IN the task of arranging her roses in the various bowls and vases Baines had set in readiness for her, Jean found a certain relief from the feeling of terror which had invaded her. Something in the homely everydayness of the occupation served to relax the tension of her mind, keyed up and overwrought by the stress of her interview with Burke, and it was with almost her usual composure of manner that she greeted Blaise when presently he joined her.
“I’ve raided the rose garden to-day,” she said, smilingly indicating the mass of scented blossom that lay heaped up on the table. “I expect when Johns finds out he will proceed to meditate upon something for my benefit with boiling oil in it.”
Johns was one of the gardeners to whom Jean’s joyous and wholesale robbery of his first-fruits was a daily cross and affliction. Only chloroform would ever have reconciled him to the cutting off of a solitary bloom while still in its prime.
Blaise regarded the tangle of roses consideringly.
“I wonder you found time to gather so many. When I passed by the rose garden, you were—otherwise occupied.” The quietly uttered comment sent the blood rushing up into Jean’s face. When had he passed? What had he seen?
She kept her eyes lowered, seemingly intent upon the disposition of some exquisite La France roses in a black Wedge-wood bowl.
“What do you mean?” she asked negligently.
Tormarin was silent a moment.
Had she looked at him she would have surprised a restless pain in the keen eyes he bent upon her.
“Jean”—he spoke very gently—“have I—to congratulate you?”
It was difficult to preserve her poise of indifference when the man she loved put this question to her, but she contrived it somehow. Women become adepts in the art of hiding their feelings. The conventions demand it of them.
Jean’s answer fluttered out with the airy lightness of a butterfly in the sunshine.
“I am sure I can’t say, unless you tell me upon what grounds?”
“You know of none, then”—swiftly.
“None.”
She nibbled the end of a stalk and surveyed the Wedge-wood bowl critically. Tormarin felt like shaking her.
“Then,” he said gruffly, “let me suggest you revise your methods. The woman who plays with Geoffrey Burke might as safely play with an unexploded bomb.”
His voice betrayed him, revealing the personal element behind the proffered counsel.
Jean glanced at him between her lashes. So that was it! He was jealous—jealous of Burke! At last something had happened to pierce the joints of his armour of assumed indifference! Her heart sang a little pæan of thanksgiving, and all that was woman in her rose bubbling to meet the situation. In an instant she had recaptured her aplomb.
“I think I rather enjoy playing with unexploded bombs,” she returned meditatively. “There are always—possibilities—about them.”
“There are”—grimly. “And it is precisely against those possibilities that I am warning you.”
“Don’t you think it’s rather bad taste on your part to warn me against a man who is admittedly on terms of friendship with you all?”
“No, I don’t”—steadily. “Nor should I care if it were. When it’s a matter of you and your safety, the question of taste doesn’t enter into the thing at all.”
“My safety?” jeered Jean softly. (It was barely half an hour since Burke had inspired her with that sudden fear of him and of his compelling personality!)
“Well, if not your safety, at least your happiness,” amended Blaise.
“It’s very kind of you to interest yourself, but really my happiness has nothing whatever to do with Geoffrey Burke.”
“Is that true?”
He flashed the question at her, and there was that in his tone which set her pulses athrill, quenching the light-hearted spirit of banter that had led her to torment him. It was the note of restrained passion which she had heard before in his voice, and which had always power to move her to the depths of her being.
“Perfectly true.” She faltered a little. “But”—forcing herself to a defiance that was in reality a species of self-defence—“I fail to see that it concerns you, Blaise.”
“It concerns me in so far as Burke is not the sort of man that a woman can make a friend of. It’s all or nothing with him. And if you don’t intend to give him all, you’d better give him—nothing.”
His glance, grave and steady, met hers, and she knew then, of a certainty, that he had witnessed the scene which had taken place in the rose garden, when Burke had held her in his arms and the flood of his passion had risen and overwhelmed her. He had witnessed that—and had misunderstood it.
She was conscious of a fierce resentment against him. It mattered nothing to her that, in the light of her nonchalant answers to his questions, he was fully justified in the obvious conclusion he had drawn. She did not stop to think whether her anger was reasonable or unreasonable. She was simply furious with him for suspecting her of flirting—odious word!—with Geoffrey Burke. Well, if he chose to think thus of her, let him do so! She would not trouble to explain—to exculpate herself.
She regarded him with stormy eyes.
“Please understand, Blaise, that I want neither your advice nor your criticism. If I choose to make a friend of Geoffrey Burke—or of any other man—I shall do so without asking your permission or approval. What I do, or don’t do, is no business of yours.”
For a moment they faced each other, his eyes, stormy as her own, dark with anger. His hands clenched themselves.
“If I could,” he said hoarsely, “I wouldmakeit my business.”
He wheeled round and left the room without another word. Jean stood staring dazedly at the blank panels of the door which had closed behind him. She wanted to laugh... or to cry. To laugh, because with every sullen word he revealed the thing he was so sedulously intent on keeping from her. To cry, because he had taken her pretended indifference at its face value, and so another film of misunderstanding had risen to thicken the veil between them—the veil which he would not, and she, being a woman, could not, draw aside.
PROBABLY masculine obtuseness and the feminine faculty for dissimulation are together responsible for more than half the broken hearts with which the highways of life are littered.
The Recalcitrant Parent, the Other Woman—be she never so guileful—or the Other Man, as the case may be, are none of them as potent a menace to the ultimate happy issue of events as the mountain of small misunderstandings which a man and a maid in love are capable of piling up for themselves.
