"Contradict, dear, the rumour that I have had anything to do with the terrible thing which might have happened last week. Say on my authority that it is so. I tremble to think"--here she trembled very much--"what might happen if the report reached Major Benjy's ears, and he found out who had started it. We must have no more duels in Tilling. I thought I should never survive that morning."

"I will go and tell Mr. Wyse instantly--dear," said Mrs. Poppit.

That would never do. True believers were so scarce that it was wicked to think of unsettling their faith.

"Poor Mr. Wyse!" said Miss Mapp with a magnanimous smile. "Do not think, dear, of troubling him with these little trumpery affairs. He will not take part in these little t.i.ttle-tattles. But if you could let dear Diva and quaint Irene and sweet Evie and the good Padre know that I laugh at all such nonsense----"

"But they laugh at it, too," said Mrs. Poppit.

That would have been baffling for anyone who allowed herself to be baffled, but that was not Miss Mapp's way.

"Oh, that bitter laughter!" she said. "It hurt me to hear it. It was envious laughter, dear, scoffing, bitter laughter. I heard! I cannot bear that the dear things should feel like that. Tell them that I say how silly they are to believe anything of the sort. Trust me, I am right about it. I wash my hands of such nonsense."

She made a vivid dumb-show of this, and after drying them on an imaginary towel, let a sunny smile peep out the eyes which she had rubbed.

"All gone!" she said; "and we will have a dear little party on Wednesday to show we are all friends again. And we meet for lunch at dear Mr.

Wyse's the next day? Yes? He will get tired of poor little me if he sees me two days running, so I shall not ask him. I will just try to get two tables together, and n.o.body shall contradict dear Diva, however many shillings she says she has won. I would sooner pay them all myself than have any more of our unhappy divisions. You will have talked to them all before Wednesday, will you not, dear?"

As there were only four to talk to, Mrs. Poppit thought that she could manage it, and spent a most interesting afternoon. For two years now she had tried to unfreeze Miss Mapp, who, when all was said and done, was the centre of the Tilling circle, and who, if any attempt was made to shove her out towards the circ.u.mference, always gravitated back again.

And now, on these important errands she was Miss Mapp's accredited amba.s.sador, and all the terrible business of the opening of the store-cupboard and her decoration as M.B.E. was quite forgiven and forgotten. There would be so much walking to be done from house to house, that it was impossible to wear her sable coat unless she had the Royce to take her about....

The effect of her communications would have surprised anybody who did not know Tilling. A less subtle society, when a.s.sured from a first-hand, authoritative source that a report which it had entirely refused to believe was false, would have prided itself on its perspicacity, and said that it had laughed at such an idea, as soon as ever it heard it, as being palpably (look at Miss Mapp!) untrue. Not so Tilling. The very fact that, by the mouth of her amba.s.sador, she so uncompromisingly denied it, was precisely why Tilling began to wonder if there was not something in it, and from wondering if there was not something in it, surged to the conclusion that there certainly was. Diva, for instance, the moment she was told that Elizabeth (for Mrs. Poppit remembered her Christian name perfectly) utterly and scornfully denied the truth of the report, became intensely thoughtful.

"Say there's nothing in it?" she observed. "Can't understand that."

At that moment Diva's telephone bell rang, and she hurried out and in.

"Party at Elizabeth's on Wednesday," she said. "She saw me laughing. Why ask me?"

Mrs. Poppit was full of her sacred mission.

"To show how little she minds your laughing," she suggested.

"As if it wasn't true, then. Seems like that. Wants us to think it's not true."

"She was very earnest about it," said the amba.s.sador.

Diva got up, and tripped over the outlying skirts of Mrs. Poppit's fur coat as she went to ring the bell.

"Sorry," she said. "Take it off and have a chat. Tea's coming. m.u.f.fins!"

"Oh, no, thanks!" said Mrs. Poppit. "I've so many calls to make."

"What? Similar calls?" asked Diva. "Wait ten minutes. Tea, Janet.

Quickly."

She whirled round the room once or twice, all corrugated with perplexity, beginning telegraphic sentences, and not finishing them: "Says it's not true--laughs at notion of--And Mr. Wyse believes--The Padre believed. After all, the Major--Little c.o.c.k-sparrow Captain Puffin--Or t'other way round, do you think?--No other explanation, you know--Might have been blood----"

She buried her teeth in a m.u.f.fin.

"Believe there's something in it," she summed up.

She observed her guest had neither tea nor m.u.f.fin.

"Help yourself," she said. "Want to worry this out."

"Elizabeth absolutely denies it," said Mrs. Poppit. "Her eyes were full of----"

"Oh, anything," said Diva. "Rubbed them. Or pepper if it was at lunch.

That's no evidence."

"But her solemn a.s.sertion----" began Mrs. Poppit, thinking that she was being a complete failure as an amba.s.sador. She was carrying no conviction at all.

"Saccharine!" observed Diva, handing her a small phial. "Haven't got more than enough sugar for myself. I expect Elizabeth's got plenty--well, never mind that. Don't you see? If it wasn't true she would try to convince us that it was. Seemed absurd on the face of it.

