Read Online Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh - Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t be happier.”
    “I love you, Dinah.”
    “I love you, Henry.”
    “The world is ours,” said Henry. “Let us go down and take it.”
     
    iii
    They followed the shoulder of the hill by a path that led down to the rectory garden. Dinah went in front, and their conversation led to repeated halts.
    “I’m afraid,” Dinah began, “that I don’t much care for your Cousin Eleanor.”
    “You astonish me, darling,” said Henry. “For myself, I regard her as a prize bitch.”
    “That’s all right, then. I couldn’t mention this before you’d declared yourself, because it’s all about us.”
    “You mean the day before yesterday when she lurked outside your drawing-room door? Dinah, if she hadn’t been there, what would you have done?”
    This led to a prolonged halt.
    “The thing is,” said Dinah presently, “she must have told your father.”
    “So she did.”
    “He’s spoken to you?”
    “He has.”
    “Oh, Henry!”
    “That sounds as if you were settling a quotation. Yes, we had a grand interview. ‘What is this I hear, sir, of your attentions to Miss Dinah Copeland?’ ‘Forgive me, sir, but I refuse to answer you.’ ‘Do you defy me, Henry?’ ‘With all respect, sir, I do!’ That sort of thing.”
    “He doesn’t want it?”
    “Eleanor has told him he doesn’t, blast her goggling eyes!”
    “Why? Because I’m the poor parson’s daughter, or because I’m on the stage, or just because he hates the sight of me?”
    “I don’t think he hates the sight of you.”
    “I suppose he wants you to marry a proud heiress.”
    “I suppose he does. It doesn’t matter a tuppenny button, my sweet Dinah, what he wants.”
    “But it does. You haven’t heard. Miss Prentice came to see Daddy last night.”
    Henry stopped dead and stared at her.
    “She said — she said — ”
    “Go on.”
    “She told him we were meeting, and that you were keeping it from your father, but he’d found out and was terribly upset and felt we’d both been very underhand and — oh, she must have been absolutely foul! She must have sort of hinted that we were — ” Dinah boggled at this and fell silent.
    “That we were living in roaring sin?” Henry suggested.
    “Yes.”
    “My God, the minds of these women! Surely the rector didn’t pay any attention.”
    “She’s so loathesomely plausible. Do you remember the autumn day, weeks ago, soon after I came back, when you drove me to Moorton Bridge and we picnicked and didn’t come back till the evening?”
    “Every second of it.”
    “She’d found out about that. There was no reason why the whole world shouldn’t know, but I hadn’t told Daddy about it. It had been such a glowing, marvellous day that I didn’t want to talk about it.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Well, now, you see, it looks all fishy and dubious, and Daddy feels I have been behaving in an underhand manner. When Miss Prentice had gone he took me into his study. He was wearing his beretta, a sure sign that he’s feeling his responsibilities. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger, which is always rather toxic, and the worst of it is, he really was upset. He got more and more feudal and said we’d always been — I forget what — almost fiefs or vassals of this-man’s-man of the Jernighams, and had never done anything disloyal, and here was I behaving like a housemaid having clandestine assignations with you. On and on and on; and Henry, my dear darling, ridiculous though it sounds, I began to feel shabby and common.”
    “He didn’t believe — ”
    “No, of course he didn’t believe that. But, all the same, you know he’s frightfully muddled about sex.”
    “They all are,” said Henry, with youthful gloom.
    “And with Eleanor and Idris hurling their inhibitions in his teeth — ”
    “I know. Well, anyway, the upshot was, he forbade me to see you alone. I said I wouldn’t promise. It was the first really deadly row we’ve ever had. I fancy he prayed about it for hours