The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  "I—I don't think I dance." She backed away from him, and Mrs. Chase went on, her mind still very obviously occupied with Robert: "It's a pity that play of his has closed. Have you any idea when rehearsals begin for the new one, Avery?"

  "He says just as soon as they find someone who could possibly be thought acceptable by the play-going public —I think he means the female section of the play-going public—as his daughter. She's got to be twenty years old, because according to him she'll not have had much acting experience otherwise, but she's got to be able to look fifteen."

  "Well, naturally," Mrs. Chase said at once. "The boy's only thirty-four himself, and on stage he looks much less. So," she examined the big ruby on her left hand, "so he's playing a father at last. H'm, that makes me wonder whether this sudden interest in Gerda might be—well, some sort of mixed-up psychological urge on his part to become a real father; you know what a devil he is for 'bringing reality to bear', as he calls it."

  "The urge to become a father, Gran, is usually biological," said Avery. "But I don't think even a perfectionist like Bob would go through the agony of matrimony just to acquire a 'father feeling' for a play. And—er—in referring to matrimony as an agony, I am merely looking at the state from Bob's point of view, which I'm darned sure hasn't suddenly changed, despite something he said the other evening."

  "What did he say?" Mrs. Chase enquired sharply.

  Avery looked teasing. "He mentioned the word wedding and he was gazing at Gerda at the time."

  "Humph!" Mrs. Chase thought about this for a moment, then she abruptly switched the conversation from Robert. "Have you thought any more about doing your duty by the Chase name? You're thirty-six! Leave it a few more years and you'll be so set in your bachelor ways you won't want a woman near you." And as Mrs. Chase spoke, her jetty glance was upon Lygia, who was leaning in the terrace-doors and swinging her foot like a small cogitating girl. Avery had followed both his grandmother's glance and her train of thought.

  "You'd approve?" he murmured.

  "Yes. She's a female—and she isn't sickly, for all that she looks like a hungry cat." The old lady gave her gold-rimmed spectacles a shove. "You're a good-looking man, Avery. You shouldn't have much trouble getting what you want."

  But he shrugged his shoulders at this and pushed a log into the red flare of the fire with the toe of his right shoe. "Good looks are the least of it, Gran. I—she keeps me at a distance—"

  "Pish! You're talking to me, Avery Chase, and I've lived a good many years. A good-looking man can always get what he wants, but it doesn't always do for him to think that he's got to practise kindness to get it. You've got some rather unholy forebears, my boy— emulate them!"

  "Or do you mean emulate Bob?" He half-smiled, then he walked towards the terrace-doors. "You're deep in thought, Lygia," he said.

  She smiled up at him. "The garden smells nice. It's an essence I'd like to put in a bottle and I'd call it 'Breath of Autumn'. It would remind me of Chase, all my life." Her smile faltered, and as suddenly she would escape a thought which brought pain she abruptly walked out upon the terrace and stood by the wall. Avery's steps rang on the stone behind her and he joined her by the wall. Shadow and fragrance dropped about them like a cloak, and music from the drawing-room wireless drifted out into the night.

  "Chase is even lovelier when winter comes and there's a carpet of snow over the park and the branches of the pines are frosted," Avery murmured.

  "I shall have gone away by the time winter comes," Lygia said, speaking quickly and not looking at Avery.

  "Lygia," he lightly touched her shoulder, "it may not be necessary for you to go. Because of that ring mark on your finger we're assuming that you have a husband or a fiancé. Yet the likeliest explanation is that you had a fiancé and that you quarrelled with him. A particularly severe and emotional quarrel could cause you to want to forget everything connected with it, you know."

  "If only the answer was as simple as that!" she whispered. "I want it to be, and yet I can't really feel that it is." She plucked at the cold stone of the terrace-wall and Gerda Maitland seemed to be standing beside her again, tall and beautiful in her blue jersey-wool, saying in that husky voice of hers: "Funny that nobody has kicked up a hue and cry about your disappearance, leaving you on Avery's hands like a stray package."

