‘Well, that’s my sister,’ said Mrs Lancey, in a low voice. ‘What do you think of her, now you’ve spoken to her?’
Philip Trent, newly arrived from England, stood by his hostess within the loggia of a villa looking out upon a prospect of such loveliness as has enchanted and enslaved the northern mind from age to age. It was a country that looked good and gracious for men to live in. Not far below them lay the broad, still surface of a great lake, blue as the sky; beyond it, low mountains rose up from the distant shore, tilled and wooded to the summit, drinking the light and warmth, visibly storing up earthly energy, with little villages of white and red scattered about their slopes – like children clustered round their mothers’ knees. Before the villa lay a long paved terrace, and by the balustrade of it, from which a stone could be dropped into the clear water, a woman stood looking out over the lake and conversing with a tall, grey-haired man.
‘Ten minutes is rather a short acquaintance,’ Trent replied. ‘Besides, I was attending rather more to her companion. Mynheer Scheffer is the first Dutchman I have met on social terms. One thing about Lady Bosworth is clear to me, though. She is the most beautiful thing in sight, which is saying a good deal. And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot.’
Mrs Lancey laughed.
‘But I want you to take a personal interest in her, Philip; it means nothing, I know, when you talk like that. I care a great deal about Isabel, she is far more to me than any other woman. That’s rather rare between sisters, I believe; but when it happens it is a great thing. And it makes me wretched to know that there’s something wrong with her.’
‘With her health, do you mean? One wouldn’t think so.’
‘Yes, but I fear it is that.’
‘Is it possible?’ said Trent. ‘Why, Edith, the woman has the complexion of a child and the step of a racehorse and eyes like jewels. She looks like Atalanta in blue linen.’
‘Did Atalanta marry an Egyptian mummy?’ inquired Mrs Lancey.
‘Not by any means – priests of Cybele bear witness!’
‘Well, Isabel did, unfortunately.’
‘It is true,’ said Trent, thoughtfully, ‘that Sir Peregrine looks rather as if he had been dug up somewhere. But I think he owes much of his professional success to that. People like a great doctor to look more or less unhealthy.’
‘Perhaps they do; but I don’t think the doctor’s wife enjoys it very much. Isabel is always happiest when away from him – if he were here now she would be quite different from what you see. You know, Philip, their marriage hasn’t been a success – I always knew it wouldn’t be. It’s lasted five years now, and there are no children. Peregrine never goes about with her; he is one of the busiest men in London – you see what I mean.’
Trent shrugged his shoulders.
‘Let us drop the subject, Edith. Tell me why you want me to know about Lady Bosworth having something the matter with her. I’m not a physician.’
‘No, but there’s something very puzzling about it, as you will see; and you are clever at getting at the truth about things other people don’t understand. Now, I’ll tell you no more. I only want you to observe Bella particularly at dinner this evening, and tell me afterwards what you think. You’ll be sitting opposite to her, between me and Agatha Stone. Now go and talk to her and the Dutchman.’
‘Scheffer’s appearance interests me,’ remarked Trent.
‘He has a face curiously like Frederick the Great’s, and yet there’s a difference – he doesn’t look quite as if his soul were lost for ever and ever.’
‘Well, go and ask him about it,’ suggested Mrs Lancey. ‘I have things to do in the house.’
When the party of seven sat down to dinner that evening, Lady Bosworth had just descended from her room. Trent perceived no change in her; she talked enthusiastically of the loveliness of the Italian evening, and joined in a conversation that was general and lively. It was only after some ten minutes that she fell silent, and that a new look came over her face.
Little by little all animation departed from it. Her eyes grew heavy and dull, her red lips were parted in a foolish smile, and to the high, fresh tint of her cheek there succeeded a disagreeable pallor. There was nothing about this altered appearance in itself that could be called odious. Had she been always so, one would have set her down merely as a beautiful and stupid woman of lymphatic type. But there was something inexpressibly repugnant about such a change in such a being; it was as though the vivid soul had been withdrawn.
