In any case, it was entirely beyond Roger to resist the appeal of her flushed cheeks and shining eyes. And he said immediately—indeed, with a good deal of graciousness:
“Then of course well go.”
“That’s splendid!” Both the Curtises seemed enchanted at having increased their party still further.
“But you’ll have to have a new dress, of course,” Barbara added. “It’s a sort of point of honour not to have oneself identified if possible. And as it’s only masks and not fancy dresses, too, one must have something none of one’s friends will recognise.”
“Hark at her,” Jim begged of the assembled company. “If there’s another woman this side of heaven who can find more excuses than my wife for buying new dresses, I’d like to meet her poor devil of a husband and swop experiences.” And he smiled with a good deal of pride at Barbara.
“It’s not an excuse. It’s perfectly true,” Barbara replied imperturbably. “A new dress is an absolute necessity.”
“You called it a point of honour a few minutes ago,” her husband pointed out. “I’d stick to that if I were you. It’s more unusual.”
Hilma saw her mother biting her lip nervously at this point, and she interposed calmly with:
“All right, I’ll have a new dress for the occasion. You remember the silk Aunt Gertrude gave me, Mother. That will do splendidly.”
“Oh, yes, dear. Yes, of course.” Her mother gave a little gasp of relief and flickered her lashes nervously.
“Poor Mother,” thought Hilma. “Poor, poor Mother! She thought the whole plan was going to be ruined for the price of a new evening dress. And that we’d be humiliated, too, by having to own to the reason. Oh, I know why I’m marrying for money! How could I do anything else?”
After that, the evening went very pleasantly. The guests obviously enjoyed themselves, and the arrangements for attending the masked ball were settled beyond dispute.
When the guests had gone and Mrs. Arnall had ceased to enumerate the points on which there might perhaps have been improvement, Hilma said:
“What a good thing Aunt Gertrude sent me that length of silk, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, dear. It was a horrid moment until you remembered that,” her mother remarked quite simply.
Hilma smiled comfortingly.
“Well, I couldn’t have anything nicer. It’s a heavenly blue, you remember, with just a powdering of tiny gold flowers.”
Mrs. Arnall looked very pleased. And as the dress began to take shape during the next few days, she looked even more pleased. She knew that Hilma was one of the loveliest girls in London (who should know it better than her own mother?) and she liked to see her daughter look her best.
With the help of a fairly humble but (as Mrs. Arnall phrased it) “quite intelligent” dressmaker, Hilma evolved a dress of considerable simplicity but of very beautiful line.
“It is line that counts, Hilma. Believe me, it was always the line that made my dresses into models in the old days when I could afford such things.”
So line was duly studied in this case, too, and, as a result, the beautiful dress fitted Hilma like the proverbial flower-sheath, winning her mother’s entire approval. Even her father said:
“Very pretty indeed, my dear. It’s new, isn’t it?”
Hilma stood smilingly before him. She was only waiting now for Roger to come and fetch her.
Hilma put on her little gold mask, and immediately it seemed to impart a faintly elusive—even mysterious—air to her whole personality. It was not only that she had done her hair differently, reflected Mr. Arnall, with a slightly troubled sigh. There were times when he felt he hardly knew his daughter quite so well as he had supposed. This was one of them.
The impression disturbed him a little. He was a man who liked his children to “remain young,” as he put it to himself. He would have preferred to be able to think of her still much as he had when she was young enough to be taken to Kensington Gardens and shown the Albert Memorial.
But the golden mask didn’t go with anything like that.
It was not that she was anything like so bright and glittering and modern as her cousin Barbara, for instance. Indeed, thought Mr. Arnall, who had a nice discrimination in shades of meaning, there was no glitter about her at all, because that implied something cold. There was a glow—that was the word. A warm, golden glow. But that enhanced the faintly mysterious air which she had this evening. And Mr. Arnall was not at all sure that he wanted any daughter of his to be mysterious.
Ah, well, it was a good thing she was marrying a nice, steady, unimaginative fellow like Roger Dolan. Nothing mysterious about him. And nothing mysterious about his solid income and his big house near Putney Heath, either. That was even more to the point perhaps.
Roger arrived a few minutes later.
He was still not entirely happy about the business of masks, although he admitted at once that Hilma’s was beautiful and that her whole appearance was enchanting.
“But it’s all very well for women, dressing up and playing the fool a little,” he said. “I’ve brought a mask, of course, but I must say it all seems very ridiculous to me. I don’t like making an exhibition of myself.”
Hilma wondered just a little impatiently how he supposed he was going to make an exhibition of himself when he would be one of hundreds doing exactly the same thing. But she supposed it was hardly poor Roger’s fault that he was singularly lacking in the carnival spirit, and it was all the kinder of him to have yielded to her wish to go.
“You’re looking your very best, Roger,” she told him. “Awfully nice and big and masculine. A mask won’t make much difference, and everyone will be wearing one, you know. It would be terribly conspicuous not to—besides being against the rules of the evening.”
