessed of beautiful teeth. Was the woman in all things perfect? Perhaps she would turn out to be stupid.
He shuddered at the thought. How terrible! What ignominy to fall in love at first sight with a woman who was a dolt!
During dinner he became convinced of two things, one that she was a brilliant woman, and the other that Mr Mudge did not know how to order a meal.
