Out of the Past

CHAPTER 4

All the houses along the cliff bore a strong resemblance to one another. Some were larger, some had more turrets and fewer balconies, others more balconies and fewer turrets. The Annings’ house had more turrets. When Colonel Anning left the East and retired it had seemed to him a very handsome and commodious residence. Through the years during which prices rose and the value of money fell he began to suspect that he had over-housed himself. Even before his death it had become very difficult to find a staff or to pay the bills. It was when his death still farther reduced her income that Mrs. Anning began to supplement it by taking in paying guests. Now, apparently, Darsie was running the place quite frankly as a boarding-house.

Alan Field made a wry face at the thought of it. Boarding-houses were mostly stocked with old ladies. Darsie wouldn’t like that at all. She had been pretty hot stuff in the old days- an exciting creature with a flashing temper and sudden flares of passion. He wondered what she was like now.

She opened the door herself. Well, he would have known her. Or would he? He really wasn’t sure. She couldn’t be thirty yet, but she had a dried-up look. Of course those dark girls didn’t wear so well. Where she had been slim she was thin, where she had been pale she was sallow. Her eyes seemed to have sunk, and there were lines between them.

He said, “Well, Darsie?” and she stared at him for what seemed quite a long time before she spoke.

“Alan-”

She said it in rather an odd sort of way, almost as if she wasn’t sure about him-under her breath too. She might have been talking to herself. And then she said,

“What do you want?”

He stepped past her into the hall.

“Aren’t you going to say how do you do to an old friend? You mayn’t have noticed it, but I’ve been away for three years-in South America, to be precise. And now that I’m back again nobody seems to be killing the fatted calf. I find it a bit damping.”

Her face was closed against him-all the blinds down and the shutters fastened. She said,

“How extraordinary! Or is it? Would you expect, let us say Carmona, to be killing fatted calves? You left her waiting for you at the church, didn’t you? At least that was the story I heard.”

He smiled.

“Rather a public place to discuss our friends, don’t you think?”

She should have sent him away-she knew that. Only there were too many bitter memories-too many bitter words which had said themselves over and over in the endless night watches, but never to him. Now he was here, and they brimmed up in her.

There was a little room on the left where Mrs. Anning had been used to do the flowers. Darsie used it as an office now. She flung open the door.

“You can come in here if you like, but I don’t think we have anything to discuss.”

Alan came in smiling.

“Well, what I really wanted to talk about was the question of whether you could give me a bed for the night. Esther seemed to think you might be able to manage it, because Carmona appears to be full up.”

It was like having cold water thrown in her face. It steadied her. You can’t run a boarding-house without finding out that it doesn’t pay to lose your temper. But-take Alan in? Something in her blazed again.

“So Carmona hasn’t room for you. How surprising!” Her voice had an edge to it.

He gave the slight shrug of the shoulders which she remembered.

“That seems to be the general idea. I’m the big bad wolf, and James mightn’t like it-not even with Esther and the Trevors to do propriety. Cold supper is permitted, so I shan’t have to trouble your housekeeping, but after that the line is drawn. Rather silly, I think.” He laughed. “After all this time you would think we could bury the past! Something in not very good taste about digging it up again!”

Two burning spots of colour had come into her cheeks. They gave her back the old lost glow.

“And that goes for me too, I suppose?”

“It goes for everyone. One has one’s good times-we had some very good ones if I remember rightly. But you can’t bring them back again. You know that, and so do I. We are sensible people, and sensible people know when they have had enough. What on earth is the good of pretending? If a thing is done, it’s done. Where’s the sense of starting a feud about it? There may be more good times ahead, or there may not, quien sabe? They either come along or they don’t. You can’t just turn them on to order.”

She knew very well what he was at. He wanted to smooth her down, to have everything comfortable and easy between them. Unpleasantness of any sort was a challenge. The fact that Carmona wouldn’t have him to stay would make him determined to get his foot in at Cliff Edge. Her own flaring antagonism was a challenge. It wasn’t in him to refuse it. He would spare no pains to charm it out of her. She had a sharp stab of self-contempt as it came to her that she would give almost anything to be charmed-to believe in him again. Bad enough if she could, but how much worse to let herself go sliding down into the pit with open eyes. She said,

“You do like everything comfortable and easy, don’t you, Alan!”

“Don’t we all?”

“We don’t all get what we want. How easy do you think my life has been?”

He said in his warmest voice,

“I was so terribly sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Thank you-she is pretty well. Just vague, you know. Her illness was brought on by worry. About me. I suppose you have forgotten what I told you the last time we saw each other.”

“My dear-”

She said in a low, steady voice,

“I told you I was going to have a child.”

He threw up a hand.

“My poor darling, what could I do about it? I was broke- absolutely. My turning up in the affair could only have made it worse. As it was, you must have been very clever about it- there doesn’t seem to have been a breath of scandal. How did you manage?”

He might have been any interested friend. She thought, “He is not human. He doesn’t love, or hate, or get in a rage. He just likes to drift along with everything going his way. He doesn’t mind what he does to keep it like that, and he doesn’t give a damn about anyone else.”

She said without any expression at all,

“I don’t know that I was clever, but I managed. A married friend took me in. They had no child, and they adopted mine. They have gone to Australia, so I shall never see him again.”

He said, “So that’s all right!”

