Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “The car can do it and Justin built the course for speed,” she said. “All I need to do is guide the wheel a bit. Besides, dying young wouldn’t be so bad, do you think? Who wants to get old and dried up and see everything slipping through your hands? Like Alicia Daven!”

  “Alicia?” I smiled wryly. “There’s nothing wrong with Alicia, by the look of her.”

  “Don’t be a goop. She must be terribly old. As old as Justin. This is her last chance and she knows it. She’ll be livid because you’ve come home. After all, Justin was hers first, until you came along and stole him from under her nose. Maybe you hadn’t any right to him. Do you ever think about that?”

  This stung me to a response. “No human being has a ‘right’ to any other. And in this case I didn’t know she existed until I’d been married for months.”

  “Oh, poor you!” said Dacia without much feeling. “Anyway, I suppose she should have been clever enough to hold onto him in the first place.”

  “Perhaps Justin wanted a change himself,” I said sourly.

  Dacia grinned as she brought the car to a halt on the shoulder of the road and stuck her long blue-clad legs out the door.

  “Come on, Evie. I want to show you a place I found a couple of days ago. Maybe you already know it, but come on anyway.”

  I followed her along a path through the woods, and knew at once where we were going. This was the way to the old ruins of Athmore Hall, where I had gone yesterday afternoon.

  When we reached the area of broken walls and grassy carpet, kept neat and well-clipped before the great arch of the chapel window, Dacia ran across the grass without a glance for the sky and arching stone that framed it. I held back, wanting to linger. Yesterday I’d had to hurry because of the approaching tour. Now I could look about more carefully.

  “Wait,” I said. “I haven’t seen this for years. I want to stop.”

  She cast a look around without comprehension. “Grotty old stones! Do come—there’s something nicer to see.”

  I stayed where I was. The thought of Old Daniel intruded, but I would not think of him now. A pointed Gothic arch pierced the blue springtime sky. The stones were old and moss-grown, but here and there gray markings gave evidence of long-ago blackening by fire. Where the stones of the window ledge rose above the grass, tiny newborn flowers clustered, yellow and pale pink—buttercups and primrose. As I stood watching just as I had done before, the vapor trail of a jet streaked across the sky.

  Emotion could repeat itself, I found. In this place the sense of everything going on and on that I had felt before came again: a fleeting awareness that human pain mattered for less than a moment’s breath in time—that others had suffered long before me, and would suffer long after. In a moment my universe would center around me again, as every man’s must, but for this little while I was detached—part of a larger picture. There was something freeing about the experience.

  “What do you see?” Dacia’s tone was one of puzzlement as she watched me.

  I gestured. “You can see it too. That jet streaking through the arch. The old England and the new. Everything moving on in spite of whatever dreadful things may have happened or may happen, and yet the old still standing, to remind us of what went before.”

  “Is that what you believe?” Dacia said. “That things really move on? I don’t. I think it’s all going to end—poof! So I’d better grab for the rosebud while I may.”

  The word “believe” brought back another memory. On that day when Justin had taken me about Athmore for the first time, showing me John Edmond’s sword, Margaret’s dress, and all the rest, he had used that word after he had kissed me. I’d not remembered for a long while.

  “You’re a believer,” he had said, and when I asked him what he meant he would not answer directly. “Believing doesn’t need to be talked about and explained. It simply is,” he told me.

  “I wish I could believe in something,” Dacia said, sounding unexpectedly wistful. “In something good, that is.”

  A young softness had touched her face that was very appealing.

  “Don’t you believe in anything?” I asked her.

  At once she was her cocky self again, facing me in her defiantly orange coat and blue tights, with her buckled shoes set wide apart in a boyish stance, and on her mouth a woman’s smile.

