Hide in the Dark Read online

  Hide in the Dark

  Frances Noyes Hart

  To

  Madre

  Time

  All-Hallows Eve, 1928

  Place

  Lady Court, an old manor house south of Washington

  Characters

  LINDY MARSDEN, lonely, lovely, a dark-eyed romanticist, and mistress of Lady Court.

  DOUG KING, hilarious and jovial, the life of every party and the founder of the March Hares.

  NEIL SHERIDAN, sleek, dark, highly successful in his career as a lawyer, and husband of

  TRUDI, wise, witty, and chic, with all the ease of manner of a grand duchess, and the lack of manners of a fishwife.

  CHATTY ROSS, small, gay, blindly adoring wife of

  TOM ROSS, the least successful man in the room, shabby and sensitive among his wealthy friends.

  HANNA DART, a gentle lady, immaculately beautiful, whose reserve masks a deep affection for her husband.

  GAVIN DART, a rather tired and immensely successful business man of fifty with shrewd dark eyes and steel-gray hair.

  RAY HARDY, the youngest member of the party, not long married and overwhelmingly in love with

  JOEL HARDY, her charming and irrepressible husband, who has not grown five minutes older in the last ten years.

  JILL LEIGHTON, graceful and gracious, step-sister of that legendary Sunny, the beloved girl whose strange death ten years ago still lay like a shadow over the gay group.

  LARRY REDMOND, an agreeable young banker who cannot understand why Jill hates him.

  KIT BAIRD, wanderer and adventurer in strange lands, who in his casual way does every romantic thing magnificently well.

  Chapter I

  The room was waiting. It was an old room; a hundred years ago it had been younger, filled with laughter and candlelight and the sound of music and dancing feet … and that fainter sound of hearts beating and hearts breaking—the room knew that sound well. It had known other things well, too, even then—that strange thing called life, that stranger thing called love, that strangest thing of all called death—even a hundred years ago these were as familiar to it as the winds that blew through its great windows, as the shadows that flitted across its high, panelled walls.

  It is still beautiful, with the imperishable beauty of a woman whose bones under her fine flesh are so essentially right, so exquisitely proportioned, that age and neglect, hunger and sorrow and loss have left her lovelier than ever. Long since, the pale ivory panellings of its walls have deepened to amber, the peacock-blue of the damask curtains has faded to turquoise and jade, the gilt of the great clouded mirrors has shadowed and tarnished—deep in its dust and dreams it has slept, heedless of the passing years, tramping relentlessly across a burning world; heedless of life itself, far from its tall barred doors. And now, not an hour since, rough dark hands have set all the crystals of its girandoles and chandeliers to ringing their little bells in protest at this rude freeing of them from the discreet veils of dust; they have unrolled the Persian rugs huddled together so comfortably in the far corners—rugs that had been old when the room was new, and that now spread their beauty gently, like little pools of changing water. Those same hands have twitched carelessly away the sheets beneath which the furniture crouched quietly, once more releasing the beauty of wood so shiningly pale that it is golden—so shiningly dark that it is black—releasing, too, the faint shimmer of silks and damasks and brocades, repeating endlessly the drowned harmonies of seaweeds and sea-flowers.

  The love-seats that flank the great fireplace had once struck a braver note of heartening red, but they, too, have suffered a sea change into coral, faint and strange; so has the huge sofa that faces it, and any stray mermaid would feel at home searching for treasure in the tall lacquered chests beneath the palladium windows that break the panelled walls at the far end.

  The hands have gone now, leaving behind them a room drowned in beauty and strangeness and silence—an old room, waking slowly and painfully from old dreams. For a long time it has had only the shadows and the wind for tenants, but on this late October evening it stirs and murmurs, and holds its breath to listen. What does it hear coming to it down the years—those lost and unforgotten sounds of dancing feet and laughter? Something else with them? Something else unforgotten, too? Perhaps it is only the wind—but the room shivers, and draws its shadows closer about it, as though it were cold…. And suddenly the air without is filled with voices, and the voices are filled with laughter; there are feet on the threshold, hands at the door—the room, grave and beautiful and silent, draws the shadows closer still. Life is coming back to it once more … and the room is afraid.

