X

He stood behind me, looking down at the picture, and he did not speak. I dared not lift my gaze from the glowing scene. All the emotion that welled up in me was one with the picture.

“Do you remember the olive trees?” he asked after a time.

I nodded. The olive trees were not in the painting, but I would never forget the way they flowed down the gorge far beneath our hotel windows—a solid phalanx of olive trees marching toward the Gulf of Corinth. The stream had narrowed as it entered the gorge, then widened as the silver-gray torrent poured down toward the plain. Once we had seen the trees on a day of storm, with all their silver branches atoss, so that the illusion of flowing seemed real.

Justin dropped to one knee beside me—and was too close. So close that I dared not move. He reached past my shoulder to point out the sacred way that men had climbed through all those centuries since the Oracle had last spoken at Delphi. His finger traced the path, curving back and forth among the ruins, as once our own feet had traced it.

“We climbed to the top,” he said in my ear. “Up through the amphitheater, and out into the open where the stadium still stands.”

I remembered. It had been early in the morning on a day of wind and sun, with a glorious blue sky overhead and the warmth of Greece wiping England’s damp out of our bones. We had been ahead of the tourists and we’d had all that beauty to ourselves as we climbed to a grassy field above the stadium, with only the sky overhead.

My voice was a small thing that seemed to stick in my throat. “Where did it go—what we had then? How did we lose it?”

“It hasn’t been lost to memory,” he said, quite gently. “It’s still there in time. But we can never again be the two people we were then.”

I laid the picture on the floor and put my face in my hands. I could not bear it that we could never go back to Delphi and be once more the lovers we had been.

I felt Justin’s hand slip beneath the fall of my hair in the old way, bridging the column of my neck with his palm. Only then did I look up at him. I leaned my head against the support of his hand and looked into his eyes. His own seemed to shine with a dark light and he put his mouth upon mine. It was a strange kiss—sudden and quick, both fierce and tender—all in an instant. I could neither respond nor repudiate. His lips touched mine and were gone.

He stood up and pulled me not ungently to my feet. “Perhaps we can talk a little now,” he said. “Perhaps for once we can use words without quarreling and accusation.”

I could not keep from shaking as I followed him into the next room. I was glad to sit down quickly in a chair near his desk. Without staring about me, I knew the room had changed very little since the last time I had seen it—that desperate, angry time. It was a man’s room, done with taste and restraint in hues of deep brown and burnt umber, with slashes here and there of scarlet and yellow—in pictures, in draperies, in the deep warm red of the rug. Justin went to a window embrasure and stood looking out upon green rain.

“I don’t want you to be unhappy,” he said. “I don’t want you to be driven to such foolish action as you tried to take last night. I was furious with you then—that you should be so stupid as to try such a measure. Now I’m only sorry.”

Only sorry, I thought. What a dreadful thing it is when a man you love is only sorry for you.

“Why do you believe Marc instead of me?” I asked.

He turned from the window. “Eve, you were out of your head at the time. You couldn’t know what you were doing. I saw you. I saw how you fought to get away from us.”

“I was carried to that parapet,” I told him. My voice would not behave, but at least it was not angry or querulous—just uneven from my quick breathing.

He waved his hands despairingly. “All right. It doesn’t matter now. I’m sure your dream seems real to you. The important thing is where do you go from here?”

“Where do we go?” I said.

“We go by separate roads,” he told me. “What are the clichés? Our bridges are burned, the dies are cast. There’s no turning back.”

I stood up and went slowly toward him. I had to walk around the end of the great carved bed, and I did not want to look at that bed. When I came close to him I stood braced, with my feet apart, and my hands clasped behind my back to hold them still, and I looked up at him without trying to hide what I felt.

“If you’re through loving me,” I said, “then I’ll have to go away. There’s nothing else I can do. You needn’t worry about what you think happened last night. I’d really never do a thing like that. But first you have to tell me you’re through with ever loving me.”

He took me by the hand, drew me up steps into the stone embrasure of the window where two cushioned seats faced each other. Gently he thrust me into one seat, and took the other himself. We sat with our knees nearly touching—yet did not touch each other at all.

