“Her face was transfigured. She spoke in a low voice hoarse with emotion, her features quivering, her breast rising and falling as though she had run a race, and her hands picking at her frock. In that quiet room, looking across the garden to the quiet, shining river, with the gramophone in the library winding out its commonplace foxtrot, she sat, a devotee who had whirled herself into a frenzy of exaltation. And then suddenly she clapped her hands to her eyes and burst into a torrent of tears.
“ ‘Oh, I am afraid … I am afraid …’ she cried in a voice suddenly desolate and hopeless; and before I could utter a word she had risen and rushed from the room.
“I sat on, with a gleam of hope in my mind. De Mirandol and Evelyn Devenish—I set them aside as really sincere. That devil-worship still existed here and there in the world of drawing-rooms, as vigorously as in the world of jungles and wide forests, I knew very well. And both de Mirandol, the disappointed degenerate, and Evelyn Devenish, the neurotic creature of her sex, were marked out for it. But Robin Webster was different. He was just the cunning manipulator who saw in it a weapon and an opportunity. He could marry Diana Tasborough. Yes, but he wanted a serf, not a wife. Believing in him as the High Priest of Satan, she was malleable as sculptor’s clay. The one hope I had of countering his fine plans lay in Diana’s sudden storm of tears and the words which had followed it. She was afraid. Therefore she could be rescued. But how? I was still considering that question when the door into the corridor was opened and Evelyn Devenish came in. She walked straight across the room to me with a face very white and set.
“ ‘I met Diana in tears just outside this room. What have you said to her?’ she demanded; and I replied:
“ ‘Mind your own business!’
“ ‘I am going to,’ she said, and nodding at me with a strange look in her eyes, she went out on to the terrace.”
At this point Joyce asked for more coffee, and not until she had drunk it and lighted a cigarette, was she willing to resume her narrative.
XXVII
The Inspiration from the Mask
But even then Hanaud must interfere.
“Let us make everything plain as the bedpost,” he said with a sweep of his hand. “I put the questions.”
“Yes?” Joyce replied, leaning towards him with a little frown of concentration upon her face.
There were difficulties in her story which she was well aware she could not answer. Why some men, for instance, of the stamp which other men detest evoke the blindest love in women. And why the adoration of idols and false gods is eternal. And why what is clean and of good repute is put aside for what is foul. She had no explanations to offer. She could only say: “Here at Suvlac these things were so, as they are so elsewhere.” But no such baffling problems were presented to her by Hanaud.
“When you come out for the first time on to the terrace at the Château, you see de Mirandol and Madame Devenish?”
“Yes.”
“And they give you the once-over?”
“Yes.”
“And that evening—with Robin Webster—you come over at him at once?”
Joyce blushed and answered rather shyly:
“I’m afraid that I did.”
“I would not distress you,” said Hanaud apologetically. “I get the facts fixed in my mind. Now, as Mr. Ricardo would say, pray proceed.”
But Mr. Ricardo with some indignation raised a protesting voice.
“Certainly, Joyce, you shall not let them distress you. He was not getting the facts fixed in his mind. He has had them there for many a day. No, he was getting the phrases fixed in his mind, and I can promise you, in revenge, that he will use them proudly on the most inappropriate occasions.”
Hanaud waved an indulgent hand.
“Well, well, such phrases are commodious. Pray, Mademoiselle Whipple, proceed!”
And she took up her story again. Her problem was how to rescue Diana from that unholy gang, in spite of herself; how to disperse them and send them to hide their faces and their names in the byways of the earth; and how to do it without involving her in a ruin of scandal and disgrace.
“I tossed about all night, and when the morning dawned I was no nearer to a solution,” she said. “But I had reached one conviction. I must myself know all that was to take place on the Wednesday week in the house of Monsieur de Mirandol. I had certainty in myself, but none for anyone to whom I might tell the story. I must have every circumstance of the ceremony so exact that no one could doubt I spoke the truth. In a word I must be present in the house of Monsieur de Mirandol, I must be an eyewitness, and more, I must have some evidence to prove who out of the Château Suvlac took a part in those orgies of horror. Oh, I knew very well that my plan was dangerous—I mean dangerous for me. But I thought that if I could once secure my evidence, then perhaps from a distance, when I was safe, I could threaten to make it all public, and under that threat exact my conditions. Oh, it wasn’t very brave, I know, but I had to release Diana if I could, without doing her any harm.”
“Mademoiselle,” said Hanaud gently, “I should welcome in myself a little more of just that cowardice.”
Joyce Whipple smiled her thanks at him.
“That is so prettily said that I shall make you out a long list of the most commodious American phrases I can think of,” she said, and went back to her story. “I could get the evidence, I thought.
