CHAPTER II
AN EARTHLY PARADISE
I was Lota’s dearest friend, and she was mine. I had never seen anyone quite so pretty, or quite so fascinating then: I have never seen anyone as pretty or as fascinating since. She was no Helen, no Cleopatra, no superbly modelled specimen of typical loveliness. She was only herself. Like no one else, and to my mind better than everybody else – a delicately wrought ethereal creature, all spirit and fire and impulse and affection, flinging herself with ardour into every pursuit, living intensely in the present, curiously reckless of the future, curiously forgetful of the past.
When I parted with her at Charing Cross Station on the first of December it was understood that I was to join her about the middle of January. One of my uncles was going to Italy at that time, and was to escort me to Taggia, where I was to be met by my hostess. I was surprised, therefore, when a telegram arrived before Christmas, entreating me to go to her at once.
I telegraphed back: ‘Are you ill?’
Answer: ‘Not ill; but I want you.’
My reply: ‘Impossible. Will go as arranged.’
I would have given much, as I told Lota in the letter that followed my last message, to have done what she wished; but family claims were too strong. A brother was to marry at the beginning of the year, and I should have been thought heartless had I shirked the ceremony. And there was the old idea of Christmas as a time for family gatherings. Had she been ill, or unhappy, I would have cancelled every other claim, and gone to her without one hour’s delay, I told her; but I knew her a creature of caprices, and this was doubtless only one caprice among many.
I knew that she was well cared for. She had a maiden aunt with her, the mildest and sweetest of spinsters, who absolutely adored her. She had her old nurse and slave, a West Indian half-caste, who had accompanied her from Pekin, and she had –
‘Another, and a dearer one still.’
Captain Holbrook, of the Stonyshere Regiment, was at San Remo. I had seen his name in a travelling note in the World, and I smiled as I read the announcement, and thought how few of his acquaintance would know as well as I knew the magnet which attracted him to quit San Remo rather than go to Monte Carlo or Nice. I knew that he loved Violetta Hammond devotedly, and that she had played fast and loose with him, amused at his worship, accepting all his attentions in her light happy manner, and giving no heed to the future.
Yes, my pretty, insouciante Lota was well cared for, ringed round with exceeding love, guarded as faithfully as a god in an Indian temple. I had no uneasiness about her, and I alighted in a very happy frame of mind at the quiet little station at Taggia, beside the tideless sea, in the dusk of a January evening.
Lota was on the platform to welcome me, with Miss Elderson, her maternal aunt, in attendance upon her, the younger lady muffled in sealskin from head to foot.
‘Why Lota,’ said I, when we had kissed, and laughed a little with eyes full of tears, ‘you are wrapped up as if this were Russia, and to me the air feels balmier than an English April.’
‘Oh, when one has a hundred guinea coat one may as well wear it,’ she answered carelessly. ‘I bought this sealskin among my mourning.’
‘Lota is chillier than she used to be,’ said Miss Elderson, in her plaintive voice.
There was a landau with a pair of fine strong horses waiting to carry us up to the villa. The road wound gently upward, past orange and lemon groves, and silvery streamlets, and hanging woods, where velvet dark cypresses rose tower-like amidst the silvery grey of the olives, and so to about midway between the valley, where Taggia’s antique palaces and church towers gleamed pale in the dusk, and the crest of the hill along which straggled the white houses of a village. The after-glow was rosy in the sky when a turn of the road brought our faces towards the summer-like sea, and in that lovely light every line in Lota’s face was but too distinctly visible. Too distinctly, for I saw the cruel change which three months had made in her fresh young beauty. She had left me in all the bloom of girlhood, gay, careless, brimming over with the joy of life and the new delight of that freedom of choice which wealth gives to a fatherless and motherless girl. To go where she liked, do as she liked, roam the world over, choosing always the companions she loved – that had been Lota’s dream of happiness, and if there had been some touch of self-love in her idea of bliss there had been also a generous and affectionate heart, and unfailing kindness to those whom Fate had not used so kindly.
I saw her now a haggard, anxious-looking woman, the signs of worry written too plainly on the wan pinched face, the lovely eyes larger but paler than of old, and the markings of nervous depression visible in the droop of the lips that had once been like Cupid’s bow.
