The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  "I don't know how long we'll be down at the vet's, Gran. Don't sit up."

  "Will Robert be coming back here?" she asked.

  "I don't really know. He may prefer to go home. There's every likelihood that Banker will be kept at the vet's, and Bob's cottage is rather closer to Brinsham than this house is."

  "You'd think the dog was a child!" she grunted. Then she peered sharply at Avery over the rims of her spectacles. "Is Gerda out there in the hall, holding his hand?"

  Avery's lips were amused. "She's upstairs getting her coat. She's going to the vet's with us."

  The double doors closed behind him and for a minute or so the room was quiet. All at once Mrs. Chase's newspaper rattled, loud in the silence, as she threw it to one side. "Humph, of course she's going with them! Quite an opportunity for her to coo over Robert and look prettily sympathetic!" The jetty eyes swept Lygia's face. "She wants my boy, Lygia—have you noticed?"

  Lygia nodded.

  "What do you think, eh?"

  "I think she's very beautiful," Lygia said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Very beautiful," Lygia repeated, as if to herself.

  Mrs. Chase sighed.

  "Beautiful? Oh, yes, beautiful!" she said, and now, for the first time in Lygia's experience, her eyes looked old and tired. "But there are depths in Robert she could never plumb, never understand. Depths that go channelling back to the past and which I can understand because, in a fashion, they're in me as well—and now, child, will you please put that messy raincoat out of my sight somewhere; David can take it away when he brings your tray. That's better. Oh, don't fiddle with it—pour yourself a drink, you've a face like paper."

  "No, I'm all right. It's just my hands, they feel cold." Lygia took a chair facing Mrs. Chase's couch, and she looked very young and angular and oddly at variance with all the finished perfections of this room as she leant towards the glow of the fire, holding out her thin hands to the warmth.

  "So you brought Banker home, eh?" Mrs. Chase said. "He probably picked up the thorn out on that waste patch behind the garage; you know what dogs are for scratching about. Well, Jess Holt is a good vet, so I shouldn't worry too much about the animal."

  "M-Mr. Chase was horribly worried."

  "Humph! Well, he makes a lot of the animal. Lonely people do tend to turn their animals into children, or idols—and I suppose you think it odd, perhaps, rubbish, that I call Robert a lonely man?"

  Lygia thought about this, her chin at rest in the palm of her right hand. Then she said: "No, I don't think it odd. We're all a little lonely, aren't we?"

  "Not all, child," Mrs. Chase contradicted. "And not all in the same way—certainly not in Robert's way! Tell me, what do you know about the Chases? How much have you learned about us since you've been here?"

  "I've learned that you're a very old family."

  "Yes, Lygia, very old, and rather unholy in times gone by. And things like that haunt the blood and get revealed every so often in certain descendants." And now Mrs. Chase's eyes rested on that Zoffany portrait dominating the drawing-room and Lygia automatically looked as well… and her heart jumped in her side, for surely those dark, gleaming, slightly mocking eyes were not painted eyes… surely they held her own… and surely they moved, their mockery deepening, as she tore her glance back to the fire?

  And then Mrs. Chase said: "He was called Adam Chase and he was an actor—like Robert. Robert resembles him, wouldn't you say?"

  "The r-resemblance is almost frightening," Lygia whispered.

  "Why do you use that word? What do you see in Adam Chase's face?" Mrs. Chase demanded.

  "I—I don't know—"

  "What do you see, Lygia?" And now there was an unmistakable note of excitement underlying the command in Mrs. Chase's voice, while the fingers of her right hand had begun to peck like birds at the big ruby on her left hand. "You see something, don't you? Can't you give it a name?"

  "P-pride—relentlessness—"

  "Pride, relentlessness, and the unquiet loneliness of the pagan. Yes, they're all there, aren't they, Lygia? There in the long-dead face of Adam Chase. But when you look at that portrait, you don't see Adam Chase, do you? I don't myself—I see Robert."

  "You see him—as well?" Lygia's violet eyes searched the old, lined face, and when Mrs. Chase nodded, Lygia felt the taut plaiting of her fingers ease a little. It was almost as though, quite suddenly, she and Mrs. Chase shared a secret.

