Ainslee's Magazine/The Brightener/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
IWONDER who will tell her,” I heard somebody say, just outside the arbor.
The somebody was a woman, and the somebody else who answered was a man,
“Glad it won't be me,” he replied ungrammatically.
I didn't know who these somebodies were, and I didn't much care. For the first instant, the one thing I did care about was that they should remain outside the arbor, to which I had retreated, instead of finding their way in. Then the next words waked my interest. They sounded mysterious, and I loved mysteries—then.
“It's an awful thing to have happen—a double blow, in the same moment!” exclaimed the woman.
They had come to a standstill close to the arbor, but there was hope that they mightn't discover it, because it wasn't an ordinary arbor. It was really a deep, sweet-scented hollow scooped out of an immense arbor-vitæ tree, disguised like its sister trees in a group beside the path. The hollow contained an old marble seat, on which I was sitting, but the low entrance could only be reached by one who knew of its existence by passing between those other trees.
I felt suddenly rather curious about the person struck by a “double blow,” for a “fellow feeling makes one wondrous kind;” and at that moment I was a sort of modern, female Damocles myself. In fact, I had got the Marchese d'Ardini to bring me away from the ballroom to hide in this secret arbor of his old Roman garden because my mood was out of tune for dancing. I hadn't wanted to come, but grandmother had insisted. Now I had made an excuse of wanting an ice in order to get rid of my dear old friend, the marchese, for a few minutes.
“She couldn't have cared about the poor chap,” said the man in a hard voice with a slight American accent, “or she wouldn't be here to-night.”
My heart missed a beat.
“They say,” explained the woman, “that her grandmother practically forced her to marry him, and, although the armistice had been signed, arranged it at a time when he'd have to report for duty an hour after the wedding, so they shouldn't be really married if anything should still happen to him. I don't know whether that's true or not!”
But I knew! I knew that it was true because they were talking about me. In an instant—before I'd decided whether to rush out or sit still—I knew something more.
“You ought to be well informed, though,” the woman's voice continued; “you're a distant cousin, aren't you?”
“'Distant' is the word! About fourth cousin, four times removed,” the man laughed with frank bitterness. No wonder, as he'd unsuccessfully claimed the right to our family estates to hitch on to his silly old, dug-up title!
Not only did I know, now, of whom they were talking, but I knew one of those who talked: a red-headed giant of a man I'd seen to-night for the first time, though he had annoyed grandmother and me, from a distance, for years. In fact, we'd left home and gone to Rome because of him. Indirectly, it was his fault that I was married, since, if it hadn't been for him, I shouldn't have come to Italy or met Prince di Miramare. I did not stop to think of all this, however. It just flashed through my subconscious mind, while I asked myself: “What has happened to Paolo?” He was still engaged in flying in Italy, though the war was now several months over. “Has he been killed or only injured? And what do the brutes mean by a 'double blow?'”
I had no longer the impulse to rush out. I waited with hushed breath. I didn't care whether or not it was nice to eavesdrop. All I thought of was my intense desire to hear what those two would say next.
“Like grandmother, like granddaughter, I suppose,” went on the ex-cowboy baronet, James Courtenaye. “A hard-hearted lot, my only surviving female relatives seem to be! Her husband at the front liable to die at any minute, her grandmother dying at home, and our fair young princess dancing at a ball.”
“You forget what's happened to-night, Sir Jim, when you speak of your 'surviving' female relatives,” said the woman.
“By George, yes! I've got only one left now. And I expect, from what I hear, I shall be called upon to support her!”
Then grandmother was dead—wonderful, indomitable grandmother—who, only three hours ago, had said, “You must go to this dance, Elizabeth. I wish it!” Grandmother, whose last words had been: “You are worthy to be what I've made you—a princess. You are exactly what I was at your age.”
Poor, magnificent grandmother! She had often told me that she was the greatest beauty of her day. She had sent me away from her to-night, so that she might die alone. Or had the news of the other blow come while I was gone and killed her?
