The Crime of Laura Sarelle

THE CRIME OF LAURA SARELLE — PART 1 — “They are not to be spoken of; they dwell in darkness!” Laura answered swiftly: “They dwell in this house!” Her brother looked at her with gloomy rebuke. “Why must you go over these old stories? I told you before you came here that such things were not to be discussed.” “Remember,” retorted the girl, rising nervously and with rebellion in her narrowed eyes, “that I did not wish to come here at all. I told you that. I wrote down my protests in a letter. Mrs. Sylk knows—” Her brother interrupted: “There is no need to call witnesses or to make a scene, my dear Laura. I know quite well the objections you made to coming to Leppard Hall, and I recall with equal clarity my answer. Pray let us have no more of this discussion. As to the portraits, it is my wish that they should remain.” Laura hesitated. She moved from her brother and looked out from the tall window across the landscape that she found so distasteful. At the bottom of the gentle slope on which the house stood the grey waters of the Avon, gleaming from between the dull leaves of the willows, flowed smoothly by with, to her, an air of sad monotony. She tried to control herself, for the young brother to whom she had spoken was her master and might easily be, she knew, her tyrant. She had to play the game that women have learned during the ages to be so skilful at, to watch her opportunity, to cajole; if need be, to deceive. She was not yet very clever at any of these slavish arts and she had to bite her lip now and to clench her hands in her palms before she had sufficient control to reply in the soft tone she wished to assume. Before she spoke she looked over her shoulder at Theodosius. He had returned to his manuscripts with an air of absorption as if he had forgotten her presence or was contemptuous of it. His fine, pale profile was clearly outlined against the dark panelling of the room. His dress, correct and severe, was too old for his years, which were not above five and twenty. Everything about him was grave and stately, and to Laura disagreeable and pedantic; but she bent her pride, and turning towards the desk humiliated herself to thrust her problems upon her brother’s attention. “Theo, pray listen to me. You never give me a chance of talking to you, you know.” “There are the evenings, my dear girl,” he replied, raising his tired, dark eyes with a cold and impatient glance. “I have my work now. Pray excuse me, I am much occupied.” Laura longed to reply that this absorption in his translations from the Encheiridion Epictète of Arrian was not work but a pastime, and a sickly, unwholesome pastime at that, for a young man. But she smiled and said: “In the evenings you are closeted here, or you expect me to go and sit with Mrs. Sylk in my own apartment; or you are going over the accounts with Lucius.” “My dear sister,” said Sir Theo firmly, with a slight sigh of resignation as he leant back in his chair, “all this is wasting my time and yours. I can guess what you want to say to me. You wish to put in a plea for leaving Leppard Hall. You want to spend the money that I can ill afford in going abroad. You want to enjoy the season, as they term it, in some gay capital — London or Paris, or even Rome.” “I have no such absurd ideas,” put in Laura quickly. “I am quite content to live modestly, as long as it be in a town, with some company of my own age.” “My dear child,” replied Theo, with exasperating calm, “you are nineteen years of age only. It will be time enough for you to go out into the world when you have learnt in my home some of the feminine arts that you seem at present to lack. You have much wasted, I fear, the two years that you have been at Leppard Hall.” “All that I have wasted here has been myself,” replied Laura in a low tone, glancing down at the shining floor. “You have wasted the opportunity of learning how to run a fairly large establishment,” remarked her brother severely. “You have not made yourself familiar either with my servants, my tenants, or with the neighbours. There are a hundred and one things that you should have learnt but have taken no notice of.” “I was bred in the town,” protested Laura with a convulsive sigh. “I do not like rustic surroundings. Pray, Theo, give me my portion and let me go.” She made the request so suddenly that it seemed crude and violent, like a blow interrupting polite conversation. Sir Theo raised his heavy eyebrows, which were like slender black wings. “You speak as if you were out of your senses,” he replied sternly. “Our parents being dead and we having no relations, where would you go from my house?” “I don’t know,” replied Laura hurriedly. She felt that she had startled him and therefore gained some small advantage and she was anxious to follow this up. “Mrs. Sylk and I could go somewhere; I suppose we could take rooms or hire a house with servants. I have a few friends in London — Aunt Mary’s friends,” she added anxiously; “something could be contrived.” “And why, pray, should there be all this contrivance?” asked Sir Theo with rising anger. She had often complained and protested before, but never put the matter so plainly, and his authority rose to meet her rebellion. His personality was impressive and forceful far beyond his years and Laura had an ado to stand her ground. The contempt in his voice brought the colour to her face, but she did not dare to allow this opportunity to slip. She had at least got him roused, interested, if in a hostile manner, in what she was saying; that was better than the long cold silences, the dull self-absorption that she could never penetrate. “I suppose I want a few companions of my own age,” she hastened on; “I should like a few entertainments, an opportunity of going to the opera, to concerts and theatres, of get ting books, of seeing pictures, of giving parties of my own.” “And the end of this, I suppose,” he interrupted sarcastically, “is to be your marriage to some adventurer whom I shall be supposed to