THE visit to London, if it had not been prolific in the results which Lady Anne had hoped for, had at least accomplished certain things.
It had acted as a brake upon the swiftly turning wheels of two lives precariously poised at the top of that steep hill of which no traveller can see the end, but which very surely leads to heartbreak and disaster, and had sufficed, as Jean had suggested that it might, to restore Nick to a more normal and temperate state of mind.
He and Claire had passed a long hour alone together the day after his return to Staple, and now that the first violent reaction, the first instinctive impulse of unbearable revolt from Sir Adrian’s spying and brutality had spent itself they had agreed to shoulder once more the burden fate had laid upon them, to fight on again, just holding fast to the simple knowledge of their love for one another and leaving the ultimate issue to that great, unfathomable Player who “hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,” not with the shadowed vision of our finite eyes but with the insight of eternity.
Jean had seen them coming hand in hand through the cool green glades of the wood where the great decision had been taken, and something in the two young, stern-set faces brought a sudden lump into her throat. She turned swiftly aside, avoiding a meeting, feeling as though here was holy ground upon which not even so close a friend as she could tread without violation.
To Jean herself the week in London had brought a certain, new tranquillity of spirit. Quite ordinarily and without effort—thanks to Lady Anne’s skilful stage-management—she and Blaise had been constantly in each other’s company, and, with the word “Beloved” murmuring in her heart like some tender undertone of melody, the hours they had shared together were no longer a mingled ecstacy and pain, marred by torturing doubts and fears, but held once more the old magic of that wonder-day at Montavan.
Somehow, the dividing line did not seem to matter very much, now that she was sure that Blaise, on his side of it, was loving her just as she, on hers, loved him. Indeed, at this stage Jean made no very great demands on life. After the agony of uncertainty of the last few months, the calm surety that Blaise loved her seemed happiness enough.
Other sharp edges of existence, too, had smoothed themselves down—as sharp edges have a knack of doing if you wait long enough. Burke seemed to have accepted her last answer as final, and now spared her the effort of contending further with his tempestuous love-making, so that she felt able to continue her friendship with Judith, and her consequent visits to Willow Ferry, with as littlegêneas though the episode at the “honeymooners’ inn” had never taken place. She even began to believe that Burke was genuinely slightly remorseful for his behaviour on that particular occasion.
Apparently he had not made a confidant of his sister over the matter, for it was without the least indication of a back thought of any kind that she approached Jean on the subject of spending a few days with herself and Geoffrey at their bungalow on the Moor.
“Geoff and I are going for a week’s blow on Dartmoor, just by way of a ‘pick-me-up.’ Come with us, Jean; it will do you good after stuffy old London—blow the cobwebs away!”
But here, at least, Jean felt that discretion was the better part of valour. It was true that Burke appeared fairly amenable to reason just at present, but in the informal companionship of daily life in a moorland bungalow it was more than probable that he would become less manageable. And she had no desire for a repetition of that scene in the inn parlour.
Therefore, although the Moor, with its great stretches of gold and purple, its fragrant, heatherly breath and its enfolding silences, appealed to her in a way in which nothing else on earth seemed quite to appeal, pulling at her heartstrings almost as the nostalgia for home and country pulls at the heartstrings of a wanderer, she returned a regretful negative to Judith’s invitation. So Burke and Mrs. Craig packed up and departed to Three Fir Bungalow without her, and life at Staple resumed the even tenor of its way.
The weather was glorious, the long, hot summer days melting into balmy nights when the hills and dales amid which the old house was set were bathed in moonlight mystery—transmuted into a wonderland of phantasy, cavernous with shadow where undreamed-of dragons lurked, lambent with opalescent fields of splendour whence uprose the glimmer of half-visioned palaces or the battlemented walls of some ethereal fairy castle.
More than once Jean’s thoughts turned wistfully towards the Moor which she had so longed to see by moonlight—Judith’s “holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits”—and she felt disposed to blame herself for the robust attack of caution which had impelled her to refuse the invitation to the bungalow.
“One loses half the best things in life by being afraid,” she told herself petulantly. “And a second chance to take them doesn’t come!”
She felt almost tempted to write to Judith and propose that she should join her at the bungalow for a few days after all if she still had room for her. And then, as is often the way of things just when we are contemplating taking the management of affairs into our own hands, the second chance offered itself without any directing impulse on Jean’s part.
The telephone bell rang, and Jean, who was expecting an answer to an important message she had ’phoned through on Lady Anne’s behalf, hastened to answer it. Very much to her surprise she found that it was Burke who was speaking at the other end of the wire.
“Is that you, Geoffrey?” she exclaimed in astonishment. “I didn’t know your bungalow was on the telephone. I thought you were miles from anywhere!”
“It isn’t. And we are,” came back Burke’s voice. From a certain quality in it she knew that he was smiling. “I’m in Okehampton, ’phoning from a pal’s house. I’ve a message for you from Judy.”
“Ye-es?” intoned Jean enquiringly.
“She wants you to come up to-morrow, just for one night. It’ll be a full moon and she says you have a hankering to see the Moor by moonlight. Have you?”
“Yes, oh yes!”—with enthusiasm.
“Thought so. It certainly does look topping. Quite worth seeing. Well, look here, Judy’s got a party of friends, down from town, who are coming over to us from the South Devon side—going to drive up and stay the night, and the idea is to do a moonlight scramble up on to the top of one of the tors after supper. Are you game?”
“Oh! How heavenly!” This, ecstatically, from Jean.
“How what?”
“Heavenly!Heavenly!”—with increasing emphasis.
