LADY ANNE sat gazing absently into the heart of the fire, watching the restless leap of the flames and the little scattered handfuls of sparks, like golden star dust, tossed upward into the dark hollow of the chimney by the blazing logs. The “warm and sunny south”—at least, that part of it within a twelve-mile radius of Dartmoor—is quite capable, on occasion, of belying its guide-book designation, particularly towards the latter end of summer, and there was a raw dampness in the atmosphere this evening which made welcome company of a fire.
It seemed a little lonely without Jean’s cheery presence, and Lady Anne, conscious of a craving for human companionship, glanced impatiently at the clock. Blaise should surely have returned by now from his all-day conference with the estate agent.
She had not much longer to wait. The quick hoof-beats of a trotting horse sounded on the drive outside, and a few minutes later the door of the room was thrown open and Blaise himself strode in.
“Well, madonna?” He stooped and kissed her. “Been a lonely lady to-day without all your children?”
She smiled up at him.
“Just a little,” she acknowledged. “When I came back from those stupid committees, which are merely an occasion for half the old tabbies in the village to indulge in a squabble with the other half, I couldn’t help feeling it would have been nice to find Jean here to laugh over them with me. Jean’s sense of humour is refreshing; it never lets one down. However, I suppose she’s enjoying her beloved Moor by moonlight, so I mustn’t grumble.”
Blaise shook his head.
“Much moonlight they’ll see!” he observed. “I rode through a thick mist coming back from Hedge Barton. It’ll he a blanket fog on Dartmoor to-night.”
“Oh, poor Jean! She’ll he so disappointed.”
Tormarin sat down on the opposite side of the hearth and lit a cigarette. The dancing firelight flickered across his face. He was thinner of late, his mother thought with a quick pang. The lines of the well-beloved face had deepened; it had a worn—almost ascetic—look, like that of a man who is constantly contending against something.
Lady Anne looked across at him almost beseechingly.
“Son,” she said, “have you quite made up your mind to let happiness pass you by?”
He started, roused out of the reverie into which he had fallen.
“I don’t think I’ve got any say in the matter,” he replied quietly. “I’ve forfeited my rights in that respect. You know that.”
“And Jean? Are you going to make her forfeit her rights, too?”
“She’ll find happiness—somehow—elsewhere. It would be a very short-lived affair with me”—bitterly. “After what has happened, it’s evident I’m not to be trusted with a woman’s happiness.”
There were sounds of arrival in the hall. Nick’s voice could be heard issuing instructions about the bestowal of his fishing tackle. Lady Anne spoke quickly.
“I don’t think so, Blaise. Not with the happiness of the woman you love.” She laid her hand on his shoulder as she passed him on her way into the hall to welcome the wanderer returned. “Tell Jean,” she advised, “and see what she says. I think you’ll find she’d be willing to risk it.”
When she had left the room Blaise remained staring impassively into the fire. His expression gave no indication as to whether or not Lady Anne’s advice had stirred him to any fresh impulse of decision, and when, presently, his mother and Nick entered the room together, he addressed the latter as casually as though no emotional depths had been stirred by the recent conversation.
“Hullo, Nick! Had good sport?”
“Only so-so. We had a jolly time, though—out at Het-worthy Bridge. But I had the deuce of a business getting back from Exeter this evening. It was so misty in places we could hardly see to drive the car.”
Blaise nodded.
“Yes, I know. I found the same. It’s a surprising change in the weather.”
“Poor Jean will have had a disappointing trip to Dartmoor,” put in Lady Anne. “The mist is certain to be bad up there.”
“Dartmoor? But she didn’t go—surely?” And Nick glanced from one to the other questioningly.
“Oh, yes, she did. It was quite clear in the afternoon when she started—looked like being a lovely night.”
“But—but——”
Nick stammered and came to a halt. There was a look of bewilderment in his eyes.
“But who’s she gone with?” he demanded at last. “I thought she said she intended stopping the night with Judith and Burke at their bungalow?”
“So she did,” replied Blaise. “Why? Have you any objection?”—smiling.
“No. Only”—Nick frowned—“I don’t quite understand it Judith isn’tonthe Moor.”
“Not on the Moor?” broke simultaneously from Lady Anne and Blaise.
“How do you know, Nick?” added the latter gravely.
“Why, because”—Nick’s face wore an expression of puzzled concern—“because I saw Judith in Newton Abbot late this evening.”
Blaise leaned forward, a sudden look of concentration on his face.
“You saw Judith?” he repeated. “What time?”
“It must have been nearly eight o’clock. I was buzzing along in Jim Cresswell’s car to catch the seven forty-five up train, and I saw Judith with one of the Holfords—you know, those people from London—turning into the gateway of a house. I expect it was the place the Holfords are stopping at. They didn’t see me.”
“You’re quite certain? You’ve made no mistake?” said Blaise sharply.
