At dinner, that first night, Alleyn witnessed the pageant of nightfall on the plateau. He saw the horn of the Cloud Piercer shine gold and crimson long after the hollows of the lesser alps, as though a dark wine poured into them, had filled with shadow. He felt the night air of the mountains enter the house and was glad to smell newly lit wood in the open fire-places.
He considered once again the inmates of the home.
Seen by candlelight round the dining-room table they seemed, with the exception of the housekeeper-chaperon, extremely young. Terence Lynne, an English girl who had been Florence Rubrick’s secretary, was perhaps the oldest, though her way of dressing her hair may have given him this impression. It swept, close-fitting as a cap, in two black wings from a central parting to a knot at the nape of her neck, giving her the look of a coryphée, an impression that was not contradicted by the extreme, the almost complacent, neatness of her dress. This was black, with crisp lawn collar and cuffs. Not quite an evening dress, but he felt that, unlike the two young men, Miss Lynne changed punctiliously every night. Her hands were long and white and it was a shock to learn that since her employer’s death she had returned to Mount Moon as a kind of land girl, or more accurately, as he was to learn later, a female gardener. Some hint of her former employment still hung about her. She had an air of responsibility and was, he thought, a trifle mousy.
Ursula Harme was an enchanting girl, slim, copper-haired and extremely talkative. On his arrival Alleyn had encountered her stretched out on the tennis lawn wearing a brief white garment and dark glasses. She at once began to speak of England, sketching modish pre-war gaieties and asking him which of the night clubs had survived the blitz. She had been in England with her guardian, she said, when war broke out. Her uncle, now fighting in the Middle East, had urged her to return with Mrs. Rubrick to New Zealand, and Mount Moon.
“I am a New Zealander,” said Miss Harme, “but all my relations — I haven’t any close relations except my uncle— live in England. Aunt Flossie — she wasn’t really an aunt but I called her that — was better than any real relation could have been.”
She was swift in her movements and had the silken air of a girl who is, beyond argument, attractive. Alleyn thought her restless and noticed that, though she looked gay and brilliant when she talked, her face in repose was watchful. Though, during dinner, she spoke most readily to Douglas Grace, her eyes more often were for Fabian Losse.
The two men were well contrasted. Everything about Fabian Losse — his hollow temples and his nervous hands, his lightly waving hair — was drawn delicately with a sharp pencil. But Captain Grace was a magnificent fellow with a fine moustache, a sleek head and large eyes. His accent was slightly antipodean, but his manners were formal. He called Alleyn “sir” each time he spoke to him and was inclined to pin a rather meaningless little laugh on the end of his remarks. He seemed to Alleyn to be an extremely conventional young man.
Mrs. Aceworthy, Arthur Rubrick’s elderly cousin who had come to Mount Moon on the death of his wife, was a large sandy woman with an air of uncertain authority and a tendency to bridle. Her manner towards Alleyn was cautious. He thought that she disapproved of his visit and he wondered how much Fabian Losse had told her. She spoke playfully and in quotation marks of “my family” and seemed to show a preference for the two New Zealanders, Douglas Grace and Ursula Harme.
The vast landscape outside darkened and the candles on the dining-room table showed ghostly in the uncurtained window-panes. When dinner was over they all moved into a comfortable, conglomerate sort of room hung with faded photographs of past cadets and lit cosily by a kerosene lamp. Mrs. Aceworthy, with a vague murmur about “having to see to things,” left them with their coffee.
Above the fire-place hung the full-dress portrait of a woman.
It was a formal painting. The bare arms, executed with machine-like precision, flowed wirily from shoulders to clasped hands. The dress was of mustard-coloured satin, very décolleté, and this line was repeated in the brassy high lights of Mrs. Rubrick’s incredibly golden coiffure. The painter had dealt remorselessly with a formidable display of jewelry. It was an Academy portrait by an experienced painter, but his habit of flattery had met its Waterloo in Florence Rubrick’s face. No trick of understatement could soften that large mouth, closed with difficulty over protuberant teeth, or modify the acquisitive glare of the pale goiterous eyes which evidently had been fixed on the artist’s and therefore appeared, as laymen will say, to “follow one about the room.” Upon each of the five persons seated in Arthur Rubrick’s study did his wife Florence seem to fix her arrogant and merciless stare.
There was no other picture in the room. Alleyn looked round for a photograph of Arthur Rubrick but could find none that seemed likely.
The flow of talk, which had run continuously if not quite easily throughout dinner, was now checked. The pauses grew longer and their interruptions more forced. Fabian Losse began to stare expectantly at Alleyn. Douglas Grace sang discordantly under his breath. The two girls fidgeted, caught each other’s eyes and looked away again.
Alleyn, sitting in shadow a little removed from the fireside group, said: “That’s a portrait of Mrs. Rubrick, isn’t it?”
It was as if he had gathered up the reins of a team of nervously expectant horses. He saw by their startled glances at the portrait that custom had made it invisible to them, a mere piece of furniture of which, for all its ghastly associations, they were normally unaware. They stared at it now rather stupidly, gaping a little.
Fabian said: “Yes. It was painted ten years ago. I don’t need to tell you it’s by a determined Academician. Rather a pity, really. John would have made something terrific out of Flossie. Or, better still, Agatha Troy.”
Alleyn, who was married to Agatha Troy, said: “I only saw Mrs. Rubrick for a few minutes. Is it a good likeness?”
Fabian and Ursula Harme said: “No.” Douglas Grace and Terence Lynne said: “Yes.”
“Hullo!” said Alleyn. “A divergence of opinion?”
“It doesn’t give you any idea of how tiny she was,” said Douglas Grace, “but I’d call it a speaking likeness.”
“Oh, it’s a conscientious map of her face,” said Fabian.
“It’s a caricature,” cried Ursula Harme. Her eyes were fixed indignantly on the portrait.
“I should have called it an unblushing understatement,” said Fabian. He was standing before the fire, his hands on the mantelpiece. Ursula Harme turned to look at him, knitting her brows. Alleyn heard her sigh as if Fabian had wakened some old controversy between them.
“And there’s no vitality in it, Fabian,” she said anxiously. “You must admit that. I mean she was a much more splendid person than that. So marvellously alive.” She caught her breath at the unhappy phrase. “She made you feel like that about her,” she added. “The portrait gives you nothing of it.”
“I don’t pretend to know anything about painting,” said Douglas Grace, “but I do know what I like.”
“Would you believe it?” Fabian murmured under his breath. He said aloud: “Is it so great a merit, Ursy, to be marvellously alive? I find unbounded vitality very unnerving.”