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Authors: Georgette Heyer

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Crime

Envious Casca (6 page)

BOOK: Envious Casca
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"And let us admit freely that you have succeeded," said Stephen cordially.

"I always think there's something frightfully sordid about corsets, don't you?" said Valerie. "Those satin ones, I mean, with millions of bones and laces and things. Of course, nowadays one simply wears an elastic belt, if one wears anything at all, which generally one doesn't."

"You'll come to it, my girl," prophesied Mathilda.

"When I was young," remarked Maud, "no one thought of not wearing corsets. It would have been quite unheard-of."

"You corseted your minds as well as your bodies," interpolated Paula scornfully. "Thank God I live in an untrammelled age!"

"When I was young," exploded Nathaniel, "no decent woman would have mentioned such things in public!"

"How quaint!" said Valerie. "Stephen, darling, give me a cigarette!"

He threw his case over to her. Roydon asked, trying to control his voice, whether anyone wished him to continue or not.

"Yes, yes, for heaven's sake get on!" snapped Nathaniel testily. "If there's any more about underwear, you can leave it out!"

"You'll have to, anyway," added Stephen.

Roydon ignored this, and read aloud in an angry voice; 'Lucetta May is discovered, seated before her dressing table. She is wearing a shoddy pink negligee, which imperfectly conceals -"

"Careful!" Stephen warned him.

"It is grimy round the edge, and the lace is torn!" said Roydon defiantly.

"I think that's a marvellous touch!" said Valerie.

"It's surprising what a lot of dirt you can pick up from carpets, even where there's a vacuum-cleaner, which I don't suppose there would be in a place like that," said Maud. "I know those cheap theatrical lodging-houses, none better!"

"It is not a theatrical lodging-house!" said Roydon, goaded to madness. "It is, as you will shortly perceive, a bawdy lodging-house!"

Maud's placid voice broke the stunned silence. "I expect they're just as dirty," she said.

"Look here!" began Nathaniel thunderously.

Joseph intervened in a hurry. "Too many interruptions! We shall be putting Roydon off if we go on like this! I'm sure we're none of us so old-fashioned that we mind a little outspokenness!"

"Speak for yourself!" said Nathaniel.

"He is speaking for himself," said Stephen. "To do him justice, he is also speaking for most of the assembled company."

"Perhaps you would rather I didn't read you any more?" suggested Roydon stiffly. "I warn you, it is not meat for weak stomachs!"

"Oh, you must go on!" Valerie exclaimed. "I know I'm going to adore it. Do, everybody, stop interrupting!"

"She sits motionless, staring at her reflection in the mirror," suddenly declaimed Paula, in thrilling accents. "Then she picks up a lipstick, and begins wearily to rub it on her mouth. A knock falls on the door. With a movement of instinctive coquetry, she pats her curls into position, straightens her tired body, and calls, "Come in!" '

The spectacle of Paula enacting these movements in the improbable setting of a respectable drawing-room proved to be too much for Mathilda. She explained between chokes that she was very sorry, but that recitations always had this deplorable effect on her.

"What you can possibly find to laugh at I fail to see!" said Paula, a dangerous light in her eyes. "Laughter was not the reaction I expected!"

"It wasn't your fault," Mathilda assured her penitently. "In fact, the more tragic recitations are the more I feel impelled to laugh."

"I know so well what you mean!" said Joseph. "Ah, Paula, my dear, Tilda is paying you a greater tribute than you know! You conveyed such a feeling of tension in those few gestures that our Tilda's nerves frayed under it. I remember once, when I was playing in Montreal, to a packed house, working up to a moment of unbearable tension. I felt my audience with me, hanging, as it were, on my lips. I paused for my climax; I knew myself to be holding the house in the hollow of my hand. Suddenly a man broke into laughter! Disconcerting? Yes, but I knew why he laughed, why he could not help laughing!"

"I wouldn't mind hazarding a guess myself," agreed Stephen.

This pleased Nathaniel so much that he changed his mind about banning the reading of Wormwood, and bade Roydon, for the third time, to get on with it.

Roydon said: "Enter Mrs. Perkins, the landlady," and doggedly read a paragraph describing this character in terms revolting enough to have arrested the attention of his hearers had not this been diverted by Maud, who was moving stealthily about the room in search of something.

