RENTS LOW IN EDEN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23231, 28 December 1938, Page 17

RENTS LOW IN EDEN

By PETER BENEDICT Author of " Day Star," etc. When a girl decides to hate a man and he is unconscious of offence, interesting complications follow.

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SYNOPSIS Mrs. Catherine Court is returning home to Court Brandon after a year in Prance. She hutl been very ill but has been restored to health. At Stanchester, Lyddon Strang is waiting with roses and a box of chocolates to greet her. Ho proposes marriage but sho refuses. Her heart is set on reaching the home she loves. At the meeting of four lanes she stopped in amazement. Trees had been cut away and the peaceful vista of the countryside had been destroyed by the erection of cottages, lines of which wero under construction. CH A PTE R I— (Continued) The watchman came out of the storeshod behind her, saw her, and carno bustling. "Now then, lady, there's no way through here. You'll have to go round by the road. This is private property, this is." ''Don't trouble," said Catherine, "I'm going." Sho looked at him; he was a town man, sho supposed from Stanchester. "I was just looking at the lay-out for the houses. Naturally I'm interested; the glen beyond the end of the rof there happens to by my property. I'm Mrs. Court." "Oh, yes. Nice" bit of ground, that glen. If the stream was run off and the pool drained it would make a grand building site; and it could be done easy. Nice job of work, this eh? Only a fortnight since we got the tree-stumps out. Pretty old, I'd say, them trees; we had to use dynamite on 'em, but it had to be done; the site wasn't big enough without clearing that copse. So tip they went. There's another site over beyond your dingle marked down for use, too." She could not bear to stay and listen to him. It was like hearing the details of a murder discussed shamelessly, and being unable to reach out a hand for any sort of revenge. Yet sho had to find out what was happening; she had to know why this one spot on earth had been chosen for the houses, and above all to whom she owed the cold pain in her heart. She went hurriedly back to the road, and headed for the cluster of trees which hid her father's old house, now Perry Dunstan's studio. Perry would know all about it, of course: he made it his business to know everything which went 011 in the district. "Is Mr. Dunstan in ?" she asked the housekeeper who let her into the house. "In the studio, Mrs. Court. Would you like to go through to him?" Catherine opened the heavy door at the head of the stairs, and went into the biggest room the house boasted, built as it had been in an age when space was valued, and before lofty rooms began to be littered with pic-' tures and crowded with furniture. It was as empty and austere as a monk's cell now, one wall an entire square of windows filled with the dusk, and only one fireside corner redeemed from stern utility to comfort by the presence of a table, a bookcase, and a large basket chair. All the rest of the room was a grev, airy space round the clay torso of a straining athlete, which stood upon a high stool in the "centre of the floor. Perry Dunstan was invisible from the doorway, but a blue coil of smoke snaking upwards from the depths of the basket chair showed where he was. Catherine closed the door, and he heard the click of the latch slipping home, and craned his head round the back of the chair without altering his position in any other way. Then he came to his feet'nimbly, and jumped to meet her with a smile which was pleasant to see. "Catherine, what on earth are you doing here?" "Coming home, I thought," she said slowly.. . "No, but what I meant is, why didn't you let me know you were coming to-night? I'd have been down to the station with the old rattle-trap like a shot. As it is, you.'ve walked; and I don't know whether you ought to be walking much yet —ought you? Let's have a look at you!" He stood back, and had his look; not with an artist's eye thia time, but with a subject's, , and an adoring subject, at that. She was something more than a beautiful woman to Pcrrv. He had adored her through ten of his twenty years, and she was a habit to him now. "Yes. They have put you together again, haven't they? Quite nicely, too'. You're looking awfully fit, darling. I think someone ought to propose a vote of thanks to France and the Perronets. I don't believe you know what a wreck you were when we sent you abroacl. It was a ghastly business, wasn't it? That awful smash, and Uncle Geoff's death, and then th# long, long, draggling recovery of yours. Once we thought we'd lost you, too, but we didn't dare admit it. Oh, don't let's talk about it!" He drew her by the hands to the hearth. "Come and sit down. Have a drink? Have something to eat! You must be •tired."

"No, said Catherine, "I'm not hungry or tired, even, though I suppose there'd be nothing abnormal in that. But, Perry " "It's nice to have you back," he interrupted enthusiastically. "Perry, who's bought up all that ground along the valley?" she remarked.

"Heaven help us!" said the young man, his contentment collapsing with a groan. "1 was hoping you hadn't been along the lane. If you'd turned straight in here you wouldn't have seen it." "I walked into the middle of it, and it was rather like sudden death. 1 came here because I have seen it. I want to know what's happening." "Happening! It's happened. Someone has hit on the bright idea of building a garden-city here in Court Brandon, There's no end of money in houseproperty, I beliere, and in these bungalow cities —village greens, roses round the door, and all that. Some rich johnny from Stanchester has bought up all the property in the valley floor, barring one or two independent bits like your dingle; and how many, little tinpot houses he means to build I don't know. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later; but I'd like to shoot the chap who's doing it, all the same." Catherine heard this bitter and not very coherent recital with a still face, though her colour ebbed and flowed a little from chin to brow. She looked at Perry, and saw that he was resigned; his face was angry, but his voice was borrowing venom only from its own Bpeaking.. "When did all this begin?" she asked.

"Well, just over three months ago, as far as I car. place it. They've made short work of our trees. That very big lime that I fell out of Oh, well, what's the use? Court Brandon is a tale that is told."

"But they needn't have sold to him. He's on Council land, as well as farm land. Does that mean ?"

