by Susan Barrie
“Oh, yes, thank you very much indeed,” she assured him, with equal politeness, and realized that it was not his intention to accompany them to Hill Street. He gave the taxi-man their address and tipped him in the lavish fashion which was one of his habits, and then smiled as he waved a farewell hand—the merest suspicion of a twinkle in his eyes, or so Melanie thought, as if he realized that she might have been slightly bored!
And that night, when she went down to dinner—Great-Aunt Amelia having departed from her routine for once—she received a surprise to find him in the dining-room, correctly attired for the evening, and fitting in very well with the handsome Victorian surroundings. For he was occupying the centre of the hearth-rug and leaning an intensely masculine black-clad shoulder against the white marble mantelpiece, and he looked at her with a slight challenge in his eyes.
So this was the reason he had refused Miss Gaythorpe’s so pressing invitation to her party! The faint, sarcastic curve to his lips, and the merest hint of curiosity under his black brows as he watched her convinced her that he was wondering what precisely she was thinking.
Dinner with Great-Aunt Amelia was something of an ordeal, for she insisted on several courses being served, and they were impressively brought to table by Fawkes. The table itself groaned under the weight of a mass of silver, and a high-piled mountain of fruit, which nobody ever seemed to touch, so far as Melanie had observed—certainly not great-Aunt Amelia, who pecked like a bird at the tiny portions placed in front of her. The wines, however, were excellent, and Richard sampled them with a suitably grave expression—a sparkling claret and a rich, thick port—and nodded to Fawkes to continue pouring them into the handsome crystal wine-glasses. Afterwards there was coffee and a selection of liqueurs in the drawing-room, with its gilt console tables and its crimson damask, and Great-Aunt Amelia discussed politics with her nephew, and the rise and fall of stocks and shares, and then fell asleep over a game of patience from which she was somewhat sharply aroused by the watchful Fawkes, and more or less ordered upstairs to bed.
Leaning on her stick in the doorway, before she left the room, Great-Aunt Amelia looked rather drowsily at Richard.
“You won’t be late, Richard? You won’t keep this child up beyond her usual bed-time?”
He shook his head and smiled at her.
“I’m going in precisely ten minutes, Aunt. But first I have something to say to Miss Brooks!”
When she had left the room he crossed to the fireplace and prodded the glowing coals on the hearth. The flames sprang up and illuminated his face, dark and slightly swarthy in that ruddy glare, and burnished the top of his sleek, dark head. Melanie wondered what it was he wanted to talk to her about.
Without turning, and addressing the fire, he asked, “Did Noel enjoy herself this afternoon?”
“Oh, yes, I’m quite sure she did,” she answered.
“And you?” He looked round at her obliquely, one eyebrow raised questioningly: “I suppose you enjoyed yourself thoroughly, too?”
“It—it was very pleasant,” she told him, with rather more hesitation.
He regarded her with an inscrutable smile.
“You don’t often visit cinemas, and places like that, do you? Somehow I think you fit in better with a background of rugged moorland, and a ridiculous dog like that animal Potch jumping all over you and devouring you with affection! You look well in tweeds and flat-heeled shoes, but I don’t think you find London particularly stimulating. Which reminds me of the thing I wish to discuss with you—the question of your salary!”
A faint, embarrassed color began to creep up in her cheeks.
“I imagine you would perhaps consider the same sum as Mrs. Duplessis and I agreed upon when I first went to her.”
“And what was that?” he asked.
She told him, and he looked almost disdainful.
“I will double it,” he told her. “Either you are worth a reasonable recompense to me, or you are not—and I imagine you will be.”
Melanie felt vaguely that she was being considered as an object of utility and barter, and something inside her rose up in a kind of angry defiance at such an attitude. After all, she had not wished to look after his niece!
“I would prefer, if you don’t mind, to receive a nominal salary, and that was what I received from Mrs. Duplessis. The duties here are no more arduous—they will be no more arduous at the Wold House. And in any case I can’t accept more.”
He looked at her small chin stuck rather noticeably into the air, at her faintly hostile eyes, and he smiled with sudden amusement.
“Can’t you? But if I refuse to offer you less?”
“Then I shall have to return to Mrs. Duplessis!”
He laughed.
“That’s an idle threat, because I would never permit you. But what foolish pride is this? Why can’t you feather your nest while you have the opportunity? Nobody knows what the future will bring—and it’s as well to be prepared for a rainy day.”
“I can always work,” she assured him evenly. “I shall always be able to keep myself.”
“Will you?” But he thought that despite the gallant uprightness of her figure, and the calm purpose of her shapely mouth and resolute chin, there was a certain air of fragility about her which had a right to be protected. And with those fawn-like eyes and pale, smooth, oval face it was unlikely that she would find it necessary to work— for long! Scarcely any time at all if he was any judge of a woman’s potentialities! “Well, it’s an unpredictable world,” he said; “but certainly, in your case, you should have no qualms about the future.”
They looked at one another for a moment in silence, and she thought that he was regarding her speculatively, and there was a curious little quirk of a smile on his lips. And then suddenly he put out a hand and laid it firmly on her shoulder.
