LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

with curious misgivings. His heart failed him. It was half-past three by mean solar time for that particular longitude. Then why had this young man said so briskly, “Good morning,” at 3.30 P.M., as if on purpose to deceive him? Was he laying a trap? Was this some wile and guile of the English medicine-men?

      II

      Next day was (not unnaturally) Sunday. At half-past ten in the morning, according to his wont, Philip Christy was seated in the drawing-room at his sister’s house, smooth silk hat in gloved hand, waiting for Frida and her husband, Robert Monteith, to go to church with him. As he sat there, twiddling his thumbs, or beating the devil’s tattoo on the red Japanese table, the housemaid entered. “A gentleman to see you, sir,” she said, handing Philip a card. The young man glanced at it curiously. A visitor to call at such an early hour!—and on Sunday morning too! How extremely odd! This was really most irregular!

      So he looked down at the card with a certain vague sense of inarticulate disapproval. But he noticed at the same time it was finer and clearer and more delicately engraved than any other card he had ever yet come across. It bore in simple unobtrusive letters the unknown name, “Mr. Bertram Ingledew.”

      Though he had never heard it before, name and engraving both tended to mollify Philip’s nascent dislike. “Show the gentleman in, Martha,” he said in his most grandiose tone; and the gentleman entered.

      Philip started at sight of him. It was his friend the Alien. Philip was quite surprised to see his madman of last night; and what was more disconcerting still, in the self-same grey tweed home-spun suit he had worn last evening. Now, nothing can be more gentlemanly, don’t you know, than a grey home-spun, IN its proper place; but its proper place Philip Christy felt was certainly NOT in a respectable suburb on a Sunday morning.

      “I beg your pardon,” he said frigidly, rising from his seat with his sternest official air—the air he was wont to assume in the anteroom at the office when outsiders called and wished to interview his chief “on important public business.” “To what may I owe the honour of this visit?” For he did not care to be hunted up in his sister’s house at a moment’s notice by a most casual acquaintance, whom he suspected of being an escaped lunatic.

      Bertram Ingledew, for his part, however, advanced towards his companion of last night with the frank smile and easy bearing of a cultivated gentleman. He was blissfully unaware of the slight he was putting upon the respectability of Brackenhurst by appearing on Sunday in his grey tweed suit; so he only held out his hand as to an ordinary friend, with the simple words, “You were so extremely kind to me last night, Mr. Christy, that as I happen to know nobody here in England, I ventured to come round and ask your advice in unexpected circumstances that have since arisen.”

      When Bertram Ingledew looked at him, Philip once more relented. The man’s eye was so captivating. To say the truth, there was something taking about the mysterious stranger—a curious air of unconscious superiority—so that, the moment he came near, Philip felt himself fascinated. He only answered, therefore, in as polite a tone as he could easily muster, “Why, how did you get to know my name, or to trace me to my sister’s?”

      “Oh, Miss Blake told me who you were and where you lived,” Bertram replied most innocently: his tone was pure candour; “and when I went round to your lodgings just now, they explained that you were out, but that I should probably find you at Mrs. Monteith’s; so of course I came on here.”

      Philip denied the applicability of that naive “of course” in his inmost soul: but it was no use being angry with Mr. Bertram Ingledew. So much he saw at once; the man was so simple-minded, so transparently natural, one could not be angry with him. One could only smile at him, a superior cynical London-bred smile, for an unsophisticated foreigner. So the Civil Servant asked with a condescending air, “Well, what’s your difficulty? I’ll see if peradventure I can help you out of it.” For he reflected to himself in a flash that as Ingledew had apparently a good round sum in gold and notes in his pocket yesterday, he was not likely to come borrowing money this morning.

      “It’s like this, you see,” the Alien answered with charming simplicity, “I haven’t got any luggage.”

      “Not got any luggage!” Philip repeated, awestruck, letting his jaw fall short, and stroking his clean-shaven chin with one hand. He was more doubtful than ever now as to the man’s sanity or respectability. If he was not a lunatic, then surely he must be this celebrated Perpignan murderer, whom everybody was talking about, and whom the French police were just then engaged in hunting down for extradition.

      “No; I brought none with me on purpose,” Mr. Ingledew replied, as innocently as ever. “I didn’t feel quite sure about the ways, or the customs, or the taboos of England. So I had just this one suit of clothes made, after an English pattern of the present fashion, which I was lucky enough to secure from a collector at home; and I thought I’d buy everything else I wanted when I got to London. I brought nothing at all in the way of luggage with me.”

      “Not even brush and comb?” Philip interposed, horrified.

      “Oh, yes, naturally, just the few things one always takes in a vade-mecum,” Bertram Ingledew answered, with a gracefully deprecatory wave of the hand, which Philip thought pretty enough, but extremely foreign. “Beyond that, nothing. I felt it would be best, you see, to set oneself up in things of the country in the country itself. One’s surer then of getting exactly what’s worn in the society one mixes in.”

      For the first and only time, as he said those words, the stranger struck a chord that was familiar to Philip. “Oh, of course,” the Civil Servant answered, with brisk acquiescence, “if you want to be really up to date in your dress, you must go to first-rate houses in London for everything. Nobody anywhere can cut like a good London tailor.”

      Bertram Ingledew bowed his head. It was the acquiescent bow of the utter outsider who gives no opinion at all on the subject under discussion, because he does not possess any. As he probably came, in spite of his disclaimer, from America or the colonies, which are belated places, toiling in vain far in the rear of Bond Street, Philip thought this an exceedingly proper display of bashfulness, especially in a man who had only landed in England yesterday. But Bertram went on half-musingly. “And you had told me,” he said, “I’m sure not meaning to mislead me, there were no formalities or taboos of any kind on entering into lodgings. However, I found, as soon as I’d arranged to take the rooms and pay four guineas a week for them, which was a guinea more than she asked me, Miss Blake would hardly let me come in at all unless I could at once produce my luggage.” He looked comically puzzled. “I thought at first,” he continued, gazing earnestly at Philip, “the good lady was afraid I wouldn’t pay her what I’d agreed, and would go away and leave her in the lurch without a penny,—which was naturally a very painful imputation. But when I offered to let her have three weeks’ rent in advance, I saw that wasn’t all: there was a taboo as well; she couldn’t let me in without luggage, she said, because it would imperil some luck or talisman to which she frequently alluded as the Respectability of her Lodgings. This Respectability seems a very great fetich. I was obliged at last, in order to ensure a night’s lodging of any sort, to appease it by promising I’d go up to London by the first train to-day, and fetch down my luggage.”

      “Then you’ve things at Charing Cross, in the cloak-room perhaps?” Philip suggested, somewhat relieved; for he felt sure Bertram Ingledew must have told Miss Blake it was HE who had recommended him to Heathercliff House for furnished apartments.

      “Oh, dear, no; nothing,” Bertram responded cheerfully. “Not a sack to my back. I’ve only what I stand up in. And I called this morning just to ask as I passed if you could kindly direct me to an emporium in London where I could set myself up in all that’s necessary.”

      “A WHAT?” Philip interposed, catching quick at the unfamiliar word with blank English astonishment, and more than ever convinced, in spite of denial, that the stranger was an American.

      “An emporium,” Bertram answered, in the most matter-of-fact voice: “a magazine, don’t you know; a place where they supply things in return for money. I want to go up to London at once this morning and buy what I require there.”

      “Oh, A SHOP, you

Скачать книгу