“Can’t you hear?”
“Oh, ‘heavenly’—yes, I hear. Yes, it would be rather—if you came.”
Even through the’phone Burke’s voice conveyed something of that upsettingly fiery ardour of his.
“I won’t come—unless you promise to behave,” said Jean warningly.
Bubbling over with pleasure at the prospect unfolded by the invitation, she found it a little difficult to infuse a befitting sternness into her tones.
“Do I need to take fresh vows?” came back Burke’s answer, spoken rather gravely. “I made you a promise that day—when we drove back from Dartmoor. I’ll keep that.”
“I’ll never hiss you again till you give me your lips yourself.”
The words of the promise rushed vividly into Jean’s mind, and now that steady voice through the ’phone, uttering its quiet endorsement of the assurance given, made her feel suddenly ashamed of her suspicions.
“Very well, I’ll come then,” she said hastily. “How shall I get to you?”
“It’s all planned, because we thought—at least we hoped—you’d come. If you’ll come down to Okehampton by the three o’clock train from Coombe Eavie, I’ll meet you there with the car and drive you up to the bungalow. Judy is going to drive into Newton Abbot early, to do some marketing, and afterwards she’ll lunch with her London people—the Holfords. Then they’ll all come up together in the afternoon.”
“I see. Very well. I’ll come to Okehampton by the three train to-morrow afternoon”—repeating his instructions carefully.
“Right. That’s all fixed, then.”
“Quite.Mindyou also fix a fine day—or night, rather! Good-bye.”
A murmured farewell came back along the wire, and then Jean, replacing the receiver in its clip, ran off to apprise Lady Anne of the arrangements made.
Lady Anne looked up from some village charity accounts which were puckering her smooth brow to smile approval.
“How nice, dear! Quite a charming plan—you’ll enjoy it. Especially as there will be nothing to amuse you here to-morrow. I have two village committees to attend—I’m in the chair, so I must go. And Blaise, I know, is booked for a busy day with the estate agent, while Nick is going down to South Devon somewhere for a day’s fishing. I think he goes down to-night. Really, it’s quite unusually lucky that Judith should have fixed on to-morrow for her moonlight party.”
THE moorland air, warm with its subtle fragrance of gorse—like the scent of peaches when the sun is shining on them—tonic with the faint tang of salt borne by clean winds that had swept across the Atlantic, came to Jean’s nostrils crisp and sparkling as a draught of golden wine.
Before her, mile after mile, lay the white road—a sword of civilisation cleaving its way remorselessly across the green wilderness of mossy turf, and on either side rose the swelling hills and jagged peaks of the great tors, melting in the far distance into a vague, formless blur of purple that might be either cloud or tor as it merged at last into the dim haze of the horizon.
“Oh, blessed, blessed Moor!” exclaimed Jean. “How I love it! You know, half the people in the world haven’t the least idea what Dartmoor is like. I was enthusing to a woman about it only the other day and she actually said, ‘Oh, yes—Dartmoor. It’s quite flat, I suppose, isn’t it?’Flat!” with sweeping disgust.
Burke, his hand on the wheel of the big car which was eating up the miles with the facility of a boa-constrictor swallowing rabbits, smiled at the indignant little sniff with which the speech concluded.
“You don’t like dead levels, then?” he suggested.
She shook her head.
“No, I like hills—something to look up to—to climb.”
“Spiritual as well as temporal?”
She was silent a moment.
“Why, yes, I think I do.”
He smiled sardonically.
“It’s just that terrible angelic tendency of yours I complain of. It’s too much for any mere material man to live up to. I wish you’d step down to my low level occasionally. You don’t seem to be afflicted with human passions like the rest of us”—he added, a note of irritation in his voice.
“Indeed I am!”
Jean spoke impulsively, out of the depths of that inner, almost unconscious self-knowledge which lies within each one of us, dormant until some lance-like question pricks it into spontaneous affirmation. She had hardly heeded whither the conversation was tending, and she regretted her frank confession the instant it had left her lips.
Burke turned and looked at her with a curious speculation in his glance.
“I wonder if that’s true?” he said consideringly. “If so, they’re still asleep. I’d give something to be the one to rouse them.”
There was the familiar, half-turbulent quality in his voice—the sound as of something held in leash. Jean sensed the danger in the atmosphere.
“You’ll house one of them—the quite ordinary, commonplace one of bad temper, if you talk like that,” she replied prosaically. “You’ve got to play fair, Geoffrey—keep the spirit of the law as well as the letter.”
“All’s fair in love and war—as I told you before,” he retorted.
“Geoffrey”—indignantly.
“Jean!”—mimicking her. “Well, we won’t quarrel about it now. Here we are at our journey’s end. Behold the carriage drive!”
The car swung round a sharp bend and then bumped its way up a roughly-made track which served to link a species of cobbled yard, constructed at one side of the bungalow, to the road along which they had come.
The track cleaved its way, rather on the principle of a railway cutting, clean through the abrupt acclivity which flanked the road that side, and rising steeply between crumbling, overhanging banks, fringed with coarse grass and tufted with straggling patches of gorse and heather, debouched on to a broad plateau. Here the road below was completely hidden from view; on all sides there stretched only a limitless vista of wild moorland, devoid of any sign of habitation save for the bare, creeperless walls of the bungalow itself.
As the scene unfolded, Jean became suddenly conscious of a strange sense of familiarity. An inexplicable impress sion of having seen the place on some previous occasion, of familiarity with every detail of it—even to a recognition of its peculiar atmosphere of loneliness—took possession of her. For a moment she could not place the memory. Only she knew that it was associated in her mind with something disagreeable. Even now, as, at Burke’s dictation, she waited in the car while he entered the bungalow from the back, passing through in order to admit his guest by way of the front door, which had been secured upon the inside, she was aware of a feeling of intense repugnance.
