by Pamela Kent
Valerie subsided on her chair. She looked like a child who had been rebuked.
“Very well,” she said meekly.
Helen became aware of an overpowering feeling of sympathy for her. She moved close to the desk and spoke to her gently.
“Valerie,” she asked quietly, “what are you doing here? Do you really know yourself?”
Once again Valerie looked bewildered.
“Of course I know,” she replied. She put out a hand to the harsh-faced man. “Perry and I—”
“But you’re married,” Helen said in the same gentle tone.
“I was married.”
“You still are married ... to Roger. Don’t you remember?”
This time Valerie looked completely bewildered, and Perry gave vent to a loud guffaw of laughter.
“So that’s it!” he exclaimed. “All this time you’ve been deluding yourself, fair Helen, and poor old Roger has had to suffer. No wonder he’s looked gloomy lately! You attributed to him a wife, and he’s never even been married. That’s rich! But I don’t feel exactly sorry for him, because he’s got quite enough without you. You’re not precisely my cup of tea, but you’ve all the tricks that would turn you into an engaging mistress for Trelawnce ... hasn’t she, Val?” turning to her and playfully pulling her long hair. “Fancy imagining you were the mistress of Trelawnce!”
“But I don’t understand...” Helen appealed to them both with her eyes, and with an impulsive little gesture with her hands. “If Valerie isn’t married to Roger, who is she married to?”
“No one,” Perry answered promptly. “Not at the moment. She was married to Roger’s brother, but most unfortunately he was drowned, and that made her a widow. It was a nasty shock, wasn’t it, little one?” carelessly rumpling the golden hair. “I’m afraid it unhinged a mind never as sound as a bell ... And Roger has proved a very devoted brother-in-law, looking after her ever since. But there again, he could afford it,” with that vicious dislike in his tone. “He has money. I wish as a result of some of my underground activities I’d acquired a tenth of it.”
“But I thought,” looking round at the boxes and cases with which the room was stacked, and determined in the midst of a flood of relief to get at the truth, “that you said—or rather indicated—that Mr. Trelawnce was with you in this? Is he, or isn’t he?”
Perry smiled.
“Is Roger a smuggler, do you mean? Of course not! Why should he smuggle anything? I’ve told you he’s all, and more, than he wants. A certain well-endowed and badly biased maiden aunt of ours saw to that! And clever speculation has done the rest. Roger always wanted to restore Trelawnce, and he’s done it. The only thing he lacks now is a wife...” grinning at her in an unpleasant way. “What a pity you’re afflicted with such a large amount of curiosity, little one!”
Helen was aware of apprehensive shivers stealing up and down her spine as she met his bold black eyes, but she had to pursue her enquiries to the full. She put the one question that she felt really mattered ... to him.
“Then, if Mr. Trelawnce doesn’t engage in smuggling, does he know that you do?”
Perry lighted himself a cigarette and smiled languidly. “Unfortunately, yes. It’s a pity, because his knowledge will almost certainly recoil on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well”—drawing on the cigarette—“there’s you, isn’t there? And at the moment Roger, I believe, is in London! I’ve got you down here, and believe me this place has many off-shoots. It’s a positive rabbit warren that you could get hopelessly lost in even with a plan to the workings. And as Roger has threatened me with exposure if I make one more attempt to build up my fortunes I don’t really see that I’ve got any alternative but to make things extremely unpleasant for you. You see,” gesturing with his hands, “this little lot arrived last night, and until it’s disposed of I can’t afford to let you go. I don’t mind letting you go once it has all been disposed of...”
“But you won’t hurt her, will you?” Valerie said, putting in a faint protest, and touching his sleeve anxiously.
He shrugged.
“I can’t promise to make things very comfortable for her, and she will have to remain here possibly for several days ... until she’s found! I might even go so far as to leave a slight clue as to her whereabouts, since we don’t want a murder on our hands, but by that time, my love, you and I will be far away ... I hope!”
Helen met his eyes levelly.
“It was that ship you called a yacht, wasn’t it?” she said. “It probably calls here often, doesn’t it?”
“Fairly often,” he agreed. “Oftener in the past, before Roger got wind of it. And,” smiling with amusement, “the owner really is something in the near neighbourhood of a millionaire.”
“I’m not surprised,” Helen said drily.
