Final Curtain

CHAPTER VI Paint

i

It was on that same night that there was an open flaring row between Paul and Fenella on the one hand and Sir Henry Ancred on the other. It occurred at the climax of a game of backgammon between Troy and Sir Henry. He had insisted upon teaching her this complicated and maddening game. She would have enjoyed it more if she hadn’t discovered very early in the contest that her opponent disliked losing so intensely that her own run of beginner’s luck had plunged him into the profoundest melancholy. He had attempted to explain to her the chances of the possible combinations of a pair of dice, adding, with some complacency, that he himself had completely mastered this problem. Troy had found his explanation utterly incomprehensible, and began by happily moving her pieces with more regard for the pattern they made on the board than for her chances of winning the game. She met with uncanny success. Sir Henry, who had entered the game with an air of gallantry, finding pretty frequent occasions to pat Troy’s fingers, became thoughtful, then pained, and at last gloomy. The members of his family, aware of his mortification, watched in nervous silence. Troy moved with reckless abandon. Sir Henry savagely rattled his dice. Greatly to her relief the tide turned. She gave herself a “blot” and looked up, to find Fenella and Paul watching her with an extraordinary expression of anxiety. Sir Henry prospered and soon began to “bear”, Paul and Fenella exchanged a glance. Fenella nodded and turned pale.

“Aha!” cried Sir Henry in triumph. “The winning throw, I think! The winning throw!”

He cast himself back in his chair, gazed about him and laughed delightedly. It was at this juncture that Paul, who was standing on the hearthrug with Fenella, put his arm round her and kissed her with extreme heartiness and unmistakable intention. “Fenella and I,” he said loudly, “are going to be married.”

There followed an electrified silence, lasting perhaps for ten seconds.

Sir Henry then picked up the backgammon board and threw it a surprising distance across the drawing-room.

“And temper,” Paul added, turning rather pale, “never got anybody anywhere.”

Miss Orrincourt gave a long whistle. Millamant dropped on her knees and began to pick up backgammon pieces.

Pauline Kentish, gazing with something like terror at her son, gabbled incoherently: “No, darling! No, please! No, Paul, don’t be naughty. No! Fenella!”

Cedric, his mouth open, his eyes glistening, rubbed his hands and made his crowing noise. But he, too, looked frightened.

And all the Ancreds, out of the corners of their eyes, watched Sir Henry.

He was the first man Troy had ever seen completely given over to rage. She found the exhibition formidable. If he had not been an old man his passion would have been less disquieting because less pitiable. Old lips, shaking with rage; old eyes, whose fierceness was glazed by rheum; old hands, that jerked in uncoordinated fury; these were intolerable manifestations of emotion.

Troy got up and attempted an inconspicuous retreat to the door.

“Come back,” said her host violently. Troy returned. “Hear how these people conspire to humiliate me. Come back, I say.” Troy sat on the nearest chair.

“Papa!” whispered Pauline, weaving her hands together, and “Papa!” Millamant echoed, fumbling with the dice. “Please! So bad for you. Upsetting yourself! Please!”

He silenced them with a gesture and struggled to his feet. Paul, holding Fenella by the arm, waited until his grandfather stood before him and then said rapidly: “We’re sorry to make a scene. I persuaded Fen that this was the only way to handle the business. We’ve discussed it with you in private, Grandfather, and you’ve told us what you feel about it. We don’t agree. It’s our show, after all, and we’ve made up our minds. We could have gone off and got married without saying anything about it, but neither of us wanted to do that. So we thought—”

“We thought,” said Fenella rather breathlessly, “we’d just make a general announcement.”

“Because,” Paul added, “I’ve sent one already to the papers and we wanted to tell you before you read it.”

“But, Paul darling—” his mother faintly began.

“You damned young puppy,” Sir Henry roared out, “what do you mean by standing up with that god-damned conceited look on your face and talking poppycock to ME?”

