The Sea Priestess

by Dion Fortune

  CHAPTER V

  DROVE over to Dickmouth, and went to the Grand Hotel, I and asked for Miss Le Fay Morgan. The page parked me in the enormous palm court, and I amused myself by watching the people; Dickmouth was becoming distinctly posh, and they were worth watching. It is always a marvel to me why women wear things that are intrinsically ugly in an effort to appear beautiful. Then a woman came in. She was tall and slight, and she had got a black velvet tarn o' shanter on her head with a diamond clip in it, and a black fur coat with enormous collar and cuffs. I thought she looked well in it, though she was quite different from the others, as she had long, straight, draped lines, whereas they had bits stuck on here and there. I could not see her face because her tarn was pulled down over the ear that was towards me and her huge collar was up, but I could tell by the way she moved that she was a beautiful woman. She looked round as if looking for someone, called a page, and the page pointed at me. "Oh," said I to myself. "So you're the lady who saws legs off chairs, are you?" She came over to me, and I rose to greet her. I couldn't see much of her face because of her collar, but I saw quite enough to know why Scottie had come home hastily. She had fine eyes, and her lips were heavily painted. That, of course, would have been enough for Scottie any dark night. It is a curious thing to look back on the first meeting with a person who subsequently plays an important part in one's life, and see whether one had any premonition of what was to come. I can honestly say that although I hadn't seen that woman's face, I should never have looked at anyone else while she was in the room. She gave me her hand, and we did the polite, and I stared at her. Her eyes looked into mine very steadily. She had come down to grip a nettle, if I was not very much mistaken. Scottie had evidently made no secret of his view of the situation. It was not difficult to guess why she had come. Scottie, duly espoused to the undertaker's daughter, was highly uninflammable and Miss Le Fay Morgan, very wisely, had not tried anything on with him. I might prove different material, however, if I took after the old man; he had led my mother the devil of a dance. "Mr. Maxwell? "she said. "Yes," said I. "I knew your father," said she. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't very well tell the woman to her face she was a liar--and I didn't want to. I once heard Sarah Bernhardt give a scene from L'Aiglon as a musichall turn. She was old, as this woman must be old--if she were to be believed, and I was more than half inclined to believe her at that moment--and she had had the same kind of golden, throaty voice. King Lear said that a low voice is an excellent thing in women, but I doubt if he had this kind of low voice in mind when he spoke. I took her out to my car. She didn't speak again. She was evidently a woman who knew how to be still, a very potent thing if anyone really knows how to do it. As I put her into the car I observed her ankles. "You're no hag-beauty," I said to myself as I looked at those ankles. She had very fine dark stockings on. Stockings arc very revealing of a woman's status. She sat silent in the car. I felt I had to speak. I made some trite remark about the place. She said; "Yes," and that was all, but I was getting more conscious of her with every minute I sat beside her. I had planned out a circular tour, and we parked the car at a strategic spot and began to visit the houses. And then I learnt something else about Miss Le Fay Morgan. There was not much about house property she did not know. Moreover she knew not only a builder's terms--and all his little tricks-- but she also had a sound grasp of first principles. That is not a thing that everyone acquires, even with experience; but the thing that had always struck me about Miss Morgan's correspondence with us, even that which dated back a quarter of a century, was her remarkable grasp of first principles. I was glad my companion had her collar up; I did not particularly want to see her face; in fact, I definitely preferred not to. We had worked our way down to a house at the end of the esplanade, and had some distance to walk back to the car. It was a small detached villa residence, standing in its own grounds, much gone to seed, and from the back windows one could see right out over the marshlands round the estuary. I looked out and I saw the devil's own squall coming up over the levels. "We had better wait till that has blown over," said I. She looked out, saw the distant hills rapidly disappearing, and agreed. We were in a small kind of back study with a gas-fire. I had noted a shilling-in-the-slot meter in the scullery, so I slipped a shilling into it and put a match to the fire. There was, however, nothing to sit on. Miss Morgan solved the problem by