  “Of course I believe in something. I believe in money. And pain. Pain I’m afraid of. That’s what makes danger exciting. But money is both for now, and for if I live to be old. When I’m old as Alicia, old as Maggie Graham—then I want to be terribly rich. I don’t want to be the way my mum was when she got too old to scrub floors because of her rheumatism, and I wasn’t making enough to help her. Now you should see her—the fine lady she is. Though she doesn’t want a lot. Not nearly what I could give her.”

  The girl could be outrageous, and she could be hard, impudent, heedless of others’ feelings—yet there was something touchingly winning about her in spite of all this. Something young and outgoing and generous that she often tried to suppress. Perhaps she believed in more than she knew.

  “I’ll come and see what you wanted to show me,” I said gently, and she bounded off down a grassy path, her long legs flashing beneath the short orange coat. I knew the path we followed. It opened into the road to the old quarry where Athmore’s stones had come from long ago. I had walked to the quarry often with Justin, and stood looking down into its steeply rounded pit where green growth had taken precarious hold along the precipitous walls, giving the whole a far less bald appearance than it must have had in the days when it was active. Perhaps before I left I would walk there again and take more pictures.

  Now, however, we did not go as far as the quarry. We rounded a turn and came out upon the old road, and into the open. Dacia stopped at the edge of a field and flung her arms wide. I had forgotten the wild bluebells. I had forgotten how breathtaking this sight could be in springtime. In every direction the blossoms spread across the hollow of the clearing—a bright blue carpet, far bluer than the sky—their heads nodding delicately in a breeze that blew from the faraway sea. One could almost hear their springtime ringing. But after a moment or two of delighted staring, I looked at Dacia instead—at her lips that were parted because her breathing came quickly, at the wide delight in her huge brown eyes, at the wrinkling of a small nose that sniffed in all the scents of the outdoors.

  “I never saw nothing like this in London!” She whispered the words, as though the scene might vanish if she broke the quiet. “Imagine flowers coming up every spring in a place like this. I’ll close my eyes and think about it when I’m home again in London. Here’s some of your keeping on and on, if you like. Stone walls and jet planes are only man things. This is different. If ever I could believe in much of anything, I suppose it would be this.”

  I kept very still, not wanting to break the spell of her mood, savoring with her the sight of that great sea of bluebells. But it was not in Dacia to be quiet for long. She bent to pick a single flower and held it up in her fingers.

  “I was never a brat who picked flowers in the parks,” she said. “It always seemed wicked to disturb them. I can’t feel happy when Mrs. Graham cuts flowers in her garden—not even when they fill the house with their color and smell—and that house needs them. But I think it’s all right to take just one, when there are so many don’t you?”

  She thrust the blue flower into the top buttonhole of her coat, where it held its own bravely and did not fight with orange dye.

  The spell came to an end, and Dacia marched long-legged ahead of me back through the woods. Where broken walls commenced she stopped and pointed.

  “See that pile of stones over there? That’s where the wall toppled over last night and killed Old Daniel. Marc says so.”

  I stared at the broken wall and something chill traced my spine. A chill caused not only by realization of the old man’s death, but by a sudden feeling that something was very wrong.

  “I know,” I said. “I met h
im here by chance yesterday. I came to take some pictures, and he turned up in one of them.”

  “How creepy!” Dacia cried, staring at me round-eyed. “That’s spooky—it really is! Where was he standing—right there by the wall that fell over?”

  I considered this, looking at the place with new eyes, now that I could see exactly where the stones had fallen. Portions of wall stood at intervals around the chapel, some of them propped up by supporting buttresses. And the arrangement was wrong.

  “No,” I said. “He wasn’t anywhere near that wall in the picture. He was in the opposite corner near that bush which makes him blur out in the snapshot. I suppose he walked over to the wall later.” I was silent for a moment, still feeling there was something wrong about all this, though I could not think what it was. “He tried to tell toe something when he saw me,” I went on. “Something that seemed important to him about the chess game in the topiary garden. He said to remember that it was the rook’s play and the king had better watch out.”