And then, in a flash, recollection returned to her. This was the house of her dream—of the nightmare vision which had obsessed her during the hours of darkness following her first meeting with Geoffrey Burke.
There stood the solitary dwelling, set amid a wild and desolate country, and to one side of it grew three wretched-looking, scrubby little fir trees, all of them bent in the same direction by the keen winds as they came sweeping across the Moor from the wide Atlantic. Three Fir Bungalow! Why, the very name itself might have prewarned her!
Her eyes fixed themselves on the green-painted door. She knew quite well what must happen next. The door would open and reveal Burke standing on the threshold. She watched it with fascinated eyes.
Presently came the sound of steps, then the grating noise of a key turning stiffly in the lock. The door was flung open and Burke strode across the threshold and came to the side of the car to help her out. Jean waited, half terrified, for his first words. Would they be the words of her dream? She felt that if he chanced to say jokingly, “Will you come into my parlour?” she should scream.
“Go straight in, will you?” said Burke. “I’ll just run the car round to the garage and then we might as well get tea ready before the others come. I’m starving, aren’t you?”
The spell was broken. The everyday, commonplace words brought with them a rush of overpowering relief, sweeping away the dreamlike sense of unreality and terror, and as Jean nodded and responded gaily, “Absolutely famished!” she could have laughed aloud at the ridiculous fears which had assailed her.
The inside of the bungalow was in charming contrast to its somewhat forbidding exterior. Its living-rooms, furnished very simply but with a shrewd eye to comfort, communicated one with the other by means of double doors which, usually left open, obviated the cramped feeling that the comparatively small size of the rooms might otherwise have produced, while the two lattice windows which each boasted were augmented by French windows opening out on to a verandah which ran the whole length of the building.
Jean, having delightedly explored the front portion of the bungalow, joined Burke in the kitchen, guided thither by the clinking of crockery and the cheerful crackle of a hearth fire wakened into fresh life by the scientific application of a pair of bellows.
“I had no idea you were such a domesticated individual,” she remarked, as she watched him carefully warming the brown earthenware teapot as a preliminary to brewing the tea while she busied herself making hot buttered toast.
“Oh, Judy and I are quite independent up here, I assure you,” he answered with pardonable pride. “We never bring any of the servants from Willow Ferry, but cook for ourselves. A woman comes over every morning to do the ‘chores’—clean the place, and wash up the dishes from the day before, and so on. But beyond that we are self-sufficing.”
“Where does your woman come from? I didn’t see a house for miles round.”
“No, you can’t see the place, but there’s a little farmstead, tucked away in a hollow about three miles from here, which provides us with cream and butter and eggs—-and with our char-lady.”
Jean surveyed with satisfaction a rapidly mounting pile of delicately browned toast, creaming with golden butter.
“There, that’s ready,” she announced at last. “I do hope Judy and Co. will arrive soon. Hot buttered toast spoils with keeping; it gets all sodden and tastes like underdone shoe leather. Do you think they’ll be long?”
Burke threw a glance at the grandfather’s clock ticking solemnly away in a corner of the kitchen.
“It’s half-past four,” he said dubiously. “I don’t think we’ll risk that luscious-looking toast of yours by waiting for them. I’m going to brew the tea; the kettle’s boiling.”
“Won’t Judith think it rather horrid of us not to wait?”
“Oh, Lord, no! Judy and I never stand on any ceremony with each other. Any old thing might happen to delay them a bit.”
Jean, frankly hungry after her spin in the car through the invigorating moorland air, yielded without further protest, and tea resolved itself into a jolly littletête-à-tèteaffair, partaken of in the shelter of the verandah, with the glorious vista of the Moor spread out before her delighted eyes.
Burke was in one of those rare moods of his which never failed to inspire her with a genuine liking for him—when the unruly, turbulent devil within him, so hardly held in check, was temporarily replaced by a certain spontaneous boyishness of a distinctly endearing quality—that “little boy” quality which, in a grown man, always appeals so irresistibly to any woman.
The time slipped away quickly, and it was with a shock of astonishment that Jean realised, on glancing down at the watch on her wrist, that over an hour and a half had gone by while they had been sitting chatting on the verandah.
“Geoffrey! Do you know it’s nearly six o’clock! I’m certain something must have happened. Judy and the Holfords would surely be here by now if they hadn’t had an accident of some sort.”
Burke looked at his own watch.
“Yes,” he acquiesced slowly. “It is—getting late.” A look of concern spread itself over Jean’s face.
“I think we ought to get the car out again and go and see if anything has happened,” she said decisively. “They may have had a spill. Were they coming by motor?”
“No. Judy drove down to Newton Abbot in the dog-cart, and the Holfords proposed hiring some sort of conveyance from a livery stable.”
“Well, I expect they’ve had a smash of some kind. I’m sure we ought to go and find out! Was Judy driving that excitable chestnut of yours?”
He shook his head.
“No—a perfectly well-conducted pony, as meek as Moses. We’ll give them a quarter of an hour more. If they don’t turn up by then, I’ll run the car out and we’ll investigate.”
The minutes crawled by on leaden feet. Jean felt restless and uneasy and more than a trifle astonished that Burke should manifest so little anxiety concerning his sister’s whereabouts. Then, just before the quarter of an hour was up, there came the shrill tinkle of a bicycle bell, and a boy cycled up to the gate and, springing off his machine, advanced up the cobbled path with a telegram in his hand.
