The Emperor's Snuff-Box Read online

  “Dance?” invited Mr. Nameless, in his bored voice.

  “Thanks, no. I’m not dancing tonight.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” murmured Mr. Nameless, and drifted away. His eyes reminded her of a certain party; it seemed to her that he almost laughed in her face.

  “Friend of yours?” asked Toby.

  “No,” answered Eve. The orchestra was playing again, a waltz of a few years back. “A friend of my ex-husband.”

  Toby kept clearing his throat. His may have been merely a romantic fondness, an idealized conception of a woman that never existed, but it hurt him like physical pain. They had never discussed Ned Atwood: that is, Eve had never told Toby the truth about Ned. The differences, she had said, were temperamental. “He’s rather nice, really.” And this light comment had got into Toby Lawes’s stolid soul with the strongest barb of jealousy.

  For the dozenth time he cleared his throat.

  “About this other matter,” he said. “I mean, asking you to marry me. If you’d like time to think it over…”

  The music of the orchestra, flowing over Eve’s mind, brought back sordid memory.

  “I—I know I’m not all I should be,” pursued Toby, fidgeting and putting down the knife. “But if you could give me a sort of business man’s idea of whether the answer might be yes or no …”

  Eve put her hands across the table.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  For fully ten seconds Toby did not say anything. He moistened his lips. He put his hands over hers, but delicately, as though still touching stained glass; and then, with a belated remembrance of making a show of himself in public, quickly withdrew them. The reverence of his look surprised Eve and rather disturbed her. It occurred to her to wonder whether Toby Lawes knew anything about women.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Toby considered this.

  “I think we’d better have another drink,” he decided. Then he shook his head, in a slow and startled way. “You know, this is the happiest day of my life.”

  On the last day of July, their engagement was announced.

  A fortnight later, Ned Atwood, in the bar of the Plaza in New York, heard about it from an acquaintance who had just arrived. For some minutes he sat perfectly still, twisting the stem of his glass round and round. Then he went out and booked passage to sail by the Normandie two days afterwards.

  And so, all unsuspected by any of these three, black tragedy was gathering round a certain villa in the rue des Anges.

  II

  IT WAS A QUARTER to one in the morning when Ned Atwood turned off the Boulevard du Casino into the rue des Anges.

  Distantly, the beam of the great lighthouse swept the sky. The intense heat of that day had begun to cool, but waves of it still seemed to rise from baked asphalt. Hardly a footstep sounded in La Bandelette. The few visitors who still remained at the dead-end of the season were at the Casino, playing until dawn.

  Therefore nobody saw the youngish-looking man in the fuzzy dark suit and soft hat, who hesitated at the mouth of the rue des Anges before diving into it. He kept his teeth clenched, and his eyes were as glassy as though he had been drinking. But on this night at least Ned had not been drinking, except of a certain emotion.

  Eve had never ceased to love him: this was the fact of which he had convinced himself.

  It had been unwise—he would have admitted it now—to boast that afternoon in the bar of the Donjon Hotel that he was going to win her back. That had been the error. He should have slipped quietly back to La Bandelette, as quietly as he was now slipping along the rue des Anges, with a key to Eve’s villa in his hand.

  The Villa Miramar, where she lived, was halfway down on the left hand side. As he approached, Ned instinctively glanced across the street at the house opposite. Like Eve’s villa, that of the Lawes family was large and square, of white stone with a bright red tiled roof. Like Eve’s, it was set back a few feet from the street behind a high wall and a little iron-grilled gate.

  And Ned saw what he expected to see. Ground floor, dark. Floor above, dark except for the two glowing windows of Sir Maurice Lawes’s study. The steel shutters were folded back from these windows; the curtains had not been drawn against that hot night.

  “All right!” Ned said aloud, and drew the sweet-scented air into his lungs.

