by Sara Seale
She kept out of the way for most of that afternoon, not wishing to be a witness of that first meeting between them, but even so he surprised them all together just before dinner. Astrea had been playing one of her records, so that they did not hear the car, and he walked in upon them unannounced.
“Hullo, Charity Child,” he said, having acknowledged his aunt’s preoccupied greeting, for she was busy searching for a mislaid recording, then he turned suddenly and saw Roma.
She had risen from her chair by the fire and taken a step forward, hands outstretched to him, and then stood, waiting. It had been a dull day and the light was already beginning to fade. In the mixture of dusk and firelight her lifted face was curiously arresting, and Charity, who watched with a sensation of trespass, could have sworn there were tears in her eyes. “Marc” she said softly.
He stood rigidly where he was, and the skin seemed to tighten over his angular features. Charity saw his nervous, bony hands clench for a moment at his sides before he put them in his pockets.
“Hullo, Roma—so you’ve arrived,” he said casually. She crossed the room to meet him and her hands rested lightly on his shoulders.
“Marc ... dear Marc ...” she said, and lifted her face like a child.
When he did not move she asked, with a little broken laugh:
“Aren’t you going to kiss me—for old time’s sake or are you still cross with me after seven years?”
He bent his head then and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
“I was never cross with you, Roma,” he replied coolly. “It’s a word associated with spoilt children, and you were never that.”
“You used to say I was spoilt.”
“So you were, abominably, but you were never a child. Well, let’s look at you. H’m ... the gods are still kind. You were a beautiful girl—you are now a very beautiful woman.” He spoke with calm deliberation, as though he was merely concerned with the assessment of an admired work of art, but he still kept his hands hidden in his pockets, and there was a little nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth.
Charity turned away and began to help Astrea look for the missing record, astonished at the shock to her own feelings. Not so long ago she would have welcomed the knowledge that disagreeable Marc Gentle was capable of being hurt, but now she found she could not bear to watch him. Was he still in love with Roma, she wondered, with unexpected pain, or had the sight of her beauty simply reminded him of old desires? Busy with her own thoughts, she moved a pile of records carelessly, and one fell to the floor, snapping in two.
“Really, dear child, how unutterably careless!” Astrea exclaimed, swooping on the broken record. “I thought I could trust you with these precious things. What can you have been thinking of?”
“I’m so sorry—so terribly sorry,” stammered Charity, nearly in tears. “I will replace it, of course.”
“You cannot replace it—it is one of the old Boncelli recordings, out of circulation long ago,” said Astrea, her face wearing the expression of a sorrowing tragedienne. “All your generation are ignoramuses—vandals! You care nothing for the genius of Boncelli, any more than you care for the genius of Astrea—jazz, jive, scuffle—those are your standards!”
“I think you mean skiffle, aunt,” Marc said with a certain amusement, and he took the broken pieces from Astrea’s hands and tossed them into the wastepaper basket. “Pack up the dramatics, Astrea, the child didn’t break the thing on purpose.”
Astrea was silent from sheer surprise at the gravity in his voice, and watched with interested curiosity her nephew gently brush a finger along Charity’s wet lashes.
“Don’t be upset,” he said with a sardonic little smile. “There are worse things than broken records—broken hearts, for instance.”
Roma was still standing where he had left her, smoke curling upwards from the cigarette she had just lighted. She, like Astrea, was watching, but the suddenly tense expression on her face was not one of curiosity.
“Was that intended as a warning?” she asked with a lightness that did not quite come off.
“I don’t think so,” Marc replied casually. “It was more in the nature of a statement. Cheer up, Charity Child, my aunt won’t eat you up! It might have been far more serious had you smashed an Astrea recording. Let me give you a glass of sherry.”
“I don’t—” began Charity, uncertainly.
“You don’t drink, of course! Never mind, this shall be regarded as medicinal.”
She took the wine he poured out for her because a refusal would only have added to the fuss. Whether he was paying her this attention to mask his own feelings, or merely to annoy Roma, she could not decide, but she wanted to escape as hurriedly as possible from the limelight that should have been the other girl’s. She took her sherry and sat down quietly in a corner of the room.
“Well!” Marc said. “We should all drink to the return of the prodigal, I suppose. What’s your tipple these days, Roma?”
“But we must have champagne!” cried Astrea, clapping her hands.
“Run and ask Minnie for the glasses, Charity dear, and tell her to keep back dinner. What an occasion! What a joy for Eastertide! Hurry, dear child—tell Minnie to pick the right vintage.”
“I think,” said her nephew with a quizzical lift of one eyebrow, “I had better do the selecting myself,” and he followed Charity out of the room.
Roma sat down with idle grace and, throwing her cigarette into the fire, lighted another.
“Is he giving your companion a little whirl?” she enquired lazily.
Astrea jingled her charms.
“A whirl? I do not understand your American jargon, dear child. What do you think of Marc, after all this time?”
Roma shrugged.
