Marry a Stranger

by Susan Barrie

  And now the bedroom door opened suddenly and quietly, and he came in. He might have knocked, but if he had she hadn’t heard the knock. She turned round in almost a startled fashion from the electric fire, the barely tasted glass of milk in her hands. Her dressing gown was of a dusky peach color, and it was fluffy and feminine, with a little upstanding collar which framed her small head like a ruff.

  “No need to jump as if a burglar had come swarming up the drainpipe,” he said, smiling at her. “I’m used to entering ladies' bedrooms without always waiting for their permission, and in this case the conventions are thoroughly well satisfied, because I’ve a right to come in. You happen to be my wife now!”—looking at her and noticing that her dark curls were a little damp and tumbled from her bath, and the whole room smelled delightfully of some delicately perfumed dusting powder she had used.

  “I was just thinking of getting into bed,” she answered, flushing uncontrollably because he was watching her so closely.

  “Well, stop thinking about it and do so,” he advised. He took the glass of milk from her hand. “You can finish this in bed.”

  She hesitated before slipping off her dressing gown. An absurd embarrassment had her in its grip, but there was no excuse for delaying because the bed had been turned down during her absence in the bathroom, and the fat, downy pillows, in their lace-edged pillow cases, actually looked inviting beneath the rays of the bedside lamp. Martin watched her fumbling with the sash of the dressing gown, and then determinedly laid hold of it himself and expertly whipped it from her shoulders. “There!” he exclaimed. “In you go!”

  She kicked off her quilted mules and slipped into bed. She drew the bedclothes up about her shoulders, concealing as much of their slender whiteness from him as she could, as well as the froth of lace and transparent nylon fabric of which her nightdress was composed, and she saw—or thought she saw—a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Such modesty!” he exclaimed. “But you don’t have to bother about that sort of thing with me. I’m case-hardened.”

  He put the glass of milk back in her hands, and then she watched him place a couple of tablets on the table beside the bed.

  “You can take those with the last of the milk,” he said.

  “I will,” she promised, and wished that he would go away. Her embarrassment refused to desert her while he stood there beside the bed.

  “Ah, but will you?” He eyed her with his head on one side, a quizzical lift to his eyebrow. “I’d rather see that you do, and I think I’d better wait until you have taken them.”

  Somehow she had reached a stage where she could no longer meet his eyes. She picked up the tablets and swallowed them hastily, and then just as hastily slid down in the great bed. He replaced the cover over her.

  “You look a little lost in there,” he observed, studying her dark head on the snowy pillow. “It’s rather like the Great Bed of Ware—but at least there’s no danger of your falling out!” Already her long eyelashes were drooping a little languidly, and he bent over her and smoothed an end of a feathery curl back from her brow. “Sleep well,” he said softly. “I shan’t be far away.”

  Suddenly she knew that she could not have borne it if he had elected to sleep in some far corner of the house. But he was only going to be next door to her. And that was far enough away...

  She wanted to touch him—to thank him for his consideration and kindness, but she lacked the courage. Or possibly it was because she was getting too sleepy.

  “Good night,” she whispered.

  “Good night—who?” he asked.

  “Martin.”

  “Good girl!” he exclaimed. He lightly touched her cheek. “Good night, Stacey, my dear. Just thump on my door if you want me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  But whether as a result of the sleeping tablets or her complete exhaustion she slept so well that night that she was not conscious of wanting anyone or anything. And she was only awakened in the morning by Hannah coming in with a breakfast tray, and proceeding to draw the curtains.

  “What time is it?” she asked, sitting up and noticing that the sunlight, pouring in through the big windows, was already so bright and golden that the morning must be far advanced.

  “It’s almost eleven o’clock,” Hannah told her, hoping that one day—when, perhaps, she got married herself—she would have a nightdress as finely tucked, and edged with as lovely a mist of lace, as the one her new mistress was wearing. “And Miss Fountain said she thought you’d better be awakened, otherwise you’d miss breakfast altogether.”