The man is prone to see only that which the woman intends he shall—and no self-respecting feminine thing is going to unveil the mysteries of her heart until she is very definitely assured that that is precisely what the man in the case is aching for her to do.
So she dissimulates with all the skill which Nature and a few odd thousand years or so of tradition have taught her and pretends that the Only Man in the World means rather less to her than her second-best shoe buckles. With the result that he probably goes silently and sadly away, convinced that he hasn’t an outside chance, while all the time she is simply quivering to pour out at his feet the whole treasure of her love.
In this respect Blaise and Jean blundered as egregiously as any other love-befogged pair.
Following upon their quarrel over the matter of Jean’s attitude towards Geoffrey Burke, Tormarin retreated once again into those fastnesses of aloof reserve which seemed to deny the whole memory of that “magic moment” at Montavan. And Jean, just because she was unhappy, flirted outrageously with the origin of the quarrel, finding a certain reckless enjoyment in the flavour of excitement lent to the proceedings by the fact that Burke was in deadly earnest.
Playing with an “unexploded bomb” at least sufficed to take her thoughts off other matters, and enabled her momentarily to forget everything for which forgetting seemed the only possible and sensible prescription.
But you can’t forget things by yourself. Solitude is memory’s closest friend. So Jean, heedless of consequences, encouraged Burke to help her.
Lady Anne sometimes sighed a little, as she watched the two go off together for a long morning on the river, or down to the tennis-court, accompanied, on occasion, by Claire Latimer and Nick to make up the set. But she held her peace. She was no believer in direct outside interference as a means towards the unravelment of a love tangle, and all that it was possible to do, indirectly, she had attempted when she revealed to Jean the history of Blaise’s marriage.
She did, however, make a proposal which would have the effect of breaking through the present trend of affairs and of throwing Blaise and Jean more or less continuously into each other’s company. She was worldly wise enough to give its due value to the power of propinquity, and her innocently proffered suggestion that she and her two sons and Jean should all run up to London for a week, before the season closed, was based on the knowledge of how much can be accomplished by the skilful handling of apartie carrée.
The suggestion was variously received. By Blaise, indifferently; by Jean, with her natural desire to know more of the great city she had glimpsed en route augmented by the knowledge that a constant round of sight-seeing and entertainment would be a further aid towards the process of forgetting; by Nick, the sun of whose existence rose and set at Charnwood, with open rebellion.
“Why go to be baked in London, madonna, when we might remain here in the comparative coolth of the country?” he murmured plaintively to his mother.
They were alone at the moment, and Lady Anne regarded him with twinkling eyes.
“Frankly, Nick, because I want Jean for my daughter-inlaw. No other reason in the world. Personally, as you know, I simply detest town during the season.”
He laughed and kissed her.
“What a Machiavelli in petticoats! I’d never have believed it of you, madonna. S’elp me, I wouldn’t!”
“Well, you may. And you’ve got to back me up, Nick. No philandering with Jean, mind! You’ll leave her severely alone and content yourself with the company of your aged parent.”
“Aged fiddlestick!” he jeered. “If it weren’t for that white hair of yours, I’d tote you round as my youngest sister. ‘And I don’t believe”—severely—“that itiswhite, really. I believe your maid powders it for you every morning, just because you were born in sin and know that it’s becoming.”
So it was settled that the first week of July should witness a general exodus from Staple, and meanwhile the June days slipped away, and Tormarin sedulously occupied himself in adding fresh stones to the wall which he thought fit to interpose between himself and the woman he loved. While Jean grew restless and afraid, and flung herself into every kind of amusement that offered, wearing a little fine under the combined mental and physical strain.
Claire, perceiving the nervous tension at which the girl was living, was wistfully troubled on her friend’s behalf, and confided her anxious bewilderment to Nick.
“I think Blaise must be crazy,” she declared one day. “I’m perfectly convinced that he’s in love with Jean, and yet he appears prepared to stand by while Geoffrey Burke completely monopolises her.”
Nick nodded.
“Yes. I own I can’t understand the fellow. He’ll wake up one day to find that she’s Burke’s wife.”
“Oh, I hope not!” cried Claire hastily.
They were pacing up and down one of the gravelled alleys that intersected the famous rhododendron shrubbery at Charnwood, and, as she spoke, Claire cast a half-frightened glance in the direction of the house. She knew that Sir Adrian was closeted with his lawyer, and that he was, therefore, not in the least likely to emerge from the obscurity of his study for some time to come. But as long as he was anywhere on the place, she was totally unable to rid herself of the hateful consciousness of his presence.
He reminded her of some horrible and loathsome species of spider, at times remote and motionless in the centre of his web—that web in which, body and soul, she had been inextricably caught—but always liable to wake into sudden activity, and then pounce mercilessly.
“Oh, I hope not!” she repeated, shivering a little. “If she only knew what marriage to the wrong man means!... And I’m certain Geoffrey is the wrong man. Why on earth does Blaise behave like this?”—impatiently. “Anyone might think—Jean herself might think—he didn’t care! And I’m positive he does.”
“If he does, he’s a fool. Good Lord!”—moodily kicking a pebble out of his path—“imagine any sane man, with a clear road before him,not taking it!!” He swung round towards her suddenly. “Claire, if there were only a clear road—for us! If only I could take you away from all this!” his glance embracing the grey old house, so beautiful and yet so much a prison, which just showed above the tops of the tall-growing rhododendrons.
“Oh, hush! Hush!”
Claire glanced round her affrightedly, as though the very leaves and blossoms had ears to hear and tongues to repeat.