  “Doug! Doug, did I give those other keys to you? I can’t make this wretched thing work at all, it won’t even turn halfway.”

  “Here, let me have a go at it. No, that’s no good.”

  “Lindy! Lin-dy! Do we tell the chauffeur not to come back till Friday afternoon? What time did you order yours?”

  “Four o’clock. Look out, Larry; if you twist it like that you’ll snap it off.”

  “Great suffering cats, I left every one of the cigarettes in that infernal car! Call him back, can’t you, Trudi? What’s his damn silly name? Jollifleur—hey, Jolli—”

  “His name’s Bonnicourt, darling. Don’t froth—I’ve got a thousand in that black bag. Lindy, for the love of liberty, get that door open. I’m frozen clear through the marrow of my bones. Oh, God be thanked!”

  The door creaks, yields, swings wide—and the room, invaded by that sudden flood of light and laughter, laughs, too, and looses its shadows with a lovely gesture of welcome.

  “Oh, Mrs. Marsden, what an absolutely divine room!”

  “I’m glad you like it—it’s yours, too. And don’t dare to call me Mrs. Marsden; Lindy’s not a bad name at all, and I’ve found out already from Joel that you’re Ray instead of Rachel. Now are we all here? Two Darts, two Hardys, two Rosses, two Sheridans—that’s eight, and Kit, Larry, Jill, Doug, and me—how many is that?”

  “Thirteen,” said the gentleman called Hardy obligingly. “Ask me something hard; I love higher mathematics.”

  “Thirteen? Truly? No—it’s too perfect.” She lifted a dramatic hand. “It was All Hallowe’en in the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-eight; the long autumn shadows were just beginning to fall as the thirteen tired travellers drew up about the great fire—”

  “The trouble with you, love,” remarked the one called Trudi bitterly, “is that you let your imagination run away with you. The thirteen weary travellers is a good realistic touch, but when it comes to great fires—well, I only hope to heaven that the spirit of prophecy is descending on you.”

  “A fire would be nice, wouldn’t it?” murmured Lindy Marsden, stripping off her pale suède gloves lazily. “Kit, you used to be the Fireman, didn’t you?”

  “The Fireman by all means,” said the red-headed young man by the door. “The best builder of fires since Nero, but neither a wood-chopper nor a beast of burden. The only material for fires that I see around here is some rather nice Sheraton furniture—”

  “Oh, dear!” mourned Lindy contritely. “I told that worthless darky if he didn’t have every single thing ready for us before he cleared out for Washington he needn’t ever come back. I wish to goodness I hadn’t given him a holiday! It’s a good quarter of a mile to the woodshed, isn’t it?”

  “Our fault, Lindy! March Hares never, never will have slaves. On our way, boys; many hands make light work and all that kind of stuff. Little Lindy shan’t get cold while Doug’s here. Fireman, save my child!”

  “No, you don’t,” said Trudi with decision. “Little Lindy, indeed! How about little Trudi, you great galoot? I don’t know who invented th
e idea that the broadtail is a fur-bearing animal. I’ll lay a pretty sum that you could freeze ice-cream any day in the right kind of a broadtail coat. A quarter of a mile to the woodshed, says she! Well, there are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with butter, girls and boys. How far is it to the ice-box?”

  “First turn to the right through that door,” said Lindy, and added mildly, “It’s probably empty.”

  “Ah, well, that’s easily remedied. Doug shall come along and run a little water up my sleeve, and I’ll bring you back as pretty a collection of ice cubes as ever you seed in all your born days. No loitering around while we’re gone now, children. I want the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker all to be on the job by the time I get back, and more especially the Barmaid. Got the key to that trunk, Sherry?”

  “Yes’m,” said her docile spouse.

  “All right—shoot. The little green squatty devil down in the right-hand corner has the absinthe in it. To be used with a light but lavish hand; don’t fail me!”

  Lindy Marsden murmured dutifully, “Wait a minute—I’ll come, too, and see whether he left any wood out there,” and slipped lightly off in the wake of the charming, husky voice and the deep booming one. As they died away, a man’s voice said judicially from the shadows:

  “Trudi’s immense. Every day in every way she has gotten better and better. Of course, I’ve seen pictures of her every week or so in the rotogravure section, but hearing is believing. She’s certainly the most amusing person in North America, isn’t she, Sherry?”

