False to Any Man. Leslie Ford

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ steps. As I started to pull the bell I glanced back, attracted, I suppose, by the fact that the taxi hadn’t started off. Or perhaps it was the sound of approaching feet scrunching in the dry snow. The driver had stopped in front of his cab and was waiting. A man came into the narrow yellow circle of the headlights and stood talking to him. I couldn’t hear his voice, but I heard the driver say “Okay, buddy, I’ll stick around—gotta light?”

      The other man struck a match and held it out. For one instant it illuminated his own face. I caught my breath sharply. It was swaddled in bandages, with one particularly big white patch strapped across his nose. Before I could recover myself sufficiently to take hold of the brass bell knob he’d turned and disappeared into the dark, in the direction of the big house across the street.

      It flashed suddenly into my mind that he’d made a mistake. He’d probably asked for the Candler house and had been directed to the old mansion, still known by that name but now owned and occupied by Philander Doyle. I waited a moment. I could see his dark figure go up the steps and stand silhouetted against the big white door. And then the door opened and he went in immediately, as if he was not only known there but was expected at that moment.

      I heard myself say, “Well, for goodness’ sake!” The taxi driver cut off his motor and switched down his lights. The cab stood as a dark island against the curb. Another car pulled in a few yards ahead of him, toward Karen Lunt’s gleaming little jewel of a house, some people got out, laughing. I pulled the Candlers’ bell and waited, with a strange conflict in what writers of a more reserved age would call my breast, but which involved, it seemed to me, my entire viscera.

      For a moment nothing happened. I was just on the point of giving up and going on to Karen’s when I heard a big booming voice on the other side of the door. “I’ll answer it,” it said, and in a second there stood before me, the dim light from the old brass lantern in the hall framing his fine leonine head, the gas jets on the stoop illuminating the broad immaculate expanse of white shirt front with its gleaming black pearl studs and the diamond and platinum chain cabled across his magnificent embonpoint, the noted if not actually notorious figure of the owner of the house across the street.

      “Good evening—is it Miss or Madam?” Philander Doyle boomed, with vast cordiality. “The party’s next door.”

      “I know,” I said quickly. “But I stopped to see if Jeremy’d gone. I’m Mrs. Latham.”

      He put out a warm welcoming paw.

      “My dear young lady! I must be losing my grip. The prosecutor said so last week, but I thought he was a fool. Come in, come in!”

      Except for that big rich Irish voice—I’d seen a dozen of the women feature writers who cover trials refer to it as a siren’s song wooing the jury to destruction on the rocks and shoals of injustice—there was no sound in that cold dark house. “Jerry, Jerry, where are you?” I thought desperately.

      “Come in, Mrs. Latham.” Philander Doyle drew me across the threshold into the frigid hall. Then out of the library came a sudden little cry. “It’s Grace! Oh, come in!” and Jeremy Candler came running out into the hall. “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come!”

      The hands she seized mine with were cold as blocks of ice, the cheek she pressed against mine was scalding hot. I was so relieved to see her—even to see her in the familiar brown velvet evening dress that Dummy had wished she’d give the Salvation Army—that I didn’t think of what icy hands and feverish cheeks must mean. Not until she’d led me into the library, and then I knew.

      A green glass-shaded reading lamp cast a white glow on the tooled leather top of the old mahogany desk, on a single legal-looking paper at one end, on the black penholder, its shiny nib wet with ink, that lay beside it. In the soft emerald light above it stood Judge Candler, tall and slender, as distinguished and courtly in dinner dress as he is in the pictures you see of him in his robes. Between the two high windows, their heavy blue worsted curtains drawn against the night, a fine old copy of the St. Memnon of Mr. Justice Taney framed his own splendid white head. He bowed to me, but there was no friendliness in his greeting. The fire his once red hair had indicated burned sombrely in the depths of his fine brown eyes set deeply under his bushy greying eyebrows. He looked past me at his daughter.

      I saw Philander Doyle look at her too, at the end of the desk, at her proud little head with burnished shadows from the coal fire behind her playing on her copper hair. Whether it was admiration in the brilliant blue eyes of her father’s one-time law partner and long-time friend I wouldn’t know. For a moment I thought it was more than that . . . pity, even. But I can sometimes be amazingly wrong.

      Then the strained silence in the emerald-shaded room was broken abruptly—not by Judge Candler’s firm gavel tones, or the fabulous voice of Philander Doyle, or Jerry’s passionate voice, bell-clear, but by a respectful and at the same time oddly admonitory throat-clearing from the corner. I glanced quickly around, and blinked my eyes.

      In the green dusk I saw something that, if it hadn’t cleared its throat, I should have thought was a smaller-than-life-sized figure of a law clerk from a Dickens novel. He was sitting bolt-upright, clutching a green baize bag across his knees. He had a wisp of grey hair combed like a Jacob’s ladder across his bald egg-shaped head, which was rather too large for the rest of him. And he cleared his throat again, with less respect this time and more admonition.

      Judge Candler turned to his daughter.

      “It’s getting on, sir,” he said, in a high-pitched and rather querulous voice that couldn’t have been more perfect.

      Judge Candler turned to his daughter.

      “If you’ll sign, please, Jeremy. Mr. Pepperday goes to bed at eight o’clock.”

      Jeremy drew a deep breath, standing there silently for an instant, her sun-flecked eyes fixed on her father. In the emerald light he looked so extraordinarily like the Wizard of Oz that I knew she’d have to sign. The silence in the room was so overpowering that I could hear the blood throb in my own throat. Then a strange thing happened. So quickly that it was almost legerdemain, and yet with no suggestion of anything but the utmost calm, Philander Doyle’s hand reached forward and picked up the black penholder, snapped it between powerful fingers like a matchstick and tossed it across the hearth rug into the blazing fire.

      It was all the stranger, and the more astonishing to me, because in some way I’d definitely got the idea that Philander Doyle was in favor of her giving the stock up to Karen. But I was certainly wrong.

      “Listen, my friend,” he said, his mellow voice vibrating through the emerald shadows in the still room like firelight through old wine. “You can’t do this. It’s Billy the girl’s thinking of, not herself. Billy and you and Sandy. If you force her to do this, you’ll lose a daughter’s love, and faith, and everything that’s made you what you are tonight. Believe me, Peyton, I, who have never had a daughter, know.”

      He stopped for an instant, frowning a little, as that absurd tiny figure in the corner, looking at a vast silver watch that came out of its checked waistcoat pocket, cleared its throat again.

      “If it’s Karen you’re concerned about, you may ease your mind. She and Roger have come to an understanding. I’m not a rich man, but my son’s wife will never want. Roger loves Jeremy as I love my dear sister—he would never allow his wife to accept such a sacrifice from her.”

      I wasn’t looking at Jeremy when he started to speak; I didn’t dare look at her now. Outside in the hall I could hear the grandfather clock girding its ancient loins to the hour. It struck . . . “Boom, boom, boom . . .”

СКАЧАТЬ