Jean’s face blanched, and she waited in taut suspense while Burke ripped open the ominous orange-coloured envelope.
“What is it?” she asked nervously. “Have they—is it bad news?”
There was a pause before Burke answered. Then, he handed the flimsy sheet to her, remarking shortly:
“They’re not coming.”
Jean’s eyes flew along the brief message.
“Returning to-morrow. Am staying the night with Holfords.Judy.”
Her face fell.
“How horribly disappointing!” Her glance fluttered, regretfully to the faint disc of the moon showing like a pallid ghost of itself in a sky still luminous with the afternoon sunlight.
“I shan’t see my moonlit Moor to-night after all!” she continued. “I wonder what has happened to make them change their plans?”
Burke volunteered no suggestion but stood staring moodily at the swiftly receding figure of the telegraph boy.
“Well,” Jean braced herself to meet the disappointment, “there’s nothing for it but for you to run me back home, Geoffrey. We ought to start at once.”
“Very well. I’ll go and get the car out,” he answered. “I suppose it’s the only thing to be done.”
He moved off in the direction of the garage, Jean walking rather disconsolately beside him.
“Iamdisappointed!” she declared. “I just hate the sight of a telegraph boy! They always spoil things. I rather wonder you get your telegrams delivered at this outlandish spot,” she added musingly.
“Oh, of course we have to pay mileage. There’s no free delivery to the ‘back o’ beyond’!”
As he spoke, Burke vanished into the semi-dusk of the garage, and presently Jean heard sounds suggestive of ineffectual attempts to start the engine, accompanied by a muttered curse or two. A few minutes later Burke reappeared, looking Rather hot and dusty and with a black smear of oil across his cheek.
“You’d better go back to the bungalow,” he said gruffly.
“There’s something gone wrong with the works, and it will take me a few minutes to put matters right.”
Jean nodded sympathetically and retreated towards the house, leaving him to tinker with the car’s internals. It was growing chilly—the “cool of the evening” manifests itself early up on Dartmoor—and she was not at all sorry to find herself indoors. The wind had dropped, but a curious, still sort of coldness seemed to be permeating the atmosphere, faintly moist, and, as Jean stood at the window, gazing out half absently, she suddenly noticed a delicate blur of mist veiling the low-lying ground towards the right of the bungalow. Her eyes hurriedly swept the wide expanse in front of her. The valleys between the distant tors were hardly visible. They had become mere basins cupping wan lakes of wraithlike vapour which, even as she watched them, crept higher, inch by inch, as though responding to some impulse of a rising tide.
Jean had lived long enough in Devonshire by this time to know the risks of being caught in a mist on Dartmoor, and she sped out of the room, intending to go to the garage and warn Burke that he must hurry. He met her on the threshold of the bungalow, and she turned back with him into the room she had just quitted.
“Are you ready?” she asked eagerly. “There’s a regular moor mist coming on. The sooner we start the better.”
He looked at her oddly. He was rather pale and his eyes were curiously bright.
“The car won’t budge,” he said. “I’ve been tinkering at her all this time to no purpose.”
Jean stared at him, a vague apprehension of disagreeable possibilities presenting itself to her mind. Their predicament would be an extremely awkward one if the car remained recalcitrant!
“Won’t budge?” she repeated. “But you must make it budge, Geoffrey. We can’t—we can’tstayhere! What’s gone wrong with it?”
Burke launched out into a string of technicalities which left Jean with a confused feeling that the mechanism of a motor must be an invention of the devil designed expressly for the chastening of human nature, but from which she succeeded in gathering the bare skeleton fact that something had gone radically wrong with the car’s running powers.
Her apprehensions quickened.
“What are we to do?” she asked blankly.
“Make the best of a bad job—and console each other,” he suggested lightly.
She frowned a little. It did not seem to her quite the moment for jesting.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Geoffrey,” she said sharply. “We’ve got to get backsomehow. What can you do?”
“I can’t do anything more than I’ve done. Here we are and here we’ve got to stay.”
“You know that’s impossible,” she said, in a quick, low voice.
He looked at her with a sudden devil-may-care glint in his eyes.
“You never can tell beforehand whether things are impossible or not. I know I used to think that heaven on earth was—impossible,” he said slowly. “I’m not so sure now.” He drew a step nearer her. “Would you mind so dreadfully if we had to stay here, little Miss Prunes-and-Prisms?”
Jean stared at him in amazement—in amazement which slowly turned to incredulous horror as a sudden almost unbelievable idea flashed into her mind, kindled into being by the leaping, half-exultant note in his tones.
“Geoffrey———” Her lips moved stiffly, even to herself, her voice sounded strange and hoarse. “Geoffrey, I don’t believe there is anything wrong with the car at all!... Or if there is, you’ve tampered with it on purpose.... You’re not being straight with me——”
She broke off, her startled gaze searching his face as though she would wring the truth from him. Her eyes were very wide and dilated, but back of the anger that blazed in them lurked fear—stark fear.
For a moment Burke was silent. Then he spoke, with a quiet deliberateness that held something ominous, inexorable, in its very calm.
“You’re right,” he said slowly. “I’ve not been straight with you. But I’ll be frank with you now. The whole thing—asking you to come here to-day, the moonlight expedition for to-night—everything—was all fixed up, planned solely to get you here. The car won’t run for the simple reason that I’ve put it out of action. I wasn’t quite sure whether or no you could drive a car, you see!”
“I can’t,” said Jean. Her voice was quite expressionless.
