Ward of Lucifer Read online

  by MARY BURCHELL "Justin Yorke," that gentleman's housekeeper told his young ward, "is a man who likes his own way. It's perfectly true that he'll be kind. to you over most things. But, in return, he won't expect you to oppose him in anything".

  And so began the struggle between Norma, who knew from the start what she wanted, and Justin, who only used her to further his own interests, until he found, almost too late, that her happiness was more important to him than his own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  NORMA stared out of the widow of the train and wondered if she ought to tell the other people in the compartment that the man they were discussing with such candour was her guardian.

  Possibly they thought her too young to be of any importance. But surely people ought not to be quite so indiscreetly personal before strangers. Even strangers of seventeen.

  Their talk was not only embarrassing now. It was faintly alarming. For they were certainly making the unknown guardian to whose care she was even now joumeying, sound quite a terrifying personality.

  "Sinister," the lady with the large pink roses in her hat was saying. "That's what I should call Justin Yorke. Sinister. In an attractive way, of course."

  "He always reminds me of a mediaeval cardinal."

  That was the intense looking woman in the comer, who evidently fancied herself as a student of human nature. "One of those princes of the church, don't you know, who looked saintly and really had no flies on them at all. A very interesting type."

  "Justin Yorke is not a type," growled the red-faced man. "He's unique. Fortunately. And don't be a fool, Beatrice, with your talk of cardinals and saints. The man could hardly be more worldly."

  "That's what I said. I said just exactly that," protested Beatrice, who of course, had not. "He looks saintly, but is really thoroughly worldly. That's what having no flies on one means. Henry. And I do think he is like a mediaeval cardinal." She obviously believed in making her point by reiteration. "There's that air of power about him. And he's sinister, as Daisy says, and knows how to get what he wants, without bothering

  too much about the means of doing it. And proud! My goodness, I never knew a prouder man, for all his cool politeness."

  "Oh, yes. He's proud, all right," agreed Henry.

  "Proud as Lucifer, as they say."

  "Still, Lucifer fell in the end, didn't he?" commented Pink Roses, with a thoughtful satisfaction which Nonna thought malicious.

  "Did he? Who was he, anyway?" inquired Henry who, although he had used the expression "proud as Lucifer," was probably, Norma thought, under the impression that he was referring to a match.

  "Oh, Henry, really! You make me ashamed of you sometimes," declared Beatrice. "I don't know how I came to have such an ignorant brother. Lucifer was another name for Satan, of course."

  "Well, that suits Justin Yorke all right," conceded Henry, and chuckled so immoderately that, with an obscure sensation of annoyance that she could not afterwards explain, Norma plunged into the conversation.

  "Lucifer also means 'the shining one,' doesn't it?" she said coolly. "He was the son of Aurora, goddess of the morning."

  At this piece of unsolicited information, profound and astonished silence fell on the compartment, while Norma found herself blushing and feeling a prig.

  What on earth had induced her to join in the conversation, sounding like any smug schoolgirl showing off her little bit of knowledge?

  But the impulse really had nothing to do with wanting to show off recently acquired knowledge. It was just that, quite suddenly, she knew that she was not going to have her guardian known or unknown likened to Satan, without a protest.

  He might be like Satan. Never having seen him, she could not say. But it was not for these people to say so, unchallenged, in front of her.

  "Well, here's a well-informed little lady," commented the red-faced man at last, with a good-natured laugh. "How many more interesting facts have you got packed away under that black thatch of yours?"

  "Not so very many," Norma acknowledged, with a sudden smile. "I just happened to know that one because we did Paradise Lost for Advanced G.C.E .. this term, so we had quite a lot of notes on the various meanings of Lucifer."

  "So that's it." Henry appeared not to have heard of Paradise Lost, but he obviously liked Norma's big dark eyes and her smile. "But you don't know anything about our local Lucifer, do you? No notes about him at school, eh?" And he laughed again, and his sister said, "Henry!" in a tone of futile, if ladylike protest.

  "If by your local Lucifer you mean Mr. Justin Yorke, I'm going to know quite a lot about him," Norma stated, not without enjoyment in the sensation she was about to cause. "He is my guardian, as a matter of fact. I'm on my way to Bishop stone now."

  "Your guardian!"

  Both ladies cried out in what Norma took to be consternation as much as surprise, while the red-faced man said: "Good God!"

  Norma laughed a little doubtfully, though she found that she was also trembling slightly.

  "Is it so very extraordinary?" She looked from one to another of the three astonished faces before her.

  "That Justin Yorke should be the guardian of a young girl? I'll say it is!" declared Henry. While his sister recovered herself sufficiently to say: "Ssh, Henry," and then, to Norma: "Are you his niece or something, my dear?"

  Norma shook her head.

  "Not really. We're not blood relations at all. My aunt by marriage was his half-sister."

  They all made an obvious effort to digest this interesting relationship, and equally obviously failed.

  "It's not so complicated as it sounds," Norma explained. "You see, my parents died when I was about six, and my only relation left was my Aunt Janet the widow of my mother's brother. She was my guardian until quite recently, and then she died. Mr. Yorke was her half-brother, but whether they had the same mother or the same father, I'm really not quite sure.

