BLAISE was seated at his study table, regarding somewhat dubiously a letter which lay open in front of him.
It was written in a flowing, foreign hand and expressed with a quaintly stilted, un-English turn of phrase. The heading of the notepaper upon which it was inscribed was that of a hotel in Exeter.
“Dear Mr. Tormarin,” it ran. “You will, without doubt, be
surprised to receive a letter from me, since we have met
only once. But I have something of the most great importance
to confide in you, and I therefore beg that you will accord
me an interview. When I add to this that the matter
approaches very closely the future of your fianc茅e, Miss
Peterson, I do not doubt to myself that you will appoint a
time when I may call to see you.”
The letter was signed M. de Varigny.
Blaise had received this thought-provoking epistle two days previously, and had been impressed by an uncomfortable consciousness that it foreboded something unpleasant. He could not imagine in what manner the affairs of Madame de Varigny impinged upon his own, or rather, as she seemed to imply, upon those of his future wife, and this very uncertainty had impelled him to fix the interview the Countess had demanded at as early a moment as possible. Disagreeables were best met and faced without delay. So now he was momentarily awaiting her arrival, still unable to rid himself of the impression that something of an unpleasant nature impended.
He glanced through the open window, facing him. Afterwards, he was always able to recall every little detail of the picture upon which his eyes rested; it was etched upon his mind as ineffaceably as though cut upon steel with a graver’s tool.
Although the mellow sunlight of September flooded the lawns and terraces, that indescribable change which heralds autumn had already begun to manifest itself. Not that any hint of chill as yet edged the balmy atmosphere or tint of russet reddened the gently waving foliage of the trees. It was something less definite—a suggestion of maturity, of completed ripening, conveyed by the deep, rich green of the grass, the strong, woody growth of the trees, the full-blown glory of the roses nodding on their stems.
To the left, in the shade of a stately cedar, Lady Anne and Jean were encamped with their sewing and writing materials at hand, and the rays of sunshine, filtering between the widespread branches above them, woke fugitive gold and silver lights in the down-bent auburn and white-crowned heads. Further away, in the valley below, the brown smudge of a wide-bottomed boat broke the smooth expanse of the lake whence the mingled laughter of Nick and Claire came floating up on the breeze.
It was a peaceful scene, full of intimate happiness and tender promises, and Blaise watched it with contented eyes. The voice of Baines, formal and urbane, roused him from a pleasant reverie.
“Madame de Varigny,” announced that functionary, throwing open the door and standing aside for the visitor to enter.
Blaise rose courteously to greet her, holding out his hand. But the Countess shook her head.
“No, I will not shake hands,” she said abruptly. “When you know why I am come, you will not want to shake hands with me.”
There was something not unattractive about the outspoken refusal to sail under false colours, more especially softened, as it was, by the charm of the faintly foreign accent and intonation.
Madame de Varigny had paused a moment in the middle of the room and was regarding her host with curiously appraising eyes, and as Blaise returned her gaze he was conscious, as once before at the fancy-dress ball at Montavan, of the strange sense of familiarity this woman had for him.
“I am sorry for that,” he said, answering her refusal to shake hands. “Won’t you, at least, sit down?” pulling forward a chair.
“Yes, I will sit.”
She sank into the chair with the quick, graceful motion of the South, and continued to regard Blaise watchfully between the thick fringes of her lashes. Had Jean been present, she would have been struck anew by the expression of implacability which hardened the dark-brown eyes. By that, and by something else as well—a look of unmistakable triumph.
“I have much—much to say to you, Monsieur Tor-ma-rin,” she began at last. “I will commence by telling you a little about myself. I am”—here she looked away for an instant, then shot a swift, penetrating glance at him—“an Italian by birth.”
A brief silence followed this announcement. Blaise was thinking concentratedly. So Madame de Varigny, despite her French name and her French mannerisms, was an Italian! He might have guessed it had the possibility ever definitely presented itself to him—guessed it from those broad, high cheek bones, those liquid, southern-dark eyes, and the coarse, blue-black hair. Yet, except for one fleeting moment at Montavan, the idea had never occurred to him, and it had then been swiftly dissipated by Jean’s explanation that the impressive-looking Cleopatra was the Comtesse de Varigny and her chaperon for the time being.
Italian! Blaise felt more convinced than ever now that Madame de Varigny’s visit portended unpleasant developments. Something, a voice from the past, was about to break stridently on the peaceful present. He braced himself to meet and counter whatever might be coming. Vaguely he foresaw some kind of blackmail, and he thanked Heaven for Jean’s absolute understanding and complete knowledge of the past and of all that appertained to his first unhappy marriage. There would be little foothold here for an attempt at blackmail, however skilfully worked, he reflected grimly.
He therefore responded civilly to Madame de Varigny’s statement, apparently accepting it at its mere face value.
“I am surprised,” he told her. “You have altogether the air of a Parisian.”
The Countess smiled.
“Oh, I had a French grandmother,” she returned carelessly. “Also, I have lived much in Paris.”
“Ah! that explains it,” replied Tormarin, leaning back in his chair as though satisfied. “It’s the influence of environment and heredity, I expect.”
He was fencing carefully, waiting for the woman to show her hand.
“I have also Corsican blood in my veins,” pursued Madame de Varigny. Then, as Tormarin made no answer, she leaned forward and said intently: “Do you know the characteristic of the Corsicans, Monsieur Tor-ma-rin? They never forget—nevaire”—her foreign accent increasing, as usual, with emotion of any kind. “The Corsican always repays.”
“Yes? And you have something to repay? Is that it?”
“Yes. I have something to repay.”
“A revenge, in fact?”
“She shook her head.
“No. I do not call it revenge. It is punishment—the just punishment earned by the man who married Nesta Freyne and brought her in return nothing but misery.” Tormarin rose abruptly.
“What have the affairs of Nesta Freyne to do with you?” he asked sternly. “As you are obviously aware, she was my wife. And I do not propose to discuss private personal matters with an entire stranger.” He moved towards the door. “I think our interview can very well terminate at that. I do not wish to forget that I am your host.”
“You are more than that,” said Madame de Varigny suavely. “You are my brother-in-law.”
“What?” Tormarin swung ’round and faced her.
“Yes.” The suavity was gone now, replaced by a curious deadly precision of utterance, enhanced by the foreign rendering of syllabic values. “I am—or was, until my marriage—Margherita Valdi. I am Nesta’s sister.”
Tormarin regarded her steadily.
“In that case,” he said, “I will hear what you have to say. Though I don’t think,” he added, “that any good can come of raking up the past. It is better—forgotten.”
“Forgotten?” Madame de Varigny seized upon the unlucky word. “Yes—it may be easy enough for you to forget—you who took Nesta’s young, beautiful life and crushed it; you who came like a thief and stole from me the one creature in the whole world whom I loved—my bambina, my little sister. Oh, yes”—her voice rose passionately—“easy enough when there is another woman—a new love—with whom you think to start your life all over again! But I tell you, you shall not! There shall be no new beginning for you—no marriage with this Jean Peterson to whom you are now fianc茅. I forbid it—I——”
Blaise stemmed the torrent of her speech with an authoritative gesture.
“May I ask how the news of my engagement reached you?” he asked, his cool, dispassionate question falling like a hailstone dropped into some molten stream of lava.
“Oh, I have kept watch. I have the means of knowing. There is very little that has happened to you since—since I wrote to you of Nesta’s death”—she stumbled a little over the words, and Blaise, despite his anger, was conscious of a sudden flash of sympathy for her—“very little that I have not known. And this—your engagement, I knew of that when it was barely a week old.”
“I’m really curious to know why my affairs should be of such surpassing interest to you. My engagement, for instance—how did you hear of it?”
“Oh, that was easy”—contemptuously. “There was another man who loved your Mees Peterson—this Monsieur Burke. I used him. I knew he was afraid that you might win her, and I told him that if ever you became engaged he must come and tell me, and I would show him how to make sure that you should never marry her. Oh! That was vairy simple!”
“I’m afraid you promised him more than you can hope to perform. I grant that you have every reason to dislike me—hate me, if you will. I acknowledge, too, that I was to blame, miserably to blame, for Nesta’s unhappiness—as much in fault as she herself. But there is nothing gained at this late hour by apportioning the blame. We each made bad mistakes—and we have each had to pay the price.”
“Yours has been a very light price—comparatively,” she commented with intense bitterness.
“Do you think so?”
Something in the quiet, still utterance of the brief question brought her glance swiftly, curiously, back to his face. It was as though, behind those four short words, she could feel the intolerable pressure of years of endurance. For a moment she seemed to waver, then, as though she had deliberately pushed the impression aside, she laughed disagreeably.
“Too light to satisfy her sister, at any rate.”
Tormarin froze.
“It is fortunate, then, that my ultimate fate does not lie in your hands,” he observed.
“But that is just where it does lie—in the palm of my hand—there!”
She flung out one shapely hand, palm, upward, and pointed to it with the other.
“And now—see—I close my hand—so!... And this beautiful marriage of which you have dreamed, your marriage with Mees Peterson—it does not take place!”
“Are you mad?” asked Blaise contemptuously, experiencing all an Englishman’s distaste for this display of unforced drama.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said quietly. “I am not mad.”
The air of theatricality seemed to fall suddenly away from her, leaving her a stem and sombre figure, invested with an intrinsic atmosphere of tragedy, filled with one sentiment only—the thirst for vengeance.
“No. I am not mad. I am telling you the truth. You can never marry Jean Peterson, because Nesta—your wife—still lives.”
Tormarin fell back a pace. For one moment he believed the woman had gone genuinely mad—that by dint of long brooding upon how she might most hurt and punish the Englishman whom she had never forgiven for marrying her sister, she had evolved from a half-crazed mind the belief that Nesta still lived and that thus she would be able to prevent his marriage with any other woman.
And then, looking into those seeming soft brown eyes with the granite hardness in their depths, he could see the light of reason burning steadily within them.
Madame de Varigny was quite sane, as sane as he was himself. And if so...
A great fear came upon him—the fear of a man who dimly senses the approach of some appalling danger and knows that it will find him utterly defenceless.
“Do you know what you are saying?” he demanded, his voice roughened and uneven.
“Yes, I know. Nesta is alive,” she repeated simply.
“Alive?”
The word was wrung from him, hardly more than a hoarse whisper of sound. He swung round upon her violently.
“But you yourself wrote and told me of her death?” She nodded placidly.
“Yes. I wrote a lie.”
“But the official information? We had that, too, later, from the French police, confirming your account. You had better be careful about what you are telling me,” he added sternly. “Lies won’t answer, now.”
