Ill Met by Moonlight. Leslie Ford
powder our noses, I suppose. We wandered down the path towards the old mansion orangery.
“You haven’t changed, Grace. Not much, anyway. You must miss Dick a lot. Why haven’t you ever married again?”
“I haven’t time, darling. And the boys are trouble enough just now.”
“Where are they?”
“One of them’s on a student tour in Europe, and the other’s taken the boat and three friends for a week up the bay. I’m having a rest—or that’s what I’d planned. And what about you?”
We’d stopped and were looking at each other. Rosemary smiled the cool smile that barely stirred the surface of her wide-set gray eyes.
“Nothing, darling, nothing.”
She looked away. I saw the corners of her mouth quiver.
“She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she. Are they . . . happy?”
A long savage streak of lightning split the sulphur-gray sky across the dark water. A hideous clap of thunder shivered the air.
“They seem to get along well enough.”
“George said she was beautiful and that all the men are mad about her.”
“Your Paul’s very handsome.”
She nodded. “He’s rather a dear. He wanted to meet Jim . . . that’s one reason we came. I suppose I wanted to . . . see her.”
She took my hand suddenly and held it very tight.
“I wish I hadn’t. I knew the minute he dropped that glass it was all a horrible mistake. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why don’t you go back, tomorrow?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“He’d understand. Your Paul, I mean.”
“Dad wouldn’t. Paul wouldn’t either, not really. I . . . I couldn’t let Jim down, anyway. Not in front of her. She’d love it, if she knew.”
“She’s not a fool.”
“No, I suppose not. She’d never have got him if she was. You know about it, don’t you?”
“Some of it.”
“It doesn’t matter now, I guess. It’s absurd. I . . . I didn’t care, yesterday—or today, till he dropped the glass.”
If I’d told him in front of Mr. Toplady’s store that morning, I thought, he’d never have dropped it. But something else would have happened, so I didn’t worry about it just then.
Another flash of lightning slit the sky and grounded in the bay. It was quite dark all at once. In the club the lights went on first in one window and then another. We could hear the faint sound of laughing voices and the children shouting on the porch. Large drops of rain began coming down.
“We’d better go back—buck up, darling,” I said. “Look out for Sandra. She’ll make trouble if she can.”
We went racing across the lawn between drops of rain as big as marbles. It was still poisonously hot and sticky, and the rain was cool on my arms and face.
“We’ll all feel better when this is over,” I said practically.
Rosemary’s laugh was a strangled half-sob in her throat. “I hope so,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
I didn’t go back to the lounge with Rosemary. The rain was starting in good earnest, we’d just had the second floor papered, and it would never occur to Julius and Lilac to see that the windows were closed, not if they happened to have company in the kitchen.
As it happened, I needn’t have bothered. Julius and Lilac did have company, but that inestimable man Sergeant Buck had seen that the hatches were battened down. He had also seen that Aunt Carrie’s ferns were put out on the lawn to catch the rain, the lawn chairs and the hammock brought in to the porch, the net from the tennis court neatly folded and stowed away in the garage, and my hat, gardening gloves and trowel brought in from the rock garden where I’d left them. All that should have given me some idea of what to expect from my week-end guest. Julius and Lilac were goose-stepping about the place in the most alarming fashion, completely regimented in half an hour’s military dictatorship, beaming with pride and importance, and saying, “Yas, Sergeant, suh,” “Yas, indeed, Sergeant, suh,” every ten seconds.
Sergeant Buck, lantern-jawed, fish-eyed, granite-visaged, six feet and two hundred twenty pounds of beef and brawn, eyed me with what really could only be called a dead pan as I ducked out of the car onto the kitchen porch. It was our first meeting, and I could see he was definitely disappointed in me. He looked at me so forbiddingly, in fact, that I almost hesitated to go into my own house.
“Where’s the Colonel, ma’am?”
He said it very suspiciously, almost as if I had him hid somewhere.
“I just slipped away to see if everything was all right here,” I said meekly. “He stayed on. The Chetwynds will bring him along shortly.”
Sergeant Buck nodded with some relief.
“You’ll find everything in order, ma’am.”
I started in.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said coldly. “I understood we’re staying here. I’ve unpacked the Colonel’s bag.”
“That’s right,” I said, turning round at the door.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
He hesitated a brief instant, and went stanchly on.
“It was my understanding we were staying with a widow woman.”
“That’s me,” I said.
Sergeant Buck’s face reddened a little.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said again, frigidly. “But who’s going to chaperon the Colonel?”
I stared for a moment, and Lilac, listening from the kitchen, threw up her hands with a scream of high-pitched colored laughter.
“Oh, law, Sergeant, suh, the Colonel he’ll be all right! Miss Grace she won’ ’noy the Colonel! ’Deed she won’!”
Julius grinned and so did I. Sergeant Buck did not.
“I think it will be all right, Sergeant,” I said soberly. “You see, Julius and Lilac live in the garage and your room is next to the Colonel’s. I’m sure he’ll be perfectly safe.”
There was no expression of any kind on Sergeant Buck’s face to indicate his acceptance of that. His face got a shade redder. “We understood you were a widow woman,” he said stiffly. “I mean an old lady.”
Colonel Primrose hadn’t seemed particularly shocked that I was not of advanced age, although of course he may not have noticed it. Somehow I’d been feeling nearer sixty than thirty-eight all that day. The effect that a lot of people in love have on one, I suppose.
It was almost seven when Colonel Primrose came back from the club. The rain was over, for a moment or two, and I was out on the porch watching the bay, still turbulent and steel-gray under the lowering sky.
“Why did you leave so soon?”
“I had to get back to see about my family. Did I miss much?”
“A first-rate scene from modern melodrama,” he said with a wry smile.
“Sandra Gould?”
He nodded. We stood silent a moment.
“I take it she knows Dikranov.”
I said “Really?” I didn’t want to talk about that.
“Her