BLAISE was seated at his study table, regarding somewhat dubiously a letter which lay open in front of him.
It was written in a flowing, foreign hand and expressed with a quaintly stilted, un-English turn of phrase. The heading of the notepaper upon which it was inscribed was that of a hotel in Exeter.
“Dear Mr. Tormarin,” it ran. “You will, without doubt, besurprised to receive a letter from me, since we have metonly once. But I have something of the most great importanceto confide in you, and I therefore beg that you will accordme an interview. When I add to this that the matterapproaches very closely the future of your fiancée, MissPeterson, I do not doubt to myself that you will appoint atime when I may call to see you.”
The letter was signedM. de Varigny.
Blaise had received this thought-provoking epistle two days previously, and had been impressed by an uncomfortable consciousness that it foreboded something unpleasant. He could not imagine in what manner the affairs of Madame de Varigny impinged upon his own, or rather, as she seemed to imply, upon those of his future wife, and this very uncertainty had impelled him to fix the interview the Countess had demanded at as early a moment as possible. Disagreeables were best met and faced without delay. So now he was momentarily awaiting her arrival, still unable to rid himself of the impression that something of an unpleasant nature impended.
He glanced through the open window, facing him. Afterwards, he was always able to recall every little detail of the picture upon which his eyes rested; it was etched upon his mind as ineffaceably as though cut upon steel with a graver’s tool.
Although the mellow sunlight of September flooded the lawns and terraces, that indescribable change which heralds autumn had already begun to manifest itself. Not that any hint of chill as yet edged the balmy atmosphere or tint of russet reddened the gently waving foliage of the trees. It was something less definite—a suggestion of maturity, of completed ripening, conveyed by the deep, rich green of the grass, the strong, woody growth of the trees, the full-blown glory of the roses nodding on their stems.
To the left, in the shade of a stately cedar, Lady Anne and Jean were encamped with their sewing and writing materials at hand, and the rays of sunshine, filtering between the widespread branches above them, woke fugitive gold and silver lights in the down-bent auburn and white-crowned heads. Further away, in the valley below, the brown smudge of a wide-bottomed boat broke the smooth expanse of the lake whence the mingled laughter of Nick and Claire came floating up on the breeze.
It was a peaceful scene, full of intimate happiness and tender promises, and Blaise watched it with contented eyes. The voice of Baines, formal and urbane, roused him from a pleasant reverie.
“Madame de Varigny,” announced that functionary, throwing open the door and standing aside for the visitor to enter.
Blaise rose courteously to greet her, holding out his hand. But the Countess shook her head.
“No, I will not shake hands,” she said abruptly. “When you know why I am come, you will not want to shake hands with me.”
There was something not unattractive about the outspoken refusal to sail under false colours, more especially softened, as it was, by the charm of the faintly foreign accent and intonation.
Madame de Varigny had paused a moment in the middle of the room and was regarding her host with curiously appraising eyes, and as Blaise returned her gaze he was conscious, as once before at the fancy-dress ball at Montavan, of the strange sense of familiarity this woman had for him.
“I am sorry for that,” he said, answering her refusal to shake hands. “Won’t you, at least, sit down?” pulling forward a chair.
“Yes, I will sit.”
She sank into the chair with the quick, graceful motion of the South, and continued to regard Blaise watchfully between the thick fringes of her lashes. Had Jean been present, she would have been struck anew by the expression of implacability which hardened the dark-brown eyes. By that, and by something else as well—a look of unmistakable triumph.
“I have much—much to say to you, Monsieur Tor-ma-rin,” she began at last. “I will commence by telling you a little about myself. I am”—here she looked away for an instant, then shot a swift, penetrating glance at him—“an Italian by birth.”
A brief silence followed this announcement. Blaise was thinking concentratedly. So Madame de Varigny, despite her French name and her French mannerisms, was an Italian! He might have guessed it had the possibility ever definitely presented itself to him—guessed it from those broad, high cheek bones, those liquid, southern-dark eyes, and the coarse, blue-black hair. Yet, except for one fleeting moment at Montavan, the idea had never occurred to him, and it had then been swiftly dissipated by Jean’s explanation that the impressive-looking Cleopatra was the Comtesse de Varigny and her chaperon for the time being.
