Lord of the Far Island, Victoria Holt [world of reading TXT] 📗

It was small wonder that both her husband and daughter felt at a disadvantage. Oddly enough, I did not. I had long made up my mind that Cousin Agatha's good works brought as much satisfaction to herself as to anyone else and I believed that when they failed to do that they would cease. She sensed this lack of appreciation in me and deplored it. She did not like me; not that she was greatly enamored of anyone but herself; yet somewhere at the back of her mind she must have appreciated the fact that her husband provided the money which made it possible for her to live as she did, and as for Esmeralda, she was her only child and therefore must be given a little consideration.

I, however, was the outsider, and not a humble one. She must have noticed the smile which I could not keep from my lips when she was talking of her newest schemes for the good of someone. There was no doubt that she sensed in me a reluctance to conform. She would convince herself, of course, that it was due to the bad blood which I had inherited from my father's side, though she protested that she knew nothing else of that connection.

Her attitude was apparent in my first few years in her household. I was about ten years old when she sent for me.

"I think it is time, Ellen," she said, "for you and me to have a talk."

There was I, a sturdy ten-year-old—with a mass of almost black hair, dark blue eyes, a short nose and a rather long stubborn chin.

I was made to stand before her on the great Persian rug in the room she called her study, where her social secretary wrote her letters and did most of the committee work for which she took the credit.

"Now, Ellen," she said to me, "we must come to an understanding. We want to make clear your position in the household, do we not?" She did not wait for an answer but went on. "I am sure you cannot fail to be grateful to me . . . and to Cousin William Loring [he was her husband] for keeping you in our household. We could, of course, on the death of your mother have put you into an orphanage, but because you are of the family . . . though the relationship could scarcely be said to be a close one... we have decided that you must be given our protection. Your mother, as you know, married a Charles Kellaway. You are a result of this marriage." Her large nose twitched a little, which showed the contempt in which she held both my parents and their ensuing offspring. "A rather unfortunate marriage. He was not the man who was chosen for her."

"It must have been a love match," I said, for I had heard about it from Nanny Grange, whose aunt had been Cousin Agatha's nanny and was therefore quite knowledgeable about past family affairs.

"Pray," went on Cousin Agatha, "do not interrupt. This is a very serious matter. Your mother, against her family's wishes, went off and married this man from some outlandish place of which we had never heard." She looked at me very severely. "In something less than a year you were born. Soon after, your mother left her new home irresponsibly and came back to her family, bringing you." "I was three years old," I said, quoting Nanny Grange.

She raised her eyebrows. "I did beg you not to interrupt. She had nothing . . . simply nothing. You and she became a burden to your grandmother. Your mother died two years later."

I had been five years old at the time. I remembered her vaguely: the suffocating embraces which I loved and the feeling of security which I did not recognize until she was gone. There was a hazy picture in my mind of sitting on cool grass, with her beside me, a sketchbook in her hand. She had always been sketching, and she used to hide the book from my grandmother. I sensed, of course, that she was in some sort of disgrace and it used to make me happy to think of myself as a kind of protector. "You love me, don't you, Ellen?" she would say. "No matter what I've done." Those words rang in my ears when I thought of her and I was always so impatient with myself for my five-year-old incompetence in not understanding what was going on.

"Your grandmother was scarcely of an age to bring up a child," went on Cousin Agatha.

No, I thought grimly. She had seemed incredibly old to me with her tight lips, her cold eyes and the little white cap without which I never saw her—a formidable old lady who struck terror into me when I realized that I was now alone and had lost that loving conspirator and companion and that in future I must extricate myself from the continual trouble which seemed to dog me. Fortunately I was naturally resilient and managed to cultivate a stoical indifference to reproaches and appeals to God as to what would become of me. I could not feel grief when my grandmother died and I made no attempt to pretend I did.

"When your grandmother died," added Cousin Agatha, "she asked me to care for you and so I gave her my solemn promise on her deathbed. I am determined to carry it out. You must realize that it is only because I have taken you into my house that you are not in an orphanage, training to give service in some household as a maid or, perhaps if you showed an aptitude for learning, a governess. However, I have brought you here and you share Esmeralda's lessons; you live as a member of my family. Pray remember it. I do not ask for gratitude but I expect it. Do not think that