The Shadow of the Lynx (28 page)

“If you are going to be sensible …”

“That’s what I am trying to be. I know this is wrong.”

“Stop talking rubbish.” He caught my arm.

“You look so preity tonight;. The dress is most becoming.”

He started to unhook it but I swung away from him.

“No,” I said.

“I will not be treated in this way.”

I ran into the dressing-room. He was startled and I had locked the door before he reached it. There were tears in my eyes. At least I had prevented his seeing them. I had a feeling that he would despise tears.

It’s changed, I thought. The honeymoon is over. My relationship with him was not what I had thought it to be.

I sat down on the small bed and thought about Stirling. Did he really love me? Yes! I answered myself. Remember when we lay in the cave. But his father had said: “Stand aside. I want her.” So Stirling stood aside. And now Lynx was saying to me: “You will do as I say. You will take your share in my grand plan for revenge.” And although my brain said:

“It is wrong and no good can come of it,” my heart was crying out:

“What does it matter? You will be with him and he will go on loving you. But if you defy him …”

And there was a vision of Jessica holding the sandalwood box in her hands.

“Plenty of room …”

Oh yes, the honeymoon was over.

1 had spent a sleepless night. I had lain on that uncomfortable bed, having removed my satin dress, hoping that he would knock at the door and beg me to come out. But he did not. It was I who unlocked the door next morning.

He was sitting in a chair reading when I went in. I was in my petticoat, carrying my satin dress.

“Ah,” he said, ‘the woman of principles. ” His mood had changed. He was no longer angry and the tenderness had come back in spite of the words.

“I trust, madam,” he went on, ‘that you had a comfortable night. “

“Hardly that,” I retorted, catching his mood.

“Remorse?”

“A very hard mattress.”

“And you prefer a feather bed.”

“In certain circumstances.”

He laughed.

“My poor child! What a brute I am! I should have insisted that you leave your hard mattress, but you were so full of determination to defend the rights of women and freedom of decision—so what could I do?”

“Nothing. You knew I was determined at all costs.”

“Now you wish to bathe and dress. While you are doing so I will order breakfast to be sent up to us. Are you agreeable

to this or wouia you like to pui i. un. Ajiu your suggestions? “

“I am perfectly agreeable.”

I was happy. It was not the end. I had been foolish. I must be less blatant. I must persuade him gently, subtly.

We sat at the table which had been wheeled in. I poured out coffee while he served bacon and devilled kidneys from the chafing dishes.

There was a cosy intimacy about the scene which made me happy.

“Now,” he said, ‘we’ll discuss this matter in a civilized manner. We have a difference of opinion. I say that we are going to England and our children will play on the lawns of Whiteladies. My grandchildren will be there with my son and daughter, for Stirling will marry and Adelaide will join us in due course. Whiteladies is not yet in my possession. It maybe a little difficult to arrange, but I always enjoyed surmounting difficulties. Now you, Nora, have your own puritan ideas. To settle old scores seems pagan to you.

“An eye for an eye,” say I. You say.

“Turn the other cheek.” But this is my affair. I have to fight for Whiteladies and I shall have an opponent in my own family—my wife. It’s a situation which appeals to me. “

“So you are going to England.”

“We are going to England.”

“And you are going to acquire this house.”

“By wicked crook or evil hook, remember. And if you are going to stop me—well, Nora, that gives an added fillip to the affair. You are going to show me why I should not acquire Whiteladies. I am going to show you why I should.”

“So you are not going to put from you a wife who does not mildly agree that you are always right?”

“Of what use would such a creature be to me? All things considered, I am reasonably satisfied with my Nora. She can be obstinate at times;

she can be arrogant; but what maddens me most is this piety of hers, that missionary spirit . “

“And what maddens me,” I said, ‘is my husband’s irritating habit of talking in my presence as though I am absent. “

“Then we both madden each other, which is as it should be.”