“But the other morning it had no right to be where it was at that particular time. It was a mistake ... something to do with coming ashore for water. It won’t occur again. It was a pity it had to occur once, because you might not have become so brave if you hadn’t had your imagination fired by the sight of that yacht.”
“It was the storm that drove me to take shelter today,” Helen defended the reason why she was there. “Not,” she added, “curiosity.”
“All the same, your subconscious was at work, I’m afraid,” and he shook his head at her. “You’ve been dying to explore this cave ever since you first caught sight of it, haven’t you?” which was true enough. “And today the old magnetic attraction worked. You walked right into the lion’s mouth!”
He jerked forth a hand and caught Valerie by the arm, drawing her roughly out of her chair. The tone of his voice changed.
“Come on, little one, we’ve talked enough,” he said. “And there’s work to be done! If you can’t help you mustn’t hinder, so you’d better slip back to the house.”
“And—Helen?” she asked, plainly disinclined to abandon Helen to her fate.
He answered just as harshly.
“She’ll be locked in here for the time being. But only for the time being! When we want to empty this place she’ll have to be put elsewhere.”
Helen shivered uncontrollably as she heard his words. What did he mean by ‘elsewhere’?
Valerie broke loose from Perry’s restraining hand and went up to Helen. She looked at her with mixture of uneasiness, regret and apology in her great blue eyes.
“I’m sorry, Helen,” she said. “But you’ve brought it on yourself, you know! You shouldn’t have been so curious. But I’ll see to it that you won’t be left here too long, and perhaps when I’m married to Perry we’ll meet again one day. I’m not as funny in the head as a lot of people think, you know...” She smiled pathetically. “And I’m terribly in love with Perry, and we’re going to be awfully happy. He says we’ll probably settle somewhere on the Continent, or we might even go as far as Jamaica. It would be nice if you could come and stay with us in Jamaica, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t count on a visit from Helen at any time in the near future, honey,” Perry cautioned her coolly. “Or even in the distant future! She has, I’m afraid, to live through what might well prove a highly unpleasant experience before anyone sees her again...”
“I think not,” a clipped, icy, but controlled voice said suddenly in the doorway. As they all three wheeled round as if a pistol shot had been fired, Roger Trelawnce, with the burly Tom Broad just behind him, spoke again, warningly, to his cousin. “You’ve rather over-reached yourself this time, Perry. And it isn’t only the fact that you’ve ignored my repeated warnings that I’m talking about!”
He extended an arm—incidentally, his only arm, which was comfortingly steel-strong and highly protective as it closed round her—to Helen, and she realised that even her teeth were chattering as a result of suddenly released tension as she clutched at him. She whispered:
“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! It—it’s not very nice down here,” a little childishly.
He held her locked against him.
“You won’t be down here much longer,” he reassured her. “And you, Tom”—as Tom pushed past him in a meaningful fashion into the hopelessly cluttered room—“see to it that Mr. Trelawnce returns to his cottage and packs. Packs, you understand?” in a hard, grating voice. “And you can think yourself lucky, Perry, that I’m not handing you over to the police,” he added. “The police will no doubt get you one of these days, but in the meantime you’re free . And I’ll see that all this stuff you’ve got stored away here is restored to the proper quarters. Before you leave,” as if he had the whole thing worked out carefully, “you’ll be provided with a cheque that will attend to your wants for some little while. And after that, I suggest that you work!”
Perry, who realised that the bulge in Tom Broad’s pocket was not there by accident, and that the reason why he kept his hand in his pocket was also not accidental, met his cousin’s eyes with an inscrutable gleam in his own.
“And Valerie?” he asked.
“Will go back to the house. She is in no condition to run away with you. I’ve arranged for her to receive treatment in a nursing-home, and if, when she’s fit and able to make decisions that are not likely to cause her any future unhappiness, she elects to join forces with you—wherever you are—then that will be entirely up to her. But until that day dawns I shall continue to be responsible for her.”
Perry did not answer, but turned and walked out of the room with Tom Broad close behind him. Valerie threw both hands up over her face and started to weep silently.
Roger murmured to Helen:
“Go to her, sweetheart! Take her back to the house!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THAT night, after dinner, Helen and Roger stood once more on the terrace that overlooked the silent waters of the creek, with the woods creeping right down to the very edge of the water, and in the velvety dusk that had followed the going down of the sun they leaned against the parapet and discussed both their future and their past.
