by Sara Seale
"Is that so strange?"
"In Pendragon it is. I thought he was like me. Have another?"
Alice hardly realized that Trelawny Was ordering a fresh round of drinks until they were brought. For the first time she was beginning to see the girl in the right perspective, violent, egotistical, certainly, but not wantonly malicious; merely lacking in heart and imagination.
"I don't believe you really mind that you've lost him," she said slowly, and Trelawny gave her a wry little smile.
"Oh, I mind all right, but not for your reasons," she replied dryly. "I took a gamble which didn't come off, but I'm still heartwhole, and I never was one to cry over spilt milk. Better take a leaf out of my book, my dear, if things don't work out right for you. There are other fish in the sea."
"Emma says you'll probably marry Merryn. Is that true?"
"Perhaps."
"But you've always laughed at him and said he was dull."
"He improves on closer acquaintance," Trelawny drawled, stretching like a cat. "Merryn's grown up a lot— and there's my old home across the moor needing a master, since it's clear I'll never be mistress of Polrame. Don't look so shocked, Alice—the world was never well lost for love!"
She would as soon have gone back in the bus, but Trelawny obviously took it for granted that she would be glad of a lift. The car was an open sports not unlike Keverne's, and as they approached the familiar winding road across the moor, Alice was reminded of that other drive when the girl had gone to such trouble to assert her claim to Pendragon. The thought had evidently crossed Trelawny's mind, for she grinned and shouted above the noise of the engine:
"I might have saved you the painful walk home with no shoes, after all."
She offered no further comment after that and settled down to the intense pleasure which she seemed to get from driving fast, but when she stopped the car at the gates of Polrames she turned in her seat and said:
"Would you like me to put things right with Pendragon? I don't mind doing that for you."
"No, thank you," Alice replied politely and Trelawny shrugged and restarted her engine.
"You'll never be my cup of tea, Alice, but I will say you've got something. So long!" she said, and reversed the car and shot off down the road with her usual careless dash.
The front door stood open, letting in the evening sun, and the house seemed very quiet. Alice dropped her parcels on one of the chests in the hall and paused to return Buckie's greeting before going to find Doone. Bryn, the brindle dog, moved his tail politely but, as usual, turned his head away when she offered to pat him and she exclaimed in chagrin:
"You are a most standoffish animal, you snooty creature! You're like your master!"
"To be truthful, it's you who's been the standoffish one of late, Alice," said Pendragon's voice from the doorway of his study, and she jumped guiltily. The household seemed so silent that she had imagined the men could not yet have returned.
"I must learn not to talk aloud to myself," she said with annoyance and he grinned unkindly.
"It can be a bad habit upon occasion—still, you were addressing Bryn in this instance. What have you done to your hair?"
She had tied her hair up in a pony-tail because the day was warm and she touched it uncertainly, feeling she must look slightly ridiculous.
"It's getting so long," she said apologetically. "I'll do it properly before supper."
"Don't bother, there will only be you and me—besides, it's rather charming," he said, and smiled a little grimly as he saw her green eyes widen with dismay.
"Where are the others?" she asked. She had never before had to dine in solitary state with Pendragon.
"Keverne and Emma have gone into Truro to the shipping agency and are making an evening of it, and Doone wanted to go with them," he said.
"Doone!"
"Why not? She's quite strong enough now for an occasional jaunt, it will do her good."
"Yes, I suppose so. And isn't Merryn here, either?" "No."
"Then I must go and see to the baby. Did Emma leave instructions? Has he been fed and—and everything?"
"And everything, as you put it, will cover the lot. Don't fuss, Alice. Mrs. Biddle is baby-sitting so I'm afarid you're stuck with me. Come in here."
She followed him into his study, remembering that other occasion when he had given her a dressing-down for upsetting Doone and refused to allow her to leave until her month was up. Was he, she wondered, planning another such reckoning, ending this time by sending her away?
"You must have a guilty conscience, Alice," he observed, his eyes resting with amusement on her transparent face. "Does smoke still come out of my nostrils?"
"Sometimes," she replied warily.
He turned to the tray of drinks which stood on his desk and poured her out a glass of sherry.
"Well," he said at last. "Shall we let bygones be bygones and call a truce?"
"I haven't quarrelled with you, Pendragon," she said quietly.
"No, but you've kept out of my way."
"That was only natural. No one cares to be judged without a hearing."
"And do you feel I judged you without a hearing? I seem to remember that you refused both denials and excuses."
Her chin went up.
"Why should I make excuses to you—or denials, either?" she demanded. "You couldn't have cared."
"No? I told you at the time, my dear, that you didn't know me very well," he said and his eyes, though grave, had lost their coldness.
"Perhaps nobody knows much about anybody else," she said unhappily, and knew that if he would, only for a moment, show doubt in his own judgment, or confess that he had cared a little, she could have thrown her own foolish pride to the winds and admitted her love for him.
"That's probably true. You're very young, aren't you?"
Yes, she was young, too young, perhaps, to understand the complexities and jealousies which had come late to a mature man. She only knew that she loved him and that unless he could help her, she could never bring herself to lay her first emotion at his feet.
