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‘Now, now,’ expostulated Mrs Melhuish. ‘No indiscretions, please.’
‘I apologise. I must remember that now I find you with a husband who believes not only that you are perfection, but that you always were.’
But his little pleasantry had somehow fallen flat, he perceived—as little pleasantries sometimes did. Melhuish, he divined, was a man to whom little pleasantries must be administered cautiously; no doubt, too, in three years of matrimony the light-hearted Pickles had acquired some of the seriousness of mind becoming to the wife of a rising physician.
‘I must get my table right. Do come and help me,’ said Mrs Melhuish hurriedly, returning to her diagram. ‘Mrs Barrington has developed bad earache and can’t come. We have just seven minutes to divide four women neatly and tactfully amongst five men. Let us concentrate our three powerful intellects. There—now I’ve drawn a nice new table. The blob at the top is Sidney.’
Gore glanced down at the first design, thus abandoned.
‘Barrington is coming then?’ he asked.
Mrs Melhuish nodded her golden head abstractedly.
‘Mrs Barrington insisted upon it, he said. Ah—I’ve got it.’ She scribbled some hasty initials. ‘There’s no help for it, Wick. You must divide Sylvia Arndale with Sir James. There—!
She held up her revised scheme for her husband’s consideration, and, when he had approved it with his grave smile, flitted from the room to superintend the rearrangement of her cards. It was nine years since Gore had seen her; but she had changed, he reflected, as he attended upon her exit, very little; if at all, for the better. Pickles must be just thirty now. Thirty … Extraordinary. His mind flashed back to the night of her coming-out dance—November, 1910. Twelve years ago—incredible. Ah, well—those days were done with, and the Pickles of them. With the faintest of sighs he turned to rejoin the lucky beggar who had, somehow, succeeded in capturing that airy miracle and putting it in charge of his socks and his servants and his dinner-parties. A good chap—a good-looking chap—a chap, perhaps, a tiny shade too old for her, but in every way plainly to the eye a chap to make her as happy and contented a wife as—well, as any intelligent wife was likely to be made.
‘You know most of the people who are coming to us this evening, Barbara assures me,’ said Melhuish.
‘All, I believe, except Barrington. I knew Mrs Barrington, of course, very well in the old days—when she was Miss Melville. She married just after the war, I think?’
‘Yes.’
A certain quality in the monosyllable attracted Gore’s attention.
‘Successfully, I hope? What part of the world does Barrington come from?’
‘Jamaica, I believe.’
Gore grinned.
‘Sounds like sugar. Money to money, I suppose. Always the way here in Linwood. Simply revolting the way it breeds in hereabouts. No chance whatever for the deserving poor, is there? I suppose old Melville came down with thirty or forty thousand at least?’ He sighed. ‘Lord—who wouldn’t be a son-in-law … in Linwood?’
For a moment Melhuish was absorbed in adjusting the rose shade of a light to his satisfaction.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, with that curious dryness of tone which his guest had already noticed, ‘I understand that the Melvilles disapproved of the marriage and made a very small settlement. Mr Barrington is a patient of mine—Mrs Barrington too, indeed. But I cannot claim what one would describe as an intimate acquaintance with either of them personally. My wife, no doubt, can tell you all about their affairs. As you are aware, of course, she and Mrs Barrington are very old friends—’
He paused. His smile was formally courteous, but unmistakably resolved to discuss Mrs Barrington and her husband in no further detail.
‘Right, my good man,’ reflected his insouciant guest, without resentment. ‘Keep your poker down your back if you think it makes you more impressive. A little bit sensitive, are you, because people are old friends of your wife’s and not of yours? Myself included, perhaps? Well, we’ve got to talk about something. Let’s try golf.’
But Melhuish, it became clear at once, regarded golf merely as an inducement to walk six miles on Sunday afternoon. Cheerfully Gore tried the by-election of the preceding week, fishing, the Panel System, and the Navy cuts. Mrs Melhuish returned to find the two men staring at the fire with the apparent conviction that in all the universe it alone held for them a common interest.
‘I did tell you, Wick, that Sir James Wellmore is our pièce de résistance this evening? Or did I? At any rate he is. We are awfully proud of him. He’s our show patient.’
‘You have met Sir James before, of course?’ Melhuish asked.
‘Once or twice—in the deplorably long ago—when he was not yet Sir James. When we were stationed out at Fieldbrook Barracks in nineteen-thirteen—just before we went to India—I remember he dined us and danced us and shot us in the most princely way. His first wife—she was still alive then—had, I recall, a penchant for the Services.’
