“All these young people are the same. Look at Felix! He loses his head over this girl and rushes off to drown himself. Most selfish, most inconsiderate! My sister and I have this dreadful tragedy happening in our house, and we do not collapse-we behave with dignity, we carry on. Nobody pampers us.”
Miss Silver continued to knit. She murmured that it was all very sad, very distressing.
Cassy Remington sent her a darting glance.
“Half an hour ago I met Eliza Cotton going up to Penny’s room with a cup of hot milk. Pampering I call it! And how she has the face to come over here leaving us the way she did-”
Miss Silver murmured in a non-committal manner which did not soothe. There was a toss of the head with its well-arranged waves.
“Not that our house is our own in any way at present.” She repeated the last words with malice. “Not in any way. I’m sure the police walk in and out as if the whole place belonged to them. That horrid Inspector Crisp was here again just as we were sitting down to tea. And brought the Chief Constable! And there they were, out and down to the cove, and up on every floor, looking at the doors going through to the other side of the house, and Crisp going round to open them, though what it’s got to do with them how many locks and bolts and bars there are, I’m sure I can’t see. I may be stupid-I suppose I am-”-the head was tossed again- “but I can’t see what a purely domestic arrangement like that has got to do with the police. I’m sure it’s bad enough having one’s own niece bolting doors against us as if we were a lunatic asylum or a menagerie of wild beasts!”
Mrs. Brand came out of her silence with a “Really, Cassy!” Her voice was heavy with resentment. She said,
“Marian Brand is my niece by marriage only. She is your second cousin twice removed. The houses were originally two. They have now been divided again.”
Cassy Remington’s colour rose to an angry flush.
“Oh, if you like it, Florence, there’s no more to be said. I’m sure I have no desire to claim relationship with Marian and Ina-or perhaps you think I should speak of them as Miss Brand and Mrs. Felton.”
Florence Brand made no reply. Her large pale face showed nothing. Presently, however, she intervened with a remark about Miss Silver’s knitting and Cassy Remington’s complaints were interrupted.
Miss Silver stayed for an hour, and had managed to draw Mrs. Brand into a slight show of interest over a pattern for long-sleeved vests and the address of a shop where the wool suitable for making them could be bought. It transpired that Florence had always worn wool next to the skin, and had now arrived at measurements which made it practically impossible for her to procure the necessary underwear. She got as far as saying that she might have some wool upstairs in the box-room, and Miss Silver offered to help her look for it in the morning.
Chapter 26
Penny lay in bed in the attic room. She had drunk the milk which Eliza brought her, just as she had taken the soup and the lightly boiled egg which had been presented to her for her supper. If she refused, and for as long as she went on refusing, Eliza would stay. She loved Eliza, but she wanted to be alone, so she drank the milk and the soup and ate the egg, and Eliza patted her and called her “my lamb,” and presently she went away.
She went through into the next house by the door on its attic floor, and when Penny heard her shoot the bolts behind her she got out of bed and locked her own door. Nothing was less likely than that either of the aunts would come up. The stair was ladder-steep for one thing, and they wouldn’t be interested for another. The thought of Aunt Florence sitting immobile at the foot of her bed and looking at her with bulging eyes, or of Aunt Cassy fidgeting and jingling and saying things about Felix, was just pure nightmare. The sort in which you want to scream and run, and there isn’t anywhere to run to.
She locked her door and lay down again. The bed was close up to the window and she could look out over the sea. She lay there watching it. She couldn’t see the other side of the cove. She couldn’t see the place where the steps came down and Helen Adrian had fallen and died. Her view began where the fine shingle changed to sand. The tide was out. Dry sand, wet sand, and shoaling water. Rock, and pool, and orange seaweed. The sky losing its blue, paling before it darkened.
Time went by. No one came near her. The tide turned. There were sounds in the house below-Cassy Remington’s voice, Florence Brand’s heavy step, the sound of water running in the bathroom, the sound of doors opening and shutting, and, at last, silence settling in the house.
Penny waited for a long time. Then she got up and dressed herself-stockings and shoes, her old thick skirt, Felix’s old shrunk sweater, an old tweed coat. She was cold with the bitter chill of grief. The shoes were sand-shoes, they would make no noise.
She went down the attic stair to the landing, and from there to the hall without making any sound at all. She moved in the silence without jarring it. No one could possibly have heard her pass from the hall to the drawing-room. The chairs were all still there in the dark, turned from their usual places to face the table behind which Inspector Crisp had sat and questioned them. Penny could see the room as if it was full of light. She could see them all sitting there. She could hear Florence Brand saying, “Felix is not my son.” She could see the constable from Farne coming up the steps from the garden with a bundle of clothes-grey slacks, and a sweater stained with Helen Adrian’s blood. The picture was there in every detail, bright and clear. The room was dark about her, and her eyes told her that it was dark, but the picture of the lighted room was clear in her mind. She could cross to the glass door and open it without so much as brushing against one of the chairs which looked towards the Inspector’s empty seat.
When she opened the door and came down the two steps to the paved path at the back of the house she had a sense of escape. It was dark outside, but not with the enclosed darkness of the house, and it was cool, but not with the heavy chill of the room she had left. There was no breeze, only a faint movement of the air setting in from the sea with the flowing tide.
She went across the lawn and sat on the stone steps which went down to the next terrace. The tide was coming up fast. She sat there listening to the movement of the water. All day she had been calling Felix. That was why she had wanted to be alone. Everything in her called to him. Now perhaps he would come.
There was a story which she had heard Eliza tell when she was a child. She hadn’t been meant to hear it. Eliza wouldn’t have told it if she had known that Penny was outside the kitchen window, pressed up against the wall listening. It was an old story from Eliza’s mother’s side of the family, and it was about a woman who had called a dead man up out of the sea. There was a lot about charms and a full moon and the turn of the tide that went by her, but some of it she never forgot. She was remembering it now. A fine summer afternoon and the sun hot on the wall. Eliza’s voice coming out through the open kitchen window as she talked to her friend. “Sarah Bethel was the woman’s name.” Penny always remembered that part, because of Bethel being in the Bible. And that bit at the end, “So she waited on the turn of the tide like the wise woman told her-‘He went with the tide and he’ll come with the tide, if so be he comes at all, and no good counting on it.’ But he did. So my mother told me, and it was her mother told her, and she knew the woman well. The tide was far out and the moon rising, and with the turn of the tide he came. First she knew of it something splashed in the shallow water, and then she saw him black against the moon. It was one of those big full moons, as yellow as an orange. She saw the shape of him against it, and the splashing came on up to the edge of the water and stopped there. Sarah Bethel said she didn’t know whether she was dead or alive with the fear that came on her. She stood where she was, and the splashing stopped, and there was a darkness between her and the moon. She couldn’t see nor she couldn’t hear. And when she could move again she come away, running and falling and catching her breath, and beating on the first door she came to be taken in.” That was the story-a full moon, and the turn of the tide, and a dead man coming up from the sea. And Sarah Bethel who called him and turned coward when he came.