  “Oh, but of course,” Stacey agreed, horrified to find she had slept so late—even at the flat she had never slept as late as this in the mornings, and Miss Fountain would be forming an entirely wrong impression of her. “But Dr. Guelder is up, of course? He had breakfast downstairs—long ago, I expect?”

  “Oh, yes, Miss—Madam,” Hannah corrected herself hastily. “And he’s gone out now for a walk, and taken one of the dogs.”

  “I didn’t see any dogs when I arrived last night,” Stacey recollected. “I didn’t know there were any dogs here.”

  “There aren’t in the house,” Hannah told her. “Miss Fountain would never allow dogs in the house. Or cats. She can’t abide animal smells except in what she calls the proper places.”

  “And those are?” Stacey asked.

  “The stables. The gardener looks after them and keeps them exercised.”

  Stacey made no comment, but she hurried over her breakfast and dressed herself after it as quickly as possible. The view from her window was breathtaking now that she saw it in daylight. The garden sloped in a succession of terraces to woods that crowded like frills at its skirts, and beyond the woods there were open fields and hills, and beyond them—softened by distance and shimmering in a heat mist—the mountains of Wales.

  Stacey already felt invigorated by her good night and the pure country air, and she ran downstairs almost lightly. In the hall she encountered Miss Fountain running a yellow duster over a shining oval table which was decorated with a vase of early Michaelmas daisies.

  “Good morning,” said Miss Fountain, looking up at her appraisingly. “I hope you slept well?”

  “Very well,” Stacey answered, “thank you. But I’m ashamed of having slept so late.”

  “That doesn’t matter at all,” Jane Fountain assured her, with a kind of detached good humor. “My cousin Fenella—your predecessor, the first Mrs. Guelder—always breakfasted in bed, and I never expected to see her around before midday. But she was such a vital person, so much of a live wire that she simply had to rest, and of course she never went to bed before midnight—usually long afterwards.” She suddenly flung open the door of a room on the right of the hall, and invited Stacey to enter it with her. “There is her portrait on the wall,” she said, indicating it. “It depicts her exactly as she was, and if anything it doesn’t do her justice.”

  But Stacey was so amazed by the appearance of the room that at first she did not even look up at the portrait. It was a delightful room—a drawing room, with long windows opening to the garden, and there was nothing in the least threadbare or shabby about it. The carpet was a lovely Aubusson, and a grand piano across a corner might have cost almost any fanciful figure. The white fireplace was flower-filled—long sprays of larkspur and delphiniums in a huge pottery vase.

  “Oh, but this is lovely!” Stacey exclaimed, the words forced out of her.

  “It is,” Miss Fountain agreed complacently. “It was her room—and that is her portrait!”

  Stacey looked up at it. She saw a young woman with a mane of long, light hair tumbling about her, forming a kind of cloak about her bare shoulders, and a vivid oval face great dark eyes and a mouth as scarlet as blood. It was a wilful mouth, and they were wilful eyes, and the shine upon her hair seemed almost real. She wore some sort of a nebulous dark evening dress, and there was a white flower like a camelia tucked in at the base of the brief corsage.

  “She was ut
terly lovely,” Miss Fountain exclaimed, almost reverently. “In fact, I never saw anyone who could equal her.”

  “And her name was Fenella?” Stacey asked.

  “Fenella Guelder, yes—Fenella Fountain before her marriage.”

  “And this was the room she liked best?”—looking round it again.

  “This was the drawing room of her old home, and she tried to refurnish it in keeping when the doctor bought the house. I never allow anyone to interfere with it nowadays, and I always keep flowers in it, just as she liked. She always surrounded herself with masses of flowers. Her bedroom is lovely, too—would you like to see it?”

  “Is that the bedroom I am to occupy tonight?” Stacey enquired, after a moment of silence.

  Miss Fountain’s faintly blue lips disappeared in a line so thin that they might not have existed at all, and her eyes went cold and fathomless as pools.

