Well, if it was so, so it was, and there was an end of it. That cramping bodice and those bolstered sleeves would serve as well as anything else for their next encounter. Off with the black, then, and on with them! She was far too late already.
Twenty minutes later there issued from her room a living Lady Jane, with the hues of the coursing blood in her cheeks and the glint of life on her brows. In one hand she carried the morsel of a handkerchief; in the other the torch.
But with her hand on the closing door she paused. The glow of the firelight lay on the disorder of garments within. She was oddly conscious of parting from them, of going out into some strange world strangely attired. Her eyes rested lingeringly on those usual clothes. Should she close the door or leave it open?
She took a couple of paces away.
But suddenly she turned again and re-entered the room. From the inside of the door she took the key and reinserted it on the outside. The sound of the closing door echoed along the corridor. She turned the key, tucked it somewhere in her waist, and sought the others.
9
All in the house was quiet; but that was of the essence of the escap-ade – to steal noiselessly upon one another and suddenly to startle the air with a spoken name. Gervaise could imagine Pamela’s shriek should she happen to be stolen upon and named after such a fashion. But the chances were that by this time they were all at the other side of the house. The passages along which Gervaise moved showed only an occasional lamp burning, and those clerestory windows dim grey in the wall. They would have to grope to find one another here. But away over there, with the moonlight flooding the chambers, it would be flashing indeed, strange, and a little heart-quickening. To imagine yourself alone and yet to know that you might not be alone – to pause with an arrested gesture almost as if you feared your own presence – and then, perhaps, as children leap out of their ambushes, to see one of them, startlingly attired, spring forward with outspread arms into that torrent of moonlight, calling aloud a name . . . that was the game they played that July night in that Abbey upon its rounded hill.
It had been arranged that no door found open was to be closed again; and, by those she had unlocked half an hour ago, Gervaise set out over the same ground once more. But no gleam of electric torch accompanied her now. The torch was hidden in her hand. She knew the Abbey’s windings as well by night as by day, as well asleep as awake. Only once she thought she heard a rustle. With her fingers still closed over the torch she pressed the button. Her hand became a little pink fairy, hovering all by itself in the darkness. The rustle turned out to be nothing. She released the button, and the fairy vanished.
She reached the corner chamber from which she had first seen the moon, but already its aspect had changed. That bulging orange ball was now a mere round of brilliance with even its volcano-scape hardly discernible. It changed the colour of things, greened the tinsel of Gervaise’s garments, turned the reds and browns of bodice and stuffed sleeves to black; and her face within the dormer-shaped structure of linen was lost to the bridge of her nose in shadow. And, forgetting all about the game, she thought again of the lovely place, so proudly awaiting its end. She supposed somebody would buy it, some preposterously rich person or some public body; but how little of it their money would buy! Hardly the mere stones of it, for the busy brains of the wilful hearts of her race were the very mortar in which they were set! Hardly a yard of its ground or an oak of its hill, for an older allegiance would remain in the air, the very winds whisper their loyalty to the exiled stock! Probably it would be turned into a hospital or a hydro. It didn’t matter. Gervaise would not be there to see.
Musing, she had left the moonlit rooms behind her and was approaching the ballroom again. All was still strangely quiet, and she stopped, wondering whether it would not be best to go back to the starting-point yet again.
But even as she stood irresolute, their nocturnal adventure took a swift stride forward. Recently – within a few minutes at most – somebody had passed that way smoking a Turkish cigarette.
Gervaise could have given no reason for knowing that that cigarette was Freddy Lampeter’s. Other men in the house smoked Turkish cigarettes, not to mention the girls. She merely knew that this cigarette was Freddy’s. She knew it all in a moment, just as certainly as she knew something else, namely, that Pamela was with him. Indeed the wonder was, not that she knew it, but that she had not known it sooner. Now that she came to think of it, he had hardly been parted from Pamela the whole afternoon. He had watched her in those fits of laughter at teatime; he had sat next to her at dinner; it had been his shoulder on which she had leaned to tie the ribbon of her slipper. How Freddy would be dressed Gervaise did not know. Probably he would have cast something casually over his evening clothes, a pierrot’s voluminous garment, say, or the traditional Mephistopheles cloak and hood. Pamela, Gervaise remembered, was to have been a paysanne of sorts, with a short, striped petticoat over her bare legs and a gaudy scarf clipping her buttercup head and depending in streamers below.
None of them knew of the impulse that had led Gervaise herself to dress as the Lady Jane.
Ahead of her stretched the dim perspective of the ballroom; but between her and it lay two ante-chambers. It was in the doorway of the first and larger of these that Gervaise stood. The smaller one, that immediately preceding the ballroom, was only smaller by reason of a comparatively modern alteration. Somebody, Gervaise’s father or grandfather probably, had had the idea of turning it into a buffet or service-room for occasions on which the ballroom was used, and, as the domestic offices lay immediately below, this had been no great task. The panelled wall had been moved some three or four feet forward, the floor behind it had been cut through and a wooden staircase had been fitted in. To this stairhead one of the panels, now a door, gave access. The apartment had no furniture except a heavy Jacobean table.
