Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

all I’ve got, and in our family it just isn’t enough. Even things I can really do well, I find myself doing so badly… It’s… a personal thing. I try too hard, and over-reach myself. It isn’t easy, being the one without any gifts at all. I can’t see any future ahead of me, except playing second fiddle all my life to someone. I know I have moods! Wouldn’t you have moods?”

Most of which was her mother speaking; and the faithful repetition of the threnody of complaint only went to show the helpless and vulnerable affection she had for her mother. She hadn’t yet turned to doubt any of that, or pick it to pieces as some young people can and do, and find all the flaws in it. There was a lot of undeserved loyalty wrapped up in this rather pathetic package.

She caught his eye, and her pale cheek warmed a little. She liked the thick, strongly marked eyebrows that yet stood so tranquilly apart, with none of the menace of those brows that almost meet over the bridge of the nose. She minded his penetrating glance less than she had expected, and yet she was afraid of it.

“I suppose I’m a psychiatric case, really,” she said rather loftily, “only nobody’s done anything about it, so far.”

“On the contrary, I think you’re a completely normal adolescent who has suffered from rather too much adult companionship,” said George candidly, and smiled at her astonished, even affronted stare. “Abnormalities are the norm, when you’re struggling out of one stage and into another. Let’s face it, Felicity, you’re not grown-up yet, you’re only growing up. I haven’t forgotten how damned uncomfortable it is. I’ve seen it happen to others. You’re not doing too badly. Just don’t take any of your elders too seriously. Above all, don’t take any of them as the gospel. Not even the psychiatrists, some of them need psychiatrists too. Is that what was troubling you, this afternoon?”

He had brought her back to the matter in hand none the less firmly for the gentleness of his manner; but she didn’t hold it against him, she knew she had to face it. The long, fair lashes lay on her cheeks. Her face was set, and she wasn’t going to show him her eyes.

“It makes it worse that I have been so much with grownups. I still am. They expect me to act like an adult, and yet they don’t treat me as one. They get the work out of me, and then expect me to be in bed by ten. I did try to confide. I… I didn’t choose very well. He hadn’t got time to listen to me. I thought… he’s only twenty-three, and women are so much more mature… I thought we could be contemporaries but he… I saw it wasn’t any good,” said Felicity with dignity, “so I went away and left him. But you’ll understand, I didn’t want to talk to anyone after that.”

“I do understand. You left him… where?”

“Just under the redwood tree,” she said firmly, “where the paths cross.”

“You took the path to the bridge? And left him standing there?”

“Yes,” she said, with the flat finality of a slab of stone being laid over a grave.

“Let me be quite certain… he was then at the crossroads, and outside the fence that rails off the riverside enclosure with the grotto?”

“Yes,” she said, with the same intonation.

“You didn’t look round to see where he went from there?”

“I didn’t look round at all. I’d been dismissed, I went,” said Felicity, with completely adult bitterness.

“And that was the last you saw of him? You don’t know where he went from there?”

“I do now,” said Felicity. “I didn’t then. That was the last I saw of him.”

She looked up. Her eyes were enormous in fear and grief, greedy for reassurance. Of this terror and this hope there was no doubt whatever. “Mr. Felse, do you think something happened to him? You don’t… you don’t think he’s…?”

“I don’t think anything yet,” said George. “I hope he’s simply suffered a crisis of his own, and run away from whatever was on his mind. Don’t think he’s exempt at twenty-three. Maybe he was so full of his own problems he couldn’t spare any consideration for yours. If we can find him, be sure we will. Now you go to bed, and leave it to us. If you’ve told me all you know, there’s nothing more you can do.”

“I’ve told you all I know.” She got as far as the door, and looked back. Her face was mute and stiff, but her eyes were full of haunted shadows. “Good night, Mr. Felse!”

“Good night, Felicity!”

And all that, thought George, watching her go, sounds like truth, and nothing but truth. But he still had an uneasy feeling that truth, with Felicity, was an iceberg, with eight-ninths of its bulk under water.

“I’d better tell you at once,” said Dickie Meurice, settling himself at his ease and spreading an elbow on Edward Arundale’s desk, “that of course I’ve realised what this is all about, even if there’s been no official admission that anything’s wrong. Old Penrose has given the impression that everything’s proceeding according to plan, and he had no intention of using Lucien Galt in to-night’s lectures. Without even saying so, which is pretty good going, but then, he’s a deep old bird. But I know too well what Lucifer costs. If they bought him at all, they wanted him on-stage the whole week-end. And I know him too well to miss the moment when he absents himself from among us. He went off, voluntarily or otherwise, between lunch and tea. And you’re here to cover the management, in case it turns out he didn’t disappear voluntarily. Solicitor? Or private trouble- shooter?”

“County C.I.D.,” said George without expression but not without relish, and saw with satisfaction the instant recoil, quickly mastered but not quickly enough.

Dickie Meurice tapped his cigarette on the arm of his chair, and stared, and thought so hard that his blond countenance paled. He said carefully, lightly: “You don’t mean you’ve found him? You’ve got a genuine police case? This is official?”

“Not yet. If everybody co-operates it may not have to be. No, we don’t know yet where Lucien Galt is. Do you, Mr. Meurice?”

“Why should I know?” The smile a little strained now, the voice demonstrating involuntarily its disastrous tendency to shrillness.

“You had, it seems, about the same chance of being the last to see him, this afternoon, as any of the others who passed up the sight-seeing trips and stayed at Follymead. Were you?”