“What happened to us was complete insanity, Eve. We both threw good sense to the winds and tried for the impossible. We believed in something that was never real. It didn’t work out and it would not again. I am no more the husband for you than you are the wife for me. Surely neither of us wants to repeat what happened before. I could never give you what you need, never fulfill the demands you must always make upon a man. I understand why you make such demands, and so do you. But that doesn’t make them easy to live with. What’s more, there are needs of mine that you never wanted to fulfill. You never wanted to be a wife for Athmore. Now I’m committed elsewhere—to a woman whom I did not treat very well when you burst into my life. It’s not in me to let her down twice.”

I could not bear the way his eyes searched my face. I could not endure knowing there was kindness in him toward me—and nothing else. I would almost rather have him angry, hating me. But anger was the old way, the wrong way. Had I grown up a little, or had I not?

“Once Maggie told me that you and Alicia never meant to marry,” I said. “She told me Alicia was irresponsible and reckless and that you never quite trusted her.”

There was a pause before he answered, and I knew he was restraining an impulse to quick temper. “And did you prove that you could be trusted?” he asked coldly. “Alicia has matured, changed, but I wonder if you have? I wonder if you’ve any idea how much Alicia would bring to Athmore as a wife—that you could not?”

The words were cruel—and honest.

“I know,” I said helplessly. “I really do know all the ways in which I failed us both and how little I brought to Athmore. I’m only beginning to find out who I am, and what I’d like to be.”

“Eve—Eve!” His eyes were kind again—and too pitying. “It’s not like you to be humble. Don’t play a new role that may not fit you either.” He reached for my hand and held it tightly in reproach. “A good deal of what happened was my fault. There’s no need for you to take all the blame. I’ve never been a patient man and I should have known better than to attempt the impossible. But there is no going back for either of us, whatever our faults or virtues. What is past is past. There’s time ahead for you to make a new life. We can’t go back to—to—” He broke off and his grip on my hand tightened.

“To the olive trees?” I said.

“Exactly. Or to anything else we had for a little while in the beginning. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wise enough to stop what was happening before it ran away with us.”

“And this time you are.” Having stated a fact, I took my hand from him gently, without snatching. There was no anger left in me.

For a few moments longer I sat looking out the window. The view from this part of Justin’s room was over the front terrace and driveways. I saw the white car as it came around the curve to stop before the house. Alicia wore a shiny vinyl raincoat that matched her car and she made a flash of brilliant white against green shrubbery as she ran toward the front door.

I looked at Justin. He was watching me rather warily and had not seen the approaching car. Far be it from me to tell him he had a visitor. I slipped down from the embrasure and left him there as I walked out of the room. There was more which needed to be said, but I knew I would never say it. If I tried I would break down, and that I would not have. Especially not with Alicia Daven on her way into the house. The house that could have been mine.

In order to avoid her I followed the corridor to the rear stairs and went down to the ground floor. My green trench coat was not where I had left it on the rack by the back door. Instead, Dacia had hung her wet orange coat there, apparently preferring my dry one. Escape from the house was what I wanted and I put on her coat and my own rainboots, found a kerchief in her pocket and tied it over my head.

Outside, the topiary garden seemed oppressively green amid an overwhelmingly green and drizzling world. I went around the side of the house, past tall drawing-room windows. At one of these I caught a gleam of white and knew that Alicia stood watching. At once I turned my back on the house and hurried toward the path that led through rainy woods in the direction of the ruins.

I wanted only to get off by myself—yet I felt uneasy as the woods closed about me, somberly green and awhisper with the sound of rain. English rain is seldom drenching and I slowed to a stroll, unmindful of the wet, though Dacia’s coat was shorter than I liked. It was not about Alicia, or the eerie feeling of rainy woods that I wanted to think. Justin had convinced me of several things. He believed in his debt to Alicia because he had hurt her badly in the past, and he believed that she had changed and matured. He believed that the course he meant to take was right and just. But he had not yet convinced me that what had existed between us was hopelessly lost.

“Dogged,” my father had once called me. Very well—I would be dogged! Prejudiced I certainly was. I could not believe that it was either right or just for Justin to marry Alicia. Even if he never looked at me again, she was not worth his loving. Once I had thought her everything an Englishwoman should be—everything I was not. I had accepted her baiting helplessly, not recognizing it for what it was, not seeing how cleverly she concealed what she was doing from Justin. Now I knew better. I saw through the sham, and I knew that Maggie did too, and that Justin must eventually. But if there was to be disillusionment for him, it might come too late as far as I was concerned.

