THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

  ‘Then,’ said MacIntosh soberly, ‘it wasn’t a real cowbell that I heard—even that first night?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I think not,’ said the doctor. ‘You see, for a time you got, as it were, absolutely “into the current” of what actually happened . . . but to go on. Well, it couldn’t last, of course. The dice were weighted against her—and after all, Emil was only a boy. Cruel, casual, light-hearted, and utterly ignorant of what he was playing with. After a few weeks the end came. A new girl arrived in the village. Hansi Leyden, a pretty pert chambermaid up in Pertisau for the season from one of the hotels in Innsbruck, and Emil instantly lost his head about her—she jeered at him for going about with a woman old enough to be his mother, and that was enough. He turned sullenly away from the poor foolish little Lettice Onnaway—when she pleaded with him, aghast, distraught, he grew resentful, uncomfortably sensing, in his bovine way, that he had aroused something he did not understand and certainly did not want . . . and at that very moment, even while her castle in Spain fell in splinters about her ears, Nemesis descended upon her, as it always does in the end. One of her charges, the two children neglected for so long, fell from the balcony, and broke an arm in falling! It was not a severe injury, since fortunately the kid fell on a barrowload of cut clover put out to dry, and that broke its fall, but a wire had to be sent to the parents, who were travelling about near Salzburg, and of course, the poor little governess knew that now the whole thing must come out. Frau Hellner, with whom she had been at odds for weeks owing to her neglect of the children, as likewise for the ridicule and scandal she was bringing upon the “Rosenhaus”, now took possession of the two children entirely, informing Miss Onnaway coldly that she took full responsibility for her action, since she had for long seen that the Engländerin was not fit to have charge of children . . . it was, of course, the end, and so the little woman realised. She would be turned out neck and crop—refused a reference, for, like all casual parents, the Fitzgeralds would undoubtedly fly to the very extreme of resentment at any casualness being shown by other people. She was no longer young enough to try and train for a fresh job, and the market was already overstocked with competent college-trained young governesses . . . this had been the most marvellous job ever offered her, and she had flung it overboard through a mad passion for a boy of twenty, to whom she was merely a passing amusement. It must have been bitter, that realisation. I remember meeting her once, and once only, after the day of the child’s fall, and thinking how, all of a sudden, the brief illusion of youth had fled from that pinched little grey face, above the over-youthful sprigged cotton dress. She was loitering down towards the village, along the lane, picking idly at the dusty flowers in the hedgerows. . . .

  ‘“Have you seen Emil?” she asked me, and the piteous absurdity off the question half-irritated, half-roused me to pity. I told her “no”, I did not want to say that I had but just seen him, loitering down beside the hotel where Hansi Leyden was working, waiting for her to come out. She glanced at me, and half-smiled as if she guessed the reason for my brusqueness—nodded, and wandered away towards the village. I heard afterwards that she had met Emil walking with Hansi, and losing her head, had made a piteous and grotesque scene before them and—unfortunately for Emil, as it turned out—before several other villagers lounging in the Fürstenhaus porch. She begged Emil—or so I heard—to come with her for a walk, for the last time—the lad, foolishly, yet understandably, since Hansi was giggling at his side, highly amused, and his fellows within earshot grinning at his expense, lost his temper and swore at her roundly. Bade her go away, or it would be the worse for her—said that he was sick of being plagued, and that unless she left him alone he would not be responsible for his actions . . . all of which was remembered and brought up against him at the trial. . . .’

  ‘There was a trial, then?’ interrupted MacIntosh.

  ‘Of course, there was. That night she disappeared, and Emil was arrested for the murder. That is two months ago—and ever since he has languished in gaol, awaiting trial, with the comfortable knowledge that he would probably get sentenced without a dissentient voice, since, curiously enough, since the little governess’s disappearance, public sympathy, like the queer irrational thing it is, veered round in her favour, and Emil found himself up against an array of evidence that loomed very threatening against his chances of acquittal. But now the discovery of her body, with the accompanying letter admitting suicide, obviously releases him at once, although I fancy he may find life in another village pleasanter, for a time, than in Pertisau.’

