I thanked Nigel and moved away, leaving him to pick up his book, while I wandered the length of the library to where a glass case stood beneath the portrait of Margaret Athmore.
Maggie Graham, I remembered, had been named after Margaret, and I recalled trying to find some resemblance between the two—though Maggie herself said there was none. Perhaps the resemblance was inner. Maggie was possessed of just such courage and of as great a loyalty to Athmore, though she was, I suspected, a less gentle person than Margaret Athmore had been.
Now, however, as I paused before the portrait, I found myself remembering the first time I had stood in this place, before this very lady, moved to tears and revealing what I felt. I had looked into the glass case which held the stained and faded dress Margaret had worn when John Edmond died in her arms, and Justin stood beside me. He had believed in my love for Athmore—and he had kissed me. The trouble was I had believed in it too—thoroughly and romantically. Even now the story was a part of my own heritage because of my grandmother’s tales, but it had not carried me through to make Athmore my real home.
I turned from the case, drawn almost without volition to the door that opened from the library into the north-wing corridor. This was a hallway I knew far better than the one above, which I now occupied. The first door across on my left opened into the room Justin and I had once shared. I did not want to set foot in that room again. It was the next door that interested me. With Justin outdoors, I could surely be forgiven for looking into what had once been my small, elegant dressing room.
The knob turned beneath my hand and the door opened upon echoing gloom. I knew where to find the wall switch, and as I touched it two bracket lights near where my dressing table had stood flashed on—to show me utter emptiness.
Nothing remained of the furnishings I had so lovingly chosen. Not a mirror, not a picture, not the chaise longue where I had sometimes napped. The rug had been rolled up and placed against one wall, the draperies removed, with only bare shades left at the windows to shut out the light.
My banishment from Athmore was complete. Why I should have expected anything else I did not know. Of course Justin would free himself of unwanted memories by removing every reminder of me from this room adjacent to his.
I stepped softly across the bare floor, noting that the wallpaper at least was the same. Once its pale yellow had seemed like early spring sunlight, with tiny wildflowers blooming across it. The paper still looked as clean and unmarred as it had when Justin had first approved my choice. I put out my hand where there was nothing to touch. Here against this wall my dressing table had stood with its folding mirrors and glass top. But the wall carried no memory of its being. It had not stood there long enough to leave a shadow. Here where the lovely painting of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi had hung, not a mark remained to tell of it. The picture which Justin had bought for me when we were in Greece had hung here too briefly to be remembered. The room was empty, as my entire being seemed empty. It was a shell without life.
I moved on about the room. Where a closet had been built into one section I opened the door. My suits and dresses had once hung upon this rod and there had been a rack for my shoes, plastic hatboxes on the shelves overhead. Now there was nothing. Nothing except a dark square that leaned against the back wall. I touched it and knew it was a picture. Curiously I drew it out, pulled up a shade and carried the picture into the light.
The glass was intact over a painting that showed the lovely columns and the remaining platform of Apollo’s Temple. Behind rose the ruins of Delphi, with great shining cliffs above, and an eagle wheeling high in the clear bright air.
I sat cross-legged on the floor of the empty room and held the picture before me. We had walked up that stone way which curved across the foreground, Justin and I. We had explored these ruins by sunlight and when the moon was bright. We had walked among these very stones hand in hand, with our lives before us, and more happiness in our possession than we had ever dreamed possible. We had talked to each other endlessly, and each had taken time to listen and to care. Perhaps all lovers did that in the beginning. When the stories grew old, it was new and shared experiences they discussed. But our stories had aged, and our shared new life had scarcely begun before it was ended. What was there to talk about after Delphi?
The glass felt cool beneath my fingers, but the colors of the picture glowed warm and clear as the sunlight of Greece, banishing gray stones and green Athmore rain, restoring the past, denying the empty room about me.
I heard footsteps in the corridor and recognized them. Yet I could not move. I could not so much as raise my eyes from the warmth of the picture as Justin came through the door I’d left ajar and walked into the room.
X
He stood behind me, looking down at the picture, and he did not speak. I dared not lift my gaze from the glowing scene. All the emotion that welled up in me was one with the picture.
“Do you remember the olive trees?” he asked after a time.
I nodded. The olive trees were not in the painting, but I would never forget the way they flowed down the gorge far beneath our hotel windows—a solid phalanx of olive trees marching toward the Gulf of Corinth. The stream had narrowed as it entered the gorge, then widened as the silver-gray torrent poured down toward the plain. Once we had seen the trees on a day of storm, with all their silver branches atoss, so that the illusion of flowing seemed real.
Justin dropped to one knee beside me—and was too close. So close that I dared not move. He reached past my shoulder to point out the sacred way that men had climbed through all those centuries since the Oracle had last spoken at Delphi. His finger traced the path, curving back and forth among the ruins, as once our own feet had traced it.
“We climbed to the top,” he said in my ear. “Up through the amphitheater, and out into the open where the stadium still stands.”