  Gerda was right to say that! There was invariably a hue and cry when somebody was missing from home. Distracted relatives, if you had them, went hurrying to the police, armed with photographs and descriptions and all manner of information. Hospitals were contacted. Friends were questioned. And it was even probable that your employer was consulted. With all this happening, there, it was surely inevitable that you were found within hours… days? You weren't left on a stranger's hands, as she had been left, if you had somebody to care where you might be!

  "Th-those absurd slippers, for instance!" she gasped. "How did I come by them! Did I steal them?"

  "Now stop that!" he reproved. "You're no more a thief than I am. But if you start thinking you might be one, you'll make yourself ill and I shall have to order you to bed and put you on a diet of custards and soft-boiled eggs. You wouldn't like that, would you?" He tipped her chin towards him and when, through the gloom, he saw the troubled flickering of her dark lashes and the trembling of her lips, he bent his head and kissed her. Her young, soft lips trembled beneath his and for a moment he held her, then he let her go. "I'm not going to apologize for that," he smiled. "Blame it on the honeysuckle and the stocks."

  Lygia slept restlessly that night. Sleep seemed to elude her for hours. Then, some time very early, she hard Avery's car drive away from the house and she slipped out of bed and ran to see what sort of a morning he had for his drive into Plymouth. A slight mist rolled low over the park and through the mist the calling of the birds had a long sound. Lygia shivered and folded her arms across her chest.

  Last night Gerda had said to her: "You came from the moors, didn't you?" And this morning Lygia came to a decision. She would go back to the moors today and find, if she could, a clue to the secret of herself.

  When Lygia slipped from the house about half-past two that afternoon, the sound of Gerda's typewriter followed her from the library, its busy tap-tapping intensifying somehow the quietness that lay over the other rooms. There was no sound from Mrs. Chase's part of the house, for she invariably rested in the after-noon. Lygia buttoned her jacket with cold, nervous fingers and hurried across the courtyard of Chase.

  This was not the first time she had ventured into the park since her arrival at Chase, but she had not gone beyond its tree-clad limits, to where, quite suddenly, there was a plunging sea of tall heather and thistles and no more the friendly sound of glossy nuts bumping from the horse-chestnuts and the leaves gone yellow on the lovely silver birches of Chase Park.

  When she came upon a sort of grassy plateau, surmounted by a little tree whose berries were bright red in the intermittent eddies of sunshine over the moors, she curled herself down in the ragged grass at the base of the tree and rested her head against its smooth grey bark. It was a rowan tree, but Lygia didn't know. She only felt that it was a kind little tree, waving its feathery foliage above her, here on this grassy promontory that seemed like her very own island.

  Island in the heather, she thought, and her eyes slanted in an elfish smile.

  Oh, how silly she had been to be afraid… the moors in daylight were quite different from how they looked under that white-faced moon, trailing witch-like hair through a night sky. Now a scented timelessness stole out of their tinted stretches and the daylight sky was a faintly misty canvas for the dipping wings of curlews, echoing with their strange cry of oorlie-oorlie.

  Lygia's lashes drifted soft and thick to her cheeks, and in a little while, when a missel-thrush came to the rowan and plucked a red berry, she was not aware, for she had fallen asleep beneath the rowan.

  The awakening from sudden sleep is just as sudden, and though, in those first seconds of returning
consciousness, the mind feels certain it had only rested for a few short minutes, the taut numbness of curled-up legs and a stiff aching neck and shoulders quickly dispels the certainty.

  Lygia moved, with a little soft moan. She opened her eyes and stared around her. She told herself, as sudden sleepers always do, that she had dozed off—surely only moments ago—and then she knew, from the deepened tinge to both sky and moorland, and from the cold stiffness of her own body, that she had been asleep for several hours. She was in the middle of absorbing this realization, a hand rubbing at her stiff neck, when a voice said: "Yes, you should always fall asleep beneath the rowan tree—most appropriate."

  Lygia turned her head wildly, and there, standing a few feet from her, was Robert Chase.

  He was without a hat and his black hair was lifting in the wind that had grown perceptibly stronger during the time Lygia had been asleep. His mouth wore the strangest smile as he approached her, and yet, when he put down a hand so that she might take it and scramble to her feet, she didn't shy from it. "Oh!" She clutched at him and almost fell back to the grass. "Oh, I'm stiff!"

