Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

40 страница из 80

Not to the church, however, was his attention directed, but to the house immediately opposite to it. A big, red-faced, old-fashioned house, fresh painted and pointed, with plate-glass windows in its lower stories, and bronzed knockers, and shining bell-pulls, looking like a portly dowager endeavouring to assume modern airs and graces. Carriages kept driving up, and depositing old and young ladies, and the door, on which was an enormous brass plate with "Madame Clarisse," in letters nearly half a foot long, was perpetually being flung open by a page with a very shiny face, produced by a judicious combination of yellow soap and friction--a page who, in his morning-jacket ruled with red lines, looked like a page of an account-book. Paul Derinzy knew many of these carriage-brought people--for Madame Clarisse was the fashionable milliner of London, and had none but the very greatest of fine ladies in her clientèle--and many of them knew him; but on the present occasion he carefully shrouded himself from observation behind one of the pillars of the church portico. There he remained in an agony of impatience, fidgeting about, looking at his watch, glaring up at the bright-faced house, and anathematising the customers, until the clock in the church-tower above him chimed the half-hour past two. Then he became more fidgety than ever. Before, he had taken short turns up and down the street, always returning sharply to the same spot, and looking round as though he had expected some remarkable alteration to have taken place during his ten seconds' absence; now, he stood behind the pillar, never attempting to move from the spot, but constantly peering across the way at Madame Clarisse's great hall-door.