  "Yes, child, I see Robert—and I know Robert—and that's why I'm so worried about this growing alliance between him and Gerda. I ask myself has she the imagination, and the truly enormous amount of heart, to understand a man"—Mrs. Chase spread out her dark hands speakingly—"who doesn't fully understand himself and why he is so devil-chased at times—devil-chased and lonely—and the answer I find I'm giving myself is not a reassuring one, Lygia."

  "Even though they might love one another, Mrs. Chase?" Lygia asked.

  "Even in the face of that probability. She is too entirely what she seems, a sensually healthy and pretty woman, fashioned to be made love to and to eventually reproduce. There is no more than that to her, and Robert needs more. He needs to be understood for what he is, or he'll go the way—the way other Chases have gone, including his own father; he'll go to the devil."

  Then Mrs. Chase half-smiled at Lygia. "You don't look particularly shocked at the idea of Robert going to the devil! Do you dislike him so much?"

  "I—I barely know him, Mrs. Chase."

  "H'm, I wonder! Anyway, I'll enlighten you; a family as old as this one is bound to produce, every so often, a throwback to its ancient and somewhat uncivilized beginnings—and Robert is such a throwback. He should wear a doublet and hose and walk medieval streets with a knife tucked beneath his sleeve, but being born in the twentieth century, and being far from witless, he is obliged to conform to its rules and its ways. He manages well, up to a point, and the stage accords him a certain amount of release, but there are times when he is entirely pagan—entirely a Chase throwback. That is Robert, Lygia. That is my Robert."

  Mrs. Chase's hands lifted from her knees, and then fell back, a gesture at once resigned and deeply worried. "I've lived to see Robert's father smash his own life, child; I pray that I am not being kept alive just to see the same awful thing happen again."

  "But, Mrs. Chase," Lygia heard herself saying, as though from a long way off, and out of a knowledge she didn't dare look straight in the face, "it's weak people who smash their own lives, and Robert isn't a weak man—"

  "Robert's smash would not result from weakness, Lygia, it would result from his complete subjugation to the loneliness within him, for if that subjugation should ever take place, he will give in to his paganism. I think he knows himself that this could happen, and that is why he is beginning to look towards Gerda. He is asking himself whether she is what he wants, and needs, and in the event that they marry I pray to God that the marriage works out. If it doesn't and he starts to go to the devil for an end to his loneliness, he'll take her with him."

  Lygia shivered at the dark, cold inevitability of that pronouncement, and Mrs. Chase watched her lashes make dense arcs upon her cheeks.

  And then the old lady said: "His father did it before him, Lygia; Adam Chase did it many years ago—it's a Chase curse, God help us! And it's a Chase peculiarity that although the blood is inclined to produce men like Robert, it produces alongside them men like Avery. I'm not going to say he's saint, because he isn't, but he'll never hurt you, child, if it turns out that that mark of a ring you carry means nothing and if I am right in thinking that you have already come to mean something to him… ah, that sounds like David with your supper-tray!"

  Lygia ate her supper without really tasting it, drained to an intense tiredness by the whole strange evening, and after she had finished her coffee she said goodnight to Mrs. Chase, returned her supper-tray to the kitchen and went up to bed.

  As her head touched the cool, thyme-scented pillows, a wry little smil
e touched her mouth.

  She had thought to leave Chase, but it seemed that Chase was not yet finished with her. And because she knew that Chase could not hold the key to her forgotten past, she decided, with a strange little fluttering at her heart, that it must be holding the key to what lay ahead of her. Her heavy eyelids sank down over her tired eyes and she let Chase take her unresisting body, and when, beyond her bedroom windows, she heard a screech-owl swoop on what was probably a field-mouse, she sank into sleep with the curious conviction that the screech-owl had swooped on her and that it was she, not the mouse, who was suddenly lifted against a grey and black breast and held inescapably in long talons.

  Robert did not return to Chase that night.

  Avery informed Lygia at breakfast that Banker had been operated upon, but in consequence of some doubt of Jess Holt's concerning the complete recovery of the eye, he was being kept in Brinsham. Avery smiled a little as he spread drop-scones with the rich, creamy butter of Devon, and then added jam made from the blackcurrants that grew in his own garden. "Bob's a funny, independent cuss at times! He's borrowed an old crock of a bicycle from Jess Holt and he's going to use it to dash in and out of Brinsham to see the invalid."