“One never knows”—she whispered the words barely above her breath—“where he is. He might easily be hidden in one of the alleys that run parallel with this.”
“The skunk!” muttered Nick wrathfully.
“What’s that?”
Claire drew suddenly closer to him, her face blanching. A sound—the light crunching of gravel beneath a footstep—had come to her strained ears.
“Nick! Did you hear?” she breathed.
A look of keen anxiety overspread his face. For himself, he did not care; Adrian Latimer could not hurt him. But Claire—his “golden narcissus”—what might he not inflict on her as punishment if he discovered them together?
The next moment it was all he could do to repress a shout of relief. The steps had quickened, rounded the corner of the alley, and revealed—Jean.
“We’re mighty glad to see you,” remarked Nick, as she joined them. “We thought you were—the devil himself”—with a grin.
“Oh, he’s safe for half an hour yet,” Jean reassured them, “I asked Tucker”—the Latimer’s butler, who worshipped the ground Claire walked on—“and his solicitor is still with him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have risked looking for you”—smiling. “I knew Nick was over here, and Sir Adrian might have followed me.”
“You’re sure he hasn’t?” asked Claire nervously. “He is so cunning—so stealthy.”
“Even if he had, you’re doing nothing wrong,” maintained Jean stoutly.
“EverythingI do is wrong—in his eyes,” returned Claire bitterly. “That’s what makes the misery of it. If I were really wicked, really unfaithful, I should feel I deserved anything I got. But it’s enough if I’m just happy for a few minutes with a friend for him to want to punish me, to—to suspect me of any evil. Sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t bear it any longer!”
She flung out her arms in a piteous gesture of abandonment. There was something infinitely touching and forlorn about her as she stood there, as though appealing against the hideous injustice of it all, and, with a little cry Jean caught her outstretched hands and drew her into her embrace, folding her closely in her warm young arms.
Nick had turned aside abruptly, his face rather white, his mouth working. His powerlessness to help the woman he loved half maddened him.
Meanwhile Jean was crooning little, inarticulate, caressing sounds above Claire’s bowed head, until at last the latter raised a rather white face from her shoulder and smiled the small, plucky smile with which she usually managed to confront outrageous fortune.
“Thank you so much,” she said with a glint of humour in her tones. “You’ve been dears, both of you. It’s awfully nice to—to let go, sometimes. But I’m quite all right again, now.”
“Then, if you are,” replied Jean cheerfully, “perhaps you can bear up against the shock of too much joy. We want you to have ‘a day out.’”
“‘A day out’?” repeated Claire. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re organising a picnic to Dartmoor, and we want to fix it so that you can come too. Didn’t you tell me that Sir Adrian was going to be away one day this week? Going away, and not returning till the next day?”
Claire nodded, her eyes dancing with excitement.
“Yes—oh, yes! He has to go up to London on business.”
“Then that’s the day we’ll choose. Heaven send it be fine!”—piously.
“Oh, how I’d love it!” exclaimed Claire. “I haven’t been on the Moor for such a long time.”
“And I’ve never been there at all,” supplemented Jean.
“Nick! Nick!” Claire turned to him excitedly. “Did you know of this plan? And why didn’t you tell me about it before?”
He looked at her, a slow smile curving his lips.
“Why, I never thought of it,” he admitted. “You see”—explanatorily—“when I’m with you, I can’t think of anything else.”
“Nick, I won’t have you making barefaced love to a married woman under my very nose,” protested Jean equably. And the shadow of tragedy that had lowered above them a few minutes earlier broke into a spray of cheery fun and banter.
“You seem very gay to-day.”
The cold, sneering tones fell suddenly across the gay exchange of jokes and laughter that ensued, and the trio looked up to see the tall, lean, black-clad figure of Sir Adrian standing at the end of the path, awaiting their approach.
To Jean, as to Claire, occurred the analogy of a malevolent spider on the watch. Even the man’s physical appearance seemed in some way to convey an unpleasant suggestion of resemblance—his long, thin, sharply-jointed arms and legs, his putty-coloured face, a livid mask lit only by a pair of snapping, venomous black eyes, half hidden between pouched lids that were hardly more than hanging folds of wrinkled skin, his long-lipped, predatory mouth with its slow, malicious smile. Jean repressed a little shudder of disgust as she responded to his sneering comment:
“We are—quite gay, Sir Adrian. It’s a fine day, for one thing, and the sun’s shining, and we’re young. What more do we want?”
“What more, indeed? Except”—bowing mockingly—“the beauty with which a good Providence has already endowed you. You are a lucky woman, Miss Peterson; your cup is full. My wife is not, perhaps”—regarding her appraisingly—“quite so beneficently dowered by Providence, so it remains for me to fill her cup up to the brim.”
He paused, and as the black, pin-point eyes beneath the flabby lids detected the slight stiffening of Claire’s slender figure, his long, thin lips widened into a sardonic smile.
“Yes, to the brim,” he repeated with satisfaction. “That’s a husband’s duty, isn’t it, Mr. Brennan?”—addressing Nick with startling suddenness.
“You should know better than I, Sir Adrian,” retorted Nick, “seeing that you have experience of matrimony, while I have none.”
“But you have hopes—aspirations, isn’t it so?” pursued Latimer suavely. There was an undercurrent of disagreeable suggestion in his tones.
Nick was acutely conscious that his keenest aspiration at the moment was to knock the creature down and jump on him.
“We must find you a wife, eh, Claire? Eh, Miss Peterson?” continued Sir Adrian, rubbing the palm of one bony hand slowly up and down over the back of the other. “I’m sure, Claire, you would like to see so—intimate—a friend as Mr. Brennan happily married, wouldn’t you?”
