Bertie’s wife screamed when she saw a revolver in Lydia’s hand.
“Keep quiet, you women!” said Bertie, playing the male; “if she’s mad, we must humour her. Where’s your money?”
They fumbled, the two men in their pockets, the two women in their bags, not one of them daring to take their eyes off Lydia for an instant.
“Is that all you’ve got?” asked Lydia, when the plate presented by Bertie was filled with silver, copper, and notes; “turn out the linings.” They obeyed. “You may go to your rooms now, if you like,” she added, “but don’t be late for dinner; we’ll have it at one. And mind you come down as you are now. You’re no more disguised like that, let me tell you, than you are with your every-day faces. There’s no such thing as truth in you, so one disguise is no more of a disguise than any other. Your shams are just as much shams as my shams. And that’s one of the things you can learn while you’re here.”
They filed out of the room, past the tall figure of Lydia, who, like a grim grenadier, watched them go, still perfectly grave, but with an awful mockery in her eyes. She savoured to the full the absurdity of their appearance. There was no detail of incongruity which escaped her glance. When they had all got out of the room, and she had heard them scurrying, frightened rabbits, up the stairs, she sat down again in her chair and laughed and laughed. But it was not quite the wholesome laugh of one who plays a successful practical joke; it was, rather, a cackle of real malevolence, the malevolence that has waited and brooded and been patient, that has dammed up its impulse for many years. She sat and laughed at the head of her table, with the debris of the brown paper parcels strewn beside every plate.
XIII
Down to dinner under the threat of the revolver. She was intolerant now of the smallest resistance. She got them sitting there in the same travesty, forced them to eat, forced them to entertain her with their conversation. “No glum faces!” she said sharply. It was hard enough to look glum under those additions to nature; Bertie’s nose especially had a convivial air, it imposed upon him a gross jollity he was very far from feeling. They ate turkey and plum-pudding, unwillingly, choking back, according to their natures, their fury or their tears. Lydia had not stinted their fare; but then, she had never been niggardly. There was a lavishness in her providing; there were raisins, almonds, brandy; and she urged the appetites of her guests with an ironical though genuine hospitality. “Christmas dinner, you know,” she said to them as she heaped the food upon their plates. They protested; she nearly laughed at the piteous protest in their eyes shining out through their ridiculous trappings. But she remembered the forty years, and the laughter died unborn.
Forty years—and she had got them to herself. She would let them off nothing.
XIV
After dinner they huddled all four together in the same room. They could not lock themselves in, because Lydia had removed all the keys.