THE great spaces of the hall seemed to slope away into impenetrable gloom; velvet darkness deepening imperceptibly into sable density of panelled wall; huge, smoke-blackened beams, stretching wide arms across the roof, showing only as a dim lattice-work of ebony, fretting the shadowy twilight overhead.
At the furthermost end, like a giant golden eye winking sleepily through the dark, smouldered a fire of logs, and near this, in the luminous circle of its warmth, a man and woman were seated at a table lit by tall wax candles in branched candlesticks. With its twinkling points of light, and the fire’s red glow quivering across its shining surface, the table gleamed out like a jewel in a sombre setting—a vivid splash of light in the grey immensity of dusk-enfolded hall.
Dinner was evidently just over, for the candlelight shone softly on satin-skinned fruit, while wonderful gold-veined glass flecked the dark pool of polished mahogany with delicate lines and ripples of opalescent colour.
A silence had fallen on the two who had been dining. They had been gay enough together throughout the course of the meal, but, now that the servants had brought coffee and withdrawn, it seemed as though the stillness—that queer, ghostly, memory-haunted stillness which lurks in the dim, disused recesses of a place—had crept out from the four corners of the hall and were stealing upon them, little by little, as the tide encroaches on the shore, till it had lapped them round in a curious atmosphere of oppression.
The woman acknowledged it by a restless twist of her slim shoulders. She was quite young—not more than twenty—and as she glanced half-enquiringly at the man seated opposite her there was sufficiency of likeness between the two to warrant the assumption that they were father and daughter.
In each there was the same intelligent, wide brow, the same straight nose with sensitively cut nostrils—though a smaller and daintier affair in the feminine edition, and barred across the top by a little string of golden freckles—and, above all, the same determined, pointed chin with the contradictory cleft in it that charmed away its obstinacy.
But here the likeness ended. It was from someone other than the dark-browed man with his dreaming, poet’s eyes—which were neither purple nor grey, but a mixture of the two—that Jean Peterson had inherited her beech-leaf brown hair, tinged with warm red where the light glinted on it, and her vivid hazel eyes—eyes that were sometimes golden like the heart of a topaz and sometimes clear and still and brown like the waters of some quiet pool cradled among the rocks of a moorland stream.
They were like that now—clear and wide-open, with a certain pensive, half-humorous questioning in them.
“Well?” she said, at last breaking the long silence. “What is it?”
The man looked across at her, smiling a little.
“Why should it be—anything?” he demanded.
She laughed amusedly.
“Oh, Glyn dear”—she never made use of the conventional address of “father.” Glyn Peterson would have disliked it intensely if she had—“Oh, Glyn dear, I haven’t been your daughter for the last twenty years without learning to divine when you are cudgelling your brains as to the prettiest method of introducing a disagreeable topic.”
Peterson grinned a little. He tossed the end of his cigarette into the fire and lit a fresh one before replying.
“On this occasion,” he observed at last, slowly, “the topic is not necessarily a disagreeable one. Jean”—his quizzical glance raked her face suddenly—“how would you like to go to England?”
“To England?”
Her tone held the same incredulous excitement that anyone unexpectedly invited to week-end at El Dorado might be expected to evince.
“England! Glyn, do you really mean to take me there at last?”
“You’d like to go then?” A keen observer might have noticed a shade of relief pass over Peterson’s face.
“Like it? It’s the one thing above all others that I’ve longed for. It seems so ridiculous to be an Englishwoman and yet never once to have set foot in England.”
The man’s eyes clouded.
“You’re not—entirely—English,” he said in a low voice. Jean knew from what memory the quick correction sprang. Her mother, the beautiful opera singer who had been the one romance of Glyn Peterson’s life, had been of French extraction.
“I know,” she returned soberly. “Yet I think I’m mostly conscious of being English. I believe it’s just the very fact that I know Paris—Rome—Vienna—so well, and nothing at all about England, that makes me feel more absolutely English than anything else.”
A spark of amusement lit itself in Peterson’s eyes.
“How truly feminine!” he commented drily.
Jean nodded.
“I’m afraid it’s rather illogical of me.”
Her father blew a thin stream of smoke into the air.
“Thank God for it!” he replied lightly. “It’s the cussed contradictoriness of your sex that makes it so enchanting. If women were logical they would be as obvious and boring as the average man.”
He relapsed into a dreaming silence. Jean broke it rather hesitatingly.
“You’ve never suggested taking me to England before.”
His face darkened suddenly. It was an extraordinarily expressive face—expressive as a child’s, reflecting every shade of his constant changes of mood.
“There’s no sense of adventure about England,” he said shortly. “It’s a dull corner of the world—bristling with the proprieties.”
Jean realised how very completely, from his own point of view, he had answered her. Romance, beauty, the sheer delight of utter freedom from the conventions were as the breath of his nostrils to Glyn Peterson.
Born to the purple, as it were, of an old English county family, he had stifled in the conventional atmosphere of his upbringing. There had been moments of wild rebellion, bitter outbursts against the established order of things, but these had been sedulously checked and discouraged by his father, a man of iron will, who took himself and his position intensely seriously.
Ultimately, Glyn had come to accept with more or less philosophy the fact of his heirship to old estates and old traditions, with their inevitable responsibilities and claims, and he was just preparing to fulfill his parents’ wishes by marrying, suitably and conventionally, when Jacqueline Mavory, the beautiful half-French opera singer, had flashed into his horizon.
In a moment the world was transformed. Artist soul called to artist soul; the romantic vein in the man, so long checked and thwarted, suddenly asserted itself irresistibly, and the very day before that appointed for his wedding, he and Jacqueline ran away together in search of happiness.
And they had found it. The “County” had been shocked; Glyn’s father, unbending descendant of the old Scottish Covenanters, his whole creed outraged, had broken under the blow; but the runaway lovers had found what they sought.
At Beirnfels, a beautiful old schloss on the eastern border of Austria, remote from the world and surrounded by forest-clad hills, Glyn Peterson and Jacqueline had lived a romantically happy existence, roaming the world whenever the wander-fever seized them, but always returning to Schloss Beirnfels, where Peterson had contrived a background of almost exotic richness for the adored woman who had flung her career to the winds in order to become his wife.
The birth of Jean, two years after their marriage, had been frankly regarded by both of them as an inconvenience. It interrupted their idyll. They were so essentially lovers that no third—not even a third born of love’s consummation—could be other than superfluous.
They had proceeded to shift the new responsibility with characteristic lightheartedness. A small army of nursemaids and governesses was engaged, and later, when Jean was old enough, she was despatched to one of the best Continental schools, whilst her parents continued their customary happy-go-lucky existence uninterruptedly. During the holidays she shared their wanderings, and Egypt and the southern coast of Europe became familiar places to her.
At the age of seventeen, Jean came home to live at Beirnfels, thenceforward regarding her unpractical parents with a species of kindly tolerance and amusement. The three of them had lived quite happily together, though Jean had remained always the odd man out; but she had accepted the fact with a certain humorous philosophy which robbed it of half its sting.
Then, two years later, Jacqueline had developed rapid consumption, and though Glyn hurried her away to Montavan, in the Swiss Alps, there had been no combating the disease, and the romance of a great love had closed down suddenly into the grey shadows of death.
Peterson had been like a man demented. For a time he had disappeared, and no one ever knew, either then or later, how he had first faced the grim tragedy which had overtaken him.
Jean had patiently awaited his return to Beirnfels. When at last he came, he told her that it was the most beautiful thing which could have happened—that Jacqueline should, have died in the zenith of their love.
“We never knew the downward swing of the pendulum,” he explained. “And when we meet again it will be as young lovers who have never grown tired. I shall always remember Jacqueline as still perfectly beautiful—never insulted by old age. And when she thinks of me—well, I’m still a ‘personable’ fellow, as they say——”
“My dear Glyn, you’re still a boy! You’ve never grown up,” Jean made answer. To her he seemed a sort of Peter Pan among men.
She had been amazed—although in a sense relieved—to find how swiftly he had rallied. It seemed almost as though his intense loathing of the onset of old age and decay, of that slow cooling of passion and gradual decline of faculties which age inevitably brings, had served to reconcile him to the loss of the woman he had worshipped whilst yet there had been no dimming of her physical perfection, no blunting of the fine edge of their love.
It was easily comprehensible that to two such temperamental, joy-loving beings as Glyn and Jacqueline, England, with her neutral-tinted skies and strictness of convention, had made little appeal, and Jean could with difficulty harmonise the suddenly projected visit to England with her knowledge of her father’s idiosyncrasies.
It was just possible of course, since all which had meant happiness to him lay buried in a little mountain cemetery in Switzerland, that it no longer mattered to Peterson where he sojourned. One place might be as good—or as bad—as another.
Rather diffidently Jean voiced her doubts, recalling him from the reverie into which he had fallen.
“I go to England?” he exclaimed. “God forbid! No, you would go without me.”
“Without you?”
Peterson sprang up and began pacing restlessly to and fro.
“Yes, without me. I’m going away. I—I can’t stay here any longer. I’ve tried, Jean, for your sake”—he looked across at her with a kind of appeal in his eyes—“but I can’t stand it. I must move on—get away somewhere by myself. Beirnfels—without her——”
He broke off abruptly and stood still, staring down into the heart of the fire. Then he added in a wrung voice:
“It will be a year ago... to-morrow.”
Jean was silent. Never before had he let her see the raw wound in his soul. Latterly she had divined a growing restlessness in him, sensed the return of the wander-fever which sometimes obsessed him, but she had not realised that it was pain—sheer, intolerable pain—which was this time driving him forth from the place that had held his happiness.
He had appeared so little changed after Jacqueline’s death, so much the wayward, essentially lovable and unpractical creature of former times, still able to find supreme delight in a sunset, or an exquisite picture, or a wild ride across the purple hills, that Jean had sometimes marvelled, how easily he seemed able to forget.
And, after all, he had not forgotten—had never been able to forget!
The gay, debonair side which he had shown the world—that same rather selfish, beauty-loving, charming personality she had always known—had been only a shell, a husk hiding a hurt that had never healed—that never would find healing in this world.
Jean felt herself submerged beneath a wave of self-reproach that she could have thus crudely accepted Glyn’s attitude at its face value. But it was useless to give expression to her penitence. She could find no words which might not wound, and while she was still dully trying to readjust her mind to this new aspect of things, her father’s voice broke across her thoughts—smooth, polished, with just its usual inflection of whimsical amusement, rather as though the world were a good sort of joke in which he found himself constrained to take part.
“I’ve made the most paternal arrangements for your welfare in my absence, Jean. I want to discuss them with you. You see, I couldn’t take you with me—I don’t know in the least where I’m going or where I shall fetch up. That’s the charm of it”—his face kindling. “And it wouldn’t be right or proper for me to drag a young woman of your age—and attractions—half over the world with me.”
By which Jean, not in the least deceived by his air of conscious rectitude, comprehended that he didn’t want to be bothered with her. He was bidding for freedom, untrammelled by any petticoats.
“So I’ve written to my old pal, Lady Anne Brennan,” pursued Peterson, “asking if you may stay with her for a little. You would have a delightful time. She was quite the most charming woman I knew in England.”
“That must be rather more than twenty years ago,” observed Jean drily. “She may have altered a good deal.”
Peterson frowned. He hated to have objections raised to any plan that particularly appealed to him.
“Rubbish! Why should she change? Anne was not the sort of woman to change.”
Jean was perfectly aware that her father hadn’t the least wish to “discuss” his proposals with her, as he had said. What he really wanted was to tell her about them and for her to approve and endorse them with enthusiasm—which is more or less what a man usually wants when he suggests discussing plans with his womankind.
So, recognising that he had all his arrangements cut and dried, Jean philosophically accepted the fact and prepared to fall in with them.
“And has Lady Anne signified her readiness to take me in for an indefinite period?” she enquired.
“I haven’t had her answer yet. But I have no doubt at all what form it will take. It will be a splendid opportunity for you, altogether. You know, Jean”—pictorially—“you ought really to see the ‘stately homes of England.’ Why, they’re—they’re your birthright!”
Jean reflected humorously that this point of view had only occurred to him now that it chanced to coincide so admirably with his own wishes. Hitherto the “stately homes of England” had been relegated to a quite unimportant position in the background and Jean’s attention focussed more directly upon the unpleasing vagaries of the British climate.
“I should like to go to England,” was all she said. Peterson smiled at her radiantly—the smile of a child who has got its own way with much less difficulty than it had anticipated.
“You shall go,” he promised her. “You’ll adore Staple. It’s quite a typical old English manor—lawns and terraces all complete, even down to the last detail of a yew hedge.”
“Staple? Is that the Brennans’ place?”
“God bless my soul, no! The Tormarins acquired it when they came pushing over to England with the Conqueror, I imagine. Anne married twice, you know. Her first husband, Tormarin, led her a dog’s life, and after his death she married Claude Brennan—son of a junior branch of the Brennans. Now she is a widow for the second time.”
“And are there any children?”
“Two sons. The elder is the son of the first marriage and is the owner of Staple, of course. The younger one is the child of the second marriage. I believe that since Brennan’s death they all three live very comfortably together at Staple—at least, they did ten years ago when I last heard from Anne. That was not long after Brennan died.”
Jean wrinkled her brows.
“Rather a confusing household to be suddenly pitchforked into,” she commented.
“But not dull!” submitted Peterson triumphantly. “And dullness is, after all, the biggest bugbear of existence.”
As if suddenly stabbed by the palpable pose of his own remark, the light died out of his face and he looked round the great dim ball with a restless, eager glance, as though trying to impress the picture of it on his memory.
“Beirnfels—my ‘House of Dreams-Come-True,’” he muttered to himself.
He had named it thus in those first glowing days when love had transfigured the grim old border castle, turning it into a place of magic visions and consummated hopes. The whimsical name took its origin from a little song which Jacqueline had been wont to sing to him, her glorious voice investing the simple words with a passionate belief and triumph.
It’s a strange road leads to the House of Dreams,
To the House of Dreams-Come-True,
Its hills are steep and its valleys deep,
And salt with tears the Wayfarers weep,
The Wayfarers—I and you.
But there’s sure a way to the House of Dreams,
To the House of Dreams-Come-True.
We shall find it yet, ere the sun has set.
If we fare straight on, come fine, come wet,
Wayfarers—I and you.
Peterson’s eyes rested curiously on his daughter’s face. There was something mystic, almost visionary, in their quiet, absent gaze.
“One day, Jean,” he said, “when you meet the only man who matters, Beirnfels shall be yours—the house where your dreams shall come true. It’s a house of ghosts now—a dead house. But some day you and the man you love will make it live again.”
JEAN was standing looking out from the window of her room in the hotel at Montavan. In the distance, the great white peaks of the Alps strained upwards, piercing the mass of drifting cloud, whilst below lay a world sheeted in snow, the long reach of dazzling purity broken only where the pine-woods etched black trunks against the whiteness and the steely gleam of a frozen lake showed like a broad blade drawn from a white velvet scabbard.
It had been part of Peterson’s expressed programme that, before going their separate ways, he and Jean should make a brief stay at Montavan, there to await Lady Anne Brennan’s answer to his letter. Jean had divined in this determination an excuse, covering his need to take farewell of that grave on the lonely mountain-side before he set out upon the solitary journey which could not fail to hold poignant memories of other, former wanderings—wanderings invested with the exquisite joy of sharing each adventure with a beloved fellow-wayfarer.
Instinctively though Jean had recognised the desire at the back of Glyn’s decision to stop at Montavan, she was scrupulously careful not to let him guess her recognition. She took her cue from his own demeanour, which was outwardly that of a man merely travelling for pleasure, and she listened with a grim sense of amusement when poor Monsieur Vautrinot, the ma卯tre d’h么tel, recognising Peterson as a former client, sympathetically recalled the sad circumstances of his previous visit and was roundly snubbed for his pains.
