Child Friday (11 page)

I love my love and well he knows

I love the ground whereon he goes ...

But that was not for her, not even yet for Dane, whose love had been taken from him long ago.

It was a relief when Vanessa suddenly tired of country life and went to stay in London for a round of parties.

“Only for a week or two, darling,” she told Dane when she came to say good-bye. “Aunt Gertrude’s rheumatism’s making her a crotchety companion and, frankly, I can’t stand Dartmoor in winter. Don’t you ever feel you want to revisit the old haunts again, Dane?”

He shook his head, smiling a little sardonically.

“All those little Soho restaurants and night-clubs—Bellometti’s when I could afford it? No.”

“But we had such fun.”

“I suppose so. One grows out of such things, though.”

“Your blindness has turned you stuffy,” she said rather tartly. “Are you going to keep poor Emily shut up in this prison for ever?”

“She married me on that understanding,” he answered quietly. “I don’t think your tastes and Emily’s really have much in common.”

“Yet I seem to remember a time when you preferred mine.”

“I was in love with you, my dear. One is inclined to adopt the tastes of another as one’s own at such times.” They were walking in the garden, Bella, in her harness, ever watchful to the pressure of her master’s hand. Vanessa put light fingers on his arm.

“Have you forgotten already?” she said softly. “I don’t think so, Dane. That day when I came back the old magnetism was there, wasn’t it—wasn’t it?”

“Magnetism is nothing to do with love,” he said harshly. “It’s purely a chemical reaction and can be experienced by anyone.”

“There speaks the research chemist,” she said, unruffled. “Well, a chemical reaction’s good enough for me. You’re still very attractive, darling, and so romantic with your guide dog and all.”

He shook her hand off and gave Bella the order to turn in another direction.

“Is it Ben’s money that’s made me appear attractive again?” he asked gently.

“Well, I admit it helps,” Vanessa replied at once with disarming frankness. “I’d be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t wish you’d come into it five years ago.”

“You would have been prepared to put up with my handicap, in that case—lead me about on a string, as you once put it?”

“Was I as crude as that? Well, darling, as I said, I was very young and I—I didn’t know what you were going to look like when the bandages came off. Was that very cowardly of me?”

“No, I suppose not. I was bad company in those days.”

Bella had halted at the steps leading down from the terrace. Dane paused too, lifting his sightless face to the soft wind of late February.

“Are any primroses out?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered impatiently. “Dane—I didn’t fill your place all those five years. Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

“What should it tell me, except that you may have had a few regrets, or found nobody—
ri
ch enough, shall we say—to compensate?”

Her temper flared up.

“That’s unpardonable!” she said.

“Perhaps it was,” he replied wearily, and she took his shoulders suddenly between her hands and turned
him
round to face her.

“I don’t believe all we once felt for each other is lost,” she said violently. “If there’s no going back, at least we
can go forward.”

“You’re forgetting, I think, that I’m married,” he said gently.

“And what sort of marriage is it, I should like to know? One of convenience because even you, in the end, couldn’t bear to live alone. What use in Emily to you—a mousy little nobody who’s content to let herself be walked on? Her voice shook with passion.

“Are you jealous of Emily?” he asked mildly.

“Oh, really, Dane!” she exclaimed. “No, I’m not jealous of her. She stands in my way, that’s all.”

He gently removed her hands from his shoulders.

“Just the same Vanessa, aren’t you?” he said. “Nothing must stand in your way.”

“Nothing has,” she said, “until that wretched accident wrecked our happiness.”

He began to descend the steps with the sureness of long familiarity and Bella’s guiding presence.

“It wasn’t the accident that wrecked us,” he said. “It was your lack of faith, my dear.”

“You haven’t forgiven me, have you?” she said. “You
haven’t made allowances for
—
”

Emily was coming to meet them. She had seen them standing so close at the top of the steps, and had heard Vanessa’s last words. The anger in her clear eyes and the color in her cheeks gave her a fleeting delicate illusion of beauty and Vanessa glanced at her curiously.

