Final Curtain

CHAPTER VII Fiesta

i

On Friday, a week after her arrival at Ancreton, Troy dragged her canvas out of the property room, where she now kept it locked up, and stared at it with mixed sensations of which the predominant was one of astonishment. How in the world had she managed it? Another two days would see its completion. Tomorrow night Sir Henry would lead his warring celebrants into the little theatre and she would stand awkwardly in the background while they talked about it. Would they be very disappointed? Would they see at once that the background was not the waste before Forres Castle but a theatrical cloth presenting this; that Troy had painted, not Macbeth himself, but an old actor looking backwards into his realization of the part? Would they see that the mood was one of relinquishment?

Well, the figure was completed. There were some further places she must attend to — a careful balancing stroke here and here. She was filled with a great desire that her husband should see it. It was satisfactory, Troy thought, that of the few people to whom she wished to show her work her husband came first. Perhaps this was because he said so little yet was not embarrassed by his own silence.

As the end of her work drew near her restlessness increased and her fears for their reunion. She remembered phrases spoken by other women: “The first relationship is never repeated.”

“We were strangers again when we met.”

“It wasn’t the same.”

“It feels extraordinary. We were shy and had nothing to say to each other.” Would her reunion also be inarticulate? “I’ve no technique,” Troy thought, “to see me through. I’ve no marital technique at all. Any native adroitness I possess has gone into my painting. But perhaps Roderick will know what to say. Shall I tell him at once about the Ancreds?”

She was cleaning her palette when Fenella ran in to say a call had come through for her from London.

It was the Assistant Commissioner at the Yard. Troy listened to him with a hammer knocking at her throat. He thought, he said with arch obscurity, that she might enjoy a run up to London on Monday. If she stayed the night, the Yard might have something of interest to show her on Tuesday morning. A police car would be coming in by way of Ancreton Halt early on Monday and would be delighted to give her a lift. “Thank you,” said Troy in an unrecognisable voice. “Yes, I see. Yes, of course. Yes, very exciting. Thank you.”

She fled to her room, realising as she sat breathless on her bed that she had run like a madwoman up three flights of stairs. “It’s as well,” she thought, “that the portrait’s finished. In this frame of mind I’d be lucky if I reached Panty’s form.”

She began distractedly to imagine their meeting. “But I can’t see his face,” she thought in a panic. “I can’t remember his voice. I’ve forgotten my husband.”

She felt by turns an unreasonable urge for activity and a sense of helpless inertia. Ridiculous incidents from the Ancred repertoire flashed up in her mind. “I must remember to tell him that,” she would think, and then wonder if, after all, the Ancreds in retrospect would sound funny. She remembered with a jolt that she must let Katti Bostock know about Tuesday. They had arranged for Alleyn’s old servant to go to London and open the flat.

“I should have done it at once,” she cried, and returned downstairs. While she waited, fuming, in a little telephone-room near the front doors, for her call to go through, she heard wheels on the drive, the sound of voices, and finally the unmistakable rumpus of arrival in the hall. A charming voice called gaily: “Milly, where are you? Come down. It’s Dessy and Thomas and me. Dessy found a Colonel, and the Colonel had a car, and we’ve all arrived together.”

“Jenetta!” Millamant’s disembodied voice floated down from the gallery. Still more distantly Pauline’s echoed her: “Jenetta!”

Was there an overtone of disapproval, not quite of dismay, in this greeting, Troy wondered, as she quietly shut the door?

ii

Jenetta, the Hon. Mrs. Claude Ancred, unlike Millamant, had caught none of the overtones of her relations-in-law. She was a nice-looking woman, with a gay voice, good clothes, an intelligent face, and an air of quietly enjoying herself. Her conversation was unstressed and crisp. If she sensed internecine warfare she gave no hint of doing so, and seemed to be equally pleased with, and equally remote from, each member of that unlikely clan.