“The need for lying is past,” she answered with the most absolute candour. “The French police wrote quite truthfully all they knew. They had found the body of a suicide, whom I identified as my sister. To strengthen matters I bribed someone I knew also to identify the dead girl as Nesta. She was a married woman, too, the poor little dead, one! So it was quite simple. And I took Nesta home—home to Ch芒teau Varigny. I had married by then. But she had heard of my marriage through friends in Italy and wrote to me from there, telling me of her misery with you and begging me to succour her. So I went to Italy and brought her back with me to Varigny. Then I planned that you should believe her dead. It was all very simple,” she repeated complacently.
“But what was your object in all this? Why did you scheme to keep me in ignorance? What was your purpose?”
“Why?” Her voice deepened suddenly, the placid satisfaction with which she had narrated the carrying out of her plan disappearing from it completely. “Why? I did it to punish you—first for stealing my Nesta from me and then because, after you had stolen her, you brought her nothing but misery and heart-break. She was so young—so young! And you, with your hideous temper and cold, formal English ways—you broke her heart, cowed her, crushed her!”
“She was old enough to coquette with every man she met,” came grimly between Tormarin’s teeth. “No husband—English or Italian, Least of all Italian—would have endured her conduct.”
“She would not have played with other men if you had loved her. She was all fire. And you—you were like a wet log that will not burn!” She gestured fiercely. “You never loved her! It was in a moment of passion—of desire that you married her!... But you were sure, eventually, to meet some other woman and learn what love—real love—is. So I waited. And when I saw you at Montavan with Jean—I knew that the day I had waited for so long would come at last. I knew that your punishment was ready to my hand.”
“Do you mean”—Blaise spoke in curiously measured accents—“do you mean that you deliberately concealed the fact that Nesta still lived so that——”
“So that you should not marry the woman that you loved when the time came! Yes, I planned it all! I kept Nesta safely hidden at Varigny, and I made little changes in her appearance—a woman can, you know”—mockingly—“the colour of her hair, the way of dressing it. Oh, just little changes, so that if by chance she was seen in the street by anyone who had known her as your wife she would not easily be recognised.” Oh once more with that exasperating complacence at her own skill in deception—“I thought of every little detail.”
Tormarin stood listening to her silently, like a man in a trance. His face had grown drawn and haggard, and his eyes burned in their sockets. Once, as she poured out her story of trickery and deception, she heard him mutter dazedly: “Jean... Jean,” and the anguish in his voice might have moved any woman to pity save only one who was utterly and entirely obsessed with the desire for vengeance.
But the intolerable suffering which had suddenly lined his face and rimmed his mouth with tiny beads of sweat was meat and drink to her. She gloried in it. This was her hour of triumph after long years of waiting.
She smiled at him blandly.
“I think I have behaved very well,” she pursued. “I might have waited till you were actually married. But I have no wish to punish the little Jean. She, at least, is ‘on the square,’ as you say—though it would have revenged my Nesta well had I waited. You ruined Nesta’s life; I could have ruined the life of the woman you love. I did think of it. Ah! You would have suffered then, knowing that the Jean you worshipped was neither wife, nor maid, but a——”
“Be silent, woman!”
Tortured beyond bearing, this final taunt, levelled at the woman he held more dear than anything in life, snapped his last thread of self-control.
He flung himself forward and his hands were gripping, gripping at the soft ivory throat from which the taunt had sprung. He felt the woman writhe, struggling to pull his hands from her neck. But it meant nothing to him. He did not think of her any longer as a woman. She was something vile—leprous to the very core of her being—a thing to be destroyed. The thing which had made of all Jean’s promised happiness a black and bitter mockery.
The mad Tormarin rage surged through his veins like a consuming fire. He would break her—break her and utterly destroy her just as one destroyed a deadly snake.
And then across the thunderous roar that beat in his ears came the beloved voice, the voice that would have power to call him out of the depths of hell itself—Jean’s voice.
“Blaise! Blaise! What are you doing? Stop!”
SLOWLY, reluctantly, Tormarin’s hands loosened their clasp of Madame de Varigny’s throat, and with a swift, flexible twist of the body she slipped aside and stood a few paces away from him.
Jean looked from one to the other with horrified eyes. “Madame de Varigny?—Blaise?” she stammered. “What is it?... Why, you—you might have killed her, Blaise!”
He stared at her blankly. His release of the Italian woman had been in mere blind response to Jean’s first imperative appeal that he should desist But the mists of ungovernable anger had hardly yet cleared from his brain; the blood still drummed in his ears like the roar of the sea.
“Blaise”—Jean spoke imploringly. “What were you doing? Tell me———”
With an effort he seemed to recover himself.
“It’s a pity you didn’t let me finish it, Jean,” he said harshly. “Such women are better dead.”
Madame de Varigny was fingering her neck delicately where the pressure of Blaise’s grip had scored red marks on the cream-like flesh. She seemed quite composed. Her smile still held its quiet triumph and her long dark eyes gleamed with the same mockery that had brought her within measureable distance of quick death.
“As Monsieur Tor-ma-rin seems to find a difficulty in explaining—permit me,” she said at last “He was angry with me because I bring him the good news that his wife is still alive, that he need mourn no longer.”
While she spoke her eyes, resting on Blaise’s mask-like face, held an expression of malicious satisfaction.
“His wife... alive?” repeated Jean dazedly. “Blaise, is she mad? Nesta has been dead years—years.” Then, as he made no answer, she continued rapidly, a faint note of fear vibrating in her voice: “Isn’t it so? Blaise—speak! Quickly, tell her—Nesta has been dead some years!”
“He cannot tell me anything about her which I do not know already, Mees Peterson, seeing that she is my sister and has been living with me ever since her husband’s cruelty drove her from his home.”
“Is it true, Blaise?” whispered Jean.
Belief that some substance of terrible truth lay behind the Italian’s coolly uttered statements was beginning to lay hold of her.
“Blaise, Blaise”—her voice rising a little—“say it isn’t true—tell her it isn’t true.”
He looked at her speechlessly, but the measureless pain in his eyes answered her more fully, more convincingly than any words.
“You see?” broke in Madame de Varigny triumphantly. “He cannot deny it! It was I who told him of her death and I who now tell him that she still lives. Listen to me, mademoiselle, and I will recount you how——”
“No!” interrupted Jean proudly. “Whatever there may be for me to hear, I will hear it from Blaise—not from you.”
She turned again to Tormarin.
“Tell me everything, Blaise,” she said simply.
He took her outstretched hands and drew her slowly towards him. No one, reading now the calm sadness, the stern imprint of endurance on his face, could have imagined it was that of the same man who, a few moments earlier, had been swept by such a tempest of uncontrollable anger.
“Jean,” he said very gently and pitifully. “I’m afraid that what Madame de Varigny says may be true. I have no proof that it is not——”
“Nor have you any proof that it is,” broke in Jean swiftly. She swung round on Madame de Varigny. “Where is your proof—where is your proof?”
The Italian smiled.
“Monsieur Tor-ma-rin will find his wife in my car. I bade the chauffeur wait with it at the lodge gate.”
“Do you mean you have brought Nesta—here?” cried Blaise.
“Why not?” replied Madame do Varigny, with a return to the same exasperating complacency with which she had originally described her whole scheme of revenge. “And—here? Surely her husband’s house is the proper place to which to bring his wife?”
“She cannot remain here,” said Blaise with decision.
“No? For the moment that was not my idea. I brought her with me because I thought there could be no more convincing proof.”
Blaise looked at her searchingly. He fancied he detected a false note in her voluble speech, and a new idea presented itself to him. Was the woman simply putting up a gigantic bluff? Or was it really Nesta, his wife, waiting in the car at the lodge gates? It occurred to him as perfectly feasible that it might be merely some woman whose remarkable resemblance to the dead girl had suggested to the Countess’s fertile brain the scheme that she should impersonate her.
His mind seized eagerly upon the idea, bolstering it up with Madame de Varigny’s own admissions. “I made little changes in her appearance,” she had said. “The colour of her hair, the way of dressing it.” Probably she was relying on those “little changes,” and on the blurred recollection resulting from the length of time which had elapsed since Nesta’s death, to aid her in her plan of introducing as his wife a woman who closely resembled her. He felt morally sure of it, and the light of hope suddenly shone bravely.
“I believe you are deceiving me,” he said quietly. “Lying—as you have lied all through the piece. I’ll come and see this ‘wife’ you have waiting in the car for me”—grimly. He turned to Jean. “Keep up your courage, sweetheart” he said in a low voice full of infinite solicitude. “I believe the whole thing is a put-up job to separate us.”
Jean smiled at him radiantly. She felt all at once very confident. In a few minutes this nightmarish story of a Nesta still alive and claiming her rights as Blaise’s wife would be proved a lie.
Tormarin crossed the room and opened the door.
“Now, Madame de Varigny—will you come with me?”
The woman hesitated a moment.
“Come,” insisted Blaise firmly. “Or—are you afraid, after all, to bring me face to face with my wife?”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I am not afraid. It is only that I am so sorry—so sorry for the little Jean.”
Her eyes, soft and dark and liquid as the eyes of a deer, sought Jean’s beseechingly.
“I am so sorry,” she repeated. And passed, slowly,—almost unwillingly, it seemed, out of the room, followed by Tormarin.
Jean raised her head from Blaise’s shoulder and pushed back her hair, damp with perspiration, from her forehead. It seemed to her as though she had been down, down into some awful, limitless abyss of darkness from which she was now feebly struggling back to a painful consciousness of material things. A great sea had surged over her head, blotting out everything, and remained poised above her like a huge black arch, imprisoning her in the vast, deserted chaos in which she found herself wandering. Then—after a long time, it seemed—it had surged away again and she could distinguish Blaise’s face bent above her.
“Then—then it’s true?” she said stupidly. Her voice sounded tiny, even to herself—a mere thread of sound.
Blaise made no answer. He only held her a little closer in his arms. She supposed he hadn’t heard that thin little thread of voice. She must try again.
“Is it true, Blaise? Is Nesta——” But somehow the last word wouldn’t come.
She felt his arm jerk against her side.
“Yes,” he said baldly. “It’s true. Nesta is alive. I’ve seen her.”
Jean said nothing. She knew it—had known it all the time the arched wall of sea had kept her down in that awful black waste where there had been neither warmth nor sunshine but only bitter, freezing cold and lightless space. She clung a little closer to Blaise, like a frightened, exhausted child.
“Heart’s beloved... little dearest Jean...” She heard the wrung murmur of his voice above her head. Then suddenly, his arms tightening round her: “My soul!”
The sunlight still slanted in through the windows, mellow and golden. A gay shout of laughter came up from the boat on the lake. The clock on the chimney-piece struck the hour—twelve slow, maddening strokes.
Jean stared at its blank, foolish face. The hands had pointed to half-past eleven when the door of the room had closed behind Blaise and Madame de Varigny. It had taken just a brief half-hour to smash up her whole world—to rob her of everything that mattered.
