"Phyllis A. Whitney - Spindrift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whitney Phyllis A)
"Why shouldn't I be well here? The house had nothing to do with what happened." I had brought it into the open, as had to be done. "Only a person, or persons, was responsible for that."
She shook her red head at me as if in sad reproach. "Christy, my dear! I thought you'd got over that notion before you left the hospital"
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"I will never get over it!" I said hotly. "I still want to know what really happened." There-I had thrown down my challenge -let her make of it what she would.
Theo did not pick up the glove. She turned instead to Joel. "You must take care of her. See that she gets lots of rest and is outdoors whenever there's sunshine."
I stared about the room, seeking some support, some sympathy. Fiona had set down the dragon burner that still exuded a thin line of blue aromatic smoke, and she was looking at none of us. She studied the broad-spaced knuckles of her right hand as if they were all that interested her. Joel looked unhappy-with mebut he watched his mother. Only Brace's eyes were fixed upon me and when I met his gaze I saw again what might have been a flash of sympathy.
There was nothing more for me to say and I knew we hadn't been brought together for idle conversation, so I subsided and said nothing more. The moment I was out of this room I meant to go looking for Peter. But the audience had not yet come to an end.
"I hope you will all help me with ideas for my party," Theo went on. "We want it to be a very gay and imaginative affair. I mean to bring people back to Spindrift the way they used to come in the old days."
"My father hasn't been dead a year," I said, forgetting about subsiding.
"Mourning periods are old-fashioned," Theo said with a slight edge to her voice. "Adam would be the first to say, 'Give a party!' Come-all of you! Give me some ideas. I'd like fancy dress. But something special."
Fiona spoke with the slight drawl she sometimes adopted with Theo, as if she must always drag back a little in the face of the older woman's dynamic surges.
"I've been thinking and I have a possible idea. But I'd like to show it to you-so why not now? Let's go down to the ballroom."
Theo was always ready for action, and she rose lithely from her straight chair-no pushing up on the arms for her-and moved to the door, the slit in her pale jade satin showing a leg that was still shapely.
"Come along then! Let's go look at Fiona's idea. Where is Ferris? I want him in on this. Bruce, do go look for him."
Fiona and Joel had followed Theo to the door, but I still sat
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where I was, and as he passed me Bruce bent his head for an instant. "Don't fight her openly. There are better ways."
I was surprised, but I left my chair and went with the others into the corridor. Joel was watching me and I felt uneasy. I didn't trust him and I didn't trust Bruce, but strangely I wanted to trust Fiona. Yet they were all under Theo's thumb.
Bruce had hurried off to find Ferris as Theo marched ahead of us down the stairs and through the marble entrance hall to a door at the rear. There Joel sprang to open it for his mother, and the vast reaches of that room I had not seen since the night of my father's death spread out before me. I held back at the door as the others stepped through.
The last time I had seen it, the gold and crystal chandeliers had been ablaze with light, the velvet draperies had glowed a rich and royal crimson and all the gold leaf of the upper walls and ceilings had shone in ornate splendor. There had been dancers out on the polished parquet floor, while viewers in couturier gowns and the men's black gathered on quilted satin benches around the room. There had been warmth and brilliant sound and the chatter of voices. All that was necessary to hide the crack of a shot fired in a distant Tower Room on the third floor.
Theo had reached the center of the great floor. "Well?" she demanded of Fiona.
"Look around." Fiona gestured. "Look at the ancestors. How many Sargents are there?"
"Three, of course," Theo said. "The one of Mrs. Patton-Stuyvesant that I bought with the house, and the two I purchased in Boston and New York."
"How fortunate for us that he painted here in Newport for a time," Fiona said. "And was part of the social life. You could give a John Singer Sargent ball, Theo. The women could come in the styles of Sargent's paintings, and I think they'd love it. That was a day when fashions were becoming."
"No," Fiona said. "You'd have to be Madame X."