Mrs Melhuish flashed a little teasing smile at him.
‘If I am not mistaken the present Lady Wellmore was addicted to the same pleasant vice in those days. Or was it the younger Miss Heathman who was the attraction?’
Gore’s teeth showed beneath his trim little wheaten moustache.
‘How happy could I have been with either,’ he laughed lightly. ‘I believe I did miss the chance of my lifetime then. Someone told me last night at the club that Angela Heathman’s income at present works out at just a shilling a minute. I’ve never stopped thinking about it since. If I hadn’t gone off so hopelessly, I—by Gad, I believe I’d chance my luck now.’
‘My dear Wick,’ laughed Mrs Melhuish, ‘Miss Heathman lives in the fourth dimension nowadays—or somewhere where there are better things than marriage and giving in marriage. Quite a difficult proposition, I should say, for a mercenary adventurer—even if he still has the smile of an angel and, still, no perceptible symptoms of a tum-tum.’
As their eyes met in smiling mutual approval, it seemed to Gore that nothing of their old camaraderie had faded, after all, in the passage of all those years. They had always looked at one another and chaffed one another just so, shrewdly yet with conviction of absolute understanding and sympathy, since the days when he had been a Harrovian of unusually misguided enterprise, and she the twinkling-legged bane of her nursemaid’s existence. It was pleasant to be back, if only for a little while, in one’s own country, and to find that one’s old place was still there, waiting for one. The chilling disillusionment that had invaded him steadily during the four days since his return was forgotten in a soothing content. From the radiant, piquant face of his hostess—smiling at him precisely as it had smiled at him twenty-five years before amongst the branches of forbidden apple-trees, with one eyebrow slightly higher than the other—his eyes turned to absorb the effect of the warmth and colour and dainty comfort of the big drawing-room that was her setting. And as they turned they met the eyes of her husband.
There was a moment of silence, and then Gore said, brightly, that it had looked quite like snow about five o’clock that afternoon. With that opinion the Melhuishs agreed, Mrs Melhuish with sparkling vivacity, her husband with considered conviction, as Clegg reappeared to announce the arrival of Mr and Mrs Arndale.
‘Good Lord,’ thought Gore, as he reared his graceful and admirably-tailored person from the most comfortable chair he had sat in for nine years. ‘The man thinks I’m an old flame of Pickles’s. I know he does. That’s why he has been watching me like a cat, is it? Fi-fi. Tut-tut. Pickles, Pickles … I hope I have not been mistaken in you?’
But no trace of these interior misgivings was visible as he shook hands with Cecil Arndale and his pretty, plump little wife. They, too, were part of the Old Days and the Old Lot—Sylvia Arndale and Barbara Melhuish were first cousins, and Cecil Arndale and he had been at Harrow together, though nearly three years separated them—and their pleasure at the meeting was as manifest as his own. In sixty seconds Mrs Arndale had reproached him for calling on two afternoons on which she had been out, informed him that she had made fifteen people buy his book, and secured him for dinner next day and a dance in the following week.
‘I went to see your film twice,’ she pouted, ‘and there you were, standing with hundreds and dozens of dead antelopes and things stacked all around you—and I never got as much as tsetse-fly’s whisker out of the lot. I shall never forget that you sent Barbara all those lovely stickers and beads and things as a wedding-present, and forgot me—me, who was once more than a sister to you—absolutely. Never, never.’
‘My dear Roly-Poly,’ grinned Gore placidly, ‘you forget that I sent you a very beautiful and costly flower-bowl when you were entitled to a wedding-present—which was, pray recollect, four years before I became a movie-star—’
‘For Heaven’s sake,’ cried Mrs Arndale, ‘don’t remind me how long I’ve been married to Cecil. It’s not fair to him, poor dear. It embitters me so, and he has a perfectly ghastly time when I’m embittered.’
Cecil Arndale laughed—a little foolishly, as he had always laughed, his rather prominent blue eyes glistening slightly in his large, brick-red face. He had grown fat, Gore observed—much too fat for a man of thirty-nine—and his fatness accentuated that slight weakness of mouth and chin that had always marred his good-humoured, healthy, conventional good looks. His laugh faded again instantly into abstraction; his blue eyes stared vacantly across the room, while his lips twisted and puckered and smoothed themselves out again restlessly. Too much food, Gore conjectured—altogether too much drink—too much money—too easy a life of it. Poor old Cecil. He had always threatened to go soft. With some little difficulty Gore suppressed the recollection that this hefty, healthy six-footer had spent the war in England, and, incidentally, doubled during it the fortune which he had inherited from his father. Well, someone had had to stay at home and build ships. Besides, Arndale had married in 1915. And anyhow all that was his own affair. Gore, who had been through the business from start to finish, was not disposed to overrate the advantages to be derived from that experience. He wondered a little, none the less, just what the plump, outspoken little Roly-Poly had thought, privately, of her spouse’s devotion to his business—say, in March, 1918.
