Читать книгу Midnight House - Ethel Lina White - Страница 10

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As she turned away, she saw May Davis coming out of the Crescent Hotel for the second time. In the interval, the lady had enjoyed a good lunch and a nap. Consequently she felt well pleased with life.

Hers had been a consistently comfortable existence. As the daughter of a flourishing draper and the wife of a prosperous manufacturing chemist, she had never known money shortage. Unlike Marion Brown, there had been no hint of the "femme fatale" about her life history. She had been sent to an exclusive school but she remained true to type. The chief result of an expensive education was the loss of her local burr, which made it easier for her to acquire a Lancashire accent, after her marriage.

She stopped for a minute to chat to a resident guest who was about to enter the hotel. His profile—which he turned towards Marion Brown—was so striking that she remembered it after a lapse of nearly twelve years. His name was Hartley Gull and he was the second young man who had been inside No. 11 on the last night.

He was now a man of poise and compelling appearance, but she noticed that he looked up at the shuttered house with dark defiance. It was evidence that he too had not forgotten...

Mrs. Davis left him and walked briskly towards Marion Brown. As she glanced at the woman without recognition, she was surprised to hear her maiden name.

"Isn't it May Evans?"

Fortunately the stranger gave the clue to her own identity in her next sentence.

"I wanted to see our old home again."

"Why, Marion," exclaimed Mrs. Davis. "Fancy meeting you. After all this time."

"Yes, years. I knew you although you've changed. You used to be so pretty, with a straight dark fringe. You've grown so thin."

"Anno Domini," explained May Davis. "I've a daughter who knows all the answers. I wouldn't put it past the little faggot to make me a grandmother one day."

Compassionately she hid the shock of her surprise as she remembered the breath-taking beauty of Marion Brown. It was almost mesmeric, for she used to find it difficult to remove her eyes from that flawless face. While she stared, she envied the other girl such perfection of feature and colour.

And now—this. Time was a champion leveller.

"I'm staying at Vine Cottage," Marion Brown told her. "Won't you come back and have tea wih me?"

Had May Davis' horoscope been cast at her birth, she might have been warned against that minute... But she was feeling responsive to the past. Every visit back to her home-town found more gaps in her circle, so that it was refreshing to meet a contemporary.

"I'd like to come," she said.

"That's nice. Do you mind if we go the back ways? I don't want to meet people I used to know. There was always so much talk about me."

They walked together through the quiet grey outskirts of the old town while the twilight veiled the end of each ancient street with a purple-blue curtain and withered chestnut leaves rustled over the cobbled road.

May Davis enjoyed her visit. The tea was good and she ate her cake with keener relish because Vine Cottage was a guesthouse patronised by bank-clerks and teachers, while she was staying at an exclusive luxury hotel. It was true that it was rather a shock to discover that Marion Brown cherished the pathetic illusion that she was still beautiful.

As though to prove that she had remained unself-conscious about her looks, she actually invited May Davis upstairs, to display her wardrobe. The consequence of thus adhering to feminine tradition was that it was nearly dark when Mrs. Davis went out of the garden-gate of Vine Cottage.

"Dear me, I'll be too late to dress for dinner," she insisted.

"You'd better take the short-cut," said Marion Brown.

Mrs. Davis took her advice... But the short-cut proved longer than the longest way back.

For she never returned.