I had seen the Sargent painting of "Madame X" in the Metropolitan. It was one that had caused something of a furor in its day-damned at the Paris Salon for being eccentric and sexoriented-though that wasn't the term used then. But Madame
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Gautreau who had posed for the picture was a celebrated beauty and Sargent had made her exquisite in a sleek-fitting black gown, her reddish-brown hair drawn severely high, graced by a small red flower above the ear and Diana's crescent over her forehead. Her face and bare shoulders were that strange bluish pearl color that had been derided in Paris, but which had been due to the lady's addiction to lavender face powder.
Theo knew the picture too, of course. Now she raised her head and turned her profile haughtily so that we could view her, for an imaginary instant, as that celebrated figure. Without beauty, she could suggest beauty, and the veiy lift of her chin and its piquant carving bespoke the portrait. I knew she could carry it off, that Fiona's suggestion had been accepted because of Madame X.
"We'll do it, Fiona. Do see where you can find some good Sargent copies and have them framed in time to hang them around the room. We'll have nothing but Sargents here that night-with the real ones in the place of honor, of course."
Bruce and Ferris had joined us, and Theo burst into an animated description of what she meant to do. I had a sense of unreality listening to her. Much of the time Theodora Moreland lived in a make-believe world. All of Spindrift was part of this make-believe, as would be Fiona's Sargent ball. But my father's death had been real and I must not let any of them lose sight of that.
I watched them all. Ferris appeared mildly amused and tolerant -as he seemed to be of all Theo's whims. Bruce's expression was more enigmatic. I suspected that he must have liked working for Hal on the paper's business better than he did jumping to the tune of Theo's whistling. If he did jump. I had a growing suspicion that she might have a slight rebellion going on beneath the surface here in Bruce Parry, and that he might be chauvinist enough to have a few opinions of his own. If I wanted help with Peter, he might be worth cultivating.
Joel was neither applauding nor deriding. He had seen his mother's enthusiasms before, and he had gone to open one long door that gave onto the rear veranda that overlooked the sea. I went quietly to stand beside him.
"When am I to see Peter?"
He spoke over one shoulder, not looking at me. "There's plenty of time. He won't be spirited away. When he's feeling more chipper he'll be happier to see you."
That hadn't been the case in the past. When Peter was feeling
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his worst, / was the one he had wanted near him, the one he had
clung to in illness.
''I won't wait," I said, and turned back to the others.
Bruce Parry was watching me as I came down the long room. Unexpectedly he smiled at me, and his sardonic look lightened.
''You'll have to come to the ball as young Zenia Patton-Stuyvesant," he said.
Startled, I looked up at the portrait of the woman who had once owned this house, who had danced in this very ballroom. Sargent had painted with an elegantly decisive touch, with broad, sure strokes, and it was the quality of his style that was arresting. His subjects told you little of themselves and he was never particularly profound, though in his day he had been considered the best of all portraitists. Yet in the end he had given up portraiture to return to his first love, landscapes, where his reputation had never been distinguished. I respected him for that. But now for the first time I looked at the lady with the geranium as a person. She had posed for his portrait in her midnight-blue gown late in the last century, when she was young and mistress of Spindrift. Her wealthy husband, Arthur Patton-Stuyvesant (railroads, I thought), had built this house for her. Why had Bruce connected her with me? Her look was mysterious and remote-she had been thinking of other things, but you couldn't tell what.
"There was some scandal about her," Bruce said in my ear. "But that came when she was a little older. As you know, her husband died from a dose of poison-whether administered by m
his own hand or by someone else's was never decided for sure. Suicide was the story accepted by the police, but there were murmurings for years."
I did know about Arthur and I shivered. He had been the first to die in the Tower Room.
Bruce drew me back to the picture of young Zenia. "Don't you see the resemblance?"
I shook my head. "You're making it up. Anyway, I won't be coming to this party. None of this is real, and I-can't bear it."
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