by Pamela Kent
“Would you?” She sounded as if this meant her cup of bliss was finally full. “And you wouldn’t find me a nuisance?”
“Before I’m through with you I’ll probably find you a tremendous nuisance, but that doesn’t put me off you. When? I asked.”
“Where—where will we live?”
“I’ve a flat in London, and we could spend our honeymoon in Paris … Venice, wherever you like.”
“I’d adore Venice!”
“Then Venice it shall be. I’ll rent a palazzo.”
“Are you as rich as all that?”
“I’m not poor. Never have been.”
“Poor Elizabeth!” she exclaimed involuntarily.
Once more he put his finger under her chin and shook his head at her.
“You know, I’m beginning to suspect you want to annoy me.”
“Oh, no, darling,” she answered breathlessly, clinging to him. “But you can’t blame Elizabeth if she had hopes. After all, you were exceptionally attentive for an employer’s nephew, and girls are apt to get ideas. I didn’t get them myself because you weren’t in the least nice to me.”
“And now?” looking at her with his heart in his eyes.
“I—I can’t think what I’ve done to deserve so much.” She laughed shakily. “I’d more or less made up my mind to be an old maid!”
“Almost?”
“Well, perhaps I was secretly hoping that someone like you would come along …”
“If I’d come along at the same time as Stephen would you have chosen me instead of him?”
She gazed at him incredulously.
“But I love you! If you turned me down I’d—I’d die!”
“Oh, darling!” he exclaimed, and gathered her into his arms. With exquisite gentleness, tenderness, and sincerity that throbbed in his voice he assured her that there would never be any need for her to contemplate dying on his account, and in fact the one thing she had to do was live for him … so long as it was for him, and him alone. Jealousy blazed in his own eyes and astounded her as he confessed:
“I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop feeling bitterly envious of Stephen because he knew you for two whole years while I didn’t … and because he once had the right to make love to you! If the fact that I’ve known a lot of pretty girls in my time can upset you sometimes when you’re tempted to believe I’ve a weakness for them then I don’t really mind, because set against my all-consuming jealousy yours will be nothing! I’ve never been particularly attached to Stephen, and lately I’ve learned to disapprove of him strongly … to detest the very sight of him, in fact! But it has nothing to do with Chris and his girlfriend, Mrs. Philip Hay. It has everything to do with you! For your sake, if we were living a hundred years ago, I’d give myself the exquisite pleasure of running him through with a small-sword, or if that’s not long enough ago for small-swords, I’d have arranged to meet him somewhere at dawn and drilled a few holes in him with a pistol!”
And she could tell that he wasn’t joking. He was looking very grim and bitterer than she would ever have believed he could look, and in a rush of sympathy for him she wound her arms about his neck again, and whispered to him sympathetically:
“Darling, that’s all past. And I’ve told you Stephen never really meant anything to me! We had so many shared interests … That was the thing that drew us together, and unfortunately Chris and Stephen have interests that are poles apart. Chris has never made any real effort to see Stephen’s side of this marriage of theirs … and if only she would things might be much better for them. But I sometimes think it’s too late.”
She sat back, gently disentangling herself from Tim’s arms, for in addition to nursing the uneasy conviction that the future for Chris and Stephen’s marriage was not really bright, she felt all at once a definite sensation like apprehension on their account. She even felt a little cold inside when she thought of her sister.
“Tim,” she said urgently, “I think I ought to go back now. Will you drive me up to the house, or shall I walk? If you’re in a rush to get back to Tor Park I can, you know. It’s not far.”
He looked at her in amazement.
“Can you see me letting you walk back to Sandals?” he asked. “Besides, I can’t wait to announce our engagement … I’m so terribly proud of my wife-to-be,” and he carried her fingers up to his lips and kissed them. Then he drew her back into his arms for a moment and they kissed in a way that left them both feeling distinctly shaken … after which Tim started up the car and they continued on their way to Sandals.
The house seemed very silent and peaceful as they stopped before the porch. The front door was standing wide open, admitting the last of the light and the fading rays of afternoon sunshine, and Miranda was stretched out in the hall as if she felt it her duty to be perpetually on guard.
But when Janine spoke to her she rose and stretched herself and advanced at once to acknowledge her return. Tim, who had been the means of procuring her in the first place, gave a pat to the massive head and declared that she appeared to be in excellent trim.
“She was getting a bit too fat, but you’ve exercised her a lot lately and that has improved her condition enormously,” he remarked. Then he addressed the mastiff directly. “Well, what has happened to your mistress, Miranda? Don’t tell me you’ve eaten her! And where’s your master?”
For the house was almost unnaturally quiet, and when Janine looked into the drawing-room she found it empty, although smelling sweetly of flowers as it always did at that hour of the day. Tim, wrenching open the door of the study after tapping twice on the panels and receiving no reply, discovered that that room, too, was empty.
“Strange,” Janine mused aloud, aware of the strange, cold sensation building up inside her. “Stephen doesn’t normally go out at this hour, and neither does Chris, if it comes to that. They usually like a drink before they go upstairs to change. But perhaps they’ve made plans to do something different for a change …” But she didn’t sound as if she really thought that was likely. “Perhaps they’re both upstairs.”
