Sunshine Yellow (8 page)

CHAPTER IX

“
Well?” S
tephen said, when she returned to the sitting-room. He was stuffing tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and
he
sounded extremely impatient.
“What
does your aunt want?”

Penny swallowed.

“She and Veronica are staying with friends not very far from here, and they would like to come and have lunch with us tomorrow. Veronica hasn’t been at all well—in fact, I think she’s been rather ill—and the doctor thought she ought to have a change and sea air. Fortunately, they know someone with a big house in Cornwall, and they’ve been their guests for about a week. Aunt Heloise says Veronica is quite fit to drive and they’d love to come over here and see you ... and me, of course!”

Penny felt as if her heart was labouring painfully, and all her pulses had been slowed down. She also felt that this was a very unkind trick that fate had played her
...
just when Stephen was beginning to forget!

Stephen seemed to be making a very thorough job of stuffing the tobacco into his pipe. He had risen and was standing in front of the rough brick hearth, and the firelight played over him.

“And I suppose you told your aunt that we shall be delighted?” he said, after a long interval of silence.
He prodded the tobacco with a long forefinger, and then set it alight. “Did you?” he asked.

“I—I said I felt sure you’d be glad to see them
...
” She corrected herself stumblingly. “I mean, Aunt Heloise was very good at the time of the accident, and naturally she’d like to see for herself how well you’re getting
on...”

“And Veronica?” he asked, standing with the bowl of the pipe gripped between his thumb and forefinger, but not putting it to his lips. “Do you think Veronica is consumed with curiosity to see how well I grope my way about the house now that I’m not exactly one hundred per cent? As I was when she saw me last! Do you think she wants to watch you guiding me about, and cutting up my meat for me, and things like that?” His voice was as bitter as a whiplash. “Do you think she wants to come over all truly feminine and regretful and pour sympathy over me, like treacle?”

“Of course not!” Penny cried, aghast.

“Then you don’t know Veronica,” he told her. He discarded his pipe, and turned as if he would leave the room. “She was
born
to ooze sympathy occasionally ... no one could do so more charmingly than Veronica! But I won’t have it! I couldn’t endure it!” His voice rose and sounded shrill. “I tell you I won’t have it!”

Penny felt herself turn gradually very cold, although the room was very warm. Stephen knocked out his pipe again in an ash-tray for which he groped awkwardly, and then thrust it away into his pocket.

“Where’s Waters?” he demanded irritably. “I’d like to go to bed!”

If anything, Veronica was more beautiful than ever when she arrived the following day. She and her mother drove over the green cliff on which the cottage stood in a smart new blue car which Veronica drove, and Veronica herself was in a shade of blue that accented her dark violet eyes, and the exquisite pallor of her skin.

If she had been ill, she had quite obviously recovered, but she was interestingly pale. It was a pity, Penny found herself thinking in a strange, detached fashion, that Stephen couldn’t see how well a hint of fragility became her.

Penny went out alone to greet them, and Aunt Heloise drew her a little aside.

“The poor child’s been fretting a lot,” she said. “She has been very distressed for Stephen, you know. She very stupidly blames herself for his accident.”

“Does she?” Penny said quietly, and led the way into the house.

Stephen was standing at the foot of the short staircase, looking unnaturally stiff and rather grim, but impeccably dressed as usual. His dark glasses showed up the gauntness of his face, and Veronica took one look at him and then came to an absolute standstill. Her mother spoke loudly to cover up her obvious distress.

“How are you, Stephen? We couldn’t come all this way and not pay you a visit. Cornwall is so remote, but we were only about thirty miles away, and
...
and so we came!”

“It’s very kind of you,” Stephen replied, and took off his dark glasses and held them in his hand. Veronica, seeing for the first time the scars about his eyes— although, actually, they were fading a little by this time, and were expected to fade still more as the months went by—and his vividly blue sightless stare, put a hand u
p
to her trembling mouth and looked as if would dissolve in a
noisy
avalanche of t
e
ars.

“Oh, Stephen,” she whispered, “how g-ghastly!”

St
ephen
stiffened still more, and her mother frowned.

“Darling, be careful,” she whi
sp
ered.

“I’m sorry if I shook you,” Stephen said, in a hard, cold voice.

“It’s not that,” Veronica assured him. “It’s
...
” And then the tears came, and her shoulders shook. She wept into her neatly gloved hands. “I feel as if I did this to you personally! I feel as if I’m responsible! I feel
...”