  They were silent a moment, while Tom MacIntosh’s eyes roved over the exquisite scene of lake, mountain, forest, his nostrils snuffed the champagne-like air of the Tyrolean Alps—that heady wonderful air that had perhaps been responsible for the whole of the piteous tragedy of little Lettice Onnaway. For one brief space of real and vivid living, such as she had never known, she had thrown away all . . . and although she had banked her heart, her future, her very life on an illusion, who shall say that it had not been worth her while? At least for a few weeks she had known love . . . if only an illusionary love. MacIntosh spoke soberly, after a long pause.

  ‘Then you think she came back to save him, despite the way he treated her?’

  The little doctor knocked out his pipe and rose to his feet.

  ‘I don’t know—anything, MacIntosh. But I do believe this—that a woman, when she loves, will forgive anything. And I think that love is indeed stronger than death. . . .’

  July

  The Priest’s Tale

  The Ikon

  ‘Ye-es. They are very fine rubies. Certainly very fine.’

  Young Mr Felstead, of Felstead & Garth, jewellers, Bury Street, St. James’, lifted the ikon to the light to see even more clearly the magnificent stones, shot with crimson and scarlet, that glinted and blinked against the beaten gold of the background. Mrs Kenworthy, ultra-wealthy wife of Walter Kenworthy (of Kenworthy’s Kosy Koverings) newly installed in the Manor House, Bleck’s Haugh, Surrey, nodded her crisply marcelled head in satisfaction, and even smiled, in sheer complacence, at the shy, brown-haired girl at her elbow. Pretty little Miss Smith did not get many smiles; the position of secretary to Mrs Kenworthy was not an enviable one.

  ‘That’s all right,’ the lady rejoined briskly. ‘I thought so when I bought it in Paris from that impoverished Princess woman—at least she said she was a Princess, but I doubt it. She looked like nothing on earth!’

  Mrs Kenworthy sniffed. It was typical of her mental attitude that a princess in shabby black, wearing an imitation fur that was not even good imitation and carrying a brown paper parcel beneath one thin arm, could not, if a princess at all, be by any possibility a princess worth considering. Mrs Kenworthy measured life and people according to her only standard—money.

  The slim young man with the black jeweller’s glass held in one eye put the ikon down, and for a moment stood contemplating it in silence. It was a truly magnificent treasure of Old Russia; against a background of beaten gold a cross of solid jewelwork stood out, a mosaic of small, glittering, many-coloured precious stones, and on it hung the figure of the Saviour carved in ivory, yellowed with age. The head lolled low over one shoulder, the body swung piteously from the nailed palms. And along the forehead, on hands and feet, and from the wounded side, gleamed patches of shining, sinister crimson . . . great rubies, red as blood, set deep in the ivory flesh.

  It was a perfect thing. The grim reflection struck Mr Felstead that it seemed tragic that so perfect a thing should be in the possession of this vulgar little woman, over-rich, over-fed, over-dressed, who stood at his elbow gloating over it; gloating, not because it was beautiful and rare, not because she now had the right to keep and care for it, but merely because it was of value, and because she, Rachel Emmeline Kenworthy, had been able to stoop from the height of her triumphant wealth and buy it from an impoverished princess! The cruel triumph of the parvenu that is at last able to spit in the face of aris
tocracy showed in her smile as she looked down on the ikon, lying prone upon the opulent buhl table in her crowded drawing-room, and Mr Felstead glanced overtly at Miss Smith, to meet her glance of quick, shy understanding . . . it was not the first time they had met, these two, since Mr Felstead had had dealings with Mrs Kenworthy before. He knew more or less how to cope with her, or thought he did, for with that type of vulgarian one never quite knew . . . he spoke with professional indifference, though his eyes kept wandering back to the lovely, glimmering thing upon the table as he did so.

  ‘Er—yes, Mrs Kenworthy. It is a fine piece, and the rubies, especially, as you say, magnificent. So large that it seems almost a pity to have wasted them in what one might term only a picture?’

  Mrs Kenworthy interrupted him with a sharp laugh of triumph.

  ‘Ah! Now you’ve said it. That’s what I want you to do!’

  Young Mr Felstead regarded her with pained surprise.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite get your meaning, madam. I understood you wished us to try and dispose of the ikon for you—I can assure you you would realise very handsomely on it.’

  ‘Money is nothing to me!’ Mrs Kenworthy spoke arrogantly but incorrectly. She should have said, ‘Money is everything to me,’ since she quite sincerely considered it the only thing in the world. She went on, thoroughly enjoying being the centre of attention—for now, not only Mr Felstead, but that silly little Smith girl was staring at her in frank amazement.

