“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 February 1940, Page 10

“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

PETER BENEDICT.

CHAPTER 111 i (Continued.) “You’re the native. Who owns tha coppice across the road there? Th< place fascinates me. I know it's pri vate, but I’ve been in it several times and I think it gets better every time.' “Oh, that belongs to Mrs CourtCaptain Court’s widow. They used t< be a very considerable family in these parts; but there never was a Couri who could keep a shilling in his pocket a moment longer than was necessary They’ve got nothing now. They—well, there’s only this girl; she owns thal scrap, and a little house higher up the valley almost on top of that bluff on the right, and an income just big enough to keep her in—well, I suppose most of us would call it comfort, but there’s not much to spare. I believe you can see her- house from here.” He came to the doorway to find it. and at last identified a tiny triangle of dull red between the distant tree-tops as the corner of the roof. “I’d forgotten the trees were in such full leaf,” he said apologetically, pointing with the pen from behind his ear. “Later on. of course, the whole house is exposed. It’s a decent enough little place, of course, but when you remember they once had the Castle, and something like a quarter of a million to play with—but that was a couple of hundred years back ” He stopped, so suddenly that Adam asked at once: “What’s the matter?” “Talk of the angel—there is Mrs Court now, just coming out of the dingle. She’s been abroad, getting over a car smash that knocked her about pretty badly, and killed her husband. Finelooking woman, isn’t she?’’ Adam Probert did not answer. He had forgotten Kenworth, and the whole two hundred of his plans with him; he was staring at the white gate, and the girl who had just emerged from it and was latching it behind her; a girl in a suit and hat of expensive cut, who walked steadily away along the lane with the grand gait of a mountain nymph. CHAPTER IV. Catherine walked up the hill very slowly, dangling her handbag listlessly against her knee. On either side of her the trees still ran upward green and straight, but the fringe on her left was thinner now, and the sky flashed here and there through its tracery of branches. The change troubled the balance of her mind, but she could not keep her eyes from it. She had spent a fruitless morning; unless, that is, she had gained by the knowledge that she had no supporters not one among the whole of the Council not one among the farmers; no one in the whole of Court Brandon except Perry, who would back her up to the last ounce of his weight no matter what she did', but who had no hope to offer her.

• She stopped at the top of the hill, and leaned upon the field-gate which severed the hedge almost opposite her own door. It was a good gate on which to lean, or it had been until that day. It commanded the whole sweep of the valley below, me curve of the village street between the dull brown of houses and shops, and the dusting of cottages round the shining meadows, and the quaint coloured outcrops of farms and barns; and all the rest had been, as long as she could remember, a shimmering green and silver of woods and waters, wonderful, sinking to the rapids of the river, swelling to the crests of the hills where the Castle stood, like the enchanted still world of a painting. The mists came up from the river every morning and made a serpent of blue cloud across the fields; and sometimes, in the noons of hot days, she had actually heard arise out of the dells below the cool, satisfying sound of Court Brandon’s dozen streams falling here and there in a hundred little waterfalls among the thirsty whispering trees. Now she leaned her chin upon her palms, and looked down upon one great open wound, raw with new red blood of sand, and dust, and brick stretching from field to field, from lane to lane; as if some horrible skin disease had broken out over that so lovely face, and blotted it from her sight for ever.

Even the silence had departed; the activity of men among the building sities, the coming and going of cars and lorries which she saw as a pestilence of crawling beetles, seemed to infect the air even in her eyrie with a medley of sounds, none of them in keeping with the Court Brandon she desired.

She put up her hand with a heavy sigh, and pulled off the smart little hat and threaded her fingers through her hair. There was a curious ache there in her head; she could have understood it better if it had been in her heart, but perhaps the eloquence the odious eloquence of all the morning's voices had left the pain there after the confusion of their arguments had ceased.