“I must think—I must think,” she muttered.
“Belovedest”—Blaise’s voice was wonderfully tender—not with the passionate tenderness of a lover but with a solicitude that was almost maternal. “Belovedest, don’t try to think now. Try to rest a little, won’t you?”
And at that Jean came right back to an understanding of all that had happened, as the needle of a compass swings back to the frozen north.
“Rest?” she said. “Rest? Do you realise that I shall have all the remainder of life to—rest in? There’ll he nothing else to do.”
She released herself very gently from Tormarin’s arms and, crossing the room to the window, stood looking out.
“How funny!” she said in a rather high-pitched, uncertain voice. “It all looks just the same—although everything in the world is changed.”
He came and stood beside her.
“No,” he said quietly. “Nothing is changed, dear. Our love is the same as it was before. Always remember that.”
“But we can’t every marry now.”
“No. We can’t marry—now. You’ll never have the Tormarin temper to bear with, after all!”
She laid her hand swiftly across his lips.
“Oh, it was dreadful!” she said, recalling the terrible scene which she had interrupted. “It—it hardly seemed—you, Blaise.”
“For the moment it wasn’t. It was the Tormarin devil—the curse of every generation. But I think that Varigny woman could turn a saint into a devil if she tried! She said something about you—and I couldn’t stand it.”
“Was that it? Then I suppose I shall have to forgive you”—with a pale little attempt at a smile.
But the half-hearted smile faded again almost instantly.
“Oh, Blaise, what would your temper matter if we could still be together?” she cried passionately. “Nothing in the wide world would matter then!”
Presently she spoke again.
“But it’s worse for you than for me. I wish it were more equal.”
“How worse for me? I don’t understand. Unless”—with a brief, sad smile—“you love me less?”
“Ah, you know I don’t mean that! But I’ve only the separation to face. I’m not tied to somebody I don’t love. You’ve got Nesta to consider.”
“Nesta?” He gave a short, grim laugh. “Nesta can go back to where she came from.”
There was a long silence. At last Jean broke it.
“Blaise, you can’t do that—you can’t send her away again,” she said in quick, low tones. “She’s your wife.”
“My wife! She seems to have been oblivious of the fact—and to have wished me to be equally oblivious of it—for the last few years.”
“Yes, of course she’s been wrong, wickedly wrong. But that doesn’t alter the fact that she’s your responsibility, Blaise. You must take her back.”
“Take her back?”—violently. “I’ll be shot if I do! She’s chosen to live her life without me for the last few years—she can continue to do so.”
Jean laid her hand on his arm. She was smiling wistfully. “Dear, you’ll have to take her back,” she persisted gently. “Don’t you see—she’s not wholly to blame? You’ve admitted that. You’ve blamed yourself in a large measure for her running away. It’s up to you now to put things straight, to—to give her the chance she didn’t have before.”
“You’re discounting these last few years,” he returned gravely. “These years in which she has lived a lie, allowing me to believe her dead—-cheating and deceiving me as no man was ever cheated before. She’s cheated me out of my happiness”—heavily—“taken you from me!”
“Yes, I know.” Jean’s voice quivered, but she steadied it again. “But even in that, she was not solely to blame. You’ve told me how—how weak she is and easily led astray. And she’s very young. What chance would Nesta have of asserting her will against her sister’s, even had she wished to return to you? She ran away from Staple in a fit of temper and because you had frightened her. After that—you can see for yourself—Madame de Varigny is responsible for everything that has happened since.”
Tormarin remained silent. The quiet justice of Jean’s summing up of the situation struck at him hard.
She waited a moment, then added quietly:
“You must take her back, Blaise.”
He wheeled round on her violently.
“And you?” he exclaimed. “You? Did you ever love me, Jean, that you can talk so coolly about turning me over to another woman?”
She whitened at the bitter accusation in his tones, but she did not flinch.
“It’s just because I love you, Blaise, that I want you to do this thing—to do the only thing that is worthy of you. Oh, my dear, my dear”—her hands went out to him in sudden, helpless pleading—“do you think it’s easy for me to ask it?” The desolate cry pierced him. He caught her in his arms, kissing her fiercely, adoringly.
“Sweetheart!... Forgive me! I’m half mad, I think. Beloved, say that you forgive me!”
She leaned against him, glad to feel the straining clasp of his arms about her—to rest once more in her place against his heart.
“Dearest of all,” she said tremulously, “there is no question of forgiveness between us two. There never will be. We’re just—both of us—struggling in the dark, and there’s only duty”—brokenly—“only duty to hold to.”
They stood together in silence, comforted just a little by the mere human touch of each other in this communion of sorrow which had so suddenly come upon them, yet knowing in their hearts that this was the very comfort that must for ever be denied them in the lonely future.
At last Jean raised her head from its resting-place and her eyes searched Blaise’s face, asking the question she could no longer bring herself to put in words. He met their gaze. “Jean, is it your wish I do this thing—take Nesta back?” He felt a shudder run through her frame. Twice she tried ineffectually to answer. At last she forced her dry lips to utter an affirmative.
“So be it.”
His answer sounded in her ears like the knell to the whole meaning of life. The future was settled. Henceforth their lives must lie apart.
“So be it,” said Blaise. “She shall come back and take her place again at Staple.”
Jean clung to him a little closer.
“Blaise, beloved—I know the harder part will be yours. But mine won’t be easy, dear. I shall go to Charnwood to be with Claire at once—to-morrow—and it won’t be easy, when I see in an evening the lights twinkle up at Staple, to know that you two are within, shut in from the world together, while I’m outside—always outside your life and your love.”
“You’ll never be outside my love,” he said swiftly. “That’s yours, now and forever. And no other woman shall rob you of one jot or tittle of it, were she my wife twenty times over. I will bring Nesta back to Staple, and she shall bear my name and live as my wife in the eyes of the world. But my love—that is yours, utterly and entirely. Yours and no other’s.”
She lifted her face to his, and their lips met in a kiss that was the seal of love and all love’s faithfulness.
“So is mine yours,” she said. “How and forever, in this world and the next. Oh, Blaise—beloved!”—she clung to him in a passion of love and anguish and straining belief—“Some day, surely, in that other world, God will give us freedom to take our happiness!”
TWO months had elapsed since Fate’s dividing sword had fallen, forever separating Jean from the man she loved, and the subsequent march of events, with the many changes involved and the bitter loneliness of soul entailed, had made the two months seem to her more like two years.
She had left Staple for Chamwood on the day following that of Madame de Varigny’s visit. It was no longer possible for her to remain under the same roof with Blaise, where the enforced strain of meeting each other daily, and of endeavouring to behave as though nothing more than mere commonplace friendship linked them together, would have been too great for either of them to endure even for the few remaining days which still intervened before the date originally planned for her departure.
Lady Anne, with her usual sympathetic insight, had made no effort to dissuade her, reluctant though she had been to part with her. For herself, the fact that Nesta was alive had come upon her in the light of an almost overwhelming blow. She had never liked the girl, whereas she had grown to look upon Jean as a beloved daughter, and no one had rejoiced more sincerely than his mother when Blaise had confided to her the news of his engagement. At last she would see that grey page in his life turned down for ever and the beginning of a newer, fairer page, illuminated with happiness! And instead, like a tide that has receded far out and then rushes in again with redoubled energy, the whole misery and sorrow of the past had returned upon him, a thousand times accentuated by reason of his love for Jean.
It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that Lady Anne, together with Nick, quitted Staple and established herself for the second time at the Dower House, retiring thither in favour of Nesta who was now installed once more at the Manor. And the thought of how gladly she would have effected the same change, had it been Jean whom Blaise was bringing home as his bride, added but a keener pang to her sorrow.
She watched with anxious eyes the progress of events at Staple. At the commencement of the new r茅gime Nesta had appeared genuinely repentant and ashamed of her conduct in the past, and there was something disarming in the little, half-apologetic air with which she had at first reassumed her position of ch芒telaine of Staple, deferring eagerly to Blaise on every point and trying her utmost to please him and conform to his wishes. It held something of the appeal of a forgiven child who tries to atone for former naughtiness by an almost alarming access of virtue.
She accepted with meek docility Blaise’s decision regarding the purely formal relations upon which their married life was henceforth to be based, apparently humbly thankful to be reinstated as his wife on any terms whatsoever that he chose to dictate..
“I know I have been bad—bad,” she declared, “to run away and leave you like that. I can’t”—forlornly—“hope for you to love me again——”
And Tormarin had replied with unmistakable decision:
“No, you can’t hope for that. And I’m glad you understand and recognise the fact. Still, we can try to be good friends, Nesta, at least.”
But this tranquil state of things only lasted for a comparatively short time. Very soon, as the novelty and satisfaction of her reinstatement began to wear off, Nesta became more self-assured and, apparently, considerably less frequently visited by spasms of repentance and remorse.
Her butterfly nature could retain no very deep impression for any length of time, and gradually the characteristics of the old Nesta—the pettish, self-willed, pleasure-loving woman of former times—began to reassert themselves.
Blaise tried hard to exercise forbearance with her and to treat her, at least with justice and with a certain meed of kindliness. But she did not second his efforts. Instead, she became more exigeant and difficult as time passed on.
She was no longer satisfied by the fact that she was once more installed as the mistress of Staple. She demanded a husband who would surround her with all the little observances that only love itself can dictate, whom she could alternately scold and cajole as the fancy took her, but who would always come back to her, after a tiff, ready anew to play the adoring lover.
She found Blaise’s cool, measured, elder-brotherly kindness unendurable, and she exhausted herself beating continually against the rock of his determination, without producing any effect other than to make his manner even more austere, less friendly than it had been before.
Then when she recognised her total inability to move him to any sort of responsive emotion, and that her beauty—which was undeniable—made no more impression upon him than if he had been blind, she resorted to the old, painfully, familiar weapons of tears and fits of temper, in the course of which she would upbraid him bitterly, pouring forth streams of reproaches which more often than not culminated in an attack of hysterics.
All of which Blaise bore with a curious, stoical self-control. It seemed as though the Tormarin temper had been exorcised, as if that fierce storm of anger provoked by Madame de Varigny’s taunts, and which had so nearly resulted in a tragedy, had shocked Blaise into realisation of the terrible latent possibilities of the family failing and the absolute necessity for an iron self-government.
For weeks he supported Nesta’s petty gibes and ebullitions of temper with illimitable patience, and it was only when, trading on his unaccustomed forbearance, she ventured too far, that she was brought very suddenly to understand that there was a limit beyond which she might not go.
“I know why you no longer love me,” she told him at last, on an occasion when she had been vainly endeavouring, by every feminine blandishment and wile of which she was mistress, to evoke from him some sign of an awakening tendresse. “I know!”