sitting down on the floor, putting her back against the wall, stretching her long, slender legs straight out in front of her and crossing her ankles. I had another view of her very nice stockings. "I like sitting on the floor," she said. "Is that why you saw the legs off your chairs?" I asked, without thinking what I was saying, for hitherto I had been most carefully professional with her. She laughed--that deep, golden, throaty laugh, that gave me a queer feeling even the first time I heard it. "I am afraid I was altogether too much for your partner," she said. "Yes, I am afraid you were," said I, not knowing what else to say. "He is not the kind of person one can explain things to," said she. "Am I?" said I, with a sudden revulsion of feeling at being vamped. She considered me. "You are better than he is--but not much," she added as an after-thought, and we both laughed. It flashed into my mind that she had shifted her ground very quickly and cleverly when she sensed my reaction--or else that she had never meant to vamp me, and I rather inclined to the latter view; I felt instinctively that there was something fine about Miss Le Fay Morgan. Anyway, she was distinctly a personality, and one can forgive a lot to that. The storm struck the windows with a swish and distracted our attention, for which I was not sorry, for I wanted to scramble back to the safety of professionalism, if that were possible while one was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a person. But Miss Le Fay Morgan wasn't having any. She had come down to grip a nettle, and she laid hold of it. "I want to talk to you," said she. I pulled my face together and made it as blank as I knew how, and stood on guard. "Your partner made no bones about calling me a thief," she said. "And if I am not very much mistaken, he had it in his mind to call me a murderer too." "We should certainly like to know what has become of Miss Le Fay Morgan." "I am Miss Lc Fay Morgan." I did not answer. It was raining like liquid Hades, and neither of us would want to walk out and slam the door in weather like that. "Don't you believe me?" she asked. "I am not in a position to judge," said I. "I can't see much of you behind that collar." She raised her hands and loosened her coat at the neck, and it fell back revealing face and breast. She was a dark woman, brown-eyed, black-browed, slightly aquiline, and her skin was a very pale olive, more creamy than olive, in fact. Her eyes were not darkened with mascara-- they did not need it--but her lips were pillar-box scarlet. She had long slender white hands, too, and the nails were filed to a point and looked as if they had been dipped in blood. So altogether, what with the black furs and white face and splashes of scarlet at the mouth and nails, she was a pretty startling figure to let loose on a bachelor from a one-eyed hole like Dickford. As she opened her coat a whiff of scent, aromatic and spicy, not sweet, came across to me. It was a very queer scent, and I think there was a good deal of musk in it. I took a reef in my backbone and thought hard of estate agcnting. "What age do you suppose I am?" she asked. I looked at her. Her skin was perfectly smooth and unlined, just like ivory-white velvet. I have never seen such a lovely skin, it was as different from my sister's as chalk from cheese. All the same, the eyes were not the eyes of a girl. There were no pouches round them, the skin was quite taut, like a young woman's, but the eyes themselves had the peculiar expression of quiet watchfulness that goes with experience. She certainly was not a young girl, despite her figure, I was quite prepared to concede that; but would Miss Le Fay Morgan be so--I could think of no other word than Scottie's dreadful expression--wellpreserved? She seemed to guess my thoughts. "So you do not believe in the power of beauty-parlours to preserve one's youth?" she said. "Not to the extent to which you have preserved it," I said frankly. "Not even with glandular treatment?" "Frankly, no." "But supposing all this were backed up by a knowledge of mind-p
ower?" I hesitated, and there suddenly came to my memory another face I had seen, a face uncommonly like hers--the face of the sea-priestess of my vision, who had sat in the great carved chair on the high stern-poop reading the book with the heavy clasps. The effect on me was extraordinary. For a moment I was back on the estuary in the sea-mist and dusk. All sense of time and place was gone and I had slipped into timelessness. I suppose my face must have shown what I felt, for I saw Miss Le Fay Morgan's dark eyes suddenly glow like lamps. I came back to normal and looked at her. It was a queer situation. There was she in her handsome furs, and there was I in my old raincoat--and yet there was something between us that was very queer. I thought of that marvellous scene in Rider Haggard's story, where "She's" hand