Read Online Lonesome Road by Patricia Wentworth - Free Book Online Page A

has emerged from the fifteenth century. The shop is still very nearly as dark, stuffy, and inconvenient as it must have been when Elizabeth was on the throne. The old oak boards are bare to the customer’s foot. There is no electric light and no counter. A long trestle table black with age serves Mr. Thomas Enderby as it served his forebears. In spite of these drawbacks, or perhaps because of them, the shop is a famous one. The Enderby’s have always had two assets, absolute probity and a most astonishing flair for stones. Thirty years ago Tobias Enderby was considered the finest judge of pearls in Europe. His son Thomas runs him close. People with great names and deep purses have sat at that trestle table and watched an Enderby—Josiah, Tobias, Thomas—bring out his treasures for their inspection. Not always easy to buy from, the Enderbys. A few years before the war a Personage who has since lost the throne which he then adorned wished to buy the Gonzalez ruby, once the property of Philip II of Spain, and come by devious ways to the Market Place in Ledlington. The Personage offered a fabulous price. He also offered some discourtesy. Nobody seems to know quite what it was, but old Tobias gazed past him with an abstracted air and murmured, “No, sir, it is not for sale.”
    Rachel told Gale Brandon the story as they were crossing the Square.
    “It’s rather nice to feel that there are some things money won’t buy.”
    He stood still under the very shadow of Sir Albert Dawnish.
    “Now, Miss Treherne, I don’t like to hear you say that. And why? Because it sounds to me as if you were letting money get you down. You know, you’re all right as long as you’re on top of it, but the minute you let it get on top of you you’re done. It’s a servant, and like all servants you’ve got to look out it doesn’t get the upper hand. Use it, work it, don’t let it drive you, don’t let yourself think you can’t do without it, don’t let yourself believe for a single moment that it can give you any value you haven’t got already. It’s the other way round. It’s you who give money its value by the way you spend it.” He laughed suddenly and came down on a schoolboy joke. “It isn’t the money that makes the man, it’s the man that makes the money.”
    “I didn’t make mine,” said Rachel.
    “Then somebody made it for you.”
    He laughed again, and took her across the line of traffic. With her hand on the latch of Mr. Enderby’s door, Rachel said with all her heart,
    “I wish they hadn’t.”
    Chapter Twelve
    Thomas Enderby was exactly like an old gray mouse, except that a mouse’s eyes are bright and dark, and his were veiled and of no color at all.
    There was an interchange of courtesies reminding Rachel of an old lady she had known as a child who was wont to say with an approving nod of the head, “Compliments pass when gentlefolk meet.”
    The compliments having passed, Mr. Brandon said something in a low voice, from which Rachel inferred that their visit had not been without preliminaries. With a bow Mr. Enderby disappeared through a door in the back of the shop, returning immediately with a square of black velvet which he laid before Miss Treherne. He then disappeared again, and this time for longer.
    As she sat waiting, Rachel was aware of the romantic atmosphere. This old house, this old room; the very chair she sat in, with its high back and straight arms; the floor, black with age, uneven from the passing of the generations— all made a setting for the man who had brought her here to choose a love-gift for another woman. She was conscious of him as she had never been conscious of a man before. His look stirred her as if it had been a touch, and his touch… She steadied her thought to face what this might mean—the folly of a lonely woman who had had no time for love and had let it pass her by; the terror of a frightened woman groping for a hand that she might trust to; or something deeper, saner,