“No? So much the better, then. But I wasn’t going to leave any weak link in the chain by which I hold you.”
“By which you hold me?” she repeated dully. She felt stunned, incapable of protest, only able to repeat, parrotlike, the words he had just used.
“Yes. Don’t you understand the position? It’s clear enough, I should think!” He laughed a little recklessly. “Either you promise to marry me, in which case I’ll take you home at once—the car’s not damaged beyond repair—or you stay here, here at the bungalow with me, until tomorrow morning.”
With a sharp cry she retreated from him, her face ash-white.
“No—no! Not that!” The poignancy of that caught-back cry wrenched the words from his lips in hurrying, vehement disclaimer. “You’ll be perfectly safe—as safe as though you were my sister. Don’t look like that.... Jean! Jean! Could you imagine that I would hurt you—you when I worship—my little white love?” The words rushed out in a torrent, hoarse and shaken and passionately tender. “Before God, no! You’ll be utterly safe, Jean, sweetest, beloved—I swear it!” His voice steadied and deepened. “Sacred as the purest love in the whole world could hold you.” He was silent a moment; then, as the tension in her face gradually relaxed, he went on: “But the world won’t know that!” The note of tenderness was gone now, swept away by the resurgence of a fierce relentlessness—triumphant, implacable—that meant winning at all costs. “The world won’t know that,” he repeated. “After tonight, for your own sake—because a woman’s reputation cannot stand the breath of scandal, you’ll becompelledto marry me. You’ll have no choice.”
Jean stood quite still, staring in front of her. Once her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Slowly, laboriously almost, she was realising exactly what had happened, her mind adjusting itself to the recognition of the trap in which she had been caught.
Her dream had come true, after all—horribly, inconceivably true.
The heavy silence which had fallen seemed suddenly filled with the dream-Burke’s voice—mocking and exultant:
“... you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast for ever. It’s too late to try and run away.... It’s too late.”
“THEN that telegram—that telegram from Judy—I suppose that was all part of the plan?”
Jean felt the futility of the question even while she asked it. The answer was so inevitable.
“Yes”—briefly. “I knew that Judy meant staying the night with her friends before she went away. She sent the wire—because I asked her to.”
“Judy did that?”
There was such an immeasurable anguish of reproach in the low, quick-spoken whisper that Burke felt glad Judith was not there to hear it. Had it been otherwise, she might have regretted the share she had taken in the proceedings, small as it had been. She was not a man, half-crazed by love, in whose passion-blurred vision nothing counted save the winning of the one woman, nor had she known Burke’s plan in its entirety.
“Yes, Judy sent the wire,” he said.. “But give her so much credit, she didn’t know that I intended—this. She only knew that I wanted another chance of seeing you alone—of asking you to be my wife, and I told her that you wouldn’t come up to the bungalow unless you believed that she would be there too. I didn’t think you’d trust yourself alone with me again—after that afternoon at the inn”—with blunt candour.
“No. I shouldn’t have done.”
“So you see I had to think of something—some way. And it was you yourself who suggested this method.”
“I?”—incredulously.
“Yes. Don’t you remember what you told me that day I drove you back from Dartmoor ‘A woman’s happiness depends upon her reputation.’”
She looked at him quickly, recalling the scattered details of that afternoon—Burke’s gibes at what he believed to be her fear of gossiping tongues and her own answer to his taunts: “No woman can afford to ignore scandal.” And then, following upon that, his sudden, curious absorption in his own thoughts.
The remembrance of it all was like a torchlight flashed into a dark place, illuminating what had been hidden and inscrutable. She spoke swiftly.
“And it was then—that afternoon—you thought of this?”
He bent his head.
“Yes,” he acknowledged.
Jean was silent. It was all clear now—penetratingly so.
“And the Holfords? Are there any such people?” she asked drearily.
She scarcely knew what prompted her to put so purposeless and unimportant a question. Actually, she felt no interest at all in the answer. It could not make the least difference to her present circumstances.
Perhaps it was a little the feeling that this trumpery process of question and answer served to postpone the inevitable moment when she must face the situation in which she found herself—face it in its simple crudeness, denuded of unessential whys and wherefores.
“Oh, yes, the Holfords are quite real,” answered Burke. “And so is the plan for an expedition to one of the tors by moonlight. Only it will be carried out to-morrow night instead of to-night. To-night is for the settlement between you and me.”
The strained expression of utter, shocked incredulity was gradually leaving Jean’s face. The unreal was becoming real, and she knew now what she was up against; the hard, reckless quality of Burke’s voice left her no illusions.
“Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “you won’t really do this thing?”
If she had hoped to move him by a simple, straightforward appeal to the best that might be in him, she failed completely. For the moment, all that was good in him, anything chivalrous which the helplessness of her womanhood might have invoked, was in abeyance. He was mere primitive man, who had succeeded in carrying off the woman he meant to mate and was prepared to hold her at all costs.
“I told you I would compel you,” he said doggedly. “That I would let nothing in the world stand between you and me. And I meant every word I said. You’ve no way out now—except marriage with me.”
The imperious decision of his tone roused her fighting spirit.
“Do you imagine,” she broke out scornfully, “that—after this—I would ever marry you?... I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth! I’d die sooner!”
“I daresay you would,” he returned composedly. “You’ve too much grit to be afraid of death. Only, you see, that doesn’t happen to be the alternative. The alternative is a smirched reputation. Tarnished a little—after to-night—even if you marry me; dragged utterly in the mire if you refuse. I’m putting it before you with brutal frankness, I know. But I want you to realise just what it means and to promise that you’ll be my wife before it’s too late—while I can still get you back to Staple during the hours of propriety”—smiling grimly.