It had been a bad omen, that meeting with him at the foot of the stairs in the Council Office, a symbol of the whole matter; for there, as in all things he had got his blow in first. Catherine found herself speculating somewhat bitterly upon Adam Probert. She admired, while she hated, the calm assurance in him which could suffer his eyes to dwell so frankly upon her as she had met and passed him. had examined her from head to foot, and assessed among her good points the beauty of her eyes and the fit of her shoes with equally detached approval for each. A dangerous man because he could not be swayed by any emo-1 lion; she was as sure of that as if she! had known him all her life. To provoke him would be difficult, and to in-

duce in him any personal gentleness virtually impossible. A hard man. reaping where he- had not sown, and all the rest of it; something almost Biblical about him in sober truth, so essentially sure of himself was he, and so ruthless. But how Perry must itch to model the grand bone-structure of his face! In her attitude to Adam Probert the man Catherine could be as unmoved as he; but Adam Probert the institution, the public benefactor, the housing profiteer, the absolute of vandalism, had to be destroyed. She knew that now; not only for the saving of what could be saved out of that pitiful wreckage in the valley but for her own saving, too. She had been too long away; it was almost an obsession in her now, this unresting agony after the Court Brandon which was gone for ever, dead and in its semi-detached red-brick grave. Her life lay buried with it. Young as I she was, she had ceased to feel any pleasure in living, but for this gnawing hunger which she supposed was for vengeance as much as for honest redress. He should go, and he should pay her high for what he had already done; but heaven alone knew how. She had been to see every available member of the' District Council, and with one voice they had talked of progress, so vigorously, and with such eloquence, that she was sure they did not themselves believe one word of it. Mrs Druce had been particularly sentimental over the possibilities of the new houses, Mr Washburn particularly oily in his compliments to herself. Mr Beardsley was brusque in his hypocrisies, as if he hardly thought the deception worth so much trouble. They acknowledged that Court Brandon had been a beauty spot, but could not see that it would cease to be one when it had lost its trees, and most of its minor waters had been drained; besides, there was progress to be considered; they must move with the times. It had been something of a relief to talk to Redfern, that hungry-eyed idealist, after so much honeyed elo-

quence; for though he talked in the same vein, he did at least mean what he said. How he could believe in the altruism of such a business man and

such a business she could not imagine; but Redfern could believe in anything if he gave his mind to it. Catherine sighed, and went on to her own cottage, which stood almost on the brow of the bluff, so that its front windows overlooked the same sweep downward into the valley. She almost regretted that now, though her eyes were for ever drawn down to the translated view. But this at least was her own, though she feared for the level span on either side of it if Adam Probert should run short of land. It was an old cottage, and not what a modern would have thought convenient in the way of houses, though it had been transformed by electric light and a new bathroom at the time when she had moved into it. The doors were broad and very low, and the ceilings low, too, but not uncomfortably low except to people of Perry’s nervous sensitivity; and the rooms were big and astonishingly well supplied with air and light, two things she loved with all her heart. She entered it always with a grateful sense of closing a door upon the world; and she had many more regrets and fears now upon which to close it.

Mabel met her in the hall, a Mabel whose senerity was slightly ruffled by the fact that she was late for lunch; for Mabel was everything, from cook to nurse, and carried the responsibilities of all her offices with great seriousness.

Catherine changed he? dress, and lunched alone, in a silence which was palpably full of thought. She had left the table, and was sitting beside the open window, with the morning paper spread listlessly in her lap, when Mabel entered in rather more haste than was usual with her. It was always easy to decipher the matter of Mabel s messages by the manner of hei entrance; and this was curiosity nicely keyed, but without excitement. “There arc two gentlemen to see you, ma am, she announced, stooping in the doorway, her shrewd eyes which had watched Catherine grow from babyhood to womanhood watching her now with a dog's intelligent anxiety. “Oh, do we know them? What do they want?”

“I don’t know, ma'am, what their business is; but I showed them into the sitting room. And I think maybe you'd better see them, because one of them is Mr Probert himself.”

“Mr Probert!" Catherine was on her feet in an instant; she stood suddenly, calculatingly still, the newspaper crumpled in her hand.

“What does he want with me? What does he know about me?"

The hope came that he already knew how she hated him. but it was impossible that he should know. “Yes, I'll see them," she said in a low and steady voice, and went slowly from the room.

Nothing stirred in her mind now; she walked across the hall, without so much as a tremor of her heart, her mind an ominous blank. It was like the moment of prayer before a battle. She entered the sitting-room, and instantly saw him; he leaped from that old and gentle background as he leap-, ed from the background of blonde woodwork in the Council office, as something superbly alive and powerful. He could not be ignored. For several minutes she scarcely noticed Mickey Dennis in her preoccupation with Adam Probert. i (To be Continued.)