To Jean the loss of her mother had meant far less than it would have done to a girl in more commonplace circumstances. It was true that Jacqueline had shown herself all that was kindhearted and generous in her genuine wish to compass the girl’s happiness, and that Jean had been frankly fond of her and attracted by her, but in no sense of the words had there been any interpretation of a maternal or filial relationship. As Jean herself, to the huge entertainment of her parents, had on one occasion summed up the situation: “Of course I know I’m a quite superfluous third at Beirnfels, but, all the same, you two really do make the most perfect host and hostess, and you try awfully hard not to let me feel de trop.”
But, despite the fact that Jacqueline had represented little more to her daughter than a brilliant and delightful personality with whom circumstances happened to have brought her into contact, Jean was conscious of a sudden thrill of pain as her glance travelled across the wide stretches of snow and came at last to rest on the little burial ground which lay half hidden beneath the shoulder of a hill. She was moved by an immense consciousness of loss—not just the mere sense of bereavement which the circumstances would naturally have engendered, but something more absolute—a sense of all the exquisite maternal element which she had missed in the woman who was dead.
And then came recognition of the uselessness of such regret. Nothing could have made Jacqueline other than she was—one of the world’s great lovers. Mated to the man she loved, she asked nothing more of Nature, nor had she herself anything more to give. And the same reasoning, though perhaps in a less degree, could be applied to Peterson’s own attitude of detachment towards his daughter; although Jean was intuitively aware that she had come to mean much more to him since her mother’s death, even though it might be, perhaps, only because she represented a tangible link with his past happiness.
Thrusting aside the oppression of thought conjured up by her glimpse of that quiet God’s Acre, set high up among the hills, she turned abruptly from the window and made her way downstairs to the hotel vestibule.
Here she discovered that Peterson had been claimed by some acquaintances. The encounter was obviously not of his own choosing, for, to Jean’s experienced eye, his face bore the slightly restive expression common to it when circumstances had momentarily got the better of him.
His companions were a somewhat elaborate little Frenchman of fifty or thereabouts, with an unmistakable air of breeding about him, and a stately-looking woman some fifteen years younger, whose warm brunette colouring and swift, mobile gesture proclaimed her of Latin blood. All three were conversing in French.
“Ah! La voici qui vient!,” Peterson turned as Jean approached, his quick exclamation tinctured with relief. Still in French, which both he and Jean spoke as fluently and with as little accent as English, he continued rapidly: “Jean, let me present you to Madame la Comtesse de Varigny.”
The girl found herself looking straight into a pair of eyes of that peculiarly opaque, dense brown common to Southern races. They were heavily fringed with long black lashes, giving them a fictitiously soft and disarming expression, yet Jean was vaguely conscious that their real expression held something secret and implacable, almost repellant, an impression strengthened by the virile, strongly-marked black brows that lay so close above them.
For the rest, Madame de Varigny was undeniably a beautiful woman, her blue-black, rather coarse hair framing an oval face, extraordinarily attractive in contour, with somewhat high cheek bones and a clever, flexible mouth.
Jean’s first instinctive feeling was one of distaste. In spite of her knowledge that Varigny was one of the oldest names in France, the Countess struck her as partaking a little of the adventuress—of the type of woman of no particular birth who has climbed by her wits—and she wondered what position she had occupied prior to her marriage.
She was sharply recalled from her thoughts to find that Madame de Varigny was introducing the little middle-aged Frenchman to her as her husband, and immediately she spoke Jean felt her suspicions melting away beneath the warm, caressing cadences of an unusually beautiful voice. Such a voice was a straight passport to the heart. It seemed to clothe even the prosaic little Count in an almost romantic atmosphere of tender charm, an effect which he speedily dispelled by giving Jean a full, true, and particular account of the various pulmonary symptoms which annually induced him to seek the high, dry air of Montavan.
“It is as an insurance of good health that I come,” he informed Jean gravely.
“Oh, yes, we are not here merely for pleasure—comme ces autres”—-Madame de Varigny gestured smilingly towards a merry party of men and girls who had just come in from luging and were stamping the snow from off their feet amid gay little outbursts of chaff and laughter. “We are here just as last year, when we first made the acquaintance of Monsieur Peterson”—the suddenly muted quality of her voice implied just the right amount of sympathetic recollection—“so that mon pauvre mari may assure himself of yet another year of health.”
The faintly ironical gleam in her eyes convinced Jean that, as she had shrewdly begun to suspect, the little Count was a malade imaginaire, and once she found herself wondering what could be the circumstances responsible for the union of two such dissimilar personalities as the high-bred, hypochondriacal little Count and the rather splendid-looking but almost certainly plebeian-born woman who was his wife.
She intended, later on, to ask her father if he could supply the key to the riddle, but he had contrived to drift off during the course of her conversation with the Varignys, and, when at last she found herself free to join him, he had disappeared altogether.
She thought it very probable that he had gone out to watch the progress of a ski-ing match to which he had referred with some enthusiasm earlier in the day, and she smiled a little at the characteristic way in which he had extricated himself, at her expense, from the inconvenience of his unexpected recontre with the Varignys.
But, two hours later, she realised that once again his superficial air of animation had deceived her. From her window she saw him coming along the frozen track that led from the hillside cemetery, and for a moment she hardly recognised her father in that suddenly shrank, huddled figure of a man, stumbling down the path, his head thrust forward and sunken on his breast.
Her first imperative instinct was to go and meet him. Her whole being ached with the longing to let him feel the warm rush of her sympathy, to assure him that he was not utterly alone. But she checked the impulse, recognising that he had no use for any sympathy or love which she could give.
She had never really been anything other than exterior to his life, outside his happiness, and now she felt intuitively that he would wish her to remain equally outside the temple of his grief.
He was the type of man who would bitterly resent the knowledge that any eyes had seen him at a moment of such utter, pitiable self-revelation, and it was the measure of her understanding that Jean waited quietly till he should choose to come to her.
“When he came, he had more or less regained his customary poise, though he still looked strained and shaken. He addressed her abruptly.
“I’ve decided to go straight on to Marseilles and sail by the next boat, Jean. There’s one I can catch if I start at once.”
“At once?” she exclaimed, taken aback. “You don’t mean—to-day?”
He nodded.
“Yes, this very evening. I find I can get down to Montreux in time for the night mail.” Then, answering her unspoken thought: “You’ll be quite all right. You will be certain to hear from Lady Anne in a day or two, and, meanwhile, I’ll ask Madame de Varigny to play chaperon. She’ll be delighted”—with a flash of the ironical humour that was never long absent from him.
“Who was she before she married the Count?” queried Jean.
“I can’t tell you. She is very reticent about her antecedents—probably with good reason”—smiling grimly. “But she is a big and beautiful person, and our little Count is obviously quite happy in his choice.”
“She is rather a fascinating woman,” commented Jean.
“Yes—but preferable as a friend rather than an enemy. I don’t know anything about her, but I wouldn’t mind wagering that she has a dash of Corsican blood in her. Anyway, she will look after you all right till Anne Brennan writes.”
“And if no letter comes?” suggested Jean. “Or supposing Lady Anne can’t have me? We’re rather taking things for granted, you know.”
His face clouded, but cleared again almost instantly.
“She will have you. Anne would never refuse a request of mine. If not, you must come on to me, and I’ll make other arrangements,”—vaguely. “I’ll let the next boat go, and stay in Paris till I hear from you. But I can’t wait here any longer.”
He paused, then broke out hurriedly:
“I ought never to have come to this place. It’s haunted. I know you’ll understand—you always do understand, I think, you quiet child—why I must go.”
And Jean, looking with the clear eyes of unhurt youth into the handsome, grief-ravaged face, was suddenly conscious of a shrinking fear of that mysterious force called love, which can make, and so swiftly, terribly unmake the lives of men and women.
“A ND this friend of your father’s? You have not heard from her yet?”
Jean and Madame de Varigny were breakfasting together the morning after Peterson’s departure.
“No. I hoped a letter might have come for me by this morning’s post. But I’m afraid I shall be on your hands a day or two longer”—smiling.
“But it is a pleasure!” Madame de Varigny reassured her warmly. “My husband and I are here for another week yet. After that we go on to St. Moritz. He is suddenly discontented with Montavan. If, by any chance, you have not then heard from Lady—Lady—I forget the name——”
“Lady Anne Brennan,” supplied Jean.
A curiously concentrated expression seemed to flit for an instant across Madame de Varigny’s face, but she continued smoothly:
“Mais, oui—Lady Brennan. Eh bien, if you have not heard from her by the time we leave for St. Moritz, you must come with us. It would add greatly to our pleasure.”
“It’s very good of you,” replied Jean. She felt frankly grateful for the suggestion, realising that if, by any mischance, the letter should be delayed till then, Madame de Varigny’s offer would considerably smooth her path. In spite of Glyn’s decision that she must join him in Paris, should Lady Anne’s invitation fail to materialise, she was well aware that he would not greet her appearance on the scene with any enthusiasm.
“I suppose”—the Countess was speaking again—“I suppose Brennan is a very frequent—a common name in England?”
The question was put quite casually, more as though for the sake of making conversation than anything else, yet Madame de Varigny seemed to await the answer with a curious anxiety.
“Oh, no,” Jean replied readily enough, “I don’t think it is a common name. Lady Anne married into a junior branch of the family, I believe,” she added.
“That would not be considered a very good match for a peer’s daughter, surely?” hazarded the Countess. “A junior branch? I suppose there was a romantic love-affair of some kind behind it?”
“It was Lady Anne’s second marriage. Her first husband was a Tormarin—one of the oldest families in England.” Jean spoke rather stiffly. There was something jarring about the pertinacious catechism.
Madame de Varigny’s lips trembled as she put her next question, and not even the dusky fringe of lashes could quite soften the sudden tense gleam in her eyes.
“Tor—ma—rin!” She pronounced the name with a French inflection, evidently finding the unusual English word a little beyond her powers. “What a curious name! That, I am sure, must be uncommon. And this Lady Anne—she has children—sons? No?”
“Oh, yes. She has two sons.”
“Indeed?” Madame de Varigny looked interested. “And what are the sons called?”
Jean regarded her with mild surprise. Apparently the subject of nomenclature had a peculiar fascination for her.
“I really forget. My father did once tell me, but I don’t recollect what he said.”
A perceptible shade of disappointment passed over the other’s face, then, as though realising that she had exhibited a rather uncalled-for curiosity, she said deprecatingly:
“I fear I seem intrusive. But I am so interested in your future—I have taken a great fancy to you, mademoiselle. That must be my excuse.” She rose from the table, adding smilingly: “At least you will not find it dull, since Lady Anne has two sons. They will he companions for you.”
Jean rose, too, and together they passed out of the salle 脿 manger.
“And what do you propose to do with yourself to-day?” asked the Countess, pausing in the hall. “My husband and I are going for a sleigh drive. Would you care to come with us? We should he delighted.”
Jean shook her head.
“It’s very kind of you. But I should really like to try my luck on the ice. I haven’t skated for some years, and as I feel a trifle shaky about beginning again, Monsieur Griolet, who directs the sports, has promised to coach me up a bit some time this morning.”
“Bon!” Madame de Varigny nodded pleasantly. “You will be well occupied while we are away. Au revoir, then, till our return. Perhaps we shall walk down to the rink later to witness your progress under Monsieur Groilet’s instruction.”
She smiled mischievously, the smile irradiating her face with a sudden charm. Jean felt as though, for a moment, she had glimpsed the woman the Countess might have been but for some happening in her life which had soured and embittered it, setting that strange implacability within the liquid depths of her soft, southern eyes.
She was still speculating on Madame de Varigny’s curious personality as she made her way along the beaten track that led towards the rink, and then, as a sudden turn of the way brought the sheet of ice suddenly into full view, all thoughts concerning the bunch of contradictions that goes to make up individual character were swept out of her mind.
In the glory of the morning sunlight the stretch of frozen water gleamed like a shield of burnished silver, whilst on its further side rose great pine-woods, mysteriously dark and silent, climbing the steeply rising ground towards the mountains.
There were a number of people skating, and Jean discovered Monsieur Griolet in the distance, supervising the practice of a pretty American girl who was cutting figures with an ease and exquisite balance of lithe body that hardly seemed to stand in need of the instructions he poured forth so volubly. Probably, Jean decided, the American had entered for some match and was being coached up to concert pitch accordingly.
She stood for a little time watching with interest the varied performances of the skaters. Bands of light-hearted young folk, indulging in the sport just for the sheer enjoyment of it, sped gaily by, broken snatches of their talk and laughter drifting back to her as they passed, whilst groups of more accomplished skaters performed intricate evolutions with an earnestness and intensity of purpose almost worthy of a better cause.
Jean felt herself a little stranded and forlorn. She would have liked someone to share her enthusiasm for the marvels achieved by the figure-skaters—and to laugh with her a little at their deadly seriousness and at the scraps of heated argument anent the various schools of technique which came to her, borne on the still, clear air.
Presently her attention was attracted by the solitary figure of a man who swept past her in the course of making a complete circle of the rink. He skimmed the ice with the free assurance of an expert, and as he passed, Jean caught a fleeting glimpse of a supple, sinewy figure, and of a lean, dark face, down-bent, with a cap crammed low on to the somewhat scowling brows.
There was something curiously distinctive about the man. Brief as was her vision of him, it possessed an odd definiteness—a vividness of impression that was rather startling.
He flashed by, his arms folded across his chest, moving with long, rhythmic strokes which soon carried him to the further side of the rink. Jean’s eyes followed him interestedly. He was unmistakably an Englishman, and he seemed to be as solitary as herself, but, unlike her, he appeared indifferent to the fact, absorbed in his own thoughts which, to judge by the sullen, brooding expression of his face, were not particularly pleasant ones.
Soon she lost sight of him amid the scattered groups of smoothly gliding figures. The scene reminded her of a cinema show. People darted suddenly into the picture, materialising in full detail in the space of a moment, then rushed out of it again, dwindling into insignificant black dots which merged themselves into the continuously shifting throng beyond.
At last she bent her steps towards the lower end of the rink, by common consent reserved for beginners in the art of skating. She had not skated for several years, owing to a severe strain which had left her with a weak ankle, and she felt somewhat nervous about starting again.
Rather slowly she fastened on her skates and ventured tentatively on to the ice. For a few minutes she suffered from a devastating feeling that her legs didn’t belong to her, and wished heartily that she had never quitted the safe security of the bank, but before long her confidence returned, and with it that flexible ease of balance which, once acquired, is never really lost.
In a short time she was thoroughly enjoying the rapid, effortless motion, and felt herself equal to steering a safe course beyond the narrow limits of the “Mugs’ Corner”—as that portion of the ice allotted to novices was unkindly dubbed.
She struck out for the middle of the rink, gradually increasing her speed and revelling in the sting of the keen, cold air against her face. Then, all at once, it seemed as though the solid surface gave way beneath her foot. She lurched forward, flung violently off her balance, and in the same moment the sharp clink of metal upon ice betrayed the cause. One of her skates, insecurely fastened, had come off.
She staggered wildly, and in another instant would have fallen had not someone, swift as a shadow, glided suddenly abreast of her and, slipping a supporting arm round her waist, skated smoothly beside her, little by little slackening their mutual pace until Jean, on one blade all this time, could stop without danger of falling.
As they glided to a standstill, she turned to offer her thanks and found herself looking straight into the lean, dark face of the Englishman who had passed her when she had been watching the skaters.
