Down Under

by Patricia Wentworth

  A surging revolt rendered Oliver speechless. He was to accept an existence without aim, without work, without hope, without Rose Anne. Every drop of natural blood in his body said no.

  He turned abruptly from Dr Spenlow, and saw Rose Anne coming across the hall. She wore a white dress that glittered as she moved. Her neck and her arms sparkled with brilliants. Her bright hair was almost hidden by a diamond wreath. Philip Rennard walked beside her. They made, as Dr Spenlow murmured, a very handsome couple.

  Everything had apparently been waiting for them, for as soon as they arrived on the dais a gong boomed and the guests took their places, with Amos Rennard at the head of the table and his son Mark at the foot. There was a name-card at each place, and whilst Oliver was looking for his own name he was touched on the shoulder, and turned to see Philip Rennard with a stranger on his arm.

  “You are lower down—next to Miss Carew. You don’t need an introduction to her, but let me introduce you to Mademoiselle Violette de Parme.” Voice and manner were those of the conventional host.

  Oliver looked with interest at the lady as he acknowledged the introduction. She was very fair, very vivacious, very French. She wore her hair wreathed in the Medusa-like curls which he knew to be the latest fashion. Her black dress exposed a great deal of admirably modelled back, and was slit very nearly to the thigh to show a diamond garter, her only ornament. Her lips were as scarlet as her nails, her lashes as black as Mascara could make them. She hung on Philip’s arm and looked at Oliver with a lazy allure. When she spoke her English was perfect except for the accent which no French woman ever loses. She said,

  “Monsieur Loddon will be a great acquisition to our little society—n’est-ce pas, Philippe?”

  To which Philip in his agreeable voice,

  “I hope that will be a consolation to him.”

  “A great consolation,” said Oliver.

  He saw Mademoiselle Violette’s grey-green eyes flicker sideways between their black lashes. There was some current running strongly here. He felt the pull of it, and wondered if it was dangerous. It might be—

  Rose Anne was half way down the table. He wondered why he was to sit beside her, and what she would say to him, and he to her, under Philip’s watching eyes, and what would be the outcome of it all.

  A servant pulled back his chair and he sat down. Rose Anne’s head turned towards him. The diamond wreath glittered above her smooth, white brow and candid, innocent eyes. Her look rested on him, blankly at first and then with a faint tinge of recognition.

  “You are Oliver?”

  And Oliver said, “Yes, Rose Anne.”

  She turned with a little nod and tasted the small fanciful savoury which had been set before her. Having tasted it, she laid down her fork.

  “Do you think I need eat it? I don’t like it very much. You know, I never did like olives.”

  Oliver’s heart was wrung. She spoke like a confiding child. And she remembered that she disliked olives, but she had forgotten their love.

  He looked across the table and saw Philip Rennard and the fair-haired French girl in the two opposite places. So that was Philip’s game. Rose Anne and Oliver were to be under his microscope for an interminable hour. Not a word, not a look, not a quick-drawn breath, scarcely a beat of the pulse, but would be his to dissect, to weigh, to use.

  The plates were changed. A mulligatawny soup was served to them. Rose Anne leaned back in her chair. Across the table Philip spoke to her.

  “No soup, Rose?”

  She shook her head and said, still in that childish tone,

  “I don’t like hot things.”

  He had her plate taken away and a cup of bouillon brought instead. And there was a fuss about that, because Amos Rennard from the head of the table wanted to know why what was good enough for him wasn’t good enough for his guests. He thumped the board and made a lot of noise about it, but Rose Anne sat there pale and smiling, and when the bouillon came she sipped from it and said, “Thank you, Philip,” and left most of it in the cup.

  Mademoiselle Violette said in her sharp, high-pitched voice,

  “And if I say that I do not like the fish, what will you do for me, Philippe? Will you serve me a fish of paradise in a gold dish, mon ami?”