Italian! Blaise felt more convinced than ever now that Madame de Varigny’s visit portended unpleasant developments. Something, a voice from the past, was about to break stridently on the peaceful present. He braced himself to meet and counter whatever might be coming. Vaguely he foresaw some kind of blackmail, and he thanked Heaven for Jean’s absolute understanding and complete knowledge of the past and of all that appertained to his first unhappy marriage. There would be little foothold here for an attempt at blackmail, however skilfully worked, he reflected grimly.
He therefore responded civilly to Madame de Varigny’s statement, apparently accepting it at its mere face value.
“I am surprised,” he told her. “You have altogether the air of a Parisian.”
The Countess smiled.
“Oh, I had a French grandmother,” she returned carelessly. “Also, I have lived much in Paris.”
“Ah! that explains it,” replied Tormarin, leaning back in his chair as though satisfied. “It’s the influence of environment and heredity, I expect.”
He was fencing carefully, waiting for the woman to show her hand.
“I have also Corsican blood in my veins,” pursued Madame de Varigny. Then, as Tormarin made no answer, she leaned forward and said intently: “Do you know the characteristic of the Corsicans, Monsieur Tor-ma-rin? They never forget—nevaire”—her foreign accent increasing, as usual, with emotion of any kind. “The Corsican always repays.”
“Yes? And you have something to repay? Is that it?”
“Yes. I have something to repay.”
“A revenge, in fact?”
“She shook her head.
“No. I do not call it revenge. It is punishment—the just punishment earned by the man who married Nesta Freyne and brought her in return nothing but misery.” Tormarin rose abruptly.
“What have the affairs of Nesta Freyne to do with you?” he asked sternly. “As you are obviously aware, she was my wife. And I do not propose to discuss private personal matters with an entire stranger.” He moved towards the door. “I think our interview can very well terminate at that. I do not wish to forget that I am your host.”
“You are more than that,” said Madame de Varigny suavely. “You are my brother-in-law.”
“What?” Tormarin swung ’round and faced her.
“Yes.” The suavity was gone now, replaced by a curious deadly precision of utterance, enhanced by the foreign rendering of syllabic values. “I am—or was, until my marriage—Margherita Valdi. I am Nesta’s sister.”
Tormarin regarded her steadily.
“In that case,” he said, “I will hear what you have to say. Though I don’t think,” he added, “that any good can come of raking up the past. It is better—forgotten.”
“Forgotten?” Madame de Varigny seized upon the unlucky word. “Yes—it may be easy enough for you to forget—you who took Nesta’s young, beautiful life and crushed it; you who came like a thief and stole from me the one creature in the whole world whom I loved—mybambina, my little sister. Oh, yes”—her voice rose passionately—“easy enough when there is another woman—a new love—with whom you think to start your life all over again! But I tell you, youshall not!There shall be no new beginning for you—no marriage with this Jean Peterson to whom you are nowfiancé. I forbid it—I——”
Blaise stemmed the torrent of her speech with an authoritative gesture.
“May I ask how the news of my engagement reached you?” he asked, his cool, dispassionate question falling like a hailstone dropped into some molten stream of lava.
“Oh, I have kept watch. I have the means of knowing. There is very little that has happened to you since—since I wrote to you of Nesta’s death”—she stumbled a little over the words, and Blaise, despite his anger, was conscious of a sudden flash of sympathy for her—“very little that I have not known. And this—your engagement, I knew of that when it was barely a week old.”
“I’m really curious to know why my affairs should be of such surpassing interest to you. My engagement, for instance—how did you hear of it?”
“Oh, that was easy”—contemptuously. “There was another man who loved your Mees Peterson—this Monsieur Burke. I used him. I knew he was afraid that you might win her, and I told him that if ever you became engaged he must come and tell me, and I would show him how to make sure that you should never marry her. Oh! That wasvairysimple!”
