“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 March 1940, Page 10

“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

PETER BENEDICT.

.CHAPTER XXI. Catherine tapped at the office door, and a voice said: “Come in!" without very much interest. She was not sure whose voice it was, but she did not think it was his. It was a singular and disturbing thing that ’his’ could apply now only to one person in her mind, without question, without reserve, as if ther existed but one man, and that one was Adam Probert. She went in. A light was switched on over the desk; it lit only the face of the desk itself, and the forms of Adam Probert and Kenworth from the waists downward, where they stood close before it. Their faces were lost in the dusk above, but she saw them dimly, and knew that they were staring at her as if at a ghost. Kenworth had a slim despatch case and the evening paper- tucked under his arm, and every paper was cleared from the normally untidy desk. She guessed that in five minutes more they would both have been gone. She stood just within the doorway, and slowly closed the door behind her. until the latch clicked into place. “I’m sorry,” she said, “to break in upon you at this hour, but I should very much like to talk to you. Mr Probert, if you will spare me a few minutes"

Adam stepped back, and felt for the main switch upon the wall, and pressed it; and with dazzling suddenness they saw each other in the blaze of light, eyes fixed with the intensity of hypnosis, he and she staring at each other as they had stared at each other beside the sleeping pool, no one knew how many ages ago. Kenworth looked at them both, and stirred uneasily, somewhere in the background of thenthoughts. “Of course!” said Adam. “I won’t interrupt you,” said Kenworth. “As a matter of fact, I was just leaving, in any case. Perhaps, sir, you’ll take the keys for tonight—l can call for them tomorrow.” “Yes, I’ll see to them. Goodnight. Kenworth!” “Goodnight!” He passed close to Catherine; she saw his smile as something warm and friendly, for she was no longer an enemy; and there was something personally kind in the very young partisan’s glance now, as if he found something positive to like about her by virtue of the negative fact that she had withdrawn her enmity from his idol. She supposed, with something of a start, that even Mickey Dennis would like her now; and Court Brandon, too, would look at her in the same way. This man had become the touch stone of the place; she could communicate with the human part of her valley only through him. Well, she had always, from the night when she had walked into his arms in the darkness sense the power in him. “Good night, Mrs Court!” said Kenworth, and was gone. They were left alone. “Will you smoke?" asked Adam, proffering his case. “No, thank you.” “Do you mind if I do?' She made a small gesture of deprecation. “Please!” He lit his cigarette. The silence, after the scrape of the match, was profound. He moved to the blind window, and stood with his face averted from her, frowning darkly into the circle his thumb and fore linger made, with the glow of the cigarette set in it—exactly like a ruby in a ring. He turned, spinning on his heel with the suddenness of a thunder-clap. She saw the light strain taut over all the broad bones of his face.

"Why did you come here?" he said, quietly enough.~“Was it necessary? I’m a patient man. Mrs Court, but why should Ibe haunted like this? Do you think there can be any pleasure for me in this meeting?” “Im sorry!” said Catherine gently. “I don’t blame you for taking that attitude. and I’m glad that you let me see it. After all, you’re right; I never had any right to trouble you at all, and any reparation I can make now will be outbalanced before it’s made. I understand that very well." He smiled. “Do you? Did I say once that we seemed born with the talent for misunderstanding each other?"

Catherine hesitated, for the thread of her own mood, so laboriously schooled for this interview, was already broken. "I shan’t keep you very long. But there is something I can do, and —” ‘■But, Mrs Court," he said, with a little laugh of vexation and what she could only suppose to be the bitterness of outraged pride, "I don't want any reparation from you; you should know that you owe me none." "I didn't expect you to accept it very gratefully." She smiled for the first time. "But, you see, this is something you haven't the right to refuse. I want to give you my dingle." "To—to give me your dingle?" Adam came back to the desk, and stood staring at her across it. “You mean that? You really want But why?” "Because I know now what you wanted with it; and I should like them to have it—those people for whom nothing was too good in your eyes—Nancy and the others ” “Nancy?” he said dazedly. “She’s Mrs Dunning, and she lives in the first house; and she loves trees. Once you asked me to sell it to you. Notv will you let me give it to them? Please! I mean it.” "I believe you do," said Adam Prober t. "And you’ll take it? I'll get my lawyer to arrange it; the legal part of it But just now 1 wanted you to know that I meant what I had done: that it was all over.” ; She put her hands upon the desk, and the light fell full upon them as she

leaned towards him in her eagerness. “It wasn't that I surrendered to any power of yours, you see; but I really found out what was in your mind when you began this work; and after that—well, I was by your side every step of the way; I had to be. And the glade —you see, it's all I have."

