A Candle in Her Heart Read online

  His wife, whom Leslie called “Aunt Agatha” because she couldn’t bring herself to say “Mother” to her father’s second wife, was an ox-eyed Juno, a large phlegmatic woman, handsome but without charm, well meaning but insensitive who went through life like a steam roller, trampling on people’s feelings without the slightest awareness of what she was doing.

  The chief difficulty in coping with Agatha Blake was that, invariably, she meant well. It wasn’t fair to be driven half mad with annoyance against a woman whose intentions were always good, who took a stern pride in being unselfish but never failed to let the hapless recipient of her heavy-handed kindness know it.

  For a moment Leslie paused in the breakfast room doorway. The sun streamed through a great window with many panes, shone through a collection of choice glass arranged on a narrow shelf against it: a piece of clear lemon-yellow; a curious mauve-tinted flagon; green bottles, a pair of them; bits of amber, pink, crimson, transformed by the sunlight into gleaming jewels.

  She slipped into her place at the table. “Good morning, Dad. Good morning, Aunt Agatha. What a glorious day! Nothing to mar it but that dingy old barge. Sooner or later,” she added darkly, “I’m going to set fire to the ugly thing.”

  Her father gave her a quick look from under his shaggy eyebrows. “The barge stays where it is,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more about it, Leslie.”

  “But it’s such an eyesore,” she began in protest.

  “I must say,” Agatha put in, “I agree with Leslie about that hideous barge. If we could just get rid of it, we could have a really attractive small dock and a nice diving board. After all, Corliss, this is your property to do with as you see fit.”

  “After all,” he broke in with a tone of authority he rarely used either to his wife or his daughter, “the barge belonged to Douglas Clayton. It was his favorite playground as a small boy. He dived from it and fished and played pirate. While I live, it will remain where it is, untouched.”

  “Really, my dear,” Agatha protested, “you are rather absurd at times about the Clayton boy, because you inherited the money and the business and this house; sheer chance, after all.”

  “Not sheer chance, Agatha. Douglas Clayton sacrificed his life magnificently. All this—the business, the money, the house. But more. Much more. Another forty years of life, perhaps. Time for a happy marriage and children of his own. Time to find where his abilities lay and to develop them. Time for a rich and fruitful middle age and mellow years of fulfillment. Time to dream dreams and watch them come true. Time for the seasons as they unfold.”

  He broke off, cleared his throat, “Everything we have today we owe to Douglas Clayton. The barge stays where it is, Leslie.”

  “Of course,” she said quietly, “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  So far as Agatha was concerned, her husband might as well not have spoken. “I must repeat,” she said in her flat voice, “I think you are rather absurd about the Clayton boy. That memorial festival you are planning for him on the Green, for instance. After all, millions of young men have died in battle. That didn’t make them necessarily all heroes. And one thing you seem to forget; you don’t owe everything to Douglas Clayton. After all, I have my own money and you know I’m always glad to let you have what you want.”

  “How well I know.” Corliss Blake bit off the words, got up to kiss his wife lightly on the forehead and smiled at Leslie. “I must be off.”

  “So early?” Agatha protested. “In your position you don’t need to get to work at this hour. After all, you owe it to your own dignity and your status to go in at a later time.”

  “I have some young chemists to interview. There have been a number of applications and we are still weeding out the applicants. Only three left to choose among and two of them will be in today.”

  “But you are no chemist yourself,” Agatha pointed out. “You are hardly equipped to decide about their qualifications. Why don’t you simply leave the decision to Oliver Harrison? Dear Oliver is always so ready and willing to help.”

  Leslie pleated her napkin in her lap, her soft full lips pressed firmly together. How could her father bear it? How could he maintain his eternal patience when Agatha interfered with everything?

  “I left the chemical end to Oliver,” he said tranquilly. “But the essential thing is to select a trustworthy man. It’s character we need, over and above ability. If a competing firm were to get hold of the new formula—and the Gypton Company, at any rate, would go to any lengths, pay any price, it would be a tremendous blow to us.”

