The Strange Waif Page 2

  "Oh, Avery," Gerda turned eagerly to her employer, "may I go? I can work Saturday if there's anything special you want done."

  "Why not go to the cottage on Saturday?" he returned uncompromisingly.

  It was Robert who answered. "I'm moving in then, old man. I've got a whole lot of my furniture coming down from London." He lifted his wine-glass and smiled in a sudden disarming fashion over the rim of it. "Go on, Avery, let the poor girl have a day off from her gruelling duties. I'll bring her back to you in good condition, I promise."

  "You're a darned nuisance!" An unwilling smile came and went about Avery's mouth. "All right, then, she's yours, just for tomorrow."

  "There you are, Gerda," Robert drawled, "you're all mine, just for tomorrow."

  "Thank you, Avery," she said, treating him to a smile so dazzling it quite outshone the gleam of the lapis lazuli earrings she was wearing.

  "My dear girl, I'm throwing you to the lions," he laughed, "don't thank me."

  "How we do keep harping on Roman activities tonight!" Robert's drawl was as smooth as silk, and once again his dark glance rested on the white-faced, violet-eyed girl at his side. He watched her bent head and the sharply etched line of her profile—and his eyes lit up with a rather cruel satisfaction as he saw tears begin to slide down that white cheek. In a moment she had thrust back her chair and was running wildly to the door. Avery rose to his feet with an oath and went after her, his hard, long strides overriding the desperate rush of her feet across the polished oak floor of the hall.

  "Now you're happy, aren't you, Robert?" Gerda said, smiling slightly.

  He lifted an eyebrow at her. "What did I do?"

  "You looked at her."

  "And that's bad?" He raised his wine-glass and admired its delicate beauty, the way the light shimmered on the glass. "Do I make you want to cry when I look at you, Gerda?"

  "You don't look at me the way you looked at that poor little wretch," she retorted, with some complacency. "If you ever did, I might very well burst into tears." She got up from the table with these words, dropping her napkin beside her plate. "I'm going to the drawing-room to talk to your grandmother," she said. "When Avery comes back he'll be foaming at the mouth. You've kicked his little stray pet, you know."

  "One moment, Gerda." Robert strode after her and took her smooth arms in his hands. "Is Avery seriously smitten with this girl?"

  Gerda inclined her blonde head. "I think—" she gave a trill of rather malicious laughter—"I think the weird little thing wakes protective urges in him. Poor Avery!"

  "Poor Avery, my foot!" Robert exclaimed inelegantly. Then, with an abrupt roughness, he pulled Gerda against him, his hands moving up the silken length of her arms. "What do protective urges feel like, anyway?" He kissed her neck and then laughed into her eyes. "Why don't you wake them in me, beautiful?"

  She pouted slightly as she pulled away from him. "I'm not a weird little thing, I hope!" As she swept from the room, Robert's insolent laughter rang out behind her. It followed her all the way across the hall and wasn't lost to her until she sharply shut the drawing-room doors.

  "He thinks I'm faking, doesn't he?" Lygia stood by the desk in the library, rubbing the tears from her cheeks with the big handkerchief Avery had given her. She saw the rather uncomfortable expression that passed over his face, and with sudden dignity she added: "I don't think I ought to stay here any longer, Dr. Chase. I think it would be better if I went to a hospital."

  "This is my house, Lygia, not Robert's." Avery's professional eye was wandering over the girl, his brow contracting at the slightness of her. "He's only here for a day or two, child. He moves into his own cottage on Saturday, you heard him say so. Come," he smiled down reassuringly into her eyes, still wet and dark from her tears, "don't let him upset you like this. He has an odd, devilish sense of humour, and if he sees he's getting a rise out of someone he goes from bad to worse. His trouble is that he's always had far too much adulation. He's enormously successful, you know; a truly superb actor, though don't you ever tell him I said so."

  "I'm never likely to tell him, Dr. Chase." That rather touching dignity was still in possession of Lygia's thin young face, and carefully she folded Avery's handkerchief and laid it on the desk. "I don't think I shall ever want to hold a voluntary conversation with your cousin. I—I think he's rather cruel."

  Avery had to laugh. "Don't you let my grandmother hear you say things like that about Rob. She regards him as a sort of divinity; one of the ancient gods, no less."

