Dorothy Eden
Authors: Sinister Weddings
Bride by Candlelight, Cat’s Prey, and Bridge of Fear
Dorothy Eden
ContentsBride by Candlelight
1
T
HE SNOWFLAKES FELL WITH
almost inaudible thuds against the window pane, like gloved fingers tapping. The wind blew straight from the mountains. Beyond that whirling world of whiteness Julia could imagine the towering cruel slopes, and the fancy came to her that the mountains were like people whose hearts had frozen, long ago, and who now revelled in the howling wind and the cold of which they were the authors. The little round tussocky hills that loved the sunlight; gathering it over them in a yellow coverlet, were obscured, the thorny grey matagouri bushes had become full of an improbable dignity.
Julia thought of the little blue lakes that lay in the hollows of the hills. They would be snowed over now, all their blueness quenched. They would be shrivelled and pinched and colourless, like her own heart. Like her heart today, because she was so frightened.
Perhaps it was only because they were completely shut-in by the storm that she was so afraid. She was suffering from claustrophobia. Because she could not escape from the house she imagined it was dangerous to stay. If the sun had been shining and she had been able to walk out perhaps she would not have gone. When she could have gone a week ago she would not. Perhaps it was only the snow that was making her so frantic.
Nevertheless, she must finish the letter to Uncle Jonathan so that if anything did happen… But
nothing
would happen. It was sheer imagination.
Her chilly hand moved the pen over the paper.
I want you to know, Uncle Jonathan, that although you may feel you persuaded me to come here to marry Paul, I would still have done so without your help. I wanted to come. Paul was the first man I ever loved, and I always hoped to marry the first man with whom I fell in love. Perhaps I am just a silly romantic. I can’t tell. For I still don’t know whether I shall ever marry Paul or not.
Harry may stop us.
Did you know that Paul had a brother Harry? He died in Australia several months ago of pneumonia. He was only twenty-six. They say he died. Yet I am sure he is in this house. I have never seen him. Then how can I be sure he is here? There are various ways, the things Georgina says, the voices I have heard, the way Nita behaved, the notes that are put under my door in the night. If there is ever another note I shall go mad. I can’t bear them any more, they are so stupidly demoralising, and there is no longer anyone I can tell about them because I don’t know whom I can trust. The funny thing is that I am sure it is Harry who doesn’t want me to marry Paul. If the snow hadn’t come and shut us in—we may not be able to get to the church tomorrow—something else would have happened. Perhaps something worse.
I am not just being stupid and imaginative. Too many odd things have happened. The worst thing of all is that now I am not sure about Davey. No one seems to know very much about him, not even Paul. Or if Paul does he doesn’t tell me anything. At first I talked a lot to Davey because I was lonely and nervous, and he seemed such a sane sensible person, even if he did despise me and call me the Queen of Sheba. He wasn’t exactly friendly but I did trust him.
Now, with the things that have happened, I am so afraid that Davey is—
Julia’s hand stopped dead, the nib of her pen stabbing the paper rigidly.
There was something protruding beneath her door, a folded scrap of paper.
She sat staring at it. She knew it was useless to run to the door and fling it open and see who was disappearing down the passage. There would he no one there. Never once had she heard a footstep. The folded slips of paper just appeared beneath her door as if they came there of their own accord.
Even that first one, in the hotel, had just been lying on the desk, the reception clerk said, as if it had materialised out of thin air. In this letter she was writing to Uncle Jonathan, Julia thought slowly, she ought to tell him everything from the beginning so that if it happened that she never saw him again he would know the events that had brought her to this state of fear and apprehension….
It was the letter from Paul that had brought her to New Zealand, that combined with Uncle Jonathan’s persuasion. Julia was very dear to him, Uncle Jonathan had said, but he was old and sick. She had no other family, and when he died she would be left alone. A villa on the French Riviera and an adequate income were of some value, but a husband, especially a fine young man like the New Zealander, Paul Blaine, was of a great deal more importance. And this was not because he was prejudiced in Paul’s favour by reason of the fact that once he had been deeply in love with a young English girl, Georgina Heriot, who was now Paul’s grandmother.
Uncle Jonathan had given Julia a love for French literature and a home in the sunshine of the Mediterranean with all its attendant pleasures. But very few young people came to their home. Julia was lonely. She was inclined to think too much about her meeting with Paul three years ago in war-time England, and to fret about his silence which could have meant either that he had forgotten her or that he was dead.
When the letter came Uncle Jonathan said she must go. But she had meant to go, anyway.
