The Heart Remembers

by Peggy Gaddis

  Jim looked down at her, puzzled.

  “You’ve lived in the pine country before?” he asked.

  “When I was a child,” she answered, and then set her teeth hard. More cautiously, after only the slightest moment of hesitation, she went on lightly, “I love pines. They’re so dependable. They’re always green and fresh-looking, even when they’re half buried beneath snow.”

  It sounded lame and she flushed a little beneath his look, then turned her head away and gazed through tear-misted eyes at the beloved, remembered pines.

  Jim said nothing and they drove on, until finally the narrow winding road widened and ahead there was a house or two; neat frame, carefully enclosed behind none too steady fences that were obviously meant to keep out the wandering pigs and chickens and an occasional cow, and not merely for beauty.

  They came at last to a small brick building, closed and deserted for so long that it had a forlorn, unhappy look. Beyond it at the left there was a neat four-room house, built of pine and never painted. It, too, wore a deserted, sad look like the small brick building.

  Jim stopped the car in front of the building and gestured toward it.

  “On your right,” he said in the dry tone of a big-city tour-conductor, “you will observe the plant of the Harbour Pines Journal, with beyond it the handsome, commodious quarters of the publisher.”

  Shelley caught her breath and her hands were clenched so tightly in her lap that the gloves were strained above her knuckles. The little brick building had a grimy window on which the words: “Harbour Pines Journal: Job-Printing” were barely legible.

  Weeds and grass and the debris of many years neglect was piled all about it, half smothering the path to the little house. The small windows were tightly shut, but here and there a shutter was hanging loose, so that the little old house seemed to peer out of half closed lids, like a very old, very sick person who has given up all hope.

  A gaunt old apple tree or two at the back lifted greening limbs above decayed wood. In the front a young peach tree had grown riotously and its small, furry buds were beginning to show traces of pink through the tight-folded outer leaves. A few rose bushes, still valiant after years of neglect, were shaking out small, hopeful clusters of reddish leaves above the rank grass and weeds.

  There was the sting of tears in Shelley’s eyes as she looked and looked, forgetting for the moment the tall, rangy young man who sat beside her. The printing shop was smaller than she remembered it, and the little house looked so sad and so shabby. But she had been a child when she saw it last, she reminded herself. The windows of the little house had been bright and shining, and crisp ruffled curtains had blown in the spring breeze; and the garden had rioted with daffodils and hyacinths and old-fashioned shrubs such as spirea and forsythia and flowering quince. And the roses had been newly planted and vigorously blooming.

  “Still think you want to stay?”

  Jim’s voice crashed into her mood of bittersweet remembering and she had to set her teeth before she could make herself answer him.

  “Of course. Thank you very much for giving me a lift.” She started to open the car door, but Jim put out a hand and held the catch, looking at her in startled protest.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, you haven’t any crazy idea of staying here tonight?”

  “The house is furnished; they told me so in Atlanta when I bought—”

  “I suppose it is, after a fashion. But it’s been shut up for fifteen years. I hardly think you’ll find it livable,” he all but snapped at her. “I’ve been racking what I loosely call my brain for the last ten miles trying to think where you are to stay until the place can be put in order. That is, if you’re still determined to stay.”

  “I certainly am, and I’m sure I can get a room at the hotel.”

  “Pardon me while I burst into raucous laughter, my benighted young friend,” Jim’s tone was definitely acid. “There isn’t a hotel nearer than the county seat and that’s eighteen miles. And there isn’t so much as a boarding-house in Harbour Pines. So the only thing to do with you is take you home with me.”

  Shelley gasped and stared at him. “Oh, no!”

  He surveyed her, slightly acrid amusement in his dark eyes.

  “My dear girl,” he assured her loftily, as though he were beginning to be a little bored with her, “I assure you that I am merely following the ancient law of hospitality in these parts; I am not making a pass at you. I live with my spinster aunt on the other side of town in a house so big that the two of us rattle around in it. It’s the only house in miles that runs to a spare bedroom and I assure you that Aunt Selena will be delighted to have you.”

