Two-Face. Ernest Dudley

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СКАЧАТЬ It’s bad.”

      He smiled at her, and stood up.

      She watched him push his hands deep into his pockets and walk the length of the room and back. A wave of gratitude swept over her. She wanted to tell him how grateful she was to him for his kindness to her.

      Somehow, she found it difficult to find words which would not sound trite and unreal. He is not an easy person to thank, she decided. He gave the impression he had done what he had as a matter of course. There was no fuss, no unnecessary words, or actions. Just a quiet method of dealing with everything.

      No situation, she felt, would ever find him at a loss. There was a breadth about his entire personality, as well as the width of his shoulders. A roughness and a hardness which his present quietness seemed to emphasize.

      Instinctively she was appraising him, his strength and his gentleness. He is rarely gentle, she told herself. Nor does he go out of his way to be charming, or nice. The set of his large, well-shaped head on his strong neck suggested a keen brain, but that of a man who disdained any subtleties.

      She realized even the culminating tragedy of the last hour had not completely blotted out her inquisitive-ness. She plucked up courage and voice to ask his name.

      “Sorry!” he apologized at once. “Here I’ve been cross-examining you from every angle, and you don’t know the first thing about me! I’m Larry Curtis—I write for the Courier—a London newspaper—”

      Her eyes darkened.

      “I hate newspapers,” she shuddered, remembering those dreadful headlines again.

      “I know—well, forget all about ’em, or that I’m anything to do with them.”

      He stood looking down at her.

      “You’ve got to be sensible. Got to try and forget all that’s happened—not look back at all. I know that’ll be enormously difficult. But I want you to try hard. See?”

      She nodded dumbly.

      He sat down and faced her.

      “Now, I feel a bit responsible for you, and I want to help you. Maybe I can, too.”

      Her eyes were fixed on his face. In them such an expression of hope attempting to combat her tragic circumstances and her dark, utterly hopeless future. It moved him. Her helplessness seemed to reach out to him. Though she herself made no attempt to grab his sympathy.

      Because she was so forlorn, because her dark eyes, big in her pale, tear-stained face, were so stricken. Because absolutely nothing about her was anything but a living picture of shabby human pathos, he knew he had to help her.

      “I have two friends who live in Paris,” he said. “They’re brother and sister. Kindest, most understanding people in the world. Come along with me, and let them decide what’s the best thing to be done about you. Does that sound rather as if you’re a little stray dog?”

      He smiled at her.

      She shook her head seriously.

      “That is what I feel like. Lost. But I cannot come with you. It would be impossible. You are a busy man, you cannot be worried by my troubles. Your friends, too. How can I ask them to bother about an utter stranger?”

      “You aren’t worrying me, you won’t bother them. So put that right out of your head. Julia and Leo—my friends—will take care of you until you feel more able to take care of yourself. Glad to do it, and they’ll think up something for you to do, find a job for you, so you won’t be destitute in a Parisian gutter—which, so I’m told, is a most unpleasant place!”

      She started to say something, but he stopped her.

      “Why, you can’t do anything else, but follow my suggestion! Don’t you see? There was nobody here to meet you—I enquired about that…”

      “You mean…?”

      “Poor Tallier had too much on his mind the last day or two. He’d forgotten all about you. His own world crashed. He was ruined. If anybody else knew about your coming to Paris, well, they forgot, too. All this business has been a bolt from the blue—not only for you, but for everybody else, Henri Tallier as well.”

      He rose. Her eyes remained riveted to his face. Her fingers were intertwined convulsively in her lap. He saw her lower lip begin to tremble.

      “Mitsi Linden!”

      Her name came sharply, and the hard note in his voice stopped the tears that were about to come. She gulped, and blew her nose.

      “Another thing—you’ll find it difficult to leave Le Bourget without answering a lot of questions. There are several people outside there who are very anxious to learn why you fainted just now. I had quite a job to keep them away from you. Understand?”

      “I could not bear to talk to anybody. It would be horrible. Oh, M’sieu—Mr. Curtis, what shall I do…?”

      “Cut the ‘Mr. Curtis’, anyway. I’m Larry to my friends, and we’re friends. Secondly, put your hat on—unless your head’s still aching, and we’ll go and have tea with Julia and Leo. You’d like some tea, wouldn’t you? And an aspirin?”

      She smiled. There was that in her smile which affected him profoundly. So full of courage and new hope it was.

      “Yes,” she said, “I would like a little tea—and some aspirin.”

      She stood up shakily. He took her arm, and she looked straight into his eyes with a queer frankness.

      “Oh, thank you! I can never repay you. Never, never…” she whispered tremulously.

      He tried to laugh, but a sudden tightness in his throat prevented him.

      “I’m glad you think so well of me!” he said lightly.

      Ten minutes later found them in a car, and on the road to Paris.

      A silence fell between them. She was busy with her thoughts. Thoughts which went round and round in her head, and which she found impossible to sort out. They started with the Frenchman’s stare when he had pushed his newspaper aside to answer her question about Tallier. Then those words leaping out at her in huge black letters suddenly dwindling to nothingness and oblivion.

      Then the hammering at the back of her head. Larry’s face when she had first regained consciousness, his voice, the import of his words. And, last of all, wonderment about where she was going, the two friends of his whom she was about to meet.

      Everything seemed possessed of a curious dream-like quality. As if everything that had happened to her in the last hour had not really happened at all. She was only dreaming it. Presently she would wake up, and find herself back in Zurich.

      “Or perhaps I’m dead,” she thought once. “Perhaps the aeroplane did crash, after all!…”

      She gave a quick, panic-stricken glance at the man beside her. No! He was here, with her, protecting her, there was nothing to be afraid of. She was alive. She wasn’t dreaming. All the things had happened, СКАЧАТЬ