“And you have decided graciously to pardon a wife who doesn’t think her husband omnipotent and omniscient?”

“I have come to the conclusion that I love the girl and that means I’ll endure a great deal. In fact I am looking forward to some sturdy battles with Nora preaching turn the other

cheek; and all the time I shall be showing her how happy she can be in her English mansion. “

“I shall never agree with you.”

“I know,” he said.

“Well, we’ll start our journey back today. We have our preparations to make.”

“Preparations….”

“For England and the battle between us.”

We left Melbourne that day. There was a compromise between us. I would plunge into my preparations; we were leaving for England in March of the following year, it had been decided—Stirling, Lynx and myself, plus the servants we should need. I would make no objections to these preparations. My task was to persuade Lynx to abandon his plan for taking Whiteladies when the time came.

He never told me what his plans were. I believe he told Stirling. I felt a little shut out; but I stifled that resentment. I was determined that we were not going to take Whiteladies from its owners.

Not that I saw how we could. These were not medieval times when castles were taken by force. I would persuade Lynx to buy the house that I wanted. I visualized it-grand and gracious. It would have to satisfy him. But whenever I pictured it it always took the form of Whiteladies.

We were approaching the end of summer and the winds were both cool and fierce. I would hear them whistling across the bush; they rattled our windows and buffeted the house as though they were trying to tear up its foundations.

When I rode out, usually with Lynx, sometimes with Adelaide, never with Stirling whom I now rarely saw, I would shudder at the damage which the fires had done, although many of the trees were not entirely dead and in due course would recover.

Lynx and I had returned to our old relationship, though perhaps we bantered more than we had just after our wedding. He liked to argue with me and enjoyed my having a different point of view. This delighted me. I ceased to fret over his obsession with revenge, for I was certain that I could turn him from it.

We had by no means shelved the matter. We often talked of Whiteladies—but he never explained to me how he hoped to wrest it from its owners.

How suddenly violent life could be in this country! Death was never far away.

That bright sunny morning I was riding out with him n-the mine. We were not alone. Stirling was with us, also two or three of the men from the mine. Lynx had recently sold out most of his share and was keeping only a small interest.

“It’s the time to sell,” he had explained.

“We’ve had most of the gilt off the gingerbread though there’s still a considerable amount in those quartz reefs. It’ll be worked for some years yet.”

He was getting rid of most of his interests in Australia because he was determined never to come back. Adelaide would stay behind for a few months and then would sell up the house and join us. It was all settled.

The sun was warm on that morning but the wind was piercingly fresh and of almost gale force. Lynx rode on ahead of our little party with the men from the mine. Stirling and I were some short distance behind. It was the first time I had been alone with Stirling since my marriage—if one could call this being-alone.

“Are you happy about going to England, Stirling?” I asked.

He said he was, and I felt angry with him. He had no will but his father’s.

“You are happy about leaving all this?” I persisted.

“And you?”

“At least I have been here a comparatively short time. It is home to you.”

“It’ll be all right in England. We had come to that spot where Jacob Jagger had lost his life. There seemed to be something eerie about it now. The ghost gums rose high and imperiously indifferent; some of the trees were blackened. So the fire had scorched this spot too. Perhaps, I thought, that is how places become haunted. A man died there … suddenly his life was brought to an end in a moment of passion. Could his spirit remain for ever, seeking revenge?

Stirling was glancing at me. Was he, too, thinking of Jagger?

“So the fire got as far as this,” I said; and my words were carried on the wind as it whistled past me.

Then it happened. The great branch fell from the top of the tallest eucalypt. There was a sudden cry as it swooped like an arrow from the sky.

Then I saw Lynx; he had fallen from his horse and was lying on the ground.

I heard someone cry: “My God, it’s a widow-maker.”

They carried him home on an improvised stretcher. How tall he looked—taller in death even than in life! He had died as one of the gods of old might have died—from a falling branch which had descended with such force that it had driven itself through his heart, impaling and pinning him to the ground. And it had happened there, not far from the spot where he had deliberately shot Jacob Jagger.

