Ngaio Marsh - Color Scheme

Dikon decided to ignore this. “What about Dr. Ackrington?” he said. “After all he was the first to suspect something. Oughtn’t you to take his advice before you make a move?”

“Uncle James doesn’t see things my way,” said Simon aggressively, “and I don’t see things his way. He thinks I’m crude and I think he’s a nark and a dug-out.”

“Nevertheless I think I should tell him.”

“I dunno where he’s got to.”

“He’s returning to-morrow, isn’t he? Wait till he comes before you do anything.”

A motor horn sounded on the main road.

“Is that the mail?” cried Dikon.

“That’s right. What about it?”

Dikon looked out of the window. “It’s beginning to rain again.”

“What of it?”

“Nothing, nothing,” said Dikon in a hurry.

It was Barbara, after all, who went first to get the mail. Dikon saw her run out of the house with her mackintosh over her shoulders, and heard Mrs. Claire call out something about the rain spoiling the bread. Of course. It was the day for the bread, thought Dikon, who had reached the secondary stage of occupation when the routine of a household is becoming familiar. With an extraordinary sensation of approaching disaster he watched Barbara go haring up the hill in the rain. “But it’s ridiculous,” he told himself, “to treat a mere incident as if it was an epic. What the devil has come upon me that I can do nothing but fidget like an old woman over this damn’ girl’s clothes? Blast her clothes. Either she refuses or she accepts them. Either she guesses who sent for them or she doesn’t. The affair will merely become an anecdote, amusing or dull. To hell with it.”

The little figure ran over the brow of the hill and disappeared.

Dikon, obeying orders, went to tell his employer that the mail was in.

Barbara was happy as she ran up the hill. The rain was soft on her face; thin like mist, and warm. The scent of wet earth was more pungent than the reek of sulphur, and a light breeze brought a sensation of the ocean across the hills. Her spirit rose to meet it, and all the impending disasters of Wai-ata-tapu could not check her humour. It was impossible for Barbara to be unhappy that morning. She had received in small doses during the past week an antidote to unhappiness. With each little sign of friendliness and interest from Gaunt, and he had given her many such signs, her spirit danced. Barbara had not been protected against green-sickness by inoculations of calf-love. Unable to compete with the few neighbouring families whom her parents considered “suitable,” and prevented by a hundred reservations and prejudices from forming friendships with the “unsuitable,” she had ended by forming no friendships at all. Occasionally she would be asked to some local festivity, but her clothes were all wrong, her face unpainted, and her manner nervous and uneven. She alarmed the young men with her gusts of frightened laughter and her too eager attentiveness. If her shyness had taken any other form she might have found someone to befriend her, but as it was she hovered on the outside of every group, making her hostess uneasy or irritable, refusing to recognize the rising misery of her own loneliness. She was happier when she was no longer invited and settled down to her course of emotional starvation, hardly aware, until Gaunt came, of her sickness. How, then, could the financial crisis, still only half-realized by Barbara, cast more than a faint shadow over her new exhilaration? Geoffrey Gaunt smiled at her, quiet prim Mr. Bell sought her out to talk to her. And, though she would never have admitted it, Mr. Questing’s behaviour, odious and terrifying as it had been at the time, was not altogether ungratifying in retrospect. As for his matrimonial alternative to financial disaster, she contrived to hide the memory of it under a layer of less disturbing recollections.

The parcel from Sarah Snappe lay under the mail-box, half obscured by tussock and loaves of bread. At first she thought it had been left there by mistake, then that it was for Gaunt or Dikon Bell; then she read her own name. Her brain skipped about among improbabilities. Unknown Auntie Wynne had sent another lot of alien and faintly squalid cast-offs. This was the first of her conjectures. Only when she was fumbling with the wet string did she notice the smart modern lettering on the label and the New Zealand stamps and postmark.

It lay under folds of tissue-paper, immaculately folded.

She might have knelt there in the wet grass for much longer if a gentle drift of rain had not dimmed the three steel stars. With a nervous movement of her hands she thrust down the lid of the box and pulled the wrapping paper over it. Still she knelt before it, haloed in mist, bewildered, her hands pressed upon the parcel. Simon came upon her there. She turned and looked at him with a glance half-radiant, half-incredulous.

“It’s not meant for me,” she said.

He asked what was in the parcel. By this time she had taken off her mackintosh and wrapped the box in it. “A black dress,” she said, “with three stars on it. Other things, underneath. Another box. I didn’t look past the dress. It’s not meant for me.”

“Auntie Wynne.”

“It’s not one of Auntie Wynne’s dresses. It’s new. It came from Auckland. There must be another Barbara Claire.”

“You’re nuts,” said Simon. “I suppose she’s sent the money or something. Why the heck have you taken your mac off? You’ll get wet.”

Barbara rose to her feet clutching the enormous package. “It’s got my name on it. Barbara Claire, Wai-ata-tapu Spa, via Harpoon. There’s an envelope inside, too, with my name on it.”

“What was in it?”

“I didn’t look.”

“You’re dopey.”

“It can’t be for me.”

“Gee whiz, you’re mad. Here, what about the bread and the rest of the mail?”

“I didn’t look.”

“Aw, hell, you’re mad as a meat-axe.” Simon opened the letter-box. “There’s a postcard from Uncle James. He’s coming back to-night. A telegram for Mum from Auckland. That’s funny. And a whole swag for the boarders. Yes, and look at the bread kicking round in the dirt. No trouble to you. Wait on.”

But Barbara, clutching the parcel, was running down the hill in the rain.

Gaunt waited on the verandah in his dressing gown; “very dark and magnificent,” thought Dikon maliciously. Whatever the fate of the dress, whatever Barbara’s subsequent reaction, Gaunt had his reward, Dikon thought, when she ran across the pumice and laid the parcel on the verandah table, calling her mother.

“Hullo,” said Gaunt. “Had a birthday?”

“No. It’s something that’s happened. I can’t understand it.” She was unwrapping the mackintosh from the parcel. Her hands, stained with housework but not yet thickened, shook a little. She unfolded the wrapping paper.

“Is it china that you handle it so gingerly?”

“No. It’s— My hands!” She ran down the verandah to the bathroom. Simon came slowly across the pumice with the bread and walked through the house.

“Did you tell them what to write?” Gaunt asked Dikon.

“Yes.”

Barbara returned, shouting for her mother. Mrs. Claire and the Colonel appeared looking as if they anticipated some new catastrophe.

“Barbie, not quite so noisy, my dear,” said her mother. She glanced at her celebrated visitor and smiled uncertainly. Her husband and her brother did not stroll about the verandah in exotic dressing gowns, but she had begun to formulate a sort of spare code of manners for Gaunt, who, as Dikon had not failed to notice, spoke to her nicely and repeatedly of his mother.

Barbara lifted the lid from her box. Her parents, making uncertain noises, stared at the dress. She took up the envelope. “How can it be for me?” she said, and Dikon saw that she was afraid to open the envelope.