  He took hold of her and with an imperturbable face he began to rub some life back into her legs. "Aren't there beds and couches enough for you at Chase?" he asked, his cigarette bobbing at the side of his mouth and throwing little curls of acrid smoke into her eyes.

  She blinked sleepily at him and didn't question this decisive possession he had taken of her, his hands hard upon her legs, making them tingle but undoubtedly restoring them to a normal functioning. "Why did you say that just now, about it being appropriate that I should fall asleep beneath a rowan tree?" she asked.

  His eyes watched her; eyes that were full of secret laughter. "The rowan is the witch-tree," he said.

  "Oh!" Her eyes looked back into his; they grew big and slightly hurt and the strangeness of this moment began to invade her. "But I'm not a w-witch, Mr. Chase," she blurted.

  "Aren't you, Lygia?" He laughed softly. "I could have sworn you were something not quite real; a thing out of a fable, who casts spells. There, do your legs feel more as if they belong to you now?"

  "Yes—thank you."

  "You're welcome! And now tell me why you're out here on the moors all alone—sleeping beneath a rowan —with my watch telling me the time's getting on for five?"

  "Oh no, it can't be that time!" she gasped.

  He re-examined his wrist-watch. "It's exactly seventeen minutes to five," he assured her.

  "Then I've been asleep for over two hours — out here!"

  "Yes, out here, and if I'm not mistaken it's going to rain; see those clouds banking dark up there, like troops massing for a battle?"

  She followed his pointing, slender hand to the sky and saw the wind, like a company sergeant-major, mustering leaden little clouds into marching formation. Their march towards this spot was inevitable and Lygia knew that Robert was right and that it would rain.

  "You haven't answered my question," Robert said. "What are you doing all alone on the moors?"

  "I came to find myself," she said, and she watched the way the heather lay flat in the dips below the higher ground on which she and Robert stood. "I thought I might remember something, out here on the moors."

  "And haven't you?" Now his eyes were not mocking; they held, instead, a strange expression of unrest. Here, beneath the rowan, ablaze with its red berries, and with the clouds casting shadows as they moved across the sky, the elusive attraction of this girl had a setting he was very conscious of; and here, too, she had a truth and a defencelessness that moved him despite himself. He said to her: "Come back to the cottage. I'll give you tea, and you can say hullo to Banker." And his eyes, as he spoke, were watching the dark, restless, nervous play of her long eyelashes.

  "Your—cottage?" she said, in a strange tone of disbelief. "Oh no, I don't think—"

  "No, never think, Lygia," he interrupted, smiling and flipping the butt of his cigarette from his fingers, "just give in to your impulses—it's much more fun. And then again I think you might be impressed by my little cottage." Abruptly he put forward a hand and they both saw a big spot of rain splash the dark skin. "Now you'll have to come back with me, or get soaking wet," he said. "We're not very far from the cottage, but it's a goodish walk back to Chase."

  She heard the increasing rustle of rain in the foliage of the rowan tree and she knew a desire of her own to probe into his strange, hard armour.

  "Perhaps I should come back with you," she said, and when he laughed, she tilted back her head and looked at him and his face was the face in that portrait at Chase, relentless and dark and haunted by a secret bitterness.

  "Of course you should," he said, "because there's no escaping the inevitable, is there, Lygia? We've generated an overwhelming curiosity about one another and neither of us will rest easy until we've satisfied that curiosity. Come along!" he held out a hand to her and suddenly they were running together through the rain and his fingers holding hers were cool and long and inescapable.

  They were both gasping for breath, rain dripping down their faces, when they finally ran in under the stone porch of Robert's cottage, which stood alone on the edge of a neglected coppice of elderly oaks, a few sombre elms, and some gnarled, embracing cedars.

