Free Singing in the Shrouds by Ngaio Marsh Page B

book. “They often turn sour at his age. It’s the life.”
    She had been quiet for so long they had forgotten her. “That’s right,” she continued, “isn’t it, Father?”
    “It may possibly, I suppose, be a reason. It’s certainly not an excuse.”
    “I think,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick lamented, “I’d better throw my lovely hyacinths overboard, don’t you?” She appealed to Father Jourdain. “Wouldn’t it be best? It’s not only poor Mr. Dale.”
    “No,” Brigid agreed. “Mr. Cuddy, we must remember, comes over queer at the sight of them.”
    “Mr. Cuddy,” Miss Abbott observed, “came over queer but not, in my opinion, at the sight of the hyacinths.” She lowered her book and looked steadily at Mrs. Dillington-Blick.
    “My dear!” Mrs. Dillington-Blick rejoined and began to laugh again.
    “Well!” Father Jourdain said with the air of a man who refuses to recognize his nose before his face. “I think I shall see what it’s like on deck.”
    Mrs. Dillington-Blick stood between him and the double doors and he was quite close to her. She beamed up at him. His back was turned to Alleyn. He was still for a moment and then she moved aside and he went out. There was a brief silence.
    Mrs. Dillington-Blick turned to Brigid.
    “My dear!” she confided. “I’ve
got
that man. He’s a reformed rake.”
    Mr. McAngus re-entered from the passage still wearing his hat. He smiled diffidently at his five fellow passengers.
    “All settling down?” he ventured, evidently under a nervous compulsion to make some general remark.
    “Like birds in their little nest,” Alleyn agreed cheerfully.
    “Isn’t it delicious,” Mr. McAngus said, heartened by this response, “to think that from now on it’s going to get warmer and warmer and warmer?”
    “Absolutely enchanting.”
    Mr. McAngus made the little chassé with which they were all to become familiar, before the basket of hyacinths.
    “Quite intoxicating,” he said. “They are my favourite flowers.”
    “Are they!” cried Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “Then do please,
please
have them. Please do. Dennis will take them to your room. Mr. McAngus, I should adore you to have them.”
    He gazed at her in what seemed to be a flutter of bewildered astonishment. “I?” Mr. McAngus said. “But why? I beg your pardon, but it’s so very kind, and positively I can’t believe you mean it.”
    “But I do, indeed. Please have them.”
    Mr. McAngus hesitated and stammered. “I’m quite overcome. Of course I should be delighted.” He gave a little giggle and tilted his head over to one side. “Do you know,” he said, “this is the first occasion, the
very
first, on which a lady has ever, of her own free will, offered me her flowers? And my favourites, too. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”
    Alleyn saw that Mrs. Dillington-Blick was touched by this speech. She smiled kindly and unprovocatively at him and Brigid laughed gently.
    “I’ll carry them myself,” Mr. McAngus said. “Of course I will. I shall put them on my little table and they’ll be reflected in my looking-glass.”
    “Lucky man!” Alleyn said lightly.
    “Indeed, yes. May I, really?” he asked. Mrs. Dillington-Blick nodded gaily and he advanced to the table and grasped the enormous basket with his reddish bony hands. He was an extremely thin man and, Alleyn thought, very much older than his strange nut-brown hair would suggest.
    “Let me help you,” Alleyn offered.
    “No, no! I’m really very strong, you know. Wiry.”
    He lifted the basket and staggered on bent legs with it to the door. Here he turned, a strange figure, his felt hat tilted over his nose, blinking above a welter of quivering hyacinths.
    “
I
shall think of something to give
you
,” he promised Mrs. Dillington-Blick, “after Las Palmas. There must be a reciprocal gesture.”
    He went groggily away.
    “He may dye his hair a screaming magenta if he chooses,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick said. “He’s a