The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  A small bridge of flint-cobbles arched over the widening depths of the stream, and Lygia gave her arm to Mrs. Chase as they climbed down through the purple loosestrife and the spiderwort and slowly walked across the bridge and in under the shade of some tall cedars. Here, beyond the cedars, lay Mrs. Chase's own special joy, a herb garden.

  Lygia was so fascinated by the many strange herbs, the fennel and the basil and the water-avons, that she quite forgot to be shy of Mrs. Chase's probing black eyes and occasionally sharp tongue, as she eagerly questioned the old lady as to the uses to which the herbs could be put.

  "When I smell a lemon scent," said Mrs. Chase, folding her dark hands in front of her and fingering the big ruby on her left hand, "I'm reminded of pancakes in the big nursery at Chase and the way Robert's father loved them. He was my favourite son, you know. There always is a favourite—a projection, one hopes, of one's self. Yet, he didn't grow into a good man—he disappointed me in many ways." Lygia heard her sigh. "Yes, in many ways."

  And then, before she could stop the words, before she had wisely considered them, Lygia blurted: "D-does Robert disappoint you, Mrs. Chase?"

  "Robert?" Mrs. Chase's eyes glittered under their wrinkled lids. "Why should you ask me that about Robert?"

  Lygia, deeply embarrassed now and wildly shredding mint leaves, looked away from Mrs. Chase's sharply questioning eyes. "Well—you seem to forgive him all that he does as one forgives a loved child who is also a—a bad child," she explained stumblingly.

  "With resignation, eh?" Mrs. Chase actually laughed. "Um, you're rather a perspicacious child, aren't you?"

  "Am I?" Lygia searched the old lady's face for mockery, but there was only a strange, half-weary look where there had been a smile a moment ago. She wasn't surprised when Mrs. Chase said: "Come, let us go back, it will soon be time for lunch."

  They took a different route back to the house, passing among more formal flower beds, interspersed by well-trimmed yew hedges. An old bent gnome of a man was attending to a magnificent bed of dahlias, and Mrs. Chase paused beside him and told him to cut a mixed bunch of the lovely things. As she pointed out the colours she wanted, the ruby on her hand gleamed sombrely. "You've excelled yourself this year, Tanner," she complimented the old man. "I particularly like that ivory bloom with the green centre."

  "Aye, they be pretty enough, missus," he replied, as he carefully cut the stems of the flowers, "but the beetle is on 'em. That be the pity of the dahlia."

  Mrs. Chase took the dahlias from him and thrust them into Lygia's arms. "You don't mind a few beetles, do you?" she grunted. "You're not one of these namby-pamby misses—are you?"

  Lygia smiled slightly and shook her head as she fingered the big spiky heads of the flowers.

  Then, somewhat unexpectedly, Mrs. Chase turned to the gardener and said to him: "Tanner, this is the young lady you've probably heard all about in the kitchen."

  His tiny, shrewd eyes, set way back in the brown, wrinkled, gnomish face, studied Lygia. "Mazed, like they said she were, missus. Well, as I sees it," and now there was a flicker that might have been a smile in those tiny eyes, "some folks 'ave got to lose their way like, afore they find it."

  "Old Tanner was gardener's boy here when I came to Chase as a bride," Mrs. Chase told Lygia, as they made their way into the house. "He's one of the last old friends I've got left. I've grown so old, child, I've left nearly everyone else behind—ah, David!" She had spotted the lugubrious butler, and she called him across the hall to her. "David, I want you to bring some vases to the library," she informed him. "That wretched room gets more like a Pall Mall smoking-den every day, and I'm going to liven it up with a few flowers. Bring the bog-oak vases; they'll look rather dashing with these dahlias, I think."

  "Yes, madam." He cast a brief but significant glance at the flowers in Lygia's arms, and his thin nostrils twitched with disgust. He went away with a set face, and Mrs. Chase's eyes were both knowing and wicked as they followed him. "David doesn't approve of our plan, child," she said, rustling into the library in her long black frock, and then turning to frown impatiently at Lygia as she stood shifting the flowers uneasily in her arms, almost as though she debated the advisability of dashing both the beetles and the dahlias back into the garden.