She looked at him with a slow, measured glance of bitter contempt.
“Even a tarnished reputation might be preferable to marriage with you—more endurable,” she added, with the sudden tormented impulse of a trapped thing to hurt back.
“You don’t really believe that”—impetuously—“I knowI knowI could make you happy! You’d be the one woman in the world to me. And I don’t think”—more quietly—“that you could endure a slurred name, Jean.”
She made no answer. Every word he spoke only made it more saliently clear to her that she was caught—bound hand and foot in a web from which there was no escape. Yet, little as Burke guessed it, the actual question of “what people might say” did not trouble her to any great extent. She was too much her father’s own daughter to permit a mere matter of reputation to force her into a distasteful marriage.
Not that she minimised the value of good repute. She was perfectly aware that if she refused to marry Burke, and he carried out his threat of detaining her at the bungalow until the following morning, she would have a heavy penalty to pay—the utmost penalty which a suspicious world exacts from a woman, even though she may be essentially innocent, in whose past there lurks a questionable episode.
But she had courage enough to face the consequences of that refusal, to stand up to the clatter of poisonous tongues that must ensue; and trust enough to bank on the loyalty of her real friends, knowing it would be the same splendid loyalty that she herself would have given to any one of them in like circumstances. For Jean was a woman who won more than mere lip-service from those who called themselves her friends.
Burke had never been more mistaken in his calculations than when he counted upon forcing her hand by the mere fear of scandal. But none the less he held her—and held her in the meshes of a far stronger and more binding net, had he but realised it.
Looking back upon the episode from which her present predicament had actually sprung, Jean could almost have found it in her heart to smile at the relative importance which, at the time, that same incident had assumed in her eyes.
It had seemed to her, then, that for Blaise ever to hear that she had been locked in a room with Burke, had spent an uncounted, hour or so with him at the “honeymooners’ inn” would be the uttermost calamity that could befall her.
He would never believe that it had been by no will of hers—so she had thought at the time—and that fierce lover’s jealousy which had been the origin of their quarrel, and of all the subsequent mutual misunderstandings and aloofness, would be roused to fresh life, and his distrust of her become something infinitely more difficult to combat.
But compared with the present situation which confronted her, the happenings of that past day faded into insignificance. She stood, now, face to face with a choice such as surely few women had been forced to make.
Whichever way she decided, whichever of the two alternatives she accepted, her happiness must pay the price. Nothing she could ever say or do, afterwards, would set her right in the eyes of the man whose belief in her meant everything. Whether she agreed to marry Burke, returning home in the odour of sanctity within the next hour or two, or whether she refused and returned the next morning—free, but with the incontrovertible fact of a night spent at Burke’s bungalow, alone with him, behind her, Blaise would never trust or believe in her love for him again.
And if she promised to marry Burke and so save her reputation, it must automatically mean the end of everything between herself and the man she loved—the dropping of an iron curtain compared with which the wall built up out of their frequent misunderstandings in the past seemed something as trifling and as easily demolished as a card house.
On the other hand, if she risked her good name and kept her freedom, she would be equally as cut off from him. Not that she feared Blaise would take the blackest view of the affair—she was sure that he believed in her enough not to misjudge her as the world might do—but he would inevitably think that she had deliberately chosen to spend an afternoon on the Moor alone with Burke—“playing with fire” exactly as he had warned her not to, and getting her fingers burnt in consequence—and he would accept it as a sheer denial of the silent pledge of love understood which bound them together.
He would never trust her again—nor forgive her. No man could. Love’s loyalty, rocked by the swift currents of jealousy and passion, is not of the same quality as the steady loyalty of friendship—that calm, unshakable confidence which may exist between man and man or woman and woman.
Moreover—and here alone was where the fear of gossip troubled her—even if the inconceivable happened and Blaise forgave and trusted her again, she could not go to him with a slurred name, give him herself—when the gift was outwardly tarnished. The Tormarin pride was unyielding as a rock—and Tormarin women had always been above suspicion. She could not break the tradition of an old name—do that disservice to the man she loved! No, if she could find no way out of the web in which she had been caught she was set as far apart from Blaise as though they had never met. Only the agony of meeting and remembrance would be with her for the rest of life!
Jean envisaged very clearly the possibilities that lay ahead—envisaged them with a breathless, torturing perception of their imminence. It was to be a fight—here and now—for the whole happiness that life might hold.
She turned to Burke, breaking at last the long silence which had descended between them.
“And what do you suppose I feel towards you, Geoffrey? Will you be content to have your wife think of you—as I must think?”
A faint shadow flitted across his face. The quiet scorn of her words—their underlying significance—flicked him on the raw.
“I’ll be content to have you as my wife—at any price,” he said stubbornly. “Jean”—a sudden urgency in his tones—“try to believe I hate all this as much as you do. When you’re my wife, I’ll spend my life in teaching you to forget it—in—wiping the very memory of to-day out of your mind.”
“I shall never forgot it,” she said slowly. Then, bitterly: “I wonder why you even offer me a choice—when you know; that it is really no choice.”
“Why? Because I swore to you that you should give me what I want—that I wouldn’t take even a kiss from you again by force. But”—unevenly—“I didn’t know what it meant—the waiting!”
