by Rufus King
“Must we,” Alan asked with a sickly grin, “keep harping on such cheery notes as suicide and death, Godfrey, old man?”
“I do not harp. I state ah unequivocal fact.”
“What color would you do Mr. Swain in, Godfrey?” Cordelia asked.
“Puce. Against pink moneybags floating on wings of steel.”
“You’re lucky, sir,” Barry said to Stuyvesant. “Mr. Lance is contemplating immortalizing Lida as a head of lettuce.”
“Christine,” Stuyvesant said, “again good-by.”
Barry stood up and joined him. “You have to pass the inn, sir. Will you give me a lift? We left the car there after that equine tea.”
“With pleasure, Mr. Vanbuskirk.”
“See you tomorrow,” Barry said to Lida. He looked around the moribund room and shuddered. “I hope.”
“I’m going to see you off.”
“Thank you for coming out, Stuyvesant,” Christine said as she and Alan walked with him toward the door.
“It was my duty.” Stuyvesant gave Alan a good, sound glare. “It will always be my duty to guard your interests, Christine. For poor Charley’s sake.”
Cordelia stood up. She gazed fondly after Barry and Lida as they followed Christine and Alan and Stuyvesant out of the room. She said: “I love young love.”
“Its effect on me,” Hugo said, “is comparable to an incurable attack of mal de mer.”
“Hugo,” Godfrey boomed, “you should give up eating tomatoes. Your system is full of acid. I knew a man in Paris who switched to alligator pears and became a positive optimist.”
Cordelia was busy with her skirt, which was cut rather full and of a lovely lilac-colored velvet. She reached a dimpled hand among its folds and, from one of its numerous inner pockets, took out a necklace of aquamarines. She looked at it and thought of Lida. Too gloomy. She returned the necklace and, selecting another pocket, took out a diamond clip.
“Would it occur to you,” Hugo was saying to Godfrey, “that our young squirt has the wind up pretty badly?”
“He has been knocked flat by the news of Christine’s annuity. I have no doubt but that he would eagerly have broken her neck, and now he must shelter her against the faintest pricking of a pin.”
“And still I wonder.”
“We must all be so careful of her now,” Cordelia said. “We must be doubly kind.” Her sweet eyes clouded. “Oh dear, I do hope the marriage won’t make any difference. Alan does seem so restless. You don’t suppose there will be a change? That our welcome—”
“Our welcome,” Hugo stated flatly, “will remain good for the precise duration of the servant shortage.”
Godfrey said, “To an extent you are right. We are safe as long as Christine remains here at Belder Tor. Her knowledge of cuisine does not remotely approach the purlieus of a boiled egg. Without me, she would starve.”
Cordelia felt better. “And she never could make a bed. Or take care of the plumbing, Hugo, or drive a car. Dear Christine, she needs us so.”
“A damn good thing for us that she does.”
“I give you this,” Godfrey boomed. “What if that conceited young ass—that parasitical, Westphalian crocodile—should persuade Christine to close Belder Tor and travel?”
“Nowadays?” Hugo asked. “Travel where?”
“What does it matter where? Anywhere away from this cenotaph to a bourgeois pork packer’s misconception of a castle on the Rhine.” Godfrey turned to Cordelia. “Christine’s first husband was a pork packer?”
“No Godfrey. Charles Belder was an engineer. Civil, I imagine.”
“No matter. If I were not chained here as an economic slave, I would flee this monstrosity as the plague.”
“Oh dear, I wouldn’t. I do so hope you’re wrong, Godfrey. Without Christine and Belder Tor, what would we do?”
“Die,” said Hugo.
Christine came back with Alan and Lida. Christine was saying to Lida: “Barry is delightful. Later we must discuss a trousseau and a thousand things.”
“I have everything I need, Aunt Christine.”
“Undoubtedly. It’s the things one doesn’t need that are important.”
“For you, dear,” Cordelia said, going to Lida and handing her the diamond clip.
Lida was mildly stunned. “It’s beautiful, Miss Banning. But why?”
“Because you remind me of my cousin Janette before she married that impossible man from Troy.”