  “Or South,” said the proud husband. He was practically standing on his head in an effort to dislodge the green bottle.

  “Ten years,” murmured Kit Baird. “I hope the rest of you are as nice as that when you get your hats off and a word in edgewise. Does she always run on like that, Sherry?”

  “More,” said Sherry cheerfully, emerging with the bottle and placing it tenderly beside three others on the mantelpiece. “What you’ve just been listening to is one of her silent, brooding spells. They come over her every now and then. Ever see a bigger and better shaker than that, Hanna?”

  The blonde vision by the empty fireplace huddled deeper into her sables and murmured, “Not ever,” in obligingly impressed tones, and the quiet man beside her said mildly, “I don’t want to introduce a jarring note, but I do think that it would simplify matters if I had the faintest idea as to who some of you are. My own humble rôle is that of Hanna’s husband.”

  “Do you honestly mean that Hanna hasn’t spent her married life telling you about us?” inquired the dark young man that someone had called Joel in obvious amazement. “I give you my word that after I acquired Ray I spent every one of the long winter evenings crouched over the fire describing every one with such eloquence and accuracy that she could have walked straight up to Chatty in the street and said, ‘Hello! You’re Chatty Ross, aren’t you?’”

  Chatty, thus evoked, gave a little bounce of irrepressible delight, her small round face suffused with friendliness and pleasure.

  “Oh, Joel, how darling. Did you describe Tom, too?”

  “Every blooming one of you. Hanna, I’m ashamed of you.” Hanna made a small, propitiatory sound, smiling vaguely but radiantly. “However, you’re forgiven. Beauty is its own excuse for being—uncommunicative, let’s say. Mr. Dart, sir, at your service. Would you like them to step up one at a time?”

  Neil Sheridan, busy with cocktail shaker and bottle, inquired plaintively, “You aren’t pretending that you don’t know Trudi and me, are you, Dart? Or Lindy Marsden and Doug King, if it comes to that?”

  “No, no, I admit it freely. I also plead guilty to the knowledge that the house is called Lady Court, that it’s forty miles from Washington over as bad roads as you’d find south of the North Pole, that this is the first time that you’ve had a house party in it for ten years, and that for some inscrutable reason you call yourselves the March Hares. Outside of that you are working on virgin soil, I assure you.”

  “Good Lord, Hanna, didn’t you ever tell him even that? You are a miser. The four original March Hares called themselves that because they were mad and were born in March. I was the maddest,” explained Joel modestly. “But Doug and Trudi and Jill weren’t to be sneezed at. Jill’s the little quiet one in the corner of the sofa that has her hat over her eyes so that you can’t see how pretty she is. Hats off, Jill.”

  The girl in the corner took it off, smiling, and even in the darkening room you could see that she was very pretty indeed.

  “Miss Jennifer Isabel Leighton, spinster,” said Joel. “Well and favourably known as Jill. The guy sitting next to her—”

  “Are all of your birthdays in March?” inquired Gavin Dart sceptically.

  “No, no. Only the first four. Each of the founders could elect two more Hares and all that we had to guarantee about them was that they were mad. Of course Trudi cheated a little when she picked Hanna, but she was so ornamental that she didn’t need to be useful.”

  “Twelve of you?” asked Hanna’s husband. “And Mrs. Hardy and I are intruders, so that leaves eleven. Who was the twelfth?” At the silence that fell abruptly over the gay voices he said quickly, “I’m sorry, that was stupid of me. Marsden, of course.”

  “Oh, no!” said Chatty swiftly and consolingly. “We hardly knew Fred Marsden—he’d only met Lindy a few weeks before they were married, and he sailed the week afterward, and got killed in the Argonne. It was one of those war marriages, you know.”

  The girl in the corner of the sofa who had taken off her hat said in a low voice:

  “The twelfth was my sister Sylvia. She died quite a long time ago—nearly ten years.”

  Gavin Dart said very gently, “I’m so sorry. Please forgive my idiocy.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive…. That tall red-headed one over there helping Sherry is Christopher Baird, better known as Kit. Take a bow, Kit!”

  Kit took one, smiling swiftly over his shoulder.