Outside, the mist had thickened into fog, curtaining the windows. The light had dimmed to a queer, glimmering dusk, changing the values of things, and out of the shifting shadows her white face, with its scarlet line of scornful mouth, gleamed at him—elusive, tantalising as a flower that sways out of reach. In the uncertain half-light which struggled in through the dulled window-panes there was something provocative, maddening—a kind of etherealised lure of the senses in the wavering, shadowed loveliness of her. The man’s pulses leaped; something within him slipped its leash.
“Kiss me!” he demanded hoarsely. “Don’t keep me waiting any longer. Give me your lips... now... now...”
She sprang aside from him, warding him off. Her eyes stormed at him out of her white face.
“You promised!” she cried, her voice sharp with fear. “You promised!”
The tension of the next moment strained her nerves to breaking-point.
Then he fell back. Slowly his arms dropped to his sides without touching her, his hands clenching with the effort that it cost him.
“You’re right,” he said, breathing quickly. “I promised. I’ll keep my promise.” Then, vehemently: “Jean, why won’t you let me take you home? I could put the car right in ten minutes. Come home!”
There was unmistakable appeal in his tones. It was obvious he hated the task to which he had set himself, although he had no intention of yielding.
She stared at him doubtfully.
“Will you? Will you take me home, Geoffrey?... Or”—bitterly—“is this only another trap?”
“I’ll take you home—at once,now—if you’ll promise to be my wife. Jean, it’s better than waiting till to-morrow—till circumstancesforceyou into it!” he urged.
She was silent, thinking rapidly. That sudden break in Burke’s control, when for a moment she had feared his promise would not hold him, had warned her to put an end to the scene—if only temporarily—as quickly as possible.
“You are very trusting,” she said, forcing herself to speak lightly. “How do you know that I shall not give you the pledge you ask merely in order to get home—and then decline to keep it? I think”—reflectively—“I should be quite justified in the circumstances.”
He smiled a little and shook his head.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not afraid of that. If you give me your word, I know you’ll keep it. You wouldn’t be—you—if you could do otherwise.”
For a moment, Jean was tempted, fiercely tempted to take his blind belief in her and use it to extricate herself from the position into which he had thrust her. As she herself had said, the circumstances were such as almost to justify her. Yet something within her, something that was an integral part of her whole nature, rebelled against the idea of giving a promise which, from the moment that she made it, she would have no smallest intention of keeping. It would be like the breaking of a prisoner’s given parole—equally mean and dishonourable.
With a little mental shrug she dismissed the idea and the brief temptation. She must find some other way, some other road to safety. If only he would leave her alone, leave her just long enough for her to make a rush for it—out of the house into that wide wilderness of mist-wrapped moor!
It would be a virtually hopeless task to find her way to any village or to the farmstead, three miles away, of which Burke had spoken. She knew that. Even moorwise folk not infrequently entirely lost their bearings in a Dartmoor mist, and, as far as she herself was concerned, she had not the remotest idea in which direction the nearest habitation lay. It would be a hazardous experiment—fraught with danger. But danger was preferable to the dreadful safety of the bungalow.
In a brief space, stung to swift decision by that tense moment when Burke’s self-mastery had given way, she had made up her mind to risk the open moor. But, for that she must somehow contrive to be left alone. She must gain time—time to allay Burke’s suspicions by pretending to make the best of the matter, and then, on some pretext or other, get him out of the room. It was the sole way of escape she could devise.
“Well, which is it to be?” Burke’s voice broke in harshly upon the wild turmoil of her thoughts. “Your promise—and Staple within an hour and a half? Or—the other alternative?”
“I don’t think it can be either—yet,” she said quietly. “What you’re asking—it’s too big a question for a woman to decide all in a minute. Don’t you see”—with a rather shaky little laugh—“it means my whole life? I—I must have time, Geoffrey. I can’t decide now. What time is it?”
He struck a match, holding the flame close to the dial of his watch.
“Seven o’clock.”
“Only that?” The words escaped her involuntarily. It seemed hours, an eternity, since she had read those few brief words contained in Judith’s telegram. And it was barely an hour ago!
“Then—then I can have a little time to think it over,” she said after a moment. “We could get back to Staple by ten if we left here at eight-thirty?”
“There or thereabouts. We should have to go slow through this infernal mist Jean”—his voice took on a note of passionate entreaty—“sweetest, won’t you give me your promise and let me take you home? You shall never regret it. I——”
“Oh, hush!” she checked him quickly. “I can’t answer you now, Geoffrey. I must have time—time. Don’t press me now.”
“Very well.” There was an unaccustomed gentleness in his manner. Perhaps something in the intense weariness of her tones appealed to him. “Are you very tired, Jean?”
“Do you know”—she spoke with some surprise, as though the idea had only just presented itself to her—“do you know, I believe I’m rather hungry! It sounds very material of me”—laughing a little. “A woman in my predicament ought to be quite above—or beyond—mere pangs of hunger.”
“Hungry! By Jove, and well you might be by this hour of the day!” he exclaimed remorsefully. “Look here, we’ll have supper. There are some chops in the larder. We’ll cook them together—and then you’ll see what a really domesticated husband I shall make.”
He spoke with a new gaiety, as though he felt very sure of her ultimate decision and glad that the strain of the struggle of opposing wills was past.
“Chops! How heavenly! I’m afraid”—apologetically—“it’s very unromantic of me, Geoffrey!”
He laughed and, striking a match, lit the lamp. “Disgustingly so! But there are moments for romance and moments for chops. And this is distinctly the moment for chops. Come along and help me cook ’em.”
He flashed a keen glance at her face as the sudden lamplight dispelled the shadows of the room. But there was nothing in it to contradict the insouciance of her speech. Her cheeks were a little flushed and her eyes very bright, but her smile was quite natural and unforced. Burke reflected that women were queer, unfathomable creatures. They would fight you to the last ditch—and then suddenly surrender, probably liking you in secret all the better for having mastered them.