‘How’s your brother?’ he asked her. ‘I fancied I caught a glimpse of a face that might have been his—brought up to date—passing me on the Promenade in a most vicious-looking two-seater. But I haven’t run into him yet, end-on, so to speak—’
‘Bertie? He lives just beside you. You’re staying at the Riverside, aren’t you? He has a flat in Selkirk Place at present—just across the way … at the other side of the Green. Number 73. You’ll find him there any morning up to lunch-time in bed.’
‘Still unattached?’
‘We hope so.’
‘What does he do all day?’
Mrs Arndale shrugged her pretty shoulders.
‘He plays a good deal of golf, I believe—races a good deal—hunts a little. If he happens not to be away, and if it’s too wet to do anything else, he runs down to the Yard in his car, smokes a cigarette, and runs back to change. I have calculated that on an average Bertie changes seven times a day.’
‘Oh, then he’s attached to the Yard now, is he?’
‘Cecil says so. I suppose Cecil knows. It’s his Yard.’
Arndale came out of his abstracted silence for a moment.
‘Bertie’s all right,’ he said. ‘Bit of an ass about women, that’s all.’
‘We all are, thank Heaven,’ smiled Gore—‘er … until we’re forty … or … er … thirty-nine.’
Arndale’s eyes regarded him blankly.
‘Eh? Thirty-nine? No. Bertie’s nothing like that …’ With a visible effort he concentrated upon his calculation. ‘Bertie’s thirty—or thirty-one. Why, hang it, old chap—I’m thirty-nine.’
He smiled vaguely and strolled away. Gore caught his wife’s eye.
‘What’s the trouble, Roly-Poly?’ he asked bluntly.
She shrugged.
‘Heaven knows. Cecil’s always like that now … I’m frightfully worried about it, really. It’s not money, I know. We’re simply revoltingly well-off … It’s some sort of blight … something mental.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Sometimes I think it’s I who am responsible for it … of course I’ve always known that I’m not the right person … And yet we get on quite well … He’s quite fond of me, really, in his way … Oh, don’t let us talk about it any more. Let’s talk about you. It’s so absolutely ripping to see your old phiz again, Wick.’
As she patted his arm with a little impulsive gesture the door reopened and Clegg announced the guests of honour.
‘Sir James and Lady Wellmore and Miss Heathman.’
While the Melhuishs chatted for a moment with the new arrivals Gore took stock of them with something like dismay. Wellmore, whom he remembered as a brisk, cheerful, keen-eyed middle-aged man, looked now every day of a tired, peevish, short-sighted sixty-five. Lady Wellmore—could that large-bosomed, broad-hipped, triple-chinned woman be the Phyllis Heathman of the old days? And that sallow, weary-eyed, bony-necked female with the nervously-flickering smile—could that be the once really quite pretty Angela? Good Lord.
His hostess’s voice claimed his attention.
‘You have met Colonel Gore before, Sir James, I think.’
Wellmore’s tired eyes rested on the younger man’s face perfunctorily, as he allowed his flabby, damp hand to be shaken.
‘Yes,’ he said briefly, ‘I remember you. Nineteen-thirteen. You were stationed at Fieldbrook Barracks. In the Westshires. One of the prettiest shots I ever saw. Been in Africa, haven’t you? Wonder you didn’t stay there instead of coming back to this filthy climate. My wife has your book. But I’ve no time to read books. Never had.’
He passed on towards the fireplace and bent to warm his hands at the cheerful blaze wearily, his back to the room. Chairman of the United Tobacco Company—owner of three millions—master of six thousand lives—he could afford to dispense with ceremony.
But Lady Wellmore was graciousness itself. She had simply revelled in his book—especially the parts about the pigmies—she considered the parts about the pigmies perfectly fascinating. And the film—perfectly wonderful. She had been absolutely thrilled when dear Barbara had told her that she was to meet him again that night. She rounded him up in a cul-de-sac formed by a small table, two chairs, the flank of the big piano, and her sister.
‘Angela, have you forgotten Colonel Gore? He has been regarding you with the most reproachful of eyes.’
