by Sara Seale
“I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “The others found me a nuisance. Do you like Uncle Dane?”
“I scarcely know him yet,” answered Emily guardedly.
“You never know him,” the child said with placid composure, and Emily felt her earlier uneasiness return.
“He probably hasn’t had much to do with little girls,” she answered evasively. “Haven’t you tried to make friends with him?”
“I never make friends with people unless they want to first. Besides, he’s blind,” said Alice, and a curious look of distaste passed over her face.
Emily’s eyes were clear and suddenly accusing.
“I should have thought that might have been a reason for going out of your way to be nice to him,” she said.
Alice looked up at the disapproving note in her voice and suddenly she became wholly a child. She had the shame-faced air of a little girl who knows she is at fault but cannot find the way to put it right.
“He frightens me,” she said. “When he looks at me I feel he must be able to see me. Sometimes I dare myself to make faces at him, and then it’s worse because he doesn’t reprove me for being rude. And when we’re in the dark, he can see and I can’t. It’s very frightening.”
Emily sighed. She could understand the child’s fear but she could also understand that Dane, with his other senses more finely attuned than most people’s, might understand only too well the aversion he unwittingly inspired.
“Yes, I know,” she said then. “But I don’t think he finds it easy yet to appear ordinary. You must be patient, Alice—patient and understanding. Blind people are just the same as everyone else in most respects, you know—only more sensitive, more easily hurt.”
“Are they?” asked Alice with the disbelieving doubt of the very young. “Oh, well, it will be all right now you’re here, I expect. Shall we go downstairs?”
II
They went by way of Emily’s room in order that she might get tidy for tea and Alice stood in the doorway frowning at the empty grate and cheap furniture.
“Why have they put you in here?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Emily, doing hasty repairs to her face in front of the spotted mirror. “I suppose it was the most convenient room there was. It’s a long way from the other bathrooms, though, and the water in this one is never hot.”
“It’s the old servants’ wing,” Alice said, still frowning. “But now no one lives in except Mrs. Pride and Shorty. Do you like Shorty, Miss Moon?”
“Well—”
“He’s very good-natured, really. He used to be a male nurse once—that’s why he sometimes seems familiar.”
“Really?” Emily found the little girl’s grown-up observations a trifle disconcerting.
“Yes. Uncle Dane says he has a heart of gold. Are you ready now? I’m beginning to feel hungry.”
As they went down the shallow staircase together, Alice suddenly slipped a hand into Emily’s.
“I shall call you Emily,” she said. “You don’t look very old.”
Tea was laid in the library and Dane was there waiting, his dog at his feet. Emily watched with curiosity the greeting between the child and her guardian.
Alice said politely:
“Good evening, Uncle Dane. How is Bella?”
Dane replied:
“It’s nice to have you home again, Alice. Bella is very well, thank you.”
They did not kiss. The bitch thumped a welcoming tail on the carpet and the child gave her a rather tentative pat before taking her place at the table.
“Will you pour out for us?” Dane asked, and smiled in Alice’s direction.
“Oh. oughtn’t Emily—Miss Moon, I mean—?”
“No, I think that’s still your privilege. After all, you’re the lady of the house in holiday time.”
Emily knew that he was going out of his way to put the child at her ease, but Alice gave him one of her repressed, old-fashioned looks and complied without pleasure.
“I hope you two have made friends,” Dane said, and Emily remembered the child saying upstairs:
“I never make friends with people unless they want to first.”
“I hope so,” she answered nervously. “We introduced ourselves in the garden.”
“I found her up a tree,” said Alice.
“What a curious place to choose on a winter’s day,” observed Dane with raised eyebrows.
“Yes, wasn’t it? She looked very beautiful peeping through the snowy branches.”
“Did she indeed?” said Dane, and Emily felt herself flushing.
After that they ate their tea in silence until Emily held out a piece of cake to Bella and was promptly rebuked by Dane.
“I never allow tit-bits at table,” he said, and Alice, observing Emily’s crestfallen face with interest, asked suddenly in a clear, reproving voice:
“Why has Emily been put in the servants’ wing?”
Dane frowned.
“I wasn’t aware that she had been,” he replied shortly. “What room do you mean?”
“The one opposite the bathroom that’s never used. There wasn’t even a fire in the grate,” said Alice.
He gave an exclamation of annoyance.
“Ring the bell for Shorty,” he said. “I’m most terribly sorry, Emily. You should have told me.”
“Oh, please—” began Emily, dismayed that he should take his servant to task in her hearing, but the little man was already at the door. He could never, Emily thought, remembering other occasions of promptitude, be very far away.
She did not enjoy the brief interchange between them, nor the discomfiture on Shorty’s face as he tried to put the blame on Mrs. Pride.
“Both of you should have known better,” Dane said sharply. “When I gave orders for a room to be prepared for a guest, it never occurred to me that it was necessary to stipulate which one. See to it that Miss Moon’s things are moved at once to the other wing and a fire lighted.”
