Instead, her life was made up of trying to make cheap little dressmakers understand what she meant by “line,” trying to pretend that inexpensive food could be dressed up to look like the best, trying to make every kind of substitute look like the real thing, trying to make one resentful daily help do the work of three well paid good ones.
No, Mrs. Arnall had not taken kindly to reduced circumstances, and she was utterly thankful that Hilma, at least, was going to step out of all that.
It was beyond her comprehension that Tony, her adored only son, actually revelled in his horrid commercial job which had taken him away to the United States for a year’s experience in the firm’s office over there. She had only the vaguest idea of what work he did. She only knew that, for some unknown reason, he liked it, and contrived to manage very happily on a salary which her brothers would have considered insulting at his age.
“It’s different for some boys, I suppose,” was the only explanation she could find. But even that didn’t ever seem entirely satisfactory, and she usually referred to him as “my poor Tony.”
When Hilma had finally seen her father off—humming a little and even more brightly expectant than usual—she carried a breakfast tray into her mother’s room.
“Here you are, Mother. Father’s gone off very cheerfully.”
“He always does.” Mrs. Arnall sat up with a sigh and accepted her breakfast with more interest than her earlier conversation would have led one to expect.
“Shall I put on your fire for you?”
“No, dear, better not. It burns such a lot of therms or watts or whatever they are. Perhaps it’s units—but anyway, they’re all dreadfully expensive. And it’s not really cold, is it?”
No, it was not, of course. That was to say, one would hardly get pneumonia sitting up in bed without a fire. Only it would have been one of those delicious, cosy little semi-luxuries which could make such a difference to the beginning of any day.
“Very well. Would you like me to bring my breakfast in here?”
“Yes, Hilma dear, do. Then we can talk over what we’re going to do about help.”
Hilma went away to fetch her own breakfast, and by the time she returned, she was relieved to see her mother was deeply absorbed in something other than the domestic question.
“Hilma! My dear!” She was bent over a newspaper, the sheets of which were spread haphazard over the eiderdown. “Have you seen the paper this morning?”
“No. What is it?”
“Murder!” her mother explained, dramatically if inadequately.
Hilma stiffened.
“Whose murder?”
“That’s just it. I was just going to tell you. We actually knew him. Charles Martin. Do you remember? You and he were so very friendly that winter we were at Torquay. I quite hoped something would come of it. Oh, Hilma!” She looked up in horror as a new thought struck her. “What a good thing nothing did. You’d have been a widow now, my poor child. Though there are worse things,” she added irrelevantly. “But a widow by murder is rather different, of course.”
Hilma laughed slightly. She managed to make it quite a natural little laugh.
“You’re quite right, Mother. It’s a good thing my fate didn’t lie in that direction.”
“Oh, my dear, it is!” her mother agreed fervently, beginning to eat her breakfast, but at the same time retaining the newspaper in her disengaged hand with maddening determination.
“What do they say about it?” Hilma hoped she was not overdoing the carelessness.
“They say he was stabbed. Found stabbed in his own flat. I see they call him ‘the well-known man about Town.’ I don’t think I should have said he was exactly that, would you?” Mrs. Arnall leant back against the pillows to consider this interesting point.
“Oh, I don’t know. We probably shouldn’t know about that, anyway. We’ve—lost touch with him for so long. What else do they say? Have they—do they think they’ve got whoever did it?”
“Well, they’re a bit mysterious about that.” Mrs. Arnall addressed herself to the newspaper once more. “They speak about ‘sensational developments expected.’ That probably means a woman in the case or else that they haven’t the faintest idea what to think. It seems it was probably done the night before last, and the light was left on. Oh, you know, really”—her mother put down the paper again—”that does seem a frightfully careless thing for a murderer to do. It looks as though he or she—I’m sure it was she—just took panic and fled.”
“Leaving the light?” There was a curious note in Hilma’s voice. She could see that lighted window so well in her mind’s eye.
“Yes, leaving the light. That was what first drew attention to the crime. The light being on day and night. I can’t imagine anyone doing such a thing,” declared poor Mrs. Arnall, who herself, for reasons of economy, kept the strictest watch on electric light switches.
Hilma agreed mechanically that she could not understand it either.
“Look, there’s a photograph of him. I remember him quite well, though, of course, newspaper photographs are always hopeless. Still, you can see who it is.”
With the greatest distaste, Hilma glanced at the photograph which her mother presented for her inspection. Yes, one could see who it was. She supposed that in a cold, impersonal way, she had hated him towards the end. Those last two meetings, after a lapse of five years, had been so—so degrading. To be blackmailed was not a pleasant sensation.
But it was over now. There was no need even to think of it. Curiously, it seemed to her that she could hear a quiet, rather deep voice saying:
“Yes, Liebling, you can go home.”
And that had meant that it was over.
“Well, my dear, doesn’t it just show that one never knows.” This was one of Mrs. Arnall’s favourite observations on life. No one had ever been able to discover exactly what it was that “one never knew,” but it usually indicated the satisfactory ending of a conversation so far as she was concerned.
