Brides of Aberdar (31 page)

So Arthur came to Plas Dar—and within the hour the old magic was at work. Unaware that this was in fact his first true love, he found himself trapped in the fatal fascination of the supposed Christine and knew that he must flee from disaster as fast as he could go. But how escape when danger wore so smiling a face and held out to him welcoming hands? He felt himself drowning in honey and in all too short a little while, forgot all but that the honey was sweet.

For—it had been true perhaps when the ghosts had said that Lawrence Jones was a dull young man. If to be sweet tempered, easy-going and doggedly devoted was to be dull, then Lawrence was dull. And life at Plas Dar was dull, with the parental eye always upon her. Scarcely out of her teens, already tied down by marriage and motherhood, predictably an illogical resentment had taken root within her. And now…‘Well, Tetty, it’s your fault, you should never have let me marry him.’

The summer had come and Lady Hilbourne sat out on a bench on the lower terrace, looking across the little river to the hillside in all its leafy green. Over forty now and very much the matron, she wore always a tiny crown of the handmade lace that Tante Louise brought back from her native Brussels, with two streamers of pale brown velvet hanging down at the back, to match the inevitable dress of plain russet or sepia, tight and tailored in the bodice, flowing out into a rigid crinoline.

Lyneth, however, was very smart and bright these days, very much in the current fashion of hitched-up skirt over a scarlet petticoat, worn short to expose the charming little tasselled boots with their painted heels. She had driven over in the dogcart with the little Christina—carried into the house by Tomos to visit her aunt in the upstairs rooms; the young gentlemen were at this moment to be seen, riding down the path that led to the little bridge across the river, coming from Plas Dar. ‘Not a word in front of
them
, Tetty, about all this!’

‘Lyneth, I cannot believe that you’re serious. Leave Lawrence—!’

‘I should never have married him.’

‘We tried to dissuade you, but you would have him.’

‘Only because I didn’t want
her
to have him. I was just a spoilt child—if only you’d been a little more clever with me, I might still have been free, now, today—I’m not yet twenty-three—with a whole glittering world to choose from and maturity enough to choose a lot more wisely. Well, now it’s going to end, and if you don’t like it, look inward, Tetty, and see whose fault that is.’

Even she, thought her step-mother, stiff and erect as ever on the old stone garden seat, even she who all her life has been my pet and my darling, now turns against me. She said grimly: ‘Don’t try to absolve yourself of blame, Lyneth, by forcing it all back to me. You were greedy and jealous and in your egotism you have brought your wonderful sister to what she is now—’

‘She would have come to that anyway. She’d have married Lawrence and, being a bride, she would have been haunted. It’s only that she’s come to it at second hand.’

‘But
you
were to be the bride—you cheated her out of her lover and became the bride-to-be and so you inherited the hauntings. To save you, she took the curse upon herself—she did it all for you.’

‘She did it all for Lawrence, really, Tetty. But what has that to do with it now. Arthur and I are in love, as we always were. I’m going away with him.’

Now the stern figure did a little crumple. ‘Lyn, you don’t really mean it? You can’t do it! What will become of you?’

‘I shall be with Arthur. Lawrence must divorce me—’

‘Lawrence will never divorce you, he would never do such a thing.’

‘Well, then, we must live abroad. Arthur knows all the delightful places—’

‘There are no delightful places, as you’ll find out, for a woman who has left her husband and child.’

‘Who says I shall leave my child?’

‘Take her with you! A married woman, roaming the continent with your paramour, trying to find such acquaintance as you could bear to know, who would condescend to know
you
! You couldn’t be so cruel and so wicked!’

‘If I’m cruel and wicked, Tetty,’ said Lyneth, ‘it was you who made me so. Deep down inside you, you’re cruel and wicked yourself. If I robbed my sister of her true love, well, you aided and abetted me in that. If I condemned her to take my place in the life she leads now—you abetted me in that also. It was you who taught me to believe that whatever I wanted, that I must have. Well, I want to go away with Arthur. Whether or not I can bring myself to leave Christina, I’m not sure. I know it’s awful, I know I’m dreadful, Tetty, but I love him. I’m going away with Arthur, I’m leaving Lawrence…’

