The Light and the Dark Read Online Free

there was muscular reserve underneath his ample, portly walk, and he was still light on his feet. His face did not match his comfortable body: a great beak of a nose stood out above a jutting jaw, with a stiff grey moustache between them. By his side, by the side of Lady Muriel and Joan, who were both strong women, his wife looked so delicate and frail that it seemed she ought to be carried. She was fragile, thin with an invalid’s thinness, and she helped herself along with a stick. In the other hand she carried a lorgnette, and, while she was limping slowly along, she was studying us all with eyes that, even at a distance, shone a brilliant porcelain blue. She had aged through illness, her skin was puckered and brown, she looked at moments like a delicate, humorous and distinguished monkey; but it was easy to believe that she had once been noted for her beauty.
    I watched her as I was being presented to her, and as Roy’s turn came. He smiled at her: as though by instinct, she gave a coquettish flick with the lorgnette. I was sure he felt, as I had felt myself, that she had always been courted, that she still, on meeting a strange man at a party, heard the echoes of gallant words.
    Lord Boscastle greeted us with impersonal cordiality, and settled down to his sherry. The last guest came, Mrs Seymour, a cousin of Lady Muriel’s who lived in Cambridge, and soon we set out to walk to the dining-room. This took some time, for the Lodge had been built, reconstructed, patched up and rebuilt for five hundred years, and we had to make our way along narrow passages, down draughty stairs, across landings: Lady Boscastle’s stick tapped away in front, and I talked to Mrs Seymour, who seemed gentle, inane, vague and given to enthusiasms. She was exactly like Lady Muriel’s concept of a suitable dinner partner for one of the younger fellows, I thought. In addition, Lady Muriel, to whom disapproval came as a natural response to most situations, disapproved with particular strength of my leaving my wife in London. She was not going to let me get any advantages through bad conduct, so far as she could help it.
    Curiously enough, the first real excitement of the dinner arrived through Mrs Seymour. We sat round the table in the candlelight, admired the table which had come from the family house at Boscastle – “from our house,” said Lady Muriel with some superbity – admired the Bevill silver, and enjoyed ourselves with the food and wine. Both were excellent, for Lady Muriel had healthy appetites herself, and also was not prepared to let her dinners be outclassed by anything the college could do. She sat at the end of the table, stiff-backed, bold-eyed, satisfied that all was well with her side of the evening, inspecting her guests as though she were weighing their more obvious shortcomings.
    She began by taking charge of the conversation herself. “Mr Eliot was putting forward an interesting point of view before dinner,” she said in an authoritative voice, and then puzzled us all by describing my opinions on Paul Morand. It seemed that I had a high opinion of his profundity. Joan questioned her fiercely, Roy soothed them both, but it was some time before we realised that she meant Mauriac. It was a kind of intellectual malapropism such as she frequently made. I thought, not for the first time, that she was at heart uninterested in all this talk of ideas and books – but she did it because it was due to her position, and nothing would have deterred her. Not in the slightest abashed, she repeated “Mauriac” firmly twice and was going ahead, when Mrs Seymour broke in: “Oh, I’d forgotten. I meant to tell you straightaway, but that comes of being late. I’ve always said that they ought to put an extra light on your dressing-table. Particularly in strange bedrooms–”
    “Yes, Doris?” Lady Muriel’s voice rang out.
    “I haven’t told you, have I?”
    “You have certainly told us nothing since you arrived.”
    “I