A Tangled Web Read Online Free PDF

her that she had grown into beauty. As years went by she did not like Nan much better. Nan, with her subtle, mysterious face, her ashgold hair, her strange liquid emerald eyes, her thin red lips, who was not now really half as pretty as Gay but had odd exotic charms unknown to Rose River. How she patronized Gay—“You quaint child,”—“So Victorian.” Gay did not want to be quaint and Victorian. She wanted to be smart and up-to-date and sophisticated like Nan. Though not exactly like Nan. She didn’t want to smoke. It always made her think of that dreadful old Mrs. Fidele Blacquiere down at the harbor and old mustached Highland Janet at Three Hills, who were always smoking big black pipes like the men. And then—Noel didn’t like girls who smoked. He didn’t approve of them at all. Nevertheless, Gay, deep down in her heart, was glad the visit of the Alpheus Penhallows to Rose River was to be a brief one this summer. Mrs. Alpheus was going to a more fashionable place.
    5
    Hugh Dark and Joscelyn Dark (née Penhallow) were sitting on opposite sides of the room, never looking at each other, and seeing and thinking of nothing but each other. And everybody looked at Joscelyn and wondered as they had wondered for ten years, what terrible secret lay behind her locked lips.
    The affair of Hugh and Joscelyn was the mystery and tragedy of the clan—a mystery that no one had ever been able to solve, though not for lack of trying. Ten years before, Hugh Dark and Joscelyn Penhallow had been married after an eminently respectable and somewhat prolonged courtship. Joscelyn had not been too easily won. It was a match which pleased everybody, except Pauline Dark, who was mad about Hugh, and Mrs. Conrad Dark, his mother, who had never liked Joscelyn’s branch of the Penhallows.
    It had been a gay, old-fashioned evening wedding, according to the best Penhallow tradition. Everybody was there to the fourth degree of relationship, and everyone agreed that they had never seen a prettier bride or a more indisputable happy and enraptured bridegroom. After the supper and the festivities were over, Hugh had taken his bride home to “Treewoofe,” the farm he had bought at Three Hills. As to what had happened between the time when Joscelyn, still wearing her veil and satin in the soft coolness and brilliance of the September moonlight—a whim of Hugh’s, that, who had some romantic idea of leading a veiled and shimmering bride over the threshold of his new home—had driven away from her widowed mother’s house at Bay Silver and the time when, three hours later, she returned to it on foot, still in her disheveled bridal attire, no one ever knew or could obtain the least inkling in spite of all their prying and surmising. All Joscelyn would ever say, even to her distracted relatives, was that she could never live with Hugh Dark. As for Hugh, he said absolutely nothing and very few people ever dared say anything to him.
    Failing to discover the truth, surmise and gossip ran riot. All sorts of explanations were hinted or manufactured—most of them ridiculous enough. One was that Hugh, as soon as he got his bride home, told her that he would be master. He told her certain rules she must keep. He would have no woman bossing him. The story grew till it ran that Hugh, by way of starting in properly, had made or tried to make Joscelyn walk around the room on all fours just to teach her he was head of the house. No girl of any spirit, especially Clifford Penhallow’s daughter, would endure such a thing. Joscelyn had thrown her wedding-ring at him and flown out of the house.
    Others had it that Joscelyn had left Hugh because he wouldn’t promise to give up a cat she had hated “And now,” as Uncle Pippin said mournfully, “the cat is dead.” Some averred they had quarreled because Joscelyn had criticized his grammar. Some that she had found out he was an infidel.