by Susan Barrie
His lips twitched. What an unusual, composed little thing she was, he thought, and those enormous eyes of hers made him think of a doe on a hillside, peering round at him as if suspicious of his somewhat peculiar brand of humor. Apart from that she was not particularly attractive—not, at any rate, according to his standards, and he was used to every variety of beautiful female—but she had a good complexion freed from the use of overmuch make-up, and she was as slender as a willow wand. Actually much too slender. She needed fattening up on good country produce.
“Well, I’m quite sure my sister must find you most efficient, otherwise she wouldn’t have kept you for as long as a week,” he told her soothingly. “Eve always demands her money’s worth, and like Shylock she expects her pound of flesh. So long as you don’t permit her to exact more than the pound which is her due.”
“Mrs. Duplessis is quite a reasonable employer,” she replied to that—unable to state truthfully that she was a considerate employer—with a touch of stiffness, for she did not regard criticisms of a relative as becoming in one who was to stay as a guest.
“Good!” he exclaimed, and suddenly swung the car through the main gates and on to the broad gravel sweep before the White Cottage. “She seems to be lucky, too. Or she evidently knows how to pick her employees!”
But she could not be absolutely certain of his complete seriousness as he made that remark, and she more than suspected a faint twinkle in his eyes.
His sister was awaiting them in the hall when they entered it. She was wearing a fine grey woollen dress which fitted her perfectly, and her greying hair had been treated to a delicate blue rinse which emphasized the curious flawlessness of her complexion—unless it was the effect of the new face-pack! Seeing them together it was easy for Melanie to decide that Richard was at least ten years younger than Mrs. Duplessis, and that he was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five or forty.
There was no effusion in their greeting. Eve offered him her cheek, which must have struck even him as remarkably cool and pleasant to the touch, and which smelled delightfully of some subtle perfume. Then they repaired to the library, where a tray of drinks were set forth on a handsome burl table, and Melanie accepted a glass of orange squash in preference to anything stronger, while her employer and her guest drank martinis.
Richard Trenchard looked tall and broad-shouldered but rather elegantly spare as he stood there in front of the flower-filled fireplace, and his flinty grey eyes barely smiled as he acknowledged his sister’s uplifted glass.
Lunch was served very soon after that, and the shining table in the dining-room was decorated with some gorgeous spiky mauve dahlias in a bowl of beaten Burmese silver.
Richard appeared to wish to concentrate on his meal and not to indulge in conversation—not idle conversation, that is, for which he plainly had little time—and his sister’s polite questioning drew forth only monosyllabic responses.
She asked him about the success of his current play, his recent visit to Italy, and how long he had stayed in Paris on the way back. About friends and relatives in London, including a certain Great-Aunt Amelia who resided, apparently, in a little house in Hill Street, and was remarkably hale for her age, which was close upon a hundred. She it was who was to leave Richard all she possessed when she did eventually depart this life, although Richard was in the fortunate position of being able to care little when, if ever, that event occurred.
“And Noel? How is she?” Mrs. Duplessis inquired at last, when she seemed to be running out of conversational openings.
Richard Trenchard frowned. Watching him secretly while she crumbled her bread Melanie thought that a muscle at one corner of his tightly compressed lips became tautened and twitched a little, as if he was suddenly possessed by a feeling of irritation, although his voice was quite level as he replied, “I have been requested to remove her from her school. She is not, apparently, doing very well.”
“Really?” Eve’s eyebrows were upraised. “You mean her work is not good?”
“No,” shortly, “I mean her health.”
Mrs. Duplessis stared at him across the table, and since like her brother she seldom betrayed complete astonishment she merely, on this occasion, looked rather more interested than surprised.
“In what way is her health affected?” she asked. Richard Trenchard refused the sweet course, but finished the remains of the excellent but very dry white wine with which his sister had regaled them during the meal, and which remained at the bottom of his glass.
“I don’t quite know,” he confessed. “But from the information I have received she is always catching colds and running high temperatures, and it is thought that the air of the East Coast is not entirely suited to her. Or at any rate the matron has decided that she would rather be rid of her responsibility. That’s why I’ve made up my mind to buy Wold House, if it’s at all worthy of purchase.”
“I see,” his sister commented. “Well, probably it’s a good plan for you to have a more permanent kind of home than the flat which you now occupy in London—although I imagine you’ll keep that on as well?—but it seems a little hard that the responsibility for Andrew’s child should rest upon you, more especially as you happen to be a bachelor. I know,” rather more hastily, “that blood is thicker than water, and so forth, and poor Andrew naturally expected one of us would either take her or make arrangements for her welfare—”
“I don’t suppose for a single instant that Andrew ever imagined you would take her, my dear Eve,” Richard interrupted her coldly, looking at her—or so Melanie imagined—almost disdainfully.
Eve’s delicate color rose slightly in her smooth cheeks. “Well, Andrew could hardly expect it,” she said clearly, in her cool voice. “After all, my house is quite unsuited to a child—for one thing it is not large enough—and from the child’s point of view it is much better that she should be sent away to school and have the benefit of young associates. If the East Coast doesn’t suit her there are plenty of other excellent schools in more sheltered parts of the country.”
