Lucien moistened his lips. His eyes kindled suddenly into a slightly feverish glitter. “This is a straightforward concert for the finish?”
“Yes. Until half past six. Then they all go home.”
“Is Liri taking part?”
“Yes, Liri’s taking part.”
He thought of her head bent over the guitar, the great braid of hair coiled on her neck, the suave curve of her cheek and the intent, burnished brow, and of the voice achingly pure and clear and passionate. He thought of a future blank with confinement and solitude, where the voice could not penetrate.
“If you’ll let me sit in on this concert, all right, I give you my word I won’t cause you any trouble.”
He didn’t believe there would be any response to that offer, he was sure they’d never risk him among the crowd.
But Inspector Felse had got to his feet briskly, and swept his papers into a drawer.
“Agreed, if you don’t mind my company. And in that case we’d better go in, hadn’t we? They’ll be starting any minute.”
From her place among the artists, Liri saw them come in.
The lights were already dimmed, the hum of voices was becoming muted and expectant, and it was time. There at the back of the great room people moved about gently in obscurity, settling themselves, changing their places, finding comfortable leg-room. For once Professor Penrose came a little late to his place, and in haste, having taken too long a nap after tea; but for that the programme would have begun before the padded door at the back of the room opened again, and her attention would have been on the singers, and not on the two late-comers. As it was, she was gazing beyond the last rank of chairs in the shadow, beyond even the walls of the room, when the opening of the door caused her to shorten her sights, and return to here and now. And the person who came in was Lucien.
Her heart turned in her, even before she saw George Felse follow him into the room, and edge along after him behind the audience, to a seat against the wall. So they had him, after all. He wasn’t used to running from things, and he hadn’t run fast enough, and now they had him, back here where the thing had happened that never should have happened, the wasted, meaningless thing in which she still couldn’t believe. She felt the walls closing in on her, too.
And yet if he was under arrest, what was he doing here? There seemed to be no constraint upon him, even if the inspector had come in with him, and taken a seat beside him on the elegant little gilt and velvet couch against the tapestried wall. They sat there like any other two members of the audience, she even saw them exchange a few words, with every appearance of normality. What was happening? There was something here that was not as it seemed to be, and she could not make out what it was, or whom it threatened.
She looked to the inspector for a clue, but his face was smooth and reserved and quite unreadable, there was no way of guessing what was going on in the mind behind it. If she had gone in terror of the obvious end, now she found herself equally afraid of some other eventuality beyond her grasp. Why bring a prisoner here into this room? She could understand that the police might prefer to get all these people out of here before they took decisive action, but even so, why bring Lucien to the gathering?
A hand jogged her arm. The professor’s insinuating voice begged her winningly: “Your legs are younger than mine, lass. Run and fetch my notebook for me, will you? I went and left it in the warden’s office before tea, and forgot to collect it again.”
His notebook was a joke by that time. He couldn’t talk without it open before him, and yet he had never been known to consult it for any detail, however abstruse.
“You’ve never needed it yet,” protested Liri, her eyes clinging to the distant pair at the back of the room, lost now in an even dimmer light. Someone had turned out the strip-lights over the pictures. “You’re not likely to start tonight.”
“There has to be a first time for everything. Go on, now, like a good girl.”
And she went, impatiently but obediently, flashing to the doorway and running along the corridor. Her heels rang on the polished wood with a solitary and frightening sound, for outside the great yellow room the house hung silent and deserted. Nothing now was quite real, so much of her mind laboured frenziedly with this crisis she could not comprehend. She pushed open the door of the warden’s office, which for the past three days had become an extension of police headquarters, while the house went about its blithe business oblivious of all evil. The massive folder of the professor’s notes lay on a walnut table near the window. She tucked it under her arm, and turned to the door again, and then as abruptly turned back, and crossed to the desk.
Would he leave anything, any unconsidered trifle, where she could find it and make sense of it? She had to know; there was a feverish pulse beating in her blood that insisted it was imperative for her to know.
She put down her portfolio on the desk, and began trying all the drawers one by one, but they were fast locked. She should have guessed that. There was nothing here for her.
But there was. Her eyes fell on it as she straightened up with a sigh from her useless search. There it was, propped against Arundale’s rack of reference books, eye to eye with her, the half-plate photograph of a young girl in a white party-dress. She had never seen the living face joyous like this, but she knew it at once, as she knew the little silver disc that hung round the girl’s neck on a thin chain.
Lucien’s medal, the one he had worn ever since she had known him, long before he met Audrey Arundale. The one thing that had been his father’s. And yet here it hung round the neck of the sixteen-year-old Audrey, how many years ago, how many worlds away?
Now she did understand. Intuitively, without need of details or evidence, she understood everything. Yes, even why Lucien was sitting there among the audience in the dressing-room, under no restraint, though he surely expected arrest afterwards. Liri knew better. She knew what was going to happen afterwards; she knew what went on behind George Felse’s unrevealing face.
She caught up the portfolio and slipped from the room, to run like a wild thing through the silent libraries, and along the corridors to the warden’s private quarters. But there was no one there. The lights were out and the rooms deserted. And she must go back, she couldn’t hunt any farther. Too late now to make any amends, too late to look for Audrey, too late to warn her. A minute more, and someone else would be out hunting for her.
She went back to the yellow drawing-room, back to her place on the dais. She gave the professor his notes, which of course he would not need or use. It was no use now; there was no way of reaching her. Liri raised her eyes and looked carefully over the array of attentive faces, little moons in a mild twilight. Those two at the back, side by side on their crazy little gilded perch, looked improbably at ease. The professor was talking about the summing-up of all that they had experienced together, the relationship of folk-music to the wider and deeper field of music itself. Presently the Rossignol twins were singing, two angelic voices, eerie and sweet.
The long range of windows that led out on to the terrace brought the dim and cloudy day in upon them in tints of subdued violet and green. Not even dusk yet, not by a couple of hours, and yet the low and heavy cloud hung like a pall, turning this after-tea hour into night.
The most distant of the long windows, down there at the back of the room, stood ajar. A while ago they had all been closed. The last chair at the end of that row, certainly empty then, was occupied now. Someone had come in by the window, and moved the chair aside into the embrasure, drawing a fold of the heavy curtains round it to screen her from at least half the room. A dead black dress, the sheen of pale, piled hair.