“YOU don’t like Jean Peterson.”
Burke made the announcement without preface. He and Judith were sitting together on the verandah at Willow Perry, where their coffee had been brought them after lunch. Judith inhaled a whiff of cigarette smoke before she answered. Then, without any change of expression, her eyes fixed on the glowing tip of her cigarette, she answered composedly:
“No. Did you expect I should?”
“Well, hang it all, you don’t hold her accountable for her father’s defection, do you?”
A dull red crept up under Mrs. Craig’s sallow skin, but she did not lift her eyes. They were still intent on the little red star of light dulling slowly into grey ash.
“Not accountable,” she replied coolly. “I look upon her as an unpleasant consequence.” She bent forward suddenly. “Do you realise that she might have been—my child?” There was a sudden vibrating quality in her voice, and for an instant a rapt look came into her face, transforming its hard lines. “But she isn’t. She happens to be the child of the man I loved—and another woman.”
“You surely can’t hate her for that?”
“Can’t I? You don’t know much about women, Geoff. Glyn Peterson stamped on my pride, and a woman never forgives that.”
She leaned back in her chair again, her face once more an indifferent mask. Burke sat silent, staring broodingly in front of him. Presently her glance flickered curiously over his face.
“Why does it matter to you whether I like her or not?” she asked, breaking the silence which had fallen.
Burke shifted in his chair so that he faced her. His eyes looked far more red than brown at the moment, as though they glowed with some hot inner light.
“Because,” he said deliberately, “I’m going to marry her.”
Judith sat suddenly upright.
“So that’s the meaning of your constant pilgrimages to Staple, is it?”
“Just that.”
She laughed—a disagreeable little laugh like a douche of cold water.
“You’re rather late in the field, aren’t you?”
“You mean that Blaise Tormarin wants her?”
“Of course I do. It’s evident enough, isn’t it?”
Burke pulled at his pipe reflectively.
“I should have thought he’d had a sickener with Nesta Freyne.”
“So he had. But not in the way you mean. He never—loved—Nesta.”
“Then why on earth did he ask her to marry him?”
“Good heavens, Geoffrey! You’re a man—and you ask me that! There are heaps of men who ask women to marry them on the strength of a temporary infatuation, and then regret it ever after. Luckily for Blaise, Nesta saved him the ‘ever after’ part. But”—eyeing him significantly—“Blaise’s feeling for Jean isn’t of the ‘temporary’ type. Of that I’m sure.”
“All the same, I don’t believe he means to ask her to marry him.”
“No. I don’t think he does—meanto. He’s probably got some high-minded scruples about not asking a second woman to make a mess of her life as a result of the Tormarin temper. It would be just like Blaise to adopt that attitude. But hewillask her, all the same. The thing’ll get too strong for him. And when he asks her, Jean will say yes.”
“You may be right. I’ve always said you were no fool, Judy. But if it’s as you think, then I must get in first, that’s all. First or last, though”—with a grim laugh—“I’ll back myself to beat Blaise Tormarin.And you’ve got to help me.”
Followed a silence while Judith threw away the stump of her cigarette and lit another. She did not hurry over the process, but went about it slowly and deliberately, holding the flame of the match to the tip of her cigarette for quite an unnecessarily long time.
At last:
“I don’t mind if I do,” she said slowly. “I don’t think I—envy—your wife much, Geoffrey. She won’t be a very happy woman, so I don’t mind assisting Glyn Peterson’s daughter to the position. It would make things so charming all round if he and I ever met again”—smiling ironically.
Burke looked at her with a mixture of admiration and disgust.
“What a thorough-going little beast you are, Judith,” he observed tranquilly.
She shrugged her thin, supple shoulders with indifference.
“I didn’t make myself. Glyn Peterson had a good share in kneading the dough; why shouldn’t his daughter eat the bread? And anyhow, old thing”—her whole face suddenly softening—“I should like you to have what you want—even if you wanted the moon! So you can count on me. But I don’t think you’ll find it all plain sailing.”
“No”—sardonically. “She’ll likely be a little devil to break.... Well, start being a bit more friendly, will you? Ask her to lunch.”
Accordingly, a day or two later, a charming little note found its way to Staple, inviting Jean to lunch with Mrs. Craig.
“I shall be quite alone,” it ran, “as Geoffrey is going off for a day’s fishing, so I hope Lady Anne will spare you to come over and keep me company for an hour or two.”
Jean was delighted at this evidence that Judith was thawing towards her. She was genuinely anxious that they should become friends, feeling that it was up to her, as Glyn’s daughter, to atone—in so far as friendliness and sympathy could be said to atone—for his treatment of her. Beyond this, she had a vague hope that later, if she and Judith ever became intimate enough to touch on the happenings of the past, she might be able to make the latter see her father in the same light in which she herself saw him—as a charming, lovable, irresponsible child, innocent of any intention to wound, but with all a child’s unregarding pursuit of a desired object, irrespective of the consequences to others.
She felt that if only Judith could better comprehend Glyn’s nature, she would not only be disposed to judge him less hardly, but, to a certain extent, would find healing for her own bitterness of resentment and hurt pride.