"The suspense is killing me!" Stephen announced at last. "What are you looking for, Aunt?"

"It's all right, my dear: I'm not going to disturb anyone," replied Maud untruthfully. "I just wondered where I had laid my knitting down. Please go on reading, Mr. Roydon! So interesting! It quite takes one back."

Stephen, who had joined Mathilda in the search for the knitting, remarked, sotto voce, that he had always wondered where Joe had picked Maud up, and now he knew. Mathilda, unearthing an embryo sock on four steel needles from behind a cushion, told him he was a cad.

"Thank you, my dear," said Maud, settling herself by the fire again. "Now I can be getting on with it while I listen."

The rest of Roydon's play was read to the accompaniment of the measured click of Maud's needles. It was by no means a bad play; sometimes, Mathilda thought, it hovered on the edge of brilliance; but it was no play to read to a drawing-room audience. As she had expected, it was often violent, always morbid; and it contained much that could with advantage have been omitted. Paula enjoyed herself immensely in the big scene; and neither she nor Roydon seemed capable of realising that the spectacle of his niece impersonating a fallen woman under tragic circumstances was unlikely to afford Nathaniel the least gratification. Indeed, it was only by a tremendous effort of will-power that Nathaniel was able to control himself; and while Paula's deep voice vibrated through the room, he grew more and more fidgety, and muttered under his breath in a way that boded ill for both dramatist and actress.

It was past seven o'clock before the play ended, and during the last act Nathaniel three times consulted his watch. Once, Stephen said something in his ear which made him smile grimly, but when Roydon at last laid down his typescript there was no trace of a smile on his face. He said in awful tones: "Very edifying!"

Paula, carried away by her own performance, was deaf to the note of anger in his voice. Her dark eyes glowed; there was a lovely colour in her cheeks; and her thin, expressive hands were restless, as always when she was excited. She started towards Nathaniel, holding out those hands. "Isn't it a wonderful play? Isn't it?"

Mathilda, Joseph, Valerie, and even Mottisfont, whom Wormwood had profoundly shocked, hurried into speech, drowning whatever blistering things Nathaniel meant to say. Stephen lounged at his ease, and watched them derisively. Dread of what Nathaniel might yet say to Roydon made them praise the play in exaggerated terms. Roydon was pleased, and triumphant, but his eyes kept travelling to his host's face with an expression on them of so much anxiety that everyone felt sorry for him, and repeated that the play was arresting, original, and quite made one think.

Paula, with an obtuseness which made Mathilda want to shake her, brushed aside the compliments she was receiving on her acting, and again attacked her uncle. "Now that you've heard it, Uncle Nat, you will help Willoughby, won't you?"

"If by that you mean will I give you the money to squander on a piece of what I can only call salacious balderdash, no, I won't!" he responded, not, however, in a loud enough voice to be overheard by the author. .

Paula stared at him, as though she scarcely grasped his meaning. "Can't you see - can't you see that the part is made for me?" she asked, with a little gasp.

"Upon my soul!" exploded Nathaniel. "I should like to know what the world is coming to when a girl of your breeding can stand there and tell me the part of a harlot is made for her!"

"That out-of-date rubbish!" Paula said contemptuously. "We are talking of Art!"

"Oh, we are, are we?" said Nathaniel, in a grim voice. "And I suppose that is your idea of Art, is it, young woman? Well, all I have to say is that it isn't mine!"

It turned out, unfortunately for everybody else, that this was an understatement. Nathaniel had a good deal more to say, on subjects which ranged from the decadence of modern drama and the puppyishness of modem dramatists to the folly of all women in general and of his niece in particular. He added a rider to the effect that Paula's mother would have done better to have stayed at home to look after her daughter than to spend her time gadding about marrying every Tom, Dick, and Harry she met.

It was now felt by all who were privileged to hear these remarks that it would be advisable to get Roydon out of the way until Nathaniel's wrath had had time to cool. Mathilda very nobly put herself forward, and told Roydon that she had been immensely interested in Wormwood, and would like to have a talk with him about it. Roydon, who, besides being rather impressed by Mathilda, was naturally eager to talk about his play, allowed himself to be manoeuvred out of the room just as Joseph joined the stricken group about his brother, and, with ill-timed jocosity, smote him lightly on the back, saying: "Well, well, Nat, we're a couple of old-stagers, eh? A crude, sometimes a violent piece of work. Yet not without merit, I think. What do you say?"