“Of course I’ve made no mistake. Think I don’t know Judy when I see her? But what’s the meaning of it, Blaise?”
Tormarin rose to his feet, tossing the stump of his cigarette into the fire.
“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “But I’m going to find out. Madonna”—turning to his mother—“did Jean tell you just exactly what Judith said when she rang her up on the’phone about this moonlight plan?”
“It wasn’t Judith who rang up,” replied Lady Anne, a faint misgiving showing itself in her face. “It was Geoffrey who gave the message.”
Tormarin looked at her with a sudden awakened expression in his eyes. There was dread in them, too—keen dread. The expression of a man who, all at once, sees the thing he values more than anything in the whole world being torn from him—dragged forcibly away from the shelter he could give into some unspeakable darkness of disaster.
“That settles it.” He pressed his finger against the bell-push and held it there, and when Baines came hurrying in response to the imperative summons, he said curtly: “Order me a fresh horse round at once—at once, mind—tell Harding to saddle Orion, and to look sharp about it.”
“Blaise”—Lady Anne’s obvious uneasiness had deepened to a sharp anxiety—“Blaise, what are you going to do? What—what are you afraid of?”
He looked her straight in the eyes.
“I’m afraid of just what you are afraid of, madonna—of the devil let loose in Geoffrey Burke.”
“And—and you’re going to look for her—for Jean?”
“I’m going to find her,” he corrected quietly.
Gravity had set its seal on all three faces. Each was conscious of the same fear—the fear they could not put into words.
“But why do you take Orion?” asked Nick. “The little thoroughbred mare—Redwing—would do the journey quicker and he lighter of foot over any marshy ground on the Moor.”
“Orion can go where he chooses,” returned Tormarin. “And he’ll choose to-night. Redwing is a little bit of a thing, though she’s game as a pebble. But she couldn’t carry—two.”
The significance of Tormarin’s choice of his big roan hunter, three-parts thoroughbred and standing sixteen hands, came home to Nick. He nodded without comment.
Silently he and Lady Anne accompanied Blaise into the hall. From the gravelled drive outside came the impatient stamping of Orion’s iron-shod hoofs. Just at the last Lady Anne clung to her son’s arm.
“You’ll bring her back, Blaise?” she urged, a quiver in her voice.
“I’ll bring her back, madonna,” he answered quietly. “Don’t worry.”
A minute later he and the great roan horse were lost to sight in the mirk of the night. Only the beat of galloping hoofs was flung back to the two who were left to watch and wait, muffled and vague through the shrouding mist like the sound of a distant drum.
ORION had fully justified Blaise’s opinion of his capabilities. As though the great horse had gathered that there was trouble abroad to which he must not add, he had needed neither whip nor spur as he carried his master with long, sweeping strides over the miles that lay betwixt Staple and the Moor. He was as fresh as paint, and the rush through the cool night, under a rider with hands as light as a woman’s and who sat him with a flexible ease, akin to that of a Cossack, had not distressed him in the very least.
Now they were climbing the last long slope of the white road that approached the bungalow, the reins lying loosely on Orion’s neck.
The mist had lifted a little in places, and a watery-looking moon peered through the clouds now and again, throwing a vague, uncertain light over the blurred and sombre moorland.
Tormarin had no very definite plan of campaign in his mind. He felt convinced that he should find Jean at the bungalow. If, contrary to his expectation, she were not there, nor anyone else to whom he could apply for information as to her whereabouts, he would have to consider what his next move must be.
Meanwhile, his thoughts were preoccupied with the main fact that she had failed to return home. If she had accepted Burke’s invitation to the bungalow, believing that Judith and the Holfords would be of the party, how was it that she had not at once returned when she discovered that for some reason they were not there?
Some weeks ago—during the period when she was defiantly investigating the possibilities of an “unexploded bomb”—it was quite possible that the queer recklessness which sometimes tempts a woman to experiment in order to see just how far she may go—the mysterious delight that the feminine temperament appears to derive from dancing on the edge of a precipice—might have induced her to remain and have tea with Burke, chaperon or no chaperon. And then it was quite on the cards that Burke’s lawless disregard of anything in the world except the fulfilment of his own desires might have engineered the rest, and he might have detained her at the bungalow against her will.
But Blaise could not believe that atête-à-têtetea with Burke would hold any attraction for Jean now—not since that day, just before the visit to London, when he and she had been discussing the affairs of Nick and Claire and had found, quite suddenly, that their own hearts were open to each other and that with the spoken word, “Beloved,” the misunderstandings of the past had faded away, to be replaced by a wordless trust and belief.
But if ithadattracted her, if—knowing precisely how much the man she loved would condemn—she had still deliberately chosen to spend an afternoon with Burke, why, then, Blaise realised with a swift pang that she was no longer his Jean at all but some other, lesser woman. Never again the “little comrade” whose crystalline honesty of soul and sensitive response to all that was sweet and wholesome and true had come into his scarred life to jewel its arid places with a new blossoming of the rose of love.