Somewhere in the distance I heard the sound of a car. It came from across Athmore land and I could not tell whether it traveled some outside road, or followed the test course within. Probably it was the former. This was no day for testing a car.

It was drizzling harder than before, and I began to hurry through the woods. The sound of the car was quickly lost in the nearer sounds of rain as it dripped about me from every tree branch and leaf. The woods were too wet by this time to offer shelter and I hurried toward the arches and walls of the old ruins. There I would find some stony nook in which to be quiet and think. Far away from the house, where I could balance one thing against another and gain some sort of perspective. Balance Justin’s kiss against all else. That, at least, had been unplanned. There was in him still the wild, unruly impulses of the young man I’d known. Impulses that were still at war with more sober reason, for all that he wore his self-control like armor these days.

There was a sudden explosion of sound, as of a car accelerating sharply not far away. Who could be out on a day like this? I began to run toward the place where the woods opened upon the course, but by the time I reached the road whatever car had passed was gone. I heard it roaring away, the sound diminishing for a moment or two, and then breaking off completely—which was strange in itself.

The eerie quality of the forest on either hand, silent now, except for the dripping, increased my sense of uneasiness. I stepped out upon a shiny wet pavement, ducking my head against the rain, stamping mud from my boots as I hurried along the open stretch of road. The curve lay ahead that separated me from the path. There was no longer any sound of a car, but I did not want to linger in the open. Once more I began to run, as though it were suddenly a matter of life or death to escape from the road before something dreadful happened. This was the way I had felt last night when I climbed to the roof for the second time, and I was beginning to believe in my own sense of premonition. This road was too far from the house, and far more open than I liked.

As I ran along the pavement’s edge I brushed past wet shrubbery that slapped at me, weighted by the rain, and almost fell as I stumbled over something which lay across the roadway at my feet. Something which lay face down and unmoving, clad in a green trench coat, with a plastic hood covering the head. A coat of hunter’s green, streaked by scarlet threads that ran in the rivulets of rain.

I stood staring down at the still figure for a moment of almost supernatural horror. It was as though I had come upon a visualization of my own death, as though I could not move because I was no longer alive. Then I dropped to my knees beside the figure, knowing very well who it must be. The plastic hood almost covered her face, and as I moved it apprehensively I saw the blood from some dreadful wounding of her head. Dacia’s eyes were closed, her face empty of life. As I stared in that instant of frozen horror I seemed to hear her own words echoing through my mind about tomorrow never coming—that it would be like that for us one of these days. Dacia who had been so full of life—

I found my voice then and began to call for help. It was Justin I shouted for, my voice rising above the rain sounds with the wind helping me as it blew toward the house. Justin heard me and shouted an answer that came to me distantly, faintly. Long before he reached me I could hear him crashing through the woods in my direction. There were others as well, running behind him. I could hear the thud of feet, the thrashing of wet brush, and I stopped screaming to listen again for any sound of the car that had hunted Dacia down and had not stopped to help her. There was nothing to be heard except the rain and the sound of running. I knew without doubt what had happened and that evil was intended. There was nothing to do but stumble to my feet and wait at the side of the road, huddled in Dacia’s orange coat, while she lay dead in mine. A pawn’s death had been intended. I was the pawn, not Dacia. She had been mistaken for me.

Justin gave me scarcely a glance as he came around the curve and crossed the road. All his attention was for the girl in green—green with that dreadful scarlet trim.

“Eve!” he cried as he bent over her. “Eve, my darling!” He picked her up in his arms and blood streaked the plastic hood as it fell across her face, washing away in the rain. The truth was in his eyes, his voice, his words. Never again would I doubt that he loved me—but this was too tragic a price to pay for the knowledge.

Marc and Nigel came into view beyond and Justin carried Dacia toward them. I hurried beside him, choked with emotion—for him, for Dacia, unable to speak. Finally he looked at me—looked past the orange coat and into my eyes, then at the face of the girl he carried.

“A car struck her down,” I told him breathlessly. “A car struck her and didn’t stop!”