She nodded her dark head significantly, while pin-points of jealous anger flickered in her long, narrow eyes, black as midnight.
“Then, if you know,” replied Tormarin patiently, “it is surely most foolish of you to keep asking why I do not. Why can’t you content yourself with things as they are, Nesta? We can only try to make the best of a bad job. You don’t help me much in the matter.”
“I don’t want to help you,” she retorted viciously. “I want you to love me. And you won’t, because of that washed-out-looking, carroty-haired woman who is living with Lady Latimer. And she’s in love with you, too!... No! I won’t be quiet! Oh!”—her voice rising hysterically—“you think I don’t notice things, but I do. I do, I tell you!”
She sprang up from the couch, where she had been lolling indolently amid a heap of cushions, and crossed the room to his side.
“Do you hear me?” she cried violently, shaking him by the arm. “You think I’m a blind fool! But I’m not! I’m not! I’ve seen that Peterson woman looking at you like a cat looking through the larder window——”
Suddenly she felt Blaise’s hand clapped against her lips, stemming the torrent of vulgar recrimination and abuse that poured from them. He held it there quite gently, so as not to hurt her, but immovably, and she had perforce to hear what he wished to say in rebellious silence.
“Listen to me,” he said gently. “It is quite true what you say—that I love Jean Peterson and that she loves me. But we have given up our love, and with it our hope of happiness in this world, for you. In return, you will give up something for us. You will give up the infinite pleasure you appear to derive from vilifying and belittling a woman who is as much above you as the heavens are above the earth, whose conception of love is as fine and pure as yours is mean and commonplace and jealous. You will never again speak to Miss Peterson with anything but respect, nor will you ever again refer to the love which you now know for a fact exists between us. Your lips soil such love as ours. If you do, if you disobey my commands in either of these respects, you go out of my house that same day. And you don’t return.”
He released her and had the satisfaction, for once, of perceiving that she believed he meant what he said. Presumably she came to the conclusion that, in the circumstances, discretion was the better part of valour, for she made no attempt to challenge his determination in the matter.
At the same time, unknown to him, she compelled Jean to pay for the silence enforced upon her at home. With a species of venom, absurdly childish in its manifestation, she essayed to excite Jean’s envy by constantly enlarging to her upon the subject of Blaise’s perfections as a husband, drawing entirely imaginary descriptions of the attention he paid her and of his constant solicitude for her welfare, and vaunting her happiness at being his wife.
“I am so proud to have won so fine and splendid a husband,” she would declare fervently. “Would you not feel the same, Miss Peterson, if you were me?”
And Jean would make answer, outwardly unmoved:
“Indeed I should. You ought to be a happy woman, Mrs. Tormarin.”
The quiet composure which Jean invariably opposed to these knat-like attacks annoyed Nesta intensely. Endowed with all the petty jealousy of a small nature, she herself, had the situation been reversed, would have found this pinprick kind of warfare insupportable, and it made her furious that her best thought-out and most spiteful efforts failed to goad Jean into any expression of either anger or distress. The “cold Englishwoman’s” armour of indifference and reserve seemed impervious to no matter what poison-tipped dart she loosed against her.
Nesta felt that, as the woman in possession, she was missing half the satisfaction in life by reason of her inability to triumph openly over the other woman—the woman without the gate. Finally, at the end of her resources of innuendo and allusion, she tried the effect of open warfare.
She had driven over to Charnwood to call and, as Claire was away, spending the afternoon with friends, Jean had perforce to entertain her undesired visitor alone. It was just as she was preparing to take her departure that Nesta launched her attack.
“You look so ill, Miss Peterson,” she remarked commiseratingly. “So pale and worn! It does not suit you, I am sure, for of course you must have been very pretty at one time for my husband to have wished to marry you.”
Jean stared at her without reply. The outrageous speech almost took her breath away, by its sheer, impudent bravado.
“There!” Nesta feigned dismay. “Now I have offended you! And I so want us to be good friends. But of course”—quickly—“it is difficult for you to feel friendly towards the wife of Blaise. I can understand that. I suppose”—her head a little tilted to one side like that of an enquiring robin and her eyes fastened on the other’s white face with a merciless, gimlet gaze that filled Jean with helpless rage—“I suppose you loved him very much?”
Jean felt the blood rush into her cheeks and caught a responsive gleam of satisfaction in the other’s half-closed eyes.
“I think that is hardly a subject which can be discussed between us,” she said, with a supreme effort at self-control.
And then, to her unbounded thankfulness, Tucker threw open the door and announced that Mrs. Tormarin’s car was waiting.
This open declaration of hostility on Nesta’s part gave Jean food for reflection. Briefly she recounted the incident to Claire, adding:
“It means I must not go to Staple again. If she intends to adopt that attitude, it would make a situation which is already quite difficult enough hopelessly impossible.”
The two girls were pacing up and down the terrace at Charnwood together when Jean indicated the consequences of Nesta’s visit, and Claire, sensing the pain in her friend’s voice, pressed her arm sympathetically. But she said nothing. What was there to say? Within herself, she felt that Jean’s determination to eschew the Tormarin menage altogether was the only wise one.
“Poor Blaise!” pursued Jean, a slight tremor in her voice. “He has the hardest part to bear. She must make life hideously difficult for him.”
Claire nodded.
“Yes. He is looking very fagged and strained. Horrid little beast!” she added with unusual vehemence. “Why on earth couldn’t she have stayed dead?”
Jean laughed joylessly.
“Why indeed?—Only she never really died, you see.”
“Jean”—Claire’s hand crept further along the other’s arm and the kind little fingers sought and clasped Jean’s own—“if you knew how miserable I am about you! It makes me feel wicked—disgustingly selfish and wicked!—to be so happy myself when you have so much to bear.”
There were tears in her voice, and Jean squeezed her hand reassuringly.
“My dear,” she said earnestly, “you had your black years if anyone ever had! If a woman ever deserved her happiness at last, you do.... I suppose we all get our share of trouble in this world,” she went on thoughtfully. “I remember the first time I ever met Blaise—that day at Montavan, you know—he said that Destiny, with her snuffers, came to most of us sooner or later and snuffed out our light of happiness. Well”—rather drearily—“I suppose it’s my turn now and she’s come to me. That’s all.”
A little wind blew up from the valley, chill and complaining. Autumn had the world at her mercy now, and a grey mist was rising from the sodden fields, soaked by the continual rains of the preceding fortnight.
Claire shivered.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “It’s growing too cold to stay out any longer. Besides, it’s depressing. Grey skies, bare branches—Oh! How I detest the autumn!” They turned and retraced their steps to the house. As they entered by way of the front door, they caught a glimpse of the postman making his way briskly down the drive. A solitary letter lay upon the hall table, addressed to Jean in a rather flourishy copper-plate style of writing.
“A bill, I suppose!” she commented indifferently.
She picked it up carelessly, carrying it unopened to her room. Nor did she open it immediately upon arriving there, stopping first to remove her hat and coat.
When at last she slit the envelope she found that it was no tradesman’s bill, as she had imagined, but a letter from Glyn Peterson’s family solicitor, announcing, in the stiff phraseology without which no lawyer seems able to express himself, the sudden death of her father.
Jean sat down abruptly, her legs seeming all at once to give way under her. She could not grasp it—could not realise that the witty, charming personality which, after all, in spite of Peterson’s lack of the more conventional paternal attributes, had meant a great deal to her, had been swept without warning out of her life for ever.
Glyn Peterson had, it seemed, died very suddenly, in a remote corner of Africa whither his restless wanderings had led him, and it had been some weeks before the news of his death had reached his lawyer, who had immediately communicated it to Jean.
By his will, everything he possessed, except for a certain sum set aside to cover a few legacies to old and valued servants, was left to Jean, and with the quaint whimsicality which was characteristic of him he had particularly mentioned: “Beirnfels, the House of Dreams-Come-True.”
The little phrase, with its suggestion of joyous consummation, stabbed her with a sharp thrill of pain. Greeting her, as it did, at the moment when all her hopes of happiness were lying trampled beneath the iron heel of hostile destiny, it seemed to add a last touch of irony to the bitterness of the burden she had to bear.
The House of Dreams-Come-True! In the solicitude and silence of her room Jean laughed out loud at the mockery of it! But her breath caught in her throat, sobbingly, and then quite suddenly the merciful, healing tears began to fall, and, laying her head down on her arms, she cried unrestrainedly.
NEW YEAR’S EYE found Jean sitting alone in Claire’s special sanctum—the room which had witnessed that frightful scene when Sir Adrian had suddenly gone mad.
It was a cosy enough little room in winter-time. A cheery fire crackled in the open grate, while a heavy velvet curtain was drawn across the door that gave egress to the terrace, effectually screening out the ubiquitous draught which invariably seeks entry through crack and hinge-space.
Claire was at the Dower House this evening, where a New Year’s dinner-party was in progress, but Jean had no heart for festivities of any kind even had she not been precluded from taking part in them by reason of her father’s death.
The grief and strain of the last four months had set their mark upon her. She was much thinner than formerly—her extreme slenderness accentuated by the clinging black of the dress she was wearing—while faint purple shadows lay beneath her eyes, giving her a look of frailty and fatigue.
She and Claire led a very sober and uneventful existence at Chamwood, the one absorbed in her quiet happiness, the other in her quiet grief. But the bond of their friendship had held true throughout the differing fortunes which had fallen to the lot of each, and although for Jean there was inevitable additional pain involved in still remaining within the neighbourhood of Staple, it was counterbalanced by the comfort she drew from Clare’s companionship.
Besides, as she reflected dispiritedly, where else had she to go? The Dower House would have been open to her, of course, at any time, but there she would be certain to encounter Blaise more frequently, and of late her principal preoccupation had been to avoid such meeting whenever possible. And she could not face Beirnfels yet—alone! Some day, when Claire was married, she knew that she must brace herself to return there—to a house of dreams that would never come true now. But at present she shrank intolerably from the idea. She craved companionship—above all, the consoling, tender understanding which Claire, who had herself suffered, was so well able to give her.
The book that she had been reading earlier in the evening lay open on her knee, and her thoughts were with Claire now. She pictured her sitting next to Nick at dinner, her flower-like face radiant with unclouded happiness, and Jean was thankful to the very bottom of her heart that she was able to feel glad—glad of that happiness. At least her own sorrow had not yet taught her the grudging envy which cannot endure another’s joy.
With a quickly repressed sigh, she turned again to her book. Its pages fluttered faintly, as though stirred by some passing current of air, and Jean, coming suddenly out of her reverie, was conscious of a cool draught wafting towards her from the direction of the terrace door.