Christine nowadays made little secret of her curious way of life. ‘I have taken on a burden which is not mine,’ her attitude seemed to say. ‘If others wish to conceal it, so they may. Why need
I
be ashamed of it?’ She was confined very much to her own rooms, however, up in the old nursery wing, only Tomos in faithful attendance and the oldest and most trusted of the housemaids. But it was impossible to keep her caged like a dangerous lunatic, in a house that was in fact all her own; and she would make her way downstairs occasionally, the servants peering out from behind curtains or half-closed doors to watch her in easy converse with a company unheard and unseen as she passed through the great hall on her way out to the gardens, or roamed without purpose through the once familiar rooms. Tomos, ever watchful to protect her from intrusion, came across her in the dining-room, holding little Christina by the hand. ‘It was in here, Tina, that the funny gentleman made the lady sit down in his lap, and your naughty aunt went off into lots and lots of giggling…!’ So entirely nowadays had she adopted her sister’s mantle that she almost forgot that it had been not she, but the real Lyneth, who had behaved so deplorably that evening. ‘You remember, Tomos?’

‘I don’t remember any lady sitting in a gentleman’s lap, Miss Lyn. I do remember that I tipped the soup into yours.’

‘Yes, yes, Christina—naughty Tomos, all the soup in my lap! And I didn’t even have my bib on, did I, Tomos?’

The tiny girl fell to an extremity of giggling. ‘How delicious she is!’ said Richard, appearing in the doorway, watching them. ‘A miniature replica of you.’

‘After all, her mother is a replica of me.’

‘Nobody dere?’ said the little girl, scared and bewildered, staring towards the door, where her aunt stood smiling, gesturing, exchanging her pleasantries with—no one.

Tomos looked anxious. ‘Why don’t you take her out into the sunshine, Miss Lyn? Her ladyship and Miss Christine are sitting on the lower terrace.’ He preceded them into the hall and caught up a large Paisley shawl. ‘Let me put this round you, Miss; you’re so thin, these days, you feel the cold more than most.’ With the loving familiarity of long years of service, he came round and taking one thin hand, so placed it at her bosom, as to keep the shawl secure. ‘Now, Miss Christina, you take your Aunt Lyneth out for a nice walk.’ Over the years, he had become aware that only within the house did his young mistress persist in her strange behaviour; outside it, she seemed free of the illusions that appeared to govern all her waking life.

Arthur Hilbourne, just dismounted, stood with his friend in the open doorway. Dear God!—is this my Lyneth?’

‘Now you know why we weren’t in any hurry to bring you over to call on her.’

‘But she’s so thin! And so pale! But who is she—?’

‘Well, she talks to—we don’t understand,’ said Lawrence, hopelessly. ‘You knew she’d been ill.’

‘Yes, but… Oh, Tomos,’ he said, whispering to the manservant, well-remembered friend of his childhood days, ‘how thin and pale your young lady has grown!’

‘Take her out into the sunshine, Mr Arthur,’ said Tomos, urgently, whispering back. God forbid that the young gentleman should see her when one of them—attacks—came on! ‘Mr Lawrence, take her into the garden.’

But already she had moved over to where Richard stood with Lenora, leaning in a familiar pose of elegant negligence on the newel post at the foot of the broad stair. ‘But, Lyn, I shall be sad if you go out; don’t go!’

‘And if you make Diccon sad, Lyneth,
I
shall be cross. And you don’t like that, do you?’

‘Well,’ she said, uncertainly, ‘if you really object—’

Christina, however, had caught sight of her father and his friend, standing as though rooted to the spot, in the entrance doorway. ‘Papa! Cousin Arfur! Aunt Lyn, look!’—and Christine turned and saw them. ‘Oh, Lawrence…! And—Arthur, can it really be you? I heard that you were staying at Plas Dar—’

‘I’ve brought him over to visit you,’ said Lawrence, stepping into the breach of Arthur’s speechless distress.

‘… should have come sooner,’ mumbled Arthur.

‘Well, but it’s wonderful to see you now!’

‘And wonderful to see you, dear, sweet Lyn,’ he said, pulling himself together, coming forward to take her hand.

‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ mimicked Richard from the stairway, and Lenora said disparagingly: ‘Is this the famous first love?’

She ignored the outstretched hand, turned back to them. In fact he had never been her first love; Lawrence had been her first and only—ever love. But she was Lyneth, whose first love indeed their cousin, Arthur Hilbourne, had been. ‘That’s long over,’ she said to the ghosts, earnestly.

‘Nobody dere?’ said the child again, clinging tight to her father’s hand.

