Читать книгу The Second House - V. J. Banis - Страница 5

Chapter One

Although it may be a cliché, it is nonetheless true that little things often have momentous effects. When I first found Hepzibah she was only a kitten, a poor wet bedraggled thing who could not decide whether she would die from starvation or from drowning. Yet it was this harmless creature who brought Jeffrey and me together, and began for me a season of steadily mounting terror that made my life a nightmare. Jeffrey. La Deuxième, that house with its haunted corridors. Tales of ghostly nuns who wandered the earth to mourn their brutal deaths. I would have known none of these had not a litter of kittens been tied in a bag and thrown into a river to drown.

I nearly drowned myself in that river. When I thought about it afterward, I could almost hear Aunt Gwyneth saying, “She always acted without thinking, I can’t say I’m surprised this happened.” And it would be true, I suppose. But on this occasion there wasn’t time to think.

I had gone for a walk in the country. I did that often; my home was not a happy one, and although Aunt Gwyneth warned me over and over that the doctors would send me to the sanitarium again, I spent as much of my time as possible in the out-of-doors, alone. I did not mind so much being alone; it seemed to me that I had been alone all of my life. I was twenty-one now. I had been only four when an accident claimed the lives of my parents, and I scarcely remembered them. I had been six when rheumatic fever claimed me, and since that time I had spent ample time indoors, in hospitals and sanitariums and sickrooms, alone except for the efficient and invariably aloof doctors and nurses who hovered about.

Aunt Gwyneth could not be expected to understand how much it meant to me to go out of her gloomy, unloving house and into the sunshine and fresh air. What did the risk of a chill matter, in exchange for the smell of sweet clover and goldenrod? Her words to me were always practical and sound, but how willing I was to trade them for the hum of grasshoppers and crickets, and the singing of birds. She had always seen that I had good food to eat and a clean bed to sleep in; but how I loved to lie in the tall grass by the river and eat wild berries I had picked myself along the way.

My Aunt had been very good to me, and I tried to be kind to her. But I had long since realized the unhappy truth, that what she did, she did from a sense of obligation, and not because she loved me. She never had.

A seldom used road followed along the river on its opposite bank. This particular day I was lying in the grass gazing reflectively at the blue sky above, when I heard the sound of an automobile. I remained where I was, not through any desire to conceal myself, but merely from indolence. The car slowed and stopped almost directly across the river from me.

After a moment or so I lifted my head out of idle curiosity. I was in time to see a shabbily dressed farmer carrying a burlap bag to the river’s edge. He looked about once. There was something so furtive in that look that I instinctively lowered my head, but he did not see me. Satisfied that he was alone, he lifted his parcel high and gave it a toss. It landed nearly in the middle of the river, sank below the surface at once, and bobbed up again. The stranger gave another quick glance around and then scrambled up the grassy bank to his car. In another moment he was driving away.

I jumped to my feet. In that moment before he had thrown that bag I was certain that something in it had moved. Now, watching it bob on the surface, I could see clearly that there was something alive in it, struggling to escape. As the noise of the car faded in the distance, I recognized the frightened meowing of kittens. He had thrown an unwanted litter of kittens into the river to drown!

Shock gave way to indignation. Without thinking ahead I ran down the bank and splashed into the water. The river was not terribly wide at this point; but it was deeper than I had realized, and its placid surface belied the swift current beneath. I struggled through water that was waist high, then chest high, until I was almost swimming. I could only move with maddening slowness. The bag had drifted downstream, but to my relief it caught on a branch dangling into the water. I prayed that it would hold there until I reached it. Just beyond that point the river grew wider and deeper, and I would never have been able to reach the sack if it were carried into that part. I was barely able to manage where I was.

It seemed an eternity before I reached the sack and could clasp it in my cold hands. I stood for a moment gasping for breath. I was not very strong physically, and I had expended very nearly all of my energy getting to these helpless creatures. Now for the first time I thought of what I was doing, and I was afraid. I did not think I could make it back to the bank as out of breath as I was. Nor could I remain where I was until I caught my breath. The water here was nearly to my chin and it required all of my strength to resist the swift rush of the water that threatened to sweep me away.