I remembered. It had been early in the morning on a day of wind and sun, with a glorious blue sky overhead and the warmth of Greece wiping England’s damp out of our bones. We had been ahead of the tourists and we’d had all that beauty to ourselves as we climbed to a grassy field above the stadium, with only the sky overhead.
My voice was a small thing that seemed to stick in my throat. “Where did it go—what we had then? How did we lose it?”
“It hasn’t been lost to memory,” he said, quite gently. “It’s still there in time. But we can never again be the two people we were then.”
I laid the picture on the floor and put my face in my hands. I could not bear it that we could never go back to Delphi and be once more the lovers we had been.
I felt Justin’s hand slip beneath the fall of my hair in the old way, bridging the column of my neck with his palm. Only then did I look up at him. I leaned my head against the support of his hand and looked into his eyes. His own seemed to shine with a dark light and he put his mouth upon mine. It was a strange kiss—sudden and quick, both fierce and tender—all in an instant. I could neither respond nor repudiate. His lips touched mine and were gone.
He stood up and pulled me not ungently to my feet. “Perhaps we can talk a little now,” he said. “Perhaps for once we can use words without quarreling and accusation.”
I could not keep from shaking as I followed him into the next room. I was glad to sit down quickly in a chair near his desk. Without staring about me, I knew the room had changed very little since the last time I had seen it—that desperate, angry time. It was a man’s room, done with taste and restraint in hues of deep brown and burnt umber, with slashes here and there of scarlet and yellow—in pictures, in draperies, in the deep warm red of the rug. Justin went to a window embrasure and stood looking out upon green rain.
“I don’t want you to be unhappy,” he said. “I don’t want you to be driven to such foolish action as you tried to take last night. I was furious with you then—that you should be so stupid as to try such a measure. Now I’m only sorry.”
Only sorry, I thought. What a dreadful t
hing it is when a man you love is only sorry for you.
“Why do you believe Marc instead of me?” I asked.
He turned from the window. “Eve, you were out of your head at the time. You couldn’t know what you were doing. I saw you. I saw how you fought to get away from us.”
“I was carried to that parapet,” I told him. My voice would not behave, but at least it was not angry or querulous—just uneven from my quick breathing.
He waved his hands despairingly. “All right. It doesn’t matter now. I’m sure your dream seems real to you. The important thing is where do you go from here?”
“Where do we go?” I said.
“We go by separate roads,” he told me. “What are the clichés? Our bridges are burned, the dies are cast. There’s no turning back.”
I stood up and went slowly toward him. I had to walk around the end of the great carved bed, and I did not want to look at that bed. When I came close to him I stood braced, with my feet apart, and my hands clasped behind my back to hold them still, and I looked up at him without trying to hide what I felt.
“If you’re through loving me,” I said, “then I’ll have to go away. There’s nothing else I can do. You needn’t worry about what you think happened last night. I’d really never do a thing like that. But first you have to tell me you’re through with ever loving me.”
He took me by the hand, drew me up steps into the stone embrasure of the window where two cushioned seats faced each other. Gently he thrust me into one seat, and took the other himself. We sat with our knees nearly touching—yet did not touch each other at all.
“What happened to us was complete insanity, Eve. We both threw good sense to the winds and tried for the impossible. We believed in something that was never real. It didn’t work out and it would not again. I am no more the husband for you than you are the wife for me. Surely neither of us wants to repeat what happened before. I could never give you what you need, never fulfill the demands you must always make upon a man. I understand why you make such demands, and so do you. But that doesn’t make them easy to live with. What’s more, there are needs of mine that you never wanted to fulfill. You never wanted to be a wife for Athmore. Now I’m committed elsewhere—to a woman whom I did not treat very well when you burst into my life. It’s not in me to let her down twice.”
I could not bear the way his eyes searched my face. I could not endure knowing there was kindness in him toward me—and nothing else. I would almost rather have him angry, hating me. But anger was the old way, the wrong way. Had I grown up a little, or had I not?
“Once Maggie told me that you and Alicia never meant to marry,” I said. “She told me Alicia was irresponsible and reckless and that you never quite trusted her.”
There was a pause before he answered, and I knew he was restraining an impulse to quick temper. “And did you prove that you could be trusted?” he asked coldly. “Alicia has matured, changed, but I wonder if you have? I wonder if you’ve any idea how much Alicia would bring to Athmore as a wife—that you could not?”
The words were cruel—and honest.
“I know,” I said helplessly. “I really do know all the ways in which I failed us both and how little I brought to Athmore. I’m only beginning to find out who I am, and what I’d like to be.”
“Eve—Eve!” His eyes were kind again—and too pitying. “It’s not like you to be humble. Don’t play a new role that may not fit you either.” He reached for my hand and held it tightly in reproach. “A good deal of what happened was my fault. There’s no need for you to take all the blame. I’ve never been a patient man and I should have known better than to attempt the impossible. But there is no going back for either of us, whatever our faults or virtues. What is past is past. There’s time ahead for you to make a new life. We can’t go back to—to—” He broke off and his grip on my hand tightened.
“To the olive trees?” I said.
