This Merry Bond

CHAPTER ONE

The Bredons, father and daughter, leaned over the rails of the Calais-Dover boat and contemplated the English shore through a mist of September rain.

“A typical reception,” Sir Charles remarked, his amused, slightly cynical mouth twisted into a quirk of distaste.

But Nicky Bredon was thinking of Nye. She made no comment as she stood beside her father with the fine rain driving into her lifted face, but presently she said as if half to herself, “I wonder if the creeper on the west wing has turned yet.”

Her father glanced down at her and smiled a little bitterly.

“Have you missed it so much?” he asked gently.

“Not at first,” she replied, still with her eyes fixed on the distant white cliffs. “But toward the end I wanted to go home.”

He gave a small impatient exclamation.

“
I
don’t know why I drag you around with me from one lousy little foreign place to another when all the time your heart’s at Nye,” he said, and for the moment he half meant what he said. Instantly he had her whole attention as he knew he would.

“You know that’s not true,” she retorted, and her eyes, like his—those slanting, wide-set Bredon eyes, which were so remarkable for their vivid clarity—looked directly into his. “You could never stay put for long, and I should hate to be left behind. It’s fun—the wanderings, the queer little inns, the amusing people. You’ve taught me the flavor, Charles, and even your own fever of restlessness—but sometimes I think about Nye. I’m glad we’re going home,” she finished simply.

He contemplated her in silence, his thin, attractive face thoughtful, the perpetual hint of gently ironical amusement for a moment absent.

“I meant to tell you before, Nicky, I’ve had to sell a bit more land. Nye is like a starving giant. It eats up all I have.”

For a moment a stricken look flashed across the girl’s pale face wet with spray and rain.

“Not again?” she said quickly, then added on a more expressionless note, “Shand?”

He nodded. “Who else?”

“Shand’s Shoes will soon own half the Bredon acres,” she said with a bitterness in her young voice that startled her father.

“Oh, come now, Nick,” he said, the old gentle irony back again in his voice. “Scarcely that. That fella’s only skirting our boundary at present. The land’s not worth the money he paid for it anyway.”

“If you mean the South Spinney it includes a mile or more of river,” said Nicky sharply.

“It doesn’t include the water,” Sir Charles replied soothingly. “I gave Banks explicit instructions.”

“Then
I
can’t see what he wants it for,” she retorted. “Old man Shand is no soft fool to part with his money without something in return.”

“My dear,” her father said with a lift of his slender eyebrows,
“
like all these self-made men who acquire a fortune and build themselves a costly and vulgar establishment, he’s a social climber. He’s amply repaid if he feels that his new estate includes a portion of Nye.”

“Still, I wish you hadn’t had to do it,” Nicky said. “It’s bad enough to have the Towers looming over us like a vast public convenience, without having pieces sliced off Nye. He’s already got the Twenty Acre and Wet Wood.”

“Well, I tell you I had no choice,” he replied irritably. “I had to have the money, and I was lucky to be able to raise it on the land.”

“
Speculating again?” she said and the corners of her wide mouth lifted in a sudden grin. “You wretched old gambler!” she said, slipping a hand through his arm. “But still, it might have come off, mightn’t it?”

“You’re a grand girl, Nick,” he said with a grin to match her own. “If it
had
come off, we’d have been in clover for months. One’s got to take a chance.”

He pulled his soft hat down at an angle over one eye as he turned to join the preparations for disembarkment, and Nicky, with a gesture that was her unconscious imitation of her father’s, adjusted her own hat with a final tug and followed him along the deck.

In her bedroom of their comfortable London hotel, Nicky dressed in leisurely fashion for dinner. Charles had gone to his club to cash a check, and she was expecting him back any minute.

“Put on your least squashed frock, my pretty, and we’ll have a rollicking evening to celebrate our return,” he had told her, and she smiled, thinking of other rollicking evenings with Charles—evenings that might end as suddenly as they began, or extend well into the next morning
a
nd up Heaven knew where.