“Aunt Pauline,” said Fenella, “I’m sorry if you’re not pleased, but—”

“Ssh!” said Pauline.

“Mother is pleased,” said Paul. “Aren’t you, Mother?”

“Ssh!” Pauline repeated distractedly.

“Be silent!” Sir Henry shouted. He was now in the centre of the hearth-rug. It seemed to Troy that his first violence was being rapidly transmuted into something more histrionic and much less disturbing. He rested an elbow on the mantelpiece. He pressed two fingers and a thumb against his eyelids, removed his hand slowly, kept his eyes closed, frowned as if in pain, and finally sighed deeply and opened his eyes very wide indeed.

“I’m an old fellow,” he said in a broken voice. “An old fellow. It’s easy to hurt me. Very easy. You have dealt me a shrewd blow. Never mind. Let me suffer. Why not? It won’t be for long. Not for long, now.”

“Papa, dearest,” cried Pauline, sweeping up to him and clasping her hands. “You make us utterly miserable. Don’t speak like that, don’t. Not for the world would my boy cause you a moment’s unhappiness. Let me talk quietly to these children. Papa, I implore you.”

“This,” a voice whispered in Troy’s ear, “is perfect Pinero.” She jumped violently. Cedric had slipped round behind his agitated relations and now leant over the back of her chair, “She played the name part, you know, in a revival of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.”

“It’s no use, Pauline. Let them go. They knew my wishes. They have chosen the cruellest way. Let them,” said Sir Henry with relish, “dree their weird.”

“Thank you, Grandfather,” said Fenella brightly, but with a shake in her voice. “It’s our weird and we shall be delighted to dree it.”

Sir Henry’s face turned an uneven crimson. “This is insufferable,” he shouted, and his teeth, unable to cope with the violence of his diction, leapt precariously from their anchorage and were clamped angrily home. Fenella giggled nervously. “You are under age,” Sir Henry pronounced suddenly. “Under age, both of you. Pauline, if you have the smallest regard for your old father’s wishes, you will forbid this lunacy. I shall speak to your mother, miss. I shall cable to your father.”

“Mother won’t mind,” said Fenella.

“You know well, you know perfectly well, why I cannot countenance this nonsense.”

“You think, don’t you, Grandfather,” said Fenella, “that because we’re cousins we’ll have loopy young. Well, we’ve asked about that and it’s most unlikely. Modern medical opinion—”

“Be silent! At least let some semblance of decency—”

“I won’t be silent,” said Fenella, performing with dexterity the feat known by actors as topping the other man’s lines. “And if we’re to talk about decency, Grandfather, I should have thought it was a damn sight more decent for two people who are young and in love to say they’re going to marry each other than for an old man to make an exhibition of himself—”

“Fenella!” shouted Pauline and Millamant in unison.

“—doting on a peroxide blonde fifty years younger than himself, and a brazen gold-digger into the bargain.”

Fenella then burst into tears and ran out of the room, followed rigidly by Paul.

Troy, who had once more determined to make her escape, heard Fenella weeping stormily outside the door and stayed where she was. The remaining Ancreds were all talking at once. Sir Henry beat his fist on the mantelpiece until the ornaments danced again, and roared out: “My God, I’ll not have her under my roof another hour! My God—!” Millamant and Pauline, on either side of him like a distracted chorus, wrung their hands and uttered plaintive cries. Cedric chattered noisily behind the sofa, where Miss Orrincourt still lay. It was she who put a stop to this ensemble by rising and confronting them with her hands on her hips.

“I am not remaining here,” said Miss Orrincourt piercingly, “to be insulted. Remarks have been passed in this room that no self-respecting girl in my delicate position can be expected to endure. Noddy!”

Sir Henry, who had continued his beating of the mantelpiece during this speech, stopped short and looked at her with a kind of nervousness.

“Since announcements,” said Miss Orrincourt, “are in the air, Noddy, haven’t we got something to say ourselves in that line? Or,” she added ominously, “have we?”

