Bride of Pendorric (4 page)

” He never had cramp before.”

” There had to be a first time.”

” But Roe … there was something.”

He smoothed my hair back from my face. ” Darling, you mustn’t upset yourself so. There’s nothing we can do now.”

He was right. What could we do?

” He would be glad,” Roe told me, ” that I am here to take care of you.”

There was a note of relief in his voice when he said that which I could not understand, and I felt the first twinges of the fear which I was to come to know very well.

Roe took charge of everything. He said that we must get away from the island as quickly as possible because then I would begin to grow away from my tragedy. He would take me home and in time I should forget. I left everything to him because I was too unhappy to make arrangements myself. Some of my father’s treasures were packed up and sent to Pendorric to await our arrival; the rest were sold. Roe saw the landlord of our studio and arranged to get rid of the lease; and two weeks later we left Capri.

w Now we must try to put that tragedy out of our minds,” said Roe as we sailed to the mainland.

I looked at his profile and for one short moment I felt that I was looking at a stranger. I did not know why—except perhaps because I had begun to suspect, since my father’s death, that there was-a great deal I had to learn about my husband.

We spent two days in Naples, and while we were there he told me that he was not in any hurry to get home because I was still so shocked and dazed, and he wanted me to have time to recover before he took me to Pendorric.

” We’ll finish our honeymoon, darling,” he said.

But my response was listless because I kept thinking of my father sitting at the studio table in the dark, and wondering what he had had on his mind.

” I ought to have found out,” I reiterated. ” How could I have been so thoughtless? I always knew when something worried him. He found it hard to hide anything from me. And he didn’t hide that.”

” What do you mean?” demanded Roe almost fiercely.

” I think he was ill. Probably that was why he got this cramp. Roe, what happened on the beach that day? Did he look ill?”

” No. He looked the same as usual.”

” Oh Roe, if only you hadn’t come back. If only you’d been with him.”

“It’s no use saying If Only, Favel. I wasn’t with him. We’re going to leave Naples. It’s too close. We’re going to put all this behind us.”

He took my hands and drew me to him, kissing me with tenderness and passion. ” You’re my wife, Favel. Remember that. I’m going to make you forget how he died and remember only that we are together now. He wouldn’t have you mourn for him.”

He was right. The shock did become modified as the weeks passed. I taught myself to accept the fact that my father’s death was not so very unusual. I must remember that I had a husband to consider now and as he was so anxious for me to put the tragedy behind me and be happy, I must do my best to please him. And it was easier as we went farther from the island.

Roe was charming to me during those days; and I felt that he was determined to make me forget all the sadness.

Once he said to me: “We can do no good by brooding, Favel. Let’s put it behind us. Let’s remember that by a wonderful chance we met and fell in love.”

We stayed for two weeks in the south of France, and each day, it seemed, took me a step farther away from the tragedy. We hired a car and Roe took a particular delight in the hairpin bends, laughing at me as I held my breath while he skilfully controlled the car. The scenery delighted me, but as I gazed at terraces of orange stucco villas which seemed to cling to the cliff face. Roe would snap his fingers. ” Wait,” he would say, ” just wait till you see Pendomc!” It was a joke between us that not all the beauty of the Maritime Alps nor the twists, turns and truly majestic gorges to be discovered on the Corniche road could compare with his native Cornwall. Often I would say it for him while we sat under a multi coloured umbrella in opulent Cannes or sunned ourselves on the beach of humbler Menton: ” But of course this is nothing compared with Cornwall.” Then we would laugh together and people passing would smile at us, knowing us for lovers.

At first I thought my gaiety was a little forced. I was so eager to please Roe and there was no doubt that nothing delighted him more than to see me happy. Then I found that I did not have to pretend. I was becoming so deeply in love with my husband that the fact that we were together could overwhelm me and all else seemed of little importance.