Dazedly I stumbled to my feet, and in a second I should have been pushing past that pair; but just at this moment footsteps came hurrying along the path. Those two moved out of the way with some murmured words I didn't catch, and then the marchese was with me again. I saw his plump figure silhouetted on the silvered-blue dusk of moonlight. He had brought no ice! He flung out empty hands in a despairing gesture which told that he also knew.
“My dear child—my poor little princess” he began in Italian. But I cut him short.
“I've heard some people talking! Grandmother is dead. And—Paolo?”
“His plane crashed. It was instant death—not painful. Alas, the telegram came to your hotel, and the signora, your grandmother, opened it. Her maid found it in her hand. The brave spirit had fled! Mr. Carstairs, her solicitor, and his kind American wife came here at once. How fortunate was the business which brought him to Rome just now, looking after your interest! A search party was after me, while I was seeking a mere ice! And now the Carstairs wait to take you to your hotel. I cannot leave our guests or I should go with you, too.”
He got me back to the old palazzo by a side door, and guided me to a quiet room where the Carstairs were waiting. They were not alone. An American friend of the ex-cowboy was with them—another self-made millionaire, but a much better made one, by the name of Roger Fane—and with him a school friend of mine whom he was in love with, Lady Shelagh Leigh. Shelagh ran to me with her arms out, but I pushed her aside. A darling girl, and I wouldn't have done it for the world if I had been myself!
She shrank away, hurt; and vaguely I was conscious that the dark man with the tragic eyes, Roger Fane, was coaxing her out of the room. Then I forgot them both as I turned to the Carstairs for news. I little knew then how soon and strangely my life and Shelagh's and Roger Fane's would twine together in a Gordian knot of mystery!
I don't remember much of what followed, except that a taxi rushed us, the Carstairs and me, to the Grand Hotel as fast as it could go through the streets filled with crowds shouting. Mrs. Carstairs, a mouse of a woman to look at, a benevolent Machiavelli in brain, held my hand gently and said nothing, while her clever old husband tried to cheer me with words. Afterward I learned that she spent those minutes in mapping out my whole future!
You see, she knew what I didn't know at that time: that I hadn't enough money in the world to pay for grandmother's funeral, to say nothing of our hotel bills!
A clock, when you come to think of it, is a fortunate animal.
When it runs down, it can just comfortably stop. No one expects it to do anything else. No one accuses it of weakness or lack of backbone because it doesn't struggle nobly to go on ticking and striking. It is not sternly commanded to wind itself. Unless somebody takes that trouble off its hands, it stays stopped. Whereas, if a girl or a young, able-bodied woman runs down—that is, comes suddenly to the end of everything, including resources—she mayn't give up ticking for a single second. She must wind herself; and this is really quite as difficult for her to do as for a clock, unless she is abnormally instructed and accomplished.
I am neither. The principal things I know how to do are to look pretty and to be nice to people, so that when people are with me they feel purry and pleasant. With this stock in trade I had a perfectly gorgeous time in life until Fate stuck a finger into my mechanism and upset the working of my pendulum.
I ought to have realized that the gorgeousness would some time come to a bad and sudden end. But I was trained to put off what wasn't delightful and to do or think of to-day until to-morrow, because to-morrow could take care of itself and droves of shorn lambs as well.
Grandmother and I had been pals since I was five, when my father, her son, and my mother quietly died of diphtheria and left me, her namesake, to her. We lived at adorable Courtenaye Abbey on the Devonshire coast, where furniture, portraits, silver, and china fit for a museum were common, everyday objects to my childish eyes. None of these things could be sold, or the Abbey, for they were all heirlooms of our branch of the Courtenayes—not the Americanized ex-cowboy's branch, be it understood! But the place could be let with everything in it; and when Mr. Carstairs was first engaged to unravel grandmother's financial tangles, he implored her permission to find a tenant. That was before the war, when I was seventeen; and grandmother refused.
“What!” she cried—I was in the room, all ears. “Would you have me advertise the fact that we're reduced to beggary, just as the time has come to present Elizabeth? I'll do nothing of the kind!. You must stave off the smash, That's your business. Then Elizabeth will marry a title with money or an American millionaire or some one, and prevent it from ever coming.”
