A FEW days later, Jean, coming in from a long tramp across country in company with Nick and half a dozen dogs of various breeds, discovered Tormarin lounging in a chair by the fire. He was in riding kit, having just returned from visiting an outlying corner of the estates where his bailiff had suggested that a new plantation might be made, and Jean eyed his long supple figure with secret approval. Like most well-built Englishmen, he looked his best in kit that demanded the donning of breeches and leggings.
A fine rain was falling out of doors, and beads of moisture clung to Jean’s clothes and sparkled in the blown tendrils of russet hair which had escaped from beneath the little turban hat she was wearing. Apparently, however, her appearance did not rouse Tormarin to any reciprocal appreciation, for, after bestowing the briefest of glances upon her as she entered, he averted his eyes, concentrating his attention upon the misty ribands of smoke that drifted upwards from his cigarette.
Jean knelt down on the hearth, and, pulling off her rain-soaked gloves, held out her hands to the fire’s cheerful blaze.
“It’s good-bye to all the skating, I’m afraid,” she said regretfully. “Nick says we’re not likely to have another hard frost like the last, now that the weather has broken so completely.”
“No. It’s April next month—supposedly springtime, you know,” returned Blaise indifferently.
He seemed disinclined to talk, and Jean eyed him contemplatively. His attitude towards her baffled her as much as ever. He was unfailingly courteous and considerate, but he remained, nevertheless, unmistakably aloof, avoiding her whenever it was politely possible, and when it was not, treating her with a cool neutrality of manner that was as complete a contrast to his demeanour when they were together at Montavan as could well be imagined. Indeed, sometimes Jean almost wondered if the events of that day they spent amid the snows had really taken place—they seemed so far away, so entirely unrelated to her present life, notwithstanding the fact that she was in daily contact with the man who had shared them with her.
“It was rather uncomplimentary of you not to come skating with us a solitary once,” she remarked at last, an accent of reproach in her voice. “Was my performance on the rink at Montavan so execrable that you felt you couldn’t risk it again?”
He looked up, his glance meeting hers levelly.
“You’ve phrased it excellently,” he replied briefly. “I felt I couldn’t risk it.”
A sudden flush mounted to Jean’s face. There was no misunderstanding the significance that underlay the curt words, which, as she was vibrantly aware, bore no relation whatever to her skill, or absence of it, on the ice.
Blaise made no endeavour to relieve the awkward silence that ensued. Instead, his eyes rested upon her with a somewhat quizzical expression, as though he were rather entertained than otherwise by her evident confusion. Jean felt her indignation rising.
“It is fortunate that other people are not so—nervous,” she said disdainfully. “Otherwise I should find myself as isolated as a fever hospital.”
“It is fortunate indeed,” he agreed politely.
In the course of the three weeks which had elapsed since her arrival at Staple, Jean had dared several similar passages-at-arms with her host. Woman-like, she was bent on getting behind his guard of reticence, on forcing him into an explanation of his altered attitude towards her—since no woman can be expected to endure that a man should completely change from ill-suppressed ardour to a cool, impersonal detachment of manner, without aching to know the reason why! But in every instance Tormarin had carried off the honours of war, parrying her small thrusts with a lazy insouciance which she found galling in the extreme.
Hitherto she had encountered little difficulty in getting pretty much her own way with the men of her acquaintance; she had sufficient of the temperament and charm of the red-haired type to compass that. But her efforts to elucidate the cause of the change in Blaise Tormarin were about as prolific of result as the efforts of a butterfly at stone-breaking.
Fortunately for the preservation of peace, at this juncture there came the sound of voices, and Lady Anne entered the room, accompanied by a visitor. Her clever, grey eyes flashed quickly from Jean’s flushed face to that of her son, but, if she sensed the electricity in the atmosphere, she made no comment.
“Blaise, my dear, here is Judith,” she said pleasantly. “I found her wandering forlornly in the lanes, so I drove her back here. She has just returned from town, and for some reason her car wasn’t at the station to meet her.”
“I wired home saying what time I should reach Coombe Eavie,” explained the new-comer. “But as I was rather late reaching Waterloo, I rashly entrusted the wire to a small boy to send off for me, and I’m afraid he’s played me false. I should have had to trudge the whole way back to Willow Ferry if Lady Anne hadn’t happened along.”
Lady Anne turned to Jean, and, laying an affectionate hand on her arm, drew her forward.
“Jean, let me introduce you to Mrs. Craig. My new acquisition, Judith, she went on contentedly. A daughter. I always told you I wanted one. Now I’ve borrowed someone else’s.”
Jean found herself shaking hands with a slender, distinctive-looking woman who moved with a slow, languorous grace that was almost snake-like in its peculiar suppleness.
She gave one the impression that she had no bones in her body, or that if she had, they had never hardened properly but still retained the pliability of cartilage.
She was somewhat sallow—the consequence, it transpired later, of long residence in India—with sullen, slate-coloured eyes, appearing almost purple in shadow, and a straight, thin-lipped mouth. Jean decided that she was not in the least pretty, though attractive in an odd, feline way, and that she must be about thirty-two. As a matter of fact, Judith Craig was forty, but no one would have guessed it—and she would certainly not have confided it.
Presently Nick, who had been personally supervising the feeding of his beloved dogs, joined the party, greeting Mrs. Craig with the easy informality of an old friend, and shortly afterwards Baines brought in the tea-things.
“And where is Burke?” enquired Blaise, of Mrs. Craig, as he handed her tea. “Didn’t he come back with you?”
“Geoffrey? Oh, no. He’s not coming down till the end of April. You know he detests Willow Ferry in the winter—‘beastly wet swamp,’ he calls it! He’s dividing his time between London and Leicestershire—London, while that long frost stopped all hunting.”
Mrs. Craig was evidently on a footing of long-established intimacy with the Staple household, and Jean, listening quietly to the interchange of news and of little personal happenings, regarded her with rather critical interest. She was not altogether sure that she liked her, but she was quite sure that, wherever her lot might be cast, Judith Craig would never occupy the position of a nonentity. She had considerable charm of manner, and there was a quite unexpected fascination about her smile—unexpected, because, when in repose, her thin lips lay folded together in a straight and somewhat forbidding line, whereas the moment they relaxed into a smile they assumed the most delightful curves, and two little lines, which should have been dimples but were not, cleft each cheek on either side of the mouth.
All at once Mrs. Craig turned to Jean as though she had made up her mind about something over which she had been hesitating.
“Have I seen you anywhere before?” she asked, her charming smile softening the abruptness of the question. “Your face is so extraordinarily familiar.”
Jean shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “I’m sure I should remember you if we had met anywhere. Besides, I’ve lived abroad all my life; this is only my first visit to England.”
“I think I can explain,” said Lady Anne. There was a deliberateness about her manner that suggested she was about to make a statement which she was aware would be of some special interest to at least one of the party. “Jean is Glyn Peterson’s daughter; so of course you see a likeness, Judith.”
Jean, glancing enquiringly across at Mrs. Craig, was startled at the sudden change in her face produced by Lady Anne’s simple announcement. The sallow skin seemed to pale—almost wither, like a cut flower that needs water—and the lips that had been parted in a smile stiffened slowly into their accustomed straight line.
“Of course”—Mrs. Craig’s voice sounded flat and she swallowed once or twice before she spoke—“that must be it. I—knew your father, Miss Peterson.”
To Jean, always sensitive to the emotional quality of the atmosphere, it seemed as though some current of hostility, of malevolence, leapt at her through the innocent-sounding speech. “I knew your father.” It was quite ridiculous, of course, but the words sounded almost like a threat.
She had no answer ready, and a brief silence followed. Then Lady Anne bridged the awkward moment with some commonplace, adroitly steering the conversation into smoother waters, and a few minutes later Mrs. Craig rose to go.
“I’ll see you across the park, Judith,” volunteered Nick, and he and his mother accompanied her out of the room.
In the hall, Lady Anne detained her visitor an instant with a light hand on her arm, while Nick foraged for his own particular headgear, amongst the family assortment of hats and caps.
“Jean is a dear girl, Judith,” she said earnestly. “I want you to be friends with her. Don’t”—pleadingly—“visit the sins of the fathers on the children.”
“Why, no, I shouldn’t,” replied Mrs. Craig, with apparent frankness. “It was only that, for the moment, it was rather a shock to learn that she was—that woman’s—child.”
“Of course it was,” acquiesced Lady Anne. “Good-bye, dear Judith.”
But notwithstanding Mrs. Craig’s assurances, a troubled look lingered in Lady Anne’s grey eyes long after her guest’s departure.
JEAN was immensely puzzled at the abrupt change which had occurred in Mrs. Craig’s manner immediately upon hearing that she was the daughter of Glyn Peterson, and, as soon as the visitor had taken her departure, she sought an explanation.
“What on earth made Mrs. Craig freeze up the instant my father’s name was mentioned? Did she hate him for any reason?”
Tormarin looked across at her.
“No,” he answered quietly. “She didn’t hate him. She loved him.”
Jean stared at him in frank astonishment. She had never dreamed that there had been any other woman than Jacqueline in Glyn’s life.
“Mrs. Craig—and my father?” she exclaimed incredulously.
“She wasn’t Mrs. Craig in those days. She was Judith Burke.”
“Well, but——” persisted Jean, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I still don’t see why.”
“Why what?”—unwillingly.
“Why she looked as if she loathed the very sight of me. That’s not”—drily—“quite the effect you would expect love to produce!”
There was a curiously abstracted look in Tormarin’s eyes as he made answer.
“Love is productive of very curious effects on occasion. More particularly when it is without hope of fulfilment,” he added in a lower tone.
“Well, I suppose my father couldn’t help not falling in love with Mrs. Craig,” protested Jean with some warmth. “Nor could he have prevented her caring for him. And it’s certainly illogical of her to feel any resentment towards me on that score. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Love and logic have precious little to say to each other, as a rule,” replied Tormarin grimly. “To Judith, you’re the child of the woman who stole her lover away from her, so you can hardly expect her to feel an overwhelming affection for you.”
“The woman who stole her lover away from her?” repeated Jean slowly. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, Blaise?”
He glanced at her in some surprise.
“Surely—— Don’t you know the circumstances?”
She shook her head.
“No. I simply don’t know in the least what you are talking about. Please tell me.”
Tormarin made no response for a moment. He was standing with his back to the light, but as he lit a cigarette the flare of the match revealed a worried expression on his face, as though he deprecated the turn the conversation was taking.
“Oh, well,” he said at last, evading the point at issue, “it’s all ancient history now. Let it go. There’s never anything gained by digging up the dry bones of the past.” Jean’s mouth set itself in a mutinous line of determination. “Please tell me, Blaise,” she reiterated. “As it is something which concerns my father and a woman I shall probably be meeting fairly often in the future, I think I have a right to know about it.”
He shrugged his shoulders resignedly.
“Very well—if you insist. But I don’t think you’ll be any happier for knowing.” He paused. “Still inflexible?” She bent her head.
“Quite”—firmly—“whatever it is, I’d rather know it.”
“On your own head be it, then.” He seemed trying to infuse a lighter element into the conversation, as though hoping to minimise the effect of what he had to tell her. “It was just this—that your father and Judith Burke were engaged to be married at the time he met your mother, and that—well, to make a long story short, he ran away with Miss Mavory on the day fixed for his wedding with Judith.”
A dead silence followed the disclosure. Then Jean uttered a low cry of dismay.
“My father did that? Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Tormarin could see that the story had distressed her. Her eyes showed hurt and bewildered like those of a child who has met with a totally unexpected rebuff.
“Don’t take it like that!” he urged hastily. “After all, It was nothing so terrible. You look as though he had broken every one of the ten commandments”—smiling.
Jean smiled back rather wanly.
“I don’t know that I should worry very much if he had—in some circumstances. But—don’t you see?—it was so cruel, so horribly selfish!”
“You’ve got to remember two things in justification——”
“Justification?”—expressively. “There wasn’t any. There couldn’t be.”
“Well, excuse, then, if you like. One thing is that Jacqueline Mavory was one of the most beautiful of women, and the other, that your father’s engagement to Judith had really been more or less engineered by their respective parents—adjoining properties, friends of long standing, and so on. It was no love-match—on his side.”
“But on her wedding-day!”—pitifully. “Oh! Poor Judith!”
Tormarin smiled a trifle cynically.
“That was the root of the trouble. It was Judith’s pride that was hurt—as well as her heart. She married Major Craig not long after, and I believe they were really fond of one another and comparatively happy. But she has never forgiven Peterson from that day to this. And you, being Jacqueline Mavory’s daughter, will come in for the residue of her bitterness. Unless”—ironically—“you can make friends with her.”
“I shall try to,” said Jean simply. “Is Major Craig living now?”
“No. He died out in India, and after his death Judith came back to England. She has lived at Willow Ferry with her brother, Geoffrey Burke, ever since.”
There was a long silence, while Jean tried to fit in the new facts she had learned with her knowledge of her father’s character. She was a little afraid that Tormarin might misunderstand her impulsive outburst of indignation.
“Don’t think that I am sitting in judgment on my father,” she said at last. “In a way, I can—even understand his doing such a thing. You know, for the last two years of my mother’s life I was with them both constantly, and anyone living with them could understand their doing all kinds of things that ordinary people wouldn’t do.” She paused, as though seeking words that might make her meaning clearer. “They would never really mean to hurt anyone, but they were just like a couple of children together—gloriously irresponsible and happy. I always felt years older than either of them. Glyn used to say I was ‘cursed with a damnable sense of duty’”—laughing rather ruefully. “I suppose I am. Probably I inherit it from our old Puritan ancestors on the Peterson side. I know I couldn’t have cheerfully run off and taken my happiness at the cost of someone else’s prior right.”
A look of extreme bitterness crossed Tormarin’s face.
“Wait till you’re tempted,” he said shortly. “Wait till what you want wars against what you ought to have—what you’ve the right to take.”
For a moment she made no answer. Put bluntly like that, the matter suddenly presented itself to her as one of the poignant possibilities of life. Supposing—supposing such a choice should ever be demanded of her? She felt a vague fear catch at her heart, an indefinable dread.
