The Heart Remembers (2 page)

Before Shelley could swing into her carefully prepared sales talk, the screen door banged open and Jim Hargroves came in.

“Well, now, Jim, I'm right glad to see you,” said the plump, middle-aged woman heartily. “Come right in and set.”

“Hello, Miss Clara.” Jim swung a glance toward Shelley's lunch, saw she was just beginning on the apple pie and added, “I'll have a cup of coffee and a piece of your swell apple pie while I wait for my passenger.”

He grinned at Shelley, then swung himself on a stool at the lunch counter and turned his back on her, instead of coming over to her table. Shelley's color rose a little and she devoted herself to her pie and to a second cup of coffee, quite sure that this Jim Hargroves was the rudest, most graceless creature she had ever met. She heard him chatting gaily with the woman he had called Miss Clara, apparently completely oblivious to Shelley. And Shelley wasn't accustomed to attractive young men who ignored her presence!

But that he was keeping an eye on her, despite his conversation with Miss Clara, was obvious, for the moment Shelley had finished her last sip of coffee, he was standing up, saying courteously, “If you've finished, we'll get started.”

“I've quite finished, thank you,” Shelley told him distantly. And then as she put down the money for her lunch, she gave Miss Clara her friendliest smile and said pleasantly, “It was a very good lunch and I enjoyed it. I'll look forward to seeing you again and maybe I can persuade you to change your mind about that advertising.”

Miss Clara smiled uncertainly, obviously unconvinced.

Outside in the brilliant mid-afternoon sunlight, Jim said dryly, “Always the ‘eager beaver' when it comes to business!”

“If business is going to be as bad as you seem to think, I can't afford to dilly-dally, can I?” she told him coolly as she got into the front seat of the station wagon, and watched him go around to slip beneath the wheel.

They were a mile out of town before either of them spoke again. Jim was obviously lost in his own thoughts and they were by no means pleasant ones, if one could judge from his expression. Then suddenly, as though he had reached a decision, he turned his head and looked down at her.

“See here, you're only a kid and I haven't the faintest idea where you got the crazy notion that you could come down here to this isolated, Godforsaken stretch of the world and run a newspaper, of all things.” He was speaking earnestly, almost coaxingly. “I'd like to warn you in the beginning: you aren't going to like it. It's the loneliest, most isolated place you ever saw. There aren't more than two dozen white families. There are a great many Negroes who operate the ‘still' and look after the trees; they are, for the most part, descendants of the first Negroes who started this naval stores business for my greatgrandfather, and they are simple, ignorant backwoods
creatures, most of whom can neither read nor write. There is no amusement whatever—a movie once a week and it's usually a couple of years old and the sound is so bad that Greer Garson sounds like Marjorie Main. You can't possibly make a living here, so why not just be a nice, sweet, sensible kid, cut your losses and take it on the lam?”

Shelley clenched her hands tightly until she was quite sure that she could speak quietly in spite of her anger.

“I must admit, Mr. Hargroves, I find it very hard to understand your aversion to strangers.”

“It's just that I don't like to see kids like you riding lickity-split into heartbreak and tragedy,” he began sombrely.

Her eyes danced, and she smiled derisively.

“Why, Mr. Hargroves, how you
do
talk! I'm only going into business—not into a tragic love affair or something equally silly.”

Jim ignored that as it deserved.

“You seem a nice youngster, and I suppose you bought the poor old
Journal
for peanuts. Just the same, you've been
had
, my girl! Even if you got it for a dollar and two bits, you've been
had
!”

“That's kind of you—I suppose.” Her tone admitted some slight doubt. “But it's too late to back out now, even if I wanted to, which I don't. I've bought the paper; I've ordered new equipment; I'm here and—well, I'm rather a determined sort of a person, Mr. Hargroves.”

“I had gathered that impression,” he responded dryly.

“So couldn't we just face it that I won't be scared off, and go on from there?” she added coolly.