  Though he could hardly be afraid that the old man would hear him, and no reason to give a curse anyway, still he walked softly. He opened the gate in the wall round Eve’s villa. He hurried up the short path to the front door. His key to the front door, retained from happier or at least more turbulent days, he fitted into the lock; again he breathed deeply, said a prayer to the pagan gods in his mind, and shouldered forward according to plan.

  Was Eve awake or asleep? The absence of lights at the Villa Miramar meant nothing. It had always been Eve’s habit—a morbidly respectable one, he had called it—to keep every window sealed up with curtains after nightfall.

  But the downstairs hall was dark. It had that smell of furniture polish and coffee which seems to haunt French houses: it brought back every detail of the past. He groped across to the staircase, and tiptoed up.

  It was a narrow, graceful staircase with a balustrade of filigree bronze, fitted against the wall like the curve of a shell. But it was also tall and steep, and its thick carpet was fastened by old-fashioned brass stair rods. How many times he had gone up those stairs in the dark! How many times he had heard the clock tick, and felt the devil stir in his heart; because he loved her and (he thought) she probably wasn’t faithful to him. One of the stair rods, he remembered—near the top, not far from Eve’s bedroom door—was loose. He had tripped on it many times, and once he swore it would be the death of him.

  Ned guided himself with one hand on the banister rail. Eve was still awake. He could see a thin line of light under the door of her bedroom at the front. In his preoccupation with that light, he forgot all about the loose stair rod he had sworn to avoid; and, of course, he fell flat over it.

  “Hell!” he said aloud.

  In her bedroom, Eve Neill heard that noise.

  She knew who it was.

  Eve was sitting before the mirror of the dressing-table, brushing her hair with slow, steady sweeps of the brush. A hanging lamp above the mirror, the only light in that room, brought out the warmth of her coloring: the fleece of light chestnut hair, falling to her shoulders, and the luminousness of the gray eyes. When her head was pulled backwards to the sweep of the brush, it showed the roundness of her neck above the defiant set of the shoulders. She was wearing white silk pajamas and white satin mules.

  Eve did not turn round. She continued to brush her hair. But she felt a second’s blind panic before—behind her back—the door opened, and she saw Ned Atwood’s face reflected in the mirror.

  Ned, though cold sober, was almost crying.

  “Look here,” he began, before the door had fully opened, “you can’t do it!”

  Eve heard herself speaking. Her panic had not lessened: it was increasing. But she continued to brush her hair, perhaps to hide the twitching of a nerve in her arm.

  “I thought it was you,” she said quietly. “Have you gone completely out of your mind? “

  “No! I —”

  “Sh-h, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I love you,” said Ned, and spread out his hands.

  “You swore to me you’d lost that key. So you lied to me again?”

  “This is no time for arguing trivialities,” said Ned, who clearly felt it as the worst of trivialities. “Are you really going to marry this fellow,” he spat out the word, “Lawes?”

  “Yes.”

  Both of them instinctively glanced towards the two closely curtained windows overlooking the street. Both of them, it appeared, had the same thought.

  “Can I interest you,” asked Eve, “in elementary decency?”

  “Not as long as I love you.”

  No doubt about it: he was almost crying. A piece of acti
ng? Eve doubted it. Something, for the moment at least, had cracked across the languid mockery and magnificent self-assurance with which he faced the world. But this quickly passed. Ned became himself again. He strolled across, threw his hat on the bed, and sat down in an easy chair.

  With difficulty, Eve kept herself from screaming.

  “Across the street…” she began.

  “I know, I know!”

  “You know what?” asked Eve. She put down the brush and swung round on the dressing-table stool to face him.

  “The old man, Sir Maurice Lawes…”

  “Oh? And what do you happen to know about him?”

  “He sits up every night,” answered Ned, “in a room across the street. Over his collection, or whatever it is. From those windows you can see straight into this room here.”

