The Green Rust, Edgar Wallace [top fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

/> He rose, leant over her and deftly pulled back her sleeve.

"If you scream I shall smother you with the towel," he said. "This won't hurt you very much. As I was going to say, you will be married here because you are in a delicate state of health and you will say 'Yes.'"

She winced as the needle punctured the skin.

"It won't hurt you for very long," he said calmly. "You will say 'Yes,' I repeat, because I shall tell you to say 'Yes.'"

Suddenly the sharp pricking pain in her arm ceased. She was conscious of a sensation as though her arm was being blown up like a bicycle tyre, but it was not unpleasant. He withdrew the needle and kept his finger pressed upon the little red wound where it had gone in.

"I shall do this to you again to-night," he said, "and you will not feel it at all, and to-morrow morning, and you will not care very much what happens. I hope it will not be necessary to give you a dose to-morrow afternoon."

"I shall not always be under the influence of this drug," she said between her teeth, "and there will be a time of reckoning for you, Dr. van Heerden."

"By which time," he said calmly, "I shall have committed a crime so wonderful and so enormous that the mere offence of 'administering a noxious drug'--that is the terminology which describes the offence--will be of no importance and hardly worth the consideration of the Crown officers. Now I think I can unfasten you." He loosened and removed the straps at her wrists and about her feet and put them in his pocket.

"You had better get up and walk about," he said, "or you will be stiff. I am really being very kind to you if you only knew it. I am too big to be vindictive. And, by the way, I had an interesting talk with your friend, Mr. Beale, this afternoon, a persistent young man who has been having me shadowed all day." He laughed quietly. "If I hadn't to go back to the surgery for the Bromocine I should have missed our very interesting conversation. That young man is very much in love with you"--he looked amusedly at the growing red in her face. "He is very much in love with you," he repeated. "What a pity! What a thousand pities!"

"How soon will this drug begin to act?" she asked.

"Are you frightened?"

"No, but I should welcome anything which made me oblivious to your presence--you are not exactly a pleasant companion," she said, with a return to the old tone he knew so well.

"Content yourself, little person," he said with simulated affection. "You will soon be rid of me."

"Why do you want to marry me?"

"I can tell you that now," he said: "Because you are a very rich woman and I want your money, half of which comes to me on my marriage."

"Then the man spoke the truth!" She sat up suddenly, but the effort made her head swim.

He caught her by the shoulders and laid her gently down.

"What man--not that babbling idiot, Bridgers?" He said something, but instantly recovered his self-possession. "Keep quiet," he said with professional sternness. "Yes, you are the heiress of an interesting gentleman named John Millinborn."

"John Millinborn!" she gasped. "The man who was murdered!"

"The man who was killed," he corrected. "'Murder' is a stupid, vulgar word. Yes, my dear, you are his heiress. He was your uncle, and he left you something over six million dollars. That is to say he left us that colossal sum."

"But I don't understand. What does it mean?"

"Your name is Predeaux. Your father was the ruffian----"

"I know, I know," she cried. "The man in the hotel. The man who died. My father!"

"Interesting, isn't it?" he said calmly, "like something out of a book. Yes, my dear, that was your parent, a dissolute ruffian whom you will do well to forget. I heard John Millinborn tell his lawyer that your mother died of a broken heart, penniless, as a result of your father's cruelty and unscrupulousness, and I should imagine that that was the truth."

"My father!" she murmured.

She lay, her face as white as the pillow, her eyes closed.

"John Millinborn left a fortune for you--and I think that you might as well know the truth now--the money was left in trust. You were not to know that you were an heiress until you were married. He was afraid of some fortune-hunter ruining your young life as Predeaux ruined your mother's. That was thoughtful of him. Now I don't intend ruining your life, I intend leaving you with half your uncle's fortune and the capacity for enjoying all that life can hold for a high-spirited young woman."

"I'll not do it, I'll not do it, I'll not do it," she muttered.

He rose from the chair and bent over her.

"My young friend, you are going to sleep," he said to himself, waited a little longer and left the room, closing the door behind him.

He descended to the hall and passed into the big dining-hall beneath the girl's bedroom. The room had two occupants, a stout, hairless man who had neither hair, eyebrows, nor vestige of beard, and a younger man.

"Hello, Bridgers," said van Heerden addressing the latter, "you've been talking."

"Well, who doesn't?" snarled the man.

He pulled the tortoiseshell box from his pocket, opened the lid and took a pinch from its contents, snuffling the powder luxuriously.

"That stuff will kill you one of these days," said van Heerden.

"It will make him better-tempered," growled the hairless man. "I don't mind people who take cocaine as long as they are taking it. It's between dopes that they get on my nerves."