  Shelley’s teeth set down hard on her lower lip and her body was rigid. Selena! It couldn’t be, yet there couldn’t be more than one woman with that name in this little town. But her name was Selena Durand, not Hargroves!

  “Selena?” she said thinly after a long moment. “It’s an unusual name.”

  “My aunt is an unusual woman,” said Jim dryly, as though with mental reservations. “A trifle odd, perhaps; though nothing dangerous. I mean you mustn’t mind if she behaves a little—well, peculiarly. The Durands have always been laws unto themselves.”

  As though there could be no argument against his plan for her, Jim was driving on, not looking at her, and Shelley was passionately grateful for the chance to pull herself together, to regain her composure before she had to face him, to talk to him. Selena Durand! And her heart whispered, shaken, “So soon? Is it going to be this easy?” And she knew, with a little sick feeling, that it wasn’t—it couldn’t be! Not after all the bitterness, the heartbreak, the tragedy—not after fifteen years!

  She tried to still her agitation by observing the little town as they drove through it; marking the bank that was the nearest building to the Journal office; opposite it one of the “business establishments” she’d been told about and which proved to be a “mercantile business” that, judging from the display piled in its windows and in front, sold practically anything and everything necessary for the maintenance of life. There was the “New York Department Store,” small and grimly determined, with its “stylish” dresses and its stout work-clothes jumbled in a hodge-podge in its one window.

  There was very little life apparent at that hour of the afternoon. A few people lounged on the front porch of the “mercantile”; a hound dog or two was asleep in the shade; a lean, hungry-looking sow, with half a dozen pint-sized progeny scrambling and squealing at her heels, crossed the road in front of them, and Jim swerved obligingly to miss the littlest one, the “runt.”

  There was a gaunt-looking building that wore its faded sign, “Harbour Pines Naval Stores; Post-Office; Groceries; Gas and Oil,” in two sections, since the building was too narrow for it all to be on one line.

  But though Shelley was trying to calm herself by looking at the town, her mind was still in a confused jumble. To go with him into Selena Durand’s home! To be accepted there as a guest! Could she do it, without betraying herself and her precious secret? The very fact that her reason for being there was a secret, and that it must remain a secret, was her only hope of accomplishing her purpose.

  For fifteen years, she had built her plan so carefully. For even as a child of eight, she had known that some day she must come back there and do this thing. And now that the time had come, now that her plans were working out so smoothly, she was offered the “hospitality” of the one home in all the village that she had thought would be closed to her. Of course, if Jim had guessed that her real name was not Shelley Kimbrough at all—she jerked her thoughts back and reassured herself. Legally, it was Shelley Kimbrough. She had been formally and legally adopted by Aunt Jane and that gave her the right to the name.

  “I’m sorry that the prospect of being a guest in my home depresses you so terribly,” drawled Jim as they left the last tidy little house behind and once more the giant pines swallowed them up. “But you needn’t look as if you were being marched off to be han
ged.”

  “Oh, please, please,” she was honestly contrite. “I’m sorry that I’ve been so rude. I think it’s grand of you to take me in, and I appreciate it terribly; it’s only that I felt I had imposed on you so much, and all that. I do appreciate everything you’ve done—truly I do!”

  Jim took his eyes off the road long enough to look down at her and to nod curtly, before he started the car again.

  Shelley looked with keen interest as the station wagon drove on through the little town. Harbour Pines’ Main Street was a brief thoroughfare, bordered for a block or so with so-called business houses; the frame houses were tucked between and farther along. There were pigs rooting in the soft, sandy road; giant water-oaks bordered the road on each side, and long festoons of Spanish moss stirred ever so faintly in the wind. Here and there a cow moved languidly aside to let the station wagon pass. Beside the road, just barely off it, a half grown Negro boy lay sound asleep, his hands folded peacefully, a mongrel dog idly kicking at fleas between naps at his feet.

  When they had left the small village behind, Jim said dryly, “And that, Fair Lady, constitutes the town of Harbour Pines. Still think it could support a newspaper?”