  "Oh, come in, do!" Mrs. Chase rapped out. "And don't be afraid of the servants — nothing pleases the jumped-up creatures more!" Then, as Lygia joined her in the room, she said: "Robert thinks you might be somebody's maid or companion. Are you?"

  Mrs. Chase had been so unexpectedly friendly up to now that this sudden switch back to suspicion was like the sudden unearthed pain of a slap round the face. Lygia's eye lashes sank downwards, throwing her eyes into shadow. "I—I don't know, Mrs. Chase. But I do know that I don't want to go on staying here if I'm under s-suspicion. I'd prefer to go to a hospital."

  "But Avery prefers you to stay here!" The old lady chuckled a little to herself and her eyes ran like spiders over Lygia's thin, hungry-looking face, drained of all colour by those immense violet eyes, and when she spoke again she was fixedly watching Lygia's left hand, thin and hungry-looking as her face against the bright, spiky heads of the dahlias. "You're not a good-looking child," she said, with a rather malicious frankness, "but men do have odd fancies, I know. Do you like Avery?"

  "Yes," Lygia replied simply. "He's so naturally kind."

  "Pish!" the old lady exclaimed. "Pish, young woman! No male in possession of his full allotment of faculties was ever 'naturally' kind to a female. When he is kind, it's because he has the hope in mind that she'll eventually be 'kind' to him. Oh, yes," Mrs. Chase looked sardonic as Lygia's eyes widened with protest, "this even applies to Avery, for all that he looks like a pipe-smoking Sir Galahad."

  But Lygia, remembering him in the car coming back from Brinsham yesterday, so brotherly and kind, could not associate him even distantly with his grandmother's insinuation.

  In any case, as Mrs. Chase said, she was not good-looking—she had no glamour—beside Gerda Maitland she must look rather like a scruffy sparrow beside a lovely canary.

  The rest of that Saturday was without event, though in the evening, very much to the fastidious Gerda's discomfiture, Mrs. Chase espied a toad upon the terrace and reiterated that it would rain before very long. Sure enough she was right and it rained all night, but by Sunday morning the rain had stopped and Avery bustled Lygia into a raincoat they found hanging in the hall-closet and, with a little smile on his mouth, he told her that he was taking her for a stroll through the Devonshire lanes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Foxglove bells hung wet and clean along the banks of the lanes and the bright yellow of sneeze-weed took away some of the greyness of the morning. Lygia walked along beside Avery in the puddles, listening with interest as he talked about Chase and the park, through which these lanes wound, allowing the public access to the main highway.

  Then all at once, with the naturalness of people who are in pleasant accord with the moment and with one another, they had got around to discussing more personal matters. Why, Lygia asked him, had he given up his practice in London?

  "Because I'm interested in a disease which can't be cured, as are many others, just by being diagnosed," he replied. "That disease is rheumatism."

  "Rheumatism?"

  He nodded. Many of his former patients, he ex-pained, had suffered badly from this painful disease and the available treatments, consisting of various medicines, ointments and diets, produced a relief which was all too brief. In consequence of this he was now devoting himself to a detailed study of rheumatism, and he eventually hoped to manufacture a drug which would provide a much more lasting alleviation of pain than any of the existing drugs and treatments seemed able to manage.

  "I think it's a perfectly splendid thing for you to want to do!" Lygia exclaimed. "And it proves that I—I was right about you."

  "Right about me?"

  "Yes! You are naturally kind." She climbed a stile and then grinned like an elf when he n
oticed her wet shoes and scolded her for walking in the puddles. "That's the very way to get rheumatism, you little devil!" he said, jumping her down off the style… right into high wet grass. As the drops splashed the long skirts of her raincoat, she laughed unrestrainedly. "Oh, I love all this water!" she sang out. "I'm probably a reincarnated duck. Yes, that's my secret, I'm a reincarnated duck."

  She went running ahead of Avery, her shorn hair black as a blackbird's wing, the sleeves of her raincoat flapping down over her hands. Avery thought that she was like a small scarecrow suddenly touched to animation. He laughed softly to himself, and his strides lengthened as he followed her through the wet grass.

