Legend of the Seventh Virgin (34 page)

Johnny had gone to Plymouth, as he said, on estate duty. Justin rode off alone immediately after luncheon. I always spent a part of the afternoon with Carlyon so Mellyora had a few hours of freedom; and when I saw her come downstairs in her riding habit that afternoon, I guessed that she was meeting Justin.

They were very sad, both of them, because there would not be many more occasions when they could be together.

“Mellyora,” I said, “I hope Justin will persuade you not to go.”

She flushed and in those moments looked very lovely. “He knows, as well as I do,” she answered, “that this is the only way.”

She pressed her lips firmly together as though she feared the suppressed sobs would escape while she hurried past me.

I went straight up to the nursery where I found Carlyon talking about the animals. I had told the servants not to mention to him that they were going to the circus because I knew that he would then want to go too and I was afraid of the circus, afraid that he might be harmed in some way. So many unclean people who might give him some disease; he might be lost; I could picture a hundred mishaps. Perhaps next year, I’ll take him myself, I thought.

We went out to the rose garden where old Lady St. Larnston was sitting in a wheel chair; she had been suffering from rheumatism in the last months and used the chair a good deal. The last year or so had brought great changes in this house. Her eyes brightened at the sight of Carlyon and he went straight to her and stood on tiptoe as she bent creakily forward to receive his kiss.

I sat on the wooden seat near her chair while Carlyon sprawled out on the grass absorbed in the progress of an ant which was climbing a blade of grass.

While he played, my mother-in-law and I talked desultorily.

“This wretched circus.” She sighed. “It has been the same for years. My hot water was five minutes late this morning and my tea was cold. I told Mrs. Rolt and she said: ‘It’s the circus, my lady.’ I remember when I was first married …”

Her voice trailed off as it often did when she started some reminiscence and she would be silent while she relived the past in her thoughts. I wondered whether her mind was beginning to fail as her body was.

“It’s one of the great days in their lives,” I remarked.

“The empty house … the servants … quite impossible.” Her voice quavered.

“Fortunately it only happens once a year.”

“Everyone gone … just everyone … Not a servant in the house. If anyone should call …”

“No one will. Everyone knows it is the day of the circus.”

“Kerensa, my dear … Judith …”

“She’s resting.”

Resting! That significant word. We used it when we meant to imply that Judith was not quite presentable. When visitors called we would say: “She is a little indisposed. She is resting.”

Her condition had improved since the departure of Fanny. It was true that she was drinking less; but there was a continual craving which seemed to be turning to a madness. When her mother went out onto the moors and danced by moonlight was it because she was drunk? Was it, as Jane Carwillen had said, that drink was the monster that haunted the Derrise family?

We were silent, each occupied with our separate thoughts; and suddenly I noticed that Carlyon was stretched out on the grass, his little body shaking with sobs.

I went over to him at once and picked him up. “What is it, my darling?” I asked.

He clung to me and it was some time before he could speak.

“It’s Nelly,” he said. “I was a wicked one.”

I smoothed the thick hair back from his forehead and murmured endearments; but I couldn’t comfort him.

“I didn’t like her any more because she wasn’t a true nellyphant.”

“And you like her again?”

“She’s Nelly,” he said.

“Well, she’ll be happy now you like her again,” I soothed.

“She’s gone.”

“Gone?”

He nodded.

“Where?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But, darling, if she’s gone away you must know where.”

“I looked and looked. She’s gone because I told her she wasn’t a true nellyphant.”

“She’s in the nursery waiting for you.”

He shook his head. “I looked.”

“And she wasn’t there?”

“She’s gone right away. I didn’t like her any more. I said she wasn’t a true nellyphant.”

“Well,” I said, “she isn’t.”

“But she’s crying. I said I don’t want her any more. I wanted a true nellyphant.”

“And now do you want her?”

“She’s my Nelly, even though she’s not a true nellyphant. I want Nelly to come back and she’s gone.”

I rocked him in my arms. Bless his tender heart! I thought. He believes he has hurt poor Nelly and wants to comfort her.

“I’ll go and find her,” I told him. “You stay here with Grandmamma. Perhaps she’ll let you count her carnelians.”

One of his greatest pleasures was examining the stone necklace which my mother-in-law invariably wore during the day; it was composed of carnelian stones of golden brown, rather roughly hewn. Carlyon had always been fascinated by them.

He brightened at the prospect and I put him on my mother-in-law’s lap; she smiled for the counting of the carnelians was, I believed, as great a pleasure for her as for him. She would tell him about the necklace and how her husband had given it to her and how his mother had given it to him for his bride; it was a St. Larnston necklace and the stones themselves had been found in Cornwall.

I left Carlyon considerably comforted, listening to his Grandmother’s sleepy voice recounting the history as she had many times before, he watching the movement of her lips, telling her when she used a word which had not been in the previous tellings.

As soon as I entered the Abbas, I tell myself now, I felt an odd foreboding. But perhaps I imagined that afterwards. Yet I was very susceptible to what I called the moods of the house. The house was a living thing to me; I had always felt my destiny was wrapped up in it. It certainly was that afternoon.

Such a silence. All the household away. It was rare that there were not some servants present. But this was the special day of the year when it was agreed that all should be absent.

Only Judith would be lying in her room, her hair tousled, her face already bearing that misshapen vague look of the dipsomaniac, the eyes a little wild and bloodshot. I shivered, although it was a warm afternoon.

I longed to be out in the rose garden with my son. I smiled thinking of him sitting on Lady St. Larnston’s lap, his eyes close to the carnelian stones, perhaps tracing the streaks in them with a plump finger.