But if she tries to convince us that it isn't true--well, something in it."

There was the gist of the matter, and Mrs. Poppit proceeding next to the Padre's house, found more m.u.f.fins and incredulity. n.o.body seemed to believe Elizabeth's a.s.sertion that there was "nothing in it." Evie ran round the room with excited squeaks, the Padre nodded his head, in confirmation of the opinion which, when he first delivered it, had been received with mocking incredulity over the crab. Quaint Irene, intent on Mr. Hopkins's left knee in the absence of the model, said, "Good old Mapp: better late than never." Utter incredulity, in fact, was the amba.s.sador's welcome ... and all the incredulous were going to Elizabeth's party on Wednesday.

Mrs. Poppit had sent the Royce home for the last of her calls, and staggered up the hill past Elizabeth's house. Oddly enough, just as she pa.s.sed the garden-room, the window was thrown up.

"Cup of tea, dear Susan?" said Elizabeth. She had found an old note of Mrs. Poppit's among the waste paper for the firing of the kitchen oven fully signed.

"Just two minutes' talk, Elizabeth," she promptly responded.

The news that n.o.body in Tilling believed her left Miss Mapp more than calm, on the bright side of calm, that is to say. She had a few indulgent phrases that tripped readily off her tongue for the dear things who hated to be deprived of their gossip, but Susan certainly did not receive the impression that this playful magnanimity was attained with an effort. Elizabeth did not seem really to mind: she was very gay.

Then, skilfully changing the subject, she mourned over her dead dahlias.

Though Tilling with all its perspicacity could not have known it, the intuitive reader will certainly have perceived that Miss Mapp's party for Wednesday night had, so to speak, further irons in its fire. It had originally been a bribe to Susan Poppit, in order to induce her to spread broadcast that that ridiculous rumour (whoever had launched it) had been promptly denied by the person whom it most immediately concerned. It served a second purpose in showing that Miss Mapp was too high above the mire of scandal, however interesting, to know or care who might happen to be wallowing in it, and for this reason she asked everybody who had done so. Such loftiness of soul had earned her an amazing bonus, for it had induced those who sat in the seat of the scoffers before to come hastily off, and join the thin but unwavering ranks of the true believers, who up till then had consisted only of Susan and Mr. Wyse. Frankly, so blest a conclusion had never occurred to Miss Mapp: it was one of those unexpected rewards that fall like ripe plums into the lap of the upright. By denying a rumour she had got everybody to believe it, and when on Wednesday morning she went out to get the chocolate cakes which were so useful in allaying the appet.i.tes of guests, she encountered no broken conversations and gleeful smiles, but sidelong glances of respectful envy.

But what Tilling did not and could not know was that this, the first of the autumn after-dinner bridge-parties, was destined to look on the famous teagown of kingfisher-blue, as designed for Mrs. Trout. No doubt other ladies would have hurried up their new gowns, or at least have camouflaged their old ones, in honour of the annual inauguration of evening bridge, but Miss Mapp had no misgivings about being outshone.

And once again here she felt that luck waited on merit, for though when she dressed that evening she found she had not antic.i.p.ated that artificial light would cast a somewhat pale (though not ghastly) reflection from the vibrant blue on to her features, similar in effect to (but not so marked as) the light that shines on the faces of those who lean over the burning brandy and raisins of "snapdragon," this interesting pallor seemed very aptly to bear witness to all that she had gone through. She did not look ill--she was satisfied as to that--she looked gorgeous and a little wan.

The bridge tables were not set out in the garden-room, which entailed a scurry over damp gravel on a black, windy night, but in the little square parlour above her dining-room, where Withers, in the intervals of admitting her guests, was laying out plates of sandwiches and the chocolate cakes, reinforced when the interval for refreshments came with hot soup, whisky and syphons, and a jug of "cup" prepared according to an ancestral and economical recipe, which Miss Mapp had taken a great deal of trouble about. A single bottle of white wine, with suitable additions of ginger, nutmeg, herbs and soda-water, was the mother of a gallon of a drink that seemed aflame with fiery and probably spirituous ingredients. Guests were very careful how they partook of it, so stimulating it seemed.

Miss Mapp was reading a book on gardening upside down (she had taken it up rather hurriedly) when the Poppits arrived, and sprang to her feet with a pretty cry at being so unexpectedly but delightfully disturbed.

"Susan! Isabel!" she said. "Lovely of you to have come! I was reading about flowers, making plans for next year."

She saw the four eyes riveted to her dress. Susan looked quite shabby in comparison, and Isabel did not look anything at all.

"My dear, too lovely!" said Mrs. Poppit slowly.

Miss Mapp looked brightly about, as if wondering what was too lovely: at last she guessed.

"Oh, my new frock?" she said. "Do you like it, dear? How sweet of you.

It's just a little nothing that I talked over with that nice Miss Greele in the High Street. We put our heads together, and invented something quite cheap and simple. And here's Evie and the dear Padre. So kind of you to look in."