In any case, the little flutter of excitement and interest had had a beneficial effect on her. She decided that, after all, she was not going to have “one of her heads,” and so she would get up and face once more the latest aspect of the servant problem.
Hilma left her and went to complete her own dressing.
Curious how one tried and tried to recall a mood and a moment, and how in the brightness of daylight it became impossible.
“What was his name, I wonder?” Hilma paused in the act of brushing her hair. “Funny that it seems so important now. It isn’t, of course—at all important. Roger’s is the only name I have a right to consider important. Still, one can wonder. What would suit him?”
It was hard to say.
When someone came into your life in the strangest and most unconventional way, when he made the strangest—the most unconventional—impression upon you, and then went out of your life again, nameless, a little mysterious, the impersonation of that breathless feeling of romance that belonged to eighteen rather than twenty-five—well, what name could you give to him in your imagination?
She smiled faintly at her own absurdity.
But she had called him the only name possible last night. The Unknown. And even the slightly dramatic flavour about that seemed in keeping. He was faintly dramatic, with those great dark eyes, that quiet, commanding voice, that lightning lovemaking which might have meant anything—or nothing.
“How silly and romantic I can still be, if I’m given any chance,” thought Hilma with a sigh.
But of course, real life was not a romantic business at all. It was the half-cynical, half-ruthless combination which they had discussed with such frankness last night. He had said they were sufficiently alike to understand each other’s motives very well.
Well, that was quite true. She understood that he must marry his heiress, and he understood that she must marry Roger. And by common consent, they understood that it would be more
than unwise for them to meet again.
“But neither of us said why it would be unwise,” thought Hilma. And, just for a moment, she seemed to be standing again in a darkened room, with somebody’s hand against her heart.
During the next few days references to “the Flat Murder” dropped to a short paragraph or two in all but the most sensational papers. One of these ventured the observation that “there seemed some support for the theory that the murdered man had engaged in more than one unsavoury activity.” But nothing more explicit was ventured upon.
“Anyway, I expect that’s just malicious gossip,” Mrs. Arnall stated firmly. “They mean drugs, I suppose, or blackmail or something like that. But I don’t feel that anyone we met at Torquay could be quite that sort.”
Hilma wondered whether it was their influence or that of Torquay which was supposed to have been sufficient to preserve his virtue.
On Thursday Mrs. Arnall gave what she called “just a tiny, tiny dinner-party.” Nothing at all like the smooth and sparkling affairs of happier days, of course, but just enough to please and win the approval of Hilma’s grave and very correct fiancé.
In addition to Roger himself, there were only two other guests, a pretty and amusing cousin of Hilma’s, named Barbara, and her husband, Jim. Barbara was considered to have done very well for herself when she had married Jim Curtis. He was “something in tin.” And whatever he was in tin seemed to yield a sufficient income to maintain a remarkably smart flat in town, a small Packard, and an extensive and becoming wardrobe for his wife.
He was a good-humoured, entirely unpretentious young man whose chief idea of enjoyment was that a lot of people should “get together” and do something. It never seemed to Hilma that it mattered much what they did, so long as they all did it.
But everyone liked him, and he and Barbara were among the few people left whom Mrs. Arnall would allow herself to entertain with enjoyment untinged by worried embarrassment.
“I always remember him with gratitude when I think of that French au pair we had,” she told Hilma. “Do you remember? The soufflé came in looking like something not very nice to drink, and he somehow made a joke, and carried the whole thing off perfectly. Dear, dear! She was a dreadful girl, and such a smasher too.”
Hilma said that she thought she remembered the incident (which was not strictly correct), and then went to dress for dinner. She knew Roger specially liked the dress she chose. Dark blue, very simply and slenderly cut, the sleeves slashed from shoulder to wrist to show a lining of a much lighter blue.
She looked at herself in the glass, and again words drifted back to her from that strange evening which she sometimes thought she had imagined.
“I hope he is a connoisseur of beautiful things, Liebling, and knows that his future wife has the loveliest hair and probably the loveliest eyes in London.”
Oh, dear! Was she going to remember everything he had said? And such an extravagant remark, too. Roger would have considered it almost indecent to have himself described as a connoisseur of beautiful things where his fiancée was concerned.
But then Roger probably never noticed that the lighter blue on her sleeves was just the blue of her eyes or anything like that. He merely thought it a nice dress and that it suited her somehow. But someone else would have noticed it—would have commented on it, teased her about it, told her once more that her eyes were beautiful.
“They are rather nice,” Hilma said aloud. But they were very serious—almost sombre—blue eyes that regarded her from the mirror. And it was a very serious Hilma who went downstairs to receive her fiancé’s conventional, but nonetheless sincere, compliments.
“Hello, Hilma, my dear.” He kissed her. “You’re looking very well.” He referred impartially to her state of health and her looks in that remark, but Hilma, taking a modest view of it, said that—yes, she was very well.
“I meant this, too.” He touched her soft pink cheek with a smile, and she was suddenly astounded to find what a difference there could be in the way a man touched one. “You’ve a very pretty colour to-night, Hilma. And I like that dress.”
“Do you? Yes, so do I. There’s something very attractive about the blue.”
