“She certainly didn’t seem to be in any conciliatory mood,” admitted Dominic, ”when she laid off just what she thought of him, to-night.”
“She didn’t, did she?” Delighted eyes blinked behind the butterfly glasses and the curtain of hair. “It’s thrilling, really, because when you come to think of it, she actually threatened him! She said if she couldn’t have him, nobody should. And did you know? – they had some sort of a brush before they came in here. No, honestly, I’m not making it up! She bit him!”
“Oh, go on!” said Tossa disbelievingly. “People don’t go round biting each other, not even the folk element.”
“All right, if you don’t believe me, take a look at his left wrist. You’ll see the marks there, all right.” Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper, drunk with the pleasures of anticipation. “You don’t suppose she really came here to try to kill him, do you? I mean, she as good as said…”
“No,” said Dominic flatly, “I don’t suppose any such thing. One minute you’re telling us she gave him the push, and the next that she’s carrying a torch for him, and will see him dead before she’ll let anybody else have him.‘’
“Well, they could both be true, couldn’t they?” said the girl blithely, and went off to spread the news farther.
“And the devil of it is,” said Tossa, looking after her with a considering frown, “that she could very well be right. They’re getting good value for their tuition fees this time, aren’t they?”
“Now don’t you start!” protested Dominic. “Don’t forget this has all come from Dickie Meurice, and you said yourself he must hate Lucien, so what’s odd about his drumming up all the trouble he can for him? But it’s just a load of personal spite. It won’t come to anything.”
The Arundales, dutifully circulating among their guests, were approaching this quiet corner by easy stages, the image of a successful, efficient, socially accomplished college head and his eminently suitable and satisfactory wife. “Now I ask you,” said Dominic, low-voiced, “how on earth could melodrama muscle in on any party of theirs? It would never get past the secretary’s office.”
Half an hour later he was not quite so certain.
The party broke up early. The warden had no way of ensuring that his houseful of young people would stay in their four-bedded rooms, even when he had got them there, but he could at least set a good example, and hope that they would take the hint and follow it. Felicity had already been detached unwillingly from Lucien Galt’s side and edged away to bed. A few of the older people had drifted off to their rooms, and more were on their way, pausing to nose along the library shelves for bedside books. The Arundales completed their tour of all the groups left in the drawing-room by half past ten, said a general good night, and strolled out along the gallery towards their own rooms. And so powerful was the compulsion of their authority that Lucien Galt, who happened to be with them at the time, fell in alongside and left with them, and half a dozen others wound up their conversations and followed.
“Not that I shall get to bed for an hour or so yet,” observed Arundale with a rueful smile. “I’ve got to address the Vintners’ annual dinner to-morrow night, on adult education in general and Follymead in particular, and I haven’t got my ideas in order yet. We’re hoping to get an annual grant from them, of course! And on Sunday afternoon there’s a conference of clerical and lay educationalists, on the use of leisure – a big subject, and very much in the news just now. I’m afraid it must all sound rather boring to you,” he said, glancing across his wife’s fair head at Lucien Galt, with more of patronage than apology. “At your age the problem of leisure is largely a matter of getting enough of it – no difficulty in filling it.”
“I don’t find it boring at all,” said Lucien politely. And indeed, the dark profile he turned to the view of Dominic and Tossa, strolling a yard or two behind, did not look bored; the tight lines of it had eased and warmed, his colour was high and his eyes soft and bright. A slightly hectic gaiety touched him, perhaps from the salutary effort of making conversation; perhaps from the secret activity of his mind. He looked at Audrey Arundale, walking between them, and from her to her husband, and said with warmth: “I think what you’re doing here is fine, and I’m glad to be associated with it.”
Mrs. Arundale turned her head a little at that, and her dutiful, acquiescent smile, which seldom left her lips and never lost its faint overtone of anxiety, flushed into something proud and animated with pleasure.
“I’d like to think it’s fine,” said Arundale, accepting the bouquet. “I know it isn’t enough. I can only hope it has some effect.”
At this point Dominic’s thumbs pricked, surely quite unjustly, as he told himself. But who had ever heard Lucifer go out of his way to pay a compliment to anyone before? He sounded quite sincere, and probably he was, but even so it didn’t seem in character that he should say it. And the slight prick of wonder and curiosity suddenly reminded Dominic of that alleged mark on Lucien’s left wrist. That was why he happened to glance down at the right, or perhaps the wrong, moment, and see what Tossa failed to see.
The three in front were walking close together, the flared skirt of the woman’s dress rustling softly against her escorts as they moved. Lucien’s left hand, carried loosely at his side, suddenly uncurled its long fingers, and delicately and deliberately touched Audrey’s hand between their bodies, and in instant response she opened her fingers to accept him. They clasped hands ardently for an instant, and as quickly and smoothly drew apart again. Their steps had never faltered, their faces had not quivered; only the hands embraced and clung and separated with passion and resolution, as though they had an independent life of their own, or had drawn down into themselves, for one moment, all the life of these two people.
In an unexpected but natural reaction, Dominic looked round hastily and almost furtively, to see if anyone else had been watching and seen what he had seen. But Tossa, thank goodness, was looking up at the elaborate pendants of the Venetian chandeliers, now turned down discreetly to a quarter their full power, so that the long gallery was almost dim, even in its open walk; and the view of anyone coming along behind must have been blocked completely by their bodies. No, nobody! He was almost relieved as if he had risked being caught out in some embarrassing misdemeanour himself, and by luck rather than desert survived undetected.
Then a minute, sudden refraction of light drew his eyes sharply to the deep alcove where one of the Cothercott portraits hung. Someone was sitting there, so still that but for the ring she wore he would never have found her. But when he had once found her, her eyes burned brighter than the reflection from her ring. She sat motionless, the long, heavy plait of hair coiled on her shoulder. Her face was as fixed as ice, her nostrils flared wide. She was neither surprised nor disconcerted. She had seen only what she had been prepared to see, something against which she was forewarned and forearmed; but it was at the same time something she would never forget or forgive, and something she would not endure without retaliation.
They moved on, and Liri Palmer watched them go, and never moved. No one saw her but Dominic; no one but Dominic knew what she had seen.
CHAPTER III
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I HOPE,” said Professor Penrose, casting a lightning glance at his watch, which showed twenty minutes past twelve, and lifting the tone-arm delicately from his precious disc of Moravian Slovak recordings, “that we’ve at least established a basis for the name of our subject. I hope we can agree that it should not be merely ‘folk,’ but ‘music,’ too. Beware of the fanatic who finds everything phoney that isn’t sung without accompaniment by an eighty-five-year-old in a public bar… without voice, too, as a rule, and who can wonder at it? No, we’ve disposed of that. We’ve surely demonstrated that there are places in the world where performances of the utmost virtuosity can be truly ‘folk,’ because the heritage of that particular people is a musical sensitivity which we, here in England, associate only with privilege, training and sophistication. Never lose sight of that humbling fact, and beware of subscribing to purely English standards – or should I say, British?” He cocked an eye at Andrew Callum, and grinned. “But they’re two different things, as I’ll show you this evening. The Celtic fringe has the drop on us poor English in so many ways, you’ll find. Puritanism has a lot to answer for.” He slammed shut the huge book of notes at which he never even looked, though he opened it religiously at the beginning of each session.