All charm, all personal force had departed. It needed an effort to recall her quaint, vivacious talk of an hour ago, now that she sat looking vaguely at the table before her, and uttering occasionally a blank monosyllable in reply to the discourse that Mr Scheffer poured into her ear. She helped herself from the dishes handed to her; some she refused; she made a fairly good dinner in a lifeless way. It was not, Trent told himself, that anything abnormal was done. It was the staring fact that Lady Bosworth was not herself, but someone wholly of another kind, that opened a new and unknown spring of revulsion in the recesses of his heart.
Mrs Stone, with whom he had been talking uninterruptedly as he watched, caught his eye.
‘We don’t notice it,’ she murmured quickly.
An hour later Mrs Lancey carried Trent off to a garden seat facing the lake.
‘Well?’ she said quietly, glancing back into the drawing-room.
‘It’s very strange and rather ghastly,’ he answered, nursing his knee. ‘But if you hadn’t told me it puzzled you, I should have thought it was easy to find an explanation.’
‘Drugs, you mean?’ He nodded. ‘Of course everybody must think so. George does, I know. It’s horrible!’ declared Mrs Lancey, with a thump on the arm of the seat. ‘Agatha Stone began hinting at it after the first few days. I told her it was a sort of nervous attack Isabel had been subject to from a child, which was a lie, and of course she didn’t believe it. Gossiping cat! She loathes Isabel, and she’ll spread it round everywhere that my sister is a drug-fiend. How I hate her!’
‘But do you believe it isn’t that?’
‘Philip, I don’t know what to believe. Listen now! The morning after the second time it happened, I asked her what was the matter with her. She said she didn’t know; she began to feel stupid and strange soon after dinner began. It had never happened to her before until she came to us here. It wasn’t either a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling, she said; she just felt indifferent to everything, and completely lazy. Then I asked her point blank if she was taking anything that could account for it. She was much offended at that; told me I had known her long enough to know she never had done and never would do such a thing. And it is certain that it would be utterly against all I ever knew of her. Besides, she denied it; and, though Isabel has her faults, she’s absolutely truthful.’
Trent looked on the ground. ‘Yes, but you may have heard – ’
‘Oh, I know! They say that kind of habit makes people lie and deceive who never did before. But you see, she is so completely herself; except just at this time. I simply couldn’t make up my mind to disbelieve her. And besides, why should she ever start such a practice? I don’t see how she would have been drawn into it. If Bella is peculiar about anything, it’s clean, wholesome, hygienic living. She was always that way as a girl, but she was studying to be a doctor, you know, when she met her husband, and that made her ever so much worse. She has every sort of carbolicky idea. She never uses scent or powder or any kind of before-and-after stuff, never puts anything on her hair; she is washing herself from morning till night, but she always uses ordinary yellow soap. She never touches anything alcoholic, or tea, or coffee. You wouldn’t think she had that kind of fad to look at her and her clothes, but she has; and I can’t think of anything in the world she would despise more than dosing herself with things.’
‘Not any kind of cosmetic whatever? That is surprising. Well, it seems to suit
her,’ Trent remarked. ‘When she isn’t like this, she is one of the most radiant creatures I ever saw.’
‘I know, and that’s what makes it so irritating for women like myself; who look absolute hags if they don’t assist Nature a little. She’s always been as strong as a horse and bursting with vitality, and her looks have never shown the slightest sign of going off. And now this thing has come to her, absolutely suddenly and without warning.’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘This is the seventh evening. I entreated her to see a doctor, but she hates the idea of being doctored. She says it’s sure to pass off and that it doesn’t make any difference to her general health. It’s true that she is quite well and lively all the rest of the time; but even if that is so, of course you can see how serious it is for a woman. It means that people shun her. She hasn’t realised it yet, but I can see our friends are revolted by the sight of these fits of hers, which they naturally account for in the obvious way. And Bella hasn’t any pleasure in life without society – especially men’s. But it’s come to this, that George, who has always been devoted to her, only talks to her now with an effort. Randolph Stone is just the same; and two days before you arrived the Illingworths and Captain Burrows both went earlier than they had intended – I’m certain, because this change in Isabel was spoiling their visit for them.’