“And in the holidays?” Richard queried. “What do you suggest she should do in the holidays?”
“What she has done for the last few years, if a healthy spot is chosen for her—remain at school!”
“As simple as all that!” Richard murmured, and helped himself to a peach from the piled-up basket of fruit on the table. He prepared it very carefully. “At the same time I think I should like to acquire what you are pleased to describe as a more permanent home of my own, and that being so there is no reason why Noel—Elaine’s as well as Andrew’s daughter!—should not come to it during her holidays. I have no aversion to children as such, although I admit I have little time for them, and if someone is found to take charge of her while she is with me the matter becomes quite uncomplicated. I naturally do not wish to have her thrust upon me during my working hours, but I am not altogether inhuman.”
“Which, at the bottom of your heart, you consider I am?”
“Not at all, my dear Eve. You are responsible to no one for your actions, and why should you be? You have your own income—quite a sufficient income!—and you are naturally rather set in your ways.”
He lifted his eyes from the peach and something glimmered in them a trifle mockingly as they took in the outward perfection of her appearance.
“This is excellent fruit,” he pronounced, as he tasted it.
“Those are home-ripened peaches,” Mrs. Duplessis informed him, and she still looked almost completely composed. “And naturally the fact that Noel is Elaine’s daughter does make a difference—to you, at least!” she murmured.
Richard Trenchard allowed the shaft to pass off him. “Quite,” he agreed, without embarrassment. “For, if Elaine had married me instead of Andrew, Noel might so easily have been my own daughter!”
“That was what I was thinking,” his sister informed him very gently, smiling with great amiability as she pushed the decanter towards him. “By the way,” she
added, “how old is Noel now?”
“She will be sixteen in a few months’ time.”
“Rather a difficult age in a girl. I hope you will find someone satisfactory to take charge of her during the holidays.”
“I hope so,” he echoed smoothly, and rose and pushed back his chair. “In the meantime I should like to borrow your car this afternoon and go and look at Wold House.”
“Of course,” she answered immediately. “And you can have Melanie to drive you.”
“Thank you, but I do not require your Miss Melanie. I made that quite clear to her this morning!”
Eve looked amused, and Melanie, glancing up at him, saw that he meant what he said.
“Melanie is quite a good and careful driver,” her employer spoke for her. “And in any case I wish you to take her with you so that she can tell me what the house is really like.”
‘“Why not come yourself?” he suggested reasonably.
“Because I simply couldn’t summon up the energy! I was playing bridge with the Baxters until three o’clock this morning, and I haven’t fully recovered even yet. Late nights have a kind of devastating effect upon me, but I can’t resist them just the same.”
“You hardly look devastated,” he observed, studying her with a kind of disinterested criticism.
“Thank you, Richard,” a little drawlingly. “You’ll be telling me next that I wear well! Also I have some friends coming in for tea this afternoon, so I am not free.”
“Very well.” He turned abruptly to Melanie. “Then if you won’t take longer than ten minutes to get ready I will take you with me, Miss Brooks,” he said. “But I shan’t wait longer than ten minutes!”
Melanie joined him on the drive beside the car in a little under eight and a half minutes. She was wearing a light coat over her primrose jumper, for the mists sometimes swept down over the moor towards tea-time now that the summer was practically over, and had run a hasty comb through her soft brown hair so that it curled attractively back from her face.
She looked at him to see whether he realized she had a minute and a half to spare, and he nodded and actually smiled at her in approval.
“Good girl!” he remarked. “Eve could never have managed that. You’ certainly are a little unusual.”
Melanie felt curiously pleased. Once more she lay back in her seat beside him at the wheel of the car while he let in his clutch smoothly, and once again they were out on the wide, white moorland road. But the sun had gone in and the afternoon looked grey and still. The distant hills were shrouded already in a kind of haze, and a heron winged its flight overhead.
The car leapt forward like a live thing. Melanie watched the hills draw nearer.
CHAPTER THREE
WOLD HOUSE had stood empty for nearly a year, and as it was full of oak beams and sombre panelling its atmosphere was ever so slightly forbidding upon immediate entry. But one single shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom of the late September afternoon and found its way into the library, which was lighted by diamond-paned windows at either end, and the shadows dispersed, and the place was full of charm.
Melanie felt the charm strongly as she sat waiting in the wide window seat for her employer’s brother to finish his inspection overhead. She herself had already examined every room with interest, and had even wandered in the neglected wilderness which was the garden and traced with her finger the time-worn message on the sundial:
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…
And now, with the hush of the house around her, she listened to those purposeful footsteps moving above her head, and when they started to descend the stairs she drew herself slightly more erect because any moment now, she felt, he would appear in the doorway to the library. And when he did he had to bend his head because of the low-hanging beam just inside it, and he glanced across at her rather quizzically because she looked like a pale and watchful wraith now that the sun had suddenly disappeared.
