The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  They were going, of course, to see his cottage, Lygia thought, staring at herself in the mirror of the old-fashioned dressing-table. Her own face was strangely unreal to her, and her body was lost in the pink foam of the nightdress which Gerda had lent her. It amazed her, and it frightened her, despite Dr. Chase's reassurances, that she could remember only the things that had happened since she had come to this house. There was nothing beyond these walls; no other people beyond the people she had met here…

  Timidly, as though she opened a dark cupboard that hid something which might jump out at her, she glanced down at that mark a ring had left on her finger. "The third finger, left hand?" Robert Chase had drawled. And then, a minute or so later: "I think you've picked on Chase to provide you with a bit of free board and lodging."

  The scene slipped back before Lygia… Robert's face… and old Mrs. Chase coming unexpectedly to her rescue. Stiffly she had climbed to her feet, and her deep, chiding voice had pricked the bubble of drama those words of Robert's had produced, so that the evaporation of tension out of the room had been almost audible. "You're over-excited, child," she had said to Lygia, "you look ready for bed." Then her jetty glance had swept to Robert. "And you, my boy," the big ruby on her finger had gleamed with a dark lustre as she had prodded his chest, "you can stop being insulting to a guest. It may be the fashion among your highly-coloured theatrical friends to throw insults at one another, but we will not start the fashion here at Chase House—do you hear me?"

  "I hear you, Grand'mere." In an instant Robert's smile of insolence had become a grin of puckish affection. "I never could bear to be caned by you. Remember how I used to bawl, years and years ago?"

  "Don't try to get round me, you devil!" Mrs. Chase had huffily turned her shoulder on him, but the quick coming and going of her smile had told Lygia that there was a lot she would condone and forgive in this lean, dark, satirical man and that he would have to commit a far greater transgression than the one he had committed tonight before she would feel that he had really earned censure. It seemed to Lygia, in fact, that she played at anger with Robert merely to divert Avery from a showing of his far more genuine anger. His face had been quite grim with it, and a sensation of acute embarrassment had suddenly swept over Lygia.

  "Please—" she had glanced wretchedly from him to his grandmother—"please let me go! I—I can't stay here—"

  "Nonsense!" The word had jumped curtly out of old Mrs. Chase's mouth. "You're tired, and over-imaginative! Can't stay here? Where can you stay, then —on the moors?"

  Mutely she had shaken her head. "I—I meant I could go to a hospital—"

  "Not a hospital, Lygia. There's no need," Avery had said, and somehow Lygia had not been able to fight him when he had taken hold of one of her hands and walked her across the hall. He had watched her go up the wide stairs to her room, and a little later a maid had brought hot milk to her in a blue and white beaker. Lygia, drinking the milk in her big bed, had wanted to cry a little, but even as she had thought of crying, tiredness had overcome her and she had fallen asleep.

  After luncheon, Avery Chase did as he had promised last night and took her to Brinsham in his car to buy shoes.

  To her mortification, however, he had made up his mind on a much more extensive shopping expedition, and when the car finally started back for Chase the grey tonneau held a miscellany of boxes and packages. Lygia sat quiet beside the amused Avery, hating all those things piled on the back seat. Finally she had to mention them.

  "Those things back there," she gestured sharply, "they make me feel what your cousin implied—last night. I wish you hadn't insisted on buying them. I—I shan't want to wear them."

  "Oh, come now, I hope you will." He shot a smile at her uneasy face as he turned the car into the pine-walk that wound up through the park belonging to Chase House. The grey old house, flanked by its lichened towers, sprawled upon a hill, so that the park belted it in green, and the mauve-pink and burnt-gold of the moors sprawled from the green belt like a colourful skirt. "Lygia, please don't feel uncomfortable about those few dresses and things," Avery coaxed. "After all, you can hardly wear one suit and one set of underclothes indefinitely."

  "Indefinitely?" Her face turned in wild, lost appeal to him. "B-but you said I'd remember all about myself —you said I'd remember soon!"