“What should I think, dear Astrea? He wasn’t exactly enthusiastic with his welcome. Has this girl lost her silly little heart to him?”
“Now that,” said Astrea, with easy invitation, “is something you could very well find out for me. They were not simpatico at the beginning, but emotions can change, can they not?”
“Are you at your little schemes again, honey? I’ll have to warn you that I’ll spike them.”
“I don’t know what you mean, dear child, and I wish you would not call me ‘honey.’ Have you no faith in yourself, Roma? Do you not know that you and someone like that little girl of mine are poles apart?”
“I would imagine so,” said Roma with amusement. “But the question is—which pole will Marc prefer?”
“Does it matter?” said Astrea, dismissing the question with her customary vagueness.
“Yes, I think it does,” said Roma, lighting another cigarette.
Outside in the hall, Marc had stopped Charity on her way to the kitchen.
“Why are you upset?” he asked. “Because you broke one of my aunt’s records?”
“Well, naturally! I know those old recordings can’t be replaced.”
“I don’t think that was the only reason. Roma’s return worries you, doesn’t it?”
She was too honest or, perhaps, too inexperienced to evade that question.
“It’s not my place to be concerned with Astrea’s visitors,” she replied a little primly. “But I don’t think Mrs. Nixon likes me.”
His face, in the dim light of the hall, had its old look of mockery.
“How correct you are, Charity Child,” he said. “But you should grow out of that idea that strangers don’t take to you. Look at me!”
She took him literally and looked, her wide eyes grave and a little troubled, and he suddenly ran a careless hand over her smooth dark head.
“Absurd child, aren’t you?” he said.
“I’m not a child,” she told him gravely, and he gave an impatient little sigh.
“No, I suppose not,” he said. “Well, we’d better see about that champagne. Does Easter mean something to you, Charity?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, her face lighting up. “My father always said it meant more t
han Christmas—Resurrection, hope, the beginning of a new life.”
He gave her a curious look.
“Yes ... well ...” he said, and his mouth softened into a half-bitter expression of tenderness. “I doubt if the rest of the household feels quite that way. Run along and fetch those glasses. Minnie won’t be best pleased at her dinner being kept waiting.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Easter morning broke fresh and sparkling, the very epitome of the spring of the year. Charity had filled the house with catkin and pussy willow and great bowls of daffodils which had just blossomed in the garden. She slipped quietly out of the house to church before Astrea or Roma were awake and, to her surprise, Marc accompanied her.
They walked through the fields in the early morning sunshine, and the bells from the village church pealed a greeting to the day.
“I didn’t think you’d want to go to church,” Charity said.
“Didn’t you, Charity? Perhaps your father’s definition of Easter inspire me. Do you remember Housman?
‘In summer time on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear...’ ”
“But that was so sad,” she said. “They wouldn’t listen until his love rose up so early and went to church alone.”
“ ‘They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see …’
“For heaven’s sake, we’re getting morbid, and Housman is outdated now, so I’m told. Did you know, Charity, that it’s supposed to be a sinister sign when two people start quoting verse to one another?”
“No,” she replied innocently, pausing to pick colts’-foot from the bank. “People, I’ve found, don’t care much for poetry any more. Does Roma?”
“Roma?” He frowned, obviously disliking the introduction of personalities. “Roma never had taste for verse,” he said, with a certain hardness. “I just try myself out on you, my dear. Didn’t you now that all poetry lovers like to quote to an admiring audience? It’s a form of conceit.”
“Is it?” said Charity, swinging her long legs over a stile with ingenuous disregard for the briefness of her skirt.
“Perhaps—perhaps not,” he answered ambiguously. “What long legs you have, grandmother!”
“All the better to race you with, my dear!” she retorted promptly, and started to run, but he soon caught up with her.
“This is not the proper spirit in which to attend a service,” he rebuked her severely, but she laughed and was happy again. She must, she thought, remember not to mention Roma unless he did himself.
At the little lych-gate which led to the church he took the colt’s-foot from her and placed it in his buttonhole.
“It doesn’t look at all right,” she protested doubtfully, but he only grinned and shepherded her firmly into the church.
When the service was over they stayed to speak to the Rector, who lamented the absence of Madame Astrea. In Cleat, at least, Astrea was not forgotten. She seldom interested herself in village affairs, but for all that she was their one prized celebrity.
“What a pity she won’t go out more,” Charity said with genuine regret as they walked through the sunny churchyard. “She could enjoy her fame in the village.”
“When you’ve enjoyed fame in the capitals of Europe the small puddle of a Sussex village is hardly sufficient,” observed Mark dryly.
“No, I suppose not.”
They walked home the way they had come, through grass still soaked with dew, and up the steep incline of Cleat Hill. They reached the crest of the hill to see a cherry tree in full flower sketched in delicate beauty against the sky.
“And this, of course, I can’t resist,” said Marc as they stopped to admire, and he began to quote:
“‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the Woodland ride,
Wearing White for Eastertide ...’