She looked lovely standing there. It was an entirely plastic loveliness, an affair of colour and shape, of line and texture. It was so complete in its kind, Troy thought, that to bring a consideration of character or vulgarity to bear upon it would be to labour at an irrelevant synthesis. In her kind she was perfect. “What about it, Noddy?” she said.

Sir Henry stared at her, pulled down his waistcoat, straightened his back and took her hand. “Whenever you wish, my dear,” he said, “whenever you wish.”

Pauline and Millamant fell back from them, Cedric drew in his breath and touched his moustache. Troy saw, with astonishment, that his hand was shaking.

“I had intended,” Sir Henry said, “to make this announcement at The Birthday. Now, however, when I realize only too bitterly that my family cares little, cares nothing for my happiness” (“Papa!” Pauline wailed), “I turn, in my hour of sorrow, to One who does Care.”

“Uh-huh!” Miss Orrincourt assented. “But keep it sunny-side-up, Petty-pie.”

Sir Henry, less disconcerted than one would have thought possible by this interjection, gathered himself together.

“This lady,” he said loudly, “has graciously consented to become my wife.”

Considering the intensity of their emotions, Troy felt that the Ancreds really behaved with great aplomb. It was true that Pauline and Millamant were, for a moment, blankly silent, but Cedric almost immediately ran out from cover and seized his grandfather by the hand.

“Dearest Grandpapa — couldn’t be more delighted — too marvellous. Sonia, darling,” he babbled, “such fun,” and he kissed her.

“Well, Papa,” said Millamant, following her son’s lead but not kissing Miss Orrincourt, “we can’t say that it’s altogether a surprise, can we? I’m sure we all hope you’ll be very happy.”

Pauline was more emotional. “Dearest,” she said, taking her father’s hands and gazing with wet eyes into his face, “dearest, dearest Papa. Please, please believe my only desire is for your happiness.”

Sir Henry inclined his head. Pauline made an upward pounce at his moustache. “Oh, Pauline,” he said with an air of tragic resignation, “I have been wounded, Pauline! Deeply wounded!”

“No,” cried Pauline. “No!”

“Yes,” sighed Sir Henry. “Yes.”

Pauline turned blindly from him and offered her hand to Miss Orrincourt. “Be good to him,” she said brokenly. “It’s all we ask. Be good to him.”

With an eloquent gesture, Sir Henry turned aside, crossed the room, and flung himself into a hitherto unoccupied armchair.

It made a loud and extremely vulgar noise.

Sir Henry, scarlet in the face, leapt to his feet and snatched up the loose cushioned seat. He exposed a still partially inflated bladder-like object, across which was printed a legend, “The Raspberry. Makes your Party go off with a Bang.” He seized it, and again, through some concealed orifice, it emitted its dreadful sound. He hurled it accurately into the fire and the stench of burning rubber filled the room.

“Well, I mean to say,” said Miss Orrincourt, “fun’s fun, but I think that kid’s getting common in her ways.”

Sir Henry walked in silence to the door, where, inevitably, he turned to deliver an exit line. “Millamant,” he said, “in the morning you will be good enough to send for my solicitor.”

The door banged. After a minute’s complete silence Troy was at last able to escape from the drawing-room.

ii

Troy was not much surprised in the morning to learn that Sir Henry was too unwell to appear, though he hoped in the afternoon to resume the usual sitting. A note on her early tea-tray informed her that Cedric would be delighted to pose in the costume if this would be of any service. She thought it might. There was the scarlet cloak to be attended to. She had half-expected a disintegration of the family forces, at least the disappearance, possibly in opposite directions, of Fenella and Paul. She had yet to learn of the Ancreds’ resilience in inter-tribal warfare. At breakfast they both appeared — Fenella, white and silent; Paul, red and silent. Pauline arrived a little later. Her attitude to her son suggested that he was ill of some not entirely respectable disease. With Fenella she adopted an air of pained antipathy and would scarcely speak to her. Millamant presided. She was less jolly than usual, but behind her anxiety, if she was indeed anxious, Troy detected a hint of complacency. There was more than a touch of condolence in her manner towards her sister-in-law, and this, Troy felt, Pauline deeply resented.