He lifted his cap, and as he stood for a moment bare-headed beside her, she noticed with a curious little shock—half surprised, half appreciative—that on the left temple his dark brown hair was streaked with a single pure white lock, as though a finger had been laid upon the hair and bleached it where it lay. It conferred a certain air of distinction—an added value of contrast—just as the sharp black shadow in a neutral-tinted picture gives sudden significance to the whole conception.
The stranger was regarding Jean with a flicker of amusement in his grey eyes.
“That was a near thing!” he observed.
Evidently he judged her to be a Frenchwoman, for he spoke in French—very fluently, but with an unmistakable English accent. Instinctively Jean, who all her life had been as frequently called upon to converse in French as English, responded in the same language.
She was breathing rather quickly, a little shaken by the suddenness of the incident, and his face took on a shade of concern.
“You’re not hurt, I hope? Did you twist your ankle?”
“No—oh, no,” she smiled up at him. “I can’t have fastened my skate on properly, and when it shot off like that I’m afraid I rather lost my head. You see,” she added explanatorily, “I haven’t skated for some years. And I was never very proficient.”
“I see,” he said gravely. “It was a little rash of you to start again quite alone, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose it was. However, as you luckily happened to be there to save me from the consequences, no harm is done. Thank you so much.”
There was a note of dismissal in her voice, but apparently he failed to notice it, for he held out his hands to her crosswise, saying:
“Let me help you to the bank, and then I’ll retrieve your errant skate for you.”
He so evidently expected her to comply with his suggestion that, almost without her own volition, she found herself moving with him towards the edge of the rink, her hands grasped in a close, steady clasp, and a moment later she was scrambling up the bank. Once more on level ground, she made a movement to withdraw her hands.
“I can manage quite well now,” she said rather nervously. There was something in that strong, firm grip of his which sent a curious tremor of consciousness through her.
He made no answer, but released her instantly, and in her anxiety to show him how well she could manage she hurried on, struck the tip of the skate she was still wearing against a little hummock of frozen snow, and all but fell. He caught her as she stumbled.
“I think.” he remarked drily, “you would do well to sacrifice your independence till your feet are on more equal terms with one another.”
Jean laughed ruefully.
“I think I should,” she agreed meekly.
He led her to where the prone trunk of a tree offered a seat of sorts, then went in search of the missing skate. Returning in a few moments, he knelt beside her and fastened it on—securely this time—to the slender foot she extended towards him.
“You’re much too incompetent to be out on the ice alone,” he remarked as he buckled the last strap.
A faint flush of annoyance rose in Jean’s cheeks at the uncompromising frankness of the observation.
“What are your friends thinking of to let you do such a thing?” he pursued, blandly ignoring her mute indignation.
“I have no friends here. I am—my own mistress,” she replied rather tartly.
He was still kneeling in the snow in front of her. Now he sat back on his heels and subjected her face to a sharp, swift scrutiny. Almost, she thought, she detected a sudden veiled suspicion in the keen glance.
“You’re not the sort of girl to be knocking about—alone—at a hotel,” he said at last, as though satisfied.
“How do you know what I’m like?” she retorted quickly, “You are hardly qualified to judge.”
“Pardon, mademoiselle, I do not know what you are—but I do know very certainly what you are not. And”—smiling a little—“I think we have just had ocular demonstration of the fact that you’re not accustomed to fending for yourself.”
There was something singularly attractive about his smile. It lightened his whole face, contradicting the settled gravity that seemed habitual to it, and Jean found herself smiling back in response.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I’m not,” she admitted. “I came here with my father, and he was—was suddenly called away. I am going on to stay with friends.”
“This is my last day here,” he remarked with sudden irrelevance. “I am off first thing to-morrow morning.”
“You’re not stopping at the hotel, are you?”
He shook his head.
“No. I’m staying at a friend’s chalet a little way beyond it. Mais, voyons, mademoiselle, you will catch cold sitting there. Are you too frightened to try the ice again?”
He seemed to assume that her next essay would be made in his company. Jean spoke a little hurriedly.
“Oh, no, I was supposed to have a lesson with Monsieur Griolet this morning. He is an instructor,” she explained. “But he was engaged coaching someone else when I came out.”
“And which is this Monsieur Griolet? Can you see him?”
Jean’s glance ranged over the scattered figures on the rink.
“Yes. There he is.”
His eyes followed the direction indicated.
“He seems to be well occupied at the moment,” he commented. “Suppose—would you allow me to act as coach instead?”
She hesitated. This stranger appeared to be uncompromisingly progressive in his tendencies.
“I’m perfectly capable,” he added curtly.
“I’m sure of that. But——”
His eyes twinkled. “But it would not be quite comme il faut? Is that it?”
“Well, it wouldn’t, would it?” she retaliated.
His face grew suddenly grave, and she noticed that when in repose there were deep, straight lines on either side of his mouth—lines that are usually only furrowed by severe suffering, either mental or physical.
“Mademoiselle,” he said quietly. “To-day, it seems, we are two very lonely people. Couldn’t we forget what is comme il faut for once? We shall probably never meet again. We know nothing of each other—just ‘ships that pass in the night.’ Let us keep one another company—take this one day together.”
He drew a step nearer to her.
“Will you?” he said. “Will you?”
He was looking down at her with eyes that were curiously bright and compelling. There was a tense note in his voice which once again sent that disconcerting tremor of consciousness tingling through her blood.
She knew that his proposal was impertinent, unconventional, even regarded from the standpoint of the modern broad interpretation of the word convention, and that by every law of Mrs. Grundy she ought to snub him soundly for his presumption and retrace her steps to the hotel with all the dignity at her command.
But she did none of these things. Instead, she stood hesitating, alternately flushing and paling beneath the oddly concentrated gaze he bent on her.
“I swear it shall bind you to nothing,” he pursued urgently. “Not even to recognising me in the street should our ways ever chance to cross again. Though that is hardly likely to occur”—with a shrug—“seeing that mademoiselle is French and that I am rarely out of England. It will be just one day that we shall have shared together out of the whole of life, and after that the ‘darkness again and a silence.’.... I can promise you the ‘silence’!” he added with a sudden harsh inflection.
It was that bitter note which won the day. In some subtle, subconscious way Jean sensed the pain which lay at the back of it. She answered impulsively:
“Very well. It shall be as you wish.”
A rarely sweet smile curved the man’s grave lips.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
“E NCORE une fois! Bravo! That went better!” Monsieur Griolet’s understudy had amply justified his claim to capability. After a morning’s tuition at his hands, Jean found her prowess in the art of skating considerably enhanced. She was even beginning to master the mysteries of “cross-cuts” and “rocking turns,” and a somewhat attenuated figure eight lay freshly scored on the ice to her credit.
“You are really a wonderful instructor,” she acknowledged, surveying the graven witness to her progress with considerable satisfaction.
Her self-appointed teacher smiled.
“There is something to be said for the pupil, also,” he replied. “But now”—glancing at his watch—“I vote we call a halt for lunch.”
“Lunch!” Jean’s glance measured the distance to the hotel with some dismay.
“But not lunch at the hotel,” interposed her companion quickly.
Jean regarded him with curiosity.
“Where then, monsieur?”
“Up there!” he pointed towards the pine-woods. “Above the woods there is a hut of sorts—erected as a shelter in case of sudden storms for people coming up from the lower valley to Montavan and beyond. It’s a rough little shanty, but it would serve very well as a temporary salle 脿 manger. It isn’t a long climb,” he added persuasively. “Are you too tired to take it on after your recent exertion?”
“Not in the least. But are you expecting a wayside refuge of that description to be miraculously endowed with a well-furnished larder?”
“No. But I think my knapsack can make good the deficiency.” he replied composedly.
Jean looked at him with dancing eyes. Having once yielded to the day’s unconventional adventure, she had surrendered herself whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of it.
She made one reservation, however. Some instinct of self-protection prevented her from enlightening her companion as to her partly English nationality. There was no real necessity for it, seeing that he spoke French with the utmost fluency, and his assumption that she was a Frenchwoman seemed in some way to limit the feeling of intimacy, conferring on her, as it were, a little of the freedom of an incognito.
“A la bonne heure!” she exclaimed gaily. “So you invite me to share your lunch, monsieur le professeur?”
“I’ve invited you to share my day, haven’t I?” he replied, smiling.
They steered for the bank, and when he had helped off her skates and removed his own, slinging them over his arm, they started off along the steep white track which wound its way upwards through the pine-woods.
As they left the bright sunlight that still glittered on the snowy slopes behind them, it seemed as though they plunged suddenly into another world—a still, mysterious, twilit place, where the snow underfoot muffled the sound of their steps and the long shadows of the pines barred their path with sinister, distorted shapes.
Jean, always sensitive to her surroundings, shivered a little.
“It’s rather eerie, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s just as if someone had suddenly turned the lights out.”
“Quite a nice bit of symbolism,” he returned enigmatically.
“How? I don’t think I understand.”
He laughed a little.
“How should you? You’re young. Fate doesn’t come along and snuff out the lights for you when you are—what shall we say? Eighteen?”
“You’re two years out,” replied Jean composedly.
“As much? Then let’s hope you’ll have so much the longer to wait before Madame Destiny comes round with her snuffers.”
He spoke with a kind of bitter humour, the backwash, surely, of some storm through which he must have passed. Jean looked across at him with a vague trouble in her face.
“Then, do you think”—she spoke uncertainly—“do you believe it is inevitable that she will come—sooner or later?”
“I hope not—to you,” he said gently. “But she comes to most of us.”
She longed to put another question, but there was a note of finality in his voice—a kind of “thus far shalt thou come and no further”—that warned her to probe no deeper. Whatever it was of bitterness that lay in the Englishman’s past, he had no intention of sharing the knowledge with his chance companion of a day. He seemed to have become absorbed once more in his own thoughts, and for a time they tramped along together in silence.
The ascent steepened perceptibly, and Jean, light and active as she was, found it hard work to keep pace with the man’s steady, swinging stride. Apparently his thoughts engrossed him to the exclusion of everything else, for he appeared to have utterly forgotten her existence. It was only when a slip of her foot on the beaten surface of the snow wrung a quick exclamation from her that he paused, wheeling round in consternation.
“I beg your pardon! I’m walking you off your legs! Why on earth didn’t you stop me?”
There was something irresistibly boyish about the quick apology. Jean laughed, a little breathless from the swift climb uphill.
“You seemed so bent on getting to the top in the least possible time,” she replied demurely, “that I didn’t like to disappoint you.”
“I’m afraid I make a poor sort of guide,” he admitted. “I was thinking of something else. You must forgive me.”
They resumed their climb more leisurely. The trees were thinning a bit now, and ahead, between the tall, straight trunks winged with drooping, snow-laden branches, they could catch glimpses of the white world beyond.
Presently they came out above the pine-wood on to the edge of a broad plateau and Jean uttered an exclamation of delight, gazing spell-bound at the scene thus suddenly unfolded.
Behind them, in the pine-ringed valley, a frozen reach of water gleamed like a dull sheet of metal, whilst before them, far above, stretched the great chain of mountains, pinnacle after pinnacle, capped with snow, thrusting up into the cloud-swept sky. Through rifts in the cloud—almost, it seemed, torn in the breast of heaven by those towering peaks—the sunlight slanted in long shafts, chequering the snows with shimmering patches of pale gold.
“It was worth the climb, then?”
The Englishman, his gaze on Jean’s rapt face, broke the silence abruptly. She turned to him, radiant-eyed.
“It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!” she exclaimed, laying her hand on her breast with the little foreign turn of gesture she derived from her French ancestry.
She said no more, but remained very still, drinking in the sheer loveliness of the scene.
The man regarded her quietly as she stood there silhouetted against the skyline, her slim, brown-clad figure striking a warm note amid the chill Alpine whites and greys. Her face was slightly tilted, and as the sunshine glinted on her hair and eyes, waking the russet lights that slumbered in them, there was something vividly arresting about her—a splendour of ardent youth which brought a somewhat wistful expression into the rather weary eyes of the man watching her.
His thought travelled hack to the brief snatch of conversation evoked by the sudden gloom of the pine-woods. Surely, for once, Fate would lay aside her snuffers and let this young, eager life pass by unshadowed!
Even as the thought took shape in his mind, Jean turned to him again, her face still radiant, “Thank you for bringing me up here,” she said simply. “It has been perfect.”
She stretched out her hand, and he took it and held it in his for a moment.
“I’m glad you’ve liked it,” he answered quietly. “It will always be a part of our day together—the day we stole from les convenances”—he smiled whimsically. “And now, if you can bring yourself back to more prosaic matters, I suggest we have lunch. Scenery, however fine, isn’t exactly calculated to sustain life.”
“Most material person!” She laughed up at him. “I suppose you think a ham sandwich worth all the scenery in the world?”
“I’ll admit to a preference for the sandwich at the moment,” he acknowledged. “Come, now, confess! Aren’t you hungry, too?”
“Starving! This air makes me feel as if I’d never had anything to eat in my life before!”
“Well, then, come and inspect my salle 脿 manger.”
The proposed refuge proved to be a roughly constructed little hut—hardly more than a shed provided with a door and thick-paned window, its only furniture a wooden bench and table. But that it had served its purpose as a kind of “travellers’ rest” was proved by the fragments of appreciation, both in prose and verse, that were to be found inscribed in a species of “Visitors’ Book” which lay on the table, carefully preserved from damp in a strong metal box. Jean amused herself by perusing the various contributions to its pages while the Englishman unpacked the contents of his knapsack.
The lunch that followed was a merry little meal, the two conversing with a happy intimacy and freedom from reserve based on the reassuring knowledge that they would, in all probability, never meet again. Afterwards, they bent their energies to concerting a suitable inscription for insertion in the “Visitors’ Book,” squabbling like a couple of children over the particular form it should take.
So absorbed were they in the discussion that they failed to notice the perceptible cooling of the temperature. The sun no longer warmed the roofing of the hut, and there was a desolate note in the sudden gusts of wind which shook the door at frequent intervals as though trying to attract the attention of those within. Presently a louder rattle than usual, coincident with a chance pause in the conversation, roused them effectually.
The Englishman’s keen glance flashed to the little window, through which was visible a dancing, whirling blur of white.
“Great Scott!” he exclaimed in good round English. “It’s snowing like the very dickens!”
In two strides he had reached the door, and, throwing it open, peered out. A draught of icy air rushed into the hut, accompanied by a flurry of fine snow driven on the wind.
When he turned back, his face had assumed a sudden look of gravity.
“We must go at once,” he said, speaking in French again and apparently unconscious of his momentary lapse into his native tongue. “If we don’t, we shan’t be able to get back at all. The snow drifts quickly in the valley. Half an hour more of this and we shouldn’t be able to get through.”
Jean thrust the Visitors’ Book back into its box, and began hastily repacking her companion’s, knapsack, but he stopped her almost roughly.
“Never mind that. Fasten that fur thing closer round your throat and come on. There’s no taking chances in a blizzard like this. Don’t you understand?”—almost roughly. “If we waste time we may have to spend the night here.”
Impelled by the sudden urgency of his tones, Jean followed him swiftly out of the hut, and the wind, as though baulked by her haste, snatched the door from her grasp and drove it to with a menacing thud behind them.
AS Jean stepped outside the hut it seemed as though she had walked straight into the heart of the storm. The bitter, ice-laden blast that bore down from the mountains caught away her breath, the fine driving flakes, crystal-hard, whipped her face, almost blinding her with the fury of their onslaught, whilst her feet slipped and slid on the newly fallen snow as she trudged along beside the Englishman.
“This is a good preparation for a dance!” she gasped breathlessly, forcing her chilled lips to a smile.
