Stephen said with even greater sharpness than before:
“Why didn’t you tell me Mr. Ardmore wanted to paint your portrait, Penny?”
Penny explained awkwardly.
“Perhaps because I didn’t take him seriously. I can’t imagine why anyone should want to paint my portrait.”
“Then you can’t look at yourself very often in the mirror,” Ardmore said swiftly, sinking into a chair beside her and accepting a drink somewhat grudgingly offered by Stephen. “You have the type of face almost any artist would like to paint, and it isn’t merely your colouring—which is unusual, of course, with those brown eyes—but your bone formation and expression. The latter might be a bit difficult to reproduce faithfully, but I could do it. If your husband would allow me.”
“Where do you suggest my wife should sit for you?” Stephen asked, his tone still very uncompromising.
“At the cottage, since that would provide a suitable background,” Ardmore replied. “Or I have a studio which I rent a mile or so along the coast—”
“If you paint Penny at all you’ll paint her at the cottage,” Stephen said, his lips compressed and grim.
His landlord cast a curious glance at him, and then agreed suavely enough.
“Splendid!” he exclaimed. “Then I take it you have no objections?”
“Not if I can buy the finished effort. I shan’t be able to see it, but I should want it.”
“Since I live by the sale of my pictures I couldn’t agree more readily. And who knows ... you may see it one day!”
Stephen’s lips grew so thin and tightly clamped together that his whole expression struck Penny as almost unbearably bleak.
Veronica, who had been trying to look mildly interested while the conversation was taking place, tossed back her lovely cloud of hair from her shoulders and glanced along the length of her cigarette—complete with ornamental holder—at the artist.
“I wonder whether your prices are very high, Mr. Ardmore?” she murmured tentatively. “I should like to be painted myself one day!”
He studied her once more very deliberately, but without the flickering of admiration.
“I’m always glad of a model,” he told her carelessly. “Any time you like to offer yourself.”
It was not quite the reply she had expected, and her scarlet upper lip curved a little resentfully. She lowered her sweeping black lashes and turned with a show of solicitousness to Stephen.
“Would you like to go now, Stephen? You’re looking rather exhausted, and it worries me. You’re not really up to gatherings of this sort,” with a disapproving glance at Ardmore, “and I think I’ll have to take it upon myself and order you home to bed! Penny may be a good nurse, but she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t have occasional lapses.”
“Penny doesn’t have many lapses,” Stephen said, his taut mouth relaxing a little.
“Well...” She slipped a hand inside his arm and more or less urged him to his feet. “You mustn’t forget that she is human! And young! We’ve always thought of Penny as awfully young for her years!”
She guided him out into the inclemency of the night with the utmost care and cautiousness; and because he would be driven nowadays by no one but Waters she put him into his own car, and his servant appeared from the landlord’s quarters at the inn. Penny joined her husband on the back seat of the car, and Veronica closed the door on them.
But not before she had urged Waters several times to drive carefully over the headland, and almost entreated Penny to see that Stephen went straight to bed when they got home.
“It’s been a wonderful evening, but I’m afraid it’s been rather too much for Stephen,” she shouted above the roar of the wind, and the restless moaning of the sea. “Take care of him, Penny! Take care of him!” she begged.
As the car slid away from the lighted front of the inn Penny sat back on the seat beside a silent Stephen and wondered how he would feel if he could see Veronica—as she could see her—standing a little forlornly in the doorway of The Three Smugglers. She was hugging her coat around her, and her black hair was streaming on the wind. Her face was white and anxious.
Just how genuine was Veronica’s anxiety for Stephen, Penny asked herself?
The next day, when Veronica and her mother paid their final visit to the cottage before returning to Grangewood, Penny learned something about her cousin’s anxiety.
The two girls were alone in her bedroom for a short while before tea, and Veronica was engaged in her favourite occupation of making up her face. She was doing it carefully, peering at herself in the mirror, as if it was highly important that her lipstick should be neither too lightly nor too heavily applied, or her mascara smudged. As if, in fact, there was a man in the cottage who could see her and admire her ... when there was only Stephen, who could not see!
Penny stood watching her, feeling awkward for some reason ... awkward because Veronica was so silent. She had been silent all the afternoon, and there was something about her silence that lay like a warning pressure against Penny’s heart. A strange taut feeling of apprehension.
When Veronica put away her various make-up aids and snapped the clasp of her handbag the younger girl knew that something was coming. For nearly a week she had watched Veronica and Stephen together, and although Stephen gave away nothing at all, Veronica was sickeningly transparent to the wife who was not a wife.
She had said that she had never been in love with Stephen, but she was in love with him now. Whether it was purely and simply pity that had awakened love, Penny could only guess ... and the feminine heart was such a strange thing, it could be worked upon by pity. The torrent of tears she had shed when she saw him without his dark glasses had been absolutely genuine.
On the other hand—and there was a nagging doubt deep down in Penny’s heart—it might well be that she was regretting haying thrown away a husband who could have provided her with everything she needed. And when to that regret was added the momentous discovery that she could have loved him after all...!