Well, if in a game that depended on vigilance and stealth, Freddy Lampeter chose to leave a breast-high scent of Turkish tobacco behind him, that was his look-out. Keeping away from the middle line of the doors, Gervaise furtively advanced. She crossed the first of the two rooms, which was empty. Empty, too, was the smaller room, with the Jacobean table in it. But from the ballroom itself there came a subdued murmur, and Gervaise peeped cautiously round the upright of the door.
They stood midway down the room, under one of the glimmering chandeliers, and the sounds Gervaise had heard had been his half-vouchsafed tones, and something sudden and as suddenly checked from Pamela.
And Gervaise had guessed his dress rightly. He was wearing the garb you will find in any costumier’s wardrobe though there be but a couple there. The close-fitting hood of a Mephistopheles enclosed his small head, and the long crimson cape draped the spare spread of his shoulders and fell to his heels.
But what Pamela wore could not be seen. She was completely enfolded in his cloak, strained to his breast. Her small mask was all that was visible of her. It resembled the petal of some other flower, windlodged in the heart of a dark poppy.
So he had not been able to refrain, even from poor weak-headed little Pamela!
It was like him, too, to have chosen his position skilfully, as it were with an eye for the surrounding country. From whichever end of the gallery they might be spied there was escape in the other direction. True they could be seen, but fourteen or fifteen yards away, and not a word of their murmuring would be distinguishable. Gervaise, as a matter of fact, saw them twice over – once directly, and once in one of the mirrors before which she herself had stood that afternoon. She saw his head bend closer over Pamela’s.
But those who see in a mirror can also be seen in a mirror. Suddenly a clear shrill shriek seemed to find the very note of the chandelier overhead. With no more volition than if she had been asleep, Gervaise had moved away from the upright of the door, and now stood flamed in the ballroom entrance – the Lady Jane herself stepped down f
rom the picture-gallery wall, and as motionless as she.
But the shriek was quenched almost before the chandelier had ceased to ring. His arms within the cloak had made a swift gathering movement, and the folds of the poppy closed completely over the alien petal. He was looking straight at Gervaise. He feared nothing. But Pamela was not to be allowed to see.
Prompt and admirable as ever (Gervaise reflected bitterly) – trust him! Even with that foolish little heart beating against his own he could still act instantaneously! Ghosts of the Lady Jane for him? It took more than a woman in a tableau-costume to shake those nerves! He was smiling the fixed smile of the scar within the oval of the crimson casque. And Gervaise scornfully waited for him to speak, disclose himself; acknowledge that he was out of the game.
But he did no such thing. Not only was he smiling that immov-able smile; he was coming towards her, with Pamela, still unseen and unseeing, shepherded along blindfold in the cloak. He was within a few yards of her, nearer, coming on without a falter –
All at once terror took Gervaise. No ghost could have been more affrighting than that steady, silent, smiling oncoming. There was only one bolt-hole – the service-stairs –
The dim, empty vista of the rooms showed again through the doorway where the Lady Jane had stood.
She did not know how her fingers found the catch of the door-panel. She could not stop to pick up the torch that fell from her hand and rolled against the Jacobean table. She closed the door again behind her. She shivered at the dark stair-head, with only the partition of oak between herself and them.
What would he do next? Be sure he would do something! He, too, knew of that little recess in which she crouched. He had only to pick up the torch she had dropped, fling open the panel, blaze the light into her face –
She waited, unable to move.
Then from the other side of the panel came Pamela’s scarcely-heard quaver.
‘Oh! Oh! Take me where it’s light!’
Gervaise did not hear his soft laugh, but she could guess at it.
‘It was – it was one of them, wasn’t it?’ came Pamela’s piteous voice again.
Then his quiet, undisturbed tones – ‘What? Who?’
‘When you covered my face up – in the glass –’
‘I don’t know what you mean. Whatever made you shriek like that?’
‘Oh, oh – ’ Pamela sobbed.
Then, after an interval of time of which Gervaise took no account, and quietened by heaven knew what consolation, the sobbing grew gradually less and less.
Open the door, he? He had found a more damnable way!
And suddenly there came from Pamela a sharp, ‘No, Freddy – no, no –’
The rest might just as well have been shouted.
‘But you promised –’
‘No, no – that was this afternoon –’
Gervaise heard his smothered, masterful laugh. ‘A bit late to change your mind now, isn’t it?’
The next thing that Gervaise knew was that she was leaning against the door at the bottom of the stairway, where the arch gave on the courtyard.
10
The pressure in her lungs gave her pain, as if she breathed only with the last cells of them. And as with her lungs, so with the rest of her. Emotions and sensations (but not yet thoughts) rushed upon her and mobbed her. Before one could be identified the next had swallowed it up.
What had happened? Where was everybody? Why (for the irrelevant things jostled with the relevant), why hadn’t the servants locked this lower door? Why was she dressed in those clothes? Hadn’t she been carrying a torch? What had she done with the key of her sitting-room?
‘Oh, not all at once – one at a time, one at a time!’ she wanted to cry, but could not because of the painful breath.