For the space of an instant I saw his stark relief and my heart leaped exultantly. The feeling was no more than a flash between us because all concern must be for Dacia.

Marc recognized me at once and made no mistake about the coat I wore. He knew it was Dacia whom Justin carried.

“Give her to me,” he said. There was bitterness in him as he took the slight figure into his arms and looked past her at me. I knew very well that he would prefer me dead, if that would bring Dacia back to life. Here and there on his face scratches flamed red—marks which my own fingernails had left.

Already Justin was hurrying ahead. He did not see his brother’s look or hear his words.

“You changed coats with Dacia and this happened,” Marc said and the accusation was clear. As though I had done this to harm Dacia and save myself.

I walked behind him on the path, possessed by such horror as I had never felt before. Horror for Dacia—horror for me. Yet no matter how disturbing was my fear, there was something else as well—something to comfort me. I need no longer doubt that Justin loved me.

Nigel fell quietly into step beside me. He had heard Marc’s words, if Justin had not. At least Nigel would listen, and I found myself trying to explain.

“Dacia’s coat was wet, so she took mine and left her own behind. I had nothing else to wear, so I put hers on. I didn’t know she had come this way too. I heard a car, and I ran toward the road and found her lying there.”

“Who would have a car out on the course on a day like this?” Nigel said.

I could only shake my head. We had reached the place where the path opened upon Athmore lawns, and as though in answer to his question a white figure came running toward us—not from the direction of the house, but from the topiary garden behind. It was Alicia Daven in her shiny wet coat.

“What has happened?” she cried to Marc. “Has Eve been hurt? I heard shouting and I came this way.”

Vaguely I wondered why she was outdoors at all, when I had last seen her standing at a drawing-room window. Some question must have crossed Nigel’s mind too, and I knew by the look he gave her that he did not like or trust this woman.

Marc told her coldly what had happened as he walked ahead of us carrying Dacia, and she listened with an air of anxiety that did not seem altogether real. She was anxious enough, but I sensed that it was for another cause.

The scene in the Hall of Armor almost repeated the night of the fire, except that now there was no excited Dacia dancing about, and Maggie was not there either. Someone went to look for her, and after a delay she came into the hall to take quiet, efficient charge.

“I stopped upstairs to ring the doctor,” she said to Marc. “He’ll take care of getting an ambulance here.”

“It’s too late,” Marc said savagely and laid his burden upon a couch. As he leaned above Dacia I thought I had never seen so grieving a look upon his face. It seemed that Marc could care genuinely about someone, after all.

Justin reached past his brother to take Dacia’s wrist between his fingers. After a moment he shook his head. Maggie gave him a small pocket mirror and he held it to the girl’s parted lips. We all stood motionless, bound by a common dread. Slowly a faint mist clouded the glass. A spark of life still flickered in Dacia’s young body. Marc sat beside her holding her hand, whispering to her softly, trying to coax back her fighting spirit.

Through all this Alicia stood a little apart, quiet and hardly noticed, her hands thrust deep into the slash pockets of her coat. Only I found myself looking repeatedly her way, wondering what it was I sensed in her that made me distrustful and uneasy.

Once Nigel, watching at a front window, turned to look at her speculatively. “Where did you leave your car, Alicia?” he asked.

I heard her quick intake of breath. She did not answer him directly, but turned to Justin. “I left it at the front door. I waited in the drawing room for you. When you didn’t come, I went to the front windows and looked out—and found my car gone. That’s why I went outdoors. It wasn’t in the garage area and I was trying to find out who had taken it, where it had gone.”

Marc did not speak, or raise his gaze from Dacia’s face, but I saw the quick turning of Maggie’s head as she stared at Alicia.

The woman appeared not to see her look. “We must find my car,” she said.

Justin gave quick orders and the search was on.

Shortly after, the ambulance arrived, and the doctor. The police followed, since Justin had phoned for them. Marc went off with Dacia to the hospital and no one made any effort to prevent his leaving. I felt a further twinge of uneasiness as he walked out the door. Maggie watched him, and I knew she was uneasy too.

The constable questioned Justin, and then the rest of us, and we all answered as best we could. What seemed to emerge was the picture of a hit-and-run accident. Someone had struck Dacia down, then panicked and fled. The police were quietly purposeful. This sort of thing was not new to them. I wondered what they thought of two accidents so close together at Athmore.

