“Small but compact,” he remarked. “There is a little sitting-room down that stair, and a bathroom beyond. If the flowers annoy you, throw them out of the window. And if you prefer to bathe in the river to-morrow morning, Brooks here will show you the diving pool. I am wearing a short coat myself to-night, but do as you please. We dine at half-past eight.”
Sir Timothy disappeared with a courteous little inclination of the head. Francis dismissed the manservant at once as being out of keeping with his quaint and fascinating surroundings. The tiny room with its flowers, its perfume of lavender, its old-fashioned chintzes, and its fragrant linen, might still have been a room in a cottage. The sitting-room, with its veranda looking down upon the river, was provided with cigars, whisky and soda and cigarettes; a bookcase, with a rare copy of Rabelais, an original Surtees, a large paper Decameron, and a few other classics. Down another couple of steps was a perfectly white bathroom, with shower and plunge. Francis wandered from room to room, and finally threw himself into a chair on the veranda to smoke a cigarette. From the river below him came now and then the sound of voices. Through the trees on his right he could catch a glimpse, here and there, of the strange pillars and green domed roof of the Borghese villa.
CHAPTER XVIII
It was one of those faultless June evenings when the only mission of the faintly stirring breeze seems to be to carry perfumes from garden to garden and to make the lightest of music amongst the rustling leaves. The dinner-table had been set out of doors, underneath the odorous cedar-tree. Above, the sky was an arc of the deepest blue through which the web of stars had scarcely yet found its way. Every now and then came the sound of the splash of oars from the river; more rarely still, the murmur of light voices as a punt passed up the stream. The little party at The Sanctuary sat over their coffee and liqueurs long after the fall of the first twilight, till the points of their cigarettes glowed like little specks of fire through the enveloping darkness. Conversation had been from the first curiously desultory, edited, in a way, Francis felt, for his benefit. There was an atmosphere about his host and Lady Cynthia, shared in a negative way by Margaret Hilditch, which baffled Francis. It seemed to establish more than a lack of sympathy—to suggest, even, a life lived upon a different plane. Yet every now and then their references to everyday happenings were trite enough. Sir Timothy had assailed the recent craze for drugs, a diatribe to which Lady Cynthia had listened in silence for reasons which Francis could surmise.
“If one must soothe the senses,” Sir Timothy declared, “for the purpose of forgetting a distasteful or painful present, I cannot see why the average mind does not turn to the contemplation of beauty in some shape or other. A night like to-night is surely sedative enough. Watch these lights, drink in these perfumes, listen to the fall and flow of the water long enough, and you would arrive at precisely the same mental inertia as though you had taken a dose of cocaine, with far less harmful an aftermath.”
Lady Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
“Cocaine is in one’s dressing-room,” she objected, “and beauty is hard to seek in Grosvenor Square.”
“The common mistake of all men,” Sir Timothy continued, “and women, too, for the matter of that, is that we will persist in formulating doctrines for other people. Every man or woman is an entity of humanity, with a separate heaven and a separate hell. No two people can breathe the same air in the same way, or see the same picture with the same eyes.”
Lady Cynthia rose to her feet and shook out the folds of her diaphanous gown, daring alike in its shapelessness and scantiness. She lit a cigarette and laid her hand upon Sir Timothy’s arm.
“Come,” she said, “must I remind you of your promise? You are to show me the stables at The Walled House before it is dark.”
“You would see them better in the morning,” he reminded her, rising with some reluctance to his feet.
“Perhaps,” she answered, “but I have a fancy to see them now.”
Sir Timothy looked back at the table.
“Margaret,” he said, “will you look after Mr. Ledsam for a little time? You will excuse us, Ledsam? We shall not be gone long.”
They moved away together towards the shrubbery and the door in the wall behind. Francis resumed his seat.
“Are you not also curious to penetrate the mysteries behind the wall, Mr. Ledsam?” Margaret asked.
“Not so curious but that I would much prefer to remain here,” he answered.
“With me?”
“With you.”
She knocked the ash from her cigarette. She was looking directly at him, and he fancied that there was a gleam of curiosity in her beautiful eyes. There was certainly a little more abandon about her attitude. She was leaning back in a corner of her high-backed chair, and her gown, although it lacked the daring of Lady Cynthia’s, seemed to rest about her like a cloud of blue-grey smoke.
“What a curious meal!” she murmured. “Can you solve a puzzle for me, Mr. Ledsam?”
“I would do anything for you that I could,” he answered.
“Tell me, then, why my father asked you here to-night? I can understand his bringing you to the opera, that was just a whim of the moment, but an invitation down here savours of deliberation. Studiously polite though you are to one another, one is conscious all the time of the hostility beneath the surface.”
“I think that so far as your father is concerned, it is part of his peculiar disposition,” Francis replied. “You remember he once said that he was tired of entertaining his friends—that there was more pleasure in having an enemy at the board.”
“Are you an enemy, Mr. Ledsam?” she asked curiously.
He rose a little abruptly to his feet, ignoring her question. There were servants hovering in the background.
“Will you walk with me in the gardens?” he begged. “Or may I take you upon the river?”
She rose to her feet. For a moment she seemed to hesitate.
“The river, I think,” she decided. “Will you wait for three minutes while I get a wrap. You will find some punts moored to the landing-stage there in the stream. I like the very largest and most comfortable.”
Francis strolled to the edge of the stream, and made his choice of punts. Soon a servant appeared with his arms full of cushions, and a moment or two later, Margaret herself, wrapped in an ermine cloak. She smiled a little deprecatingly as she picked her way across the lawn.
“Don’t laugh at me for being such a chilly mortal, please,” she enjoined. “And don’t be afraid that I am going to propose a long expedition. I want to go to a little backwater in the next stream.”
She settled herself in the stern and they glided down the narrow thoroughfare. The rose bushes from the garden almost lapped the water as they passed. Behind, the long low cottage, the deserted dinner-table, the smooth lawn with its beds of scarlet geraniums and drooping lilac shrubs in the background, seemed like a scene from fairyland, to attain a perfection of detail unreal, almost theatrical.
“To the right when you reach the river, please,” she directed. “You will find there is scarcely any current. We turn up the next stream.”
There was something almost mysterious, a little impressive, about the broad expanse of river into which they presently turned. Opposite were woods and then a sloping lawn. From a house hidden in the distance they heard the sound of a woman singing. They even caught the murmurs of applause as she concluded. Then there was silence, only the soft gurgling of the water cloven by the punt pole. They glided past the front of the great