During the four weeks’ journey out she had occasionally felt nervous and apprehensive. She had wondered if Paul would be the way she remembered him. She had wondered, too, if the excitement of seeking her husband on the other side of the world had been of more importance to her than her feelings for Paul himself. But it was not until she waited in the hotel room in Timaru, the seaside town in the South Island of New Zealand, that was the gateway to the lonely tussock-ridden country stretching to the foot of the Alps where Paul’s sheep station was situated, that she began to feel frightened.
She kept looking at the door, waiting for it to open. A dozen times she had imagined what Paul would say, but never had she been able to think what she would answer.
The answer would come spontaneously, she told herself, just as most of her actions did. If she could come half way across the world to marry a man because he had written her one irresistible letter, she need scarcely worry about her first words to him.
In any case he would probably kiss her so that she could not speak. And everything would be completely right.
At any time now the door would open. Julia forced her eyes away from its depressing pale chocolate surface, and turned to the window to watch the road. This led through a cutting and up a hill. The cliffs on either side of the cutting were clay, as yellow as dandelions, and beyond the houses were perched on the hillside like nesting seabirds. It was early spring and the flowering trees were white ghosts and pale pink clouds. Soon after her arrival everything had been vivid and exciting, with the strong spring sunlight, the dancing blue sea, the sea-faded colours of the town. And the anticipation. The excitement of a new town, a new country, mingled with her anticipation of Paul’s arrival.
For an hour, two hours, she had been in a happy dream. But now the sun had set, all the colour had gone out of the sea, it was very cold and she was tired. She was so tired that she would have cried had she not always scorned tears, and fought against them as a sly and humiliating enemy. Even alone and unseen she would not allow herself to weep.
Something had happened to prevent Paul arriving. He had sent that message to the ship in Wellington telling her to wait for him at the George Hotel in Timaru, because it was a four-hour drive to Heriot Hills, and if anything delayed him he didn’t want her forced to hang around a railway station.
Consequently, she had gone to the George Hotel, and for the first two hours she hadn’t minded at all. She had thought the lounge with its turkey-red carpet, its shabby comfortable chair, and its air of cosy gloom, could very easily have belonged to one of the seaside hotels at Bournemouth or Littlehampton or Eastbourne where she used to be taken for holidays. It had just been transported to the antipodes, along with herself, and with it, too, had come all the ecstatic excitement and glamour of holidays in a real hotel by the sea.
For two hours she was a mixture of a child on holiday in a new intriguing place, and a nervous young bride-to-be. Her friendship with Paul in England had been for so short a time. When she tried to think back over what it had been, it was all concentrated in her mind in one lovely new sensation of tenderness, excitement, growing love. What had there been between them? A night dancing, an old song, a drive along the sea coast as dawn showed in a pale primrose line, a withered spray of lily of the valley, a half dozen letters of a shy formality that could have meant everything or nothing.
Then the three-year-long silence during which, she now knew, Paul had been in and out of hospitals and undergone a series of skin grafts for war wounds.
No wonder, when that surprising letter had come and she had impulsively announced her intention of agreeing to Paul’s proposal, her friends, apart from Uncle Jonathan, had told her she was crazy.
Crazy… Julia looked round the drab darkening room. Was she? She hadn’t seemed so, or perhaps she had, in a purely delightful way, until now. Now it was no longer an altogether amusing craziness.
Supposing Paul didn’t come. He had wanted her to marry him in Wellington. He had sent a cable to the ship asking her to do that. She had had the impression that he meant to have the parson waiting at the foot of the gangway. After his long silence the impatience had been flattering, but a little puzzling. She cabled back, refusing, saying that she wanted to be taken to Heriot Hills first, to meet his family and to become accustomed to her new home.
She hadn’t any uncertainties about her feelings for Paul. Ever since getting that letter she had been in a state of dreamy delight.
My dear love… You are my day
a
nd night
… Paul had said those things, shy uncommunicative Paul!
She remembered his steady blue eyes and longed to be in his arms. Yet she was not ready to marry him in Wellington. She mixed caution with her craziness. She wanted to see her home first, and after all there was her elaborate trousseau which must be displayed with all the background of a real wedding.
Perhaps subconsciously she was providing herself with a loophole for escape.
That was quite silly, of course. Yet had it not been justified? For strangely enough Paul had not met her in Wellington. There had only been the note telling her to come to Timaru and wait at the hotel.
Now she was here, and still he had not come.
It must be the storm that had held him up. The girl at the reception desk, when Julia had enquired whether she could put a telephone call through to Heriot Hills, had told her that the telegraph wires were down. There had been a bad storm in the high country the previous night, and communications were temporarily cut