Angela Heathman smiled nervously and held out a languid hand. At close quarters the sallow, haggard weariness of her face, with its drawn lips and shadowed eyes, was still more noticeable. Beside her sister’s florid exuberance her faded thinness was accentuated painfully. Her smile faded, her eyes looked beyond him in brooding abstraction. She said nothing—withdrew her hand listlessly, and appeared to have forgotten the existence of the people who surrounded her.
‘Nerves, poor thing,’ Gore reflected. ‘Another of ’em that doesn’t know why she was born.’
As a silvery-toned clock somewhere in the room chimed eight fleetly, Clegg announced the last guest.
‘Mr Barrington.’
For a moment the hum of voices died. The man who had entered surveyed the occupants of the room with smiling composure as he moved towards his hostess.
‘My wife has charged me with the most abject of apologies, Mrs Melhuish. She had hoped until the last moment to be able to come.’
‘We are so sorry,’ Mrs Melhuish assured him. ‘But it would have been folly for her to have ventured out on an evening like this. Of all afflictions in the world, I can imagine none worse than earache.’
‘Dreadful. Quite dreadful,’ Barrington agreed. He included Melhuish in his smile. ‘However, she has retired to bed with a large supply of aspirin tabloids at hand … How are you, doctor? Worked to death, I suppose, as usual? I see you rushing about in that big car of yours from morning to night. Lot of sickness about, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ said Melhuish simply.
Not a brilliant conversationalist, Dr Sidney Melhuish, Gore reflected—an exceedingly dry stick indeed. No one could suspect him of shyness or nervousness; his clean-cut face was as cool as a chunk of ice. Just one of those men who just didn’t want to talk most of the time and wouldn’t. Grim-looking chap, when his mouth set. Sort of chap that would look at your tongue and tell you you had six months to live and touch the bell for his man to show you out. Poor Pickles … What sparkling conjugal tête-à-têtes …
And yet, a moment later, when Melhuish crossed the room, Gore caught a glimpse of another man—a man whose kind, wise eyes and almost boyish sincerity and simplicity of manner and gesture brought a faint flush of animation to Angela Heathman’s apathetic face as he smiled at her. No doubt she, too, was a patient of his. For that matter, as far as Gore had been able to discover, everybody in Linwood was, though it was only four years or so, he had learned, since Melhuish had purchased an old and decaying practice and installed himself in that most conservative of Westmouth’s suburbs, a stranger and an interloper. True, he had brought with him from Bath, where he had been in practice for several years before the war, a reputation for brilliance, especially in heart cases. But Gore knew the stiff reserve and suspicion of Linwood too well to believe that a reputation for anything in the world acquired, anywhere else in the world could influence it in the least. Something—something which no doubt Pickles had found out for herself—there must be in this difficult husband of hers that was not vouchsafed to the common or garden general practitioner … Something, for instance, that had been able to win for him not merely the patronage but the friendship of a man like James Wellmore, whose sole standard of judgment was value for his money.
His eyes returned to the shrivelled, peevish face of the tobacco magnate, bent obstinately on the fire, its underlip protruding sulkily as he listened to something which Barrington was saying to him. There was no trace of affection, paternal or otherwise, in his expression just then. Indeed as Barrington moved away from him towards Mrs Melhuish, Wellmore turned to look after him with an unmistakable scowl until, detecting Gore’s interest in him, he switched his erring gaze back to the fire once more.
‘I have succeeded in finding that cutting for you, Mr Barrington,’ said Mrs Melhuish.
‘How kind of you to have remembered,’ replied Barrington, displaying his small, even teeth in a smile of open admiration. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, Gore admitted ungrudgingly—quite the handsomest man he had seen for some time—with some quality of charm that lay deeper than the perhaps slightly theatrical effect of his dark aquilinity and reckless gray eyes. Thirty-five at most, broad-shouldered, slim-flanked, easily—a little too easily, perhaps—sure of himself, he was one of those men at whom no woman could look without interest or without the awakening of her oldest and strongest instinct. Already Gore had noticed with amusement that, as he moved across the room to his hostess, the regards of the other three women had followed him with a speculative intentness. And that the charms of this smiling Adonis were not lost upon Mrs Melhuish herself was no less evident. Her colour had brightened beneath the flattery of his look; her poise and intonation as she spoke to him were tinged with the subtle challenge of her sex—the indefinable yet unmistakable blending of defiance and invitation that—by a cynic as hardened as Wick Gore—could be taken for nothing but … well, what any chap with two eyes in his head would take it for. Miss Pickles hadn’t changed all her spots, then—for all the rash vows of holy matrimony. Still a flash of colour and a sparkling eye for an agreeable-looking young fellah. She had always preferred ’em dark … and a bit hooky about the beak.
