“I DON’T think I want any champagne,” said Claire smilingly, as Nick filled a glass and handed it to her. “Being utterly free like this produces much the same effect. I feel drunk, Nick—drunk with happiness. Oh, why can’t I be always free——”
She broke off abruptly in her speech, her face whitening, and stared past Nick with dilated eyes. Her lips remained parted, just as when she had ceased speaking, and the breath came between them unevenly.
Nick followed the direction of her glance. But he could see nothing to account for her suddenly stricken expression of dismay. A man in chauffeur’s livery, vaguely familiar to him, was approaching, and it was upon him that Claire’s eyes were fixed in a sick gaze of apprehension. It reminded Nick of the look of a wounded bird, incapable of flight, as it watches the approach of a hungry cat.
“What is it?” he asked quickly. “What’s the matter? For God’s sake don’t look like that, Claire!”
Slowly, with difficulty, she wrenched her eyes away from that sleek, conventional figure in the dark green livery.
“Don’t you see who it is?” she asked in a harsh, dry whisper.
Before Nick could answer, the man had made his way to Claire’s side and paused respectfully.
“Beg pardon, my lady,” he said, touching his hat, “Sir Adrian sent me to say that he’s waiting for you in the car just along the road there.” He pointed to where, on the white ribbon of road which crossed the Moor not far from the base of the tor, a stationary car was visible.
Claire, her face ashen, turned to Nick in mute appeal.
“Sir Adrian? I thought he left for London this morning?”
Nick shot the question fiercely at the chauffeur, but the man’s face remained respectfully blank.
“No, sir. Sir Adrian drove as far as Exeter and then returned. Afterwards we drove on here, sir, and they told us in the village we should find you at Shelston Tors.”
Meanwhile the other members of the party were becoming aware that some contretemps had occurred. Claire’s white, stricken face was evidence enough that something was amiss, and simultaneously Lady Anne and Jean hurried forward, filled with apprehension.
“What is it, Claire?” asked Lady Anne, suspecting bad news of some kind. “What has happened?” Recognising the Charnwood livery, she turned to the chauffeur and continued quickly: “Has Sir Adrian met with an accident?” She could conceive of no other cause for the man’s unexpected appearance.
“No, my lady. Sir Adrian is waiting in the car for her ladyship.”
“Waiting in the car?” repeated Jean and Lady Anne in chorus.
The little group of friends drew closer together.
“Don’t you see what it means?” broke out Claire in a low voice of intense anger. “It’s been all a trick—a trick! He never meant to go to London at all. He only pretended to me that he was going, so that I should think that I was free and he could trap me.” She looked at Nick and Jean significantly. “He must have overheard us—that day in the shrubbery at Charnwood—you remember?” They both nodded. “And then planned to humiliate me in front of half the county.”
“But you won’t go back with him?” exclaimed Nick hotly. He swung round and addressed the chauffeur stormily. “You can damn well tell your master that her ladyship will return this evening with the rest of the party.” The man’s face twitched. As far as it is possible for a well-drilled servant’s face to express the human emotion of compassion, his did so.
“It would be no good, sir,” he said in a low voice. “He means her ladyship to come. ‘Go and fetch her away, Langton,’ was his actual words to me. I didn’t want the job, sir, as you may guess.”
“Well, she’s not coming, that’s all,” declared Nick determinedly.
“Oh, I must, Nick—I must go,” cried Claire in distress. “I—I daren’t stay.”
Lady Anne nodded.
“Yes, I think she must go, Nick dear,” she said persuasively. “It would he—-wiser.”
“But it’s damnable!” ejaculated Nick furiously. “It’s only done to insult her—to humiliate her!”
Claire smiled a little wistfully.
“I ought to be used to that by now,” she said a trifle shakily. “Put Lady Anne is right—I must go.” She turned to the chauffeur, dismissing him with a little air of dignity that, in the circumstances, was not without its flavour of heroism. “You can go on ahead, Langton, and tell Sir Adrian that I am coming.”
The man touched his hat and moved off obediently.
“Nick and I will walk down to the car with you,” said Lady Anne. She was fully alive to the fact that her escort might contribute towards ameliorating the kind of reception Claire would obtain from her husband. “Jean dear, look after everybody for me for a few minutes, will you? And,” raising her voice a little, “explain that Claire has been called home suddenly, as Sir Adrian was not well enough to make the journey to town, after all.”
But Lady Anne’s well-meant endeavour to throw dust in the eyes of the rest of the party was of comparatively little use. Although to many of them Claire was personally an entire stranger—since Sir Adrian intervened whenever possible to prevent her from forming new friendships—the story of her unhappy married life was practically public property in the neighbourhood, and it was quite evident that to all intents and purposes the detestable husband had actually insisted on her returning with him, exactly as a naughty child might be swept off home by an irate parent in the middle of a jolly party.
It was impossible to stem the flood of gossip, and though most of it was kindly enough, and wholeheartedly sympathetic to Lady Latimer, Jean’s cheeks burned with indignation that Claire’s dignity should be thus outraged.
The remainder of the afternoon was spoilt for her, and Nick’s stormy face when he, together with Lady Anne, rejoined the rest of the party did not help to lighten her heart.
“I’m so sorry, Nick,” she whispered compassionately, when presently the opportunity of a few words alone with him occurred.
He glared at her.
“Are you?” he said shortly. “I’m not. I think I’m glad. This ends it. No woman can be expected to put up with public humiliation of that sort.”
“Nick!” There was a sharp note of fear in Jean’s voice. “Nick, what do you mean? What are you going to do?”
There was an ugly expression on the handsome boyish-looking face.
“You’ll know soon enough,” was all he vouchsafed. And swung away from her.
Jean felt troubled. She had never seen Nick before with that set, still look on his face—a kind of bitter concentration which reminded her forcibly of his brother—and she rather dreaded what it might portend.
Her thoughts were still preoccupied with the afternoon’s unpleasant episode, and with the possible consequences which might accrue, as she climbed into Burke’s high dog-cart.
She had had a fleeting notion of claiming Claire’s vacant seat for the homeward run, but had dismissed it since actually Claire’s absence merely served to provide comfortable room for Blaise in the Willow Ferry car, which had held its full complement of passengers on the outward journey. Moreover, she reflected that any change of plan, now that she had agreed to drive back with Burke, might only lead to trouble. He was not in a mood to brook being thwarted.
A big, raking chestnut, on wires to be off, danced between the shafts of the dog-cart, irritably pawing the ground and jerking her handsome, satin-skinned head up and down with a restless jingle of bit and curb-chain. She showed considerable more of the white of a wicked-looking eye than was altogether reassuring as she fought impatiently against the compulsion of the steady hand which gripped the reins and kept her, against her will, at a standstill.
The instant she felt Jean’s light foot on the step her excitement rose to fever heat. Surely this must mean that at last a start was imminent and that that firm, masterful pressure on the bit would be released!
But Burke had leaned forward to tuck the light dust-rug round Jean’s knees, and regarding this further delay as beyond bearing the chestnut created a diversion by going straight up in the air and pirouetting gaily on her hind legs.
“Steady now!”
Burke’s calm tones fell rebukingly on the quivering, sensitive ears, and down came two shining hoofs in response, as the mare condescended to resume a more normal pose. The next moment she was off at a swinging trot, breaking every now and again, out of pure exuberance of spirits, into a canter, sternly repressed by those dominating hands whose quiet mastery seemed conveyed along the reins as an electric current is carried by a wire.
“You needn’t be afraid,” remarked Burke. “She’ll settle down in a few minutes. It’s only a ‘stable ahead’ feeling she’s suffering from. There’s not an ounce of vice in her composition.”
“I’m not afraid,” replied Jean composedly.
She did not tell him why. But within herself she knew that no woman would ever be afraid with Geoffrey Burke. Afraid of him, possibly, but never afraid that he would not be entire master of any situation wherein physical strength and courage were the paramount necessities.
She reflected a little grimly to herself that it was this very forcefulness which gave the man his unquestionable power of attraction. There is always a certain fascination in sheer, ruthless strength—a savour of magnificence about it, something tentatively heroic, which appeals irresistibly to that primitive instinct somewhere hidden in the temperamental make-up of even the most ultra-twentieth-century feminine product.
And Jean was quite aware that she herself was not altogether proof against the attraction of Burke’s dynamic virility.
There was another kind of strength which appealed to her far more. She knew this, too. The still, quiet force that was Tormarin’s—deep, and unfathomable, and silent, of the spirit as well as of the body. Contrasted with the savage power she recognised in Burke, it was like the fine, tempered steel of a rapier compared with a heavy bludgeon.
“A penny for your thoughts!”
Jean came out of her reverie with a start. She smiled.
“Don’t get conceited. I was thinking about you.”
“Nice thoughts, I hope, then?” suggested Burke. “It’s better”—audaciously—“to think well of your future husband.”
The old gipsy’s words flashed into Jean’s mind: “You’m bound together so fast and firm as weddin-ring could bind ’ee,” and her face flamed scarlet.
It was true—at least as far as she was concerned—that no wedding-ring could bind her more firmly to Blaise than her own heart had already bound her.
The instinct to flirt with Burke was in abeyance. It was an instinct only born of heartache and unhappiness, and now that Blaise’s mood was so much less cool and distant than, it had been, the temptation to play with unexploded bombs had correspondingly lost much of its charm.
“Don’t be tiresome, Geoffrey,” she said vexedly. “If only you would make up your mind to be—just pals, I should think much better of you.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to think worse,” he retorted.
Just at that moment they encountered a flock of sheep, ambling leisurely along towards them and blocking up the narrow roadway, and Jean was spared the necessity of replying by the fact that Burke immediately found his hands full, manoeuvring a path for the mare between the broad, curly backs of the bleating multitude.
The drover of the flock was, of course, a hundred yards or more behind his charges, negligently occupied in relighting his pipe, so that no assistance was to be looked for in that direction, and as the sheep bumped against the mare’s legs and crowded up against the wheels of the trap in their characteristically maddening fashion, it required all Burke’s skill and dexterity to make a way through the four-footed crowd.
The chestnut’s own idea of dealing with the difficulty was to charge full speed ahead, an idea which by no means facilitated matters, and she fought her bit and fairly danced with fury as Burke checked her at almost every yard.
They had nearly reached the open road again, and Jean, looking down on the sea of woolly backs, with the hovering cloud of hoof-driven dust above them, thought she could fully appreciate the probable feelings of the Israelites as they approached the further shore of the Red Sea. And it was just at this inauspicious moment that the drover, having lit his pipe to his satisfaction, looked up and grasped the situation.
Guilty conscience not only makes cowards, but is also prolific in the creation of fools, and the drover, stung into belated action by the consciousness of previous remissness, promptly did the most foolish thing he could.
He let off a yell that tore its way through every quivering nerve in the mare’s body, and with a shout of, “Round ’em, lad!” sent his dog—a half-trained youngster—barking like a creature possessed, full tilt in pursuit of the sheep.
That settled it as far as the chestnut was concerned. With a bound she leapt forward, scattering the two or three remaining sheep that still blocked her path, and the next moment the light, high cart was rocking like a cockle-shell in a choppy sea, as she tore along, utterly out of hand.
Luckily, for a couple of miles the road ran straight as a dart, and after the first gasp of alarm Jean found herself curiously collected and able to calculate chances. At the end of the two miles, she know, there came a steep declivity—a typical Devonshire hill, like the side of a house, which the British workman had repaired in his usual crude and inefficient manner, so that loose stones and inequalities of surface added to the dangers of negotiation. At the foot of this descent was a sharp double turn—a veritable death-trap. Could Burke possibly got the mare in hand before they reached the brow of the hill? Jean doubted it.
There was no sound now in all the world except the battering of the mare’s hoofs upon the road and the screaming rush of the wind in their ears. The hedges flew past, a green, distorted blur. The strip of road fled away beneath them as though coiled up by some swift revolving cylinder; ahead, it ended sheer against a sky blue as a periwinkle, and into that blue they were rushing at thirty miles an hour. When they reached it, it would be the end. Jean could almost hear the crash that must follow, sense the sickening feeling of being flung headlong, hurled into space.... hurtling down into black nothingness.,..
Her glance sought Burke’s face. His jaw was out-thrust, and she could guess at the clenched teeth behind the lips that shut like a rat-trap. His eyes gleamed beneath the penthouse brows, drawn together so that they almost met above his fighting beak of a nose.
In an oddly detached manner she found herself reflecting on the dogged brute strength of his set face. If anyone could check that flying, foam-flecked form, rocketing along between the shafts like a red-brown streak, he could.
She wondered how long he would be able to hold the beast—to hang on? She remembered having heard that, after a time, the strain of pulling against a runaway becomes too much for human nerves and muscles, and that a man’s hands grow numb—and helpless! While the dead pull on the bit equally numbs the mouth of the horse, so that he, too, has no more any feeling to be played upon by the pressure of the hit.
Her eyes dropped to Burke’s hands. With a little inward start of astonishment she realised that he was not attempting to pull against the chestnut. He was just holding... holding... steadying her, ever so little, in her mad gallop. Jean felt the mare swerve, then swing level again, still answering faintly to the reins.
Burke’s hands were very still. She wondered vaguely why—now—he didn’t pit his strength against that of the runaway. They must have covered a mile or more. A bare half-mile was all that still lay between them and disaster.
And then, as she watched Burke’s hands, she saw them move, first one and then the other, sawing the bit against the tender corners of the mare’s mouth. Jean was conscious of a faint difference in the mad pace of her. Not enough to be accounted a check—but still something, some appreciable slackening of the whirlwind rush towards that blue blur of sky ahead.
It seemed as though Burke, too, sensed that infinitesimal yielding to the saw of the bit. For the first time, he gave a definite pull at the reins. Then he relaxed the pressure, and again there followed the same sawing motion and the fret of the steel bar against sensitive, velvet lips. Then another pull—the man’s sheer strength against the mare’s.... Jean watched, fascinated.
And gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the frenzied beat of the iron-shod hoofs became more measured as the chestnut shortened her stride. It was no longer merely the thrashing, thunderous devil’s tattoo of sheer, panic-driven speed.
Now and again Jean could hear Burke’s voice, speaking to the frightened beast, chiding and reassuring in even, unhurried tones.
She was conscious of no fear, only of an absorbing interest and excitement as to whether Burke would be able to impose his will upon the animal before they reached that precipitous hill the descent of which must infallibly spell ‘destruction’.
She sat very still, her hands locked together, watching... watching....
IT was over. A bare twenty yards from the brow of the bill the man had won, and now the mare was standing swaying between the shafts, shaking in every limb, her flanks heaving and the sweat streaming off her sodden coat in little rivulets.
Burke was beside her, patting her down and talking to her in a little intimate fashion much as though he were soothing a frightened child.
“You’re all in, aren’t you, old thing?” he murmured sympathetically. Then he glanced up at Jean, who was still sitting in the cart, feeling rather as though the end of the world had occurred and, in some surprising fashion, left her still cumbering the earth.
“She’s pretty well run herself out,” he remarked. “We shan’t have any more trouble going home”—smiling briefly. “I hope not,” answered Jean a trifle flatly.
“You all right?”
She nodded.
“Yes, thank you. You must be an excellent whip,” she added. “I thought the mare would never stop.”
Probably even Jean hardly realised the fineness of the horsemanship of which she had just been a witness—the judgment and coolness Burke had evinced in letting the mare spend the first freshness of her strength before he essayed to check her mad pace; the dexterity with which he had somehow contrived to keep her straight; and finally, the consummate skill with which, that last half-mile, he had played her mouth, rejecting the dead pull on the reins—the instinctive error of the mediocre driver—which so quickly numbs sensation and neutralises every effort to bring a runaway to a standstill.
“Yes. I rather thought our number was up,” agreed Burke absently. He was passing his hands feelingly over the mare to see if she were all right, and suddenly, with a sharp exclamation, he lifted one of her feet from the ground and examined it.
“Cast a shoe and torn her foot rather badly,” he announced. “I’m afraid we shall have to stop at the next village and get her shod. It’s not a mile further on. You and I can have tea at the inn while she’s at the blacksmith’s.”
With a final caress of the steaming chestnut neck, he came back to the side of the cart, reins in hand.
“Can you drive her with a torn foot?” queried Jean.
“Oh, yes. We’ll have to go carefully down this hill, though. There are such a confounded lot of loose stones about.”
He climbed into the dog-cart and very soon they had reached the village, where the chestnut, tired and subdued, was turned over to the blacksmith’s ministrations while Burke and Jean made their way to the inn.
Tea was brought to them upstairs in a quaint, old-fashioned parlour fragrant of bygone times. Oaken beams, black with age, supported the ceiling, and on the high chimneypiece pewter dishes gleamed like silver, while at either end an amazingly hideous spotted dog, in genuine old Staffordshire, surveyed the scene with a satisfied smirk. Through the leaded diamond panes of the window was visible a glimpse of the Moor.