comes through the curtains. It was as if the woman opposite me had laid her hand on a curtain, and could, if she chose, draw it back and reveal something very strange indeed. Then she spoke. "I am very far from being a young woman," she said. "I was not a young woman when I joined Miss Morgan. If you look closely, you will see that. I have cared for my skin, and my figure has taken care of itself, that is all." Her ways were certainly not the ways of a young woman, but we had had her name on our books getting on for half a century. At the very least she must be rising seventy. It took a lot of swallowing. "Well, Miss Morgan," I said, "I really don't know that it is any business of ours what your age is. We shall send the cheques to the address we have always sent them to, and we shall be satisfied with the receipts we have always had. I don't suppose I am particularly competent to form an opinion. You look very young to me; but if you say it is the result of taking care of yourself, I am not in a position to dispute it." "I thought you were an authority on antiques," said Miss Le Fay Morgan with a mischievous smile, and made me laugh, which I had not meant to do. However, she let the curtain fall back again, and I think we both breathed more freely. She got up and walked over to the window. "How much longer do you suppose this downpour is going on?" she asked. "Not long like this," I said. "As soon as it lets up a bit, I will slip out and get the car." She nodded negligently, and stood gazing out of the window with her back to me, lost in thought. I wondered what she had to think about. If she really were Miss Lc Fay Morgan, she must have had plenty. She probably remembered the Franco-Prussian War, if not the Crimea. I was trying to sum up how far we were involved if we kept our mouths shut and did nothing about it. Of course she wasn't Miss Morgan the First's antiquated companion. I may be pretty green about women, but I am not as green as all that. I wondered what had become of the original Miss Le Fay Morgan. I had read a detective story once where a wealthy old dame had died on the Continent and the companion had impersonated her. There was no reason to presuppose murder, even if Miss Morgan the Second were not forthcoming. Miss Morgan the Third might have ministered to her last moments most dutifully, and then planted her perfectly respectably. It was not improbable that Miss Morgan the Second had followed the example of Miss Morgan the First, and liaving no little nephews and nieces, left everything to her faithful companion --a very decent thing to do, in my opinion, and infinitely better than organised charity. Then there might have been some hitch in the will, it wasn't witnessed, or something, and the faithful companion saw what she had been promised going to some fourth cousin twice removed who already had more than he needed, and had taken the will for the deed, literally as well as metaphorically, forgotten to inform us of the funeral, and traced the signature on the receipts. I suppose all this reasoning was pretty specious if one looked at it closely. One thing was quite certain, however, I had no mind to turn private detective and put my head in a hornets' nest from purely altruistic motives. I will not go so far as to say I had taken a liking to Miss Le Fay Morgan, I distrusted her too much for that, but I found her decidedly stimulating. This was the sort of thing I had wanted to go to London for; I had hoped that writing women would be of this type; but I expect if I had got there, I should have found out my mistake. The only authoress I ever saw looked like Ophelia in the Mad Scene, and you couldn't tell where the hair ended and the straws began. Miss Le Fay Morgan seemed to have forgotten my existence, and I was very anxious not to commit myself in any way till I had talked things over with Scottie and Headley, our solicitor. We did not want to be let in as accessories after the fact if anything fishy had been afoot. I could not imagine anything more likely to make you commit yourself than being shut up alone with Miss Le Fay Morgan in an empty villa during a thunderstorm, so I sidled quietly across the room without drawing attention to myself, turned up my coat-collar, and slipped out of the door. The rain was coming down in sheets, with a wind behind it that drove it down my neck, but that couldn't be helped, so I put my best foot foremost and legged it for the car. Then I collected Miss Morgan and drove her to her hotel. She blew me up in a most motherly manner for having gone out in the rain, and if I looked half as sheepish as I felt, I must have looked a prize sheep. She wanted me to stop and have tea with her, but I wouldn't, saying I must get home and get changed, which was the sober truth; but even if it hadn't been, I should have said it, for I had had quite enough of Miss Le Fay Morgan for one afternoon.