Nathaniel at once became a cripple. He said: "My lumbago! Damn you, don't do that!" and tottered to a chair, one hand to the small of his back and his manly form bent with suffering.

"Why, I thought it was all right again!" said Valerie innocently.

Nathaniel, who had closed his eyes, opened them to cast a baleful glance in her direction, and replied in the voice of one whose days were attended by anguish bravely borne: "The least touch brings it on!"

"Rubbish!" said Paula, with quite unnecessary emphasis. "You weren't even thinking about your lumbago a minute ago! You're a miserable humbug, Uncle Nat!"

Nathaniel rather liked being abused, but he resented having his lumbago belittled, and said that the day might come when Paula would be sorry she had said that.

Maud, who was rolling up her knitting-wool, said in her sensible way that he had better have some antiphlogistin, if it was really bad.

"Of course it's bad!" snapped Nathaniel. "And don't think I'm going to have any of that muck on me, because I'm not! If anyone had the least consideration - But I suppose that's too much to expect! As though it isn't enough to have the house filled with a set of rackety people, I'm forced to sit and listen to a play I should have thought any decent woman would have blushed to sit through!"

"When you talk about decent women you make me sick!" flashed Paula. "If you can't appreciate a work of genius, so much the worse for you! You don't want to put your hand in your pocket: that's why you're making all this fuss! You're mean, and hypocritical, and I despise you from the bottom of my soul!"

"Yes, you'd be very glad to see me laid underground! I know that!" said Nathaniel, hugely enjoying this refreshing interlude. "Don't think I don't see through you! All the same, you women: money's all you're out for! Well, you won't get any of mine to waste on that young puppy, and that's flat!"

"All right!" said Paula, in the accents of a tragedienne. "Keep your money! But when you're dead I shall spend every penny you leave me on really immoral plays, and I shall hope that you'll know it, and hate it, and be sorry you were such a beast to me when you were alive!"

Nathaniel was so pleased by this vigorous response to his taunt that he forgot to be a cripple, and sat up quite straight in his chair, and said that she had better not count her chickens before they were hatched, since after this he would be damned if he didn't Make a Few Changes.

"Do as you please!" Paula said disdainfully. "I don't want your money."

"Oho, now you sing a different tune!" Nathaniel said, his eyes glinting with triumph. "I thought that that was just what you did want - two thousand pounds of my money, and ready to murder me to get it!"

"What are two thousand pounds to you?" demanded Paula, with poor logic, but fine dramatic delivery. "You'd never miss it, but just because you have a bourgeois taste in art you deny me the one thing I want! More than that! You are denying me my chance in life!"

"I don't care for that line," said Stephen critically.

"You shut up!" said Paula, rounding on him. "You've done all you can to crab Willoughby's play! I suppose your tender regard for me makes you shudder at the thought of my appearing in the role of a prostitute!"

"Bless your heart, I don't care what sort of a role you appear in!" replied Stephen. "All I beg is that you won't stand there ranting like Lady Macbeth. Too much drama in the home turns my stomach, I find."

"If you had a shred of decency, you'd be on my side!"

"In that case, I haven't a shred of decency. I don't like the play, I don't like the dramatist, and I object to being read to."

"Children, children!" said Joseph. "Come now, this won't do, you know! On Christmas Eve, too!"

"Now I am going to be sick," said Stephen, dragging himself up, and lounging over to the door. "Let me know the outcome of this Homeric battle, won't you? I'm betting six to four on Uncle Nat myself."

"Well, really, Stephen!" exclaimed Valerie, with a giggle. "I do think you're the limit!"

This infelicitous intervention seemed to remind Nathaniel of her existence. He glared at her, loathing her empty prettiness, her crimson fingernails, her irritating laugh; and gave vent to his feelings by barking at Stephen. "You're as bad as your sister! There isn't a penny to choose between you! You've got bad taste, do you hear me? This is the last time either of you will come to Lexham! Put that in your pipe, and smoke it!"

"Tut-tut!" said Stephen, and walked out of the room, greatly disconcerting Sturry, who was standing outside with a tray of cocktails, listening with deep appreciation to the quarrel raging within.

BOOK: Envious Casca
7.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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