Читать книгу Death Came Softly - Edith Caroline Rivett - Страница 6

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It was the end of June before Mrs. Stamford traveled down to Devonshire to see her sister’s much debated house. Eve Merrion had wasted no time in moving her goods and chattels to Valehead, and by the end of May she was already established there. Her letters to Emmeline had all been full of delighted enthusiasm: Valehead seemed to Eve to be the loveliest place in the world; the weather was perfect, the move had been carried through with a minimum of delay and bother; Professor Crewdon was delighted with his quarters, and the “scratch lot” of servants seemed to be both competent and contented.

Indeed, Mrs. Stamford had felt positively irritated over Eve’s delight in her new home. The former felt that the “gilt was off the gingerbread” in her own case. Emmeline had moved heaven and earth, as the saying is, to get back to England in order to be near her own children, and she had longed to be in London again after her four years’ exile. Now, after that maddeningly long, slow voyage in convoy, half around the world and back again, Emmeline found herself in a London which seemed alien. Very few of her friends were still living there, and those whom she managed to meet were all preoccupied. Either they were in the services, or doing civilian defense work, or driving ambulances, or doing clerical work in ministries whose location must not be mentioned—whatever it was they were all too busy to join in the small festivities which Emmeline had promised herself. As with her friends, so with the shops and restaurants and hairdressers and places of amusement. Even where the premises were intact, the firms often no longer existed. Restaurants were all full, crowded with people who had booked tables well in advance; hairdressers and court dressmakers had lost their assistants, and worried proprietors were no longer anxious for fresh custom. The light-hearted London to which Emmeline had looked forward was no longer there, and herself, a comparatively young married woman of leisure, seemed out of the picture. Everything seemed to be a problem—food, service, even laundry, all those things which had been taken for granted so gaily in the old world, were now major problems, crises occurring afresh week after week.

It was sheer disappointment in the conditions to which she had returned that made Emmeline Stamford decide to go to Valehead for a while. Possibly, after the children’s summer holidays, she said to herself, she might decide to do Red Cross work, or even drive for one of the services—though having seen something of the trucks and long chassis being driven by nonchalant young women a dozen years younger than herself, Emmeline Stamford felt no enthusiasm in that direction. Several years of life in India had not developed in her luxury-loving nature any capacity for “roughing it.” Emmeline was full of enthusiasm for Empire and Prestige, but dirty work had never come her way, and she looked askance at it.

London, then, being a disappointment, and arduous work unpalatable, she decided to give life at Valehead a trial while she “considered things.” Eve Merrion met her sister at Enster on a blazing midsummer evening. Eve’s obvious pleasure in welcoming her sister—and the fact that a car was in the station yard—helped to assuage the irritation engendered in Emmeline by a hot and tiresome journey in a crowded third-class carriage. As they drove out of Enster, and the sweet-smelling country air blew away Emmeline’s “train headache,” she began to feel more amiably disposed to her sister and to the promised seclusion of Valehead. Eve, for her part, was both kindly and tactful in dealing with her sister. Eve sympathized with Emmeline’s disappointment over conditions in London, over missing her friends, over difficulties of shopping and living, and the drive was spent in an outpouring of Emmeline’s small woes. It was not until they were actually within sight of the house that Mrs. Stamford made any comment about her surroundings, though Eve had been conscious all the time she drove of the enchanting Devon countryside, of the rich hayfields, some newly mown, some still white with moon daisies, and all fragrant with the heady, exquisite scents of hay-time. They were driving slowly over the deplorable surface of Valehead drive when Emmeline exclaimed:

“Good gracious! Is that it? It does look an imposing house, Eve.”

Mrs. Merrion laughed. Truth to tell, the word “imposing” had never entered her head in connection with Valehead. The beauty of house and setting had won her heart so completely that the word “beautiful” seemed the only appropriate one.

“I do hope you’ll like it, Emma,” she said, almost diffidently. “I know it’s awfully remote, and terribly far from London, but honestly it’s a very comfortable house.”

“How modest you are, Eve. You never even sent me a photograph of it. I had pictured it as one of those rather derelict, rambling country houses that agents love to palm off on the unsuspecting. Actually it looks in very good condition—so white and immaculate—and even I can see it’s fine architecturally, though architecture isn’t in my line. How exciting to be able to take a vast property like that; it looks positively ducal.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad as that,” laughed Eve. “It’s true that it’s rather enormous, but now that Daddy and Mr. Keston and the Bradys have occupied one wing, and the Carters are in the servants’ wing, with Nanny, who’s on her holiday just now, and I’ve got the children’s rooms fitted up, it doesn’t seem so very big. I’ve got lots of room for visitors, of course—I love having people to stay—and I think you’ll like your rooms. They’re lovely and sunny.”

