House Of Storm (22 page)

All at once the two women, Nonie and Lydia, seemed to be standing alone, removed from the others, aware only of the thing that was between them. “Yes,” Nonie said.

Lydia said, excluding the others by her very look, setting herself and Nonie apart, “I’ve loved Roy for a long time. That’s why I stayed on here. Always. But Aurelia hated me. I’ve no money except a small annuity. I … She hated me. She fought our marriage until—time works against a woman, Nonie. You’re too young to know that. But I’ve always loved Roy. I couldn’t bear to think of your marriage. I came here for the last time the night Hermione was murdered. I came to dinner. I was desperate and there was nothing I could do. Hermione knew it and taunted me. You didn’t understand, but I did. I …”

Roy tried to enter their suddenly isolated circle. “Lydia, stop … Lydia, my dear. You must not say these things.…”

Her brilliant green eyes did not waver. “Nonie, suppose they arrest Jim! Suppose they hang him.…”

“They can’t, they won’t …”

“They can, they can! If he’s innocent that’s murder, too. An innocent man hanged!”

Aurelia cried: “Don’t believe her, Nonie! Roy was never in love with her. He never wanted her.…”

Lydia said: “She’s jealous; she’s always been jealous. She never wanted me here at Beadon Gates as Roy’s wife. She knew I’d rule, not Aurelia. You are young; you’re a child. She’d have ruled you.…”

“That’s not true!” Aurelia cried. “How can you lie to her like that, Lydia? How can you …?”

Lydia’s green eyes still did not waver, yet she heard Aurelia and replied: “I’m not lying. Conscience—it’s a queer thing, conscience! What it lets you do and what it can’t let you do! Queer things—against your will …” The brightness had gone from her eyes; there was a blank, hazy look in them. Roy said gravely: “Lydia, you must not talk like this. If she wants to marry Jim, I’m not going to stand in their way.”

Nonie cried suddenly, knowing it for the truth: “Lydia, he loves you. He was sorry for me, he wanted to help me—he didn’t love me. It’s been you all along.…”

Aurelia interrupted with a sweeping, heavy defiance which carried all before it. “He loves you, Nonie. He could have married Lydia any time, all these years. She’s lying when she says I stopped it. I wouldn’t have stopped anything Roy wanted. I tell you it’s you he loves. You’ll be his wife. This is only another attempt of Lydia’s to get him back. He …”

Roy broke in: “Stop that, Aurelia! You and Lydia never got on together …”

“She hates me,” flashed Lydia.

Roy continued: “All this is beside the point just now.” He put out his hand gently, almost beseechingly toward Lydia. “Come, Lydia. We’ll talk, if you like, but it’s better not to now.”

She refused his hand. And with that astonishing dignity she turned and walked out of the room.

No one spoke until her lifted red head, her lovely, graceful figure, vanished into the hall. The candlelight wavered, sending changing shadows into the corners of the room. Aurelia looked at Nonie and said, also with a certain recovered and essential dignity: “Forget Lydia. The things she said have nothing to do with your life here as Roy’s wife. Believe me, my dear, and trust me.”

She, too, went away as quietly calm, as poised as Lydia.

Roy said again bluntly: “Lydia and Aurelia never got on together. Lydia—I’ll have to tell you the truth, Nonie. What she said is partly true, or rather it
was
partly true. But that’s past. Lydia …” he hesitated, a look of compunction and distress in his face, and Jim broke in with that new, grave maturity: “Nonie is to be my wife, Roy. She has no right to question you about anything.”

“Well,” Roy said bluntly again, “she can’t marry you unless we get you out of this thing. I don’t know what’s come over Dick. He’s like a different person. He hated Hermione. Yet he’s set on getting somebody hanged for murder.”

“Me,” Jim said shortly.

“Well, there’s one advantage of this storm; it gives us a respite, a chance to do something.” He began to search in his pockets absently, frowning. “I put the letter from the lawyers somewhere. The letter about Nonie’s money, I mean. You took it like a soldier, Nonie. I’m not rich; but your money or lack of money means nothing one way or the other to me, and I want you to know that. I thought—and I still think—I could make you happy.”