With grim determination I struck out for the bank. But it was no use. I knew almost as soon as I started that I was beaten. My feet slipped out from under me and the water rushed over my head with a cold woosh. I was tumbling and splashing head over heels. I tried to swim but could not; I gasped for air and swallowed instead the chill green river water. Still clinging to my prize I felt myself being rushed downstream, my lungs violently protesting the watery intrusion. The thought flashed through my mind that I was certain to drown. I prayed for a miracle.

I got my miracle, if only in the nick of time. Dazed and frightened as I was, I somehow fancied that I was being attacked by some creature of the deep; I didn’t know what, I could hardly think clearly. But something brushed against me and then curled about me, and in my fright I struggled against it, trying to free myself. Then suddenly my head was above water. That first gasp of air and the flash of sunlight in my eyes, so shocking after the murky greenness, was like a slap in the face to an hysterical person. I realized at once that what had encircled me was the arm of a man, and that he was trying to save me. I was being pulled toward the shore.

“Don’t fight,” someone said, “I’m not much of a swimmer myself.”

I stopped struggling then and clung weakly to him. In a moment he said breathlessly, “It’s shallow here, try to stand down.” I did so. I had enough sense still to realize that my poor rescuer was only slightly less breathless than I was. Together we managed to stumble the rest of the way through the shallow water, to the grassy bank. I still held the fateful sack in my hands. I let it fall gently into the grass and then I myself fell down. My ears still seemed filled with that ominous roaring that I thought signaled my death. I tried to fill my burning lungs with air.

“Are you all right?” My unknown friend asked after a long moment, putting a hand on my shoulder.

I managed to nod my head weakly. “Yes, I think so. The kittens...?”

I tried to get up but he restrained me. “I’ll look at them; you try to get your breath back.”

By the time he returned I was able to breathe a little more evenly. He held in his hand the tiniest ball of wet, matted fur. At first I thought it could hardly be alive, but when I touched it I felt the gentlest stirring of its breath.

“The others were already gone,” he said, putting the kitten tenderly into my hands. “And this poor devil’s more dead than alive right now.”

I stared down into a diminutive face and felt a wave of affection sweep over me, the intense pleasurable pain of caring. “But it is alive,” I said.

“Thanks to you.”

I looked up and for the first time really looked at my companion. He was smiling, and perhaps it was that he had just saved my life in the water, but with the blue sky behind him he looked quite like I had always imagined angels to look. He had what is described in romantic novels as a sensitive face, framed with dark curls. His complexion was tawny, and his wide dark eyes and his deeply colored lips made me think he was Italian. He could not in fairness have been called handsome; pretty, despite its false suggestion of effemininity, described him better.

“And I’m alive, thanks to you,” I said, warming to his smile. “Where did you come from anyway?”

He nodded toward the road—we had come out on that side of the river—and when I looked I saw a bright red sports car, the door open on the driver’s side, informing me that he had left it very much in a hurry.

“I came along just in time to see you jumping into the river with all your clothes on. That didn’t suggest to me that you were merely going for a swim. Then I saw you were after that burlap bag, but by that time I had come to the conclusion that you couldn’t swim and you were having a bad time of it. So, I came after you as quick as I could. That’s all there was to it.”

“I owe you my life.”

My gratitude embarrassed him a little. “It was beginning to look like all I was going to accomplish was drowning two of us instead of just one. I’m not much of a swimmer, actually, but I am taller than you, so I could keep on the bottom the whole way.”

“I suppose you must think I’m a very foolish girl to have jumped in like that after a sack of kittens.”

“I think you’re a very brave girl,” he said, looking at me soberly.

Something happened to him in that moment. I not only sensed it, I could actually see it in his eyes. They seemed to grow darker. I had a sensation that he had suddenly come to a conclusion about something, that the answer to some long worrisome problem had finally occurred to him in that moment that he studied me.

He said, in a lower voice, “You’re very beautiful.”

I was too astonished to think of anything to say, and could only stare dumbly at him.

“Has no one ever told you that before?” He looked surprised by my surprise. I shook my head solemnly. No one had. It was not the sort of thing a doctor was likely to say to his patient, or that a nurse would remark upon, and physical beauty was not a matter upon which Aunt Gwyneth put much importance.

