LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

The sight of tea-and-toast at four in the afternoon when you have had nothing since four in the morning! But the sovereign remained intact. With that he and Peggy could have an excellent lunch—without wine—and Peggy never touched wine....

      * * *

      He started to his feet.

      "I really beg your pardon! I am afraid I..." A stranger had awakened him as he slept in a smoking-room arm-chair.... He did not recollect how he came to do such a thing when he should have been in the Park.... What was the man saying—"Ill?"

      "I was afraid you were ill. To tell the truth, I jolly well thought you were dead for the moment. Let me drive you to my doctor's. Splendid chap. Just going that way.... No—don't run away."

      "Most awfully kind," replied Geoffry, peering through the veil, "but I'm quite all right. Just a bit tired, you know. I am going to have a real Rest soon.... At present I have a Quest."

      The poor devil looked absolutely starved, thought Colonel Doddington. Positively ghastly.

      "Come and have some lunch with me," he said, "and let me tell you about this doctor of mine, anyhow."

      Geoffry flushed—though it was remarkable that there was sufficient blood in so meagre a body and feeble a heart for the purpose.

      Lunch! A four-course lunch in a beautiful room—silver, crystal, fine napery, good service—perhaps wine, certainly alcohol of some sort, and real coffee....

      It was a cruel temptation. But he put it from him. After all, one was a gentleman, and a gentleman does not accept hospitality which he cannot return, from a stranger.

      "Awfully sorry—but I must go," he replied. "I'm feeding out." He was—late that night, on twopence.

      He fled, and outside mopped his brow. It had been a terrible temptation and ordeal. For two pins he would go back and have a brandy-and-soda at the cost of two days' food. No, he dared not risk collapse—and two days' complete starvation would probably mean collapse. Collapse meant expense too, and money was time to him. The expenditure of more than fourpence a day would shorten the time of his Quest. A day lost, was a chance lost. She might pass through London at that very time, if he lay ill in the Hammersmith Rowton House.

      That night he had to take a 'bus home or lie down in the street. Next day, dressing took so long and his walk to the Club was so painful and slow, that he had to omit the Bond Street, Regent Street, and Piccadilly walk, and go straight to the Park.

      There he had shocking luck. A zealous but clumsy policeman rendered him First Aid to the Fainting with such violence that he spoilt the collar and shirt-front that should have lasted another two days. Why could not the worthy fool have left him to come out of his faint alone? He went into it alone, all right. And there was an accursed, gaping crowd. Nor could he give the policeman two pennies, and so gave him nothing—which was very distressing. A most unlucky day!

      Well—the days of his Quest were numbered, and the number was lessened.

      Next day he found the Enemy very powerful and the tottering fortress closely beset. He would be hard put to it to walk to the Club—but come!—an old Legionary who had done his fifty kilometres a day under a hundred-weight kit, over loose sand, with the thermometer at 120° in the shade; and who had lived on a handful of rice-flour and a mouthful of selenitic water in the Sahara—surely he was not going to shirk a stroll from Hammersmith Broadway to Pall Mall and round the Town to the Park?

      He had got as far as Devonshire House, when a lady, who was driving from the Berkeley Hotel, where she had been lunching, to the Coburg Hotel, where she was to have tea with friends who were taking her on to Ranelagh, suddenly saw him and thought she saw a ghost. As her carriage crawled through the crush into Berkeley Street it brought her within a yard of him.

      She turned very pale and lay back on the cushions. Immediately she sat upright again, and then leaned towards him. It could not be! Not this poor wreck, this shattered ruin—her splendid Geoff—the Geoff who had seemed to love her, five years ago, and had suddenly dropped her, and so been the cause of her marrying in haste and repenting in even greater haste, to the day of her widowhood.

      "Geoff!" she said.

      He raised his hat with a trembling hand and his face was transfigured.... Was he dying on his feet, wondered the woman.

      "Get in, Geoff," she said, and the footman half-turned and then jumped down.

      Geoffry Brabazon-Howard, with a great and almost final effort, stepped into the victoria.

      "Will you come to lunch with me at..." he began, and then burst into tears.

      Later, it was the woman who wept, tears of joy and thankfulness, after the agonizing suspense when the great specialist staked his reputation on his plain verdict that the man was not organically diseased. He was in a parlous state, no doubt, practically dying of starvation and nervous exhaustion—but nursing could save him.

      Nursing did—the nursing of Lady Peggy Brabazon-Howard.

XII. "Vengeance Is Mine..."

       Table of Contents

      As Jean Rien expressed it, he was bien touché; as le Légionnaire 'Erbiggin put it, he had got it in the neck; as the Bucking Bronco "allowed," his monica was up; as Jean Boule saw, he was dying.

      One cannot blame him, since an Arab lance had pinned him to the ground and an Arab flissa had nearly severed his arm from his shoulder.

      Jean Rien evidently blamed himself however, and for many things—chief among them a little matter of parricide, it seemed to Jean Boule, as he bent over him in his endeavour to comfort and to soothe.

      "In much pain, mon ami?" the old soldier asked, as he moistened the dying man's lips and forehead.

      "Little of body, but in great pain of mind.... I would confess to you, Père Boule.... I would ease my soul.... I would ask if you think I am a murderer.... I have not blamed myself until now that I am dying.... Now I am afraid.... Look you, Père Jean Boule, I was brought up by my mother (le bon Dieu rest and bless her soul) with one purpose in life, with one end to fulfil, with one deed to do. Nothing earlier can I remember than her making me repeat after her the words of a promise and an oath. Night after night, as I went to bed, morning after morning, as I arose, I said my prayers at her knee, and followed them by this promise and this oath which she had taught me. Never did we sit down to a meal, never did we rise from one, without this formula. From my very birth I was dedicated, and my life was devoted and avowed, to the fulfilment of this promise, the keeping of this oath.... Hear it.... 'I, Jean-Without-A-Name, son of Marie Duval and Ober-Leutnant von Schlofen of the Hundred and Thirty-ninth Pomeranian Regiment, do most solemnly swear, that from my seventeenth birthday I will devote the whole of my mind and will, my strength and skill, my time and my money, to finding the man who in 1870 was Ober-Leutnant von Schlofen and who is my father, the torturer of my mother and the murderer of my mother's beloved husband, Jacques Duval. I do most solemnly swear that, having found him, I will call him "Father," I will torture him, as he tortured my mother, and I will kill him even as he killed him who should have been my father, so help me God and the Blessed Virgin. Amen.' ...

      "Yes, my friend, morning, noon, and night I repeated this after my mother, and at the conclusion of each repetition this poor soul, who loved and hated me, and whose heart was buried in the pit in which lay Jacques Duval and many more, would kiss me on the brow, and say, 'Thou art the instrument of God's vengeance.' For sixteen years she did this, and on my seventeenth birthday gave me a knife that had belonged to Jacques Duval, together with her savings of seventeen years. The knife had killed poor Jacques, and the money was to help in his avenging by means of the knife.... Mad? Yes, mad as ever a human being was, poor soul.... But think of what she saw and suffered.... Married a week before war broke out, her husband torn from her arms to march away to fight,

Скачать книгу