  Philip said without any attempt to lower his voice, “What a hope!”

  The colour stung her cheeks, burning through the rouge that was there already. She said something quickly in French on a dropped note. And Philip, as loudly as before:

  “You’ll get no more from me, my dear.”

  The drugged faces on either side of the table showed no sign. Their jaws moved as they ate. They looked at the food on their plates. It made no difference to them whether Mademoiselle Violette de Parme had her nose put out of joint or not.

  Oliver looked past them and caught Dr Spenlow’s eye. Then from beside him Rose Anne spoke, reproving Philip.

  “I think that’s rather rude,” she said. “I don’t think you ought to speak to her like that.”

  Philip let his eyes dwell on her as if they were alone. He said,

  “I’m sorry.”

  And Rose Anne:

  “You ought to say that to her, not to me.”

  He smiled, and was Prince Charming to the life.

  “I will if you want me to, Rose.”

  “Yes, please, Philip.”

  He turned at once and spoke to Mademoiselle Violette.

  “I am reproved, you see. I was unpardonably rude, but I am sure you will forgive me.”

  She had turned perfectly white with rage. The artificial colour stood ghastly on her cheek-bones. Her lips were so drawn in that the shape of the skull could be seen. Oliver was horrified and dismayed. His apology was more of an insult than the original offence, and Rose Anne had lent herself to it. He was afraid for her with all his heart, and there was nothing that he could do. The current he had felt before was carrying them all away. Philip sat there smiling.

  Violette did not speak. She stared across the table at Rose Anne with a stinging hatred in her eyes. The service of Amos Rennard’s feast went on.

  If the chef was drugged, it did not affect his skill. The Old Fox liked good food and plenty of it. He sat in his red velvet robe at the head of the table and disposed of the menu plateful by plateful. Mark appeared to be a good trencherman too, but Philip ate little, and Mademoiselle Violette nothing at all.

  Oliver turned to Rose Anne in the silence which followed Philip’s apology. Since this appeared to be the Palace of Truth, he might as well be in the mode. He touched one of her gleaming bracelets with the tip of his finger.

  “Diamonds?”

  She moved her arm. He was to remember that she must not be touched. Having moved it, she said in her gentle, distinct voice,

  “Yes.”

  “And your necklace? You used not to have any diamonds, Rose Anne.”

  “No. Philip gave them to me. They cost a great deal.”

  Oliver wondered whether Philip had paid for them, or whether he could be made to pay with a really satisfying term of penal servitude. He said,

  “I’m sure they did.”

  The necklace was a double chain of brilliants linked here and there with a diamond rose. The wreath in her hair repeated the pattern. She lifted the chain to catch the light and let it fall again.

  “They are very beautiful, but I don’t like wearing them—really.” She leaned forward and spoke to Philip, who was watching her. “Don’t you think I might take them off now?”

  “Why, Rose?”

  “Cold,” said Rose Anne. She unclasped one of the bracelets and laid it down on the white table-cloth. “Hard.” A second bracelet was laid beside the first. “Very—very—heavy.” She slipped them all off and pushed the glittering pile towards him.

  Philip Rennard’s smiling gaze rested on it for a moment, then went to her bare white arms. He said in a low, intimate tone,

  “Quite right, Rose—your arms are too beautiful to be hidden.”
r />   But she turned to Oliver.

  “Do you like that better?”

  “Much better, Rose Anne.”

  “But I like the chain round your neck,” said Philip across the table—“and the wreath in your hair. It ought to be a crown, but you shall have a crown too some day.”

  She lifted the chain over her head and laid it down. Then her hands went to the wreath.

  “Rose—” Philip’s voice had an insistent note, but the wreath was lifted from the bright hair and laid beside the chain. Rose Anne met his dark gaze with the blue innocence of her own.

  “Thank you, Philip. It was so kind of you, but they hurt.”

  Philip picked up the diamonds gravely.