‘She seems to get on remarkably well with Scheffer,’ remarked Trent.
‘I know – it’s extraordinary, but he seems more struck with her than ever.’
‘Well, he is, but in a lizard-hearted way of his own. He and I were talking just now after you left the dining-room. I had said something about the art of primitive peoples, and he took me aside soon afterwards and gave me more ideas on the subject in ten minutes than I’d ever heard in all my life. Then he began suddenly to speak of Lady Bosworth in a queer, semi-scientific sort of way, saying she was the nearest approach to a perfect female physiology he had ever seen among civilised and educated women; and he went on to ask if I had noticed her strangeness during dinner. I said, “Yes,” of course; and he said it was very interesting to a medical man like himself. You didn’t tell me he was one.’
‘I didn’t know. George calls him an anthropologist, and disagrees with him about the races of Farther India. George says it’s the one thing he does know something about, having lived there twelve years governing the poor things. They took to each other at once when they met last year, and when I asked him to stay here he was quite delighted. He only begged to be allowed to bring his cockatoo, as it could not live without him.’
‘Strange pet for a man,’ Trent observed. ‘He was showing off its paces to me this afternoon. It’s a mischievous fowl, and as clever as a monkey. Well, it seems he’s greatly interested in these attacks of hers. He has seen nothing quite like them. But he is convinced the thing is due to what he calls a toxic agent of some sort. As to what, or how, or why, he is absolutely at a loss.’
‘Then you must find out what, and how, and why, Philip. I’m glad Scheffer isn’t so easily upset as the other men; it’s so much better for Isabel. She finds him very interesting, of course; not only because he’s the only man here who pays her a lot of attention but because he really is a wonderful person. He’s lived for years among the most appalling savages in Dutch New Guinea, doing scientific work for his Government, and according to George they treat him like a sort of god; he’s somehow got the reputation among them that he can kill a man by pointing his finger at him, and he can manage the natives as nobody else can. He’s most attractive and quite kind really, I think, but there’s something about him that makes me afraid of him.’
‘What is it?’
‘I think it is the frosty look in his eyes,’ replied Mrs Lancey, drawing her shoulders together in a shiver.
‘You share the public opinion of Dutch New Guinea, in fact,’ said Trent. ‘Did you tell me, Edith, that your sister began to be like this the very first evening she came here?’
‘Yes. And it had never happened before, she declares.’
‘She came out from England with the Stones, didn’t she?’
‘Only the last part of the journey. They got on the train at Lucerne.’
Trent looked back into the drawing-room at the wistful face of Mrs Stone, who was playing piquet with her host. She was slight and pretty, with large, appealing eyes that never lost their melancholy, though she was always smiling.
‘You say she loathes Lady Bosworth,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s mainly Bella’s own fault,’ confessed Mrs Lancey, with a grimace. ‘You may as well know, Philip – you’ll soon find out, anyhow – the truth is she will flirt with any man that she doesn’t actively dislike. She’s so brimful of life she can’t hold herself in – or she won’t, rather; she says there’s no harm in it, and she doesn’t care if there is. Before her marriage she didn’t go on in that way, but since it turned out badly she has been simply uncivilised on that point. And her being perfectly clear-headed about it makes it seem so much worse. Several times she has practised on Randolph, and although he’s a perfectly safe old donkey if there ever was one, Agatha can’t bear the sight of her.’
‘She seems quite friendly with her,’ Trent observed.
Mrs Lancey produced through her delicate nostrils a sound that expressed a scorn for which there were no words. There was a short silence.
‘Well, what do you make of it, Philip?’ his hostess asked at length. ‘Myself, I simply don’t know what to think. These queer fits of hers frighten me horribly. There’s one dreadful idea, you see, that keeps occurring to me. Could it, perhaps, be’ – Mrs Lancey lowered her already low tone – ‘the beginning of insanity?’