“What an enchanting place!” commented Jean, as, tea over, she made a tour of inspection, pausing at last in front of the window.
Burke had been watching her as she wandered about the room, his expression moody and dissatisfied.
“It’s a famous resort for honeymooners,” he answered. “Do you think”—enquiringly—“it would be a good place in which to spend a honeymoon?”
“That depends,” replied Jean cautiously. “If the people were fond of the country, and the Moor, and so on—yes. But they might prefer something less remote from the world.”
“Would you?”
“I?”—with detachment. “I’m not contemplating a honeymoon.”
Suddenly Burke crossed the room to her side.
“We might as well settle that point now,” he said quietly. “Jean, when will you marry me?”
She looked at him indignantly.
“I’ve answered that question before. It isn’t fair of you to reopen the matter here—and now.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t fair. In fact, I’m not sure that it isn’t rather a caddish thing for me to do, seeing that you can’t get away from me just now. But all’s fair in love and war. And it’s both love and war between us two”—grimly.
“The two things don’t sound very compatible,” fenced Jean.
“It’s only war till you give in—till you promise to marry me. Then”—a smouldering light glowed in his eyes—“then I’ll show you what loves means.”
She shook her head.
“I’m afraid,” she said, attempting to speak coolly, “that it means war indefinitely then, Geoffrey. I can give you no different answer.”
“You shall!” he exclaimed violently. “I tell you, Jean, it’s useless your refusing me. I won’t take no. I want you for my wife—and, by God, I’m going to have you!”
She drew away from him a little, backing into the embrasure of the window. The look in his eyes frightened her.
“Whether I will or no?” she asked, still endeavouring to speak lightly. “My feelings in the matter don’t appear to concern you at all.”
“I’d rather you came willingly—but, if you won’t, I swear I’ll marry you, willing or unwilling!”
He was standing close to her now, staring down at her with sombre, passion-lit eyes, and instinctively she made a movement as though to elude him and slip back again into the room. In the same instant his arms went round her and she was prisoned in a grip from which she was powerless to escape.
“Don’t struggle,” he said, as she strove impotently to release herself. “I could hold you from now till doomsday without an effort.”
There was a curious thrill in his voice, the triumphant, arrogant leap of possession. He held her pressed against him, and she could feel his chest heave with his labouring breath.
“You’re mine—mine! My woman—meant for me from the beginning of the world—and do you think I’ll give you up?... Give you up? I tell you, if you were another man’s wife I’d take you away from him! You’re mine—every inch of you, body and soul. And I want you. Oh, my God, how I want you!”
“Let me go... Geoffrey...”
The words struggled from her lips. For answer his arms tightened round her, crushing her savagely, and she felt his kisses burning, scorching her face, his mouth on hers till it seemed as though he were draining her very soul.
When at last he released her, she leant helplessly against the woodwork of the window, panting and shaken. Her face was white as a magnolia petal and her eyes dark-rimmed with purple shadow.
A faint expression of compunction crossed Burke’s face.
“I suppose—I shall never be forgiven now,” he muttered roughly.
With an effort Jean forced her tongue to answer him.
“No,” she said in a voice out of which every particle of feeling seemed to have departed. “You will never be forgiven.”
A look of deviltry came into his eyes. He crossed the room and, locking the door, dropped the key into his pocket.
“I think,” he remarked coolly, “in that case, I’d better keep you a prisoner here till you have promised to marry me. It’s you I want. Your forgiveness can come after. I’ll see to that.”
The result of his action was unexpected. Jean turned to the window, unlatched it, and flung open the casement.
“If you don’t unlock that door at once, Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “I shall leave the room—this way”—with a gesture that sufficiently explained her meaning.
Her voice was very steady. Burke looked at her curiously.
“Do you mean—you’d jump out?” he asked, openly incredulous.
Her eyes answered him. They were feverishly bright, with an almost fanatical light in them, and suddenly Burke realised that she was at the end of her tether, that the emotional stress of the last quarter of an hour had taken its toll of her high-strung temperament and that she might even do what she had threatened. He had no conception of the motive behind the threat—of the imperative determination which had leaped to life within her to endure or suffer anything rather than stay locked in this room with Burke, rather than give Blaise, the man who held her heart between his two hands, ground for misunderstanding or mistrusting her anew.
Burke fitted the key into the lock of the door and turned it sulkily.
“You prim little thing! I was only teasing you,” he said. “Do you mean you’re really as frightened as all that of—what people may say? I thought you were above minding the gossip of ill-natured scandal-mongers.”
Jean grasped eagerly at the excuse. It would serve to hide the real motive of her impulsive action.
“No woman can afford to ignore scandal,” she answered quickly. “After all, a woman’s happiness depends mostly on her reputation.”
Burke’s eyes narrowed suddenly. He looked at her speculatively, as though her words had suggested a new train of thought, but he made no comment. Somewhat abstractedly he opened the door and allowed her to pass out and down the stairs. Outside the door of the inn they found the mare and dog-cart in charge of an ostler.
“The mare’s foot’s rather badly torn, sir,” volunteered the man, “but the blacksmith thinks she’ll travel all right. Far to go, sir?”
“Nine or ten miles,” responded Burke laconically.
He was curiously silent on the way home. It was as though the chain of reasoning started by Jean’s comment on the relation scandal bears to a woman’s happiness still absorbed him. His brows were knit together morosely.
Jean supposed he was probably reproaching himself for his conduct that afternoon. After all, she reflected, he was normally a man of decent instincts, and though the flood-tide of his passion had swept him into taking advantage of the circumstances which had flung them together in the solitude of the little inn, he would be the first to agree, when in a less lawless frame of mind, that his conduct had been unpardonable. Although, even from that, one could not promise that he would not be equally culpable another time!
Blaise had proved painfully correct in his estimate of the dangers attaching to unexploded bombs. Jean admitted it to herself ruefully. And she was honest enough also to admit that, with his warning ringing in her ears and with the memory of what had happened in the rose garden to illumine it, she herself was not altogether clear of blame for the incidents of the afternoon.
She had played with Burke, even encouraged him to a certain extent, allowing him to be in her company far more frequently than was altogether wise, considering the circumstance of his hot-headed love for her.
It was with somewhat of a mental start of surprise that she found herself seeking for excuses for his behaviour—actually trying to supply adequate reasons why she should overlook it!
His brooding, sulky silence as he drove along, mile after mile, was not without its appeal to the inherent femininity of her. He did not try to excuse or palliate his conduct, made no attempt to sue for forgiveness. He loved her and he had let her see it; manlike, he had taken what the opportunity offered. And she didn’t suppose he regretted it.
The faintest smile twitched the comers of her lips. Burke was not the type of man to regret an unlawful kiss or two!
She was conscious that—as usual, where he was concerned—her virtuous indignation was oozing away in the most discreditable and hopeless fashion. There was an audacious charm about the man, an attractiveness that would not be denied in the hot-headed way he went, all out, for what he wanted.
Other women, besides Jean had found it equally difficult to resist. His sheer virility, with its splendid disregard for other people’s claims and its conscienceless belief that the battle should assuredly be to the strong, earned him forgiveness where, for misdeeds not half so flagrant, a less imperious sinner would have been promptly shown the door.
But no woman—not even the women to whom he had made love without the excuse of loving—had ever shown Burke the door or given him the kind of treatment which he had thoroughly well merited twenty times over. And Jean was no exception to the rule.
At least he had some genuine claim on her forgiveness—the claim of a love which had swept through his very bung like a flame, the fierce passion of a man to whom love means adoration, worship—above all, possession.
And what woman can ever long remain righteously angry with a man who loves her—and whose very offence is the outcome of the overmastering quality of that love? Very few, and certainly none who was so very much a woman, so essentially feminine as Jean.
It was in a very small voice, which she endeavoured to make airily detached, that she at last broke the silence which had reigned for the last six miles or so.
“I suppose I shall have to forgive you—more or less. One can’t exactly quarrel with one’s next door neighbour.” Burke smiled grimly.
“Can’t one?”
“Well, there’s Judith to be considered.”
“A rather curious expression came into her eyes.
“Yes,” he agreed. “There’s Judith to be considered.” There was a hint of irony in the dry tones.
“It would complicate matters if I were not on speaking terms with her brother,” pursued Jean.
She waited for his answer, but none came. The threatened possibility contained in her speech appeared to have fallen on deaf ears, and the silence seemed likely to continue indefinitely.
Jean prompted him gently.
“You might, at least, say you are sorry for—for——”
“For kissing you?”—swiftly.
“Yes”—flushing a little.
“But I’m not. Kissing you”—with deliberation—“is One of the things I shall never regret. When I come to make my peace with Heaven and repent in sackcloth and ashes for my sins of omission and commission, I shan’t include this afternoon in the list, I assure you. It was worth it—if I pay for it afterwards in hell.”
He was silent for a moment. Then:
“But I’ll promise you one thing. I’ll never kiss you again till you give me your lips yourself.”
Jean smiled at the characteristic speech. She supposed this was as near an apology as Burke would ever get.
“That’s all right, then,” she replied composedly. “Because I shall never do that.”
He flicked the chestnut lightly with the whip.
“I think you will,” he said. “I think”—he looked at her somewhat enigmatically—“that you will give me everything I want—some day.”
THROUGHOUT the day following that of the expedition to Dartmoor, Nick seemed determined to keep out of Jean’s way. It was as though he feared she might force some confidence from him that he was loth to give, and, in consequence, deliberately avoided being alone with her.
On the second day, however, as luck would have it, she encountered him in the corridor just outside her own sitting-room. He was striding blindly along, obviously not heeding where he was going, and had almost collided with her before he realised that she was there.
He jerked himself backwards.
“I beg your pardon,” he muttered, still without looking at her, and made as though to pass on.
Jean checked him with a hand on his sleeve. She had not watched the dogged sullenness of his face throughout yesterday to no purpose, and now, as her swift gaze searched it anew, she felt convinced that something fresh had occurred to stir him. It was impossible for Jean to see a friend in trouble without wanting to “stand by.”
“Nick, old thing, what’s wrong?” she asked.
He stared at her unseeingly. “Wrong?” he muttered. “Wrong?”
“Yes. Come in here and let’s talk it out—whatever it is.” With gentle insistence she drew him into her sitting-room. “How,” she said, when she had established him in an easy-chair by the open window and herself in another, “what’s gone wrong? Are you still boiling over about that trick Sir Adrian played on Claire the day of the picnic?”
She spoke lightly—more lightly than the occasion warranted—of set purpose, hoping to reduce the tension under which Nick was obviously labouring. His face hurt her. The familiar lazy insouciance which was half its charm was blotted out of it by some heavy cloud of tragic significance. He looked as though he had not slept for days, and his eyes, the gaiety burnt out of them by pain, seemed sunken in his head.
He stared at her blankly for a moment. Then he seemed to awaken to the meaning of her question.
“No,” he said slowly. “No. The boiling over part is done with—finished.... I’m going to take her away from him.”
He spoke with a curious precision. It frightened Jean far more than any impetuous outburst of anger could have done. She made no answer for a moment, but her mind worked rapidly. She did not doubt the absolute sincerity of his intention. This was no mere reckless boast of an angry lover, but the sane, considered aim and object of a man who has come, by way of some long agony of thwarting, to a set determination.
“Do you mean that, Nick?” she asked at last, to gain time.
“Do I mean it?” he laughed. Then his hands gripped the arms of the chair and he leaned forward. “I saw her—last evening after dinner.... Her shoulder was black.”
A sharp cry broke from Jean’s lips.
“Not—not—he hadn’t——”
Nick nodded.
“He had struck her. There was one of the usual scenes when they got back from the Moor—and he struck her.... It’s the first time he has ever actually laid hands on her. It’s going to be the last”—grimly.
Jean was silent. Her whole soul was in revolt against the half-mad, drug-ridden creature who was making of Claire’s life a devil martyrdom; the instinct to protect her, to succour her in some way, asserting itself with almost passionate force. And yet—— She knew that Nick’s way was not the right way.
“Yes, it must be the last time,” she agreed. “But—but, Nick, your plan won’t do, you know.”
Nick stiffened.
“Think not?” he said curtly. “Can you suggest a better?” Then, as Jean remained miserably silent: “Nor can I. And one thing I swear—I won’t leave the woman I love in the hands of a man who is practically a maniac, to be tortured day after day, mentally and physically, just whenever he feels like it.”
It struck Jean as curious that Nick had been able, more or less, to keep himself in hand whilst Sir Adrian inflicted upon Claire whatever of mental and spiritual torture seemed good in his distorted vision. It was the fact that he had hurt her physically, laid his hand upon her in actual violence, which had scattered Nick’s self-control to the four winds of heaven. To Jean herself, it seemed conceivable that the mental anguish of Claire’s married life had probably far outstripped any mere bodily pain. Half tentatively she gave expression to her thoughts.
Nick sprang to his feet.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “If you were a man, you’d understand! I see red when I think of that damned brute striking the woman I love. It—it was sacrilege!”
“And won’t it be—another kind of sacrilege—if you take her away with you, Nick?” asked Jean very quietly.
He flushed dully.
“He’ll divorce her, and then we shall marry,” he answered.
“Even so”—steadily—“it would be doing evil that good may come.”
“Then we’ll do it”—savagely. “It’s easy enough for you to sit there moralising, perfectly placid and comfortable. Claire and I have borne all we can. It has been bad enough to care as we care for each other, and to live apart But when it means that Claire is to suffer unspeakable misery and humiliation while I stand by and look on—why, it’s beyond human endurance. You’re not tempted. You’ve no conception what you’re talking about.”
Jean sat very still and silent while Nick stormed out the bitterness of soul, recognising the truth of every word he littered—even of the gibes which, in the heedlessness of his own pain, he flung at herself.
Presently she got up and moved rather slowly across to his side.
“Nick,” she said, and her eyes, looking into his, were very bright and clear and steady. Somehow for Nick they held the semblance of two flames, torches of pure light, burning unflickeringly in the darkness. “Nick, every word you say is true. I’m not tempted as you and Claire have been, and so it seems sheer cheek my interfering. But I’m only asking you to do what I pray I’d be strong enough to do myself in like circumstances. I don’t believe any true happiness can ever come of running away from duty. And if ever I’m up against such a thing—a choice like this—I hope to God I’d be able to hang on... to run straight, even if it half killed me to do it.”
The quick, impassioned utterance ceased, and half shrinkingly Jean realised that she had spoken out of the very depths of her soul, crystallising in so many words the uttermost ideal and credo of her being. In some strange, indefinable fashion it was borne in on her that she had reached an epoch of her life. It was as when a musician, arrived at the end of a musical period, strikes a chord which holds the keynote of the ensuing passage.
She faltered and looked at Nick beseechingly, suddenly self-conscious, as we most of us are when we find we have laid bare a bit of our inmost soul to the possibly mocking eyes of a fellow human being.
But Nick’s eyes were not in the least mocking.
Instead of that, some of the hardness seemed to have gone out of them, and his voice was very gentle, as, taking Jean’s two hands in his, he answered:
“I believe you would run straight, little Jean—even if it meant tearing your heart out of your body to do it. But, you know, you’re always on the side of the angels—instinctively. I’m only a man—just an average earthy man”—smiling ruefully—“and my ideals all tumble down and sit on the ground in a heap when I think of what my girl’s enduring as Latimer’s wife. I believe I might stick my part of the business—but I can’t stick it for her.”
“And yet,” urged Jean, “if you go away together, Nick, it’s she who’ll pay, you know. The woman always does. Supposing—supposing Sir Adrian doesn’t divorce her—refuses to? It would be just like him to punish her that way. What about Claire—then?”
“He would divorce her,” protested Nick harshly.
Jean shook her head.
“I don’t think so. Honestly, I believe he would get undiluted satisfaction out of the fact that, as long as he lived, he could stand between Claire and everything that a normal woman wants—home, and a sheltered life, and the knowledge that no one can ‘say things’ about her. Oh, Nick, Nick! Between you—you and Sir Adrian—you’d make an outcast of Claire, make her life a worse hell with you than it is without you.” She paused, then went on more quietly: “Have you said anything to her about this—told her what you want her to do?”
“No, not yet—not definitely.”
Jean breathed a quick sigh of relief.
“Then don’t! Promise me you won’t, Nick?”
“She might refuse, after all,” he suggested, evading a direct answer.
“Refuse! You know her better than that. If you wanted Claire to make a burnt-offering of herself for your benefit to-morrow, you know she’d do it! And—and”—laughing a little hysterically—“pretend, too, that she enjoyed the process of being grilled! No, Nick, it’s up to you to—to just go on helping to make her life bearable, as you have done for the last two years.”
“It’s asking too much of me, Jean.”
Nick spoke a little thickly. He was up against one of man’s most primitive instincts—the instinct to protect and comfort and cherish the woman he loved.
“I know. It’s asking everything of you.”