She waited to see if he would rise to it, but he just nodded vaguely and said, “Yes, blue’s always a nice colour.” And then she wanted to laugh. But above all, she wanted to have someone with it just as funny as she did.
Poor Roger! It was too bad. How could one expect him to start giving voice to romantic absurdities at this date? It was not his fault, but hers, that everything seemed a little flat and dull just now.
Then her mother came in and, a few minutes later, her father, carrying the evening paper.
When greetings had been exchanged and they were all sipping their sherry, Mr. Arnall remarked:
“Curious business, that flat murder. They had the inquest to-day. A good deal came out then. We knew him, you know, quite well” he added to Roger, a little as though there were some distinction about it.
“Well, some years ago, my dear,” his wife amended rather hastily. She seemed to feel one could be just a little indelicate in claiming too close an acquaintance with someone who had been murdered. “We met him on holiday. You know how one does.”
Roger appeared to know how one did.
“It seems it was a woman who did it.” Mr. Arnall glanced at his paper.
“Was it?” That came very sharply from Hilma.
“A very sordid case altogether,” Roger said gravely, by which he intended to indicate quite kindly but firmly that it was not the best subject for conversation with the girl he was going to marry.
But Hilma was not noticing that.
“Who was it, Father?”
“Eh? Oh, some woman he’d been trying to blackmail. He seems to have been a pretty dirty rogue, all told. She stabbed him, and then went home and gassed herself, poor devil. But she left some sort of confession that the police found.”
“Oh—poor—soul,” Hilma said, with the strange sensation of having escaped some terrible danger.
“Very sordid, very sordid,” repeated Roger just a trifle more loudly, as though he felt they could not possibly have heard his verdict before, or they would certainly have dismissed the case.
Fortunately, just then Barbara and her husband arrived, and there was something of a diversion. But as soon as they settled down to talk again, Barbara cried:
“Didn’t you know that flat murder man once, Hilma? I was almost sure I remembered the name. We all went to a New Year’s Eve dance or something one time?”
“Yes, I knew him.”
“Good lord! What does it feel like to have a murderer on your visiting list?” demanded Jim.
“Don’t be silly, dear,” his wife said. “You’ve got it all wrong. He wasn’t the murderer, he was the corpse. And you can’t have a corpse on your visiting list. He’s crossed off automatically.”
They both laughed a good deal at this, though Roger raised his eyebrows as high as they would go, and Mrs. Arnall said, “Barbara! Barbara!”
“Well, it’s true,” Barbara declared. “It was a woman who did him in, you know, Jim. Someone he’d been blackmailing. Poor thing, I’m very sorry for her, but I never can quite see the sense of creeping about with knives just because someone’s kept a few silly letters from one’s youth. After all, we all write them, don’t we? I shouldn’t be surprised if Hilma had written one or two to this man herself.”
“I,” said Roger heavily, “should be exceedingly surprised. And I’m sure, on second thoughts, you won’t want to make such a suggestion against your cousin.”
“Oh, well,” Barbara pouted slightly, “it’s not meant as seriously as all that. I’m not really taking away your character, Hilma dear.”
“Of course not.” Hilma smiled mechanically.
“But I don’t expect Roger was the first man you kissed. And, mark my words, Roger, you won’t be the last!”
S
he laughed at Roger’s expression as he tried to frame a suitable answer to this, and ran on, before he could achieve his object:
“I want you and Hilma to come to this marvellous masked charity ball at Eltrincham House. You know, Lord and Lady Ordingley have lent the place for the occasion. It’s in aid of one of the hospitals, or something entirely praiseworthy. The tickets are ten guineas, but gosh, won’t it be worth it!”
At that moment Mrs. Arnall announced, very much too loudly, that dinner was served, and they all moved into the other room.
But Barbara was not to be moved from her point.
“You will come to the ball, you two, won’t you? There are quite a crowd of us going. It’ll be such fun, won’t it, Jim?”
“Rather. About a dozen of us, anyway. We’re hoping to make it twenty,” Jim explained.
“Oh, I don’t think running around in fancy dress with a mask on is quite in my line,” protested Roger, who, although the possessor of an excellently preserved, somewhat athletic figure, was always guarding against looking a fool, and heartily disapproved of everything which he classed under “stagey nonsense.”
“It isn’t fancy dress, it’s only masks,” cried Barbara, at the same time as Hilma exclaimed:
“Oh, Roger, I’d love to go.”
“Would you, my dear?” He looked surprised, but rather indulgent as well. It was very pleasant to be able to make Hilma’s eyes sparkle like that, and, in an obscure way, it pleased him to know that without his money she could not possibly go, whereas with his money he could perform the pleasing miracle for her.
“That’s settled, then, isn’t it?” declared Barbara.
“Well”—Roger intensely disliked being hurried—”I’m not quite certain—”
“Roger, if we could manage it, I should so like it.”
Hilma didn’t know quite why she was so insistent. She very seldom displayed such overwhelming enthusiasm for anything. But somehow, the idea of this attracted her. Perhaps it was that the idea of a masked ball appealed to the vein of romanticism which had so recently been touched in her. Or perhaps it was just that the novelty was as charming to her as to Barbara.
One Man's Heart Page 5