“I should like to see him happy,” answered Claire with tight lips.
“Just so—just so,” agreed her husband in a queer cackling tone as though inwardly amused. “Well, get him a wife, my dear. You are such friends that you should know precisely the type of woman which appeals to him.”
He nodded and turned to go, gliding away with an odd shuffling gait, and muttering to himself as he went: “Precisely the type—precisely.”
As he disappeared from view down one of the branching paths of the shrubbery, an odious little laugh, half chuckle, half snigger, came to the ears of the three listeners.
Claire’s face set itself in lines that made her look years older than her age.
“You’d better go,” she whispered unevenly. “We shan’t be able to talk any more now that he knows you are here. He’ll be hovering round—somewhere.”
Jean nodded.
“Yes, we’d better be going. Come along, Nick. And let us know, Claire”—dropping her voice—“as soon as you have found out for certain what day he goes away. You can telephone down to us, can’t you?”
“Yes. I’ll ring up when he’s out of the house some time,” she answered “Or send a message. Anyway, I’ll manage to let you know somehow. Oh!”—stretching out her arms ecstatically—“imagine a day, of utter freedom! A whole day!”
GOLD of gorse and purple of heather, a shimmering haze of heat quivering above the undulating green of the moor, and somewhere, high up in the cloud-flecked blue above, the exultant, piercingly sweet carol of a lark.
“Oh! How utterly perfect this is!” sighed Jean.
She was lying at full length on the springy turf, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows denting little cosy hollows of darkness in the close mesh of green moss.
Tormarin, equally prone, was beside her, his eyes absorbing, not the open vista of rolling moor, hummocked with jagged tors of brown-grey stone, but the sun as it rioted through a glory of red-brown hair and touched changeful gleams of gold into topaz eyes.
There was a queer little throb in Jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. It plucked at the chords of memory, and Tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled Alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!”
“Do you remember——” he began involuntarily, then checked himself.
“’M—m?” she queried. The little interrogative murmur was tantalising in its soft note of intimacy.
The Jean of the last few days—the days immediately following their quarrel—had temporarily vanished. The beauty of the Moor had taken hold of her, and all the mockery and bitter-sweetness which she had latterly reserved for Tomarin’s benefit was absent from her manner. She was just her natural sweet and wholesome self.
“’M—m? Do I remember—what?”
“I was thinking what a pagan little beauty-lover you are! You worshipped the Alps. Now you are worshipping Dartmoor.”
She nodded.
“I don’t see why you should call it ‘pagan,’ though. I should say it was equally Christian. I think we weremeantto love beauty. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a lot of it about. God didn’t put it around just by accident.”
“Quite probably you’re right,” agreed Blaise. “In which case you must be”—he smiled—“an excellent Christian.”
“Positively I believe they’re talking theology!”
Claire’s voice, girlishly gay and free from the nervous restraint which normally dulled its cadence of youth, broke suddenly on their ears, as she and Nick, rounding the corner of a big granite boulder, discovered the two recumbent forms.
“You disgustingly lazy people!” she pursued indignantly. “Everybody’s dashing wildly to and fro unpacking the lunch baskets, while you two are just lounging here in blissful idleness!”
“It’s chronic with me,” murmured Tormarin lazily. “And anyway, Claire, neither you nor Nick appear to be precisely overtaxing yourselves bearing nectar and ambrosia.”
“I carried some of the drinks up this confounded hill,” submitted Nick. “And damned heavy they were, too! I can’tthink”—plaintively—“why people should be so thirsty at a picnic. I’m sure Baines has shoved in enough liquid refreshment to float a ship.”
“Praise be!” interpolated Blaise piously.
“Oh, we’ve done our share,” supplemented Claire. “And now we’re going to the gipsy who lives here to have our fortunes told.”
“Before lunch,” subjoined Nick, “so that in case they’re depressingly bad you can stay us with flagons afterwards.”
Jean sat up suddenly, her face alight with interest “Do you mean that there is a real gipsy who tells real fortunes?” she demanded.
“Yes—quite real. She’s supposed to be extraordinarily good,” replied Nick. “She is a lady of property, too, since she has acquired a few square yards of the Moor from the Duchy and built herself a little shanty there. She rejoices in the name of Keturah Stanley.”
“I should like to have my fortune told,” murmured Jean meditatively.
“I’ll take you,” volunteered Blaise.
There was a suddenly alert look in his face, as though he, too, would like to hear Jean’s fortune told.
“We’ll all go, then,” said Claire. “You must let Keturah tell yours as well, Blaise.”
He shook his head.
“Thanks, no,” he answered briefly. “I know my fortune quite as well as I have any wish to.”
Tormarin’s curt refusal somewhat quenched the gaiety of the moment, and rather soberly they all four made their way down the slope to where, in a little sheltered hollow at the foot of the tor, the sunlight glinted on the corrugated iron roofing of a tiny two-roomed hut, built of wood.
Outside, sitting on an inverted pail and composedly puffing away at a clay pipe, they discovered a small, shrivelled old woman, sunning herself, like a cat, in the midday warmth.
She lifted her head as they approached, revealing an immensely old, delicately-featured face, which might have been carved out of yellow ivory. It was a network of wrinkles, colourless save for the piercing black eyes that sparkled beneath arched black brows, while the fine-cut nostrils and beautifully moulded mouth spoke unmistakably of race—of the old untainted blood which in some gipsy families has run clear, unmixed and undiluted, through countless generations.
