Bride of Pendorric

Epilogue

It is a year since that night and yet the memory of it is with me as vividly as when it happened. Perhaps, if one has come near to violent death, as I did, it is an experience which is never far from the surface of the mind.

I often say to Roc: “If it hadn’t been that I was so absorbed in the diary I should have drunk all the milk; I should have been unconscious when Barbarina came into my room and that would have been the end of me.” To that Roc answers: ” All life is chance. If your father had never come to our coast, you would not have been here at all.” And it is so.

It is difficult to understand everything that went on in Barbarina’s mind; I am sure that for much of the time she believed she was Deborah. She could never have played the part so well if she had not; and her character must have changed after Deborah died so that she really did take on the personality of her twin. The more she behaved like Deborah, the more like her she grew, just as Deborah, when Petroc became her lover, began to be like Barbarina. The curse laid on the Brides of Pendorric became an obsession with her. It may have been that she believed Deborah’s spirit had actually entered her body, and that she had become Deborah; and because she constantly thought of the sister whom she had sent to her death, she believed she was haunted by her and it was for this reason that she was anxious for another bride to take over the role of ghost at Pendorric.

But how can one follow the tortuous meandering of a sick mind? My conjectures must have an element of truth in them, though, because there was no doubt that I had been in danger from the moment I had come to Pendorric.

Poor simple-minded Carrie, who had always been dominated by her charges, was easily caught up in this morbid dream-life of her mistress; Barbarina and Deborah were one and the same; and Carrie believed it, while she alone knew that the twin who had fallen to her death in the hall at Pen dorric was Deborah. At times she could not understand Barbarina’s interpretation of this strange phenomenon; namely that Deborah’s mind and soul were now with Barbarina. Carrie could only accept this by telling herself that the two of them were really alive.

It was from Carrie that we gleaned a little understanding of Barbarina’s madness; but the years during which she had devoted herself to Barbarina and her crazy conception of life had undermined her own sanity and Roc was anxious that she should not be upset. He sent her away in the care of an old nanny of his who had a cottage on the Devon coast, and there she is now.

It was not so easy with Hyson, for Barbarina had tried to draw the child into her orbit. She saw in Lowella and Hyson a repetition of herself and Deborah; and because for most of the time she believed she was Deborah, she had great sympathy for the less attractive twin.

Barbarina’s affection for the child was deep and possessive and Hyson was fascinated by the strangeness of Barbarina, who revealed herself more to the child than to anyone else. Hyson did not understand but she was aware of the strangeness and, like Barbarina, learned to project herself into that make-believe world; Barbarina had hinted that she still lived and Hyson believed her; she believed that Barbarina would lure me to my death, so that she might rest in her grave according to the legend.

It was from Carrie we learned that Barbarina had sometimes gone to the music room and played the violin, and that she sang Ophelia’s song; and that it was she who had waited for me to leave Polhorgan and had removed the sign on the cliffs in the hope that I, less surefooted than those accustomed to the path, would have a fatal accident. She it was who had locked me in the vault, for the only other key to the vault had been in her possession; she had often paid secret visits to the vault as, according to Carrie, she told her she wanted to be with Barbarina. She would never have come to the vault had not Hyson been missing and she, guessing where she was, had decided to abandon that method of disposing of me, for the sake of the child. She had quietly unlocked the door before going to find Roc. Then she had tampered with the car and chance again had stepped in so that it was Morwenna who had had an accident.

Often I reflect how easily the legend of the Brides might have gone on and on; for few people can have come as near to death as I did, and escape. If Barbarina had been a coldblooded murderess I should never have escaped; but she was not that; if she had been, she would have planned more carefully; but she was caught in her world of make-believe; she was living on two levels and she could not see where reality and the dream-world merged. I discovered that she hpd trunks of Deborah’s clothes and often wore them when she was in Devon. The Hansons were not aware of this, never having known Deborah, and when Carrie called her Barbarina they merely thought that Carrie was a little weak in the head. And Barbarina could lightly step back into the character of Deborah to assure them that this was so.

I often wondered what damage she would have done to Hyson if I had not come to Pendorric when I did. The child was neurotic, her head full of strange notions. She was already beginning to believe that she stood in the same relationship to Lowella as Deborah had to Barbarina.

Barbarina had won her devotion by preferring her to her gayer sister; and that was when the damage began to be done.