Jean waited. She felt that she had gained a certain amount of ground—that Nick’s resolution had weakened a little in response to her pleading, but she feared to drive him too far. She fancied she could hear steps crossing the hall below. If someone should come upstairs and disturb them now, while things were still trembling in the balance——
“See, Nick,” she began to speak again hurriedly. “You believe I’m your pal—yours and Claire’s?”
“I know it,” he replied quietly.
“And—and you do care a bit about me?”—smiling a little.
“You’re the third woman in my world, Jean. After Claire and my mother.”
“Then, to please me—for nothing else in the world, if you like, but because I ask it—will you let things stay as they are for a few weeks longer? Just that little while, Nick? We’re going to London next week. That’ll make a break—bring us all back to a calmer, more everyday outlook on things. Will you wait? Sir Adrian may never strike Claire again. And it wouldn’t be fair—just now, at a time when she is feeling horribly bitter and humiliated from that—that insult—to ask her to go away with you. Give her a fair chance to decide a big question like that when things are at their normal level—not when they are worse than usual. To ask her now would be to take advantage of the feeling she must have, just at this moment, that her life is unbearable. It wouldn’t be playing the game.”
He made no answer, and Jean waited with increasing trepidation. She was sure now that she could hear footsteps. Someone had mounted the stairs and was coming along the corridor towards her room.
“Nick!” The low, agitated whisper burst from her as the steps halted outside the door. “Promise me!”
It seemed an eternity before he answered.
“Very well. I promise. You’ve won for the moment—‘Saint Jean’!”
He smiled at her, rather sadly. Before she could reply, Blaise’s voice sounded outside the door, asking if he might come in, and with a feeling of intense relief that the battle was won for the moment, Jean gave the required permission. As his brother entered the room, Nick quitted it, brushing past him abruptly.
Tormarin’s eyes questioned Jean’s;
“We have been discussing Sir Adrian,” she explained, as the door closed behind Nick. “And—and Claire.”
He nodded comprehendingly.
“Poor old Nick!” he said. “It’s damned rough on him. Latimer ought to be carefully and quickly chloroformed out of the way. He’s as much a menace to society as a mad dog.”
Jean sighed.
“I’m afraid they’re very unhappy—Nick and Claire.”
“I wonder Claire doesn’t chuck her husband,” said Blaise. “And take whatever of happiness she can get out of the world.”
Jean shook her head.
“You know you don’t mean that. You don’t really believe in snatching happiness—at all costs.”
“I’d let precious little stand in the way. If I were Nick I think I should do it.”
“But being you?”
Jean did not know what unaccountable impulse induced her to give a personal and individual twist to what had been developing almost into an academic discussion. Perhaps it was the familiar, unsatisfied longing to hear Blaise himself define the thing which kept them apart—even though, since Lady Anne’s disclosure, she could guess only too well what it was. Or perhaps it was the faint, tormenting hope that one day his determination would weaken and his love sweep away all barriers.
He looked at her contemplatively.
“Sometimes the past makes claims upon a man which forbid him to snatch at happiness. I don’t believe in any man’s shirking his just punishment for the evil he has done. What he has brought on himself, that he must bear. But Nick and Claire have had no part in bringing about their own tragedy. They are just the sport of chance—of an ill fate. They are morally free to take their happiness in a way in which I shall never be free to take mine, as long as I live.” He regarded her steadily. “There are certain things for which I have proved myself unfitted—with which it is evident I am not to be trusted. And one of those is the safeguarding of any woman’s happiness.”
Jean felt her throat contract. It would always be the same, then! The long tentacles of the past would reach out eternally into the future. The woman who had been his wife—the woman who had destroyed herself, and, in so doing, hanged a millstone of remorse about his neck—would stand forever at the gateway of the garden of happiness, her dead lips silently denying him—and, with him, the woman who loved him—the right to enter.
With an effort Jean answered that part of his speech which had reference only to Claire and Nick.
“There are other ways, though, in which they have no moral right. I grant that Claire was persuaded, almost driven into marrying Sir Adrian by her parents, but, after all, we each have our individual free will. She could have refused to obey them. Or, if she felt there were reasons why she must marry him—the material advantage to her parents, and so on, why, she ought to have reckoned the cost I don’t mean to be hard, Blaise————-” She broke off wistfully.
“You—hard!” He laughed a little, as though amused.
“Only—only one must try to be fair all round—to look at things straight.”
She leaned her chin on her palm and her eyes grew thoughtful.
“I don’t know, but it seems to me that we weren’t meant to run away from things—hard things. If a man and a woman marry, they must accept their responsibilities—not evade them.”
So absorbed was she in her trend of thought that she never realised how directly this speech must strike at Blaise himself. His face changed slightly.
“You’re right, of course,” he said abruptly. “You—generally are. And if all women were like you, it would be easy enough.”
His eyes dwelt with a curious intentness on the pure outline of her face; on the parted, tenderly curved lips, and the golden eyes with their momentary touch of the idealist and the dreamer.
It seemed as if the quiet intensity of his regard drew her, for slowly she turned her head and met his gaze, flushing suddenly and faltering under it. The consciousness of him, of his nearness, swept her from head to foot, and it seemed to her as though now, in this moment, they were in closer touch, nearer understanding, than they had ever been.
The dreamer and idealist vanished and it was all at once just sheer woman, passionate and wistful and tremulous, and infinitely alluring, that looked at him out of the golden eyes.
With a stifled exclamation he caught her hands in his.
“Beloved——”
And the whole of a man’s forbidden, thwarted love vibrated in the word as he spoke it.
Then he bent his head, and for a moment his lips were against her soft palms....
She stood very still and quiet when he had gone, realising in every quivering nerve of her that whatsoever the future might bring—even though Blaise might choose to shut himself away from her again as in the past and the dividing wall between them rise as high as heaven—she knew now, without any shadow of doubt or questioning, that he loved her.
In the burning utterance of a single word, in the pressure of passionate, renouncing lips, the assurance had been given, and nothing could ever take it away again.
She spread out her hands, palms upward, and looked at them curiously.
“H AVE you been very bored, Nick?”
The week in London had nearly run its course, and Lady Anne’s eyes begged charmingly for a negative. Nick accorded it with a smile.
“I’m never bored with you, madonna; you know that,” he said. “And hotel life is always more or less amusing. One comes across such queer types. There’s one here this evening has been intriguing me enormously. At a little table by herself—do you see her? A tall, rather gorgeous-looking being—kind of cross between the Queen of Sheba and Lucretia Borgia.”
Lady Anne threw a veiled glance in the direction indicated.
“Yes, she’s a very handsome woman, obviously not English.” Her eyes travelled onwards towards the door. “I wish Blaise and Jean would hurry up,” she added impatiently. “They’re taking an unconscionable time to dress.”
The two latter had come in late from a sight-seeing expedition undertaken on Jean’s behalf, and had only returned to the hotel just as Lady Anne and Nick were preparing to make their way in to dinner.
“For such a deliberate matchmaker, you’re a lot too impatient, madonna,” commented Nick teasingly. “That they should have stayed out together until the very last moment ought to have pleased you immensely.”
Lady Anne made a small grimace.
“So it does—theoretically. Only from a practical and purely material point of view, everything else sinks into insignificance beside the fact that I am literally starving. Oh!”—joyfully catching sight of Jean and Tormarin making their way up the room—“Here they are at last! Collect our waiter, Nick, and let’s begin.”
Neither of the late-comers appeared in the least embarrassed by the tardiness of their arrival, said they responded to tentative enquiries concerning their afternoon’s amusement with a disappointing lack of self-consciousness.
Lady Anne experienced an inward qualm of misgiving. There seemed too calm and tranquil a camaraderie between the two to please her altogether. It was as though the last few days had brought about a silent understanding between them—a wordless compact.
She picked up the menu and assumed an absorption in its contents which she was far from feeling.
“What are we all going to eat?” she asked. “I think we must hurry a little, or we shall be late for the play. Then I shall lose the exquisite thrill of seeing the curtain go up.” Tormarin looked entertained.
“Does it still thrill you, you absurdly youthful person?”
“Of course it does. I always consider that the quality of the thrill produced by the rise of the curtain is the measure of one’s capacity for enjoyment. When it no longer thrills me, I shall know that I am getting old and bored, and that I only go to the theatre to kill time and because everyone else goes.”
Dinner proceeded leisurely in spite of Lady Anne’s admonition that they should hurry, and presently Nick, who had glanced across the room once or twice as though secretly amused, remarked confidentially:
“My Lucretia Borgia lady is taking a quite uncommon interest in someone of our party. I’m afraid I can’t flatter myself that she’s lost her heart to me, as I’ve only observed this development since Jean and Blaise joined us. Blaise, I believe it’s you who have won her devoted—if, probably, somewhat violent—affections.”
“Your Lucretia Borgia lady? Which is she?” enquired Jean.
“You can’t see her, because you are sitting with your back to her,” replied Nick importantly. “And it isn’t manners to screw your head round in a public restaurant—even although the modern reincarnation of an unpleasantly vengeful lady may be sitting just behind you. But if you’ll look into that glass opposite you—a little to the right side of it—you’ll see who I mean. She’s quite unmistakable.”
Jean tilted her head a little and peered slantwise into the mirror which faced her. It was precisely at the same moment that Nick’s “Lucretia Borgia lady” looked up for the second time from her p锚che Melba, and Jean found herself gazing straight into the dense darkness of the eyes of Madame de Varigny.
“Why—why————” she stammered in astonishment. “It is the Comtesse de Varigny!” She turned to Lady Anne, adding explanatorily: “You remember, madonna, I told you about her? She chaperoned me at Montavan, after Glyn had departed.”
The recognition had been mutual. Madame de Varigny had half-risen from her seat and was poised in an attitude of expectancy, smiling and gesturing with expressive hands an invitation to Jean to join her.
“I’ll go across and speak to her,” said Jean. “I can’t imagine what she is doing in London.”
“I suppose you, too, met this rather splendid-looking personage at Montavan?” enquired Nick of his brother, as Jean quitted the table.
Tormarin shook his head.
“I never spoke to her. I saw her once, on the night of a fancy-dress ball at the hotel, arrayed as Cleopatra.”
“She’d look the part all right,” commented Nick. “She gives me the impression of being one of those angel-and-devil-mixed kind of women—the latter flavour preponderating. I should rather feel the desirability of emulating Agag in any dealings I had with her. Good Lord!”—with a lively accession of interest—“Jean’s bringing her over here. By Jove! She really is a beautiful person, isn’t she. Like a sort of Eastern empress.”
“Madame de Varigny wishes to be presented to you, Lady Anne,” said Jean, and proceeded to effect introductions all round.
“I remember seeing you with Mees Peterson at Montavan,” remarked the Countess, as she shook hands with Blaise, her dark eyes resting on him curiously.
“Join us and finish your dinner at our table,” suggested Lady Anne hospitably.
But Madame de Varigny protested volubly that she had already finished her meal, though she would sit and talk with them a little if it was agreeable? It was—quite agreeable. She herself saw to that. No one could be more charming than she when she chose, and on this occasion she elected to make herself about as altogether charming as it is possible for a woman to be, entirely conquering the hearts of Lady Anne and Kick. Her simple, childlike warm-heartedness of manner was in such almost ludicrous contrast to her majestic, dark-browed type of beauty that it took them completely by storm.
“This is only just a flying visit that I pay to England,” she explained artlessly. “It is a great good fortune that I should have chanced to encounter ma ch猫re Mees Peterson.”
“It’s certainly an odd chance brought you to the same hotel,” agreed Kick. .
“Is it not?”—delightedly.
And, from the frank wonder and satisfaction she evinced at the coincidence, no one could possibly have surmised that the sole cause and origin of her “flying visit” was a short paragraph contained in the Morning Post, a copy of which, by her express order, had been delivered daily at Chateau Varigny ever since her return thither from the Swiss Alps. The paragraph referred simply to the arrival at Claridge’s of Lady Anne Brennan, accompanied by her two sons and Miss Jean Peterson.
“And are you making a long stay in London?” enquired Madame de Varigny.
Lady Anne shook her head.
“No. We go back to Staple to-morrow.”
The other’s face fell.
“But how unfortunate! I shall then see nothing of my dear Mees Peterson.”
She seemed so distressed that Lady Anne’s kind heart melted within her, albeit it accorded ill with her plans to increase the number of her party.
“We are going on to the theatre,” she said impulsively. “If you have no other engagement, why not come with us? There will be plenty of room in our box.”
Madame de Varigny professed herself enchanted. Curiously enough, she seemed to have no particular wish to draw Jean into anything in the nature of a private talk, but appeared quite content just to take part in the general conversation, while her eyes rested speculatively now upon Jean, now upon Tormarin, as though they afforded her an abstract interest of some kind.
Even at the theatre, where from her corner seat she was able to envisage the other occupants of the box, she seemed almost as much interested in them as in the play that was being performed on the stage. Once, as Tormarin leaned forward and made some comment to Jean, their two pairs of eyes meeting in a look of mutual understanding of some small joke or other, the quiet watcher smiled contentedly, as though the little byplay satisfied some inner questioning.
With the fall of the curtain at the end of the first act, she turned to Lady Anne, politely enthusiastic.
“But it is a charming play,” she said. “It is no wonder the house is so full.”
Her glance strayed carelessly over the body of the auditorium, then was suddenly caught and held. A minute later she touched Jean’s arm.
“I think there is someone in the stalls trying to attract your attention,” she observed quietly.
Even as she spoke, Nick, too, became aware of the same fact.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed. “There’s Geoffrey Burke down below. I didn’t know he was in town.”
Madame de Varigny found the effect upon her companions of this apparently innocent announcement distinctly interesting. It was as though a thrill of disconcerting consciousness ran through the other occupants of the box. Jean flushed suddenly and uncomfortably, and the dark, keen eyes that were watching from behind the fringe of dusky lashes noted an almost imperceptible change of expression flit across the faces of both Lady Anne and Tormarin. In neither case was the change altogether indicative of pleasure. Then, following quickly upon a bow of mutual recognition, the music of the orchestra suddenly ceased and the curtain went up for the second act.
Once more the curtain had fallen, and, to the hum of conversation suddenly released, the lights flashed up into being again over the auditorium. Simultaneously the door of Lady Anne’s box was opened from the corridor outside.
“May I come in?” said a voice—a pleasant voice with a gay inflection of laughter running through it as though its owner were quite sure of his welcome—and Burke, big and striking-looking in his immaculate evening kit, his ruddy hair flaming wickedly under the electric lights, strolled into the box.
He shook hands all round, his glance slightly quizzical as it met Jean’s, and then Lady Anne presented him to the Comtesse de Varigny.
It almost seemed as though something, some mutual recognition of a kindred spirit, flashed from the warm southern-dark eyes to the fiery red-brown ones, and when, a minute or two later, Burke established himself in the seat next Jean, vacated by Nick, he murmured in a low tone:
“Where did you find that Eastern-looking charmer? I feel convinced I could lose my heart to her without any effort.”
Jean could hardly refrain from smiling. This was her first meeting with Burke since the occasion of the scene which had occurred between them in the little parlour at the “honeymooners’ inn,” and now he met her with as much composure and arrogant assurance as though nothing in the world, other than of a mutually pleasing and amicable nature, had taken place. It was so exactly like Burke, she reflected helplessly.
“Then you had better go and make love to her,” she suggested. “There happens to be a husband in the background—a little hypochondriac with quite charming manners—but I don’t suppose you would consider that any obstacle.”
“None,” retorted Burke placidly. “I’m quite certain she can’t be in love with him. Her taste would be more—robust, I should say. Where is she stopping?”
“At Claridge’s. We met her there this evening. I knew her in Switzerland.”
“Well, you shall all come out to supper with me to-morrow:—-the Countess included.”
Jean shook her head demurely.
“We shall all be back at Staple to-morrow—the Countess excepted. You can take her.”
“Then the supper must be to-night,” replied Burke serenely.
“What are you doing in town, anyway?” asked Jean. “Is Judith with you?”
“No. Came up to see my tailor”—laconically.
He crossed the box to arrange matters with Lady Anne, and before the curtain rose on the last act it was settled that they should all have supper together after the play.
Later, when Burke had once more resumed his seat next
Jean, Madame de Varigny, whose hearing, like her other senses, was preternaturally acute, caught a whispered plaint breathed into Nick’s ear by Lady Anne.
“Now isn’t that provoking, Nick, darling? Why on earth need Geoffrey Burke have turned up in town on our last evening? I was hoping, later on—if you and I were very discreet and effaced ourselves—that Blaise and Jean might settle things.”
Madame de Varigny’s eyes remained fixed upon the stage. There was no change in their expression to indicate that Lady Anne’s plaintive murmur had at that moment supplied her with the key of the whole situation as it lay between Jean and the two men who were sitting one each side of her.
But the following evening, when, the Staple party having left town, she and Burke were dining alone together at a little restaurant in Soho, the knowledge she had gleaned bore fruit.
