She thought again: ‘I have no business to be glad that Clarence does not know, nor ask if he will be taken here. I came first.’ This was an excuse, not only in honour, but in letting life alone.
He got up and drew her on to her feet. He walked her along the grass between the thickets and boulders, so that her feet never touched a stone. Up the landslide she hardly felt the slant of the earth, held as if he were walking with a tree. At the top of the cliffs he gave her no time to look back. In their triumph they walked alone a little separate from each other.
At a gate he caught her up.
“What y’ thinking about?” She saw his head on one side.
“Carston and the cup. That ought to get him going more than us.”
“Perhaps it will.”
“Picus, demon, where did you hide it?”
“Hush! love.”
Chapter XII
After an accident in the sea with a small octopus he would sooner have avoided, Carston returned to the house. Felix had not talked to him, said that it would be wiser not to talk, because there might be big magic about. Could not Carston feel it cooking up? Convinced that the boy was enjoying himself, he went up to his room. And what was there to do but think of those two, up somewhere high in air, kissing, or finding some strangeness in Nature and forgetting to kiss. He lay staring and fretting, until with slow alarm growing like a dream, he saw the lost cup, by itself, on the end of his mantelpiece. And earlier in the day, they had passed in and out of his room looking for it there.
His first impulse was to run downstairs with it, crying. Crossing the room to take it, he slipped on the glassy boards, and the fall and anger from pain turned him. He did not want to touch it. There might be something about it after all. Working a splinter out of his hand, it occurred to him that they had put it there; that the morning had been a farce played for his benefit, a vile joke to make a fool of him. Those people who made love under his eyes, who had lost him on a moor. They had not let him into their lives. They would not believe his innocence. Under the shock of his fall, his imagination galloped reeling. He felt very lonely. He was very lonely. It did not cross his head that they would believe what he told them. Still less that it did not matter whether they believed him or not. Behind this, a dead fever reviving in the blood, was the literal fear of the cup, that it was uncanny, tabu. He passed a dreadful minute, staring at its impressive antiquity. His sensitive intelligence raced through a variety of panics, till the shock of his fall subsided and he began to arrange alternatives. To go down to tea with the cup and say: “I found it in my room. I don’t know how it got there.”
To hide it in his baggage. In the house. To put it somewhere—say, in Picus’s room. To destroy it.
The first would make a fool of him, the second a thief, the third impossible, the fourth a trickster; the fifth might bring him to a bad end. This was what had come of his nosing round for power. Scylla would be coming in, burnt with kisses. Perhaps she had played off this trick on him. How many years had he been living in this Chinese box of tricks? If he could have believed in their belief of the possibility of a possible sanctity, gone down to them and said: “Here is something that may be precious,” he would have walked into their hearts. But that would not have served him, because he did not want their hearts. Did not want hearts. Wanted scalps.
On a final sweep of rage he went downstairs with a cup in his hands to Felix and Clarence and Ross. He said: “Here’s your cup. I should like to know which of you played this off on me. I should like to know who put it in my room.”
“Oopsey daisy,” said Felix.
“If that’s your notion of hospitality, it doesn’t coincide with mine.”
Clarence said: “If you don’t like us, what d’you come down here for?”
“What we mean, is,” said Ross, “that we don’t understand why you should think such a thing.”
“Are you trying it out on me that the thing got there by itself, and that none of you knew?” Felix said:
“If we had known, why should we have spent a morning perspiring over it?”
Carston cried at him:
“I’d not put it past you. The day I turn my back on you all will be the best I’ve spent. I can tell people then what I think of you.”
Felix answered: “And we might as well tell the world that your thirst for antiquities led you to steal a family chalice. Nice kind of mind you’ve got. You know none of us put it in your room.” That was what he did not know. What he could not have done, others could do. There was a stupid, broken pause. Then he said, who had had time to think:
“I suppose the alliance between Miss Taverner and Mr. Tracy explains it.”
“What alliance explains what?”
Carston looked at the brother; felt like a man pulling up blinds.
“Love made them mischievous, I suppose.”
“What love?”
Warm, sunburnt, they came in. They were in the room, leaning on their ashplants, serene, apart. After a silence, “What’s wrong?” said Scylla.
“The cup’s turned up,” said Ross, “in Carston’s bedroom. Did either of you put it there?”
Knowing Picus behind her, she laughed. Lovers’ jokes are sacred, pleasantries of a man who discovers the sea-wood, the rock soft with birds, the meeting of pure water and salt. Come down out of that to enchant and rule her equals.
“Count us out,” she said. “What’s biting you, Carston?”
If she had shewn a little decent concern it might have recalled him. But he went on:
“Then I suppose your friend did it. Not content with keeping me awake all night.”
They stared at him. Clarence was practically invisible with frightful emotion.
“Put what where?” said Picus, laughing.
“Four mysteries,” said Carston, “since I got here. First, you found that thing. Then Tracy vanished, after leading us a dance in an infernal prairie. Then the thing vanished. Then it’s found in my room. I’m waiting your explanations. I’ve gotten my own.”
“Let’s hear ’em,” said Ross.
Scylla spoke: “It is my cup. My lover who gave it me. We who have enjoyed it. Carston can think what he likes. I did not put it in his room. It is he who will not play. If he wants to find out what has happened, he will find out. We will tell him when we know. Which we don’t at present. Don’t be a fool, man. No one has tried to trick you here.”
All fairly true, but Picus had done something. Just a little devilry. Her heart caught at a beat, she tasted something in her mouth, salt like pain. Pain so soon after. Other side of the halfpenny. She sneered and sat down, tapping the bright boards with her stick.
Carston felt disintegrating, sticky, a loser, afraid. Still standing, he stared out at the wood, at the ilex-limb, each leaf a white-fire flame. He became aware of all the noises of the wood, that it was cackling all the time, a frightful old long gossip about dirt and the dead ends of lies. His subtle brain raced on, took a glorious chance. He said:
“I can tell you something then. Tracy has a book up in his room. On somebody’s collection of early church ornaments. He brought the cup down from London to work this off on you all. You remember how he stunted his ignorance? Just a little game to make you think something of yourselves and let you down. You may like being kidded. I don’t. I reckon I’ve done you a service—”
“Bright idea,” said Felix. “True, Picus?” He flew at them, with the menaces of a bird.
“What d’you mean? Scylla’s been talking. You are all a pack of old women intriguing against me. Making my life hell. Like Carston, I’m sick of your hospitality. Especially when it includes him.”