  This meant nothing to Dacia, who had not the slightest interest in chess.

  “Too bad for Old Daniel,” she said. “Marc says he should have known enough to keep away from that wall. Anyway, we’ve seen the bluebells, so let’s go back.”

  I did not want to leave right away. Besides, I had no wish to go racing back to the house with Dacia in Marc’s red car.

  “I’ll stay for a while,” I said. “Go along, if you like. And thank you for showing me the flowers.”

  She studied me thoughtfully. “If you want to get Justin back, I’ll help you,” she offered, as she had before. “I don’t like Alicia Daven. I don’t like what she’s doing to Marc. I don’t think her money will do Athmore all that lot of good.”

  “Please!” I begged her. “Let everything alone. I don’t expect to be here more than a day or two, now that I know how things are.”

  She grinned at me, cheeky again. “All right then. But you may need me before you’ve done. And watch it, Evie, when you go back to the house. You have to follow the test course for a little way on foot, you know, and a car can come swinging around the curve just above here without much warning. Justin fixes it so everyone’s warned away when he or Marc take out a car for real testing. But Marc gets careless sometimes. He almost ran Old Daniel down a few days ago. So mind your step.”

  She sauntered off through the woods by the way we had come, and I watched her orange coat swing out of sight among the trees.

  Too much of history was repeating itself—yet not enough. There could be no going back to that other time when I had first come here. I was neither so young, nor so much of a believer as I had been then I lay down upon my back on thick grass, with my hands clasped beneath my head, letting the morning sun warm me gently. I closed my eyes and tried to think of some sensible plan. Since I had seen Justin drive off with Alicia a little while ago my world had caved in upon itself. Until that moment I had not really believed that he was lost to me for good. But I had seen him kiss her, seen his face darken with anger at the sight of me. These were facts which I must accept. The end of love had come long ago for Justin, though not for me.

  This was not the first time I had lain upon the grass in this spot. It had been my favorite place ever since I’d come to Athmore as Justin’s wife. Yet I could no longer think about my times here with Justin. Alicia stood between, and there was another face besides. That of Old Daniel.

  The puzzle concerning the old man seemed to be growing ominously. How could it be that I had caught a picture of him as he stood near that other wall which still remained? Yet only moments later he had walked toward me from another direction. That was the thing that troubled me, the thing I had groped for. I had it now.

  It would not have been possible, any more than it was likely that Old Daniel, who knew this place very well, would have endangered himself by going too close to a wall which needed repair. For the first time I began to wonder whether the man in my picture was really the gardener, after all. Now that I considered it, I was not even sure that the old man had worn a peaked cap when I had seen him.

  I sat up on the grass cross-legged and stared at the blue sky beyond the great window, seeking comfort in a sight that had once given a repeated lift to my spirits. Behind me a dog came leaping suddenly out of the woods and nearly bowled me over in loving assault.

  “Deirdre McIntosh!” I cried, and put my arms about the great beast, more than glad to see her.

  She whimpered in joyful excitement, and then glanced behind her hopefully. Along the woods path her master came striding. The anger was gone from his face, but I liked anger better than the disdain with which he looked down at me.

  “Dacia said you were here,” he told me coldly.

  That was Dacia—“helping,” I thought, and did not thank her. I clung more tightly to Deirdre, my face against her rough, brindle-gray coat, so that I need not look up into Justin North’s face. Whatever he had to say, while he looked like this—I did not want to hear it.

  VI

  “Deirdre likes me,” I said by way of a delaying tactic when Justin did not speak. “Even if she doesn’t remember me, she knows I’m someone she can like.”

  The dog responded with a loving lick at my cheek, but Justin still remained silent. After what seemed ages I stole a look at him and found that he had gone to sit upon the ledge of the chapel window, and that he was watching me in the same strange way that he had done last night after I had bandaged his arm.