  ‘I don’t want to sell it. I want you to dig out those rubies—right now—and reset them for me to wear.’

  A faint gasp broke the silence. Miss Smith, frightened at her own temerity, clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes round. Mr Felstead was far too well bred to gasp, but his eyes were almost as round as Miss Smith’s under their elevated eyebrows.

  ‘But, madam!’ he protested.

  Mrs Kenworthy brusquely cut him short.

  ‘Now, don’t argue with me, please. They’re worth seeing aren’t they?’

  ‘Oh, certainly!’ hastily assented the young man. ‘They are, as I have said, exceptionally fine . . . but it somehow seems a pity to spoil the ikon, don’t you think?’

  His glance lingered over the gorgeous fragment of a bygone age, and there was something more than mere professional interest in it. But Mrs Kenworthy, sensing a hint of criticism, even (possibly) of disapproval, in the smooth voice of the good-looking young man from Felstead & Garth’s, frowned, and her voice took on an edge that Grace Smith knew only too well.

  ‘That’s my business!’ she remarked truculently. ‘If I buy a thing I’ve a right to spoil it if I want—anyway I can always have red paste put in afterwards, when the rubies are out. But really I only bought it for the sake of the rubies. I’ve got all but the finest collection of them in the country, as you ought to know, considering I bought most of ’em from you! Unless you cheated me, which is quite possible. . . .’

  This was Mrs Kenworthy’s idea of humour. Young Mr Felstead bowed in silence, but his London pallor was the warmer for a sudden flash of angry colour, and on the other side of the table Miss Smith lowered her eyes, conscious of a vivid hate of her employer even stronger than her usual very definite dislike. But Mrs Kenworthy, unconscious—perhaps blandly oblivious—of her dependant’s opinion of her and her doings, went on serenely towards the finish of her sentence.

  ‘I’m determined to beat the Countess of Dair’s collection, and I have very nearly. Stone for stone I can beat hers, only she’s got those ear-rings made out of some Indian idol’s eyes that all the papers rave over. . . .’

  ‘The Eyes of Lahvani,’ murmured Mr Felstead almost automatically, but Mrs Kenworthy did not pause to listen.

  ‘. . . And if I can have something really pictorial made out of these, I can get my publicity-man to work up a story about them that will put the Dair woman’s ear-rings entirely in the shade.’

  ‘And for that,’ queried Mr Felstead with a faintly sardonic intonation, ‘you think it worth while to spoil the ikon?’

  This time the inflexion of criticism was too marked for even so obtuse a person as Mrs Kenworthy to miss—after all Mr Felstead was only thirty-two, and had not, as yet, developed the perfect automationism that is so necessary to a successful salesman. The Lady of the Manor glared, and Miss Smith caught her breath at the glint of anger in the small black eyes, sunk between two highly rouged cheeks and bordered with badly done rings of mascara . . . despite tuition from half a dozen beauty specialists, Rachel Kenworthy, born in a ‘kosher’ butcher’s shop in Hoxton, would never learn to use make-up really successfully.

  ‘Young man,’ she snapped, ‘I didn’t get you down here to ask your opinion on what I was going to do. I asked you for two things. One was to value those stones, and the second was to dig ’em out for me, here and now!’

  Mr Felstead raised his brows and bit his lips sharply. Times were bad, and he and his partner could not afford to lose so good a customer as the Kenworthy—but, ye gods, how he would have liked to throw the ikon in her fat, horrible face! Only it would have been sheer insult to the lovely thing to bring it so close to her—soulless, greedy, utterly hateful . . . Miss Smith’s imploring glance pulled him sharply together, and he bowed, acquiescent. It was as madam wished, of course. He could do it in a matter of minutes . . . accustomed to Mrs Kenworthy’s vagaries, he had taken the precaution of bringing a small case of jeweller’s tools down to the Manor in his pocket, and now extracting a small ‘scorper’ from the litter of tiny, shining implements within, he got to work on the gorgeous thing that lay helpless, as it were, under his vandal hands. It took time and care, for many years had passed since the glowing stones were set in their bed of yellowed ivory, yet one by one they yielded to his practised touch, until at last a group of glorious crimson fragments lay in the millionairess’s grasp, and in the ikon a series of dark holes lay staring up at the ceiling like sightless eyes. The man and the girl were silent, but Mrs Kenworthy chortled with glee, gloating over her handful of beauty, as she moved towards the door.