  "Whew!" Robert flicked rain from his face with his jacket sleeve and pushed open the door of the cottage. "Come along in — ah, d'you hear Banker?" His voice lifted. "It's all right, you chump, you can stop barking and pretending you're on guard! This way, Lygia." He opened a door off the tiny, dark hallway and the warmth of an elm-wood fire came spilling in a rich wave towards Lygia, and on the crest of the wave came Banker, joyous with recognition of her, his paws thumping hard upon her shoulders as he grinned at her and licked the raindrops from her cheeks.

  Robert put a wax spill to the fire and lit a pair of globular lamps and as light flared in the room, not quite penetrating to the black rafters of the ceiling, Lygia looked about her and there was a strange wonder in her that she should be here. She held an arm across Banker's muscular neck and unconsciously she was using his questioning friendliness as a shield against the enmity that might still lurk beneath Robert's smile as he watched her.

  She liked the room. She truly liked the room.

  There were long, black wickerwork chairs, just made to be indolently stretched out in, with cushions of ribbed ruby velvet. Decanters and pewter glittered and gleamed on an antique sideboard, its doors so delicately carved they looked like dark lace. The white plaster walls of the room were relieved by several curious brasses, and when Robert pulled the curtains across the latticed windows, Lygia was fascinated by the red-gold damascened look of the curtains, echoing the red-gold glint on pewter and brass—and on Banker's lovely coat as well.

  "Well?" Robert murmured.

  "I am impressed," Lygia admitted. "You undoubtedly belong to all this, the red-gold, the black, and the flashes of ruby."

  "My 'stage-setting', eh?"

  But she had been thinking that these colours were exactly the colours filling in the background of a certain portrait and she was half inclined to think that he knew it as well. Yes, he did know it, she could tell from the satiric curve of his mouth as he came across the room to her and, in that imperious way of his, which could not be denied, slipped the tweed jacket from her thin body. He felt the jacket. "It's very wet," he said. "Are your feet wet?"

  "No!" In a half-shocked little way she curled her feet beneath her, in case he decided to remove her shoes as well. "No, my feet are fine."

  "I sounded quite like Avery then, didn't I?" He grinned as he spread her jacket on a leather pouffe and then pushed it within range of the fire warmth. "He's gone into Plymouth today, hasn't he?"

  She nodded, knowing that Gerda had probably told him about Avery's trip while they had been together in Brinsham, last night. Lygia stroked Banker's soft golden throat and her eyes brooded on the red glow of the fire. Gerda would not be pleased about this impromptu tea-party… she would be bit
chily angry again, saying crude, sickening things.

  "I'd better get you that tea I promised you," Robert said. "Are you hungry?"

  "Well—"

  "Oh, be hungry," he coaxed, "because I'm going to make an omelette and show off. We'll have mushrooms with it; I found some in that coppice outside this morning. Well, does my menu sound interesting?"

  "I do like mushrooms," she smiled.

  "They've a smell like no other smell when they're cooking, haven't they?" For a moment his smile was almost boyish, then he began to move towards the door. When he reached the door, he turned to look back at her, thin and small on the black and gold rug, holding on to Banker as though he were a big gold toy. "Lygia," Robert murmured, "why did you pretend not to like Banker, that day at Chase?"

  She looked down at the dog, abruptly embarrassed. "I—I did like him." She touched Banker's cold, black nose. "I liked him very much."

  "Ah, I see!" Now laughter lay in the murmur of Robert's voice. "It was me you didn't like."

  "You were very unkind to me that day!" She shot a look of indignation at him over Banker's head; an indignation that was rather spoiled, however, for in that moment Banker chose to give her chin an affectionate lick with his large, rough tongue.

  "Stop that, Banker!" Robert scolded. "Keep your tongue to yourself!"

  "Oh, don't, he's all right!" Lygia dropped a kiss of consolation on Banker's head. "His tongue isn't hurting me."

  "Only mine can do that, eh, Lygia?"

  Lygia looked up sharply, and met that very same smile which had been on Robert's mouth on the moors, when he had lifted her out of the grass. That strange, enigmatic, almost waiting smile.

  The door closed on him, then, and there swept over her once more the curious conviction that a motive of some sort lay behind this invitation to tea. A quick alarm raced through her and she rose upon her knees, as though she meant to flee the cottage, now—now—