When at last she spoke, the eyes she lifted to meet Tor-marin’s were troubled. In them he could read the innate honesty which was prepared to face the question he had raised, and behind that—courage. A young, untried courage, not sure of itself, it is true, but still courage that only waited till some call should wake it into fighting actuality.
“I hope,” she said with a wistful humility that was rather touching, “I hope I should stick it out One’s ideals, and duty, and other people’s rights—it would be horrible to scrap the lot—just for love.”
“Worth it, perhaps. You”—his voice was the least bit uneven—“you haven’t been up against love—yet.”
Again she was conscious of that little catch at her heart—the same convulsive tightening of the muscles as one experiences when a telegram is put into one’s hand which may, or may not, contain bad news.
“You haven’t been up against love yet.”
The words recalled her knowledge of the tragic episode that lay in Tormarin’s own past. The whole history she did not know—only the odds and ends of gossip which one woman had confided to another. But here, in the man’s curt brevity of speech, surely lay proof that he had suffered. And if he had suffered, it followed that he must have cared deeply for the woman who had thrown him aside for the sake of another man.
Jean’s first generous impulse of pity as she realised this was strangely intermingled with a fleeting disquiet, a subconscious sense of loss. It was only momentary, and not definite enough for her to express in words, even to herself—hardly more than the slightly blank sensation produced upon anyone sitting in the sunshine when a cloud suddenly intervenes and drops a shadow where a moment before there has been warmth and light.
An instant later it was overborne by her spontaneous sympathy for the man beside her, and, recognising the rather painful similarity between her father’s treatment of Judith Craig and the story she had heard of the unknown woman’s treatment of Tormarin himself, she tactfully deflected the conversation to something that would touch him less closely, launching into a description of the life her parents had led at Beirnfels.
“They were wonderfully happy together there. Not in the least—as I suppose they ought to have been—an awful example of poetic justice!” she declared. “Glyn used to call Beirnfels his ‘House of Dreams-Come-True’.”
“Glyn?”—suddenly remarking her use of Peterson’s Christian name.
She smiled.
“I never called them father and mother. They would have loathed it. Glyn used to say that anything which savoured so much of domesticity would kill romance!”
“That sounds like all that I have ever heard about him,” said Tormarin, smiling too. “So does the ‘House of Dreams-Come-True.’ It’s a charming idea.”
“He took it from one of Jacqueline’s songs. She had a glorious voice, you know.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard. I suppose you have inherited it?”
She shook her head.
“No, I wish I had. But Jacqueline insisted on trying to teach me singing, all the same. Poor dear! I was a dreadful disappointment to her, I’m afraid.”
“Couldn’t you sing the ‘House of Dreams’ song? I’m rather curious to hear the remainder of it.”
Jean rose and crossed to the piano.
“Oh, yes, I can sing you that. Jacqueline always used to say it was the only thing I sang as if I understood it, and Glyn declared it was because it agreed with my ‘confounded principles’!”
She smiled up at him as her fingers slid into the prelude of the song, but her little joke against herself brought no answering smile to his lips. Instead, he stood waiting for the song to begin with an odd kind of expectancy on his face.
Jean had most certainly not inherited her mother’s exquisite voice, but she had a quaint little pipe of her own, with a clouded, husky quality in it that was not without its appeal. It lent a wistful charm to the simple words of the song.
"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.”
The soft, husky voice ceased, and for a moment there was silence. Then Tormarin said quietly:
“Thank you. I don’t think your mother need have felt any great disappointment concerning your voice. It has its own qualities, even if it is not suited to the concert hall.”
“But the words of the song?” questioned Jean eagerly. “Don’t you like them?”
“It’s a pretty enough idea.” He laid a faint, significant stress on the last word. “But for some of us the ‘House of Dreams-Come-True’ has never been built. Or, if it has, we’ve lost the way there.”
There was a note of rigid acceptance in his voice, as though he no longer strove against the decisions of destiny, and Jean’s eager sympathy leaped impulsively to her lips.
“Don’t say that!” she began. Then checked herself, flushing a little. “I hate to hear you speak in that way,” she went on more quietly. “It sounds as though there were nothing worth trying for—worth waiting for. I like to believe that everyone has a house of dreams which may ‘come true’ some day.” She paused. “‘If we fare straight on, come fine, come wet,’” she repeated softly.
Her eyes had a far-away look in them, as though they were envisioning that narrow, winding track which leads, somewhen, to the place where dreams even the most wonderful of them—shall become realities.
Glorious faith and optimism of youth! If we could only recapture it in those after years, when time has added tolerance and a little wisdom to our harvest’s store, the houses where dreams come true might add themselves together until there were whole streets of them—glowing townships—instead of merely an isolated dwelling here or there.
As Tormarin listened to Jean’s young, eager voice, his face softened and some of the tired lines in it seemed to smooth themselves out “Little Comrade,” he said gently, and she felt her breath quicken as he called her again by the name which he had used at Montavan—and once since, when they had come suddenly face to face at Coombe Eavie Station. But that second time the words had escaped him unawares. Now he was using them deliberately, withholding no part of their significance. “Little comrade, I think the man who ‘fares straight on’ with you for fellow-traveller will find the House of Dreams-Come-True. But it isn’t—just any man who may start that journey with you. It mustn’t be”—his grave eyes held hers intently—“a man who has tried to find the road once before—and failed.”
It seemed to Jean that, as he spoke, the wall which he had built up between them since she came to Staple crumbled away. This was the same man she had known at Montavan, whose hands reached out to hers across some fixed dividing line which neither he nor she might pass. She knew now what that dividing line must be—the shadow flung by a past love, his love for Nesta Freyne which had ended in hopeless tragedy.
There must always be a limit set to any friendship of theirs. So much he had implied at their first meeting. But, since then, he had taken even that friendship from her, substituting a deliberate indifference against which she had struggled in vain.
And now, without knowing quite how it had come about, the barrier was down. They were comrades once more—she and the Englishman from Montavan—and she was conscious of a great content that it should be so.
For the moment she asked nothing more, was unconscious of any further wish. The woman in her still slumbered, and, to the girl, this friendship seemed enough. She did not realise that something deeper, more imperative in its ultimate demands, was mingled with it—was, indeed, unrecognised by her, the very essence of it.
JEAN, sculling leisurely down the river which ran between Staple and Willow Eerry, looked around her with a little thrill of enjoyment—the sheer, physical thrill of youth unconsciously in harmony with the climbing sap in the trees, with the upward thrust of young green, with all the exquisite recreation of Nature in the spring of the year.
April had been, as it too commonly is in this northern clime of ours, the merest travesty of spring, a bleak, cold month of penetrating wind and sleet, but now May had stolen upon the world almost unawares, opening with tender, insistent fingers the sticky brown buds fast curled against the nipping winds, and misting all the woods with a shimmer of translucent green.
Overhead arched a sky of veiled, opalescent blue, and Jean, staring up at it with dreamy eyes, was reminded of the “great city” of the Book of Revelation whose “third foundation” was of chalcedony. This soft English sky must be the third foundation, she decided whimsically.
But the occupation of sky-gazing did not combine well with that of steering a straight course down a stream whose width hardly entitled it to its local designation of “the river,” and a few minutes later the boat’s nose cannoned abruptly against the bank.
As, however, to tie up somewhere under the trees which edged the water had been Jean’s original intention, this did not trouble her overmuch, and discovering a gnarled stump convenient to her purpose, she looped the painter round it, collected the rug and a couple of cushions which she had brought with her, and established herself comfortably in the stern of the boat.
Everyone else at Staple having engagements of one sort or another, she had promised herself a lazy afternoon in company with the latest novel sent down from Mudie’s. But she was in no immediate hurry to begin its pages. The mellow warmth of the afternoon tempted her to the more restful occupation of mere day-dreaming, and as she lay tucked up snugly amongst her cushions, enjoying the sweet-scented airs that played among the trees and over the surface of the water, she allowed her thoughts to drift idly back across the two months she had spent at Staple.
The time had slipped by so quickly that it was hard to believe that rather more than eight weeks had elapsed since that grey February evening when she had alighted on the little, deserted platform at Coombe Eavie Station. They had been quiet, happy weeks, filled with the pleasant building up of new friendships, and Jean reflected that she had already grown to look upon Staple almost as “home.” She possessed in a large measure the capacity to adapt herself to her surroundings, and realising that Lady Anne had been perfectly sincere in her expressed desire to play at having a daughter, Jean had, at first a little tentatively, but afterwards, encouraged by Lady Anne’s obvious delight, with more assurance, gradually assumed the duties that would naturally fall to the daughter of the house.
Day by day she had discovered an increasing pleasure and significance in their performance. They were like so many tiny links knitting her life into the lives of those around her, and already Lady Anne had begun to turn to her instinctively in the small difficulties and necessities which, one way or another, most days bring in their train. Jean appreciated this as only a girl who had counted for very little in the lives of those nearest her could do. It seemed to make her “belong” in a way in which she had never “belonged” at Beirnfels. There, Glyn and Jacqueline had turned to each other for counsel in the little daily vicissitudes of life equally as in its larger concerns, and Jean had learned to regard herself as more or less outside their lives.
She had had one letter from Peterson since her arrival at Staple, a brief, characteristic note in which he expressed the hope that she liked England “better than her father ever could” but suggested that if she were bored she should return to Beirnfels, and ask some woman friend to stay with her; he warned her not to expect further letters from him for some time to come as, according to his present plans—of which he volunteered no particulars—he expected to spend the next few months “as far from civilisation as the restricted size of this world permits.”
With this letter it seemed to Jean as though the last link with her former life had snapped. She felt no regret. Beirnfels, and the unconventional, rather exotic life she had led there—dictated by her parents’ whims and the practically unlimited wealth to gratify them which Peterson’s flair for successful speculation had achieved—seemed very far away, and Staple, with its peaceful, even-flowing English life, very near and enfolding.
Her first visit to Charnwood had been a disappointment. Under changing ownerships, little now remained to remind her of the generations of Petersons who had lived there long ago. Such of the old pieces of furniture and china as Peterson had not considered worth transferring to Beirnfels at his father’s death had been bought by the next owners of the place, and had been taken away by them when they, in their turn, disposed of the property. Only a great square stone remained, sunk into one of the walls and bearing the Peterson coat of arms and the family motto: Omnia debeo Deo.
Sir Adrian Latimer had translated the words to Jean, with a cynical gleam in his heavy-lidded eyes and accompanying the translation by a caustic reference to her father. The drug had not so far dulled his intellect. On the contrary, it seemed to have had the opposite effect of endowing him with an almost uncanny insight into people’s minds, so that he could prick them on a sensitive spot with unerring accuracy and a diabolical enjoyment of the process.
Jean’s sympathy for his wife was boundless. A great affection had sprung up between the two girls, and bit by bit Claire had drawn aside the veil of reticence, letting the other see into the arid, bitter places of her life.
Jean could understand, now, of what Claire had been thinking on the occasion of their first meeting, when she had spoken of the influences of the people who inhabit a house. The whole atmosphere of Charnwood seemed permeated with the influence of Adrian Latimer—a grey, sinister, unwholesome influence, like the miasma which rises from some poisonous swamp.
The hell upon earth which he contrived to make of life for his young wife had been a revelation to Jean, accustomed as she had been to the exquisite love and tenderness with which her father had surrounded Jacqueline.
Sir Adrian’s chief pleasure in life seemed to be to thwart and humiliate his wife in every possible way, and once, in an access of indignation over some small refinement of cruelty of which he had been guilty, Jean had declared her intention of giving him her frank opinion of his behaviour. She had never forgotten the look of bitter amusement with which Claire had greeted the suggestion.
“Do you know what would happen? He would listen to you with the utmost politeness, and very likely let you think you had impressed him. But afterwards he would make me pay—for a day, or a week, or a month. Till his revenge was satisfied. And he would put an end to our friendship——”
“He couldn’t!” Jean had interrupted impulsively.
“Couldn’t he? You don’t know Adrian.... And I can’t afford to lose you, Jean. You’re one of my few comforts in life. Promise me”—she caught Jean’s hands in hers and held them tightly—“promise me that you will do nothing—that you won’t try to interfere? I can generally manage; him—more or less. And when I can’t, why, I have to put up with the consequences of my own bad management”—with a smile that was more sad than tears.
With an effort of will Jean tried to banish the recollection of Sir Adrian from her thoughts. The picture of his thin, leaden-hued face, with its cruel mouth and furtive, suspicious eyes, was out of harmony with this soft day of spring. She wished she had not let the thought of him intrude upon her pleasant reverie at all. His sinister figure seemed to cast a shadow over the sunlit river, a shadow which grew bigger and bigger, blurring the green of the trees and the sky’s faint blue, and even silencing the comfortable little chirrups of the birds, busy with their spring housekeeping. At least, Jean couldn’t hear them any longer, and she took no notice even when one enterprising young cock-bird hopped near enough to filch a feather that was sticking out invitingly from the corner of the cushion behind her head.
The next thing she was conscious of was of sitting up with great suddenness, under the impression that she had overslept and that the housemaid was calling to her very loudly to waken her.
Someone was calling—shouting lustily, in fact, and collecting her sleep-bemused faculties, she realised that instead of being securely moored against the bank her boat was rocking gently in mid-stream, and that the occupant of another boat, coming from the opposite direction, was doing his indignant best to attract her attention, since just at that point the river was too narrow for them to pass one another unless each pulled well in towards the bank.
Jean reached hastily for her sculls, only to find, to her intense astonishment, that they had vanished as completely as though they had never existed. She cast a rapid glance of dismay around her, scanning the surface of the water in her vicinity for any trace of them. But there was none. She was floating serenely down the middle of the stream, perfectly helpless to pull out of the way of the oncoming boat.
Meanwhile its occupant was calling out instructions—tempering his wrath with an irritable kind of politeness as he perceived that the fool whose craft blocked the way was of the feminine persuasion.
“Pull in a bit, please. We can’t pass here if you don’t.... Pull in!” he yelled rather more irately as Jean’s boat still remained in the middle of the river, drifting placidly towards him.