  ‘I must just see how they match my others,’ she said over one shoulder. ‘Then you can take them back to London, and send me some designs for setting them at once. I want ’em as soon as possible.’

  Her hand was on the latch, when Miss Smith’s timid little voice arrested her.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Kenworthy, but what do you want done with the ikon?’

  Mrs Kenworthy laughed, her good humour restored by the feel of the jewels in her grasp.

  ‘I don’t want the thing!’ she asserted. Then the instinctive cupidity of the East End Jewess asserted itself, and she hastily qualified her first remark. ‘That is, I don’t want it just now. You can take it and hang it up in your room for the moment, I mean. You’re fond of churchy things, and so on, aren’t you?’

  The jibe, again, was typical of the woman. As the door closed behind her Miss Smith, her eyes full of tears, looked up into the sympathetic face of young Mr Felstead. The spark of romance, already lit between them, flamed at that moment into a lasting fire, and in his heart of hearts, Mr Felstead knew it; but after the fashion of the Briton, he maintained a perfectly unmoved countenance as he rolled up his little case of professional tools and tucked them into his breast-pocket. But as he did so he remarked with vicious emphasis that he knew nobody he disliked worse than Mrs Kenworthy, and that he had always thought, and was now entirely sure, that Miss Smith was far too good for her. He wondered whether, perhaps, next time Miss Smith came up to town on an errand, lunch. . . .?

  * * * * *

  The rubies certainly made a magnificent brooch. Combined with diamonds in an oblong square, and worn conspicuously on the shoulder of a dead white satin gown trimmed with sable, together with a ruby and diamond pendant, ear-rings and at least five diamond bracelets, Mrs Kenworthy made a notable entrance into her box at the opera on the opening night, and had the satisfaction of reading in the papers next morning that ‘Mrs Kenworthy looked regal in white and sabl
es wearing some of her famous rubies, and notably her new purchase, a magnificent corsage ornament made from rubies found in an old Russian ikon. . . .’

  Mrs Kenworthy enjoyed the phrase ‘corsage ornament’, although she had an uneasy feeling that it was slightly out of date. But it sounded, somehow, much larger and more imposing than the mere word ‘brooch’, which that fool Brinton, her publicity-man, had suggested using. After the performance she went on to supper at the fashionable night-club of the moment, where she had the further exquisite pleasure of being nodded to in the most friendly way by at least three women of title, one of them a Viscountess. The latter crowned her compliment by coming up and shaking hands and leaning over the Kenworthy’s table to talk, thus putting poor little Kenworthy, Mrs Kenworthy’s very-much-managed husband, to the exquisite embarrassment of having to jump up and remain standing, uneasily shifting from one foot to the other, until she chose to go . . . but before she went she had admired The Brooch, and compared it favourably with Lady Dair’s, so Rachel Kenworthy’s cup of satisfaction was full. So full that she even consented to pay a visit next day to the Viscountess’s dress shop, though she knew, shrewdly enough, it meant buying a second-class frock at a super-first-class price. She firmly drove away the still, small voice that murmured that that, of course, was the only reason that the Viscountess had ever troubled to come up to and talk to her, and sat there, eating the most expensive food on the menu, and drinking champagne, though she privately hated it, surveying the crowd through the diamond-rimmed quizzing-glass that Madame Lisette had told her was far smarter than a lorgnette, and feeling for the moment entirely content.

  So content that she condescended for once to listen to poor little Kenworthy’s humble plea for something more simple to eat than that set before them . . . he detested caviare, thought oysters tasted like wet mackintosh, and did not know how to dismember a ‘bird’ without shooting it off his plate into some neighbouring lap or other. All right. In the height of her content she was gracious. He might have a haddock, if he liked . . . there was a party of people over there eating haddock, now she came to look at them. Funny thing that was! People in a posh place like this, eating haddock! But if they did, there was obviously no reason why Alfred shouldn’t eat it too. But he was going to finish his champagne, whether he liked it or not. She wasn’t going to leave a good half-bottle for the waiter to drink. . . .