simplicity was a continual pleasure. It was long and narrow and held all she needed: her drawing board and worktable, filing cabinet for swipes, a comfortable shabby chair, books, lamps and a lovely battered baroque sofa upholstered in tattered silk the colors of a dream, grays and lavenders and pinks and delicate blues and purples. Sam had bought it at an auction, but Frances had refused to give it house room so Julie had snatched at it. One set of windows at one end of the room looked down the hill on the valley and the river, the other up into the rock garden that separated her from Brian’s house in which she was going to live. This was larger, having been made over out of an older house.
No one ever locked a door at Hoydens Hill. Julie closed hers behind her and ran down the three steep steps. It was dark out and colder than she had expected. There was no wind. Bushes at the edge of the driveway rustled and she turned and peered through the blackness. There was a scratchy sound, like a heel on gravel. She called out, “Is there—anyone there?” No answer. She must have imagined the footstep. The rustle in the bushes might have been Horrible Albert, Sam’s cat, or a stray dog. She wasn’t afraid. She drew her coat tightly around her and went with a quick step up the winding path through the rock garden. She didn’t look back. She was glad when she reached the top.
It was early, and she and Brian would have a few minutes in front of the fire before the others came. Walter, Brian’s man of all work, had gone on a tear, so they were going to have a buffet supper with one hot dish, a turkey she had helped Frances’s maid prepare that afternoon. Julie decided to have a look at the turkey on the way in, so instead of going around to the front she went up the kitchen steps. The kitchen was a big, square, sunny room at the back. It had blue walls with yellow curtains and geraniums on the five window sills. Having been on his own for so long had made Brian quite an efficient housekeeper, but he wasn’t the world’s best cook.
The kitchen was empty when she went in. The turkey was doing nicely. She threw her coat over a chair and went out into the hall. The glass doors of the living-room up a step on the right were ajar. Had she come in the front way she would have been visible crossing the hall. Coming from the kitchen she wasn’t. Brian was in the living-room, but he wasn’t alone. There was a woman with him. Listening absently, Julie’s brows rose. The woman was Brian’s aunt, Eleanor Yates.
What on earth had brought Eleanor Yates to Hoydens Hill? Fifteen years earlier she had been an actress of note and a great beauty. Her husband’s failure and death in. 1929 had put an end to all that. An estate near Westhaven was the only thing the lawyers had managed to, salvage. Without money or experience she had turned the estate into a farm out of the products of which she had built up a substantial New Haven trade. She was as closely wedded to her poultry and cattle, her fields and gardens as though she were fastened to them with a ball and chain. The life that had formerly engrossed her was dead, and she never went anywhere. That was one of the reasons why Julie and Brian were going to be married in Westhaven. Eleanor had said, “I’d like to dance at your wedding, old boy, but I simply can’t get away. If I’m gone for more than a couple of hours a barn is struck by lightning or my cream curdles or a cow miscarries. Why not have the wedding up here? Anywhere in the state’s all right.”
Julie frowned at one of Bone’s etchings on the wall near the foot of the stairs. It was like Eleanor, strong and forthright. Inside the living-room Eleanor spoke. She said, “I thought you ought to know.” Brian said, “Yes.” He added, “I’ve been—afraid of it.”
Afraid? What was it that Brian was afraid of? Julie’s heartbeat accelerated. Instinctively her mind flew to Bill Conroy. But that large, handsome bird of evil omen who had already frightened her obscurely twice had no connection whatever with Hoydens Hill or with Brian. The two men knew each other simply as casual acquaintances, through Mouse and Sarah.
She couldn’t stand there listening. She called “Hello” on a bright note and followed her call through the glass doors.
The sight of the big, warm, comfortable book-lined room and its two occupants quieted her flash of alarm. Brian was standing on the hearth, tall, wide-shouldered and at ease, an elbow propped on the mantel, smoke curling bluely from his cigarette. Eleanor was in a corner of the long red-leather sofa at right angles to the stone fireplace. There wasn’t the slightest trace of the glamour that had once invested her. Her body was square and hard, her skin was weather-beaten and her thick iron-gray hair was cut short and brushed Straight back from a strong, lined faces devoid of make-up. Her clothes were the clothes she habitually wore and that made Frances moan—stout shoes and woolen stockings, tweed skirt and tailored flannel shirt. Her expression was serene. She smiled at Julie.
“Come and let me look at you, young woman. Ah, she’s lovely, isn’t she, Brian?”
Julie said, “You might as well ask the fish man ‘Are your fish fresh?’ He wouldn’t dare say no, even if he prefers blondes.”
Brian said, “I do prefer blondes, and I think she’s a fright.” Julie sat down in the other corner of the couch. She evidently wasn’t going to be told what it was they had been talking about when she interrupted them. She agreed that her dress was pretty and put the question it would have been unnatural not to put. “What tore you from Westhaven, Eleanor? What brought you to Hoydens Hill?”
Was there a pause? Did Eleanor fill it before Brian could speak? “Business,” she said in her rich full voice, and put a match to a Mexican cigarette that looked like a small cigar in its brown wrapping. “I’ve got to see a lawyer,” she continued, “and Brian’s attorney here is as good as anyone else. You’ve got to explain to him that I’m broke, Brian, and that I won’t pay any extravagant fees. If Sinclair Lewis was right about doctors, if tonsils were put into the human system to provide physicians with closed motor cars, the income-tax forms do as much or more for our legal brethren. How about a cocktail all hands around? You two go and make it and let me toast my shins. The cold is vile, and I’ve got a whole brood of hens with roup.”
In the kitchen Brian took Julie in his arms, suddenly and without warning. She felt the tenseness in him as he held her close, resting his chin on her hair. “I wish we could get away from here tonight, you and I,” he said in a muffled voice. “This last-minute business is the devil. Red tape, red tape, red tape.”
Julie shivered involuntarily. The dark impetuosity in him, the way his arms tightened around her, brought the shadow a step closer. He to as worried about something; it wasn’t her imagination. “What is it, Brian?” she asked again, as she had asked almost a week earlier in the Biltmore lounge.
Brian Moore might have told Julie then, if it hadn’t been for the interruption. The face lifted to his was very lovely. It wasn’t a child’s face, it was a woman’s, with strength and endurance, courage and resolution in its delicate contours, its play of light, and shade.
Julie felt the hesitation in him. The opportunity passed. The door opened and Sam and Frances came in, Frances mistily lovely in taupe chiffon with topazes in her ears and a string of them around her slender throat. Sam hadn’t bothered to dress. Frances said despairingly, “What can you do with a husband who spends his entire life in a potting-shed? I had difficulty making him wash his hands. He should have married an onion.”
She was as surprised to find Eleanor there as Julie had been. She didn’t ask any questions. Julie watched that swift glance flow, from Sam to Brian to Eleanor, from Frances to Eleanor to Brian. They left the ball in the air, in play, continued with their surface chatter of this and that. Hot color stung Julie’s cheeks. Whatever had brought Eleanor to Hoydens Hill, and it wasn’t to see Brian’s lawyer about business of her own, Frances and Sam knew about it. It was the same thing that had hit Brian when he was paged in the Biltmore. Her hurt was back again and with it that nagging uncertainty as to how much of Brian she actually possessed. He was eight years older than she was, and his life had settled into a definite pattern, hardened into a definite