pension for life.” “I have no thought of marriage with an adventurer,” said Laura. The colour came again to her face and faded. “But I suppose that someday you will permit me to marry?” “Only when I approve your choice, some long years hence. I do not consider you fit for marriage,” he replied impatiently. “You want a good deal of schooling and training first.” “Well,” said she desperately, “maybe I could obtain that out in the world. In London! I tell you I am used to London. I knew Aunt Mary and I lived in Hampstead only very modestly, but we did see people. We went about. I have lost the few friends I had there, for you never would allow them to come and stay here, or me to visit them.” “You lead the life that is fitting to your station and disposition,” replied Sir Theo, rising at last and speaking with a weight uncommon in one of his youth; cold and formidable, he stared her down. “I never agreed with the designs of your staying with your Aunt Mary Tolls. She was a frivolous woman, I dislike the fashion in which she brought you up. I always intended to exert my authority as soon as I came of age to take you from under her charge. Remember that you were always reported as wild and wilful, even when you were at school.” Laura drew a short breath, then said in a whisper: “Our parents did not disapprove of me, at least they did not say so. It is only you, Theo, who are always so censorious.” “Call me censorious if you will, I am acting for your own good,” replied the young man dryly. “I do not intend to allow you to go to town, I do not intend to allow you to have the friends you made when you were under Aunt Mary Tollis’s charge down at Hampstead, and I have no sympathy with your petulant impatience with the life you lead here. There are neighbours whom you can visit.” “They are all elderly people and they live miles away,” broke out Laura. “I tell you I detest this place! I always did from the moment I came into it. I can’t understand — it certainly seems unreasonable, I know.…” “Your feelings are running away with you, Laura,” replied Theo with a contemptuous air of finality. She was glad that he had stopped her, much as she hated him for his continued exercise of authority. She knew that she had said too much, had tried to express the intangible. Not to him, so unfriendly, so hostile, could she unfold these fearful and delicate feelings. “Well, then,” she said, “that is my fate. I must stay at Leppard Hall. One other thing, while you are listening to me, Theo, even in so cruel a spirit — if I were to come to you and say I wished to be married, that I wanted to escape that way, what would you do?” He looked at her keenly, suspecting that she was fooling him, trying to entrap him into some admission that she might twist to her own use, for he was perfectly sure that she had not the acquaintance of any man whom she could desire to marry. “Your husband,” he replied immediately, “would have to meet with my complete approval. Remember the terms of our father’s will. I think at the end he was alarmed himself about your frivolous disposition. He left your future entirely in my hands. If you marry without my consent, I need not pay a penny of dowry.” “Well,” said Laura, still holding her head high, “I might find a man who had enough money to keep me.” “Such talk is unbecoming,” replied the baronet. He began to show signs of impatience; the interview had been long and exhausting. He really disliked his sister, who in everything was different from himself. He intended to do his duty by her, and that exasperated his ill-feeling towards her. For she was a burden, a responsibility, a constant vexation. “Pray,” said he, “let us have no more of this. I am not to be moved.” She believed him, and being too well-bred and too proud to break out into reproaches, she merely said: “Can I once more ask you to have the two portraits moved?” “I shall refuse,” he replied. He in his turn was flushed, his well-shaped lips quivered slightly; he had not much reserve of physical strength, and these disputes with Laura, in whom he sensed a hidden spirit as strong as his own, always in the end slightly unnerved him. “If I begin to give way to your follies, I should strip the Hall from attic to cellar and still not please you. The portraits remain where they are.” Laura turned away. From the door she said in a low voice, looking over her shoulder: “I wish you would strip the whole place, I wish it would be burnt down. It ought to have been destroyed years ago.” He gave her a startled look at that, but controlled himself quickly and turned again to his thick piles of papers. Laura closed the door and stood in the dark corridor, agitated and desperately angry, surprised too. Why had she said those last words? She knew no good reason why Leppard Hall should have been destroyed. It was a fine building that had been in the possession of the Sarelles for many hundreds of years. No legend of horror, no ghostly fable attached to it so far as she knew. She had spoken, she supposed, out of mere spite because she disliked the place so much, because she had been so unhappy there for two years — two long, dragging years of her youth that should have been so bright and happy. Not only did she detest Leppard Hall and the park, the gloomy mill and the stone farmhouse, the winding river with the Georgian bridge; she detested also the flat, dull pastoral landscape with the alders and the willows and the continually browsing black cattle, the thorn-trees and the water meadows. She disliked the church, which half a mile or so along the river rose clear grey into the grey skies, with the clustered lichened graves rising above the sloping banks where the black, ragged cedar cast a shade into the water. Gloomy to her was the small grey village and the small, dark inn, the Sarelle Arms; dull and stupid seemed the rustic inhabitants; fiercely she regretted the day that her parents had come into an inheritance that had meant to her a life so melancholy and, as she thought, unnatural.