It is difficult to recall what happened next. I was aware of the blazing bed as I pulled at the door-handle and for one hideous second believed that I was locked in this room as I had been locked in the vault. But that was only due to my anxiety to get out quickly. The door was not locked.

I pulled it open and had the sense to shut it behind me. I saw her then. She was running along the corridor, and I went after her shouting: “Fire!” as I did so. She turned to look at me. I cried:

“Quick! My room’s on fire. We must give the alarm.” She looked at me in bewilderment. I knew then that she was mad, and for those few dramatic seconds I even forgot the danger we were in.

“You tried to kill me … Barbarina I said.

Horror dawned in her face. I heard her whisper as though to herself: ” The diary … Oh, my God, she’s read the diary.”

I caught her arm. ” You’ve set my room on fire,” I said urgently.

“It’ll spread … quickly. Where’s Carrie? On this floor? Carrie!

Carrie! Come quickly. “

Barbarina’s lips were moving; she went on muttering to herself: ” It’s there … in the diary…. She’s seen the diary….” Carrie came into the corridor, wrapping an old dressing-gown about her, her hair in a plait tied with a red tape.

” Carrie,” I shouted. ” My room’s on fire. Phone the fire brigade quickly.”

“Carrie I Carrie! She … knows …” moaned Barbarina.

I gripped Carrie’s arm.

“Show me where the phone is. There’s no time to lose. We must all get out of the house. Don’t you understand?” Still gripping Carrie I pulled her downstairs. I did not look back, being certain that Barbarina, knowing how deadly was the fire she had started, would follow us.

I never saw Barbarina again. By the time we had phoned for the brigade, the top floor was a mass of flame. All I knew was that Barbarina did not follow us downstairs. I have always believed that, rudely shaken out of her dream-world, she had had no thought of anything but the incriminating diary. To her it represented the only way of remembering what had actually happened; and to have lost it would have been to have lost touch with the past. Unbalanced as she was, she had made a futile attempt to save it. I do not like to think what happened to Barbarina when she burst into that room which by then must have been a roaring furnace.

It was nearly an hour before the fire brigade reached the isolated manor house, and by that time it was too late to save it. It was not until we had telephoned for the brigade and the Hansons had arrived that we missed Barbarina. Hanson bravely went up to try to rescue her.

We had to prevent Carrie from dashing into the flames to bring out her mistress, for we knew it was hopeless.

Looking back it is hard to remember the sequence of events. But I do remember sitting in the Hansons’ cottage drinking tea which Mrs. Hanson brought to me, when suddenly I heard a familiar voice. ” Roc!”

I cried, and ran to him; we just stood together clinging. And this was a Roc I had never known before because I had never seen him clearly through the fog of suspicion which surrounded him—strong in his power to protect, weak in his anxiety over my safety, ready to do battle with the powers of darkness for my sake, yet terrified for fear some harm had come to me.

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.