“Exactly. Or to anything else we had for a little while in the beginning. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wise enough to stop what was happening before it ran away with us.”
“And this time you are.” Having stated a fact, I took my hand from him gently, without snatching. There was no anger left in me.
For a few moments longer I sat looking out the window. The view from this part of Justin’s room was over the front terrace and driveways. I saw the white car as it came around the curve to stop before the house. Alicia wore a shiny vinyl raincoat that matched her car and she made a flash of brilliant white against green shrubbery as she ran toward the front door.
I looked at Justin. He was watching me rather warily and had not seen the approaching car. Far be it from me to tell him he had a visitor. I slipped down from the embrasure and left him there as I walked out of the room. There was more which needed to be said, but I knew I would never say it. If I tried I would break down, and that I would not have. Especially not with Alicia Daven on her way into the house. The house that could have been mine.
In order to avoid her I followed the corridor to the rear stairs and went down to the ground floor. My green trench coat was not where I had left it on the rack by the back door. Instead, Dacia had hung her wet orange coat there, apparently preferring my dry one. Escape from the house was what I wanted and I put on her coat and my own rainboots, found a kerchief in her pocket and tied it over my head.
Outside, the topiary garden seemed oppressively green amid an overwhelmingly green and drizzling world. I went around the side of the house, past tall drawing-room windows. At one of these I caught a gleam of white and knew that Alicia stood watching. At once I turned my back on the house and hurried toward the path that led through rainy woods in the direction of the ruins.
I wanted only to get off by myself—yet I felt uneasy as the woods closed about me, somberly green and awhisper with the sound of rain. English rain is seldom drenching and I slowed to a stroll, unmindful of the wet, though Dacia’s coat was shorter than I liked. It was not about Alicia, or the eerie feeling of rainy woods that I wanted to think. Justin had convinced me of several things. He believed in his debt to Alicia because he had hurt her badly in the past, and he believed that she had changed and matured. He believed that the course he meant to take was right and just. But he had not yet convinced me that what had existed between us was hopelessly lost.
“Dogged,” my father had once called me. Very well—I would be dogged! Prejudiced I certainly was. I could not believe that it was either right or just for Justin to marry Alicia. Even if he never looked at me again, she was not worth his loving. Once I had thought her everything an Englishwoman should be—everything I was not. I had accepted her baiting helplessly, not recognizing it for what it was, not seeing how cleverly she concealed what she was doing from Justin. Now I knew better. I saw through the sham, and I knew that Maggie did too, and that Justin must eventually. But if there was to be disillusionment for him, it might come too late as far as I was concerned.
Somewhere in the distance I heard the sound of a car. It came from across Athmore land and I could not tell whether it traveled some outside road, or followed the test course within. Probably it was the former. This was no day for testing a car.
It was drizzling harder than before, and I began to hurry through the woods. The sound of the car was quickly lost in the nearer sounds of rain as it dripped about me from every tree branch and leaf. The woods were too wet by this time to offer shelter and I hurried toward the arches and walls of the old ruins. There I would find some stony nook in which to be quiet and think. Far away from the house, where I could balance one thing against another and gain some sort of perspective. Balance Justin’s kiss against all else. That, at least, had been unplanned. There was in him still the wild, unruly impulses of the young man I’d known. Impulses that were still at war with more sober reason, for all that he wore his self-control like armor these days.
There was a sudden explosion of sound, as of a car accelerating sharply not far away. Who could be out on a da
y like this? I began to run toward the place where the woods opened upon the course, but by the time I reached the road whatever car had passed was gone. I heard it roaring away, the sound diminishing for a moment or two, and then breaking off completely—which was strange in itself.
The eerie quality of the forest on either hand, silent now, except for the dripping, increased my sense of uneasiness. I stepped out upon a shiny wet pavement, ducking my head against the rain, stamping mud from my boots as I hurried along the open stretch of road. The curve lay ahead that separated me from the path. There was no longer any sound of a car, but I did not want to linger in the open. Once more I began to run, as though it were suddenly a matter of life or death to escape from the road before something dreadful happened. This was the way I had felt last night when I climbed to the roof for the second time, and I was beginning to believe in my own sense of premonition. This road was too far from the house, and far more open than I liked.
As I ran along the pavement’s edge I brushed past wet shrubbery that slapped at me, weighted by the rain, and almost fell as I stumbled over something which lay across the roadway at my feet. Something which lay face down and unmoving, clad in a green trench coat, with a plastic hood covering the head. A coat of hunter’s green, streaked by scarlet threads that ran in the rivulets of rain.
I stood staring down at the still figure for a moment of almost supernatural horror. It was as though I had come upon a visualization of my own death, as though I could not move because I was no longer alive. Then I dropped to my knees beside the figure, knowing very well who it must be. The plastic hood almost covered her face, and as I moved it apprehensively I saw the blood from some dreadful wounding of her head. Dacia’s eyes were closed, her face empty of life. As I stared in that instant of frozen horror I seemed to hear her own words echoing through my mind about tomorrow never coming—that it would be like that for us one of these days. Dacia who had been so full of life—
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