Desdemona, on the other hand, was, of all the Ancreds after Sir Henry, most obviously of the theatre. She was startlingly good-looking, of voluptuous build, and had a warm ringing voice that seemed to be perpetually uttering important lines of climax from a West-End success. She ought really, Troy thought, to be surrounded by attendant figures: a secretary, an author, an agent, perhaps a doting producer. She had an aura of richness and warmth, and a knack of causing everybody else to subscribe to the larger-than-life atmosphere in which she herself moved so easily. Her Colonel, after a drink, drove away to his lawful destination, with Dessy’s magnificent thanks no doubt ringing in his ears. Troy, emerging from the telephone-room, found herself confronted by the new arrivals. She was glad to see Thomas: already she thought of him as “old Thomas”, with his crest of faded hair and his bland smile. “Oh, hallo,” he said, blinking at her, “so here you are! I hope your carbuncle is better.”

“It’s gone,” said Troy.

“We’re all talking about Papa’s engagement,” said Thomas. “This is my sister-in-law, Mrs. Claude Ancred, and this is my sister, Desdemona. Milly and Pauline are seeing about rooms. Have you painted a nice picture?”

“Not bad. Are you producing a nice play?”

“It’s quite good, thank you,” said Thomas primly. “Darling Tommy,” said Desdemona, “how can it be quite good with that woman? What were you thinking about when you cast it?”

“Well, Dessy, I told the management you wanted the part.”

“I didn’t want it. I could play it, but I didn’t want it, thank you.”

“Then everybody ought to be pleased,” said Thomas mildly. “I suppose, Jenetta,” he continued, “you are anxious to see Fenella and Paul. Papa’s engagement has rather swamped theirs, you may feel. Are you as angry as he is about them?”

“I’m not a bit angry,” she said, catching Troy’s eye and smiling at her. “I’m fond of Paul and want to talk to him.”

“That’s all very nice,” said Dessy restlessly, “but Milly says it was Paul and Fenella who exploded the bomb.”

“Oh, well,” said Thomas comfortably, “I expect it would have gone off anyway. Did you know Mr. Rattisbon has been sent for to make a new Will? I suppose Papa’ll tell us all about it at the Birthday Dinner to-morrow. Do you expect to be cut out this time, Dessy?”

“My dear,” cried his sister, sinking magnificently into the sofa and laying her arms along the back of it, “I’ve said so often exactly what I think of the Orrincourt that he can’t possibly do anything else. I don’t give a damn, Tommy. If Papa expects me to purr round congratulating them, he’s never been more mistaken. I can’t do it. It’s been a hideous shock to me. It hurts me, here” she added, beating a white fist on her striking bosom. “All my respect, my love, my ideal—shattered.” She flashed her eyes at her sister-in-law. “You think I exaggerate, Jen. You’re lucky. You’re not easily upset.”

“Well,” said Jenetta lightly, “I’ve yet to meet Miss Orrincourt.”

“He’s not your father,” Dessy pointed out with emotion.

“No more he is,” she agreed.

“T’uh!” said Dessy bitterly.

This conversation was interrupted by Fenella, who ran downstairs, flew across the hall, and, with an inarticulate cry, flung herself into her mother’s arms.

“Now, then,” said Jenetta softly, holding her daughter for a moment, “no high strikes.”

“Mummy, you’re not furious! Say you’re not furious?”

“Do I look furious, you goat? Where’s Paul?”

“In the library. Will you come? Mummy, you’re Heaven. You’re an angel.”

“Do pipe down, darling. And what about Aunt Dessy and Uncle Thomas?”

Fenella turned to greet them. Thomas kissed her carefully. “I hope you’ll be happy,” he said. “It ought to be all right, really. I looked up genetics in a medical encyclopedia after I read the announcement. The chap said the issue of first cousins was generally quite normal, unless there was any marked insanity in the family which was common to both.”

“Tommy!” said his sister. “Honestly, you are!”

“Well,” said Jenetta Ancred, “with that assurance to fortify us, Fen, suppose you take me to see Paul.”

They went off together. Millamant and Pauline came downstairs. “Such a nuisance,” Millamant was saying, “I really don’t quite know how to arrange it.”