Alan said to Lida: “Cordelia is a unique phenomenon, in that she is a walking Christmas tree.”
“A self-replenishing one, I might add,” Hugo said.
“But this is much too expensive—too nice, Miss Banning,” Lida said.
“My dear, it is the least I can do. Think of it as a little wedding gift.”
“Lida,” Christine said abruptly, “I have decided that any justice-of-the-peace business is absurd. There will be a very simple and informal ceremony here. Yes, the more I think it over—there’s that minister at the Notch and the woman who sells eggs and sings—Godfrey can take care of the cake—the wedding march—” Christine looked speculatively at the clavichord. “I wonder whether the clavichord is in tune? I haven’t played it for centuries.” Definitely, Alan thought, my head is going to split. This puny chatter which rippled in wavelets of inconsequential tinsel across the mortal deep of his sable problem did its best, having entered one handsome ear, to go out the other, but most of it would stick, further stuffing his unusually crowded brain.
Clavichord? Wasn’t that what the old crocodilian masterpiece had just said? It must have been, for she was moving toward the instrument with that walk of hers which was a combination of the determined aristocrat expertly coursing over knowledgeable seas and a vitality of spring outrageously lacking in a decent proportion to her years. And Joe—Joe had been interested—Joe had looked at the clavichord for an appreciable moment while storing it in his horrible mind as a possible murder instrument among the horrendous list compiled for the fog-like Dove.
How utterly absurd. But if so, Alan wondered, why am I sweating like a rain-drenched horse? He did his best to conceal the alarums which seemed to be screaming inside of him, and almost succeeded in smiling charmingly. Christine had reached the clavichord by now.
“Isn’t it bad luck, darling?” Alan said.
“What, Alan?”
“To play the wedding march before the ceremony?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Nor anybody else,” Hugo said.
Christine went behind the instrument and sat down on the stool. Her back was very close to the wall.
“I simply want to find out whether it’s in tune.”
Lida went over and joined her.
“I’ve never heard a clavichord. Is it much different from a piano?”
“It is like striking the keys with mallets,” Godfrey boomed. “And the tone is that of an intelligent dishpan.”
Christine rippled a few chords in the treble register.
“You do have to hit the keys rather hard.”
Alan’s torture receded in a surge of relief. Just what diabolical confection he had been expecting he did not know. Something, fantastically, along the line of a violent explosion. But no. The Dove, according to Joe’s advance press-agenting, was too subtle for anything as obvious as that. Poison? A poisoned pin point cleverly cemented on the ivory of a selected key? (“He knows more about drugs and poisons than most of the pill-pushers in the country,” Joe had said.) The surge of relief fled, leaving in its sorry wake a tideless beach of insufferable poverty to mock Alan’s haggard eyes.
“Darling, it is perfectly in tune.” He furtively wiped his brow and added with fervor: “Perfectly!”
Christine tried a few more chords in the treble.
“The upper register is all right.”
So far, Alan realized with a desperate snatch at the thought’s tepid comfort, she hasn’t winced. He watched her fingers in an agony of frustration as they moved t
o the center of the keyboard. Antidotes? But what was their use unless you knew the specific poison which had been introduced? Christine was tentative with a deeper chord, and still there was no wince.
But wait.
What had it been? On the fringe of Alan’s vision something had moved. It had moved in response to the chord’s fuller, more vibrant note. His eye shot upward along the wall to the heavy plaque (so conveniently hung directly above Christine’s invaluable head) with its mounted wild boar’s head and the dreadful, pointed tusks. More fearful even than a sword of Damocles, the potential murder weapon was in patient suspension. After one tremulous move?
His rich, red blood turned to water. What best to do? Snatch her swiftly, with the full strength of his magnificent arms, from the fatal stool? She would think him mad. All of them would—or, what was worse, some prescience might come to one of them which would betray, as a result of his inexplicable gesture, the unkind complicity of his secret guilt. As a convict about to be finitely juiced, Alan heard the reprieve of Lida’s fresh young voice saying: “Do let me try it. May I?”
Christine stood up.
“It sounds something like one of those Russian things.”
“Play their boat song, Lida,” Cordelia suggested placidly. “One of Papa’s dearest friends was a basso. So triste!”