“For a dance? What dance?”
“There’s a fancy dress ball at the hotel to-night. There won’t be—much of me—left to dance, will there?”
The Englishman laughed suddenly.
“My chief concern is to get you back to the hotel—alive,” he observed grimly.
Jean looked at him quickly.
“Is it as bad as that?” she asked more soberly.
“No. At least I hope not. I didn’t mean to frighten you”—hastily. “Only it seemed a trifle incongruous to be contemplating a dance when we may be struggling through several feet of snow in half an hour.”
The fierce gusts of wind, lashing the snow about them in bewildering eddies, made conversation difficult, and they pushed on in a silence broken only by an occasional word of encouragement from the Englishman.
“All right?” he queried once, as Jean paused, battered and spent with the fury of the storm.
She nodded speechlessly. She had no breath left to answer, but once again her lips curved in a plucky little smile. A fresh onslaught of the wind forced them onwards, and she staggered a little as it blustered by.
“Here,” he said quickly. “Take my arm. It will be better when we get into the pine-wood. The trees there will give us some protection.”
They struggled forward again, arm in arm. The swirling snow had blotted out the distant mountains; lowering storm-filled clouds made a grey twilight of the day, through which they could just discern ahead the vague, formless darkness of the pine-wood.
Another ten minutes walking brought them to it, only to find that the blunted edge of the storm was almost counterbalanced by the added difficulties of the surrounding gloom. High up overhead they could hear the ominous creak and swing of great branches shaken like toys in the wind, and now and again the sharper crack of some limb wrenched violently from its parent trunk. Once there came the echoing crash of a tree torn up bodily and flung to earth.
“It’s worse here,” declared Jean, “I think”—with a nervous laugh—“I think I’d rather die in the open!”
“It might be preferable. Only you’re not going to die at all, if I can help it,” the Englishman returned composedly.
But, cool though he appeared, he experienced a thrill of keen anxiety as they emerged from the pine-wood and his quick eyes scanned the dangerously rapid drifting of the snow.
The wind was racing down the valley now, driving the snow before it and piling it up, inch by inch, foot by foot, against the steep ground which skirted the sheet of ice where they had been skating but a few hours before.
Through the pitiless beating of the snow Jean strove to read her companion’s face. It was grim and set, the lean jaw thrust out a little and the grey eyes tense and concentrated.
“Can we get through?” she asked, raising her voice so that it might carry against the wind.
“If we can get through the drifted snow between here and the track on the left, we’re all right,” answered the man.
“The wind’s slanting across the valley and there’ll be no drifts on the further side. I wish I’d got a bit of rope with me.”
He felt in his pockets, finally producing the rolled-up strap of a suit-case.
“That’s all I have,” he said discontentedly.
“What’s it for?”
“It’s to go round your waist. I don’t want to lose you”—smiling briefly—“if you should stumble into deep snow.”
“Deep snow? But it’s only been snowing an hour or so!” she objected.
“Evidently you don’t know what a blizzard can accomplish in the way of drifting during the course of an ‘hour or so.’ I do.”
Deftly he fastened the strap round her waist, and, taking the loose end, gave it a double turn about his wrist before gripping it firmly in his hand.
“Now, keep close behind me. Regard me”—laughing shortly—“as a snow-plough. And if I go down deep rather suddenly, throw your weight backward as much as you can.”
He moved forward, advancing cautiously. He was badly handicapped by the lack of even a stick with which to gauge the depth of drifting snow in front of him, and he tested each step before trusting his full weight to the delusive, innocent-looking surface.
Jean went forward steadily beside him, a little to the rear. The snow was everywhere considerably more than ankle-deep, and at each step she could feel that the slope of the ground increased and with it the depth of the drift through which they toiled.
The cold was intense. The icy fingers of the snow about her feet seemed to creep upward and upward till her whole body felt numbed and dead, and as she stumbled along in the Englishman’s wake, buffeted and beaten by the storm, her feet ached as if leaden weights were attached to them.
But she struggled on pluckily. The man in front of her was taking the brunt of the hardship, cutting a path for her, as it were, with his own body as he forged ahead, and she was determined not to add to his work by putting any weight on the strap which bound them together.
All at once he gave a sharp exclamation and pulled up abruptly.
“It’s getting much deeper,” he called out, turning back to her. “You’ll never get through, hampered with your skirts. I’m going to carry you.”
Jean shook her head, and shouted back:
“You wouldn’t get through, handicapped like that. No, let’s push on as we are. I’ll manage somehow.”
A glint of something like admiration flickered in his eyes.
“Game little devil!” he muttered. But the wind caught up the words, and Jean did not hear them. He raised his voice again, releasing the strap from his wrist as he spoke.
“You’ll do what I tell you. It’s only a matter of getting through this bit of drift, and we’ll be out of the worst of it. Put your arms round my neck.” Then, as she hesitated: “Do you hear? Put your arms round my neck—quick!”
The dominant ring in his voice impelled her. Obediently she clasped her arms about his neck as he stooped, and the next moment she felt herself swung upward, almost as easily as a child, and firmly held in the embrace of arms like steel.
For a few yards he made good progress, thrusting his way through the yielding snow. But the task of carrying a young woman of average height and weight is no light one, even to a strong man and without the added difficulty of plunging through snow that yields treacherously at every step, and Jean could guess the strain entailed upon him by the double burden.
“Oh, do put me down!” she urged him. “I’m sure I can walk it—really I am.”
He halted for a moment.
“Look down!” he said. “Think you could travel in that?”
The snow was up to his knees, above them whenever the ground hollowed suddenly.
“But you?” she protested unhappily. “You’ll—you’ll simply kill yourself!”
“Small loss if I do! But as that would hardly help you out of your difficulties, I’ve no intention of giving up the ghost just at present.”
He started on again, pressing forward slowly and determinedly, but it was only with great difficulty and exertion that he was able to make headway. Jean, her cheek against the rough tweed of his coat, could hear the labouring beats of his heart as the depth of the snow increased.
“How much further?” she whispered.
“Not far,” he answered briefly, husbanding his breath.
A few more steps. They were both silent now. Jean’s eyes sought his face. It was ashen, and even in that bitter cold beads of sweat were running down it; he was nearing the end of his tether. She could bear it no longer. She stirred restlessly in his arms.
“Put me down,” she cried imploringly. “Please put me down.”
But he shook his head.
“Keep still, can’t you?” he muttered between his teeth. She felt his arms tighten round her.
The next moment he stumbled heavily against some surface root or boulder, concealed beneath the snow, and pitched forward, and in the same instant Jean felt herself sinking down, down into a soft bed of something that yielded resistlessly to her weight. Then came a violent jerk and jar, as though she had been seized suddenly round the waist, and the sensation of sinking ceased abruptly.
She lay quite still where she had fallen and, looking upwards, found herself staring straight into the eyes of the Englishman. He was lying flat on his face, on ground a little above the snow-filled hollow into which his fall had flung her, his hand grasping the strap which was fastened round her body. He had caught the flying end of it as they fell, and thus saved her from sinking into seven or eight feet of snow.
“Are you hurt?”
His voice came to her roughened with fierce anxiety.
“No. I’m not hurt. Only don’t leave go of your end of the strap!”
“Thank God!” she heard him mutter. Then, aloud, reassuringly: “I’ve got my end of it all right. How, can you catch hold of the strap and raise yourself a little so that I can reach you?”
Jean obeyed. A minute later she felt his arms about her shoulders, underneath her armpits, and then very slowly, but with a sure strength that took from her all sense of fear, he drew her safely up beside him on to the high ground.
Eor a moment they both rested quietly, recovering their breath. The Englishman seemed glad of the respite, and Jean noticed with concern the rather drawn look of his face. She thought he must be more played out than he cared to acknowledge.
Across the silence of sheer fatigue their eyes met—Jean’s filled with a wistful solicitude as unconscious and candid as a child’s, the man’s curiously brilliant and inscrutable—and in a moment the silence had become something other, different, charged with emotional significance, the revealing silence which falls suddenly between a man and woman.
At last:
“This is what comes of stealing a day from Mrs. Grundy,” commented the man drily.
And the tension was broken.
He sprang up, as though, anxious to maintain the recovered atmosphere of the commonplace.
“Come! Having shot her bolt and tried ineffectually to down you in a ditch, I expect the old lady will let us get home safely now. We’re through the worst. There are no more drifts between here and the hotel.”
It was true. Anything that might have spelt danger was past, and it only remained to follow the beaten track up to the hotel, though even so, with the wind and snow driving in their faces, it took them a good half-hour to accomplish the task.
Monsieur and Madame de Varigny, a distracted ma卯tre d’h么tel, and a little crowd of interested and sympathetic visitors welcomed their arrival.
“Mon dieu, mademoiselle! But we rejoice to see you back!” exclaimed Madame de Varigny. “We ourselves are only newly returned—and that, with difficulty, through this terrible storm—and we arrive to find that none knows where you are!”
“Me, I made sure that mademoiselle had accompanied Madame la Comtesse.” asseverated Monsieur Vautrinot, nervously anxious to exculpate himself from any charge of carelessness.
“We were just going to organise a search-party,” added the little Count. “I, myself”—stoutly—“should have joined in the search.”
Weary as she was, Jean could hardly refrain from smiling at the idea of the diminutive Count in the r么le of gallant preserver. He would have been considerably less well-qualified even than herself to cope with the drifting snow through which the sheer, dogged strength of the Englishman had brought her safely.
Instinctively she turned with the intention of effecting an introduction between the latter and the Varignys, only to find that he had disappeared. He had taken the opportunity presented by the little ferment of excitement which had greeted her safe return to slip away.
She felt oddly disconcerted. And yet, she reflected, it was so like him—so like the conception of him which she had formed, at least—to evade both her thanks and the enthusiasm with which a recital of the afternoon’s adventure Would have been received.
JEAN, surprisingly revived by a hot bath and a hot drink, and comfortably tucked up beside the fire in her room, was recounting the day’s adventure to Madame de Varigny.
It was a somewhat expurgated version of the affair that she outlined—thoughtfully calculated to allay the natural apprehensions of a temporary chaperon—in which the unknown Englishman figured innocuously as merely having come to her assistance when, in the course of her afternoon’s tramp, she had been overtaken by the blizzard. Of the stolen day, snatched from under Mrs. Grundy’s enquiring nose, Jean preserved a discreet silence.
“I don’t know who he could be,” she pursued. “I’ve never seen him on the ice before; I should certainly have recognised him if I had. He was a lean, brown man, very English-looking—that sort of cold-tub-every-morning effect, you know. Oh! And he had one perfectly white lock of hair that was distinctly attractive. It looked”—descriptively—“as though someone had dabbed a powdered finger on his hair—just in the right place.”
Madame de Varigny’s eyes narrowed, and a quick ejaculation escaped her. It was something more than a mere exclamation connoting interest; it held a definitely individual note, as though it sprang from some sudden access of personal feeling.
Jean, hearing it, looked up in some surprise, and the other, meeting her questioning glance, rushed hastily into speech.
“A lock of white hair? But how chic!
“It should not”—thoughtfully—“be difficult to discover the identity of anyone with so distinctive a characteristic.”
“He is not staying in the hotel, at all events,” said Jean. “He told me he was at a friend’s chalet.”
“And he did not enlighten you as to his name? Gave you no hint?”
Madame de Varigny spoke with an assumption of indifference, but there was an undertone of suppressed eagerness in her liquid voice.
Jean shook her head, smiling a little to herself. It had been part of the charm of that brief companionship that neither of the two comrades knew any of the everyday, commonplace details concerning the other.
“Perhaps you will see him again at the rink to-morrow,” suggested Madame de Varigny, still with that note of restrained eagerness in her tones. “The snow is not deep except where it has drifted; they will clear the ice in the morning.”
Jean was silent. She was not altogether sure that she wanted to see him again. As it stood, robbed of all the commonplace circumstances of convention, the incident held a certain glamour of whimsical romance which could not but appeal to the daughter of Glyn Peterson. Nicely rounded off, as, for instance, by the unknown Englishman’s prosaically calling at the hotel the next day to enquire whether she had suffered any ill effects, it would lose all the thrill of adventure. It was the suggestion of incompleteness which flavoured the entire episode so piquantly.
No, on the whole, Jean rather hoped that she would not meet the Englishman again—at least, not yet. Some day, perhaps, it might be rather nice if chance brought them together once more. There would be a certain element of romantic fitness about it, should that happen.
“I don’t think I am likely to see him again,” she said quietly, replying to Madame de Varigny’s suggestion. “He told me he was going away to-morrow.”
Had it been conceivable, Jean would have said that a flash of disappointment crossed the Countess’s face. But there seemed no possible reason why the movements of an unknown Englishman should cause her any excitation of feeling whatever, pleasant or otherwise. The only feasible explanation was that odd little streak of inquisitiveness concerning other people’s affairs which appeared to be characteristic of her and which she had before evinced concerning the circumstances of Lady Anne Brennan.
Whatever curiosity she may have felt, however, on this occasion Madame de Varigny refrained from giving expression to it. Apparently dismissing the subject of the Englishman’s identity from her mind, she switched the conversation into a fresh channel.
“It is unfortunate that you should have met with such a contretemps to-day. You will not feel disposed to dance this evening, after so much fatigue,” she observed commiseratingly.
But Jean scouted the notion. With the incomparable resiliency of youth, she felt quite equal to dancing all night if needs be.
“Mais tout au contraire!” she exclaimed. “I’m practically recovered—at least, I shall be after another half-hour’s lazing by this glorious fire. I wonder what heaven-sent inspiration induced Monsieur Vautrinot to install a real English fire-place in this room? It’s delicious.”
The Countess rose, shrugging her expressive shoulders.
“You are wonderful—you English! If it had been I who had experienced your adventure to-day, I should be fit for nothing. As to dancing the same evening—ma foi, non! Voyons, I shall leave you to rest a little.”
She nodded smilingly and left the room. Once in the corridor outside, however, the smile vanished as though it had been wiped off her face by an unseen hand. Her curving lips settled into a hard, inflexible line, and the soft, disarming dark eyes grew suddenly sombre and brooding.
She passed swiftly along to her own suite. It was empty. The little Count was downstairs, agreeably occupied in comparing symptoms with a fellow health crank he had discovered.
With a quick sigh of relief at his absence she flung herself into a chair and lit a cigarette, smoking rapidly and exhaling the smoke in quick, nervous jerks. The long, pliant fingers which held the cigarette were not quite steady.
“Tout va bien!” she muttered restlessly. “All goes well! Assur茅ment, his punishment will come.” She bent her head. “Que Dieu le veuille!” she whispered passionately.
Jean took a final and not altogether displeased survey of herself in the mirror before descending to the big salle where the fancy-dress ball was to be held. She had had her dinner served to her in her room so that she might rest the longer, and now, as there came wafted to her ears the preliminary grunts and squeals and snatches of melody of the hotel orchestra in process of tuning up, she was conscious of a pleasant glow of anticipation.
There was nothing strikingly original about the conception of her costume. It represented “Autumn,” and had been designed for a fancy-dress ball of more than a year ago—before the death of Jacqueline had suddenly shuttered down all gaiety and mirth at Beirnfels. But, simple as it was, it had been carried out by an artist in colour, and the filmy diaphanous layers of brown and orange and scarlet, one over the other, zoned with a girdle of autumn-tinted leaves, served to emphasise the russet of beech-leaf hair and the topaz-gold of hazel eyes.
Madame de Varigny’s glance swept the girl with approval as they entered the great salle together.