“If you’re talking about rooms, Milly,” said Desdemona, “I tell you flatly that unless something has been done about the rats I won’t go into Bracegirdle.”

“Well, but Dessy—” Pauline began.

“Has something been done about the rats?”

“Barker,” said Millamant unhappily, “has lost the arsenic. I think he did Miss Orrincourt’s rooms some time ago, and after that the tin disappeared.”

“Good God!” said Thomas quietly.

“Pity he didn’t put some in her tooth-glass,” said Desdemona vindictively.

“What about Ellen Terry?”

“I was putting Jenetta into Terry.”

“Come into Bernhardt with me, Dess,” Pauline suggested richly. “I’d love to have you. We can talk. Let’s.”

“The only thing against that,” said Millamant, knitting her brows, “is that since Papa had all those large Jacobean pieces put in Bernhardt, there really isn’t anywhere for a second bed. I can put one in my room, Desdemona. I wondered if you’d mind… Lady Bancroft, you know. Quite spacious and plenty of hanging room.”

“Well, Milly, if it isn’t turning you upside down.”

“Not at all,” said Millamant coldly.

“And you can still talk to me,” said Pauline. “I’ll be next door.”

iii

On Friday night the weather broke and a deluge of rain beat down on the tortuous roofs of Ancreton. On Saturday morning Troy was awakened by a regular sequence of sharp percussionlike notes: Ping, ping, ping.

On going to her bath she nearly fell into a basin that had been placed on the landing. Into it fell a continuous progression of water-drops from a spreading patch in the roof. All day it rained. At three o’clock it had grown too dark to paint in the little theatre, but she had worked through the morning, and, having laid her last touch against the canvas, walked away from it and sat down. She felt that curious blankness which follows the completion of a painting. It was over. Her house was untenanted. It did not long remain so, for now, unchecked by the discipline of her work, Troy’s thoughts were filled with the anticipation of reunion. “The day after to-morrow I shall be saying: ‘Tomorrow.’ ” The Ancreds and their machinations now seemed unreal. They were two-dimensional figures gesticulating on a ridiculously magnificent stage. This reaction was to colour all memories of her last two days at Ancreton, blurring their edges, lending a tinge of fantasy to commonplace events, and causing her to doubt the integrity of her recollections when, in a little while, it would be imperative for her to recount them accurately.

She was to remember that Sir Henry was invisible all day, resting in preparation for his Birthday Dinner; that there was an air of anticipation in his enormous house, that his presents were set out in the library, a dark no-man’s-land in the east wing, and that the members of his family visited this Mecca frequently, eyeing each other’s gifts with intense partiality. Troy herself, in readiness for The Birthday, had made a lively and diverting sketch of Panty, which she had mounted and placed among the other gifts, wondering if, in view of Panty’s fall from grace, it was too preposterously inept. The sketch was viewed with wholehearted favour by Panty herself and her mother, and by nobody else except Cedric, who chose to regard it as an acid comment on the child’s character, which it was not.

Troy remembered afterwards how she had looked at the long dresses she had brought with her and decided that they were nothing like grand enough for the occasion. She remembered how the air of festivity had deepened as evening came, and how Barker and his retinue of elderly maids were in a continuous state of controlled bustle. Most often, though still with a feeling of incredulity, would it seem to her that there had been a sense of impending climax in the house, an impression of something drawing to its close. At the time Troy said to herself: “It’s because Rory’s coming. It’s because I’ve finished an intensive bit of work done at concert pitch.” But in retrospect these answers sounded unconvincing, and she wondered if the thoughts of one malevolent creature could have sent out a thin mist of apprehension.