  Avery flicked a pellet of bread across the table and smiled at her. "You can come and feed my guinea-pigs if you want to," he said. "Do you want to?"

  "Of course."

  "You like animals, don't you, Lygia?" And when she nodded, he said: "That's what I told Bob, going down in the car to Brinsham last night. The funny cuss had got it into his head that you were frightened of Banker… tell me, Lygia, did you see Bob, earlier on in the evening… was that why you slipped out of the house and didn't turn up for dinner?"

  She fiddled nervously with her knife and fork. "Y-es, I did see him. I—" she glanced up, her eyes full of appeal as they met Avery's—"I don't want to talk about it. He doesn't like me and—and we argue when we meet, that's all. Now let's go and see the guinea-pigs."

  "What do you argue about?" Avery insisted.

  "S-silly things—it isn't important."

  "I won't put up with him being rude to you, Lygia." Those attractive grey-blue eyes searched her face. "He isn't over-scrupulous about what he says to people, especially when he's got a bee in his bonnet about them."

  "Dear Avery, it isn't important, please believe me." She smiled and her violet eyes were more beguiling than she fully realized, and in an instant he had got to his feet and was striding round the table to her. He caught hold of one of her hands and pulled her to her feet. "Come on then, you strange child, come and feed the guinea-pigs. Afterwards I'll let you look at some germs through my microscope. Does that sound terribly appealing?"

  "Terribly."

  "There isn't anything else you'd sooner do?" He laughed, on a rather rueful note, and she glanced up at him. The morning sun was full on his blond hair and skin and he looked very clean and wholesome, and when his hands found her arms and he slowly pulled her against him, she didn't fight him.

  "Lygia," he put his arms round her, carefully, not wanting to frighten her, "Lygia, you feel like a little bird, a little blackbird. I want to cage you. I don't care who you are, or where you've come from."

  "I might be a criminal," she smiled, with just a touch of melancholy. His tweed jacket was rough and warm beneath her hand and his arms were so comfortable. "Do you suppose that's what I am, Avery?"

  "Yes, you're a regular Mata Hari. You're probably here to steal all my laboratory secrets."

  "Then you'd better not show me those terribly appealing germs. I might take a blueprint."

  "I'll give you a blueprint. Anything." He stroked the dark hair back from her forehead, and suddenly his lips were against her cheek and moving towards her mouth. "No!" Quick panic had hold of her and she was fighting him. "No—please! L-let's go and feed the guinea-pigs."

  "Don't be silly, darling. I'm not hurting you."

  "I—I mean it, Avery! Let me go! I don't—let me go!"

  Her face had blanched to ivory, and Avery, coming to his senses, drew away from her in quick self-disgust. "I'm sorry, Lygia. Of course we'll feed the guinea-pigs. I didn't mean to frighten you, child."

  They went to the door, self-consciously polite with one another. But when they stepped out into the hall, Lygia said huskily, unable to bear Avery's look of self-disgust a moment longer: "I'm the one to be forgiven. I'm stupid a-and ungrateful."

  "Ungrateful?" He looked down at her quizzically. "My dear, I wasn't seeking thanks for anything I've done. God forgive! But I was forgetting that you have amnesia. I was forgetting that mark on your finger, which may mean that you're another man's possession."

  During the week that followed the fate of Banker's eye was discussed at Chase. Robert didn't show up, and bulletins on the dog's progress were brought back to the house by Gerda, who wangled so much free time from her work that week that Avery finally found himself turning to Lygia for help with his note-taking and the varied correspondence he exchanged with chemists who were working on the same research as himself.

  Lygia proved a willing enough helper, but her attempts to emulate Gerda's secretarial efficiency proved one very concrete thing about her, she had never been a secretary and she would never make one. She took down Avery's notes and letters in painstaking longhand, then, with the tip of her tongue hanging out to dry, she forced Gerda's streamlined typewriter to hammer out more inaccuracies in an hour than it had so far hammered out in its entire lifetime.

