I had been longer than I thought, for when I returned to the lounge I saw he had already left the dining room, and she, fearful of losing him, had not waited for the letter, but had risked a bare-faced introduction on her own. He was even now sitting beside her on the sofa. I walked across to them, and gave her the letter without a word. He rose to his feet at once, while Mrs. Van Hopper, flushed with her success, waved a vague hand in my direction and mumbled my name.
“Mr. de Winter is having coffee with us, go and ask the waiter for another cup,” she said, her tone just casual enough to warn him of my footing. It meant I was a youthful thing and unimportant, and that there was no need to include me in the conversation. She always spoke in that tone when she wished to be impressive, and her method of introduction was a form of self-protection, for once I had been taken for her daughter, an acute embarrassment for us both. This abruptness showed that I could safely be ignored, and women would give me a brief nod which served as a greeting and a dismissal in one, while men, with large relief, would realize they could sink back into a comfortable chair without offending courtesy.
It was a surprise, therefore, to find that this newcomer remained standing on his feet, and it was he who made a signal to the waiter.
“I’m afraid I must contradict you,” he said to her, “you are both having coffee with me”; and before I knew what had happened he was sitting in my usual hard chair, and I was on the sofa beside Mrs. Van Hopper.
For a moment she looked annoyed—this was not what she had intended—but she soon composed her face, and thrusting her large self between me and the table she leaned forward to his chair, talking eagerly and loudly, fluttering the letter in her hand.
“You know I recognized you just as soon as you walked into the restaurant,” she said, “and I thought, ‘Why, there’s Mr. de Winter, Billy’s friend, I simply must show him those snaps of Billy and his bride taken on their honeymoon,’ and here they are. There’s Dora. Isn’t she just adorable? That little, slim waist, those great big eyes. Here they are sunbathing at Palm Beach. Billy is crazy about her, you can imagine. He had not met her of course when he gave that party at Claridge’s, and where I saw you first. But I dare say you don’t remember an old woman like me?”
This with a provocative glance and a gleam of teeth.
“On the contrary I remember you very well,” he said, and before she could trap him into a resurrection of their first meeting he had handed her his cigarette case, and the business of lighting-up stalled her for the moment. “I don’t think I should care for Palm Beach,” he said, blowing the match, and glancing at him I thought how unreal he would look against a Florida background. He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery, I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long-distant past—a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy.
I wished I could remember the Old Master who had painted that portrait. It stood in a corner of the gallery, and the eyes followed one from the dusky frame…
They were talking though, and I had lost the thread of conversation. “No, not even twenty years ago,” he was saying. “That sort of thing has never amused me.”
I heard Mrs. Van Hopper give her fat, complacent laugh. “If Billy had a home like Manderley he would not want to play around in Palm Beach,” she said. “I’m told it’s like fairyland, there’s no other word for it.”
She paused, expecting him to smile, but he went on smoking his cigarette, and I noticed, faint as gossamer, the line between his brows.
“I’ve seen pictures of it, of course,” she persisted, “and it looks perfectly enchanting. I remember Billy telling me it had all those big places beat for beauty. I wonder you can ever bear to leave it.”
His silence now was painful, and would have been patent to anyone else, but she ran on like a clumsy goat, trampling and trespassing on land that was preserved, and I felt the color flood my face, dragged with her as I was into humiliation.