Luxuriously she lay in her bath, revelling in the hot, scented water, and thought about Charles. Theirs had never been the usual father and daughter relationship. It was difficult to think of Charles as a parent in any case. He had so few family qualities in the accepted sense. He was a natural bachelor, cheerful, irresponsible, and a wholly delightful companion. Nicky remembered the day he had suddenly appeared at the carefully selected school, where she had been sent after her mother’s death, and announced that he had come to fetch her away.

“Forever?”

“Oh, I expect so. What use are schools to young ladies, anyway?”

“Where are we going?”

“Anywhere. Across the seas to the places colored pink on the map.”

“Will there be adventures, and perhaps spies and international crooks?”

“Probably. And strange birds and fishes and food and stories too.”

Herself, a wide-eyed child of fourteen, snatched from the care of a scandalized headmistress and transported into an Arabian Nights entertainment of a strange father’s making.

The years had passed in a kaleidoscope of assorted enchantments, odd bits and pieces of knowledge that never penetrated to any schoolroom, and an education as strange as it was unusual. The snatched months at Nye had been a never-failing delight. There were times when they spent as much as a year there without leaving England. But sooner or later Charles would find the fever upon him again and they would pack and be off, returning perhaps for the hunting, or snatching a lazy summer before they were off again with the swallows.

No, one could not think of Charles as a parent. Nicky supposed he must be about forty-five, still young for a man.

She thoughtfully dried her long, slender limbs—a lit
t
le too slender with the racketings of the past few months. It would be pleasant to winter at Nye, hunt a little, entertain a little, and perhaps in the spring she and Charles would start again on one of those tours that had no objective and no time limit.

She was ready and fiddling idly with a nail buffer when she heard her father’s knock, and she turned laughing to greet him.

“Come on, you old horror! We’ll never have time for a show if you don’t hurry.”

He came in looking severe and faintly raffish. She knew the symptoms and was not surprised when he said with fierce apology: “Darling, would you mind awfully if we called tonight off? The fact is something rather urgent has turned up that I must attend to.”

“But Charles, I’m all ready!” she said, unable to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “What’ll I do with my evening, all dressed up like this?”

“Can’t you ring up some young man? Here, give me the book—let’s try that Marlin fella we met in Cannes. He told you to ring him as soon as you got back.”

He seized the telephone book and began hurriedly turning the pages. Nicky watched him, his spare, slender figure propped gracefully against the mantel-piece as he searched through the book, a frown of concentration between his lowered, slanting eyes.

“All right, darling, I’ll do my own cadging,” she said and took the book out of his hands. “Your clothes are all laid out. You’d better hurry.”

“You’re a grand girl,” he said and took her face between his hands, lightly kissing her on the nose. “You don’t mind, my sweet, do you? It’s just one of those things.”

“All right,” said Nicky again. “Do I know her?”

“What? You terrible child! I may be frightfully late, Nicky, and so may you. Meet in the morning? Good night, my pretty.”

He vanished into his own room, and thoughtfully Nicky began to turn the pages of the telephone book.

She went out with Jacky Marlin because he was the first person she thought of. He danced well and he was amusing. She got back to the hotel at four in the morning after an unfortunate altercation in the taxi, and looked softly into Charles’s room on the way to her own. He hadn’t yet come in, and Nicky tumbled sleepily into bed, vaguely dissatisfied and disappointed in the evening. That Marlin man! Somebody ought to teach him!

It was late when she awoke and a pale sun was streaming in at her bedroom window. She flung on a green dressing gown and made her way into her father’s room, yawning as she went. Charles was still asleep, and she perched herself on the end of his bed and prodded him firmly.

“It’s half-past ten and I want my breakfast,” she exclaimed as he moved and grunted protestingly.

“Horrible child!” he said, sitting up reluctantly and running his fingers through his thick hair until it stood on end. “Ring the bell if you must.”

She did so, then went over to the windows and drew back the curtains with a rattle. She stood laughing down at him blinking at her in the sudden light.

