Green Rust by Edgar Wallace

Author:Edgar Wallace [Wallace, Edgar]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-19T14:10:15.265000+00:00

CHAPTER XVI. THE PAWN TICKET

OLIVA CRESSWELL awoke to consciousness as she was being carried up the stairs of the house. She may have recovered sooner, for she retained a confused impression of being laid down amidst waving grasses and of hearing somebody grunt that she was heavier than he thought.

Also she remembered as dimly the presence of Dr. van Heerden standing over her, and he was wearing a long grey dust-coat.

As her captor kicked open the door of her room she scrambled out of his arms and leant against the bed-rail for support.

"I'm all right," she said breathlessly, "it was foolish to faint, but--but you frightened me."

The man grinned, and seemed about to speak, but a sharp voice from the landing called him, and he went out, slamming the door behind him. She crossed to the bathroom, bathed her face in cold water and felt better, though she was still a little giddy.

Then she sat down to review the situation, and in that review two figures came alternately into prominence--van Heerden and Beale.

She was an eminently sane girl. She had had the beginnings of what might have been an unusually fine education, had it not been interrupted by the death of her foster-mother. She had, too, the advantage which the finished young lady does not possess, of having grafted to the wisdom of the schools the sure understanding of men and things which personal contact with struggling humanity can alone give to us.

The great problems of life had been sprung upon her with all their hideous realism, and through all she had retained her poise and her clear vision. Many of the phenomena represented by man's attitude to woman she could understand, but that a man who admittedly did not love her and had no other apparent desire than to rid himself of the incubus of a wife as soon as he was wed, should wish to marry her was incomprehensible. That he had already published the banns of her marriage left her gasping at his audacity. Strange how her thoughts leapt all the events of the morning: the wild rush to escape, the struggle with the hideously masked man, and all that went before or followed, and went back to the night before.

Somehow she knew that van Heerden had told her the truth, and that there was behind this act of his a deeper significance than she could grasp. She remembered what he had said about Beale, and flushed.

"You're silly, Matilda," she said to herself, employing the term of address which she reserved for moments of self-depreciation, "here is a young man you have only met half a dozen tunes, who is probably a very nice married policeman with a growing family and you are going hot and cold at the suggestion that you're in love with him." She shook her head reproachfully.

And yet upon Beale all her thoughts were centred, and however they might wander it was to Beale they returned. She could analyse that buoyancy which had

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