The luxurious ease, and quiet, well-oiled machinery of service at
Thorngate gave no slightest indication of the worm at its heart. Up the
long, winding, carpeted stairs the servants glided on their errands,
and, in turn, the guests themselves came softly down by ones and twos,
with a gleam of jewels, of colored silk, of white shirt-fronts in the
halls dimly lit with candles.
Belknap had hastened his dressing in order to be first in the
drawing-room. He felt that at any moment he might be needed in the front
line, and that no time should be wasted under a shower or before a
mirror. His trust in Whittaker was not so perfect as to assure him that
he had been honest in saying no one was in the least aware of impending
trouble. And there was just the chance that someone, being forehanded,
would get away with murder!
Although he had been in the receiving room, which was also library and
den, fifty times over, Belknap looked it over with awakened interest.
Whittaker, it was apparent, had a leaning toward panelings and oil
portraits, medieval tapestries and deep-napped carpets. Here tapestries
formed the wall covering from floor to ceiling: none of exceptional
value except the Gobelin over the mantel, but all equally lovely in
colors and texture. An impulse, not so odd perhaps under the
circumstances, prompted Belknap to test what lay immediately behind the
surface of woven cloth and, as far as its stretching would yield to his
hand, he found space. He tried it at various points and discovered it
everywhere the same; and he recalled having heard that it was the safest
way to hang tapestries against the rear attack of insects and dampness.
Convenient to know, he thought. He was engaged in trying to locate the
servants’ entrance to this interstitial passage when he became gradually
aware that someone else had come into the room.
He turned about with elaborate sang-froid and met the gaze of a tall,
strikingly handsome woman, who stood quizzically regarding him. She wore
a black sheath gown with crimson accessories that included the oval
nails of tapering fingers and the clear-cut lips of a willful mouth. The
crimson handkerchief tied to her garnet bracelets floated lightly up and
back at every slightest movement of her arm. The cigarette case of
scarlet enamel which she opened with a deft flick of one hand to help
herself with the other, gleamed like smoldering coal.
He had met Nadia Mdevani several times with Whittaker; and he had
vaguely realized the relationship between them, but had given it little
consideration; except that once he had instinctively withdrawn from a
case in which her name had figured more or less conspicuously. The sense
of her guilt had been conveyed to him on the wings of one of what he
called his wild guesses, and he paid Whittaker the courtesy of letting
well enough alone. As it happened, she had cleared herself easily.
Looking at her now he realized that she was inwardly disturbed at sight
of him. Perhaps she saw in his mere presence a confirmation of the faint
doubts she might be entertaining with respect to the week-end. But her
poise held perfectly—in fact it was by a shade of its over-emphasis that
he caught the inner tremor at all.
“Ah, Mr. Belknap!” she exclaimed, in her slow, husky contralto. “How
ni-ice to see you here. Or should I call you Judge Belknap—or Detective
Ordway Belknap? I am never sure of the term to your face. Behind your
back I call you Belknap for short.”
“Let’s discard them, all four, and make it simply Ordway, to my face, as
you put it, _and_ behind my back. And may I make it Nadia? Remember
Bertrand is an equally dear friend to us both. You are looking divinely,
Miss Nadia. Black is your color. Although I have seen you when I should
have said the same of red, or white for the matter of that. Red and
white are your contrasts. Tonight you are fused into a single vivid
figure of black. Whistler would have liked you. You have a way, which
most women have not, of lending distinction to a color instead of
letting it create you. You have a like faculty with situations I am
told.”
“I am not quite certain what you may mean by that, or whether it should
entirely please me. But I have sufficient vanity to be flattered by your
recollection of my gowns in view of how little attention you seemed to
give them. Will you have one?”
She proffered her exquisite box and on his “Thank you, no,” crossed to
the hearth where she lifted a crimson-slippered foot to the side bar of
the fender, and for graceful balance (pose, Belknap thought it) laid a
hand against the tapestried wall. It yielded enough to mar her picture.
“I had forgotten these tapestries are but the semblance of walls,” she
murmured. “What a cosy place for rats. Although I suppose it was for the
very purpose of perpetrating the Hamlet act against rats that the space
was originally reserved.”
Belknap was pouring himself a thimbleful of Scotch at the tray standing
in readiness on the divan table. He tossed it off, and turned over the
after flavor on his tongue, as his mind turned over the possible
subtleties of Nadia’s remark. She had made it piquant by a twist of
inflection. A Polonius as well as a rat—or so the tone implied.
“We were speaking of Bertrand,” she continued abruptly. “Do you not
consider him a little secretive about the week-end, conveying that there
is a _reason_ why we are here? Why should there need be a reason?”
“There _should_ be none, Nadia, except our enjoyment of his unbounded
hospitality. But I feel myself, now that you mention it,” Belknap
pursued, willing to test where her guards were raised, “that Bertrand
has something up his sleeve. Possibly an announcement; he likes to make
any news impressive. He may have lost his shirt in the Market, or been
left a fortune by his great-aunt Emma in Vermont. You know Bertrand well
enough to know he’d celebrate either with equal pomp.”