Roe was eager to wean me from my sorrow; and because he was the sort of man who was determined to have his way he could not fail. I was conscious of his strength, of his dominating nature, and I was glad of it because I would not have wished him to be different. He was the perfect husband and I wondered how I could ever have had doubts about him.

But I grew suddenly uneasy one night in Nice. We had driven in from Villefranche, and as we did so, noticed the dark clouds Which hung over the mountains—a contrast to the sparkling scene. Roe had suggested that we visit the Casino, and I as usual readily fell in with his suggestion. He took a turn at the tables and I was reminded then of the light in his eyes when he had sat with my father in the studio.

There was the same burning excitement that used to alarm me when I saw it in my father’s.

He won that night and was elated; but I couldn’t hide my concern, and when in our hotel bedroom I betrayed this, he laughed at me. ” Don’t worry,” he said, ” I’d never make the mistake of risking what I couldn’t afford to lose.”

” You’re a gambler,” I accused.

He took my face in his hands.

“Well, why not?” he demanded. ” Life’s supposed to be a gamble, isn’t it, so perhaps it’s the gamblers who come off best.”

He was teasing me as he used to before my father’s death, and I assured myself it was only teasing; but that incident seemed to mark a change in our relationship. I was over the first shock; there was no need to treat me with such delicate care. I knew then that Roe would always be a gambler no matter how I tried to persuade him against it, and I experienced once more those faint twinges of apprehension.

Now that the results of the shock were diminishing, I began to think of the future, and there were occasions when I was uneasy. This happened first during the night when I awoke suddenly from a hazy dream in which I knew myself to be in some unspecified danger. I lay in the darkness, aware of Roe beside me, sleeping deeply, and I thought: What is happening to me? Two months ago I did not know this man. My home was the studio on the island with my father, and now another artist works in the studio and I have no father. I had a husband. But what did I know of him? —except that I was in love with him. Wasn’t mat enough? Ours was a deeply passionate relationship and I could at times become so completely absorbed in our need of each other that this seemed all I asked. But that was only a part of marriage. I considered the marriage of my parents and remembered how they had relied on each other and felt that all was well as long as the other was close by.

And here I was waking in the night after a nightmare which hung about me seeming like a vague warning.

That night I really looked the truth in the eye, which was that I knew very little of the man I had married or of the sort of life to which he was taking me.

I made up my mind that I must have a talk with him, and j when we drove into the mountains next day I decided to do so. The fears of the night had departed and somehow seemed | ridiculous by day, yet I told myself it was absurd that I should1 know so little of his background.

;

We found a small hotel where we stopped to have lunch. I was thoughtful as we ate, and when Roe asked the reason, I blurted out: ” I want to know more about Pendorric and your family.”

” I’m ready for the barrage. Start firing.”

” First the place itself. Let me try to see it and then you fill it with the people.”

He leaned his elbows on the table and narrowed his eyes as though he were looking at something far away, which he could not see very clearly.

” The house first,” he said. ” It’s about four hundred years old in some parts. Some of it has been restored. In fact there was a house there in the Dark Ages I believe—so the story goes…. We’re built on the cliff rook some five hundred yards from the sea; I believe we were much farther from it in the beginning but the sea has a habit of encroaching, you know, and in hundreds of years it advances. We’re built of grey Cornish granite calculated to stand against the southwest gales; as a matter of fact over the front archway—one of the oldest parts of the house—there’s a motto in Cornish cut into the stone. Translated into English it is: ” When we build we believe we build for ever. ” I remember my father’s lifting me up to read that and telling me that we Pendorrics were as much a part of the house as that old archway and that Pendorrics would never rest in their graves if the time came when the family left me place.”

” How wonderful to belong to such a family!”

” You do now.”

” But as a kind of outsider … as all the people who married into the family must be.”

” You’ll soon become one of us. It’s always been so with Pendorric brides. In a short time they’re upholding the family more enthusiastically than those who started life with the name Pendorric.”

“Are you a sort of squire in the neighbourhood?”

