I
From her vine-screened retreat in the summer house, Judith Ascott
looked out on the fairest May Day she had ever known. It was the
morning after ... and the promise she had made to Lary hung sinister
and foreboding over her spirit. Everything around her was vibrant with
coming summer. At home the buds would be opening timorously, while
here the perennial climbers were in full leaf. An aureate splendour,
seductive as Danae’s rain, rippled through the open structure of the
pergola, transmuting the pebble walk to a pavement of costly gems;
but within the widening of the arbour--that David had converted into
an outdoor living-room--the frightened shadows sought refuge from the
shafts that would presently destroy them. To the cool umbrageous corner
nearest the house, where the light was faint, the woman had taken her
world-weary body, yearning for the relaxation her bed had denied her.
It was all so insistent, this new life that had come to her, its music
keyed to a pitch she had never realized, a tempo beyond the reach of
her experience. The Trenches. Were there other families in the universe
like this one? Before her coming to Springdale she had viewed the world
through a thick forest of people, most of them intolerably tiresome.
In the main they were contented ... such contentment as is to be
derived from a favourable turn in the market or the balm of Bermuda to
beguile a winter’s day. Happy lives, she had read, make uninteresting
biographies. Her life had been far from happy, and her biography
would be utterly stupid. Mrs. Trench was--she realized with a stab of
astonishment--a desperately unhappy woman, and her life story was made
up of a propitious marriage and six abnormally interesting children.
And then ... Theo appeared at the other side of the garden wall,
discerned the white-clad figure among the verdant shadows of the summer
house, and scaled the low barrier with the nimbleness of a squirrel. In
the folds of her skirt she held something, and a furtive air pervaded
her small person.