Vaguely surprised, she glanced up, and a startled cry broke from her lips. The door was open, the folds of the curtain had been drawn aside, and in the aperture stood Blaise Tormarin.
Jean sprang up from her chair and stood staring at him with dilated eyes, one hand gripping the edge of the chimney-piece.
“Blaise!... You!” The words issued stammeringly from her lips.
“Yes,” he returned shortly. “May I come in?”
Without waiting for an answer he closed the door behind him, letting the curtain fall back into its place, and crossed the room to her side.
Jean felt her heart contract as her eyes marked the changes wrought in him by the few weeks which had elapsed since she had seen him. His face was haggard as though from lack of sleep, and the lines on either side the mouth were scored deep into the flesh. The mouth itself closed in a tense line of savage misery and the stark bitterness of his eyes filled her with grief and pity, knowing how utterly powerless she was to help or comfort him.
Distrusting her self-control, she snatched at the first conventional remark that suggested itself.
“I thought—I thought you and Nesta were both dining at the Dower House,” she said confusedly.
“Nesta is there. I made an excuse. I came here instead.”
Something in the curt, clipped sentences sounded a note of warning in her ears.
“But you ought not to have come here,” she replied quickly—defensively almost. “Why have you come, Blaise?”
“I came,” he said slowly, “because I can’t bear my life without you a day longer. Because—— Oh, Jean! Jean!... Beloved! Do you need to ask me why I came?”
With a swift, irresistible movement he swept her up into his arms, holding her crushed against his breast, his mouth on hers, kissing her as a man kisses when love that has been long thwarted and denied at last bursts asunder the shackles which constrained it.
And Jean, starved for four long months of the touch of the beloved arms, the pressure of the beloved lips upon her own, had yielded to him almost before she was aware of her surrender.
Then the remembrance of the woman who stood between them rushed across her and she tore herself free from his embrace, white and trembling in every limb.
“Blaise!... Blaise!... What are you thinking of? Oh! We’re mad—mad!”
She covered her face with her shaking hands but he drew them away, gazing down at her with eyes that worshipped.
“No, beloved, we’re not mad,” lie cried triumphantly. “We’re sane—sane at last. We were mad to think we could live apart, mad to dream we could starve love like ours. That was when we were mad! But we’ll never be parted again; sweet——”
“Blaise,” she whispered, staring at him with horrified, dilated eyes. “You don’t know what you are saying! You’re forgetting Nesta—your wife. Oh, go—go quickly! You must not stay here and talk like this to me!”
“No,” he returned. “I won’t go, Jean. I’ve come to take you away with me.” Once more his arms went round her. “Belovedest, I can’t live without you any longer. I’ve tried—and I can’t do it. Jean, you’ll come? You love me enough—enough to come away with me to the ends of the earth where we’ll find happiness at last?”
She sought to free herself from his, clasp, pressing with straining hands against his chest.
“No! No!” she cried breathlessly. “I can’t go with you... you know I can’t! Ah! Don’t ask me, Blaise!” There was an agony of supplication in her voice.
“But I do ask you. And if you love me”—his eyes holding hers—“you’ll come, Jean.”
“I do love you,” she answered earnestly. “But it isn’t the you I love asking me this, Blaise. It’s some other man—a stranger——”
“If you love me, you’ll come,” he reiterated doggedly. “I can’t live without you, Jean. I want you—oh, heart’s beloved, if you knew—” And the burning, passionate words, the pent-up love and longing of months of separation and despair, came pouring from his lips—beseeching and demanding, wringing her heart, pulling at the love within her that ached to give him the answer which he craved.
“Oh, Blaise, dearest of all—hush! Hush!” She checked him brokenly, with quivering lips. “I can’t go with you. It wouldn’t bring us happiness. Ah, listen to me, dear!” She came close to him and laid her hands imploringly on his arm, lifting her white, stricken face to his. “It would only spoil our love—to take it like that when we have no right to. It would smirch and soil it, make it something different. I think—I think, in the end, Blaise, it would kill it.”
“Nothing would ever kill my love for you,” he exclaimed passionately. “Jean, little Jean, think of what our life together might be—the glory and beauty of it—just you and I in our House of Dreams!”
She caught her breath. Oh! Why did he make it so hard for her? With every fibre of her being yearning towards him she must refuse, deny him, drive him away from her.
“No, no!” she cried tremulously. “We could never reach our House of Dreams that way—Oh, I know it! At least, not the sort of House of Dreams that would be worth anything to you or me, Blaise. It would only be a sham, a make-believe. You can’t build true on a rotten foundation.... Don’t ask me any more, dear. It’s so hard—so hard to keep on saying no when everything in me wants to say yes. But I must say it. And you... you must go back to Nesta.”
Her voice almost failed her. She could feel her strength ebbing with every moment that he stayed beside her. She knew that she would not be able to resist his pleading much longer. Her own heart was fighting against her—fighting on his side!
He saw her weakness and caught at it eagerly.
“Do you know what you’re asking?” he demanded hoarsely. “Do you know what you are sending me back to? Our life together—Nesta’s and mine—has been simple hell upon earth. I obeyed you—and I took her back. But I have done no good by it. She is as weak and worthless as she ever was. Our days are one continual round of bickering and quarrels.” His face darkened. “And she is not satisfied! Her nominal position as my wife does not con tent her. Do you understand what that must mean—if I go back?” He paused, his eyes bent steadily upon her. “Jean”—very low—“now that you know—will you still send me hack to Nesta? Or will you come with me and let us find our happiness together?”
He watched the scarlet flood surge into her face and then retreat, leaving it a pallid white.
“Answer me!” he persisted, as she remained silent.
“Wait... wait a little...” she muttered helplessly.
She turned away from him and, leaning her elbows on the chimney-piece, buried her face in her hands.
The supreme test had come at last. She realised, now, that her renunciation—that renunciation which had cost her so much pain and bitterness—had been, after all, only something superficial and incomplete. She had not made the full sacrifice that duty and honour demanded of her. Though she had outwardly renounced her lover—bade him return to Nesta—she still held him hers by the utter faithfulness of his love for her. Nesta had had but the husk, the shell—a husband in name only, every hour of their life together an insult to her pride and womanhood.
Jean’s thoughts lashed her. Her shoulders bent and cowered a little as though beneath a physical blow.
There had been a time—oh! very long ago, it seemed, before Destiny had come with her snuffers and quenched the twin flames and love and happiness—a time when dimly, as in some exquisite dream, she had heard the sound of little voices, felt the helpless touch of tiny hands. Perhaps Nesta, too, had heard those voices, felt those clinging hands, while her soul quickened to the vision of a future which might hold some deeper meaning, some more sacred trust and purpose, than her empty, wayward past.
And she, Jean, had stood between Nesta and the fulfilment of that dream, forever forbidding her entrance to her woman’s kingdom.
She saw it all now with a terrible clarity of vision, understood to the full the two alternatives which faced her—to go with Blaise, as he implored, or to send him—her man, the man she loved—hack to Nesta. There was no longer any middle course.
A voice sounded in her ears.
“No true happiness ever came 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 words sounded so clear and distinct that Jean half raised her head to see who spoke them. And then, in an overwhelming rush of memory, she recognised that it was no actual voice she heard but the mental echo of her own words to Nick—to Nick at the time when he had been passing through a like fire of fierce temptation.
How easily, in her young, untried ignorance, the words had fallen from her lips as she had urged Nick to renounce his fixed resolve! Such eminently wise and excellent counsel! And how little—how crassly little had she realised at the time the huge demand that she was making!
She had spoken as though it were comparatively easy to reject the wrong and choose the right—to follow the stern and narrow path of Duty, through the mists and utter darkness that enshrouded it, up to those shining heights which lie beyond human sight—the outposts of Eternal Heaven itself.
Easy!.... Oh, God!....
When at last Jean uncovered her face and lifted it to meet the set gaze of the man beside her, it was wan and ravaged “the face of one who has come through some fierce purgatory of torment.”
“Well?” he demanded, his voice roughened because he found himself unable to steady it with that strained and altered face upturned to his. “Well? Are you going to send me back to Nesta?”
She did not answer his question. Instead, she put another.
“Do you think she—loves you?”
He stared.
“Nesta? Yes. As far as her sort can love, I believe she does.”
Jean nodded, as though it were the answer she had expected.
“Blaise... I’m going to send you back to her. I’m sure now. I know. It’s the only thing we can do... We must say good-bye—altogether—never see each other again.”
“Never?” The word came draggingly.
“Never. It—it would be too hard for us, Blaise, to see each other.”
“Yes,” he answered slowly. “It would be too hard.”
They were both silent. The minutes ticked away unregarded. Time had ceased to count. This farewell was till the end of time.
“Blaise—” All the resonance had gone out of her voice. It sounded flat and tired. “You—you will go back to her?”
“Yes, I will go back.”
She stretched out her hands flutteringly.
“Then go.... go soon, Blaise! I—I can’t bear very much more.”
He opened his arms, then, and she went to him, and for a space they clung together in silence. For the last time he set his lips to hers, held her once more against his heart. Then slowly they drew apart, stricken eyes gazing lingeringly into other eyes as stricken, and presently the closing of the terrace door told her that he had gone, and that she must turn her feet to the solitary path of those who have said farewell to love.
Henceforth, she would be alone—living or dying, quite alone.
It was long past midnight when Claire returned from the Dower House.
She found Jean sitting beside the grey embers of a burnt-out fire, her hands lying folded upon her knee, her eyes staring stonily in front of her in a fixed, unseeing gaze.
Claire called to her softly, as when one wakes a sleeper.
“Jean!”
Jean turned her head.
“So you have got back?” she said dully. She stood up stiffly, as though her limbs were cramped. “Claire, I am going away—right away from here—to Beirnfels.”
“Why?” asked Claire.
She waited tensely for the answer.
“Blaise has been here. He asked me to go away with him. I’ve sent him back to Nesta.”
The short, stilted sentences fell mechanically from her lips. She spoke exactly like a child repeating a lesson learned by rote.
Claire’s eyes grew very pitiful.
“And must you go to Beirnfels alone?” she asked quietly. “Won’t you take me with you?”
“Will you come?”—incredulously.
“Of course I’ll come. I shouldn’t dream of letting you go by yourself.”
And then, all at once, Jean’s tired body, exhausted by the soul’s long conflict, gave way, and she slipped to the ground in a dead faint.
A WEEK later Jean sat at the foot of the stairs and surveyed with faint amusement the motley collection of trunks and suit-cases which thronged the hall.
She was still looking pale and worn, strung up to face her self-imposed exile from the country which now held everything that was dear to her, but no enormity of sorrow, would ever blind Jean for long to the whimsical aspect that attends so many of the little things of daily life.