  “I’m glad you have Oliver,” Agatha said. “Now there’s a man with a future, if I ever saw one.” She turned to Leslie. “You haven’t asked him to dinner for weeks. Any time you want to have him, you know, I’d be simply delighted.”

  “Thank you.” Leslie’s hands clenched into small fists. If only Agatha wouldn’t try to run everything! Now she was determined to marry Leslie off suitably. If there were only some way she could support herself, be independent, free from Agatha’s domination, the everlasting clink of Agatha’s money. At least, she could do something productive.

  “Dad,” she said impulsively, and her father stopped at the door. Looked back.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Is there any reason why I couldn’t work on a statue of Douglas Clayton for the Green?”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t try it if you would like to.”

  “Don’t you think,” Agatha pointed out, “it would be better if you didn’t? In a way it would be absurd to try it. There are so many professional sculptors.”

  Corliss gave his wife a quick look, turned to Leslie. “Doing creative work of some kind, any kind, whether it’s making a fireplace bench or landscaping a garden, is necessary if a person is to be complete. I’d be delighted to have you go back to sculpting.” He smiled at his daughter.

  “How can I find out what he looked like? Are there any pictures of him here in the house?”

  “No, I understand he gave them all to Jane Williams—Jane Brooke, she was then—when he became engaged to her. She may have kept them.”

  Again Corliss Blake started toward the door. Again he turned back. “Oh, there’s a theater in New York showing The Tower Heights Offensive. Nors Swensen, a guard at the Company who remembers young Clayton very well, saw it last weekend. Said it gave him quite a turn. Showed the whole incident, the way Clayton saved his men and wiped out the Red machine-gun nest. I’ve been making inquiries to see whether it would be possible to rent the film to show here at the time of the Clayton festival.”

  “Was that when he was reported missing?” Leslie asked.

  “Yes. He was never seen again.”

  Her father went out of the room and in a few minutes his shabby old Chevrolet, of which Agatha disapproved so vehemently—after all, he could have a Cadillac if he wanted it, nothing would give her more pleasure, and he really owed it to his position—drove around the house and turned toward the winding road along the river.

  Rosie, the second maid, came into the breakfast room. Her eyes were like blue glassies and her cheeks like withered winter apples.

  “It’s Mr. Logan on the phone for you.”

  Leslie nodded. “Please excuse me, Aunt Agatha.” In the library she picked up the telephone. “Hello, Paul.”

  “Hi, Beautiful,” said a cheerful voice. “How about some tennis?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry but not today. There’s an errand I must do, so I’m going to New York.”

  There was an exaggerated sigh of disappointment and she laughed.

  “Hardhearted Hannah,” Paul Logan grumbled. “Why couldn’t I have fallen for a more sympathetic girl?”

  “Never mind,” she mocked him, “Maybe the next one will be more satisfactory.”

  “Next one, indeed,” he said, indignantly, “when you can see me wasting away, day by day. I may be magnanimous enough to forgive you for that crack, but only if you promise to play golf at the club Saturday af
ternoon.”

  “Shylock! You and your pound of flesh,” she said gaily.

  “Will you?”

  “I’d love it.”

  “Wonderful! Now don’t let that local Lothario talk you out of it.”

  “I won’t. And who is the local Lothario?”

  “Oliver Harrison, of course. The Viking god. The Great Profile. As though you didn’t know. But if I catch you swooning when he goes by—”

  “You m-m-make me so m-m-mad,” she sputtered.

  He laughed. “ ’By, Beautiful.”

  Leslie was laughing as she ran upstairs for gloves, handbag and car keys. When she came down, Agatha was crossing the wide hallway.

  “Where are you going?”

  Leslie counted slowly to ten and then said politely, “To see Jane Williams about the Douglas Clayton photographs.”

  “Will you be in for lunch?”

  “I don’t know. No, I won’t. Whether Jane kept them or not, I think I’ll run into New York and see that old documentary film. It might give me some ideas for the statue, some suggestions for action. I’ll be home for dinner, in any case.”