This thrilled me, and I felt like a Joan of Arc out to save her family, not by capturing a foe, but a husband.
Mr. Carstairs did stave off the smash, Heaven or its opposite alone knows how; and grandmother spent about half a future millionaire husband's possible income in taking a town house with a train of servants, renting a Rolls-Royce, and buying for us both the most divine clothes imaginable. I was long and leggy and thin as a young colt; but my face was all right, because it was a replict of grandmother's at seventeen. My eyes and dimples were said to be something to dream about, even then—I often dreamed of them myself after much flattery at balls!—and already my yellow-brown braids fell far below my waistline. Besides, I had grandmother's early manner—as one says of an artist, and really she was one—so, naturally, I received proposals—lots of proposals. But they were the wrong lots!
All the good-looking young men who wanted to marry me had never a penny to do it on. All the rich ones were so old and appalling that even grandmother hadn't the heart to order me to the altar. So there it was! Then that awful Jim Courtenaye came over from America, where, after an adventurous life, or worse, he'd made pots of money by hook or crook, probably the latter. He stirred up, out of the mud of the past, a trumpery baronetcy bestowed by stodgy King George the Third upon an ancestor of his in that younger, less-important branch of the Courtenayes. Also did he strive expensively to prove a right to Courtenaye Abbey as well, though not one of his Courtenayes had ever put a nose inside it. He didn't do this, he kindly explained to Mr. Carstairs, to snatch the property out of our mouths. If he got it, we might go on living there till the end of our days. All he wanted was to own the place and have the right to keep it up decently, as we had never been able to do.
Well, he had to be satisfied with his title and without the Abbey, which was luck for us. But there our luck ended. Not only did the war break out before I had a single proposal worth acceptance, but an awful thing happened at the Abbey.
Grandmother had kept the rented town house, from her love of display in my behalf, no matter what the expense. From time to time she replenished the household equipment from supplies which were on hand at the Abbey. Grandmother wasn't a woman to be conquered by shortages! On one occasion she remembered a hundred yards of bargain stuff she'd bought to be used for new dust covers at the Abbey, and as all the servants but two were discharged when we left for town, the sheets had never been made up. And now she had found a use for them.
She could not be spared for a day, but I could. By this time I was nineteen, and felt fifty in wisdom, as all girls do since the war. Grandmother was old-fashioned in some ways, but new-fashioned in others, so she ordered me off to Courtenaye Abbey by myself to unlock the room where the bundle had been put. Train service was not good, and I would have to stay the night; but she wired to old Barlow and his wife, once lodge keepers, now trusted guardians of the house. She told Mrs. Barlow—a dear old Devonshire thing, like peaches and cream, called by me “Barley'—to get my old room ready, and Barlow was to meet me at the train. At the last moment, however, Shelagh Leigh—my close friend and now just out of the school-room—decided to go; and if we had guessed it, this was to turn out one of the most important decisions of her life.
Barlow met us, of course; and how he had changed since last I'd seen his comfortable old face! I expected him to be charmed with the sight of me, if not of Shelagh, for I was always a favorite with Barl and Barley; but the poor man was absent-minded and queer. When a stuffy station cab from Courtenaye Coombe had rattled us to the shut-up Abbey, I went at once to the housekeeper's room and had a heart-to-heart talk with the Barlows. It seemed that while the war was still on the police had been to the house and had “run all over it,” because of reports that lights had flashed from the upper windows over the sea at night—signals to submarines!
Nothing suspicious had been found, however, and the police had made it clear that they considered the Barlows themselves above reproach. Indeed, an inspector had actually apologized for the visit, saying that the police had pooh-poohed the reports at first. They had paid no attention until “the story was all over the village;” and there are not enough miles between Courtenaye Abbey and Plymouth dockyards for even the rankest rumors to be disregarded long.