  I've never even seen Mr. Yorke, and I didn't know my Aunt Janet very well, because I was at boarding school and she didn't have me home with her for the holidays. She preferred to send me to some people she knew who had a farm.

  "Well, if! had a pretty ward like you, I'd want to have her home for the holidays," declared Henry. "A shame," he added, with sincere disapproval.

  "I don't think about Aunt Janet like children," Norma explained without rancour. It was so very long since she had belonged to anyone who thought her of supreme importance, that she almost always accepted the position philosophically.

  "And now Justin Yorke's taken on your guardianship, and you've never even seen him?" Henry seemed to find her situation full of pathos, even if Norma did not. But then, of course, gruff, red-faced men are notoriously sentimental.

  "Yes. I'm going home to him for the holidays, for the first time," Norma explained.

  "Come a long way?" inquired Henry, whose sympathy appeared to take the form of questions.

  "Yes. I've been travelling most of the day. My boarding school is right away in the south of England, so I had a long journey to Carlisle first, and then I had to wait over an hour for the local train"

  "Always have to," commented Henry disgustedly.

  "This train just runs as and when it pleases, so far as I can see. Are you getting out at Munley Halt or Rosendale?"

  "Munley Halt. Mr. Yorke's solicitor said in his letter that Munley was the nearest station for Bishop stone."

  "Well, Bishop stone's just about the same distance from both," Henry declared, with an air of putting all solicitors in their place. "We get out at Rossingdale. If you like to get out there, we can set you on the right road."

  'Nonsense, Henry," interrupted his sister. "There win have been a car sent from Bishop stone. If the child has been told to go to Munley, there's no sense in her g
etting out at Rossingdale. She'd better start by making the best impression she can."

  "Yes, indeed. Poor child," commented Pink Roses, with a sigh.

  "Why?" Norma ventured to ask, feeling both amused and apprehensive. "I mean why poor child?"

  The three looked at each other doubtfully. But, while they all obviously shared more or less the same view, they seemed to find some difficulty in explaining their reasons for holding it.

  "You don't any of you like my guardian at all, do you?" Norma said slowly at last.

  "He is not a popular man in the district," Pink Roses explained carefully. "But then he is very aloof and takes no part or interest in anything which happens locally."

  "I see," Norma said. Though privately she thought this rather an inadequate reason for the degree of awed dislike which these people seemed to feel for him.

  "Anyway, he may make a very good guardian," Beatrice declared brightly. And, at that point, the train began to slow down from a walking pace to a crawl, and finally to a halt.

  The three began to gather up their parcels and say good-bye to Norma, with a leisureliness which showed that they knew the train would not have the impertinence to proceed until they had dismounted at then own conference.

  "Munley is the next stop," Henry informed Norma.

  "You'll be at Bishop stone in time for your tea. And mind you drop in and see us when you come over to Rossingdale. The name is Bawdley."

  "Yes, do come." His sister reinforced the invitation possibly as much from curiosity as kindness but she sounded genuinely cordial. "Ask for the White House. Anyone will direct you."

  Norma thanked them both sincerely, handed out two parcels which had been forgotten, and then the train moved very, very slowly on towards Munley Halt.

  Norma sat back in her corner seat and reviewed the situation.

  So her guardian was sinister and proud, was he?

  And not popular in the district. Even allowing for picturesque exaggeration (very necessary with Beatrice, she felt sure), and even while doing everything possible to preserve loyal impartiality towards hearsay evidence, one could not feel reassured.

  Norma sighed. Sometimes she thought the nicest thing in the world must be to have a secure and normal home background where one unquestionably belonged. For to anyone orphaned at six and then subjected to Aunt Janet's impersonal system of remote control, any impressions of a real home were, of necessity, hazy in the extreme.

  Only on a few occasions could Norma even recollect having seen Aunt Janet. She had been an unsmiling, upright, rather dignified woman, with greying hair and a forbidding manner. One felt instinctively that she dispensed justice, quite untempered by mercy, and that she believed disagreeable things like cold baths, early rising and plain food were good for one just because they were disagreeable.

  She had certainly paid unflinchingly, but without enthusiasm all the costs of Norma's education at a good boarding school, but she could hardly have made her lack of personal interest clearer. And in the holidays Norma had always been dispatched to have a healthy, if somewhat monotonous, time on a farm in Cornwall, situated at least two hundred miles away from Aunt Janet.

  Being a normal child, she had been reasonably happy during term-time, and often very happy during the holidays. But occasionally an unchildlike melancholy, tinged with something almost like panic, overwhelmed her. For there was nowhere in the world which she could call home and no one to whom she really belonged.

  And, like every child and perhaps rather more than most, Norma had needed that feeling of "belonging."

  At heart she was almost wildly affectionate and demonstrative, and, though she was unaware of the actual clear-cut fact, her warm and ardent nature longed for something or someone on whom to expend her affection.

  Curiously enough, it was the senior science mistress generally believed not to view life in terms of anything more human than chemical reactions who made the most acute observation about Norma, during an idle ten minutes in the staff room when various pupils were being discussed with candour .

