Mysterious Mr. Quin - Agatha Christie [105]
She was full of excitement and enthusiasm over the forthcoming performance.
‘I’m getting awfully nervous, though,’ she announced, as they drank coffee after dinner. ‘I know my voice will wobble, and I shall forget the words.’
‘Your voice is very charming,’ said Anna. ‘I should not worry about it if I were you.’
‘Oh, but I do. The other I don’t mind about–the dancing, I mean. That’s sure to go all right. I mean, you can’t go very far wrong with your feet, can you?’
She appealed to Anna, but the older woman did not respond. Instead she said:
‘Sing something now to Mr Satterthwaite. You will find that he will reassure you.’
Molly went over to the piano. Her voice rang out, fresh and tuneful, in an old Irish ballad.
‘Shiela, dark Shiela, what is it that you’re seeing?
What is it that you’re seeing, that you’re seeing in the fire? ’
‘I see a lad that loves me–and I see a lad that leaves me,
And a third lad, a Shadow Lad–and he’s the lad that grieves me.’
The song went on. At the end, Mr Satterthwaite nodded vigorous approval.
‘Mrs Denman is right. Your voice is charming. Not, perhaps, very fully trained, but delightfully natural, and with that unstudied quality of youth in it.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed John Denman. ‘You go ahead, Molly, and don’t be downed by stage fright. We’d better be getting over to the Roscheimers now.’
The party separated to don cloaks. It was a glorious night and they proposed to walk over, the house being only a few hundred yards down the road.
Mr Satterthwaite found himself by his friend.
‘It’s an odd thing,’ he said, ‘but that song made me think of you. A third lad–a Shadow Lad–there’s mystery there, and wherever there’s mystery I–well, think of you.’
‘Am I so mysterious?’ smiled Mr Quin.
Mr Satterthwaite nodded vigorously.
‘Yes, indeed. Do you know, until tonight, I had no idea that you were a professional dancer.’
‘Really?’ said Mr Quin.
‘Listen,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. He hummed the love motif from the Walküre. ‘That is what has been ringing in my head all through dinner as I looked at those two.’
‘Which two?’
‘Prince Oranoff and Mrs Denman. Don’t you see the difference in her tonight? It’s as though–as though a shutter had suddenly been opened and you see the glow within.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Quin. ‘Perhaps so.’
‘The same old drama,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘I am right, am I not? Those two belong together. They are of the same world, think the same thoughts, dream the same dreams…One sees how it has come about. Ten years ago Denman must have been very good-looking, young, dashing, a figure of romance. And he saved her life. All quite natural. But now–what is he, after all? A good fellow–prosperous, successful–but–well, mediocre, Good honest English stuff–very much like that Hepplewhite furniture upstairs. As English–and as ordinary–as that pretty English girl with her fresh untrained voice. Oh, you may smile, Mr Quin, but you cannot deny what I am saying.’
‘I deny nothing. In what you see you are always right. And yet–’
‘Yet what?’
Mr Quin leaned forward. His dark melancholy eyes searched for those of Mr Satterthwaite.
‘Have you learned so little of life?’ he breathed.
He left Mr Satterthwaite vaguely disquieted, such a prey to meditation that he found the others had started without him owing to his delay in selecting a scarf for his neck. He went out by the garden, and through the same door as in the afternoon. The lane was bathed in moonlight, and even as he stood in the doorway he saw a couple enlaced in each other’s arms.
For a moment he thought–
And then he saw. John Denman and Molly Stanwell. Denman’s voice came to him, hoarse and anguished.
‘I can’t live without you. What are we to do?’
Mr Satterthwaite turned to go back the way he had come, but a hand stayed him. Someone else stood in the doorway beside him, someone else whose eyes had also seen.
Mr Satterthwaite had only to catch one glimpse of her face to know how wildly astray all his