The situation was surely a most grave and remarkable one, and her position was certainly unenviable. Knowing her abject terror of the man I felt apprehensive of the result, for I felt confident that one single sign of weakness would give the desperate game entirely into his own unscrupulous hands.
In the big white drawing-room where the visitors assembled before dinner, the Countess appeared in a marvellous gown of pale turquoise and cream, and wearing the diamond collar and bodice-ornament which was her husband’s wedding gift, and which cost a sum which to many a man would have represented a fortune. Her coiffure was beautifully arranged without a hair awry, and her white neck and arms seemed like alabaster. Truly she was a magnificent woman, and well merited the description a certain royal prince had once uttered of her—“Taking face and figure, the prettiest woman who ever came to Court during the present reign.”
She was laughing gaily with old Lord Cotterstock as she entered, chaffing him about his sleepiness after luncheon and missing several birds, and as her gaze met mine I saw that the manner she had reassumed, that nonchalant air that she usually wore, was little short of marvellous. One would hardly have recognised in her the white-faced, terrified and despondent woman of half-an-hour before.
In the corner of the room stood Smeeton, a tall, commanding figure in faultless dress clothes, and a small but fine diamond in his shirt, chatting to two women, Lady Barford and the Honourable Violet Middleton, to whom he had just been introduced. Her ladyship was of that middle-aged type of stiff-backed lion-hunter who sought London through to get the latest poet, painter or littérateur to go to her weekly “At Homes,” and had already, it seemed, buttonholed the renowned hunter of big game.
Old Slater appeared at the door, bowing with that formality acquired by long service in that noble family, and announced in a voice loud enough to be heard by all—
“Dinner is served, m’lady.”
Then the Countess walked boldly up to Smeeton and asked to be taken in by him, while I linked myself up with a rather angular girl in a pale rose gown that had seen long service, the daughter of a Squire from a neighbouring village who was this evening eating his annual dinner at the Hall.
Through dinner her ladyship preserved an outward calm that was remarkable. She chatted and laughed amiably with her guest seated at her right hand, and as I watched narrowly I detected that he was already amazed at her self-possession. That night she was even more brilliant than ever. Her conversation sparkled with wit, and her remarks and criticisms caused her guests in her vicinity to roar with laughter at frequent intervals.
From where I sat little escaped my watchful eyes. Once or twice she turned her gaze upon me, as though to ask whether she were acting her part sufficiently well, then fired off some epigrammatic remark to one or other of the gay crowd of well-dressed people around her.
Dinner ended, the ladies retired, the cloth was removed, the port was circulated in decanters in silver stands along the bare table of polished oak, in accordance with the custom that had obtained at Sibberton ever since the Jacobean days. The Stanchester cellars had always been celebrated, and assuredly there was not a finer port in the whole country than that which they contained. Among the men, as they drank their wine, the newly-arrived visitor became the centre of attraction. Sportsmen all of them, Lord Stanchester had told them of Smeeton’s keenness after big game, and many questions were being put to him regarding the practicability of shooting expeditions in East Africa.