“But it is charming, your costume! Regarde, Henri”—turning to the Count, who, as a swashbuckling d’Artagnan, was getting into difficulties with his sword. “Has it not distinction—this costume d’automne?”
The Count retrieved himself and, hitching his sword once more into position, poured forth an unembarrassed stream of Gallic compliment.
Madame de Varigny herself was looking supremely handsome as Cleopatra. Jean reflected that her eyes,—slumberous and profound, with their dusky frame of lashes and that strange implacability she always sensed in them—might very well have been the eyes of the Egyptian queen herself.
The salle was filling up rapidly. Jean, who did not anticipate dancing overmuch, as she had made but few acquaintances in the hotel, watched the colourful, shifting scene with interest. There was the usual miscellany of a masquerade—Pierrots jostling against Kings and Cossacks, Marie Antoinettes flaunting their jewels before the eyes of demure-faced nuns, with here and there an occasional costume of outstanding originality or merit of design.
Contrary to her expectations, however, Jean soon found herself with more partners than she had dances to bestow, and, newly emancipated from the rigour of her year’s mourning, she threw herself into the enjoyment of the moment with all the long repressed enthusiasm of her youth.
It was nearing the small hours when at last she found herself alone for a few minutes. In the exhilaration of rapid movement she had completely forgotten the earlier fatigues of the day, but now she was beginning to feel conscious of the strain which the morning’s skating, followed by that long, exhausting struggle through the blizzard, had imposed upon even young bones and muscles. Close at hand was a deserted alcove, curtained off from the remainder of the salle, and here Jean found temporary sanctuary, subsiding thankfully on to a big cushioned divan.
The sound of the orchestra came to her ears pleasantly dulled by the heavy folds of the screening curtain. Vaguely she could feel the rhythmic pulsing, the sense of movement, in the salle beyond. It was all very soothing and reposeful, and she leaned her head against a fat, pink satin cushion and dosed, at the back of her mind the faintly disturbing thought that she was cutting a Roman senator’s dance.
Presently she stirred a little, hazily aware of some disquiet that was pushing itself into her consciousness. The discomfort grew, crystallising at last into the feeling that she was no longer alone. Eor a moment, physically unwilling to be disturbed, she tried to disregard it, but it persisted, and, as though to strengthen it, the recollection of the defrauded senator came back to her with increased insistence.
Broad awake at last, she opened her eyes. Someone—the senator presumably—was standing at the entrance to the little alcove, and she rushed into conscience-stricken speech.
“Oh, have I cut your dance? I’m so sorry——”
She broke off abruptly, realising as she spoke that the intruder was not, after all, the senator come to claim his dance, but a stranger wearing a black mask and domino. She was sure she had not seen him before amongst the dancers in the salle, and for a moment she stared at him bewildered and even a little frightened. Vague stories she had heard of a “hold-up” by masked men at some fancy-dress ball recalled themselves disagreeably to her memory, and her pulse quickened its beat perceptibly.
Then, quite suddenly, she knew who it was. It did not need even the evidence of that lock of poudr茅 hair above the mask he wore, just visible in the dim light of the recess, to tell her. She knew. And with the knowledge came a sudden, disturbing sense of shy tumult.
She half-rose from the divan.
“You?” she stammered nervously. “Is it you?”
He whipped off his mask.
“Who else? Did this deceive you?”—dangling the strip of velvet from his finger, and regarding her with quizzical grey eyes. “I’ve been hunting for you everywhere. I’d almost made up my mind that you had gone to bed like a good little girl. And then my patron saint—or was it the special devil told off to look after me, I wonder?—prompted me to look in here. Et vous voil脿, mademoiselle! How are you feeling after your exploits in the snow?”
He spoke very rapidly, in a light half-mocking tone that seemed to Joan to make the happenings of the afternoon unreal and remote. His eyes were very bright, almost defiant in their expression—holding a suggestion of recklessness, as though he were embarked upon something of which his inmost self refused to approve but which he was nevertheless determined to carry through.
“So you did ‘call to enquire,’ after all!”
As she spoke, Jean’s mouth curled up at the corners in an involuntary little smile of amused recollection.
“So I did call after all?” He looked puzzled—not unnaturally, since he had no clue to her thoughts. “What do you mean? I came”—he went on lightly—“because I wanted the rest of the day which you promised to share with me. The proceedings were cut short rather abruptly this afternoon.”
“But how did you get here?” she asked. “And—and why did you disappear so suddenly after we got back to the hotel this afternoon?”
“I got here by the aid of a pair of excellent skis and the light of the moon; the snow ceased some hours ago and the surface is hardening nicely. I disappeared because, as I told you, if you gave me this one day, it should bind you to nothing—not even to introducing me to your friends.”
“I should have had to present you as Monsieur l’Inconnu,” remarked Jean without thinking.
“Yes.” He met her glance with smiling eyes, but he did not volunteer his name.
He had made no comment, uttered no word beyond the bald affirmative, yet somehow Jean felt as though she had committed an indiscretion and he had snubbed her for it. The blood rushed into her cheeks, staining them scarlet.
“I beg your pardon,” she said stiffly.
Again that glint of ironical amusement in his eyes.
“For what, mademoiselle?”
She was conscious of a rising indignation at his attitude. She could not understand it; he seemed to have completely changed from the man of a few hours ago. Then he had proved himself so good a comrade, been so entirely delightful in his thought and care of her, whereas now he appeared bent on wilfully misunderstanding her, putting her in a false position just for his own amusement.
“You know perfectly well what I meant,” she answered, a tremor born of anger and wounded feeling in her voice. “You thought I was inquisitive—trying to find out your name——”
“Well”—humorously—“you were, weren’t you?” Then, as her lip quivered sensitively, “Ah! Forgive me for teasing you! And”—more earnestly—“forgive me for not telling you my name. It is better—much better—that you should not know. Remember, we can only have this one day together; we’re just ‘ships that pass.’” He paused, then added: “Mine’s only a battered old hulk—a derelict vessel—and derelicts are best forgotten.”
There was an undercurrent of deep sadness in his voice, the steadfast, submissive sadness of a man who has long ago substituted endurance for revolt.
“Remember, we can only have this one day together.” The quiet utterance of the words stung Jean into a realisation of their significance, and suddenly she was conscious that the knowledge that this unknown Englishman was going away—going out of her life as abruptly as he had come into it—filled her with a quite disproportionate sense of regret. She found herself unexpectedly up against the recognition of the fact that she would miss him—that she would like to see him again.
“Then—you want me to forget?” she asked rather wistfully.
Her eyes fell away from him as she spoke.
“Yes,” he returned gravely. “Just that. I want you to forget.”
“And—and you?” The words seemed dragged from her without her own volition.
“I? Oh”—he laughed a little—“I’m afraid I’m inconsistent. I’m going to ask you to give me something I can remember. That’ll even matters up, if you forget and I—remember.”
“What do you want me to give you?”
He made a sudden step towards her.
“I want you to dance with me—just once. Will you?”—intently.
He waited for her reply, his keen, compelling glance fixed on her face. Then, as though he read his answer there, he stepped to her side and held out his arm.
“Come,” he said.
Almost as if she were in a dream, Jean laid her hand lightly on his sleeve and he pulled aside the porti猫re for her to pass through. Then, putting his arm about her, he swung her out on to the smooth floor of the salle.
They danced almost in silence. Somehow the customary small-change of ballroom conversation would have seemed irrelevant and apart. This dance—the Englishman had implied as much—was in the nature of a farewell. It was the end of their stolen day.
The band was playing Valse Triste, that unearthly, infinitely sad vision of Sibelius’, and the music seemed to hold all the strange, breathless ecstacy, the regret and foreboding of approaching end of which this first, and last, dance was compact.
It was over at last. The three final chords of the Valse—inexorable Death knocking at the door—dropped into silence, and with the end of the dance uprose the eager hum of gay young voices, as the couples drifted out from the salle in search of the buffet or of secluded corners in which to “sit out” the interval, according as the spirit moved them.
Jean and her partner, making their way through the throng, encountered Madame de Varigny on the arm of a handsome Bedouin Arab. For the fraction of a second her eyes rested curiously on Jean’s partner, and a gleam of something that seemed like triumph flickered across her face. But it was gone in an instant, and, murmuring some commonplace to Jean, she passed on.
“Who was that?”
The Englishman rapped out the question harshly, and Jean was struck by an unaccustomed note in his voice. It held apprehension, distaste; she could not quite analyse the quality.
“The Cleopatra, do you mean?” she said. “That was my chaperon, the Comtesse de Varigny. Why do you ask?” He gave a short, relieved laugh.
“No particular reason,” he returned with some constraint “She reminded me—extraordinarily—of someone I used to know, that’s all. Even the timbre of her voice was similar. It startled me for a moment.”
He dismissed the matter with apparent indifference, and led Jean again into the same little alcove in which he had found her. They stood together silently in the dim, rose-hued twilight diffused by the shaded lamp above.
“Well,” he said at last, slowly, reluctantly. “So this is really the end of our stolen day.”
Jean’s hands, hanging loosely clasped in front of her, suddenly tightened their grip of each other. She felt herself struggling in the press of new and incomprehensible emotions. A voice within her was crying out rebelliously: “Why? Why must it be the end? Why not—other days?” Pride alone kept her silent. It was his choice, his decision, that they were not to meet again, and if he could so composedly define the limits of their acquaintance, she was far too sensitively proud to utter a word of protest. After all, he was only the comrade of a day. How—why should it matter to her whether he stayed or went?
“I always believe”—the Englishman was speaking again, his eyes bent on hers—“I always believe that, no matter how sad or tragic people’s lives may be, God invariably gives them one magic moment—so that they may believe in heaven.... I have had mine to-day.”
“Don’t you—believe in heaven?”
He laid his hands lightly on her shoulders.
“I do now. I believe... in a heaven that is out of my reach.”
His hands slipped upward from her shoulders, cupping her face, and for a moment he held her so, staring down at her with grave, inscrutable eyes. Then, stooping his head, he kissed her lips.
“Good-bye, little comrade,” he said unevenly. “Thank you for my magic moment.”
He turned away sharply. She heard his step, followed by the quick, jarring rattle of brass rings jerked violently along the curtain-pole, and a moment later he was gone. With a dull sense of finality she watched the heavy folds of the porti猫re swing sullenly back into their place.
THE dawn of a new day possesses a curious potency of readjustment. It is as though Dame Nature, like some autocratic old nurse, wakes us up and washes and dresses our minds afresh for us each morning, so that they come to the renewed consideration of the affairs of life freed from the influences and emotions which were clogging their pores when we went asleep. Not infrequently, in the course of this species of mental ablution, a good deal of the glamour which invested the doings of the previous day gets scrubbed off, and a new and not altogether pleasing aspect of affairs presents itself.
This was somewhat Jean’s experience when she woke on the morning following that of the fancy-dress ball. Looking back upon the events of the previous day, it seemed to her newly-tubbed, matutinal mind almost incredible that they should have occurred. It was like a dream—life itself tricked out in fancy dress.
Stripped of the glamour of romance and adventure with which the unknown Englishman had contrived to clothe it, the whole episode of their day together presented itself as disagreeably open to criticism, and the memory of that final scene in the alcove sent the blood flying into her cheeks. She asked herself in mute amazement how it was possible that such a thing should have happened to her,—to “our chaste Diana,” as her father used laughingly to call her in recognition of the instinctive little air of aloofness with which she had been wont to keep men at a distance.
Of course, the Englishman had taken her by surprise, but Jean was too honest, even in her dealings with herself, to shelter behind this excuse.
She knew that she had yielded to his kiss—and knew, too, that the bare memory of it sent her heart throbbing in an inexplicable tumult of emotion.
The stolen day, that day embarked upon so unconcernedly, in a gay spirit of adventure, had flamed up at its ending into something altogether different from the light-hearted companionship with which it had begun.
Then her conscience, recreated and vigorous from its morning toilet, presented another facet of the affair for her inspection. With officious detail it marshalled the whole series of events before her, dwelling particularly on the fact that, with hut very slight demur, she had consented to abrogate the accepted conventions of her class—conventions designed to safeguard people from just such consequences as had ensued—and winding up triumphantly with the corollary that although, like most men in similar circumstances, the Englishman had not scrupled to avail himself of the advantages the occasion offered, he had probably, none the less, thought rather cheaply of her for permitting him to do so.
This reflection stung her pride—exactly as Conscience had intended it should, without doubt. Last night there had seemed to her no question about the quality of that farewell in the little screened-off alcove. There had been nothing common or “cheap” about it. The gathering incidents of the whole day, the fight through the storm, the prelude of Valse Triste, all seemed to have led her by imperceptible degrees to a point where she and the Englishman could kiss at parting without shame. And now, with the morning, the delicate rainbow veiling woven by romance was rudely torn asunder, and the word “cheap” dinned in her ears like the clapper of a bell.
The appearance of her premier dejeuner came as a web come distraction from her thoughts, and with the consumption of caf茅 au lait and the crisp little rolls, hot from the oven, accompanying it, the whole matter began to assume a less heinous aspect. After all, argued Jean’s weak human nature, the unconventionality of the affair had been considerably tempered by the fact that the Englishman had practically saved her life during the course of the day. Alone, she would undoubtedly have foundered in the drifting snow; and when a man has rescued you from an early and unpleasantly chilly grave, it certainly sets the acquaintance between you, however short its duration, on a new and more intimate plane.
“Good-bye, little comrade; thank you for my magic moment.”
The words, and the manner of their utterance, came back to Jean, bringing with them a warm and comforting reassurance. The man who had thus spoken had not thought her cheap; he was too fine in his perceptions to have misunderstood like that. She felt suddenly certain of it. And the pendulum of self-respect swung back into its place once more.
Presently she caught herself wondering whether she would see him again before she left Montavan. True, he had told her he was going away the next day. But had he actually gone? Somewhere within her lurked a fugitive, half-formed hope that he might have altered his intention.
She tried to brush the thought aside, refusing to recognise it and determinedly maintaining that it mattered nothing to her whether he stayed or went. Nevertheless, throughout the whole day—in the morning when she made a pretence of enjoying the skating on the rink, and again in the afternoon when she walked through the pine-woods with the Varignys—she was subconsciously alert for any glimpse of the lean, supple figure which a single day had sufficed to mate so acutely familiar.
But by evening she was driven into accepting the fact that he had quitted the mountains, and of a sudden Montavan ceased to interest her; the magic that had disguised it yesterday was gone. It had become merely a dull little village where she was awaiting Lady Anne Brennan’s answer to her father’s letter, and she grew restlessly impatient for that answer to arrive.
It came at last, during the afternoon of the following day, in the form of a telegram: “Delighted to welcome you. Letter follows.”
The letter followed in due course, two days later, the tardiness of its arrival accounted for by the fact that the writer had been moving about from place to place, and that Peterson’s own letter, after pursuing her for days, had only just caught up with her.
“I cannot tell you,” wrote Lady Anne in her squarish, characteristic hand, “how delighted I shall be to have the daughter of Glyn and Jacqueline with me for a time. Although Glyn with a grown-up daughter sounds quite improbable; he never really grew up himself. So you must come and convince me that the unexpected has happened.”
Jean liked the warm-hearted, unconventional tone of the letter, and the knowledge that she would so soon be leaving Montavan filled her with a sense of relief.
During the four days which had elapsed since the Englishman’s departure her restlessness had grown on her. Montavan had become too vividly reminiscent of the hours which they had shared together for her peace of mind. She wanted to forget that stolen day—thrust it away into the background of her thoughts.