She flung up her hand.
“ I cant!” she shouted back. “I’ve lost my sculls!”
“Lost your sculls?” The man’s tones sufficiently implied what he thought of the proceeding.
A couple of strokes, and, gripping the gunwale of her boat as he drew level, he steadied it to a standstill alongside his own.
Jean’s eyes travelled swiftly from the squarish, muscular-looking hand that gripped the boat’s side to the face of its owner. He was decidedly an ugly man as far as features were concerned, with a dogged-looking chin and a conquering beak of a nose that jutted out arrogantly from his hatchet face. The sunlight glinted on a crop of reddish-brown hair, springing crisply from the scalp in a way that suggested immense vitality; Jean had an idea that it would give out tiny crackling sounds if it were brushed hard. His eyebrows, frowning in defence against the sun, were of the same warm hue as his hair and very thick; in later life they would probably develop into the bristling, pent-house variety. The eyes themselves, as Jean described them on a later occasion, were “too red to be brown”; an artist would have had to make extensive use of burnt sienna pigment in portraying them. Altogether, he was not a particularly attractive-looking individual—and just now the red-brown eyes were fixed on Jean in a rather uncompromising glare.
“How on earth did you lose your oars?” he demanded—as indignantly as though she had done it on purpose, she commented inwardly.
Her lips twitched in the endeavour to suppress a smile.
“I haven’t the least idea,” she confessed. “I tied up under some trees further up and—and I suppose I must have fallen asleep. But still that doesn’t explain how I came to be adrift like this.”
“A woman’s knot, I expect,” he vouchsafed rather scornfully. “A woman never ties up properly. Probably you just looped the painter round any old thing and trusted to Providence that it would stay looped.”
She gave vent to a low laugh.
“I believe you’ve described the process quite accurately,” she admitted. “But I’ve done the same thing before without any evil consequences. There’s hardly any current here, you know. I don’t believe”—with conviction—“that my loop could have unlooped itself. And anyway”—triumphantly—“the sculls couldn’t have jumped out of the boat without assistance.”
The man smiled, revealing strong white teeth.
“No, I suppose not. I fancy”—the smile broadening—“some small boy must have spotted you asleep in the boat and, finding the opportunity too good to be resisted, removed your tackle and set you adrift.”
There was a sympathetic twinkle in his eyes, and Jean, suddenly sensing the “little boy” in him which lurks in every grown-up man, flashed back:
“I believe that’s exactly what you would have done yourself in your urchin days!”
“I believe it is,” he acknowledged, laughing outright. “Well, the only thing to do now is for me to tow you back. Where do you want to go—up or down the river?”
“Up, please. I want to get back to Staple.”
He threw a quick glance at her.
“Surely you must be Miss Peterson?”
She nodded.
“Yes. How did you guess?”
“My sister, Mrs. Craig, told me a Miss Peterson was staying at Staple. It wasn’t very difficult, after that, to put two and two together.”
“Then you must be Geoffrey Burke?” returned Jean.
He nodded.
“That’s right. So now that we know each other, will you come into my parlour?”—smiling. “If I’m going to take you back, there seems no reason why we shouldn’t accomplish the journey together and tow your boat behind.”
He held out his hand to steady her as she stepped lightly from one boat to the other, and soon they were gliding smoothly upstream, the empty craft tailing along in their wake.
For a while Burke sculled in silence, and Jean leant back, idly watching the effortless, rhythmic swing of his body as he bent to his oars. His shirt was open at the throat, revealing the strong, broad-based neck, and she noticed in a detached fashion that small, fine hairs covered his bared arms with a golden down, even encroaching on to the backs of the brown, muscular hands.
She found herself femininely conscious that the most dominant quality about the man was his sheer virility. Nor was it just a matter of appearances. It lay in something more fundamental than merely externals. She had known men of great physical strength to be not infrequently gifted with an almost feminine gentleness of nature, yet she was sure this latter element played but a small part in the make-up of Geoffrey Burke.
The absolute ease with which he sent the boat shearing through the water seemed to her in some way typical. It conveyed a sense of mastery that was unquestionable, even a little overpowering.
She felt certain that he was, above and before all other things, primeval male, forceful and conquering, of the type who in a different age would have cheerfully bludgeoned his way through any and every obstacle that stood between him and the woman he had chosen as his mate—and, afterwards, if necessary, bludgeoned the lady herself into submission.
“Here’s where you tied up, then?”
Burke’s voice broke suddenly across her thoughts, and she looked round, recognising the place where she had moored her boat earlier in the afternoon.
“How did you divine that?” she asked.
“It didn’t require much divination! There are your sculls”—pointing—“stuck up against the trunk of a tree—and looking as though they might topple over at any moment. I fancy”—with a smile—“that my ‘small boy’ theory was correct. I believe I could even put a name to the particular limb of Satan responsible,” he went on. “You moored your boat on the Willow Perry side of the stream, and our lodge-keeper’s kids are a troop of young demons. They want a thorough good thrashing, and I’ll see that they get it before they are much older.”
He pulled in to the shore and rescuing the sculls from their precarious position, restored them to the empty boat.
“All the same,” he added, as, a few minutes later, he helped Jean out on to the little wooden landing-place at Staple, “I think I’m rather grateful to the small boy—whoever he may be!”
She laughed and retorted impertinently:
“I’m sure I’m very grateful to the bigger boy who came to the rescue.”
There was something quite unconsciously provocative about her as she stood there with one foot poised on the planking, her head thrown back a trifle to meet his glance, and a hint of gentle raillery tilting the corners of her mouth.
The cave-man woke suddenly in him. He was conscious of an almost irresistible impulse to take her in his arms and kiss her. But the conventions of the centuries held, and all Jean knew of that swift flare-up of desire in the man beside her was that the grip of his hand on hers suddenly tightened so that the pain of it almost made her cry out.
And because she was not given to regarding every unmarried man she met in the light of a potential lover—as some women are prone to do—and because, perhaps, her thoughts were subconsciously preoccupied by a lean, dark face, rather stern and weary-looking as though from some past discipline of pain, Jean never ascribed that fierce pressure of the hand to its rightful origin, but merely rubbed her bruised fingers surreptitously and wished ruefully that men were not quite so muscular.
“I’ll go with you up to the house,” remarked Burke, without any elaboration of “by your leave.”
She was privately of the opinion that her leave would have little or nothing to do with the matter. If this exceedingly autocratic and masculine individual had decided to accompany her through the park, accompany her he would, and she might as well make the best of it.
He was extraordinarily unlike his sister, she thought. Where Judith Craig would probably seek to attain her ends in a somewhat stealthy, cat-like fashion, Burke would employ the methods of the club and battering-ram. Of the two, perhaps these last were preferable, since they at least left you knowing what you were up against.
“Will you come in?” asked Jean, pausing as they reached the house. “Though I’m afraid everyone is out.”
“So much the better,” he replied promptly. “I’d much rather have tea alone with you.”
“That’s not very polite to the others”—smiling a little. “I thought the Staple people were old friends of yours?”
“So they are. That’s exactly it. I feel the mood of the explorer on me this afternoon.”
“You’re one of the people with a penchant for new acquaintances, then?” she said indifferently, leading the way into the hall, where, in place of the great log fire of chillier days, a hank of growing tulips made a glory of gold and orange and red in the wide hearth.
“No, I’m not,” he returned bluntly. “But I’ve every intention of making your acquaintance right now.”
Jean rang the bell and ordered tea.
“I think perhaps I might be consulted in the matter,” she returned lightly when Baines had left the room. “The settling of questions of that kind is usually considered a woman’s prerogative. Supposing”—smiling—“I don’t ask you to tea, after all?”
There was a smouldering fire in the glance he bestowed upon her vivid face.
“It wouldn’t make a bit of difference—in the long run,” he replied deliberately. “If a man makes up his mind he can usually get his own way—over most things.”
“You can’t force friendship,” she said quickly. It was as though she were defying something that threatened.
Again that queer gleam showed for a moment in his eyes.
“Friendship? No, perhaps not,” he conceded.
He said no more and an uncomfortable silence fell between them. Jean was suddenly conscious that it might be possible to be a little afraid of this man. She did not like that side of him—the self-willed, masterful side—of which, almost deliberately, he had just given her a glimpse.
With the appearance of tea the slight sense of tension vanished, and the conversation dropped into more ordinary channels. She discovered that he had travelled considerably and was familiar with many of the places to which, at different times, she had accompanied her father and mother, and over the interchange of recollections the little hint of discord—of challenge, almost—was forgotten.
They were still chatting amicably together half an hour later when Blaise returned. The latter’s face darkened as he entered the hall and found them together, nor did it lighten when Jean recounted the afternoon’s adventure.
“I suppose Miss Peterson has your lodge-keeper’s boys to thank for this?” he demanded stormily of Burke.
“I’m afraid that’s so,” admitted the other.
“If you had any consideration for your neighbours, you’d sack the lot of them,” returned Blaise sharply. “Or else see that they’re kept under proper control. They’ve given trouble before, but it is a little too much of a good thing when they dare to play practical jokes of that description on a guest of ours.”
Jean stared at him in astonishment. She had told the story as rather a good joke and in explanation of Burke’s presence, and, instead of laughing at her dilemma, Tormarin appeared to be thoroughly angry over the matter.
Burke remained coolly unprovoked.
“I can’t say I’ve any quarrel with the young ruffians,” he said. “They afforded me a charming afternoon.”
“Doubtless,” retorted Blaise. “But that’s hardly the point. Anyway”—heatedly—“I’ll thank you to see that those lads are kept in hand for the future.”
Jean glanced across at Burke with some apprehension, half fearing a responsive explosion of wrath on his part, but to her relief he was smiling—a twinkling, mirthful smile that redeemed the ugliness of his features.
“’Fraid I can’t truthfully declare I’m sorry, Tormarin,” he said good-humouredly. “You wouldn’t, in my place.”
The man was keeping his temper in the face of considerable provocation, and Jean liked him better at that moment than she had done throughout the entire afternoon. Tormarin’s own attitude she quite failed to understand, and after Burke’s departure she took him to task for his churlishness.
“It was really absurd of you, Blaise,” she scolded, half-smiling, half in genuine vexation. “As if Mr. Burke could possibly be held responsible for the actions of a mischievous schoolboy! At least he did all he could to repair the damage; he brought me back, and recovered the missing pair of oars for me. You hadn’t the least reason to flare up like that.”
Blaise listened to her quietly. The anger had died out of his face and his eyes were somewhat sad.
“You’re right,” he said at last, “absolutely right. But there rarely is any reason for a Tormarin’s temper. Do you know—it sounds ridiculous, but it’s perfectly true—it was all I could do not to knock Burke down.”
“My dear Blaise, you fill me with alarm! I’d no idea you were such a bloodthirsty individual! But seriously, what had the poor man done to incur your wrath? He’s been most helpful.”
There was an element of self-mockery in the brief smile which crossed his face.
“Perhaps that was just it. I’ve rather grown to look upon it as my own particular prerogative to help you out of difficulties.”
“Well, naturally I’d rather it had been you,” she allowed, twinkling.
“Do you mean that?”—swiftly.
“Of course I do”—lightly. She had failed to notice the eagerness of demand in his quick question. “I’m more used to it! Besides, I believe Mr. Burke rather frightens me. He’s a trifle—overwhelming. Still”—shaking her head reprovingly—“I don’t think that excuses you. You must have a shocking temper.”
He laughed shortly.
“Most of the Tormarins have ruined their lives by their temper. I’m no exception to the rule.”
Jean’s thought flew back to the description she had overheard when in London: “A Tormarin in a temper is like a devil with the bit between his teeth.”
“Then it’s true, escaped her lips.
“What’s true?”—with some surprise. “That the Tormarins are a vile-tempered lot? Quite. If you want to know more about it, ask my mother. She’ll tell you how I came by this white lock of hair—the mark of the beast.”
Jean was trying to make the comments of the woman at the hotel and Blaise’s own confession tally with her recollection of the latter’s complete self-control on several occasions when he, or any other man, might have been pardoned for yielding to momentary anger.
“I believe you’re exaggerating absurdly,” she said at last. “As a matter of fact, I’ve often been surprised at your self-control, seeing that I know you have a temper concealed about you somewhere. I think that is why your anger this afternoon took me so aback. It seemed unlike you to be so fearfully annoyed over practically nothing at all. I don’t believe”—half smiling—“that really you’re anything like bad-tempered as a Tormarin ought to be—to support the family tradition!”
He was looking, not at her but beyond her, as she spoke, as though his thoughts dwelt with some past memory. His expression was inscrutable; she could not interpret it. Presently he turned back to her, and though he smiled there was a deep, unfathomable sadness in his eyes.
“I’ve had one unforgettable lesson,” he said quietly. “The Tormarin temper—the cursed inheritance of every one of us—has ruined my life just as it has ruined others before me.”
The words seemed to fall on Jean’s ears with a numbing sense of calamity, not alone in that past to which they primarily had reference, but as though thrusting forward in some mysterious way into the future—her future.
She was conscious of a vague foreboding that that “cursed inheritance” of the Tormarins was destined, sooner or later, to impinge upon her own life.
At night, when she went to bed, her mind was still groping blindly in the dark places of dim premonition. Single sentences from the afternoon’s conversation kept flitting through her brain, and when at last she slept it was to dream that she had lost her way and was wandering alone in a wild and desolate region. Presently she came to a solitary dwelling, set lonely in the midst of the interminable plain. Three wretched-looking scrubby little fir trees grew to one side of the house, all three of them bent in the same direction as though beaten and bowed forward by ceaseless winds. While she stood wondering whether she should venture to knock at the door of the house and ask her way, it opened and Geoffrey Burke came out.
“Ah! There you are!” he exclaimed, as though he had been expecting her. “I’ve been waiting for you. Will you come into my parlour?”
He smiled at her as he spoke—she could see the even flash of his white teeth—but there was something in the quality of the smile which terrified her, and without answering a word she turned to escape.