“Scared off?” Oddly enough, that seemed to annoy him as nothing else she could have said. “Did I give you the impression I was trying to frighten you?”

“Well, you certainly were not encouraging.”

“Sorry. I didn't intend to try to frighten you. Though telling a woman the bitter truth is, I suppose, attempting to frighten her.”

Shelley let him have the last word, because by now the car had left the highway and was winding through a narrow unpaved road that wound through scrub-pine and underbrush, until suddenly ahead of them there was a view that made Shelley catch her breath in sharp delight.

The road was thick with resinous dry pine-needles. Stretching away on either side were tall, stately pines, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, in neat, orderly rows, their giant tops murmurous with the wind that was so slight Shelley could scarcely feel it. The air was spicy with sunshine hot on the green needles of the lifted tree-tops, and from the fragrance of the dry needles beneath them and strewing the road. Several feet up from the ground, she saw that each tree wore a broad, oddly shaped gash, and beneath each gash a brown cup had been wired in place to catch the thick, whitish resinous sap as it dripped slowly, steadily.

She lifted her enchanted face and closed her eyes, the better to hear the soft, murmurous sighing in the tops of the trees.

“Wind in the pines,” she whispered, forgetful of everything except the keen delight of this old, old memory made real and new again. “I love it! It's the loveliest sound in all the world, the most beautiful music ever composed.”

Jim looked down at her, puzzled.

“You've lived in the pine country before?” he asked.

“When I was a child,” she answered, and then set her teeth hard. More cautiously, after only the slightest moment of hesitation, she went on lightly, “I love pines. They're so dependable. They're always green and fresh-looking, even when they're half buried beneath
snow.”

It sounded lame and she flushed a little beneath his look, then turned her head away and gazed through tear-misted eyes at the beloved, remembered pines.

Jim said nothing and they drove on, until finally the narrow winding road widened and ahead there was a house or two; neat frame, carefully enclosed behind none too steady fences that were obviously meant to keep out the wandering pigs and chickens and an occasional cow, and not merely for beauty.

They came at last to a small brick building, closed and deserted for so long that it had a forlorn, unhappy look. Beyond it at the left there was a neat four-room house, built of pine and never painted. It, too, wore a deserted, sad look like the small brick building.

Jim stopped the car in front of the building and gestured toward it.

“On your right,” he said in the dry tone of a big-city tour-conductor, “you will observe the plant of the
Harbour Pines Journal
, with beyond it the handsome, commodious quarters of the publisher.”

Shelley caught her breath and her hands were clenched so tightly in her lap that the gloves were strained above her knuckles. The little brick building had a grimy window on which the words: “
Harbour Pines Journal
: Job-Printing” were barely legible.

Weeds and grass and the debris of many years neglect was piled all about it, half smothering the path to the little house. The small windows were tightly shut, but here and there a shutter was hanging loose, so that the little old house seemed to peer out of half closed lids, like a very old, very sick person who has given up all hope.

A gaunt old apple tree or two at the back lifted greening limbs above decayed wood. In the front a young peach tree had grown riotously and its small,
furry buds were beginning to show traces of pink through the tight-folded outer leaves. A few rose bushes, still valiant after years of neglect, were shaking out small, hopeful clusters of reddish leaves above the rank grass and weeds.

There was the sting of tears in Shelley's eyes as she looked and looked, forgetting for the moment the tall, rangy young man who sat beside her. The printing shop was smaller than she remembered it, and the little house looked so sad and so shabby. But she had been a child when she saw it last, she reminded herself. The windows of the little house had been bright and shining, and crisp ruffled curtains had blown in the spring breeze; and the garden had rioted with daffodils and hyacinths and old-fashioned shrubs such as spirea and forsythia and flowering quince. And the roses had been newly planted and vigorously blooming.

“Still think you want to stay?”

Jim's voice crashed into her mood of bittersweet remembering and she had to set her teeth before she could make herself answer him.

“Of course. Thank you very much for giving me a lift.” She started to open the car door, but Jim put out a hand and held the catch, looking at her in startled protest.