"Dr. Milsom speaks like a Christian and an artist," said Bridgers, with sudden cheerfulness. "If I didn't dope, van Heerden, I should not be working in your beastly factory, but would probably be one of the leading analytical chemists in America. But I'll go back to do my chore," he said rising. "I suppose I get a little commission for restoring your palpitating bride? Milsom tells me that it is she. I thought it was the other dame--the Dutch girl. I guess I was a bit dopey."

Van Heerden frowned.

"You take too keen an interest in my affairs," he said.

"Aw! You're getting touchy. If I didn't get interested in something I'd go mad," chuckled Bridgers.

He had reached that stage of cocaine intoxication when the world was a very pleasant place indeed and full of subject for jocularity.

"This place is getting right on my nerves," he went on, "couldn't I go to London? I'm stagnating here. Why, some of the stuff I cultivated the other day wouldn't react. Isn't that so, Milsom? I get so dull in this hole that all bugs look alike to me."

Van Heerden glanced at the man who was addressed as Dr. Milsom and the latter nodded.

"Let him go back," he said, "I'll look after him. How's the lady?" asked Milsom when they were alone.

The other made a gesture and Dr. Milsom nodded.

"It's good stuff," he said. "I used to give it to lunatics in the days of long ago."

Van Heerden did not ask him what those days were. He never pryed too closely into the early lives of his associates, but Milsom's history was public property. Four years before he had completed a "life sentence" of fifteen years for a crime which had startled the world in '99.

"How are things generally?" he asked.

Van Heerden shrugged his shoulders.

"For the first time I am getting nervous," he said. "It isn't so much the fear of Beale that rattles me, but the sordid question of money. The expenses are colossal and continuous."

"Hasn't your--Government"--Milsom balked at the word--"haven't your friends abroad moved in the matter yet?"

Van Heerden shook his head.

"I am very hopeful there," he said. "I have been watching the papers very closely, especially the Agrarian papers, and, unless I am mistaken, there is a decided movement in the direction of support. But I can't depend on that. The marriage must go through to-morrow."

"White is getting nervous, too," he went on. "He is pestering me about the money I owe him, or rather the syndicate owes him. He's on the verge of ruin."

Milsom made a little grimace.

"Then he'll squeal," he said, "those kind of people always do. You'll have to keep him quiet. You say the marriage is coming off to-morrow?"

"I have notified the parson," said van Heerden. "I told him my fiancee is too ill to attend the church and the ceremony must be performed here."

Milsom nodded. He had risen from the table and was looking out upon the pleasant garden at the rear of the house.

"A man could do worse than put in three or four weeks here," he said. "Look at that spread of green."

He pointed to an expanse of waving grasses, starred with the vari-coloured blossoms of wild flowers.

"I was never a lover of nature," said van Heerden, carelessly.

Milsom grunted.

"You have never been in prison," he said cryptically. "Is it time to give your lady another dose?"

"Not for two hours," said van Heerden. "I will play you at piquet."

The cards were shuffled and the hands dealt when there was a scamper of feet in the hall, the door burst open and a man ran in. He was wearing a soiled white smock and his face was distorted with terror.

"M'sieur, m'sieur," he cried, "that imbecile Bridgers!"

"What's wrong?" Van Heerden sprang to his feet.

"I think he is mad. He is dancing about the grounds, singing, and he has with him the preparation!"

Van Heerden rapped out an oath and leapt through the door, the doctor at his heels. They took the short cut and ran up the steps leading from the well courtyard, and bursting through the bushes came within sight of the offender.

But he was not dancing now. He was standing with open mouth, staring stupidly about him.

"I dropped it, I dropped it!" he stammered.

There was no need for van Heerden to ask what he had dropped, for the green lawn which had excited Milsom's admiration was no longer to be seen. In its place was a black irregular patch of earth which looked as though it had been blasted in the furnaces of hell, and the air was filled with the pungent mustiness of decay.


CHAPTER XIX

OLIVA IS WILLING


It seemed that a grey curtain of mist hung before Oliva's eyes. It was a curtain spangled with tiny globes of dazzling light which grew from nothing and faded to nothing. Whenever she fixed her eyes upon one of these it straightway became two and three and then an unaccountable quantity.

She felt that she ought to see faces of people she knew, for one half of her brain had cleared and was calmly diagnosing her condition, but doing so as though she were somebody else. She was emerging from a drugged sleep; she could regard herself in a curious impersonal fashion which was most interesting. And people who are drugged see things and people. Strange mirages of the mind arise and stranger illusions are suffered. Yet she saw nothing save this