“I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting,” he said, “but I’ve made up my mind to buy this house, and I wanted to discover its secrets.”
He crossed the room and sat down beside her in the window seat, giving a hitch to his carefully creased trousers before he did so; then he produced his cigarette-case and offered it to her, preferring, however, to smoke a pipe himself.
“If you don’t mind?” he inquired, with detached politeness.
“Of course not,” she answered.
She watched him as he stuffed the bowl full of tobacco, pressing it down with the tips of those extraordinarily sensitive but sure fingers of his. Then he puffed it alight and a most pleasing aroma stole all about them, and a faint haze of tobacco smoke circled their heads and then drifted behind them to the window which he had opened to throw away his match.
As he closed it his eyes lighted upon the garden, and he observed that a great deal would have to be done to the place before it was really habitable.
“But it’s a perfectly genuine old house, and some of the panelling, is quite remarkable. And apart from that I like its atmosphere. Do you believe in the atmosphere of old houses, Miss Brooks?”
“Well,” Melanie hesitated, not quite sure what he meant. “You mean that they have a ‘lived-in’ feeling? That they are quite different to modern houses because, even when you know you’re alone you are not quite alone—not always alone, that is—but it isn’t in the least frightening ...?”
She paused, expecting to see him smile in an amused way, but he was merely watching her with something a little more disconcerting in his eyes—something thoughtful and appreciative.
“That’s precisely what I do mean,” he told her. “Old houses have souls. They sometimes seem to be actual living things, and if the people who have once dwelt in them have been happy people you soon get to know about it. Happiness leaves its mark just as surely as unhappiness. If this room in which we are now sitting is filled with ghosts, probably watching us two very closely at this particular moment, they are happy ghosts. I have already decided that.”
She shivered a little, for the dusk was deepening moment by moment, and he could feel her move instinctively nearer to him along the seat.
“Oh, don’t!” she said. “It—it sounds a bit eerie.”
“Does it?” He laughed, and there was a teasing note in his voice. “But I thought you said there was nothing in the least frightening about it!”
“Neither there is,” she defended her weakness, “in the daylight!” she added.
He smiled and stowed away his pipe, and then he stood up and started to move restlessly about the room. She felt that he was occupied by a problem, for his shoulders were bowed a little and with bent head he appeared to be studying the floor boards, as if seeking some sort of inspiration from them. And then abruptly he came back to her and stood in front of her, looking down at her from his superior height with rather a grim expression on his face.
“Miss Brooks,” he said almost curtly, “from our conversation at lunch-time you have probably gathered that, as a family, we Trenchards are not sentimental. But whereas my sister is a complete egoist I have certain weaker sides to my character which will not permit me, for instance, to neglect to fulfil a promise. And I made a promise in connection with my niece Noel, the daughter of my half-brother Andrew.”
Melanie looked up at him as if amazed that he should open up a conversation of this sort with her, and holding her wide brown eyes with his own he continued:
“My brother and his wife were both killed in an accident while their daughter was no much more than an infant, and I promised my brother before he died”—he paused, and Melanie felt that although he mentioned his brother he was thinking almost exclusively of his brother’s wife—“that I would do all I could for the child. And I did send her to school, and I’ve spent quite a lot of money on her in one way and another, but my sister Eve is like that—completely absolutely self-centred!”
Melanie was silent. He produced his pipe again and once more stuffed it full of tobacco,
and once more he puffed it, but more violently this time.
“I am a busy man—I am not even a married man, and a girl in her teens is a problem. I’ll admit that when I tackled my sister at lunch-time I had a kind of faint hope that she might, for once, come to my rescue, especially when she heard that Noel’s health is none too good. But—” with a sudden, almost angry sneer on his well-cut mouth—“might have saved myself the effort. I might have known that the leopard does not change its spots, and certainly the Eve Duplessis of this life do not do so.”
Melanie found herself murmuring in a concerned way that she was very sorry—it was certainly a problem, a particularly awkward problem for a man, but surely there must be some way out?
“There is,” he agreed, very shortly, and sank down beside her again on the window seat, looking at her so directly this time that for an instant her eyelashes wavered. “I have decided to buy this house, and at great personal self-sacrifice I have decided to put my own housekeeper in charge here and my niece in her care. But an elderly housekeeper is not enough for a young girl of sixteen, particularly one accustomed to the society of plenty of other young people. And that’s where you, Miss Brooks, if you have not become too devoted to my sister”—a little sarcastically—“can be really helpful!”
“I?” Melanie looked at him in astonishment.
“Yes, you!”
“But I don’t understand—” she got out, when he interrupted her impatiently.
“Of course you don’t understand. You haven’t the faintest idea what I am about to suggest, but it is simply this: You will take over the charge of my niece—as her companion, or governess, or what you will—and Mrs. Abbie, my housekeeper, will look after the pair of you. I shall not be here because naturally I could not work at all in an atmosphere so thick with females, but I shall see to it that you have all the comforts you require, and from the financial point of view you will benefit rather than otherwise. I am in a position to offer you double the money my sister pays you if necessary.”