Burke never quite knew what impulse it was that had prompted him, as he made his farewells after the supper-party, to murmur in Madame de Varigny’s ear, “Dine with me to-morrow night.” It was as though the dark, mysterious eyes had spoken to him, compelling him to some sort of friendly overture which the shortness of his acquaintance with their owner would not normally have inspired.
It was not until the coffee and cigarette stage of the little dinner had been reached that Madame de Varigny suddenly shot her dart.
“So you come all the way up from this place, Coombe—Coombe Eavie?—to see Mees Peterson, and hey, presto! She vanish the next morning!”
Burke stared at her almost rudely. The woman’s perspicacity annoyed him.
“I came up to see my tailor,” he replied curtly.
“Mais parfaitement!” she laughed—low, melodious laughter, tinged with a frank friendliness of amusement which somehow smoothed away Burke’s annoyance at her shrewd summing up of the situation. “To see your tailor. Naturellement! But you were not sorry to encounter Mees Peterson also, hein? You enjoyed that?”
Burke’s eyes gleamed at her.
“Do you think a dog enjoys looking at the bone that’s out of reach?” he said bluntly.
“And is Mees Peterson, then, out of your reach? Me, I do not think so.”
Burke was moved to sudden candour.
“She might not be, if it were not that there is another man——”
“Ce Monsieur Tor-ma-rin?”
“Yes, confound him!”
“We-ell”—with a long-drawn inflection compact of gentle irony. “You should be able to win against this Monsieur Tor-ma-rin. I think”—regarding him intently—“I think you will win.”
Burke shook his head gloomily.
“He had first innings. He met her abroad somewhere—rescued her in the snow or something. That rescuing stunt always pays with a woman. All I did”—with a short, harsh laugh—“was nearly to break her neck for her out driving one day recently!”
“Is she engaged to Monsieur Tormarin?” asked Madame do Varigny quickly.
“No. Luckily, there’s some old affair in the past holds him back.”
She nodded.
“You shall marry her,” she declared with conviction. “See, Monsieur Bewrke—a茂e, a茂e, quel nom! I am clairvoyante, proph茅tesse, and I tell you that you weel marry zis leetle brown Jean.”
Her foreign accent strengthened with her increasing emphasis.
Burke looked dubious.
“I’m afraid your clairvoyance will fail this journey madame. She’ll probably marry Tormarin—unless”—his eyes glinting—“I carry her off by force.”
Madame de Varigny shook her head emphatically.
“But no! I do not see it like that. Eh bien! If she become fianc茅e—engaged to him—you shall come to me, and I will tell you how to make sure that she shall not marry him.”
“Tell me now!”
“Non, non! Win her your own way. Only, if you do not succeed, if Monsieur Tormarin wins her—why, then, come to visit me at Ch芒teau Varigny.”
That night a letter written in the Comtesse de Varigny’s flowing foreign handwriting sped on its way to France.
“Matters work towards completion,” it ran. “My visit here has chanced bien 脿 propos. There is another would-be-lover besides Blaise Tormarin. I have urged him on to win her if he can, for if I have not wrongly estimated Monsieur Tormarin—and I do not think I have—he is of the type to become more deeply in love and less able to master his feelings if he realises that he has a rival. At present he refrains from declaring himself. The opposition of a rival will probably drive him into a declaration very speedily. When the dog sees the bone about to be taken from him—he snaps! So I encourage this red-headed lion of a man, Monsieur Burke, to pursue his affaire du cour with vigour. For if Blaise Tormarin becomes actually betrothed to Mademoiselle Peterson, it will make his punishment the more complete. I pray the God of Justice that it may not now; be long delayed!”
THE visit to London, if it had not been prolific in the results which Lady Anne had hoped for, had at least accomplished certain things.
It had acted as a brake upon the swiftly turning wheels of two lives precariously poised at the top of that steep hill of which no traveller can see the end, but which very surely leads to heartbreak and disaster, and had sufficed, as Jean had suggested that it might, to restore Nick to a more normal and temperate state of mind.
He and Claire had passed a long hour alone together the day after his return to Staple, and now that the first violent reaction, the first instinctive impulse of unbearable revolt from Sir Adrian’s spying and brutality had spent itself they had agreed to shoulder once more the burden fate had laid upon them, to fight on again, just holding fast to the simple knowledge of their love for one another and leaving the ultimate issue to that great, unfathomable Player who “hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,” not with the shadowed vision of our finite eyes but with the insight of eternity.
Jean had seen them coming hand in hand through the cool green glades of the wood where the great decision had been taken, and something in the two young, stern-set faces brought a sudden lump into her throat. She turned swiftly aside, avoiding a meeting, feeling as though here was holy ground upon which not even so close a friend as she could tread without violation.
To Jean herself the week in London had brought a certain, new tranquillity of spirit. Quite ordinarily and without effort—thanks to Lady Anne’s skilful stage-management—she and Blaise had been constantly in each other’s company, and, with the word “Beloved” murmuring in her heart like some tender undertone of melody, the hours they had shared together were no longer a mingled ecstacy and pain, marred by torturing doubts and fears, but held once more the old magic of that wonder-day at Montavan.
Somehow, the dividing line did not seem to matter very much, now that she was sure that Blaise, on his side of it, was loving her just as she, on hers, loved him. Indeed, at this stage Jean made no very great demands on life. After the agony of uncertainty of the last few months, the calm surety that Blaise loved her seemed happiness enough.
Other sharp edges of existence, too, had smoothed themselves down—as sharp edges have a knack of doing if you wait long enough. Burke seemed to have accepted her last answer as final, and now spared her the effort of contending further with his tempestuous love-making, so that she felt able to continue her friendship with Judith, and her consequent visits to Willow Ferry, with as little g锚ne as though the episode at the “honeymooners’ inn” had never taken place. She even began to believe that Burke was genuinely slightly remorseful for his behaviour on that particular occasion.
Apparently he had not made a confidant of his sister over the matter, for it was without the least indication of a back thought of any kind that she approached Jean on the subject of spending a few days with herself and Geoffrey at their bungalow on the Moor.
“Geoff and I are going for a week’s blow on Dartmoor, just by way of a ‘pick-me-up.’ Come with us, Jean; it will do you good after stuffy old London—blow the cobwebs away!”
But here, at least, Jean felt that discretion was the better part of valour. It was true that Burke appeared fairly amenable to reason just at present, but in the informal companionship of daily life in a moorland bungalow it was more than probable that he would become less manageable. And she had no desire for a repetition of that scene in the inn parlour.
Therefore, although the Moor, with its great stretches of gold and purple, its fragrant, heatherly breath and its enfolding silences, appealed to her in a way in which nothing else on earth seemed quite to appeal, pulling at her heartstrings almost as the nostalgia for home and country pulls at the heartstrings of a wanderer, she returned a regretful negative to Judith’s invitation. So Burke and Mrs. Craig packed up and departed to Three Fir Bungalow without her, and life at Staple resumed the even tenor of its way.
The weather was glorious, the long, hot summer days melting into balmy nights when the hills and dales amid which the old house was set were bathed in moonlight mystery—transmuted into a wonderland of phantasy, cavernous with shadow where undreamed-of dragons lurked, lambent with opalescent fields of splendour whence uprose the glimmer of half-visioned palaces or the battlemented walls of some ethereal fairy castle.
More than once Jean’s thoughts turned wistfully towards the Moor which she had so longed to see by moonlight—Judith’s “holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits”—and she felt disposed to blame herself for the robust attack of caution which had impelled her to refuse the invitation to the bungalow.
“One loses half the best things in life by being afraid,” she told herself petulantly. “And a second chance to take them doesn’t come!”
She felt almost tempted to write to Judith and propose that she should join her at the bungalow for a few days after all if she still had room for her. And then, as is often the way of things just when we are contemplating taking the management of affairs into our own hands, the second chance offered itself without any directing impulse on Jean’s part.
The telephone bell rang, and Jean, who was expecting an answer to an important message she had ’phoned through on Lady Anne’s behalf, hastened to answer it. Very much to her surprise she found that it was Burke who was speaking at the other end of the wire.
“Is that you, Geoffrey?” she exclaimed in astonishment. “I didn’t know your bungalow was on the telephone. I thought you were miles from anywhere!”
“It isn’t. And we are,” came back Burke’s voice. From a certain quality in it she knew that he was smiling. “I’m in Okehampton, ’phoning from a pal’s house. I’ve a message for you from Judy.”
“Ye-es?” intoned Jean enquiringly.
“She wants you to come up to-morrow, just for one night. It’ll be a full moon and she says you have a hankering to see the Moor by moonlight. Have you?”
“Yes, oh yes!”—with enthusiasm.
“Thought so. It certainly does look topping. Quite worth seeing. Well, look here, Judy’s got a party of friends, down from town, who are coming over to us from the South Devon side—going to drive up and stay the night, and the idea is to do a moonlight scramble up on to the top of one of the tors after supper. Are you game?”
“Oh! How heavenly!” This, ecstatically, from Jean.
“How what?”
“Heavenly! Heavenly!”—with increasing emphasis.
“Can’t you hear?”
“Oh, ‘heavenly’—yes, I hear. Yes, it would be rather—if you came.”
Even through the’phone Burke’s voice conveyed something of that upsettingly fiery ardour of his.
“I won’t come—unless you promise to behave,” said Jean warningly.
Bubbling over with pleasure at the prospect unfolded by the invitation, she found it a little difficult to infuse a befitting sternness into her tones.
“Do I need to take fresh vows?” came back Burke’s answer, spoken rather gravely. “I made you a promise that day—when we drove back from Dartmoor. I’ll keep that.”
“I’ll never hiss you again till you give me your lips yourself.”
The words of the promise rushed vividly into Jean’s mind, and now that steady voice through the’phone, uttering its quiet endorsement of the assurance given, made her feel suddenly ashamed of her suspicions.
“Very well, I’ll come then,” she said hastily. “How shall I get to you?”
“It’s all planned, because we thought—at least we hoped—you’d come. If you’ll come down to Okehampton by the three o’clock train from Coombe Eavie, I’ll meet you there with the car and drive you up to the bungalow. Judy is going to drive into Newton Abbot early, to do some marketing, and afterwards she’ll lunch with her London people—the Holfords. Then they’ll all come up together in the afternoon.”
“I see. Very well. I’ll come to Okehampton by the three train to-morrow afternoon”—repeating his instructions carefully.
“Right. That’s all fixed, then.”
“Quite. Mind you also fix a fine day—or night, rather! Good-bye.”
A murmured farewell came back along the wire, and then Jean, replacing the receiver in its clip, ran off to apprise Lady Anne of the arrangements made.
Lady Anne looked up from some village charity accounts which were puckering her smooth brow to smile approval.
“How nice, dear! Quite a charming plan—you’ll enjoy it. Especially as there will be nothing to amuse you here to-morrow. I have two village committees to attend—I’m in the chair, so I must go. And Blaise, I know, is booked for a busy day with the estate agent, while Nick is going down to South Devon somewhere for a day’s fishing. I think he goes down to-night. Really, it’s quite unusually lucky that Judith should have fixed on to-morrow for her moonlight party.”
THE moorland air, warm with its subtle fragrance of gorse—like the scent of peaches when the sun is shining on them—tonic with the faint tang of salt borne by clean winds that had swept across the Atlantic, came to Jean’s nostrils crisp and sparkling as a draught of golden wine.
Before her, mile after mile, lay the white road—a sword of civilisation cleaving its way remorselessly across the green wilderness of mossy turf, and on either side rose the swelling hills and jagged peaks of the great tors, melting in the far distance into a vague, formless blur of purple that might be either cloud or tor as it merged at last into the dim haze of the horizon.
“Oh, blessed, blessed Moor!” exclaimed Jean. “How I love it! You know, half the people in the world haven’t the least idea what Dartmoor is like. I was enthusing to a woman about it only the other day and she actually said, ‘Oh, yes—Dartmoor. It’s quite flat, I suppose, isn’t it?’ Flat!” with sweeping disgust.
Burke, his hand on the wheel of the big car which was eating up the miles with the facility of a boa-constrictor swallowing rabbits, smiled at the indignant little sniff with which the speech concluded.
“You don’t like dead levels, then?” he suggested.
She shook her head.
“No, I like hills—something to look up to—to climb.”
“Spiritual as well as temporal?”
She was silent a moment.
“Why, yes, I think I do.”
He smiled sardonically.
“It’s just that terrible angelic tendency of yours I complain of. It’s too much for any mere material man to live up to. I wish you’d step down to my low level occasionally. You don’t seem to be afflicted with human passions like the rest of us”—he added, a note of irritation in his voice.
“Indeed I am!”
Jean spoke impulsively, out of the depths of that inner, almost unconscious self-knowledge which lies within each one of us, dormant until some lance-like question pricks it into spontaneous affirmation. She had hardly heeded whither the conversation was tending, and she regretted her frank confession the instant it had left her lips.
Burke turned and looked at her with a curious speculation in his glance.
“I wonder if that’s true?” he said consideringly. “If so, they’re still asleep. I’d give something to be the one to rouse them.”
There was the familiar, half-turbulent quality in his voice—the sound as of something held in leash. Jean sensed the danger in the atmosphere.
“You’ll house one of them—the quite ordinary, commonplace one of bad temper, if you talk like that,” she replied prosaically. “You’ve got to play fair, Geoffrey—keep the spirit of the law as well as the letter.”
“All’s fair in love and war—as I told you before,” he retorted.
“Geoffrey”—indignantly.
“Jean!”—mimicking her. “Well, we won’t quarrel about it now. Here we are at our journey’s end. Behold the carriage drive!”
The car swung round a sharp bend and then bumped its way up a roughly-made track which served to link a species of cobbled yard, constructed at one side of the bungalow, to the road along which they had come.
The track cleaved its way, rather on the principle of a railway cutting, clean through the abrupt acclivity which flanked the road that side, and rising steeply between crumbling, overhanging banks, fringed with coarse grass and tufted with straggling patches of gorse and heather, debouched on to a broad plateau. Here the road below was completely hidden from view; on all sides there stretched only a limitless vista of wild moorland, devoid of any sign of habitation save for the bare, creeperless walls of the bungalow itself.
As the scene unfolded, Jean became suddenly conscious of a strange sense of familiarity. An inexplicable impress sion of having seen the place on some previous occasion, of familiarity with every detail of it—even to a recognition of its peculiar atmosphere of loneliness—took possession of her. For a moment she could not place the memory. Only she knew that it was associated in her mind with something disagreeable. Even now, as, at Burke’s dictation, she waited in the car while he entered the bungalow from the back, passing through in order to admit his guest by way of the front door, which had been secured upon the inside, she was aware of a feeling of intense repugnance.
And then, in a flash, recollection returned to her. This was the house of her dream—of the nightmare vision which had obsessed her during the hours of darkness following her first meeting with Geoffrey Burke.
There stood the solitary dwelling, set amid a wild and desolate country, and to one side of it grew three wretched-looking, scrubby little fir trees, all of them bent in the same direction by the keen winds as they came sweeping across the Moor from the wide Atlantic. Three Fir Bungalow! Why, the very name itself might have prewarned her!
Her eyes fixed themselves on the green-painted door. She knew quite well what must happen next. The door would open and reveal Burke standing on the threshold. She watched it with fascinated eyes.
Presently came the sound of steps, then the grating noise of a key turning stiffly in the lock. The door was flung open and Burke strode across the threshold and came to the side of the car to help her out. Jean waited, half terrified, for his first words. Would they be the words of her dream? She felt that if he chanced to say jokingly, “Will you come into my parlour?” she should scream.
“Go straight in, will you?” said Burke. “I’ll just run the car round to the garage and then we might as well get tea ready before the others come. I’m starving, aren’t you?”
The spell was broken. The everyday, commonplace words brought with them a rush of overpowering relief, sweeping away the dreamlike sense of unreality and terror, and as Jean nodded and responded gaily, “Absolutely famished!” she could have laughed aloud at the ridiculous fears which had assailed her.
The inside of the bungalow was in charming contrast to its somewhat forbidding exterior. Its living-rooms, furnished very simply but with a shrewd eye to comfort, communicated one with the other by means of double doors which, usually left open, obviated the cramped feeling that the comparatively small size of the rooms might otherwise have produced, while the two lattice windows which each boasted were augmented by French windows opening out on to a verandah which ran the whole length of the building.
Jean, having delightedly explored the front portion of the bungalow, joined Burke in the kitchen, guided thither by the clinking of crockery and the cheerful crackle of a hearth fire wakened into fresh life by the scientific application of a pair of bellows.
“I had no idea you were such a domesticated individual,” she remarked, as she watched him carefully warming the brown earthenware teapot as a preliminary to brewing the tea while she busied herself making hot buttered toast.
“Oh, Judy and I are quite independent up here, I assure you,” he answered with pardonable pride. “We never bring any of the servants from Willow Ferry, but cook for ourselves. A woman comes over every morning to do the ‘chores’—clean the place, and wash up the dishes from the day before, and so on. But beyond that we are self-sufficing.”