But he overtook her in a couple of strides, catching her by the hand in a grip so fierce that it seemed as though the bones of her fingers must crack under it.
“Come into my parlour,” he repeated. “If you don’t, you’ll be stamped forever with the mark of the beast. It’s too late to try and run away.”
Jean woke in a cold perspiration of terror. The dream had been of such vividness that it was a full minute before she could realise that, actually, she was safely tucked up in her own bed at Staple. When she did, the relief was so immeasurable that she almost cried.
The next morning, with the May sunshine streaming in through the open window, it was easier to laugh at her nocturnal fears, and to trace the odd phrases which, snatched from the previous day’s conversation with Burke and Tormarin and jumbled up together, had supplied the nightmare horror of her dream.
But, even so, it was many days before she could altogether shake off the disagreeable impression it had made on her.
“Y OU don’t like Jean Peterson.”
Burke made the announcement without preface. He and Judith were sitting together on the verandah at Willow Perry, where their coffee had been brought them after lunch. Judith inhaled a whiff of cigarette smoke before she answered. Then, without any change of expression, her eyes fixed on the glowing tip of her cigarette, she answered composedly:
“No. Did you expect I should?”
“Well, hang it all, you don’t hold her accountable for her father’s defection, do you?”
A dull red crept up under Mrs. Craig’s sallow skin, but she did not lift her eyes. They were still intent on the little red star of light dulling slowly into grey ash.
“Not accountable,” she replied coolly. “I look upon her as an unpleasant consequence.” She bent forward suddenly. “Do you realise that she might have been—my child?” There was a sudden vibrating quality in her voice, and for an instant a rapt look cajne into her face, transforming its hard lines. “But she isn’t. She happens to be the child of the man I loved—and another woman.”
“You surely can’t hate her for that?”
“Can’t I? You don’t know much about women, Geoff. Glyn Peterson stamped on my pride, and a woman never forgives that.”
She leaned back in her chair again, her face once more an indifferent mask. Burke sat silent, staring broodingly in front of him. Presently her glance flickered curiously over his face.
“Why does it matter to you whether I like her or not?” she asked, breaking the silence which had fallen.
Burke shifted in his chair so that he faced her. His eyes looked far more red than brown at the moment, as though they glowed with some hot inner light.
“Because,” he said deliberately, “I’m going to marry her.”
Judith sat suddenly upright.
“So that’s the meaning of your constant pilgrimages to Staple, is it?”
“Just that.”
She laughed—a disagreeable little laugh like a douche of cold water.
“You’re rather late in the field, aren’t you?”
“You mean that Blaise Tormarin wants her?”
“Of course I do. It’s evident enough, isn’t it?”
Burke pulled at his pipe reflectively.
“I should have thought he’d had a sickener with Nesta Freyne.”
“So he had. But not in the way you mean. He never—loved—Nesta.”
“Then why on earth did he ask her to marry him?”
“Good heavens, Geoffrey! You’re a man—and you ask me that! There are heaps of men who ask women to marry them on the strength of a temporary infatuation, and then regret it ever after. Luckily for Blaise, Nesta saved him the ‘ever after’ part. But”—eyeing him significantly—“Blaise’s feeling for Jean isn’t of the ‘temporary’ type. Of that I’m sure.”
“All the same, I don’t believe he means to ask her to marry him.”
“No. I don’t think he does—mean to. He’s probably got some high-minded scruples about not asking a second woman to make a mess of her life as a result of the Tormarin temper. It would be just like Blaise to adopt that attitude. But he will ask her, all the same. The thing’ll get too strong for him. And when he asks her, Jean will say yes.”
“You may be right. I’ve always said you were no fool, Judy. But if it’s as you think, then I must get in first, that’s all. First or last, though”—with a grim laugh—“I’ll back myself to beat Blaise Tormarin. And you’ve got to help me.”
Followed a silence while Judith threw away the stump of her cigarette and lit another. She did not hurry over the process, but went about it slowly and deliberately, holding the flame of the match to the tip of her cigarette for quite an unnecessarily long time.
At last:
“I don’t mind if I do,” she said slowly. “I don’t think I—envy—your wife much, Geoffrey. She won’t be a very happy woman, so I don’t mind assisting Glyn Peterson’s daughter to the position. It would make things so charming all round if he and I ever met again”—smiling ironically.
Burke looked at her with a mixture of admiration and disgust.
“What a thorough-going little beast you are, Judith,” he observed tranquilly.
She shrugged her thin, supple shoulders with indifference.
“I didn’t make myself. Glyn Peterson had a good share in kneading the dough; why shouldn’t his daughter eat the bread? And anyhow, old thing”—her whole face suddenly softening—“I should like you to have what you want—even if you wanted the moon! So you can count on me. But I don’t think you’ll find it all plain sailing.”
“No”—sardonically. “She’ll likely be a little devil to break.... Well, start being a bit more friendly, will you? Ask her to lunch.”
Accordingly, a day or two later, a charming little note found its way to Staple, inviting Jean to lunch with Mrs. Craig.
“I shall be quite alone,” it ran, “as Geoffrey is going off for a day’s fishing, so I hope Lady Anne will spare you to come over and keep me company for an hour or two.”
Jean was delighted at this evidence that Judith was thawing towards her. She was genuinely anxious that they should become friends, feeling that it was up to her, as Glyn’s daughter, to atone—in so far as friendliness and sympathy could be said to atone—for his treatment of her. Beyond this, she had a vague hope that later, if she and Judith ever became intimate enough to touch on the happenings of the past, she might be able to make the latter see her father in the same light in which she herself saw him—as a charming, lovable, irresponsible child, innocent of any intention to wound, but with all a child’s unregarding pursuit of a desired object, irrespective of the consequences to others.
She felt that if only Judith could better comprehend Glyn’s nature, she would not only be disposed to judge him less hardly, but, to a certain extent, would find healing for her own bitterness of resentment and hurt pride.
Judith was an unhappy woman, embittered by one of those blows in life which a woman finds hardest to hear. And Jean hated people to be unhappy.
So that it was with considerable satisfaction that she set out across the park towards Willow Perry, crossing the river by the footbridge which spanned it at a point about a quarter of a mile below the scene of her boating mishap.
Judith welcomed her with unaccustomed warmth, and after lunch completely won her heart by a candour seemingly akin to Jean’s own.
“I’ve been quite hateful to you since you came to Staple,” she said frankly. “Just because you were—who you were. I suppose”—turning her head a little aside—“you’ve heard—you know that old story?”
Then, as Jean murmured an affirmative, she went on quickly:
“Well, it was idiotic of me to feel unfriendly to you because you happened to be Glyn’s daughter, and I’m honestly ashamed of myself. I should have loved you at once—you’re rather a dear, you know!—if you had been anyone else. So will you let me love you now, please—if it isn’t too late?”
It was charmingly done, and Jean received the friendly overture with all the enthusiasm dictated by a generous and spontaneous nature.
“Why, of course,” she agreed gladly. “Let’s begin over again”—smiling.
Judith smiled back.
“Yes, we’ll make a fresh start.”
After that, things progressed swimmingly. The slight gene which had attended the earlier stages of the visit vanished, and very soon, prompted by Judith’s eager, interested questions, Jean found herself chatting away quite naturally and happily about her life before she came to Staple and confessing how much she was enjoying her first experience of England.
“It’s all so soft, and pretty, and old,” she said. “I feel as if Staple must always have been here—just where it is, looking across to the Moor, and nodding sometimes, as much as to say, ‘I’ve been here so long that I know some of your secrets.’ The Moor always seems to me to have secrets,” she added dreamily. “Those great tors watch us all the time, just as they’ve watched for centuries. They remind me of the Egyptian Sphinx, they are so still, and silent, and—and eternal-looking.”
“You’ve not been on to Dartmoor yet, have you?” asked Judith. “We have a bungalow up there—Three Fir Bungalow, it’s called. You must come and spend a few days there with us when the weather gets warmer.”
“I should love it,” cried Jean, her eyes sparkling. “I’m aching to go to the Moor. I want to see it in all sorts of moods—when it’s raining, and when the sun’s shining, and when the wind blows. I’m sure it will be different each time—rather like a woman.”
“I think it’s loveliest of all by moonlight,” said Judith, her eyes soft and shining with recollection. She loved all the beauty of the world as much as Jean herself did. “I remember being on the top of one of the tors at night. All the surrounding valleys wore hidden in a mist like a silver sea, and I felt as if I had got right away from the everyday world, into a sort of holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits. One almost forgot that one was just an ordinary, plain-boiled human being tied up in a parcel of flesh and bone.”
“Only people aren’t really in the least plain-boiled or ordinary,” observed Jean quaintly.
“You aren’t, I verily believe.” Judith regarded her curiously for a moment. “I think I wish you were,” she said abruptly.
She was not finding the part assigned to her by her brother any too easy. It complicates matters, when you are deliberately planning a semblance of friendship towards someone, if that someone persists in inspiring you with little genuine impulses of liking and friendliness.
Jean herself was delighted with the result of her visit to Willow Perry. She was convinced that Judith was a much nicer woman than she had imagined, or than anyone else imagined her to be, and when she took her departure she carried these warmer sentiments with her, characteristically reproaching herself not a little for her first hasty judgment. People improved upon acquaintance enormously, she reflected.
She did not go straight back to Staple, but took her way towards Charnwood on the chance of finding Claire at home, and, Fate being in a benevolent mood, she discovered her in her garden, precariously mounted upon a ladder and occupied in nailing back a creeper.
Claire greeted her joyfully and proceeded to descend.
“I’ve been lunching at Willow Perry,” explained Jean, “so I thought I might as well come on here and cadge my tea as well!”
“Of course you might Adrian has gone into Exeter to-day, so we shall be alone.”
Jean was conscious of an immense relief. The knowledge that Sir Adrian was not anywhere on the premises seemed like the lifting of a blight.
Claire’s blue eyes smiled at her understandingly.
“Yes, I know,” she nodded, as though Jean had given voice to her thought. “It’s just as if someone had opened a window and let the fresh air in, isn’t it?”
She collected her tools, and slipping her arm within Jean’s led her in the direction of the house.
“We’ll have tea at once,” she said, “and then I’ll walk back with you part way.”
“You’re bent on getting rid of me quickly, then?”
“Yes”—seriously. “He”—there was little need to specify to whom the pronoun referred—“will be back by the afternoon train, and for some reason or other he is very unfriendly towards you just now.”
“What have I done to offend?” queried Jean lightly. Somehow, with Sir Adrian actually away, it didn’t seem a matter of much importance whether he was offended or not. Even the house had a different “feel” about it as they entered it.
“It’s not anything you’ve done; it’s what you are, I think, sometimes, that when a man is full of evil and cruel thoughts and knows he has given himself up to wickedness, he simply hates to see anyone young and—and good, like you are, Jean, with all your life before you to make a splendid thing of.”
“And what about you?” asked Jean, her eyes resting affectionately on the other’s delicate flower face with its pathetically curved lips and the look of trouble in the young blue eyes. “He sees you constantly.”
“Oh, he’s used to me. I’m only his wife, you see. Besides”—wearily—“he knows that he can effectually prevent me from making a splendid thing of my life.”
The note of bitterness in her voice wrung Jean’s heart.
“I don’t know how you bear it!” she exclaimed.
“One can bear anything—a day at a time,” answered Claire with an attempt at brightness. “But I never look forward,” she added in a lower tone.
The words seemed to Jean to contain an epitome of tragedy. Not yet twenty, and Claire’s whole philosophy of life was embodied in those four desolate words: “I never look forward!”
The world seemed built up of sadness and cross-purposes. Claire and Nick, Judith, and Blaise Tormarin—all had their own particular burdens to carry, burdens which had in a measure spoiled the lives of each one of them. It seemed as though no one was allowed to escape those “snuffers of Destiny” of which Blaise had spoken as he and Jean had climbed the mountain-side together. She felt a depressing conviction that her own turn would come and wondered whether it would be sooner or later.
“Don’t look so blue!” Claire’s voice broke in upon her gloomy trend of thought. She was laughing, and Jean was conscious of a sudden uprush of admiration for the young gay courage which could laugh even while it could not look forward. “After all, there are compensations in life. You’re one of them, my Jean, as I’ve told you before! Now let’s talk about something else.”
Jean responded gladly enough, and presently Sir Adrian was temporarily forgotten in the little intimate half-hour of woman-talk which followed.
“W ELL, have you enjoyed yourself?” enquired Lady Anne when Jean returned. “I suppose so, as you stayed to tea”—smiling.
“Oh, I had tea with Claire. Sir Adrian was away”—with a small grimace—“so we had quite a nice little time together. But, yes, madonna”—Jean had fallen into the use of the gracious little name which Blaise and Nick kept for their mother—“I really enjoyed myself very much. Judith was ever so much nicer than I expected.”
“So now, I suppose, we shall all be side-tracked in favour of Burke and his sister?” put in Blaise, who had been listening quietly. There was a sharpness in his tones, as though the prospect did not please.
Jean smiled at him engagingly.
“Of course you will,” she replied. “I invariably sidetrack old friends when I get the chance.”
“Oh, you’ll get the chance right enough!”—rather sulkily. “Yes, I think I shall”—demurely. “Geoffrey has always been nice to me; and now Judith, too, has succumbed to my charms, and says she hopes we shall be good pals.”
Tormarin rose, pushing back his chair with unnecessary violence.
“I don’t think I see Judith Craig extending her friendship to Glyn Peterson’s daughter,” he commented cynically.
An instant later the door banged behind, and Lady Anne and Jean looked across at each other smiling, as women will when one of their menkind proceeds to behave exactly like a cross little boy.
But a quick sigh chased the smile from Lady Anne’s lips.
“Poor old Blaise!” she murmured, as though to herself. Then, her grey eyes meeting Jean’s squarely, she said quietly:
“Jean, you’re so much one of us, now, that I should like you to know what lies at the hack of things. You’d understand—some of us—better.”
Jean turned impulsively.
“I don’t need to understand you,” she said quickly. “I love you.”