I remembered Mr Dean’s endeavour to dissuade her from occupying her grandfather’s villa on this lovely hill, and I began to detest the Orange Grove before I had seen it. I was prepared to find an abode of gloom – a house where the foul miasma from some neighbouring swamp crept in at every open window, and hung grey and chill in every passage; a house whose too obvious unwholesomeness had conjured up images of terror, the spectral forms engendered of slackened nerves, and sleepless nights. I made up my mind that if it were possible for a bold and energetic woman to influence Lota Hammond I would be that woman, and whisk her off to Nice or Monte Carlo before she had time to consider what I was doing.
There would be a capital pretext in the Carnival. I would declare that I had set my heart upon seeing a Carnival at Nice; and once there I would take care she never returned to the place that was killing her. I looked, with a thrill of anger, at the mild sheep-faced aunt. How could she have been so blind as not to perceive the change in her niece? And Captain Holbrook! What a poor creature, to call himself a lover, and let the girl he loved perish before his eyes.
I had time to think while the horses walked slowly up the hill-road, for neither the aunt nor the niece had much to say. Each in her turn pointed out some feature in the view. Lota told me that she adored Taggia, and doted on her villa and garden; and that was the utmost extent of our conversation in the journey of more than an hour.
At last we drove round a sharpish curve, and on the hill-side above us, looking down at us from a marble terrace, I saw the prettiest house I had ever seen in my life; a fairy palace, with lighted windows, shining against a background of wooded hills. I could not see the colours of the flowers in the thickening gloom of night, but I could smell the scent of the roses and the fragrant-leaved geraniums that filled the vases on the terrace.
Within and without all was alike sparkling and lightsome; and so far as I could see on the night of my arrival there was not a corner which could have accommodated a ghost. Lota told me that one of her first improvements had been to install the electric light.
‘I love to think that this house is shining like a star when the people of Taggia look across the valley,’ she said.
I told her that I had seen Captain Holbrook’s name among the visitors at San Remo.
‘He is staying at Taggia now,’ she said. ‘He grew rather tired of San Remo.’
‘The desire to be nearer you had nothing to do with the change?’
‘You can ask him if you like,’ she answered, with something of her old insouciance. ‘He is coming to dinner tonight.’
‘Does he spend his days and nights going up and down the hill?’ I asked.
‘You will be able to see for yourself as to that. There is not much for anyone to do in Taggia.’
* * * * *
Captain Holbrook found me alone in the salon when he came; for, in spite of the disadvantages of arrival after a long journey, I was dressed before Lota. He was very friendly, and seemed really glad to see me; indeed, he lost no time in saying as much with a plainness of speech which was more friendly than flattering.
‘I am heartily glad you have come,’ he said, ‘for now I hope we shall be able to get Miss Hammond away from this depressing hole.’
Remembering that the house was perched upon th
e shoulders of a romantic hill, with an outlook of surpassing loveliness, and looking round at the brilliant colouring of an Italian drawing-room steeped in soft clear light, and redolent of roses and carnations, it seemed rather hard measure to hear of Lota’s inheritance talked of as ‘a depressing hole’; but the cruel change in Lota herself was enough to justify the most unqualified dislike of the house in which the change had come to pass.
Miss Elderson and her niece appeared before I could reply, and we went to dinner. The dining-room was as bright and gracious of aspect as all the other rooms which I had seen, everything having been altered and improved to suit Lota’s somewhat expensive tastes.
‘The villa ought to be pretty,’ Miss Elderson murmured plaintively, ‘for Lota’s improvements have cost a fortune.’
‘Life is so short. We ought to make the best of it,’ said Lota gaily.
We were full of gaiety, and there was the sound of talk and light laughter all through the dinner; but I felt that there was a forced note in our mirth, and my own heart was like lead. We all went back to the drawing-room together. The windows were open to the moonlight, and the faint sighing of the night wind among the olive woods. Lota and her lover established themselves in front of the blazing pine logs, and Miss Elderson asked me if I would like a stroll on the terrace. There were fleecy white shawls lying about ready for casual excursions of this kind, and the good old lady wrapped one about my shoulders with motherly care. I followed her promptly, foreseeing that she was as anxious to talk confidentially with me as I was to talk with her.