“Yes, darling, we know all about that,” her mother said soothingly, “but you mustn’t upset Stephen.” She turned to Penny, “Perhaps I could take her upstairs to your room? Or if you have a guest-room perhaps she could rest there for a while before lunch? She’s badly overwrought.”

“Of course,” Penny answered, wondering why the words didn’t stick in her throat and choke her, she found it so difficult to answer and literally trembling with indignation and resentment. “She can rest for as long as she pleases in my room”—afterwards she wished she had had the sense to offer the guest-room—“and I’ll give you both a call when lunch is ready.”

She raced up the stairs ahead of them to show them the way to her room, and as she flung open the door she didn’t notice her aunt glance curiously round it, as if satisfying a curiosity that was very much to the surface in spite of her daughter’s collapsed condition. Then, when she had turned on the electric fire for them, and invited them to make themselves as comfortable as possible, she raced downstairs again to Stephen, who was standing in front of the sitting-room window and staring sightlessly out to sea.

Timidly she touched his arm.

“Is that you, Penny?” he said tonelessly. “It never occurred to me before that I must present a rather ghastly spectacle to people who look at me.”

“But you don’t!” she assured him, her indication rising afresh, and her young voice ringing with it. “You don’t look any different from the way you used to look, except that there are one or two scars above
your eyes, and of course you can’t
—
”

“See?”

He turned to her, and she saw that he was still without his dark glasses.

“I suppose it does give you a rather strange feeling to meet the direct gaze of a blind man? And Veronica is an extremely sensitive type, and she must have been profoundly shocked. You’ve had an opportunity to get used to me, Penny, so you’re no longer shocked, but Veronica couldn’t take it.”

“She is upset,” Penny said, looking at him with all her heart in her eyes, and yearning to do something about the bitterness round his mouth. “But she’ll get over it. You mustn’t forget that she hasn’t been very well lately.”

“What’s been the matter with her?”

“I don’t know
...
she’s a bit run down, I think.” He turned back to the window.

“Would you say she was genuinely upset just now?”

“Oh, yes—quite genuinely.”

“And she’s upstairs trying to get over—the shock I caused her when I took off my glasses! I suppose that was rather a brutal thing to do?”

“Not at all. I’ve told you, you look perfectly all right.”

“You’re a dear little soul, Penny,” he said, and she felt as if she had dropped right back into the limbo of unimportant things—certainly unimportant feminine companions—by comparison with her cousin Veronica.

Ten minutes later Veronica came down the stairs, her face delicately powdered, her eyes no longer red with weeping, but just a little misty with feminine sympathy. She went straight up to Stephen and slipped a hand in his arm.

“Forgive me, Stephen,” she said softly. “Not only for behaving so badly when I arrived just now, but—for everything!”

Stephen remained silent for perhaps a full second, and then groped for the fingers resting on his arm and patted them lightly.

“Of course. Not,” he added, surprisingly, “that there was ever anything to forgive!”

Lunch passed off with surprising lightness and ease considering the tension that pervaded the atmosphere when Mrs. Wilmott and her daughter arrived at the cottage. They expressed themselves as charmed with both the situation and the simplicity of the latter, although Mrs. Wilmott did voice a certain doubt concerning the isolation of such a retreat for one who was as young as Penny.

She added hastily that of course she understood Stephen was not in the mood for social contacts at the present time—but that as soon as he felt capable of making a return to normal life he must do so
...
for his own sake, as well as the sake of Penny.

“You mustn’t forget that you have friends,” she said, introducing a warmly affectionate note into her voice, “and those friends miss you.” It was possibly by accident that her glance alighted upon her own daughter. “You mustn’t forget, either, that you have Old Timbers, and if Penny is going to lead the part of a normal wife”—did she lay a slight emphasis on the word “normal”? Penny wondered afterwards— “and get to know a circle of acquaintances who will prevent time hanging heavily on her hands, as it must sometimes do in such a lonely spot as this, then the sooner she begins to act the part in her own home the better. And at Old Timbers Veronica and I will be able to visit you fairly often,” she concluded, as if that was important not only for the sake of her own satisfaction, but the benefit of the two she was discussing.

“I’m sorry you feel that Penny is leading rather a dull life at the present time,” Stephen remarked dryly.

Mrs. Wilmott shook a waggish finger at him—apparently forgetting that he couldn’t see it—and denied anything of the kind.

“Now, now, I didn’t say that! She is a young married woman—a bride of only a few months—and of course she isn’t dull. But I feel that life is just a little restricted for her down here in Cornwall.”