“Where does your woman come from? I didn’t see a house for miles round.”
“No, you can’t see the place, but there’s a little farmstead, tucked away in a hollow about three miles from here, which provides us with cream and butter and eggs—-and with our char-lady.”
Jean surveyed with satisfaction a rapidly mounting pile of delicately browned toast, creaming with golden butter.
“There, that’s ready,” she announced at last. “I do hope Judy and Co. will arrive soon. Hot buttered toast spoils with keeping; it gets all sodden and tastes like underdone shoe leather. Do you think they’ll be long?”
Burke threw a glance at the grandfather’s clock ticking solemnly away in a corner of the kitchen.
“It’s half-past four,” he said dubiously. “I don’t think we’ll risk that luscious-looking toast of yours by waiting for them. I’m going to brew the tea; the kettle’s boiling.”
“Won’t Judith think it rather horrid of us not to wait?”
“Oh, Lord, no! Judy and I never stand on any ceremony with each other. Any old thing might happen to delay them a bit.”
Jean, frankly hungry after her spin in the car through the invigorating moorland air, yielded without further protest, and tea resolved itself into a jolly little t锚te-脿-t猫te affair, partaken of in the shelter of the verandah, with the glorious vista of the Moor spread out before her delighted eyes.
Burke was in one of those rare moods of his which never failed to inspire her with a genuine liking for him—when the unruly, turbulent devil within him, so hardly held in check, was temporarily replaced by a certain spontaneous boyishness of a distinctly endearing quality—that “little boy” quality which, in a grown man, always appeals so irresistibly to any woman.
The time slipped away quickly, and it was with a shock of astonishment that Jean realised, on glancing down at the watch on her wrist, that over an hour and a half had gone by while they had been sitting chatting on the verandah.
“Geoffrey! Do you know it’s nearly six o’clock! I’m certain something must have happened. Judy and the Holfords would surely be here by now if they hadn’t had an accident of some sort.”
Burke looked at his own watch.
“Yes,” he acquiesced slowly. “It is—getting late.” A look of concern spread itself over Jean’s face.
“I think we ought to get the car out again and go and see if anything has happened,” she said decisively. “They may have had a spill. Were they coming by motor?”
“No. Judy drove down to Newton Abbot in the dog-cart, and the Holfords proposed hiring some sort of conveyance from a livery stable.”
“Well, I expect they’ve had a smash of some kind. I’m sure we ought to go and find out! Was Judy driving that excitable chestnut of yours?”
He shook his head.
“No—a perfectly well-conducted pony, as meek as Moses. We’ll give them a quarter of an hour more. If they don’t turn up by then, I’ll run the car out and we’ll investigate.”
The minutes crawled by on leaden feet. Jean felt restless and uneasy and more than a trifle astonished that Burke should manifest so little anxiety concerning his sister’s whereabouts. Then, just before the quarter of an hour was up, there came the shrill tinkle of a bicycle bell, and a boy cycled up to the gate and, springing off his machine, advanced up the cobbled path with a telegram in his hand.
Jean’s face blanched, and she waited in taut suspense while Burke ripped open the ominous orange-coloured envelope.
“What is it?” she asked nervously. “Have they—is it bad news?”
There was a pause before Burke answered. Then, he handed the flimsy sheet to her, remarking shortly:
“They’re not coming.”
Jean’s eyes flew along the brief message.
“Returning to-morrow. Am staying the night with Holfords.
Judy.”
Her face fell.
“How horribly disappointing!” Her glance fluttered, regretfully to the faint disc of the moon showing like a pallid ghost of itself in a sky still luminous with the afternoon sunlight.
“I shan’t see my moonlit Moor to-night after all!” she continued. “I wonder what has happened to make them change their plans?”
Burke volunteered no suggestion but stood staring moodily at the swiftly receding figure of the telegraph boy.
“Well,” Jean braced herself to meet the disappointment, “there’s nothing for it but for you to run me back home, Geoffrey. We ought to start at once.”
“Very well. I’ll go and get the car out,” he answered. “I suppose it’s the only thing to be done.”
He moved off in the direction of the garage, Jean walking rather disconsolately beside him.
“I am disappointed!” she declared. “I just hate the sight of a telegraph boy! They always spoil things. I rather wonder you get your telegrams delivered at this outlandish spot,” she added musingly.
“Oh, of course we have to pay mileage. There’s no free delivery to the ‘back o’ beyond’!”
As he spoke, Burke vanished into the semi-dusk of the garage, and presently Jean heard sounds suggestive of ineffectual attempts to start the engine, accompanied by a muttered curse or two. A few minutes later Burke reappeared, looking Rather hot and dusty and with a black smear of oil across his cheek.
“You’d better go back to the bungalow,” he said gruffly.
“There’s something gone wrong with the works, and it will take me a few minutes to put matters right.”
Jean nodded sympathetically and retreated towards the house, leaving him to tinker with the car’s internals. It was growing chilly—the “cool of the evening” manifests itself early up on Dartmoor—and she was not at all sorry to find herself indoors. The wind had dropped, but a curious, still sort of coldness seemed to be permeating the atmosphere, faintly moist, and, as Jean stood at the window, gazing out half absently, she suddenly noticed a delicate blur of mist veiling the low-lying ground towards the right of the bungalow. Her eyes hurriedly swept the wide expanse in front of her. The valleys between the distant tors were hardly visible. They had become mere basins cupping wan lakes of wraithlike vapour which, even as she watched them, crept higher, inch by inch, as though responding to some impulse of a rising tide.
Jean had lived long enough in Devonshire by this time to know the risks of being caught in a mist on Dartmoor, and she sped out of the room, intending to go to the garage and warn Burke that he must hurry. He met her on the threshold of the bungalow, and she turned back with him into the room she had just quitted.
“Are you ready?” she asked eagerly. “There’s a regular moor mist coming on. The sooner we start the better.”
He looked at her oddly. He was rather pale and his eyes were curiously bright.
“The car won’t budge,” he said. “I’ve been tinkering at her all this time to no purpose.”
Jean stared at him, a vague apprehension of disagreeable possibilities presenting itself to her mind. Their predicament would be an extremely awkward one if the car remained recalcitrant!
“Won’t budge?” she repeated. “But you must make it budge, Geoffrey. We can’t—we can’t stay here! What’s gone wrong with it?”
Burke launched out into a string of technicalities which left Jean with a confused feeling that the mechanism of a motor must be an invention of the devil designed expressly for the chastening of human nature, but from which she succeeded in gathering the bare skeleton fact that something had gone radically wrong with the car’s running powers.
Her apprehensions quickened.
“What are we to do?” she asked blankly.
“Make the best of a bad job—and console each other,” he suggested lightly.
She frowned a little. It did not seem to her quite the moment for jesting.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Geoffrey,” she said sharply. “We’ve got to get back somehow. What can you do?”
“I can’t do anything more than I’ve done. Here we are and here we’ve got to stay.”
“You know that’s impossible,” she said, in a quick, low voice.
He looked at her with a sudden devil-may-care glint in his eyes.
“You never can tell beforehand whether things are impossible or not. I know I used to think that heaven on earth was—impossible,” he said slowly. “I’m not so sure now.” He drew a step nearer her. “Would you mind so dreadfully if we had to stay here, little Miss Prunes-and-Prisms?”
Jean stared at him in amazement—in amazement which slowly turned to incredulous horror as a sudden almost unbelievable idea flashed into her mind, kindled into being by the leaping, half-exultant note in his tones.
“Geoffrey———” Her lips moved stiffly, even to herself, her voice sounded strange and hoarse. “Geoffrey, I don’t believe there is anything wrong with the car at all!... Or if there is, you’ve tampered with it on purpose.... You’re not being straight with me——”
She broke off, her startled gaze searching his face as though she would wring the truth from him. Her eyes were very wide and dilated, but back of the anger that blazed in them lurked fear—stark fear.
For a moment Burke was silent. Then he spoke, with a quiet deliberateness that held something ominous, inexorable, in its very calm.
“You’re right,” he said slowly. “I’ve not been straight with you. But I’ll be frank with you now. The whole thing—asking you to come here to-day, the moonlight expedition for to-night—everything—was all fixed up, planned solely to get you here. The car won’t run for the simple reason that I’ve put it out of action. I wasn’t quite sure whether or no you could drive a car, you see!”
“I can’t,” said Jean. Her voice was quite expressionless.
“No? So much the better, then. But I wasn’t going to leave any weak link in the chain by which I hold you.”
“By which you hold me?” she repeated dully. She felt stunned, incapable of protest, only able to repeat, parrotlike, the words he had just used.
“Yes. Don’t you understand the position? It’s clear enough, I should think!” He laughed a little recklessly. “Either you promise to marry me, in which case I’ll take you home at once—the car’s not damaged beyond repair—or you stay here, here at the bungalow with me, until tomorrow morning.”
With a sharp cry she retreated from him, her face ash-white.
“No—no! Not that!” The poignancy of that caught-back cry wrenched the words from his lips in hurrying, vehement disclaimer. “You’ll be perfectly safe—as safe as though you were my sister. Don’t look like that.... Jean! Jean! Could you imagine that I would hurt you—you when I worship—my little white love?” The words rushed out in a torrent, hoarse and shaken and passionately tender. “Before God, no! You’ll be utterly safe, Jean, sweetest, beloved—I swear it!” His voice steadied and deepened. “Sacred as the purest love in the whole world could hold you.” He was silent a moment; then, as the tension in her face gradually relaxed, he went on: “But the world won’t know that!” The note of tenderness was gone now, swept away by the resurgence of a fierce relentlessness—triumphant, implacable—that meant winning at all costs. “The world won’t know that,” he repeated. “After tonight, for your own sake—because a woman’s reputation cannot stand the breath of scandal, you’ll be compelled to marry me. You’ll have no choice.”
Jean stood quite still, staring in front of her. Once her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Slowly, laboriously almost, she was realising exactly what had happened, her mind adjusting itself to the recognition of the trap in which she had been caught.
Her dream had come true, after all—horribly, inconceivably true.
The heavy silence which had fallen seemed suddenly filled with the dream-Burke’s voice—mocking and exultant:
“... you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast for ever. It’s too late to try and run away.... It’s too late.”
“T HEN that telegram—that telegram from Judy—I suppose that was all part of the plan?”
Jean felt the futility of the question even while she asked it. The answer was so inevitable.
“Yes”—briefly. “I knew that Judy meant staying the night with her friends before she went away. She sent the wire—because I asked her to.”
“Judy did that?”
There was such an immeasurable anguish of reproach in the low, quick-spoken whisper that Burke felt glad Judith was not there to hear it. Had it been otherwise, she might have regretted the share she had taken in the proceedings, small as it had been. She was not a man, half-crazed by love, in whose passion-blurred vision nothing counted save the winning of the one woman, nor had she known Burke’s plan in its entirety.
“Yes, Judy sent the wire,” he said.. “But give her so much credit, she didn’t know that I intended—this. She only knew that I wanted another chance of seeing you alone—of asking you to be my wife, and I told her that you wouldn’t come up to the bungalow unless you believed that she would be there too. I didn’t think you’d trust yourself alone with me again—after that afternoon at the inn”—with blunt candour.
“No. I shouldn’t have done.”
“So you see I had to think of something—some way. And it was you yourself who suggested this method.”
“I?”—incredulously.
“Yes. Don’t you remember what you told me that day I drove you hack from Dartmoor ‘A woman’s happiness depends upon her reputation.’”
She looked at him quickly, recalling the scattered details of that afternoon—Burke’s gibes at what he believed to be her fear of gossiping tongues and her own answer to his taunts: “No woman can afford to ignore scandal.” And then, following upon that, his sudden, curious absorption in his own thoughts.
The remembrance of it all was like a torchlight flashed into a dark place, illuminating what had been hidden and inscrutable. She spoke swiftly.
“And it was then—that afternoon—you thought of this?”
He bent his head.
“Yes,” he acknowledged.
Jean was silent. It was all clear now—penetratingly so.
“And the Holfords? Are there any such people?” she asked drearily.
She scarcely knew what prompted her to put so purposeless and unimportant a question. Actually, she felt no interest at all in the answer. It could not make the least difference to her present circumstances.
Perhaps it was a little the feeling that this trumpery process of question and answer served to postpone the inevitable moment when she must face the situation in which she found herself—face it in its simple crudeness, denuded of unessential whys and wherefores.
“Oh, yes, the Holfords are quite real,” answered Burke. “And so is the plan for an expedition to one of the tors by moonlight. Only it will be carried out to-morrow night instead of to-night. To-night is for the settlement between you and me.”
The strained expression of utter, shocked incredulity was gradually leaving Jean’s face. The unreal was becoming real, and she knew now what she was up against; the hard, reckless quality of Burke’s voice left her no illusions.
“Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “you won’t really do this thing?”
If she had hoped to move him by a simple, straightforward appeal to the best that might be in him, she failed completely. For the moment, all that was good in him, anything chivalrous which the helplessness of her womanhood might have invoked, was in abeyance. He was mere primitive man, who had succeeded in carrying off the woman he meant to mate and was prepared to hold her at all costs.
“I told you I would compel you,” he said doggedly. “That I would let nothing in the world stand between you and me. And I meant every word I said. You’ve no way out now—except marriage with me.”
The imperious decision of his tone roused her fighting spirit.
“Do you imagine,” she broke out scornfully, “that—after this—I would ever marry you?... I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth! I’d die sooner!”
“I daresay you would,” he returned composedly. “You’ve too much grit to be afraid of death. Only, you see, that doesn’t happen to be the alternative. The alternative is a smirched reputation. Tarnished a little—after to-night—even if you marry me; dragged utterly in the mire if you refuse. I’m putting it before you with brutal frankness, I know. But I want you to realise just what it means and to promise that you’ll be my wife before it’s too late—while I can still get you back to Staple during the hours of propriety”—smiling grimly.
She looked at him with a slow, measured glance of bitter contempt.
“Even a tarnished reputation might be preferable to marriage with you—more endurable,” she added, with the sudden tormented impulse of a trapped thing to hurt back.
“You don’t really believe that”—impetuously—“I know I know I could make you happy! You’d be the one woman in the world to me. And I don’t think”—more quietly—“that you could endure a slurred name, Jean.”
She made no answer. Every word he spoke only made it more saliently clear to her that she was caught—bound hand and foot in a web from which there was no escape. Yet, little as Burke guessed it, the actual question of “what people might say” did not trouble her to any great extent. She was too much her father’s own daughter to permit a mere matter of reputation to force her into a distasteful marriage.
Not that she minimised the value of good repute. She was perfectly aware that if she refused to marry Burke, and he carried out his threat of detaining her at the bungalow until the following morning, she would have a heavy penalty to pay—the utmost penalty which a suspicious world exacts from a woman, even though she may be essentially innocent, in whose past there lurks a questionable episode.
But she had courage enough to face the consequences of that refusal, to stand up to the clatter of poisonous tongues that must ensue; and trust enough to bank on the loyalty of her real friends, knowing it would be the same splendid loyalty that she herself would have given to any one of them in like circumstances. For Jean was a woman who won more than mere lip-service from those who called themselves her friends.
Burke had never been more mistaken in his calculations than when he counted upon forcing her hand by the mere fear of scandal. But none the less he held her—and held her in the meshes of a far stronger and more binding net, had he but realised it.
Looking back upon the episode from which her present predicament had actually sprung, Jean could almost have found it in her heart to smile at the relative importance which, at the time, that same incident had assumed in her eyes.
It had seemed to her, then, that for Blaise ever to hear that she had been locked in a room with Burke, had spent an uncounted, hour or so with him at the “honeymooners’ inn” would be the uttermost calamity that could befall her.
He would never believe that it had been by no will of hers—so she had thought at the time—and that fierce lover’s jealousy which had been the origin of their quarrel, and of all the subsequent mutual misunderstandings and aloofness, would be roused to fresh life, and his distrust of her become something infinitely more difficult to combat.
But compared with the present situation which confronted her, the happenings of that past day faded into insignificance. She stood, now, face to face with a choice such as surely few women had been forced to make.
Whichever way she decided, whichever of the two alternatives she accepted, her happiness must pay the price. Nothing she could ever say or do, afterwards, would set her right in the eyes of the man whose belief in her meant everything. Whether she agreed to marry Burke, returning home in the odour of sanctity within the next hour or two, or whether she refused and returned the next morning—free, but with the incontrovertible fact of a night spent at Burke’s bungalow, alone with him, behind her, Blaise would never trust or believe in her love for him again.
And if she promised to marry Burke and so save her reputation, it must automatically mean the end of everything between herself and the man she loved—the dropping of an iron curtain compared with which the wall built up out of their frequent misunderstandings in the past seemed something as trifling and as easily demolished as a card house.