  "Oh, you'll remember in time, my dear, of course you will," he reassured. "But if you're alone in the world and no one turns up to claim you, I'm instituting myself as your—well, your guardian—just for the present." His blond face was gentle; his hands large and capable upon the wheel of the car. "Just stop being afraid, there's a good girl. Everything will come right in time."

  "But you said—last night you said that I—that I might be engaged or married." Her nervous hands found one another and clung together like strangers in the dark. "Dr. Chase, I don't want to find that I'm married! I don't want to!"

  "You're to call me Avery." Abruptly he halted the car beneath the pines, and he turned round so that he was facing her. "Listen, child, you've been at Chase a couple of days now and no one has yet reported you as missing to the South Devon police. I can't imagine either a husband or a fiancé being that remiss, can you?" He half smiled. "A husband values a wife rather more than he values a lost library book or a mislaid parcel of groceries. Those he might not bother very much about, but he'd soon be flying to the police station if his wife didn't come home."

  "But supposing we've quarrelled?" she said. "In—in those circumstances he might not trouble himself to look for me."

  "Do you feel that you have a husband, Lygia?" Avery asked, smiling as he had not smiled last night. It seemed absurd, now, in the prosaic light of day, to imagine this thin, black-haired child possessed of a husband. She was too unprotected by the assurance and the awareness which marriage brings, and too coltishly easy to startle, he thought, ever to have known a husband.

  "A—husband?" She tested the word, as though it were a foreign word, its meaning unknown to her. A husband, she thought, and her eyes ran wildly over Avery; over his greeny tweed jacket, patched with leather at the elbows; over the watch upon his wrist, the leather strap showing dark through the fair hairs of his wrist. She seemed to search him, to throw each salient point of his masculinity into the dark, worrying vacuum of her mind, as though she hoped that one of these points would switch on a light for her…

  Avery seemed suddenly to guess what she was at and he shook his head at her. "No, don't try too hard, Lygia," he said. "Don't beat your mind like a tired donkey. Let it have this sleep it's taken, then let it awake in its own good time. It will, my dear."

  When they arrived at the house, Gerda Maitland and Robert were back from their jaunt to his cottage and drinking lagers and limes on the terrace. Robert watched with wry amusement the removal of the boxes and packages from the car, and as Lygia walked past him towards the house, he called out: "Hullo, Lygia, had a good day?"

  His emphasis upon the word 'good' brought an embarrassed flush to Lygia's face, and for a brief, desperate moment her eyes were fixed upon his mocking face. "Please—I'm not—" Then the words were lost in a stifled cry as her foot missed the step into the drawing-room and she fell sprawling among the packages she had been carrying. She lay among the packages, wishing she could die; she violently resisted Robert when he stooped over her and swung her to her feet.

  "Let me go!" she cried, and as she fought his hands, Avery's voice said behind them:

  "Yes, let her go, Bob! Stop your tormenting once and for all—I'm getting tired of it!"

  "Are you?" Robert looked at him with careless eyes. "Should I have left the girl lying in the dust?"

  "Better in the dust than in your hands!" Avery said, and even as Lygia was wondering why he should say that, when last night he had insisted that there was nothing malevolent about his cousin, Robert withdrew his hands from her waist and rejoined Gerda, who was openly smiling from the rattan garden chair she occupied. As Lygia and Avery disappeared into the house—
Lygia having grabbed up the packages she had dropped as though they were so many red-hot coals — Gerda said: "You are a bit of a beast, you know, Robert."

  He leaned against the grey wall of the terrace and his right hand was slender and dark about the tall glass he had picked up from the rattan table beside Gerda. "I'll have to start collecting the derogatory names I get called," he drawled. "Last night Avery called me a damn cad. Am I a damn cad, Gerda?"

  "Of course you are, Robert." Her smile was rather self-consciously arch. "I shouldn't be here with you now if you weren't."

  "Gerda!" He stared down at her, his dark eyebrows two mocking question-marks above his dark eyes. "Is that a stolen line from a play you've seen me in, or do you mean it?"

  She met his dancing eyes, the pink of her smooth, clear cheeks deepening slightly. Even her sophistication wasn't proof against the mocking, world-weary cynicism that emanated from this man. "False modesty nauseates me," she said. "I might as well admit that I find you attractive."