There was an odd dignity about the shrunken, still upright figure as she rose from her seat—the freedom of one whose neck has never bowed to the yoke of established custom, whose kingdom is the sun and sea and earth and air as God gave them to Adam—and when the visitors had explained their errand, and she proceeded to answer them in the soft, slurred accents of the Devon dialect, the illiterate speech seemed to convey a strange sense of unfitness.
Claire and Nick were the first to dare the oracle. The old woman beckoned to them to follow her into the cottage, while Tormarin and Jean waited outside, and when they emerged once more, both were laughing, their faces eager and half excited like the faces of children promised some indefinite treat.
“She’s given you luck, then?” asked Jean, smiling in sympathy.
The gipsy interposed quickly.
“Tezn’t for me to give nor take away the luck. But I knaw that, back o’ they gert black clouds the young lady’s so mortal feared of, the zun’s shinin’ butivul. I tell ’ee, me dear”—nodding encouragingly to Claire, while her keen old eyes narrowed to mere pin-points of light—“you’ll zee it, yourself—and afore another year’s crep’ by. ’Ess, fay! You’ll knaw then as I tolled ’ee trew.”
Then, with a gesture that summoned Jean to follow her, she disappeared once more into the interior of the hut.
Jean hesitated nervously in the doorway. For a moment she was conscious of an acute feeling of distaste for the impending interview—a dread of what this woman, whose eyes seemed the only live thing in her old, old face, might have to tell her.
“Come with me,” she appealed to Blaise. And he nodded and followed her across the threshold.
The scent of a peat fire came warm and fragrant to her nostrils as she stepped out of the sunlight into the comparative dusk of the little shanty, mingling curiously with an aroma of savoury stew which issued from a black pot hung above the fire, bubbling and chuckling as it simmered.
The gipsy, as though by force of habit, gave a stir to its contents and then, settling herself on a three-legged stool, she took Jean’s hand in her wrinkled, claw-like fingers and peered at its palm in silence.
“Your way baint so plain tu zee as t’other young lady’s,” she muttered at last, in an odd, sing-song tone. “There’s life an’ death an’ fire an’ flame afore yu zee the sun shinin’ clear.... And if so be yu take the wrong turnin’, you’ll niver zee it. And there’ll be no postes to guide ’ee. Tez your awn sawl must tell ’ee how to walk through the darkness. For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
She paused, and the liquid in the black pot over the fire seethed up suddenly and filled the silence with its chuckling and gurgling, so that to Jean it seemed like the sound of some hidden malevolence chortling defiance at her.
The old woman clutched her hand a little tighter, turning the palm so that the light from the tiny window fell more directly upon it.
“There’s a castle waitin’ for ’ee, me dear,” she resumed in the same sing-song voice as before. “I can zee it so plain as plain. But yu won’t never live there wi’ the one yu luve, though you’m hopin’ tu. I see ruin and devastation all around it, and the sky so red as blid above it.”
She released Jean’s hand slowly, and her curiously bright eyes fastened upon Tormarin.
“Shall I tell the gentleman’s hand?” she asked, stretching out her withered claw to take it.
But he drew it away hurriedly.
“No, no,” he said, attempting to speak lightly. “This lady’s fortune isn’t sufficiently encouraging for me to venture.”
The gipsy’s eyes never left his face. She nodded slowly.
“That’s as may be. For tez the zaim luck and zaim ill-lack will come to yu as comes to thikke maid. There’s no ring given or taken, but you’m bound together so fast and firm as weddin’-ring could bind ’ee.”
Jean felt her face flame scarlet in the dusk of the tiny room, and she turned and made her way hastily out into the sunshine once more, thankful for the eager queries of Nick and Claire, which served to bring back to normal the rather strained atmosphere induced by the gipsy’s final comment.
As they climbed the side of the tor once more, Jean relapsed into silence. More than once, more than twice, since she had come to England, she had been vaguely conscious of some hidden menace to her happiness, and now the gipsy had suddenly given words to’ her own indefinite premonition of evil.
“For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
It was a relief to join the rest of the picnic party, who were clamouring loudly for their lunch, good-humouredly indignant with the wanderers for keeping them waiting.
“Another five minutes,” announced Burke, “and we should have begun without you. Not even Lady Anne could have kept us under restraint a moment longer.”
The party was quite a large one, augmented by a good many friends from round about the neighbourhood, and amid the riotous fun and ridiculous mishaps which almost invariably accompany an alfresco meal, Jean contrived to throw off the feeling of oppression generated by Keturah’s prophecy.
Burke, having heaped her plate with lobster mayonnaise, established himself beside her, and proceeded to catechise her about her recent experience.
“Did the lady—what’s her name, Keturah?—tell you when you were going to marry me?” he demanded in an undertone, his dare-devil eyes laughing down at her impudently.
“No, she did not. She only foresees things that are really going to happen,” retorted Jean.
“Well, that is”—composedly. “She can’t be much good at her job if she missed seeing it.”
“Well,” Jean affected to consider—“the nearest she got to it was that she saw ‘darkness coming... black darkness.’”
Under cover of the general preoccupation in lunch and conversation, Burke’s hand closed suddenly over hers.
“You little devil!” he said, half amused, half sulky. “I’ll make you pay for that.”
But out here, in the wind-swept, open spaces of the Moor, Jean felt no fear of him.
“First catch your hare——” she retaliated defiantly.
He regarded her tensely for a moment.
“I’ll take your advice,” he said briefly. Then he added: “Did you know that I’m driving you back in my cart this afternoon?”