Barley was convinced that one of our own ghosts had been waked by the war, the ghost of a young girl burned to death, who now and then rushes like a column of fire through the front rooms of the second floor in the west wing; but the old pet hoped I wouldn't let this idea of hers keep me awake. The ghost of a “nice English young lady” was preferable in her opinion to a military spy in the flesh! I agreed, but I was not keen on seeing either. My nerves were jumpy. Consequently I lay awake, hour after hour, though Shelagh was in grandmother's room, adjoining mine, with the door open between.
When I did sleep I must have slept heavily. I dreamed that I was a prisoner on a submarine and that signals from Courtenaye Abbey flashed straight into my face. They flashed so brightly that they set me on fire, and with the knowledge that if I couldn't escape at once I should become a family ghost, I wrenched myself awake with a start.
Yes, I was awake; although what I saw was so astonishing that I thought it must be another nightmare. There really was a strong light pouring into my eyes. What it came from I don't know to this day, but probably an electric torch. Anyhow, the ray was so powerful that, though directed upon my face, it faintly lit another face close to mine, as I suddenly sat up in bed.
Instantly that face drew back, and then, as if on a second thought, after a surprise, out went the light. By contrast, the darkness was black as a bath of ink, though I'd pulled back the curtains before going to bed, and the sky was white with stars. But on my retina was photographed a pale, illumined circle with a face looking out of it, looking straight at me. You know how quickly these light pictures begin to fade; but before this dimmed I had time to verify my first waking impression.
The face was a woman's face, beautiful and hideous at the same time, like Medusa. It was young, yet old. It had deep-set, long eyes which slanted slightly up to the corners. It was thin and hollow-cheeked, with a pointed chin, cleft in the middle; and it was framed with bright auburn hair of a curiously unreal color.
When the blackness closed in, and I heard in the dark scrambling sounds, like a rat running in the wainscot, I gave a cry. In my horror and bewilderment I wasn't yet sure whether I was awake or asleep; but some one answered. Dazed as I was, I recognized Shelagh's sweet young voice, and, at the same instant her electric bed lamp was switched on in the next room. “Coming, coming!” she cried, and appeared in the doorway presently.
By this time I had the sense to switch on my own lamp, and, comforted by it and her presence, I told Shelagh in a few words what had happened.
“Why, how weird! I dreamed the same dream!” she broke in. “At least, I dreamed about a light and a face.”
Hastily we compared notes and realized that Shelagh had not dreamed. The woman of mystery had visited us both, only she had gone to Shelagh first and had not been scared away, because Shelagh hadn't thoroughly waked up.
We decided that our vision was no ghost, but that, for once, rumor was right. In some amazing way a strange woman had concealed herself in the rambling old Abbey—the house has several secret rooms of which we know, and there might be others, long forgotten—and possibly she had been carrying on signaling of some sort until warned of danger by that visit from the police. We resolved to rise before dawn and walk to Courtenaye Coombe to let the police know what had happened to us; but, as it turned out, a great deal more was to happen before dawn.
We felt pretty sure that the weird intruder would cease her activities for the night, after the shock of finding our rooms occupied. Still, it would be cowardly, we thought, to lie in bed. We slipped on dressing gowns, therefore, and with candles—only our wing was furnished with the electric light which dear grandmother never paid for—we descended fearsomely to the Barlow's quarters. Having roused the old couple and got them to put on some clothes, a search party of four perambulated the house. As far as we could see, however, the place was innocent of strangers, and at length we crept into bed again.
We didn't mean or expect to sleep, of course, but we must all have “dropped off;” otherwise we should have smelled the smoke long before we did. As it was, the great hall slowly burned until Barlow's usual getting-up hour. Shelagh and I knew nothing until Barl came pounding at my door. Then the stinging of our nostrils and eyelids was a fire alarm!
It's wonderful how quickly you can do things when you have to! Ten minutes later I was running as fast as I could go to the village, and might have earned a prize for a two-mile sprint if I hadn't raced alone. By the time the fire engines reached the Abbey, it was too late to save a whole side of the glorious old “linen fold” paneling of the hall. The celebrated staircase was injured, too, and several suits of historic armor, as well as a number of antique weapons,
Fortunately the portraits were all in the picture gallery, and the fire was stopped before it had swept beyond the hall. Where it had started was soon learned, but how it had started remained a mystery; shavings and oil tins had apparently been stuffed behind the paneling. The theory of the police was that the intruder—no one doubted her existence now!—had seen that the “game was up,” since the place would be strictly watched from that night on. Therefore, she had attempted to burn down the famous old house before she lost her chance, or she had, perhaps, already made preparations to destroy it when her other work should be ended.
