“Please, Matron,” Penny said, wishing she would stop being so sympathetic, and let her know the worst without attempting to soften it in any way, “are you trying to tell me that my husband—that Stephen —has had his sight irreparably damaged by the car accident? That he—that he won’t see again?”
“We are very much afraid that he won’t see again,” Matron said gently. “At the moment Sir Robert thinks it highly unlikely, but miracles, of course, do sometimes happen—”
“But you don’t anticipate one in Stephen’s case?” Penny felt her lips frame the question.
“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Blair,” Matron answered.
CHAPTER VII
It was a very sheltered cove, and the sand on which Penny loved to lie and invite the kiss of the sun was fine and white like powdered shells.
Today she had been having a bathe as usual, and beside her her swim-suit was drying in the warmth of the sun. She was wearing a cotton sun-suit which left her arms and shoulders bare, and already she was acquiring a delicate golden tan that made her bright yellow hair appear even more striking by contrast. She used very little make-up, but her mouth was vivid—rather like a flower that had no real right to show signs of drooping—and her big brown eyes were too serious for a girl who was only twenty-four, and a couple of months ago had looked nothing like her age.
In two months she hadn’t merely grown up, she had put the comparatively carefree days of her girlhood right behind her. She had become a woman and a wife—although only in the sense that she bore her husband’s name—and she had learned to face responsibility, to be patient and cheerful, long-suffering and secretive about anything that closely affected herself.
Impatient words that hurt, for instance ... She must never allow the truth to leak out that they hurt badly. Long periods when she was ignored, when her very presence seemed to arouse a form of irritability that was very difficult to cope with, and certainly to soothe. Angry tirades that reminded her of the futility of the Cornish seas hurling themselves against the granite cliffs, and a slightly hostile jealousy because she was free to come and go as she chose.
She looked up at the white cottage on the cliff-top where Stephen was at that moment anticipating her return for lunch. It was a sturdily built cottage that had once been a coastguard’s cottage and look-out, and in the brilliant morning sunlight it had a harsh attractiveness against the deep blue of the sky.
There was a little garden behind it, with paved walks and a lot of flowers like fuchsia bushes and gay clumps of valerian. In front there was a terrace raised high above the sea, and on that terrace Stephen took his exercise whenever the weather permitted, and when the sun was hot he sat in a cane chair and stared sightlessly through his dark glasses at the sea that was always very empty save where it met the horizon. And there the phantom shapes of passing ships showed up against the sunset, or in the early dawn light when a pearly phosphorescence edged each incoming wave.
The cottage had been leased to them through an agent, and it was Stephen’s idea that they take it because he had been very fond of Cornwall when he was a boy. And in Cornwall, as he said bitterly, you could be more quickly forgotten than in any other corner of England.
His doctors took the more optimistic view that the Cornish air would do him good. But Penny, who was beginning to know her husband fairly well, was not so much concerned with his physical health as with his condition of mind if he could not reconcile himself to the verdict that had been passed on him.
On the surface, he had been strangely fatalistic when he first heard the truth about his eyes. Grimly fatalistic. But Penny, who could see below the surface, knew that he could not have rebelled more violently than he did when the news was broken. Only it was a rebellion that was under iron control.
The Stephen who had been looking forward to his convalescence was a changed man overnight. To her he changed completely. There was no longer any tenderness, any moments when she felt near to him, and when he talked about making a future together. For him there was no future—nothing!—although Sir Robert Bolton had said that after six months there might be some reason to hope. He wasn’t prepared to say that he believed there would be reason to hope, but there might be ... and such a vague promise meant nothing to Stephen.
He wanted something more than an empty crumb of comfort to hug to himself. And that something more was not forthcoming.
Sometimes Penny, in the silence of a very lonely night, found herself wishing ardently that she had refused to marry Stephen when he asked. If only she had done so there would never have been that disastrous night drive on the other side of the Channel that put an end to everything for him.
He would have recovered from his broken engagement, but the shock of losing his eyesight ... that was something he could not recover from.
She pulled on a pair of rope-soled sandals and rose and stood looking out over the sparkling surface of the sea. A motor-boat had been describing circles in the bay for the last half hour, and she watched it regretfully as it slid towards the shore. Even watching a motor-boat was exciting these days ... a form of diversion.
But if she was late for lunch Stephen would be annoyed again, and there might even be one of the scenes she was beginning to dread. He lost his temper so easily these days, and he never spared her. He seemed to take a kind of delight in knowing that she couldn’t answer back because she felt he had a right to be angry under present conditions.
She gathered up her swim-suit and the knitting bag which usually accompanied her down to the beach, and turned to walk up the shelving sand to the stairway hewn out of the jagged surface of the cliff. At the head of the stairway Trevose Cottage waited, and so did Stephen.
But before she could even set her foot on the first tread of the stairway the motor-boat came nosing its way into the cove, its engine spluttered and finally died, and the man who was its only occupant leapt ashore. Turning to look at him over her shoulder, Penny saw that he was standing very still and gazing at her, a tall man in waders and a coarse white sweater, with very fair hair that glittered in the sunshine, and a matching, extremely neat little beard.