Troy had cleaned her palette, shut her paint-box on ranks of depleted tubes, and washed her brushes for the last time at Ancreton. The portrait had been set up on the stage and framed in crimson velvet curtains that did their best to kill it. “If it was spring-time,” Troy thought, “I believe they’d have festooned it in garlands.” The act-drop had been lowered in front of the portrait and there it waited on a dark stage for the evening’s ceremony. She couldn’t glower at it. She couldn’t walk in that deluge. She was unendurably restless. The dinner itself was at nine; she had three hours to fill in. Taking a book with her, she wandered uncertainly from one vast room to another, and wherever she went there seemed to be two Ancreds in private conversation. Having disclosed Paul and Fenella tightly embraced in the study, disturbed Desdemona and Pauline hissing together in the drawing-room, and interrupted Millamant in what appeared to be angry parley with Barker under the stairs, she made her way to a room next the library, known as the Great Boudoir (the Little Boudoir was upstairs). Unnerved by her previous encounters, Troy paused outside the door and listened. All was still. She pushed open the door, and was confronted by Cedric and Miss Orrincourt side by side on a sofa, doubled up in an ecstasy of silent laughter.

She was well into the room before they saw her. Their behaviour was extraordinary. They stared at her with their mouths open, the laughter drying out on their faces as if she had scorched it. Cedric turned an ugly red, Miss Orrincourt’s eyes were as hard as blue glass marbles. She was the first to speak.

“Well, for crying out loud,” she said in a flat voice, “look who’s here.”

“Dearest Mrs. Alleyn,” said Cedric breathlessly, “do come in. We’ve been having a dreadfully naughty giggle over everything. The Birthday, you know, and all the wheels within wheels and so on. Do join us. Or are you too grand and upright? Dear me, that sounds as if you were a piano, doesn’t it?”

“It’s all right,” said Troy, “I won’t come in, thank you. I’m on my way upstairs.”

She went out, closing the door on their silence.

In the hall she found a completely strange elderly gentleman reading a newspaper before the fire. He wore London clothes, an old-fashioned wing collar and a narrow black tie. His face was thin and his hands blue-veined and knotty. When he saw Troy he dropped his newspaper, snatched off his pince-nez, and ejaculating “M-m-m-mah!” rose nimbly to his feet.

“Are you waiting to see somebody?” Troy asked.

“Thank yer, thank yer, no thank yer,” said the elderly gentleman rapidly. “Make myself known. Haven’t had the pleasure — Introduce myself. M-mah. Rattisbon.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Troy. “I knew you were coming. How do you do?” She introduced herself.

Mr. Rattisbon vibrated the tip of his tongue between his lips and wrung his hands. “How d’do,” he gabbled. “Delighted. Take it, fellow-guests. If I may so designate myself. Professional visit.”

“So’s mine,” said Troy, picking the sense out of this collection of phrases. “I’ve been doing a job here.”

He glanced at the painting-smock she had not yet removed. “Surely,” he clattered, “Mrs. Roderick Alleyn? Née Troy?”

“That’s it.”

“Pleasure of your husband’s acquaintance,” Mr. Rattisbon explained. “Professional association. Twice. Admirable.”

“Really!” said Troy, at once delighted. “You know Roderick? Do let’s sit down.”

Mr. Rattisbon sucked in his breath and made a crowing sound. They sat before the fire. He crossed his knees and joined his gnarled fingers, “He’s a drawing by Cruikshank,” Troy thought. She began to talk to him about Alleyn, and he listened exactly as if she was making a series of statements which he would presently require his clerk to come in and witness. Troy was to remember vividly this quiet encounter, and how in the middle of her recital she broke off apologetically to say: “But I don’t know why I should bore you with these stories about Roderick.”

“Bore?” he said. “On the contrary. Entirely so. May I add, strictly in camera, that I — ah — had contemplated this call with some misgivings as — ah — a not altogether propitious necessity. I find myself unexpectedly received, and most charmingly so, by a lady for whose remarkable talents I have long entertained the highest regard. M-m-mah!” Mr. Rattisbon added, dipping like a sparrow towards Troy. “Entirely so.”

At this juncture Pauline and Desdemona appeared in the hall and bore down rapidly upon Mr. Rattisbon.

“We are so sorry,” Pauline began. “Leaving you so long. Papa’s only just been told — a little upset. The great day, of course. He will be ready for you in a few minutes, dear Mr. Rattisbon. Until then Dessy and I would be so glad if you — we feel we’d like to—”

Troy was already on her way out. They were waiting for her to get out of earshot.