The man went sulkily away, muttering: “Guest, my foot!” under his breath, and Emily sighed. Now he would resent her more than ever, thinking she had complained.
“I wish—” she began despondently, but Dane gave her one of those long level looks which were so deceptive.
“He was probably jealous,” he said. “The house has been a good bit upset by the other applicants for your job.”
“But Emily will stay, won’t she, Uncle Dane?” said Alice. “She’ll stay for the whole of my holidays, won’t she?”
“I hope so,” he returned gravely. “Though it wasn’t entirely for your benefit that she was invited here. Incidentally, has she given you permission to use her Christian name on such short acquaintance?”
Emily saw the child flush and said quickly:
“Yes, of course. I hoped it was a mark of—of friendship.”
Alice shot her a look of gratitude.
“Yes, it was,” she said with her rare, shy smile. “You looked so lovely in that tree. I shall always remember.”
Emily’s heart warmed to the little girl in the days that followed. She was a quiet child, evidently brought up to be seen and not heard, and at first her sedate composure worried Emily, used to the uninhibited children of previous employers. Alice was always tidy. She would sit for hours reading or just listening politely to the conversation of her elders, and only when she took her daily walks with Emily did she display the normal appetites of her age, and then with an air of faint surprise. She looked quite shocked the first time Emily pelted her with snowballs, but after a little she retaliated and Emily was relieved to find that Alice could run and fall down in the snow like other children.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” Alice said on that occasion. “Will you be here next holidays?”
“Well—” began Emily doubtfully, and Alice sighed.
“I thought you were staying on to help Uncle Dane with his book and things. Do you think you won’t be able to stand it when I’ve gone back to school?”
“What an absurd question! Your guardian is very considerate. Why should you suppose I mightn’t be able to stand working for him if you’re not here?”
“Now you’re being grown-up and putting me in my place like Uncle Dane. I only thought—”
Emily glanced at her quickly.
“Why don’t you like Mr. Merritt? He seems very kind to you.”
Alice wriggled.
“Oh, yes, but he doesn’t really want me.”
“That’s nonsense!” Emily spoke with firmness. “He wouldn’t have made himself responsible for you otherwise.”
“He couldn’t help himself,” said Alice simply. “I went with the house. He couldn’t have one without the other, you see.”
Emily knew the old disquiet. She remembered that Miss Pink had said that Dane’s inheritance had been dependent on his willingness to care for the child, but it was not pleasant to think that Alice should know that she was only a means to an end.
“I think you misjudge your guardian,” Emily said uneasily. “After all, you are not his own child.”
“Does that make a difference?”
“Of course.” But even as she spoke, Emily remembered her own father who had wanted only the bewitching beauty that had been Seraphina’s and had nothing left for his daughter.
“You look sad, Emily,” said Alice, slipping a warm, gloved hand through Emily’s arm. “Did no one want you either when you were a little girl?”
“Of course,” said Emily, suspecting that the conversation was in danger of becoming invitingly morbid “Solitary children tend to think too much about themselves, Alice, and at your age one doesn’t understand grown-up problems. Who lives in that house down in the combe? I’ve often noticed it and it always seems to be shut up.”
They were walking along the moorland road which would take them over the ridge to Pennyleat, and Alice’s eyes followed Emily’s pointing hand to the snow-capped turrets and gables of a house on the outskirts of the village of Pennycross.
“That’s Torcroft,” Alice replied indifferently. “It’s been empty for ages.”
“But it’s still furnished.”
“Is it? Perhaps old Mrs. Mortimer will come back one day. She spends most of her time abroad, Shorty says.”
“No children?” asked Emily, thinking of Alice in her adult isolation at Pennyleat.
“No,” said Alice, her attention already wandering from a familiar landmark of little interest. “There used to be a niece, I think, who came to stay when Uncle Dane visited Uncle Ben Carey, but that was long ago and they went away.”
“Was your guardian a relation of Mr. Carey’s?”
“I don’t think so. They just liked each other. Mrs. Pride says Uncle Dane was one of the few people who ever stayed at Pennyleat. Uncle Ben was a relic.”
“A what?” Emily laughed. “I think you probably mean a recluse.”
“Perhaps I do. Mrs. Pride says that Uncle Ben was once in love with Uncle Dane’s mother and would really like to have adopted him instead of me, only he was too old. Uncle Dane wasn’t blind, then, of course. Mrs. Pride says—”
“Mrs. Pride, it would seem, talks too much to a little girl who shouldn’t be concerned with such matters,” broke in Emily quickly, and Alice gave her a scornful look and withdrew her hand.
“That’s grown-up talk,” she observed with displeasure. “I didn’t think you would be like the others, Emily.”
They walked the rest of the way home in silence, Emily wondering, for not the first time, how this strange child fared at school. Alice never talked about her school and if she had made friends there, which seemed unlikely, her companions were never mentioned. Emily resolved to speak to Dane about the child. It could hardly be possible, she thought, that isolated though the house was, there could be no young families in the district to provide companionship in the holidays.
But Dane, when she broached the subject with him that evening, after Alice had gone to bed, was not helpful or even particularly interested.