“Well, Milly,” said Pauline after a long silence, “do you propose to continue your rôle under new management?”

“I’m always rather lost, Pauline, when you adopt theatrical figures of speech.”

“Are you going to house-keep, then, for the new châtelaine?”

“I hardly expect to do so.”

“Poor Milly,” said Pauline. “It’s going to be difficult for you, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t think so. Cedric and I have always thought we’d like to have a little pied-à-terre together in London.”

“Yes,” Pauline agreed much too readily, “Cedric will have to draw in his horns a bit too, one supposes.”

“Perhaps Paul and Fenella would consider allowing me to house-keep for them,” said Millamant, with her first laugh that morning. And with an air of genuine interest she turned to them. “How are you going to manage, both of you?” she asked.

“Like any other husband and wife without money,” said Fenella. “Paul’s got his pension and I’ve got my profession. We’ll both get jobs.”

“Oh, well,” said Millamant comfortably, “perhaps after all, your grandfather—”

“We don’t want Grandfather to do anything, Aunt Milly,” said Paul quickly. “He wouldn’t anyway, of course, but we don’t want him to.”

“Dearest!” said his mother. “So hard! So bitter! I don’t know you, Paul, when you talk like that. Something”—she glanced with extraordinary distaste at Fenella—“has changed you so dreadfully.”

“Where,” asked Millamant brightly, “is Panty?”

“Where should she be if not in school?” Pauline countered with dignity. “She is not in the habit of breakfasting with us, Milly.”

“Well, you never know,” said Millamant. “She seems to get about quite a lot, doesn’t she? And, by the way, Pauline, I’ve a bone to pick with Panty myself. Someone has interfered with My Work. A large section of embroidery has been deliberately unpicked. I’d left it in the drawing-room and—”

“Panty never goes there,” cried Pauline.

“Well, I don’t know about that. She must, for instance, have been in the drawing-room last evening during dinner.”

“Why?”

“Because Sonia, as I suppose we must call her, says she sat in that chair before dinner, Pauline. She says it was perfectly normal.”

“I can’t help that, Milly. Panty did not come into the drawing-room last night at dinner-time for the very good reason that she and the other children were given their medicine then and sent early to bed. You told me yourself, Milly, that Miss Able found the medicine in the flower-room and took it straight in for Dr. Withers to give the children.”

“Oh, yes,” said Millamant. “Would you believe it, the extraordinary Sonia didn’t trouble to take it in to Miss Able, or to give Papa’s bottle to me. She merely went to the flower-room, where it seems,” said Millamant with a sniff, “orchids had been brought in for her; and dumped the lot. Miss Able hunted everywhere before she found it, and so did I.”

“T’uh,” said Pauline.

“All the same,” said Paul. “I don’t mind betting that Panty—”

“It has yet to be proved,” Pauline interrupted with spirit rather than conviction, “that Panty had anything to do with — with—”

“With the Raspberry!” said Paul, grinning. “Mother, of course she did.”

“I have reason to believe—” Pauline began.

“No, really, Mother. It’s Panty all over. Look at her record.”

“Where did she get it? I’ve never given her such a thing.”

“Another kid, I suppose, if she didn’t buy it. I’ve seen them in one of the village shops; haven’t you, Fen? I remember thinking to myself that they ought to have been sent to a rubber dump.”

“I’ve had a little talk with Panty,” said Panty’s mother obstinately, “and she promised me on her word of honour she didn’t know anything about it. I know when that child is speaking the truth, Milly. A mother always knows.”

“Honestly, Mother!” said Paul.