“What a genuine countryman Housman was!”
“You a special fondness for him I think” Charity said. “And yet I would never really associate you with country things.”
“Wouldn’t you, Charity Child? But I wasn’t always a street sparrow like you. When my mother was alive we lived in country much like this. We even had our own cherry tree in the garden.”
“Did you?” She glanced at him quickly, seeing the fleeting nostalgia in his face, and remembered that he had loved and missed his mother.
“Was your childhood spent in the country?” she asked gently.
“Yes,” he said, and she sighed.
“How I envy you. My father was a countryman, too, but our life was spent in towns, trying to make a living from is music—teaching the piano, playing in cafe orchestras—anything that gave him time to compose the stuff he never could sell.”
He glanced at her profile as she swung along beside him, seeing again the melancholy look of Pierrot, the plaintive brows, the air of lost forlornness.
“Don’t regret it,” he told her with gentleness. “Your father must have given you all you would have found for yourself, and more, for I think he gave you appreciation—and values.”
“Values?”
“Yes. For a young girl just turned twenty, you have, I should imagine, remarkable values.”
It was a strange conversation and, for Charity, was accompanied by the odd sensation that he was no stranger, that walking to church and back on Easter Day had forged a slender bond between them.
But once back at Cleat House the illusion vanished. Astrea and Roma were both breakfasting downstairs in varying stages of undress, and Roma twitted Marc with charming impudence for going to church. The atmosphere became, all at once, slightly artificial, and Charity, although she tried to share Astrea’s exaggerated delight in the colored eggs which Minnie had dyed for them, felt foolish and insincere.
“Such a glorious day!” Roma exclaimed, stretching her bare, firmly rounded arms above her head. “Will you take me to the sea, Marc?”
“Not over the holiday,” he retorted, slicing the top off a scarlet egg with a deft twist of the wrist. “All main roads to Brighton will be hell on earth with the Easter coastal traffic.”
“What can we do, then?” she said plaintively. “I seem to remember of old the deadly inertia of a British Sunday.”
“You’re used to the exhausting hustle of the States, my dear. In England we still like to think the sabbath a day of rest,” Marc replied with a grin. However he had reacted last night to Roma’s arrival, he seemed to have himself well in hand now, Charity thought, taking a guilty pleasure in the fact that Roma’s careful toilet seemed to be making little impression.
“You will, dear child, have to accustom yourself again to the quiet of Cleat if you want to stay,” Astrea chimed in with unexpected asperity, and Marc smiled.
“I daresay Roma has other, more exciting plans,” he observed. “When she’s paid you her little courtesy visit, Astrea, she’ll be off to the bright lights and the pursuits of the idle rich.”
“But she is no longer a rich woman, dear boy,” said Astrea, remembering, with satisfaction, that her nephew had not yet learnt that piece of news.
His eyebrows went up.
“The dollars not so numerous as was at first supposed?” he said with a touch of irony.
“The dollars were very numerous,” said Roma, with her husky drawl. “Wilbur saw fit to leave me nothing, that’s all.”
Marc pushed back his plate and wiped his mouth with deliberation.
“I see,” he said then, and his eyes, resting on Roma with an attention that was now undivided, were shrewd and alert and rather hard. “Didn’t you have lawyers to advise you?”
She shrugged her shapely shoulders and her smile was a little bitter.
“Your legal mind reacting first, as always,” she said. “No, I didn’t have lawyers. It didn’t occur to me that my husband would change his will. When he was dead it was too late. Oh, I got me an attorney then, double quick, but he couldn’t do anythi
ng. Wilbur had tied everything, nice and tight, and his folks had never liked me.”
“How American you’ve become,” said Marc absently, then he leaned forward, quizzing her as if she was in the witness-box.
“Does that mean that you have nothing—that you’re in precisely the same position as you were seven years ago?” he asked.
There was a hint of humility, or was it invitation, in her eyes before she lowered her heavy lids and answered softly:
“Yes, Marc.”
“I see,” he said again.
“Does it make a difference?”
“To me? Perhaps—perhaps not.”
The sound Charity’s spoon made as she drove it through her empty egg-shell seemed like a pistol shot in the small silence.
“Really, dear child!” exclaimed Astrea, annoyed by the interruption of such a promising little drama. “Must you behave so uncouthly.”
“It’s an old superstition. It—it lets the witches out,” Charity excused herself, knowing how irrelevant and absurd the remark must sound. Only Marc threw her an involuntary smile; Roma frowned impatiently, and Astrea said with pardonable irritation.
“Witches in eggs! What on earth are you talking about?”
Charity tactfully refrained from making any answer, and Roma held out her hand to Marc across the table, turning it palm upward in a small gesture of supplication.
“You’d like to say I got my deserts, wouldn’t you, Marc?” she said softly. “I treated you badly—and Astrea, too. Now I’m paid back in my own coin.”