"Mean?" Ho gave a short laugh. "It means they fell on his neck as soon as he went high enough with his offers. Not one of them; all of them. And, mind you, lie's generous enough over prices; so generous that it seems pretty plain he's going to scoop in a packet over the finished products. He wrenched himself from the mantelpiece, and came and sat on the arm of her chair. "It's no use worrying about it, darling."

Without moving or appearing to hear him Catherine said: "What are you going to do about it?" "Do? I'm going to out, like a sensible person. I'm going to try and find another Court Brandon, or the nearest possible approach to it, and settle there until another Probert comes and turns mo out of it. Or if I can't find such a place I'll go back to London. Anyhow, that's got a character of its own. And I advise you to do the s;ime."

She said deliberately: "No, I'm not going to turn my back on it. There must be something 1 can do."

"But there' isn't! Short of shooting him, anyhow. I've asked Massingham, Uncle Geoff's lawyer, but Massingham says the only thing we can do is clear out."

"Massingham!" said Catherine scornfully. "What does he know about,it? He's never lived here. He doesn't know what I feel about this place. Neither do you, or you couldn't run away from it. I'm staying." "But what can you do?" Perry demanded miserably. He sprang up and began to walk restlessly about the room. "What can you do? Much better get out now, and forget it." Catherine rose. "I suppose I must go. I'm late, and Mabel will be wondering whore I am.'

"I'll walk up with you," ho said, relieved at the change ii the subject and in her tone.

"No, please. I'd hate to make yon do that. 1 shall ho (juite all right." She hesitated, staring at him. "What did you say this man's name is? The man behind this building scheme?"

"Probert. Some rich business magnate from Stanchester, named Adam Probert."

CHAPTER 11. CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY Catherine had meant to go straight home, but when she came to the lane at the further end of the building area, and saw the gates of her own glen shining pale in the moonlight some hundred yards away from her. she could not resist the impulse to look at it again. She passed along the little stretch of lane which separated her from it. On her right hand, beyond the green hedge of alders, the ground fell away to the hollow valley which was her one valuable possession; on her left the once tall hawthorns had been torn up by the roots with tractors. Much of the hedge lay in great heaps where it had been gathered from the lane, shadowy black now in the night. She saw, across the aching emptiness where the tall bushes had been, the watchman's ] fire again, and the silvery glint of the corrugated iron store-shed beyond it. She turned and went ih through the white gate. Green shadows, interspersed with patches of moonlight, astonishingly silver, made a paved pathway before her feet. She walked between ferns waist-high, on turf soft and springy with the feeding of centuries of leafmould; and above her the arching trees met like the moulded roof of the church. In the heart of this quiet there was a music, where the stream tumbled in a cascade from the thirty-foot slide of moss-grown rocks, polished and slimy with years, into the foaming rim of a large pool. But the pool itself opened out beyond silver and bland, filled from above with moonlight, as by day it had sunshine while the rest of the dingle lay in the shadow. It was surrounded on every side by willows, whose leaves trailed hero and there in the water; because it was too large to be shadowed by its trees it remained the most happy of waters, remote in a sort of shining peace, with nothing sinister in its loneliness. Catherine's' past, seemed to her just then to lie like a series of wrecks along tlie green shores. There was not a spot anywhere in the hollow which was not peopled by herself and some whom she had valued. She had played there in her childhood, had brooded there in her adolescence, had been courted there, had —the one thing for which she could not be grateful—consented to marry Geoffrey there, in just that angle of rock where the willow stooped so low to its reflection. "Only marry me," he had said, "and you'll love me some day. I'll make you love me. I'll make you so happy that you'll have no choice." . So she had married him; and they had been fond of each other with a completeness as beautiful as it was unsatisfying. He had not made' her love him. She did not know why, for the form of love had been there, and only the last living spark had evaded them. And now Geoffrey was dead, eighteen months ago; and she was home again, healed of the injuries received in the motor accident which had destroyed him. Presently she turned back up the ferny patli. She latched the gate carefully behind her, and walking for a pace or two with her chin on her shoulder, she collided, but gently, with a man who had just alighted from a car opposite the uprooted stretch of hedge. An impersonal- arm went out instinctively to support her and yet never touched her. There were eyes she supposed an artist would call good, rather deep-sot, wide apart but not too wide, full-coloured and thoughtful, and quite beyond classification. There was a mouth long, and hard, and fine; a face of broad and sparsely-covered bones. Intense details, these, to remember of a man after one so brief contact by moonlight; and she was not even sure that she had seen them, that they had not been stamped into her consciousness by some more subtle method. "I beg your pardon!" he said in a low, hurried, but very even voice; and that was all. He was stepping over the brushings of debris from the hawthorn hedge; and she was standing in the lane looking after him. Voices roused her. Two men were coming along the lane together; and the nearer of them was the jobbing gardener who tended Perry's roses. She hailed him. "Jordan! It is you, isn't it, Tom?" "Well, now, Mrs. Court, I'm glad to see you home again. It's a fine long while since you left us. How long have you been back?" "1 only came to-night, Tom." She was not looking at liim With head poised she started after the owner of the car. "Tom do you know who that man is? See, there he is, talking to the watchman by the brazier. He drove up in this car, and I wondered—strangers in Court Brandon are rare." "Of course, ma'am," said the gardener, looking where she pointed. "Only he isn't a stranger to us now, so much; but of course you wouldn't know about him, after being away so long." "Why, who is he?" "The man who's having all these houses built. His name's Probert — Adam Probert." (To be continued daily.)