She stopped; for he was no longer listening to her with more than half of his mind; the remainder was concentrated behind those fine eyes which had first troubled her consciousness. Adam Probert was staring at her spread, hands, white against the dark wood of the desk. Often he had seen them ungloved, folded over the edge of the witness box as she faced his counsel, and swinging her handbag against her knee in that characteristic way she had, as she walked through the streets of London magnificently inappropriate, or through the lanes of Court Brandon, where she so splendidly belonged. But the hands had looked different, then; there had been a hoop of diamonds upon the left one, glittering upon her marriage finger. Now it was gone; the two long, thin hands were wonderfully white and innocent of diamonds or any other gem. He liked them better so. He went to her side, slowly, and put his own upon them, and lifted them. He smiled at her. Her eyes were wide and dark. "Catherine!" he said, in a voice so low that it seemed only the echo, or the memory, of her name as he had said it once already that day, under the ash tree in the lane. "Catherine! Did you send him away?” “No.” she said, in a breathless whisper. “He how did you know?” “Do you think you can put his ring on and off, and I shall notice nothing?” He lifted the limp left hand, and held it before her face, and slowly and reverently kissed it. “What do you think I am?” he said fiercely, but very low. “A machine for getting plans passed by unwilling councils just to bother you? A mere vandal who doesn’t scruple at snatching your ground from under you to give to someone else?”

“You gave me something, too,” she said. “You gave me a better realisation of what I really valued, and what I really wanted. And I ought to thank you for that, at least.” “And Strang went away? did he?”

“Yes,” said Catherine, in a mere whisper. “Because he knew you weren’t for him, and never would be? He’s a better man than I took him for,” said Adam, and after that was silent for a long time, devouring her face with his incorrigibly inquisitive eyes, at such short range now that she felt herself flushing before them, and presently her own steadfast glance wavered and sank. “You don’t love him,” said Adam, challengingly; but it was a statement not a question. “No,” she admitted in a whisper. “Catherine Court,” he said, in a rush, and his arms went round her with an impetuosity she had never known in him, “you can’t—it isn’t possible that you—that you and I ?” He drew a long breath; he kissed her. It was not at all like that helpless kiss in the lane; it stirred none of the same feelings in her. perhaps because this time she had looked for it, had raised her face voluntarily to receive it. She knew that this was the moment for which she had been waiting all her life, long before Geoffrey had kissed her beside the pool in the valley long before she had even known him. This was the moment for which she should have waited and kept herself, looking neither to right nor left until it came to find her. And it seemed to matter less than nothing that it came at last in the unromantic dusk of a dreary winter day, without flower or tree or sun or moon to grace it, and in the prosaic setting of a small business office.

She knew it, at least, and it was all and more than she had dreamed it could be, so that for the first time in her proud and confident life she found herself afraid. She struggled in his arms, and drew herself away from the limit of their very gentle circle. " r 1 must go. Mabel will be wondering what's happened to me.” "Oh. no. you don’t!" said Adam, smiling. "Not until I know that you won’t escape me again. Not until I have an answer so definite that you can't get away from me. I never thought you were anything but a dryad; and now that I have you here, you must pay your ransom before I let you go. And even then I’m coming with you. Heaven knows I'm afraid to let you out of my sight. Catherine, look at me!" She looked. His face was very near. There seemed to her very little need of .words now between them. But she said helplessly, stirred by a last scruple for him: "But it’s so mad! Remember what I tried to do to you. You can’t—you can’t care for me. It isn’t possible?” “What have I to do with the possible?” said Adam Probcrt, with the old, cold-blooded arrogance. "Didn’t 1 love the very ground you walked on, and the trees that leaned over you, before ever I set eyes on you? And haven't 1 been in love with you from the distance where you kept me, ever since 1 saw you? And dare you tell me. now, this moment, that you never did it?" "I never did. I never realised that that could be " "That there was!’ "That there was anything but enmity between us." He laughed. Listen! Let us be clear. ! Catherine, I love you. Will you marry I