Unfortunately for the success of her efforts in this direction, the element of the unknown which surrounded the Englishman, quite apart from anything else, would have tended to keep him in the forefront of her mind. It was only now, surveying their acquaintance in retrospect, that she fully realised how complete had been his reticence. True his figure dominated her thoughts, but it was a figure devoid of any background of home, or friends, or profession. He might be a king or a crossing-sweeper, for all she knew to the contrary—only that neither the members of the one nor the other profession are usually addicted to sojourning at Swiss chalets and forming promiscuous friendships on the ice.
There were moments when she felt that she detested this man from nowhere who had contrived to break through her feminine guard of aloofness merely to gratify his whim to spend a day in her company.
But there were other moments when the memory of that stolen day glowed and pulsed like some rare gem against the even, grey monotony of all the days that had preceded it—and of those which must come after. She could not have analysed, even to herself, the emotions it had wakened in her. They were too complex, too fluctuating.
As she packed her trunks in preparation for an early start the following day, Jean recalled with satisfaction the genuine ring of welcome which had sounded through the letter that had come from England. Until she had received it, she had been the prey of an increasing diffidence with regard to suddenly billeting herself for an indefinite period upon even such an old friend of her father’s as Lady Anne—a timidity Peterson himself had certainly not shared when he penned his request.
“Give my little girl house-room, will you, Anne?” he had written with that candid and charming simplicity which had made and kept for him a host of friends through all the vicissitudes of his varied and irresponsible career. “I am off once more on a wander-year, and I can’t be tripped up by a petticoat—certainly not my own daughter’s—at every yard. This isn’t quite as cynical as it sounds. You’ll understand, I know. Frankly, a man whose life, to all intents and purposes, is ended, is not fit company for youth and beauty standing palpitating on the edge of the world. By the way, did I tell you that Jean is rather beautiful? I forget. Let her see England—that little corner where you live, down Devonshire way, always means England to my mind. And let her learn to love Englishwomen—if there are any more there like you.”
And, having accomplished this characteristic, if somewhat; sketchy provision for his daughter’s welfare, Peterson had gone cheerfully on his way, convinced that he had done all that was paternally encumbent on him.
Madame de Varigny was voluble in her regrets at the prospect of losing her “ch猫re Mademoiselle Peterson,” yet in spite of her protestations of dismay Jean was conscious of an impression that the Countess derived some kind of satisfaction from the imminence of her departure.
She could not reconcile the contradiction, and it worried her a little. She believed—quite justly—that Madame de Varigny had conceived a real affection for her, and, as far as she herself was concerned, she had considerably revised her first impressions of the other, finding more to like in her than she had anticipated, noticeably a genuine warmth and fervour of nature, and a certain kind-hearted capacity for interesting herself in other people.
And, liking her so much better than she had at first conceived possible, Jean resented the sudden recurrence of her original distrust produced by the suggestion of insincerity which she thought she detected in the Countess’s expressions of regret.
On the face of it the thing seemed absurd. She could imagine no conceivable reason why her departure should give Madame de Varigny any particular cause for complacency, which only made the more perplexing her impression that this was the actual feeling underlying the latter’s cordial interest in her projected visit to England.
On the morning of her departure, Jean’s mind was too preoccupied with the small details attendant upon starting off on a journey dwell upon the matter. But, as she shook bands with Madame de Varigny for the last time, the recollection surged over her afresh, and she was strongly conscious that beneath the other woman’s pleasant, “Adieu, mademoiselle! Bon voyage!” something stirred that was less pleasant—even inimical—just as some slimy and repulsive form of life may stir amid the ooze at the bottom of a sunlit stream.
JEAN arrived in London with a good three hours to spare before the South-Western express, by which she proposed to travel to Devonshire, was due to leave Waterloo Station. She elected, therefore, to occupy the time by touring round the great, unknown city of her dreams in a taxicab, and spent a beatific hour glimpsing the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and the old, grey, misty river that Londoners love, and skirmishing in and out of the shops in Regent Street and Bond Street with her hands full of absurd, expensive, unnecessary purchases only bought because this was London and she felt she just simply must have something English at once, and winding up with a spin through Hyde Park—which didn’t impress her very favourably in its winter aspect of leafless trees and barren stretches of sodden grass.
Then she drove to a hotel, and, her luggage deposited there to await her departure, her thoughts turned very naturally towards lunch. Her scamper round London in the crisp, clear, frosty air had converted the recollection of her early morning coffee and roll into something extremely nebulous and unsupporting, and it was with the healthy appetite of an eager young mind in an eager young body that she faced the several courses of the table d’hote.
She glanced about her with interest, the little snatches of English conversation which drifted to her from other near-by tables giving her a patriotic thrill of pure delight. These were typically English people lunching in a typically English hotel, and she, hitherto a stranger to her own mother-country, was doing likewise. The knowledge filled her with ridiculous satisfaction.
Nor were English people—at home in their own country—anything like as dull and dowdy as Glyn Peterson’s sweeping criticisms had led her to expect. The men were immensely well-groomed and clean-looking. She liked the “morning-tub” appearance they all had; it reminded her of the Englishman at Montavan. Apparently it was a British characteristic.
The women, too, filled her with a species of vicarious pride. They were so well turned-out, with a slim, long limbed grace of figure she found admirable, and with splendid natural complexions—skins like rose and ivory.
Two of them were drifting into the room together now, with a superbly cool assurance of manner—rather as though they had bought the hotel—which brought the sleek head-waiter automatically to their side, bowing and obsequious.
Somewhat to Jean’s satisfaction he convoyed them to the table next her own, and she was pleasantly conscious, as they passed her, of a provocative whisper of silk and of the faint fragrance of violets subtly permeating the atmosphere.
Conscious that perhaps she had been manifesting her interest a little too openly, she turned her attention to a magazine she had bought en route from Dover and was soon absorbed in the inevitable happy-ever-after conclusion of the story she had been reading.
“Lady Anne? Oh, she lives at Staple now. Didn’t you know?”
The speaker’s voice was clear and resonant, with the peculiar carrying quality which has replaced in the modern Englishwoman of the upper classes that excellent thing in woman which was the proud boast of an earlier generation.
The conjunction of the familiar words “Lady Anne” and “Staple” struck sharply on Jean’s ears, and almost instinctively she looked up.
As she stirred, one of the women glanced indifferently in her direction, then placidly resumed her conversation with her companion.
“It was just after the smash-up,” she pursued glibly. “Blaise Tormarin rushed off abroad for a time, and the news of Nesta’s death came while he was away. Poor Lady Anne had to write and tell him of it.”
“Rather ghastly!” commented the other woman. “I never heard the whole story of the affair. I was in Paris, then, and it was all over—barring the general gossip, of course!—by the time I returned. I tried to pump it out of Lady Anne once, but she was as close as an oyster.”
Both women talked without lowering their voices in the slightest degree, and with that complete indifference to the proximity of a stranger sometimes exhibited by a certain arrogant type.
Jean, realising that it was her father’s friends who were under discussion, and finding herself forced into the position of an unwilling auditor, felt wretchedly uncomfortable. She wished fervently that she could in some way arrest the conversation. Yet it was clearly as impossible for her to lean forward and say: “You are talking about the people I am on my way to visit,” as it would have been for her to put her fingers in her ears. So far nothing had been said to which she could actually object. Her feeling was chiefly the offspring of a supersensitive fear that she might learn from the lips of these two gossiping women, one of whom was apparently intimately acquainted with the private history of the Tormarin family, some little fact or detail which Lady Anne might not care for her future guest to know. Apart from this fear, it would hardly have been compatible with human nature—certainly not feminine human nature—if she had not felt pricked to considerable personal interest in the topic under discussion.
“Oh, it was a fool business,” the first woman rejoined, settling down to supply the details of the story with an air of rapacious satisfaction which reminded Jean of nothing so much as of a dog with a bone. “Nesta Freyne was a typical Italian—though her father was English, I believe—all blazing, passionate eyes and blazing, passionate emotion, you know; then there was another man—and there was Blaise Tormarin! You can imagine the consequences for yourself. Blaise has his full share of the Tormarin temper—and a Tormarin in a temper is like a devil with the bit between his teeth. There were violent quarrels and finally the girl bolted, presumably with the other man. Then, later, Lady Anne heard that she had died abroad somewhere. The funny thing is that it seemed to cut Tormarin up rather badly. He’s gloomed about the world ever since, so I suppose he must have been pretty deeply in love with her before the crash came. I never saw her, but I’ve been told she was diabolically pretty.”
The other woman laughed, dismissing the tragedy of the little tale with a shallow tinkle of mirth.
“Oh, well, I’ve only met Blaise Tormarin once, but I should say he was not the type to relish being thrown over for another man!” She peered short-sightedly at the grilled fish on her plate, poking at it discontentedly with her fork. “I never think they cook their fish decently here, do you?” she complained.
And, with that, both women shelved the affairs of Blaise Tormarin and concentrated upon the variety of culinary sins from which even expensive hotel chefs are not necessarily exempt.
Jean had no time to bestow upon the information which had been thus thrust upon her until she had effected the transport of herself and her belongings from the hotel to Waterloo Station, but when this had been satisfactorily accomplished and she found herself comfortably settled in a corner seat of the Plymouth express, her thoughts reverted to her newly acquired knowledge.
It added a bit of definite outline to the very slight and shadowy picture she had been able to form of her future environment—a picture roughly sketched in her mind from the few hints dropped by her father.
She wondered a little why Glyn should have omitted all mention of Blaise Tormarin’s love affair and its unhappy sequel, but a moment’s reflection supplied the explanation. Peterson had admitted that it was ten years since he had heard from Lady Anne; presumably, then, the circumstances just recounted in Jean’s hearing had occurred during those years.
Jean felt that the additional knowledge she had gained rather detracted from the prospective pleasure of her visit to Staple. Judging from the comments which she had overheard, her host was likely to prove a somewhat morose and gloomy individual, soured by his unfortunate experience of feminine fidelity.
Thence her thoughts vaulted wildly ahead. Most probably, as a direct consequence, he was a woman-hater and, if so, it was more than possible that he would regard her presence at Staple as an unwarrantable intrusion.
A decided qualm assailed her, deepening quickly into a settled conviction—Jean was nothing if not thorough!—that the real explanation of the delay in Lady Anne’s response to Glyn’s letter had lain in Blaise Tormarin’s objection to the invasion of his home by a strange young woman—an objection Lady Anne had had to overcome, or decide to ignore, before she could answer Glyn’s request in the affirmative.
The idea that she might be an unwelcome guest at Staple filled Jean with lively consternation, and by the time she had accomplished the necessary change of train at Exeter, and found herself being trundled along on the leisurely branch line which conducted her to her ultimate destination, she had succeeded in working herself up into a condition that almost verged upon panic.
“Coombe Ea-vie! Coombe Eavie!”
The sing-song intonation of a depressed-looking porter, first rising from a low note to a higher, then descending in contrary motion abruptly from high to low, was punctuated by the sharper, clipped pronouncement of the stationmaster as he bustled up the length of the platform declaiming: “’Meavie! ’Meavie! ’Meavie!” with a maddeningly insistent repetition that reminded one of a cuckoo in June.
Apparently both stationmaster and porter were too much absorbed in the frenzied strophe and antistrophe effect they were producing to observe that any passenger, handicapped by luggage, contemplated descending from the train—unexpected arrivals were of rare occurrence at Coombe Eavie—and Jean therefore hastened to transfer herself and her hand-baggage to the platform unassisted. A minute later the train ambled on its way again, leaving the stationmaster and the depressed porter grouped in astonished admiration before the numerous trunks and suit-cases, labelled “Peterson,” which the luggage van of the departing train had vomited forth.
To the bucolic mind, such an unwonted accumulation argued a passenger of quite superlative importance, and with one accord the combined glances of the station staff raked the diminutive platform, to discover Jean standing somewhat forlornly in the middle, of it, surrounded by the smaller fry of her luggage. The stationmaster hurried forward immediately to do the honours, and Jean addressed him eagerly.
“I want a fiacre—cab”—correcting herself hastily—“to take me to Staple Manor.”
The man shook his head.
“There are no cabs here, miss,” he informed her regretfully. “Anyone that wants to be met orders Wonnacott’s wagonette in advance.” Then, seeing Jean’s face lengthen, he continued hastily: “But if they’re expecting you up at Staple, miss, they’ll be sure to send one of the cars to meet you. There!”—triumphantly, as the chug-chug of an approaching motor came to them clearly on the crisp, cold air—“that’ll be it, for certain.”
Followed the sound of a car braking to a standstill in the road outside the station, and almost immediately a masculine figure appeared advancing rapidly from the lower end of the platform.
Even through the dusk of the winter’s afternoon Jean was struck by something curiously familiar in the man’s easy, swinging stride. A surge of memories came flooding over her, and she felt her breath catch in her throat at the sudden possibility which flashed into her mind. For an instant she was in doubt—the thing seemed so amazingly improbable. Then, touching his hat, the stationmaster moved respectfully aside, and she found herself face to face with the unknown Englishman from Montavan.
She gazed at him speechlessly, and for a moment he, too, seemed taken aback. His eyes met hers in a startled, leaping glance of recognition and something more, something that set her pulses racing unsteadily.
“Little comrade!” She could have sworn the words escaped him. Then, almost in the same instant, she saw the old, rather weary gravity replace the sudden fire that had blazed up in the man’s eyes, quenching its light.
“So—you are Miss Peterson!”
There was no pleasure, no welcome in his tones; rather, an undercurrent of ironical vexation as though Fate had played some scurvy trick upon him.
“Yes.” The brief monosyllable came baldly in reply; she hardly knew how to answer him, how to meet his mood. Then, hastily calling up her reserves, she went on lightly: “You don’t seem very pleased to see me. Shall I go away again?”
His mouth relaxed into a grim smile.
“This isn’t Clapham Junction,” he answered tersely. “There won’t be a train till ten o’clock to-night.”
A glint of humour danced in Jean’s eyes.
“In that case,” she returned gravely, “what do you advise?”
“I don’t advise,” he replied promptly. “I apologise. Please forgive such an ungracious reception, Miss Peterson—but you must acknowledge it was something in the nature of a surprise to find that you were—you!”
Jean laughed.
“It’s given you an unfair advantage, too,” she replied. “I still haven’t penetrated your incognito—but I suppose you are Mr. Brennan?”
“No. Nick Brennan’s my half-brother. I’m Blaise Tormarin, and, as my mother was unable to meet you herself, I came instead. Shall we go? I’ll give the station-master instructions about your baggage.”
So the unknown Englishman of Montavan was the man of whom the two women at the neighbouring lunch table in the hotel had been gossiping—the central figure of that most tragic love-affair! Jean thought she could discern, now, the origin of some of those embittered comments he had let fall when they were together in the mountains.
In silence she followed him out of the little wayside station to where the big head-lamps of a stationary car shed a blaze of light on the roadway, and presently they were slipping smoothly along between the high hedges which flanked the road on either hand.
IT was too dark to distinguish details as the big car flew-along, but Jean found herself yielding instinctively to the still, mysterious charm of the country-side at even.
A slender young moon drifted like a curled petal in the dusky blue of the calm sky, its pale light faintly outlining the tops of the trees and the dim, gracious curves of distant hills, and touching the mist that filled the valleys to a nebulous, pearly glimmer, so that to Jean’s eager eyes the foot of the hills seemed laved by some phantom sea of faery.
She felt no inclination to talk. The smooth rhythm of the pulsing car, the chill sweetness of the evening air against her face, the shadowy, half-revealed landscape all combined to lull her into a mood of tranquil appreciation, aloof and restful after the fatigue of her journey and the shock of her unexpected meeting with the Englishman from Montavan. She knew that later she would have to take up the thread of things again, adjust her mind to the day’s surprising developments, but just for the moment she was content to let everything else slide and simply enjoy this first exquisite revelation of twilit Devon.