He tried to thrust the thought away from him. It was just the kind of thing that Nesta would have done, playing off one man against the other with the innate instinct of the born coquette. But not Jean—not Jean of the candid eyes.
Presently, through the thinning mist, Tormarin discerned the sharp turn of the track which branched off from the road towards the bungalow, and quickening Orion’s pace, he was soon riding up the steep ascent, the moonlight throwing strange, confusing lights and shadows on the mist-wet surface of the ground.
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the roan snorted and wheeled around, shying violently away from the off-side bank. A less good horseman might have been unseated, but as the big horse swerved Tormarin’s knees gripped against the saddle like a vice, and with a steadying word he faced him up the track again, then glanced keenly at the overhanging side of the roadway to discover what had frightened him.
A moment later he had jerked Orion to a sudden standstill, leapt to the ground and, with the reins over his arm, crossed the road swiftly to where, clad in some light-stuff that glimmered strangely in the moonlight, lay a slender figure, propped against the bank.
“Blaise!” Jean’s voice came weakly to his ears, but with a glad note in it of immense relief that bore witness to some previous strain.
In an instant Tormarin was kneeling beside her, one arm behind her shoulders. He helped her to her feet and she leaned against him, shivering. Feeling in his pockets, he produced a brandy flask and held it to her lips.
“Drink some of that!” he said. “Don’t try to tell me anything yet.”
The raw spirit sent the chilled blood racing through her veins, putting new life into her. A faint tinge of colour crept into her face.
“Oh, Blaise! I’m so glad you’ve come—so glad!” she said shakily.
“So am I,” he returned grimly. “See, drink a little more brandy. Then you shall tell me all about it.”
At last, bit by bit, she managed to give him a somewhat disjointed account of what had occurred.
“I think I must have been stunned for a little when I fell,” she said. “I can’t remember anything after stepping right off into space, it seemed, till—oh, ages afterwards—- I found myself lying here. And when I tried to stand, I found I’d hurt my ankle and that I couldn’t put my foot to the ground. So”—with a weak little attempt at laughter—“I—I just sat down again.”
Blaise gave vent to a quick exclamation of concern. “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she reassured him hastily. “Only a strain. But I can’t walk on it.” Then, suddenly clinging to him with a nervous dread: “Oh, take me away, Blaise—take me home!”
“I will. Don’t be frightened—there’s no need to be frightened any more, my Jean.”
“No, I know. I’m not afraid—now.”
But he could hear the sob of utter nerve stress and exhaustion back of the brave words.
“Well, I’ll take you home at once,” he said cheerfully. “But, look here, you’ve no coat on and you’re wet with mist.”
“I know. My coat’s at the bungalow. I left in a hurry, you see”—whimsically. The irrepressible Peterson element, game to the core, was reasserting itself.
“Well, we must fetch it———”
“No! No!” Her voice rose in hasty protest. “I won’t—I can’t go back!”
“Then I’ll go.”
“No—don’t! Geoffrey might be there——”
“So much the better”—grimly. “I’d like five minutes with him.” Tormarin’s hand tightened fiercely on the hunting-crop he carried. “But he’s more likely lost his way in the mist and fetched up far enough away. Probably”—with a short laugh—“he’s still searching Dartmoor for! you. You’d be on his mind a bit, you know! Wait here a minute while I ride up to the bungalow——”
But she clung to his arm.
“No, no! Don’t go! I—I can’t be left alone—again.” The fear was coming back to her voice and Blaise, detecting it, abandoned the idea at once.
“All right, little Jean,” he said reassuringly. “I won’t leave you. Put my coat round you”—stripping it off. “There—like that.” He helped her into it and fastened it with deft fingers. “And now I’m going to get you up on to Orion and we’ll go home.”
“I shall never get up there,” she observed, with a glance at the roan’s great shoulders looming through the mist. “I shan’t be able to spring—I can only stand on one foot, remember.”
Blaise laughed cheerily.
“Don’t worry. Just remain quite still—standing on your one foot, you poor little lame duck!—and I’ll do the rest.”
She felt his arm release its clasp of her, and a moment later he had swung his leg across the horse and was back in the saddle again. With a word to the big beast he dropped the reins on to his neck and, turning towards Jean, where she stood like a slim, pale ghost in the moonlight, he leaned down to her from the saddle.
“Can you manage to come a step nearer?” he asked.
She hobbled forward painfully.
“Now!” he said.
Lower, lower still he stooped, his arms outheld, and at last she felt them close round her, lifting her with that same strength of steel which she remembered on the mountain-side at Montavan. Orion stood like a statue—motionless as if he knew and understood all about it, his head slewed round a bit as though watching until the little business should be satisfactorily accomplished, and blowing gently through his velvety nostrils meanwhile.