  It was very warm in the bedroom, which smelled of bath-salts and cigarettes. At ease in the chair, one long leg hooked over the arm of it, Ned surveyed the room. His face sharpened with mockery. It was not only a ruggedly good-looking face: in the forehead, the eyes, the lines round the mouth, it was an imaginative and even intellectual face.

  He looked round the familiar walls, panelled in dark red satin. He looked at the many mirrors. He looked at the bed, where his hat now lay on the coverlet. He looked at the telephone by the bed. He looked at the solitary light over the dressing-table.

  “They’re very holy, aren’t they?” he suggested.

  “Who?”

  “The Lawes family. If the old man knew you were entertaining an obviously welcome guest at one o’clock in the morning…”

  Eve started to get up, but sat down again.

  “Don’t worry,” Ned added harshly. “I’m not quite such a swine as you think I am.”

  “Then will you please get out of here?”

  His tone grew desperate.

  “All I want to know,” he insisted, “is why? Why are you marrying this bloke?”

  “Because I happen to be in love with him.”

  “Rubbish,” said Ned with calm arrogance, and brushed this aside.

  “How long,” said Eve, “will it take you to finish what you’ve got to say?”

  “It can’t be money,” he was musing. “You’ve got more of that than you can possibly need. No, my sugar-candy witch: it’s not money. On the contrary.”

  “What do you mean: on the contrary?”

  Ned used a horrible directness.

  “Why do you think the old goat over there is so anxious to marry his stuffed-shirt son to you? It’s your money, my darling. And, so help me, that’s all it is.”

  Eve could have picked up the brush and flung it at him. He was breaking down, as he usually did, everything she had tried to build up. He was sitting back at ease, his necktie fallen out over the coat of his rough dark suit, and the troubled air of one who honestly tries to solve a problem. Eve’s chest hurt her, and she wanted to cry herself.

  “And I suppose,” she blazed at him, “you know so much about the Lawes family?”

  He took this seriously.

  “I don’t know them, no. But I’ve picked up all the information I could about them. And the key to the whole business…”

  “While we’re on the subject,” said Eve, “suppose you give me back that key of yours.”

  “Key?”

  “The key to this house. The key you’re twirling round your finger on the key-ring now. I should like to make certain this is the last time you put me in such an embarrassing position.”

  “Eve, for God’s sake!”

  “Lower your voice, please.”

  “You’re coming back to me,” said Ned, silting up straight. Then his voice grew querulous as he saw the expression on her face. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve changed.”

  “Have I?”

  “Why this excess of holiness all of a sudden? You used to be a human being. Now you’re all hoity-toity and God knows what. Since you met this Lawes family, your virtue would make Lucrece ashamed of herself.”

  “Really?”

  Ned jumped to his feet during a dangerous and hard-breathing silence.

  “And don’t sit there saying, ‘really,’ and putting your nose in the air. You can’t tell me you’re in love with this Toby Lawes. I dare you to tell me that!”

  “Just what have you got against Toby Lawes, Ned dear?”

  “Nothing, except that everybody says he’s a moron and a stuffed shirt. He may be all right: he may be the grand high muck-a-muck. But he’s not your sort. For better or worse, I am.”

  Eve shuddered.

  “Now what the devil,” shouted Ned, addressing a mirror, “can you do with a woman like this?” Then he paused. “I suppose,” he added, with an expression she knew only too well from the past, “there’s only one thing I ought to do.”

  Eve also jumped up.

  “Your sex-appeal,” said Ned, “especially in those pajamas, would make an anchorite forget himself. And I’m no anchorite.”

  “Don’t you dare come near me!”

  “I feel,” said Ned, with sudden despondency, “like a villain in a melodrama. With the heroine cringing in front of me, afraid to call out in case …” He nodded towards the window. Then his expression changed. “All right,” he said slyly. “Why not be a villain? Why not be a creeping blackguard? You’ll enjoy it.”

  “I’ll scratch! I warn you!”

  “Good for you. That’s more like it.”