“I don’t care what anyone says—” Pauline began, but was interrupted by the entrance of Cedric, very smooth and elegant, and with more than a touch of smugness in his general aspect.

“Good morning, dearest Mrs. Alleyn. Good morning, my sweets,” he said. “Planning how to lay out the proverbial shilling to advantage, Paul dear? I’ve been so excited thinking up a scheme for a double wedding. It’s a teeny bit involved. The Old Person, you see, in Uncle Claude’s absence, must give Fenella away and then whisk over to the other side as First Bridegroom. I thought I might be joint Best Man and Paul could double Second Bridegroom and Sonia’s papa. It’s like a rather intricate ballet. Uncle Thomas is to be a page and Panty a flower-girl, which will give her wonderful opportunities for throwing things. And you, dearest Mama, and all the aunts shall be Dowagers-in-Waiting. I’ve invented such marvellously intimidating gowns for you.”

“Don’t be naughty,” said Millamant.

“No, but truly,” Cedric went on, bringing his plate to the table. “I do feel, you two, that you’ve managed your affairs the least bit clumsily.”

“It’s not given to all of us,” said Paul dryly, “to be quite as nimble after the main chance as you.”

“Well, I do rather flatter myself I’ve exhibited a pretty turn of low cunning,” Cedric agreed readily. “Sonia’s going to let me do her trousseau, and the Old Person said that I at least showed some family feeling. But I’m afraid, dearest Auntie Pauline, that Panty has lost ground almost irretrievably. Such a very robust sense of comedy.”

“I have already told your mother, Cedric, that I have reason to believe that Panty was not responsible for that incident.”

“Oh, Gracious!” said Cedric. “So touching. Such faith.”

“Or for the writing on your grandfather’s looking-glass.”

Cedric made one of his ingratiating wriggles at Troy. “Panty has another champion,” he said.

Pauline turned quickly to Troy, who, with a sense of stepping from the stalls up to the stage, murmured: “I didn’t think Panty wrote on the glass. I thought her protests rang true.”

“There!” cried Pauline emotionally, and stretched out her hand to Troy. “There, all of you! Thank you, Mrs. Alleyn. Someone has faith in my poor old Panty.”

But Troy’s faith in Panty Kentish, already slightly undermined, was to suffer a further jolt.

She went from the dining-room to the little theatre. Her canvas was leaning, face to the wall, where she had left it. She dragged it out, tipped it up on one corner, set it on the lowered tray of her easel and stepped back to look at it.

Across the nose and eyes of the completed head somebody had drawn in black paint an enormous pair of spectacles.

iii

For perhaps five seconds alternate lumps of ice and red-hot coal chased each other down her spine and round her stomach. She then touched the face. It was hard dry. The black spectacles were still wet. With a sense of relief that was so violent that it came upon her like an attack of nausea, Troy dipped a rag in oil and gingerly wiped off the addition. She then sat down and pressed her shaking hands together. Not a stain, not a blur on the bluish shadows that she had twisted under the eyes, not a trace of dirt across the strange pink veil that was the flesh under his frontal bone. “Oh, Golly!” Troy whispered. “Oh, Golly! Thank God! Oh, Golly!”

“Good morning,” said Panty, coming in by the side door. “I’m allowed to do another picture. I want some more board and lots more paint. Look, I’ve finished the cows and the aeroplane. Aren’t they good?”

She dumped her board on the floor against the foot of the easel, and, with a stocky imitation of Troy, fell back a pace and looked at it, her hands clasped behind her back. Her picture was of three vermilion cows in an emerald meadow. Above them, against a sky for which Panty had used neat New Blue, flew an emerald aeroplane in the act of secreting a black bomb.

“Damn good,” said Panty, “isn’t it?” She tore her gaze away from her picture and allowed it to rest on Troy’s.

“That’s good too,” she said. “It’s nice. It gives me a nice feeling inside. I think you paint good pictures.”