Judith was an unhappy woman, embittered by one of those blows in life which a woman finds hardest to hear. And Jean hated people to be unhappy.
So that it was with considerable satisfaction that she set out across the park towards Willow Perry, crossing the river by the footbridge which spanned it at a point about a quarter of a mile below the scene of her boating mishap.
Judith welcomed her with unaccustomed warmth, and after lunch completely won her heart by a candour seemingly akin to Jean’s own.
“I’ve been quite hateful to you since you came to Staple,” she said frankly. “Just because you were—who you were. I suppose”—turning her head a little aside—“you’ve heard—you know that old story?”
Then, as Jean murmured an affirmative, she went on quickly:
“Well, it was idiotic of me to feel unfriendly to you because you happened to be Glyn’s daughter, and I’m honestly ashamed of myself. I should have loved you at once—you’re rather a dear, you know!—if you had been anyone else. So will you let me love you now, please—if it isn’t too late?”
It was charmingly done, and Jean received the friendly overture with all the enthusiasm dictated by a generous and spontaneous nature.
“Why, of course,” she agreed gladly. “Let’s begin over again”—smiling.
Judith smiled back.
“Yes, we’ll make a fresh start.”
After that, things progressed swimmingly. The slight gene which had attended the earlier stages of the visit vanished, and very soon, prompted by Judith’s eager, interested questions, Jean found herself chatting away quite naturally and happily about her life before she came to Staple and confessing how much she was enjoying her first experience of England.
“It’s all so soft, and pretty, and old,” she said. “I feel as if Staple must always have been here—just where it is, looking across to the Moor, and nodding sometimes, as much as to say, ‘I’ve been here so long that I know some of your secrets.’ The Moor always seems to me to have secrets,” she added dreamily. “Those great tors watch us all the time, just as they’ve watched for centuries. They remind me of the Egyptian Sphinx, they are so still, and silent, and—and eternal-looking.”
“You’ve not been on to Dartmoor yet, have you?” asked Judith. “We have a bungalow up there—Three Fir Bungalow, it’s called. You must come and spend a few days there with us when the weather gets warmer.”
“I should love it,” cried Jean, her eyes sparkling. “I’m aching to go to the Moor. I want to see it in all sorts of moods—when it’s raining, and when the sun’s shining, and when the wind blows. I’m sure it will be different each time—rather like a woman.”
“I think it’s loveliest of all by moonlight,” said Judith, her eyes soft and shining with recollection. She loved all the beauty of the world as much as Jean herself did. “I remember being on the top of one of the tors at night. All the surrounding valleys were hidden in a mist like a silver sea, and I felt as if I had got right away from the everyday world, into a sort of holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits. One almost forgot that one was just an ordinary, plain-boiled human being tied up in a parcel of flesh and bone.”
“Only people aren’t really in the least plain-boiled or ordinary,” observed Jean quaintly.
“You aren’t, I verily believe.” Judith regarded her curiously for a moment. “I think I wish you were,” she said abruptly.
She was not finding the part assigned to her by her brother any too easy. It complicates matters, when you are deliberately planning a semblance of friendship towards someone, if that someone persists in inspiring you with little genuine impulses of liking and friendliness.
Jean herself was delighted with the result of her visit to Willow Perry. She was convinced that Judith was a much nicer woman than she had imagined, or than anyone else imagined her to be, and when she took her departure she carried these warmer sentiments with her, characteristically reproaching herself not a little for her first hasty judgment. People improved upon acquaintance enormously, she reflected.
She did not go straight back to Staple, but took her way towards Charnwood on the chance of finding Claire at home, and, Fate being in a benevolent mood, she discovered her in her garden, precariously mounted upon a ladder and occupied in nailing back a creeper.
Claire greeted her joyfully and proceeded to descend.
“I’ve been lunching at Willow Perry,” explained Jean, “so I thought I might as well come on here and cadge my tea as well!”
“Of course you might Adrian has gone into Exeter to-day, so we shall be alone.”
Jean was conscious of an immense relief. The knowledge that Sir Adrian was not anywhere on the premises seemed like the lifting of a blight.
Claire’s blue eyes smiled at her understandingly.
“Yes, I know,” she nodded, as though Jean had given voice to her thought. “It’s just as if someone had opened a window and let the fresh air in, isn’t it?”
She collected her tools, and slipping her arm within Jean’s led her in the direction of the house.
“We’ll have tea at once,” she said, “and then I’ll walk back with you part way.”
“You’re bent on getting rid of me quickly, then?”
“Yes”—seriously. “He”—there was little need to specify to whom the pronoun referred—“will be back by the afternoon train, and for some reason or other he is very unfriendly towards you just now.”
“What have I done to offend?” queried Jean lightly. Somehow, with Sir Adrian actually away, it didn’t seem a matter of much importance whether he was offended or not. Even the house had a different “feel” about it as they entered it.
“It’s not anything you’ve done; it’s what you are, I think, sometimes, that when a man is full of evil and cruel thoughts and knows he has given himself up to wickedness, he simply hates to see anyone young and—andgood, like you are, Jean, with all your life before you to make a splendid thing of.”
“And what about you?” asked Jean, her eyes resting affectionately on the other’s delicate flower face with its pathetically curved lips and the look of trouble in the young blue eyes. “He sees you constantly.”
