I had arrived at Inley Abbey that afternoon, and was sitting at dinner
with Inley and his pretty wife, whom I had not seen for five years,
since the day I was his best man, when we all heard faintly the tolling
of a church bell. Lady Inley shook her shoulders in a rather exaggerated
shudder.
“Someone dead!” said her husband.
“It’s a mistake to build a church in the grounds of a house,” Lady Inley
said in her clear, drawling soprano voice. “That noise gives me the
blues.”
“Whom can it be for?” asked Inley.
“Miss Bassett, probably,” Lady Inley replied carelessly, helping herself
to a bonbon from a little silver dish.
Inley started.
“Miss Sarah Bassett! What makes you think so?”
“Oh, while you were away in town she got ill. Didn’t you know?”
“No,” said Inley.
I could see that he was moved. His dark, short face had changed
suddenly, and he stopped eating his fruit. Lady Inley went on crunching
the bonbon between her little white teeth with all the enjoyment of a
pretty marmoset.
“Influenza,” she said airily. “And then pneumonia. Of course, at her
age, you know---- By the way, what is her age, Nino?”
“No idea,” said Inley shortly.
He was listening to the dim and monotonous sound of the church bell.
Lady Inley turned to me with the childish, confidential movement which
men considered one of her many charms.
“Miss Bassett is, or was, one of those funny old spinsters who always
look the same and always ridiculous. Dry twigs, you know. One size all
the way down. Very little hair, and no emotions. If it weren’t for the
sake of cats, one would wonder why such people are born. But they’re
always cat-lovers. I suppose that’s why they’re so often called old
cats.”
She uttered a little high-pitched laugh, and got up.
“Don’t be too long,” she said to me carelessly as I opened the
dining-room door for her. “I want to sing ‘Ohé Charmette’ to you.
“I won’t be long,” I answered, thinking what exquisite eyes she had.
She turned, and went out in her delicious, thin way. No wonder she had
made skeletons the rage in London. When I came back to the dinner-table
Inley was sitting with both his brown hands clenched on the cloth. His
black eyes--inherited from his dead mother, who had been one of the
Neapolitan aristocracy--were glittering.
“What is it, Nino?” I asked as I sat down.
We had been such intimate friends that even my five years’ absence
abroad had not built up a barrier between us.
“I wonder if it is Miss Bassett?” he said, looking at me earnestly.
“But was she a great friend of yours?” I said. “If Lady Inley’s
description of her is accurate, I can hardly imagine so.”
“Vere doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Then Miss Bassett----”
“Oh, she does look like that; dried up, unemotional, tame, English, even
comic.”
“The regular spinster, eh?”
“She looks it. But, damn it all, Vere has no business to say she has no
emotions, to wonder why such people are born. But she doesn’t know--Vere
doesn’t know.”
His agitation grew, and was inexplicable to me. But I knew Inley, knew
that he was bound to tell me what was on his mind. He could be reserved,
but not with me. So I took a cigar, cut the end off it deliberately,
struck a match, lighted it, and began to smoke in silence. He followed
my example quickly, and then said:
“Vere talks like that, and, but for Miss Bassett, Vere would have been
murdered two years ago.”