On the other hand, if she risked her good name and kept her freedom, she would be equally as cut off from him. Not that she feared Blaise would take the blackest view of the affair—she was sure that he believed in her enough not to misjudge her as the world might do—but he would inevitably think that she had deliberately chosen to spend an afternoon on the Moor alone with Burke—“playing with fire” exactly as he had warned her not to, and getting her fingers burnt in consequence—and he would accept it as a sheer denial of the silent pledge of love understood which bound them together.
He would never trust her again—nor forgive her. No man could. Love’s loyalty, rocked by the swift currents of jealousy and passion, is not of the same quality as the steady loyalty of friendship—that calm, unshakable confidence which may exist between man and man or woman and woman.
Moreover—and here alone was where the fear of gossip troubled her—even if the inconceivable happened and Blaise forgave and trusted her again, she could not go to him with a slurred name, give him herself—when the gift was outwardly tarnished. The Tormarin pride was unyielding as a rock—and Tormarin women had always been above suspicion. She could not break the tradition of an old name—do that disservice to the man she loved! No, if she could find no way out of the web in which she had been caught she was set as far apart from Blaise as though they had never met. Only the agony of meeting and remembrance would be with her for the rest of life!
Jean envisaged very clearly the possibilities that lay ahead—envisaged them with a breathless, torturing perception of their imminence. It was to be a fight—here and now—for the whole happiness that life might hold.
She turned to Burke, breaking at last the long silence which had descended between them.
“And what do you suppose I feel towards you, Geoffrey? Will you be content to have your wife think of you—as I must think?”
A faint shadow flitted across his face. The quiet scorn of her words—their underlying significance—flicked him on the raw.
“I’ll be content to have you as my wife—at any price,” he said stubbornly. “Jean”—a sudden urgency in his tones—“try to believe I hate all this as much as you do. When you’re my wife, I’ll spend my life in teaching you to forget it—in—wiping the very memory of to-day out of your mind.”
“I shall never forgot it,” she said slowly. Then, bitterly: “I wonder why you even offer me a choice—when you know; that it is really no choice.”
“Why? Because I swore to you that you should give me what I want—that I wouldn’t take even a kiss from you again by force. But”—unevenly—“I didn’t know what it meant—the waiting!”
Outside, the mist had thickened into fog, curtaining the windows. The light had dimmed to a queer, glimmering dusk, changing the values of things, and out of the shifting shadows her white face, with its scarlet line of scornful mouth, gleamed at him—elusive, tantalising as a flower that sways out of reach. In the uncertain half-light which struggled in through the dulled window-panes there was something provocative, maddening—a kind of etherealised lure of the senses in the wavering, shadowed loveliness of her. The man’s pulses leaped; something within him slipped its leash.
“Kiss me!” he demanded hoarsely. “Don’t keep me waiting any longer. Give me your lips... now... now...”
She sprang aside from him, warding him off. Her eyes stormed at him out of her white face.
“You promised!” she cried, her voice sharp with fear. “You promised!”
The tension of the next moment strained her nerves to breaking-point.
Then he fell back. Slowly his arms dropped to his sides without touching her, his hands clenching with the effort that it cost him.
“You’re right,” he said, breathing quickly. “I promised. I’ll keep my promise.” Then, vehemently: “Jean, why won’t you let me take you home? I could put the car right in ten minutes. Come home!”
There was unmistakable appeal in his tones. It was obvious he hated the task to which he had set himself, although he had no intention of yielding.
She stared at him doubtfully.
“Will you? Will you take me home, Geoffrey?... Or”—bitterly—“is this only another trap?”
“I’ll take you home—at once, now—if you’ll promise to be my wife. Jean, it’s better than waiting till to-morrow—till circumstances force you into it!” he urged.
She was silent, thinking rapidly. That sudden break in Burke’s control, when for a moment she had feared his promise would not hold him, had warned her to put an end to the scene—if only temporarily—as quickly as possible.
“You are very trusting,” she said, forcing herself to speak lightly. “How do you know that I shall not give you the pledge you ask merely in order to get home—and then decline to keep it? I think”—reflectively—“I should be quite justified in the circumstances.”
He smiled a little and shook his head.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not afraid of that. If you give me your word, I know you’ll keep it. You wouldn’t be—you—if you could do otherwise.”
For a moment, Jean was tempted, fiercely tempted to take his blind belief in her and use it to extricate herself from the position into which he had thrust her. As she herself had said, the circumstances were such as almost to justify her. Yet something within her, something that was an integral part of her whole nature, rebelled against the idea of giving a promise which, from the moment that she made it, she would have no smallest intention of keeping. It would be like the breaking of a prisoner’s given parole—equally mean and dishonourable.
With a little mental shrug she dismissed the idea and the brief temptation. She must find some other way, some other road to safety. If only he would leave her alone, leave her just long enough for her to make a rush for it—out of the house into that wide wilderness of mist-wrapped moor!
It would be a virtually hopeless task to find her way to any village or to the farmstead, three miles away, of which Burke had spoken. She knew that. Even moorwise folk not infrequently entirely lost their bearings in a Dartmoor mist, and, as far as she herself was concerned, she had not the remotest idea in which direction the nearest habitation lay. It would be a hazardous experiment—fraught with danger. But danger was preferable to the dreadful safety of the bungalow.
In a brief space, stung to swift decision by that tense moment when Burke’s self-mastery had given way, she had made up her mind to risk the open moor. But, for that she must somehow contrive to be left alone. She must gain time—time to allay Burke’s suspicions by pretending to make the best of the matter, and then, on some pretext or other, get him out of the room. It was the sole way of escape she could devise.
“Well, which is it to be?” Burke’s voice broke in harshly upon the wild turmoil of her thoughts. “Your promise—and Staple within an hour and a half? Or—the other alternative?”
“I don’t think it can be either—yet,” she said quietly. “What you’re asking—it’s too big a question for a woman to decide all in a minute. Don’t you see”—with a rather shaky little laugh—“it means my whole life? I—I must have time, Geoffrey. I can’t decide now. What time is it?”
He struck a match, holding the flame close to the dial of his watch.
“Seven o’clock.”
“Only that?” The words escaped her involuntarily. It seemed hours, an eternity, since she had read those few brief words contained in Judith’s telegram. And it was barely an hour ago!
“Then—then I can have a little time to think it over,” she said after a moment. “We could get back to Staple by ten if we left here at eight-thirty?”
“There or thereabouts. We should have to go slow through this infernal mist Jean”—his voice took on a note of passionate entreaty—“sweetest, won’t you give me your promise and let me take you home? You shall never regret it. I——”
“Oh, hush!” she checked him quickly. “I can’t answer you now, Geoffrey. I must have time—time. Don’t press me now.”
“Very well.” There was an unaccustomed gentleness in his manner. Perhaps something in the intense weariness of her tones appealed to him. “Are you very tired, Jean?”
“Do you know”—she spoke with some surprise, as though the idea had only just presented itself to her—“do you know, I believe I’m rather hungry! It sounds very material of me”—laughing a little. “A woman in my predicament ought to be quite above—or beyond—mere pangs of hunger.”
“Hungry! By Jove, and well you might be by this hour of the day!” he exclaimed remorsefully. “Look here, we’ll have supper. There are some chops in the larder. We’ll cook them together—and then you’ll see what a really domesticated husband I shall make.”
He spoke with a new gaiety, as though he felt very sure of her ultimate decision and glad that the strain of the struggle of opposing wills was past.
“Chops! How heavenly! I’m afraid”—apologetically—“it’s very unromantic of me, Geoffrey!”
He laughed and, striking a match, lit the lamp. “Disgustingly so! But there are moments for romance and moments for chops. And this is distinctly the moment for chops. Come along and help me cook ’em.”
He flashed a keen glance at her face as the sudden lamplight dispelled the shadows of the room. But there was nothing in it to contradict the insouciance of her speech. Her cheeks were a little flushed and her eyes very bright, but her smile was quite natural and unforced. Burke reflected that women were queer, unfathomable creatures. They would fight you to the last ditch—and then suddenly surrender, probably liking you in secret all the better for having mastered them.
He had forgotten that he was dealing with a daughter of Jacqueline Mavory. All the actress that was Jean’s mother came out in her now, called up from some hidden fount of inherited knowledge to meet the imperative need of the moment.
No one, watching Jean as she accompanied Burke to the kitchen premises and assisted him in the preparation of their supper, would have imagined that she was acting her part in any other capacity than that of willing playmate. She was wise enough not to exhibit any desire to leave him alone during the process of carrying the requisites for the meal from the kitchen into the living-room. She had noticed the sudden mistrust in his watchful eyes and the way in which he had instantly followed her when, at the commencement of the proceedings, she had unthinkingly started off down the passage from the kitchen, carrying a small tray of table silver in her hand, and thereafter she refrained from giving him the slightest ground for suspicion. Together they cooked the chops, together laid the table, and finally sat down to share the appetising results of their united efforts.
Throughout the little meal Jean preserved an attitude of detached friendliness, laughing at any small joke that cropped up in the course of conversation and responding gaily enough to Burke’s efforts to entertain her. Now and again, as though unconsciously, she would fall into a brief reverie, apparently preoccupied with the choice that lay before her, and at these moments Burke would refrain from distracting her attention, but would watch intently, with those burning eyes of his, the charming face and sensitive mouth touched to a sudden new seriousness that appealed.
By the time the meal had drawn to an end, his earlier suspicions had been lulled into tranquillity, and over the making of the coffee he became once more the big, overgrown schoolboy and jolly comrade of his less tempestuous moments. It almost seemed as though, to please her, to atone in a measure for the mental suffering he had thrust on her, he was endeavouring to keep the vehement lover in the background and show her only that side of himself which would serve to reassure her.
“I rather fancy myself at coffee-making,” he told her, as he dexterously manipulated the little coffee machine. “There!”—pouring out two brimming cups—“taste that, and then tell me if it isn’t the best cup of coffee you ever met.”
Jean sipped it obediently, then made a wry face.
“Ough!” she ejaculated in disgust. “You’ve forgotten the sugar!”
As she had herself slipped the sugar basin out of sight when he was collecting the necessary coffee paraphernalia on to a tray, the oversight was not surprising.
It was a simple little ruse, its very simplicity it’s passport to success. The naturalness of it—Jean’s small, screwed-up face of disgust and the hasty way in which she set her cup down after tasting its contents—might have thrown the most suspicious of mortals momentarily off his guard.
“By Jove, so I have!” Instinctively Burke sprang up to rectify the omission. “I never take it myself, so I forgot all about it. I’ll get you some in a second.”
He was gone, and before he was half-way down the passage leading to the kitchen, Jean, moving silently and swiftly as a shadow, was at the doors of the long French window, her fingers fumbling for the catch.
A draught of cold, mist-laden air rushed into the room, while a slender form stood poised for a brief instant on the threshold, silhouetted against the white curtain of the fog. Then followed a hurried rush of flying footsteps, a flitting shadow cleaving the thick pall of vapour, and a moment later the wreaths of pearly mist came filtering unhindered, into an empty room.
Blindly Jean plunged through the dense mist that hung outside, her feet sinking into the sodden earth as she fled across the wet grass. She had no idea where the gate might be, but sped desperately onwards till she rushed full tilt into the bank of mud and stones which fenced the bungalow against the moor. The sudden impact nearly knocked all the breath out of her body, but she dared not pause. She trusted that his search for the hidden sugar basin might delay Burke long enough to give her a few minutes’ start, but she knew very well that he might chance upon it at any moment, and then, discovering her flight, come in pursuit.
Clawing wildly at the bank with hands and feet, slipping, sliding, bruised by sharp-angled stones and pricked by some unseen bushy growth of gorse, she scrambled over the bank and came sliding down upon her hands and knees into the hedge-trough dug upon its further side. And even as she picked herself up, shaken and gasping for breath, she heard a cry from the bungalow, and then the sound of running steps and Burke’s voice calling her by name.
“Jean! Jean! You little fool!... Come back! Come back!” She heard him pause to listen for her whereabouts. Then he shouted again. “Come back! You’ll kill yourself! Jean! Jean!....”
But she made no answer. Distraught by fear lest he should overtake her, she raced recklessly ahead into the fog, heedless of the fact that she could not see a yard in front of her—even glad of it, knowing that the mist hung like a shielding curtain betwixt her and her pursuer.
The strange silence of the mist-laden atmosphere hemmed her round like the silence of a tomb, broken only by the sucking sound of the oozy turf as it pulled at her feet, clogging her steps. Lance-sharp spikes of gorse stabbed at her ankles as she trod it underfoot, and the permeating moisture in the air soaked swiftly through her thin summer frock till it clung about her like a winding-sheet.
Her breath was coming in sobbing gasps of stress and terror; her heart pounded in her breast; her limbs, impeded by her clinging skirts, felt as though they were weighted down with lead.
Then, all at once, seeming close at hand in the misleading fog which plays odd tricks with sound as well as sight, she heard Burke’s voice, cursing as he ran.
With the instinct of a hunted thing she swerved sharply, stumbled, and lurched forward in a vain effort to regain her balance. Then it seemed as though the ground wore suddenly cut from under her feet, and she fell... down, down through the mist, with a scattering of crumbling earth and rubble, and lay, at last, a crumpled, unconscious heap in the deep-cut track that linked the moor road to the bungalow.
LADY ANNE sat gazing absently into the heart of the fire, watching the restless leap of the flames and the little scattered handfuls of sparks, like golden star dust, tossed upward into the dark hollow of the chimney by the blazing logs. The “warm and sunny south”—at least, that part of it within a twelve-mile radius of Dartmoor—is quite capable, on occasion, of belying its guide-book designation, particularly towards the latter end of summer, and there was a raw dampness in the atmosphere this evening which made welcome company of a fire.
It seemed a little lonely without Jean’s cheery presence, and Lady Anne, conscious of a craving for human companionship, glanced impatiently at the clock. Blaise should surely have returned by now from his all-day conference with the estate agent.
She had not much longer to wait. The quick hoof-beats of a trotting horse sounded on the drive outside, and a few minutes later the door of the room was thrown open and Blaise himself strode in.
“Well, madonna?” He stooped and kissed her. “Been a lonely lady to-day without all your children?”
She smiled up at him.
“Just a little,” she acknowledged. “When I came back from those stupid committees, which are merely an occasion for half the old tabbies in the village to indulge in a squabble with the other half, I couldn’t help feeling it would have been nice to find Jean here to laugh over them with me. Jean’s sense of humour is refreshing; it never lets one down. However, I suppose she’s enjoying her beloved Moor by moonlight, so I mustn’t grumble.”
Blaise shook his head.
“Much moonlight they’ll see!” he observed. “I rode through a thick mist coming hack from Hedge Barton. It’ll he a blanket fog on Dartmoor to-night.”
“Oh, poor Jean! She’ll he so disappointed.”
Tormarin sat down on the opposite side of the hearth and lit a cigarette. The dancing firelight flickered across his face. He was thinner of late, his mother thought with a quick pang. The lines of the well-beloved face had deepened; it had a worn—almost ascetic—look, like that of a man who is constantly contending against something.
Lady Anne looked across at him almost beseechingly.
“Son,” she said, “have you quite made up your mind to let happiness pass you by?”
He started, roused out of the reverie into which he had fallen.
“I don’t think I’ve got any say in the matter,” he replied quietly. “I’ve forfeited my rights in that respect. You know that.”
“And Jean? Are you going to make her forfeit her rights, too?”
“She’ll find happiness—somehow—elsewhere. It would be a very short-lived affair with me”—bitterly. “After what has happened, it’s evident I’m not to be trusted with a woman’s happiness.”
There were sounds of arrival in the hall. Nick’s voice could be heard issuing instructions about the bestowal of his fishing tackle. Lady Anne spoke quickly.
“I don’t think so, Blaise. Not with the happiness of the woman you love.” She laid her hand on his shoulder as she passed him on her way into the hall to welcome the wanderer returned. “Tell Jean,” she advised, “and see what she says. I think you’ll find she’d be willing to risk it.”
When she had left the room Blaise remained staring impassively into the fire. His expression gave no indication as to whether or not Lady Anne’s advice had stirred him to any fresh impulse of decision, and when, presently, his mother and Nick entered the room together, he addressed the latter as casually as though no emotional depths had been stirred by the recent conversation.
“Hullo, Nick! Had good sport?”
“Only so-so. We had a jolly time, though—out at Het-worthy Bridge. But I had the deuce of a business getting back from Exeter this evening. It was so misty in places we could hardly see to drive the car.”
Blaise nodded.
“Yes, I know. I found the same. It’s a surprising change in the weather.”
“Poor Jean will have had a disappointing trip to Dartmoor,” put in Lady Anne. “The mist is certain to be bad up there.”
“Dartmoor? But she didn’t go—surely?” And Nick glanced from one to the other questioningly.
“Oh, yes, she did. It was quite clear in the afternoon when she started—looked like being a lovely night.”
“But—but——”
Nick stammered and came to a halt. There was a look of bewilderment in his eyes.
“But who’s she gone with?” he demanded at last. “I thought she said she intended stopping the night with Judith and Burke at their bungalow?”
