“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 February 1940, Page 10

“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

PETER BENEDICT.

CHAPTER I. Lyddon Strang was waiting under the clock on Platform Three when the London train steamed into Stanchester.

Catherine saw him from the window of her carriage, and the sight was like a first stab of the returning part in her heart, at once most grateful and most poignant. The year of her exile in France seemed to dissolve in a moment before the first glance of those eyes which had watched ner set out, here, from this very platform as a pale wreck of the woman she was now. This was the self-same moment; she remembered every detail of it. Only she herself was changed.

Lyddon. with his astonishing gift foi looking correct under any disadvantage, carried a sheaf of yellow roses and a box of chocolates as gravely as if they had been despatch case and gloves. She thought, in the instant before he saw her, and came bounding across the platform: ‘‘lf only his office•staff could see him now!” But she dropped the window and leaned out to him as he came; and her smile as their hands met was almost as radiant as his. She was not forgotten; there was still a place for her.

"Lyddon, this is good of you! How did you know 1 was coming by this train? I've written to- no one but Mabel."

"I've been phoning her every day for the past week. Did you really think 1 should let you pass through without seeing me? A year? It’s been a century. Are you really well now? No more relapses?” "No more; I swear it. How long have we? Five minutes? Get in and talk to me until the train leaves.” There was nothing he desired more. He closed the door upon his entrance, and they were alone in a queerly intimate isolation, the activity upon the platform a world away. They looked at each other, and the old constraint fell upon them. “I hardly knew you, Catherine. How nice it sounds—Catherine. I haven’t called you that for a year. I was lookfor a ghost again, I think, and behold an Amazon! I've brought you some chocolates, and these roses," he said, piling them upon the already littered seat. "I don’t suppose you want them, but one does it. I'd have brought you something better if 1 could; the moon, maybe. Or have you given up wanting the moon?" He smiled at her; she saw behind the pleasure in his eyes the old, patient bitterness. “No,” she said slowly, “no, I’ve not given up wanting the moon. But thank you for these, all the same; they mean much more than you think. Every moment of this journey, do you know, I’ve had a stupid feeling that I should never reach Court Brandon at all, that something would have happened to it while I was away; and. now I’m nearly home, and someone has remembered me.”

“Every moment of every day,” he said very simply. “And I wrote twice! I’m sorry!”

"You.were very ill; I don’t believe you know now how ill. Catherine, there’s so much 1 want to say to you; now most of all. I wish we had longer. You’ll let me see you soon?” “Of course, if you really want me. I’ll ring you in a day or so, shall I? Just at present —and I know you’ll understand it—all I can think of is getting home.” She smiled, half in apology. "After all. Ive lived for a year on the memory of it.” “Such a quiet little place to call you so strongly,” he said, regarding her curiously.

"But my place; and always will be.” “I wish I knew how to make you lock like that about me.”

She did not reply, but she felt the moment stilling in her heart to a crisis not altogether unexpected. They heard the hurried clatter of wheels and hasting feet fall back from them, and a great gust of steam cut them off for a moment from even the realisation of a world beyond the clouded glass. They were utterly alone, and had only a moment now in which to readjust their lives, either into the old easy friendship, or “Catherine,” said Lyddon Strang, “will you marry me?” There was a brief pause; she dared not let it be more than brief. Doors were slamming along the train, nearer and nearer to their isolation; and Lyddon, oven in this desperate moment, had his hand upon the door, and his foot braced for a hasty leap to the platform. “No, I won’t marry you. But if it’s any consolation to you. I never liked you so much as I do now, at this moment.”

“It isnl. Why won’t you let me take care of you? Haven’t you boon through enough? I’ll give you everything you even dream of wanting; and you know how much I love and want you; you've always known. Why won’t you marry me?"

‘•Because I don't love you. my dear.” The train began to move. ‘Forgive me," he said in a rapid gasp, as he jumped down from her side and closed the door between them, ■‘but this is in self-defence: you didn’t love Geoffrey, either." "That’s why I'm so determined not to accept a second best this time." She touched his hand in the instant before he withdrew it from the windowframe. "I want the moon more than ever. I'm sorry." “No need; I understand. If ever you want anything loss, come to me; you can promise that, at least—anything in the world — She heard no more, and her own unsteady reply was lost, as the train gathered way. He saw her lips move

upon words, and a wry smile end them, and that was all. Catherine sat back in her corner with a helpless sigh, and tried to go on with the letter to Marie in Bayonne. It was a strange homecoming. after all; but stranger than the brief distress was the speed with which her mind threw it aside. By the time she was three stations out from Stanchester, drawing into Court Redcliff’s long platform, she had forgotten Lyddon Strang. She felt her heart stir softly, as if it had been asleep for a long time, and was now about to awake. She sat forward, and looked out at the evening. Straining her eyes through the dusk, she could just make out beyond the barrier of the station the rolling green of meadows. This was her own country, and she had been away from it for over a year. Already she was in the jurisdiction of her own name. Court Redcliff, Court Harwell, Court Brandon; two more halts, and she would be home.