  "So many dangerous statements in an extremely romantic spot, my sweet!" Robert swung a slender hand, indicating the gracious stretch of the terrace; the winking late-afternoon sunlight caught in the mullioned windows of the house; the tall, silent, slender pines that marched their way towards the house, bringing their aromatic scent and their subdued light and the velvet fall of their brown needles. "You're a lovely woman, and I'm a cad—a damn cad—therefore aren't you just a little afraid?" he asked.

  As he smoothly uttered the word, something that was almost brazen leapt into Gerda's blue eyes. "Afraid?" The word rang away into the treetops. She laughed and took a quick sip at her drink. "I'm deliciously unafraid. Didn't I come with you to your lovely cottage?"

  "You're deliciously frank." Robert laughed down into her glowing face. "You're rather deliciously insulting as well. What did you think I'd do to you at my lonely cottage?"

  "I thought you might kiss me," she replied shamelessly. "Why didn't you?"

  "Why didn't I?" He smiled over her head in a rather enigmatic fashion. "I didn't think of it, my lovely. Am I supposed only ever to have seduction on my terrible mind?"

  "We-ll, you have got rather a doubtful reputation, haven't you Robert?" As she gazed at him, dark as a Spaniard against the wall of the terrace, insolently careless of the whole world and its opinion, she knew that she wanted far more than admiration from him. She doubted his possession of tenderness and the ability to stay faithful, but that didn't matter. She just wanted him. The wanting, and the thought of it, slurred her speech slightly as she said to him: "Are you really going to live in that cottage, with its precarious plumbing and only the owls at night to keep you company?"

  "The owls, the snapping of twigs under invisible feet, and the lonely patter of rain in the night." The glitter of a knowing laughter was in his eyes as he watched her. "Of course I'm going to live there."

  "Who's going to look after you?" she demanded. "Is Mrs. Woods coming down from your place in London?"

  "No, my dear." He stretched his arms along the terrace wall and gazed lazily up at the sky. A few clouds floated by, edged with the pink that the westering sun was beginning to throw into the sky, and the calling of rooks could be heard from the park. A breath of wind stirred Robert's hair and he smelled moorland heather. "No, I'm not bringing Woodsy down," he said. "I'm going to cook for myself—and I can, surprisingly enough. I shall, of course, get a woman to come in and clean for me, but on the whole I'm going to enjoy a spot of rustication. Talks concerning a new play have got held up, but all the same I shall study the script."

  Gerda examined her long fingernails; the varnish was chipped on one nail and she fussed with the nail. "I—I don't see why you couldn't have stayed here at Chase," she said.

  "Don't you?" He grinned at her. "Relatives are fine, if one doesn't have to see too much of them. And do you know, I'm really a solitary man at heart."

  "You are?" Gerda's eyes flashed a tender scorn at him. "You're one of the idols of London and you know it. You love adulation. I think it's the only thing you are capable of loving."

  "Do you now?" Abruptly he quitted the terrace wall and stepped across to her chair. He stooped over her and held her face in his hands. "That isn't quite true, my lovely. I love my dog!" The next instant he was standing tall in front of her, then he was turning from her and strolling into the house.

  The remainder of the weekend turned out to be quiet.

  Robert left Chase early Saturday morning, bound for his cottage and the task of settling in the furniture he was having brought down from London, and when Lygia came down to breakfast and found him gone she suddenly felt like a small mouse released from the torments of a big cat.

  She went to the library and grubbed about among the many books there.

  It was about eleven o'clock when David, the butler, brought a cup of coffee to her, his black-clad figure respectfully standing back from the door so that old Mrs. Chase might precede him into the room. Lygia, curled small in a leather armchair and with her nose dusty from an old rubbed copy of the Ingoldsby Legends, scrambled out of the chair like a guilty intruder as David silently extended the silver coffee-tray towards her.

  "Oh—thank you!" Her eyes lifted to the butler's face, but when she saw the contemptuous chilliness of his eyes, her glance hastily dropped away again. She took the cup and saucer from the tray, and she knew, with reddening cheeks, that Avery had given the man orders to bring coffee to her.