me?” She was silent, but she raised her eyes again, and suddenly there was nothing left to be done, except to fasten her arms around him, and close her eyes, and laugh and laugh until all the remaining doubts and regrets were laughed clean away out of her mind, washed away like thin autumn cobwebs before a high wind. For now. looking back, not even the labour and pain by which they had reached this consummation seemed to matter at all, not even the time they had wasted in being enemies, when they might have been loving each other; all that mattered was that the moment had not failed them, that she had the moon in her hands at last, and that it was all she had know it would be for beauty and grandeur. She went on laughing softly into his shoulder, that cleansing, renewing merriment, until all the years were laughed away from them, and they were like two very young children just setting out on the queer pilgrimage of their lives.

“I knew that it must end like this,’ he said at last, still smiling. "I knew from the very beginning, that you were the one and the only one. But sometimes, do you know, I doubted whether you would ever know it.” And presently they stirred reluctantly, and time came- back into some sort of consequence, and they went out into the full evening, and locked the office door behind them upon the echoes and fragrance of that laughter, which filled it from varnished floor to panelled ceiling.

They walked up the hill with linked arms, Adam and Catherine together in the dusk under the leaning shadowy trees, in that impossible and characteristic companionship which had begun without their volition, and could never be ended either by their will or against their will. It was all a little strange as yet, which was fitting, for the fusion was too recent to have become a familiar thought. A surprising peace filled them, none the less when they reached the gate below the head of the bluff, and paused to look down upon their city, a peace of accomplishment, as if their ambitions were one.

It was beyond dusk now, but not yet night, the hour between when light and shade have become shadow and darker shadow, in a hundred blues from cobalt to ultramarine, and as many greens from olive to the purest black. The bowl of the valley lay open before their eyes, dark and clear, luminous blue at the rim, and black within, the texure of the trees like velvet here and there, though all their leaves were fallen.

Now the newness of all those little houses was utterly lost, so that they seemed always to have been there under Catherines eyes. They had some form still, as neatly angular as in daylight but less sharply defined, and diminished by darkness to a distance like that of the stars. And stars they were, flung into the bowl in an extravagence of generosity, strings of them festooned across it, the little lit windows of Adam Probert’s people, of her people. There had never, in the old days whose passing she had mourned so bitterly, been such a radiance in the valley. Here, in sight of the issue which had parted them for so long, Adam drew her into the hollow of his arm again, as if he feared that his possession of her was still precarious. She turned bed head, and smiled at him and for a few moments they looked down together in silence. “I’m sorry.” he said presently, in a very low voice, “that I had to trade so much in return for that; you were right, you know. It was a high price for me. as well as for you so much of that inviolable beauty ” She put up her hand, and touched his shoulder. “But don’t you see? —It's more beautiful than ever before?" THE END. CONQUERING THE STRATOSPHERE “TIMES-AGE" NEW SERIAL. Having conquered the immediate atmosphere, the efforts of aircraft designers are now turned toward the stratosphere. The object in view is to construct an aeroplane, which, tearing ahead at the immensely increased speed which is possible only in the stratosphere, will enable a machine to fly round the world in a day. The man who makes this a commercial proposition will reap a fortune and make other methods of air travel hopelessly slow and old-fashioned. This is the subject of a new story by Alroy West, writer of vivid imaginative novels. In “STRATOSPHERE EXPRESS” which begins in the “TimesAge” tomorrow, the reader is introduced to “Queerways" Bessiter, who has perfected a design for a stratoplane. In a mysterious, concealed factory he is working on the construction of the plane, receiving daily checks from the unscrupulous agents of established air companies.

Assisted by Jim Storm and Manda Williams, Bessiter proceeds with his plans, and the result is a talc full of thrills and action, which those who have read any of Mr West's other stories (among which are “Messengers of Death” and "Hate Island") have come to expect.