Marry a Stranger

by Susan Barrie

  Stacey felt almost cheered by this common-sense way of looking at the matter, and when Mrs. Elbe served her with a portion of roast goose, accompanied by apple sauce, she even discovered an appetite. The goose was followed by a savory that was one of Mrs. Elbe’s “specials”, and then she had coffee served to her in the library, and sat with her ears cocked for either the telephone or the grating of wheels on the drive outside.

  But the snow continued to fall softly, and at ten o’clock it was piling up outside the windows. And the telephone did not ring, and the white world without was undisturbed by any noise such as an approaching car.

  Stacey began to pace up and down the library. She felt almost in a state of panic. What had happened? Where was Martin? Why had he not written? Why had he not telephoned? Why did he not come?

  Carollers sang softly outside in the porch, and she instructed Mrs. Elbe to give them money. Mrs. Elbe looked at her face when she came back into the library. It was white, and the eyes were a trifle wild.

  And then at last the telephone rang, shrilly, in the hall, and, almost running past Mrs. Elbe, Stacey reached the instrument with her knees all but knocking together. This was it! This was news of an accident, she felt sure. Martin had, after all, got stuck in a drift, or he couldn’t proceed, or his car had overturned, or...

  "Hello?” she said, her voice sounding quite unnatural as she spoke into the mouthpiece.

  “A merry Christmas, Stacey!” came Martin’s perfectly controlled and even cheerful reply. "I'm afraid it’s a bit late to ring you, but I was called out this evening, and I didn’t think you’d have gone to bed yet. If you had I’d have given you another ring tomorrow morning.”

  “Then you’re not—?” Stacey could not get out the words, but he knew what she meant, and he answered at once, with the merest tinge of regret in his tones.

  “Coming to Fountains? No; I’m sorry, my dear, but I’ve made up my mind that I just can’t spare the time. It’s a long journey, for one thing, and I could only stay for a couple of days, at most, and I understand that some of the roads are already blocked—”

  “Oh!” Stacey exclaimed, and clung to the table on which the telephone stood.

  “Are you all right?” he exclaimed, a little more sharply.

  “Yes, yes,” she assured him, speaking quickly, feverishly, “I’m perfectly all right, Martin!”

  He was silent for a moment, and then he said: “I’ve sent you off a present, Stacey—I’m sorry it will arrive late, but I wasn’t absolutely certain that I couldn’t get away. I’ll try and snatch a weekend in the New Year, and in the meantime enjoy yourself as much as you can—I expect you’ll go to the Adens...?”

  “I expect so,” she answered mechanically.

  “Well, convey my wishes to them, and tell Jane to get rid of that chip on her shoulder and join you in a glass of something exciting. I recommend rum punch! And you can tell Mrs. Elbe—”

  But suddenly Stacey put down the receiver, and sank on to a chair beside the table. She felt cold—cold at heart, and cold physically, and for once she didn’t care what he thought of her for ringing off. She didn’t care about anything any more. Christmas! And he was telling her to enjoy it alone—passing her off on to the Adens, who would think his behaviour quite extraordinary—even suggesting that she and his ex-cousin-in-law got together!

  She stood up and returned, walking stiffly, to the library. Mrs. Elbe took one quick anxious glance at her and knew that something was very wrong indeed.

  “He’s not—coming?” she asked quietly, fumbling with a sprig of holly which had just tumbled down from behind a picture, and which she had picked up. Its sharp prickles drew blood from her fingers.

  “No,” Stacey answered, and walked to the table and picked up the neatly wrapped box, tied with bright tinsel ribbon, which contained the present she had made for Martin. It was a pullover, beautifully knitted, with a high polo collar, in a shade of primrose yellow, which she knew he liked to wear with country tweeds. She had decided on it because she didn't know what else to give him.

  “I’ll have to post this to him after Christmas,” she said mechanically. “It won’t reach him now.”