“Good old Eve! How nice of you! If it were my house, I’m sure I should have sent pictures of it to everybody. It really is rather exciting!”

When Mrs. Stamford got out of the car and stood on the level sweep of ground in front of the pillared Ionic portico, she glanced around at the wooded parkland, and the sunlit valley stretching away eastward, with something like enthusiasm in her eyes. Remote Valehead might be, but it had a splendor of its own. The beauty of trees and flowers and lawn did not catch at Emmeline’s heart as it had caught at Eve’s, but the dignity and spaciousness of the great house set so superbly facing up the wooded valley gave her a feeling of warm satisfaction.

This feeling did not grow less when Eve led her sister through the pillared white-walled entrance hall and up to a vast bedroom whose windows looked out over the magnolias and cypresses on the lawn. The faint jade-green of the paneled walls had been applied with the cunningest of modern artistry; mirrors were inset just where they were most useful and decorative, and a swinging silvered candelabra gave an air to the formal charm of the great room. A bathroom opened out from the bedroom, and Eve displayed its mirrored shining perfection with laughing pride.

“When the children came over for the week-end and saw the house, they called this ‘The Duke’s bathroom’ and mine the Duchess’s,” she laughed. “I had to let all of them have a bath in here because they were so thrilled by its splendor. They’re very unsophisticated, bless them. Of course it was the American tenants who put in these bathrooms. English people never squander money on anything so superbly luxurious.”

“But, Eve, I can’t understand you saying that the place was cheap,” burst out Mrs. Stamford. “It looks enormously expensive. What’s the secret about it? Is it haunted? Has it some gruesome history? Was somebody murdered here, or something like that?”

“Nothing like that, my dear.” Eve walked over to the window and looked out happily at the sunny valley. “Cheap is a relative term, of course. What I did say—and it’s perfectly true—is that the rent of this house costs no more than the rent of a big expensive London flat plus the upkeep of a property in Surrey. The reason for Valehead being cheap is that no one would take such a big house so far away from a town. When I first saw it myself, I said, ‘Impossible,’ but here I am, and here you are, and it’s all going to be great fun.”

Mrs. Stamford walked over to the window and stood looking out, beside her sister.

“Oh, who’s that? I didn’t know you had a party staying here,” she said.

On the lawns below, in the shadow of the great magnolia tree, a group of three men were sitting.

“It isn’t a party. They just happened,” said Eve cheerfully. “I told you I liked having visitors, and I hope those two will help to entertain you. The dark man is Bruce Rhodian. He’s an American. Axel got to know him last year. Rhodian is a traveler.”

“I know, the man who did that journey over the Andes and wrote a book about it?”

“That’s the man. He wants to join the R.A.F., but he had a flying accident and isn’t quite fit yet. I know Father wants to meet him. Father’s away this week, by the way. He’s lecturing in London. The other man—the fair one on the grass—is David Lockersley. He’s a poet. I like him quite a lot. He’s awfully shy and difficult to know, but he’s very keen on gardens, and knows a lot about rock gardens. He’s helping me with the one here.”

“Why isn’t he in the army?”

“Weak heart and weak eyesight. They won’t take him. The third man is Roland Keston. You know him, of course.”

“Keston? Horrors! I should say I do. He’s an insufferable creature. How do you all live here, Eve? I mean, does Father—and Keston—share meals and everything with you?”

“Oh, no. Father has his own establishment, as it were. The Bradys look after him, and cook for him, and he has his own dining room and all that. I knew it would never work for us to try living ‘en famille.’ Father’s much too individualist—he’s an eccentric, really, in his way of living, and he’d never conform to ordinary times or remember meals. As it is, he can do just as he likes, and I’ve not got to worry about him. Mr. Keston lives with Father, of course. We just meet in the garden sometimes, but I don’t see much of him. He’s quite a dear, in his way, although he’s pedantic and gauche, and he’s a magnificent scholar. Now, my dear, would like some tea sent up here, and then you can revel in a lovely bath in the ducal bathroom, and make yourself look glorious to adorn our dinner table.”

Emmeline sighed with satisfaction. “Eve, darling, how nice! I’d no idea I was coming to anything so superb and luxurious. This room is simply perfect. I feel I’m going to be terribly happy here!”

“Oh, Emma, I do hope so. I’ve looked forward so much to having you. I only hope you won’t be bored.”

“It doesn’t seem a bit boring to me so far,” laughed Emmeline Stamford.

“This is just one of the loveliest spots I’ve seen the world over, Mrs. Stamford, and I’ve seen some.”