  "Norma Lacey will be either violently unhappy or fantastically happy when she grows up," she asserted, in the didactic manner common to science mistresses. "She has loads of unused emotions and affections, and everything will depend on whether she spills them on someone worth while or someone quite unworthy."

  "Doesn't that apply to most people?" inquired the Latin mistress, who privately thought the science mistress was showing off.

  "Oh, no. Most of us spread our emotions a bit, so that if we're disillusioned in one direction, we do have a chance of making up for it in another. Norma will put all her emotional eggs into one basket, and there will either be disaster or one of those rare grand romances. In a way, it's a pity she's so lovely. She'll attract all the wrong sort as well as the right."

  "Well, she's quite a well-balanced girl," declared the Latin mistress (now quite sure that her colleague was showing off, because, otherwise, why discourse at such length on a mere fifth form girl?). "I don't think we need worry about her."

  And, as the bell for the next period had rung at that moment, neither of them did worry about her any further.

  But the science mistress was nearer the truth than the Latin mistress or even she herself had known. Norma had "loads of unused emotions and affections" and she had had no one on whom to expend them yet.

  Also she was lovely. So lovely that Henry might well have been excused the partiality which he had immediately displayed.

  As she sat there now in the train, crawling towards Munley Halt and her new life, she looked an extraordinarily colourful, vital, arresting young creature.

  Thick, soft black hair fell almost to her shoulders, and was cut in a fringe on her wide, intelligent forehead. Her face, at this age, tended to childlike roundness, and was to maintain something of those childlike contours always. But the first thing which one noticed about her were her enormous, thickly-fringed dark eyes, with their direct, truthful gaze, and their tendency to widen when she was surprised or pleased or distressed.

  For the rest, her skin was smooth and pale, and her mouth full and red. She had a short, rather strongly defined nose, whose lack of romantic length she mourned occasionally, but which really suited her round, rather wide face much better than the Roman nose of her own desires. And her young figure was admirably set off by the off-white travelling coat, belted with scarlet, which was her own choice not Aunt Janet's.

  As the tram drew into Munley Halt, Norma pulled on her scarlet beret, lifted her case down from the rack, and stood by the window, scanning the platform.

  Almost before the train had stopped, she had jumped down on to the little boarded walk which combined with what looked like a garden shed made up the station of Munley Halt.

  With a faint though unfounded belief that her guardian might, in spite of all reports, have come personally to meet her, she looked round for someone grey-haired and forbidding, for she supposed he would be more or less a contemporary of Aunt Janet, and not unlike her in manner.

  But there was no sign of anyone grey-haired or forbidding. Indeed, no sign of anyone who could be considered in the light of a guardian at all.

  There was a stout farmerish looking man, who was superintending the eviction of a crate of hissing goslings from the luggage van, and there was a vacant looking youth languidly sweeping the platform. But, by no stretch of imagination, could either of them be the sinister Justin Yorke, or even have any connection with him.

  And, as Norma slowly made her way towards the small wicket gate which served as a ticket barrier and general dividing line between the station of Munley Halt and the outside world, she saw that there was no vehicle waiting outside except a farm cart which was obviously the property of the owner of the goslings. No car from Bishop stone hospitably awaited her coming.

  As she reached the gate, the vacant looking youth abandoned his sweeping and stretched out a hand for her ticket.

  "Has anyone been down from Bishop stone
to-day?"

  Norma asked.

  "Eh?" said the youth without interest.

  "I'm going to Bishopstone Mr. Justin Yorke's house. Has anyone been down to the station to inquire about my arrival?"

  The youth stared fixedly at the ticket in his hand and at length said: "You get out at Rossingdale for Bishop stone." "But I was told to get out here," Norma insisted patiently.

  At this, the youth lost what faint interest he had previously worked up, and turned to watch the slow progress of the train out of the station once more.

  Norma waited a moment, and then tried again. "How far is it to walk?"

  "Where?" asked the youth.

  "To Bishop stone."

  "Tidy step," was the helpful reply. "Do you mean two or three miles?"

  The youth gave it as his opinion that it was hard to say. And Norma, feeling that the conversation was getting nowhere, was about to go out of the station and try to find a signpost, when a hissing noise behind her denoted that the farmer and his charges were approaching. She turned to him.

  "Could you tell me how far it is to Bishop stone please?"

  "Three to four miles you young devil!" replied the farmer promptly. And it was a moment before Norma realized that the first half of the sentence had been addressed to her, and the second to an enterprising young gosling who had popped his head out of the crate and nearly nipped the farmer's thumb.

  "You don't happen to be going that way, do you?"

  She rather ruefully weighed her case up and down in her hand.

  "I'm sorry, my dear." The farmer looked sympathetic. "I'm going in just the opposite direction, and Friday evening's my busiest time, so I can't go so far out of my way."

  "Of course, not! I don't want to take you out of your way. I may get a lift further on," Norma said cheerfully. "Which road is it?"

  "Straight in front and on for half a mile. Then turn right at the crossroads. After that, just follow the road till it brings you right into Bishop stone village."

  "Oh, is there a village, as well as the house?" Norma asked with interest.

  "Isn't it the village you want?"