“Roy, I know. I thank you …” She couldn’t find words which said what was in her heart. But Roy understood and gave her a little smile and went on: “The fact seems to be simply that your father used his capital practically to the last cent. What’s salable in the estate—and I’m afraid your mother’s jewelry too, Nonie—will go to pay various debts. He was extravagant; but I don’t think anybody who knew him could find it in his heart to blame him.” He unfolded the letter he drew from his pocket.

“This came for you, Nonie,” he said, “that afternoon you took Jim in the boat—before Hermione … I took the liberty of opening it thinking that it might require an immediate cable in reply. Then this all started and I couldn’t bear to tell you.

“Here, you’d both better read it,” he continued. “It’s all I know about the thing. If there’s anything to be salvaged, they’ll do it. It’s a good firm, couldn’t be better.”

It was a communication from another world and almost in literal truth it seemed to carry no validity in the world into which they had been plunged. The paper rustled in Jim’s hand. The lawyer’s name at the top had long familiarity and no vestige of authority. The rustle of the paper was less real than the click of the shutters. Nonie told herself that she was an heiress dispossessed, and heard only phrases as Jim read the letter aloud.

But the phrases she heard were simple and conclusive, and actually the bare statement over the name of the firm of lawyers she had known all her life would have been enough. Brown and Hogarth did not make mistakes. They would have accounted for every penny of her father’s expenditures and of his estate before they wrote to her. Wind wrenched at the windows, shook the house and Jim’s voice lifted over the tumult: “ … estate left by your father—we were aware, for many years of the dwindling state of Mr. Hovenden’s capital investments and advised him on numerous occasions to curtail expenses. We very much regret—rigid and accurate accounting—no losses or bad investments—only what we regret to call extravagance—debts—notes at the bank—your mother’s jewelry—no stone unturned—sincere efforts to salvage anything possible. Yours faithfully …”

Jim folded up the letter.

Roy said: “It’s a changing world; he didn’t realize it.”

But when he was about to die, he’d thought of it, he’d worried; he’d wanted Nonie to be cared for; he’d sent for Roy. Nonie said: “He wanted you to marry me, Roy. I see that.…”

“He said nothing to me, if he did,” Roy said. “There’s only one reason why I asked you to marry me, Nonie.”

She said slowly: “I can see now where it went—he had a genius for spending.” Pictures of that gay—and fantastically extravagant—life flashed across her memory. The suites on boats, the chartered planes, the motor cars, the yachts, the summers in Bar Harbor or Scotland, the winters in Florida or Cannes, the gay, reckless course of spending money that had been her father’s life.

“Perhaps there’ll be something left,” Roy said, comfortingly.

She shook her head. “I know the firm. Nothing could slip past them; they’ll have accounted for every penny.”

Jim said, watching her, “Rich girl, poor girl. Do you care?”

Care!
She met Jim’s eyes and her answer must have been in her own gaze, for suddenly he smiled and said in the most casual way in the world, “That’s all right, then.”

Roy said: “It came yesterday and I thought I’d wait till after we were married. I was afraid you’d mind. I wanted that to be a happy day. Well—well, we’ll talk of all that later. The wind is going down a bit. We may have a lull. Riordan wants to see some of his sick patients. He’s a fool to go out in this but …”

Roy went into the hall and closed the door and Jim’s arms went tightly around her and drew her close against him so her head rested on his shoulder. “I’ll make you a decent living. I’ll have enough for us—not yachts and sables but enough …”

“All I want is you.” She said it so earnestly that her voice sounded childish and broken and Jim chuckled suddenly and lifted her face and kissed her. “I’ll love you all my life—all my life, Nonie …”

But then the house began to watch and listen outside the magic circle around them. Intangibly, with a kind of deadly patience, it reminded them of the barriers it knew, the shocking secret it had witnessed—and the threat that secret held for them.

Jim felt it, too. He moved, putting his cheek down against her head for a moment, warmly, like a comforting promise. Then he said: “I’ve got to see Riordan. I’ll be back.”

He disappeared into the hall, his black head shining under the light. A vine beat against the shutters like impatient fingers demanding entrance. She had stood for a time, thinking, not thinking—mainly feeling his arms around her again, his mouth against her own, before it occurred to her that there had been something rather different about his voice when he said he had to see Riordan. Something different about the abrupt way he left. Different—well, then how?

What was he going to do?

But she knew that; he meant to find the evidence that Seabury had found. What had Riordan to do with that?