“Thank you, my dear.” Lady Anne’s voice trembled slightly. “If I were not sure of that, I shouldn’t tell you what I am going to. But I want you to understand Blaise—and to make allowances for him, if you can.”
Jean pulled forward a stool and settled herself at Lady Anno’s feet.
“Do you mean about the ‘mark of the beast’?” she asked, smiling a little. “Blaise told me to ask you about it one day.”
“Did he? He thinks far too much about it and what it stands for”—sadly. “It has come to be almost a symbol in his eyes. You see, he too has suffered from the family failing—the very failing that was responsible for that white lock of hair.”
“Tell me about it.”
Lady Anne looked down at her thoughtfully.
“Well, there’s no need for me to tell you that the Tor-marins have hot tempers! You’ve seen evidences of it in Blaise—that sudden flaming up of anger. Though he has learnt through one most bitter experience to hold himself more or less in check.” She paused a moment, as if her thoughts had reverted painfully to the past. Presently she resumed: “All the Tormarin men have had it—that blazing, uncontrollable kind of temper which simply cannot brook opposition. Blaise’s father had it, and it was that which made our life together so unhappy.”
So Destiny had been busy with her snuffers here, also!
“You—you, too!” whispered Jean.
“I. too?” Lady Anne questioned. “What does that mean?”
“Why, it seems to me as if no one is ever allowed to be really happy and to live their life in peace! There is Judith, whose life my father spoilt, and Claire, whose life Sir Adrian spoils—and that means Nick’s life as well. And now—you!”
Some unconscious instinct of reticence deep within her forbade the mention of Blaise Tormarin’s name.
“I expect we are not meant to be too joyful,” said Lady Anne. “Though, after all, it’s largely our own fault if we are not. We make or mar each other’s happiness; it isn’t all Fate.... But I’ve had my share of happiness, Jean—never think that I haven’t. Afterwards, with Claude, I was utterly happy.”
She fell silent for a space, ceasing on that quiet note of happiness. Presently, almost loth to disturb the reverie into which she had fallen, Jean questioned hesitantly:
“And the ‘mark of the beast,’ madonna? You were going to tell me about it.”
“It came as a consequence of the Tormarin temper. That’s why Blaise calls it the ‘mark of the beast.’ It was just before he was born—when I was waiting for the supreme joy of holding my first-born in my arms. Derrick—Blaise’s father—was an extremely jealous-natured man. He hated to think that there had ever been anyone besides himself who cared for me. And there was one man, in particular, of whom he had always been foolishly jealous and suspicious. I can’t imagine why, though”—with a little puzzled laugh. “You would think that the mere fact that I had married him, and not the other man, would have been sufficient proof that he had no cause for jealousy. But no! Men are queer creatures, and he always resented my friendship with John Lovett—which continued after my marriage. I had known John from childhood, and he was the truest friend a woman ever had!” She sighed: “And I needed friends in those days! For somehow, brooding over things to himself, my husband conceived the idea that the little son who was coming was not his own child—but the child of John Lovett. I think someone must have poisoned his mind. There was a certain woman of our acquaintance whom I always suspected; she hated me and was very much attached to Derrick—she had wanted to marry him, I believe. In any case, he came home one evening, from her house, like a madman; and there was a scene... a terrible scene... he hurling accusations at me.... I won’t talk of it, because he was bitterly repentant afterwards. As soon as the fit of rage was past, he realised how utterly groundless his suspicions had been, and I don’t think he ever ceased to reproach himself. But that has always been the way! The Tormarins have invariably brought the bitterest self-reproach upon themselves. One way or another, the same story of blind, reckless anger, and its consequences, has repeated itself generation after generation.”
“And then? What happened then?” asked Jean in low, shocked tones.
“I was very ill—so ill that they thought I should not live. But I did live, and I brought my baby into the world. Only, he was born with that white lock of hair. And my own hair had turned perfectly white.”
Jean was silent for a little. At last she said softly:
“I’m so glad, madonna, that you were happy afterwards. Your ‘house of dreams’ came true in the end!”
“Yes”—Lady Anne’s grey eyes were very bright and luminous. “My house of dreams came true.”
After a while, she went on quietly:
“But my poor Blaise’s house of dreams fell in ruins. The foundation was rotten. You knew, didn’t you, that there was a woman he once cared for?”
Jean nodded. Speech was difficult to her just at that moment.
“It was a miserable business altogether. The girl, Nesta Freyne was an Italian. Blaise met her when he was travelling in Italy, and—oh, well, it wasn’t love! Not love as I know it, and as I think, one day, you too will know it. It blazed up, just one of those wild infatuations that sometimes spring into being between a man and a woman, and almost before he had time to think, Blaise had married her——”
“Married her!”
The words leapt from Jean’s lips before she could check them. In the account of Tormarin’s disastrous love affair which had been forced upon her hearing in London, there had been no mention of the word marriage, and she had always imagined that the woman, this Nesta Freyne, had simply jilted him in favour of another man. Moreover, since she had been at Staple, nothing had been said to correct this impression, as, very naturally, the subject was one avoided by general consent.
And now, without warning or preparation, she found herself face to face with the fact that Blaise had been married—that he had belonged to another woman! It seemed to set her suddenly very far apart from him, and a fierce, intolerable jealousy of that other woman leaped to life in her heart, racking her with an anguish that was almost physical. She was confused, bewildered, by the storm of emotion which suddenly swept her whole being.
“Married her?” she repeated with dry lips.
“Yes. Didn’t you know that Blaise was a widower?”
Had Lady Anne divined the stress under which the girl was labouring that she so quickly interposed the knowledge that his wife was dead?
“No,” answered Jean unsteadily. “I didn’t even know that he had been married.”
The fact of that other woman’s being dead did not serve to allay the tumult within her. She had lived, and while she lived she had been his wife!
“Yes, he married her.” Lady Anne went on speaking in level tones. “I think matters were hurried to a climax by the fact that Nesta’s step-sister, Margherita Valdi, detested English people. She was much the elder of the two, and as their mother had died when Nesta was born, she had practically brought the girl up. She would never have countenanced the idea of her marrying an Englishman, but Nesta so contrived her meetings with Blaise that Margherita was unaware of his very existence, and eventually they married without her knowledge. From that day onward, Margherita declined to hold any communication with her sister.”
“Why had she such a rooted antipathy to the English?” Jean had recovered her composure during the course of Lady Anne’s narrative, and now put her question with a very good semblance of detachment. But, inside, her brain was dully hammering out the words “Married—married!”
“It seems that Margherita’s step-father—Nesta’s father, of course,—who was an Englishman, treated his wife extremely badly, and Margherita, who had adored her mother, never forgave him and hated all Englishmen in consequence. At least, that was what Nesta told Blaise, and it seems quite probable. Italians are a hot-blooded race, you know, and very vindictive and revengeful. Of course, these Valdis were of no particular family—that was where the trouble began. Nesta was just a rather second-rate, though extraordinarily beautiful girl, suddenly elevated to a position which she was not in the least fitted to fill. It didn’t take a month for the glamour to wear off—and for Blaise to see her as I saw her. He came to his senses to find himself married to a bit of soulless, passionate flesh and blood. Oh, Jean! If I could only have been there—in Italy, to have saved him from it all!”
Jean hardly heeded that instinctive mother-cry. She was keyed up to know the end of the story. She felt as though she must scream if Lady Anne were long about the telling.
“Go on,” she said, forcing herself to speak quietly. “Tell me the rest.”
“The rest had the Tormarin temper for its corner-stone. Nesta was an utterly spoilt child, and a coquette to her very finger-tips. She tossed dignity to the winds, and there were everlasting scenes and quarrels. Then, one day, Blaise came in and found her entertaining a man whom he had forbidden the house. I don’t know what he said to her—but I can guess, poor child! He horsewhipped the man, and he must have frightened Nesta half out of her mind. That evening she ran away from Staple—Nick and I, of course, were living at the Dower House then—and after months of fruitless enquiry I had a letter from Margherita Valdi telling me that she had been found drowned. She had evidently made her way back to Italy, hoping to reach her sister, and then, in a fit of despair, committed suicide.”
“Oh, poor Blaise! How awful for him!” exclaimed Jean, horror-stricken. For the moment her own individual point of view was swept away in a flood of sympathy for Tormarin.
“Yes. It broke him up badly. Always, I think, he is brooding over the past. It colours his entire outlook on things. You see, he blamed himself—his ungovernable temper—for the whole tragedy.... If only he had been gentler with her, not terrified her into running away!... After all, she was a mere child—barely seventeen. But she was a heartless, conscienceless minx, nevertheless.... And Margherita Valdi did not let him down lightly. She wrote him a terrible letter, accusing him of her sister’s death. I opened it—he was abroad at the time—but, of course, he had to see it ultimately. Tied up in a little separate packet was Nesta’s wedding-ring, together with a newspaper report of the affair, and, to add a last stab of horror, she had folded the newspaper clipping and thrust it through the wedding-ring, labelling the packet ‘Cause and effect.’ It was a brutal thing to do.”
They were both silent for a space, Jean painfully envisaging the tragedy that lay behind that stern, habitual gravity of Tormarin’s, Lady Aime asking herself tremulously if she had been wise—if she had been wise in her disclosure? She wanted her son’s happiness so immeasurably! She believed she knew wherein it might lie, and she had raked over the burning embers of the past that she might help to give it him.
She knew that he himself was very unlikely to confide in Jean the story of his unhappy marriage, or that if he ever did so, it would be but to shoulder all the blame himself, exonerating Nesta entirely. Nor, unless Jean understood the fiery furnace through which he had passed—that ordeal of impetuous, mistaken love, of disillusion, and, finally, of the most bitter self-reproach—could she possibly interpret aright Blaise’s strange, churlish moods, his insistent efforts to stand always on one side, as though he were entitled to make no further claim on life, and, above all, the bitter quality which permeated his whole outlook.
All these things had been in Lady Anne’s mind when she had decided to enlighten Jean. She had seen, just as Judith had seen, whither Blaise was tending, fight against it as he might, and she was determined to remove from his path whatever of stumbling-block and hindrance she could. And, in this instance, she felt instinctively that Jean’s own attitude might constitute the greatest danger. Any woman, as sincere and positive as she, might easily be driven in upon herself, shrinkingly misunderstanding Blaise’s deliberate aloofness, and thus unconsciously assist in strengthening that barrier against love which he was striving to hold in place between them—and which Lady Anne so yearned to see thrown down.
It was to this end that she had reopened the shadowed pages of the past—so that no foolish obstacle, born of sheer misunderstanding, might imperil her son’s hope of happiness if the time should ever come—as she prayed it would come—when he would free himself from the shackles of a tragic memory and turn his face towards the light of a new dawn.
THERE are some people to whom love comes in a single blinding flash; it is as though the heavens were opened and the vision and the glory theirs in a sudden, transcendant revelation. To others it comes gradually, their hearts opening diffidently to its warmth and light as a closed bud unfolds its petals, almost imperceptibly, to the sun.
With Jean, its coming partook in a measure of both of these. Love itself did not come to her suddenly. It had been secretly growing and deepening within her for months. But the recognition of it came upon her with an overwhelming suddenness.
Lady Anne, in recalling that bleak tragedy of the past, had accomplished more than she knew. She had shown Jean her own heart.
From those fierce, unexpected pangs of jealousy which had stabbed her as she realised the part played by another woman in Blaise’s life—the woman who had been his wife—had sprung the knowledge that she loved him. Only love could explain the instant, clamorous rebellion of her whole being against that other woman’s claim. And now, looking back upon the months which she had spent at Staple, she comprehended that the veiled figure of Love, face shrouded, had walked beside her all the way. That was why these even, uneventful weeks at Staple had seemed so wonderful!
The recognition of the great thing that had come into her life left her a little breathless and shaken. But she did not seek to evade or deny it. The absolute candour of her mind—candid even to itself—accepted the truth quite simply and frankly. No false shame that she had, as far as actual fact went, given her love unasked, tempted her to disguise from herself the reality of what had happened. For good or ill, whether Blaise returned her love or no, it was his.
But in her inmost heart she believed that he, too, cared—half-fearfully, half-joyfully recognising the pent-up force which surged behind the bars of his deliberate aloofness.
True, he had never definitely spoken of his love in so many words, hut Lady Anne had supplied the key to his silence. The past still bound him! Alive, Nesta had held him by her beauty; and dead, she still held him with the cords of remorse and unavailing self-reproach—cords which can bind almost as closely as the strands of love.
But for that——
The hot colour surged into Jean’s cheeks at the sweet, secret thought which lay behind that “but”. Blaise cared! Cared for her, needed her, just as she cared for and needed him. To her woman’s eyes, newly anointed with love’s sacramental oil and given sight, it had become suddenly evident in a hundred ways, most of all evident in his sullen effort to conceal it from her.
So much that he had said, or had not said—those clipped sentences, bitten off short with a savage intensity that had often enough troubled and bewildered her, now found their right interpretation. He cared... but the bondage of the past still held.
And with that thought came reaction. The brief, quivering ecstacy, which had sent little fugitive thrills and currents racing through every nerve of her, died suddenly like a damped-out fire, as she realised all which that bondage implied.
It was possible he might never break the silence which he himself had decreed. From the very beginning he had recognised and insisted upon—the fact that they two were only “ships that pass,” and though now, for a little space, Fate had directed the course of each into the same channel, a year, at most, would float them out again on to the big ocean of life where vessels signalled—and passed—each other. She must, in the ordinary course of events, return eventually to Beirnfels, while Blaise remained in England. And that would be the end of it.
She knew the man’s dogged pertinacity; he would hold to an idea or belief immovably if he conceived it right, no matter what the temptation to break away. And in the flood of light vouchsafed by Lady Anne’s disclosure, she felt convinced that he had somehow come to regard the tragic happenings of the past as standing betwixt him and any future happiness. Why, Jean could not altogether fathom, but she guessed that the dominant factor in the matter was probably an exaggerated consciousness of responsibility for his wife’s death, and perhaps, too, a certain lingering tenderness, a subconscious feeling of loyalty to the dead woman, which urged him on to the sacrifice of his own personal happiness as some kind of atonement.