“Hullo, Emily,” she said in a changed voice. “That new dress is very becoming, but won’t you be cold without a coat?”

“I’ve only come to tell Dane lunch is ready,” Emily said.

“Well, I must be off,” Vanessa wrapped her smart coat snugly about her graceful body. “I’ve a train to catch in a couple of hours. Good-bye, Dane—I’ll be back.”

“Good-bye, and enjoy your parties,” Dane replied.
Emil
y said nothing, neither did she accompany Vanessa to her car.

“The primroses are out,” she said when the sound of the engine had died away.

“
Where? I asked Vanessa but she hadn’t noticed.”

“At the top of the steps and all over the place. She must have been standing in them.”

He gave her a quick glance as if he would like to discern the expression on her face.

“She never was observant of little things,” he said, and flung an arm carelessly about Emily’s shoulders.

“That dress feels too thin for winter weather out of doors,” he observed. “What’s it look like that it becomes you so well?”

She moved away from the touch of his hand.

“Oh, it’s just one Vanessa chose for me,” she said evasively. “Bella will bring you up the steps safely, won’t she? I’m going in. I think I am cold, after all.”

CHAPTER
SIX

WITH Vanessa’s going the house settled once more i
nto
its quiet routine. Emily worked with Dane in the mornings and read to him in the evenings or sat silent in the semidarkness just as before. She had never acquired the habit of switching on lights for her own benefit, and now she had come to enjoy the dimness, dreaming of many things while she watched Dane’s hands in the firelight travelling so delicately over pages of Braille.

Already she had begun to share the compensations of blindness. It ceased to be a miracle that fingers should spell out words as quickly as sight, that touch, scent, and hearing should be so sure and perception so acute. But Dane did not approve of idleness.

“Have you turned on the lights?” he would say, conscious that he had heard no movement from her for some time.

“No. I like the firelight”

“You’re too young to share my darkness. You’ll get mopey,” he said moodily.

“I don’t think so. I like to share, where I can, the life you’re forced to lead.”

“That
’s
morbid.”

“No—no, Dane, you’re wrong. If one identifies oneself to some extent, one understands better. Isn’t that what
y
ou wanted?”

His hands lay still on the book on his knees. Sue could not see his face in the shadows.

“I don’t know,” he said. “When I first approached Louisa Pink I hadn’t any such ideas. Perhaps my motives were muddled. I hadn’t, you see, expected her to send me someone quite like you.”

Emily remembered that interview in Pink’s Employment Agency and laughed.

“She took a gamble on me, I think,” she said. “I wasn’t much of a success, you know, in her normal offers
of employment.”

“And are you content?” His voice was suddenly urgent “You don’t feel that somehow you were sold a pup?”

“No, Dane.” Her own voice was soft with reassurance.
“I wasn’t, after all, forced into anything.”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I’ve an idea you were desperately anxious to hold down this job that you didn’t perhaps, fully realize what you were taking on. That young man—it would be a pity if you had jumped into a marriage with me because your first love affair had gone wrong.”

“He no longer matters,” she said. “I’m content, Dane.

“You’re very sweet,” he said, and she thought of Vanessa and her vivid, striking beauty. Were they both, she wondered sadly, putting up with each other because it no longer mattered any more?

“No,” he said with that sudden, disconcerting perception. “You are too young to think along those lines. I shouldn’t
have married you.”

“Have you regrets yourself?” she asked, and was unassured when he answered: “Perhaps.”

She remembered Vanessa appearing so unexpectedly in their drawing-room, the tenseness of their bodies in that first moment of meeting, when she had known herself forgotten, and she saw them again at the top of the terrace steps, Vanessa’s passionate pose a she pleaded with him, her hands on his shoulders.

“Well,” she said with a deep sigh, “what’s done cannot be undone, so we’re told. I’ll try to be what you want Dane—if that will satisfy.”

