Lord of the Far Island Page 7

  I am sensitive about dwellings and as I stood savoring the atmosphere I fancied I could detect suffering in these. I shivered, and Philip said : "You're cold."

  "No, just a shiver."

  "Why are you shivering then?"

  "Someone walked over my grave, as they say."

  "Let's go down."

  "Not just yet. I want to linger awhile. I wonder what she felt like up here. Perhaps she was trying to be different so that Rollo and his family wouldn't be ashamed of her."

  "Come on. Let's go down. You're running on again. I can't tell you anything more about her. We don't talk of her. She's Rollo's affair."

  "Hers too," I reminded him. I went to the bed and touched the quilt, then the back of a chair. She had lived with these things. I wanted to know about her, to see her. Perhaps I could talk to her, help her in some way.

  We don't talk about these things, Philip had said. But that was the Carrington way of life. When something was unpleasant you pretended it didn't exist. I could never be like that and I couldn't stop thinking about Rollo's wife.

  While we were in the country Philip insisted we go to Dead Man's Leap. We walked through the woods together and came to the spot near the path where there was a wooden seat. We sat down and Philip said: "It brings it all back, doesn't it? It'll always be one of my favorite places. You were a bit scared to come here alone, admit it, Ellen."

  "Well, just a bit."

  "I was a beast to make you."

  "You were a horrid little beast quite often."

  "But you were such a know-it-all that you had to be brought down a peg or two sometimes. It does seem a bit weird here, doesn't it?"

  "I wonder how many people have sat on this seat and thought about jumping over."

  "If rumor's true, quite a number."

  Philip stood up to go to stand at the edge of the path as he used to.

  "Come back," I shouted.

  He obeyed, laughing. "Why, Ellen, you're really scared. You didn't think I was going to leap over, did you?"

  "I thought you might show off once too often. There ought to be a rail of some sort up there."

  "I'll speak about it. It's our land, you know."

  I was surprised that he remembered to do so, and before we left London an iron rail was put up.

  Back in London, Philip and I liked to walk in the Park and talk about our plans. There we could often escape from people who wanted to come up and congratulate us and be quite alone, so we made the most of it. We would wander along by the Serpentine into Kensington Gardens and right across to the other side of the Park. It was in the Park that I was aware of a man watching us. There was nothing very remarkable about him except his unusually bushy eyebrows. He had come along very quietly, it seemed, and seated himself on one of the benches not far from us.

  I don't know why I was aware of him, but I was. He gave me an uneasy feeling.

  "Do you see that man over there, Philip?" I asked.

  He looked about him. "On the bench, you mean?"

  "Yes, he seems to be watching us."

  "Well, he must be thinking how pretty you look."

  "He seems interested in us."

  Philip squeezed my arm.

  "Of course he's interested in us. We're rather special people."

  The man got up and walked away; and we forgot him.

  The House in Finlay Square

  We went to see a house in a Knightsbridge square. I was so excited when Philip produced the key and we went in. It was a tall white Queen Anne house with a garden in front and four stories. There is something about empty houses which is almost personal. They can be welcoming or forbidding.

  I don't think I have any special perception, merely an overcharged imagination perhaps, but this house affected me as the top rooms of the Carrington country house had done: It was the reverse of welcoming. There was something about it that was alien, and for the first time in my new-found happiness a coldness touched me. Was it because the house represented a reality and the rest had been dreams?

  I was to spend my life with Philip—all the years ahead would be with him; we should grow old together, grow like each other. We should be the most important people in each other's lives. It was a sobering thought. I suddenly felt that I had been put into a cage—a pleasant gilded cage, it was true, but outside was the world which I had never yet explored.

  I looked at Philip. He was saying eagerly: "Do you like it?"

  "I haven't seen it yet. You can't judge a house by the hall."

  "Come on then."

  He took my hand and we went into the lower rooms; they were intimate—walls closing round me. No, I thought. No!

  He ran up the stairs dragging me with him. The rooms on the first floor were light and airy. I liked them better.

  "We'll give our parties here," he said. "Rather elegant eh?"

  We went up again. There were more big rooms and on the top floor more, and above that attics.

  "It's too big," I said, finding excuses.

  He looked startled. By Carrington standards it was quite small.

  "We shall need these rooms. There are the servants... to be accommodated, and we want a nursery. What's the matter? You want a nursery, don't you?"

  "Yes, I do very much. But I just feel there is something... not quite right about it."

  "What do you mean... ghosts or something?"

  "Of course not. It looks so ..." I floundered. "Empty!"

  He laughed at me. "What do you expect it to be, you goose? Let's look all round. Come on." He was enthusiastic. "The right house is not so easy to find these days," he went on. "The sooner we get a place, the sooner we can get married. Let's look downstairs again."

  "I want to stay here... alone for a bit."

  "Whatever for?"

  "To feel what it's like to be here by myself."

  "You ass," he said, like the Philip of our childhood. But he went downstairs.

  I stood there in the center of the room. I looked out of the long narrow window. There was a garden, small of course, with two trees in it, and a round flower bed.