“All right,” he said, “you win! But we’ll think up a suitable bonus for you when you leave—that is to say, when my niece no longer requires you. And by the look of her at the moment she is going to require you for some time yet!”
“She’s very far from strong,” she said seriously. “I hope Murchester will do her good.”
“So do I,” soberly. “She had, I’m afraid, a bad beginning, and there is a certain inherited weakness there. If Murchester fails we shall have to think of something else. But for the meantime I feel that I can rely upon you to watch her carefully, to do your best to give her confidence, and to let me know if you are not satisfied with her progress. I am anxious to do the best I can for her, for she is after all my brother’s child.”
“Is she at all like her mother?” Melanie questioned him suddenly, without quite understanding why she asked.
He shook his head.
“No—apart from her fairness. But her mother’s coloring was far richer. She—” He stared into the fire, something like a shadow creeping over his face, and his voice went curiously flat. “Actually someone else resembles her mother much more closely.”
“Miss Gaythorpe?” Melanie suggested quietly.
“How did you know?”
“Noel told me Miss Gaythorpe is some sort of connection of her mother’s, and that she. is rather strikingly like her. That’s why I wondered whether Noel is perhaps rather more like her father?”
“It’s quite possible that she is—in a way,” he agreed, but he sounded a trifle curt. He turned from her and strode out into the hall, picked up his light raincoat and threw it over his shoulder. “Good night, Miss Brooks. I hope you won’t be too lonely at the Wold House. You must let me know if there is anything you want.”
“I will,” she promised.
“I shall be visiting you soon—before Christmas.” Suddenly he held out his hand and she placed hers in it. She suddenly longed intensely to know whether, having fulfilled one obligation this evening, he was now going to taste the reward of virtue by joining the party which contained Miss Gaythorpe. It was early yet—there was plenty of time for him to do so.
He looked down at her slim fingers lying almost confidingly in his hold. He gave them a little squeeze, and lightly caught her other hand as well.
“The hands of a world’s worker!” he observed, and looked up at her with a curious blend of laughter and something quite inexplicable in his gaze. “I don’t want them to toil too hard in my service!”
That afternoon she might not have existed so far as he was concerned, but this evening she was made all at once most acutely aware that he exercised, when he felt like it, quite a powerful charm. It was in his voice, and his look, and his baffling smile. It was in the faint, attractive odor of pipe tobacco and shaving-cream which clung to him. It was in some way connected with the magnetic contact his fingers were maintaining with her own, and which made her want to snatch hers rather hastily away because she was being overcome by a sort of confusion... She even dropped her eyes, when he persisted in looking at her, and saw the white line of his cuff emerging from the effective contrast of his sombre sleeve. His wrists were very brown and strong-looking, and there was a neat wrist-watch encircling the left one, the plain leather strap gripping it closely. The hands of the watch indicated that it was a few minutes to eleven. Eleven o’clock was still very early for a man of his habits.
“Good night,” he repeated gently, giving her fingers another very definite squeeze before’ he dropped them. “My aunt would consider it high time you were in bed. And I’m going home to work.”
“Oh, are you?” she said, and was amazed at her own pleasure because he had told her that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HE saw them off at the station when they left for the north, and provided them with books and magazines for their journey. Their compartment was first-class, and he had arranged with the dining-car attendant to serve them the first lunch. Mrs. Abbie had gone on ahead of them by two days, taking with her a young under-housemaid, and so far it was possible the house would be in trim for their arrival. They were to take a taxi when they reached the junction at Haveringford, which would convey them the ten or twelve miles to Murchester.
Melanie felt her hand gripped hard when she said goodbye to her employer. He was in one of his least distant moods, his grey eyes warm and encouraging, his voice brisk and cheerful. He had a smile which certainly made up for some of his past neglect for Noel Trenchard, his niece; but Melanie thought that just before the train pulled out the curve of his lips took on the faintest suggestion of a downward droop of envy as he peered into the comfort of their compartment.
“I almost wish I was coming with you,” he said. “But I’ll see you soon. And in the meantime I hope you’ll both behave yourselves!”
In her last glimpse of him, before the long stream of slowly moving carriages slid away from the platform, he was standing with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his fawn raincoat, a felt hat pulled rather well down over his eyes, which were no longer—she was almost certain—smiling. And the last he saw of her was a little hat with a tiny upstanding quill at one side of it, and dark curls which bobbed beneath it.
Noel, who stood beside her at the open window, suddenly lifted her gloved hand and waved. Melanie waved, too, but by that time the train was gathering speed and he had turned away and was walking back along the platform.
Noel gave vent to a curious little half-sigh.
“Sometimes I think that Uncle Richard is really nice, and then at others—I’m not so sure!” she remarked oddly.
“You silly child,” Melanie told her, smiling at her humorously. “He’s doing rather a lot for you, and I think you ought to be really grateful. Look at that new dressing-case on the rack! It makes mine look like a poor relation!”