Various cars and traps and saddle horses had brought the party together at the appointed rendezvous—a little village on the outskirts of the Moor, and Jean had driven up with Blaise in one of the Staple cars. She looked at Burke now, in astonishment.
“You certainly are not,” she replied quickly. “I shall go back as I came—in the car.”
“Quite impossible. It’s broken down. They rashly brought on the lunch hampers in it, across that God-forsaken bit of moor road—with disastrous consequences to the car’s internals. So that you and Tormarin have got to be sorted into other conveyances. And I’ve undertaken to get you home.”
Jean’s face fell a little. Throughout the drive up to the Moor Blaise had seemed less remote and more like his old self than at any time since their quarrel, and she could guess that this arrangement of Burke’s was hardly likely to conduce towards the continuance of the new peace.
“How will Blaise get home?” she asked.
“They can squeeze him into her car, Judy says. It’ll be a tight fit, but he can cling on by his eyelashes somehow.”
“I think it would be a better arrangement if you drove Blaise and I went back in the car with your sister,” suggested Jean.
“There’s certainly not room for two extra in the car. There isn’t really room for one.”
“There wouldn’t be two. You would drive Blaise.”
“Pardon me. I should do nothing of the sort.”
“Do you mean”—incredulously—“that you would refuse?”
“Oh, I should invent an armour-plated reason. A broken spring in the dog-cart or something. But I do mean that if I don’t drive you, I drive no one.”
Jean looked at him vexedly.
“Well,” she said uncertainly, “we can’t have a fuss at a picnic.”
“No,” agreed Burke. “So I’m afraid you’ll have to give in.”
Jean rather thought so, too. There didn’t seem any way out of it. She knew that Burke was perfectly capable, under cover of some supposed mishap to his trap, of throwing the whole party into confusion and difficulty, rather than relinquish his intention.
“Oh, very well,” she yielded at last, resignedly. “Have your own way, you obstinate man.”
“I intend to,” he replied coolly. “Now—-and always.”
“IDON’T think I want any champagne,” said Claire smilingly, as Nick filled a glass and handed it to her. “Being utterly free like this produces much the same effect. I feel drunk, Nick—drunk with happiness. Oh, why can’t I be always free——”
She broke off abruptly in her speech, her face whitening, and stared past Nick with dilated eyes. Her lips remained parted, just as when she had ceased speaking, and the breath came between them unevenly.
Nick followed the direction of her glance. But he could see nothing to account for her suddenly stricken expression of dismay. A man in chauffeur’s livery, vaguely familiar to him, was approaching, and it was upon him that Claire’s eyes were fixed in a sick gaze of apprehension. It reminded Nick of the look of a wounded bird, incapable of flight, as it watches the approach of a hungry cat.
“What is it?” he asked quickly. “What’s the matter? For God’s sake don’t look like that, Claire!”
Slowly, with difficulty, she wrenched her eyes away from that sleek, conventional figure in the dark green livery.
“Don’t you see who it is?” she asked in a harsh, dry whisper.
Before Nick could answer, the man had made his way to Claire’s side and paused respectfully.
“Beg pardon, my lady,” he said, touching his hat, “Sir Adrian sent me to say that he’s waiting for you in the car just along the road there.” He pointed to where, on the white ribbon of road which crossed the Moor not far from the base of the tor, a stationary car was visible.
Claire, her face ashen, turned to Nick in mute appeal.
“Sir Adrian? I thought he left for London this morning?”
Nick shot the question fiercely at the chauffeur, but the man’s face remained respectfully blank.
“No, sir. Sir Adrian drove as far as Exeter and then returned. Afterwards we drove on here, sir, and they told us in the village we should find you at Shelston Tors.”
Meanwhile the other members of the party were becoming aware that some contretemps had occurred. Claire’s white, stricken face was evidence enough that something was amiss, and simultaneously Lady Anne and Jean hurried forward, filled with apprehension.
“What is it, Claire?” asked Lady Anne, suspecting bad news of some kind. “What has happened?” Recognising the Charnwood livery, she turned to the chauffeur and continued quickly: “Has Sir Adrian met with an accident?” She could conceive of no other cause for the man’s unexpected appearance.
“No, my lady. Sir Adrian is waiting in the car for her ladyship.”
“Waiting in the car?” repeated Jean and Lady Anne in chorus.
The little group of friends drew closer together.
“Don’t you see what it means?” broke out Claire in a low voice of intense anger. “It’s been all a trick—a trick! He never meant to go to London at all. He onlypretendedto me that he was going, so that I should think that I was free and he could trap me.” She looked at Nick and Jean significantly. “He must have overheard us—that day in the shrubbery at Charnwood—you remember?” They both nodded. “And then planned to humiliate me in front of half the county.”
“But you won’t go back with him?” exclaimed Nick hotly. He swung round and addressed the chauffeur stormily. “You can damn well tell your master that her ladyship will return this evening with the rest of the party.” The man’s face twitched. As far as it is possible for a well-drilled servant’s face to express the human emotion of compassion, his did so.
“It would be no good, sir,” he said in a low voice. “He means her ladyship to come. ‘Go and fetch her away, Langton,’ was his actual words to me. I didn’t want the job, sir, as you may guess.”
“Well, she’s not coming, that’s all,” declared Nick determinedly.
“Oh, I must, Nick—I must go,” cried Claire in distress. “I—Idaren’tstay.”
Lady Anne nodded.
“Yes, I think she must go, Nick dear,” she said persuasively. “It would he—-wiser.”
“But it’s damnable!” ejaculated Nick furiously. “It’s only done to insult her—to humiliate her!”
Claire smiled a little wistfully.