  “I wouldn’t have you hurt for all the diamonds in the world. Shall I give them away?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “To Violette?”

  “If you like, Philip.”

  He dropped the glittering handful into the French girl’s lap.

  “A present from Rose,” he said in a light laughing tone.

  Oliver expected an explosion, but none came. Violette’s dreadful pallor remained unchanged as death. Her black lashes flickered up and down again. The drawn-in lips moved and said,

  “Thank you, Philippe.”

  It was at this moment that the lights went out. Through the whole hall the great arc-lamps flickered once and died. Like a curtain darkness fell. And with it something else. Oliver’s vague fear of what this hour might hold for them became an agony of terror for Rose Anne. His arm was round her before he had time for conscious thought, and his lips were at her ear.

  “Rose Anne!”

  She turned. Her lips touched his. He felt them move, and felt her draw away. Her open palm pressed hard against his shoulder, holding him off. The bright beam of an electric torch struck between them like a dividing sword. She said in a sweet, cool voice,

  “I don’t like to be touched.”

  At her last word the lights came on again. They shone down on Amos Rennard’s amazing tangle of hair and beard, on Dr Harold Spenlow surveying the scene with a sardonic eye, on Fanny flushed and frightened, on a dozen dull drugged faces, and on Philip Rennard. He had pushed back his chair and was standing. His left hand held the electric torch. With his right he had Violette de Parme by the wrist. She too had risen—perhaps she had risen first. The diamonds which he had flung her lay unregarded at her feet. The hand whose wrist he had caught held a small, sharp dagger, a mere toy for size, with a razor edge which caught the light. The torch went into his pocket, and he had her in a grip in which she could not move. The telling spins it out. In the acting it all went by in a flash as the lights came on. The girl shrieked as he twisted her wrist. The knife dropped, and he put his foot on it. He shook her with such violence that she had no more breath to scream with, and threw her back into her chair.

  “Sit there and behave yourself!”

  The knife joined the torch in his pocket. The diamonds lay where they were. The ordered service of the feast went on.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The interminable meal was over at last. If the servants were drugged they were amazingly efficient. As soon as Amos Rennard rose the table was cleared, broken into leaves and carried away. The chairs were ranged in a semicircle, curving to right and left of the Old Fox’s seat. The guests took their places.

  Rose Anne was between Philip and his father. The French girl sat in a brooding silence with Luke Simpson on one side and his wife on the other. They spoke neither to one another nor to her. Oliver found himself last but one on the left, with Dr Spenlow beyond him, and Dr Spenlow’s assistant on his other side. He said,

  “What happens next?”

  Harold Spenlow had a trick of the voice which took his words just as far as he meant them to go and no farther. He used it now.

  “Music—to soothe our savage passions.”

  “What kind of music?”

  Dr Spenlow laughed.

  “Good—bad—indifferent—and, to my mind, damnable. According to your taste. Philip has the most catholic taste—Josef Piglosiewiez for a start. He was the rage of Europe, I’m told, before Philip lifted him. The affair made some stir.”

  One end of the dais had been raised to form a stage. There was a grand piano, a screen or two, and some palms—enough to call up the illusion of a concert platform. To this stage the thin, melancholy man whom Harold Spenlow had pointed out before dinner advanced, violin in hand. A much older man with a bush of grey hair opened the grand piano and sat down to it.

  Josef Piglosiewiez lifted his violin to his shoulder. There was a chord, a murmur of accompaniment, and the faint sweet notes of a lullaby came upon the air. It was the softest, most ethereal playing, like something remembered, like something heard in a dream. When it was over, the violinist bowed as gravely and conventionally as if from the platform of Queen’s Hall. Three bows, and then a racing tarantelle, inconceivably swift, every note perfect. At the end he bowed again without a smile and came back to the chair he had left.

  “Is he drugged?” said Oliver at Dr Spenlow’s ear.