She heard Desdemona’s rich voice: “Just a tiny talk, Mr. Rattisbon. Just to warn you.” And Mr. Rattisbon suddenly very dry and brittle: “If you desire it, certainly.”

“But,” thought Troy, plodding along the passage, “they won’t get much change out of Mr. Rattisbon.”

iv

“It’s the big scene from a film script,” thought Troy, looking down the table, “and I’m the bit-part lady.” The analogy was unavoidable. How often had one not seen Sir Aubrey Smith at the head of such a table? Where else but on the screen was such opulence to be found? Where else such a welter of flowers, such sumptuously Edwardian epergnes, or such incredibly appropriate conversation? Never out of a film studio had characters been so well typed. Even the neighbouring squire and the parson, the one lean and monocled, the other rubicund and sleek, who apparently were annual fixtures for the event; even they were carefully selected cameo parts, too like themselves to be credible. And Mr. Rattisbon? The absolute in family solicitors. As for the Ancreds themselves, to glance at them or to hear their carefully modulated laughter, their beautifully articulated small-talk, was to realise at once that this was an all-star vehicle. Troy began to make up titles. “Homage to Sir Henry.” “The Astonishing Ancreds.”

“Going quite nicely, so far, don’t you consider?” said Thomas at her left elbow. She had forgotten Thomas, although he had taken her in. Cedric, on her right hand, had directed at her and at his partner, Desdemona, a number of rather spasmodic and intensely artificial remarks, all of which sounded as if they were designed for the ears of his grandfather. Thomas, presumably, had been silent until now.

“Very nicely,” Troy agreed hurriedly.

“I mean,” Thomas continued, lowering his voice, “you wouldn’t think, if you didn’t know, how terrified everyone is about the Will, would you? Everybody except me, that is, and perhaps Cedric.”

“Ssh!” said Troy. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“It’s because we’re putting on the great Family Act, you know. It’s the same on the stage. People that hate each other’s guts make love like angels. You’d be surprised, I dare say. Outsiders think it very queer. “Well,” Thomas continued, laying down his soupspoon and gazing mildly at her. “What, after all, do you think of Ancreton?”

“I’ve found it absorbing.”

“I’m so glad. You’ve come in for a set-piece, haven’t you? All the intrigues and fights. Do you know what will happen after dinner?” And without waiting for her reply he told her. “Papa will propose the King’s health and then I shall propose Papa’s. I’m the eldest son present so I shall have to, but it’s a pity. Claude would be much better. Last year Panty was brought in to do it. I coached her in the ‘business’ and she managed very nicely. Papa cried. This year, because of ringworm and the practical jokes, she hasn’t been invited. Gracious,” Thomas continued, as Troy helped herself from a dish that had appeared over her shoulder, “that’s never New Zealand crayfish? I thought Millamant had decided against it. Has Papa noticed? There’ll be trouble if he has.”

Thomas was right. Sir Henry, when offered this dish, glanced truculently at his daughter-in-law and helped himself to it. An instant silence fell upon the table, and Troy, who was opposite Millamant, saw her make a helpless deprecating grimace at Pauline, who, from the foot of the table, responded by raising her eyebrows.

“He insisted,” Millamant whispered to Paul on her left hand. “What?” asked Sir Henry loudly.

“Nothing, Papa,” said Millamant.

“They call this,” said Sir Henry, addressing himself to Mr. Rattisbon, “rock lobster. No more like a lobster than my foot. It’s some antipodean shell-fish.”

Furtively watched by his family, he took a large mouthful and at the same time pointed to his glass and added: “One must drink something with it. I shall break my rule, Barker. Champagne.”

Barker, with his lips very slightly pursed, filled the glass.

“That’s a big boy,” said Miss Orrincourt approvingly. The Ancreds, after a frightened second or two, burst simultaneously into feverish conversation.

“There,” said Thomas with an air of sober triumph. “What did I tell you? Champagne and hot crayfish. We shall hear more of this, you may depend upon it.”