  “I’m going to give it a chance to try,” said Shelley stubbornly.

  His jaw hardened a little and a moment later he turned the nose of the station wagon from the rambling sandy road down a narrow twisting lane between live-oaks and lower growing underbrush and came out at last in front of a beautiful old house with gracious, mellow lines which spoke of an almost regal stateliness before the evil shadow of decay and neglect had fallen upon it.

  It was a big house, square, solid-looking, with four tall white columns guarding the wide front gallery and steps. A lovely fan-light filled in the space above the arched front door. Windows were full-length to the porch, with green shutters. Paint was flaking from the white house and from the green shutters.

  The lawn and the garden were infested with weeds, so that they were little more than a ghost of what must have been a former glory.

  But it was obvious that to Jim the house required no explanations or apology. It was home and he probably saw it with the eyes of affection that refused to accept its signs of decay. Eyes that had watched a disintegration so gradual that he was hardly aware of it.

  He slid out of the car, swung the door open for her and said politely, “Welcome to Oaklawn, the home of the Durands and Hargroves, Miss Kimbrough. Will you come in?”

  The big front door was open, and he led the way into a square, old-fashioned reception hall, from the back of which curving stairs led upward. He put down her suitcases, and glanced through an open door on the left that was obviously, judging by its decoration, a woman’s sitting-room.

  “I’ll have to find Aunt Selena,” he said carelessly. “Make yourself at home. I won’t be long.”

  He did not see the tightening of her body at the mention of his aunt, and she was deeply grateful that he turned and went out without hearing her small, caught breath.

  She stood very still, hearing his footsteps go away down the hall. In a handful of moments now she was going to be face to face with Selena Durand, a name that had held a very special place in her thoughts for fifteen years. A name that she had heard, and that she had come to hate with all the resentment inspired by the burning injustice done her mother and her own childish, bewildered pain. The woman had played an ugly, if unseen part in the tragedy of Shelley’s childhood, a tragedy that had blighted three lives.

  She was so shaken that she was not aware of the passing of time. She could not be sure whether it was five minutes or many times that long that Jim had been gone, when at last she heard him returning. She braced herself, her hands clenching tightly as she heard the sound of other, lighter footsteps accompanying his.

  Shelley had moved instinctively so that her back was to the window, so that her expression would be somewhat hidden, when she looked on the woman beside Jim.

  She was, like the house, a ghost of what must once have been a great beauty. Tall, too thin, her graying head held high, her gaunt face composed, her dark eyes cold, she stood beside Jim in her neat flowered cotton dress, faded from too many washings, as Jim said quietly:

  “Aunt Selena, this is Shelley Kimbrough. I’ve told her we would put her up for a few days until she can get her own place cleaned and ready to occupy.”

  There was such an expression of violent protest on Selena Durand’s thin face for a moment that Shelley shrank from it almost visibly; but the next moment the expression was gone and Selena was saying thinly, “Of course. We’ll be happy to have her. But I’m afraid, Miss Kimbrough, I won’t be able to make you very comfortable. We have no servants any more and we only use a portion of the house.”

  Shelley had a wild desire to flee and managed to control it only with an almost superhuman effort.

  “It’s very kind of you, Miss Durand—” how hard it was to force that hated name from her lips—“but I do feel it’s a very grave imposition. I am sure I could easily travel by bus to and from the hotel in the county seat until my place is ready.”

  For a moment Selena looked as though she would agree to that thankfully. But Jim cut in sharply, “Nonsense, it’s all settled. You’re to stay here, of course. We’ll be delighted to have you, won’t we, Aunt Selena?”

  And as though she felt a compulsion in his voice that she dared not fight, Selena said lifelessly, “Of course. Naturally you will stay here. If you will come with me, I’ll show you your room. Supper is in an hour or so.”

  She turned to the stairs, and Shelley followed her, wanting to run the other way. If he suspected that emotion, Jim did not reveal it by so much as a glance as he followed them, with Shelley’s suitcases.