He had forgotten that he was dealing with a daughter of Jacqueline Mavory. All the actress that was Jean’s mother came out in her now, called up from some hidden fount of inherited knowledge to meet the imperative need of the moment.
No one, watching Jean as she accompanied Burke to the kitchen premises and assisted him in the preparation of their supper, would have imagined that she was acting her part in any other capacity than that of willing playmate. She was wise enough not to exhibit any desire to leave him alone during the process of carrying the requisites for the meal from the kitchen into the living-room. She had noticed the sudden mistrust in his watchful eyes and the way in which he had instantly followed her when, at the commencement of the proceedings, she had unthinkingly started off down the passage from the kitchen, carrying a small tray of table silver in her hand, and thereafter she refrained from giving him the slightest ground for suspicion. Together they cooked the chops, together laid the table, and finally sat down to share the appetising results of their united efforts.
Throughout the little meal Jean preserved an attitude of detached friendliness, laughing at any small joke that cropped up in the course of conversation and responding gaily enough to Burke’s efforts to entertain her. Now and again, as though unconsciously, she would fall into a brief reverie, apparently preoccupied with the choice that lay before her, and at these moments Burke would refrain from distracting her attention, but would watch intently, with those burning eyes of his, the charming face and sensitive mouth touched to a sudden new seriousness that appealed.
By the time the meal had drawn to an end, his earlier suspicions had been lulled into tranquillity, and over the making of the coffee he became once more the big, overgrown schoolboy and jolly comrade of his less tempestuous moments. It almost seemed as though, to please her, to atone in a measure for the mental suffering he had thrust on her, he was endeavouring to keep the vehement lover in the background and show her only that side of himself which would serve to reassure her.
“I rather fancy myself at coffee-making,” he told her, as he dexterously manipulated the little coffee machine. “There!”—pouring out two brimming cups—“taste that, and then tell me if it isn’t the best cup of coffee you ever met.”
Jean sipped it obediently, then made a wry face.
“Ough!” she ejaculated in disgust. “You’ve forgotten the sugar!”
As she had herself slipped the sugar basin out of sight when he was collecting the necessary coffee paraphernalia on to a tray, the oversight was not surprising.
It was a simple little ruse, its very simplicity it’s passport to success. The naturalness of it—Jean’s small, screwed-up face of disgust and the hasty way in which she set her cup down after tasting its contents—might have thrown the most suspicious of mortals momentarily off his guard.
“By Jove, so I have!” Instinctively Burke sprang up to rectify the omission. “I never take it myself, so I forgot all about it. I’ll get you some in a second.”
He was gone, and before he was half-way down the passage leading to the kitchen, Jean, moving silently and swiftly as a shadow, was at the doors of the long French window, her fingers fumbling for the catch.
A draught of cold, mist-laden air rushed into the room, while a slender form stood poised for a brief instant on the threshold, silhouetted against the white curtain of the fog. Then followed a hurried rush of flying footsteps, a flitting shadow cleaving the thick pall of vapour, and a moment later the wreaths of pearly mist came filtering unhindered, into an empty room.
Blindly Jean plunged through the dense mist that hung outside, her feet sinking into the sodden earth as she fled across the wet grass. She had no idea where the gate might be, but sped desperately onwards till she rushed full tilt into the bank of mud and stones which fenced the bungalow against the moor. The sudden impact nearly knocked all the breath out of her body, but she dared not pause. She trusted that his search for the hidden sugar basin might delay Burke long enough to give her a few minutes’ start, but she knew very well that he might chance upon it at any moment, and then, discovering her flight, come in pursuit.
Clawing wildly at the bank with hands and feet, slipping, sliding, bruised by sharp-angled stones and pricked by some unseen bushy growth of gorse, she scrambled over the bank and came sliding down upon her hands and knees into the hedge-trough dug upon its further side. And even as she picked herself up, shaken and gasping for breath, she heard a cry from the bungalow, and then the sound of running steps and Burke’s voice calling her by name.
“Jean! Jean! You little fool!... Come back! Come back!” She heard him pause to listen for her whereabouts. Then he shouted again. “Come back! You’ll kill yourself! Jean! Jean!....”
But she made no answer. Distraught by fear lest he should overtake her, she raced recklessly ahead into the fog, heedless of the fact that she could not see a yard in front of her—even glad of it, knowing that the mist hung like a shielding curtain betwixt her and her pursuer.
The strange silence of the mist-laden atmosphere hemmed her round like the silence of a tomb, broken only by the sucking sound of the oozy turf as it pulled at her feet, clogging her steps. Lance-sharp spikes of gorse stabbed at her ankles as she trod it underfoot, and the permeating moisture in the air soaked swiftly through her thin summer frock till it clung about her like a winding-sheet.
Her breath was coming in sobbing gasps of stress and terror; her heart pounded in her breast; her limbs, impeded by her clinging skirts, felt as though they were weighted down with lead.
Then, all at once, seeming close at hand in the misleading fog which plays odd tricks with sound as well as sight, she heard Burke’s voice, cursing as he ran.
With the instinct of a hunted thing she swerved sharply, stumbled, and lurched forward in a vain effort to regain her balance. Then it seemed as though the ground wore suddenly cut from under her feet, and she fell... down, down through the mist, with a scattering of crumbling earth and rubble, and lay, at last, a crumpled, unconscious heap in the deep-cut track that linked the moor road to the bungalow.