  “You don’t think he could play like that? But it doesn’t work that way. They don’t have enough to spoil them for their jobs, only enough to take the fight out of them, to keep them from kicking against the pricks. They go on doing the thing they know, and they go on doing it as well as ever, but they don’t start anything new. We’ve no revolutionary dare-devils down here, and no go-getters. Now sit back and listen to our nice tame crooner.”

  The crooner had two chins and a lot of hair, and fat white fingers which were marvellously agile upon the keys. He sang in a meltingly effeminate voice:

  “Lost—a heart as good as new,

  Lost the moment I saw you—”

  Oliver turned and looked at Rose Anne. It had been that way with him. He had seen her, and he had loved her once for all. But it had been that way with Philip Rennard too—and what was to happen to her between them?

  “Finders keepers—losers weepers,” wailed the crooner with dismal appropriateness.

  Amos Rennard broke into a hearty, coarse guffaw and slapped his knee. Oliver could not hear what he said, but he could guess it well enough. He turned away sick with hopeless rage, and heard the song go on:

  “Lost—two lips that look like mine,

  Found—two lips that are divine.

  I lost my heart, but I was lucky too,

  Because I lost my heart—to you.”

  One of the women sang after that, an old-fashioned sentimental ballad of the Just a Song at Twilight type with a super-sugary tune. The voice was pretty, the words, the tune, the sentiment all as pretty as could be. Amos Rennard enjoyed it thoroughly. He beat time, he wagged his beard to it, he hummed the refrain.

  Followed a jazz pianist who exhibited the most remarkable gymnastic feats and slammed, banged, thumped and bumped his way through a lively collection of the latest dance hits.

  There was a little hitch after that. It appeared that Mademoiselle Violette was to dance, and that she refused, not in so many words but in a pose of sulky languor, head against the back of her tall chair, hands laid open in her lap, feet passively resistant.

  Philip got up, went over to her, offered his arm. She looked at her reddened finger-tips. He bent and spoke to her. She slapped his face. It was over in a flash. He straightened himself.

  Amos roared with laughter, and Mademoiselle Violette sprang to her feet, blew a kiss to the audience, and ran up on to the stage, where the pianist sat staring.

  Her dance was an amazing thing, spirited, vicious, alluring. Oliver could well imagine that Paris had mourned for her. She had a daring technique and a wild, wilful grace. He guessed her to be at the top of her form. He said to Harold Spenlow, “You’re not going to tell me that girl’s drugged,” and got a shake of the head.

  “Not much! Philip wouldn’t get any kick out of it if she were. It amuses him to go around striking matches in a powder-magazine, but if the powder
was wet, there would be no fun about it. He likes to get a kick out of things.”

  Philip Rennard stood watching the dance with the red mark of the dancer’s hand across his cheek. He leaned on the back of Rose Anne’s chair, and sometimes he bent down and spoke to her, but only she could hear what he said. Whatever it was, it did not move her from her gentle silence or change the faint smile about her lips.

  Violette de Parme flung back her fair hair and bowed.

  “Why do you not all dance?” she cried in a shrill, ringing voice. “Why watch me? Why not dance yourselves and get your blood to run again, and your feet to move again, and your hearts—perhaps—to beat again?”

  She ran down from the platform, smiling, animated.

  “Well, Philippe, what do you say? Did I dance well? Let us see if anyone can dance better. You shall have Miss Carew for a partner and I will have Captain Loddon, and we will see who dances the best. Jacques shall play, and we shall dance—Oh, all of us, for this once—even your Reverend Luke, and the Mrs Reverend Luke, and the scientific Dr Spenlow, and the serious Monsieur Ernie. Let them all be a little mad for once, and dance, and forget that when the dance is over there are no streets outside, no lights, no taxis, no gay world waiting to applaud!” She had dropped her voice, and only Philip heard the end. Rose Anne might have heard it too, but if she did she made no sign.