And then Jean found herself resting against the curve of Blaise’s arm, with the roan’s powerful shoulders, firm and solid as a rock, beneath her.
“All right?” queried Blaise, gathering up the reins in his left hand. “Lean well back against my shoulder. There, how’s that?”
“It’s like an arm-chair.”
He laughed.
“I am afraid you won’t say the same by the end of the journey,” he commented ruefully.
But by the end of the journey Jean was fast asleep. She had “leant well back” as directed, conscious, as she felt the firm clasp of Blaise’s arm, of a supreme sense of security and well-being. The reaction from the strain of the afternoon, the exhaustion consequent upon her flight through the mist and the fall which had so suddenly ended it, and the rhythmic beat of Orion’s hoofs all combined to lull her into a state of delicious drowsiness. It was so good to feel that she need fight and scheme and plan no longer, to feel utterly safe... to know that Blaise was holding her...
Her head fell back against his shoulder, her eyes closed, and the next thing of which she was conscious was of being lifted down by a pair of strong arms and of a confused murmur of voices from amongst which she hazily distinguished Lady Anne’s heartfelt: “Thank God you’ve found her!” And then, characteristically practical, “I’ll have her in bed in five minutes. Blankets and hot-water bottles are all in readiness.”
It was the evening of the following day. Jean, tucked up on a couch and with her strained ankle comfortably bandaged, had been reluctantly furnishing Blaise with the particulars of her experience at the bungalow. She had been very unwilling to confide the whole story to him, fearing the consequences of the Tormarin temper as applied to Burke. A violent quarrel between the two men could do no good, she reflected, and would only be fraught with unpleasant results to all concerned—probably, in the end, securing a painful publicity for the whole affair.
Fortunately Blaise had been out when Judith had rung up earlier in the day to inquire if Jean had returned to Staple, or he might have fired off a few candid expressions of opinion through the telephone. But now there was no evading his searching questions, and he had quietly but determinedly insisted upon hearing the entire story. Once or twice an ejaculation of intense anger broke from him as he listened, but, beyond that, he made little comment.
“And—and that was all,” wound up Jean. “And, anyway, Blaise”—a little anxiously—“it’s over now, and I’m none the worse except for the acquisition of a little more worldly wisdom and a strained ankle.”
“Yes, it’s over now,” he said, standing looking down at her with a curious gleam in his eyes. “But that sort of thing shan’t happen twice. You’ll have to marry me—do you hear?”—imperiously. “You shall never run such a risk again. We’ll get married at once!”
And Jean, with a quiver of amusement at the corners of her mouth, responded meekly:
“Yes, Blaise.”
The next minute his arms were round her and their lips met in the first supreme kiss of love at last acknowledged—of love given and returned.
There is no gauge by which those first moments when two who love confess that they are lovers may be measured. It is the golden, timeless span when “unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday” cease to hem us round about and only love, and love’s ecstasy, remain.
To Blaise and Jean it might have been an hour—a commonplace period ticked off by the little silver clock upon the chimneypiece—or half eternity before they came back to the recollection of things mundane. When they did, it was across the kindly bridge of humour.
Blaise laughed out suddenly and boyishly.
“It’s preposterous!” he exclaimed. “I quite forgot to propose.”
“So you did! Suppose”—smiling up at him impertinently—“suppose you do it now?”
“Not I! I won’t waste my breath when I might put it to so much better use in calling you belovedest.”
Jean was silent, but her eyes answered him. She had made room for him beside her, and now he was seated upon the edge of the Chesterfield, holding her in his arms. She did not want to talk much. That still, serene happiness which lies deep within the heart is not provocative of garrulity.
At last a question—the question that had tormented her through all the long months since she had first realised whither love was leading her, found its way to her lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me before, Blaise?”
His face clouded.
“Because of all that had happened in the past. You know—you have been told about Nesta——”
“Ah, yes! Don’t talk about it, Blaise,” she broke in hastily, sensing his distasteful recoil from the topic.
“I think we must a little, dear,” he responded gravely.
“You see, Nesta was not all to blame—nor even very much, as I’m sure”—with a little half-tender smile—“my mother tried hard to make you believe.”
Jean nodded vigorously.
“She did. And I expect she was perfectly right”
He shook his head.
