The faint mockery of her tone made the other uneasy.
"You are hateful, Allegra."
"But stimulating, darling. That's why you have me here. I'm a student of history, you know, and it always intrigued me why the court jester was permitted and encouraged. Now that I'm one myself, I see the point. It's rather a good role, you see, I had to do something. There was I, proud and penniless like the heroine of a novelette, well born and badly educated. 'What to do, girl? God wot,' saith she. The poor relation type of girl, all willingness to do without a fire in her room and content to do odd jobs and 'help dear Cousin So and So,' I observed to be at a premium. Nobody really wants her - except those people who can't keep their servants, and they treat her like a galley slave.
"So I became the court fool. Insolence, plain speaking, a dash of wit now and again (not too much lest I should have to live up to it), and behind it all, a very shrewd observation of human nature. People rather like being told how horrible they really are. That's why they flock to popular preachers. It's been a great success. I'm always overwhelmed with invitations. I can live on my friends with the greatest ease, and I'm careful to make no pretence of gratitude."
"There's no one quite like you, Allegra. You don't mind in the least what you say."
"That's where you're wrong. I mind very much - I take care and thought about the matter. My seeming outspokenness is always calculated. I've got to be careful. This job has got to carry me on to old age."
"Why not marry? I know heaps of people have asked you."
Allegra's face grew suddenly hard.
"I can never marry."
"Because -" Maisie left the sentence unfinished, looking at her friend. The latter gave a short nod of assent.
Footsteps were heard on the stairs. The butler threw open the door and announced:
"Mr. Segrave."
John came in without any particular enthusiasm. He couldn't imagine why the old boy had asked him. If he could have got out of it he would have done so. The house depressed him, with its solid magnificence and the soft pile of its carpet.
A girl came forward and shook hands with him. He remembered vaguely having seen her one day in her father's office.
"How do you do, Mr. Segrave? Mr. Segrave - Miss Kerr."
Then he woke. Who was she? Where did she come from? From the flame-colored draperies that floated round her, to the tiny Mercury wings on her small Greek head, she was a being transitory and fugitive, standing out against the dull background with an effect of unreality.
Rudolph Wetterman came in, his broad expanse of gleaming shirtfront creaking as he walked. They went down informally to dinner.
Allegra Kerr talked to her host. John Segrave had to devote himself to Maisie. But his whole mind was on the girl on the other side of him. She was marvelously effective. Her effectiveness was, he thought, more studied than natural. But behind all that, there lay something else. Flickering fire, fitful, capricious, like the will-o'-the-wisps that of old lured men into the marshes.
At last he got a chance to speak to her. Maisie was giving her father a message from some friend she had met that day. Now that the moment had come, he was tongue-tied. His glance pleaded with her dumbly.
"Dinner-table topics," she said lightly. "Shall we start with the theatres, or with one of those innumerable openings, beginning, 'Do you like -?'"
John laughed.
"And if we find we both like dogs and dislike sandy cats, it will form what is called a 'bond' between us?"
"Assuredly," said Allegra gravely.
"It is, I think, a pity to begin with a catechism."
"Yet it puts conversation within the reach of all."
"True, but with disastrous results."
"It is useful to know the rules - if only to break them."
John smiled at her.
"I take it, then, that you and I will indulge our personal vagaries. Even though we display thereby the genius that is akin to madness."
With a sharp unguarded movement, the girl's hand swept a wineglass off the table. There was the tinkle of broken glass. Maisie and her father stopped speaking.
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Wetterman. I'm throwing glasses on the floor."
"My dear Allegra, it doesn't matter at all, not at all." Beneath his breath John Segrave said quickly: "Broken glass. That's bad luck. I wish - it hadn't happened."
"Don't worry. How does it go? 'Ill luck thou canst not bring where ill luck has its home.'"
She turned once more to Wetterman. John, resuming conversation with Maisie, tried to place the quotation. He got it at last. They were the words used by Sieglinde in the Walküre when Sigmund offers to leave the house.
He thought: "Did she mean -"
But Maisie was asking his opinion of the latest revue. Soon he had admitted that he was fond of music.
"After dinner," said Maisie, "we'll make Allegra play for us."
They all went up to the drawing room together. Secretly, Wetterman considered it a barbarous custom.
He liked the ponderous gravity of the wine passing round, the handed cigars. But perhaps it was as well tonight. He didn't know what on earth he could find to say to young Segrave. Maisie was too bad with her whims. It wasn't as though the fellow were good-looking - really good-looking - and certainly he wasn't amusing. He was glad when Maisie asked Allegra Kerr to play. They'd get through the evening sooner. The young idiot didn't even play bridge.
Allegra played well, though without the sure touch of a professional. She played modern music, Debussy and Strauss, a little Scriabine. Then she dropped into the first movement of Beethoven's Pathétique, that expression of a grief that is infinite, a sorrow that is endless and vast as the ages, but in which from end to end breathes the spirit that will not accept defeat. In the solemnity of undying woe, it moves with the rhythm of the conqueror to its final doom.
Towards the end she faltered, her fingers struck a discord, and she broke off abruptly. She looked across at Maisie and laughed mockingly.
"You see," she said. "They won't let me."
Then, without waiting for a reply to her somewhat enigmatical remark, she plunged into a strange haunting melody, a thing of weird harmonies and curious measured rhythm, quite unlike anything Segrave had ever heard before. It was delicate as the flight of a bird, poised, hovering - Suddenly, without the least warning, it turned into a mere discordant jangle of notes, and Allegra rose laughing from the piano.
In spite of her laugh, she looked disturbed and almost frightened. She sat down by Maisie, and John heard the latter say in a low tone to her:
"You shouldn't do it. You really shouldn't do it."
"What was the last thing?" John asked eagerly.
"Something of my own."
She spoke sharply and curtly. Wetterman changed the subject.
That night John Segrave dreamed again of the House.
John was unhappy. His life was irksome to him as never before. Up to now he had accepted it patiently - a disagreeable necessity, but one which left his inner freedom essentially untouched. Now all that was changed. The outer world and the inner intermingled.
He did not disguise to himself the reason for the change. He had fallen in love at first sight with Allegra Kerr. What was he going to do about it?
He had been too bewildered that first night to make any plans. He had not even tried to see her again. A little later, when Maisie Wetterman asked him down to her father's place in the country for a weekend, he went eagerly, but he was disappointed, for Allegra was not there.
He mentioned her once, tentatively, to Maisie, and she told him that Allegra was up in Scotland paying a visit. He left it at that. He would have liked to go on talking about her, but the words seemed to stick in his throat.