“So she did,” replied Blaise. “Why? Have you any objection?”—smiling.
“No. Only”—Nick frowned—“I don’t quite understand it Judith isn’t on the Moor.”
“Not on the Moor?” broke simultaneously from Lady Anne and Blaise.
“How do you know, Nick?” added the latter gravely.
“Why, because”—Nick’s face wore an expression of puzzled concern—“because I saw Judith in Newton Abbot late this evening.”
Blaise leaned forward, a sudden look of concentration on his face.
“You saw Judith?” he repeated. “What time?”
“It must have been nearly eight o’clock. I was buzzing along in Jim Cresswell’s car to catch the seven forty-five up train, and I saw Judith with one of the Holfords—you know, those people from London—turning into the gateway of a house. I expect it was the place the Holfords are stopping at. They didn’t see me.”
“You’re quite certain? You’ve made no mistake?” said Blaise sharply.
“Of course I’ve made no mistake. Think I don’t know Judy when I see her? But what’s the meaning of it, Blaise?”
Tormarin rose to his feet, tossing the stump of his cigarette into the fire.
“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “But I’m going to find out. Madonna”—turning to his mother—“did Jean tell you just exactly what Judith said when she rang her up on the’phone about this moonlight plan?”
“It wasn’t Judith who rang up,” replied Lady Anne, a faint misgiving showing itself in her face. “It was Geoffrey who gave the message.”
Tormarin looked at her with a sudden awakened expression in his eyes. There was dread in them, too—keen dread. The expression of a man who, all at once, sees the thing he values more than anything in the whole world being torn from him—dragged forcibly away from the shelter he could give into some unspeakable darkness of disaster.
“That settles it.” He pressed his finger against the bell-push and held it there, and when Baines came hurrying in response to the imperative summons, he said curtly: “Order me a fresh horse round at once—at once, mind—tell Harding to saddle Orion, and to look sharp about it.”
“Blaise”—Lady Anne’s obvious uneasiness had deepened to a sharp anxiety—“Blaise, what are you going to do? What—what are you afraid of?”
He looked her straight in the eyes.
“I’m afraid of just what you are afraid of, madonna—of the devil let loose in Geoffrey Burke.”
“And—and you’re going to look for her—for Jean?”
“I’m going to find her,” he corrected quietly.
Gravity had set its seal on all three faces. Each was conscious of the same fear—the fear they could not put into words.
“But why do you take Orion?” asked Nick. “The little thoroughbred mare—Redwing—would do the journey quicker and he lighter of foot over any marshy ground on the Moor.”
“Orion can go where he chooses,” returned Tormarin. “And he’ll choose to-night. Redwing is a little bit of a thing, though she’s game as a pebble. But she couldn’t carry—two.”
The significance of Tormarin’s choice of his big roan hunter, three-parts thoroughbred and standing sixteen hands, came home to Nick. He nodded without comment.
Silently he and Lady Anne accompanied Blaise into the hall. From the gravelled drive outside came the impatient stamping of Orion’s iron-shod hoofs. Just at the last Lady Anne clung to her son’s arm.
“You’ll bring her back, Blaise?” she urged, a quiver in her voice.
“I’ll bring her back, madonna,” he answered quietly. “Don’t worry.”
A minute later he and the great roan horse were lost to sight in the mirk of the night. Only the beat of galloping hoofs was flung back to the two who were left to watch and wait, muffled and vague through the shrouding mist like the sound of a distant drum.
ORION had fully justified Blaise’s opinion of his capabilities. As though the great horse had gathered that there was trouble abroad to which he must not add, he had needed neither whip nor spur as he carried his master with long, sweeping strides over the miles that lay betwixt Staple and the Moor. He was as fresh as paint, and the rush through the cool night, under a rider with hands as light as a woman’s and who sat him with a flexible ease, akin to that of a Cossack, had not distressed him in the very least.
Now they were climbing the last long slope of the white road that approached the bungalow, the reins lying loosely on Orion’s neck.
The mist had lifted a little in places, and a watery-looking moon peered through the clouds now and again, throwing a vague, uncertain light over the blurred and sombre moorland.
Tormarin had no very definite plan of campaign in his mind. He felt convinced that he should find Jean at the bungalow. If, contrary to his expectation, she were not there, nor anyone else to whom he could apply for information as to her whereabouts, he would have to consider what his next move must be.
Meanwhile, his thoughts were preoccupied with the main fact that she had failed to return home. If she had accepted Burke’s invitation to the bungalow, believing that Judith and the Holfords would be of the party, how was it that she had not at once returned when she discovered that for some reason they were not there?
Some weeks ago—during the period when she was defiantly investigating the possibilities of an “unexploded bomb”—it was quite possible that the queer recklessness which sometimes tempts a woman to experiment in order to see just how far she may go—the mysterious delight that the feminine temperament appears to derive from dancing on the edge of a precipice—might have induced her to remain and have tea with Burke, chaperon or no chaperon. And then it was quite on the cards that Burke’s lawless disregard of anything in the world except the fulfilment of his own desires might have engineered the rest, and he might have detained her at the bungalow against her will.
But Blaise could not believe that a t锚te-脿-t锚te tea with Burke would hold any attraction for Jean now—not since that day, just before the visit to London, when he and she had been discussing the affairs of Nick and Claire and had found, quite suddenly, that their own hearts were open to each other and that with the spoken word, “Beloved,” the misunderstandings of the past had faded away, to be replaced by a wordless trust and belief.
But if it had attracted her, if—knowing precisely how much the man she loved would condemn—she had still deliberately chosen to spend an afternoon with Burke, why, then, Blaise realised with a swift pang that she was no longer his Jean at all but some other, lesser woman. Never again the “little comrade” whose crystalline honesty of soul and sensitive response to all that was sweet and wholesome and true had come into his scarred life to jewel its arid places with a new blossoming of the rose of love.
He tried to thrust the thought away from him. It was just the kind of thing that Nesta would have done, playing off one man against the other with the innate instinct of the born coquette. But not Jean—not Jean of the candid eyes.
Presently, through the thinning mist, Tormarin discerned the sharp turn of the track which branched off from the road towards the bungalow, and quickening Orion’s pace, he was soon riding up the steep ascent, the moonlight throwing strange, confusing lights and shadows on the mist-wet surface of the ground.
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the roan snorted and wheeled around, shying violently away from the off-side bank. A less good horseman might have been unseated, but as the big horse swerved Tormarin’s knees gripped against the saddle like a vice, and with a steadying word he faced him up the track again, then glanced keenly at the overhanging side of the roadway to discover what had frightened him.
A moment later he had jerked Orion to a sudden standstill, leapt to the ground and, with the reins over his arm, crossed the road swiftly to where, clad in some light-stuff that glimmered strangely in the moonlight, lay a slender figure, propped against the hank.
“Blaise!” Jean’s voice came weakly to his ears, but with a glad note in it of immense relief that bore witness to some previous strain.
In an instant Tormarin was kneeling beside her, one arm behind her shoulders. He helped her to her feet and she leaned against him, shivering. Feeling in his pockets, he produced a brandy flask and held it to her lips.
“Drink some of that!” he said. “Don’t try to tell me anything yet.”
The raw spirit sent the chilled blood racing through her veins, putting new life into her. A faint tinge of colour crept into her face.
“Oh, Blaise! I’m so glad you’ve come—so glad!” she said shakily.
“So am I,” he returned grimly. “See, drink a little more brandy. Then you shall tell me all about it.”
At last, bit by bit, she managed to give him a somewhat disjointed account of what had occurred.
“I think I must have been stunned for a little when I fell,” she said. “I can’t remember anything after stepping right off into space, it seemed, till—oh, ages afterwards—- I found myself lying here. And when I tried to stand, I found I’d hurt my ankle and that I couldn’t put my foot to the ground. So”—with a weak little attempt at laughter—“I—I just sat down again.”
Blaise gave vent to a quick exclamation of concern. “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she reassured him hastily. “Only a strain. But I can’t walk on it.” Then, suddenly clinging to him with a nervous dread: “Oh, take me away, Blaise—take me home!”
“I will. Don’t be frightened—there’s no need to be frightened any more, my Jean.”
“No, I know. I’m not afraid—now.”
But he could hear the sob of utter nerve stress and exhaustion back of the brave words.
“Well, I’ll take you home at once,” he said cheerfully. “But, look here, you’ve no coat on and you’re wet with mist.”
“I know. My coat’s at the bungalow. I left in a hurry, you see”—whimsically. The irrepressible Peterson element, game to the core, was reasserting itself.
“Well, we must fetch it———”
“No! No!” Her voice rose in hasty protest. “I won’t—I can’t go back!”
“Then I’ll go.”
“No—don’t! Geoffrey might be there——”
“So much the better”—grimly. “I’d like five minutes with him.” Tormarin’s hand tightened fiercely on the hunting-crop he carried. “But he’s more likely lost his way in the mist and fetched up far enough away. Probably”—with a short laugh—“he’s still searching Dartmoor for! you. You’d be on his mind a bit, you know! Wait here a minute while I ride up to the bungalow——”
But she clung to his arm.
“No, no! Don’t go! I—I can’t be left alone—again.” The fear was coming back to her voice and Blaise, detecting it, abandoned the idea at once.
“All right, little Jean,” he said reassuringly. “I won’t leave you. Put my coat round you”—stripping it off. “There—like that.” He helped her into it and fastened it with deft fingers. “And now I’m going to get you up on to Orion and we’ll go home.”
“I shall never get up there,” she observed, with a glance at the roan’s great shoulders looming through the mist. “I shan’t be able to spring—I can only stand on one foot, remember.”
Blaise laughed cheerily.
“Don’t worry. Just remain quite still—standing on your one foot, you poor little lame duck!—and I’ll do the rest.”
She felt his arm release its clasp of her, and a moment later he had swung his leg across the horse and was back in the saddle again. With a word to the big beast he dropped the reins on to his neck and, turning towards Jean, where she stood like a slim, pale ghost in the moonlight, he leaned down to her from the saddle.
“Can you manage to come a step nearer?” he asked.
She hobbled forward painfully.
“Now!” he said.
Lower, lower still he stooped, his arms outheld, and at last she felt them close round her, lifting her with that same strength of steel which she remembered on the mountain-side at Montavan. Orion stood like a statue—motionless as if he knew and understood all about it, his head slewed round a bit as though watching until the little business should be satisfactorily accomplished, and blowing gently through his velvety nostrils meanwhile.
And then Jean found herself resting against the curve of Blaise’s arm, with the roan’s powerful shoulders, firm and solid as a rock, beneath her.
“All right?” queried Blaise, gathering up the reins in his left hand. “Lean well back against my shoulder. There, how’s that?”
“It’s like an arm-chair.”
He laughed.
“I am afraid you won’t say the same by the end of the journey,” he commented ruefully.
But by the end of the journey Jean was fast asleep. She had “leant well back” as directed, conscious, as she felt the firm clasp of Blaise’s arm, of a supreme sense of security and well-being. The reaction from the strain of the afternoon, the exhaustion consequent upon her flight through the mist and the fall which had so suddenly ended it, and the rhythmic beat of Orion’s hoofs all combined to lull her into a state of delicious drowsiness. It was so good to feel that she need fight and scheme and plan no longer, to feel utterly safe... to know that Blaise was holding her...
Her head fell back against his shoulder, her eyes closed, and the next thing of which she was conscious was of being lifted down by a pair of strong arms and of a confused murmur of voices from amongst which she hazily distinguished Lady Anne’s heartfelt: “Thank God you’ve found her!” And then, characteristically practical, “I’ll have her in bed in five minutes. Blankets and hot-water bottles are all in readiness.”
It was the evening of the following day. Jean, tucked up on a couch and with her strained ankle comfortably bandaged, had been reluctantly furnishing Blaise with the particulars of her experience at the bungalow. She had been very unwilling to confide the whole story to him, fearing the consequences of the Tormarin temper as applied to Burke. A violent quarrel between the two men could do no good, she reflected, and would only be fraught with unpleasant results to all concerned—probably, in the end, securing a painful publicity for the whole affair.
Fortunately Blaise had been out when Judith had rung up earlier in the day to inquire if Jean had returned to Staple, or he might have fired off a few candid expressions of opinion through the telephone. But now there was no evading his searching questions, and he had quietly but determinedly insisted upon hearing the entire story. Once or twice an ejaculation of intense anger broke from him as he listened, hut, beyond that, he made little comment.
“And—and that was all,” wound up Jean. “And, anyway, Blaise”—a little anxiously—“it’s over now, and I’m none the worse except for the acquisition of a little more worldly wisdom and a strained ankle.”
“Yes, it’s over now,” he said, standing looking down at her with a curious gleam in his eyes. “But that sort of thing shan’t happen twice. You’ll have to marry me—do you hear?”—imperiously. “You shall never run such a risk again. We’ll get married at once!”
And Jean, with a quiver of amusement at the corners of her mouth, responded meekly:
“Yes, Blaise.”
The next minute his arms were round her and their lips met in the first supreme kiss of love at last acknowledged—of love given and returned.
There is no gauge by which those first moments when two who love confess that they are lovers may be measured. It is the golden, timeless span when “unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday” cease to hem us round about and only love, and love’s ecstasy, remain.
To Blaise and Jean it might have been an hour—a commonplace period ticked off by the little silver clock upon the chimneypiece—or half eternity before they came back to the recollection of things mundane. When they did, it was across the kindly bridge of humour.
Blaise laughed out suddenly and boyishly.
“It’s preposterous!” he exclaimed. “I quite forgot to propose.”
“So you did! Suppose”—smiling up at him impertinently—“suppose you do it now?”
“Not I! I won’t waste my breath when I might put it to so much better use in calling you belovedest.”
Jean was silent, but her eyes answered him. She had made room for him beside her, and now he was seated upon the edge of the Chesterfield, holding her in his arms. She did not want to talk much. That still, serene happiness which lies deep within the heart is not provocative of garrulity.
At last a question—the question that had tormented her through all the long months since she had first realised whither love was leading her, found its way to her lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me before, Blaise?”
His face clouded.
“Because of all that had happened in the past. You know—you have been told about Nesta——”
“Ah, yes! Don’t talk about it, Blaise,” she broke in hastily, sensing his distasteful recoil from the topic.
“I think we must a little, dear,” he responded gravely.
“You see, Nesta was not all to blame—nor even very much, as I’m sure”—with a little half-tender smile—“my mother tried hard to make you believe.”
Jean nodded vigorously.
“She did. And I expect she was perfectly right”
He shook his head.
“No,” he answered. “The fault was really mine. My initial mistake was in confusing the false fire with the true. It—was not love I had for Nesta. And I found it out when it was too late. We were poles apart in everything, and instead of trying to make it easier for her, trying to understand her and to lead her into our ways of looking at things. I only stormed at her. It roused all that was worst in me to see her trailing our name in the dust, throwing her dignity to the winds, craving for nothing other than amusement and excitement. I’m not trying to excuse myself. There was no excuse for me. In my way, I was as culpable and foolish as she. And when the crash came—when I found her deliberately entertaining in my house, against my express orders, a man who ought to have been kicked out of any decent society, why, I let go. The Tormarin temper had its way with me. I shall never forgive myself for that. I frightened her, terrified her. I think I must have been half mad. And then—well, you know what followed. She rushed away and, before anyone could find her or help her, she had killed herself—thrown herself into the Seine. Quite what happened between leaving here and her death we were never able to find out. Apparently since her marriage with me, her sister had gone to Paris, unknown to her, and had taken a situation as dame de compagnie to some Frenchwoman, and Nesta, though she followed from Italy to Paris, failed to find her there. At least that is what Margherita Valdi told me in the letter announcing Nesta’s death. Then she must have lost heart. So you see, morally I am responsible for that poor, reckless child’s death.”
“Oh, no, no, Blaise! I don’t see that”—pitifully.
“Don’t you? I do—very clearly. And that was why, when I found myself growing to care for you, I tried to keep away.”
He felt in his pocket and produced a plain gold wedding ring. On the inside were engraved the initials “B.T. and N.E.,” and a date.
“That was my talisman. Alargherita sent it back to me when she wrote telling me of Nesta’s death. Whenever I felt my resolution weakening, I used to take it out and have a look at it. It was always quite effective in thrusting me back into my proper place in the scheme of things—that is, outside any other woman’s life.” There was an inexpressible bitterness in his tones, and Jean drew a little nearer to him, her heart overflowing with compassion. He looked down at her, and smiled a thought ironically. “But now—you’ve beaten me.” His lips brushed her hair. “I’m glad to be beaten, belovedest... I knew, that day at Montavan, what you might come to mean to me. And I intended never to see you again, but just to take that one day for remembrance. I felt that, having made such an utter hash of things, having spoiled one woman’s life and been, indirectly, the cause of her death, I was not fit to hold another woman’s happiness in my hands.”
Jean rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.