  “Sometimes,” Agatha said with an abruptness that was unlike her usual heavy placidity, “it seems to me that Douglas Clayton is more alive now than he ever was. He—he haunts this house!”

  As though startled by her own vehemence, she added in her customary flat voice, “There’s Hermann. Late as usual. I must speak to him about the flower beds. That spray he is using—” She went out on the lawn at her habitual firm, deliberate pace.

  Leslie heard her say, “Hermann, I don’t like—” She saw the controlled exasperation on the gardener’s face. With a hopeless little shrug she went to the garage, backed out her small Renault, and wound down the windows. She took a long breath. It was a relief to escape from Agatha. For the hundredth time she wondered why on earth her father had married the woman.

  * * *

  Web Rock, the Williams house, was long, rambling and as modern as Telstar. Since the death of her husband, two years before, Jane Williams had lived there with her little son, Jack, and her young sister, Doris Brooke. Three indoor servants and a full-time gardener kept it in superb condition. From the time John Williams had built it for his bride, Web Rock had been the showplace of Claytonville.

  The sisters were on the terrace at the back when Leslie arrived, discussing the best landscaping to set off the new swimming pool. Jack, tow-headed and freckled, who had seen the red Renault turn in at the driveway, raced to meet Leslie and tell her about it.

  As she got out of the car he caught her arm, pulling her in his impatience. “C’mon, Leslie. Mom got an oval pool just to be different. Now she wants to put in some pink water lilies. Next thing we’ll have swans. And I ask you, how can you swim with swans?”

  The two sisters turned as Leslie came around the side of the house with Jack tugging at her hand. Leslie was struck, as always when she saw them together, by the difference between the sisters. It was not merely a matter of age, though Jane was ten years older than Doris. They were unlike in looks, in manner, in character. Jane was tall, misleadingly fragile in appearance, with blond hair, appealing blue eyes and a helpless manner. Doris was small and dark, with snapping black eyes and inexhaustible energy.

  “Jack,” his mother expostulated in her soft, rather fretful voice, “let Leslie alone! From the moment she enters this house you pester her.”

  “Well, gosh,” he began. His hand tightened on Leslie’s and she gave him a conspiratorial wink.

  “Though I must say, Leslie,” Jane went on, “you are partly to blame. Since he was knee-high you’ve spoiled him, telling him stories, playing with him. Now do run away, Jack, and don’t make a nuisance of yourself.”

  He shuffled his feet. “Okay,” he mumbled and wandered off, scuffing his shoes on the gravel of the driveway, head down in dejection.

  “He’s really fun, Jane,” Leslie protested when he was out of hearing. “He doesn’t bother me at all. And I love playing with him, you know. At that age, a child’s imagination is so alive, so adventurous, that I find every minute I’m with him a delight. He’s at the time of ‘Let’s pretend,’ and there’s no excitement like it in childhood.”

  “You ought to have him as a steady diet,” Jane said. “You’d get as sick and tired of having him always underfoot as I do. He’s reached the age when he never stops asking impossible questions: What makes the wind blow? How can we see things that are bigger than our eyes? Why are goldfish gold? Why? Why? Why? It’s enough to drive any woman out of her mind.”

  Leslie bit back the words that crowded to her lips. She wondered how much love Jane could have had for her husband if she found their only child a nuisance. Perhaps, for once, Agatha Blake had been right when she said Jane had married John Williams simply because he was the richest available bachelor after Douglas Clayton died.

  “Let’s have some coffee,” Jane suggested.

  “I really can’t stay,” Leslie told her. “I’m going into New York to see that old war documentary about Douglas Clayton. I just stopped by here because I want to try to do a statue for the festival and I wondered if you still have any pictures of him. I haven’t the slightest idea what he looked like.”

  “Good heavens, Leslie, that was years ago,” Jane said in her plaintive voice. “I haven’t the faintest memory of what I did with them. Probably they are stuck away in an old trunk somewhere. After he died and I met Jack, I naturally got rid of them. No man wants to look at the pictures of a younger and handsomer predecessor.”