“What a lot of useless lumber we women carry about with us wherever we go!” she commented. “Five—six—seven packages to supply the needs of two solitary females—and Heaven only knows how many brown paper parcels will be required at the last moment for all the things we shall find we have forgotten when the time actually comes to start.” Claire, standing on the flight of stairs above and viewing the assemblage in the hall from over the top of the banister rail, giggled helplessly.
“Yes, they do look a lot,” she admitted. “However”—hopefully—“there’ll be plenty of room for them all when we actually get to Beirnfels.”
“Oh, plenty,” agreed Jean. “But we’ve got to convey them half across Europe first—two lone women and one miserable maid who will probably combine train-sickness and home-sickness to an extent that will totally incapacitate her for the performance of her duties.”
At this moment the front-door bell clanged violently through the house, as though pulled by someone in a tremendous hurry. Claire hastily withdrew her head from over the banister rail and disappeared upstairs, while Jean relinquished the accommodation offered by the bottommost step and sought refuge in the nearest of the sitting-rooms, closing the door stealthily behind her.
A moment later Tucker, who had caught sight of her hurriedly retreating figure, reopened it and announced imperturbably:
“Mr. Burke.”
Jean greeted him with surprise, but without any feeling of embarrassment. So much had happened since the day she had eluded him on the Moor, events of such intimate and tragic import had swept her path, that the unexpected meeting failed to rouse any feeling either of anger or dismay. Burke, and everything connected with him, belonged to another period of her existence altogether—to that glorious care-free time when it had seemed as though life were a deep, inexhaustible well bubbling over with wonderful possibilities. Burke was merely a ghost—a revenant from that far distant epoch.
“I’m in time, then?” he said, when he had shaken hands. “In time? In time for what?”
“In time to see you before you go.”
“Oh, yes.” Jean spoke lightly. “You’re in time for that. But who told you I was going away? I didn’t know you were in England, even.”
“I came back a fortnight ago—to London. Judith wired me from home that you were leaving Coombe Eavie.”
“I don’t see the necessity for her wiring you,” remarked Jean a little coldly. “There was no need for you to see me.”
“There was—every need.”
She glanced at him keenly, detecting a new note in his voice, an unexpected gravity and restraint.
“Every need,” he repeated. He paused, then went on quickly, with a nervousness that was foreign to him. “Jean, I know everything that has happened—that your engagement to Tormarin is at an end—and I have come to ask you if you will be my wife. No—hear me out!”—as she would have interrupted him. “I’m not asking you now as—as I did before. If you will marry me, I swear I will ask for nothing that you are not willing to give. I’m making no demands. I’ve learned now”—with a faint weary smile—“that you cannot force love. It can only be given. And I want nothing but just the right to take care of you, to shield you—to keep the sharp corners of life away from you.” Then, as he read her incredulous face, he went on gravely: “If I had wanted more than that, Jean, if I had not learned something—just from loving you, I should not have waited until now. I should have come at once—as soon as I learned from Madame de Varigny that Tormarin’s wife was still alive.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Why didn’t you come then, Geoffrey? I sometimes wondered—you being you!”—with a faint smile. “Because, of course, I knew why you had rushed off to France. Madame de Varigny explained that.”
A dull flush mounted to his face.
“Did she? I expect she told you merely what was the truth. I went to see her because she had assured me that she could stop your marriage with Tormarin—could interfere in some way to prevent it. That was why I went to France.... But when she told me her blackguardly scheme—how she had planned and plotted to conceal the fact that Tormarin’s wife was alive—and why she had done it, I would have no hand in anything that followed. I’m no saint”—a brief, ironical smile flitted across his face—“but there are some methods at which even I draw the line.”
“So—that was why you stayed away?”
“That was why. I wanted you, Jean—God only knows how I wanted you!—but I couldn’t try to force your hand at such a time. I couldn’t profit by a damnable scheme like that.”
Jean’s eyes grew soft as she realised that beneath all the impetuous arrogance and dominant demands of the man’s temperament there yet lay something fine and clean and straight—difficult to get at, perhaps, but which could yet rise, in answer to a sense of honour and fairness with which she had not credited him, and take command of his whole nature.
“I’m glad—glad you didn’t come, Geoffrey,” she said gently. “Glad you—couldn’t.”
“I don’t know that I’m glad about it,” he returned with a grim candour. “I simply couldn’t do it, and that’s all there is to it. But I’ve come now, Jean. I’ve come because I want you to give me just the right to look after you. I’m not asking for anything. I only want to serve you—if you’ll let me—just to be near you. If Tormarin were free, I would not have come to you again. I know I should have no chance. But he’s not free. Does that give me a chance, Jean? If it doesn’t, I’ll take myself off—I’ll never bother you again. I’ll try Africa—big game shooting”—with a short laugh. “But if it does——”
He paused and waited for her answer. The intensity of longing in his eyes was the sole indication of the emotion that stirred within him—an emotion held in check by a stem self-control that seemed to Jean to be part of this new, changed lover of hers. Surely, in the months which had elapsed since she had fled from him on Dartmoor, he had fought with his devils and cast them out!
She held out her hands to him.
“Geoffrey, I’m so sorry—but I’m afraid it doesn’t. I wish—I wish I could give you any other answer. But, you see, it isn’t marrying—it’s love that matters. And all my love is given.”
He took her hands in his and held them gently with that strange, new restraint he seemed to have learned.
“I see,” he said slowly. Then for a moment his calm wavered. The underlying passion, so strongly held in leash, shook the even tones of his voice. “Tormarin is a lucky man—in spite of everything! I’d give my soul to have what he has—your love, Jean.”
His big hands closed round her slight ones and he lifted them to his lips. Then, without another word, he went away, and Jean was left wondering sorrowfully why the love that she did not want was offered her in such full measure, hers to take at will, while the love for which she craved, the love which would have meant the glory and fulfilment of life itself, was denied her—shut away by all the laws of God and Man.
JEAN leaned idly against the ancient wall which bounded the stone-paved court at Beirnfels and looked down towards the valley below.
Spring was in the air—late comer to this eastern corner of Europe—but, at last, even here the fragrance of fresh growing things was permeating the atmosphere, strips of vivid blue rent the grey skies, and splashes of golden sunshine lay dappled over the shining roofs of the village that nestled in the valley.
But no responsive light had lit itself in Jean’s wistful eyes. She was out of tune with the season. Spring and hope go hand in hand, the one symbolical of the other, and the promise of spring-time, the blossom of hope, was dead within her heart—withered almost before it had had time to bud.
The months since she had quitted England had sufficed to blunt the keen edge of her pain, but always she was conscious of a dull, unending ache—a corroding sense of the uselessness and emptiness of life.
Yet she had learned to be thankful for even this much respite from the piercing agony of the first few weeks which she had spent at Beirnfels. Whatever the coming years might bring her of relief from pain, or even of some modicum of joy, those weeks when she had suffered the torments of the damned would remain stamped indelibly upon her memory.
During the last days at Charnwood she had been keyed up to a high pitch of endurance by the very magnitude of the renunciation she had made. It seems as though, when the soul strains upwards to the accomplishment of some deed that is almost beyond the power of weak human nature to achieve, there is vouchsafed, for the time being, a merciful oblivion to the immensity of pain involved. A transport of spiritual fervour lifts the martyr beyond any ordinary recognition of the physical fire that burns and chars his flesh, and some such ecstasy of sacrifice had supported Jean through the act of abnegation by which she had surrendered her love, and with it her life’s happiness, at the foot of the stern altar of Duty.
Afterwards had followed the preparations and bustle of departure, the necessary arrangements to be made and telegraphed to Beirnfels, and finally the long journey across Europe and the hundred and one small details that required settlement before she and Claire were fully installed at Beirnfels and the wheels of the household machinery running smoothly.
But when all this was accomplished, when the need to arrange and plan and make decisions had gone by and her mind was free to concern itself again with her own affairs, then Jean realised the full price of her renunciation.
And she paid it. In days that were an endless procession of anguished hours; in sleepless nights that were a mental and physical torment of unbearable longing such as she had never dreamed of; in tears and in dumb, helpless silences, she paid it. And at last, out of those racked and tortured weeks she emerged into a numbed, listless capacity to pick up once more the torn and mutilated threads of life.
Looking backward, she marvelled at the wonderful patience with which Claire had borne with her, at the selfless way in which she had devoted all her energies to ministering to one who was suffering from heart-sickness—that most wearying of all complaints to the sufferer’s friends because so difficult of comprehension by those not similarly afflicted.
Nick’s “pale golden narcissus!” To Jean, who had clung to her, helped inexpressibly by her tranquil, steadfast, unswerving faith and loving-kindness, it seemed as though the staunch and sturdy oak were a more appropriate metaphor in which to express the soul of Claire.
She heard her now, coming with light steps across the court. She rarely left Jean brooding long alone these days, exercising all her tact and ingenuity to devise some means by which she might distract her thoughts when she could see they had slipped back into the past.
Jean turned to greet her with a faint smile.
“Well, my good angel? Come to rout me out? I suppose”—teasingly—“you want me to ride down to the village and bring back two lemons urgently demanded by the cook?”
Claire laughed a little. Many had been the transparent little devices she had employed to beguile Jean into the saddle, knowing well that once she was on the back of her favourite mare the errand which was the ostensible purpose of the occasion would quite probably be entirely forgotten. But Jean would return from a long ride over the beloved hills and valleys that had been familiar to her from childhood with a faint colour in her pale cheeks, and with the shadow in her eyes a little lightened. There is no cure for sickness of the soul like the big, open spaces of the earth and God’s clean winds and sunlight.
“No,” said Claire, “it’s not lemons this time.”
“Then what is it?” demanded Jean. “You didn’t come out here just to look at the view. There’s an air of importance about you.”
It was true. Claire wore a little fluttering aspect of excitement. The colour came and went swiftly in her cheeks, and her eyes had a bright, almost dazzled look, while a small anxious frown kept appearing between her pretty brows. She regarded Jean uncertainly.
“Well—yes, it is something,” she acknowledged. “I had a letter from Lady Anne this morning.”
Both girls had their premiers d茅jeuners served to them in their rooms, so that each one’s morning mail was an unknown quantity to the other until they met downstairs.
“From Lady Anne?” Jean looked interested. “What does she say?”
“She says—she writes———” Here Claire floundered and came to a stop as though uncertain how to proceed, the little puzzled frown deepening between her brows. “Oh, Jean, she had a special reason for writing—some news——”
Jean’s arm, hanging slackly at her side, jerked suddenly. Something in Claire’s half-frightened, deprecating air sent a thrill of foreboding through her. Her heart turned to ice within her.
“News?” she said in a harsh, strangled voice. “Tell me quick—what is it?... Blaise? He’s not—dead?” Her face, drained of every drop of colour, her suddenly pinched nostrils and eyes stricken with quick fear drew a swift cry from Claire.