Veronica gazed curiously across the table at Penny. “You don’t look like a bride, Penny,” she told her. “You look exactly as you used to look!”

After lunch, as the sun was warm, and the sea was the heavenly blue it so often is in Cornwall when the autumn days are growing shorter and shorter, they all went for a short stroll on the cliff-top, and Veronica insisted on taking Stephen’s arm and cautioning him against any uneven surfaces in the path. The two of them fell a little behind the other pair, and in the golden light of the westering sun they seemed to have quite a lot to say to one another. Whenever Penny looked backwards over her shoulder—which she did frequently, because she was in a constant state of alert over Stephen, and their nearness to the cliff edge sent her heart into her mouth every time
Veronica hung back still more and indicated some
thing out at sea—they seemed to be chatting both happily and contentedly, and it was plain that Stephen no longer blamed Veronica for failing to become his wife after all.

When they turned back to the cottage Veronica was sighing, and saying how much she had enjoyed the afternoon, and every time her eyes rested on the blind man their violet depths grew tender in a way Penny had never seen them before.

She began to feel not so much vaguely, as suddenly keenly, afraid.

The visitors did not remain for tea, but when she went upstairs to collect her hat and coat Veronica was talking musingly of driving to see them again within a matter of days.

“Of course, we could put up at the inn for a few days, if you’ve got an inn?” she said to Penny. “It may be a bit crude, but now that we’re in your area I feel that we ought to see rather more of you than is possible in a few hours.”

But although she smiled at Penny it was not the smile she bestowed on Stephen when she wished him a soft
“
Au revoir
,
Stephen!”

He took her fingers and held them for exactly the length of time he would have held anyone else’s, but watching them Penny experienced a nasty pang. An uneasy pang. For she thought there was a note of gratitude in her husband’s voice when he said:

“It was good of you to come!”

Veronica’s voice was husky as she replied:

“I had to come! ... and I’m coming again!”

When the blue car had driven away from the white front of the cottage Penny went upstairs to her bedroom, and she thought that it smelled overpoweringly
of the perfume Veronica used. Her comb, that Veronica had borrowed, had some fine silky black hairs clinging to it—Veronica’s hair had the downy darkness of a blackbird’s plumage—and she had left her gold lipstick behind on the dressing-table.

Penny picked it up, and stood holding it as if it might bite her. She was recalling Veronica’s alert eyes roving round the room, and remembering the apparently surprised note in her voice when she exclaimed:

“But this is a single room! Don’t you and Stephen share a room? Or are you”—with a strange little laugh—“too
modern
?”

Penny knew that the colour had simply rushed to her face, but she had made a tremendous effort to speak casually.

“Oh, as a matter of fact, I like sleeping alone. And Stephen has been so ill that, naturally, he prefers his own room, too.”

She realized that it sounded very thin indeed, but she was not prepared for the amused curve of Veronica’s lovely red mouth. She actually put back her head and laughed.

“How quaint you are, Penny darling!” And then, her eyes as bright and beautiful as stars: “And now I know that you’re still the old Penny!” She squeezed her cousin’s hand. “And I forgive you for taking Stephen away from me like that!”

Downstairs Stephen waited impatiently for Penny to pour out tea, and when she entered the cosy sitting-room where a log fire was blazing on the hearth, and the lamp was already lighted, he called out to her with a note of impatience in his voice:

“What on earth have you been doing upstairs all this time? Waters has just brought in crumpets, and they won’t be improved if they have to congeal in their own fat down there on the hob, or wherever he’s placed them.”

“I’m sorry,” Penny said instantly, and knelt to rescue the crumpets. But as she lifted the silver lid from the chafing dish her fingers were shaking.

Stephen seemed to sense that she was not quite herself, and he asked sharply:

“What’s wrong, Penny?”

“Nothing ... nothing is wrong.”

She thought his lips curved a little dryly.

“And you enjoyed the visit of your aunt? I’m sorry she thinks you’re having rather a poor time of it.”

“But I’m not having a poor time of it! I’m
...
perfectly happy!”

“Are you?” He turned his head restlessly on his cushions, and she had the feeling that he was striving to see her. Then he sighed. “Ah, well, some people don’t need a very great deal to make them happy! Perhaps you’re one of them, Penny. For your own sake I hope you are.”

Penny poured out the tea, and she was glad he couldn’t see how much she spilled. Her heart felt like lead inside her.

“Thanks.” He knew when she set his cup beside him, within reach of his hand. “You’re a good little thing, Penny.”

So once more she was a “good little thing,” and not the woman he had so nearly taken into his arms the night before!