“Oh, he’s used to me. I’m only his wife, you see. Besides”—wearily—“he knows that he can effectually prevent me from making a splendid thing of my life.”
The note of bitterness in her voice wrung Jean’s heart.
“I don’t know how you bear it!” she exclaimed.
“One can bear anything—a day at a time,” answered Claire with an attempt at brightness. “But I never look forward,” she added in a lower tone.
The words seemed to Jean to contain an epitome of tragedy. Not yet twenty, and Claire’s whole philosophy of life was embodied in those four desolate words: “I never look forward!”
The world seemed built up of sadness and cross-purposes. Claire and Nick, Judith, and Blaise Tormarin—all had their own particular burdens to carry, burdens which had in a measure spoiled the lives of each one of them. It seemed as though no one was allowed to escape those “snuffers of Destiny” of which Blaise had spoken as he and Jean had climbed the mountain-side together. She felt a depressing conviction that her own turn would come and wondered whether it would be sooner or later.
“Don’t look so blue!” Claire’s voice broke in upon her gloomy trend of thought. She was laughing, and Jean was conscious of a sudden uprush of admiration for the young gay courage which could laugh even while it could not look forward. “After all, there are compensations in life. You’re one of them, my Jean, as I’ve told you before! Now let’s talk about something else.”
Jean responded gladly enough, and presently Sir Adrian was temporarily forgotten in the little intimate half-hour of woman-talk which followed.
“WELL, have you enjoyed yourself?” enquired Lady Anne when Jean returned. “I suppose so, as you stayed to tea”—smiling.
“Oh, I had tea with Claire. Sir Adrian was away”—with a small grimace—“so we had quite a nice little time together. But, yes, madonna”—Jean had fallen into the use of the gracious little name which Blaise and Nick kept for their mother—“I really enjoyed myself very much. Judith was ever so much nicer than I expected.”
“So now, I suppose, we shall all be side-tracked in favour of Burke and his sister?” put in Blaise, who had been listening quietly. There was a sharpness in his tones, as though the prospect did not please.
Jean smiled at him engagingly.
“Of course you will,” she replied. “I invariably sidetrack old friends when I get the chance.”
“Oh, you’ll get the chance right enough!”—rather sulkily. “Yes, I think I shall”—demurely. “Geoffrey has always been nice to me; and now Judith, too, has succumbed to my charms, and says she hopes we shall be good pals.”
Tormarin rose, pushing back his chair with unnecessary violence.
“I don’t think I see Judith Craig extending her friendship to Glyn Peterson’s daughter,” he commented cynically.
An instant later the door banged behind, and Lady Anne and Jean looked across at each other smiling, as women will when one of their menkind proceeds to behave exactly like a cross little boy.
But a quick sigh chased the smile from Lady Anne’s lips.
“Poor old Blaise!” she murmured, as though to herself. Then, her grey eyes meeting Jean’s squarely, she said quietly:
“Jean, you’re so much one of us, now, that I should like you to know what lies at the hack of things. You’d understand—some of us—better.”
Jean turned impulsively.
“I don’t need to understand you,” she said quickly. “I love you.”
“Thank you, my dear.” Lady Anne’s voice trembled slightly. “If I were not sure of that, I shouldn’t tell you what I am going to. But I want you to understand Blaise—and to make allowances for him, if you can.”
Jean pulled forward a stool and settled herself at Lady Anno’s feet.
“Do you mean about the ‘mark of the beast’?” she asked, smiling a little. “Blaise told me to ask you about it one day.”
“Did he? He thinks far too much about it and what it stands for”—sadly. “It has come to be almost a symbol in his eyes. You see, he too has suffered from the family failing—the very failing that was responsible for that white lock of hair.”
“Tell me about it.”
Lady Anne looked down at her thoughtfully.
“Well, there’s no need for me to tell you that the Tor-marins have hot tempers! You’ve seen evidences of it in Blaise—that sudden flaming up of anger. Though he has learnt through one most bitter experience to hold himself more or less in check.” She paused a moment, as if her thoughts had reverted painfully to the past. Presently she resumed: “All the Tormarin men have had it—that blazing, uncontrollable kind of temper which simply cannot brook opposition. Blaise’s father had it, and it was that which made our life together so unhappy.”
So Destiny had been busy with her snuffers here, also!
“You—you, too!” whispered Jean.
“I. too?” Lady Anne questioned. “What does that mean?”
“Why, it seems to me as ifno oneis ever allowed to be really happy and to live their life in peace! There is Judith, whose life my father spoilt, and Claire, whose life Sir Adrian spoils—and that means Nick’s life as well. And now—you!”
Some unconscious instinct of reticence deep within her forbade the mention of Blaise Tormarin’s name.
“I expect we are not meant to be too joyful,” said Lady Anne. “Though, after all, it’s largely our own fault if we are not. We make or mar each other’s happiness; it isn’t all Fate.... But I’ve had my share of happiness, Jean—never think that I haven’t. Afterwards, with Claude, I was utterly happy.”