“No—no!” she exclaimed in hasty reassurance. “It’s good news! Good—-not bad!”
Jean’s taut muscles relaxed and she leaned against the wall as though seeking support.
“You frightened me,” she said dully. “Good news? Then it can’t be for me. What is it, Claire? Is Nick”—forcing a smile—“coming out here to see you?”
Claire nodded.
“Yes, Nick—and Blaise with him.”
Jean stared at her.
“Blaise—coming here? Oh, but he must not—he mustn’t come!”—in sudden panic. “I couldn’t go through it all again! I couldn’t!”
Claire slipped an arm round her.
“You won’t have to,” she answered. “Because, Jean-Jean! Blaise has the right to come now. He’s free!”
“Free? Free?” repeated Jean. “What do you mean! How can he be free?”
“Nesta is dead,” said Claire simply.
“Dead?” Jean began to laugh a trifle hysterically.
“Oh, yes, she’s been ‘dead’ before. But——”
“She is really dead this time,” said Claire. “That is why Lady Anne has written—to tell us.”
“I can’t believe it!” muttered Jean. “I can’t believe it.”
“You must believe it,” insisted Claire quietly. “It is all quite true. She was buried last week in the little churchyard at Coombe Eavie, and Lady Anne writes that Nick and Blaise will be here almost as soon as her letter. They’re on their way now—now, Jean! Do you understand?” Her eyes filling with tears, Claire watched the gradual realisation of the amazing truth dawn in Jean’s face. That face so tragically worn, so fined and spiritualised by suffering, glowed with a new light; a glory of unimaginable hope lit itself in the tired golden eyes, and on the half-parted lips there seemed to quiver those kisses which still waited to be claimed.
Jean passed her hand across her eyes like one who has seen some bright light of surpassing radiance.
“Tell me, Claire,” she said at last, tremulously. “Tell me...” She broke off, unable to manage her voice.
“I’ll read you what Lady Anne says,” replied Claire quickly. “After writing that Nesta is dead and Nick and Blaise are coming here, she goes on: ‘Poor Nesta! One cannot help feeling sorry for her—killed so suddenly and so tragically. And yet such a death seems quite in the picture with her lawless, wayward nature! She was shot, Claire, shot in the Boundary Woods by a Frenchman who had apparently followed her to England for the express purpose. It appears he met her at Ch芒teau Varigny, in the days when she was posing as Madame de Varigny’s niece, and fell violently in love with her. Of course Nesta could not marry him, and equally of course the Frenchman—he was the Vicomte de Chassaigne—did not know that she had a husband already. So, naturally, he hoped eventually to win her, and Nesta, (who, as you know, would flirt with the butcher’s boy if there were no one else handy) encouraged him and allowed him to make love to her to his heart’s content. Then, after her return to Staple, he learned of her marriage, and, furious at having been so utterly deceived, he followed. He must have watched her very carefully for some days, as he apparently knew her favourite walks, and waylaid her one afternoon in the woods. What passed between them we shall never know, for Chassaigne killed her and then immediately turned the revolver on himself. Blaise and Nick heard the shots and rushed down to the Boundary Woods where the shots had sounded—you’ll know where I mean, the woods that lie along the border between Willow Ferry and Staple. There they found them. Nesta was dead, and de Chassaigne dying. He had just strength enough to confide in Blaise all that I have written. I am writing to you, because I think it might come as too great a shock to Jean as you say she is still so far from strong. You must tell her——”
Jean interrupted the reading with a shout of laughter.
“Oh, Claire! Claire! You blessed infant! I suppose all those preliminary remarks of yours about ‘a letter from Lady Anne’ and the ‘news’ it contained were by way of preparing me for the shock—‘breaking the news’ in fact?”
“Yes,” admitted Claire, flushing a little.
Jean rocked with laughter—gay, spontaneous laughter such as Claire had not heard issue from her lips since the day when Madame de Varigny had come to Staple.
“And you just about succeeded in frightening me to death!” continued Jean. “Oh, Claire, Claire, you adorable little goose, didn’t you know that good news never kills?”
“I didn’t feel at all sure,” returned Claire, laughing a little, too, in spite of herself. “You’ve looked lately as though it wouldn’t take very much of anything—good or bad—to kill you.”
“Well, it would now,” Jean assured her solemnly. “Not all the powers of darkness would prevail against me, I verily believe.” She paused, frowning a little. “How beastly it is though, to feel outrageously happy because someone is dead! It’s indecent. Poor little Nesta! Oh, Claire! Is it hateful of me to feel like this? Do say it isn’t, because—because I can’t help it!”
“Of course it isn’t,” protested Claire. “It’s only natural.”
“I suppose it is. And I really am sorry for Nesta—though I’m so happy myself that it sort of swamps it. Oh, Claire darling”—the shadow passing and sheer gladness of soul bubbling up again into her voice—“I’m bound to kiss someone—at once. It’ll have to be you! And look! Those two may be here any moment—Lady Anne said so. I’m going to make myself beautiful—if I can. I wish I hadn’t grown so thin! The most ravishing frock in the world would look a failure draped on a clothes-horse. Still, I’ll do what I can to conceal from Blaise the hideous ravages of time. And I’m not going to wear black—I won’t welcome him back in sackcloth and ashes! I won’t! I won’t! I’ve got the darlingest frock upstairs—a filmy grey thing like moonlight. I’m going to wear that. I know—I know”—-softly—“that Glyn would understand.”
And if he knew anything at all about it—and one would like to think he did—it is quite certain Peterson would have approved his daughter’s decision. For to his incurably romantic spirit, the idea of a woman going to meet the lover of whom a malign fate had so nearly robbed her altogether, clad in the sable habiliments with which she had paid filial tribute to her father’s death, would have appeared of all things the most incongruous and irreconcilable.
So that when at last a prehistoric vehicle, chartered from the inn of the Green Dragon in the village below, toiled slowly up the hill to Peirnfels and Blaise and Nick climbed down from its musty interior, a slender, moon-grey figure, which might have been observed standing within the shadow of a tall stone pillar and following with straining eyes the snail-like progress of the old-fashioned carriage up the steep white road, flitted swiftly hack into the shelter of the house. Claire, dimpling and smiling at the great gateway of the castle, alone received the travellers.
“Go along that corridor,” she said to Blaise, when they had exchanged greetings. “To the end door of all. That’s the sun-parlour. You’ll find Jean there. She thought it appropriate”—smiling at him.
Then, as Blaise strode down the corridor indicated, she turned to Nick and asked him with an adorable coquetry why he, too, had come to Beirnfels?
“I’ve heard it is the House of Dreams-Come-True,” replied Nick promptly. “It seemed a likely place in which to find you, most beautiful.”
Claire beamed at him.
“Oh, am I that—really, Nick?”
“Of course you are. The most beautiful in all the world. Claire”—tucking his arm into hers—“tell me, how is the ‘soul-rebuilding’ process getting on? That’s why I came, really, you know, to find out if you had completely finished redecorating your interior?—I can vouch for the outer woman myself”—with an adoring glance at the fluffy ash-blonde hair and pure little Greuze profile.
Claire rubbed her cheek against his sleeve. To a woman who has been for four months limited almost exclusively to the society of one other woman—even though that other woman be her chosen friend—the rough ‘feel’ of a man’s coat-sleeve (more particularly if he should happen to be the man) and the faint fragrance of tobacco which pervades it form an almost delirious combination.
Claire hauled down her flag precipitately.
“I’m ready to go back to England any time now, Nick,” she murmured.
“Are you? Darling! How soon can you be ready? In a week? To-morrow? Next day?”
“Quite soon. And meanwhile, mightn’t you—you and Blaise—stay for a bit at the Green Dragon?”
“We might,” replied Nick solemnly, quite omitting to mention that something of the sort had been precisely their intention when leaving England.
Meanwhile Blaise had made his way to the door at the end of the corridor. Outside it he paused, overwhelmed by the sudden realisation that beyond that wooden harrier lay holy ground—Paradise! And the Angel with the Flaming Sword stood at the gate no longer....
She was waiting for him over by the window, straight and slim and tall in her moon-grey, her hands hanging in front of her tight-clasped like those of a child. But her eyes were woman’s eyes.
With a little inarticulate cry she ran to him—to the place that was hers, now and for all time, against his heart—and his arms, that had been so long empty, held her as though he would never let her go.
“Beloved of my heart!” he murmured. “Oh, my sweet—my sweet!”
They spoke but little. Only those foolish, tender words that seem so meaningless to those who are not lovers, but which are pearls strung on a thread of gold to those who love—a rosary of memory which will be theirs to keep and tell again when the beloved voice that uttered them shall sound no more.
THE landlord of the inn of the Green Dragon watched his two English visitors ride away up the steep road that led to Beirnfels with unquestionable regret.
They had been lodging at the Green Dragon for the past fortnight, and he had discovered that English milords, whatever else they might be, were not niggardly with their money. They required a good deal of attention, it is true, and had a strange, outlandish predilection for innumerable baths, demanding a quite unheard-of quantity of water for the same. And at all unlikely hours of the day, too—when returning from a ride or before going up to the castle to dine, mark you!
Still, they made no difficulty about paying—and paying handsomely—for all they wanted, and if a man chooses to spend his money upon the superfluous scrubbing of his epidermis, it is, after all, his own affair!
And now the two English milords were taking their departure from the Green Dragon and, so the landlord understood, proposed to stay at the castle itself until their return to England.
It appeared that their lady-mother—who, it was rumoured in the village, was the daughter of an English archduke, no less!—was coming to Beirnfels and there was much talk amongst the village girls of weddings and the like. Apparently the Green Dragon’s two eccentric visitors, not withstanding their altogether abnormal liking for soap and water, were much as most men in other respects and had lost their hearts to the two pretty English ladies living at the castle.
So, no doubt, the “daughter of an English archduke, no less” was coming from England post haste to enquire into the suitability of the brides-elect—and also into the important point of the amount of the dowry each might be expected to bring her future husband.
There was no question that Lady Anne was certainly coming post haste—in reply to a series of joyful and imperative telegrams demanding that she should pack up and come to Beirnfels immediately—“for we are all enjoying ourselves far too much to return to England at present,” as Nick wired her with an iniquitous disregard for the cost per word of foreign telegrams. And Lady Anne, who always considered money well-spent if it purchased happiness, proceeded to wire back with equal extravagance that she was delighted to hear it and that she and her maid would start at once.
It was a very happy party that gathered round the table in the great dining-hall at Beirnfels on the night of Lady Anne’s arrival, and beneath all the surface laughter and gaiety lay the deep, quiet thanksgiving that only comes to those who have emerged out of the night of darkness and sorrow into a glorious sunlight of happiness and hope.
