by Sara Seale
“Do you? Why?”
“Because—well, because it’s stamped with your personality—the books and the pictures and things.”
He smiled a little crookedly.
“Well, live among the mountains for a little longer. I have
them within me,” he said. “Have you fed your robin again?” “Oh, no, I’d forgotten!” she cried, immediately diverted, and she scrambled to her feet, pushing the hair from her eyes. “Brock—when can I see Penruthan again—properly, I mean?” “Tomorrow, if you like,” he answered carelessly. “But this time you’ll come with me in the car.”
“Thank you,” she said and hesitated, and he remarked with his old indifference:
“I can wait outside if you want to go over it alone, but there’s nothing much to see. Only a few of the rooms are furnished.” She fingered the handsome armoire which had first caught her attention in the crowded room.
“Is it French?” she asked, because, for some reason, she wanted to linger.
“Yes. It’s said to be by Boulle, if your French upbringing has included any mention of him.”
She shook her head, and he said with faint irony: “You should study the masters, Sabina. You will find furniture like that at the Chateau Berger. You mustn’t show your ignorance to Rene Bergerac.”
“Will he expect knowledge of such things?” she asked a little anxiously.
“Undoubtedly—unless he is the type of man who prefers to do his own educating, which I think he might be. Don’t look so alarmed. Haven’t you been told that reformed rakes make the best husbands?
“Y-yes. Is a rake the same as a roue?”
“It’s a matter of opinion, I should say. You’ll find out in due course. Now what about this starving robin?”
He was laughing at her again, but he also wanted to get rid of her, she thought. An hour of her solitary company was, doubtless, as much as he could manage without becoming disagreeable.
She went out to the kitchen, where she found Bunny cleaning silver, and started to heat some milk on the stove.
“Has Brock converted you to climbing?” Bunny asked, not interrupting her task of polishing.
“He’s a different person when he talks about mountains, isn’t he?” Sabina said, but she did not sound very sure of the outcome of the conversation.
“Well, that applies to us all when we can mount our hobbyhorse, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so, only—”
“Yes?”
“I—I wish he wouldn’t sneer at M. Bergerac.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Bunny, “he hasn’t a very high opinion of M. Bergerac.”
“Oh!” said Sabina, discovering with surprise that Brock’s good opinion of the man she was to marry should matter.
She took the warm milk off the stove and sat down on the floor to feed the robin in silence.
It had stopped snowing by nightfall, and in the morning the sun would shine from a cloudless sky to lend a sparkling beauty to the white landscape, but it was still dark when Sabina ran downstairs in her dressing-gown to heat milk for the robin.
The house was bitterly cold and icicles clung to every window, but the kitchen still retained its warmth; the range must have been replenished. Copper and brass reflected a glow from the fire and a rosy pattern danced on the flags. It was a nice kitchen, Sabina thought, aware for perhaps the first time of the reality of a home that was not a hotel. When she had fed her bird she would make tea and take it up to Bunny as a surprise.
But the robin was dead. She found it cold and stiff in the workbasket, its beak a little open, and its claws stretched in mute defeat to the ceiling.
Sabina knelt on the bright rag rug and looked at the bird with a sorrow that was touched with bitter self-reproach. She had left it there to die and never thought to feed it through the night. She lifted it from the basket and held it between her breasts, trying vainly to warm it back to life, and her tears fell gently on the soft red feathers.
Someone came into the kitchen and she raised her face to Brock. He was unshaven and probably shirtless, for he had knotted a handkerchief round his throat and tucked the ends carelessly into his coat.
“It’s dead,” she said tragically; “I let it die.”
He knelt down beside her and took the robin from her cold hands, but she tried to snatch it back.
“If I warm it ...” she began, but he laid the little body back in the basket and closed the lid.
“My dear child, it’s quite stiff,” he said with faint impatience. “It must have been dead an hour or more. I told you yesterday that this would probably happen.”
“I let it die,” she said again. “If I’d sat up—or come down during the night to feed it—it might have lived. ”
The early light of day was beginning to filter through the windows, and his face looked hard and discouraging in the greyness.
“It would have made no difference, if that’s any comfort to you,” he said. “I fed it several times through the night and kept the fire up. I saw it wasn’t going to live.” Her tears fell faster. She had a forlorn desire to rest her head against his breast and
find comfort.
“Oh, Brock. ” she said, “Bunny told me how you used to bring maimed creatures into the warm and tend them when you were a boy. You are so much kinder than you want people to think, aren’t you?”
“Do you think so?” he said a little caustically. “You’re like most women—confuse kindness with sentimentality. For heaven’s sake! Why do you have to weep over such a trivial commonplace? The bird would have died in any case.”
His voice was still impatient, but his fingers as he brushed away her tears were curiously gentle, and when he next spoke, his voice was gentle, too.
“This is a personal loss for you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, and no longer minded his impatience. “It was the first live thing that I have ever had—the first creature for which I’ve been responsible.”
