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

in prayer and she held a Bible in her hands. In the picture on the opposite page, the girl's hair was unbound. It fell untidily and her face peeped out from the curtain of hair; the eyes were wild and there was a look of strangeness in the face that I found hard to define. The expression was in a way tortured, the eyes pleading; she looked as though she were trying to tell some secret and did not know how.

It was a horrible picture.

Then I saw the initial under it. "S."

I was quite shaken. I got out of bed and opened the cupboard door to look at the immature scratching there. I knew this was the same "S" who had written her message on the wall.

Who, I asked myself, was S?

Sleep had deserted me. I turned over the pages and studied the peaceful landscapes, the colored parts of the castle, hoping they would soothe me; but I kept seeing the wild eyes of S and the picture of Jago had taken me right back to those moments in the house in Finlay Square.

There was a further shock from that sketchbook—and this was the greatest of them all. I was telling myself that my mother had just been amusing herself and that it might be she had conjured up pictures out of her imagination . . . taking a face she knew well and adding touches to it to show how a line here and there could change the character.

I didn't really believe that but the thought was comforting.

I turned a page and gasped in amazement. My first thought was that I had fallen asleep and was dreaming, that this was a new way of getting into the dream. There it was on the page and there could be no doubt of it: the room of my dream!

There was the fireplace, the chimney seat, the rocking chair, the picture over the fireplace . . . everything was there as I had seen it in my dreams.

I was too stunned to do anything but stare at it.

One thought kept hammering on my brain: The phantom room existed. My mother had seen it. Could it be in the castle? But I had explored the castle.

The sketchbook fell from my hands and lay on the bed coverlet. What did it mean? What could it mean? I almost felt that the spirit of my mother was in this room and trying to get in touch with me through her sketchbook.

What did she know of Jago? She had seen him as two different men. And who was S who could look so demure and so wild?

But it was the picture of the room which haunted me. Where was that room? One thing I had learned: It must exist, for my mother knew it. She had sketched it in her book. It was there for me to see. It was no piece of imagination.

I tried to look back over the years to my grandmother's garden when we had sat together on the lawn and her sketchbook lay on the grass between us.

One thing I could now be sure of: The dream room existed. But where?

On Sanctuary Island

I slept fitfully that night and oddly enough I did not have my dream. The first thing I did when I was awake was to pick up the sketchbook, for I had an idea, which I didn't believe for more than a moment, that I had dreamed what I had seen in the book.

No. There it was. The room which I knew so well. But the picture of Jago looked different in daylight. Perhaps it was the candlelight which had made it seem sinister.

When Janet came in with my hot water I opened the sketchbook at the page where my mother had painted the dream room.

"What do you think of this room, Janet?" I asked, watching her closely.

"Oh, pretty, ain't it?"

"Have you ever seen that room?"

"Be it a real room then, Miss?"

It was clear that she had never seen it.

After breakfast Gwennol came to my room to see if I was ready.

"I've been looking through my mother's sketchbook," I said. "It's very interesting. Look at this picture of a room."

She looked and nodded.

"Do you know that room?" I asked.

She was clearly puzzled. "Know it? Should I? It's just an ordinary room."

An ordinary room! How odd to hear it so described! I wanted to say: That room has haunted me for as long as I can remember. If I could only find it I might understand why it is I dream about it and always feel in such an ordinary room such an overwhelming dread.

But I found it difficult to talk of it, so I said: "I wondered if it was somewhere in the castle."

She shook her head as though vaguely surprised that I should make so much of such an insignificant matter. She was not very interested in the pictures and no doubt put my preoccupation with them down to the fact that they had been painted by my mother.

At that moment there was a knock on the door. I called: "Come in," and Slack entered.

"What's wrong?" asked Gwennol.

" "Tis just, Miss Gwennol, that I thought we'd best get an early start because of the tide."

"You're right," said Gwennol. "And we're almost ready."

On impulse I took the sketchbook to Slack. I was determined to leave no stone unturned in my attempt to discover where that room was and how my mother had known it so well that she could reproduce it in every detail.

"Slack," I asked, "have you ever seen that room?"

He did not exactly change color—in fact, I never saw Slack other than very pale—but there was a change in his face. There was a tension about him and he kept staring at the page and did not look at me.

"You know it then?" I prompted eagerly.

" 'Tis a pretty room, Miss Ellen," he said slowly.

"Yes, Slack, but you've seen it before, haven't you?"

Was it my fancy or did