  “The one in the big chair that looks as though he were going to sleep is Chatty’s husband, Tom Ross,” continued Jill serenely, her hands locked so tight that no one could see the nervous tremor in them. “And the one nearest you in the tweed coat is Larry Redmond. That’s all of us, Mr. Dart—no, Gavin’s better, isn’t it? And, Tom, if you’re the candlemaker, I do think that you’d better wake up and tend to the lights. It really is getting blacker than Egypt.”

  “Want the real candlelight or the chandeliers?” inquired the candlemaker pleasantly, bestirring himself from the sofa.

  “Candlelight—no, that takes too long. Here are the others, let’s ask them. Lindy, which is it we want, romance or brilliance?”

  “Brilliance,” said Lindy from the doorway. “All those candles take much too long; we’ll save them for dinner. Children, there’s not even a twig! As soon as Sherry gives you stirrup cups, you’ll have to do something about it.”

  “Gangway!” came Doug King’s uproarious boom. “Here comes the ice, lads and lasses. Buckets of it—Doug with a big one and Trudi with a little one—”

  “Ow!” Trudi’s voice was raised in lamentations. “Drat you, Doug King, there goes half of mine and I nearly broke my neck over that stool, too. Why don’t you look where I’m going? … What do you people think you’re doing in here—playing train in a tunnel?”

  “Steady on!” Tom’s pleasant voice came from just behind her. “I forgot where the switch was for a minute. Don’t cry, Trudi; everything’s going to be all right. There, how about it?”

  Abruptly the room was flooded with light, the two great chandeliers like frozen fountains glittered and sparkled with it, the room sparkled and glittered back.

  Trudi, standing ruefully on one foot amid the fragments of ice, said mournfully, “If you’ll just bay like a bloodhound, Uncle Tom, I think I can make it in two jumps. Nothing like an incentive!”

  Uncle Tom bayed obligingly, Eliza once more triumphantly crossed the ice amid the plaudits of the multitude, and ov
er the laughter rose the reassuring sound of more ice, jingling as merrily as sleighbells.

  “When you think,” said Joel reverently, “that all that you have to do with the nasty stuff is to freeze it to turn it practically into the staff of life, it’s enough to restore your faith in geology or chemistry or human nature or something.”

  “Shut up, Joel!” Doug King swung a frosted glass high, his face one vast, inclusive beam. “March Hares, here’s to Us! A long life and a gay one—”

  “I thought it was a short life,” murmured Hanna, and thereat a mild insanity of mirth seized and held them.

  “I love you, Hanna!” cried Trudi. “I hate people who know when they’re funny. Sherry, give her another, because she’s so beautiful, and doesn’t know when she’s funny.”

  And Sherry gave her another, and himself another, and Kit another, and while they’re all laughing over that, you can get a better look at them. Now in the pure flood of crystal light you can see them quite clearly, and, really, they are rather worth looking at.

  If Neil Sheridan, the one with the cocktail shaker and the platinum cigarette case, were in the movies, you would promptly and accurately cast him as the villain—so slim, so dapper, the possessor of such a sleek, dark moustache, such sleek, dark hair, and so sleek and dark a pair of eyes. His clothes are far too impeccable, his consumption of cigarettes far too rapid, and the glint of teeth beneath his slim moustache far too white, to bode any good—and yet those who know him best insist that he is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, an amiable chap who is more than willing to do any fellow a good turn, and who is absurdly proud of the chic and hard-boiled Trudi. Twelve years ago he had come to Washington with Tom Ross, his roommate at law school, and they had both gone into the State Department together—and had left it together in 1917, to join the enterprising young law firm of Kountz & Maury (ex-Morowitz) of New York, which happened to be long on legal talent but short on social prestige. Sherry proved the little leaven that leavened the whole lump, and for several years now his income has fluctuated agreeably between a hundred and a hundred and twenty-five thousand a year, earned principally on the golf links and tennis courts of Palm Beach and South-ampton, while the indefatigable Semites have kept the home fires of legal talent burning in the Broadway offices of the firm. Sherry wears neckties as rich and glowing as the more dignified species of butterflies; he is thirty-eight, looks precisely as he did at twenty-eight, and at forty-eight will look even more so.