It wasn’t likely, though, to be a clue, a material thing—a piece of evidence that could be put under a microscope, photographed, analyzed so it became an arrow pointing to identity, pointing to a murderer.

The tempo of the storm was changing. The wind was steady and strong, less wild and gusty; the beat of the rain had a heavy rhythm. The candle flame burned more evenly; its light and the steadiness of the rain were hypnotic. After awhile she pulled the eiderdown around her and, without knowing it, listening to the beat of the rain upon the balcony, she fell into an uneasy sleep.

But the storm marched through her sleep. She knew when it began to accelerate its pace. She even thought about it, clearly, when she awoke. The lull had passed; the wild whirling outer circle of the storm fell ravaging upon the island, as if it had drawn back like a tiger to spring with renewed force.

She had no sense of time. An eerie twilight filtered dimly through the closed shutters, the candle flickered and wavered and sent flying shadows into the corners of the room. Her letter to Aunt Honoria—written in another age it seemed to her—glimmered faintly out of the dusk and fell into obscurity again as the small golden flame flickered and smoked and almost died and then sprang back into life.

She would not send the letter. She thought of Roy and Lydia, clearly now and with an inward conviction. Almost certainly at some time Roy had been in love with Lydia. Time had passed and Aurelia had, perhaps, blocked their marriage. But Lydia obviously still loved Roy. Nonie had been sure, for a moment, that Roy in his heart still loved Lydia. He had been sincere in his affection for her, Nonie. He would have been loyal to her; she was equally sure of that. But perhaps the love a man gives to only one woman in his life had been given long ago to Lydia.

Suddenly, again, she was sure it still existed—without Roy’s knowledge perhaps, choked and smothered by Aurelia, but still alive. She remembered the night Lydia had come, uninvited, to dinner. She remembered the laughter and shared memories between them—Roy, manlike, unaware of the thing his eyes admitted. How could she have failed to see it then?

A load lifted from her heart. The sense of disloyalty to Roy no longer oppressed her.

Where was Jim, she wondered. What was he doing? She could have heard no sounds in the house, the storm was too loud. Yet there was a sense of emptiness and quiet. She roused and took the candle to the dressing table. She showered and dressed and brushed up her hair and looked at the gold-backed brush. The little brilliant-set monogram twinkled and glittered in the candlelight. How like her father that was! And glad she was now because he’d been like that. He had lived in his own romantic and glamorous generation. But in her own no less romantic, certainly no less idealistic age, money, as money, had lost some of its halo.

She had no need for a fortune; no need for jewels, no need—her thought broke off abruptly. Jim might need lawyers; she hadn’t thought of that.

Would they let him use money from Hermione’s estate, from his own inheritance, to defend himself if he were tried for murder? Almost certainly not. The twelve hundred dollars taken from her brown alligator bag might have helped. Could she, by any chance, recover it? She could at least try.

She took the candle and went into the hall. Another candle in a tall silver candlestick stood on a table near the stairway; beyond it the long hall stretched away into deep shadow. Again she had an impression of emptiness within the house.

But a pool of light came upward from the lower hall, lighting the stairway and casting deep shadows of banister and newel post. Roy was there, sitting in an armchair, his head resting on his hands, and a great old candelabrum, its candles flaring and dripping wax, on the table beside him. He saw her and got to his feet.

“Nonie! I hoped you were asleep.”

She sat down, putting the small candle she carried on the table. “The house seems empty,” she said. “Where is everybody?”

He sighed. “Riordan said he had to see some patients and left during the lull. He’ll be back; the roads must be blocked everywhere. Aurelia is asleep, I suppose. Lydia, too. At least I haven’t seen them. Jim …” He rubbed his forehead wearily and said: “Jim started off for Middle Road. Dick discovered it, flew into a rage at me for letting him go and started to bring him back. Jim couldn’t escape. Nobody could escape in a storm like this. But Dick had a brainstorm; said it was the same as breaking a parole, said he’d bring him back in handcuffs …” He sighed again. “I don’t know what’s happened to Dick. He hated Hermione. Yet anybody would think he’d appointed himself her avenger.”

The flames wavered so the shadows everywhere moved. Arrest, lawyers, money!

Roy put his hand over her own with a gesture like an apology. “I’ve been thinking, Nonie. Lydia …”