“Oh, for Pete's sake, you haven't any crazy idea of staying here tonight?”

“The house is furnished; they told me so in Atlanta when I bought—”

“I suppose it is, after a fashion. But it's been shut up for fifteen years. I hardly think you'll find it livable,” he all but snapped at her. “I've been racking what I loosely call my brain for the last ten miles trying to think where you are to stay until the place can be put in order. That is, if you're still determined to stay.”

“I certainly am, and I'm sure I can get a room at
the hotel.”

“Pardon me while I burst into raucous laughter, my benighted young friend,” Jim's tone was definitely acid. “There isn't a hotel nearer than the county seat and that's eighteen miles. And there isn't so much as a boarding-house in Harbour Pines. So the only thing to do with you is take you home with me.”

Shelley gasped and stared at him. “Oh,
no!
”

He surveyed her, slightly acrid amusement in his dark eyes.

“My dear girl,” he assured her loftily, as though he were beginning to be a little bored with her, “I assure you that I am merely following the ancient law of hospitality in these parts; I am
not
making a pass at you. I live with my spinster aunt on the other side of town in a house so big that the two of us rattle around in it. It's the only house in miles that runs to a spare bedroom and I assure you that Aunt Selena will be delighted to have you.”

Shelley's teeth set down hard on her lower lip and her body was rigid. Selena! It couldn't be, yet there couldn't be more than one woman with that name in this little town. But
her
name was Selena Durand, not Hargroves!

“Selena?” she said thinly after a long moment. “It's an unusual name.”

“My aunt is an unusual woman,” said Jim dryly, as though with mental reservations. “A trifle odd, perhaps; though nothing dangerous. I mean you mustn't mind if she behaves a little—well, peculiarly. The Durands have always been laws unto themselves.”

As though there could be no argument against his plan for her, Jim was driving on, not looking at her, and Shelley was passionately grateful for the chance to pull herself together, to regain her composure before she had to face him, to talk to him.
Selena
Durand!
And her heart whispered, shaken, “So soon? Is it going to be this easy?” And she knew, with a little sick feeling, that it wasn't—it couldn't be! Not after all the bitterness, the heartbreak, the tragedy—not after fifteen years!

She tried to still her agitation by observing the little town as they drove through it; marking the bank that was the nearest building to the
Journal
office; opposite it one of the “business establishments” she'd been told about and which proved to be a “mercantile business” that, judging from the display piled in its windows and in front, sold practically anything and everything necessary for the maintenance of life. There was the “New York Department Store,” small and grimly determined, with its “stylish” dresses and its stout work-clothes jumbled in a hodge-podge in its one window.

There was very little life apparent at that hour of the afternoon. A few people lounged on the front porch of the “mercantile”; a hound dog or two was asleep in the shade; a lean, hungry-looking sow, with half a dozen pint-sized progeny scrambling and squealing at her heels, crossed the road in front of them, and Jim swerved obligingly to miss the littlest one, the “runt.”

There was a gaunt-looking building that wore its faded sign, “Harbour Pines Naval Stores; Post-Office; Groceries; Gas and Oil,” in two sections, since the building was too narrow for it all to be on one line.

But though Shelley was trying to calm herself by looking at the town, her mind was still in a confused jumble. To go with him into Selena Durand's home! To be accepted there as a guest! Could she do it, without betraying herself and her precious secret? The very fact that her reason for being there was a secret, and that it must remain a secret, was her only hope of accomplishing her purpose.

For fifteen years, she had built her plan so carefully. For even as a child of eight, she had known that some day she must come back there and do this thing. And now that the time had come, now that her plans were working out so smoothly, she was offered the “hospitality” of the one home in all the village that she had thought would be closed to her. Of course, if Jim had guessed that her real name was not Shelley Kimbrough at all—she jerked her thoughts back and reassured herself. Legally, it
was
Shelley Kimbrough. She had been formally and legally adopted by Aunt Jane and that gave her the right to the name.