He lifted his hand and waved to her, and as she made no attempt to move he called out clearly: “Forgive me, but do you know the people who live at the cottage on the cliff? Trevose Cottage?”
He was striding swiftly up the beach, a magnificent specimen of a man, rather like a Viking with that golden beard, and when he reached her he sketched her a salute.
“I suppose you don’t happen to be Mrs. Blair?” Penny admitted that she was nobody else.
His sea-blue eyes roved over her, revealing admiration as they took in the slender lines of her figure, and the simple white sun-suit that left so much of her creamy skin bare.
“Mrs. Stephen Blair?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, and smiled with a flash of perfect white teeth. “I’m your landlord, Roland Ardmore, and I was going to make a call on my tenants some time this afternoon. But, now that we’ve met, would it be asking too much if I could be introduced to your husband now ... before lunch? Do you think he might ask me in for a drink?” grinning disarmingly so that the request didn’t sound in the least presumptuous.
Penny stood very still on the sand, and tried to imagine how Stephen would react—and what he would very likely say!—if she took a stranger up to the cottage in the middle of the day, when lunch was already just a little late. A bare couple of minutes, but to Stephen that would be infuriating.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ardmore, but my husband is an invalid, and he doesn’t like callers,” she said quietly.
His eyebrows ascended.
“Poor chap! As groggy as all that? I heard there was something wrong with him, but I didn’t know he was in actual fact an invalid.”
Penny licked her lips.
“He isn’t ... well, not a real invalid any longer. But he was involved in an accident a short time ago, and his eyes were affected.”
“Permanently?”
&
nbsp; “They’re not... absolutely certain.”
“I see.” His blue eyes reflected the keenest sympathy. “And you’ve come down here for peace and quiet while he tries to get accustomed to the idea? Well, you could hardly have picked a more perfect spot. Trevose is sited on one of the finest bits of the whole Cornish coast, and you’ve nothing between you and America when you stand on your front door step. That is a thought that has given me pleasure many a time ... There’s something exciting about it, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” she agreed, her brown eyes kindling because it was an exciting thought.
“On a moonlight night there’s magic in it, and on a night of storm and tempest—such as we often get along this coast—it’s awe-inspiring. Wait until October and the gales start raging along the coast here! You’ll know what I mean then!”
“I think I know what you mean now,” Penny answered.
He grinned at her engagingly.
“I’m an artist, and that’s why my tongue runs away with me at times. It also explains why I find it impossible to go on living up at Trevose unless I let the place sometimes. At the moment I’m staying at an inn where they put me up fairly cheaply, and I hang on to the boat because I couldn’t get along without it. Any time you’d care to go out in her,” he bowed with exaggerated formality, “I’d be delighted!”
“Thank you,” Penny returned, “but I’m afraid my husband isn’t awfully keen at the moment on that sort of thing.”
“And you?” He was looking at her suddenly with curiosity. “Even if your husband isn’t keen, do you have to remain tied to his apron strings? Or whatever the masculine equivalent of apron strings might be!” She flushed brilliantly, the colour rolling upwards over her neck and face, and disappearing under her hair.
“Wasn’t that rather impertinent, Mr. Ardmore?” she said stiffly.
He made an abject movement with his strong brown hands.
“I quite agree, it was ... You’ll have to forgive me! But you’re not in the least what I expected to find, and there’s something about you ... something about the way you look...”
“And how,” she inquired, in some amazement, “do I look?”
“Rather like a dryad who has lost her way,” he returned soberly. “A yellow-headed dryad. It’s that white frock and your sandals, and the way your hair falls in that soft fringe. And, of course, your eyes ... although you may try to hide it you’ve taken the wrong turning in life, and you know it. Moreover, you know there’s nothing you can do about it! Is your husband very impossible to live with?”
She turned away.
“I must go now, Mr. Ardmore. Every moment that I stand here talking to you my husband is being kept waiting for his lunch.”
“You don’t mean that you have to cook the lunch?”
“No, we have a manservant.”
“H’m,” he said, studying her thoughtfully through narrowed eyes. “You pay me a thumping rent for that cottage up there, and you have a manservant. On the surface it wouldn’t appear that you lack very much, and yet you do.” As she made a swift movement towards the foot of the steps, he added, “If you won’t let me call and get acquainted with your husband will you let me paint you some time?”
She looked down at him from three steps up the cliff face.
“I can’t imagine why you should want to paint me.”
“Can’t you?”
She shook her head.
“Paint the cove. It’s much more worthy of being consigned to canvas, or whatever it is you do. Perhaps you paint watercolours?”
“I want to paint you,” he said, ignoring her query. “And what’s more, I’ve made up my mind that I am going to paint you!”
She went running swiftly up the steps, and he returned rather more slowly to his motor-boat. It had the name Sea Nymph painted on its side, and it shot out to sea with all the gaiety and abandon of a sea nymph.
