But Deborah did not come first. She came last, hoping to escape the painful minutes before dinner, so that the stage was fully set by the time she entered the warm, delicately-tinted room. The High Sheriff was discussing the exact date of the carved fireplace with his hostess, dropping an occasional lofty remark to Christian, while Slinker’s wife, her dark head framed by an alcove panelled in yellow satin brocade, and crowned by the blue and gold of old Worcester on a white shelf, dragged the Arevar parson across Canada with a celerity which left him gasping. The High Sheriff’s sister and the parson’s sister sat together on the broad chintz sofa, listening politely to the Crump doctor, who was saying nothing. They had been born to sit on sofas out of the limelight.
Deb took in the group at a glance, and for a moment she stood still in the middle of the room, lifting her head with the startled grace of Christian’s fallow deer, every line of her rigid with reproach in her white gown, casting a steady look of condemnation at the conscience-stricken Savaury, who prepared for any catastrophe in that fateful second.
But Petronilla saved the situation. Leaving the High Sheriff with a weighty sentence hanging in the balance, she moved placidly forward, took the girl’s hand and kissed her; then flung her into Mrs. Slinker’s arms before she had time to retreat.
Slinker’s wife made no attempt to hold her; merely gave her a courteous bow and smile, and continued to expand the parson’s mind, at the same time manœuvring Christian skilfully and unobtrusively forward. Deborah found herself inquiring after the runaway puppy in perfectly normal tones, though the miniatures swam round her, and a helpless fury possessed her galloping heart. It was not until she met the disapproving gaze of the High Sheriff’s sister that she became fighting-cool. The High Sheriff’s sister had cut her in Witham. To-night Deborah Lyndesay cut the High Sheriff’s sister.
Yet the dinner passed smoothly, for all the high tension and the warring sympathies. It was a frantic situation, as everybody realised, but convention has its own transforming magic. Savaury, in after years, when the terror of it had left him, was known to say that it was the most successful dinner he had ever given. Perhaps everybody made a special effort, even the sofa-people. Perhaps the spice of danger in the air lent the touch of excitement necessary to brilliance. Perhaps both accounted for it—or neither. Perhaps just the wizardry of Mrs. Slinker, with her heart knocking for admittance at Dockerneuk gates. Savaury was at her feet before he had swallowed his first fish-bone. The High Sheriff’s head had turned in her direction by the time the entrée was served. And when dessert had been reached without fiasco, she had the whole table listening to her.
Christian looked at her with affectionate admiration; then back to Deborah at his side, remembering with some bewilderment their unrewarding stroll across the park, and her steadily-averted head. To-night she had plenty to say; to-night he saw the curve of her mouth and the even flash of her teeth, the satisfaction of a clear skin and the clean line of a cheek that has eight hundred years of breeding behind it. Glancing from that revealing profile to her hands, so strangely like his own, for the first time he realised their kinship with a thrill of pleasure and pride. As for her, she had long ceased to look at him, for where a man matters, a woman looks at him once for all time. She knew by heart his easy grace, the light on his hair and the charm of his quiet eyes.
They were in full tide of a discussion on wire-fencing—amazingly and volubly interested—when Slinker’s wife leaned forward and addressed Deborah deliberately across the table. She wore black to-night as a concession to poor Savaury and his ancestors, and her vivid face rose from a cloud of soft drapery which spelt Crump’s widow as little as it spelt horse-dealer’s daughter.
“I want you to tell me, please,” she said, “the way to the wishing-well in the Pixies’ Wood. Christian says he has forgotten it, and Mrs. Lyndesay says she never knew it. But of course your father’s daughter will know it. You can tell me, can’t you?”
“Why, yes!” Deborah answered, without stopping to think. (How could she resist such a question? Oh, weirdly-wise Mrs. Slinker!) “The path is lost now, but I knew it well in my childhood, and I couldn’t forget it if I tried. Old ‘Buck’ Lyndesay fought a right of way over it, you know, and though he lost, he shut it in the teeth of the law and everybody else, and by degrees people gave up going, when they got tired of pulling down the wall in protest. Some say that the well is lost altogether, but that isn’t true.”
“And how does one start to find it?”