There was a hue and cry all over the county in pursuit of the fugitive, which echoed as far as London; but the woman had escaped, and not even a trace of her was found.
Grandmother openly proclaimed that her inspiration in sending for some dust covers had saved the Abbey. This was all very well to bask in self-respect and the praise of friends. When, however, we were bombarded by newspaper men, who took revenge for grandmother's snubs by publishing interviews with Sir “Jim”—now Major Courtenaye, D.S.O., M.C.—she lost her temper.
It was bad enough, she complained, to have the Abbey turned prematurely into a ruin, but for “that fellow” to proclaim all over the place that it wouldn't have happened had he been the owner, was too much! The democratic and socialist papers—“rags,” according to grandmother—stood up for the self-made cowboy baronet and blamed the great lady who had “thrown away in selfish extravagance” what should have paid the upkeep of a historic monument. This, to a woman of my grandmother's dignity of bearing! And to pile Ossa on Pelion, our Grosvenor Square landlord was cad enough to tell that he had never received his rent! Which statement, by the way, was all the more of a libel because it was true.
Now you understand how Sir James Courtenaye was responsible for driving us to Italy and indirectly bringing about my marriage; for grandmother wiped the dust of Grosvenor Square off our feet with Italian passports and swept me off to new activities in Rome.
Here was Mr. Carstairs' moment to say: “I told you so! If only you had let the Abbey when I advised you that it was best, all would have been well. Now, with the central hall in ruins, nobody would be found dead in the place!” But being a particularly kind man, he said nothing of the sort. He merely implored grandmother to live economically in Rome; and, of course, being grandmother, she did nothing of the sort.
We lived at the most expensive hotel, and whenever we had any money, gave it to the Croce Rossa, running up bills for ourselves. But we spiced charity with joy, and my descriptive letters to Shelagh were so attractive that she persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Pollen, her guardians—uncle and aunt, who were sickening snobs—to bring her to Rome. Then, not long after, the cowboy's friend, Roger Fane, late of the American Expeditionary Force, appeared on the scene. He was a thrilling, handsome, and mysteriously tragic person. James Courtenaye also turned up for a sojourn in Italy, but grandmother and I contrived never to meet him. And when our financial affairs began to rumble like an earthquake, Mr. Carstairs decided to see grandmother in person.
It was when she received his telegram that she decided I must accept Prince Miramare. She had wanted an Englishman for me; but a prince is a prince; and though Paolo was far from rich at the moment, he had the prospect of an immediate millionlire, alas, not pounds. An enormously rich Greek offered him that sum for the fourteenth-century Castello di Miramare on a mountain all its own, some miles from Rome. In consideration of a large sum paid to his younger brother, Carlo, the two Miramare princes would break the entail; and this quick solution of our difficulties was to be a surprise for Mr. Carstairs.
Paolo and I were married as hastily as such matters can be arranged abroad, between persons of different nations; and it was true, as those cynics outside the arbor said, that my soldier prince went back to his military duty an hour after the wedding. It was just after we were safely married that grandmother ceased to fight a temperature of a hundred and three, and gave up to an attack of “flu.” She gave up quite quietly, for she thought that, whatever happened, I would be rich, because she had browbeaten lazy, unbusinesslike Paolo into making a will in my favor. The one flaw in this calculating was his concealing from her the fact that the entail was not yet legally broken. No contract between him and the Greek could be signed while the entail existed; therefore Paolo's will gave me only his personal possessions. These were not much, for I doubt if even the poor boy's uniforms had been paid for. But I am thankful that grandmother died without realizing her failure; and I hope that her spirit was far away before the ex-cowboy began making overtures.
If it had not been for Mrs. Carstairs' inspiration, I don't know what would have become of me!