  I tried to imagine myself alone in this house.

  It was a strange feeling. I just knew that I didn't want to come here. It was the same feeling that I had in the dream. How very odd, I thought, and disturbing, because I knew this could never be the house for me.

  I went down the stairs to the room below and was standing at the window and looking out on the garden when there was a movement behind me. Hands encircled my throat. I gasped out in terror.

  "Fe fi fo fum!" cried Philip. "I am the ghost of the last tenant. I was found hanging from the rafters."

  He swung me round to face him.

  He kissed me: and we were both laughing.

  He took my hands and we raced down the stairs.

  I couldn't shake off my uneasy feeling about the house in Finlay Square. I knew that Philip was eager to acquire it. He said we didn't want to spend months looking for houses. Buying a house was a lengthy matter at the best of times.

  "We can always sell it if we don't like it," he pointed out. "We shall be wanting something bigger in due course, I daresay."

  The house was to be his father's wedding present and I hated to curb his enthusiasm. It was not even that I could find anything definite to dislike about the place; but it was a fact that from the time we looked over it my happiness became a little clouded. Oddly enough I had the dream again, which was surprising because I had so recently had it on the night before the dance.

  I became so obsessed by the house that one day I went to the house agent and asked if I could have a key to look it over alone. When they knew who I was they reminded me that Mr. Carrington already had a key. I explained then that I wanted to look it over by myself. So I got another key.

  It was afternoon, about three o'clock, when I arrived at Finlay Square. It was warm and there were few people about. I stood near the gardens which formed the center of the square and looked at the house from across the
road. Again I felt the odd misgiving. My impulse was to turn away at once, take the key back to the house agent and tell him that we had decided against the house. Philip would be disappointed but I could make him understand, I was sure.

  Then it was as though some force was propelling me across the road. I didn't want to go, and yet the overpowering urge to do so was forcing me to. I would let myself in and go carefully through the house. I would make myself see that it was just an ordinary house. There was nothing different there from thousands of other empty houses.

  As I opened the gate it gave what I thought of as a protesting whine; I was looking for omens, I told myself severely. Determined not to give way to such fancies, I went up the short path to the front door and let myself in. I closed the door behind me and stood in the hall. Then it came to me again—that strange feeling of foreboding. It seemed as though the house was telling me to go. It had no welcome for me. It had nothing to offer me but disaster.

  I looked up at the tall ornamented ceiling and at the really rather beautiful curving staircase. It seemed to me as though the house was rejecting me.

  I suppose I was a fanciful person, despite my firm intentions. Only such a one would have that recurring dream surely and try to read something into it. I supposed lots of people dreamed and forgot their dreams the next day. I was being foolish really.

  I mounted the stairs slowly and deliberately and studied the rooms on the first floor—the entertaining rooms. They were elegant—long windows to the floor—typical of their period; the fireplaces were exquisite in their simplicity. Adam perhaps. I furnished it in my mind and imagined myself as the hostess—moving gracefully among the guests—a Carrington hostess, I thought with a curl of the lips. "Oh, good evening, Cousin Agatha. How good of you to come. Philip and I are delighted." And "Why, Mrs. Oman Lemming, how nice to see you and your daughters." (There were two of them, weren't there?) They would all be so delighted to be received at a Carrington evening. I wanted to laugh at the thought of the imitation I would give of them later to Philip.

  Then I went upstairs. Our bedrooms would be here, and there was a small room which had been made into a bathroom. "There wouldn't be a great deal to be done," Philip had said. "The house is ideal, Ellen."

  "The house is ideal," I repeated aloud. Then I stood listening. I fancied I heard mocking laughter.

  I went up to the rooms which would be nurseries and the attics where the servants would be housed. I pictured white walls and a blue frieze of animals, and a little cot of white wood with a blue coverlet.

  I was looking very far into the future. But that after all is what marriage was for, wasn't it? That was why the Carringtons wanted it. Philip must marry young because it seemed as though Rollo would never have children. Odd to think of Philip and myself as parents.

  Then I felt my heart leap in terror. In the silence of the house I heard something. I stood very still listening. All was quiet. Had I imagined it? It is strange really how sometimes without sound one can be conscious of a presence. I had the uncanny feeling that someone was in the house. Then as I stood very still in the center of the room, I heard a sound. I had not been mistaken. Someone was in the house.

  My heart began to hammer painfully. Who? It couldn't be Philip. I knew where he was. He had told me he had to go to his father's London office that day.

  I listened. There it was again. A muffled sound; the creak of an opening door.

  Then I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  I found it difficult to move. I was as though petrified. It was absurd. The house was for sale; we had not definitely bought it, so why should not some prospective buyer come to look at it?

  The footsteps came nearer. I stared in fascination at the door. Someone was immediately outside.

  As the door was slowly pushed open I gasped; Rollo Carrington stood there.

  "Why," he said, "I thought there was no one here."

  "So... did I."

  "I'm afraid I startled you."

  "I...I heard someone below and ..."