  Avery laughed at her, but when she was alone she was aware of a mounting disquiet within her. She had been at Chase for over three weeks now and still she was totally ignorant of her own identity; of the place she came from; of the work she did. And it couldn't go on! It wasn't natural! And, since the morning Avery had tried to kiss her, she had grown unsure of him. He had drawn closer to her, made her conscious of him as a man, and in so doing he had put a mental distance between them that hadn't been there before. She had grown reserved with him and couldn't help herself. She was haunted by those words, 'another man's possession'.

  She was inexpressibly glad on the Saturday evening when Avery suggested they take a car trip into Brinsham.

  "Yes, oh yes!" she said, and ran upstairs to fetch a coat. She came down wearing the tweed jacket in which she had arrived at Chase, and though Avery frowned to see her wearing this awful little jacket in preference to the warm heather-tweed coat he had bought her, he refrained from voicing a comment. But as soon as they were in the car he did insist upon wrapping a rug about her knees. "There's a wind off the sea tonight," he said; this wind of his, in reality, being a slight salty breeze.

  "You're an old fusser," she said, pulling a face at him.

  "Well, it's nice for a stick-in-the-mud bachelor like me to have someone to fuss over." His hand smoothed the rug. "Do you want to go to the seashore, or shall we pop in and see the pierrots?"

  "The seashore—please."

  There had been a couple of hours of rain in the afternoon, and now the long, down-curving road into Brinsham had dried out, leaving behind in the air the vivid scent of washed trees and freshened fields, and Lygia breathed the scented air with the rising relief of someone who has felt strangely stifled.

  Avery parked the car, then he and Lygia made their way down towards the harbour.

  Tonight the lapping of the sea was sleepy—sleepy and dark under a moonless sky—and Lygia stood by the sea-wall and breathed the scents of the harbour and the drifting smoke of Avery's pipe. The peace and quietness had entered into both of them and they were companionable, in almost their old unreserved way. Just occasionally they would speak, but for the most part they were content to listen to the rippling of the sea as it stirred now and again under the touch of that soft breeze in the air.

  They were both startled when a voice murmured behind them:

  'I love waves, and winds and storms,

  Everything almost

  Which is Nature's, and may be

  Untainted by man's mis
ery.'

  "And I do, indeed, with Shelley, on such a night as this," concluded the voice, deepening to a whimsical note.

  Avery swung round towards Robert, taking his pipe from his mouth. Lygia turned more slowly and her left hand was folded into a taut little fist against her heart.

  "When you quote poetry, Bob, I can almost believe that you have a heart," Avery said.

  Robert laughed, and the bobbing light from one of the harbour sheds showed them his dark face. Then the light moved and shadow masked his face to the eyes, and his eyes were glittering and challenging and fixed upon Lygia.

  Without preliminary he said to her: "Thank you for helping my dog, Lygia. I'm told you carried him. As he's almost your own size, that must have been quite a marathon."

  "Is he better now?" she asked.

  "Enormously improved, thanks. I take him home tomorrow. Jess Holt has sealed the eye—"

  "I'm so sorry he lost the eye!" Quick sympathy made Lygia forget her usual constraint with this man. "He's such a beautiful animal, isn't he?"

  "Yes. Still," Robert fingered the tiny cleft in the bridge of his nose, "it could have been worse. Jess told me that if an infection had set in, I'd probably have lost Banker. I'd hate to do that! He was a last-minute gift from the cast of one of my plays—The Chinese Banker." The white teeth glimmered in a smile. "The name Banker is a bit odd for a dog, I know, but we had such a grand success with that play that I just couldn't resist calling the pup after it. Anyway, as I was saying, Jess has sealed the eye. It didn't look too good, and Banker's a lad for running up to children—he mistook you for a child that day at Chase."

  "We're all liable to make mistakes about people," Avery put in, with an obvious note of meaning in his voice.

  Robert's black eyebrows flickered and an impish grin came to sit on his mouth. "How very juridical you sound tonight, old man. I think you need a drink. Ah, that's an idea, we'll all go back to Toby's Parlour. There's a party of sorts going on there; the landlord's son has taken a bride, and Gerda and I, calling in for a drink, got pulled into the prevailing festivities. She, poor girl, is now playing the piano. I came out to clear the fumes of nuptial ale and blessing from my head— yes, we'll all go back—come along!" And before Lygia fully realized his intention, he had caught her by the hand and was walking her away from the sea-wall and up over the cobbles to the street.