“Darling, you must have made a night of it,” she said and went back to her position on the end of his bed.

“Horrible child!” he said again and felt his unshaven jaw doubtfully. “You’ve no business to look like that. You probably had every bit as hard an evening as I did, if I know you, and you have the effrontery to sit there looking as fresh as paint.”

He was too accustomed to such awakenings to notice that there were dark stains under her eyes and her pale skin looked delicate and transparent.

“I didn’t enjoy it much,” she said and shook back her heavy red hair. “I don’t think Jacky is nearly so amusing as he was in Cannes, and his technique is positively mechanical; he’s had so much practice.”

“Exit Mr. Marlin,” Charles said with a little explosion of laughter. “I hope my technique doesn’t earn me such scathing comments.”

“Your technique, darling, like everything else about you, is probably brought to a fine art,” Nicky said, and he bowed to her in mock acknowledgement from his pillows.

A waiter carried in a loaded tray and placed it on the table beside the bed, and Nicky began pouring out the steaming coffee.

“We’ll go down this morning, won’t we?” she said. “There’ll be time if we hurry, and I’m longing to see Nye again.”

He looked away.

“Listen, my sweet, you wouldn’t mind if I joined you tomorrow morning, would you?” he said quickly. “The fact is—”

“Something rather urgent has turned up that I must attend to,” she finished for him, and he laughed.

“Well, you won’t mind, will you?”

“Of course I’ll mind,” said Nick half-seriously. “But I’m getting used to you running out on me. This one must have great recommendations.”

“Cheeky young devil!”

Nicky observed him critically, deciding he must have had a real blind the night before. His thin lined face looked tired in the morning light, and his eyes were slightly bloodshot.

“Have a turkish bath and a face massage before tonight,” she advised him and went back to her own room to dress.

She caught her train just as it was moving out of
Victoria
Station and flung herself into a first-class carriage, leaving a gesticulating porter, on the platform, wildly demanding what he was to do with the luggage.

“Leave it there!” she shouted out of the window. “No—put it in the Lost Luggage—anything—here, catch!”

She flung half a crown onto the platform and dropped to her knees in the carriage and began to collect the scattered contents of her bag, which had flown open disgorging most of its contents on the floor. The only other occupant of the carriage put down his paper with an amused smile and began to help Nicky collect her belongings.

“Do you usually catch trains like this?” he asked in a deep, rather pleasant voice. “And do you expect to see your luggage again?”

She looked up laughing and a strand of hair fell over her eyes, obscuring her vision for the moment.

“But I always catch them,” she said with pride. “And the luggage will turn up sometime—it always does.”

“Oh, you’re hardened to it, I see.”

“I’m a seasoned traveller,” she said.

“So I’ve heard, Miss Bredon.”

She looked up again, startled this time, and pushed the hair out of her eyes.

“How did you—” she began and found herself meeting a glance that was both disconcerting and vaguely familiar in its directness.

She stared at his rather grave, clean-shaven face, trying to place him. He was no different from any other personable-looking man in the early thirties, but those very blue eyes were not easily forgotten.

“Was it in Florence?” she asked, wrinkling her nose in perplexity.

“No.”

“Dresden?”

He shook his head.

“I know! It was that funny little place on the Dalmatian coast—the time of
the fiesta
.”

He smiled and immediately his face was alive with humor.

“It was much nearer home than that,” he said, and all at once, Nicky flushed scarlet.

“Of course—you’re Simon Shand,” she said, and got abruptly off her knees and sat down in the opposite corner of the carriage to him, remembering the only unforgettable occasion on which she had met him.

A moonlight bathing party last summer—one of those crazy rather silly freak parties that Liza Coleman was so fond of giving. She had never known how he came to be included in such a party.

Simon Shand, watching the brilliant color mounting to the roots of her vivid hair, felt vaguely sorry for her and also a little surprised. The Bredon girl’s reputation had not until now included the art of blushing.