He had walked with Polly during that interview, hardly knowing whether his answers to her lively sallies were rational or mere sputterings from an overcharged brain. She had told him finally he was absent-minded and run off to her car.
And when he looked in through the window and saw Gita sitting in that high-backed chair like an image of arrogant fate he knew that Eustace had lost again.
CHAPTER XXI
Topper announced luncheon. It was served in the dining-room, as Gita had taken a dislike to the breakfast-room, so intimately associated with Eustace and Elsie; and although she had sat beside Eustace here on the night of the wedding, their chairs tied together with a white ribbon, and listened to speeches and toasts, the only memory that emerged definitely was the white flounces De Witt Turner had sewed on her dignified ancestor’s uniform of state. He had looked excruciatingly funny and she had fastened her mind on those flounces and refrained from gritting her teeth when toasting bores were congratulating Eustace and assuming she was congratulating herself.
Geoffrey Pelham had sat on her side of the table and she had not seen him again until he bade her good-night. Then she had been too excited over her beautiful wedding-presents to give him a parting glance.
The dining-room was high and dark and austere. Black-browed Carterets in tarnished frames seemed to look out of the wall itself. But she felt a Carteret among them, severed the more completely from that brief period when all but the blessed sophisticates had called her Mrs. Bylant.
Places for two were laid at one end of the long table. Topper had suggested a small table in front of the fireplace for herself and Polly, but Gita was in no mood for compromise. She would sit where her grandmother had sat alone for so many years, save on the rare occasions when she had summoned the county to a formal and depressing function. Otherwise, no doubt, she had sat with her thoughts for company, her dimming vision peopling the long lines of chairs with ghosts. No compromise for her.
Topper, too, was uncompromising. If he could not have a symmetrical small table he would not crowd his beloved silver at one end leaving a long expanse desolate. Candelabra and massive pieces were arranged with precision from end to end, and although he felt no inclination to set places for absent guests, and left all but two of the paneled chairs against the paneled walls, the remote curve patronized by this incomprehensible mistress had never the unseemly effect of being cluttered.
Pelham felt that he had enough to endure without being asked to eat in a tomb. His mother talked sometimes of the past glories of her family, whose ancestral mansion (wooden, painted white, with green blinds) had been in Massachusetts, but he was thankful he was descended from the Dedhams on the petticoat side and had been brought up in a light and airy house in Atlantic City, however unhistoried and architecturally debased.
And Gita, sitting in her grandmother’s high-backed wing-chair, looked less like a descendant than an ancestress. She had been brittle but vivacious during that half-hour in the garden, but here she looked as if the mantle of these infernal frowning Carterets had frozen the blood in her veins. For the moment she once more interested him as a case.