“In that case, I won’t wait. I’ll come back later for the celebration champagne, and you and I will go for a drive … by moonlight!” Tim’s hand was on Janine’s shoulder, and he was about to bid her goodbye when Chris appeared on the stairs, moving with the economical movements of a sleepwalker, and with a blind, unseeing look in her eyes. When her sister rushed up the stairs to meet her she hardly seemed to notice her.
“Is everything all right?” Janine found it quite impossible to keep the alarm out of her voice, and she caught Chris by the arm and fastened her fingers about it so tightly that they must have hurt the other girl, but she gave no sign. Janine shook her gently. “Chris! What’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost—”
Chris looked past her at Tim, already beginning to ascend the stairs in the wake of his newlyacquired fiancée.
“I’ve something to show you,” Chris said, speaking in a curious kind of monotone, but in a perfectly composed manner nevertheless. “It’s a discovery I made this afternoon … while you were out, Jan. I told Stephen about it, and he went off in one of his bad tempers. In fact, I think he was livid!”
Tim thrust his way past Janine, and slipped a firm but kindly hand inside Chris’s arm.
“Show me what it is you’ve discovered, Chris,” he said, as if he was dealing with a child. “I don’t think it pleased you very much, because you look upset, and Stephen was obviously upset. Is it something inside your bedroom?”
She gazed at him at first blankly, and then with wondering eyes.
“How did you know? Have you always known? Why didn’t you tell me, warn me?”
“I thought you’d find out in time, and in any case it didn’t seem important.”
“But if you’d told me—if you’d told Stephen, he wouldn’t have made use of it in the way he did …”
All this was too much for Janine, and without another word she slipped past them both and made her way to
her sister’s room. The apparently blank wall at the opposite end of it was blank no more, for part of it had slid aside to reveal an entrance to a dark, windowless passage at the end of which there was a flight of stairs. Without descending the stairs or even entering the passage—from which she recoiled as she had an instinctive dislike of dark, undiscovered places—it didn’t take Janine long to realise that here was an all-important clue to what had been happening to her sister over the past few weeks and months. When she said that a man stood looking in at her through an open door she was perfectly right. A man had discovered the secret entrance to her room, and was responsible for the appalling state of nerves in which she was at the present time, or from which she was already partially recovered.
Janine turned to her sister excitedly, and she simply couldn’t understand why she failed to look as if a tremendous discovery had been made, and why Stephen had gone off after quarrelling with his wife.
“But this is wonderful!” she exclaimed. “It proves that everything you told us was right! You didn’t dream that a man found his way to your room, he actually did find his way! You’re not ill—not mentally ill! You’ve been the victim of a cruel trick … a hoax!”
“I know.” But there was absolutely no pleasure in Chris’s face. “It was Stephen’s idea.”
“Stephen?”
“Yes, but he didn’t intend that I should find out. He didn’t really intend to scare me half out of my wits. He simply thought it would have the effect of wearing me down gradually, and as he so constantly left me alone I would in time associate the nightmares with him—because they only happened when he was at home—and decide that I’d be better off without him, and divorce him. You see, he has to get a divorce somehow or other, in order to marry the Hay woman …”
Her voice had grown fainter and fainter as she spoke, and suddenly all the colour deserted her face and she looked as if she was about to sink to the carpet in a state of insensibility. Janine flew across the room to her side and supported her to a chair, and Tim snatched up a bottle of smelling-salts from the dressing-table and handed it to Janine.
“I think you’d better get her a small brandy,” the latter said, and he made a swift journey to the dining-room for the purpose. When he came back Chris was looking a slightly better colour, but her eyes were as dead as if she no longer had any interest in anything. When her sister pleaded with her to know whether she really felt better, and chafed her cold hands furiously to restore the circulation, she discovered a thin thread of a voice and assured them that there was nothing seriously to worry about.
“I’m all right,” she insisted. “Perfectly all right! It’s Stephen who was upset when he tore out of the house.” She closed her eyes for an instant as if she was re-living a painful chapter in the history of her life. “I don’t know where he’s gone, but at a guess I’d say … Exeter! He was half out of his mind … demented. The last thing he wanted me to do was find out about the panel in the wall.”
“How—how did you find out?” Janine enquired, kneeling on the floor beside her sister. “Was it an accident? Or did you … suspect?”
“I’ve suspected something of the sort for some time,” Chris admitted. She looked reproachfully at Tim. “You could have told me about it, couldn’t you?” she stated rather than asked. “You lived here. This was your house before Stephen bought it! You knew all its secrets, and yet you didn’t pass them on to us. Why didn’t you?”
Tim looked slightly cornered, but his compassion for the girl in the chair was too great for him to be capable of deceiving her any more. He endeavoured to explain to her why it was that he had withheld the secret of the wall panel in her room—a secret that he had uncovered long ago in the days of his childhood—and at the same time he had to keep it from her that he had had some inkling of the true situation weeks ago.
For he meant it when he said that he had never been greatly attached to Stephen.