After dinner, in the soft, candle-lit dusk—for Peterson had never introduced the garish anomaly of electric light into the ancient castle—Jean sang to them in that quaintly appealing, husky voice of hers, simple tender folk-songs of the country-side, and finally, at a murmured request from Blaise, she gave them The House of Dreams.
"It’s a strange road leads to the House of Dreams, To the House of Dreams-Come-True, Its hills are steep and its valleys deep, And salt with tears the Wayfarers weep, The Wayfarers—I and you. But there’s sure a way to the House of Dreams,
"To the House of Dreams-Come-True.
We shall find it yet, ere the sun has set,
If we fare straight on, come fine, come wet,
Wayfarers—I and you.”
As the last words died away into silence, she looked up and met Blaise’s eyes. He was leaning against the piano, looking down at her with a tranquil happiness in his gaze.
“Our House of Dreams-Come-True, Jean, at last,” he said softly.
She met his glance with one of utter trust.
“And we needn’t ever fear, now, that it will tumble down. But oh! Blaise, if we had built on a rotten foundation, we should never have felt safe—not safe like this!”
“No. You were right, belovedest—as you always have been, always will be.” Then, very low, so that none but she should hear: “Thank God for you, my sweet!”
It was ultimately settled that the whole party should remain at Beirnfels until the latter end of June, when they would all return to England together and the two weddings should take place as soon as possible afterwards.
“But we won’t have a double wedding,” declared Jean. “It’s always supposed to be unlucky.”
“Do you believe in good and bad luck, then?” asked Lady; Anne, smiling.
“I don’t know,” Jean answered seriously. “But it’s always just as well to be on the safe side. Anyway, we won’t tempt Fate by running unnecessary risks!”
“Besides, madonna,” added Nick, “in the excitement of the moment we might get mixed and the parson hitch us up to the wrong people. The average nerve-strain attendant upon the r么le of bridegroom will be quite sufficient for me, thank you, without the added uncertainty as to whether I’m getting tied up to the right woman or not.”
So spring lengthened out into summer, and, as the heat increased, boating and swimming on the big lake that nestled in a basin of the hills were added to the long rides and excursions with which they whiled away the pleasant, sunshiny days.
Ever afterwards, the memory of those tranquil months at Beirnfels would linger in the minds of those who shared them as something rare and precious. It was as though for this little span of time, passed so far away from the noise and bustle of the big world, they had pulled their barque out of the busy fairway of the river and moored it in some quiet, shady backwater. Then, when they were rested and refreshed, they would be ready to face anew, with fresh strength and courage, the difficulties and dangers of midstream.
“I’m sorry it’s so nearly over—this long, long holiday of ours,” said Jean regretfully. “The only thing that reconciles me to the fact is that after we’re married Blaise and I propose to spend at least six months out of every year at Beirnfels.”
She was lying on her back in the shady wood whither they had ridden out to lunch that day, staring up at the bits of blue sky overhead which showed between the interlacing branches of the trees. The remainder of the party were grouped around her, reclining in various attitudes of a dolce far niente nature, while from a little distance away, where the horses were picketed in charge of a groom, came the drowsy, rhythmic sound of the munching of corn, punctuated by an occasional stamp of an impatient hoof.
“Yes, it’s been good,” agreed Lady Anne. “I shall never settle down again properly as a dowager at the Dower House!” And she laughed gleefully.
To her, it had been almost like a return to the days of her youth, for “her four children”—as she called them—had insisted on her sharing in all their active pursuits, and Lady Anne, who in her girlhood and early married life had been a first-class horsewoman and a magnificent swimmer, had consented con amore.
Blaise pulled himself lazily up into a sitting posture and glanced toward the crimson glow of westering sun where it struck athwart the tall trunks of the trees.
“You’ll none of you live to go back to England. Instead, you’ll be dying of pneumonia and a few other complaints—if we don’t get a move on soon,” he observed. “It’s almost sunset, and after that it grows abominably chilly in this eastern paradise of Jean’s. Besides, I fancy it’s going to blow great guns before long.”
It was true. Already a little chill whisper of wind was shaking the tops of the trees, and before the party was fairly mounted and away, the whisper had changed to a shrill whistling, heralding the big gale which drove along behind the innocent seeming breeze which at first had barely rocked the topmost branches.
It was a longish ride back to Beirnfels, and the sun had dipped below the horizon in a sullen splendour of purple and red before the shoulder of the hill, upon the further side of which the castle stood, came into sight.
Now and again the moon peered out between the racing, wind-driven clouds, clearly limning the bold, black curve of the hill against a background of lowering sky.
Jean and Blaise were riding abreast, a little in advance of the rest, engrossed by the difficulties of carrying on an animated conversation in a high wind. As they swung round the bend in the road which brought the hill’s great shoulder into view, Jean threw back her head and stared at the sky above it with a puzzled frown on her face.
“Why... how queer!” she ejaculated. “The sun set nearly half an hour ago and yet there’s still quite a brilliant red glow in the sky. Look, Blaise—just above where Beirnfels stands.”
Blaise glanced up casually in the direction indicated, then suddenly reigned in his horse and half-rose in the stirrups, staring at the red glow deepening in the sky ahead.
“That’s no sunset!” he exclaimed sharply. “It’s—Great heavens, Jean! Beirnfels is on fire!”
Even as he spoke a tongue of flame, mocking the dull glow with its gleaming blaze, shot up like a thin red knife into the sky and sank again.
A shout came from behind. The others had seen it, also, and recognised its deadly import. The next moment the clatter of galloping hoofs echoed along the road as the whole party urged their horses on towards home as fast as they could cover the ground.
Soon they struck off from the road, taking a bridle-path which slanted through the woods clothing the base of the hill, and as they emerged on to the broad plateau where Beirnfels had stood sentinel through wind and weather for so many years, the whole extent of the catastrophe was revealed.
By this time the angry glow in the sky had turned dusk into day, while from the doors and windows of the castle fire vomited forth as from a furnace—upward in long, sinuous tongues of flame, licking the blackened walls, downward in spangled showers of sparks that drifted towards the earth like flights of golden butterflies.
Little groups of men and women, helpless as ants to stay the fire, rushed futilely hither and thither with hosepipe and engine, while on the smooth sward which fronted the castle lay piled enormous quantities of household stuff a medley of fine old furniture, tom tapestry wrenched from its place against the walls, pictures, mirrors—anything and everything that could be dragged out into the open by eager hands and willing arms.
The major-domo, an elderly, grey-haired man who had been born and reared upon the estate and who had taken service with Glyn Peterson on the day when he had first brought Jacqueline, a bride, to Beirnfels, caught sight of the riding-party returned and came hurrying to Jean’s side.
The tears were running down his wrinkled face as he recounted the discovery of the fire, which must have started either just before or during the servants’ dinner-hour, when few people, of course, were about the castle, and which had obtained a firm hold before it was detected.
The household staff, practised to a limited extent,—a fire drill had been held once a month in Peterson’s time—had done their hest to cope with the flames, but vainly. The high wind which had arisen had thwarted their utmost efforts, and finally giving up all hope of saving the interior from being gutted, they had confined themselves to rescuing such valuables as could be easily removed.
There was the usual mystery as to how the fire had originated, and several stories circulated amongst the chattering throng which hurried hither and thither, momentarily augmented by the peasants who, at sight of the castle in flames, had come trooping up the hill from the village below.
The most likely story, and the one to which Blaise inclined to give most credence, was that the child of a woman who worked daily at the castle, escaping from its mother’s care and launched on an independent voyage of discovery through the rooms, had knocked over a burning lamp. Then, terrified at the immediate consequences—the sudden flaring of some ancient tapestry, dry as tinder with the summer heat, near which the lamp had fallen—he had bolted away, out of the castle and so home, too scared to tell anyone of the accident.
But, as Jean commented mournfully, what did it matter how it happened? Except from the prosaic viewpoint of the fire insurance company, who would probably desire to know: all kinds of details that it was impossible to supply!
For her, nothing mattered except that Beirnfels, her home from childhood and the place where she and Blaise had proposed to spend a great part of their married life, was a furnace of flames.
It was a splendid but very terrible sight The great, grim walls of the castle stood four-square against the sky, charred and blackened but defiantly impervious to the flames that were licking covetously against the solid stone which fashioned them. Sentinel to the very end, they reared themselves unvanquished, guardians still, though all that they had sheltered through their centuries of watch and ward lay consumed within their very heart.
Jean, standing beside Blaise and watching the upward tossing flames and the crimson banner of the lowering heavens, spoke suddenly:
“‘And the sky as red as blood above it.’ Blaise, the last of Keturah Stanley’s prophecies has come true!”
An hour later help was forthcoming from the distant town to which a messenger had been despatched post haste as soon as it was realised that the household staff, even with assistance from the village, was hopelessly inadequate to cope with a fire of such magnitude. But it was already too late to accomplish very much in the way of salvage. All that remained possible was to quench that inferno of fire as soon as might be and so, perhaps, save some of the outbuildings.
Hour after hour through the night, human endeavour fought with the flames—subduing them again and again only to find them kindling into fresh life at the gusty bidding of the wind, leaping redly from the lambent heart of the conflagration, which glowed and pulsed and heaved like some living monster intent upon destruction.
It was not until dawn was breaking that, with the dying down of the wind, the flickering crimson light faded finally from the sky; and half an hour later, when the fire had been at last extinguished, the village folk, gathered about the scene of the catastrophe, had dispersed to their homes.
Lady Anne, accompanied by Nick and Claire, started for the inn of the Green Dragon, whither the landlord had hurried on ahead to prepare temporary quarters for the now homeless little company from the castle. But Joan and Blaise still lingered by the deserted ruins, loth to say farewell to the place that had meant so much to them.
Beneath the misty azure of the summer morning sky, fanned by little vagrant zephyrs—rearguard of the hurricane which had passed—stood all that remained of Beirnfels—blackened, naked walls, stark against that tender blue, brooding above a mass of cooling wreckage.
Jean’s mouth quivered a little as her glance took in the scene of utter desolation.
“My House of Dreams,” she whispered brokenly.
She was silent for a few moments, her eyes embracing all that had once been Beirnfels in a gaze which held both farewell and retrospect. And something more—some vision of the future. In the dawn-light pearling the sky above she recognised the eternal promise of Him Who “commanded the light to shine out of darkness.”
Her House of Dreams! The inner meaning of the song had grown suddenly clear to her.
When she turned again to Blaise, her expression was serene and tranquil. Touched with regret perhaps, but bravely confident.
“I don’t think it matters, Blaise,” she said simply. “Beirnfels was only a symbol, after all. My House of Dreams-Come-True isn’t built of stones and mortar. No one’s is. It’s just—where love is.”
The End