Not for other eyes to see; but there they were indeed, so beautiful, and bright, Lenora dark and brilliant, Diccon with his aureole of the golden Hilbourne hair. ‘There’s no need to be jealous,’ she was saying to him, pleadingly. ‘He
was
my first love but we were only children. Then I turned to Lawrence Jones because—because my sister loved him and wanted him; and I would have been his bride except that you and Lenora wanted
me
and so I gave him up to Christine—’

‘And yourself to Diccon for ever!’

She stood trembling. ‘Yes, Lenora. Yes, Diccon, I did: I gave myself over to you for ever.’

Arthur stood in the doorway, ashen and trembling. ‘Dear God, Lawrence, dear God!—what is happening?’ There at the foot of the broad stairs, smiling, pleading, responding to voices unheard, her own voice only half heard across the wide hall—gesturing, gesticulating; ludicrous, grotesque, infinitely pathetic…‘Who is she talking to? What is this all about? Is she mad?’

‘It’s what I tried to prepare you for,’ said Lawrence, almost as shaken as he. ‘It’s this—this Hilbourne sickness; they say that her mother was the same.’ He added quickly: ‘You’ve no need to be afraid—it seems to be inherited only by this branch of the family: your own would be free of it.’

‘Aren’t you anxious about the child?’

‘Her mother seems free enough of any taint of it. I can but pray, as indeed I do every night on my knees—that my beautiful Christine is safe and her precious Christina.’

Arthur’s heart turned over, sick within him at recollection of the treachery contemplated against his ever well-loved friend; and felt in himself the same cold shiver of apprehension as had come to his beloved—could he but have known it—on the night of her betrothal to another man: when first the bright ghost had appeared before her and her betrothal ring fallen into the water of the little fountain—when she had known the touch of that hand that was like a drift of mist in her own, chill and intangible… He came-to with a start and found that the sick girl had left the stairway—had indeed taken his hand in a hand as cold as ice and was leading them across the broad gravelled drive and on to the terrace. Below them, her sister sat in close conversation with their step-mother. Lawrence said, ‘We’ll go down and join them…’

But he could not endure to go there, not yet: to be with these two old and dear friends, exchange sly glances with the girl he was planning to steal from them: to posture and pretend. ‘Could we walk a little, before we meet Lady Hilbourne?’

‘We’ll go round by the stables,’ said Lawrence immediately, glancing at the white face and trying to speak lightly. ‘There’s a new pair of carriage horses just arrived: Hil will be there receiving them. Just wait while I conduct Lyneth down the terrace steps…’

‘We’ll go veeeeeery quietly,’ said Christina to her aunt as he left them on the grassy pathway leading between the flowerbeds to the bench. ‘Give Mama a
biiiiiiig
deprise!’ She caught at Christine’s hand and led her, tip-toeing, to where the two sat, backs turned to them, lost in the intensity of their conversation.

And Lyneth’s voice said, just raised in defiance: ‘I
am
leaving Lawrence, Tetty. I
am
going away with Arthur.’

She cried out in an absolute agony, ‘Lyneth!’ and two white and startled faces were turned as she stumbled towards them. The little girl ran after her, clutching at her skirts. She cried: ‘Tetty—take her! Take her away, take her into the house!’ But her eyes were fixed on her sister’s face. ‘What did you say? Lyn? You
can’t
have said that? What did you say—?’

Their step-mother scooped up the protesting child and was gone, pausing only to look back from the upper terrace to where they confronted one another, Lyneth ashen-faced, at bay. ‘I can’t help it, Christine. I’ve fallen in love with Arthur.’

For this! All the huge out-pouring of sacrifice, to end in this! She stammered: ‘But Lyneth—you’re married to Lawrence.’

‘Darling… Christine, please understand, please understand! I can’t help it. One can’t help one’s feelings. I’ve fallen out of love with him, that’s all.’

Christine stood ashen, gasping, clutching the bosom of her white dress; the Paisley shawl tumbled back from her shoulders to the ground. ‘Out of love! You can’t be! You can’t have fallen out of love with him. He’s your husband, you married him.’

Lyneth’s face was terribly pale under the bright little, hard, high hat with its cocky red feather. ‘I married him because you wanted him Christine. Didn’t I? We both knew that. It’s terrible, I know: but it’s true. I don’t think I ever loved him at all, not really.’

‘But you taught him to love
you
. And he does, he married you and he loves you, he’ll never change. You can’t leave him, Lyn, you can’t! You must get over this and go back to loving him, Arthur must go away—’