It was New Year's Eve. The elder members of the house party at Royston
were assembled in the big hall.
Mr. Satterthwaite was glad that the young people had gone to bed. He
was not fond of young people in herds. He thought them uninteresting
and crude. They lacked subtlety and as life went on he had become
increasingly fond of subtleties.
Mr. Satterthwaite was sixty-two--a little bent, dried-up man with a
peering face oddly elflike, and an intense and inordinate interest in
other people's lives. All his life, so to speak, he had sat in the
front row of the stalls watching various dramas of human nature unfold
before him. His role had always been that of the onlooker. Only now,
with old age holding him in its clutch, he found himself increasingly
critical of the drama submitted to him. He demanded now something a
little out of the common.
There was no doubt that he had a flair for these things. He knew
instinctively when the elements of drama were at hand. Like a war
horse, he sniffed the scent. Since his arrival at Royston this
afternoon, that strange inner sense of his had stirred and bid him be
ready. Something interesting was happening or going to happen.
The house party was not a large one. There was Tom Evesham, their
genial good-humored host, and his serious political wife, who had been
before her marriage Lady Laura Keene. There was Sir Richard Conway,
soldier, traveler, and sportsman, there were six or seven young people
whose names Mr. Satterthwaite had not grasped, and there were the
Portals.
It was the Portals who interested Mr. Satterthwaite.
He had never met Alec Portal before but he knew all about him, had
known his father and his grandfather. Alec Portal ran pretty true to
type. He was a man of close on forty, fair-haired, and blue-eyed like
all the Portals, fond of sport, good at games, devoid of imagination.
Nothing unusual about Alec Portal. The usual good, sound English stock.
But his wife was different. She was, Mr. Satterthwaite knew, an
Australian. Portal had been out in Australia two years ago, had met her
out there, and had married her and brought her home. She had never been
to England previous to her marriage. All the same, she wasn't at all
like any other Australian woman Mr. Satterthwaite had met.
He observed her now covertly. Interesting woman--very. So still, and
yet so--alive. Alive! That was just it! Not exactly beautiful--no, you
wouldn't call her beautiful, but there was a kind of calamitous magic
about her that you couldn't miss--that no man could miss. The masculine
side of Mr. Satterthwaite spoke there, but the feminine side (for Mr.
Satterthwaite had a large share of femininity), was equally interested
in another question: Why did Mrs. Portal dye her hair?
No other man would probably have known that she dyed her hair, but Mr.
Satterthwaite knew. He knew all those things. And it puzzled him. Many
dark women dye their hair blond; he had never before come across a fair
woman who dyed her hair black.
Everything about her intrigued him. In a queer intuitive way, he felt
certain that she was either very happy or very unhappy--but he didn't
know which, and it annoyed him not to know. Furthermore, there was the
curious effect she had upon her husband.
_He adores her_, said Mr. Satterthwaite to himself, _but sometimes
he's--yes, afraid of her! That's very interesting. That's uncommonly
interesting._
Portal drank too much. That was certain. And he had a curious way of
watching his wife when she wasn't looking.
_Nerves_, said Mr. Satterthwaite. _The fellow's all nerves. She knows
it too, but she won't do anything about it._
He felt very curious about the pair of them. Something was going on
that he couldn't fathom.
He was roused from his meditations on the subject by the solemn chiming
of a big clock.
"Twelve o'clock," said Evesham. "New Year's Day. Happy New
Year--everybody. As a matter of fact, that clock's five minutes fast. I
don't know why the children wouldn't wait up and see the New Year in."
"I don't suppose for a minute they've really gone to bed," said his
wife placidly. "They're probably putting hairbrushes or something in
our beds. That sort of thing does so amuse them. I can't think why. We
should never have been allowed to do such a thing in my young day."
"_Autre temps, autre moeurs_," said Conway, smiling.
He was a tall soldierly-looking man. Both he and Evesham were much of
the same type--honest, upright, kindly men with no great pretensions to
brains.
"In my young days we all joined hands in a circle and sang 'Auld Lang
Syne,'" continued Lady Laura. "'Should auld acquaintance be forgot'--so
touching, I always think the words are."