“I ought to be used to that by now,” she said a trifle shakily. “But Lady Anne is right—I must go.” She turned to the chauffeur, dismissing him with a little air of dignity that, in the circumstances, was not without its flavour of heroism. “You can go on ahead, Langton, and tell Sir Adrian that I am coming.”
The man touched his hat and moved off obediently.
“Nick and I will walk down to the car with you,” said Lady Anne. She was fully alive to the fact that her escort might contribute towards ameliorating the kind of reception Claire would obtain from her husband. “Jean dear, look after everybody for me for a few minutes, will you? And,” raising her voice a little, “explain that Claire has been called home suddenly, as Sir Adrian was not well enough to make the journey to town, after all.”
But Lady Anne’s well-meant endeavour to throw dust in the eyes of the rest of the party was of comparatively little use. Although to many of them Claire was personally an entire stranger—since Sir Adrian intervened whenever possible to prevent her from forming new friendships—the story of her unhappy married life was practically public property in the neighbourhood, and it was quite evident that to all intents and purposes the detestable husband had actually insisted on her returning with him, exactly as a naughty child might be swept off home by an irate parent in the middle of a jolly party.
It was impossible to stem the flood of gossip, and though most of it was kindly enough, and wholeheartedly sympathetic to Lady Latimer, Jean’s cheeks burned with indignation that Claire’s dignity should be thus outraged.
The remainder of the afternoon was spoilt for her, and Nick’s stormy face when he, together with Lady Anne, rejoined the rest of the party did not help to lighten her heart.
“I’m so sorry, Nick,” she whispered compassionately, when presently the opportunity of a few words alone with him occurred.
He glared at her.
“Are you?” he said shortly. “I’m not. I think I’m glad. This ends it. No woman can be expected to put up with public humiliation of that sort.”
“Nick!” There was a sharp note of fear in Jean’s voice. “Nick, what do you mean? What are you going to do?”
There was an ugly expression on the handsome boyish-looking face.
“You’ll know soon enough,” was all he vouchsafed. And swung away from her.
Jean felt troubled. She had never seen Nick before with that set, still look on his face—a kind of bitter concentration which reminded her forcibly of his brother—and she rather dreaded what it might portend.
Her thoughts were still preoccupied with the afternoon’s unpleasant episode, and with the possible consequences which might accrue, as she climbed into Burke’s high dog-cart.
She had had a fleeting notion of claiming Claire’s vacant seat for the homeward run, but had dismissed it since actually Claire’s absence merely served to provide comfortable room for Blaise in the Willow Ferry car, which had held its full complement of passengers on the outward journey. Moreover, she reflected that any change of plan, now that she had agreed to drive back with Burke, might only lead to trouble. He was not in a mood to brook being thwarted.
A big, raking chestnut, on wires to be off, danced between the shafts of the dog-cart, irritably pawing the ground and jerking her handsome, satin-skinned head up and down with a restless jingle of bit and curb-chain. She showed considerable more of the white of a wicked-looking eye than was altogether reassuring as she fought impatiently against the compulsion of the steady hand which gripped the reins and kept her, against her will, at a standstill.
The instant she felt Jean’s light foot on the step her excitement rose to fever heat. Surely thismustmean that at last a start was imminent and that that firm, masterful pressure on the bit would be released!
But Burke had leaned forward to tuck the light dust-rug round Jean’s knees, and regarding this further delay as beyond bearing the chestnut created a diversion by going straight up in the air and pirouetting gaily on her hind legs.
“Steady now!”
Burke’s calm tones fell rebukingly on the quivering, sensitive ears, and down came two shining hoofs in response, as the mare condescended to resume a more normal pose. The next moment she was off at a swinging trot, breaking every now and again, out of pure exuberance of spirits, into a canter, sternly repressed by those dominating hands whose quiet mastery seemed conveyed along the reins as an electric current is carried by a wire.
“You needn’t be afraid,” remarked Burke. “She’ll settle down in a few minutes. It’s only a ‘stable ahead’ feeling she’s suffering from. There’s not an ounce of vice in her composition.”
“I’m not afraid,” replied Jean composedly.
She did not tell him why. But within herself she knew that no woman would ever be afraid with Geoffrey Burke. Afraid of him, possibly, but never afraid that he would not be entire master of any situation wherein physical strength and courage were the paramount necessities.
She reflected a little grimly to herself that it was this very forcefulness which gave the man his unquestionable power of attraction. There is always a certain fascination in sheer, ruthless strength—a savour of magnificence about it, something tentatively heroic, which appeals irresistibly to that primitive instinct somewhere hidden in the temperamental make-up of even the most ultra-twentieth-century feminine product.
And Jean was quite aware that she herself was not altogether proof against the attraction of Burke’s dynamic virility.
There was another kind of strength which appealed to her far more. She knew this, too. The still, quiet force that was Tormarin’s—deep, and unfathomable, and silent, of the spirit as well as of the body. Contrasted with the savage power she recognised in Burke, it was like the fine, tempered steel of a rapier compared with a heavy bludgeon.
“A penny for your thoughts!”
Jean came out of her reverie with a start. She smiled.
“Don’t get conceited. I was thinking about you.”
“Nice thoughts, I hope, then?” suggested Burke. “It’s better”—audaciously—“to think well of your future husband.”
The old gipsy’s words flashed into Jean’s mind: “You’m bound together so fast and firm as weddin-ring could bind’ee,” and her face flamed scarlet.
It was true—at least as far as she was concerned—that no wedding-ring could bind her more firmly to Blaise than her own heart had already bound her.