My darling child! I would die for him. Then I laughed at the sentiment. Of what use would I be to him, dead? He needed me to plan for him, to give him the life of which he was worthy. Did I sense in him already a softness, a sentimentality which might let his heart rule his head.

How happy he would be when I put his toy elephant into his arms. Together we would explain that he loved her still, and the fact that she was not a true elephant was unimportant.

I went along first to the nursery, but the toy was not there. I had seen him with it that morning. I smiled, remembering how he had dragged it along in a dejected sort of way. Poor Nelly! She was in disgrace. When had I seen him? It was when Mellyora had brought him to my room on their way out. They had gone together along the corridor and down by the main staircase.

I followed the direction, guessing that his attention had been distracted and he had relinquished the strap and left the toy somewhere on the way. I would descend the stairs and go out to one of the front lawns where he had played that morning.

When I reached the top of the staircase I saw the elephant. It was lying on the second stair from the top and caught in it was a shoe.

I went closer. A high-heeled shoe caught in the cloth of the elephant’s coat! Whose shoe?

I stood up holding the toy in one hand, the shoe in the other, and as I did so I saw a form at the bottom of the staircase.

My heart was beating as though it would burst out of my body as I ran down the stairs.

Lying at the foot of the stairs was Judith.

“Judith,” I whispered. I knelt beside her. She was very still. She wasn’t breathing and I knew that she was dead.

It seemed now that the house was watching me. There I was alone in it … with death. In one hand I held the shoe — in the other the toy elephant.

I could see it all so clearly. The toy lying at the top of the stairs; Judith coming down, slightly tipsy, not seeing the toy. I could picture her stepping on it, her heel catching in the cloth — her balance lost; the sudden descent, down the great staircase which I had mounted once so proudly in my red velvet dress … down to death.

And this because my son had left his toy on the stairs — a death trap innocently set.

I closed my eyes and I thought of the whisperings! The little boy was responsible for her death in a manner of speaking … It was the sort of story they loved, that lived on for years.

And he would know it, and even though none could say it was his fault, it would cloud his happiness to know that he was responsible for her death.

Why should his bright future be clouded because a drunken woman had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck?

The great silence of the house was unnerving. It was as though time had stopped — the clocks had stopped and there was no sound whatever. Great events had taken place within these walls over the centuries. Something told me that I was now facing one of those occasions.

Then time seemed to begin again. I heard the ticking of the grandfather clock as I knelt down by Judith. There was no doubt that she was dead.

I laid the shoe on the stairs; but I took the elephant back to the nursery and left it there. No one was going to say that Judith had died because of my son’s action.

Then I ran out of the house, as fast as I could to Dr. Hilliard’s.

D
eath in the Abbas. A hushed atmosphere. The blinds drawn to shut out the sun. The servants creeping about on tiptoe, speaking in whispers.

In that bedroom where I had so often dressed her hair, Judith lay in her coffin. The servants hurried past the closed door, eyes averted. I was oddly moved to see her lying there, in the white frilled cap and the white nightdress, looking more at peace than she ever had in life.

Justin shut himself in his room and was seen by no one. Mrs. Rolt took trays up to his room but she brought them all down again, the food untouched. There was a grim look about her mouth. I guessed that in the kitchen she said: “It’s on his conscience. Poor lady! Can you wonder at it?” And they would all agree because of their unwritten law that the dead were sanctified.

The events of that day stand out clearly in my mind. I remember running along the road in the hot sun, finding Dr. Hilliard asleep in his garden, a newspaper over his head to protect him from the sun, blurting out that there had been an accident, and going back to the Abbas with him. The house was still silent; the shoe lay on the stairs; but the elephant was in the nursery.

I stood there beside him as he touched her poor face.

“This is terrible,” he murmured. “Terrible.”

Then he looked up the stairs and at her shoe. “She’d been drinking,” he went on.

I nodded.

He stood up. “There’s nothing I can do for her.”

“Would it have been instantaneous?” I asked.

He lifted his shoulders. “I should think so. No one heard her fall?”

I explained that the servants were all at the circus. It was the one occasion of the year when the house was empty.

“Where is Sir Justin?”

“I don’t know. My husband has gone to Plymouth on estate duty and Lady St. Larnston is in the garden with my son.”

He nodded. “You look shaken, Mrs. St. Larnston.”

“It was a great shock.”

“Exactly. Well, we must try and get hold of Sir Justin as soon as possible. Where would he be at this time of day?”

I knew where he was … with Mellyora; and then the fear struck at me for the first time. He was free now … free to marry Mellyora. In a year — which would be a respectable time — they would marry. Perhaps in another they would have a son. I had been so intent on arranging that Carlyon’s toy should not be involved in the accident that I had not realized that what I dreaded might after all happen.

Dr. Hilliard was talking, giving instructions; but I merely stood still and it was as though the house itself were mocking me.

Later that day Judith’s parents arrived at the Abbas. Her mother was very like Judith — statuesque with the same tortured eyes. They were indeed tortured on this occasion.

She went to the room where Judith lay on her bed, for they had not yet made her coffin. I heard her wild sobbing and her reproaches.

“What have you done to my daughter? Why did I ever let her come to this house?”

The servants heard. I met Mrs. Rolt on the stairs and she lowered her eyes so that I should not see the excitement there. This was a situation the servants loved. Scandal in high places. While they talked of the death of Judith, they would speak in the same breath of her unhappiness and that last scene when she had betrayed before them all her jealousy of Mellyora.