He heard the little whispering sigh that Nadia suddenly drew.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said, more to herself than Belknap.
Then, quickly: “Is it the Diary?” she asked.
Belknap hesitated by the fraction of a second. By all accounts Nadia
Mdevani was dangerous. Her intelligence, fearlessness and beauty were
things that might throw dust in any man’s eyes. Her ability to ‘clinch,’
as she was doing now, with a power greater than her own, and cut her way
free from within, had won her many a hand-to-hand encounter that if
taken blow for blow would have seen her downed long ago. However,
Belknap could see no better way at the moment than to close with her.
“Yes, it is the Diary,” he said quietly; and stood spellbound by the
extreme beauty of her face as the color mounted under the ivory skin,
accentuating the high, molded contours of the bones beneath it. He could
not have said whether she were more angered or hurt.
“When?” Her low voice held its ground; not by a shade did it show
disquiet. “How much time is granted us to deal with it?”
He was smitten with admiration at the serenity and ease of her apparent
candor. With veteran coolness she took him on. He could do no less than
to match her play for play.
“He intends letting the cat out of the bag tonight. But there will be
nothing published for several days.”
“Thank you. I don’t know why, Mr. Detective, you are being so kind and
telling me tales out of school.” She turned fully toward him and gave
him one of her rare smiles, lifting her drooped eyelids enough to show
two burning high-lights, like two stars under an edge of cloud. “I had
to know how swift the sands were running away. Even you can’t speed them
or retard them. And you wouldn’t if you could—for you have really seen
me tonight for the first time,” she said, with the faint irony he was
beginning to adore because in a more subtle and whimsical way, it
counterbalanced his own. “May I?” She took a flower from a bowl on the
table and broke it short for his buttonhole. At that moment he had
regretfully to turn from her. Whittaker, at his elbow, was presenting
the Crawfords.
V
ORDWAY BELKNAP
O
NADIA MDEVANI O O ROMANY MONTE VIDEO
NEIL CRAWFORD O O MILTON DORN
JULIAN PRENTICE O O HARTLEY BLAKE
JOEL LACEY O O SYDNEY CRAWFORD
O
BERTRAND WHITTAKER
was the way they sat at dinner.
Belknap regretted Miss Video on his left. He was one of the few who had
never been properly infatuated with the Romany patteran, as he privately
named her for her continuous flow of inconsequential chatter, and had
therefore never liked her. It was one thing or the other with Romany.
She was a sylph-like creature with enormous eyes, an auburn Viennese
bob, and a disingenuous manner. She ‘needed’ them, was the way men put
it, first their friendship, then their protection, finally their
passion. You couldn’t somehow let her down by disappointing her. They
said she was weak and easily swayed, and each in turn flattered himself
he could strengthen her philosophy against a bitter world (a world he
helped to embitter, if he could but see it that way), and help her get
on her feet. Yet somehow she had never mastered this art of walking
alone!
Belknap, always irritated by willowy natures, now wished her in Kingdom
Come. He wanted to renew the dangerous but charming intimacies that had
swiftly and strangely sprung up between himself and Nadia Mdevani; and
here would have been his opportunity, with Nadia beside him sending odd
disturbing currents up the arm that almost brushed hers. He felt her
mind being restive and wild, puzzled and angry, and above all keenly
intent on a loophole of escape. If anyone else should succeed in
silencing Whittaker forever it would not be because Nadia had yielded
her designs but because she had delayed long enough to be cunning and
intricate in their workmanship. She even seemed, now that the die was
cast, rather to relish the added risk of having Belknap in the arena
with her. Whittaker, asked for a description of Nadia, would have said
the obvious things about raven locks and snowdrift skin, with eyes too
revealing to go revealed. Belknap, after this evening, would have spoken
of her in terms of a banked fire with a scent of brimstone. With less
than half his exasperated attention given to Romany’s innumerable
reasons, centering in jealousy, why she had not been assigned to lead in
_After Midnight_, he glanced surreptitiously at Nadia. Her face, ivory
white and immobile, signified nothing. He wondered whether he might be
mistaken in thinking the atmosphere so heavily charged between them. His
appraising eye passed down the table, appreciating beauty and
distinction where he found it, and paused at Joel—dear Joel, not
beautiful perhaps, but dear looking. Belknap, in his fashion, had loved
her; but for his own bachelor’s sake (he was not an unselfish man), as
well as for her youth’s sake, he had never spoken of it to her. Looking
unwaveringly ahead into a night that might well be terrible for them
all, he felt a particular pang for her. She was talking _sotto voce_
with Julian:
“Hush, dear, people are listening.”
“Then darling, more darling, most darling.”
“Don’t, _please_!”
“I want to see your amber eyes, not the back of a leaf-brown head.”
“Don’t say things like that at the table. Speak when you are spoken to.”
“Can’t you say something nice to me?”
She looked around at him, half tearful, half laughing, under her lashes.
“Oh, my dearest one, is it as bad as all that?”
“Worse, Joel, much worse.”