“Somebody,” said Troy, watching her, “thought it would be better if I put in a pair of spectacles.”

“Well, they must have been pretty silly,” said Panty. “Kings don’t wear spectacles. That’s a king.”

“Whoever it was, painted them on the face.”

“If anybody puts spectacles on my cows,” Panty said, “I’ll kill them.”

“Who do you think could have done it?”

“I dunno,” said Panty without interest. “Did Noddy?”

“I hardly think so.”

“I suppose it was whoever put whatever it was on Noddy’s glass. Not me, anyway. Now can I have another board and more paint? Miss Able likes me to paint.”

“You may go up to my room and get yourself one of the small boards in the cupboard.”

“I don’t know where your room is.”

Troy explained as best she could. “Oh, well,” said Panty, “if I can’t find it I’ll just yell till somebody comes.”

She stumped away to the side door. “By the way,” Troy called after her, “would you know a Raspberry if you saw one?”

“You bet,” said Panty with interest.

“I mean a rubber thing that makes a noise if you sit on it.”

“What sort of noise?”

“Never mind,” said Troy wearily. “Forget about it.”

“You’re mad,” said Panty flatly and went out.

“If I’m not,” Troy muttered, “there’s somebody in this house who is.”

iv

All that morning she painted solidly through the background. In the afternoon Sir Henry posed for an hour and a half with two rests. He said nothing, but sighed a great deal. Troy worked at the hands, but he was restless, and kept making small nervous movements so that she did little more than lay down the general tone and shape of them. Millamant came in just before the end of the sitting, and, with a word of apology, went to him and murmured something indistinguishable. “No, no,” he said angrily. “It must be to-morrow. Ring up again and tell them so.”

“He says it’s very inconvenient.”

“That be damned. Ring up again.”

“Very well, Papa,” said the obedient Millamant.

She went away, and Troy, seeing that he was growing still more restless, called an end to the sitting, telling him that Cedric had offered to pose for the cloak. He left with evident relief. Troy grunted disconsolately, scraped down the hands, and turned again to the background. It was a formalised picture of a picture. The rooky wood, a wet mass, rimmed with boldly stated strokes of her brush, struck sharply across a coldly luminous night sky. The monolithic forms in the middle distance were broadly set down as interlocking masses. Troy had dragged a giant brush down the canvas, each stroke the summing-up of painful thinking that suddenly resolved itself in form. The background was right, and the Ancreds, she reflected, would think it very queer and unfinished. All of them, except, perhaps, Cedric and Panty. She had arrived at this conclusion when on to the stage pranced Cedric himself, heavily and most unnecessarily made-up, moving with a sort of bouncing stride, and making much of his grandfather’s red cloak.

“Here I am,” he cried, “feeling so keyed up with the mantle of high tragedy across my puny shoulders. Now, what precisely is the pose?”

There was no need to show him, however. He swept up his drape, placed himself, and, with an expert wriggle, flung it into precisely the right sweep. Troy eyed it, and, with a sense of rising excitement, spread unctuous bands of brilliant colour across her palette.

Cedric was an admirable model. The drape was frozen in its sculptured folds. Troy worked in silence for an hour, holding her breath so often that she became quite stuffy in the nose.

“Dearest Mrs. Alleyn,” said a faint voice, “I have a tiny cramp in my leg.”

“Lord, I’m sorry!” said Troy. “You’ve been wonderful. Do have a rest.”

He came down into the auditorium, limping a little but still with an air, and stood before her canvas.

“It’s so piercingly right,” he said. “Too exciting! I mean, it really is theatre, and the Old Person and that devastating Bard all synthesised and made eloquent and everything. It terrifies me.”

He sank into a near-by stall, first spreading his cloak over the back, and fanned himself. “I can’t tell you how I’ve died to prattle,” he went on, “all the time I was up there. This house is simply seething with intrigue.”

Troy, who was herself rather exhausted, lit a cigarette, sat down, and eyed her work. She also listened with considerable interest to Cedric.