His tone was one of heartfelt relief. What could have been luckier-the convenient friend, the adoption, and, to crown it all, the Antipodes. A narrow shave, but they had come out of it. And why in the world should Darsie be looking at him the way she was? Whatever else had changed, her temper hadn’t.

As she looked at him with blazing eyes and said, “I could kill you for that!” the door opened and someone came a step into the room-a pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties. She came in just that one step, stood for a moment uneasy and embarrassed, and backed out again. The door closed upon her.

Alan Field burst out laughing.

“That’s torn it!” he said. “What a little spitfire you are, Darsie!”

Mrs. Burkett almost ran up the stairs, knocked at the door of the bedroom next to her own, and hardly waited for a reply before bursting in. Even at the time, and in the midst of her perturbation, she was conscious with gratitude of the marked improvement in her own health. At the beginning of her fortnight’s visit the ascent of the stairs had left her breathless and certainly in no state to hasten along a passage and enter her aunt’s room in this precipitate manner.

Miss Maud Silver looked up from her knitting in surprise. She had been enjoying the cool breeze from the sea. Such an airy room, and the view quite delightful. The sun on the blue expanse of the bay, and now this cool breeze springing up. The holiday had indeed been a successful one, and dear Ethel quite restored to her usual excellent health. A pity that she had to go back tomorrow, but this was the first time in her married life that she had ever been persuaded to leave home without her husband or at least one of the children. It was something of an achievement to have detached her for so long. It was these placid thoughts that were interrupted by Ethel Burkett’s entrance. She certainly did look well. Quite brown too, but then the weather had been so fine. She looked well now, but as certainly flushed and agitated.

“My dear, what is the matter?”

“Oh, Auntie-the most extraordinary thing, and so embarrassing!”

Miss Silver was concerned.

“Had you not better sit down and tell me about it? What has happened?”

Mrs. Burkett sank into a chair.

“Oh, I expect it’s nothing really. But so unexpected-from Miss Anning. She always seemed so controlled. And then coming in on them like that. I suppose I ought to have knocked-but of course I had no idea she had anyone with her. I thought I would just drop in and have a little chat. She has been so kind and made us so comfortable, and as I was taking the early train tomorrow, I just thought-”

Miss Silver interrupted her in a mild but firm manner.

“A very nice thought on your part, my dear. But you are not telling me what has happened to embarrass you. You went to find Miss Anning, and when you found her she was not alone?”

“I’m telling it very badly,” said Ethel Burkett, “and you have such a logical mind. Well, I went to the office just to see if she was there-and of course I had no idea she had anyone with her, but when I opened the door, there she was, standing back against the writing-table and saying the most extraordinary thing to one of the handsomest young men I have ever seen in my life. He really was, Auntie.”

“My dear, you sound quite melodramatic.”

Ethel Burkett nodded.

“But, Auntie, that is just what it was-like a scene in a film. And that is what made it so embarrassing, because you don’t expect to walk into a scene from a film when you are staying in a quiet private hotel-now do you?”

Miss Silver’s cough indicated dissent. She had known melodrama crop up in some very unexpected places. She said dryly,

“Perhaps if you were to tell me what made the scene an embarrassing one-”

“Oh, but it was. You see, he was by the mantelpiece, and she was over by the writing-table like I told you. He seemed quite easy and comfortable-he looked like that sort of person. But Miss Anning-well, I would hardly have known her. She was as white as a sheet, and her eyes were blazing, and just as I came a step into the room, she said, ‘I could kill you for that!’ And, oh dear, she really did sound as if she meant it. Of course I came away at once and shut the door, but I don’t know how she could have helped seeing me. And it does make it so very awkward, doesn’t it?”

Miss Silver had resumed her knitting-one of those small coatees considered suitable for the new baby, in this case an expected addition to the family of Ethel’s brother Jim. After ten childless years his wife Dorothy had presented him with a boy, followed two years later by a little girl. Now there was to be another baby. Their cup of happiness was full, and Miss Silver proposed to mark the occasion with one of her finest, lightest coatees in a delicate shade of blush rose. She smiled across the fleecy wool and said, “When people are angry they often say foolish things that they do not mean. Miss Anning has a hot temper.”

“I should never have thought so.”

“She has it very well under control, but it is there. We had better not speculate as to what may have roused it now. Very good-looking young men are often responsible for a great deal of unhappiness. I believe Miss Anning used to be a very attractive girl.”

“Was she?” Ethel Burkett’s tone was one of surprise.

“Oh, yes, my dear. That nice Mrs. Field who is staying at Cliff Edge was telling me about her. You remember Miss Anning introduced us, and down on the beach I have been able to help her once or twice when she was in difficulties with her knitting. She does not find it at all easy to keep her stitches on the needles, and I have been trying to teach her the continental method of holding them. It makes a dropped stitch almost impossible, but I am afraid she is not at all an apt pupil.”

Ethel Burkett was not interested in Esther Field as a knitter. She said,

“And she told you about Miss Anning?”

“Oh, yes. The Fields used to take a house down here every year. Her husband was quite a famous artist, but he has been dead for some years. They knew the Annings quite well, and she said how much Darsie Anning had changed from the pretty, lively girl she used to be. You know, my dear, I have frequently had occasion to remark that it is just these gay, spirited girls who are apt to become repressed and over strict in middle life. It seems strange, but I have seen it happen.”

“Perhaps they go too far, and find out that it doesn’t do,” said Ethel Burkett.