The train drew slowly out of the station, and the dusk was pressing against the lighted windows defied any further effort to follow the lines of scenery which ran with the track. She sat back slowly, and sighed with a deep, passionate pleasure. Then she tried to go- on with her letter to Marie, which had been begun only a few miles out from London. “ —I shall be home in about a

quarter of an hour. I'm almost afraid to think of it, because it seems too good to be true. I shall never forget how kind you and Fernand have been to me; but you'll understand, I know, that here I’m in my own place, and I fit. I belong to the soil of Court Brandon in so many ways. My own people have lived in the same farmstead for centuries, almost as long, I suppose, as my husband's family lived at the castle. I’ve lost both now and I’m the last real relic of what they stood for; because I can’t tear up my roots, no matter what happens. It must be the blood' of all my own ancestors and his which ties me to this place. , It isn’t simply the beauty of it, though that helps; it’s simply that—well, there isn’t a field along this railway line which isn't made up partly of the clay of Courts and Peynells; and I'm Court and Peynell both. I can never escape, even if I wanted to. If I went to the end of the world, I should still be homesick for these woods and valleys. “In a few minutes now 1 should be able to see the Castle, but after a glorious day I’m afraid it’s going to be too dark to make out much of it. And from the station I can see my

okl home. All the land belonging to it was sold long ago, and a nephew of my husband’s makes the bouse his studio now; but at least I can go in and out when 1 please; and it was never stones that held men, but the most lasting things, every wave

in the river, every mote of the soil.” It was useless to try and finish the letter now, with the very unrest she was trying to describe running like a mill-race in her quickening blood. She folded the sheets away into her handbag, and slipped in the closed foun-tain-pen after them, and began to gather up the scattered encumbrances of her journey, the chocolates Lyddon had brought, the magazine she had bought in London, and scarcely opened. the yellow roses, her raincoat, her gloves. The train was already slowing for Court Brandon station. She sal forward, with her hand upon the windowstrap, straining her eyes through the blind twilight for any landmark, with a foolish dread in her mind that they would all be gone, that the desired beauty would have vanished beneath a waste of sand or sea. They were all there. She was carried, at slower and slower pace, past the three poplars, past the gamekeeper’s cottage with its peaked straw skeps of bees like a tiny Zulu kraal, past the-clumps of peonies at the near end of the platform, the rows of sentinel holly hocks, the tiny house of the bachelor station-master. She was home.

She raised her eyes, and saw above the near roofs of the smoke-blue shadowy slopes of trees, and far off the loom of the Castle on its immemorial hills. She was out of the train almost before it had stopped, and looking round her with an appreciative glance. All her misgivings vanished. The very air smelled as she remembered it. of lime trees in full bloom. Nothing was changed; nothing, she thought exultantly, could ever bo changed in this dimension the world had forgotten. The porter at the barrier knew her at once, and his face lit in a smile which macle her heart leap again. There was no longer any fear of finding herself forgotten, or her place filled. "You look surprised io see me," she said as she proffered her ticket. "Very pleasant surprise, too, Mrs Court, take my word for it. Everybpdy’ll be glad to see you back, and looking so well, too." "And I’m glad to be back, I can tell you. It seems much more than a year to me since I went away. There'll be my luggage Io sec to. but it doesn’t matter tonight. Will you get someone to bring it up in the morning?”

Once out of the station, and away from the choking narrowness of the railway carriages, the dusk was not so deep. She walked out into the lane smiling like a conqueror, with the old elastic step of the eightcen-year-old Catherine Peynell who had met and married Geoffrey Court ten years before. She could -almost, bring herself to believe that she was still that very girl, that she had never married, never been, either wife or widow, but only

and always the dryad she had first been, half of her an unreality married to the beauty of earth and air, half a steadfast memory of the soil itself, and of all the yeoman Peynells who went to make up the soil. At the meeting of the four lanes she stopped, and looked all round. There was the castle, and the hill on which it stood, a lofty distant rise beyond the near and slight one of the lane she faced. There was the smoke from the valley cottages, like a blue raft midway between earth and heaven cottages, like a blue raft midway between earth and heaven. There were the twisted chimneys of her father’s old farm, just showing out of the trees on her left hand. It was, she thought at first glance, exactly as before. Then a doubt assailed her. She did not know what was wrong, but there was something. The three-tops which should have shown like one big mushroom just above the skyline of the lane were no longer there. "They cut off the view from the grange windows," she thought, “and the new tenant didn't like it, and has had them cut down.’’ But she was not satisfied.

She went on, more quickly because she was afraid. A hundred yards ahead the lane was at its highest, before the slow, rambling drop through the village; and from that point she could see the river, the hamlet, the meadows and woods, spread in a narrow, gently rising amphitheatre before her. She reached it. and looked eagerly forward.

The dusk was not yet so heavy as to disguise the scene. She wished night had covered it. She stood quite still, while all the exultation, ebbed slowly and sadly from her mind. There had boon trees to the left and to the right of the straggling road which ran between the cottages. There were no trees now. only at the outlying edges of the fields where they had been there were still the broken stumps of them. Inward, towards The road, even those had been blasted out of the ground. Over the raw wounds there was spread a debris of progress, stacks of wooden beams covered with tarpaulin, one dr two large sheds of corrugated iron, a square red-brick building with frosted windows, the bright orange of heaps of sand, and the riper Indian red of neatly stacked now brick's. Contlnueif.