Read Online The House at Sandalwood by Virginia Coffman - Free Book Online

mirror.
    “But you mustn’t say that. Or even think it. You have just as much right to your opinion as others have to theirs. You are happy here, aren’t you?”
    “Divinely!” She hugged me around the neck and almost strangled me in her enthusiasm. We both laughed. “That is,” she added as her mobile, young face shadowed suddenly, “I’m happy when I can be myself and not somebody else. The thing is, I was behaving exactly the way I always have. I’ve never changed. I swear it, Judy! Yet, after I’ve known people for a while, they want to change me . They say, ‘grow up, Deirdre. Be grown-up, Deirdre. Use your head, Deirdre.’ And yet, I’m only behaving just as I’ve always behaved when they—when they liked me.”
    Her voice cracked just a little on that word and brought the sharp pinprick of tears to my eyes. I avoided her gaze and patted her hands that kept their tight grasp upon my shoulders.
    “Everyone likes you, dear. But people are often very busy, or they have headaches, or they’re feeling angry over their own lives, and so they snap at other people. But they don’t mean it. One of the differences between being a little girl and being a grown-up woman married to Mr. Giles, is that when you are grown-up you understand other people have problems too, and you’re tolerant when they forget how much they really like you.”
    “Wise old Judy!”
    I wrinkled my nose at our reflections and she giggled. I said, “Remember one more thing. You talk of their liking you. Don’t you suppose they have their needs too? Why don’t you start thinking about liking other people yourself?”
    She took her hands off my shoulders and murmured petulantly, “Not unless they like me first.”
    The most obvious explanation of her thinking and her behavior was ready in my mind—the only possible answer: “I’m afraid you have been spoiled, Deirdre. By mother and me, and then by others. There really are other people in the world, you know.”
    “Do I!” She rolled her eyes which were large and green and innocent as a ... I was about to say “innocent as a child’s,” an ironic cliché, but her eyes were childlike, mischievous, easily hurt, quick to laugh and cry. Though they looked like mirrors of what was within her still-childish mind, I felt they were more like the green leaves I had seen on the edge of the path below my window. They were fresh, dewy, and young, but behind them was the jungle, the unknown.
    “You don’t want breakfast in your room, do you, wise old Auntie? Let’s eat in the dining room. Very regal and splendid. It’s a creaky old place, but fun. Like the haunted house we used to play in when I was a child, before I got sick. Remember?”
    “I certainly don’t want to be served in my room, but strictly speaking, I shouldn’t eat with you and Mr. Giles. I have a job to do here.”
    “How stuffy! No, you must come, because Stephen sent me to ask you to come.”
    It was a slight letdown to be told that she had come in here so happily to see me only because her husband told her to invite me to breakfast, but when I realized that I was hurt, I was amused that I was behaving like Deirdre by allowing myself to take offense over nothing. I had evidently made too much out of Deirdre’s simplicity and honesty. She was a perfectly normal, slightly unsure young wife, in her first year of marriage.
    We went together to the big, high-ceilinged dining room with its comfortable but exceedingly old-fashioned look. The furniture was too heavy: the long mahogany table and chair were more suited to a cluttered room in a mid-Victorian mansion. Certainly, it was not suited to the humid, sun-and-showers climate of Hawaii. I suspected it was part of Sandalwood’s nineteenth-century heritage. I could imagine how thrilled the Mrs. Giles of that period must have been when her fine, heavy, impressive furniture arrived at Lahaina or Honolulu in an old windjammer that had gone around the Horn to deliver