She fell silent for a space, ceasing on that quiet note of happiness. Presently, almost loth to disturb the reverie into which she had fallen, Jean questioned hesitantly:
“And the ‘mark of the beast,’ madonna? You were going to tell me about it.”
“It came as a consequence of the Tormarin temper. That’s why Blaise calls it the ‘mark of the beast.’ It was just before he was born—when I was waiting for the supreme joy of holding my first-born in my arms. Derrick—Blaise’s father—was an extremely jealous-natured man. He hated to think that there had ever been anyone besides himself who cared for me. And there was one man, in particular, of whom he had always been foolishly jealous and suspicious. I can’t imagine why, though”—with a little puzzled laugh. “You would think that the mere fact that I had marriedhim, and not the other man, would have been sufficient proof that he had no cause for jealousy. But no! Men are queer creatures, and he always resented my friendship with John Lovett—which continued after my marriage. I had known John from childhood, and he was the truest friend a woman ever had!” She sighed: “And I needed friends in those days! For somehow, brooding over things to himself, my husband conceived the idea that the little son who was coming was not his own child—but the child of John Lovett. I think someone must have poisoned his mind. There was a certain woman of our acquaintance whom I always suspected; she hated me and was very much attached to Derrick—she had wanted to marry him, I believe. In any case, he came home one evening, from her house, like a madman; and there was a scene... a terrible scene... he hurling accusations at me.... I won’t talk of it, because he was bitterly repentant afterwards. As soon as the fit of rage was past, he realised how utterly groundless his suspicions had been, and I don’t think he ever ceased to reproach himself. But that has always been the way! The Tormarins have invariably brought the bitterest self-reproach upon themselves. One way or another, the same story of blind, reckless anger, and its consequences, has repeated itself generation after generation.”
“And then? What happened then?” asked Jean in low, shocked tones.
“I was very ill—so ill that they thought I should not live. But I did live, and I brought my baby into the world. Only, he was born with that white lock of hair. And my own hair had turned perfectly white.”
Jean was silent for a little. At last she said softly:
“I’m so glad, madonna, that you were happy afterwards.Your‘house of dreams’ came true in the end!”
“Yes”—Lady Anne’s grey eyes were very bright and luminous. “My house of dreams came true.”
After a while, she went on quietly:
“But my poor Blaise’s house of dreams fell in ruins. The foundation was rotten. You knew, didn’t you, that there was a woman he once cared for?”
Jean nodded. Speech was difficult to her just at that moment.
“It was a miserable business altogether. The girl, Nesta Freyne was an Italian. Blaise met her when he was travelling in Italy, and—oh, well, it wasn’t love! Not love as I know it, and as I think, one day, you too will know it. It blazed up, just one of those wild infatuations that sometimes spring into being between a man and a woman, and almost before he had time to think, Blaise had married her——”
“Married her!”
The words leapt from Jean’s lips before she could check them. In the account of Tormarin’s disastrous love affair which had been forced upon her hearing in London, there had been no mention of the word marriage, and she had always imagined that the woman, this Nesta Freyne, had simply jilted him in favour of another man. Moreover, since she had been at Staple, nothing had been said to correct this impression, as, very naturally, the subject was one avoided by general consent.
And now, without warning or preparation, she found herself face to face with the fact that Blaise had been married—that he had belonged to another woman! It seemed to set her suddenly very far apart from him, and a fierce, intolerable jealousy of that other woman leaped to life in her heart, racking her with an anguish that was almost physical. She was confused, bewildered, by the storm of emotion which suddenly swept her whole being.
“Married her?” she repeated with dry lips.
“Yes. Didn’t you know that Blaise was a widower?”
Had Lady Anne divined the stress under which the girl was labouring that she so quickly interposed the knowledge that his wife was dead?
“No,” answered Jean unsteadily. “I didn’t even know that he had been married.”
The fact of that other woman’s being dead did not serve to allay the tumult within her. She had lived, and while she lived she had beenhis wife!
“Yes, he married her.” Lady Anne went on speaking in level tones. “I think matters were hurried to a climax by the fact that Nesta’s step-sister, Margherita Valdi, detested English people. She was much the elder of the two, and as their mother had died when Nesta was born, she had practically brought the girl up. She would never have countenanced the idea of her marrying an Englishman, but Nesta so contrived her meetings with Blaise that Margherita was unaware of his very existence, and eventually they married without her knowledge. From that day onward, Margherita declined to hold any communication with her sister.”
“Why had she such a rooted antipathy to the English?” Jean had recovered her composure during the course of Lady Anne’s narrative, and now put her question with a very good semblance of detachment. But, inside, her brain was dully hammering out the words “Married—married!”
“It seems that Margherita’s step-father—Nesta’s father, of course,—who was an Englishman, treated his wife extremely badly, and Margherita, who had adored her mother, never forgave him and hated all Englishmen in consequence. At least, that was what Nesta told Blaise, and it seems quite probable. Italians are a hot-blooded race, you know, and very vindictive and revengeful. Of course, these Valdis were of no particular family—that was where the trouble began. Nesta was just a rather second-rate, though extraordinarily beautiful girl, suddenly elevated to a position which she was not in the least fitted to fill. It didn’t take a month for the glamour to wear off—and for Blaise to see her as I saw her. He came to his senses to find himself married to a bit of soulless, passionate flesh and blood. Oh, Jean! If I could only have been there—in Italy, to have saved him from it all!”