“Yes, I see,” he said and he smiled with sudden tenderness. “You are one of the ones who will be hurt by life, you know. You should think of that when you contemplate marriage with a stranger.”
She blinked at him uncertainly, and for the first time Rene Bergerac, from being a nebulous, unreal character, became more sharply defined, a man whose desires were already spent and who did not really want her.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I’m not usually emotional.” “Aren’t you? Well, perhaps half-past six in the morning is a little early. We’d better make some tea.”
He got to his feet and began to set out cups and saucers on a tray with the ease of long practice. She watched him fill a kettle and spoon tea into an old brown teapot, and the small domestic ritual made him seem friendly and familiar. Just so, she used to imagine, would a husband and wife share the small trivialities of marriage, a sharing which might not be for her. M. Bergerac, she felt sure, would never penetrate to his own well-staffed
kitchens, or pour tea carelessly into cups which did not match the saucers.
She sighed as Brock handed her one and he observed with unflattering raillery that her nose was pink and she had better swallow her tea as hot as possible.
“Crying is apt to make one’s nose pink,” she retorted with spirit. “And you aren’t looking your best yourself, if it comes to that. Your chin is blue.”
He laughed and ran a hand over his face.
“Quite right—I need a shave,” he said. “What an odd mixture you are, Sabina Lamb.”
“I think you’re an odd mixture yourself,” she replied. “I never quite know where I am.”
“Don’t you? Ah, well, you haven’t much experience as yet. Do you still dislike me, I wonder, or will you put me in my place again by saying you don’t know me?” “It can make no difference to you which I say. I don’t think you
mind what people think of you.” He sat on the edge of the table stirring his tea, and his eyes rested on her with amused questioning.
“You take me at face value, don’t you—just as you accept your aunt and Marthe and even the egregious M. Bergerac?” “I’ve never known any other way,” she said simply and his mouth softened.
“No, I suppose you haven’t. Shall we try to teach you a few values, Bunny and I?” She looked surprised and a little puzzled and he added inconsequently: “You look like a little girl sitting there in your long blue dressing-gown, a little girl meant for simple, homely pleasures—farmhouse teas, birthday cakes with candles, and a bosom to cry on when you’re tired.”
His words had an unexpected nostalgic beauty for Sabina and her eyes grew bright.
“How strange for you to talk like that,” she said and his eyebrows lifted.
“Why? Do you suppose I’ve never wanted such things myself?”
“Have you never had them?”
“I suppose in some measure—when I was small.”
“And a bosom to weep on, too?”
“No, perhaps not—and that’s the most important, isn’t it?” It was a strange conversation and somehow out of character with what she knew of him.
“You had Bunny,” she said, remembering that his parents had been separated, but he replied with a touch of dryness:
“Bunny was the governess. She had very proper ideas of what was her place. We came to know each other at a much later date.”
She was silent, recognising with surprise a childhood much akin to her own. Did a ghost of the lonely little boy still hide behind that indifferent facade, she wondered? Could he be reached by tenderness or had he dwelt so long with his cold loves, the mountains, that he no more desired a bosom to weep upon when he was tired?
“What were you thinking?” he asked, watching the betrayal of her thoughts in the face she had turned to the strengthening morning light, but she could not say these things to him yet. Their acquaintance was still no more than that, and he too arrogant to permit trespass.
“I was thinking—” she began, searching for words, “I—I was remembering that I had meant to take some tea to Bunny as a surprise.”
His smile was a little sceptical, but he only fetched another cup and saucer and poured out some fresh tea.
“Here you are,” he said. “Then you’d better go and get dressed, and I’ll do likewise. Mrs. Cheadle will be here soon to do the fires, unless they’re snowed up in the village.”
“Do you think they might be?” Sabina asked, standing there in her long blue robe, Bunny’s cup in her hands.
“No, of course not,” he replied, exasperated by such a literal question, then he smiled.
“Were you thinking we wouldn’t get to Penruthan? he said as if he were rallying a child. “It takes more snow than this to make the roads impassable, my dear.”
She remembered that he had promised to take her to see Penruthan today, but she no longer wanted to be reminded of the house which bound her to an unknown man.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “About going to Penruthan, I mean. I can see it another time.”
His eyebrows rose, but he made no comment, and she went out of the kitchen, holding the cup of tea carefully in one hand while she hitched up her trailing robe in the other.
Bunny was sympathetic about the death of the robin, but like Brock, she did not encourage sentiment.
“It would have died anyhow, I fear. This weather takes toll of many birds,” she said.
“That’s what Brock said, but he fed it through the night and kept it warm even though he knew it would die. Don’t you
think that’s strange?”
“I’ve no doubt it was for your sake.”
“Mine?”
“He thought you would grieve. He told me last night that it would be kinder to put the little thing out of its misery.”
“Oh!” said Sabina and reflected on what a contradictory person he was, doing his best to keep the bird alive until morning to save her disappointment, but insisting, later on, upon driving her to Penruthan although he knew she was reluctant to go. But when breakfast was finished and he suggested that she got dressed for the drive, she had no ready excuse, since only yesterday she had been so eager, and indeed her blood clamoured to be out in the snow and the sunshine.