Torture tightened its vicious clamp. Through an iced glaze of impotent inertia Alan saw the shift get under way. Could he—could he sacrifice this harmless young creature in the pristine bloom of love, of life itself, on the altar of his own so important and so urgent future? The question trembled and then died in its academic stage.
Then Christine paused.
The shift was still incomplete. The stool between them still empty. Christine struck a strong, harsh chord in the bass. The boar’s head fell and shattered the fragile stool with a resounding crash.
And Alan screamed.
CHAPTER VIII
It was Hugo alone among them who noted Alan’s scream and filed it away for further thought. The others had lost it in the general melee of their own shocked reactions.
The wretched scream had barely died on Alan’s lips when he replaced it with a shout of: “Christine—are you all right? Did it touch you?” He ran to her.
“Yes—quite all right—Lida?”
Alan brushed any consequences to Lida aside and all but clung, in a restrained, hovering fashion, to Christine, whom he was convinced nothing but a miracle had preserved. He was obscurely conscious of Lida’s: “No, it never touched me,” and of Cordelia’s placid comment that it must have weighed a ton.
“Odd,” Hugo was saying, “that after all these years it should have chosen this evening—”
Hugo left the acid implication floating lightly in air, and Godfrey said: “Choose? How could a stuffed symbol of the overprivileged classes such as that thing choose?”
“You are sure you are all right, darling?” Alan implored.
“Perfectly, Alan—a little shaken—”
Lida was somewhat aghast. “Aunt Christine—if I hadn’t asked you to let me play—”
“Miss Belder,” Godfrey boomed, “you are right. Christine would have been impaled by that fetid object’s horns through her head.”
And Hugo said: “Quite so.”
Cordelia put her arm tenderly around Christine. “Come, dear, do sit down. Let me get you something.” She led Christine to the nearest chair, which was the little one in front of the spinet desk, and Christine sat down.
“I shall appreciate a lot better after this any news story about an avalanche,” Christine said. “If you don’t mind, Cordelia—I do think some Prunelle—”
“Of course, dear.”
Cordelia went to the cellaret and took a cordial glass. She decided it was much too small for the emergency and selected a tumbler instead. She filled it with Prunelle.
A touch of nimbleness was returning to Alan’s wits. He knelt by the wreckage and examined the back of the plaque, the strong wire which had held it to its supporting hook. He heard Hugo say to him: “Well?”
“The wire was worn through, Hugo.” (Yes, it could have been simply that. A curious coincidence in a million that after all the years it had been hanging there—but—His fingers were suddenly careful and concealing over a slender little length of wire that seemed foreign to the others.) “It snapped.”
“Well, well!”
“Hugo,” Christine said, “take that thing out and bury it somewhere, will you? I never could understand why Charley ever shot it in the first place.”
“Certainly, Christine.”
Hugo took the boar’s head and left the room, while Alan stood slowly up and, after another glance at it which explained nothing and did him no good, slipped the odd little length of wire into his jacket pocket. Had it been a murder trap? Was the Dove already in the house and the tusked boar’s falling a true result of his highly perfected technique in the arts of death? Alan’s head began to swim again.
What was Cordelia saying?
“The Prunelle, dear,” Cordelia was saying, and handing the tumbler to Christine.
No. This was too much. Alan clutched at reason and completely missed. Prunelle, too, had been on the list. He heard his normally enchanting voice choke out: “Prunelle! Darling—wouldn’t brandy—” But Christine had already swallowed some of the dubious stuff.
“You know I loathe brandy, Alan.” Christine put the tumbler on the desk. It was still over half full. “There’s enough in this to stock a camel.”
He stood looking at her with rapt fascination, waiting for the usual manifestations. What were they? Turn cerise? White? A groan, or a shriek, or a collapse? With strychnine, of course, she would form a hoop. He pulled himself together, brushing the odd picture aside. He was kaleidoscopically aware that Hugo had rejoined them. Alan forced himself to walk normally to Christine’s side and say with tender concern: “Darling, why not lie down and rest?”
Christine stood up.
“I think I will. Later we shall have some bridge.”
“Lean on me, dear.”