Jean hardly heeded that instinctive mother-cry. She was keyed up to know the end of the story. She felt as though she must scream if Lady Anne were long about the telling.
“Go on,” she said, forcing herself to speak quietly. “Tell me the rest.”
“The rest had the Tormarin temper for its corner-stone. Nesta was an utterly spoilt child, and a coquette to her very finger-tips. She tossed dignity to the winds, and there were everlasting scenes and quarrels. Then, one day, Blaise came in and found her entertaining a man whom he had forbidden the house. I don’t know what he said to her—but I can guess, poor child! He horsewhipped the man, and he must have frightened Nesta half out of her mind. That evening she ran away from Staple—Nick and I, of course, were living at the Dower House then—and after months of fruitless enquiry I had a letter from Margherita Valdi telling me that she had been found drowned. She had evidently made her way back to Italy, hoping to reach her sister, and then, in a fit of despair, committed suicide.”
“Oh, poor Blaise! How awful for him!” exclaimed Jean, horror-stricken. For the moment her own individual point of view was swept away in a flood of sympathy for Tormarin.
“Yes. It broke him up badly. Always, I think, he is brooding over the past. It colours his entire outlook on things. You see, he blamed himself—his ungovernable temper—for the whole tragedy.... If only he had been gentler with her, not terrified her into running away!... After all, she was a mere child—barely seventeen. But she was a heartless, conscienceless minx, nevertheless.... And Margherita Valdi did not let him down lightly. She wrote him a terrible letter, accusing him of her sister’s death. I opened it—he was abroad at the time—but, of course, he had to see it ultimately. Tied up in a little separate packet was Nesta’s wedding-ring, together with a newspaper report of the affair, and, to add a last stab of horror, she had folded the newspaper clipping and thrust it through the wedding-ring, labelling the packet ‘Cause and effect.’ It was a brutal thing to do.”
They were both silent for a space, Jean painfully envisaging the tragedy that lay behind that stern, habitual gravity of Tormarin’s, Lady Anne asking herself tremulously if she had been wise—if she had been wise in her disclosure? She wanted her son’s happiness so immeasurably! She believed she knew wherein it might lie, and she had raked over the burning embers of the past that she might help to give it him.
She knew that he himself was very unlikely to confide in Jean the story of his unhappy marriage, or that if he ever did so, it would be but to shoulder all the blame himself, exonerating Nesta entirely. Nor, unless Jean understood the fiery furnace through which he had passed—that ordeal of impetuous, mistaken love, of disillusion, and, finally, of the most bitter self-reproach—could she possibly interpret aright Blaise’s strange, churlish moods, his insistent efforts to stand always on one side, as though he were entitled to make no further claim on life, and, above all, the bitter quality which permeated his whole outlook.
All these things had been in Lady Anne’s mind when she had decided to enlighten Jean. She had seen, just as Judith had seen, whither Blaise was tending, fight against it as he might, and she was determined to remove from his path whatever of stumbling-block and hindrance she could. And, in this instance, she felt instinctively that Jean’s own attitude might constitute the greatest danger. Any woman, as sincere and positive as she, might easily be driven in upon herself, shrinkingly misunderstanding Blaise’s deliberate aloofness, and thus unconsciously assist in strengthening that barrier against love which he was striving to hold in place between them—and which Lady Anne so yearned to see thrown down.
It was to this end that she had reopened the shadowed pages of the past—so that no foolish obstacle, born of sheer misunderstanding, might imperil her son’s hope of happiness if the time should ever come—as she prayed it would come—when he would free himself from the shackles of a tragic memory and turn his face towards the light of a new dawn.
THERE are some people to whom love comes in a single blinding flash; it is as though the heavens were opened and the vision and the glory theirs in a sudden, transcendant revelation. To others it comes gradually, their hearts opening diffidently to its warmth and light as a closed bud unfolds its petals, almost imperceptibly, to the sun.
With Jean, its coming partook in a measure of both of these. Love itself did not come to her suddenly. It had been secretly growing and deepening within her for months. But the recognition of it came upon her with an overwhelming suddenness.
Lady Anne, in recalling that bleak tragedy of the past, had accomplished more than she knew. She had shown Jean her own heart.
From those fierce, unexpected pangs of jealousy which had stabbed her as she realised the part played by another woman in Blaise’s life—the woman who had been his wife—had sprung the knowledge that she loved him. Only love could explain the instant, clamorous rebellion of her whole being against that other woman’s claim. And now, looking back upon the months which she had spent at Staple, she comprehended that the veiled figure of Love, face shrouded, had walked beside her all the way. That was why these even, uneventful weeks at Staple had seemed so wonderful!
The recognition of the great thing that had come into her life left her a little breathless and shaken. But she did not seek to evade or deny it. The absolute candour of her mind—candid even to itself—accepted the truth quite simply and frankly. No false shame that she had, as far as actual fact went, given her love unasked, tempted her to disguise from herself the reality of what had happened. For good or ill, whether Blaise returned her love or no, it was his.