“Do be careful,” Troy murmured nervously, and then, seeing that Sir Henry was in gallant conversation with Jenetta on his left, she added cautiously: “Is it so very bad for him?”

“I promise you,” said Thomas, “disastrous. I don’t think it tastes very nice, anyway,” he continued after a pause. “What do you think?” Troy had already come to this conclusion. The crayfish, she decided, were dubious.

“Hide it under your toast,” said Thomas. “I’m going to. It’s the Birthday turkey next, from the home farm. We can fill up on that, can’t we?”

But Sir Henry, Troy noticed, ate all his crayfish.

Apart from this incident, the dinner continued in the same elevated key up to the moment when Sir Henry, with the air of a Field-Marshal in Glorious Technicolor, rose and proposed the King.

A few minutes later Thomas, coughing modestly, embarked upon his speech.

“Well, Papa,” said Thomas, “I expect you know what I’m going to say, because, after all, this is your Birthday dinner, and we all know it’s a great occasion and how splendid it is for us to be here again as usual in spite of everything. Except Claude, of course, which is a pity, because he would think of a lot of new things to say, and I can’t.” At this point a slight breeze of discomfort seemed to stir among the Ancreds. “So I shall only say,” Thomas battled on, “how proud we are to be gathered here, remembering your past achievements and wishing you many more Birthday dinners in the time that is to come. Yes,” said Thomas, after a thoughtful pause, “that’s all, I think. Oh, I almost forgot! We all, of course, hope that you will be very happy in your married life. I shall now ask everybody to drink Papa’s health, please.”

The guests, evidently accustomed to a very much longer speech and taken unawares by the rapidity of Thomas’s peroration, hurriedly got to their feet.

“Papa,” said Thomas.

“Papa,” echoed Jenetta, Millamant, Pauline and Desdemona.

“Grandpapa,” murmured Fenella, Cedric and Paul.

“Sir Henry,” said the Rector loudly, followed by Mr Rattisbon, the Squire and Troy.

“Noddy!” said Miss Orrincourt, shrilly. “Cheers. Oodles of juice in your tank.”

Sir Henry received all this in the traditional manner. He fingered his glass, stared deeply at his plate, glanced up at Thomas, and, towards the end, raised his hand deprecatingly and let it fall. There was evidence of intense but restrained feeling. When they had all settled down he rose to reply. Troy had settled herself for resounding periods and a great display of rhetoric. She was not prepared, in view of the current family atmosphere, for touching simplicity and poignant emotion. These, however, were the characteristics of Sir Henry’s speech. It was also intensely manly. He had, he said, taken a good many calls in the course of his life as a busker, and made a good many little speeches of gratitude to a good many audiences. But moving as some of these occasions had been, there was no audience as near and dear to an old fellow as his own kith and kin and his few tried and proven friends. He and his dear old Tommy were alike in this: they had few words in which to express their dearest thoughts. Perhaps they were none the worse for it. (Pauline, Desdemona and the Rector made sounds of fervent acquiescence.) Sir Henry paused and glanced first at Paul and then at Fenella. He had intended, he said, to keep for this occasion the announcement of the happy change he now contemplated. But domestic events had, should he say, a little forced his hand, and they were now all aware of his good fortune. (Apparently the Squire and Rector were not aware of it, as they looked exceedingly startled.) There was however, one little ceremony to be observed.

He took a small morocco box from his pocket, opened it, extracted a dazzling ring, and, raising Miss Orrincourt, placed it on her engagement finger and kissed the finger. Miss Orrincourt responded by casting one practised glance at the ring and embracing him with the liveliest enthusiasm. His hearers broke into agitated applause, under cover of which Cedric muttered: “That’s the Ranee’s Solitaire re-set. I swear it is. Stay me with flagons, playmates.”