  When he reached the other side of the field, Lygia was standing by a little lych gate and listening to the tumbling bells of a church nearby. "Isn't that a lovely sound, Dr. Chase?" she murmured, and as the scents out of the hedges and the fields stole to her nostrils, she suddenly knew that all this was very new to her. Never before had she walked along a Devonshire lane on a Sunday morning and heard the peaceful chime of church bells over autumnal fields. Nor were the elegant luxuries of Chase known to her in that life she could not remember.

  "You know," she said, in a low, tremulous voice, "I can't go on battening on your kindness, Dr. Chase."

  "My name is Avery." He half smiled and touched a finger to her tremulous bottom lip. "Kindness, you know, is the sunshine in which virtue grows—perhaps I'm seeking virtue."

  "You have loads of virtue!" she exclaimed warmly. "It has never occurred to you to think that I might be p-playing a sort of game. Your cousin things I am! He thinks I'm out to get all I can from you — and it isn't true!"

  "I know it isn't true—and forget Robert!" He helped her over the lych gate and they turned their steps back towards Chase. "Right now, I imagine, he's wrestling with odd bits and pieces of furniture, strange Picassos, Continental novels, and my secretary. She said she was going along to help him get straight, but lord knows whether he invited her or not."

  "He seems to like her, doesn't he?" Lygia said, remembering Robert's dark eyes upon Gerda's white shoulders on Friday evening; the way the two of them had played revue duets on the drawing-room piano. "She's very lovely. W-when I'm in a room with her, I feel a terrible ugly duckling—with my raggle-taggle hair!" Lygia pulled small, quick hands through her hair and made it stand on end. Avery, glancing down at her, burst out laughing.

  "Little ugly duckling, promise me you'll never turn into a swan," he begged.

  She smiled, diffidently. A swan! she thought, and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her long raincoat and kicked at a puddle. The drops scattered bright in a sudden shaft of sunshine, and it was then that she thought of what Avery's grandmother had insinuated—yesterday. Her fey, violet eyes found his face… and her heart gave a bump as he said: "You're not ugly, my dear. You have the prettiest eyes I've ever seen in my life."

  In the week that followed, autumn came richly to Chase, with a knee-high haze over the park first thing of a morning, the noisy chattering of starlings as they began to wing their way back from their foreign journeyings, and a vivid russet flush to the scarves of lichen draping the walls of the Chase House towers.

  It was Friday, and all afternoon Lygia had been in the garden sweeping up leaves for Tanner. Now, as dusk began to fall, she put away the garden broom and the rake in old Tanner's shed. "I'm going in now, Mr. Tanner," she said to him, and as she spoke she cast an appreciative eye over her cleared paths. "I think I've made things look a bit neater, don't you?"

  "You'm worked like a regular toga, missie," he agreed, rubbing grease along the blades of a big pair of hedge shears with a thumb as brown and gnarled as a walnut.

  "You mean a Trojan, Mr. Tanner," she laughed, brushing the tumbled black hair from her eyes.

  "Aye, well, I bain't edicated in your manner," he replied, in no way put out by her youthful correction, according her the respect which the other Chase servants contemptuously withheld. Tanner accepted her in the garden of the big house as he would have accepted the sudden upspringing of a new and harmless little shoot. He 'cultivated' her and yarned to her by the hour, and from him she learned quite a bit of Devon lore—and several interesting facts about the Chases.

  She learned, for instance, that Avery's grandmother had been a Chase before her marriage. She had married a cousin.

  "Cos, missie," old Tanner said, " 'twas the way things was arranged in them days. It kept the cash and the breeding in the family. I don't know whether she were all that happy, though, for 'twas said she wanted to go her own way. But there was a lot of love of house 'n property in all the Chases in them days. It ain't in 'em so much now. The doctor ain't a man to care much about things he can't see through that there microscope of his. And Mister Robert—well, there's no get-tin' to the bottom of him. Every garden's got its weeds," Tanner had added darkly, wiping away Lygia's slight smile at his 'microscope', "and there's some 'as got their roots too deep down for digging out. Sprung from out o' the devil's herb-pot, they are!"

  "Mrs. Chase seems very fond of him," Lygia had remarked.

  "Aye, well, love in the breast is oft-times spurs in the sides! She knows him, missie, never you fear."

  Lygia recalled that conversation as she stood now, watching Tanner's gnarled thumb run along the edge of the shears he held, and she wondered a little about love. Spurs in the sides! Was that love?