‘I put it down somewhere,’ said Mrs Melhuish, glancing about her. ‘Now … where …? Oh, yes. I remember.’
She moved to the piano, and picked up an envelope that lay on some music. Barrington took the envelope from her smilingly, opened it, glanced casually at the newspaper cutting which it contained.
‘Thanks so much,’ he said, as he replaced the cutting and put the envelope away in a pocket. ‘As a matter of fact I had rather thought of running up to look at another shoot in that part of Wiltshire this week.’
‘Really?’
Mrs Melhuish’s colour had forsaken her now. Her eyes consulted with anxiety the little Sèvres clock on the table beside Gore, rose to his brown, hard profile, and rested there for a moment warily. He stood but an arm’s-length from her; but he was listening with the most flattering of attention to Lady Wellmore’s views upon the sinister aims of Labour. The slightest movement of her golden head showed her her husband and Sylvia Arndale grouped by the big chair near the fire into which Wellmore had subsided with a yawn. At the other side of the room Arndale struggled feebly with Miss Heathman’s vague-eyed listlessness, pausing between each laborious effort to regard a water-colour above her head vacantly. Mrs Melhuish’s hand strayed to a bowl of chrysanthemums by the piano, touched a great gold and russet bloom caressingly.
‘If the door is shut, go away,’ she said softly—almost inaudibly. ‘I may not be able to manage tonight. I will ring you up tomorrow at eleven if not.’
Barrington bent to examine the gorgeous blossom.
‘It will be open,’ he smiled.
His reckless eyes dwelt in hers victoriously for an instant. As she turned to introduce him to Gore, Clegg appeared once more, slightly flushed and seven minutes late.
‘Dinner is served, madam.’
CHAPTER II (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
IT was, it appeared, Sir James Wellmore’s inviolable rule to get out of his bed at seven o’clock and get into it again before midnight, and at half-past eleven he and Lady Wellmore departed in an immense limousine. Miss Heathman, silent and vague-eyed to the last, accompanied them; the big house on the Promenade of which she was the capricious mistress, lay on the Wellmores’ homeward way across the Downs to their palatial mansion at Bishops Leaze. The Arndales had gone away before eleven o’clock hurriedly, disturbed by a telephone-message requiring, Gore presumed, Mrs Arndale’s immediate return to some urgent trouble of the baby, with details of whose incredible brilliancy of intellect and beauty of form she had regaled him at intervals during dinner. It was twenty minutes to twelve when he and Barrington made their adieux to Mrs Melhuish and went down the stairs accompanied by their host.
As Clegg helped him into his overcoat, in the hall, Gore glanced at the artistically-arranged trophy which occupied the wall space between the hall door and the door of the dining-room. His wedding present made, he reflected, quite a decent display, the two befeathered Masai head-dresses and the scarlet-and-ochre magic-mask forming an effective centre to the design. The shaft of one of the Wambulu spears had developed some mysterious breed of worm some months after its arrival, Melhuish told him, and had been replaced by a new one.
‘Hope your maids aren’t curious about cutlery, doctor,’ Gore grinned, as he accepted a light for his cigarette. ‘I mean—those hunting spears are probably quite safe. But those little arrows—and the knives—Well, I think I inserted lavish warnings in the packing-cases. I hope I did.’
Barrington fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Bad medicine, are they?’
‘Possibly very nasty indeed,’ said Gore—‘some of them.’ He touched the beaded sheaths of two small knives, crossed to form the lower point of the trophy. ‘These two little brutes, for instance … I shouldn’t mind betting that if you were thoughtless enough to scratch yourself with one of these—even after three years—something exceedingly unpleasant would happen you in the next few minutes. I’ve actually seen a poor beggar die in less than two minutes from a prick of one of those little throwing-knives … Die most untidily, too.’
‘What’s the poison?’ asked Melhuish, with professional interest. ‘I remember now that my wife did say something about the cautions you sent her. But I’m afraid we had both forgotten all about them.’
‘It’s a root called “nmakato.” Not in the B.P., I rather fancy, doctor. We didn’t succeed in seeing the root itself. As a matter of fact, the old witch-doctors who distill the stuff are rather reticent about little trade-secrets of that sort. I saw the flowers of the thing, though—yellow—not unlike our gorse, both to look at and to smell. They use the flowers to make wreaths for their young women when they retire into seclusion to think over the joys of matrimony for a month or so before they plunge into them.’
He held out his hand. ‘Well, we shall meet again, doctor, no doubt.’