“First I must tell you,” he began, “the Old Person has positively sent for his solicitor. Imagine! Such lobbyings and whisperings! One is reminded of Papal elections in the seventeenth century. First the marriage settlement, of course. What do you suppose darling Sonia will have laid down as the minimum? I’ve tried piteously hard to wheedle it out of her, but she’s turned rather secretive and grande dame. But, of course, however much it is it’s got to come from somewhere. Panty was known to be first favourite. He’s left her some fabulous sum to make her a parti when she grows up. But we all feel her little pranks will have swept her right out of the running. So perhaps darling Sonia will have that lot. Then there’s Paul and Fenella, who have undoubtedly polished themselves off. I rather hope,” said Cedric with a modest titter and a very sharp look in his eye, “that I may reap something there. I think I’m all right, but you never know. He simply detests me, really, and the entail is quite ridiculous. Somebody broke it up or something ages ago, and I may only get this awful house and nothing whatever to keep it up with. Still, I really have got Sonia on my side.”

He touched his moustache and pulled a small pellet of cosmetic off his eyelashes. “I made up,” he explained in parentheses, “because I felt it was so essential to get the feeling of the Macsoforth seeping through into every fold of the mantle. And partly because it’s such fun painting one’s face.”

He hummed a little air for a moment or two and then continued: “Thomas and Dessy and the Honourable Mrs. A. are all pouring in on Friday night. The Birthday is on Saturday, did you realize? The Old Person and the Ancient of Days will spend Sunday in bed, the one suffering from gastronomic excess, the other from his exertions as Ganymede. The family will no doubt pass the day in mutual recrimination. The general feeling is that the pièce-de-résistance for the Birthday will be an announcement of the new Will.”

“But, good Lord—!” Troy ejaculated. Cedric talked her down.

“Almost certain, I assure you. He has always made public each new draft. He can’t resist the dramatic mise-en-scène.”

“But how often does he change his Will?”

“I’ve never kept count,” Cedric confessed after a pause, “but on an average I should say once every two years, though for the last three years Panty has held firm as first favourite. While she was still doing baby-talk and only came here occasionally he adored her, and she, most unfortunately, was crazy about him. Pauline must curse the day when she manoeuvred the school to Ancreton. Last time I was grossly unpopular and down to the bare bones of the entail. Uncle Thomas was second to Panty with the general hope that he would marry and have a son, and I remain a celibate with Ancreton as a millstone round my poor little neck. “Isn’t it all too tricky?”

There was scarcely a thing that Cedric did or said of which Troy did not wholeheartedly disapprove, but it was impossible to be altogether bored by him. She found herself listening quite attentively to his recital, though after a time his gloating delight in Panty’s fall from grace began to irritate her.

“I still think,” she said, “that Panty didn’t play these tricks on her grandfather.” Cedric, with extraordinary vehemence, began to protest, but Troy insisted. “I’ve talked to her about it. Her manner, to my mind, was conclusive. Obviously she didn’t know anything about last night’s affair. She’d never heard of the squeaking cushion.”

“That child,” Cedric announced malevolently, “is incredibly, terrifyingly subtle. She is not an Ancred for nothing. She was acting. Depend upon it, she was acting.”

“I don’t believe it. And what’s more, she didn’t know her way to my room.”

Cedric, who was biting his nails, paused and stared at her. After a long pause he said: “Didn’t know her way to your room? But, dearest Mrs. Alleyn, what has that got to do with it?”

It was on the tip of her tongue to relate the incident of the painted banister. She had even begun: “Well, if you promise—”

And then, catching sight of his face with its full pouting mouth and pale eyes, she suddenly changed her mind. “It doesn’t matter,” Troy said, “it wouldn’t convince you. Never mind.”

“Dearest Mrs. Alleyn,” Cedric tittered, pulling at his cloak, “you are mysterious. Anyone would suppose you didn’t trust me.