  "Pluto?" The violet eyes flashed stormily under the fine peaks of the very black eyebrows and the cap of close-cut black hair. "Yes, Pluto, for I think your cousin could only shed iron tears, Dr. Chase."

  "And carry Persephone off to Hades, eh?" Avery's voice and his grey-blue eyes had quickened with excitement. "A door opened then, Lygia, letting in a little light. You've evidently read poetry, or Greek mythology."

  "Poetry?" She looked at him with big, startled eyes.

  "Pluto's iron tears—you said it yourself."

  "Why—yes!" For a moment her face grew bright. "I knew that, didn't I?" Then she shivered and once more the blankness of lost identity closed around her, holding her in its dark, frightening vacuum. Fear rose in her, beating in her throat like a big uneven pulse, for all she could remember was a dark sky over her head, and a moon wandering lost in a web of grey cloud—like drifting witch's hair. The moon in its web had lit the flowing moorland only intermittently and the patches of dense shadow had seemed like bottomless ditches. Each time, drowned in shadow, she had felt like screaming out in case she did stand on the edge of a real ditch, or a waiting patch of bog, that would swiftly drag her down and smother her. The sudden lights of this house, shining out like a beacon, had seemed like the lights of heaven and she had run to them, stumbling over the hillocks of bracken, thrusting aside the tall heather, losing all her strength and her determination to ask for help when she had finally reached the front porch of the house. The people who lived within its high walls would surely think her mad… or a pretender. Robert Chase thought she pretended!

  She pressed her cold face into her hands and she tried desperately to force some small ray of light through the darkness of her mind, but there was nothing beyond the certainty that she was called Lygia. Lygia— what?

  "I feel as though I've only just been born—and it's awful!" she whispered.

  "Don't worry yourself to death, Lygia," Avery murmured. "It will all come back in time."

  "But why should it happen?" Her eyes pleaded with him. "What made it happen?"

  "It's an hysterical amnesia, as we doctors call it. Such an amnesia is usually caused by some sort of emotional upset."

  "Emotional upset? W-what do you mean?"

  "Well, child—a love affair that's gone wrong, perhaps. An employment problem, or a quarrel with your parents."

  "My parents." A vast, scared perplexity was written upon her face. "Would I forget my parents so completely? Why, I feel as though—as though I've never had any."

  Avery smiled indulgently upon her. "Parents are a very necessary ingredient, Lygia—where would we be without them?" Abruptly he wrapped an arm about her shoulders, ignoring the way she tried to shrink away from him. He walked her from the library, out into the hall. "Come and meet my rather wonderful old grandmother," he said. "She'll take your mind off your troubles. You didn't see her at dinner because she has a complaint which necessitates her adherence to a strict diet. She firmly declares that she won't inflict either the torture of our meals upon her, or the unpalatable appearance of hers upon us, so she eats in her room. She's quite a character."

  "As long as she doesn't think—what your cousin obviously thinks," Lygia mumbled. "Aren't you influenced by what he thinks?"

  Avery paused in front of the double doors of the drawing-room and now his hands were hard upon Lygia's thin shoulders. "What my cousin chooses to think means very little to me, Lygia. Robert's a charming swine and I enjoy his company, but he and
I have totally different approaches to life. He's cynical and it amuses him to treat life as a side-show. But he'll trip up one of these days. He'll trip up on his own ironies."

  "He's cruel!" Lygia whispered the words, and now there were sudden little shadows, like dark blue bruises, painted in the slight hollows under her eyes. She looked tired and melancholy, and she spoke her next words with a strange conviction: "He frightens me," she said. "Something about him—frightens me."

  "Lygia, Bob wouldn't hurt you!" Avery exclaimed. "What an idea! I know he's taken it into his fool head to think… well, to think that you're faking, but there's nothing malevolent about him. A lot of his nonsense is best ignored; he never really stops acting, you know." Avery carefully examined her face, but she still looked far from reassured. Poor little scrap! A bundle of nerves, and understandably so; shot nerves were a natural accompaniment to the hysterical amnesia she was suffering from. And then, as he watched her, he realized that her white, shadowed face, a certain waif-like quality about her, had touched him to a concern that transcended mere professional interest. She was, he judged, about nineteen or twenty. She spoke like a lady, as his grandmother would say, and he had noticed at the dining-table that she was possessed of natural good manners. Her eyes were wonderfully set. They lifted slightly at their outer edges and long black lashes clustered thickly, almost mysteriously about the vivid violet irises.