But there again events worked against her. Hyson had endured the terrifying experience of being locked in the vault with me. She had known, because of the hints Barbarina loved to give the child, that something was going to happen that day. She believed that the figure she saw in the graveyard when she had hidden herself there was the ghost of Barbarina. Barbarina had been unwise to involve the child, but, because she was already identifying Hyson with Deborah, could not stop doing so. And when Barbarina opened the door of the vault and sang the song which was to lure me inside. Hyson slipped in. Thus we were locked in together, and from that moment Hyson began to understand the horror of death, that it did not come lightly, that there must be suffering before oblivion was reached.

Then she saw her mother in the hospital and she must have known that Morwenna was lying where I was intended to be.

Death was hateful; it was frightening; and it touched those she loved.

Her own mother. And even for me she had some affection.

She was frightened; and when she saw me going off with Barbarina in the car, guessing for what purpose, she broke into hysteria which so alarmed her father that he sent for Dr.

Clement, but it was some time before they could understand the meaning of her incoherent words. Dr. Clement’s first action was to telephone Roc; and Roc immediately drove to the manor.

Yet although I lived so dangerously up to that night when Roc came to me in Devon, it was during the following months that I learned so much more of life than I ever had before; the months of safety and serenity.

For one thing, I learned the story of the boy who lived in Louisa Sellick’s house on the moor. Morwenna must have grown up too, because she confessed to Charles that he was hers. She had been afraid to do so before because the boy was the result of a brief passionate love affair which had occurred when she was seventeen.

Rachel Bective, who as a child had so longed to be asked to Pendorric that she had locked Morwenna in the vault in order to blackmail her into giving her an invitation, had proved a good friend. She had looked after Morwenna during her troubles, and of course Roc had been at hand. It had been his idea to ask Louisa’s help, and he and Rachel took the child to her; Louisa had been only too glad to do what she could for Petroc’s children.

As Roc said to me: ” I couldn’t tell you the truth when I’d sworn to keep Morwenna’s secret. But I did intend to persuade her that you should be brought in. The trouble was she was so afraid of Charles’s knowing.”

There had been fear and drama in Pendorric before I arrived. During the last year we have gone a long way towards turning Polhorgan into a home for orphans. I am going to be very busy keeping an eye on this particular project as I shall be starting my own family. Rachel Bective is going to be a nursery governess to the orphans, and Dr.

Clement will be at hand to advise when we need him. The Dawsons will stay on and although there may be a little friction now and then between them and Rachel, that is inevitable, I suppose. I don’t like Rachel—I doubt whether I ever shall—but I have wronged her in my thoughts so much that I try very hard to change my opinion. She was merely enamoured of a way of life which was not hers. The romantic big house must have been very appealing to an orphan, brought up by an aunt who had children of her own and didn’t really want her. She saw her main opportunity in life when she was sent to a good school paid for with the money her parents had left with instructions that all of it be spent on their daughter’s education. She had attached herself to Morwenna and clung; but she had been a good friend in Morwenna’s trouble and often visited Bedivere House—as Roc did—to bring Morwenna news of the son she dared not see until she had confessed to Charles.

The twins have now gone to school—separate schools. Hyson had a holiday, a holiday at Bournemouth alone with her mother after Morwenna’s recovery. They both needed to recuperate; and we feel that in time Hyson will grow away from that sinister influence which Barbarina cast about her. We shall have to be very careful in our treatment of Hyson.

This, then, has been an illuminating year. We all seem to have grown up, become wise; but then I suppose it is experiences such as these which make us learn our lessons quickly.

Morwenna has cast off the burden which, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, she has carried for fourteen years, and Charles, she discovered, was less self-righteous than she had believed him to be.

Indeed he was a little sad and reproachful that she had not trusted him all those years.

As a result, Ennis and Louisa are often at Pendorric. Morwenna would not take the boy from Louisa, but she does want to share him, and I have an idea that in time he will be to Charles as the son he did not have.

It may well be that one day we shall have to give up Pendorric as we know it. We shall probably have to throw it open to the public and have strangers walking through our rooms. We shall have our own apartments of course, but it will not be the same.

Roc is reconciled. ” You can’t fight the times,” he says. ” It would be like trying to fight the sea.”

All the money I have will be used on Polhorgan, and that is how Roc wishes it to be.

He often teases me, reminding me that I once thought he schemed to marry an heiress and then planned to murder her.

” And yet,” he said, ” you loved me … after your fashion.” He is right. During those months of danger I was deep in physical love with Roc; I knew only what I saw, what I heard, what I sensed.