He spoke reassuringly. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t cherish that fancy. There are other things much more likely and much less terrible. And there are some things we can do, too, and do at once. Look here, Edith, you know I hate explaining my own ideas until I’m sure there’s something in them. Will you try to arrange certain things for tomorrow, without asking me why? And don’t let anybody know I asked you to do it – not even George. Until later on, at least. Will you?’
‘How exciting!’ Mrs Lancey breathed. ‘Yes, of course, mystery-man. What do you want me to do?’
‘Do you think you could manage things tomorrow so that you and I and Lady Bosworth could go out in the motorboat on the lake for an hour or two in the evening, getting back in time to change for dinner – just the three of us and the engineer? Could that be worked quite naturally?’
She pondered. ‘It might be. George and Randolph are playing golf at Cadenabbia tomorrow. I might arrange an expedition in the afternoon for Agatha and Mr Scheffer, and let Bella know I wanted her to stay with me. You could lose yourself after breakfast with your sketching things, I dare say, and return for tea. Then the three of us could run down in the boat to San Marmette – it’s a lovely little place – and be back before seven. In this weather it’s really the best time of day for the lake.’
That would do admirably, if you could work it. And one thing more – if we do go as you suggest, I want you privately to tell your engineer to do just what I ask him to do – no matter what it is. He’s an Italian, isn’t he? Yes, then he’ll be deeply interested.’
Mrs Lancey worked it without difficulty. At five o’clock the two ladies and Trent, with a powerful young man of admirable manners at the steering-wheel, were gliding swiftly southward, mile after mile, down the long lake. They landed at the most picturesque, and perhaps the most dilapidated and dirtiest, of all the lakeside villages, where, in the tiny square above the landing-place, a score of dusky infants were treading the measures and chanting the words of one of the immemorial games of childhood. While Mrs Lancey and her sister watched them in delight Trent spoke rapidly to the young engineer, whose gleaming eyes and teeth flashed understanding.
Soon afterwards they strolled through San Marmette, and up the mountain road to a little church, half a mile away, wher
e a curious fresco could be seen.
It was close on half-past six when they returned, to be met by Giuseppe, voluble in excitement and apology. It appeared that while he had been fraternising with the keeper of the inn by the landing-place certain tristi individui had, unseen by anyone, been tampering maliciously with the engine of the boat, and had poured handfuls of dust into the delicate mechanism. Mrs Lancey, who had received a private nod from Trent, reproved him bitterly for leaving the boat, and asked how long it would take to get the engine working again.
Giuseppe, overwhelmed with contrition, feared that it might be a matter of hours. Questioned, he said that the public steamer had arrived and departed twenty minutes since; the next one, the last of the day, was not due until after nine. Their excellencies could at least count on getting home by that, if the engine was not ready sooner. Questioned further, he said that one could telephone from the post office, and that food creditably cooked was to be had at the trattoria.
Lady Bosworth was delighted. She declared that she would not have missed this occasion for anything. She had come to approve highly of Trent, who had made himself excellent company, and she saw her way to being quite admirable, for she was in dancing spirits. In ten minutes she was on the best of terms with the fat, vivacious woman of the inn. Trent, who had been dispatched to telephone their plight to George Lancey, and had added that they were enjoying it very much, returned to find Lady Bosworth in the little garden behind the inn, with her skirts pinned tip, peeling potatoes and singing ‘Il segreto per esser felice,’ while her sister beat up something in a bowl, and the landlady, busy with cooking, laughed and screamed cheerful observations from the kitchen. Seeing himself unemployable, Trent withdrew; sitting on a convenient wall, he took a leaf from his sketch-book and began to devise and decorate a menu of an absurdity suited to the spirit of the hour.
It was a more than cheerful dinner that they had under a canopy of vine-leaves on a tiny terrace overlooking the lake. Twilight came on unnoticed. It was already dark when Trent, returning from an inspection of the boat, advised that they should return by the steamer if they would make sure of getting home that night; it would take an hour, but it would be safer. And presently there was a long-drawn hoot from down the lake, and a great black mass crowned with a galaxy of yellow lights came moving smoothly through the darkness.
Trent Intervenes and Other Stories Page 5