Roger’s horror of being conspicuous immediately helped him to swallow that bait. If it would appear peculiar to be without a mask, then, of course, to go masked was the only thing to do.
They donned their masks—since they were supposed to arrive disguised—and went out to Roger’s car, Roger muttering that he hoped his chauffeur would not think they had taken leave of their senses.
The chauffeur naturally had no such idea. He had once been chauffeur to an aged actress who had spent the last ten years of her life trying to recapture her youth. It would have taken a great deal more than a couple of masks to arouse even the mildest curiosity in him.
“Oh, Roger, it’s going to be such fun!” Hilma turned to him in the car and smiled at him. And even Roger thought how strange and beautiful her blue eyes looked as they sparkled at him through the gold of her mask.
“I’m glad you think so, my dear,” was what he said. But he honestly meant it. He was glad if she was pleased—only Hilma wished there were someone to share her gay, rather crazy mood of the moment. There was nothing either gay or crazy about Roger.
The house where the ball was being held was magnificent, with grounds that once would never have imagined a London house could boast. The whole setting was gorgeously suitable to the occasion, and even Roger began to blossom forth slightly when he found that literally everyone else there seemed very willing to “dress up and play the fool a little,” as he had said.
The windows of the great ballroom came right to the floor, and they had been opened outwards on the warm dusk of an early autumn evening. The lilt of music, the ripple of talking, the bubble of laughter made an irresistible combination, and there was something slightly intoxicating about the adventurous feeling it gave one to know that identity was put in doubt—if not entirely destroyed—by the absurd and delightful masks. Perhaps Roger didn’t quite catch the full enjoyment of it, but at least he began to think it a nice evening.
To Hilma the enjoyment was almost painfully intense. She realised obscurely that during the last week or so she had had a great longing to escape from reality—to run away from the hard, rather heavy actualities of life. This evening she seemed to have
achieved something like that escape. Nothing was completely real. Not even Roger. For how could Roger be completely real in a mask?
From time to time during the evening she danced with other men. Men whom Barbara—who had insisted on disclosing her quite undisguisable identity—brought up and introduced in a cheerful, casual way which left one quite unaware of their real names. But to Hilma it seemed that the highlight of the evening had been reached when—Roger having left her to fetch her an ice—she stood by one of the long open windows, savouring the quiet of the night outside yet keenly aware of the gay scene in the room.
The contrast accorded very well with her mood—half-gay, half-melancholy. She stood with her back against the shutter of the window, her eyes on the little slice of golden moon that was creeping up the sky. She was half lost in a reverie of her own when a voice spoke softly beside her.
“Liebling,” the voice said, and she started at the sound of it, for that caressing tone with the undercurrent of laughter could belong to only one person. “Liebling, is it possible that I’ve found you again?”
CHAPTER FOUR
For a moment Hilma was so startled and so thrilled that she could not have turned round, anyway. Then a strangely mischievous little impulse took hold of her.
“Don’t you think,” she said softly in return, “that you’ve made a mistake?”
“No, Liebling. I have watched you for too much of this evening. Do you think I don’t know that wonderful hair—even though you have it piled up in that delicious, ridiculous way on top of your head? Besides, a mask doesn’t hide the eyes, you know.”
She didn’t answer that directly. She said instead:
“My fiancé will be coming back in a moment.”
“Yes, I’m sure of that. Come with me into the grounds.”
“I—can’t very well. Besides, I don’t know the way.”
“I do. And you know we must talk. Please, Liebling—while there’s still time.”
“All right. You go. I’ll follow you. Which is the way?”
“Through the door on the left at the end of the room, and then down the little flight of steps.”
She hardly let her glance follow him, but she knew he had gone from her side. Then she was seized with panic lest she should not get away herself before Roger came back. He would wander about looking for her, of course. Get very worried and a good deal annoyed.
Oh, well, let him! she thought, with sudden reckless impatience. And she began to thread her way through the people at the side of the room.
Near the door she ran into Barbara and, catching her by the arm, said coolly:
“If you see Roger, tell him I’ve torn my dress a bit and gone to the cloakroom to have it put right.”
“Very well. Is it serious? Pity—such a pretty dress.”
“No, nothing much, but it may take a little while. He would wonder where I was.”
“All right, I’ll tell him,” Barbara said, and Hilma passed quickly out of the door on the left.
A short flight of steps lay straight in front of her, and at the bottom she could see a glass door which evidently led out of doors.
Running down the steps, she pushed open the door and stepped out into the darkness. At the sudden change from the light she could see only vague shapes round her. Then someone caught her hand and a voice said:
“Come this way, down the yew alley. There’s a stone bench at the end.”
She caught her breath on a little laugh of sheer excitement, and at that he laughed too.
“How do you know the place so well?” she said in a whisper, because somehow the dark shapes of the yew trees were mysterious and a trifle frightening.
“I used to stay here sometimes as a boy. I’m remotely related to the owner of the place.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Look, here’s the bench. Now, sit there, where I can see you in what little moonlight there is. You’re not cold, are you?” He touched her bare arm very lightly and gently.
