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

forgave Effie. . . ." He shook his head. "I shouldn't be speaking to you like this about your own father."

"What I want is to get at the truth. If it's unpleasant I have to face it. I'd rather know it all and see it clearly than have it dressed up to look pretty to please me."

"You must forgive me," he said. "I was carried away. Your father and I were not on speaking terms. When he was alive he wouldn't have had me on the Island. If I had put a foot there someone would have been ordered to throw me into the sea."

"Well, I hope that unhappy situation is over now."

"Oh, these family feuds get carried on for generations. They exist when the families don't know the original cause of the quarrel. Did we ever know what was the start of the trouble between the Montagues and Capulets? I wouldn't go to Kellaway Island now—just wouldn't dream of it. I'm content to stay at Blue Rock."

"You enjoy your little island all to yourself."

"It suits me. I paint most of the time I'm there and then I go up to London to arrange exhibitions and see other people's. I come to the mainland and put my pictures in shop windows hoping that art-conscious, beauty-loving young ladies will come along and buy them."

"I'm glad I saw "The Gulls' and I'm glad it's yours. I hope my appreciation of your picture has done something to break through a little of the feud."

He smiled at me. "It's miraculous," he said, "that you could be his daughter."

It had been an interesting afternoon, and after I had rowed myself back with the picture I set it up in my room and studied it.

Then I put it away, for if I was going to give it to Jago it would have to be a secret until Christmas.

It was a golden October and people were talking about an Indian summer. The days were warm and hazy and there was no sign of the gales. Jago said it was hardly possible that we should avoid them altogether and that they had probably delayed their visit until November.

I took the Ellen out every day. I loved to row round the Island. The place was growing on me. Jago used to talk to me about the troubles of the various people and I was beginning to know a few of them. They accepted me and I was gratified when they appeared to like me, and I felt especially delighted when they hinted what a good landlord Jago was.

"Stern," said one old woman, "but just. You've got to keep your cottage neat and clean and the garden shipshape, then he'll see your roof's mended if the need arises."

It was a lovely afternoon with a rather hazy sun visible through the slightly misty atmosphere. My thoughts were with the people of the Island—not so much those who lived there at this time, but those vague figures of the past whom it was so difficult, on the flimsy evidence available, to bring to life.

Why was I so anxious to know about the lives of people who were gone?

"Idle curiosity," Philip would have said.

"Oh, you always want to know everything," I could hear Esmeralda telling me. "Particularly about people."

Yes, it was true. But there was something more. I could not help feeling that my life was interwoven with those of the people who had lived here and that there was some reason why it was important to me to know what had happened to them.

Never far from my thoughts was Jago himself. My feelings for him were so varied that he was of perpetual interest to me. I often looked at the pictures in my mother's sketchbook, from which I would not be parted. She, too, had been aware of a dual personality. But then she had felt the same about Silva. Perhaps she had meant to convey that there were two sides—and often more—to everyone's character. My father, for instance. He seemed to have been very difficult to live with and yet both my mother and Effie must have been in love with him at one time to have married him.

I shipped the oars and drifted on the tide. It was so beautiful with the faint cool breeze on my face and that benign reddish sun up there. The clouds drifting slowly in the wind were taking on weird shapes. There was a face up there—a woman's face, a nutcracker of a face—and I immediately thought of Tassie. Dark shadows hovering over all of us, she had said. "Be watchful." Had that been an oblique reference to some danger threatening me, or was it just the fortuneteller's jargon? When I was with Jago it had been all the "happy ever after if you take the right turning" theme. Wouldn't that apply to anybody? Wasn't there a "right turning" in everybody's life which if taken at the flood leads on to greatness ... or happiness, which was more to be desired? I was misquoting and mixing metaphors but truth was there.

I had drifted nearly a mile out from the Island, I should think. Perhaps I ought to go back.

As I moved the oars I stared at the bottom of the boat in sudden consternation. Water was seeping in.

I bent forward and felt with my hand. The water was very shallow so the boat had only just started to leak. I touched the bottom of the boat. There was something sticky on my hand. It looked like sugar.

Even as I looked the water started to come in faster. The whole of the bottom of the boat was covered now. I seized the oars and started to row for the Island as fast as I could.

The Ellen had sprung a leak. There was no doubt of that. How far off the Island seemed! The boat was going to sink at any moment and I was not a strong swimmer.

It was sooner than I expected. The