Unless—and a swift spasm of pain shot through her, searing its way like a tongue of flame—unless Lady Anne had been altogether mistaken in her fixed belief that Blaise had not really cared for his wife but had only been carried away on the swift tide of passion—that tide which runs so fiercely and untrammelled in hot youth.
Jean had her black hour then, when she faced the fact that although her love was given, and although she tremulously believed it was returned, she would probably never know the supreme joy of utter certainty, never hear the beloved’s voice utter those words which hold all heaven for the woman who hears them.
But, through the darkness that closed about her, there gleamed a single thread of light—the light of her own bestowal of love. Even if she never knew, of a surety, that Blaise cared, even if—and here she shrank, but forced herself to face the possibility sincerely—even if she were utterly mistaken and he did not care for her in any other way save as a friend—his “little comrade”—still there would remain always the golden gleam of love that has been given. For no one who loves can be quite unhappy.
THE chalcedony of the spring skies had deepened into the glowing sapphire of early June—a deep, pulsating blue, tremulous with heat. On the sundial, the shadow’s finger pointed to twelve o’clock, and the sleepy hush of noontide hung over the rose garden where Jean was gathering roses for the house.
“Can’t I help?”
Burke’s voice broke across the drowsy quiet so unexpectedly that she jumped, almost letting fall the scissors with which she was scientifically snipping the stems of the roses. She bestowed a small frown upon the head and shoulders appearing above the wooden gate on which he leant.
“It’s not very helpful to begin by giving one an electric shock,” she complained. “How long have you been there?” His attitude had a repose about it which suggested that he might have been standing there some time watching her.
“I don’t know. But as I am here, may I come in?” Without waiting for her answer, he unlatched the gate and came striding across the velvet greenness of the lawn.
His visits to Staple had grown of late so much a matter of daily occurrence that they were no longer hedged about by any ceremony, and Jean had come to accept his appearance at any odd moment without surprise.
Since the day when she had lunched at Willow Eerry, and learned, as she believed, to understand and make allowances for the bitterness which had so warped Judith’s nature, her acquaintance with both brother and sister had ripened rapidly into a friendly intimacy. But the fact that Burke’s feeling towards her was something other, and much warmer than mere friendship, had failed to penetrate her consciousness.
It was patent enough to the lookers on, and probably Jean was the only one amongst the little coterie of intimate friends who had not realised what was impending.
It is not very often that a woman remains entirely oblivious of the small, unmistakable signs which go to indicate a man’s attitude towards her. In Jean’s case, however, her thoughts were so engrossed with the one man that, at the moment, all other men occupied but a very shadowy relationship towards the realities of life as far as she was concerned.
So that she scarcely troubled to look up as Burke halted beside her, but went on cutting her roses unconcernedly, merely observing:
“Idlers not allowed. You can make yourself useful by paring the thorns off the stems.” She gestured towards a basket which stood on the ground at her side, already overflowing with its scented burden of pink and white and crimson roses.
He glanced at the russet head bent studiously above a bush rose and there was a gleam, half angry, half amused, in his eyes. His fingers went uncertainly to his pocket, where reposed a serviceable knife, then suddenly he drew his hand sharply away, empty.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t come over to be useful this morning. I came over”—he spoke slowly, as though endeavouring to gain her attention—“on a quite different errand.” There was a vibration in his voice that might have warned her had she been less intent upon her task of wrestling with a refractory branch. As it was, she merely questioned absently:
“And what was the ‘quite different’ errand?”
The next moment she felt his hand close over both hers, gardening scissors and wash-leather gloves notwithstanding.
“Stop cutting those confounded flowers, and I’ll tell you,” he said roughly.
She looked up in astonishment, and, at last, a glimmering of what was coming dawned upon her. Even the blindest of women, the most preoccupied, must have read the expression of his eyes at that moment.
“Oh, no—no,” she began hastily. “I must finish cutting the roses—really, Geoffrey.”
She tried to release her hands, but he held them firmly.
“No,” he said coolly. “You won’t finish cutting your flowers—at least, not now. You’re going to listen to me.” He drew the scissors from her grasp, and they flashed like a fish in the sunshine as he tossed them down on to the rose-basket. Then, quite deliberately, he pulled off the loose gloves she was wearing and his big hands gripped themselves suddenly, closely, about her slight, bared ones.
“Geoffrey——”
Her voice wavered uncertainly. The realisation of his intent had come upon her so unexpectedly, rousing her from her placid unconsciousness, that she felt stunned—nervously unready to deal with the situation. She struggled a little, instinctively, but he only laughed down at her, a ring of masterful triumph in his voice, holding her effortlessly, with all the ease of his immense strength.
“It’s no good, Jean. You’ve got to hear me out. I’ve waited long enough.” He paused, then drew a deep breath. “I love you!” he said slowly. “My God, how I love you!” There was an element of wonder in his tones, and she felt the strong hands gripping hers tremble a little. Then their clasp tightened and he drew her towards him.
“Say you love me,” he demanded. “Say it!”
It was then Jean found her voice. The imperious demand, infringing on that secret, inner claim of which she alone knew, stung her into quick denial.
“But I don’t! I don’t love you!” Then, as she saw the blank look in his eyes, she went on hastily: “Oh, Geoffrey, I am so sorry. I never guessed—I never thought of your caring.”
“You never guessed! Good God!”—with a harsh laugh—“I should have thought I’d made it plain enough. Why, even that first day, on the river—I wanted you then. What do you suppose has brought me to Staple every day? Affection for Blaise Tormarin?”—cynically.
“I thought—I thought——” She cast about in her mind for an answer, then presented him with the simple truth. “I’m afraid I never thought about it at all. I just took your coming over for granted. I knew you and Judith were old friends and neighbours, so it seemed quite natural for you to be here often—just as Claire Latimer is.”
Burke searched her face for a moment. He was thinking of the other women he had known—women who would never have remained blind to his meaning, who had, indeed, shown their willingness to come half-way—more than half-way—to meet him.
“I really believe that’s true,” he said at last, grudgingly. “But if it is, you’re the most unselfconscious woman I’ve ever come across.”
“Of course it’s true,” she replied simply. “I’m—I’m so sorry, Geoffrey. I like you far too much to have wished to hurt you.”
“I don’t want liking. I want your love. And I mean to have it. You may not have understood before, Jean, but you do now.”
She drew herself away from him a little.
“That doesn’t make any difference, Geoffrey. I have no love to give you,” she said quietly.
He shook his head.
“I won’t take no,” he said doggedly. “You’re the woman I want. And I mean to have you.... Don’t you understand? It’s no use fighting against me. You may say no, now; you may say no fifty times. But one day you’ll say—yes.”
Jean’s slight frame tautened.
“You are mistaken,” she said, in a chill, clear voice calculated to set immeasurable spaces between them. “I’m not a cave woman to be forced into marriage. Oh!”—the ludicrous side of this imperious kind of wooing striking her suddenly—“don’t be so absurd, Geoffrey! You can’t seize me by the hair and carry me off to your own particular hole in the rocks, you know.” She began to laugh a little. “Let’s just go on being good friends—and forget that this has ever happened.”
She held out her hand, but he took no notice of the little friendly gesture. There was a red gleam in his eyes, a smouldering glow that needed but a breath to fan it into flame.
“You speak as if it were something that was over and done with,” he said in a low, tense voice. “But it isn’t; it never will be. I love you and want you, and I shall go on loving you and wanting you as long as I live. Jean—sweetest”—his voice suddenly softened incredibly—“I’ll try to be more gentle. But when a man loves as I do, he doesn’t stop to choose his words.” He stepped closer to her. “Oh! You little, little thing! Why, I could pick you up and carry you off to my cave with two fingers. Jean, when will you marry me?”
His big frame towered beside her. He paid no more attention to her dismissal of him than if she had not spoken, and she was conscious of an odd feeling of impotence.
“You don’t seem to have understood me,” she said forcing herself to speak composedly. “If I loved you, you’d have no need to ‘carry me off’ to your cave. I’d come—gladly. But I don’t love you, Geoffrey. And I shall never marry a man I don’t love.”
“You’ll marry me,” he returned stubbornly. “Do you think I’m going to give you up so easily? If you do, you mistaken. I love you, and I’ll teach you to love me—when you’re my wife.”
The two pairs of eyes met, a challenging defiance flashing between them. Jean shrugged her shoulders.
“I think you must be mad,” she said contemptuously, and turned to leave him.
In the same instant his hands gripped her shoulders and he swung her round facing him again.
“Mad!” he exclaimed hoarsely. “Yes, I am mad—mad for you. You little cold thing! Do you know what love is—man’s love?”
She felt his arms close round her like a vice of steel, lifting her off her feet, so that she hung helpless in his embrace. For a moment his eyes burned down into hers—the hot flame of desire that blazed in them seeming almost to scorch her—the next, he had hidden his face against the warm white curve of her throat, where a little affrighted pulse throbbed tempestuously. Then, as though the touch of her snapped the last link of his self-control, his mouth sought hers, and he was kissing her savagely, crushing her soft, wincing lips beneath his own. Her slender body swayed helpless as a reed in his strong grip, while the tide of his passion, like some fierce, untamable flood, swept over her resistlessly.
When at last he released her, she stood back from him, staggering a little. Instinctively he stretched out his hand to steady her.
“Don’t... touch me!” she panted.
The words came driven between clenched teeth, chokingly. Her face was milk-white and her eyes blazed at him out of its pallor. She felt as if her heart were beating in her throat, stifling her, and for a little space sheer physical stress held her silent But she fought it back, asserting her will against her weakness.
“How dare you?” There was bitter anger in her still tones. “How dare you touch me—like that?”
With a swift movement she passed her handkerchief across her lips and then let it fall on the ground as though it were something unclean. He winced at the gesture; for a moment the passion died out of his face and a rueful look, almost of schoolboy shame, took its place.
“Do you—feel like that about it?” he said, nodding towards the handkerchief.
“Just like that,” she returned. “Do you think—if I had known—I would ever have risked being alone with you? But I thought we were friends—I never dreamed I couldn’t trust you.”
“Well, you can’t,” he said unsteadily. The sight of her slender, defiant figure and lovely, tilted face, with the scornful lips he had just kissed showing like a scarlet stain against its whiteness, sent the blood rioting through his veins once more. “You’ll... you’ll never be able to trust any man who loves you, Jean.”
Her thoughts flew to Blaise. She would trust herself with him—now, at any time, always. But then, perhaps—the after thought came like a knife-thrust—perhaps he did not care!
“A man who—loved me,” she said dully, “would not do what you’ve just done.”
“He would—sooner or later. Unless his veins ran milk and water!” He drew a step nearer and stood staring down at her sombrely. “Do you know what you’re like, I wonder? With your great golden eyes and your maddening mouth and that little cleft in your white chin.... You’re angry because I kissed you. I wonder I didn’t do it before! I’ve wanted to, dozens of times. But I wanted your love more than a passing kiss. I’ve waited for that—waited all these weeks. And now you refuse it—you’ve not even understood that you’re all earth and heaven to me. God! How blind you must have been!”
She was silent. Her anger was waning, giving place to a certain distressful comprehension of the mighty force which had suddenly broken bondage in the man beside her. Dimly, from her own knowledge of the yearning bred of the loved one’s nearness, she envisaged what these last weeks must have meant to a man of Burke’s temperament. Was it any wonder, when suddenly made to realise that the woman he loved not only did not love him in return, but had failed even to sense his love for her, that his stormy spirit had rebelled—flung off its shackles? An element of self-reproach tinctured her thoughts. In a measure the fault had been hers; her self-absorption was to blame.
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “I’m afraid I have been blind, Geoffrey. Indeed—indeed I would have prevented all this if I had known, if I had guessed. But, honestly, I just thought of you—you and Judith—as friends.”
“I believe you really did,” he said slowly, almost incredulously. Then, as though in swift corollary: “Jean, is there anyone else?”
The question drove at her with its sudden grasp of the truth. Her face grew slowly drawn and pinched-looking beneath his merciless gaze and her lips moved speechlessly.
“So it is that, is it? And does he—has he——”
“Geoffrey, you are insufferable!” The words came wrung from her in quick, low protest. “You have no right—no right——”
“No, I suppose I haven’t,” he admitted, touched by the stricken look in her eyes. “I’d no business to ask that. For the moment, it’s enough that you don’t love me.... But I shall never give you up, Jean. You’re mine—my woman!” The light of possession flared up once more in his eyes. “Do you remember I told you once that, if a man makes up his mind, he can get his own way over most things? Well, it’s true.”
He paused a moment, then abruptly swung round on his heel and without a word of farwell, strode away across the garden towards the gate by which he had entered.
As the latch clicked into its place behind him, Jean was conscious of a sudden tremor, of a curious, uncontrollable fear, as though his words held something of prophecy. The man’s dominating personality seemed to swamp her, overwhelming her by its sheer physical force.
The remembrance of her sinister dream, and of the dream Burke’s threat: “It’s too late to try and run away. If you don’t come into my parlour, you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast forever,” returned to her with a disagreeable sense of menace. She shivered a little and, picking up her basket, almost ran back to the house, as though seeking safety.
IN the task of arranging her roses in the various bowls and vases Baines had set in readiness for her, Jean found a certain relief from the feeling of terror which had invaded her. Something in the homely everydayness of the occupation served to relax the tension of her mind, keyed up and overwrought by the stress of her interview with Burke, and it was with almost her usual composure of manner that she greeted Blaise when presently he joined her.
“I’ve raided the rose garden to-day,” she said, smilingly indicating the mass of scented blossom that lay heaped up on the table. “I expect when Johns finds out he will proceed to meditate upon something for my benefit with boiling oil in it.”
Johns was one of the gardeners to whom Jean’s joyous and wholesale robbery of his first-fruits was a daily cross and affliction. Only chloroform would ever have reconciled him to the cutting off of a solitary bloom while still in its prime.
Blaise regarded the tangle of roses consideringly.
“I wonder you found time to gather so many. When I passed by the rose garden, you were—otherwise occupied.” The quietly uttered comment sent the blood rushing up into Jean’s face. When had he passed? What had he seen?