  “I have instructions to get it ready,” she admitted.

  “Then I would certainly like to see it,” Stacey said.

  Her heart was hammering rather strangely as she climbed the stairs behind Miss Fountain to the room she knew she would never occupy. She could never sleep in a room in which Fenella Fountain had slept, and yet she was burningly curious to see it. If it was anything like the drawing room it would be a room of charm and personality, and so it was—as she could see immediately the door was flung open.

  It was a white and yellow room. The yellow was the yellow of a tea-rose, the white spilled over the floor in the form of a white carpet, and papered the walls with a satiny sheen, and curtained the windows in thick white brocade—without any darns!—beneath a pelmet of draped white velvet. The yellow quilted the bed-head and covered the chairs and encompassed the dressing table in a petticoat of net over ivory satin. As a result the room was all sunlight, as bright and gay as the morning itself, with an outlook over the neglected rose garden. In June, when the roses were at their best, their scents must be carried into this room in almost overpowering strength and fill it like a bowl of potpourri.

  Stacey noticed little personal knick-knacks about the room, such as a photograph of Martin—Martin, obviously, when he was much younger, but easily recognizable as Martin—in a silver frame beside the bed, gold-backed hair brushes on the dressing table, and a flagon of perfume, and even a gold lipstick case lying carelessly in the cut-glass toilet tray. And there was a little white suede-covered address book apparently flung down carelessly on a table in the window, and beside it a framed snapshot of two people lying sun bathing on a beach—Fenella and Martin on honeymoon?

  Stacey turned away abruptly and walked back to the door.

  “There will be no need for you to get this room ready for me tonight,” she said, in a slightly muffled voice. “I shall not sleep in it. I will keep the room I have.”

  Miss Fountain’s voice in answer sounded like the smooth, purring voice a cat would have if it could speak

  “I think you are wise,” she observed. “This room is full of memories, and like the drawing room, I keep it untouched. Why, even the wardrobes are still full of Fenella’s clothes...” She slid back the smooth, white-painted door of one of them, which had been built into the wall, and revealed a long row of dresses, most of them in black or pastel shades, fresh as when they were newly bought, if perhaps a little out of fashion. An odor like violets collected in a mass and dried in the sun stole out from amongst them. “I send them to be cleaned regularly and looked after,” Miss Fountain announced, as if it was a most praiseworthy thing to do. “They are in perfect order.”

  Stacey was a little revolted. It was like turning a dead person’s room into a museum, and if Fenella Guelder had possessed relatives surely her clothes might have been sent to them? But she realized that Jane Fountain—apparently the relative who had thought the most of her—would have been utterly shocked by this suggestion.

  “I always keep the door locked,” Miss Fountain said, turning the key and putting it in her pocket. “I feel that her things are safer.”

  Stacey said nothing. She felt that she wanted to get away from Miss Fountain, and she was hurrying back to the stair-head along the corridor.

  “Of course,” Miss Fountain murmured, still keeping at her heels, “there are other rooms in the house which you might like better than the one you are occupying now—smaller rooms, perhaps a little more cosy. Fenella had two or three rooms done up specially for guests, and they are quite nice. But I thought the large room with the dressing room—Well, it seemed the most convenient, and at one time it was the best bedroom in the house—”

  “It will do very well for the time being,” Stacey told her, and was delighted, when they reached the hall, to see Martin coming in through the wide open doorway, with a beautiful specimen of a young red setter following close at his heels. Miss Fountain pursed up her mouth when she saw the animal, but Stacey went forward at once to caress it, and she looked up at Martin with softened eyes.

  “What a lovely creature!” she exclaimed. “What do you call it?”

  “Tessa,” he answered. “She’s the daughter of Miranda, who inhabits the stables. I’ve just taken them both for a long walk, but Miranda’s gone back for a rest after her exertions. Tessa’s still ready for anything.”