  “No,” Mrs. Elbe agreed. “But if he can’t come—”

  And then the telephone rang again, insistently. “Don’t answer it!” Stacey ordered sharply, turning to the housekeeper. “I don’t want it answered.”

  “But if it’s the doctor—he may even have changed his mind—”

  “It doesn’t matter if he has,” Stacey replied, in a tone that was absolutely colorless. “But I don’t want you to answer the telephone. Whoever it is can go on ringing!”

  Mrs. Elbe watched her ascend the stairs to her room. In the morning Stacey appeared at her normal time for breakfast, and she appeared to be in her normal frame of mind again. She presented Mrs. Elbe with the little gift she had for her, and she brought quite a radiant smile to Hannah’s eyes by giving her two pairs of really fine nylon stockings. Hannah had already received a powder compact from Mrs. Elbe, and a lily-of-the-valley brooch from Mrs. Moss, and she thought that Christmas had entirely lived up to all her expectations.

  After breakfast Stacey decided to write letters to the few friends who had remembered her with cards and good wishes, and she spent the better part of the morning in the library dealing with her correspondence. Just before lunch Beatrice Aden rang up to wish her the compliments of the season, and also to invite both her and Martin to dine with them on Boxing Night. But when Stacey informed her in a completely emotionless voice that Martin had not managed to get away from London for Christmas, Beatrice almost gasped.

  “But, my dear! ... Surely he could have managed...?” And then she broke off. “Well, in that case, you’ll come and have dinner with us today. You will, won’t you, Stacey? You mustn’t have Christmas dinner by yourself.”

  But, although Beatrice tried everything from persuasion to argument, and finally attempted to insist that she joined them, Stacey remained politely firm and declined every attempt to lure her from her home. She was not in the mood for anyone’s company but her own on that day of all days in the year, and she was determined that no pitying looks should be hers. She was very fond of Beatrice, but she would not have her trying to make up to her for what she was missing in her own home.

  “Then you’ll come over tomorrow? Promise?” Mrs. Aden insisted, and Stacey at last agreed to appear at her festive board on Boxing Day. But in the meantime she was spending Christmas Day by herself.

  Or not quite by herself.

  In the afternoon, Miss Fountain made an unexpected appearance, and they had tea together in front of a small fire in the drawing room. Miss Fountain’s expression was almost as bleak as usual, but her tongue was not quite so acid. Perhaps because there was something about Stacey’s grave, self-contained appearance, in one of her more subdued dresses, which struck even the self-centred Jane Fountain as not altogether natural for a girl of her age, she started to talk about her past life, and the kind of Christmas she had enjoyed when she was a very young girl. Stacey listened with a feeling that the case of the hardened and rather sour spinster was one that called for more sympathy than she ever received, and she resolved that in future she would try to make a few more allowances for her.

  After all, this had always been her home—she had loved Fenella Fountain, and for some reason she seemed to detest Martin Guelder. It was not therefore so very strange that she should feel antipathy for Martin Guelder’s second wife.

  At ten o’clock they said good night to one another and went to bed. Jane even paused on the stairs to observe to Stacey that it had been quite a pleasant evening after all.

  But for Stacey nothing was pleasant since Martin was not there.

  She fell asleep almost immediately her head touched the pillow, however—perhaps because she had kept hidden so much emotion during the day, and it had exhausted her. She dreamed of Christmases past, when her father was alive, and they had laughed together
over the flames of the brandy sauce when it was poured over the pudding and lighted, and over such childish delights as pulling crackers and donning paper hats. There had always been a lot of simple presents in those days, and opening them had been one of the highlights of breakfast. And listening to the music of Christmas bells, and going to church with her father, and being half hidden inside the ancient family pew, and trying to keep her father awake during the sermon by occasionally giving him a little prod, and very occasionally a little pinch.