“I’m glad you thought better of it? she observed.
“I don’t know, even now, that I’m right in letting you love me——”
“You can’t stop me,” she objected.
He smiled.
“I don’t think I would if I could—now.”
Jean leaned up and, with a slender, dictatorial finger on the side of his face, turned his head towards her.
“Quite sure?” she demanded saucily. Then, without waiting for his answer: “Blaise, I do love your chin—it’s such a nice, square, your-money-or-your-life sort of chin.”
Something light as a butterfly, warm as a woman’s lips, just brushed the feature in question.
He drew her into his arms, folding them closely about her.
“And I—I love every bit of you,” he said hoarsely. “Body and soul, I love you! Oh! Heart’s beloved! Nothing—no one in the whole world shall come between us two ever again!”
AUGUST seemed determined to justify her claim to be numbered amongst the summer months before making her exit. Apparently she had repented her of having recently veiled the country in a mist that might have been regarded as a very creditable effort even on the part of November, for to-day the sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky and scarcely a breath of wind swayed the nodding cornstalks, heavy with golden grain.
Jean, her strained ankle now practically recovered, was tramping along the narrow footpath through the cornfield, following in Blaise’s footsteps, while Nick brought up the rear of the procession. She had not seen Claire since her engagement had become an actual fact, though a characteristically warm-hearted little note from the latter had found its way to Staple, and this morning Jean had declared her inability to exist another day “without a ‘heart-to-heart’ talk with Claire.”
Hence the afternoon’s pilgrimage across the cornfield which formed part of a short cut between Staple and Chamwood.
At first Jean had feared lest her new-found happiness might raise a barrier of sorts betwixt herself and Claire. The contrast between the respective hands that fate had dealt them was so glaring, and the rose and gold with which love had suddenly decked Jean’s own life seemed to make the bleak tragedy which enveloped Claire’s appear ever darker than before.
But Claire’s letter, full of a quiet, unselfish rejoicing in the happiness which had fallen to the lot of her friend, had somehow smoothed away the little uncomfortable feeling which, to anyone as sensitive as Jean, had been a very real embarrassment. Nick’s felicitations, too, had been tendered with frank cordiality and affection, and with a delicate perception that had successfully concealed the sting of individual pain which the contrast could hardly fail to have induced.
So that it was with a considerably lightened heart that Jean, with her escort of two, passed between the great gates of Charnwood and, avoiding the lengthy walk entailed by following the windings of the drive, struck off across the velvety lawns—smooth stretches of close-cropped sward which, broken only by branching trees and shrubbery, and undefaced by the dreadful formality of symmetrical flower-beds, swept right up to the gravelled terrace fronting the windows of the house itself.
The two men loitered to discuss the points of a couple of young spaniels rollicking together on the grass, but Jean, eager to see Claire, smilingly declined to wait for them, and, speeding on ahead, she mounted the short flight of steps leading to the terrace from the lower level of the lawns.
Facing her, as she reached the topmost step was a glass door, giving entrance to Claire’s own particular sanctum, which usually, in summer, stood wide open to admit the soft, warm air and the fragrant scents breathed out from a border of old-fashioned flowers, sweet and prim and quaint, which encircled the base of the house.
But to-day the door was shut and forbidding-looking, and Jean experienced a sudden sense of misgiving. Supposing Claire chanced to be out just when she had arrived brimming over with the hundred little feminine confidences that were to have formed part of the “heart-to-heart” talk! It would be too aggravating!
Her eager glance flew ahead, searching the room’s interior, clearly visible through the wide glass panel of the door. Then, with a startled cry, she halted, her hand clapped against her lips to stifle the involuntary exclamation of dismay and terror that had leapt to them.
The afternoon sunshine slanted in upon a picture of grotesque horror—-a nightmare conception that could only have sprung from the macabre imagination of a madman.
In the middle of the room Claire sat bound to a high-backed chair, secured by cords which cut cruelly across her slender body. Her face had assumed a curious ashen shade, and her eyes were fixed in a numbed look of fascinated terror upon the tall, angular figure of her husband, which pranced in front of her jerkily, like a marionette, while he threatened her with a revolver, his thin lips, smiling cruelly, drawn back from his teeth like those of a snarling animal.
He was addressing her in queer, high-pitched tones that had something inhuman about them—the echoing, empty sound of a voice no longer controlled by a reasoning brain.
“And you needn’t worry that Mr. Brennan will be overwhelmed with grief at your early demise. He won’t—te-he-he!”—he gave a foolish, cackling laugh—“he won’t have time to miss you much! I’ll attend to that—I’ll attend to that! There’ll be a second bullet for your dear friend, Mr. Brennan.” ... Crack! The sharp report of a revolver shattered the summer silence as Jean sprang forward and wrenched at the handle of the door. But it refused to yield. It had been locked upon the inside!
Then, as the smoke cleared away, she saw that Claire was Unhurt. Sir Adrian had deliberately fired above her head and was now rocking his long, lean body to and fro in a paroxysm of horrible, noiseless mirth. Evidently he purposed to amuse himself by inflicting the torture of suspense upon his victim before he actually murdered her, for Latimer had been at one time an expert revolver shot, and, even drug-ridden as he had since become, he could not well have missed his helpless target by accident.
Claire’s head had fallen back, but no merciful oblivion of unconsciousness had come to her relief. Her mouth was a little open and the breath came in short, quick gasps between her grey lips. Her face looked like a mask, set in a blank stupor of horror.
The sound of the shot brought Blaise and Nick racing to Jean’s side. One glance through the glass door sufficed them.
“God in heaven! He’s gone mad!” Nick’s voice was quick with fear for the woman he loved.
“Get Tucker here at once!”
Blaise’s swift command, flung at her as he and Nick leaped forward, sent Jean flying along the terrace as fast as feet winged with unutterable terror could carry her. As she ran, she heard the crash of splintering glass as the two men she had left behind smashed in the panel of the locked door, and, almost simultaneously, Sir Adrian’s pistol barked again—another shot, and then a third in quick succession.
The sound seemed to wring every nerve in her body... had that madman shot him?
With sobbing breath she rushed blindly on into the house and met the butler, running too, white faced and horror-stricken.
“My God, miss! Sir Adrian’s murdering her ladyship—and the room door’s locked!”
The man almost babbled out the words in his extremity of fear.
“The terrace door... Quick, Tucker!”—Jean gasped out the order. “Mr. Brennan’s there they’ve broken in the glass...”
Not waiting to hear the end of the sentence, Tucker bolted out of the hall and along the terrace, while Jean leaned up against the doorway drawing long, shuddering breaths that seemed actually to tear their way through her throat and yet brought no relief to the agonised thudding of her heart. For the moment she was physically unable to run another yard.
But her mind was working with abnormal clarity and swiftness. This was her doing—hers! If she had not dissuaded Nick that day when he had proposed taking Claire away with him, all this would never have happened.... Claire would have been safe—safe! But she had interfered, clinging to her belief that no real good ever came by doing wrong, and now her creed had failed her utterly. Nick’s resistance of temptation was culminating in a ghastly tragedy that might have been avoided. To Jean it seemed in that moment as if her world were falling in ruins about her.
Sick with apprehension, she almost reeled out again into the mocking summer sunlight, and, running as fast as the convulsive throbbing of her heart would let her, regained the far end of the terrace and peered through the door that led into Claire’s room.
Its great panes were shattered. Jagged teeth and spites of glass stuck out from the wooden framework, while here and there, dependent from them, were bits of cloth tom from the men’s coats as they had scrambled through.
Within the room Jean could discern a confused hurly-burly of swaying, writhing figures—Blaise and Nick and the butler struggling to overpower Sir Adrian, who was fighting them with all the cunning and the amazing strength of madness. From beyond came the clamour of people battering uselessly at the door, the shrill, excited voices of the frightened servants who had collected in the hall outside the room.
For a few breathless seconds Jean was in doubt—wondered wildly whether Sir Adrian would succeed in breaking away from his captors. Then she saw Nick’s foot shoot out suddenly like the piston-rod of an engine, and Sir Adrian staggered and came crashing down on to his knees. The other two closed in upon him swiftly, and a minute later he was lying prone on his back with the three men holding him down by main force.
With difficulty avoiding the protruding pieces of glass, Jean stepped into the room. Her first thought was for Claire, who now hung helpless and unconscious against the bonds that held her. But Blaise very speedily directed her attention to something of more urgent importance for the moment.
“Unlock that door,” he called to her. “Quick!” He was still panting from the exertion of the recent struggle. “Get a rope of some sort!”
Jean turned the key and tore open the door leading into the hall. The little flock of servants gathered outside it overflowed into the room, frightened and excitedly inquisitive.
“Get some cord, one of you,” commanded Jean authoratively. “Anything will do if it’s strong.”
Two or three of the servants broke away from the main body and ran frantically in search of the required cord, glad to be of use, and very soon Sir Adrian, bound as humanely as his struggles rendered possible, was borne to his own room and laid upon his bed.
“Ring up the doctor,” ordered Blaise, as he assisted in the rather difficult process of conveying Sir Adrian upstairs. “Tell him to come to Charnwood as quickly as he can get here.” And another eager little detachment of domestics flew off to carry out his bidding. The under-footman won the race for the telephone by a good half-yard, and, in a voice which fairly twittered with the agitating and amazing news he had to impart, transmitted the message to the doctor’s parlour-maid at the other end of the wire, adding a few picturesque and stimulating details concerning the struggle which had just taken place—and which, apparently, he had perceived with the eye of faith through the wooden panels of the locked door.
Meanwhile Nick and Jean had turned their attention towards releasing Claire, who, as the last of her bonds was cut, toppled forward in a dead faint into the former’s arms.
A second procession wended its way upstairs, Nick bearing the slight, unconscious figure in his arms while Jean and a kindly-faced housemaid followed.
“Her ladyship’s maid is out, miss,” volunteered the girl. “But perhaps I can help?”
Jean smiled at her, the frank, friendly smile that always won for her the eager, willing service of man and maid alike.
“I’m sure you can,” she said gently. “As soon as we can bring her ladyship round, you shall help me undress her and put her to bed.”
In a few minutes Claire recovered consciousness, but she was horribly shaken and distraught, crying and clinging to Jean or to the housemaid—who was almost crying, too, out of sympathy—like a child frightened by the dark.
Jean, understanding just what was needed, shepherded Nick to the door of the room, where he lingered unhappily, his anxious gaze still fixed on the slender, shrinking figure upon the couch.
“Don’t worry, Nick,” she said reassuringly. “She’ll he all right; it’s only reaction. But I know what she wants—she wants a real mother-person. Go down and ring up Lady Anne, will you, and ask her to come over in the car as quickly as she can.”
Nick nodded; the idea commended itself to him. His “pale golden narcissus,” so nearly broken, would be safe indeed with the kind, comforting arms of his mother about her.
It was an intense relief to Jean when Lady Anne arrived and quietly and efficiently took command of affairs. And there was sore need for her unruffled poise and capability throughout the night that followed.
Claire, nervous and utterly unstrung, slept but little, waking constantly with a cry of terror as in imagination she relived the ordeal of the afternoon, while in the big bedroom across the landing, where her husband lay, the grim shadow of death itself was drawing momentarily closer.
By the time the doctor had arrived in answer to the summons sent, there seemed small need for the strong cords with which Sir Adrian’s limbs were bound. The wild fury of the afternoon’s struggle had thoroughly exhausted him, and he lay, propped up with pillows, apparently in a state of stupor, breathing very feebly.
“Heart,” the doctor told Tormarin after he had made a swift examination. “I’ve known for months that Sir Adrian might go out at any moment. His heart was already impaired, and, of course, he’s drugged for years. He may recover a little, but if, as I think is highly probable, there’s any recurrence of the brain disturbance—why, he’ll not live out a second paroxysm. The heart won’t stand it.”
Tormarin endeavoured to look appropriately shocked. But the doctor was a man and an honest one, and not even professional etiquette prevented his adding, with a jerk of his head in the direction of Claire’s bedroom:
“It would be a merciful deliverance for that poor little woman. There’s a strain of madness in the Latimer’s you know. And”—with a shrug—“naturally Sir Adrian’s habits have accentuated it in his own case.”
But the doctor was mistaken in his calculations. Sir Adrian’s constitution was stronger than he estimated. As Nick had once bitterly commented to Jean, the man was like a piece of steel wire, and two dreadful outbreaks of maniacal fury had to be endured before the wire began to weaken.
During the course of the first paroxysm it was all the four men could do to restrain him from leaping from the bed and rushing out of the room, since, during the period of quiescence which had preceded the doctor’s arrival, a mistaken feeling of humanity had dictated the loosening of the cords which bound him.
He fought and screamed, uttering the most horrible imprecations, and his evil intent towards the woman who was his wife was unmistakable. With her husband free to work his will, Claire’s life would not have been worth a moment’s purchase.
In the period of coma that succeeded this outbreak Sir Adrian, was again secured, as mercifully as possible, from any possibility of doing his wife a mischief, and the second paroxysm which convulsed the bound and shackled madman was very terrible to witness.
Like its predecessor, this attack was followed by a stupor, during which Sir Adrian appeared more dead than alive.
He was palpably weaker, restoratives failing to produce any appreciable effect, and towards morning, in those chill, small hours when the powers of the body languish and fail, the crazed and self-tormented spirit of Adrian Latimer quitted a world in which he had been able to perceive none of those things that are just and pure and lovely and of good report, but only distrust and malice and, finally, black hatred.
A fortnight had come and gone. Sir Adrian’s body had been laid to rest in Coombe Eavie churchyard, and Claire, in the simplest of widow’s weeds, went about once more, looking rather frail and worn-out but with a fugitive light of happiness on her face that was a source of rejoicing to those who loved her.
She made no pretence at mourning the man who had turned her life into a living hell for nearly three years and who stood like a gaoler betwixt her and the happiness which might have been hers had she been free. But the conventions, as well as her own feelings, dictated that a decent interval must elapse before she and Nick could be married, and this would be for her a quiet period dedicated to the readjustment of her whole attitude towards life.
The length of that period was the subject of considerable discussion. Nick protested that six months was amply long enough to wait—too long indeed!—but Claire herself seemed disposed to prolong her widowhood into a year.
“It isn’t in the least because I feel I owe it to Adrian,” she said in answer to Nick’s protest. “I don’t consider that I owe him anything at all. But I feel so battered, Nick, so utterly tired and weary after the perpetual struggle of the last three years that I don’t want to plunge suddenly into the new duties of a new life—not even into new happiness. It’s difficult to make you understand, but I feel just like a sponge which has soaked up all it can and simply can’t absorb any more of anything. You must let me have time for the past to evaporate a bit.”
But it required the addition of a few common-sense observations on the part of Lady Anne to drive the nail home.
“Claire is quite right, Nick,” she told him. “She is temporarily worn out—mentally, physically and spiritually spent. Her nerves have been kept at their utmost stretch off and on for years, and now that release has come they’ve collapsed like a fiddle-string when the peg that holds it taut is loosened. You must give her time to recover, to key herself up to normal pitch again. At present she isn’t fit to face even the demands that big happiness brings in its train.”
So Nick had perforce to bow to Claire’s decision, and it was settled that for the first month of two, at least, of her widowhood Jean should remove herself and her belongings from Staple and bear her company at Chamwood. And meanwhile Nick and Claire would spend many peaceful hours together of quiet happiness and companionship, while Claire, as she herself expressed it, “rebuilt her soul.”
To Jean the issue of events had brought nothing but pure joy. Her belief had been justified, and the grim gateway of death had become for these two friends of hers the gateway to happiness.
She had neither seen nor heard anything from Burke since the day she had fled from him on the Moor, although indirectly she had discovered that he had quitted the bungalow the day following that of her flight from it and had gone to London.
Judith sent her a brief, rather formal letter of congratulation upon her engagement, but in it she made no reference to him nor did she endeavour to explain away or palliate her own share in his scheme to force Jean’s hand. Probably? an odd kind of loyalty to her brother prevented her from clearing herself at his expense, added to a certain dogged pride which refused to let her extenuate any action of hers; to the daughter of Glyn Peterson.
But none of these things had any power to hurt Jean now. In her new-born happiness she felt that she could find it in her heart to forgive anybody anything! She was even conscious of a certain tentative understanding and indulgence for Burke himself. He had only used the “primitive man” methods his temperament dictated in his effort to win the woman he wanted for his wife. And he had failed. Just now, Jean could not help sympathising with anybody who had failed to find the happiness that love bestows.
She reflected that the old gipsy on the Moor had been wonderfully correct in her prophecy concerning Nick and Claire. The sun was “shin’ butivul” for them at last, just as she had assured them that it would.
And, with the same, came a sudden little clutch of fear at Jean’s heart, like the touch of a strange hand. The gipsy had had other words for her—harsher, less sweet-sounding.
“For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
She shivered a little. She felt as though a breath of cold air had passed over her, chilling the warm blood that ran so joyously in her veins.