“No,” he answered. “The fault was really mine. My initial mistake was in confusing the false fire with the true. It—was not love I had for Nesta. And I found it out when it was too late. We were poles apart in everything, and instead of trying to make it easier for her, trying to understand her and to lead her into our ways of looking at things. I only stormed at her. It roused all that was worst in me to see her trailing our name in the dust, throwing her dignity to the winds, craving for nothing other than amusement and excitement. I’m not trying to excuse myself. Therewasno excuse for me. In my way, I was as culpable and foolish as she. And when the crash came—when I found her deliberately entertaining in my house, against my express orders, a man who ought to have been kicked out of any decent society, why, I let go. The Tormarin temper had its way with me. I shall never forgive myself for that. I frightened her, terrified her. I think I must have been half mad. And then—well, you know what followed. She rushed away and, before anyone could find her or help her, she had killed herself—thrown herself into the Seine. Quite what happened between leaving here and her death we were never able to find out. Apparently since her marriage with me, her sister had gone to Paris, unknown to her, and had taken a situation asdame de compagnieto some Frenchwoman, and Nesta, though she followed from Italy to Paris, failed to find her there. At least that is what Margherita Valdi told me in the letter announcing Nesta’s death. Then she must have lost heart. So you see, morally I am responsible for that poor, reckless child’s death.”
“Oh, no, no, Blaise! I don’t see that”—pitifully.
“Don’t you? I do—very clearly. And that was why, when I found myself growing to care for you, I tried to keep away.”
He felt in his pocket and produced a plain gold wedding ring. On the inside were engraved the initials “B.T. and N.E.,” and a date.
“That was my talisman. Alargherita sent it back to me when she wrote telling me of Nesta’s death. Whenever I felt my resolution weakening, I used to take it out and have a look at it. It was always quite effective in thrusting me back into my proper place in the scheme of things—that is, outside any other woman’s life.” There was an inexpressible bitterness in his tones, and Jean drew a little nearer to him, her heart overflowing with compassion. He looked down at her, and smiled a thought ironically. “But now—you’ve beaten me.” His lips brushed her hair. “I’m glad to be beaten, belovedest... I knew, that day at Montavan, what you might come to mean to me. And I intended never to see you again, but just to take that one day for remembrance. I felt that, having made such an utter hash of things, having spoiled one woman’s life and been, indirectly, the cause of her death, I was not fit to hold another woman’s happiness in my hands.”
Jean rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.
“I’m glad you thought better of it? she observed.
“I don’t know, even now, that I’m right in letting you love me——”
“You can’t stop me,” she objected.
He smiled.
“I don’t think I would if I could—now.”
Jean leaned up and, with a slender, dictatorial finger on the side of his face, turned his head towards her.
“Quitesure?” she demanded saucily. Then, without waiting for his answer: “Blaise, I do love your chin—it’s such a nice, square, your-money-or-your-life sort of chin.”
Something light as a butterfly, warm as a woman’s lips, just brushed the feature in question.
He drew her into his arms, folding them closely about her.
“And I—I love every bit of you,” he said hoarsely. “Body and soul, I love you! Oh! Heart’s beloved! Nothing—no one in the whole world shall come between us two ever again!”
AUGUST seemed determined to justify her claim to be numbered amongst the summer months before making her exit. Apparently she had repented her of having recently veiled the country in a mist that might have been regarded as a very creditable effort even on the part of November, for to-day the sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky and scarcely a breath of wind swayed the nodding cornstalks, heavy with golden grain.
Jean, her strained ankle now practically recovered, was tramping along the narrow footpath through the cornfield, following in Blaise’s footsteps, while Nick brought up the rear of the procession. She had not seen Claire since her engagement had become an actual fact, though a characteristically warm-hearted little note from the latter had found its way to Staple, and this morning Jean had declared her inability to exist another day “without a ‘heart-to-heart’ talk with Claire.”
Hence the afternoon’s pilgrimage across the cornfield which formed part of a short cut between Staple and Charnwood.
At first Jean had feared lest her new-found happiness might raise a barrier of sorts betwixt herself and Claire. The contrast between the respective hands that fate had dealt them was so glaring, and the rose and gold with which love had suddenly decked Jean’s own life seemed to make the bleak tragedy which enveloped Claire’s appear ever darker than before.
But Claire’s letter, full of a quiet, unselfish rejoicing in the happiness which had fallen to the lot of her friend, had somehow smoothed away the little uncomfortable feeling which, to anyone as sensitive as Jean, had been a very real embarrassment. Nick’s felicitations, too, had been tendered with frank cordiality and affection, and with a delicate perception that had successfully concealed the sting of individual pain which the contrast could hardly fail to have induced.
So that it was with a considerably lightened heart that Jean, with her escort of two, passed between the great gates of Charnwood and, avoiding the lengthy walk entailed by following the windings of the drive, struck off across the velvety lawns—smooth stretches of close-cropped sward which, broken only by branching trees and shrubbery, and undefaced by the dreadful formality of symmetrical flower-beds, swept right up to the gravelled terrace fronting the windows of the house itself.
The two men loitered to discuss the points of a couple of young spaniels rollicking together on the grass, but Jean, eager to see Claire, smilingly declined to wait for them, and, speeding on ahead, she mounted the short flight of steps leading to the terrace from the lower level of the lawns.