  He looked so tall and I remembered what Philip had said a long time ago about his being a Viking; he even had the appropriate name.

  I had had a glimpse of him before but I felt I was seeing him for the first time. He exuded power and a sort of magnetism. I felt that if Rollo Carrington entered a room everyone must be aware of him.

  I went on: "You are Mr. Carrington, Philip's brother. I am Ellen Kellaway, his fiancee."

  "Yes, I know. Congratulations."

  "Thank you. I didn't know you were in London."

  "I arrived home last night. I had heard the news of your engagement, of course."

  I wondered whether he had come home because of it.

  "Philip has told me about the house. I said I'd look it over, so he gave me the key."

  "I wanted to look over it on my own," I explained.

  He nodded. "Naturally you are eager to see that it is suitable."

  "Shall you advise your father to buy it?"

  "I think it's very likely a sound proposition. I'm not sure yet of course."

  He kept his eyes on me and I felt uncomfortable because it seemed as though he was trying to assess me, to probe my innermost thoughts; and I was not at all sure what he was thinking of me. As for myself, I could not stop thinking of him with that poor wife of his—a shadowy figure in my imagination—in those top rooms at Trentham Towers, and the decision which must have come to him that she must have a companion to watch over her.

  It was impossible to imagine this man caught up in a passionate love affair, which there must have been to make him marry so hastily. I thought I detected a certain bitterness about his mouth. He was no doubt reviling fate for making his beautiful wife unsuitable and allowing him to discover this after he had married her. So cool, he looked, so much in command of himself—and I imagined of everyone around him—that I could not reconcile the story of his romantic tragic marriage with this man at all.

  "Have you been round again?" he asked.

  "Not properly."

  "Shall we look at it together?"

  "Yes, please."

  "Come then, we'll start from the top."

  He talked about the snares to look for. I was hardly paying attention. I just wanted to hear his voice, which was deep and authoritative; I wanted to know so much about him—everything; he seemed so mature compared with Philip and me; he talked of Philip as though he were a mere boy and it was clear that he considered me very young too.

  "I've had some experience of buying property," he said. "One has to be careful. Caveat emptor, you know."

  We went through the house, then out into the garden. We stood beneath one of the trees.

  I looked back at the house. It seemed more menacing than ever and I felt a great desire to run away from it even though Philip's brother was beside me to protect me from any evil that might befall me.

  He started to walk back into the house and I followed. It seemed to close in on me like a prison, and I found it so hard to shake off this feeling of foreboding that I was afraid I would show it. Rollo looked at me rather intently as though he were about to say something, then he changed his mind, or appeared to. He opened the front door and as we stepped out of the house a great relief swept over me.

  "I'll call a cab," he said, "and take you home."

  I don't know how to describe Rollo. There was something enigmatic and completely baffling about him. He was not nearly as good-looking as Philip. His features were more rugged, but he emanated power and a kind of magnetism. He was the sort of man who could slip quietly into a room and yet everyone would be aware of him and he gave the impression that whatever he did would be successful.

  I could not get him out of my mind. Perhaps the venue of our encounter had something to do with it. I had been so terrified—ridiculously so—when I had heard his footsteps, which was simply because I had worked myself up about a presence in the house. And then he had appeared.

  Ever since I had heard the story o
f his marriage, I had been thinking about him, and seeing those top rooms at Trentham Towers had set my imagination working. I pictured the hasty courtship, and Rollo's being swept off his feet. That was certainly hard to imagine. But she must have been very beautiful and had tremendous appeal for the opposite sex; perhaps she was greatly sought after—so Rollo married her. Then when passion had subsided he made the alarming discovery that she was not the woman he needed and there followed the terrible discovery that she was a secret drinker. I could imagine how horrified he must have been. He was a man, though, who would conceal his true feelings.

  Perhaps in the years to come I should get to know him very well. After all, he would be my brother-in-law.

  When Philip and I met in the Park I told him about my meeting with Rollo. He was amused.

  "He came home from Rome only last night," he said. "Quite unexpectedly. Our mother had written to him about the engagement."

  "Was that what brought him home?"

  "Oh yes, he had to come at such a time."

  "To inspect the bride?"

  "He'd met you before. He knows your family well."

  "And he looked at the house."

  "Yes, as soon as he heard we were contemplating getting this one he wanted to see it. He thinks it's quite a good bargain. He suggests we make an offer for it."

  "He doesn't object to our marriage ..."

  "Object! Why on earth should he?"

  "Well, you're so rich and I have no money at all."

  Philip burst out laughing. "What notions you get! As if they care about that. My mother was poor when she married my father and he was already a rich man then."

  "She had a title."

  "Well, look what you've got. You're beautiful and kind, and kind hearts are more than coronets. You should know that."

  "And simple faith than Norman blood. Do I have simple faith?"

  "You must have to love me."

  He was so gay, jaunty, so sure that life was going to be good. I kept comparing him with his brother. How different they were.

  "I think it's marvelous," I said, "the way your family have accepted me. Cousin Agatha is amazed."