The widow-maker had caught him as it had caught lesser men before him.

I could not believe it. I went to the library. I touched the chessmen;

I took his ring with the lynx engraved on it and I stared at it until it seemed as though it were his eyes which looked at me in place of those glittering stones.

Lynx . dead! But he was immortal. I was stunned. I felt as though I myself were dead.

Stirling came to see me and it was then that I was able to shed my pent-up tears. He held me in his arms and we were as close as we had been in the cave when the fire had raged above us.

“We must go to England,” he said.

“It was what he would wish.”

I shuddered and replied: “He would not wish us to go, Stirling. What good could that do? He wanted to go, but that is impossible now. It’s over.”

But Stirling shook his head and said: “He wished us to go. We shall leave as we should have done had he been here.”

I thought then that Lynx was living on to govern our lives.

Subconsciously I had always believed that death could not touch him.

Perhaps that was so.

MINTA

One

Tonight as I sat in my room looking down on the lawn 1 decided that I would write down what had happened. To do so would be to keep the memory of the days with me for ever. One forgets so quickly;

impressions become hazy; one’s mind distorts, colouring events to make them as one would like them to have been, high-lighting what one wants to preserve, pushing away what one would rather not remember. So I would keep a sort of journal and write down everything truthfully and unvarnished just as i^i took place.

What prompted me to do this was that afternoon’s adventure, the day Stirling came. It was ridiculous really. He had come briefly into my life and there was no reason why he should appear again. It was absurd to feel this urge to write down what had happened. It was an ordinary enough incident. I knew his name was Stirling and the girl’s was l^ora because they had addressed each other so—perhaps only once, but my mind had been receptive. I was more than usually alert, so I remembered every detail.

Her scarf had blown over the wall and they came to retrieve it. I had a notion that the incident was contrived. A foolish thought really.

Why should it have been?

I was on the lawn with Lucie and it was one of Mamma’s more fretful days. Poor Mamma, she would never be happy, I knew. She was looking back into a past which could not have been so wonderful as she made it out to be. It seemed that she had missed great happiness. One day she would tell me about it. She had promised to do so.

Lucie and I sat on the lawn. Lucie was working at her tapestry; she was making covers for one of the chairs in the dining-room. My father had dropped his cigar ash on the seat of one of these and burned a hole in the tapestry, which had been worked in 1701. How like Lucie to decide that she would copy the Jacobean design and provide a cover which would be indistinguishable from the rest. In her quiet way Lucie was clever and I was so glad that she was with

us. Life would have oeen very dull without her. She could do most things; she could help my father with his work; she would read the latest novel or from the magazines and newspapers to Mamma; and she was a companion for me. I was marvelling at the similarity of her work to the existing chair seats.

“It’s almost exact,” I cried.

“Almost!” she replied in dismay.

“That won’t do. It has to be exact in every detail.”

“I’m sure we shall all be satisfied with something slightly less,” I comforted.

“Who is going to peer into it for discrepancies?”

“Some people might … in the future.” Lucie’s eyes grew dreamy.

“I

want people a hundred years hence to look at that chair and say, “Which was the one which was done towards the end of the nineteenth century?”

But why? “

Lucie was a little impatient.

“You don’t deserve to belong to this house, Minta,” she scolded.

“Think what it means. You can trace your family back to the Tudors’ day and beyond. You have this wonderful heritage … Whiteladies! And you don’t seem to appreciate it.”

“Of course I love Whiteladies, Lucie, and I’d hate to live anywhere else, but it’s only a house after all.”

“Only a house!” She raised her eyes to the top of the chestnut tree.

“Whiteladies! Five hundred years ago nuns lived their sheltered lives here. Sometimes I imagine I hear the bells calling them to comp line and at night I fancy I hear their voices as they say their prayers in their cells and the swish of their white robes as they mount the stone staircases.”