"Well," he said impatiently, drinking the last of his sherry. "As I said just now, can't we let bygones be bygones? There are going to be changes at Polrame and the past is past and best done with, but when Emma goes there will have to be fresh plans."
"They really are going, then?" she said. It seemed difficult to imagine the house without Emma and the baby.
"Oh, yes—probably quite soon. And you, Alice—are you prepared to take her place?"
"What do you mean?" She looked up at him, startled out of her own thoughts. For a moment she saw herself in Emma's shoes, housekeeper, mistress in all but name of Polrame.
"No!" she cried in violent repudiation, and saw his slanting eyebrows lift.
"Dear me!" he said mildly. "I was only asking if you were prepared to stop on—for Doone's sake, of course— without another woman in the house."
She stared back at him and immediately felt foolish, but it seemed clear, now, that with the prospect of Emma going, the fact that he must have some woman in the house was uppermost in his mind. She looked at him subjectively, seeing the half-healed scar on his temple that, like the dog bite, he would bear all his life, and wondered what the future would hold for him, along in this big house with only a little girl for company.
"It would not," she said, clinging to Aunt Brown's half-forgotten edicts of propriety, "be proper for me to stay here unchaperoned."
The lines about his mouth tightened.
"Then you had better marry me," he said calmly.
She stared back at him dumbly. Of anything she had expected him to say it was certainly not this. A sense of outrage began to rise in her and she took the second glass of sherry he handed her, hardly knowing she did so.
His face softened to tenderness as he watched her. She was so sweet sitting there, stiff and straight in her pink cotton frock with that ridiculous pony-tail sticking out from the pack of her head and tickling the childish nape of
her neck. Couldn't she know that what he had put up between them was just a facade, the last barrier between himself and his new-found desires?
She put the glass of sherry, untasted, carefully on the desk and got to her feet.
"I wouldn't care," she said very clearly and distinctly, "to be married for convenience. You can get housekeepers by the dozen, Pendragon. . . . There's no need to marry any of them."
"But it's you I'm asking," he replied, still postponing the moment when he should take her in his arms and pull the ribbon off that absurd pony-tail.
"Then I must refuse—if you were really serious," she said gravely. "I will stay on for as long as you want me, Pendragon, but only as Alice Brown."
The moment of tenderness left him and it was with difficulty then that he restrained himself from shaking her. How dared she, when he was willing to forget the hurt she had already done him, stand there in judgment and find him wanting?
"Very well," he said, his voice harsh and bitter once more. "Forget the whole thing. It will be time enough, later, to reorganize this house. In the meantime, I shall be grateful if you will remain with Doone. She has a very great affection for you."
"Then you weren't serious?" she faltered, feeling that in some way she had transgressed.
"Most probably not," he replied coolly. "If you want to tidy before supper, you'd better do so. Cold food has been left in the day-room for us, I believe."
To Alice it was a nightmare meal designed especially to humiliate her. She sat opposite to Pendragon and tried to make polite conversation, but he gave her no help. He seemed withdrawn and chilly, and afforded her the small
courtesies of host with absent inattention. The meal, she thought, was as irksome to him as it was to her and she was thankful when it came to an end.
"I'll help you clear," he said as, in Emma's absence, she began stacking the plates, and only insisted rather grimly when she assured him she could manage alone.
They marched backwards and forwards with trays in silence and Alice felt near to tears. It could have been fun, in different circumstances, she thought, and remembered the night when the strike had started and how at the end of that long evening when she had borne him company at his own request, he had taken her in his arms in the darkness of the kitchen and she had thought he needed her.
Pendragon's voice spoke suddenly from the shadows. "Don't wait up unless you want to," he said. "I've got work to do, and Emma will see Doone into bed." "Very well."
He hesitated a moment. It had not been worth lighting the lamp and the big kitchen was now full of shadows.
"I'm sorry you've had a dull evening," he said with rather stiff formality. "I'm afraid I haven't been very good company."
She began snatching the neatly folded tea-cloths from the fire guard, and refolding them again so that her back would be towards him.
"Mightn't it be better if I didn't stay till the end of the summer, Pendragon?" she asked. Would he not remember, too, the sweet intimacy that the kitchen could invite and unbend from his chieftain mood? But he answered, sounding both impatient and irritable:
"I can't have this perpetual shilly-shallying. We've had this argument at intervals over the past four months. I thought it had been settled."
"But things have happened since then."
"Not things that need make any difference to you for the moment," he said with what seemed like intentional cruelty. "Let's hear no more about it, please, Alice. I won't bother you from now on, if that's what's worrying you."
"Bother me!"
"That's what you're afraid of, isn't it?" he said, but
when she turned swiftly in hot denial he had gone, and she could hear his rapid, impatient footsteps echoing down the flagged passage.