  The vicar had always been one to drone on ... In her dreams she heard him again, and she could see how the candles flamed on the altar, and the vase of white chrysanthemums looked so unblemished and pure ... The flames of the candles were growing longer and longer, and they seemed to be giving off a great deal of heat, which was odd, since the church was usually so cold. The vicar was always appealing for an up-to-date heating system...

  But there was no need to worry about heat. It was tremendously hot, and the heat was taking her breath away, and the fumes from the candles were making her choke. She coughed. She awoke coughing and feeling as if her lungs were choked, and something acrid and stifling stung her nostrils. The room was full of moonlight, since her curtains were drawn back, but it was also full of filmy white trails of vapor—it was full of smoke!

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Stacey sprang out of bed, and somehow she fought her way to the door, and beyond that to the head of the stairs. There was a loud crackling and roaring noise on either side of her, and the heat was tremendous. Mrs. Elbe was calling to her from half-way up the stairs, holding a flapping dressing gown round her and looking like a wraith in her flying draperies.

  “Hurry!—hurry!” called Mrs. Elbe. “The whole place is burning like tinder! I was trying to get up to your room...”

  “What started it?” Stacey choked, joining her on the stairs. “And where is Hannah? Is she—”

  “Outside, on the lawn. It’s deep snow, but it can’t be helped, and the fire brigade are coming.” They started to make their way down the stairs.

  “Miss Fountain?” Stacey suddenly remembered her. “Is she outside, too?”

  Mrs. Elbe looked back, but she was impatient to win free from the suffocating smoke and the scorching heat, and the danger of the staircase collapsing at any moment.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t seen her. But if she’s in her room she’ll have to stay there now until the brigade arrives—”

  “They might not get here in time,” Stacey replied, and she had a sudden vision of the spinster trapped in her room—perhaps overcome by fumes, and lying helpless in the middle of her bedroom floor. “I’d better go back and see if she’s still there,” she said, and before Mrs. Elbe could prevent her she had started to climb the stairs again and was fighting her way back along the corridors to the wing of the house which contained Miss Fountain’s chosen apartments. But when she reached them it was to find that Miss Fountain had already escaped to safety—or, at least, she was not in either of her rooms—and Stacey turned to win free from the burning building herself. But by this time the main staircase was blazing like an inferno, and the corridors leading to it were choked with flames and acrid fumes. Stacey knew that all hope of escape in that direction was cut off for her. So, coughing and gasping, her senses already reeling, she strove to reach the back staircase on a side of the house which the fire had not yet attacked as fiercely as it probably would do very soon—unless help arrived in the very nick of time!

  But even as she strove to force herself forward a tongue of flame sprang up ahead of her, and she cowered in sudden, utter panic against the wall. It seemed to her that she was hopelessly trapped, and a little cry of horror left her throat. And then she thought she heard someone calling to her—a voice, anxious and imperative and desperately familiar, which reached her through the hiss and crackle of ancient timbers being relentlessly consumed before her eyes. A great roaring was in her ears, too, like the noise of a gigantic waterfall, and it was as much as she could do to hang on to her senses. Her lungs were bursting, and the hem of her dressing gown was on fire.

  “Stacey!” the voice called, again and again. “Stacey!” imploringly, “Where are you?”

  She did her best to call an answer, but no sound would pass her lips. She stood leaning against the wall, aware that in the dimness and the vagueness of drifting smoke and darting tongues of fire a shadowy form was approaching near to her, fighting to get within reach of her, and although her will urged her to make a supreme effort and force herself forward to meet it half-way, she could not do so. She could only croak, through dry and cracked lips: “Here! Here, Martin!...”

  And when Martin reached her she collapsed in his arms, and he swung her up into them and turned and fought his way back along the way he had come, their only hope the back staircase which had still been intact when he saw it last. And although the treads were smouldering it had still not burst into flames when he started to descend it, with Stacey, limp in his arms...