Penny pushed open the front door of the cottage and went straight through into the living-room to find Stephen sitting in his customary chair beside the wide hearth. The room had an almost spartan simplicity that went well with the heavy oak beams that crossed the ceiling, but Stephen was carefully dressed, his tie meticulously knotted, and he was grasping the arms of his chair with thin, nervous hands.
“Is that you, Penny?” he called, as soon as her footsteps sounded in the flagged hall.
Penny burst into the room a little breathlessly.
“I’m so sorry I’m late, Stephen,” she apologized. “But it was so lovely down on the beach I couldn’t tear myself away, and then I met someone who detained me.”
“Oh, really?” Stephen said, with dangerous quietness. Penny was quite shocked by the pallor around his mouth, and the stony set of his jaw. “I don’t need to have it explained to me that you find it dull living here with me in this simple cottage; but I do think you might sometimes remember that I, too, find it dull! In fact I find it poisonously dull!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and hurried across the floor to his side. “Shall I ring the bell for Waters to serve lunch?”
“In a minute.” His tone was peremptory. “You’ve already delayed lunch by about ten minutes, so there’s no great hurry. Who was this ‘someone’ you met on the beach?”
“A man named Ardmore. He says he’s our landlord.”
“Oh, indeed? And do we have to have our landlord inflicted on us as well as the deficiencies in his scheme of furnishings?” He stood up, a still elegant but rather spare shape in his immaculate suiting. “Why didn’t you bring him up here to see me if he was anxious to talk? Why did you let him keep you down there on the beach?”
“He wanted to pay a formal call, but I discouraged him because I thought you’d find that rather boring,” Penny explained hurriedly. “Especially,” she added, “as it was just on lunch time.”
“We could have asked him to lunch. I don’t suppose Waters would have found it utterly impossible to provide for an unexpected guest.”
She bit her lip nervously.
“I never thought of that.”
“You mean,” he said jibingly, “that you thought I’d act the part of host so abominably that our precious landlord would take a pretty dim view of his tenants ... the male part of the contract, anyway! And you could be right, for I’m in no mood to talk to strangers!”
He took a few uncertain steps forward in the direction he imagined the dining-room door to be, although actually he was moving away from it, and Penny flew to his side.
“Not that way, Stephen! Let me guide you!”
He swore softly, thrusting her aside.
“Please leave me alone! Won’t you ever understand that I have to find my way about alone, without assistance from anyone?” He was speaking through his teeth, and Penny saw the veins stand out on his forehead, and the sudden hollows in his cheeks as his jaws clamped themselves so tightly together that she could almost hear the harsh grating of his hard white teeth. “Get out of my way, Penny!”
Penny stood aside and watched him as he blundered into furniture, and took three times the length of time to reach the dining-room door that he would have done if he had allowed her to help him. When at last she watched Waters, his faithful manservant, placing him comfortably in his chair at the table the tears were blinding her eyes so badly that she could hardly see her own chair when Waters drew it forth for her.
Tall and gaunt, with a cheerful Cockney accent, Waters placed a hand sympathetically on her shoulder.
“A glass of sherry, madam?” he suggested. “It will cheer you up.”
“My wife is not in need of being cheered up,” Stephen said, a sarcastic edge to his voice. “She has been conversing on the beach with an attractive stranger.”
“I never said he was attractive—” Penny began, but Waters shook his head at her warningly. The shake said plainly that it wasn’t worth it, and in any case allowances had to be made.
Penny subsided into silence, and when her soup was brought she tried h
ard to force some of it down her throat, but she felt as if. every spoonful would choke her. Her hand shook, and the spoon rattled against her plate, and the tears that were streaming down her cheeks dropped into the soup itself without having any noticeable diluting effect on the rich and aromatic brew.
“As a matter of fact, you were quite right. I didn’t want to see the chap,” Stephen remarked suddenly, as if he was continuing a conversation. “What did you say his name was?”
“Roland Ardmore,” Penny told him.
“There’s a quite a well-known artist called Ardmore. Does this one paint portraits?”
“Yes, I think he does. At any rate, he paints pictures.”
A bright drop rolled off her lashes and splashed into the soup, and she caught her breath although there was absolutely no sound.
Stephen lifted his head and spoke sharply.
“Penny!”
“Y-yes?” Penny quavered.
“Is anything the matter with you, Penny? Has something upset you?”
“Of—of course not,” Penny answered, trying to sound as if she were being strictly truthful. “Of—c-course not!”
“Then, in that case, you must be developing a cold,” he remarked, “for I distinctly heard you sniff!”
Penny remained silent.
“It’s because I was such a brute to you before lunch, isn’t it?” he murmured, softly. “Oh, Penny, you sweet little idiot, when will you cease taking everything so much to heart?” he demanded. “You mustn’t mind so much if I lose my temper. I’m consumed with temper these days, and therefore I’m bound to lose it occasionally ... until I get more used to things, that is.” His hand came out across the table and covered one of hers. “Penny, I know I’m impossible to live with, but try and put up with me!”
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