III
It seemed to Alice, able at last to luxuriate in tears in the safety of her own room, that there could be only one thing left to her. Before, while the state of her own heart was only a half-discovered secret, she could endure the day-today bitter-sweet relationship with Pendragon, knowing that for him she was never a woman, but too many things had been brought into the open and twisted to make it possible for her to remain. She could not live with the icy politeness which she knew was all that he would afford her in the future, being a little sorry, perhaps, that she had lost her head over him, willing, even, to renew his offer of marriage because Emma was going and it might suit his convenience.
This time she would really run away. With the men back at the mine and Emma busy in the nursery it would be easy to slip out of the house and catch a bus into St. Mewan. She had saved her salary for weeks since there was nothing to spend it on and it would keep her in reasonable comfort until she found another job. It would not be possible to get her trunk out of the house and on to the bus, but when she had a settled address she would send for her clothes. It all seemed very simple.
When she was ready for bed she wandered about the room in her nightdress, touching the things which had become so familiar to her; the carved armoires which she had once thought so gloomy, the dragons on the maded tapestry, and last of all she traced out the motto in Welsh which she had never been able to pronounce, remembering only that it meant I take, O hold. . . . She was so tired that she stumbled on the three steps leading to the high, curtained bed, but the sharp knock her shins received shocked her out of sentimentality. Before she went to sleep she must write her note to Pendragon, for she could not leave his house without the courtesy of some explanation, however vague, but when she had reached for pen and paper, her thoughts seemed as confused as the pattern in
the tapestry. Dear Dragon . . . she wrote and, because it was nearly midnight and the oil in her lamp had almost burnt out, she wrote hastily the first things that came into her head and had no time to read the letter over before the light went out. . . .
Doone was the first to discover her absence in the morning. The child had been left to sleep on after her unaccustomed late night and it was not until lunch time that she began looking for Alice.
"Don't fuss!" exclaimed Emma impatiently, harried by the endless questions. "She's probably gone for a walk as you were asleep most of the morning. She'll be back for lunch."
But when luncheon was over and cleared away, she began to feel uneasy. It crossed her mind that the solitary evening spent with Pendragon might not have ended happily and Alice was keeping out of the way, but Doone's childish fears began to worry her.
"I know she's fallen over the cliffs, I know she has;" the child insisted. "Alice would never stay out all day without telling us. Emma, do something!"
"What do you expect me to do, my dear child? We can't search the moor."
"We can go along the headland and call. That's her favorite walk."
To pacify Doone, Emma accompanied her along the cliffs, both of them calling at intervals, but only the screaming gulls answered, and by the time they returned to the house, Doone was in tears.
"Something awful's happened—you must ring up Pendragon — you must!" she sobbed.
"Oh, really, Doone, I can't fetch him back from the mine on a wild goose chase," Emma protested, but it was now nearly five o'clock and she was definitely beginning to feel uneasy.
"Very well," she said at last, "I'll ring him, but don't blame me if he's annoyed at being disturbed. If it hadn't been for the strike they would none of them be working on a Saturday afternoon."
Whether Pendragon was annoyed or not, Emma did not gather on the telephone, but she was surprised to see his car turn into the drive only twenty minutes later.
"I'm sorry," she apologized. "I didn't mean to get you home. We just wanted some advice. Poor Doone's convinced that Alice must have fallen over the cliffs."
"Have you looked in her room?" he snapped, and she became aware of the tension in his face and the livid way the fresh scar stood out against his dark skin.
"Of course we've looked in her room," she said.
"Has her luggage gone?"
"Her luggage? No, I don't think so.
Was she leaving? You—you didn't have words last night and give her notice, did you, Pendragon?"
"No. On the other hand-Go and look again, will
you, Emma?"
He waited, pacing up and down the hall while she went upstairs, and took no notice of Doone's tearful entreaties. Emma came down again, looking anxious.
"All her clothes are there, but her brushes and toilet things have gone, and the little over-night case that she came with," she said. "Pendragon, you don't think-"
"That she's run away? Yes, I think it's highly probable. What a damn fool I was! What a blithering, self-opinionated numbskull!"
"What happened last night?" she asked gently.
He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes.
"I asked her to marry me."
"Did you, Pendragon? I should hardly have thought it a reason for running away."
"The way I put things was enough to scare anyone off," he said grimly. "Poor child . . . she didn't know what I was getting at half the evening."
"But Alice loves you, Pendragon," cried Doone, her eyes like saucers. "She made me promise not to tell because you didn't love her. Do you love her, Pendragon?"
"Be quiet, Doone," said Emma sharply, but Keir answered gently:
"Yes. I love her very much, Doone. We'll get her back —don't worry—and this time she'll stay."
"Will she have gone to London, do you suppose?" Emma asked, following him into his study.
"I imagine so."
"Then she can't have got far," Emma replied tranquilly. "There are no through trains after midday on Saturdays
and she was still eating her breakfast at ten o'clock. There wasn't a bus before a quarter to twelve."
"By heaven, you're right!" he exclaimed, and suddenly saw Alice's letter propped against the clock on the mantelpiece.
Emma watched him while he read it, but after a time, she turned her eyes away. It was like looking over his shoulder, and spying, to watch the expression on Pendragon's face.