The boy, who had not answered her question, now stated: “My name’s Ronny. What’s yours?”
“June.”
“You look rather funny,” he said.
June defended herself. “I’ve been sick. It’s the first time I’ve been out and I think I shouldn’t have, come so far.”
“I’m never sick,” said Ronny with a look of regret. Then suddenly his face changed as though a secret thought had opened like a rose inside his brain. “I sometimes have headaches,” he offered, looking down at her with that flirting glance which children sometimes give, a glance to which June could not respond. With a proud gesture he took the hood from his bird’s head. The falcon fluttered for a moment and then lifted himself straight upwards. They watched in silence as his dark wings cut the sky above the trees. “He’s a hunting hawk,” said Ronny.
“Is he hunting now?” asked June.
“Well, he doesn’t really hunt yet. I haven’t got as far as that with him, but he comes when I call him home at night.”
June started and looked up surprised. Ronny’s horse, long finished drinking, was tearing at the foliage which grew near the spring. Now and then he stamped his hoof impatiently. A big fly with a brilliant green head was bothering him, giving him long, vicious bites so that his flanks quivered.
“Do you know,” asked Ronny in his high, excited voice, “what happens when you put the leaves he is eating into the water?” With a kick he threw his bare leg over the horse’s back and slid to the ground. Grasping one of the weeds from beneath the animal’s nose, he pulled it up roots and all and plunged it into the water. He was like a magician performing a star trick and at once the leaves turned into precious silver, glittering as they bent beneath the water’s current. Ronny crouched there in triumph by the spring and his black hair fell across his eyes.
“It’s beautiful!” cried June, who had known about silver-weed all her life.
Ronny rose to his feet. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“In the house on top of the hill,” replied June. “But I don’t know how I’m ever going to get back there. My legs are so tired and weak.”
“Get on behind,” said Ronny at once. “Gambol will take you there.” He led the horse to a fallen tree and they both climbed up. “I usually spring onto his back in a single bound,” said Ronny, “but there’s no point if you must mount too.”
“None at all,” agreed June, holding on to the boy’s waist in order not to fall. She was overcome with lassitude and murmured directions as though in a dream. Once Ronny half turned around and asked:
“Do you think you could be called a damsel?”
“Certainly,” June answered with a smile. “A damsel in distress.”
Ronny was silent after that. He frowned in thought and swung his bare feet against the horse’s sides.
CHAPTER THREE
Ronny, the lovely child with his silky olive skin and tangle of hair, was a worry to his mother. Especially of late. The boarding school, to which he had been sent for the first time, did not suit his temperament. He failed in his classes, and his constant tension forced them to release him early. Even pretty, worldly Grace Villars realized that something must be done about her son. But Grace could not bear to give up her summer visits at fashionable resorts; indeed she could not afford to. So it was good luck when she came across Walsh at a party in New York that spring; Walsh who owned the boathouse on Mrs. Grey’s peninsula.
“Grace,” he said, “how nice to see you again after all these years, and looking as pretty as ever. How’s Roger?”
“Roger’s dead, Jim. Surely you must have heard,” said Grace Villars.
“Oh, yes, as a matter of fact I did read about it.” He put his rubbery face nearer hers so that she could look into his eyes below their heavy lids and asked: “How’s the boy?”
“It’s about time you asked,” said Grace, shaking her bright curls and blinking her lashes against the melancholy power of his eyes.
“Now Grace, you know I’ve always taken an interest in the boy, even though we don’t see each other,” protested Jim, who had never been sure whether or not Ronny was his own son. He looked again at his companion. How strange it always was after a lapse of years to rediscover an old love! Their coy ways and the meaning which they unconsciously gave to every gesture mixed oddly with their added signs of age and filled him with a cruel pleasure. That he himself had grown flabby and gout-ridden did not disturb Walsh. He had never been handsome, nor young in any real sense; only, after a while, rich.
Walsh had decided tastes in women, although they had evolved slightly. When he had first been in a position to choose, show girls had been his choice; blond, with adequate experience and without tiresome, dramatic ambitions. Later, perhaps because this type was becoming hard to find, Jim had preferred women on the fringe of society: elegant but slightly flashy, women in their thirties, women who knew how to dress and how to set off a man’s wealth without looking like a wife, women with thin, active legs, with long, tubular arms and bracelets on their wrists. He had never had a dark woman and he had never been in love.