Then with so deep an expiration was she rid of its excess that but for the support of the archway she must have fallen.
Ah! that was better!
By and by it began to come back in images less disordered. It began with that trace of Turkish tobacco that she had known to be his. From that starting-point the rest fell into proper sequence. She saw them again under the crystal shower of the chandelier. She saw Pamela’s weak upturned little mask. He had seemed to hold it as some conjurer or ventriloquist might have held a property-mask, he the wizard, she the puppet, to play her part in the little illusion and then back with Blanche and the others into the trick-box again. ‘What is the matter with darling Pam?’ Lady Harow had asked that afternoon. Well might she ask! Ask him what was the matter with her! He had had all the afternoon in which to perfect himself in it, and should know!
And presto! Even as Gervaise had watched, with a pass of his clever fingers the mask had vanished, and the prestidigitateur had advanced, with mocking eyes steadily fixed on her own.
Yet why had she not stood her ground? Why had she stood, dumb, and rooted there when she might have sprung forward and claimed the forfeit?
Had she been the guilty one, he the innocent?
She seemed to hear Pamela’s voice again – ‘No, no, Freddy, that was this afternoon’ – and then his soft masterful laugh –
They were still up there, with her torch lying on the floor to show where she had passed –
Gervaise stumbled out of the arch, out into the open court. Wildly she looked about her. Across the court, under a moon-gilded chimney-stack, was the latticed window of her own ground-floor sitting-room. She must escape quickly. She must lock herself up, be alone with herself.
She ran into the house.
But one other thing she had forgotten. Her sitting-room door was locked, and the key that she drew from the stiff-busked waist of the tableau-dress was that of her bedroom door. As if in some way he had been to blame for this mischance, the thought of him swept over her again.
Oh, devilish, devilish! Yes, doubly devilish, for surely a devil ought not to disguise himself as a devil! As an angel of light if you like; one allows a devil that; but to disguise himself merely as what he was!
Devilish too would be the skill with which he would presently be setting himself right with Gervaise. She could almost hear the low privy words in advance, for her ear only, as if she and he understood and the others were a mere spectacle.
‘Poor Pam! Jumpy little thing! Of course I saw in a moment who it was. Pity you couldn’t see yourself as you stood in the doorway there – really awfully effective – I confess you startled me for a second or so. But I had a feeling it might upset her. So I just covered her face up. I found that red rig of mine in one of the cupboards. What I don’t understand is your bolting like that!’
And again (oh, you couldn’t say that Gervaise did not understand her Freddy!): ‘I suppose you dodged down those back-stairs? I nearly opened the door, but thought perhaps better not. That would have scared her worse than ever. And I say, Gervaise – I don’t think I’d say anything to her if I were you – she thinks it was all her fancy – best let well alone, don’t you think?’
A soft ‘Oh!’ broke from Gervaise as she struck at the air with one lace-cuffed fist.
In order to get to her bedroom she must cross the hall again. She found it empty, but lighted; evidently her mother and Sir Walter had gone to bed. But the half-completed puzzle still stood where they had left it in its tray before the hearth, where the logs streamed up the chimney in amethyst flames. Gervaise stopped suddenly in her flight.
Whole again, was he, and lord over her once more? Ah, no! Not so! She would see to that!
The lace-cuffed fist descended in the middle of the puzzle. The fretwork fountain leaped into the air and fell again in a hundred fragments. She plunged her hands among the wooden jigs, scattered them, crushed them together, drove them this way and that.
And now a double handful into the heart of the amethyst there!
See them spit and flame and crackle!
That was the place for devils!
For a moment she watched the yellow flare that lighted the farthest corners of the hall. Then, with a stifled cry she ran upstairs.
11
‘Gervaise! Gervaise!’ they called to her as she sped past them. Their game was over, and they were trooping down the staircase again, a motley rabble of squires in beaver hats, men in Dutch trousers, Philip in something frilly and satiny and green, girls in silver bells and cockle-shells, girls in velvet gowns.
‘It was Gervaise, wasn’t it?’
‘Wherever can she have been all this time?’
‘And what’s become of Freddy and Pam?’
A bright-eyed girl put her finger to her lips and made her eyes brighter still. They laughed. Hilda was only seventeen, the youngest of the party.
‘But what was Gervaise supposed to be?’ somebody else interposed.
‘I know! Don’t you remember those tableaux, Philip, when she got herself up as one of the pictures?’
‘Yes. The Lady Jane.’
‘Then she was going to frighten us, all on her own! Brrr! I shall creep into your bed, Evelyn!’
‘Shall you, indeed!’ said Evelyn with a toss, and there was another laugh.
They made merry, discussed their escapade, told who had found. Men in beavers, men in turbans and sashes, got themselves whiskey-and-soda. Then, ‘Bedtime – off you go,’ they ordered the girls, and silver bells and cockleshells took their candles, waved good-nights, and moved off chattering upstairs. The men gathered about the table of glasses and syphons and cigarettes, helping themselves to nightcaps.
‘Hallo, what’s been happening here?’ one of them suddenly asked.
It was what remained of Lady Harow’s puzzle.
The Dead of Night Page 20