“Oh, really, Alan!”
“Why don’t you go right to bed, Aunt Christine?” Lida said.
“Bed? My dear child, it is barely half-past nine, and I am chained to the habit of making at least one grand slam a night.”
Christine started for the door to her suite, with Alan hovering at her elbow.
“Your grandaunt’s bridge, Miss Belder,” Hugo said, “is based on an effective little system originally cooked up by Captain Kidd.”
Christine gave him a wicked smile. “Dear Hugo! Simply a quinine pill in reverse. The sugar is on the inside. I shall rejoin you, Lida, in an hour—carrying my letters of marque.”
“I will go in and stay with you,” Alan said.
Christine looked at him in amazement.
“My dear Alan, why?”
“I just want to, Christine. We could have a game of double Canfield.”
Christine said to Lida that he loathed it, that usually he had to be bribed even to cut the cards. She assured Alan that she really did want to rest. She left, almost, in fact quite actually, closing the door in Alan’s face.
He remained standing before it, leaving his back to the others (wasn’t it Sarah Bernhardt who had once played a scene in such fashion?) while seeking, like a swimmer who has plunged too deep, to raise himself to the placid surface and the sun. He clutched, as he had always clutched when in the grip of an emotional crisis, at some accomplished role which would serve both as a precedent and a pattern for immediate behavior. Robert Montgomery? In Night Must Fall?
Yes, that was it: the smiling, boyish, trustworthy face of murder. Had Montgomery, during his hours of dread purpose, felt alone? As Alan felt alone. He caught the sardonic cynicism in Hugo’s voice as Hugo said to him: “The solicitous, in fact the complete husband. You reminded me of an anxious destroyer on convoy duty.” Alan turned, already boyishly trustworthy and perturbed, with a thin, fine plating of
truculent manliness over it all.
“I am worried about her.”
“Well, aren’t we all?” Hugo’s smile became insultingly cynical as he added: “Now?”
Cordelia began gathering the coffee cups and arranging them on the Sheffield tray, and Godfrey said gloomily to Lida: “Shall I tell you what Christine really left us for?”
“If you wish. I can understand her being very tired and nervously shocked.”
“That is nonsense. Neither that boar’s head falling nor the day in town could affect her nerves, which are of steel. It is dishes.”
“Dishes?”
“And pots and pans. It keeps up the agreeable fiction that they are washed by magic.”
“Godfrey and I,” Cordelia said, “will have done them by the time dear Christine returns from her after-dinner rest. We always do.”
“But you must let me help.”
“No, dear, thank you. Godfrey and I are thoroughly accustomed to doing them, and it makes us feel happy—as though we were repaying in some little way Christine’s great kindness to us.”
“Cordelia,” Godfrey said, “you will speak for yourself.”
The magic of the role was working, and Alan, as secure within it as within some private tower, was in full sweep as the agreeable host. He stood beside the cellaret with his handsomely tanned fingers poised over bottles.
“Will you have some kirsch, Miss Belder?” (Should he call her Lida? After all, the competent and smooth young article, with her steady blue-green eyes, was, by marriage, his grandniece too. A beautiful flash from heaven struck him. She couldn’t be Christine’s heiress, because the annuity left the old witch nothing to leave. But hadn’t he heard—surely he had heard that Lida was wealthy in her own right? The Boston obstacle, Vanbuskirk? Alan smiled.) “There are also,” he went on charmingly, “Curasao, benedictine, cognac, or a dozen other cordials if you prefer.”
“I think a little kirsch, please, Mr. Admont. I’ve never tried it.”
Alan’s hovering fingers lifted the bottle of kirsch. Godfrey said: “It is made of peach pits.”
“The same,” Cordelia added placidly, “as prussic acid.” With a galvanic shock the bottle of kirsch slipped from Alan’s (again) palsied fingers and into the ice bucket. He managed to retrieve it. He thought: Good God, in another instant I’ll be confessing like a fool. He searched for something immediate on which to pin his present and recent visible fits of alarm. He continued to search as Hugo said: “Is this sudden, and I might add remarkable, worry about Christine a general one, Alan? Or can you segregate it?”