For a long time they drove in silence, Tormarin seeming no more disposed to talk than she herself.
Presently, however, he slowed the car down and, half-turning in his seat, addressed her abruptly.
“This is somewhat in the nature of an anti-climax,” he remarked, the comment quite evidently springing from the thoughts which had been absorbing him.
He spoke curtly, as though he resented the march of events.
Jean felt herself jolted suddenly out of the placid reverie into which she had fallen.
“Yes. It is odd we should meet again so soon,” she assented hurriedly.
“The silence has been broken—after all! You may be sure, Miss Peterson, it was by no will of mine.”
Jean smiled under cover of the darkness.
“You’re not very complimentary,” she returned. “I’m sorry our meeting seems to afford you so little satisfaction.” There was a ripple of laughter in her tones.
“It’s not that.” As he spoke, he slackened speed until the car was barely moving. “You know it’s not that,” he continued, his voice tense. “But, all the same, I’m going to ask you to—forget Montavan.”
Jean’s heart gave a violent throb, and the laughter went suddenly out of her voice as she repeated blankly:
“To forget Montavan?”
“Please. I said—and did—a few mad things that day we spent together. It was to be an uncounted day, you know, and—oh, well, the air of the Alps is heady! I want you to forgive me—and to blot out all remembrance of it.”
He seemed to speak with some effort, yet each word was uttered deliberately, searing its way into her consciousness like red-hot iron.
The curt, difficultly spoken sentences could only signify one thing—that he had meant nothing, not even good, honest comradeship, that day at Montavan. He had merely been amusing himself with a girl whom he never expected to meet again, and now that circumstances had so unexpectedly brought them together he was clearly anxious that she should be under no misapprehension in the matter.
Jean’s pride writhed beneath the insult of it. It was as though he feared she might make some claim upon his regard and had hastened to warn her, almost in so many words, not to set a fictitious value upon anything that had occurred between them. The glamour was indeed torn from her stolen day on the mountains! The whole memory of it, above all the memory of that pulsing moment of farewell, would henceforth he soiled and vulgarised—converted into a rather sordid little episode which she would gladly have blotted out from amongst the concrete happenings of life.
The feminine instinct against self-betrayal whipped her into quick speech.
“I’ve no wish to forget that you practically saved my life,” she said. “I shall always”—lightly—“feel very much obliged for that.”
“You exaggerate my share in the matter,” he replied carelessly. “You would have extricated yourself from your difficulties without my assistance, I have no doubt. Or, more truly”—with a short laugh—“you would never have got into them.”
He said no more, but let out the car and they shot forward into the gathering dusk. Presently they approached a pair of massive iron gates admitting to the manor drive, and as these were opened in response to a shrill hoot from Tormarin’s horn the car swung round into an avenue of elms, the bare boughs, interlacing overhead, making a black network against the moonlit sky.
Still in silence they approached the house, its dim grey bulk, looming indeterminately through the evening mist, studded here and there with a glowing shield of orange from come unshaded window, and almost before Tormarin had pulled up the car, the front door flew open and a wide riband of light streamed out from the hall behind.
Jean was conscious of two or three figures grouped in the open doorway, dark against the welcoming blaze of light, then one of them detached itself from the group and hastened forward with outstretched hands.
“Here you are at last!”
For an instant Jean hesitated, doubtful as to whether the speaker could be Lady Anne. The voice which addressed her was so amazingly young—clear and full of vitality like the voice of a girl. Then the light flickered on to hair as white as if it had been powdered, and she realized that this surprisingly young voice must belong to her hostess.
“I was so sorry I could not meet you at the station myself,” continued Lady Anne, leading the way into the house. “But a tiresome visitor turned up—one of those people who never know when it’s time to go—and I simply couldn’t get away without forcibly ejecting her.”
In the fuller light of the hall, Jean discerned in Lady Anne’s appearance something of that same quality of inherent youth apparent in her voice. The keen, humorous grey eyes beneath their black, arched brows were alertly vivacious, and the quite white hair served to enhance, rather than otherwise, the rose-leaf texture of her skin. Many a much younger woman had envied Lady Anne her complexion; it was so obviously genuine, owing nothing at all to art.
“And now”—Jean felt herself pulled gently into the tight—“let me have a good look at you. Oh, yes!”—Lady Anne laughed amusedly—“You’re Glyn Peterson’s daughter right enough—you have just his chin with that delicious little cleft in it. But your eyes and hair are Jacqueline’s.” She leaned forward a little and kissed Jean warmly. “My dear, you’re very welcome at Staple. There is nothing I could have wished more than to have you here—except that you could have prevailed upon Glyn to bring you himself.”
“When you have quite finished going into the ancestral details of Miss Peterson’s features, madonna, perhaps you will present me.”
Lady Anne laughed good-humouredly.
“Oh, this is my pushful younger son, Jean. (I’m certainly going to call you Jean without asking whether I may!) You’ve already made acquaintance with Blaise. This is Nick.”
Nick Brennan was as unlike his half-brother as he could possibly be—tall, and fair, and blue-eyed, with a perfectly charming smile and an air of not having a care in the world. Jean concluded he must resemble closely the dead Claude Brennan, since, except for a certain family similarity in cut of feature, he bore little resemblance to his mother.
“Blaise has had an hour’s start of me in getting into your good graces, Miss Peterson,” he said, shaking hands. “I consider it very unfair, but of course I had to be content—as usual—with the younger son’s portion.”
Jean liked him at once. His merry, lazy blue eyes smiled friendship at her, and she felt sure they should get on together. She could not imagine Nick “glooming” about the world, as one of the women at the hotel had declared his half-brother did.
It occurred to her that it would simplify matters if both he and Lady Anne were made aware at once of her former meeting with Blaise, so she took the opportunity offered by Nick’s speech.
“He’s had more than that,” she said gaily. “Mr. Tor-marin and I had already met before—at Montavan.”
“At Montavan?” Lady Anne gave vent to an ejaculation of amused impatience. “If we had only known! Blaise could have accompanied you back and saved you all the bothersome details of the journey. But we had no idea where he was. He went off in his usual way”—smiling a shade ruefully—“merely condescending to inform his yearning family that he was going abroad for a few weeks.” Then, as Tormarin, having surrendered the car to a chauffeur, joined the group in the hall, she turned to him and continued with a faint note of expostulation in her voice: “You never told us you had already met Miss Peterson, Blaise.”
“I didn’t know it myself till I found her marooned on the platform at Coombe Eavie,” he returned. His eyes, meeting Jean’s, flickered with brief amusement as he added nonchalantly: “I did not catch Miss Peterson’s name when we met at Montavan.”
“No, we were not formally introduced,” supplemented Jean. “But Mr. Tormarin was obliging enough to pull me out of an eight-foot deep snowdrift up in the mountains, so we allowed that to count instead.”
“What luck!” exclaimed Nick with fervour.
“Yes, it was rather,” agreed Jean. “To be smothered in a snowdrift isn’t exactly the form of extinction I should choose.”
“Oh, I meant luck for Blaise,” explained Nick. “Opportunities of playing knight-errant are few and far between nowadays”—regretfully.
They all laughed, and then Lady Anne carried Jean off upstairs.
Here she found that a charming bedroom, with a sitting-room connecting, had been allotted her—“so that you’ll have a den of your own to take refuge in when you’re tired of us,” as Lady Anne explained.
Jean felt touched by the kindly thought. It takes the understanding hostess to admit frankly that a guest may sometimes crave for the solitude of her own company—and to see that she can get it.
The rooms which were to constitute Jean’s personal domain were delightfully decorated, old-world tapestries and some beautiful old prints striking just the right note in conjunction with the waxen-smooth mahogany of Chippendale. From the bedroom, where a maid was already busying herself unstrapping the traveller’s manifold boxes, there opened off a white-tiled bathroom frankly and hygienically modern, and here Jean was soon splashing joyfully. By the time she had finished her bath and dressed for dinner she felt as though the fatigue of the journey had slipped from her like an outworn garment.
The atmosphere at dinner was charmingly informal, and presently, when the meal was at an end, the party of four adjourned into the hall for coffee. As Jean’s eyes roved round the old-fashioned, raftered place, she was conscious of a little intimate thrill of pleasure. With its walls panelled in Jacobean oak, and its open hearth where a roaring fire of logs sent blue and green flames leaping up into the chimney’s cavernous mouth, it reminded her of the great dining-hall at Beirnfels. But here there was a pleasant air of English cosiness, and it was obvious that at Staple the hall had been adopted as a living-room and furnished with an eye to comfort. There were wide, cushioned window-seats, and round the hearth clustered deep, inviting chairs, while everywhere were the little, pleasant, home-like evidences—an open book flung down here, a piece of unfinished needlework there—of daily use and occupation.
Nick at once established himself at Jean’s side, kindly informing her that now that his inner man was satisfied he was prepared to make himself agreeable. Upon which Lady Anne apologised for his manners and Nick interrupted her, volubly pointing out that the fault, if any (which he denied), was entirely hers, since she had been responsible both for his upbringing and inherited tendencies. They both talked at once, wrangling together with huge zest and enjoyment, and it was easily apparent that the two were very close friends indeed.
Blaise took no part in the stream of chatter and nonsense which ensued, but stood a little apart, his shoulder propped against the chimney-piece, drinking his coffee in silence.
Jean’s glance wandered reflectively from one brother to the other. They presented a striking contrast—the stern, dark-browed face of the elder man, with its bitter-looking mouth and that strange white streak lying like some, ghostly finger-mark across his dark hair, and the bubbling, blue-eyed charm of the younger. The difference between them was as definite as the difference between sunlight and shadow.
Nick was full of plans for Jean’s entertainment, suggestions for boating and tennis occupying a prominent position in the programme he sketched out.
“It’s really quite jolly paddling about on our lake,” he rattled on. “The stream that feeds it hails from Dartmoor, of course. All Devonshire streams do, I believe—at least, you’ll never hear of one that doesn’t, the Moor being our proudest possession. Besides, people always believe that your water supply must be of crystalline purity if you just casually mention that its source is a Dartmoor spring. So of course, we all swear to the Dartmoor origin of our domestic waterworks. It sounds well—even if not always strictly true.”
“Miss Peterson must find it a trifle difficult to follow your train of thought,” commented Blaise a little sharply. “A moment ago you were discussing boating, and now it sounds as though you’ll shortly involve yourself—and us—in a disquisition upon hygiene.”
Nick smiled placidly.
“My enthusiasm got away with me a bit,” he admitted with unruffled calm. “But I haven’t the least doubt that Miss Peterson will like to know these few reassuring particulars. However——” And he forthwith returned enthusiastically to the prospects of tennis and kindred pastimes.
Once again Blaise broke in ungraciously. It seemed as though, for some reason, Nick’s flow of light-hearted nonsense and the dozen different plans he was proposing for Jean’s future divertisement, irritated him.
“Your suggestions seem to me remarkably inept, Nick,” he observed scathingly, “seeing that at present it is midwinter and the lake frozen over about a foot deep. Quite conceivably, by the time that tennis and boating become practicable, Miss Peterson may not be here. She may get tired of us long before the summer comes,” he added quickly, as though in a belated endeavour to explain away the suggestion of inhospitality which might easily be inferred from his previous sentence.
But if the hasty addition were intended to reassure Jean, it failed of its purpose. The idea that her coming to Staple was not particularly acceptable to its master had already taken possession, of her. Originally the consequence of the conversation she had overheard at the hotel, Tormarin’s reluctantly given welcome when he met her at Coombe Eavie Station had served to increase her feeling of embarrassment And now, this last speech, though so hastily qualified, convinced her that her advent was regarded by her host in anything but a pleasurable light.
“Yes, I don’t think you must count on me for the tennis season, Mr. Brennan,” she said quickly, “I don’t propose to billet myself on you indefinitely, you know.”
“Oh, but I hope you do, my dear,” Lady Anne interposed with a simple sincerity there was no doubting. “You must certainly stay with us till your father comes home, and”—with a smile—“unless Glyn has altered considerably, I imagine Beirnfels will not see him again under a year.”
“But I couldn’t possibly foist myself on to you for a year!” exclaimed Jean. “That would be a sheer imposition.”
Lady Anne smiled across at her.
“My dear,” she said, “I’ve never had a daughter—only these two great, unmanageable sons—and I’m just longing to play at having one. You’re not going to disappoint me, I hope?”
There was something irresistibly winning in Lady Anne’s way of putting the matter, and Jean jumped up and kissed her impulsively.
“I should hate to!” she answered warmly.
But she evaded giving a direct promise; there must be a clearer understanding between herself and Tormarin before she could accept Lady Anne’s hospitality as frankly and fully as it was offered.
The opportunity for this clearer understanding came with the entry of Baines, the butler, who brought the information that a favourite young setter of Nick’s had been taken ill and that the stableman feared the dog had distemper.
Nick sprang up, his concern showing in his face.
“I’ll come out and have a look at him,” he said quickly.
“I’ll come with you,” added Lady Anne.
She slipped her hand through his arm, and they hurried off to the stables, leaving Blaise and Jean alone together.
For a moment neither spoke. Blaise, smoking a cigarette, remained staring sombrely into the fire. Apparently he did not regard it as incumbent on him to make conversation, and Jean felt miserably nervous about broaching the subject of her visit. At last, however, fear lest Lady Anne and Nick should return before she could do so drove her into speech.
“Mr. Tormarin,” she said quietly—so quietly that none would have guessed the flurry of shyness which underlay her cool little voice—“I am very sorry my presence here is so unwelcome to you. I’m afraid you will have to put up with me for a week or two, but I promise you I will try to make other arrangements as soon as I can.”
He turned towards her abruptly.
“May I ask what you mean?” he demanded. It was evident from the haughty, almost arrogant tone of his voice that something had aroused his anger, though whether it was the irritation consequent upon her presence there, or because he chose to take her speech as censuring his attitude, Jean was unable to determine. His eyes were stormy and inwardly she quailed a little beneath their glance; outwardly, however, she retained her composure.
“I think my meaning is perfectly clear,” she returned with spirit. “Even at the station you made it quite evident that my appearance came upon you in the light of an unpleasant surprise. And—from what you said just now to Mr. Brennan—it is obvious you hope my visit will not be a long one.”
If she had anticipated spurring him into an impulsive disclaimer, she was disappointed.
“I am sorry I have failed so lamentably in my duties as host,” he said coldly.
The apology, uttered with such an entire lack of ardour, served to emphasise the offence for which it professed to ask pardon. Jean’s face whitened. She would hardly have felt more hurt and astonished if he had struck her.
“I—I——” she began. Then stopped, finding her voice unsteady.
But he had heard the break in the low, shaken tones, and in a moment his mood of intolerant anger vanished.
“Forgive me,” he said remorsefully—and there was genuine contrition in his voice now. “I’m a cross-grained fellow, Miss Peterson; you’ll find that out before you’ve been here many days. But never think that you are unwelcome at Staple.”
“Then why—I don’t understand you,” she stammered. She found his sudden changes of humour bewildering.
He smiled down at her, that rare, strangely sweet smile of his which when it came always seemed to transform his face, obliterating the harsh sternness of its lines.
“Perhaps I don’t quite understand, either,” he said gently. “Only I know it would have been better if you had never come to Staple.”
“Then—you wish I hadn’t come?”
“Yes,”—slowly. “I think I do wish that.”
She looked at him a little wistfully.
“Is that why you were angry—because I’ve come here? Lady Anne and—and Mr. Brennan seemed quite pleased,” she added as though in protest.
“No doubt. Nick, lucky devil, has no need to economise in magic moments.”