  Chapter Three

  The room was big, airy—and shabby. The furniture was old and beautiful, but it needed polishing badly, and the window curtains, though spotless and crisply starched, were old and neatly mended. The rag rugs scattered over the floor had been faded by washing. But the room was neat and clean and quite comfortable.

  When Selena and Jim had gone, and Shelley was alone, she stood very still and looked about her. She was shaking a little and she fought hard to control that trembling. Was it a good omen, or otherwise, that she had been brought so suddenly and with so little ceremony into the very home of her secret enemy? That the first person she had met there had been related to that enemy? That she was already accepted, though with obvious unwillingness, by that enemy herself?

  By the time she had freshened up in the one bathroom down the hall and changed from the gray suit to a softly tailored dinner-dress of pale blue that she told herself was quite suitable for country dining, she had herself under control. And she had warned herself that she mustn’t let herself think of the unlovely fact that although officially there as a guest, covered by the ancient law of hospitality, she was in reality a spy.

  By the time she found her way down the stairs, dusk was setting in and she hesitated at the foot of the stairs, not quite certain which way to go. The door to the small sitting room was open and soft yellow lamp-light spilled out. But the room seemed quiet and deserted.

  From down the hall beyond the stairs, in what she knew must be the service quarters, she heard the subdued murmur of voices, the faint clatter of pots and pans that told her of preparations for supper, and she was relieved that she was not going to be late. To be a tardy guest at mealtimes in a servant-less house, she knew, was one of the cardinal sins.

  And while she stood hesitantly at the foot of the stairs, Jim came in from outdoors, and looked startled at sight of her there in the yellow lamplight.

  “Oh, hello, there you are; come on in here,” he said lightly, and drew her toward the small sitting-room. “Supper’s almost ready. There’s a fire in here. Even if it is spring, these nights are a bit chilly, and Aunt Selena and I enjoy an open fire.”

  “As who doesn’t?” agreed Shelley, politely making conversation, liking the small, cheerful
room, the comfortable old furniture with its faded slipcovers of flowery chintz, the bowls of fresh flowers and the small, cheerful apple-wood fire leaping companionably beneath the old-fashioned stone mantel.

  “Miss Durand said you didn’t have any servants. Do you suppose she’d like me to help with supper?” Shelley suggested uneasily.

  Jim grinned as he offered her a chair.

  “Mam’ Cleo would have a fit and fall into it,” he assured her. “Mam’ Cleo has been here ever since she was a pickaninny two years old and her mother was cook. She must be close to seventy now, but she’s most definitely not a servant. She, Aunt Selena and I are a family, and it’s a toss-up who’s the boss—but I think Mam’ Cleo has a faint edge on the job.”

  “She sounds like quite a person,” Shelley answered. “I didn’t know that ‘old family retainers’ still existed.”

  “The race is fast dying out. That’s one reason Aunt Selena and I treasure Mam’ Cleo so fondly.”

  “I don’t suppose it would be possible for me to find a Mam’ Cleo to help get my place cleaned up, but what about a reasonable facsimile?” asked Shelley.

  Jim looked down at his cigarette for a moment and she saw a curious expression touch his mouth, before he looked up and straight at her. And now that curious expression was in his eyes.

  “I hardly think it’s likely,” he said quietly, “since the colored folk hereabouts are very superstitious. They always detour widely around any place that’s reputed to be ha’nted.”

  Shelley stared at him, startled, momentarily offended; and then suddenly she laughed with honest mirth.

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” she protested derisively. “You’ve tried every other way to make me leave Harbour Pines, surely you don’t think me childish enough to be frightened away by ghost stories!”

  “You, being a Yankee, wouldn’t understand.” Jim was unimpressed by her mirth and his eyes were still grave and steady. “But in these parts where livable quarters are so hard to find, a house that has been unoccupied, deserted for many years, where ruin and desolation have had their way, gets itself a lot of legends and rumors as time goes on. ‘Ghos’es trailing long white garments and wailing in the dark o’ the moon; and strange sounds as one passes on a midnight.’ ”