But in her inmost heart she believed that he, too, cared—half-fearfully, half-joyfully recognising the pent-up force which surged behind the bars of his deliberate aloofness.
True, he had never definitely spoken of his love in so many words, hut Lady Anne had supplied the key to his silence. The past still bound him! Alive, Nesta had held him by her beauty; and dead, she still held him with the cords of remorse and unavailing self-reproach—cords which can bind almost as closely as the strands of love.
But for that——
The hot colour surged into Jean’s cheeks at the sweet, secret thought which lay behind that “but”. Blaise cared! Cared for her, needed her, just as she cared for and needed him. To her woman’s eyes, newly anointed with love’s sacramental oil and given sight, it had become suddenly evident in a hundred ways, most of all evident in his sullen effort to conceal it from her.
So much that he had said, or had not said—those clipped sentences, bitten off short with a savage intensity that had often enough troubled and bewildered her, now found their right interpretation. He cared... but the bondage of the past still held.
And with that thought came reaction. The brief, quivering ecstacy, which had sent little fugitive thrills and currents racing through every nerve of her, died suddenly like a damped-out fire, as she realised all which that bondage implied.
It was possible he might never break the silence which he himself had decreed. From the very beginning he had recognised and insisted upon—the fact that they two were only “ships that pass,” and though now, for a little space, Fate had directed the course of each into the same channel, a year, at most, would float them out again on to the big ocean of life where vessels signalled—and passed—each other. She must, in the ordinary course of events, return eventually to Beirnfels, while Blaise remained in England. And that would be the end of it.
She knew the man’s dogged pertinacity; he would hold to an idea or belief immovably if he conceived it right, no matter what the temptation to break away. And in the flood of light vouchsafed by Lady Anne’s disclosure, she felt convinced that he had somehow come to regard the tragic happenings of the past as standing betwixt him and any future happiness. Why, Jean could not altogether fathom, but she guessed that the dominant factor in the matter was probably an exaggerated consciousness of responsibility for his wife’s death, and perhaps, too, a certain lingering tenderness, a subconscious feeling of loyalty to the dead woman, which urged him on to the sacrifice of his own personal happiness as some kind of atonement.
Unless—and a swift spasm of pain shot through her, searing its way like a tongue of flame—unless Lady Anne had been altogether mistaken in her fixed belief that Blaise had not really cared for his wife but had only been carried away on the swift tide of passion—that tide which runs so fiercely and untrammelled in hot youth.
Jean had her black hour then, when she faced the fact that although her love was given, and although she tremulously believed it was returned, she would probably never know the supreme joy of utter certainty, never hear the beloved’s voice utter those words which hold all heaven for the woman who hears them.
But, through the darkness that closed about her, there gleamed a single thread of light—the light of her own bestowal of love. Even if she never knew, of a surety, that Blaise cared, even if—and here she shrank, but forced herself to face the possibility sincerely—even if she were utterly mistaken and he did not care for her in any other way save as a friend—his “little comrade”—still there would remain always the golden gleam of love that has been given. For no one who loves can be quite unhappy.
THE chalcedony of the spring skies had deepened into the glowing sapphire of early June—a deep, pulsating blue, tremulous with heat. On the sundial, the shadow’s finger pointed to twelve o’clock, and the sleepy hush of noontide hung over the rose garden where Jean was gathering roses for the house.
“Can’t I help?”
Burke’s voice broke across the drowsy quiet so unexpectedly that she jumped, almost letting fall the scissors with which she was scientifically snipping the stems of the roses. She bestowed a small frown upon the head and shoulders appearing above the wooden gate on which he leant.
“It’s not very helpful to begin by giving one an electric shock,” she complained. “How long have you been there?” His attitude had a repose about it which suggested that he might have been standing there some time watching her.
“I don’t know. But as Iamhere, may I come in?” Without waiting for her answer, he unlatched the gate and came striding across the velvet greenness of the lawn.
His visits to Staple had grown of late so much a matter of daily occurrence that they were no longer hedged about by any ceremony, and Jean had come to accept his appearance at any odd moment without surprise.
Since the day when she had lunched at Willow Eerry, and learned, as she believed, to understand and make allowances for the bitterness which had so warped Judith’s nature, her acquaintance with both brother and sister had ripened rapidly into a friendly intimacy. But the fact that Burke’s feeling towards her was something other, and much warmer than mere friendship, had failed to penetrate her consciousness.
It was patent enough to the lookers on, and probably Jean was the only one amongst the little coterie of intimate friends who had not realised what was impending.
It is not very often that a woman remains entirely oblivious of the small, unmistakable signs which go to indicate a man’s attitude towards her. In Jean’s case, however, her thoughts were so engrossed with the one man that, at the moment, all other men occupied but a very shadowy relationship towards the realities of life as far as she was concerned.
So that she scarcely troubled to look up as Burke halted beside her, but went on cutting her roses unconcernedly, merely observing:
“Idlers not allowed. You can make yourself useful by paring the thorns off the stems.” She gestured towards a basket which stood on the ground at her side, already overflowing with its scented burden of pink and white and crimson roses.