  “Would it be an awful job to look for them?”

  “Yes, it would,” Jane said frankly. “Anyhow, there is something about going back, stirring up the past—well, it’s hardly fair to ask that of me. Now is it?”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t,” Leslie agreed. She flushed with embarrassment. “I just didn’t realize how you felt about him.”

  “You were too young to remember Doug, or you would understand.”

  “We’re the same age,” Doris exclaimed, “and I remember him just as clearly as anything.”

  “But I never saw him at all,” Leslie pointed out. “I never saw him in my life. We didn’t come to Claytonville until after he died.”

  “Yes, of course,” Jane said. “That was when your father inherited everything. I always knew Doug had a strong feeling of obligation about the Clayton Textile Company but, I must say, it was the biggest shock of my life when he left everything to your father, a distant cousin about five times removed, whom no one had ever heard of, just to keep it in the family, and didn’t leave a thing to me. We’d been engaged a whole month before he went overseas, too, and he had had plenty of time to change his will. Naturally,” she added, “I kept his diamond, but after I married Jack I wore it on my right hand.”

  She lifted her slender hand and the diamond blazed with light.

  “What was he like?” Leslie asked.

  “Heavens,” Jane said with a reproachful look, “sometimes I think you have no real feelings at all, Leslie. He was the only man I ever really loved. Now let’s—suppose we don’t talk about him any more.”

  “I’m—honestly, I’m sorrier than I can say.” Leslie put out her hand, pleading forgiveness, but Jane had turned away. Leslie gathered up her gloves and handbag.

  “Wait, Leslie,” Doris said eagerly, “let me go into New York with you. Do you mind?”

  “I’d love it.”

  Several hours later, the girls were lunching at the Colony. Ever since the Blakes had moved to Claytonville, Doris Brooke, known as the Babbling Brooke to her friends, had been the closest thing to a sister that Leslie had ever known. As usual, Doris was chattering volubly, her black eyes snapping, cheeks flushed like a wild rose.

  “So,” she concluded, “Jane was shattered when Doug died. He was—well, he was absolutely wonderful: good-looking, gay, brilliant, sweet-tempered. He hated rows. I can still remember when people lost their tempers or got overheated in an a
rgument, the way he would stop it by making such a ridiculous comment that the argument dissolved in laughter.

  “Then the war. And the worst of it was that he didn’t even have to go. He could have got out of it but he said he didn’t particularly like the idea of someone doing his fighting for him and taking his risks while he sat it out in comfort at home.

  “Three months after he reached Korea he wiped out that machine-gun nest. When word came that he was missing, presumed dead, Jane was stunned. She went around for weeks like a zombie. Then, about six months later, she married Jack. Of course, he was a lot older than she was but at least he didn’t have to go off somewhere to fight.”

  “Only six months!” Leslie said in surprise.

  “Well,” Doris said practically, “Doug was gone and Jack wasn’t the kind to wait around for her to make up her mind. Jane knew she’d never get another offer like that so she accepted him while she had the chance.”

  Leslie reached for the check in silence.

  “Don’t be too hard on Jane,” Doris said unexpectedly. “You can stand on your own feet but she can’t stand on hers. She needs someone to lean on, someone to take care of her. And, in a way, it was probably better all around that things happened as they did.”

  “Better?” Leslie was aware of a strong feeling of partisanship for the man who had not been remembered for six months.

  “Well,” Doris said, “I’ve often thought, suppose Doug had come back and he had been maimed in some way or disfigured. Jane has a—a kind of horror, a feeling of revulsion for anything like that. It really makes her ill. It would have been awful for both of them.”

  “But if she loved him—” Leslie began.

  “There are all kinds of love,” Doris said with unexpected shrewdness.

  While they strolled along the Avenue she said, “Speaking of all kinds of love, how long are you going to keep Paul Logan dangling?”

  Leslie laughed. “But I’m not!”