It was Bruce Rhodian who spoke. Mrs. Stamford, bathed, changed and refreshed, had come out into the garden with her sister, who had just introduced her two visitors. Rhodian was a dark fellow, about thirty-five, with a lean, bronzed face and bright, dark eyes, attractively set under tilted humorous dark brows. His alert expression and quick, neat movements contrasted with the apparent heaviness and immobility of David Lockersley. The poet was a big, heavily built young man, with a square, pale face, a shock of rather colorless fair hair, and a face which seemed dull and expressionless save for his heavily set gray eyes. Lockersley had very fine eyes, and very observant ones, but he tended to look downward, away from the person addressing him, and thus his face seemed frowning and rather uninteresting. Eve Merrion, who had made friends with the rather detached young poet on account of their mutual interest in gardens, had told him that he ought to wear tinted glasses. His frown, she was certain, was caused by eyesight which could not stand bright sunlight. He had replied that he certainly could not stand having the world spoiled by viewing it through dark glasses, and Eve understood what he meant. Emmeline Stamford, prone to judge people by a conventional standard of her own, labeled him “rather a clod” at first glance. She preferred the quick responsiveness of Rhodian’s dark eyes and easy speech. Leaning back in her chair, she smiled across at him.

“It is indeed a lovely place. The house is full of charm, and it’s so beautifully set, looking right up this wooded valley.”

“The house looks down the valley,” put in Keston’s pedantic voice. “The head of the valley is in the other direction, behind the house.”

“Who cares?” Rhodian retorted cheerfully. “Technicalities of language leave me cold. Whoever fixed on the location of this house did a good job. It’s perfectly set, plumb in the middle of the valley, so that you see the little river and its series of lakes set between the woods. There’s a symmetry about it, somehow—and my word, doesn’t it smell good, the hay and the flowers? It’s grand.”

Eve was laughing quietly to herself, as she often did, as though enjoying a private joke, and Rhodian turned to her:

“What is it I’ve said now, making you laugh at me?”

“It was your phrase about whoever was responsible for the location of the house. According to Father, you’ve got to go a goodish way back to place the responsibility. He suggested that a Roman villa had once stood here when he first contemplated the site.”

Lockersley put in a word here. “I believe he has a theory now about this level ground on which the house stands being a prehistoric encampment, or something of that kind. He’s found some long barrows up towards Maldon Moor.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, let us eschew archeology and anthropology and all such head-aching topics,” protested Mrs. Stamford. “My youth was haunted by my inability to spell dolichocephalic or comprehend what it meant.”

Bruce Rhodian laughed, his dark eyes surveying Mrs. Stamford with an expression telling of pleasure as well as amusement.

“That’s just too bad,” he said. “We’ll leave out the skulls and the jawbones and homo sapiens in the making, and just enjoy the present without debating our predecessors in this glorious spot.”

Emmeline turned and looked at him laughingly. “Goodness, I’d forgotten. You are an anthropologist, too, aren’t you? You come back from incredibly arduous and hazardous journeys with a collection of bones which all the experts start quarreling about.”

“Don’t hold it against me,” he begged. “It wasn’t I who marred the peace of the evening with words like dolichocephalic.”

“What’s the matter with the word, anyway?” inquired Eve’s placid voice, “it sounds to me an eminently peaceful word, pleasantly redolent of learned societies and unwarlike lecture rooms.”

“But your sister doesn’t enjoy the thought of learned societies and all that,” laughed Rhodian. “She just wants to enjoy a peaceful evening in this garden, untroubled by dissertations on primitive man.”

“Do you always prefer to take your surroundings for granted, Mrs. Stamford?” inquired Roland Keston, peering at Emmeline rather in the manner a scientist might study an untabulated specimen. “Does the thought of previous inhabitants of this wonderful valley merely repel you?”

“I haven’t a scientific or an inquiring mind,” replied Emmeline, “and I certainly find it tiresome to regard everything from the point of view of academic research. I agree with Eve that this is a gloriously beautiful spot, and I’m content to leave it at that. I don’t want to analyze it from the point of view of the anthropologist, the geologist, the botanist or the historian, and that’s that.”

“Would a cigarette amplify the pleasure of the spot?” inquired Rhodian, holding out his case. As he lighted a cigarette for Emmeline, Lockersley bent forward toward Eve.

“Do you feel the same about things as your sister does, Mrs. Merrion? Does the history of the place you live in seem totally unrelated to the place—an irrelevance, almost an impertinence?”

Eve sighed a little to herself. She was afraid this party was going to prove none too easy. Eve loved discussion for discussion’s sake, but she did not want to bore her sister. It seemed evident enough that abstract discussions did not entertain Emmeline.