“I’m afraid you promised him more than you can hope to perform. I grant that you have every reason to dislike me—hate me, if you will. I acknowledge, too, that I was to blame, miserably to blame, for Nesta’s unhappiness—as much in fault as she herself. But there is nothing gained at this late hour by apportioning the blame. We each made bad mistakes—and we have each had to pay the price.”
“Yours has been a very light price—comparatively,” she commented with intense bitterness.
“Do you think so?”
Something in the quiet, still utterance of the brief question brought her glance swiftly, curiously, back to his face. It was as though, behind those four short words, she could feel the intolerable pressure of years of endurance. For a moment she seemed to waver, then, as though she had deliberately pushed the impression aside, she laughed disagreeably.
“Too light to satisfy her sister, at any rate.”
Tormarin froze.
“It is fortunate, then, that my ultimate fate does not lie in your hands,” he observed.
“But that is just where it does lie—in the palm of my hand—there!”
She flung out one shapely hand, palm, upward, and pointed to it with the other.
“And now—see—I close my hand—so!... And this beautiful marriage of which you have dreamed, your marriage with Mees Peterson—it does not take place!”
“Are you mad?” asked Blaise contemptuously, experiencing all an Englishman’s distaste for this display of unforced drama.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said quietly. “I am not mad.”
The air of theatricality seemed to fall suddenly away from her, leaving her a stern and sombre figure, invested with an intrinsic atmosphere of tragedy, filled with one sentiment only—the thirst for vengeance.
“No. I am not mad. I am telling you the truth. You can never marry Jean Peterson, because Nesta—your wife—still lives.”
Tormarin fell back a pace. For one moment he believed the woman had gone genuinely mad—that by dint of long brooding upon how she might most hurt and punish the Englishman whom she had never forgiven for marrying her sister, she had evolved from a half-crazed mind the belief that Nesta still lived and that thus she would be able to prevent his marriage with any other woman.
And then, looking into those seeming soft brown eyes with the granite hardness in their depths, he could see the light of reason burning steadily within them.
Madame de Varigny was quite sane, as sane as he was himself. And if so...
A great fear came upon him—the fear of a man who dimly senses the approach of some appalling danger and knows that it will find him utterly defenceless.
“Do you know what you are saying?” he demanded, his voice roughened and uneven.
“Yes, I know. Nesta is alive,” she repeated simply.
“Alive?”
The word was wrung from him, hardly more than a hoarse whisper of sound. He swung round upon her violently.
“But you yourself wrote and told me of her death?” She nodded placidly.
“Yes. I wrote a lie.”
“But the official information? We had that, too, later, from the French police, confirming your account. You had better be careful about what you are telling me,” he added sternly. “Lies won’t answer, now.”
“The need for lying is past,” she answered with the most absolute candour. “The French police wrote quite truthfully all they knew. They had found the body of a suicide, whom I identified as my sister. To strengthen matters I bribed someone I knew also to identify the dead girl as Nesta. She was a married woman, too, the poor little dead, one! So it was quite simple. And I took Nesta home—home to Château Varigny. I had married by then. But she had heard of my marriage through friends in Italy and wrote to me from there, telling me of her misery with you and begging me to succour her. So I went to Italy and brought her back with me to Varigny. Then I planned that you should believe her dead. It was all very simple,” she repeated complacently.
“But what was your object in all this? Why did you scheme to keep me in ignorance? What was your purpose?”
“Why?” Her voice deepened suddenly, the placid satisfaction with which she had narrated the carrying out of her plan disappearing from it completely. “Why? I did it to punish you—first for stealing my Nesta from me and then because, after you had stolen her, you brought her nothing but misery and heart-break. She was so young—so young! And you, with your hideous temper and cold, formal English ways—you broke her heart, cowed her, crushed her!”
“She was old enough to coquette with every man she met,” came grimly between Tormarin’s teeth. “No husband—English or Italian, least of all Italian—would have endured her conduct.”