” Squires went out of fashion years ago. We own most of the farms in the district, and customs die harder in Cornwall than anywhere else in England. We cling to old traditions and superstitions. I’m sure that a practical young woman like yourself is going to be very impatient with some of the stories you hear ; but bear with us—we’re the fey Cornish, remember, and you married into us.”

” I’m sure I shan’t complain. Tell me some more.”

“Well, there’s the house—a solid rectangle facing north, south, east and west. Northwards we look over the hills to the farmlands—south we face straight out to sea, and east and west give you magnificent views of a coastline that is one of the most beautiful in England and the most treacherous. When the tide goes out you’ll see the rocks like sharks’ teeth, and you can imagine what happens to boats that find their way on to those. Oh, and I forgot to mention there’s one view we don’t much like from the east window. It’s known to us in the family as Polhorgan’s Folly. A house which looks like a replica of our own.

We loathe it. We detest it. We nightly pray that it will be blown into the sea. “

” You don’t mean that, of course.”

” Don’t I?” His eyes flashed, but they were laughing at me. ” Of course you don’t. You’d be horrified if it were.”

” There’s actually no fear of it. It has stood there for fifty years—an absolute sham—trying to pretend to those visitors who stare up at it from the beach below that it is Pendorric of glorious fame.”

“But who built it?”

He was looking at me and there was something malicious in his gaze which alarmed me faintly because for a second it seemed as though it was directed at me; but then I realised that it was dislike of the owner of Polhorgan’s Folly which inspired it.

” A certain Josiah Fleet, better known as Lord Polhorgan. He came there fifty years ago from the Midlands, where he had made a fortune from some commodity—I’ve forgotten what. He liked our coast, he liked our climate, and decided to build himself a mansion. He did, and spent a month or so there each year, until eventually he settled in altogether and took his name from the cove below him.”

” You certainly don’t like him much. Or are you exaggerating?”

Roe shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps. It’s really the natural enmity between the nouveaux poor and the nouveaux rich.”

” Are we very poor?”

” By the standards of my Lord Polhorgan … yes. I suppose what annoys us is that sixty years ago we were the lords of the manor and he was trudging the streets of Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester—I can never remember which—barefooted. Industry and natural cunning made him a millionaire. Sloth and natural indolence brought us to our genteel poverty, when we wonder from week to week whether we shall have to call in the National Trust to take over our home and allow us to live in it and show it at half-a-crown a time to the curious public who want to know how the aristocracy once lived.”

” I believe you’re bitter.”

“And you’re critical. You’re on the side of industry and natural cunning. Oh, Favel, what a perfect union! You see, you’re all that I’m not. You’re going to keep me in order marvellously!”

” You’re laughing at me again.”

He gripped my hand so hard that I winced. ” It’s my nature, darling, to laugh at everything, and sometimes the more serious I am the more I laugh.”

” I don’t think you would ever allow anyone to keep you in order.”

” Well, you chose me, darling, and if I was what you wanted when you made the choice you’d hardly want to change me, would you?”

” I

hope,” I said seriously, ” that we shan’t change, that we shall always be as happy as we have been up till now. “

For a moment there was the utmost tenderness in his expression, then he was laughing again.

” I told you,” he said, ” I’ve made a very good match.” I was suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps his family, who I imagined loved Pendorric as much as he did, would be disappointed that he had married a girl with no money, but I was touched and very happy because he had married me who could bring him nothing. I felt my nightmare evaporating and I wondered on what it could possibly have been founded.

“Are you friendly with this Lord Polhorgan?” I asked quickly to hide my emotion.

u Nobody could be friendly with him. We’re polite to each other. We don’t see much. of him. He’s a sick man, well guarded by a nurse and a staff of servants. “

“And his family?”

” He quarrelled with them all. And now he lives alone in his glory.

There are a hundred rooms at Polhorgan . all furnished in the most flamboyant manner. I believe, though, that dustsheets perpetually cover the flamboyance. You sec why we call it the Folly. “