“No.” Eve’s reply was made direct to David Lockersley. “If I care about a place, I like to know all that I can about it. Actually I have rather a childish tendency to populate these woods with their earlier inhabitants. I imagine all sorts of people—early Britons, and Romans, and medieval folk, inhabiting this valley. I get a bit confused at whiles. Take the Hermit’s Cave, for instance; sometimes I think of real cavemen living there, then I visualize a solitary friar in a rough brown habit, meditating in the archway there. He’s awfully real, my hermit.” She broke off, laughing a little. “I said it was childish, and it is,” she admitted naively, “but I always visualize what Father would call my ‘reconstructions.’ ”

“But I think you’re probably quite right in your feelings about the cave, Mrs. Merrion,” put in Keston in his earnest, pedantic way. “Undoubtedly it would have been the habitation of primitive man many centuries before any medieval contemplative fashioned it for his dwelling.”

“I say, what’s this about the Hermit’s Cave?” put in Bruce Rhodian. “Is it a leg-pull, or another amenity of the house?”

“It’s not a leg-pull. It’s a perfectly good cave,” replied Eve. “It’s in the great scarp of rock to the south of the main entrance. Legend calls it the Hermit’s Cave, and the carvings in it bear out the legend. If you’re interested, you’d better go and have a look at it. Mr. Keston will take you. He and Father are both very interested in it. Father has actually been sleeping there, but he has most eccentric ideas on the subject of sleeping-places.”

“I should like to see it,” said Rhodian. “We could explore this evening, while the professor is still away, and then we shan’t disturb his meditations there.” He turned to Emmeline. “Won’t you come and explore too, Mrs. Stamford? I’ll run you down the drive in my auto.”

“Heavens, no, thanks very much. I loathe caves,” replied Emmeline. “Good gracious! Who on earth is that?”

A small, bent old man with a very bald head, his person enveloped in a capacious white apron, had just appeared around the corner of the house.

“Mr. Keston, sir, it’s high time ye were in to your meal. It’ll be ready and waiting by the time ye’re seated. Come along now, and don’t let the good meal be spoiling.”

“All right, Brady. Thank you. If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Merrion, I’d better do as I’m told.”

There was humor as well as kindliness in Keston’s usually too serious face as he turned to Eve, and she replied laughingly:

“That’s right, Mr. Keston. Off you go! Brady, I’m glad you’re keeping him in order.”

“Sure to goodness, ma’am, as far as I’m able, though it’s the devil’s own job and all, seven o’clock struck and never a sign of him. You’ll be wanting to wash your hands before you’ll be eating,” he added anxiously to Keston, as the latter went off with the little man quite good-humoredly.

“Well, really!” said Emmeline, as the oddly assorted pair strolled off together. “Of all the fantastic objects. Does he generally come and collect Mr. Keston as though he were a child and lead him to his meals?”

“Oh, Brady’s a dear,” said Eve. “He and his wife have looked after Father for years now, and they make a great success of it—the only servants he’s ever had who really managed him happily. While Father’s away they look after Mr. Keston in their own peculiar way.” She turned to Bruce Rhodian, laughing a little. “You haven’t met my father yet, Mr. Rhodian. He’s an extreme individualist and, as such, very difficult to cater for. Like many learned men, he disregards the routine of the average person. I think night and day are the same to him. He sleeps when he feels like it, and eats when the fancy takes him. Breakfast has no place or meaning in his scheme of things. The Bradys have made one rule, and that they abide by. A proper meal is cooked and served at half past seven every evening, and Brady goes and finds Father and Mr. Keston, and takes them firmly indoors for that meal. For the rest they can do as they like; they can eat nuts or raw carrots and contemplate the sun, moon or stars, or prehistoric man, but at half past seven they are bidden to sit down like Christians—as Brady puts it—to ‘a decent meal.’ I have the greatest admiration for Brady. I think he’s a marvel.”

“I think I like the sound of your father, Mrs. Merrion. I’m looking forward a lot to meeting him,” rejoined Rhodian. “I like the idea of his sleeping in that cave you were telling us about.”

“Oh, that isn’t nearly so mad as it sounds. It’s a lovely place. I should like to sleep there myself and see the dawn over the lake through that little archway. You must go and have a look at it after dinner. Mr. Lockersley will take you. He likes it, too.”

“Delighted,” rejoined the poet, his voice resigned, his expression remote. Eve caught young Rhodian’s eye and nearly laughed back; there was something infectious in the quick humor lurking in his glance as he looked from one member of the party to another, taking them all in.

The sound of a gong came from the house and Eve got up, saying, “Dinner in quarter of an hour, everybody. We always have two gongs.”

“Very considerate,” murmured Emmeline. She got up, too, and stood looking around her, and then slipped her arm inside her sister’s.

“It’s lovely here, Eve, but somehow it’s eerie,” she said.

Eve laughed. “Is it, Emma? I can only see that it’s lovely,” she rejoined.