“Then you’ve certainly spent your time with the grandest bunch of dolts in the world.”

I suddenly had a vision of myself as I must look just then—my hair hanging in wet strands about my face, my clothes clinging wetly to me, one shoe lost somewhere in my swim. It struck me as extremely funny that anyone should choose that particular moment of my life to call me beautiful. I couldn’t help myself, I began to giggle, and then to laugh aloud.

At first he looked at me curiously, but after a moment he realized the joke and began to laugh with me. I held my dear wet kitten to my breast and thought what idiots we must look, wet and bedraggled, sitting in the grass by the river, heads thrown back, laughing ourselves silly. And that thought only made me laugh harder.

The laughing spell passed finally, but it had served to dispel the tension lingering from our escapade. We might have been long-time acquaintances, we were so at ease with one another. The kitten stirred in my hands and I held it up to look at it more closely.

“Heavens, you look starved as well as drowned,” I said. “I think it would be a good idea if I got you home quickly and got some food into you.”

He helped me to my feet. “I think you’d better let me drive you home. You’re already courting pneumonia, without pressing your luck.”

“Yes, I suppose I’d better,” I agreed. Aunt Gwyneth’s house wasn’t far, but it was on the opposite side of the river, and I didn’t think I was up to another crossing.

“I’m Liza Durant,” I said, offering him my free hand.

He smiled and took it warmly. “Good grief, I forgot we hadn’t met; it seems like we’ve known each other forever. I’m Jeffrey Forrest.”

So he had felt it too, that sense of intimacy. In myself I had been willing to shrug it off as the result of not having had friends; that makes one eager to seize upon them when they do appear. But it was something more than that; I didn’t know just what. I felt that my young rescuer had shared many of my own experiences. I had a certainty that he too was very lonely, and very unhappy. I could see from looking at him that he was not an awfully strong person, and it occurred to me that perhaps he too had been ill. In any case, we certainly shared a rapport that was astonishing in its spontaneity.

“Forrest,” I repeated as we walked up the bank to the road. “I rather thought you were Italian.”

“It’s the eyes, I got them from my grandmother. She was Italian, a Countess. But I’m afraid the rest is just ordinary upper state New York.”

I smiled to myself. Upper state New York he might be, but I very much doubted if Jeffrey Forrest could be called ordinary.

Nor was his car. “Lamborghini,” he said in answer to my question. The name meant nothing to me, but the low-slung silhouette and the gleaming wire wheels did. It looked like money.

I gave him directions to Aunt Gwyneth’s house. “You’re not a local resident,” I said, more as a statement than a question. I knew most of the people who lived nearby.

“No, I’m in the area on some business.”

“If it brought you along this road, it must have to do with farming. I’m afraid that’s about all there is here.” I raised an eyebrow. He did not look like a farmer to me.

He laughed. “To tell the truth, I suppose someone else should have come in my place; I haven’t much of a business head. Today, for instance, I was just playing hooky. It was such a beautiful day, and the countryside so inviting, that I was just rambling.”

“It’s lucky for the kitten and me that you were,” I said. Then, since he offered no further information, I added, “If you’re going to be here for a few days, and want to play hooky again, perhaps you’ll let me show you some of the local sights. There are a few interesting ones.”

“I should like that very much,” he said. I indicated the drive ahead. He turned neatly into it, and we were there.

“I suppose I should invite you in to dry off,” I said.

“I’m afraid it’s the clothes that are wet, and I think I’d look a little peculiar borrowing your things.”

We laughed together, and shook hands. “Take care of the little one,” he said. “We went to such lengths to salvage her it would be a shame not to.”

“Since it’s really you to whom she owes everything, perhaps you should pick a name for her.”

He thought for a moment, and said, “Let’s make it Hepzibah, then.”

“Hepzibah it is.” I held the now dry ball of fur up. Her eyes were open by this time, and she gave me a hesitant meow. “I think she said she approves.”

“I think she said she’s hungry,” he said. “Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow would be fine, about one.”

As I watched Mr. Forrest drive away, raising dust from the road, I thought that it was good that we both liked Hawthorne.