  “Oh, she’s perfect,” Stacey murmured, kneeling beside the animal and stroking it and looking into its intelligent golden eyes. “But why keep them in the stables instead of the house? Can’t this one stay here?”

  “Of course, if you want to make a companion of it. She’s a young dog, and she’ll probably take to you.”

  Tessa was plainly signifying that she had taken to Stacey by proceeding to lick her face most methodically, but Miss Fountain, in the background, had objections to raise.

  “The dogs always sleep over in the stables,” she said. “I don’t usually permit them in the house.”

  “But if Mrs. Guelder wishes to keep them in the house that’s a different thing, isn’t it?” Martin suggested coldly, and without waiting for any further conversation took Stacey by the arm and led her into the library. It was a large room, neglected like a large portion of the house, to which he had once planned to do great things; but at least there were plenty of books there, and it had comfortable, deep armchairs.

  “I haven’t asked you how you slept last night?” he said then, looking down carefully into Stacey’s face.

  She rewarded the enquiry with a smile which no longer had any tiredness in it.

  “Very well, thank you,” she assured him, “thanks to your pills! But I haven’t even said good morning to you!”

  “Neither have I said good morning to you. Good morning, Mrs. Guelder!”

  “Good morning, Dr. Guelder!”

  They both laughed. He took her arm again and drew her over to the window, which was standing open on to a kind of flagged terrace.

  “Come out and get a breath of fresh air before lunch. The air here is wonderful, as you don’t need me to tell you.”

  At lunch she tried to introduce the subject of changing bedrooms. Miss Fountain, to Stacey’s intense relief, apparently preferred to take her midday meal alone, in the little room she had earmarked as a kind of sitting-room-sanctum of her own—or else she was merely endeavouring to be tactful and leave them alone together. But Stacey was much more inclined to believe that tact was not included in her make-up, and that it was simply because she did not wish to join them that she took her lunch alone. Whether she would also decide not to join them for dinner they would have to wait to find out.

  “Miss Fountain has been showing me something of the house,” she began, feeling her way. “It’s very big and rambling.”

  “Yes, much too big and much too rambling. I’ve often thought of selling it.”

  “But it’s a wonderful situation.”

  “There are other houses much more convenient in equally wonderful situations, and very much nearer to London,” he told her, smiling at her as he suspended a jug of water above the glass besid
e her plate. “Water is very unexciting, but apparently it’s all there is in the house at the moment. You’ll have to go into the question of housekeeping with Jane, and do some ordering on your own account. And before I forget, you must change that bedroom you occupied last night—”

  “Oh, but I’d much prefer to keep it,” she answered swiftly. “I’ve seen the others, and I prefer—that one.”

  “Do you?”—looking at her a little curiously.

  “Yes.” She bit her lip, and felt the color rise in her cheeks. She had not so far told him about the telephone call Vera Hunt had made to her on the night before she was married, and so far as he was aware she knew little or nothing about his former wife. He himself had introduced the topic only once, and that was when they were sitting beside the river in his car, and just before he asked her to marry him. But something shrewd in his look now made her wonder what he was thinking. “It may be a bit large, and perhaps not too well furnished, but it really has a wonderful view, and—anyway, I’d like it,” she finished lamely.

  “There are other rooms beside the Yellow Room, you know,” he told her, gravely watching her. “Fenella—my former wife—had one or two of them done up rather well when we were thinking of doing a lot of entertaining. Couldn’t you choose one of them?”

  She shook her head, so determined not to change her room that she surprised even herself.

  “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “Of course I don’t mind, you silly child!” He helped himself to more water. “But you’re a little out of the way in that corridor, you know, and we haven’t made certain that the mice haven’t been at the bell-rope”—his eyes twinkling a little. “However, we could do that without much delay, and if your mind is quite firmly made up you’d better get in touch with a firm of house-furnishers in Beomster and get them to supply something more suitable in the way of equipment for the room. It will give you something to do, choosing something new and attractive.”