My eagerness anticipated her measured speech. ‘You are unhappy about Lota,’ I asked.
‘Very, very unhappy.’
‘But why haven’t you taken her away from here? You must see that the place is killing her. Or perhaps the dreadful change in her may not strike you, who have been seeing her every day – ?’
‘It does strike me; the change is too palpable. I see it every morning, see her looking a little worse, a little worse every day, as if some dreadful disease were eating away her life. And yet our good English doctor from San Remo says there is nothing the matter except a slight lung trouble, and that this air is the very finest, the position of this house faultless, for such a case as hers, high enough to be bracing, yet sheltered from all cold winds. He told me that we could take her no better place between Genoa and Marseilles.’
‘But is she to stop here, and fade, and die? There is some evil influence in this house. Mr Dean said as much; something horrible, uncanny, mysterious.’
‘My dear, my dear!’ ejaculated the amiable invertebrate creature, shaking her head in solemn reproachfulness, ‘can you, a good Churchwoman, believe in any nonsense of that sort?’
‘I don’t know what to believe; but I can see that my dearest friend is perishing bodily and mentally. The three months in which we have been parted have done the work of years of declining health. And she was warned against the house; she was warned.’
‘There is nothing the matter with the house,’ that weak-brained spinster answered pettishly. ‘The sanitary engineer from Cannes has examined everything. The drainage is simply perfect – ’
‘And your niece is dying!’ I said, savagely, and turned my back upon Miss Elderson.
I gazed across the pale grey woods to the sapphire sea, with eyes that scarcely saw the loveliness they looked upon. My heart was swelling with indignation against this feeble affection which would see the thing it loved vanishing off the earth, and yet could not be moved to energetic action.
CHAPTER III
‘SOMETIMES THEY FADE AND DIE’
I tested the strength of my own influence the next day, and I was inclined to be less severe in my judgment of the meek spinster, after a long morning in the woods with Lota and Captain Holbrook, in which all my arguments and entreaties, backed most fervently by an adoring lover, had proved useless.
‘I am assured that no place could suit my health better,’ Lota said, decisively, ‘and I mean to stay here till my doctor orders me to Varese or home to England. Do you suppose I spent a year’s income on the villa with the idea of running away from it? I am tired to death of being teased about the place. First it is auntie, and then it is Captain Holbrook, and now it is young Helen. Villa, gardens, and woods are utterly lovely, and I mean to stay.’
‘But if you are not happy here?’
‘Who says I am not happy?’
‘Your face says it, Lota.’
‘I am just as happy here as I should be anywhere else,’ she answered, doggedly, ‘and I mean to stay.’
She set her teeth as she finished the sentence, and her face had a look of angry resolve that I had never seen in it before. It seemed as if she were fighting against something, defying something. She rose abruptly from the bank upon which she had been sitting, in a sheltered hollow, near the rocky cleft where a ruined oil mill hung mouldering on the brink of a waterfall; and she began to walk up and down very fast, muttering to herself with frowning brows:
‘I shall stay! I shall stay!’ I heard her repeating, as she passed me.
* * * * *
After that miserable morning – miserable in a climate and a scene of loveliness where bare existence should have been bliss – I had many serious conversations with Captain Holbrook, who was at the villa every day, the most wonderful and devoted of lovers. From him I learnt all that was known of the house in which I was living. He had taken infinite pains to discover any reason, in the house or the neighbourhood, for the lamentable change in Lota, but with the slightest results. No legend of the supernatural was associated with the Orange Grove; but on being questioned searchingly an old Italian physician who had spent his life at Taggia, and who had known Ruffini, confessed that there was a something, a mysterious something, about the villa which seemed to have affected everybody who lived in it, as owner or master, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant.
‘People are not happy there. No, they are not happy, and sometimes they fade and die.’
‘Invalids who come to the South to die?’
‘Not always. The Signorina’s grandfather was an elderly man; but he appeared in robust health when he came. However, at that age, a sudden break up is by no means wonderful. There were previous instances of decay and death far more appalling, and in some ways mysterious. I am sorry the pretty young lady has spent so much money on the villa.’