“No,” she said, and hoped he didn’t notice her slight shiver of excitement.
“Aren’t you going to take off your mask?” She saw how his eyes were sparkling through the eye-holes of his own mask.
“No,” Hilma told him, “I don’t think I am. That’s outside the rules of the evening.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for that.” He leant back with his arms folded, and she saw his mouth, below the line of his black mask, curve with something like indulgent amusement.
“Why? Don’t you like it?” She was faintly chagrined.
“It’s beautiful, Liebling. But it makes you a little frightening.”
“Frightening?” She was taken aback. “But why should it?”
“It gives you a remote and unearthly character. Like one of those beautiful princesses of Egypt who have death-masks of pure gold.”
“Oh!” She snatched the mask from her face. “I think that’s a horrible thing to say.”
He laughed.
“But it had the desired result,” he told her, and at that, her reluctant smile came. “Besides, Liebling, I think it serves you right for that horrid moment when you pretended not to know me,” he added gravely.
Hilma laughed then.
“Did you really think then that you’d made a mistake?” she enquired irresistibly.
But he shook his head.
“You said—you said you’d watched me for a long time.”
“Yes. You and the big fair man with the slightly self-conscious air. I suppose that’s the fiancé?”
“Yes. He doesn’t really like wearing a mask, poor Roger. He thinks it’s very silly.”
“So it is—a little. That’s why you and I like it.”
She laughed.
“Perhaps that’s true.”
“So that’s—Roger?” he said reflectively. “He looks, I’m sorry to say, an entirely worthy person. A thoroughly good sort.”
“He is. Why shouldn’t he be?”
“Oh, no reason at all. Except that he’s a very large and very solid reproach to anyone as frivolous and unstable as I am.”
“Yes,” Hilma agreed. “Yes, I suppose that’s how he makes me feel sometimes. That’s the worst of being a second-rate person, isn’t it?”
“Eh? Yes. Yes, of course it is.”
There was a slight pause while they digested that. Then she said:
“I suppose we are definitely inferior people to Roger?”
“Unquestionably. I’m afraid.” And she saw again the roguish sparkle of his eyes behind the dark mask.
“Tell me, is—is she here to-night too?”
“Evelyn?”
“Oh—her name’s Evelyn, is it?”
He nodded.
“Yes, she’s here.”
“Could I—pick her out from description? Or is that against the rules?”
“No, it isn’t against the rules. Since I’ve met Roger—metaphorically speaking, of course—I see no reason why you shouldn’t meet Evelyn—also metaphorically speaking. She’s slim and dark and is wearing a red dress. Altogether I should call her the smartest-looking girl in the room, I think,” he added thoughtfully.
“Oh, would you?” Hilma was surprised to find how little she liked that. “How—nice for you to have such a smart fiancée.”
“Except, Liebling,” he said with an odd touch of weariness, “that smartness is not a quality which appeals to me above all others.”
She wondered curiously which quality did, but forbore to ask him.
“Anyway”—she spoke a little coldly—”beggars can hardly be choosers.”
“Perfectly right, Liebling.” He seemed genuinely amused by the feel of her claws. “Perfectly right but most unpleasantly expressed.”
“I’m sorry!” She felt much more contrite than she could have wished. “I was—I was thinking of both of us, you understand.”
“I’m honoured to be coupled with you in anyone’s thoughts,” he assured her. But, feeling
suddenly at a disadvantage, she said quickly:
“Aren’t you going to take off your mask, too?”
He took it off at once. But she thought that his eyes were not so sparkling without the setting of the mask. They looked tired, somehow, and just a little disillusioned.
“Well, we haven’t either of us many illusions, I suppose,” thought Hilma. And at that moment he spoke again.
“The case of our blackmailing friend seems to have settled itself satisfactorily. There can hardly be any reason for the police to take any further interest in either of us.”
“No,” Hilma agreed. And then, with a sigh: “Wasn’t it terrible?”
“What? The whole experience, do you mean?”
“Oh, no!” She found she didn’t mean that at all. “No, I was thinking of that poor woman, feeling so desperate—ten times more desperate than I felt, I suppose. And she didn’t mistake the flat, or find the problem solved for her. She had to go right through with it. Right through to the point of murdering him.”
“Why, Liebling,” he said curiously and gently, “you never got near murder, did you?”
“Oh, no. But then I hadn’t so much at stake as she, I dare say. Even if everything had gone wrong, I should have lost Roger and a very good marriage. But—suppose I had loved him desperately—” She stopped and looked away thoughtfully into the shadows.
“Are you suggesting”—his tone was mocking, but only slightly so—“are you actually suggesting that the case would then have been much more serious?”
“Oh, well—” She gave a shamefaced little laugh, as though she had only just realised she was cornered.
“Because, if so,” he pointed out gravely, “you’re deliberately going against the worldly and mercenary principles which you upheld to me.”
“You supported them, too,” she reminded him quickly.
“Of course. That’s why I immediately recognised the volte-face.” he assured her.
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