  Avery was not an imaginative man as a rule, but this girl's strange, brilliant eyes, set in such a colourless, sensitive-looking face, definitely intrigued him; moved him to ponder her identity with a stir of almost boyish excitement. His glance travelled over her. The cheap little tweed suit, which Robert had called off the peg, hung without grace on her thin body, and the top of her head barely reached his breast pocket. Her feet, in the flat-heeled walking shoes which Gerda had lent her, were ridiculously small, he noticed. With his hands upon the silver handles of the drawing-room doors, he said to Lygia: "I'll run you into Brinsham tomorrow and buy you some shoes your own size. You'll break an ankle, trying to go up and down the stairs in those shoes of Gerda's." He was opening the doors as he said this and his remark carried across the room. Gerda heard it and she swung round from the long glass doors, where blue damask curtains were thrown open and a length of moon-flooded terrace gleamed palely.

  "What's the matter with my shoes, Avery?" Gerda demanded. "Has Lygia been complaining about them?"

  Lygia flushed hotly under Gerda's sweeping glance of disdain, aware of wanting to snatch the shoes off her feet, so that she might aim them across this handsome room, straight into the beautiful face of this secretary who behaved like the mistress of the house.

  "So this is the girl, eh?"

  The voice was as deep as a man's, and immediately it drew Lygia's attention from Gerda. She stared at Avery Chase's grandmother and she knew a sweeping return of that strange fear Robert Chase had woken in her. It wasn't because the face confronting her was dark and haughty and etched with the many deep lines of great age; it was because the eyes that glittered out of the aged face were incongruously youthful, wicked and jetty—Robert Chase's eyes!

  Lygia sustained their jet-black scrutiny of herself with an effort, her hands clenched upon the tweed of her skirt.

  "Lygia, eh? A funny sort of name," old Mrs. Chase grunted. Abruptly she patted the big tapestry couch where she sat. "Come and sit here by me," she ordered. "And take that funny look off your face, I'm not going to eat you!"

  Lygia nervously advanced to the couch and sat down on the very edge of it. Then her thumping heart executed a somersault as one of the old lady's wrinkled hands, upon the bony forefinger of which there gleamed an immense ruby, reaching to the knuckle and heavily set in gold, took hold of her left hand. With a cool deliberation Mrs. Chase examined Lygia's hand, turning it first one way, then the other. At last the jetty eyes came to Lygia's scared face. "You've had a ring on this third finger, my child," she said.

  "A—a ring?" Lygia glanced down wildly at her hand, still held in the old lady's dry, bony fingers, and sure enough there was a depression at the base of her third finger. It leapt out now like a sudden light in the dark…

  "A ring, did you say, Gran?" Avery's long legs carried him swiftly round the couch, and he caught hold of Lygia's hand without ceremony. His fingers closed hard on the smallness of her fingers as he saw for himself that tell-tale depression where a ring had undoubtedly rested. His eyes met Lygia's. "Engagement ring — or wedding ring? I wonder which, Lygia?"

  "What's this about a wedding ring?" The doors of the drawing-room had opened almost silently, admitting the tall, lean figure of Robert Chase. "The plot thickens, I take it?" he said.

  "Most exciting, Robert!" It was Gerda who answered, and her blue eyes were full of a rather malicious inquisitiveness as they darted from Robert's face to Avery's. "We've just learned that Lygia has a husband."

  "Only supposition, Gerda!" Avery spoke curtly, but his expression wasn't curt as he met the sardonic glance that Robert turned upon him. "Gran's sharp eyes have discovered the mark of a ring on one of Lygia's fingers."

  "The third finger, left hand?" One of Robert's eyebrows quirked with a wicked derision, and now he was watching Lygia.

  "The mark of a ring on that particular finger doesn't necessarily mean a wedding ring," Avery pointed out.

  "You hope!"