Of course it must be a dream, and a very bad one, that Whittaker had
been saying things about cancer and murder and murderers. The more so
when one looked at Whittaker himself, sitting genially, though perhaps
with an extra dash of grey pallor, at the head of his board, lifting his
champagne to touch glasses with Sydney Crawford: “To the lips, to the
eyes.” The Stein song again! Would its revival never die? Yet it quite
applied at Whittaker’s table tonight. Every woman in her way was as
fair, as vital, as more than willing to play up, as any man could ask.
Even Sydney, with a flash of challenging laughter at her husband, was
returning Hartley Blake’s sallies in kind. Sydney was obviously fey
tonight, with a heightened color, brighter eyes, and a recklessness of
sentiment that might mean trouble. Had Neil and Romany failed in
discretion?
Blake was in his usual excellent form; and it was plain to see thought
his wit of too good a flavor to be entirely spent on a woman, even the
excited Sydney. So he was tossing it by means of a slightly lifted voice
up over his right shoulder at Dorn. Dorn however looked darkly
unresponsive, and, being a man of few words, it seemed probable Blake
would never know whether his delightful flippancies and exaggerations
were being appreciated. Then, suddenly, he knew:
“As for myself,” Dorn remarked to his side-partners in particular, and
to the table tangentially, “I have recently resolved to remain silent
unless I feel that I can definitely contribute something worth while to
the conversation. Time and energy are indiscriminately wasted in the
futile, the repetitive, and the platitudinous. If we could hold our
tongues until they were loosed by the real idea, the absolute necessity
of speech, there would at least be a deal less noise, and quite possibly
a return to the art of thinking which at present is a lost one.”
It was an insulting and uncalled for remark under the circumstances.
Romany, who looked positively crestfallen for a change, perhaps needed a
blunt rebuke (she wasn’t suppressed in a day), but Blake, though an
inveterate talker, was a brilliant one. His high color showed such anger
that the control of his first words was surprising.
“I should not only hold it, Dorn, I should bite it if I were you.”
The silence that fell in the room was deep and ominous. But in it was
Whittaker’s opportunity, not only to distract Dorn and Blake, but to
call attention to himself. Here, like Jason, he could cast his stone
among the dragon’s teeth.
“I believe I _have_ a contribution to make to the conversation, to the
evening’s pastime, and I hope to posterity.”
Belknap, without looking her way, knew that Nadia stiffened and
straightened at the words. As for the others, their eyes turned to
Whittaker expectantly, but with no premonitory awakening.
“I had planned letting you learn of what I intend when it had ceased to
be an intention and become an actuality. In other words, you were only
to know of the publication of my memoirs when you saw them in print. But
I really can’t resist a little boasting in advance, and I thought I
might read scraps of them after dinner to the assembled gathering,
before we get down to bridge.”
“Oh, how wonderful of you, Uncle Bertrand,” Joel exclaimed, eager to
help him, as she thought, tide over the embarrassing moment. “I didn’t
know you were writing. You have so many irons in the fire, how _did_ you
find time to do a book? But it must have been pretty good fun, so much
has happened to you.”
“It isn’t recent, Joel; it’s been written at odd moments over a period
of twenty years. In other words, it’s my Diary. But it _is_ packed full
of material, and all sorts of things. Everybody’s in it. Oh yes, you are
all there, my dears.”
“You talk like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, Bertrand,” Nadia said with cold
acidity, and at her tone the first chill, like the first autumn frost,
fell on them all. “Just what do you mean when you say we are in it?”
“Exactly that, Nadia darling. I hope you are in it to the life, as I’m
sure I am.”
“You mean it is a character portrayal of your friends and foes as well
as a revelation of your own nature—you sinner,” she added with bitter
lightness.
“You express it in a nutshell.”
Blake spoke.
“By what right does one betray one’s friends—even in the cause of
literature; and you will excuse me, Whittaker, if I doubt the literary
merits of your pen.”
“By the modern right of giving the public what it craves and pays for:
the revelation of evil, the worse the merrier. It used to be how I found
the true light; now it is how I went plumb to Hell.”
“How you did perhaps, but not how I did.”
“In most instances one touches close upon the other, I’m afraid. It is a
platitude of course (I ask your pardon, Dorn) to remark that we none of
us can sin alone, but it is true nevertheless. Even the person that
hears the tale of a crime is somehow affected. I feel the need of
clearing my decks, of things heard and committed.”
“I doubt it would earn you a free pass through the pearly gates,
supposing your proposed act comes off. Mark I say proposed.”
“Is that your glove, Blake? You must be able to get gloves at a
discount.”
“My glove, yes, but not concealing the dagger beneath.”
“I’ll meet you where and when you please.”
“With Ordway Belknap as your second, I suppose? No, thank you; there are
safer ways.”
“Then make it fast, man,” Whittaker cried in a suddenly broken voice as
the dew of intense pain stood out on his forehead and he drooped a
little forward over the table. “The time is short for both of us.”
“Quick, Mr. Belknap,” Nadia exclaimed, “Romany is fainting.”
It _would_ be Romany who took things the hardest.