She felt her cheeks flush under the look he bent upon her, but she forced herself to meet it.
“And—and you?” she questioned very low.
“I have”—briefly.
It was long before sleep visited Jean that night The events of the day marched processionally through her mind, and her thoughts persisted in clustering round the baffling, incomprehensible personality of Blaise Tormarin.
His extreme bitterness of speech she ascribed to the unfortunate episode that lay in his past. But she could find no reason for his strange, expressed wish to disregard their former meeting at Montavan—to wipe out, as it were, all recollection of it.
That he did not dislike her she felt sure; and a woman rarely makes a mistake over a man’s personal attitude towards her. But for some reason, it seemed to her, he was afraid to let himself like her! It was as though he were anxious to bolt and bar the door against any possibility of friendship between them. From whichever way she looked at it, she could find no key to the mystery of his behaviour. It was inexplicable.
Only one thing emerged from the confusion of thought; the lost glamour of that night at Montavan had returned—returned with fresh impulse and persuasiveness. And when at last she fell asleep, it was with the beseeching, soul-haunting melody of Valse Triste crying in her ears.
JEAN woke to find the chill, wintry sunlight thrusting in long fingers through the space between the casements and the edges of the window-blinds. At first the unfamiliar look of a strange bedroom puzzled her, and she lay blinking drowsily at the wavering slits of light, wondering in vague, half-awake fashion where she was. Gradually, however, recollection returned to her, and with it a lively curiosity to view Staple by daylight. She jumped out of bed and, rattling up the blinds on their rollers, peered out of the window.
There was a hard frost abroad, and the stillness which reigned over the ice-bound country-side reminded her of the big Alpine silences. But here there was no snow—no dazzling sheet of whiteness spread, with cold, grey-blue shadows flung across it Green and shaven the lawns sloped gently down from a flagged terrace, running immediately beneath her window, to the very rim of the frozen lake that gleamed in the valley below. Beyond the valley, scattered woods and copses climbed the hillside opposite, leafless and bare save where a cluster of tall pines towered in evergreen defiance against the slate of the sky.
In the farther distance, beyond the confines of the manor park itself, Jean could catch glimpses of cultivated fields—the red Devon soil glowing jewel-like through filmy wisps of morning mist that still hung in the atmosphere, dispersing slowly as though loth to go. Here and there a little spiral of denser, blue-grey smoke wreathed its way upwards from the chimney of some thatched cottage or farmhouse. And back of it all, adumbrated in a dim, mysterious purple, the great tors of Dartmoor rose sentinel upon the horizon.
Jean’s glance narrowed down to the sloping sward in front of the house. It was all just as her father had pictured it to her. On the left, a giant cedar broke the velvet smoothness of mown grass, its gnarled arms rimmed with hoar-frost, whilst to the right a tall yew hedge, clipped into huge, grotesque resemblances of birds and beasts, divided the lawns from a path which skirted a walled rose garden. By craning her neck and almost flattening her nose against the window-pane, she could just make out a sunk lawn in the rose garden, and in its centre the slender pillar of an ancient sundial.
It was all very English and old-fashioned, breathing the inalienable charm of places that have been well loved and tended by successive generations. And over all, hills and valleys, park and woodland, lay that faint, almost imperceptible humid veil wherewith, be it in scorching summer sunshine or iron frost, the West Country tenderly contrives to soften every harsh outline into something gracious, and melting, and alluring.
To Jean, familiarised from childhood with the piercing clarity of atmosphere, the brilliant colouring and the definiteness of silhouette of southern Europe and of Egypt, there was something inexpressibly restful and appealing in those blurred hues of grey and violet, in the warm red of the Devon earth, with its tender overtone of purple like the bloom on a grape, and the rounded breasts of green-clad hills curving suavely one into the other till they merged into the ultimate, rock-crowned slopes of the brooding moor.
“I’m going to love your England,” she told Nick.
They were making their way down to the lake—alone together, since Blaise had curtly refused to join them—and as she spoke, Nick stopped and regarded her consideringly.
“I rather imagine England will love you,” he replied, adding, with the whimsical impudence which was somehow always permitted Nick Brennan: “If it were not for a prior claim, I’m certain I should have loved you in about five minutes.”
“I’m sorry I happened too late,” retorted Jean.
“But I can still be a brother to you,” he pursued, ignoring her interpolation. “I think,”—reflectively—“I shall like being a brother to you.”
“I should expect a brother to fetch and carry,” cautioned Jean. “And to make himself generally useful.”
“I haven’t got the character from my last place about me at the moment, but I’ll write it out for you when we get back. Meanwhile, I will perform the menial task of fastening on your skates.”
They had reached the lake by now. It was a wide stretch of water several acres in extent, and rimmed about its banks with rush and alder. At the far end Jean could discern a boat-house.
“It must be an ideal place for boating in the summer,” she said, taking in the size of the lake appreciatively as together they circled it with long, sweeping strokes, hands interlocked. It was much larger than it had appeared from her bedroom window, when it had been partially screened from her view by rising ground.
“It’s all right just for paddling about,” answered Nick. “But there’s really jolly boating on our river. That’s over on the west side of the park”—he pointed in the direction indicated. “It divides Staple from Willow Ferry—the property of our next-door neighbour, so to speak. You’d like the boating here,” he added, “though I’m afraid our skating possibilities aren’t likely to impress anyone coming straight from Switzerland.”
“I’m sure I shall like skating—or anything else—here,” said Jean Warmly. “It is all so beautiful. I suppose Devonshire is really quite the loveliest county in England? My father always declared it was.”
“We think so,” replied Nick modestly. “Though a Cornishman would probably want to knock me down for saying so! But I love it.” he went on. “There’s nowhere else I would care to live.” His eyes softened, seeming almost to caress the surrounding fields and woods.
Jean nodded. “I can understand that,” she said. “Although I’ve only been here a few hours, I’m beginning to love it, too. I don’t know why it is—I can’t explain it—but I feel as if I’d come home.”
“So you have. The Petersons lived here for generations.”
“Do you mean”—Jean stared at him in astonishment—“do you mean that they lived at Coombe Eavie?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know? They used to own Charnwood—a place about a mile from here. It was sold after your grandfather’s death. Did your father never tell you?”
She shook her head.
“He always avoided speaking of anything in connection with his life over here. I think he hated England. Is there anyone living at Charnwood now?” she asked, after a pause.
“Yes. It has changed hands several times, and now a friend of ours lives there—Lady Latimer.”
“Then perhaps I shall be able to go there some day. I should like to see the place where my father’s people lived”—eagerly.
Nick laughed.
“You’ve got the true Devonshire homing instinct,” he declared. “Devon folk who’ve left the country always want to see the ‘place where their people lived.’ I remember, about a year ago, a Canadian girl and her brother turned up at Staple. They were descendants of a Tormarin who had emigrated two or three generations before, and they had come across to England for a visit. Their first trip was to Devonshire; they wanted to see ‘the place where Dad’s people had lived.’ And, by Jove, they knew a lot more about it than we did! They were posted up in every detail, and insisted on a personally conducted tour over the whole place. They went back to Canada rejoicing, loaded with photographs of Staple.”
Jean smiled.
“I think it was rather dear of them to come back like that,” she said simply.
They swung round the head of the lake and, as they turned, Jean caught sight of a woman’s figure emerging from the path which ran through the woods. Apparently the newcomer descried the skaters at the same moment, for she stopped and waved her hand in a friendly little gesture of greeting. Nick lifted his cap.
“That is Lady Latimer,” he said.
Something in his voice, some indescribable deepening of quality, made Jean look at him quickly. She remembered on one occasion, in a jeweller’s shop, noticing a very beautiful opal lying in its case; she had commented on it casually, and the man behind the counter had lifted it from its satiny bed and turned it so that the light should fall full upon it. In an instant the red fire slumbering in its heart had waked into glowing life, irradiating the whole stone with pulsing colour. It was some such vitalising change as this that she sensed in the suddenly eager face beside her.
Hastening their pace, she and Nick skated up to the edge of the lake where Lady Latimer awaited them, and as he introduced the two women to each other it seemed as though the eyes of the woman on the bank asked hastily, almost frightenedly: “Will you prove friend or foe?” And Jean’s eyes, all soft and luminous like every real woman’s in the presence of love, signalled back steadily: “Friend!”
“Claire!” said Nick. And Jean thought that no name could have suited her better.
She was the slenderest thing, with about her the pliant, delicate grace of a harebell. Ash-blonde hair, so fair that in some lights it looked silver rather than gold, framed the charming Greuze face. Only it was not quite a Greuze, Jean reflected. There was too much character in it—a certain gentle firmness, something curiously still and patient in the closing of the curved lips, and a deeper appeal than that of mere wondering youth in the gentian-blue eyes. They were woman’s eyes, eyes out of which no weeping could quite wash the wistfulness of some past or present sorrow.
“So you are one of the Charnwood Petersons?” said Lady Latimer in her soft, pretty voice. “You won’t like me, I’m afraid”—smiling—“I’m living in your old home.”
“Oh, Jean won’t quarrel with you over that,” put in Nick. “She’s got a splendacious castle all her own somewhere in the wilds of Europe.”
“Yes. Beirnfels is really my home. I’ve never even seen Charnwood,” smiled Jean. “But I should like to—some day, if you will ask me over.”
“Oh, yes, certainly you must come,” replied Lady Latimer a little breathlessly. But she seemed unaccountably flurried, as though Jean’s suggestion in some day disquieted her. “But of course, Charnwood—now—isn’t a bit like what it must have been when the Petersons had it. I think a place changes with the people who inhabit it, don’t you? I mean, their influence impresses itself on it. If they are good and happy people, you can feel it in the atmosphere of the place, and if they are people with bad and wicked thoughts, you feel that, too. I know I do.” And there was no doubt in the mind of either of her hearers that she was referring to the last-named set of influences.
“But I think Charnwood must be lovely, since it’s your home now,” said Jean sincerely.
“Oh, yes—of course—it is my home now.” Lady Latimer looked troubled. “But other people live—have lived there. It’s changed hands several times, hasn’t it, Nick?”—turning to him for confirmation.
Nick was frowning. He, too, appeared troubled.
“Of course it’s changed hands—heaps of times,” he replied gruffly. “But I should think your influence would be enough to counteract that of—of everybody else. Look here, chuck discussing rotten, psychic influences, Claire, and come on the ice.”
“No, I can’t,” she replied hastily. “I haven’t my skates here.”
“That doesn’t matter. We’ve a dozen pairs up at the house. One of them is sure to fit you. I’ll go and collect a few.”
He wheeled as though to cross the lake on his proposed errand, but Claire Latimer laid her hand quickly on his arm.
“No, no,” she said. “I can’t skate this morning. I’m on my way home.”
“Oh, change your mind!” begged Jean, noticing with friendly amusement Nick’s expression of discontent.
“No, really I can’t” Claire’s face had whitened and her big eyes sought Nick’s in a kind of pathetic appeal. “Adrian is not—very well to-day. My husband,” she added explanatorily to Jean.
The latter was conscious of a sense of shock. She had quite imagined Lady Latimer to be a widow, and had been mentally engaged in weaving the most charming and happy-ever-after of romances since the moment she had seen that wonderful change come over Nick’s face. Probably her impression was due to the manner of his first introduction of Claire’s name, “A friend of ours lives there—Lady Latimer,” without reference to any husband lurking in the background.
She observed that Nick made no further effort to persuade Claire to remain, and after exchanging a few commonplace remarks the latter continued her way back to Charnwood.
It was so nearly lunch time that it did not seem worth while resuming their skating. Besides, with Claire Latimer’s refusal to join them, the occupation seemed to have lost some of its charm, and when Jean suggested a return to the house Nick assented readily.
“She is very sweet—young Lady Latimer,” remarked
Jean, as they walked back over the frostily crisp turf. “But she looks rather sad. And she isn’t the kind of person one associates with sadness. There’s something so young and fresh about her; she makes one think of spring flowers.”
Nick’s face kindled.
“Yes, she’s like that, isn’t she?” he answered eagerly. “Like a pale golden narcissus.”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes, the thoughts of each of them dwelling on the woman who had just left them. Then Jean said softly:
“So that’s the ‘prior claim?’”
“Yes,” he acknowledged simply.
“You never mentioned that she had a husband concealed somewhere. I quite thought she was a widow till she suddenly mentioned him.”
“I never think of him as her husband”—shortly. “You can’t mate light and darkness.”
“I suppose he’s an invalid?” ventured Jean.
Rick’s face darkened.
“He’s a drug fiend,” he said in a low, hard voice.
“Oh!”
After that one breathless exclamation of horror Jean remained silent. The swift picture conjured up before her eyes by Rick’s terse speech was unspeakably revolting.
Years ago she had heard her father describing the effect of the drug habit upon a friend of his own who had yielded to it. He had been telling her mother about it, characteristically oblivious of the presence of a child of eleven in the room at the time, and some of Glyn Peterson’s poignant, illuminating phrases, punctuated by little, stricken murmurs of pity from Jacqueline, had impressed a painfully accurate picture on the plastic mind of childhood. Ever since then, drug-mania had represented to Jean the uttermost abyss.
And now, the vision of that slender, gracious woman, Rick’s “pale golden narcissus,” tied for life to a man who must ultimately become that which Glyn Peterson’s friend had become, filled her with compassionate dismay.
It was easy enough, now, to comprehend Claire Latimer’s curious lack of warmth when Jean expressed the hope that she might go over to Charnwood some day. It sprang from the nervous shrinking of a woman at the prospect of being driven to unveil before fresh eyes the secret misery and degradation of her life.
Jean was still silent as she and Nick re-entered the hall at Staple. It was empty, and as, by common consent, they instinctively drew towards the fire Nick pulled forward one of the big easy-chairs for her. Then he stood gloomily staring down into the leaping flames, much as Tormarin had stood the previous evening.
Intuitively she knew that he wanted to give her his confidence.
“Tell me about it, Nick,” she said quietly.
“May I?” The words jerked out like a sigh of relief. He dropped into a chair beside her.
“There isn’t very much to tell you. Only, I’d like you to know—to be a pal to her, if you can, Jean.” He paused, then went on quickly: “They married her to him when she was hardly more than a child—barely seventeen. She’s only nineteen now. Sir Adrian is practically a millionaire, and Claire’s father and mother were in low water—trying to cut a dash in society on nothing a year. So—they sold Claire. Sir Adrian paid their debts and agreed to make them a handsome allowance. And they let her go to him, knowing, then, that he had already begun to take drugs.”
“How could they?” burst from Jean in a strangled whisper.
Nick nodded. His eyes, meeting hers, had lost their gay good humour and were dull and lack-lustre.
“Yes, you’d wonder how, wouldn’t you?” he said. His voice rasped a little. “Still—they did it. Then, later on, the Latimers came to Charnwood, and Claire and I met. It didn’t take long to love her—you can understand that, can’t you?”
“Oh, Nick—yes! She is so altogether lovable.”
“But understand this, too,”—and the sudden sternness that gripped his speech reminded her sharply of his brother—“we recognise that that is all there can ever be between us. Just the knowledge that we love each other. I think even that helps to make her life—more bearable.”
He fell silent, and presently Jean stretched out a small, friendly hand.
“Thank you for telling me, Nick,” she said. “Perhaps some day you’ll be happy—together. You and Claire. It sounds a horrible thing to say—to count on—I know, but a man who takes drugs——”
Nick interrupted her with a short laugh.
“You needn’t count on Latimer’s snuffing out, if that’s what you mean. He is an immensely strong man—like a piece of steel wire. It will take years for any drug to kill him. I sometimes think”—bitterly—“that it will kill Claire first.”