Sir Henry, with some firmness, reseated his fiancée and resumed his speech. It was, he said, a tradition in his family that the head of it should be twice married. The Sieur d’Ancred— he rambled on genealogically for some time. Troy felt embarrassment give place to boredom. Her attention was caught, however, by a new development. It had also been the custom, Sir Henry was saying, on these occasions, for the fortunate Ancred to reveal to his family the manner in which he had set his house in order. (Mr. Rattisbon raised his eyebrows very high and made a little quavering noise in his throat.) Such frankness was perhaps ouf of fashion nowadays, but it had an appropriate Shakespearian precedent. King Lear — but glancing at his agonised daughters Sir Henry did not pursue the analogy. He said that he proposed to uphold this traditional frankness. “I have to-day,” he said, “executed — my old friend Rattisbon will correct me if this is not the term”—(“M-m-mah!” said Mr. Rattisbon confusedly)— “thank you — executed My Will. It is a simple little document, conceived in the spirit that actuated my ancestor, the Sieur d’Ancred when—” A fretful sigh eddied round the table. This time, however, Sir Henry’s excursion into antiquity was comparatively brief. Clearing his throat, and speaking on a note so solemn that it had an almost ecclesiastical timbre, he fired point-blank and gave them a résumé of his Will.

Troy’s major concern was to avoid the eyes of everybody else seated at that table. To this end she stared zealously at a detail of the epergne immediately in front of her. For the rest of her life, any mention of Sir Henry Ancred’s last Will and Testament will immediately call up for her the image of a fat silver cupid who, in a pose at once energetic and insouciant, lunged out from a central globe, to which he was affixed only by his great toe, and, curving his right arm, supported on the extreme tip of his first finger a cornucopia three times his own size, dripping with orchids.

Sir Henry was speaking of legacies. Five thousand pounds to his devoted daughter-in-law, Millamant, five thousand pounds to his ewe lamb, Desdemona. To his doctor and his servants, to the hunt club, to the Church there were grand seigneurial legacies. Her attention wandered, and was again arrested by a comparison he seemed to be making between himself and some pentateuchal patriarch. “Into three parts. The residue divided into three parts.” This, then, was the climax. To his bride-to-be, to Thomas, and to Cedric, he would leave, severally, a life interest in a third of the residue of his estate. The capital of this fund to be held in trust and ultimately devoted to the preservation and endowment of Ancreton as a historical museum of drama to be known as The Henry Ancred Memorial.

“Tra-hippit!” Cedric murmured at her elbow. “Honestly, I exult. It might have been so much worse.”

Sir Henry was now making a brief summary of the rest of the field. His son, Claude, he thanked God, turning slightly towards Jenetta, had inherited a sufficient portion from his maternal grandmother, and was therefore able through this and through his own talents to make provision for his wife and (he momentarily eyed Fenella) daughter. His daughter Pauline (Troy heard her make an incoherent noise) had been suitably endowed at the time of her marriage and generously provided for by her late husband. She had her own ideas in the bringing up of her children and was able to carry them out. “Which,” Cedric muttered with relish, “is a particularly dirty crack at Paul and Panty, don’t you feel?”

“Ssh!” said Desdemona on the other side of him.

Sir Henry drifted into a somewhat vague and ambiguous diatribe on the virtues of family unity and the impossibility, however great the temptation, of ever entirely forgetting them. For the last time her attention wandered, and was jerked sharply back by the sound of her own name: “Mrs. Agatha Troy Alleyn… her dramatic and, if I as the subject may so call it, magnificent canvas, which you are presently to see—”

Troy, greatly startled, learned that the portrait was to be left to the Nation.

v

“It’s not the money, Milly. It’s not the money, Dessy,” wailed Pauline in the drawing-room. “I don’t mind about the money, Jen. It’s the cruel, cruel wound to my love. That’s what hurts me, girls. That’s what hurts.”

“If I were you,” said Millamant with her laugh, “I think I should feel a bit hipped about the money, too.”

Miss Orrincourt, according to her custom, had gone away to do her face. The ladies were divided into two parties — the haves and the have-nots. Dessy, a not altogether delighted legatee, had a foot in each camp. “It’s damn mean,” she said; “but after the things I’ve said about the Orrincourt, I suppose I’m lucky to get anything. What do you think of her, Jen?”