A dozen years ago Grace, even if too young, had been a fairly good embodiment of his ideal. Married to a man whose money and career were slipping from his fingers, she had been looking around with those blue eyes of hers to find something different. By her husband Roger’s trembling hands, his mute mouth and desperate gaze she knew that he was finished. Sometimes he had looked as though he wanted to beg her understanding, as though some sign must pass between them for their eight years together, their common meals, the darkness of their bed. Then Grace would cry:
“Roger, don’t look like such an old bear! Take a drink! Do something! I must hurry and dress for dinner. I’m going out.”
Her liaison with Walsh had lasted a little over a year and it was Walsh who had tired first; Grace could have gone on forever in the atmosphere of wealth which he exuded. Never mind, she had her twin diamond brooches, an emerald and diamond bracelet, a superb fur coat and the beginnings of Ronny. About Ronny she had not been so sure, and had tried several times in a haphazard way to get rid of him. But he clove stubbornly to her side and, after nine months and three days, emerged as dark as a changeling and yellow with jaundice.
Grace today was no longer too young. Her hair was bleached and she covered her face with a bricklike powder, in imitation of the ash blond curls, the peachy glow that had once been hers. Those little birdlike ways were showing a hint of the peckish; the nerves were rubbing through. Yet such details were only to be seen on scrutiny. Grace could still show a stranger that blond, dolly femininity for which men are supposed to sigh. The brave candid blue eyes glittered as though to say: “We at least are fearless, two stones unworn by tears.”
Walsh looked into them now and smiled. “Well, he said, “what is it?” and moved his knee beneath the table.
At the feel of this thick yet knobby knee, matted, as she remembered, by black hair, Grace unaccountably thrilled. It was the thrill of wealth and ease and big cars, of a new dress for each occasion, and of jewels. Grace was not doing as well as she would have liked and Walsh was the best she had ever done.
“I don’t want to bore you with my own problems,” she said, “but I am worried about Ronny. My doctor says he’s near a breakdown and mustn’t be stimulated in any way.”
“In other words you want to get him off your hands for the summer,” guessed Walsh. “Quite right, a pretty woman like you has no business dragging a grown-up boy around. Besides, boys have their own tastes. Now if I had a son—”
It was as a direct result of this conversation that Ronny arrived at Star Harbour Junction one day in early June. He was met by Jeremy, Jim Walsh’s caretaker. Jeremy was a pink-cheeked man with good health and a pessimistic outlook. He had come to the peninsula when the boathouse was first built and now lived there together with his wife Mary and Walsh’s horse, Gambol. They had all three been cast away, so to speak, and existed quietly enough. Although the couple’s salary came regularly in the mail, they had never received money for the upkeep of the house nor any orders concerning its repair. Jeremy, with Gambol’s help, dug up the ground beyond the wall and had made there a large vegetable garden. It was on Mrs. Grey’s property but no word had been said. Then as a complete surprise, had come a letter from Walsh saying that a boy was coming to stay the summer; that he was to have Gambol to ride, and that a tutor had been found for him. Walsh had enclosed money and given Mrs. Villar’s address in case of emergency.
Jeremy asked no questions of Ronny on the way home from the station. He did not pay much attention to this child who was to spend the next months under his care, and Ronny, as he climbed into the old Ford, felt lonely and abandoned. While they drove into the hills along the coastline, the boy stole sideways glances, not so much at his companion’s face as at his square hands on the wheel and the black-booted feet on the pedal. Then he looked across at the woods, at the field of old and dying apple trees, and finally at the reedy marshes which fought the beaches along the shore. A sea smell filled his nostrils, stagnant and strong. It was low tide.
At last they drove over a space redeemed from the marsh, a filled-in area, which was ended abruptly by the boathouse. From the land it looked like any other house, conventional although somewhat shabby in its brick dress. How was one to know of the salt water which flowed like blood into its lower chamber? Ronny felt near to tears with dreariness, yet somewhere inside was a thrill of excitement. For a contrast he thought of his mother who would surely never come here if once she had seen the place.
“Well, how does it strike you?” asked Jeremy, carrying the boy’s one modest valise.
“Fine,” answered Ronny politely.
“Oh it’s just a house, in any case,” said Jeremy. “Houses are all the same; big or small, they can’t prevent us from going to another one in the end, as narrow as our shoulders.” For Jeremy could not conceive why he had been let live only to die in the end.
His wife Mary appeared now on the threshold. A thin woman, slightly shriveled and pale as her husband was rosy, her every gesture was kind, fussy and anxious. She hesitated, dried her fingers on her apron, and finally shook hands with Ronny.