“Which is exactly what I am,” Noel murmured, staring out of the window at the depressing ugliness ‘of London before it begins to merge itself with the suburbs. “Do you know,” she added, with a rather shame-faced laugh, “when I was at school, and received a letter from him which was not quite as business-like and formal as some of his letters, I used to let my imagination run away with me and make plans. And the plans were that when the day came that I left school for good I would go and live with him and look after him and act as his housekeeper! You see, I hadn’t seen him since I was very tiny, and I had no idea that Uncle Richard was—well, as Uncle Richard is! I pictured him much older, and not nearly so successful and prominent a person.”
“Did you?” Melanie looked at her gently. “But there’s plenty of time yet for you to realize your ambition—if it is your ambition! It won’t be long before you’re quite a sophisticated young lady, and Mr. Trenchard has already bought a most attractive house for you to live in. He probably plans for you to become its mistress, and then you can begin your programme of looking after him.”
“With Mrs. Abbie doing the actual running of the place?” She smiled sceptically. “You heard what he said about Mrs. Abbie. He thinks she’s the most wonderful housekeeper in existence.”
“Which she probably is. I don’t think she would have lasted so long with your uncle if she hadn’t the most extraordinary qualifications to commend her.”
“That’s what I mean,” Noel said. “He has no time for inefficiency! I couldn’t hope to compete with her, and in any case he’ll probably be getting married quite soon—”
Melanie was struggling with the rearrangement of their assortment of hand luggage on the rack, and she paused, struck by the shrewdness—and the apparent powers of observation—of the sixteen-year-old.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Is he thinking of getting married?”
“If he isn’t, Sylvia Gaythorpe is thinking of marrying him!” Noel frowned down at an advertisement in one of the glossy magazines, and then flicked over a page. “And she’s so beautiful! She really is beautiful, and I can’t help admiring her enormously, and she was wonderful in that film we saw—but I don’t know whether I should like to have her for an aunt!”
“If I were you,” Melanie advised her, thankful that an attendant was approaching along the corridor and that she could create a diversion by ordering coffee, “I wouldn’t bother my head about such matters until you have to. There is such a thing as crossing your bridges before you get to them, you know.”
The afternoon was already closing in when they reached Haveringford, but Noel’s questing eyes made out the hilly grandeur on all sides of them. A single shaft of red-gold late afternoon sunlight gilded the piled-up purple distance, and transmuted the shabby vehicle in which they were to travel the last lap of the journey to a temporarily pleasing fiery chariot. But even so it was bitterly cold—a cold which stung like the sharp thrust of knives after the damp, depressing cold of London—and both girls were glad of the rug which was wrapped round their knees. Their luggage made the journey piled up behind them on the luggage grid.
Noel was tired after her long day devoted to travelling, and Melanie was glad, when they finally reached the Wold House, to find that Mrs. Abbie had more than justified her advance journey. She had a huge fire glowing half-way up the chimney in the library, and something more in the nature of a most welcome high tea awaited them after their cold car-ride.
To Melanie’s eyes the whole house had been transformed, and was an oasis of comfort and quiet after the prim luxuriousness of Hill Street. When she had seen Noel into bed in the room which conveniently adjoined her own she wandered round it, taking in all the carefully thought out appointments, and the many improvements which, had been made. The bedrooms were airily comfortable, and her own was both tasteful and artistic. She wondered whether the plain green carpet, like a carpet of moss, and the highly-glazed chintz with a tiny pattern of violets and harebells on a clear primrose ground was the choice of the new owner of the house, or someone whom he had employed. And she particularly admired her magnificent specimen of a walnut tallboy, and the deep, comfortable, tapestry-covered chair which stood, cheek-by-jowl with a handy little low table, drawn up close to the fire.
The lampshades were all new and unusual, shedding a warm amber light
over the room, and the bathroom she shared with Noel lacked nothing in its equipment.
Yet the house still retained its atmosphere—its unassailable, reassuring atmosphere of solidity and age which had been the one thing about it which had impressed itself upon both Melanie and Richard Trenchard when they had seen it first. The hall echoed to the solemn tick of a grandfather clock which stood at the foot of the carved oak staircase, and the panelling now had a kind of soft sheen which reflected the bright sparkle of the logs blazing on a wide hearth. Mrs. Abbie had arranged a huge pottery bowl full of purple michaelmas daisies on a black oak dower chest against the farther wall, and this splash of color was duplicated in a beautiful Jacobean mirror which hung directly facing it.
Mrs. Abbie moved softly about the many corridors which crisscrossed the house at all angles, jingling her keys and attending to such important items as hot water bottles in beds, and boiling hot water in the bathroom taps. Melanie joined her on her final round of locking up the house for the night, and it suddenly struck her as intensely strange that she and not Richard Trenchard, should be sampling the delights of an entirely new home while he was still in London.
In the room which he himself had selected as the room in which he would one day work, quite a large number of his favorite books awaited him on the shelves, and there were copies of his own plays, too—alongside Dickens and Thackeray and Scott, of whom he obviously approved. Mrs. Abbie had had a fire lighted to air the room, and she carefully placed a guard in front of it in order that no spark should alight upon the glowing beauties in the Persian rug and set it alight. Then she wiped an imaginary speck of dust from the shining surface of his desk, which looked unnaturally bare and rather bleak, awaiting some evidence of his occupation.