Dance of the Years by Margery Allingham

Author:Margery Allingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Later on that same night, when Frank’s tutor was on his way to London, with his ears still tingling, Edwin Castor talked to his son.

The two were peculiarly alike as they sat looking at one another. Frank was in bed, sitting up clasping his knees, and his father leant back in the chair by the fire. It had been a long and difficult conversation, but one carried on with surprisingly little passion once the first outburst had died away. The boy was white, and his eyes were dark saucers, while Castor himself was more unaffected and sincere than he had ever been in his life.

“You see,” he said, emphasizing the point he had made before, “there is nothing to it but that. It would be a folly out of all reason to spoil your life for it. There is nothing to it but that, nothing whatever.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, swallowed, and put his head down. “It is difficult to believe that, sir,” he said at last.

“Is it?” Castor was staring at him fiercely. “Is it? Do you honestly find it difficult to believe that now?”

It was an unfair question. There had been dreadful moments for Frank during the hours he had spent with Lizzie; moments of hair-raising embarrassment and erratic revulsion, moments when he had hated himself, but never her. At the time while the incense of enchantment was still burning, these moments had been snatched up quickly and bundled away into the back of his mind like dirty linen in a cupboard. But now at Castor’s command they came tumbling out again, twice as hideous in the clearer light.

There was another thing, too.

This was something more difficult, more awful, somehow; to the instincts more wrong. Now that he knew Lizzie so thoroughly, now that her mystery was explained, she was just as dear, if not dearer, but not so overwhelming, not so muddling to the mind, not so ‘above all the world’ important. This was true. At his father’s command it had to be faced. There is nothing to it but that. It would be a folly out of all reason to spoil your life for it.

Frank’s life spread out before him into the haze of the future like an inviting valley. Always its promise had been held out to him as something fair. There were glimpsed, triumphal avenues in it, happy mysteries. At one time (in Mr. Timson’s stucco temple, for instance) it had seemed well lost for one touch of Lizzie in the dark, but to-night, when the bright light of unstimulated life and Castor’s cold intelligence were brought to illumine that moment, it looked a time of delusion, of madness, or drunkenness.

Castor went on talking about the Timsons. Now that he had won he was tolerant again, and in an unenlightened fashion, kind.

They were all right, he said, probably even good little people in their way. Only anxious to do something extra fine for their child. One must be intelligent, he said. One must try to see their motive.

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