E. Bentley - Trent Intervenes

Trent shrugged his shoulders.

‘Let us drop the subject, Edith. Tell me why you want me to know about Lady Bosworth having something the matter with her. I’m not a physician.’

‘No, but there’s something very puzzling about it, as you will see; and you are clever at getting at the truth about things other people don’t understand. Now, I’ll tell you no more. I only want you to observe Bella particularly at dinner this evening, and tell me afterwards what you think. You’ll be sitting opposite to her, between me and Agatha Stone. Now go and talk to her and the Dutchman.’

‘Scheffer’s appearance interests me,’ remarked Trent. ‘He has a face curiously like Frederick the Great’s, and yet there’s a difference—he doesn’t look quite as if his soul were lost for ever and ever.’

‘Well, go and ask him about it,’ suggested Mrs Lancey. ‘I have things to do in the house.’

When the party of seven sat down to dinner that evening, Lady Bosworth had just descended from her room. Trent perceived no change in her; she talked enthusiastically of the loveliness of the Italian evening, and joined in a conversation that was general and lively. It was only after some ten minutes that she fell silent, and that a new look came over her face.

Little by little all animation departed from it. Her eyes grew heavy and dull, her red lips were parted in a foolish smile, and to the high, fresh tint of her cheek there succeeded a disagreeable pallor. There was nothing about this altered appearance in itself that could be called odious. Had she been always so, one would have set her down merely as a beautiful and stupid woman of lymphatic type. But there was something inexpressibly repugnant about such a change in such a being; it was as though the vivid soul had been withdrawn.

All charm, all personal force had departed. It needed an effort to recall her quaint, vivacious talk of an hour ago, now that she sat looking vaguely at the table before her, and uttering occasionally a blank monosyllable in reply to the discourse that Mr Scheffer poured into her ear. She helped herself from the dishes handed to her; some she refused; she made a fairly good dinner in a lifeless way. It was not, Trent told himself, that anything abnormal was done. It was the staring fact that Lady Bosworth was not herself, but someone wholly of another kind, that opened a new and unknown spring of revulsion in the recesses of his heart.

Mrs Stone, with whom he had been talking uninterruptedly as he watched, caught his eye.

‘We don’t notice it,’ she murmured, quickly.

An hour later Mrs Lancey carried Trent off to a garden seat facing the lake.

‘Well?’ she said, quietly, glancing back into the drawing-room.

‘It’s very strange and rather ghastly,’ he answered, nursing his knee. ‘But if you hadn’t told me it puzzled you, I should have thought it was easy to find an explanation.’

‘Drugs, you mean?’ He nodded. ‘Of course everybody must think so. George does, I know. It’s horrible!’ declared Mrs Lancey, with a thump on the arm of the seat. ‘Agatha Stone began hinting at it after the first few days. I told her it was a sort of nervous attack Isabel had been subject to from a child, which was a lie, and of course she didn’t believe it. Gossiping cat! She loathes Isabel, and she’ll spread it round everywhere that my sister is a drug fiend. How I hate her!’

‘But you do believe it isn’t that?’

‘Philip, I don’t know what to believe. Listen, now! The morning after the second time it happened, I asked her what was the matter with her. She said she didn’t know; she began to feel stupid and strange soon after dinner began. It had never happened to her before until she came to us here. It wasn’t either a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling, she said; she just felt indifferent to everything, and completely lazy. Then I asked her point blank if she was taking anything that could account for it. She was much offended at that; told me I had known her long enough to know she never had done and never would do such a thing. And it is certain that it would be utterly against all I ever knew of her. Besides, she denied it; and, though Isabel has her faults, she’s absolutely truthful.’

Trent looked on the ground. ‘Yes, but you may have heard—’

‘Oh, I know! They say that kind of habit makes people lie and deceive who never did before. But you see, she is so completely herself, except just at this time. I simply couldn’t make up my mind to disbelieve her. And besides, why should she ever start such a practice? I don’t see how she would have been drawn into it. If Bella is peculiar about anything, it’s clean, wholesome, hygienic living. She was always that way as a girl, but she was studying to be a doctor, you know, when she met her husband, and that made her ever so much worse. She has every sort of carbolicky idea. She never uses scent or powder or any kind of before-and-after stuff, never puts anything on her hair; she is washing herself from morning till night, but she always uses ordinary yellow soap. She never touches anything alcoholic, or tea, or coffee. You wouldn’t think she had that kind of fad to look at her and her clothes, but she has; and I can’t think of anything in the world she would despise more than dosing herself with things.’

‘Not any kind of cosmetic whatever? That is surprising. Well, it seems to suit her,’ Trent remarked. ‘When she isn’t like this, she is one of the most radiant creatures I ever saw.’

‘I know, and that’s what makes it so irritating for women like myself, who look absolute hags if they don’t assist nature a little. She’s always been as strong as a horse and bursting with vitality, and her looks have never shown the slightest sign of going off. And now this thing has come to her, absolutely suddenly and without warning.’

‘How long has it been going on?’

‘This is the seventh evening. I entreated her to see a doctor, but she hates the idea of being doctored. She says it’s sure to pass off and that it doesn’t make any difference to her general health. It’s true that she is quite well and lively all the rest of the time; but even if that is so, of course you can see how serious it is for a woman. It means that people shun her. She hasn’t realized it yet, but I can see our friends are revolted by the sight of these fits of hers, which they naturally account for in the obvious way. And Bella hasn’t any pleasure in life without society—especially men’s. But it’s come to this, that George, who has always been devoted to her, only talks to her now with an effort. Randolph Stone is just the same; and two days before you arrived the Illingworths and Captain Burrows both went earlier than they had intended—I’m certain, because this change in Isabel was spoiling their visit for them.’

‘She seems to get on remarkably well with Scheffer,’ remarked Trent.

‘I know—it’s extraordinary, but he seems more struck with her than ever.’

‘Well, he is, but in a lizard-hearted way of his own. He and I were talking just now after you left the dining-room. I had said something about the art of primitive peoples, and he took me aside soon afterwards and gave me more ideas on the subject in ten minutes than I’d ever heard in all my life. Then he began suddenly to speak of Lady Bosworth in a queer, semi-scientific sort of way, saying she was the nearest approach to a perfect female physiology he had ever seen among civilized and educated woman; and he went on to ask if I had noticed her strangeness during dinner. I said: “Yes,” of course; and he said it was very interesting to a medical man like himself. You didn’t tell me he was one.’

‘I didn’t know. George calls him an anthropologist, and disagrees with him about the races of Farther India. George says it’s the one thing he does know something about, having lived there twelve years governing the poor things. They took to each other at once when they met last year, and when I asked him to stay here he was quite delighted. He only begged to be allowed to bring his cockatoo, as it could not live without him.’