“If only I’d known,” Helen said, as she kept her hand inside his arm, and her whole slight body was gently pressed against him, “that Valerie was not your wife. If only I’d had the common sense to ask you whether she was your wife!”
Roger smiled down at the dimly seen top of her head.
“And if you’d had my assurance that she was not my wife what would you have done? In what way would it have affected our relationship?”
She put back her head and looked up at him. She was glad that the dusk prevented him from seeing all the confusion in her eyes.
“I wouldn’t have behaved towards you as I did last night! I mean,” hastily, “I wouldn’t have gone upstairs to bed leaving you thinking I wasn’t interested ... or not terribly interested,” the confusion growing.
She felt his lips moving in her hair.
“Just how interested are you, Helen?” he asked, in a murmuring voice. “As a matter of pure curiosity—and violent importance!—where do I fit in in your scheme of things?”
She would never have believed that she would have found the coinage to say what she did.
“I love you,” she told him.
“Oh, darling!” He turned towards her, and his one good arm went round her, holding her against him with a kind of desperation. “Last night I didn’t have any doubts—not really! But I had some idea you were a little mixed up about something. For one thing you suspected me of nefarious practices, didn’t you?”
She kept her face hidden against him.
“You mean smuggling?”
“If that sounds more romantic to you!”
“It sounds—horrible!” She shuddered as she recalled her experience in the cave—and the far worse experience that might have been hers if Roger hadn’t prevented it. “It’s true I did, at one time, think it a little odd that you had so much money, and chose to live in a spot where ... well, you might have been able to make it quite easily if you were unscrupulous enough. But I soon got over thinking things like that about you, although I always suspected Perry ... and even poor old Colonel Wince at one time.”
“Poor Colonel,” Roger murmured whimsically. “In his case smuggling must have struck you as not nearly the kind of thing it’s usually cracked up to be. He always looks as if he’s terribly hard up, but in point of fact he isn’t.”
“Anyway, I like him,” Helen admitted. “And I like Tom Broad,” she added.
“You were quite certain he was a real ruffianly type of smuggler?”
“I ... I did think so at one time.”
Roger laughed softly under cover of the dude. “Sweetheart,” he said, “we’re all—with the exception of Perry, who’ll probably come to a very sticky end one of these days—eminently respectable, and I hope you’re thoroughly satisfied on that head by now. And as I’m also a bachelor—although you’ve apparently had me married to Valerie for years!—how soon will you marry me?”
“You ... want to marry me?” she breathed jerkily.
“I don’t merely want to marry you, I’m going to!”
His mouth was on hers, preventing any further utterance for the time being, and as on the previous night Helen felt as if the starry heavens were whirling eccentrically above her head, and that the earth beneath her feet was no longer the solid earth. Any unhappiness that she had experienced since she came to Trelawnce was completely expunged by that kiss, and after it she clung breathlessly to Roger, aware that he, too, was as shaken as she was. In fact they were both too shaken to discuss ordinary matters for some time. And then:
“Will you really let Valerie marry Perry one day, if she still wants to?” Helen asked.
“If she still wants to.”
“Although you don’t think he’d make her a very good husband?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t.”
“But I think he loves her — in a way...”
“Well then, we’ll see.”
“And we’ll do everything we can to get her well and strong again?”
“Everything we can.”
She sighed, because she was so happy herself.
“I used to think you treated her abominably ... that is to say, when I thought of you as her husband.”
“But you don’t think I’ll treat you abominably? When I’m your husband?”
The very thought of him as her husband made her fed slightly giddy.
“Oh, Roger!” she exclaimed. “How awful if you’d really been married to Valerie!”
“Awful indeed,” he agreed soberly. And then his arm tightened about her, and she could feel his heart beating strongly and possessively against her. He was so much taller than she was that he had to lift her up slightly in order that their two hearts could beat in tune. “However, we’ve been lucky, my darling ... and if, after ten years of marriage to me, you can still say how awful it would be if Valerie was my wife instead of you, I’ll know that we’re very lucky indeed.”
She smiled up at him with a hint of impishness.
“And if I can’t...?”
“Don’t!” he said sharply, as if that hurt him.
She remembered, that he had only one arm to hold her, and she wound both of her own about his neck.
“Darling,” she reassured him breathlessly, “a thousand years of marriage to you will not be too much for me!” And he answered on the same note of breathlessness and laughter.
“Wait and see! I still think it will be better to bring the question up after a decade, and thereafter on each anniversary!”
THE END
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