Brides of Aberdar Read Free Page B

poor wife in this gloomy place?’ and he was silent immediately and for many hours to come. She had no wish to wound; but why trouble with long argument when here was the sure, swift way to victory? He would be thankful in the end; men had to be managed, it was always so.
    Meanwhile…
    Meanwhile, eyes watched: ears listened. From another world, another life, another—somewhere—eyeless, yet other eyes watched, other lips communicated; mindless yet observed, made judgments: with no future, yet peered forward into the future—and waited. And voiceless, yet whispered.
    Brother and sister, voiceless—whispering. One day…
    One day, it will be time for us to go back there and haunt again.
    One battle Edward Hilbourne won against Tante Louise. ‘The nurse is too old and grim, the children must have someone younger and easier, someone kind.’
    ‘You do not suggest, mon cher Edouard, que je ne suis pas gentille vers ces enfants?’
    ‘No, of course not. I’m speaking of who ever has the actual care of them. They need someone not so old-fashioned as this one, not so strict and cold.’
    ‘It is necessary to have a nurse well-trained, one who knows the manners, what is comme il faut. They are mal-élevées. Their poor mother—’
    He interrupted as if he would not hear the words, repudiated them. ‘No one’s asking you to find some bouncing country girl. It’s not in fact a nurse they should have. They are over five years old, they need more lessons, they need a governess.’
    A chill doubt entered her heart. A governess—some bright, pretty young woman who would settle in, take over the children, take over the Squire himself—marry him, dispossess her of all that was left to her, now that she had given up her Parisian home and possessions. She determined upon resistance. ‘Oh, ho, a fine gouvernante—’
    But he interrupted her, unwontedly impatient: ‘Louise, please just do as I say. Find a young woman able to instruct them; and dismiss the nurse.’
    ‘Find! Dismiss! Is it for me to have your orders, Edouard? Am I not mistress here, do I not take the place of their mother?’
    He looked into the sallow frog face, the prominent grey-green eyes. He said flatly: ‘No.’ But, after all, who else would even try? ‘Nobody can do that,’ he said, more gently, ‘but I’m grateful to you for being here, Louise, truly grateful. I need you. Only, meanwhile, please do as I say, and find a suitable young person.’ He summoned a smile, dragged up from the depths of his desolate heart some shreds of the old, easy Hilbourne charm. He said in his excellent French, ‘You are far too intelligent, ma chère, not to know just what I mean. So please help me! Be kind!’ It always pleased her to hear her own tongue spoken. After all, he thought, she must be lonely too.
    ‘I will make the advertisement,’ said Tante Louise.
    So Tetty came—Miss Alys Tetterman, a neat compromise between the two schools of thought.
    No atmosphere, indeed, in which to mend a breaking heart. Dear heavens, thought Miss Tetterman, arriving, what a gloomy place! I shall have to get away, I could never bear it here…
    Lying in the lap of the low, thickly-wooded hill, with no outlook but across the gravelled drive and terraces (flowerless, but at least green-grassed now, for it was full summer and that poor young wife and mother had been three months dead), to the narrow stream of the Dar which gave the Manor its name, flowing on to feed the great river Severn, many miles away; across the stream and immediately to the up-rising slope of the opposite hill, closing it in. A long, two-storied building, begun as a simple manor house and since much added to—but altered in its early days, so that it had lost nothing of its Tudor characteristic. No stripes of black and white, but built of brick and stone, an ungainly sort of house, stout pillars holding up its heavily-brooding portico, three sets of projecting oriel windows divided into many squares of