Facing her, as she reached the topmost step was a glass door, giving entrance to Claire’s own particular sanctum, which usually, in summer, stood wide open to admit the soft, warm air and the fragrant scents breathed out from a border of old-fashioned flowers, sweet and prim and quaint, which encircled the base of the house.
But to-day the door was shut and forbidding-looking, and Jean experienced a sudden sense of misgiving. Supposing Claire chanced to be out just when she had arrived brimming over with the hundred little feminine confidences that were to have formed part of the “heart-to-heart” talk! It would be too aggravating!
Her eager glance flew ahead, searching the room’s interior, clearly visible through the wide glass panel of the door. Then, with a startled cry, she halted, her hand clapped against her lips to stifle the involuntary exclamation of dismay and terror that had leapt to them.
The afternoon sunshine slanted in upon a picture of grotesque horror—-a nightmare conception that could only have sprung from the macabre imagination of a madman.
In the middle of the room Claire sat bound to a high-backed chair, secured by cords which cut cruelly across her slender body. Her face had assumed a curious ashen shade, and her eyes were fixed in a numbed look of fascinated terror upon the tall, angular figure of her husband, which pranced in front of her jerkily, like a marionette, while he threatened her with a revolver, his thin lips, smiling cruelly, drawn back from his teeth like those of a snarling animal.
He was addressing her in queer, high-pitched tones that had something inhuman about them—the echoing, empty sound of a voice no longer controlled by a reasoning brain.
“And you needn’t worry that Mr. Brennan will be overwhelmed with grief at your early demise. He won’t—te-he-he!”—he gave a foolish, cackling laugh—“he won’t have time to miss you much! I’ll attend to that—I’ll attend to that! There’ll be a second bullet for your dear friend, Mr. Brennan.” ... Crack! The sharp report of a revolver shattered the summer silence as Jean sprang forward and wrenched at the handle of the door. But it refused to yield. It had been locked upon the inside!
Then, as the smoke cleared away, she saw that Claire was Unhurt. Sir Adrian had deliberately fired above her head and was now rocking his long, lean body to and fro in a paroxysm of horrible, noiseless mirth. Evidently he purposed to amuse himself by inflicting the torture of suspense upon his victim before he actually murdered her, for Latimer had been at one time an expert revolver shot, and, even drug-ridden as he had since become, he could not well have missed his helpless target by accident.
Claire’s head had fallen back, but no merciful oblivion of unconsciousness had come to her relief. Her mouth was a little open and the breath came in short, quick gasps between her grey lips. Her face looked like a mask, set in a blank stupor of horror.
The sound of the shot brought Blaise and Nick racing to Jean’s side. One glance through the glass door sufficed them.
“God in heaven! He’s gone mad!” Nick’s voice was quick with fear for the woman he loved.
“Get Tucker here at once!”
Blaise’s swift command, flung at her as he and Nick leaped forward, sent Jean flying along the terrace as fast as feet winged with unutterable terror could carry her. As she ran, she heard the crash of splintering glass as the two men she had left behind smashed in the panel of the locked door, and, almost simultaneously, Sir Adrian’s pistol barked again—another shot, and then a third in quick succession.
The sound seemed to wring every nerve in her body... had that madman shot him?
With sobbing breath she rushed blindly on into the house and met the butler, running too, white faced and horror-stricken.
“My God, miss! Sir Adrian’s murdering her ladyship—and the room door’s locked!”
The man almost babbled out the words in his extremity of fear.
“The terrace door... Quick, Tucker!”—Jean gasped out the order. “Mr. Brennan’s there they’ve broken in the glass...”
Not waiting to hear the end of the sentence, Tucker bolted out of the hall and along the terrace, while Jean leaned up against the doorway drawing long, shuddering breaths that seemed actually to tear their way through her throat and yet brought no relief to the agonised thudding of her heart. For the moment she was physically unable to run another yard.
But her mind was working with abnormal clarity and swiftness. This was her doing—hers! If she had not dissuaded Nick that day when he had proposed taking Claire away with him, all this would never have happened.... Claire would have been safe—safe! But she had interfered, clinging to her belief that no real good ever came by doing wrong, and now her creed had failed her utterly. Nick’s resistance of temptation was culminating in a ghastly tragedy that might have been avoided. To Jean it seemed in that moment as if her world were falling in ruins about her.
Sick with apprehension, she almost reeled out again into the mocking summer sunlight, and, running as fast as the convulsive throbbing of her heart would let her, regained the far end of the terrace and peered through the door that led into Claire’s room.
Its great panes were shattered. Jagged teeth and spites of glass stuck out from the wooden framework, while here and there, dependent from them, were bits of cloth tom from the men’s coats as they had scrambled through.