“I suppose,” said Jenetta Ancred thoughtfully, “she is real, isn’t she! I mean, I catch myself wondering, quite seriously, if she could be somebody who has dressed up and is putting on the language and everything as a colossal practical joke. I didn’t think people ever were so shatteringly true to type. But she’s much too lovely, of course, to be a leg-pull.”

“Lovely!” cried Desdemona. “Jen! Straight out of the third row of the chorus and appallingly common at that.”

“I dare say, but they are generally rather lovely in the chorus nowadays, aren’t they, Fenella?”

Fenella had withdrawn entirely from the discussion. Now, when they all turned to her, she faced them rigidly, two bright red spots burning over her cheek-bones.

“I want to say,” she began in a loud, shaky voice, “that I’m very sorry, Aunt Pauline and Mummy, that because of Paul and me you’ve been treated so disgracefully. We don’t mind for ourselves. We’d neither of us, after the things he’s said, touch a penny of his money. But we are sorry about you and Panty.”

“Well, darling,” said her mother, putting an arm through hers, “That’s very handsome of you and Paul, but don’t let’s have any more speeches, shall we?”

“Yes, but Mummy—”

“Your two families are very anxious for both of you to be happy. It’s like that, isn’t it, Pauline?”

“Well, Jenetta, that, of course, goes without saying, but—”

“There you are, Fen,” said Jenetta. “It goes, and without saying, which is such a blessing.”

Pauline, looking extremely vexed, retired into a corner with Desdemona.

Jenetta offered Troy a cigarette. “I suppose,” she muttered in a friendly manner, “that was not a very good remark for me to make, but, to tell you the truth, I take a pretty gloomy view of all these naked wounds. Mr. Rattisbon tells me your husband’s coming back. What fun for you.”

“Yes,” said Troy, “it’s all of that.”

“Does everything else seem vague and two-dimensional? It would to me.”

“It does with me, too. I find it very muddling.”

“Of course the Ancreds are on the two-dimensional side anyway, if it comes to that. Especially my father-in-law. Did it make painting him easier or more difficult?”

Before Troy could answer this entertaining question, Cedric, flushed and smirking, opened the door, and stood against it in a romantic attitude waving his handkerchief.

“Darlings,” he said, “Allez-houp!The great moment. I am to bid you to the little theatre. Dearest Mrs. Alleyn, you and the Old Person should be jointly fêted. A cloud of little doves with gilded wings should be lowered by an ingenious device from the flies, and, with pretty gestures, crown you with laurels. Uncle Thomas could have arranged it. I should so adore to see Panty as an aerial coryphée. Will you all come?”

They found the men assembled in the little theatre. It was brilliantly lit, and had an air of hopefully waiting for a much larger audience. Soft music rumbled synthetically behind the front curtain, which (an inevitable detail) was emblazoned with the arms of Ancred. Troy found herself suddenly projected into a star rôle. Sir Henry led her up the aisle to a seat beside himself. The rest of the party settled behind them. Cedric, with a kind of consequential flutter, hurried backstage.

Sir Henry was smoking a cigar. When he inclined gallantly towards Troy she perceived that he had taken brandy. This circumstance was accompanied by a formidable internal rumbling.

“I shall,” he murmured gustily, “just say a few words.”

They were actually few, but as usual they were intensely embarrassing. Her reluctance to undertake the portrait was playfully outlined. His own pleasure in the sittings was remorselessly sketched. Some rather naïve quotations on art from Timon of Athens were introduced, and then: “But I must not tantalise my audience any longer,” said Sir Henry richly. “Curtain, my boy. Curtain!”

The house lights went down: the front drop slid upwards. Simultaneously four powerful floodlamps poured down their beams from the flies. The scarlet tabs were drawn apart, and there, in a blaze of highly unsuitable light, the portrait was revealed.

Above the sombre head and flying against a clear patch of night sky, somebody had painted an emerald green cow with vermilion wings. It was in the act of secreting an object that might or might not have been a black bomb.