He glanced at the russet head bent studiously above a bush rose and there was a gleam, half angry, half amused, in his eyes. His fingers went uncertainly to his pocket, where reposed a serviceable knife, then suddenly he drew his hand sharply away, empty.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t come over to be useful this morning. I came over”—he spoke slowly, as though endeavouring to gain her attention—“on a quite different errand.” There was a vibration in his voice that might have warned her had she been less intent upon her task of wrestling with a refractory branch. As it was, she merely questioned absently:
“And what was the ‘quite different’ errand?”
The next moment she felt his hand close over both hers, gardening scissors and wash-leather gloves notwithstanding.
“Stop cutting those confounded flowers, and I’ll tell you,” he said roughly.
She looked up in astonishment, and, at last, a glimmering of what was coming dawned upon her. Even the blindest of women, the most preoccupied, must have read the expression of his eyes at that moment.
“Oh, no—no,” she began hastily. “I must finish cutting the roses—really, Geoffrey.”
She tried to release her hands, but he held them firmly.
“No,” he said coolly. “You won’t finish cutting your flowers—at least, not now. You’re going to listen to me.” He drew the scissors from her grasp, and they flashed like a fish in the sunshine as he tossed them down on to the rose-basket. Then, quite deliberately, he pulled off the loose gloves she was wearing and his big hands gripped themselves suddenly, closely, about her slight, bared ones.
“Geoffrey——”
Her voice wavered uncertainly. The realisation of his intent had come upon her so unexpectedly, rousing her from her placid unconsciousness, that she felt stunned—nervously unready to deal with the situation. She struggled a little, instinctively, but he only laughed down at her, a ring of masterful triumph in his voice, holding her effortlessly, with all the ease of his immense strength.
“It’s no good, Jean. You’ve got to hear me out. I’ve waited long enough.” He paused, then drew a deep breath. “I love you!” he said slowly. “My God, how I love you!” There was an element of wonder in his tones, and she felt the strong hands gripping hers tremble a little. Then their clasp tightened and he drew her towards him.
“Say you love me,” he demanded. “Say it!”
It was then Jean found her voice. The imperious demand, infringing on that secret, inner claim of which she alone knew, stung her into quick denial.
“But I don’t! I don’t love you!” Then, as she saw the blank look in his eyes, she went on hastily: “Oh, Geoffrey, I am so sorry. I never guessed—I never thought of your caring.”
“You never guessed! Good God!”—with a harsh laugh—“I should have thought I’d made it plain enough. Why, even that first day, on the river—I wanted you then. What do you suppose has brought me to Staple every day? Affection for Blaise Tormarin?”—cynically.
“I thought—I thought——” She cast about in her mind for an answer, then presented him with the simple truth. “I’m afraid I never thought about it at all. I just took your coming over for granted. I knew you and Judith were old friends and neighbours, so it seemed quite natural for you to be here often—just as Claire Latimer is.”
Burke searched her face for a moment. He was thinking of the other women he had known—women who would never have remained blind to his meaning, who had, indeed, shown their willingness to come half-way—more than half-way—to meet him.
“I really believe that’s true,” he said at last, grudgingly. “But if it is, you’re the most unselfconscious woman I’ve ever come across.”
“Of course it’s true,” she replied simply. “I’m—I’m so sorry, Geoffrey. I like you far too much to have wished to hurt you.”
“I don’t want liking. I want your love. And I mean to have it. You may not have understood before, Jean, but you do now.”
She drew herself away from him a little.
“That doesn’t make any difference, Geoffrey. I have no love to give you,” she said quietly.
He shook his head.
“I won’t take no,” he said doggedly. “You’re the woman I want. And I mean to have you.... Don’t you understand? It’s no use fighting against me. You may say no, now; you may say no fifty times. But one day you’ll say—yes.”
Jean’s slight frame tautened.
“You are mistaken,” she said, in a chill, clear voice calculated to set immeasurable spaces between them. “I’m not a cave woman to be forced into marriage. Oh!”—the ludicrous side of this imperious kind of wooing striking her suddenly—“don’t be so absurd, Geoffrey! You can’t seize me by the hair and carry me off to your own particular hole in the rocks, you know.” She began to laugh a little. “Let’s just go on being good friends—and forget that this has ever happened.”
She held out her hand, but he took no notice of the little friendly gesture. There was a red gleam in his eyes, a smouldering glow that needed but a breath to fan it into flame.
“You speak as if it were something that was over and done with,” he said in a low, tense voice. “But it isn’t; it never will be. I love you and want you, and I shall go on loving you and wanting you as long as I live. Jean—sweetest”—his voice suddenly softened incredibly—“I’ll try to be more gentle. But when a man loves as I do, he doesn’t stop to choose his words.” He stepped closer to her. “Oh! You little, little thing! Why, I could pick you up and carry you off to my cave with two fingers. Jean, when will you marry me?”
His big frame towered beside her. He paid no more attention to her dismissal of him than if she had not spoken, and she was conscious of an odd feeling of impotence.
“You don’t seem to have understood me,” she said forcing herself to speak composedly. “If I loved you, you’d have no need to ‘carry me off’ to your cave. I’d come—gladly. But I don’t love you, Geoffrey. And I shall never marry a man I don’t love.”