Aunt Heloise had hinted at financial strain and unpaid bills. The bills for Veronica’s trousseau had not yet all been met, apparently ... and there were other commitments.
Penny tensed as her cousin turned and smiled at her in an almost gentle manner.
“Poor Penny! I did you no good service when I broke off my engagement and left Stephen in such a state of bitterness that he asked the first young woman he knew reasonably well to marry him, did I? And you must surely have realized that it was because he felt so bitter, and for no other reason, that he proposed to you?”
Penny said nothing, but her legs felt so weak suddenly that she sat down rather abruptly on the side of her own bed.
“I’m not blaming you...” Veronica didn’t sound as if she was blaming her, but she did sound as if she had a purpose in mentioning such a delicate subject within a brief half-hour or so of taking her departure from the lonely cottage where Penny would have plenty of time in the weeks ahead to dwell upon her words. “I never did feel in the least annoyed with you for catching Stephen on the rebound but having seen him again... Having made the rather appalling discovery that I ought never to have let him go—and I mean that!” extending a hand almost appealingly to Penny—“and being absolutely certain that I’ve ruined Stephen’s life, I want to ask one thing of you before I go back to Grangewood.”
“And what is that?” Penny asked, feeling as if the entire inside of her mouth had gone dry as bones, so that she found it difficult to articulate.
Veronica made another gesture with her hands. “Oh, Penny, if I thought you were living in some sort of a fool’s paradise I honestly wouldn’t say this, but I know you’re not! You’re too sensible! You didn’t even try and pretend when I asked you why you were sleeping in a room with a single bed! You know that it’s all so obvious ... such a hollow pretence!” She gestured round the simple room, inside which Stephen had never once set foot. “You’re the old Penny, and Stephen’s the old Stephe
n ... except that he’s bitterly unhappy! He has every cause to be. Through me he lost his eyesight, and through you...”
“Yes?” Penny barely breathed.
“Through you he has lost all hope of happiness—some sort of compensation—in the future. But if you’re very deeply attached to him—and I believe you always were!—try and see his side of the picture more clearly than you can see your own. Tell yourself that he needn’t lose everything—everything!—if you can find it in your heart to be generous and let him go. Such marriages as yours are the easiest things in the world to annul...”
Aunt Heloise called from the bottom of the stairs: “Darling, I don’t think we ought to stay to tea. It looks like being another wild night, and we ought to get back.”
“Coming, Mother!” Veronica called.
“Tell Penny we’ll make an effort and come down again in a few weeks.”
“I’ll probably come down by rail,” Veronica said to Penny. “They’ll always put me up at The Three Smugglers.” She slipped into her coat, and tied a silk head-square under her white chin. “However much you may pretend, Penny, you’re going to find it fiendishly dull here with Stephen!”
And then she was running lightly down the narrow stairs to join an agitated Mrs. Wilmott, who was nervous at the thought of driving across the exposed cliff with a storm sweeping in from the sea.
CHAPTER XI
After that Penny lived in constant dread of receiving a telephone message from Veronica to say that she was on her way to Cornwall.
But the autumn passed, winter set in in deadly earnest on that exposed bit of coast, and Veronica did not turn up unexpectedly at The Three Smugglers. The landlord kept Trevose Cottage supplied with dinner wines and the bottles of brandy and whisky that provided Stephen with an occasional liqueur with his coffee, and his final nightcap before he went to bed ... which no doubt helped him to sleep. Especially since he took to rating Waters if the nightcap was not strong enough!
Penny often wondered whether he did sleep, however, or whether he lay awake throughout most of the long nights. His room was not far away from hers, and sometimes she heard him tossing restlessly while the tide lapped at the foot of the cliffs upon which they were perched, and otherwise—except on blustery nights—there was complete silence.
Roland Ardmore climbed up from the inn on perhaps a couple of fine mornings every week to work on Penny’s portrait. Stephen sat in a chair while he worked, and Penny sat in the window-seat, with the sea behind her and the flying clouds, and wore a soft green dress that made her look more than ever like a dryad—or so Ardmore assured her, when she made her first appearance in it.
“You wore green when we were married, Penny,” Stephen reminded her, after Ardmore had made his observation. “It wasn’t a very lucky colour for you!”
Ardmore sent him one of his searching looks, and then glanced at Penny. The sunlight was pouring over her and her yellow hair, and he smiled at her.
“Green isn’t really an unlucky colour,” he told her. “If you were Irish you’d probably believe that it is, because the fairies are supposed to resent human creatures wearing it. But since you wore it at your wedding you obviously are not Irish.”
Penny didn’t tell him that she had worn green at her wedding because the suit and coat were a present to her from Aunt Heloise, and she couldn’t really afford a new outfit at that time. If she had been a normal bride—a bride who could choose!—she would have worn white.
“In any case, you’re not unhappy, are you?” he asked, as if he were deliberately probing. “I’ll grant you it was most unfortunate you should have that accident right at the beginning of your honeymoon, but your husband’s health is improving.” Once again he glanced at Stephen, who was looking dark and elegant in one of his beautifully cut suits, and whose dark glasses no longer drew attention to the fact that his cheeks were hollow, because the hollows had filled out.