The instinct to flirt with Burke was in abeyance. It was an instinct only born of heartache and unhappiness, and now that Blaise’s mood was so much less cool and distant than, it had been, the temptation to play with unexploded bombs had correspondingly lost much of its charm.
“Don’t be tiresome, Geoffrey,” she said vexedly. “If only you would make up your mind to be—just pals, I should think much better of you.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to think worse,” he retorted.
Just at that moment they encountered a flock of sheep, ambling leisurely along towards them and blocking up the narrow roadway, and Jean was spared the necessity of replying by the fact that Burke immediately found his hands full, manoeuvring a path for the mare between the broad, curly backs of the bleating multitude.
The drover of the flock was, of course, a hundred yards or more behind his charges, negligently occupied in relighting his pipe, so that no assistance was to be looked for in that direction, and as the sheep bumped against the mare’s legs and crowded up against the wheels of the trap in their characteristically maddening fashion, it required all Burke’s skill and dexterity to make a way through the four-footed crowd.
The chestnut’s own idea of dealing with the difficulty was to charge full speed ahead, an idea which by no means facilitated matters, and she fought her bit and fairly danced with fury as Burke checked her at almost every yard.
They had nearly reached the open road again, and Jean, looking down on the sea of woolly backs, with the hovering cloud of hoof-driven dust above them, thought she could fully appreciate the probable feelings of the Israelites as they approached the further shore of the Red Sea. And it was just at this inauspicious moment that the drover, having lit his pipe to his satisfaction, looked up and grasped the situation.
Guilty conscience not only makes cowards, but is also prolific in the creation of fools, and the drover, stung into belated action by the consciousness of previous remissness, promptly did the most foolish thing he could.
He let off a yell that tore its way through every quivering nerve in the mare’s body, and with a shout of, “Round ’em, lad!” sent his dog—a half-trained youngster—barking like a creature possessed, full tilt in pursuit of the sheep.
That settled it as far as the chestnut was concerned. With a bound she leapt forward, scattering the two or three remaining sheep that still blocked her path, and the next moment the light, high cart was rocking like a cockle-shell in a choppy sea, as she tore along, utterly out of hand.
Luckily, for a couple of miles the road ran straight as a dart, and after the first gasp of alarm Jean found herself curiously collected and able to calculate chances. At the end of the two miles, she know, there came a steep declivity—a typical Devonshire hill, like the side of a house, which the British workman had repaired in his usual crude and inefficient manner, so that loose stones and inequalities of surface added to the dangers of negotiation. At the foot of this descent was a sharp double turn—a veritable death-trap. Could Burke possibly got the mare in hand before they reached the brow of the hill? Jean doubted it.
There was no sound now in all the world except the battering of the mare’s hoofs upon the road and the screaming rush of the wind in their ears. The hedges flew past, a green, distorted blur. The strip of road fled away beneath them as though coiled up by some swift revolving cylinder; ahead, it ended sheer against a sky blue as a periwinkle, and into that blue they were rushing at thirty miles an hour. When they reached it, it would be the end. Jean could almost hear the crash that must follow, sense the sickening feeling of being flung headlong, hurled into space.... hurtling down into black nothingness.,..
Her glance sought Burke’s face. His jaw was out-thrust, and she could guess at the clenched teeth behind the lips that shut like a rat-trap. His eyes gleamed beneath the penthouse brows, drawn together so that they almost met above his fighting beak of a nose.
In an oddly detached manner she found herself reflecting on the dogged brute strength of his set face. If anyone could check that flying, foam-flecked form, rocketing along between the shafts like a red-brown streak, he could.
She wondered how long he would be able to hold the beast—to hang on? She remembered having heard that, after a time, the strain of pulling against a runaway becomes too much for human nerves and muscles, and that a man’s hands grow numb—and helpless! While the dead pull on the bit equally numbs the mouth of the horse, so that he, too, has no more any feeling to be played upon by the pressure of the hit.
Her eyes dropped to Burke’s hands. With a little inward start of astonishment she realised that he was not attempting to pull against the chestnut. He was just holding... holding... steadying her, ever so little, in her mad gallop. Jean felt the mare swerve, then swing level again, still answering faintly to the reins.
Burke’s hands were very still. She wondered vaguely why—now—he didn’t pit his strength against that of the runaway. They must have covered a mile or more. A bare half-mile was all that still lay between them and disaster.
And then, as she watched Burke’s hands, she saw them move, first one and then the other, sawing the bit against the tender corners of the mare’s mouth. Jean was conscious of a faint difference in the mad pace of her. Not enough to be accounted a check—but stillsomething, some appreciable slackening of the whirlwind rush towards that blue blur of sky ahead.
It seemed as though Burke, too, sensed that infinitesimal yielding to the saw of the bit. For the first time, he gave a definite pull at the reins. Then he relaxed the pressure, and again there followed the same sawing motion and the fret of the steel bar against sensitive, velvet lips. Then another pull—the man’s sheer strength against the mare’s.... Jean watched, fascinated.
And gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the frenzied beat of the iron-shod hoofs became more measured as the chestnut shortened her stride. It was no longer merely the thrashing, thunderous devil’s tattoo of sheer, panic-driven speed.
Now and again Jean could hear Burke’s voice, speaking to the frightened beast, chiding and reassuring in even, unhurried tones.
She was conscious of no fear, only of an absorbing interest and excitement as to whether Burke would be able to impose his will upon the animal before they reached that precipitous hill the descent of which must infallibly spell ‘destruction’.
She sat very still, her hands locked together, watching... watching....