Chapter 33

THE ROOF

The main door of LECHFORD HOUSE was ajar, and at the sound of G.J.’s footsteps on the marble of the porch it opened.  Robin, the secretary, stood at the threshold.  Evidently she had been set to wait for him.

“The men-servants are all in the cellars,” said she perkily.

G.J. retorted with sardonic bitterness: 

“And quite right, too.  I’m glad someone’s got some sense left.”

Yet he did not really admire the men-servants for being in the cellars.  Somehow it seemed mean of them not to be ready to take any risks, however unnecessary.

Robin, hiding her surprise and confusion in a nervous snigger, banged the heavy door, and led him through the halls and up the staircases.  As she went forward she turned on electric lamps here and there in advance, turning them off by the alternative switches after she had passed them, so that in the vast, shadowed, echoing interior the two appeared to be preceded by light and pursued by a tide of darkness.  She was mincingly feminine, and very conscious of the fact that G.J. was a fine gentleman.  In the afternoon, and again to-night—­at first, he had taken her for a mere girl; but as she halted under a lamp to hold a door for him at the entrance to the upper stairs, he perceived that it must have been a long time since she was a girl.  Often had he warned himself that the fashion of short skirts and revealed stockings gave a deceiving youthfulness to the middle-aged, and yet nearly every day he had to learn the lesson afresh.

He was just expecting to be shown into the boudoir when Robin stopped at a very small door.

“Her ladyship and Mrs. Carlos Smith are out on the roof.  This is the ladder,” she said, and illuminated the ladder.

G.J. had no choice but to mount.  Luckily he had kept his hat.  He put it on.  As he climbed he felt a slight recurrence of the pain in his side which he had noticed in St. Martin’s Street.  The roof was a very strange, tempestuous place, and insecure.  He had an impression similar to that of being at sea, for the wind, which he had scarcely observed in the street, made melancholy noises in the new protective wire-netting that stretched over his head.  This bomb-catching contrivance, fastened on thick iron stanchions, formed a sort of second roof, and was a very solid and elaborate affair which must have cost much money.  The upstreaming light from the ladder-shaft was suddenly extinguished.  He could see nobody, and the loneliness was uncomfortable.