Within the room Jean could discern a confused hurly-burly of swaying, writhing figures—Blaise and Nick and the butler struggling to overpower Sir Adrian, who was fighting them with all the cunning and the amazing strength of madness. From beyond came the clamour of people battering uselessly at the door, the shrill, excited voices of the frightened servants who had collected in the hall outside the room.
For a few breathless seconds Jean was in doubt—wondered wildly whether Sir Adrian would succeed in breaking away from his captors. Then she saw Nick’s foot shoot out suddenly like the piston-rod of an engine, and Sir Adrian staggered and came crashing down on to his knees. The other two closed in upon him swiftly, and a minute later he was lying prone on his back with the three men holding him down by main force.
With difficulty avoiding the protruding pieces of glass, Jean stepped into the room. Her first thought was for Claire, who now hung helpless and unconscious against the bonds that held her. But Blaise very speedily directed her attention to something of more urgent importance for the moment.
“Unlock that door,” he called to her. “Quick!” He was still panting from the exertion of the recent struggle. “Get a rope of some sort!”
Jean turned the key and tore open the door leading into the hall. The little flock of servants gathered outside it overflowed into the room, frightened and excitedly inquisitive.
“Get some cord, one of you,” commanded Jean authoratively. “Anything will do if it’s strong.”
Two or three of the servants broke away from the main body and ran frantically in search of the required cord, glad to be of use, and very soon Sir Adrian, bound as humanely as his struggles rendered possible, was borne to his own room and laid upon his bed.
“Ring up the doctor,” ordered Blaise, as he assisted in the rather difficult process of conveying Sir Adrian upstairs. “Tell him to come to Charnwood as quickly as he can get here.” And another eager little detachment of domestics flew off to carry out his bidding. The under-footman won the race for the telephone by a good half-yard, and, in a voice which fairly twittered with the agitating and amazing news he had to impart, transmitted the message to the doctor’s parlour-maid at the other end of the wire, adding a few picturesque and stimulating details concerning the struggle which had just taken place—and which, apparently, he had perceived with the eye of faith through the wooden panels of the locked door.
Meanwhile Nick and Jean had turned their attention towards releasing Claire, who, as the last of her bonds was cut, toppled forward in a dead faint into the former’s arms.
A second procession wended its way upstairs, Nick bearing the slight, unconscious figure in his arms while Jean and a kindly-faced housemaid followed.
“Her ladyship’s maid is out, miss,” volunteered the girl. “But perhaps I can help?”
Jean smiled at her, the frank, friendly smile that always won for her the eager, willing service of man and maid alike.
“I’m sure you can,” she said gently. “As soon as we can bring her ladyship round, you shall help me undress her and put her to bed.”
In a few minutes Claire recovered consciousness, but she was horribly shaken and distraught, crying and clinging to Jean or to the housemaid—who was almost crying, too, out of sympathy—like a child frightened by the dark.
Jean, understanding just what was needed, shepherded Nick to the door of the room, where he lingered unhappily, his anxious gaze still fixed on the slender, shrinking figure upon the couch.
“Don’t worry, Nick,” she said reassuringly. “She’ll he all right; it’s only reaction. But I know what she wants—she wants a real mother-person. Go down and ring up Lady Anne, will you, and ask her to come over in the car as quickly as she can.”
Nick nodded; the idea commended itself to him. His “pale golden narcissus,” so nearly broken, would be safe indeed with the kind, comforting arms of his mother about her.
It was an intense relief to Jean when Lady Anne arrived and quietly and efficiently took command of affairs. And there was sore need for her unruffled poise and capability throughout the night that followed.
Claire, nervous and utterly unstrung, slept but little, waking constantly with a cry of terror as in imagination she relived the ordeal of the afternoon, while in the big bedroom across the landing, where her husband lay, the grim shadow of death itself was drawing momentarily closer.
By the time the doctor had arrived in answer to the summons sent, there seemed small need for the strong cords with which Sir Adrian’s limbs were bound. The wild fury of the afternoon’s struggle had thoroughly exhausted him, and he lay, propped up with pillows, apparently in a state of stupor, breathing very feebly.
“Heart,” the doctor told Tormarin after he had made a swift examination. “I’ve known for months that Sir Adrian might go out at any moment. His heart was already impaired, and, of course, he’s drugged for years. He may recover a little, but if, as I think is highly probable, there’s any recurrence of the brain disturbance—why, he’ll not live out a second paroxysm. The heart won’t stand it.”
Tormarin endeavoured to look appropriately shocked. But the doctor was a man and an honest one, and not even professional etiquette prevented his adding, with a jerk of his head in the direction of Claire’s bedroom:
“It would be a merciful deliverance for that poor little woman. There’s a strain of madness in the Latimer’s you know. And”—with a shrug—“naturally Sir Adrian’s habits have accentuated it in his own case.”