  The words came softly from Robert, but they seemed to explode in that big room, with its sudden air of tension. Gerda lifted a hand to her mouth, covering her half shocked, half-delighted exclamation. Mrs. Chase drew in her breath sharply.

  Then Lygia was upon her feet and wildly facing Robert, her eyes presenting the only colour in her white face. "Say what you're thinking, Mr. Chase!" she cried. "Go on—say it!"

  "It will give me infinite pleasure." He lifted his cigarette in that insolent way that was so particularly his, and as smoke wreathed from his lips he said: "I think you've lost your job, not your memory, and that you've picked on Chase to provide you with a bit of free board and lodging. All right, if you're hard up and you've nowhere to go, say so. Don't play games with the lot of us!"

  "But I—I'm not playing games." A hint of tears had come into her eyes. "I wouldn't do that—please believe me."

  "Of course she wouldn't, Bob," Avery interposed. "Why do you have to be so suspicious and distrustful?"

  "Why?" Robert impatiently threw ash off his cigarette. "Because lost memory gags are as easy to pull as Christmas crackers — and you know what comes out of Christmas crackers, don't you?" His dark, mocking eyes met Avery's. "Little pieces of paper, old man, warning you to beware of any dark strangers who come into your life."

  "My God," anger swept across Avery's face, leaving it slightly ravaged, "I don't think I've ever met anybody so completely without trust as you, Bob. Something inside you must hurt very, very badly to make you the way you are. What the devil is it?"

  Lygia, unnerved by this whole scene to the point of sheer hysteria, had drawn back from everyone until she stood isolated, the sweeping blue curtains and the moon-flooded terrace seeming to form a stage-setting behind her. The terrace doors were a little open, she saw, and her heart began to beat high and nervously in her throat. A quick dart and she would be out of the house and away…

  "No, my dear, you don't have to do that." Warm fingers closed round her left wrist. "You don't have to run away into the dark a second time."

  "Am I running away, Dr. Chase?" she whispered.

  "Yes, from a man who has frightened you very badly, I believe."

  A man? She tried to remember, to force the forgotten face back into her mind, but there was nothing— nothing., There was only the mysterious mark of a ring on her finger—and her strange fear of Robert Chase. A fear that had nothing to do with the fact that he didn't like or trust her. A fear that made her fingers suddenly find Avery's and cling tightly to them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Autumn sunshine, bringing a tang out of the rich Devon soil, slanted throug
h old-rose curtains and fell across the big bed, bathing the curled-up figure of Lygia in its light. For perhaps another two or three minutes she remained deeply asleep, then all at once the sunlight pierced the veil of her sleep and she woke up.

  Her eyes drifted to the windows and her ears caught the early morning chattering of birds—and yet another sound, that of the impatient hooves of a horse clattering on paving-stones. Curiosity banished her sleepiness and she threw aside the bedcovers and ran to a window.

  Her room, Lygia discovered, looked down upon a square courtyard, with high yew hedges for its walls, and a rustic, green-painted door opening upon an undulating stretch of parkland. Sunshine splashed the paving-stones of the courtyard; danced upon the well-brushed hindquarters of a black horse and made the smooth head of the man seated upon the horse gleam as though polished.

  Lygia's hand tightened upon the curtain she was holding back, and just as she would have turned aside and retreated from the window, Robert Chase glanced up and saw her. His eyes, dark and hard as black onyx in the morning light, stared straight up into Lygia's, and in a moment a wave of colour swept over her face. Her hand released the curtain as though it burned her, and it swung quickly back into place, banishing Robert Chase's lean, breeched figure from her sight.

  She stood by the window, not unlike a small creature at bay, the sunshine splashing warm through the curtains, but not warming her; the sounds below growing more active as the hooves of a second horse joined the clatter of Robert's. Then Gerda Maitland's voice floated up to Lygia. "My, Robert, you do look nice!" she cooed. "Like a poster advertising Indian tea—very white-sahib and all that." Her seductive laughter bubbled. "Do I remind you of anything nice?"

  "As a matter of fact you do, my sweet." He too was laughing. "You remind me of that soap that's supposed to give everyone a schoolgirl complexion."

  "Oh, Robert—you pig!" The voices were growing fainter as the two trotted through the green door into the park, then Robert's laughter was cut off short by the clang of the door as it closed.