She kept her eyes lowered, seemingly intent upon the disposition of some exquisite La France roses in a black Wedge-wood bowl.
“What do you mean?” she asked negligently.
Tormarin was silent a moment.
Had she looked at him she would have surprised a restless pain in the keen eyes he bent upon her.
“Jean”—he spoke very gently—“have I—to congratulate you?”
It was difficult to preserve her poise of indifference when the man she loved put this question to her, but she contrived it somehow. Women become adepts in the art of hiding their feelings. The conventions demand it of them.
Jean’s answer fluttered out with the airy lightness of a butterfly in the sunshine.
“I am sure I can’t say, unless you tell me upon what grounds?”
“You know of none, then”—swiftly.
“None.”
She nibbled the end of a stalk and surveyed the Wedge-wood bowl critically. Tormarin felt like shaking her.
“Then,” he said gruffly, “let me suggest you revise your methods. The women who plays with Geoffrey Burke might as safely play with an unexploded bomb.”
His voice betrayed him, revealing the personal element behind the proffered counsel.
Jean glanced at him between her lashes. So that was it! He was jealous—jealous of Burke! At last something had happened to pierce the joints of his armour of assumed indifference! Her heart sang a little p忙an of thanksgiving, and all that was woman in her rose bubbling to meet the situation. In an instant she had recaptured her aplomb.
“I think I rather enjoy playing with unexploded bombs,” she returned meditatively. “There are always—possibilities—about them.”
“There are”—grimly. “And it is precisely against those possibilities that I am warning you.”
“Don’t you think it’s rather bad taste on your part to warn me against a man who is admittedly on terms of friendship with you all?”
“No, I don’t”—steadily. “Nor should I care if it were. When it’s a matter of you and your safety, the question of taste doesn’t enter into the thing at all.”
“My safety?” jeered Jean softly. (It was barely half an hour since Burke had inspired her with that sudden fear of him and of his compelling personality!)
“Well, if not your safety, at least your happiness,” amended Blaise.
“It’s very kind of you to interest yourself, but really my happiness has nothing whatever to do with Geoffrey Burke.”
“Is that true?”
He flashed the question at her, and there was that in his tone which set her pulses athrill, quenching the light-hearted spirit of banter that had led her to torment him. It was the note of restrained passion which she had heard before in his voice, and which had always power to move her to the depths of her being.
“Perfectly true.” She faltered a little. “But”—forcing herself to a defiance that was in reality a species of self-defence—“I fail to see that it concerns you, Blaise.”
“It concerns me in so far as Burke is not the sort of man that a woman can make a friend of. It’s all or nothing with him. And if you don’t intend to give him all, you’d better give him—nothing.”
His glance, grave and steady, met hers, and she knew then, of a certainty, that he had witnessed the scene which had taken place in the rose garden, when Burke had held her in his arms and the flood of his passion had risen and overwhelmed her. He had witnessed that—and had misunderstood it.
She was conscious of a fierce resentment against him. It mattered nothing to her that, in the light of her nonchalant answers to his questions, he was fully justified in the obvious conclusion he had drawn. She did not stop to think whether her anger was reasonable or unreasonable. She was simply furious with him for suspecting her of flirting—odious word!—with Geoffrey Burke. Well, if he chose to think thus of her, let him do so! She would not trouble to explain—to exculpate herself.
She regarded him with stormy eyes.
“Please understand, Blaise, that I want neither your advice nor your criticism. If I choose to make a friend of Geoffrey Burke—or of any other man—I shall do so without asking your permission or approval. What I do, or don’t do, is no business of yours.”
For a moment they faced each other, his eyes, stormy as her own, dark with anger. His hands clenched themselves.
“If I could,” he said hoarsely, “I would make it my business.”
He wheeled round and left the room without another word. Jean stood staring dazedly at the blank panels of the door which had closed behind him. She wanted to laugh... or to cry. To laugh, because with every sullen word he revealed the thing he was so sedulously intent on keeping from her. To cry, because he had taken her pretended indifference at its face value, and so another film of misunderstanding had risen to thicken the veil between them—the veil which he would not, and she, being a woman, could not, draw aside.
PROBABLY masculine obtuseness and the feminine faculty for dissimulation are together responsible for more than half the broken hearts with which the highways of life are littered.
The Recalcitrant Parent, the Other Woman—be she never so guileful—or the Other Man, as the case may be, are none of them as potent a menace to the ultimate happy issue of events as the mountain of small misunderstandings which a man and a maid in love are capable of piling up for themselves.
The man is prone to see only that which the woman intends he shall—and no self-respecting feminine thing is going to unveil the mysteries of her heart until she is very definitely assured that that is precisely what the man in the case is aching for her to do.
So she dissimulates with all the skill which Nature and a few odd thousand years or so of tradition have taught her and pretends that the Only Man in the World means rather less to her than her second-best shoe buckles. With the result that he probably goes silently and sadly away, convinced that he hasn’t an outside chance, while all the time she is simply quivering to pour out at his feet the whole treasure of her love.
In this respect Blaise and Jean blundered as egregiously as any other love-befogged pair.
Following upon their quarrel over the matter of Jean’s attitude towards Geoffrey Burke, Tormarin retreated once again into those fastnesses of aloof reserve which seemed to deny the whole memory of that “magic moment” at Montavan. And Jean, just because she was unhappy, flirted outrageously with the origin of the quarrel, finding a certain reckless enjoyment in the flavour of excitement lent to the proceedings by the fact that Burke was in deadly earnest.
Playing with an “unexploded bomb” at least sufficed to take her thoughts off other matters, and enabled her momentarily to forget everything for which forgetting seemed the only possible and sensible prescription.
But you can’t forget things by yourself. Solitude is memory’s closest friend. So Jean, heedless of consequences, encouraged Burke to help her.
Lady Anne sometimes sighed a little, as she watched the two go off together for a long morning on the river, or down to the tennis-court, accompanied, on occasion, by Claire Latimer and Nick to make up the set. But she held her peace. She was no believer in direct outside interference as a means towards the unravelment of a love tangle, and all that it was possible to do, indirectly, she had attempted when she revealed to Jean the history of Blaise’s marriage.
She did, however, make a proposal which would have the effect of breaking through the present trend of affairs and of throwing Blaise and Jean more or less continuously into each other’s company. She was worldly wise enough to give its due value to the power of propinquity, and her innocently proffered suggestion that she and her two sons and Jean should all run up to London for a week, before the season closed, was based on the knowledge of how much can be accomplished by the skilful handling of a partie carr茅e.
The suggestion was variously received. By Blaise, indifferently; by Jean, with her natural desire to know more of the great city she had glimpsed en route augmented by the knowledge that a constant round of sight-seeing and entertainment would be a further aid towards the process of forgetting; by Nick, the sun of whose existence rose and set at Charnwood, with open rebellion.
“Why go to be baked in London, madonna, when we might remain here in the comparative coolth of the country?” he murmured plaintively to his mother.
They were alone at the moment, and Lady Anne regarded him with twinkling eyes.
“Frankly, Nick, because I want Jean for my daughter-inlaw. No other reason in the world. Personally, as you know, I simply detest town during the season.”
He laughed and kissed her.
“What a Machiavelli in petticoats! I’d never have believed it of you, madonna. S’elp me, I wouldn’t!”
“Well, you may. And you’ve got to back me up, Nick. No philandering with Jean, mind! You’ll leave her severely alone and content yourself with the company of your aged parent.”
“Aged fiddlestick!” he jeered. “If it weren’t for that white hair of yours, I’d tote you round as my youngest sister. ‘And I don’t believe”—severely—“that it is white, really. I believe your maid powders it for you every morning, just because you were born in sin and know that it’s becoming.”
So it was settled that the first week of July should witness a general exodus from Staple, and meanwhile the June days slipped away, and Tormarin sedulously occupied himself in adding fresh stones to the wall which he thought fit to interpose between himself and the woman he loved. While Jean grew restless and afraid, and flung herself into every kind of amusement that offered, wearing a little fine under the combined mental and physical strain.
Claire, perceiving the nervous tension at which the girl was living, was wistfully troubled on her friend’s behalf, and confided her anxious bewilderment to Nick.
“I think Blaise must be crazy,” she declared one day. “I’m perfectly convinced that he’s in love with Jean, and yet he appears prepared to stand by while Geoffrey Burke completely monopolises her.”
Nick nodded.
“Yes. I own I can’t understand the fellow. He’ll wake up one day to find that she’s Burke’s wife.”
“Oh, I hope not!” cried Claire hastily.
They were pacing up and down one of the gravelled alleys that intersected the famous rhododendron shrubbery at Charnwood, and, as she spoke, Claire cast a half-frightened glance in the direction of the house. She knew that Sir Adrian was closeted with his lawyer, and that he was, therefore, not in the least likely to emerge from the obscurity of his study for some time to come. But as long as he was anywhere on the place, she was totally unable to rid herself of the hateful consciousness of his presence.
He reminded her of some horrible and loathsome species of spider, at times remote and motionless in the centre of his web—that web in which, body and soul, she had been inextricably caught—but always liable to wake into sudden activity, and then pounce mercilessly.
“Oh, I hope not!” she repeated, shivering a little. “If she only knew what marriage to the wrong man means!... And I’m certain Geoffrey is the wrong man. Why on earth does Blaise behave like this?”—impatiently. “Anyone might think—Jean herself might think—he didn’t care! And I’m positive he does.”
“If he does, he’s a fool. Good Lord!”—moodily kicking a pebble out of his path—“imagine any sane man, with a clear road before him, not taking it!!” He swung round towards her suddenly. “Claire, if there were only a clear road—for us! If only I could take you away from all this!” his glance embracing the grey old house, so beautiful and yet so much a prison, which just showed above the tops of the tall-growing rhododendrons.
“Oh, hush! Hush!”
Claire glanced round her affrightedly, as though the very leaves and blossoms had ears to hear and tongues to repeat.
“One never knows”—she whispered the words barely above her breath—“where he is. He might easily be hidden in one of the alleys that run parallel with this.”
“The skunk!” muttered Nick wrathfully.
“What’s that?”
Claire drew suddenly closer to him, her face blanching. A sound—the light crunching of gravel beneath a footstep—had come to her strained ears.
“Nick! Did you hear?” she breathed.
A look of keen anxiety overspread his face. For himself, he did not care; Adrian Latimer could not hurt him. But Claire—his “golden narcissus”—what might he not inflict on her as punishment if he discovered them together?
The next moment it was all he could do to repress a shout of relief. The steps had quickened, rounded the corner of the alley, and revealed—Jean.
“We’re mighty glad to see you,” remarked Nick, as she joined them. “We thought you were—the devil himself”—with a grin.
“Oh, he’s safe for half an hour yet,” Jean reassured them, “I asked Tucker”—the Latimer’s butler, who worshipped the ground Claire walked on—“and his solicitor is still with him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have risked looking for you”—smiling. “I knew Nick was over here, and Sir Adrian might have followed me.”
“You’re sure he hasn’t?” asked Claire nervously. “He is so cunning—so stealthy.”
“Even if he had, you’re doing nothing wrong,” maintained Jean stoutly.
“Everything I do is wrong—in his eyes,” returned Claire bitterly. “That’s what makes the misery of it. If I were really wicked, really unfaithful, I should feel I deserved anything I got. But it’s enough if I’m just happy for a few minutes with a friend for him to want to punish me, to—to suspect me of any evil. Sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t bear it any longer!”
She flung out her arms in a piteous gesture of abandonment. There was something infinitely touching and forlorn about her as she stood there, as though appealing against the hideous injustice of it all, and, with a little cry Jean caught her outstretched hands and drew her into her embrace, folding her closely in her warm young arms.
Nick had turned aside abruptly, his face rather white, his mouth working. His powerlessness to help the woman he loved half maddened him.
Meanwhile Jean was crooning little, inarticulate, caressing sounds above Claire’s bowed head, until at last the latter raised a rather white face from her shoulder and smiled the small, plucky smile with which she usually managed to confront outrageous fortune.
“Thank you so much,” she said with a glint of humour in her tones. “You’ve been dears, both of you. It’s awfully nice to—to let go, sometimes. But I’m quite all right again, now.”
“Then, if you are,” replied Jean cheerfully, “perhaps you can bear up against the shock of too much joy. We want you to have ‘a day out.’”
“‘A day out’?” repeated Claire. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re organising a picnic to Dartmoor, and we want to fix it so that you can come too. Didn’t you tell me that Sir Adrian was going to be away one day this week? Going away, and not returning till the next day?”
Claire nodded, her eyes dancing with excitement.
“Yes—oh, yes! He has to go up to London on business.”
“Then that’s the day we’ll choose. Heaven send it be fine!”—piously.
“Oh, how I’d love it!” exclaimed Claire. “I haven’t been on the Moor for such a long time.”
“And I’ve never been there at all,” supplemented Jean.
“Nick! Nick!” Claire turned to him excitedly. “Did you know of this plan? And why didn’t you tell me about it before?”
He looked at her, a slow smile curving his lips.
“Why, I never thought of it,” he admitted. “You see”—explanatorily—“when I’m with you, I can’t think of anything else.”
“Nick, I won’t have you making barefaced love to a married woman under my very nose,” protested Jean equably. And the shadow of tragedy that had lowered above them a few minutes earlier broke into a spray of cheery fun and banter.
“You seem very gay to-day.”
The cold, sneering tones fell suddenly across the gay exchange of jokes and laughter that ensued, and the trio looked up to see the tall, lean, black-clad figure of Sir Adrian standing at the end of the path, awaiting their approach.
To Jean, as to Claire, occurred the analogy of a malevolent spider on the watch. Even the man’s physical appearance seemed in some way to convey an unpleasant suggestion of resemblance—his long, thin, sharply-jointed arms and legs, his putty-coloured face, a livid mask lit only by a pair of snapping, venomous black eyes, half hidden between pouched lids that were hardly more than hanging folds of wrinkled akin, his long-lipped, predatory mouth with its slow, malicious smile. Jean repressed a little shudder of disgust as she responded to his sneering comment:
“We are—quite gay, Sir Adrian. It’s a fine day, for one thing, and the sun’s shining, and we’re young. What more do we want?”