But the doctor was mistaken in his calculations. Sir Adrian’s constitution was stronger than he estimated. As Nick had once bitterly commented to Jean, the man was like a piece of steel wire, and two dreadful outbreaks of maniacal fury had to be endured before the wire began to weaken.
During the course of the first paroxysm it was all the four men could do to restrain him from leaping from the bed and rushing out of the room, since, during the period of quiescence which had preceded the doctor’s arrival, a mistaken feeling of humanity had dictated the loosening of the cords which bound him.
He fought and screamed, uttering the most horrible imprecations, and his evil intent towards the woman who was his wife was unmistakable. With her husband free to work his will, Claire’s life would not have been worth a moment’s purchase.
In the period of coma that succeeded this outbreak Sir Adrian, was again secured, as mercifully as possible, from any possibility of doing his wife a mischief, and the second paroxysm which convulsed the bound and shackled madman was very terrible to witness.
Like its predecessor, this attack was followed by a stupor, during which Sir Adrian appeared more dead than alive.
He was palpably weaker, restoratives failing to produce any appreciable effect, and towards morning, in those chill, small hours when the powers of the body languish and fail, the crazed and self-tormented spirit of Adrian Latimer quitted a world in which he had been able to perceive none of those things that are just and pure and lovely and of good report, but only distrust and malice and, finally, black hatred.
A fortnight had come and gone. Sir Adrian’s body had been laid to rest in Coombe Eavie churchyard, and Claire, in the simplest of widow’s weeds, went about once more, looking rather frail and worn-out but with a fugitive light of happiness on her face that was a source of rejoicing to those who loved her.
She made no pretence at mourning the man who had turned her life into a living hell for nearly three years and who stood like a gaoler betwixt her and the happiness which might have been hers had she been free. But the conventions, as well as her own feelings, dictated that a decent interval must elapse before she and Nick could be married, and this would be for her a quiet period dedicated to the readjustment of her whole attitude towards life.
The length of that period was the subject of considerable discussion. Nick protested that six months was amply long enough to wait—too long indeed!—but Claire herself seemed disposed to prolong her widowhood into a year.
“It isn’t in the least because I feel I owe it to Adrian,” she said in answer to Nick’s protest. “I don’t consider that I owe him anything at all. But I feel so battered, Nick, so utterly tired and weary after the perpetual struggle of the last three years that I don’t want to plunge suddenly into the new duties of a new life—not even into new happiness. It’s difficult to make you understand, but I feel just like a sponge which has soaked up all it can and simply can’t absorb any more ofanything. You must let me have time for the past to evaporate a bit.”
But it required the addition of a few common-sense observations on the part of Lady Anne to drive the nail home.
“Claire is quite right, Nick,” she told him. “She is temporarily worn out—mentally, physically and spiritually spent. Her nerves have been kept at their utmost stretch off and on for years, and now that release has come they’ve collapsed like a fiddle-string when the peg that holds it taut is loosened. You must give her time to recover, to key herself up to normal pitch again. At present she isn’t fit to face even the demands that big happiness brings in its train.”
So Nick had perforce to bow to Claire’s decision, and it was settled that for the first month of two, at least, of her widowhood Jean should remove herself and her belongings from Staple and bear her company at Charnwood. And meanwhile Nick and Claire would spend many peaceful hours together of quiet happiness and companionship, while Claire, as she herself expressed it, “rebuilt her soul.”
To Jean the issue of events had brought nothing but pure joy. Her belief had been justified, and the grim gateway of death had become for these two friends of hers the gateway to happiness.
She had neither seen nor heard anything from Burke since the day she had fled from him on the Moor, although indirectly she had discovered that he had quitted the bungalow the day following that of her flight from it and had gone to London.
Judith sent her a brief, rather formal letter of congratulation upon her engagement, but in it she made no reference to him nor did she endeavour to explain away or palliate her own share in his scheme to force Jean’s hand. Probably an odd kind of loyalty to her brother prevented her from clearing herself at his expense, added to a certain dogged pride which refused to let her extenuate any action of hers; to the daughter of Glyn Peterson.
But none of these things had any power to hurt Jean now. In her new-born happiness she felt that she could find it in her heart to forgive anybody anything! She was even conscious of a certain tentative understanding and indulgence for Burke himself. He had only used the “primitive man” methods his temperament dictated in his effort to win the woman he wanted for his wife. And he had failed. Just now, Jean could not help sympathising with anybody who had failed to find the happiness that love bestows.
She reflected that the old gipsy on the Moor had been wonderfully correct in her prophecy concerning Nick and Claire. The sun was “shin’ butivul” for them at last, just as she had assured them that it would.
And, with the same, came a sudden little clutch of fear at Jean’s heart, like the touch of a strange hand. The gipsy had had other words for her—harsher, less sweet-sounding.
“For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
She shivered a little. She felt as though a breath of cold air had passed over her, chilling the warm blood that ran so joyously in her veins.