The Moon Rock | Page 9

as swiftly withdrawn. She walked quickly to
the door and flung it open. There was nobody outside, and the passage
was empty.
"We have been talking family secrets with the door open," she said,
returning to her seat. "I thought I saw one of the servants
eavesdropping."
"My servants would not listen at doors," said Robert Turold coldly.
"You must have imagined it."
Mrs. Pendleton made no rejoinder. She had a strong belief that
someone had been watching and listening, but she could not be sure.
"We must really be going," she announced, with a glance at the clock.
"Joseph"--such was her husband's name--"you had better go and see if
the car is ready, and I will go for Sisily. Is she upstairs in her room,
Robert?"
"I believe so," said Robert Turold, bending abstractedly over his papers.
"But you had better ask Thalassa. He'll tell you. Thalassa will know."
Mrs. Pendleton looked angrily at him, but was wise enough to forbear
from further speech. She instinctively realized that her brother was
beyond argument or reproof.
She went upstairs to look for her niece, but she was not in her room.
She came downstairs again and proceeded to the kitchen. Through the
half-open door she saw the elderly male servant, and she entered
briskly.
"Can you tell me where Miss Sisily is, Thalassa?" she asked.
"Miss Sisily is out on the cliffs." Thalassa, busy chopping suet with a
knife, made answer without looking up. There was something absurdly
incongruous between the mild domestic occupation and the grim

warrior face bent over it.
"When did she go out?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, struck by a sudden
thought.
Thalassa threw a swift sidelong glance at her. "It might be an hour
ago," he said.
"Do you know where I am likely to find her?"
Thalassa pointed vaguely through an open window.
"Somewhere along there," he said. "Miss Sisily is fond of the cliffs. If
you're going to look for her you'd best not go round by the back of the
house, or you'll fall over, like as not. It's a savage spot, only fit for
savages--or madmen." He turned his back and bent over his chopping
board again.
Mrs. Pendleton turned away in perplexity, and walked up the passage
to the front door. There her eye fell on the figure of Charles Turold,
lounging moodily over the gate, smoking a cigarette.
She walked down the flinty path and touched his arm. "Would you
mind going and looking for Sisily?" she said. "She is out on the cliffs,
Thalassa says." She pointed a hand in the direction she supposed the
girl to be.
The young man's moodiness vanished in eager alacrity. "Certainly," he
replied. "I'll go with pleasure." He tossed away his cigarette and
disappeared around the side of the house.
CHAPTER IV
Sisily first opened her eyes on a grey day by a grim coast, and life had
always been grim and grey to her. Her memory was a blurred record of
wanderings from place to place in pursuit of something which was
never to be found. Her earliest recollection was of a bleak eastern coast,
where Robert Turold had spent long years in a losing game of patience

with the sea. He had gone there in the belief that some of his ancestors
were buried in a forgotten churchyard on the cliffs, and he spent his
time attempting to decipher inscriptions which had been obliterated
almost as effectually as the dead whose remains they extolled.
The old churchyard had been called "The Garden of Rest" by some
sentimental versifier, but there was no rest for the dead who tried to
sleep within its broken walls. The sea kept undermining the crumbling
cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and
bones. Nor was it a garden. Nothing grew in the dank air but crawling
things which were horrible to the eye. There were great rank growths of
toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which
squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay.
The only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic vampire which drew its
lifeblood from the mouldering corpse of an old church.
It was in this desolate place that the girl conceived her first impression
of her father as a stern and silent man who burrowed among old graves
like a mole. Robert Turold had fought a stout battle for the secret
contained in those forgotten graves on a bleak headland, but the sea had
beaten him in the long run, carrying off the stones piecemeal until only
one remained, a sturdy pillar of granite which marked the bones of one
who, some hundred and fifty years before had been "An English
Gentleman and a Christian"--so much of the epitaph remained. Robert
Turold