Penmarric Read Online Free PDF Page B

park, raced across those smooth lawns, beneath trees tired with the summer heat, past nursemaids with perambulators and children with hoops. I ran until my breath was sobbing in my throat—and yet still she refused to let me escape. She came after me, and finally I stopped running, sank down on another bench and waited for the inevitable quarrel to begin.
    “Mark …” She was at my elbow at last, scarlet-faced, out of breath but very far from speechless. “Mark, please! Listen to me! I—”
    “No,” I said, “no, you’re going to listen to me. I’ve listened to you long enough. I’m never going to Penmarric. I’m never going to see Giles Penmar. And I never want to set eyes on you again as long as I live.”
    We quarreled for some time. She shouted, bullied, pleaded, cajoled and even cried. And then finally she used the one argument that could persuade me to change my mind.
    “But, Mark,” she said, shedding a despairing tear, “how am I ever to live at Penmarric unless Giles makes you his heir? You know it’s the dearest wish of my life to spend my declining years there! If you don’t want to live at Penmarric yourself, then of course you need not, but … please, Mark, for my sake …”
    I saw it all then as clearly as if it had been set down before me in black and white. I saw the exact pattern of my revenge and of course I must steer to achieve it. When she paused for breath at last I heard myself say shortly, “Very well, Mama, I’ll do as you wish. I do so against my will and better judgment, but if you wish to see Giles I suppose I shall have to accompany you.”
    She was overjoyed; tears of relief shone in her eyes, but if she had anticipated my revenge I doubt that she would have felt so satisfied with her hard-won and odious victory.
2
    I was still two months short of my twenty-first birthday when I first crossed the threshold of Penmarric. It no longer seemed an enchanted castle to me, only an old house that had been remodeled with pseudo-Gothic clumsiness by my grandfather Mark Penmar. The hall was gloomy and ill-kept, the servants were slovenly and the wainscoting bore the marks of mice. We were ushered into a dreary morning room with dark wallpaper, cumbersome furniture and a threadbare Indian carpet. Windows led out onto the terrace that overlooked the sea, but the terrace was overgrown with weeds and rust had corroded the absurd cannon that had been placed long ago on the flagstones to decorate the battlements.
    It was no better than a neglected tomb, a desolate epitaph to decay.
    “It’s not as I remember it,” said my mother, very white around the lips. “Can Giles have exhausted his financial resources? Surely not! Yet how could he have let the place become like this? Giles was so gay, so fastidious! I think you will be impressed by Giles. He was a tall man with a brilliant smile and a splendid manner. He was handsome.”
    But people change. When the door opened at last I understood why he had never gone to London to champion his cause in person, why he had confined himself so rigorously to Penmarric. A nurse brought in an invalid in a wheelchair; a shriveled, hunched invalid with a lined face and lifeless eyes; I had never before seen a man so close to death yet still, improbably, alive.
    After the nurse had gone I waited for my mother to speak, but she could not. There was a long silence. He was looking at her, not at me. I think he hardly noticed that there was another person present. He looked only at her with his tired dark eyes, and after a long while he said slowly, “How well you look, Maud,” as if he felt in some remote degree surprised by her obvious health and untarnished good looks.
    “Giles,” she said. She did not say any more. She went on looking at him, but presently I saw her glance wander to the shabby surroundings shrouded by that oppressive pall of neglect.
    “I lost interest,” he said. “I lost interest long ago when I first became ill. I continued the