“What more, indeed? Except”—bowing mockingly—“the beauty with which a good Providence has already endowed you. You are a lucky woman, Miss Peterson; your cup is full. My wife is not, perhaps”—regarding her appraisingly—“quite so beneficently dowered by Providence, so it remains for me to fill her cup up to the brim.”
He paused, and as the black, pin-point eyes beneath the flabby lids detected the slight stiffening of Claire’s slender figure, his long, thin lips widened into a sardonic smile.
“Yes, to the brim,” he repeated with satisfaction. “That’s a husband’s duty, isn’t it, Mr. Brennan?”—addressing Nick with startling suddenness.
“You should know better than I, Sir Adrian,” retorted Nick, “seeing that you have experience of matrimony, while I have none.”
“But you have hopes—aspirations, isn’t it so?” pursued Latimer suavely. There was an undercurrent of disagreeable suggestion in his tones.
Nick was acutely conscious that his keenest aspiration at the moment was to knock the creature down and jump on him.
“We must find you a wife, eh, Claire? Eh, Miss Peterson?” continued Sir Adrian, rubbing the palm of one bony hand slowly up and down over the back of the other. “I’m sure, Claire, you would like to see so—intimate—a friend as Mr. Brennan happily married, wouldn’t you?”
“I should like to see him happy,” answered Claire with tight lips.
“Just so—just so,” agreed her husband in a queer cackling tone as though inwardly amused. “Well, get him a wife, my dear. You are such friends that you should know precisely the type of woman which appeals to him.”
He nodded and turned to go, gliding away with an odd shuffling gait, and muttering to himself as he went: “Precisely the type—precisely.”
As he disappeared from view down one of the branching paths of the shrubbery, an odious little laugh, half chuckle, half snigger, came to the ears of the three listeners.
Claire’s face set itself in lines that made her look years older than her age.
“You’d better go,” she whispered unevenly. “We shan’t be able to talk any more now that he knows you are here. He’ll be hovering round—somewhere.”
Jean nodded.
“Yes, we’d better be going. Come along, Nick. And let us know, Claire”—dropping her voice—“as soon as you have found out for certain what day he goes away. You can telephone down to us, can’t you?”
“Yes. I’ll ring up when he’s out of the house some time,” she answered “Or send a message. Anyway, I’ll manage to let you know somehow. Oh!”—stretching out her arms ecstatically—“imagine a day, of utter freedom! A whole day!”
GOLD of gorse and purple of heather, a shimmering haze of heat quivering above the undulating green of the moor, and somewhere, high up in the cloud-flecked blue above, the exultant, piercingly sweet carol of a lark.
“Oh! How utterly perfect this is!” sighed Jean.
She was lying at full length on the springy turf, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows denting little cosy hollows of darkness in the close mesh of green moss.
Tormarin, equally prone, was beside her, his eyes absorbing, not the open vista of rolling moor, hummocked with jagged tors of brown-grey stone, but the sun as it rioted through a glory of red-brown hair and touched changeful gleams of gold into topaz eyes.
There was a queer little throb in Jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. It plucked at the chords of memory, and Tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled Alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!”
“Do you remember——” he began involuntarily, then checked himself.
“’M—m?” she queried. The little interrogative murmur was tantalising in its soft note of intimacy.
The Jean of the last few days—the days immediately following their quarrel—had temporarily vanished. The beauty of the Moor had taken hold of her, and all the mockery and bitter-sweetness which she had latterly reserved for Torin arm’s benefit was absent from her manner. She was just her natural sweet and wholesome self.
“’M—m? Do I remember—what?”
“I was thinking what a pagan little beauty-lover you are! You worshipped the Alps. How you are worshipping Dartmoor.”
She nodded.
“I don’t see why you should call it ‘pagan,’ though. I should say it was equally Christian. I think we were meant to love beauty. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a lot of it about. God didn’t put it around just by accident.”
“Quite probably you’re right,” agreed Blaise. “In which case you must be”—he smiled—“an excellent Christian.”
“Positively I believe they’re talking theology!”
Claire’s voice, girlishly gay and free from the nervous restraint which normally dulled its cadence of youth, broke suddenly on their ears, as she and Nick, rounding the corner of a big granite boulder, discovered the two recumbent forms.
“You disgustingly lazy people!” she pursued indignantly. “Everybody’s dashing wildly to and fro unpacking the lunch baskets, while you two are just lounging here in blissful idleness!”
“It’s chronic with me,” murmured Tormarin lazily. “And anyway, Claire, neither you nor Nick appear to be precisely overtaxing yourselves bearing nectar and ambrosia.”
“I carried some of the drinks up this confounded hill,” submitted Nick. “And damned heavy they were, too! I can’t think”—plaintively—“why people should be so thirsty at a picnic. I’m sure Baines has shoved in enough liquid refreshment to float a ship.”
“Praise be!” interpolated Blaise piously.
“Oh, we’ve done our share,” supplemented Claire. “And now we’re going to the gipsy who lives here to have our fortunes told.”
“Before lunch,” subjoined Nick, “so that in case they’re depressingly bad you can stay us with flagons afterwards.”
Jean sat up suddenly, her face alight with interest “Do you mean that there is a real gipsy who tells real fortunes?” she demanded.
“Yes—quite real. She’s supposed to be extraordinarily good,” replied Nick. “She is a lady of property, too, since she has acquired a few square yards of the Moor from the Duchy and built herself a little shanty there. She rejoices in the name of Keturah Stanley.”
“I should like to have my fortune told,” murmured Jean meditatively.
“I’ll take you,” volunteered Blaise.
There was a suddenly alert look in his face, as though he, too, would like to hear Jean’s fortune told.
“We’ll all go, then,” said Claire. “You must let Keturah tell yours as well, Blaise.”
He shook his head.
“Thanks, no,” he answered briefly. “I know my fortune quite as well as I have any wish to.”
Tormarin’s curt refusal somewhat quenched the gaiety of the moment, and rather soberly they all four made their way down the slope to where, in a little sheltered hollow at the foot of the tor, the sunlight glinted on the corrugated iron roofing of a tiny two-roomed hut, built of wood.
Outside, sitting on an inverted pail and composedly puffing away at a clay pipe, they discovered a small, shrivelled old woman, sunning herself, like a cat, in the midday warmth.
She lifted her head as they approached, revealing an immensely old, delicately-featured face, which might have been carved out of yellow ivory. It was a network of wrinkles, colourless save for the piercing black eyes that sparkled beneath arched black brows, while the fine-cut nostrils and beautifully moulded mouth spoke unmistakably of race—of the old untainted blood which in some gipsy families has run clear, unmixed and undiluted, through countless generations.
There was an odd dignity about the shrunken, still upright figure as she rose from her seat—the freedom of one whose neck has never bowed to the yoke of established custom, whose kingdom is the sun and sea and earth and air as God gave them to Adam—and when the visitors had explained their errand, and she proceeded to answer them in the soft, slurred accents of the Devon dialect, the illiterate speech seemed to convey a strange sense of unfitness.
Claire and Nick were the first to dare the oracle. The old woman beckoned to them to follow her into the cottage, while Tormarin and Jean waited outside, and when they emerged once more, both were laughing, their faces eager and half excited like the faces of children promised some indefinite treat.
“She’s given you luck, then?” asked Jean, smiling in sympathy.
The gipsy interposed quickly.
“Tezn’t for me to give nor take away the luck. But I knaw that, back o’ they gert black clouds the young lady’s so mortal feared of, the zun’s shinin’ butivul. I tell ’ee, me dear”—nodding encouragingly to Claire, while her keen old eyes narrowed to mere pin-points of light—“you’ll zee it, yourself—and afore another year’s crep’ by. ’Ess, fay! You’ll knaw then as I tolled ’ee trew.”
Then, with a gesture that summoned Jean to follow her, she disappeared once more into the interior of the hut.
Jean hesitated nervously in the doorway. For a moment she was conscious of an acute feeling of distaste for the impending interview—a dread of what this woman, whose eyes seemed the only live thing in her old, old face, might have to tell her.
“Come with me,” she appealed to Blaise. And he nodded and followed her across the threshold.
The scent of a peat fire came warm and fragrant to her nostrils as she stepped out of the sunlight into the comparative dusk of the little shanty, mingling curiously with an aroma of savoury stew which issued from a black pot hung above the fire, bubbling and chuckling as it simmered.
The gipsy, as though by force of habit, gave a stir to its contents and then, settling herself on a three-legged stool, she took dean’s hand in her wrinkled, daw-like fingers and peered at its palm in silence.
“Your way baint so plain tu zee as t’other young lady’s,” she muttered at last, in an odd, sing-song tone. “There’s life an’ death an’ fire an’ flame afore yu zee the sun shinin’ clear.... And if so be yu take the wrong turnin’, you’ll niver zee it. And there’ll be no postes to guide ’ee. Tez your awn sawl must tell ’ee how to walk through the darkness. For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
She paused, and the liquid in the black pot over the fire seethed up suddenly and filled the silence with its chuckling and gurgling, so that to Jean it seemed like the sound of some hidden malevolence chortling defiance at her.
The old woman clutched her hand a little tighter, turning the palm so that the light from the tiny window fell more directly upon it.
“There’s a castle waitin’ for ’ee, me dear,” she resumed in the same sing-song voice as before. “I can zee it so plain as plain. But yu won’t never live there wi’ the one yu luve, though you’m hopin’ tu. I see ruin and devastation all around it, and the sky so red as blid above it.”
She released Jean’s hand slowly, and her curiously bright eyes fastened upon Tormarin.
“Shall I tell the gentleman’s hand?” she asked, stretching out her withered claw to take it.
But he drew it away hurriedly.
“No, no,” he said, attempting to speak lightly. “This lady’s fortune isn’t sufficiently encouraging for me to venture.”
The gipsy’s eyes never left his face. She nodded slowly.
“That’s as may be. For tez the zaim luck and zaim ill-lack will come to yu as comes to thikke maid. There’s no ring given or taken, but you’m bound together so fast and firm as weddin’-ring could bind ’ee.”
Jean felt her face flame scarlet in the dusk of the tiny room, and she turned and made her way hastily out into the sunshine once more, thankful for the eager queries of Nick and Claire, which served to bring back to normal the rather strained atmosphere induced by the gipsy’s final comment.
As they climbed the side of the tor once more, Jean relapsed into silence. More than once, more than twice, since she had come to England, she had been vaguely conscious of some hidden menace to her happiness, and now the gipsy had suddenly given words to’ her own indefinite premonition of evil.
“For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
It was a relief to join the rest of the picnic party, who were clamouring loudly for their lunch, good-humouredly indignant with the wanderers for keeping them waiting.
“Another five minutes,” announced Burke, “and we should have begun without you. Not even Lady Anne could have kept us under restraint a moment longer.”
The party was quite a large one, augmented by a good many friends from round about the neighbourhood, and amid the riotous fun and ridiculous mishaps which almost invariably accompany an alfresco meal, Jean contrived to throw off the feeling of oppression generated by Keturah’s prophecy.
Burke, having heaped her plate with lobster mayonnaise, established himself beside her, and proceeded to catechise her about her recent experience.
“Did the lady—what’s her name, Keturah?—tell you when you were going to marry me?” he demanded in an undertone, his dare-devil eyes laughing down at her impudently.
“No, she did not. She only foresees things that are really going to happen,” retorted Jean.
“Well, that is”—composedly. “She can’t be much good at her job if she missed seeing it.”
“Well,” Jean affected to consider—“the nearest she got to it was that she saw ‘darkness coming... black darkness.’”
Under cover of the general preoccupation in lunch and conversation, Burke’s hand closed suddenly over hers.
“You little devil!” he said, half amused, half sulky. “I’ll make you pay for that.”
But out here, in the wind-swept, open spaces of the Moor, Jean felt no fear of him.
“First catch your hare——” she retaliated defiantly.
He regarded her tensely for a moment.
“I’ll take your advice,” he said briefly. Then he added: “Did you know that I’m driving you back in my cart this afternoon?”
Various cars and traps and saddle horses had brought the party together at the appointed rendezvous—a little village on the outskirts of the Moor, and Jean had driven up with Blaise in one of the Staple cars. She looked at Burke now, in astonishment.
“You certainly are not,” she replied quickly. “I shall go back as I came—in the car.”
“Quite impossible. It’s broken down. They rashly brought on the lunch hampers in it, across that God-forsaken bit of moor road—with disastrous consequences to the car’s internals. So that you and Tormarin have got to be sorted into other conveyances. And I’ve undertaken to get you home.”
Jean’s face fell a little. Throughout the drive up to the Moor Blaise had seemed less remote and more like his old self than at any time since their quarrel, and she could guess that this arrangement of Burke’s was hardly likely to conduce towards the continuance of the new peace.
“How will Blaise get home?” she asked.
“They can squeeze him into her car, Judy says. It’ll be a tight fit, but he can cling on by his eyelashes somehow.”
“I think it would be a better arrangement if you drove Blaise and I went back in the car with your sister,” suggested Jean.
“There’s certainly not room for two extra in the car. There isn’t really room for one.”
“There wouldn’t be two. You would drive Blaise.”
“Pardon me. I should do nothing of the sort.”
“Do you mean”—incredulously—“that you would refuse?”
“Oh, I should invent an armour-plated reason. A broken spring in the dog-cart or something. But I do mean that if I don’t drive you, I drive no one.”
Jean looked at him vexedly.
“Well,” she said uncertainly, “we can’t have a fuss at a picnic.”
“No,” agreed Burke. “So I’m afraid you’ll have to give in.”
Jean rather thought so, too. There didn’t seem any way out of it. She knew that Burke was perfectly capable, under cover of some supposed mishap to his trap, of throwing the whole party into confusion and difficulty, rather than relinquish his intention.
“Oh, very well,” she yielded at last, resignedly. “Have your own way, you obstinate man.”
“I intend to,” he replied coolly. “How—-and always.”