“Couldn’t we go for a walk, instead?” she asked lamely when he had brought the car round to the door, but his grin was unsympathetic.
“I’m not much of a walker these days with this stiff leg of mine,” he said. “Don’t you want to see your inheritance by daylight? It’s worth a visit, I assure you.”
“Yes, of course,” she agreed hurriedly, aware that his insistence was not entirely on her account. But when the steep moorland road had taken them over the crest of the moor and Brock turned the car between a pair of massive broken gates, she forgot her strange reluctance and caught her breath sharply.
“I told you it was worth a visit,” said Brock.
CHAPTER SIX
PENRUTHAN rose majestic and beautiful from its snowy terraces. Even to Sabina’s untrained eye, the house had gracious proportions, and the icicles which hung sparkling from cornice and window gave it the look of a fairy-tale palace. The grounds had fallen into decay, she supposed, remembering the broken steps and balustrade of the other night, but all neglect was hidden and the worn grace of plinth and pillar borrowed fresh beauty from the snow.
“It’s lovely,” Sabina sighed, feasting her eyes, “and somehow not quite real.”
“Snow lends most things a magic touch,” Brock replied, watching her eyes grow bright with wonder. “Penruthan, stripped of its disguise, is in a bad state of repair. Here’s the
key. Take a look round inside but have a care for crumbling floorboards.”
He handed her a great iron key with elaborate scrolling, and she hesitated.
“I don’t feel I should. It seems like trespassing,” she said.
“On your own property? Don’t be so foolish.”
“Aren’t you coming, too?”
“No. Isn’t that what you wanted—to see Penruthan for the first time alone?”
She thought she detected a faint taunt in his words and she walked to the massive door between the two tall pillars which formed a porch, and scooped the frozen snow from the keyhole. But she could not turn the key and had to call to Brock.
The door swung inwards slowly under his hands and she saw a great hall soaring to the roof, its dimness cut by a ray of sunlight slanting from a window out of her vision. Motes danced like a cloud of midges in the light and the smell of ancient things filled the emptiness.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Afraid of ghosts?” he mocked, but he followed her into the house and left the door open behind them.
Sabina stood in the centre of the hall, feeling small and insignificant, not knowing where to begin. Open doors gave vistas of high, dim rooms, and a wide staircase of stone with heavily carved balustrades led to a gallery and the rooms beyond.
“It’s so big,” Sabina kept repeating. “Who could ever live here in these days?”
“No one probably, unless they were prepared to turn the place into a school or—a hotel.”
“Yes, I can see Tante’s point. But even if it hadn’t been entailed, one would have had a job to sell it, I should think.”
“But the Bergeracs would still have been your best market, I presume.”
She glanced up at his dark face and felt a passing pity for Tante, cheated from the start in offering her niece a home; poor Tante with her gaiety and her love of good things, forever tormented by a source of revenue which could not be realised.
“Well, aren’t you going to make a start on your tour of inspection?” Brock’s voice was impatient and she went into
the first room she came to.
It was, she supposed, a kind of salon, for its proportions seemed vast and the parquet floor was made for dancing. An old grand piano still stood in splendid isolation, its worn, shabby case painted and scrolled in the Empire style.
“The
future ballroom of the Bergerac English branch, perhaps?” observed Brock, and she felt he was laughing at her.
They went from room to room, Brock’s dragging footsteps loud on the polished floors. He seemed to know his way about the house and surprised her with knowledge about the original uses of many of the rooms.
“Have you been here before?” she asked him, and he replied carelessly:
“Oh, yes. Most people in these parts have wandered round the place since it’s been empty. Penruthan used to be one of the show houses of the Duchy, you know.”
“I suppose it was. I’d no idea it was so grand. Madame Bergerac’s own family must have been rich too.”
“On the contrary, they were rather poor, and only lived in one wing,” he said. “I believe the house has always been a bit of a white elephant. It would have saved a lot of trouble if old Rene Bergerac had been allowed to do what he wanted.”
The rooms led one from another in gracious sequence. Some were shuttered, and Brock would undo the bolts to let in the daylight, dislodging dust and cobwebs as he did so. The rooms were empty for the most part, with a stale, piercing cold and the indescribable flavour of gentle decay, but in others there was still furniture, chairs of faded damask, and old presses, pocked with worm.
“I never knew there was furniture,” Sabina said, opening an empty cabinet to inspect a dead spider inside. “I wonder why these things were left here.”
“Not worth a dealer’s trouble, perhaps,” Brock answered carelessly. “This room is rather charming, Sabina, and it has a secret cupboard which should appeal.”
He showed her how the spring operated in the worm-eaten panelling, but her interest was no more than polite. She had seen an armoire which seemed to be a replica of the one which Bunny had in her living-room.
“Look, Brock,” she said; “it’s the same, surely?”
“The same as what?” he asked, but his voice was absent.
“The armoire Bunny has. You told me it was made by someone famous. There can’t be many like it, can there?”