  “How does your arm feel this morning?” I asked him, politely. All this was unreal and had no meaning.

  He shrugged the question aside as though the subject of his injury had no interest for him. “I was rude to you yesterday, Eve. I want to apologize.”

  “That’s rather unlike you,” I said before I could bite my tongue. Why must I always be sharp with him? But I knew why. I wanted to hurt him before he hurt me. There had been too much of that before, yet here I was starting it all over again. Why couldn’t I just let myself be hurt—and never mind slapping back?

  For once he did not take me up with equal sharpness. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why have you come?”

  I knew what he meant, but I chose to misunderstand. “Dacia brought me here to show me the bluebells. I’d forgotten how beautiful they can be at this time of the year.”

  I could sense exasperation rising in him, and I fed it, as I had always been able to do.

  “If I’d known you were coming here, of course, I wouldn’t have stayed in the place. But I saw you driving off with Alicia and I thought you’d be gone for the day.”

  He must be counting at least to fifty, I thought, and stole another look at him. The exasperation was there, but he was smiling, however wryly. When he answered he sounded reasonable enough, reminding me of how angry his very reasonableness could make me.

  “Alicia wants to give Maggie a mare for her birthday,” he said. “I’m not sure Maggie will accept it, but Alicia wanted me to drive over to have a look at it. She brought me back right after, since there’s plenty to do around my workshop picking up the pieces from last night.”

  I made a tremendous effort to do an about-face. I tried to let down that desperate guard of pride I held against him.

  “I’m sorry about the delay to your work,” I said. “From what Nellie tells me, it’s something pretty important you’re onto. Is it really a new type of fuel?”

  “That’s only part of it. Not that the fact of what I’m working on must be kept quiet. It’s the method that’s secret. The ingredients. Though whether they’ll come to anything or not I can’t tell. Especially not with all these beastly delays.”

  “How long has this mischief been going on?” I asked.

  “Several weeks. But never mind about that I hardly came here to cry on your shoulder. There’s just one thing I want to know—when will you be leaving?”

  I stroked Deirdre’s proud neck and would not look at him. I was feeling stubborn again. “Maggie would like me to
stay a little while.”

  “What use will that be? I’m sorry Maggie wrote to you first about my plans. I should have been the one to open the subject. She had no business to ask you to come to Athmore.”

  “She didn’t ask me,” I said. “I was supposed to see her in London. She lied for me yesterday.”

  “Then why did you come?” he demanded bluntly.

  I fumbled for an answer. “Aren’t there things we must discuss? The usual decisions to be made?”

  “Such as whether you might get half of Athmore, I suppose?”

  I pushed Deirdre away and stood up. I had to face him now. “I don’t want anything from you, and you know that very well. I have a job and I’m not helpless. If you want to know why I came, I’ll tell you. I wanted to know whether you really meant it.”

  He looked at me with an astonishment that was obviously real. “If I really meant it? But what else could you think after the way you behaved? How could you possibly believe I’d ever want to set eyes on you again?”

  “I behaved badly enough,” I agreed, “but not as badly as Marc made you think. Yet you seem to have forgiven him.”

  “One may have to accept a brother. But some things are unforgivable in a wife. I haven’t much use for a woman who can’t be trusted.”

  The old hopeless feeling of not being listened to, of not being understood, rose in me again. It was because of this futility that I had run away, hoping that somehow his feeling for me—if he missed me—might do what words could not.

  “Yes,” I said, “it was unforgivable. It wouldn’t have happened if I had not let it. But I never thought you’d let me go. I went to London and waited. I thought you’d come after me.”

  “I don’t play such games,” he said. “You always could behave like an obstinate child, and I’d had all of that I could stand.”

  What could I say to him? That this was two years later and that I wanted to believe I might be more than two years older—that what I wanted more than anything else was another chance? Of course I could say none of this. I could not throw my pride away to that extent, or embarrass him by begging for a love he could not give.