  "Well, goodnight, Mr. Tanner," she said suddenly, and she ran between the arcaded yew hedges, back towards the house.

  Rooks were flying low over the lichen-hung towers and the westering sun was flickering red in the many windows of the house as Lygia leapt up the steps of the long terrace and made for the glass doors of the drawing-room. Then, as she would have opened the blue curtains and walked into the room, the fragrance of coffee and the acridity of a certain type of cigarette made her pull up short.

  She drew back from the curtains — and jumped sharply as Gerda Maitland's voice said behind her: "What's the matter with you, Lygia? What are you up to? If you're going in, for goodness' sake go!" And the next instant one of Gerda's far from gentle hands had pushed Lygia through the breeze-blown curtains and she was gazing at Robert Chase's straight, slender back. A log spat sharply in the fireplace, and as though this were a signal, demanding his attention, he spun smartly about.

  A Paisley scarf was knotted elegantly into the grey and black check of his jacket, and the cigarette, which Lygia had recognized as one of his Egyptians, smoked in his long fingers. He seemed to stare fathoms deep into Lygia's frightened eyes, and then his lips twitched on a smile and he had withdrawn his eyes from her and he was saying to Gerda: "Look who I've brought to see you." He swung a hand towards the carpet, and there, sitting imperturbably in the middle of it and cleaning himself like a big golden cat, was Banker, his handsome retriever.

  "He got himself muddied coming across the moors," Robert said, "and being more of a dandy than a gentleman he now proceeds to clean himself up. Banker! Banker, you vanity-ridden sap you, look up and say hullo to this lovely lady. You've seen her before."

  She drew back and away from the dog, and Robert said sharply: "He won't bite you! Good lord, he's the friendliest creature in the world!"

  She wanted to say: "Yes, I know that," but the words wouldn't come. Nothing would come but the intolerable feeling that she intruded; that she was where she shouldn't be.

  "Banker, come here, boy," Robert said. "Come here to me, you're not wanted in that quarter, old chap."

  Banker hesitated, his eyes again lifted to Lygia; big, puzzled, soulful eyes. He gave a low little yelp, as though demanding her reciprocation of his advances, and Robert grew impatient. "Over here, you chump, come on! Over here and stop making a nuisance of yourself." A small screen of cigarette smoke cleared from his eyes, and Lygia saw their coldness as they swept her from head to foot. "The lady doesn't like you," he drawled.

  The dog shot him a wondering look, which plainly said: "What are you talking about
— everybody likes me!" Then, as Robert frowned, he turned from Lygia and resumed his cleaning operations in the middle of the Aubusson rug, its blue and rose and glowing honey blending so perfectly with the light polished oak of the floor.

  At other times, when Robert Chase was not here to wind all Lygia's emotions into one great, silent cry of hurt protest, she liked this room.

  Here the past and the present were brought together to form a rich, tasteful harmony of colour. The oak walls, like the floor, were pale, so that the curtains, the carpet and the tapestried couch and chairs gleamed like muted jewels about the room. A small cabinet, its wood the colour of nut-brown sherry glimmering through crystal, matched the wood of a baby grand piano gracing its very own dais at the end of the room.

  There were only two paintings upon the walls. One was a Madonna, lying soft and warm against the pale oak. The other was a portrait by Johann Zoffany, and the subject was a long-dead member of the Chase family who had also been an actor—like Robert. A man in sombre black silk; his face lean and enigmatical; his dark, beautiful hands lightly poised upon the carved back of a tall chair.

  Lygia stared at that portrait, just beyond Robert's black head, and she knew now why the portrait always made her feel uncomfortable when she sat in this room. The painted face, the long-dead face, was Robert's. The painted eyes, the long-dead eyes, mocked and gleamed and followed just as Robert's did—and Lygia suddenly knew that she couldn't stand his eyes one more minute. She broke free of her mute position by the blue curtains and went to dart past him. Immediately, like a dark, striking weapon, his left hand was upon her shoulder and he was swinging her round towards him. She winced at the uncaring cruelty of his fingers as he said: "Where do you think you're going? We've barely exchanged notes, you and I. I want to know how you're getting on here."

  But she couldn't answer him. She could only stand dumb before him, feeling his long, hard fingers biting into the slight bones of her shoulder.