It was only the restless tapping of his hands on the arms of his chair—that and his occasional bursts of temper, and moods of irritable impatience—that gave away the truth that he was not happy.
That he was very unhappy, as Veronica had pointed out to Penny.
Although sometimes in the evenings, when the wind howled round the cottage, and they were snug in their beamed sitting-room, Stephen did not behave like a bitterly unhappy man.
“Come and sit here, Penny,” he would say—or rather, command—and she would sit beside him and let him hold her hand and play with the delicate tips of her fingers, while the walls of the cottage shuddered and shook, and the waves thundered on the beach below them. Sometimes she would play gramophone records at his request, and sometimes she would turn up the lamp and read to him, but the evening nearly always ended with those few minutes of quiet, and the strength of his hand holding hers.
“Such little soft fingers,” he would say, and sometimes he carried them up to his face and held them there almost absentmindedly. Sometimes he made her kneel down before him so that he could let his fingers rove in her hair, but he never made any attempt to draw her into his arms, as he had done the night before Veronica drove back into his life.
They never talked of Veronica, but she was always an unspoken thought between them, or so Penny believed. She believed, also, that Veronica was the reason why Stephen invariably grew a little strange before he actually said good night and let Waters guide him upstairs to bed. Why he always said good night so curtly and briefly.
If he had been married to Veronica there would have been no curt good night of that sort!
Christmas came, and it was one of the strangest Christmases in Penny’s life. Waters, who looked after them so very admirably that Penny never had anything at all to do in the house—although she sometimes wished she had, for the days might not then have seemed as long as they frequently did—provided them with all the usual trimmings in the way of seasonable fare, and Penny herself dressed a small Christmas tree which she brought in from the garden. She placed it in a corner of the main living-room, and the bright tinsel streamers and coloured glass balls looked surprisingly gay and attractive by contrast with the heavy oak beams.
She also decked all the pictures with holly, and hung a bunch of mistletoe beside the swinging ship’s lantern in the hall. When Waters saw it for the first time his gaunt face registered approval, and then he glanced at Penny and his eyes grew soft and pitiful.
“If the master’s to know about that you’ll have to tell him where it is,” he said.
But, although her colour deepened, Penny shook her head.
“I don’t think I’ll do that,” she replied quickly. “It—it’s just because it’s Christmas!”
On Christmas Eve Stephen put a hand into his pocket and produced a jeweller’s case, which he tossed almost carelessly into Penny’s lap as she sat beside him.
“I had no real idea what you’d like for a present,” he said, “and I decided to play for safety and make it jewellery. Most women seem to like it, and you’re feminine enough in all conscience.”
Penny sat with the case in her lap, feeling suddenly so acutely shy that it was almost an agony. Her fingers itched to touch the red morocco and explore the neat gold clasp, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do so. It was only when Stephen spoke impatiently—so impatiently that it astounded her, when only a second or so before he had been as casual as if he was bestowing on her some neglected weed from the garden—that she apologized swiftly and opened the case.
“What are you waiting for?” Stephen demanded. “Don’t you like trinkets? Or do you like to be consulted,” with ponderous dryness, “before you start collecting suitable items for your jewel-box?”
“Of course not,” she answered, and by this time she had the case open, and was staring with delighted eyes at the string of milky pearls that lay on a bed of velvet. The clasp alone, she realized, with its solitary sapphire surrounded by diamond points, must have put the price of the necklace up considerably; and when it was gradually
borne in on her that these were real pearls ... Real pearls! … And for her!
“Oh, Stephen!” she said, and found that she could say nothing more.
The note in her voice was enough. Stephen relaxed.
“Put them on,” he said—or rather commanded. “Or give them to me, and let me put them on for you.”
She knelt in front of him on the rug—so often, nowadays, she felt like the beggarmaid kneeling at the feet of King Cophetua—and he fumbled with the clasp, and then secured it about her slender neck as she bent her head. His fingers were warm and vital as they brushed against her skin, and such a wild thrill shot through her that she remained silent.
“You like it?” her husband asked, quietly, while his breath stirred the gold floss of her hair. “You really like it?”
“I think it’s absolutely beautiful. But it must have cost a lot of money.”
“Never mind how much it cost,” he said disagreeably. “A wife receiving her first Christmas present from her husband shouldn’t be thinking about cost.”
“I—I wasn’t” She was suddenly aghast. “It was simply that...”
“Oh, forget it!” It was plain that he was no longer in a mood for present giving. He sat back in his chair and thrust out a hand to turn on the portable wireless set that stood on a table at his elbow. “Let’s drown the noise of those confounded carollers in the porch outside!” Penny had been thinking the voices of the carollers—a little band that had trudged all the way from the village to entertain them—so beautiful that it was one reason why she had been so easily overcome just then; and on top of them Stephen’s present made her feel as if she wanted to dissolve into tears. As if she wanted suddenly to drown in tears.
“I never could bear carol-singers,” Stephen said harshly, his mouth grim and mutinous.
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