“Old Ben Carey had been a recluse long before he adopted Alice,” he said. “You’d hardly expect him to alter his habits at his age, would you?”
“I suppose not,” said Emily dubiously. “Only—”
“Only what?”
“Well—if you adopt a child when you’re too old to care any longer, I should have thought you owed it something.”
In the now familiar semi-darkness of the room his lean face had a sudden ironic weariness. “How young you sound,” he said. “Are you thinking that I, too, neglect the child?”
“No—no, of course not, only—”
“Only what?” he said again on a warning note of coldness.
Emily felt she was being impertinent. What, after all, did she, know about an affair which so little concerned her?”
“I only meant that I don’t feel security—material things—are enough,” she continued courageously. “A child needs affection.”
“I don’t doubt it,” he retorted dryly. “Don’t we all?”
Not you, she thought with sudden anger, and with that disconcerting trick he often had a discerning a mood, he added:
“You are thinking that affection is a commodity I, personally, have no use for, aren’t you, Emily? I must remind you that what one cannot have one must learn to do without.”
“And deny it to others?” she asked quickly. “If you’re thinking of Alice, I should have thought it was plain that she wanted nothing of me. Ben brought her up to be self-contained, like himself. It’s an admirable lesson to learn when young.”
He spoke with his old bitterness and Emily said with gentleness:
“I think you have your values confused, Mr. Merritt. Alice is too young to learn that sort of lesson. Mr. Carey may have been old and a recluse, but you are different.”
“Do you think so? It isn’t necessarily old age or a bad digestion that drives one into seclusion, you know. Ben knew that when he died and unexpectedly left me all his property. I was poor and my work curtailed and badly handicapped by an unfortunate infirmity. Also there were other matters with which he had knowledge and sympathy.”
Emily, because such a denial of life made her angry, said without thinking:
“Were you, too, crossed in love?”
In the silence that fell between them, she became vividly conscious of her own temerity. She remembered that both Miss Pink and Shorty had hinted at a love affair which had gone awry as a result of Dane’s accident, and she realized to the full that as a paid employee her personal views were merely impertinent when voiced unasked.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered wretchedly. “That was unpardonable.”
He was looking across at her in the firelight as if he could actually observe the confusion in her face.
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” he observed quietly. “However, since I hope you may still consider stopping on here, no doubt you have a right to your opinions. Yes, my dear Emily, among other things I was crossed in love as you so, elegantly put it, but don’t let that trouble you. Incidentally, from one of your remarks at our first interview, I rather had the impression that something of the sort had come your way.”
Emily thought of Tim and the bitter lesson he had taught her. Had not she, too, wanted to run away from life, to hide herself from the pitying amusement of acquaintances, to vow never again to fling her affections under the careless feet of a stranger?
“Yes,” she said, then added honestly: “I think I ran after him.”
His face was suddenly gentle in the shadows.
“I daresay you did, my dear,” he observed carelessly. “It never pays, you know, to wear your heart on your sleeve. Ah, well! Scars are not so deep at eighteen as they are at thirty. You’ll get over it.”
He did not care, she thought, hearing only his words, any more than he cared whether the child in his charge perhaps needed more than he was prepared to give her.
“Of course,” she said, regretting that brief admission of
her own foolishness. “Would you like me to read to you, Mr. Merritt?”
“If you must,” he replied with an amused resignation which she ignored.
She switched on the lights with decision, then reached for the book of travel which had occupied them in idle moments since her arrival, and began to read.
III
Christmas came and went almost unnoticed. It seemed strange to Emily that no one even bothered with the usual decorations.
“Don’t you put up holly and mistletoe?” she asked Alice.
“No,” said the child, gazing moodily out of the window. “Uncle Dane can’t see it and Mrs. Pride says it makes too much mess.”
She spoke disinterestedly for the snow had all gone, washed away by the steady moorland rain which had fallen for two days. With the snow gone it was just like any other time in the winter at Pennyleat and Christmas no longer mattered.
Emily looked at her helplessly. Old Mr. Carey, too, she suspected, had never troubled about Christmas.
She spoke to Dane about presents for Alice. There would be very few, she knew, arriving through the post.
“Buy what you like,” he told her indifferently. “I gave her money last year—it seemed the simplest solution since I couldn’t do much selecting myself. Get Shorty to drive you into Plymouth and get the feel of the car yourself now the roads are reasonable again. I shall need you to act as chauffeuse for me upon occasion. By the way, I had a phone call from Louisa Pink last night. She seems a little worried about you.”
“About me? Why?”
“She seems to think you are rather helpless and in need of security and a home. She hopes you have settled down here. Have you, Emily?”
“I think so.” Emily’s voice sounded suddenly lost. “I—I don’t imagine Miss Pink sent me here either for security or for a home.”
“Don’t you?” He was faintly mocking. “Can you not think of Pennyleat as home, then?
“Yes,” said Emily, “I think I can, but Miss Pink—well, I didn’t suppose she’d have any personal feeling about me.”
