Free The Unsuspected by Charlotte Armstrong Page B

"alone."
     
    He looked into her eyes. How anxious he was, how tender, how wise! Yes, he would know, of course. He sensed it already. She was quite safe. There was no hurry.
     
    They trooped after Grandy, who carried the deep wooden bowl of spaghetti as if he held it on a cushion to show the king. But Grandy was the king too. There was candlelight. Mathilda at his left, then Oliver. Althea at the foot. Then Francis. Then Jane. Happy family. Mathilda felt gay. No hurry; and, meanwhile, it was all so terribly amusing.
     
    There was Oliver, on her left. A mild man, married to dynamite, and he didn't know what to do, she could tell. He was a mild man, a little man, in spite of his size, a drifting kind of creature, willing to be available and kind. But he didn't know what to do about the
    flagrant behavior of his bride. He fluctuated between stern anger and the determination to put his foot down, and another mood, a conviction of weakness and the tired thought that it didn't really matter.
     
    But Althea, in all her glamour, was down at the foot, being a young matron with such amusing reluctance. And Francis, beside her, was looking very gloomy, very much subdued. Mathilda was glad to see it. She felt it was only just that he should have to sit
    at the table with the ax hanging over his head.
     
    At the same time, she felt a surge of violent curiosity about him. What was the man up to, this Francis Howard? What kind of man? Well-bred, you could tell at table. Really quite attractive, if you liked that dark type, that lean kind of face. "Fortune hunter." She
    remembered her formula. She looked at his clothes. They were in expensive good taste. But if money wasn't his motive, what could it be?
     
    She thought; angrily, as she'd been taught to, All that stuff about my beauty. She thought. If he thinks he isn't going to be caught out in his lies— If he thinks I wont find out what's at the bottom of them— She caught a suffering look from his dark eyes, and she smiled a little cruelly.
     
    Francis asked Jane for the bread. The little blond girl looked as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Tyl's green eyes took stock of her.
     
    Nobody had even mentioned Rosaleen. Rosaleen was gone, although she had sat on Grandy's right hand in her day.
     
    But they began to ask Mathilda questions, and she left off her puzzling to tell the tidbits she'd saved for Grandy. About Mrs. Stevens' drinking spells. About Mr. Boyleston and his one eye at the bridge table. All at once it seemed funny and rather gay. Besides, it burned Althea up.
     
    Down at his end, Grandy listened. And his black eyes were restless and shrewd. Once he said, "Poor Tyl" in the middle of the laughter and watched her face sadden obediently.
     
    Francis saw it too. He thought, Damn it, the kid looks intelligent. Can't she see what he does? He directs her. Plays on her feelings like an organ, the old vulture. The beautiful bones of Mathilda's face haunted and reproached him. He was miserably tense and
    unhappy. He wished the dinner were over. He wished he didn't have to sit here, looking soulful, when what he would really like to do was to smash in that beaming hypocrite's beaming face and snatch Mathilda and shake some sense into her, and then take Jane and get out of here. Damn such a game!
     
    Althea's little foot was in his way under the table. He brought his own foot to rest, touching hers, and let it stay. Damn such a game, but if you have to play it, play it!
     
    When Mathilda had done, Grandy went to work and changed the mood. He brought sea mist into the room, gray, fast, lonely danger, salty death. He made them remember the coral bones of those lost at sea. He told one of his favorite ghost stories.
     
    Tyl began to look less vivid. She sobered and shrank. The wild mood, the free feeling ebbed away. After all, she was only poor Tyl, plain little Tyl, with all that money, who could never trust anyone very much. She'd have made a lovely ghost, a sad little