“I thought it might alarm you if you knew there was another entrance to your room,” he said, “so I decided to keep quiet about it. After all, it was unlikely to be discovered, unless someone was actually looking for it. You did that very thing—”
“Stephen says he found it by accident,” Chris told them.
Janine and Tim exchanged glances. He could remember now quite clearly letting Stephen into the secret when they were boys together.
“The best thing you can do now,” Tim said, “is to have it sealed up,” and he went across to the panel and closed it. There was a slight creaking noise as it slid back into place, and then the delicate white panelling was without any sign of having been torn apart for a brief, revealing while.
“I think you ought to have a rest,” Janine decided for Chris, but she glanced uneasily at the panelling. “In my room.”
Chris shook her head.
“I’m not afraid to stay here,” she said, indifferent now to nightmares or fears of any kind. “Stephen has confessed what he’s been up to, and he’s hardly likely to continue it. In future, if he really wants us to part, I’ve no doubt he’ll resort to more civilised methods of bringing about a separation.”
“Does that mean you’ll—consider giving him a divorce?” Janine enquired, feeling anguish in her heart at the sight of the stricken face of her sister.
Chris made a slight, shrugging movement with her shoulders. Apparently at that moment she was incapable of feeling anything acutely.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I—don’t—know!”
Janine nodded at Tim, and he disappeared from the room, and Janine fetched hot-water bottles from the bathroom and settled her sister under her eiderdown with the curtains of her windows drawn before she left her alone. She hated leaving her alone, but there seemed no other course she could take, for Chris gave no sign of wishing her to remain with her, and her whole appearance was so wan and cold and comfortless that the girl whose engagement had been broken because of her now felt that there was no longer even the smallest cause for grievance in her heart. It was Chris who had reaped the whirlwind, and Chris for whom the future loomed bleak indeed.
As she descended the stairs Janine would have given anything if there was something she could do for Chris at that moment, but there appeared to be literally nothing.
In the drawing-room she found Tim pouring himself a glass of sherry at the corner cabinet. He turned and silently put a glass into her hand.
It was by now quite dark outside, and the lights were burning softly in the tastefully furnished and charming room. Janine went round touching things without realising what she was doing … the heavy silk of the curtains, which Chris had undoubtedly chosen with a great deal of care, the Chinese vase which Stephen had bought for his wife only a very short time ago. As she picked it up and held it in her hands she found herself wondering why, precisely, he had bought it.
“Sit down,” Tim suggested, and pushed forward a chair for her. As she sank into it he bent over her and gently kissed her hair. “Don’t worry about this too much,” he said. “Things have a habit of working out, you know.”
“Sometimes,” Janine said ominously.
She looked up at him, into his dark brown, anxious eyes.
“Tim! Why didn’t you let me know that you knew about the panelling?” she asked.
Tim shrugged and moved away from her.
“Perhaps I thought it wasn’t really necessary.”
“But after you’d been let into the secret of all those nightmares and things! You must have begun to suspect Stephen!”
“I did,” Tim admitted, almost coolly.
“Well, then…?”
He walked back to her, drew her out of her chair and held her firmly encompassed by both his arms.
“Listen to me, little one,” he said. “If you and I were married—as I intend that we shall be soon!—and because of the superior charms of someone I can’t imagine succeeding in catching my fancy I wanted to be rid of you, would you take it kindly if a well-intentioned friend came alo
ng and made it painfully clear to you that your beloved—me!—was stooping to a particularly nasty bit of nerveshattering hocus-pocus in order to bring the happy day nearer when you’d throw me out of the house?”
Janine’s eyes widened with horror and revulsion at this crude definition of what her brother-in-law had stooped to.
“No,” she answered, clutching at him, “I wouldn’t!”
“Well, then …? Do you understand now why I didn’t blurt it all out to Chris?”
“But you could have told me.”
“At that time I wasn’t absolutely certain that you would believe me. I didn’t know for certain that you weren’t still in love with him yourself!”
“Tim!” she exclaimed.
“Well, I didn’t, did I?”
“No,” she agreed, after a moment’s thought, “I suppose you didn’t.” And then her eyes brightened with indignation, and she drew back from him a little. “If you thought I might still be in love with Stephen when did you get the idea that I was also falling for you? Were you capable of accepting the idea that I might find it possible to love two men at the same time?”
He smiled whimsically and stroked her hair soothingly.
“As a matter of fact, darling, I was fairly certain you were never even the least little bit in love with Stephen—as I understand love!—and therefore I wasn’t anxious. I was waiting for the moment when the cumulative effect of my charms would cause you to reveal the fact that I was the only man in the world for you!”
She smiled at him, and then the sudden overwhelming knowledge that he was now hers caught her, as it were, by the throat, and in sheer gratitude she fastened her arms about him and held him with a kind of desperation.
“Oh, Tim,” she whispered to him, “if ever anything like this happened to us, I—I couldn’t bear it!”
He held her passionately close.
“Silly little owl, it couldn’t happen to us in a thousand years!”
“But you could—you might … Men do grow tired!”