  The cup of coffee, however, was deliciously creamy and hot, and she stood taking sips at it, watched by Mrs. Chase.

  "I don't drink coffee," Mrs. Chase said dryly, as she noticed the questioning look which Lygia was giving her, over the rim of the coffee cup. "It's poisonous stuff without cream and sugar, and I have diabetes."

  "Have you?" Lygia looked at the old lady with quick sympathy, while she recalled that Avery had said something about his grandmother having a complaint which made it necessary for her to keep to a strict diet.

  "Well, don't let it worry you." Again that note of dryness sounded in the deep voice. "Diabetes is quite a comfortable complaint, when one has a doctor in the house. Now hurry up and finish that coffee and we'll go out to the garden. You won't get any colour in those white cheeks if you sit about in this dark old room."

  "Oh, I'd love to go out in the garden," Lygia said at once. The tall heads of trees and the bright flash of flowers could be seen from the windows of the library, but she hadn't liked to venture out in the garden alone, for she was constantly afraid of intruding, of seeming to push herself forward, despite Avery's repeated injunctions that she run about the house and the garden as much as she liked. She knew he was the master of the house, but the servants about the place made her feel uncomfortable, they watched her with such inquisitive eyes.

  "Are you getting more used to us now?" Mrs. Chase asked. She was standing by Avery's desk and impatiently regarding the cluttered appearance of it. Then, not waiting for Lygia's reply, and with her wrinkled lips almost disappearing as she pursed them, she picked up the silk handkerchief he had plainly been using as a pen-wiper. "Really, take a look at this!" she exclaimed. "What would you do with the man? I know he doesn't have to count his shillings, but he needn't use his handkerchiefs to wipe his pens on. Nor one of the Burslem plates as an ash-tray!" Lygia followed the old lady's shocked glance to the dark-blue plate, whose exquisite galleon centrepiece was bespattered with sordid grey ash and cigarette stubs with Gerda's lipstick marks on them.

  "Right from a boy he's been like this," Mrs. Chase told Lygia, as she emptied the contents of the Burslem plate into the waste-paper basket and gave it a quick rub with the soiled handkerchief. "He's never had the Chase appreciation of fine possessions, and I shudder to think what will become of them all when I'm no longer here to keep an eye on things. It's really a very great pity that Robert wasn't the child of my eldest son; Chase and its possessions might stand a chance in his hands, for he does appreciate a fine piece of porcelain or glass. Avery woul
dn't know if he was eating out of a dog bowl, or drinking out of a tooth glass, and I sometimes think that he'll end by sacrificing all the lovely things here at Chase on the altar of science — he's perfectly capable of it!"

  She sighed, and Lygia saw the aged and rather weary shaking of her wrinkled old hand as she carefully put the Burslem plate back on the cluttered desk.

  "I've lived at Chase a good many years, child," she said. "I came here as a seventeen-year-old bride, and one grows into the very walls and foundations of a house after sixty-five years."

  "Sixty-five years!" Lygia breathed. How wonderful, and yet at the same time how sad, to have the fabric of nearly all your life woven into the walls of a house that went on living long after your children, who had skipped so gaily along its winding corridors and laughed and loved and quarrelled in its lovely rooms, had become only memories!

  "Yes, child," Mrs. Chase said, touching an aged hand to Lygia's young hand, "I am very old and I have many memories, nearly all of them bound up with this house. Do you think Chase a fine house?"

  "Oh, yes!" Lygia said at once. "It fascinates me with its towers and its tall pines. I hear the pines in the night; their murmuring makes me feel much less lonely in my great big room, with its enormous cupboards."

  "Come along, let us go and catch a little autumn sunshine," Mrs. Chase said, and they left the library and made for the garden.

  It was not a planned garden. It sprawled with all the mixed charm of Chase House itself, the massy heads of wild hydrangea glowing side by side with the tangled, silken heads of the mystic smoke-plant and the exotic cream flowers and sweeping sword-leaves of Adam's needle. While below banks of purple loosestrife and rose and violet spiderwort there ran the shimmer of a meandering stream, its surface dimpled as goldfish darted, their flashing bodies spinning the ballerina skirts of big white water-lilies.