“I
think
it might,” he said with gentle humor. “But you mustn’t be so resigned, Emily. People will walk on you, if you let them, you know.”

“Including you?”

“Yes, including me,” he said with faint bitterness. “After all, we each of us probably think of what suits us best, don’t we?”

“Yes,” she said, striving for wisdom. “Yes, perhaps we do.”

March came in with the traditional roar. The wind screamed across the moor, battering on the house and isolating them in
a
little world which resisted the elements.

“I told you what Dartmoor could be like in the winter,” Dane said, but she replied:

“It’s almost spring. The bracken is beginning to unfold and green shoots are coming up everywhere. I like the wind, Dane. It makes me feel secure.”

“Secure?”

“Yes. The warmth inside and the knowledge that one hasn’t got
to go out and do battle for existence.”

“What a strange notion,” he said, and added affectionately: “You’ve had a stormy passage, for all your tender years, Emily?”

“Not stormy,” she answered honestly. “Drab—disappointing, perhaps, but I don’t inspire storms.

“Don’t you? And is that an admission of failure?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Women who create disturbance got further than I should, I think.”

“And how far do you want to get?”

“Not very far, perhaps,” she said. “Just to something settled—something worth while.”

“What are you looking like tonight?” he asked suddenly. “No—don’t tell me. My hands acquainted me with your slenderness—too slender, perhaps. You are sitting on the other side of the fire with the light flickering on delicate limbs and the planes and angles of your face. Your eyes are—what color?”

“Grey—too big for my face.”

“And your hair?”

“Brown—not one of those exciting shades, and never very manageable.”

“Alice’s dryad peeping through the frosty branches of an apple tree. You see, I haven’t forgotten.”

She said with sudden anguish:

“You love beauty, don’t you? Perhaps it’s as well you can’t see me, Dane.”

“But I’ve described beauty,” he told her gently. “Alice has a child’s gift for the truth. I shall always see you that way—peeping through frosty branches with a wonder at what you behold.”

The tears would spring to her eyes when he spoke like that and she would not answer. The wind howled round the house and she would feel suddenly desolate, as if life were cheating them both and she, no more than he, was building a false image.

There was one letter from Vanessa which said:

Emily will, of course, read this to you, so I will only say that I’m having a wonderful time and have been to many of our old haunts. What ghosts one raises in going back! I shall be seeing you soon with much to tell of what you are missing. ...

Emily read the letter to him in a light, expressionless voice. He listened gravely, then asked for the letter.

“She still uses the same paper,” he said, fingering the thick, glossy sheets. “Was there any other post of interest?”

“One from Miss Pink asking if she might come next weekend?” said Emily. “Do you want her?”

“Of course. You wrote, if I remember, telling her to come when she wished. Better send a wire.”

So Emily telegraphed and, her thoughts still full of Vanessa, went to arrange about rooms with Mrs. Pride. It was her first duty as nominal mistress of the house since she had married Dane.

Mrs. Pride looked surprised; guests were unusual at Pennyleat and she made it clear that she held Emily responsible for such changes.

“Mr. Merritt likes to be quiet,” she said reprovingly. “You’ll not be wise, Mrs. Merritt, if you institute weekend parties, if you’ll excuse me saying so.”

“A single elderly lady scarcely constitutes a week-end party,” retorted Emily. “Besides, Miss Pink happens to be an old friend of Mr. Merritt’s.”

“I never heard tell of her,” replied Mrs. Pride repressively. “Well, leave it to me. Miss Alice’s room is good enough, I should suppose.”

“Miss Alice’s room has her things in the cupboards,” said Emily a little sharply. “It won’t hurt you to prepare one of the guest rooms. Mrs. Meeker can do the cleaning.”

“Very well, Mrs. Merritt,” the wo
m
an answered, but her eyes said plainly that she did not consider it Emily’s place to give her orders.