The Joker - Edgar Wallace (good book club books TXT) 📗

CHAPTER 5

‘A LITTLE heart trouble,’ said Mr Harlow, smiling as he set down the

glass of water. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble,

Miss Rivers. I haven’t had an attack in years.’

 

He was still pale, but such was his extraordinary self-control that the

hand that put down the glass was without a tremor.

 

‘Phew!’ He dabbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief and rose steadily

to his feet.

 

Elk was engaged in the prosaic task of brushing the dust stains from his

knees and looked up.

 

‘You’d better let me take you home, Mr Harlow,’ he said.

 

Stratford Harlow shook his head.

 

‘That is quite unnecessary—quite,’ he said. ‘I have my car at the door

and a remedy for all such mental disturbances as these! And it is not a

drug!’ he smiled.

 

Nevertheless, Elk went with him to the car.

 

‘Will you tell my chauffeur to drive to the Charing Cross power station?’

was the surprising request; and long after the car had moved off in the

fog Elk stood on the sidewalk, wondering what business took this

multi-millionaire to such a venue.

 

They evidently knew Mr Harlow at the power station and they at any rate

saw nothing remarkable in his visit.

 

The engineer, who was smoking at the door, stood back to let him walk

into the great machinery hall, and placed a stool for him. And there for

half an hour he sat, and the droning of the dynamos and the whirr and

thud of the great engines were sedatives and anodynes to his troubled

mind.

 

Here he had come before, to think out great schemes, which developed best

in this atmosphere. The power and majesty of big wheels, the rhythm of

the driving belts as they sagged and rose, the shaded lights above the

marble switchboards, the noisy quiet of it all, stimulated him as nothing

else could. Here he found the illusion of irresistibility that attuned so

perfectly to his own mood; the inevitable effects of the inevitable

causes. The sense that he was standing near the very heart of power was

an inspiration. This lofty hall was a very home of the gods to him.

 

Half an hour, an hour, passed, and then he rose with a catch of his

breath, and a slow smile lit the big face. ‘Thank you, Harry, thank you.’

 

He shook the attendant’s hand and left something that crinkled in the

hard palm of the workman. A few minutes later he drove through

brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus and could offer a friendly nod

to the flickering and flashing lights whose birth he had seen and whose

very brilliance was a homage to the steel godhead.

 

To be thoroughly understood, Mr Stratford Harlow must be known.

 

There had been five members of the Harlow family when Stratford Selwyn

Mortimer Harlow was born, and they were all immensely rich. His mother

died a week later, his father when he was aged three, leaving the infant

child to the care of his Aunt Mercy, a spinster who was accounted, even

by her charitable relatives, as ‘strange’. The boy was never sent to

school, for his health was none of the best and he had his education at

the hands of his aunt. An enormously rich woman with no interest in life,

she guarded her charge jealously. Family interference drove her to a

frenzy. The one call that her two sisters paid her, when the boy was

seven, ended in a scene on which Miss Alice, the younger, based most of

her conversation for years afterwards.

 

The main result of the quarrel between Miss Mercy and her maiden sisters

was that she shut up Kravelly Hall and removed, with her maid Mrs Edwins,

to a little cottage at Teignmouth. Here she lived unmolested by her

relatives for seven years. She then went to Scarborough for three years

and thence to Bournemouth. Regularly every month she wrote to her two

sisters and her bachelor brother in New York; and the terminology of the

letters did not vary by so much as a comma:

 

“Miss Mercy Harlow presents her compliments and begs to state that The

Boy is in Good Health and is receiving adequate tuition in the essential

subjects together with a sound instruction in the tenets of the

Protestant Faith.”

 

She had engaged a tutor, a bearded young man from Oxford University (she

deigned to mention this fact to her brother, with whom she had not

quarrelled), whose name was Marling. There came to the ears of Aunt Alice

a story which called into question the fitness of Mr Marling to mould the

plastic mind of youth. A mild scandal at Oxford. Miss Alice felt it her

duty to write, and after a long interval had a reply:

 

“Miss Mercy Harlow begs to thank Miss Alice Harlow for her communication

and in reply begs to state that she has conducted a very thorough and

searching enquiry into the charges preferred against Mr Saul Marling

(B.A. Oxon) and is satisfied that Mr Marling acted in the most honourable

manner, and has done nothing with which he may reproach himself or which

renders him unfit to direct the studies of The Boy.”

 

This happened a year before Miss Mercy’s death. When nature took its toll

and she passed to her Maker, Miss Alice hastened to Bournemouth and in a

small and secluded cottage near Christchurch found a big and solemn young

man of twenty-three, dressed a little gawkily in black. He was tearless;

and indeed, his aunt suspected, almost cheerful, at the prospect of being

freed from Miss Mercy’s drastic management.

 

The bearded tutor had left (Mrs Edwins, the maid, tearfully explained) a

fortnight before the passing of Miss Mercy.

 

‘And if he hadn’t gone,’ said Miss Alice with tight lips, ‘I should have

made short work of him. The Boy has been suppressed! He hasn’t a word to

say for himself!’

 

A council was held, including the family lawyer, who was making his first

acquaintance with Stratford. It was agreed that The Boy should have a

flat in Park Lane and the companionship of an elder man who combined a

knowledge of the world with a leaning towards piety. Such was found in

the Rev. John Barthurst, M.A., an ex-naval chaplain.

 

Miss Edwins was pensioned off and the beginning of Stratford’s

independent life was celebrated with a dinner and a visit to Charley’s

Aunt, through which roaring farce he sat with a stony face.

 

The tutelage lasted the best part of a year; and then the quiet young man

suddenly came to life, dismissed his worldly and pious companion with a

cheque for a thousand pounds, summoned Mrs Edwins to be his housekeeper;

and bought and reconstructed the Duke of Greenhart’s house in Park Lane.

 

And thenceforward Mr Harlow’s name began to appear in the records of

important transactions. Family fortunes dropped into his lap. Miss Mercy

had been fabulously rich. She had left him every penny of her fortune,

with the exception of �100 to Lucy Edwins in recognition of her faithful

service, realising that she will not regard this sum as inadequate in

view of the great service I rendered to her.’ Then Miss Henrietta died;

and when the death duties were paid there was the greater part of two

millions. Miss Alice left more. The bachelor uncle in New York died a

comparative pauper, leaving a beggarly six hundred thousand.

 

Mr Harlow’s house was a rather ugly three-storey building which occupied

a small island site, possibly the most valuable in Park Lane, though the

actual entrance was not in that exclusive thoroughfare, but in the side

street. He opened the door with a key and walked into the hall. The door

to the library faced him. There were some letters on the table, which he

scanned through rapidly, opening only one. It was from Ellenbury; and

just then Mr Harlow was annoyed with Ellenbury; he had supplied erroneous

information about Aileen Rivers, and had made