'Because Uncle Maurice would say I had been drinking.' 'Good old Uncle Maurice! Here..: ' She swallowed with difficulty and a good deal of pain, while he soaked a towel in water, wrung it out, and tried to adjust it round the purplish bruises on her neck. 'That's better. That's fine. Like it?'
'Of course I like it.'
'Have another? No? Then wait till I get this thing fixed around your neck, and then I wish you'd tell me what makes friends of yours like — like the Honorable Louise Carewe,' the name sounded fantastic in his ears as he said it, when applied to that self-effacing girl whom he always pictured as sitting on a chair lower than that of anybody else. He tested it again. 'Friends of yours like the Honorable Louise Carewe go hysterical and try to kill you. Sit still!'
'I say, you're making a most awful mess of me. Give me that towel.' She stirred, smiled faintly, and tried to assume a businesslike briskness. He studied her as she leaned back in the window-embrasure. The resemblance? If he had not been prepared for it by some accident or trick of the light, he wondered if he would have noticed it at all.
In her quiet, casual, rather nervous way she had a beauty of her own. The face was pale and devoid of make-up; she had thin brows, curving a little upwards at the outer comers, over brown-black eyes of a curiously luminous quality. Her glance was direct, in contrast to Marcia's, and of a disturbing intensity; but she had the same heavy eyelids, the same small soft mouth and small neck.
What then? Another victim of the dreams in the cloudy absorption of this house? A background for the pompous vagaries of the brothers Bohun, as quiet Louise was for Lord Canifest? You had the whole matter in the tone of John Bohun's voice when he spoke abstractedly of Little Kate. He remembered what Willard had said.
'You must forgive me,' she said, in her somewhat nervous fashion, 'if I was upset, or said-silly things, or I'm always doing that. But I'm very fond of Louise. She has never had a chance. Her father. you know him, don't you?'
'I know his voice.'
'Yes. Yes, that's what I meant,' she nodded. 'You understand. Louise liked you. She's a very different person, really, when she's among friends. I expect we all are. ' She stared out of the window for a moment, and then turned back. 'May I ask you something? Stella said — Stella's the maid who brought my tea up this morning — Stella said they were all talking about it downstairs, and that it was true. About Marcia. Is it true? Is it?'
She spoke breathlessly, and he nodded without replying.
'Stella said she was hurt, killed, out at the pavilion; and her head was all — all hurt, and John found her there. Is that true too?'
'I'm afraid so.'
Again she turned away to the window, her shoulders rigid and her eyes closed. After a pause he said quietly: 'Were you fond of her, then?'
'Fond of her? No. I detested her. No, that's not true either. But, oh, my God, how I envied her.'
There was nothing to say. He felt nervous and uncomfortable. He got up to fumble among his belongings for a cigarette. The disturbing influence of this girl whom nobody ever noticed. She was speaking again:
'Do they know who did it?'
'No. Except they seem to think that it was somebody in this house.'
'Of course it was somebody in this house. It was the same person who was walking in the gallery last- night.'
He sat down on the window-seat again; not wanting to force confidences, not wanting to throw out blatant and futile offers of help for-what? Yet those were the sensations, baffling and complicated, that he felt more fiercely than he could have explained them. But she must have seen it, for she said surprisingly:
'Thanks. Thanks you-don't-know-how much.' A steady smile. 'Most people would say I can take care of myself. I can. But it frightened me nearly as much as it frightened
.. Yes, there was somebody in the gallery last night, blundering, searching, pacing; I don't know what. It was what nearly drove poor Louise out of her wits, and why we shall probably need to have the doctor for her. Whoever it was took hold of her wrist in the dark, and then pushed her away.'
'You don't suppose she imagined-?'
'There was blood on her,' said Katharine Bohun.
'When did all this happen?'
She shook her head blankly. 'I don't remember the time. At close on four o'clock, I should think; I looked at the clock afterwards. That was my room you saw me come out of. Something woke me up; I'm not sure what. But then I heard somebody fumbling at my door and pawing at the knob. Like — like a big dog. I suppose I keep thinking of dogs because Tempest barked so much early last night, and I heard him howling again this morning.
'But this was at my door. Then I heard a sound like a fall, and somebody running. I didn't dare move, until I heard Jervis Willard's voice speaking out there. He'd heard some noise, and come out in the hall and turned on the light to see what it was. When I opened my door he was lifting up Louise in a faint.'
Bennett said rather irritably: 'Why the devil was she wandering around in the dark at four o'clock in the morning?'
'I'm not sure. She hasn't been very coherent since. I think she was coming to my room; she hadn't been asleep all night, and she was rather hysterical already. I suppose when she got out of her own room she wasn't able to find the light-switch, and got lost and worse frightened because she couldn't find her way either back or to me. I know she has kept saying, `Lights, lights! ' Katharine Bohun stared straight ahead, her hands clenched in her lap. 'Were you ever awfully frightened by thinking you were lost in a maze in the dark, and you'd never get to where you wanted to go? I've been. In dreams, sometimes.'
He leaned forward suddenly and took her by the shoulders. He said:
'I'm very fond of ghost stories and the morbid kind. That's because I've never run up against anything really morbid in my own life. But you're not to get frightened by a lot of damned shadows and nonsense, do you hear? You've had too much of it.'
'I say, what on earth-'
'What you need is to walk out of this forsaken house with its cold hot water pitchers and its cockeyed mirrors and its moth-eaten ghosts. You need to make straight for London or Paris, preferably Paris, and fly off on a bender that would knock the unholy watch-springs out of anything you'd ever imagined. You need to wallow in dress- makers' shops and red plush hotels; you need to hear bands and have a dizzy love-affair and get sozzled in every bar round the Place de Clichy; you need to see the Chinese lanterns on the lake in the Bois, and dance at the Chateau de Madrid in a postage-stamp of a dress, and see the chafing-dishes steam and the color of Burgundy while you're jammed up in a crazy little room that's served the best in the world for two hundred years. You need to see the chestnut-trees coming out in spring on the Champs Elysees, and taste onion soup down in the markets by the river when it's just getting daylight; you need..'
He had pitched diplomacy clear out of the window. He had got up and was waving one arm in the air during the fervor of the moment. Now the balloon collapsed as he realized he must be making a fool of himself. He saw again the bleak room, the windows looking out on snow. But he was surprised at the vividness and intensity of Katharine Bohun's face. She looked up at him.
'You — you blasted Yank!' cried Katharine Bohun, with a violence of relief which made her voice quaver. Then she began to laugh, but not in ridicule. It seemed difficult for her to stop.
'Er-yes. Exactly.'
'You're quite the craziest person I ever met.'
'On the contrary, you blasted Limey, I am regarded as-'
'And you mustn't talk like that; at least, you see-that is, of course, I mean — where anybody else can hear you.' 'Ho?'
She caught herself up, nervously. 'Never mind. Be sensible again. I've got to be. I mean — Marcia. I can't think of anything else. Marcia could do all those things you were speaking about. Marcia was herself; she was alone; she was wonderful. in her own way.' Again she clenched her hands. 'And maybe — I've been thinking of this too-maybe she was satisfied. She's lying down there dead. But she died when she had everything she wanted; when she had everything a woman ever wanted; when she was alone and splendid and not growing old. Who wouldn't give death for that? And if somebody smashed in her head with the loaded end of a riding-crop, then maybe it was worth it.'
