Troy’s major concern was to avoid the eyes of everybody else seated at that table. To this end she stared zealously at a detail of the epergne immediately in front of her. For the rest of her life, any mention of Sir Henry Ancred’s last Will and Testament will immediately call up for her the image of a fat silver cupid who, in a pose at once energetic and insouciant, lunged out from a central globe, to which he was affixed only by his great toe, and, curving his right arm, supported on the extreme tip of his first finger a cornucopia three times his own size, dripping with orchids.
Sir Henry was speaking of legacies. Five thousand pounds to his devoted daughter-in-law, Millamant, five thousand pounds to his ewe lamb, Desdemona. To his doctor and his servants, to the hunt club, to the Church there were grand seigneurial legacies. Her attention wandered, and was again arrested by a comparison he seemed to be making between himself and some pentateuchal patriarch. “Into three parts. The residue divided into three parts.” This, then, was the climax. To his bride-to-be, to Thomas, and to Cedric, he would leave, severally, a life interest in a third of the residue of his estate. The capital of this fund to be held in trust and ultimately devoted to the preservation and endowment of Ancreton as a historical museum of drama to be known as The Henry Ancred Memorial.
“Tra-hippit!” Cedric murmured at her elbow. “Honestly, I exult. It might have been so much worse.”
Sir Henry was now making a brief summary of the rest of the field. His son, Claude, he thanked God, turning slightly towards Jenetta, had inherited a sufficient portion from his maternal grandmother, and was therefore able through this and through his own talents to make provision for his wife and (he momentarily eyed Fenella) daughter. His daughter Pauline (Troy heard her make an incoherent noise) had been suitably endowed at the time of her marriage and generously provided for by her late husband. She had her own ideas in the bringing up of her children and was able to carry them out. “Which,” Cedric muttered with relish, “is a particularly dirty crack at Paul and Panty, don’t you feel?”
“Ssh!” said Desdemona on the other side of him.
Sir Henry drifted into a somewhat vague and ambiguous diatribe on the virtues of family unity and the impossibility, however great the temptation, of ever entirely forgetting them. For the last time her attention wandered, and was jerked sharply back by the sound of her own name: “Mrs. Agatha Troy Alleyn… her dramatic and, if I as the subject may so call it, magnificent canvas, which you are presently to see—”
Troy, greatly startled, learned that the portrait was to be left to the Nation.
v
“It’s not the money, Milly. It’s not the money, Dessy,” wailed Pauline in the drawing-room. “I don’t mind about the money, Jen. It’s the cruel, cruel wound to my love. That’s what hurts me, girls. That’s what hurts.”
“If I were you,” said Millamant with her laugh, “I think I should feel a bit hipped about the money, too.”
Miss Orrincourt, according to her custom, had gone away to do her face. The ladies were divided into two parties — the haves and the have-nots. Dessy, a not altogether delighted legatee, had a foot in each camp. “It’s damn mean,” she said; “but after the things I’ve said about the Orrincourt, I suppose I’m lucky to get anything. What do you think of her, Jen?”
“I suppose,” said Jenetta Ancred thoughtfully, “she is real, isn’t she! I mean, I catch myself wondering, quite seriously, if she could be somebody who has dressed up and is putting on the language and everything as a colossal practical joke. I didn’t think people ever were so shatteringly true to type. But she’s much too lovely, of course, to be a leg-pull.”
“Lovely!” cried Desdemona. “Jen! Straight out of the third row of the chorus and appallingly common at that.”
“I dare say, but they are generally rather lovely in the chorus nowadays, aren’t they, Fenella?”
Fenella had withdrawn entirely from the discussion. Now, when they all turned to her, she faced them rigidly, two bright red spots burning over her cheek-bones.
“I want to say,” she began in a loud, shaky voice, “that I’m very sorry, Aunt Pauline and Mummy, that because of Paul and me you’ve been treated so disgracefully. We don’t mind for ourselves. We’d neither of us, after the things he’s said, touch a penny of his money. But we are sorry about you and Panty.”
“Well, darling,” said her mother, putting an arm through hers, “That’s very handsome of you and Paul, but don’t let’s have any more speeches, shall we?”
“Yes, but Mummy—”
“Your two families are very anxious for both of you to be happy. It’s like that, isn’t it, Pauline?”
“Well, Jenetta, that, of course, goes without saying, but—”
“There you are, Fen,” said Jenetta. “It goes, and without saying, which is such a blessing.”
Pauline, looking extremely vexed, retired into a corner with Desdemona.
Jenetta offered Troy a cigarette. “I suppose,” she muttered in a friendly manner, “that was not a very good remark for me to make, but, to tell you the truth, I take a pretty gloomy view of all these naked wounds. Mr. Rattisbon tells me your husband’s coming back. What fun for you.”
“Yes,” said Troy, “it’s all of that.”
“Does everything else seem vague and two-dimensional? It would to me.”
“It does with me, too. I find it very muddling.”
“Of course the Ancreds are on the two-dimensional side anyway, if it comes to that. Especially my father-in-law. Did it make painting him easier or more difficult?”
Before Troy could answer this entertaining question, Cedric, flushed and smirking, opened the door, and stood against it in a romantic attitude waving his handkerchief.
“Darlings,” he said, “Allez-houp!The great moment. I am to bid you to the little theatre. Dearest Mrs. Alleyn, you and the Old Person should be jointly fêted. A cloud of little doves with gilded wings should be lowered by an ingenious device from the flies, and, with pretty gestures, crown you with laurels. Uncle Thomas could have arranged it. I should so adore to see Panty as an aerial coryphée. Will you all come?”
They found the men assembled in the little theatre. It was brilliantly lit, and had an air of hopefully waiting for a much larger audience. Soft music rumbled synthetically behind the front curtain, which (an inevitable detail) was emblazoned with the arms of Ancred. Troy found herself suddenly projected into a star rôle. Sir Henry led her up the aisle to a seat beside himself. The rest of the party settled behind them. Cedric, with a kind of consequential flutter, hurried backstage.
Sir Henry was smoking a cigar. When he inclined gallantly towards Troy she perceived that he had taken brandy. This circumstance was accompanied by a formidable internal rumbling.