No one mentioned the switch in coats, or any possible intent to kill. Yet Marc had believed in this, and so did I. In fact, I might have blurted everything out if it had not been for Maggie. She came to sit beside me and once she put a hand upon my arm. “Wait—don’t judge,” she seemed to warn me, as plainly as though she had spoken. So I was silent, for the moment at least.

Eventually someone came to report finding Alicia’s car on the test course, not far from where Dacia had been struck down. The front fender was dented and a headlight bore the marks of a severe impact. The girl must have been struck and flung to the side of the road while the white car was going at high speed. Whoever had driven it had abandoned it just around the next curve, and fled on foot through the rain.

Fled where? Back to the house? Back to where he could come out with the others when my shouting had summoned help? The constable asked a good many questions, but did not speculate aloud about what might have happened. It seemed that everyone except Dacia and Alicia and me had been indoors out of the rain. But while each one accounted for his own presence in the house, each had been alone and lacked other corroboration. Maggie was in her sitting room, Nigel had returned to the library. Justin was still in his bedroom. No one seemed to know where Marc had been, though Maggie admitted that he had looked in on her some time earlier to ask if she knew Dacia’s whereabouts. She did not, and presumably he had gone looking for her. Whether outside, or inside, no one knew.

To me it began to seem that almost anyone might have looked out a window and seen a girl in a green coat walking toward the path that led to the ruins—a path that must inevitably follow the test course for a short distance. But if anyone had seen her, he made no admission of the fact.

Alicia, of course, was questioned carefully, but she seemed to give a straightforward account, apparently horrified at the use to which her car had been put. She had left it standing in front of the door, she repeated, the keys in the ignition. She had not given it another thought until, while waiting for Justin to come downstairs, she had wandered to the front windows of the drawing room and looked out, to discover the car gone. She had thereupon gone out in the rain to find where it had been put.

“Didn’t you take it for granted that it had been moved to the garage, and let it go at that?” the constable asked her.

Alicia shrugged. “I chose to look myself. I like my property to remain where I leave it. And of course when I found that it had not been put into the garage I was annoyed. I started around the back of the house to find someone to question, and heard Mrs. North calling for help. The moment I saw what had happened, I began to worry if it was really my car which had struck Dacia down.”

In the end the servants were better able to vouch for each other’s activities than were those within the house. No strangers seemed to have been noticed around the place, and the mysterious Leo Casella was supposed to be back in London.

The police left to turn in their report and Maggie went at once to ring up the hospital for word of Dacia. I managed to slip away unnoticed and climbed the stairs to my room. A deep trembling reaction was taking place in me. I was the only one of them—except Marc—who was convinced that it was my death which had been intended, and not poor Dacia’s. It was a miracle that I could walk upstairs on legs that were slightly rubbery, but still sound, that I could reach out with a hand that was whole and open the door of my room. I was alive only because Dacia had been sacrificed, and that was a dreadful thing to be grateful for.

I closed my door behind me and stood in the center of the shabby blue rug, looking vaguely about me. At least there had been no further searching of my room. But how was I to remain in this house when I knew without doubt that someone wanted me dead? Yet if I went to Justin or Maggie with this story, I knew very well the reception I would receive. They had not believed me last night, nor would they now. Athmore blood was thicker than any ties of marriage. They would stand together and protect one another against an intruder like me. And because they stood together, I would still be in danger, with no one to believe in that danger and help me. Yet I would stay. I had seen Justin’s face when he thought me dead. I had heard him call me his darling. I had something real to fight for now.

This was the time to make myself a promise. I went to my dressing table to stare into the mirror. My face was pale, my hair tangled, my eyes dark with shock—yet there was something different about the face that looked out at me. Not mere stubbornness or the ability to endure. This was an Eve who knew she was loved, knew she must have the courage to set herself against whatever evil force had, struck Dacia down. This was the promise I must give myself.

In one corner of the mirror a square of white caught my eye and I stared at it, startled. A small envelope had been thrust into a corner of the glass, with my name written across its face. I picked it up and tore it open, looking first for the name that signed the few lines of handwriting.

At the bottom of the notepaper, written in a rather scrawled young hand, was the signature: “Dacia.”