  “Ned, I’m not joking!”

  “Neither am I. You’ll scratch. But only at first. I don’t mind that.”

  “You’ve always sworn you had no sense of decency. But you used to pride yourself on a sense of fair play. If —”

  “You don’t think the old goat across the road can hear anything do you?”

  “Ned, what are you doing? Come back from that window!”

  Belatedly, Eve remembered the light over the dressing-table. She groped above her head and switched it off, plunging the room into darkness. The windows were shrouded with heavy damask curtains; there were lace curtains underneath, veiling the open casement. A breath of cooler air stirred as Ned, fumbling among damask folds, drew back a corner of them. He meant to cause no real embarrassment to Eve unless it became absolutely necessary; and what he saw reassured him.

  “Is Maurice Lawes still up? Is he?”

  “Yes, he’s still up. But he’s not paying any attention. He’s got a magnifying glass, and he’s looking at some kind of snuff-box thing.—Hold on!”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s somebody with him; but I can’t see who it is.”

  “Toby, probably.” Eve’s whisper rose to a kind of stifled shriek. “Ned Atwood, will you come away from that window?”

  This was the point at which they both became conscious that the light was out.

  A faint whitish glow filtered in from the rue des Anges, illuminating the side of Ned’s face as he turned round. His naïveté of manner, his childlike surprise at finding the room in darkness, were betrayed by the mocking expression of his mouth. He dropped the lace netting and drew the curtains, shutting down a lid of darkness.

  The room seemed overpoweringly hot. Again Eve groped over her head for the switch of the hanging lamp—and failed to find it. Instead of groping still further, she backed away from the dressing-table stool and blundered across the room away from him.

  “Eve, listen…”

  “This is getting rather ridiculous. Will you turn on the light, please?”

  “How can I turn on the light? You’re closer to it!”

  “No, I’m not. I’m…”

  “Oh,” said Ned in a curious voice.

  She caught that inflection, and it frightened her still more. It was a note of triumph.

  What he would not understand, or in his simple vanity could not understand, was that she found him repulsive. The situation was more than merely awkward: it had become a nightmare. And, of all possible ways out, the one solution which would never have occurred
to her was to call for help—call the servants for instance—and end this.

  Eve Neill, quite simply, had got used to the idea that nobody ever believed her version of any incident like this. Nobody ever had, and nobody ever would. This was her experience of life. To tell the truth, she was almost as much afraid of the servants’ knowing as of having it known to the Lawes family. Servants gossiped. Whispered behind each successive hand, their stories grew more decorated at every telling. The new maid Yvette, for instance …

  “Give me one good reason,” Ned was saying coolly, “why you’re marrying this fellow Lawes.”

  Her voice came piercing out of the dark, even though it was not loud.

  “For God’s sake go away. You don’t believe I’m in love with him. But it’s true. Anyway, I haven’t got to explain my actions to you. Not any longer. Do you think you have any claim on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What claim?”

  “I’m coming over there to show you.”

  In the dark, as clearly as though he could see her, he knew what she was doing. By the rustling sound, the creak of a spring, he could tell that she had caught up the heavy lace negligée that lay across the foot of the bed, and was starting to put it on. She had struggled into it, all except one sleeve, by the time he reached her.

  There was another fear, too. Eve had not failed to think of it. No woman—so her more worldly acquaintances had always assured her—ever forgets the first man in her physical life. She may think it forgotten, yet it remains. Eve was a human being; she had been alone for many months; and Ned Atwood, whatever else you might say, had a way with him. What if…?

  She struck out at him, fiercely but clumsily, as he caught her.

  “Let go! You’re hurting me!”

  “Are you going to be good?”

  “No! Ned, the servants …!”

  “Nonsense. There’s only old Mopsy.”

  “Mopsy’s gone. There’s a new maid. And I don’t trust her. I think she spies. Anyway, can’t you please have the ordinary decency to…”