‘What does money matter if she would only go elsewhere?’
She would not. That was the difficulty. No argument of her lover’s could move her. She would go in April, she told him, at the season for departure; but not even his persuasion, his urgent prayers, would induce her to leave one week or one day sooner than the doctor ordered.
‘I should hate myself if I were weak enough to run away from this place,’ she said; and it seemed to me that those words were the clue to her conduct, and that she was making a martyr of herself rather than succumb to something of horror which was haunting and killing her.
Her marriage had been fixed for the following June, and George Holbrook was strong in the rights of a future husband; but submissive as she was in all other respects, upon this point she was stubborn, and her lover’s fervent pleading moved her no more than the piteous entreaties of her spinster aunt.
I began to understand that the case was hopeless, so far as Lota’s well-being depended upon her speedy removal from the Orange Grove. We could only wait as hopefully as we could for April, and the time she had fixed for departure. I took the earliest opportunity of confiding my fears to the English physician; but clever and amiable as he was, he laughed all ideas of occult influence to scorn.
‘From the moment the sanitary engineer – a really scientific man – certified this house as a healthy house, the last word was said as to its suitableness for Miss Hammond. The situation is perfect, the climate all that one could desire. It would be folly to move her till the spring is advanced enough for Varese or England.’
What could I say against
this verdict of local experience? Lota was not one of those interesting and profitable cases which a doctor likes to keep under his own eye. As a patient, her doctor only saw her once in a way; but he dropped in at the villa often as a friend, and he had been useful in bringing nice people about her.
I pressed the question so far as to ask him about the rooms at the back of the house, the old monkish rooms which had served as an infirmary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘Surely those rooms must be cold and damp?’
‘Damp, no. Cold, yes. All north rooms are cold on the Riviera – and the change from south to north is perilous – but as no one uses the old monkish rooms their aspect can make little difference.’
‘Does not Miss Hammond use those rooms sometimes?’
‘Never, I believe. Indeed, I understood Miss Elderson to say that the corridor leading to the old part of the house is kept locked, and that she has the key. I take it the good lady thinks that if the rooms are haunted it is her business to keep the ghosts in safe custody – as she does the groceries.’
‘Has nobody ever used these rooms since the new villa was built?’ I asked.
‘Mr Hammond used them, and was rather attached to that part of the house. His library is still there, I believe, in what was once a refectory.’
‘I should love to see it.’
‘You have only to ask Miss Elderson.’
I did ask Miss Elderson without an hour’s delay, the first time I found myself alone with her. She blushed, hesitated, assured me that the rooms contained nothing worth looking at, and fully confessed that the key was not come-atable.
‘I have not lost it,’ she said. ‘It is only mislaid. It is sure to turn up when I am looking for something else. I put it in a safe place.’
Miss Elderson’s places of safety had been one of our stock jokes ever since I had known Lota and her aunt; so I was inclined to despair of ever seeing those mysterious rooms in which the monks had lived. Yet after meditating upon the subject in a long ramble on the hill above the villa I was inclined to think that Lota might know more about that key than the good simple soul who had mislaid it. There were hours in every day during which my friend disappeared from the family circle, hours in which she was supposed to be resting inside the mosquito curtains in her own room. I had knocked at her door once or twice during this period of supposed rest; and there had been no answer. I had tried the door softly, and had found it locked, and had gone away believing my friend fast asleep; but now I began to wonder whether Lota might not possess the key of those uninhabited rooms, and for some strange capricious motive spend some of her lonely hours within those walls. I made an investigation at the back of the villa the following day, before the early coffee and the rolls, which we three spinsters generally took in the verandah on warm sunny mornings, and most of our mornings were warm. I found the massive Venetian shutters firmly secured inside, and affording not a glimpse of the rooms within. The windows looked straight upon the precipitous hill, and these northward-facing rooms must needs be dark and chilly at the best of times. My curiosity was completely baffled. Even if I had been disposed to do a little house-breaking there was no possibility of opening those too solid-looking shutters. I tugged at the fastenings savagely, but made no more impression than if I had been a fly.
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two Page 7