“You’ll marry me,” he returned stubbornly. “Do you think I’m going to give you up so easily? If you do, you mistaken. I love you, and I’ll teach you to love me—when you’re my wife.”
The two pairs of eyes met, a challenging defiance flashing between them. Jean shrugged her shoulders.
“I think you must be mad,” she said contemptuously, and turned to leave him.
In the same instant his hands gripped her shoulders and he swung her round facing him again.
“Mad!” he exclaimed hoarsely. “Yes, I am mad—mad for you. You little cold thing! Do you know what love is—man’s love?”
She felt his arms close round her like a vice of steel, lifting her off her feet, so that she hung helpless in his embrace. For a moment his eyes burned down into hers—the hot flame of desire that blazed in them seeming almost to scorch her—the next, he had hidden his face against the warm white curve of her throat, where a little affrighted pulse throbbed tempestuously. Then, as though the touch of her snapped the last link of his self-control, his mouth sought hers, and he was kissing her savagely, crushing her soft, wincing lips beneath his own. Her slender body swayed helpless as a reed in his strong grip, while the tide of his passion, like some fierce, untamable flood, swept over her resistlessly.
When at last he released her, she stood back from him, staggering a little. Instinctively he stretched out his hand to steady her.
“Don’t... touch me!” she panted.
The words came driven between clenched teeth, chokingly. Her face was milk-white and her eyes blazed at him out of its pallor. She felt as if her heart were beating in her throat, stifling her, and for a little space sheer physical stress held her silent But she fought it back, asserting her will against her weakness.
“How dare you?” There was bitter anger in her still tones. “How dare you touch me—like that?”
With a swift movement she passed her handkerchief across her lips and then let it fall on the ground as though it were something unclean. He winced at the gesture; for a moment the passion died out of his face and a rueful look, almost of schoolboy shame, took its place.
“Do you—feel like that about it?” he said, nodding towards the handkerchief.
“Just like that,” she returned. “Do you think—if I had known—I would ever have risked being alone with you? But I thought we were friends—I never dreamed I couldn’t trust you.”
“Well, you can’t,” he said unsteadily. The sight of her slender, defiant figure and lovely, tilted face, with the scornful lips he had just kissed showing like a scarlet stain against its whiteness, sent the blood rioting through his veins once more. “You’ll... you’ll never be able to trust any man who loves you, Jean.”
Her thoughts flew to Blaise. She would trust herself with him—now, at any time, always. But then, perhaps—the after thought came like a knife-thrust—perhaps he did not care!
“A man who—loved me,” she said dully, “would not do what you’ve just done.”
“He would—sooner or later. Unless his veins ran milk and water!” He drew a step nearer and stood staring down at her sombrely. “Do you know what you’re like, I wonder? With your great golden eyes and your maddening mouth and that little cleft in your white chin.... You’re angry because I kissed you. I wonder I didn’t do it before! I’ve wanted to, dozens of times. But I wanted your love more than a passing kiss. I’ve waited for that—waited all these weeks. And now you refuse it—you’ve not evenunderstoodthat you’re all earth and heaven to me. God! How blind you must have been!”
She was silent. Her anger was waning, giving place to a certain distressful comprehension of the mighty force which had suddenly broken bondage in the man beside her. Dimly, from her own knowledge of the yearning bred of the loved one’s nearness, she envisaged what these last weeks must have meant to a man of Burke’s temperament. Was it any wonder, when suddenly made to realise that the woman he loved not only did not love him in return, but had failed even to sense his love for her, that his stormy spirit had rebelled—flung off its shackles? An element of self-reproach tinctured her thoughts. In a measure the fault had been hers; her self-absorption was to blame.
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “I’m afraid I have been blind, Geoffrey. Indeed—indeed I would have prevented all this if I had known, if I had guessed. But, honestly, I just thought of you—you and Judith—as friends.”
“I believe you really did,” he said slowly, almost incredulously. Then, as though in swift corollary: “Jean, is there anyone else?”
The question drove at her with its sudden grasp of the truth. Her face grew slowly drawn and pinched-looking beneath his merciless gaze and her lips moved speechlessly.
“So itisthat, is it? And does he—has he——”
“Geoffrey, you are insufferable!” The words came wrung from her in quick, low protest. “You have no right—no right——”
“No, I suppose I haven’t,” he admitted, touched by the stricken look in her eyes. “I’d no business to ask that. For the moment, it’s enough that you don’t love me.... But I shall never give you up, Jean. You’re mine—my woman!” The light of possession flared up once more in his eyes. “Do you remember I told you once that, if a man makes up his mind, he can get his own way over most things? Well, it’s true.”
He paused a moment, then abruptly swung round on his heel and without a word of farwell, strode away across the garden towards the gate by which he had entered.
As the latch clicked into its place behind him, Jean was conscious of a sudden tremor, of a curious, uncontrollable fear, as though his words held something of prophecy. The man’s dominating personality seemed to swamp her, overwhelming her by its sheer physical force.
The remembrance of her sinister dream, and of the dream Burke’s threat: “It’s too late to try and run away. If you don’t come into my parlour, you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast forever,” returned to her with a disagreeable sense of menace. She shivered a little and, picking up her basket, almost ran back to the house, as though seeking safety.