  It was the icy chill of the out of doors, and the heavenly sweetness and freshness after the conflagration within the house, that restored Stacey to her senses, and she was aware that she was being borne swiftly in a pair of arms which held her closely across lawns hidden by a white carpet of snow, while stars blazed like frosty fire away up in the deep night sky.

  A sensation of lassitude, mingled with an extraordinary feeling of complete contentment, held her, and as she gazed up into the dark face which loomed above—and yet so near—to her own, a tiny half smile came into her eyes, and she whispered: “Martin?” It was an unbelieving, merest thread of a whisper, and it came again: “Martin...?” Martin stopped on the edge of the lawn, and with the starshine illuminating his face and disclosing the unutterable tenderness in it, he bent his head still lower.

  “Oh, my beloved!” he exclaimed, and touched her cracked lips so gently with his own that, had her eyes been closed, she might never have known that he kissed her. But her eyes were open, and she did know. She nestled against him with a little sigh of happiness that was almost too great to be borne.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When Stacey opened her eyes the following day she remembered at once that it was Boxing Day. And the sun was shining through a break in leaden clouds, and because the world was still carpeted in snow outside, a strange, white light was reflected on her ceiling, and the cheerful voices of energetic snow shovellers, as well as the ring of the implements they used, were queerly hushed and muffled in that wilderness of frozen beauty.

  But in Stacey’s room an electric fire glowed comfortingly in the fireplace, and there was a good, thick carpet which prevented draughts from entering under the door. She looked round it a little wonderingly at first, realizing that it was slightly familiar, and then recognizing it as the spare bedroom—the most important spare bedroom!—in Beatrice Aden’s cottage. There were rosebuds on the chintz which hung at the window, and the same chintz covered the deep armchair. There was a little table beside the bed, and on it Beatrice set down a breakfast tray after coming quietly into the room.

  “Why, you’re awake!” she exclaimed. “Or did I wake you? How do you feel, my dear?”

  “Perfectly all right,” Stacey assured her, although she realized that one of her arms, almost to the shoulder, was swathed in bandages. “I think I’ve had a very good night—I must have slept like a log!

  “That was the sedative your husband gave you,” Beatrice told her, and added: “What a mercy we didn’t have to send for a doctor! And after you’d had such a ghastly time! My poor sweet, I can’t tell you how sorry I am you had to endure anything so frightful.”

  “But Martin must have been burned, too—?” Stacey suddenly recollected. “Was he—is he?”

  “Here,” Martin’s voice answered for him, just inside the doorway, and it was a very quiet voice, and it sent the wildest of thrills through Stacey’s whole being. Beatrice could see the rush of color which came to her cheeks, a
nd the way in which her eyes almost lit up. She decided to beat a tactful retreat, and leave together the husband and wife who had survived an ordeal by fire the night before.

  Martin had a large piece of sticking plaster adhering to one side of his head, and his dark hair above his right temple had been badly singed. But otherwise there seemed to be very little the matter with him, and there was a look in his eyes as he took a seat on the edge of the bed and gazed down at the girl whom he had married in London very nearly six months before which caused Stacey to lower her own eyes for an instant. And then she remembered what he had called her, out there in the icy cold and the snow, the previous evening, and the feel of his arms as they had held her, and she looked up at him again with the same revealing look chasing all shyness away from the violet-blue depths, so that words between them for a moment were not really necessary. And then he took her uninjured hand and held it gently, his professional instincts causing one finger to hover for a few seconds over her wildly fluttering pulse.

  “What about your breakfast?” he asked her. “You’ve got to eat it, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. I will eat it in a moment.”

  “When I’ve told you how I came to be at Fountains last night—just in the nick of time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, sit up,” he commanded her, with a smile which was virtually a caress. He caught her by the shoulders and drew her upright against her lace-edged feather pillows, and then draped a fleecy bed-jacket which was Beatrice’s property about her, and painstakingly tied the ribbon. “There you are!” he exclaimed, when he had finished. “And you look much better than I expected to see you look this morning.”