“No,” he replied rather coldly. “I shall be staying in the neighbourhood, but with the Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol.”
He is not to be blamed if he rolled the name rather grandly upon his tongue. It belonged undoubtedly to the first cru among names, and had a delicate fine flavour of the Crusades. However, Mr. Ricardo was honest and, after only the slightest possible struggle with his vanity, he added:
“But I have not yet made the acquaintance of the Vicomte, Miss Whipple. There is illness in the house where I was to have stayed and I have been passed on in the hospitable way people have there.”
“I see.”
Joyce Whipple was clearly disappointed and almost aggrieved.
“I made certain, since I have met you at Diana’s house, that you would be breaking your journey at Suvlac.”
Mr. Ricardo shook his head.
“But I shall be no more than a mile away, and if I can do anything for you I certainly will. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen either Miss Tasborough or her aunt for at least six months.”
“No. They have been all the summer at Biarritz,” said Joyce.
“I have never stayed at the Château Suvlac,” Mr. Ricardo continued naively, “though I should have liked to. For from the outside it is charming. A rose-pink house of one story in the shape of a capital E, with two little round towers in the main building and a great stone-paved terrace at the back overlooking the river Gironde—”
But Joyce Whipple was not in the least interested in his description of the rose-pink country house, and Mr. Ricardo broke off. Joyce Whipple was leaning forward, her elbow on her knee and her chin propped in the cup of her hand, and a look of anxiety upon her face.
“Yes—after all,” said Mr. Ricardo on quite a new note of interest, “it is a little odd.”
“What’s odd?” asked Joyce Whipple, turning her face to him.
“That the Tasboroughs should have spent the whole summer at Biarritz. For if anywhere was anybody’s spiritual home, London was Miss Diana’s.”
Rich by the inheritance of the Suvlac vineyards, and chaperoned by a submissive aunt, Diana Tasborough was the heart and pivot of one of those self-contained sets into which young London is subdivided. A set of people, youthfully middle-aged for the most part, who had already reached distinction or were on the way to it. Diana, it is true, fished a river in Scotland and hunted in the Midlands, but London was her home and the headquarters of the busy company of her friends.
“She has been ill?” Mr. Ricardo suggested.
“No. She writes to me and there’s never a word about any illness. All the same, I am troubled. Diana was terribly kind to me when I first came over to England and knew nobody at all. I should hate anything to happen to her—anything, I mean—evil.”
Joyce pronounced the word slowly, not because she had any doubt that it was the right word to use, but so that Mr. Ricardo might not make light of it. Mr. Ricardo, indeed, was startled. He looked about the room. The banks of roses, the brightness of the illumination, the smartly-dressed people were not in accord with so significant a word.
“Do you really think that something evil is happening to her?” he asked. He was thrilled, even a little pleasurably thrilled.
“I am sure,” Joyce Whipple declared.
“Why are you sure?”
“Diana’s letters to me,” said Joyce, and turning towards Mr. Ricardo, she fixed her big grey eyes upon his face. “I tell you frankly that I can’t find in any one of them a single sentence, even a single phrase, which taken by itself is alarming. I know that, for I have analysed them carefully over and over again. And I want you to believe that I am not imaginative, or psychic—no, not the least bit in the world. And yet I never read a letter from Diana without going through the most horrible experience. I seem to see”—and she broke off to correct herself—“no, there’s no seeming about it. I do see underneath the black ink letters, swinging backwards and forwards somehow between the written words and the white paper they are written on, a chain of faces, grotesque, unfinished and dreadful. And they are always changing. Sometimes they—how shall I describe it?—flatten out into featureless, pink round discs with eyes which are alive. Sometimes they quiver up again into distorted human outlines. But they are never complete. If they were, I feel sure that they would be utterly malignant. And they are never still. They float backwards and forwards, like”—and she clasped her hands over her eyes for a moment and shivered so that a big fire-opal on a plain gold bracelet flamed against her wrist—“like the faces of drowned people who have been swinging to and fro with the tides for months.”
Joyce Whipple was no longer concerned with the effect of her narrative upon Mr. Ricardo. She had almost forgotten his presence. Her eyes, too, though they moved here and there from a bridge table to a group of people talking, saw really nothing of the room. She was formulating her strange experience for the hundredth time to herself, in the hope that somewhere, in her story, by some chance word, she would be led to its explanation.
“And I am afraid,” she continued in a low but very distinct voice. “I am afraid that sooner or later I shall see all those cruel dead faces complete and alive, the faces of living people.”
“Living people who are threatening Diana Tasborough,” said Mr. Ricardo gently, so that he might not break the train of Joyce Whipple’s thoughts.
“More than threatening her,” said Joyce. “Harming her—yes, now already doing her harm which already it may be too late to repair. No doubt it sounds medieval and—and—ridiculous, but I have a horrible dread that utterly evil spirits—the elementals—are fighting in the darkness for her soul, that she herself isn’t aware of it, but that by some dispensation the truth