“She would not have played with other men if you had loved her. She was all fire. And you—you were like a wet log that will not burn!” She gestured fiercely. “Youneverloved her! It was in a moment of passion—of desire that you married her!... But you were sure, eventually, to meet some other woman and learn what love—real love—is. So I waited. And when I saw you at Montavan with Jean—I knew that the day I had waited for so long would come at last. I knew that your punishment was ready to my hand.”
“Do you mean”—Blaise spoke in curiously measured accents—“do you mean that you deliberately concealed the fact that Nesta still lived so that——”
“So that you should not marry the woman that you loved when the time came! Yes, I planned it all! I kept Nesta safely hidden at Varigny, and I made little changes in her appearance—a woman can, you know”—mockingly—“the colour of her hair, the way of dressing it. Oh, just little changes, so that if by chance she was seen in the street by anyone who had known her as your wife she would not easily be recognised.” Oh once more with that exasperating complacence at her own skill in deception—“I thought of every little detail.”
Tormarin stood listening to her silently, like a man in a trance. His face had grown drawn and haggard, and his eyes burned in their sockets. Once, as she poured out her story of trickery and deception, she heard him mutter dazedly: “Jean... Jean,” and the anguish in his voice might have moved any woman to pity save only one who was utterly and entirely obsessed with the desire for vengeance.
But the intolerable suffering which had suddenly lined his face and rimmed his mouth with tiny beads of sweat was meat and drink to her. She gloried in it. This was her hour of triumph after long years of waiting.
She smiled at him blandly.
“I think I have behaved very well,” she pursued. “I might have waited till you were actually married. But I have no wish to punish the little Jean. She, at least, is ‘on the square,’ as you say—though it would have revenged my Nesta well had I waited. You ruined Nesta’s life; I could have ruined the life of the woman you love. I did think of it. Ah! You would have suffered then, knowing that the Jean you worshipped was neither wife, nor maid, but a——”
“Be silent, woman!”
Tortured beyond bearing, this final taunt, levelled at the woman he held more dear than anything in life, snapped his last thread of self-control.
He flung himself forward and his hands were gripping, gripping at the soft ivory throat from which the taunt had sprung. He felt the woman writhe, struggling to pull his hands from her neck. But it meant nothing to him. He did not think of her any longer as a woman. She was something vile—leprous to the very core of her being—a thing to be destroyed. The thing which had made of all Jean’s promised happiness a black and bitter mockery.
The mad Tormarin rage surged through his veins like a consuming fire. He would break her—break her and utterly destroy her just as one destroyed a deadly snake.
And then across the thunderous roar that beat in his ears came the beloved voice, the voice that would have power to call him out of the depths of hell itself—Jean’s voice.
“Blaise! Blaise! What are you doing? Stop!”
SLOWLY, reluctantly, Tormarin’s hands loosened their clasp of Madame de Varigny’s throat, and with a swift, flexible twist of the body she slipped aside and stood a few paces away from him.
Jean looked from one to the other with horrified eyes. “Madame de Varigny?—Blaise?” she stammered. “What is it?... Why, you—you might have killed her, Blaise!”
He stared at her blankly. His release of the Italian woman had been in mere blind response to Jean’s first imperative appeal that he should desist But the mists of ungovernable anger had hardly yet cleared from his brain; the blood still drummed in his ears like the roar of the sea.
“Blaise”—Jean spoke imploringly. “What were you doing? Tell me———”
With an effort he seemed to recover himself.
“It’s a pity you didn’t let me finish it, Jean,” he said harshly. “Such women are better dead.”
Madame de Varigny was fingering her neck delicately where the pressure of Blaise’s grip had scored red marks on the cream-like flesh. She seemed quite composed. Her smile still held its quiet triumph and her long dark eyes gleamed with the same mockery that had brought her within measureable distance of quick death.
“As Monsieur Tor-ma-rin seems to find a difficulty in explaining—permit me,” she said at last “He was angry with me because I bring him the good news that his wife is still alive, that he need mourn no longer.”
While she spoke her eyes, resting on Blaise’s mask-like face, held an expression of malicious satisfaction.
“His wife... alive?” repeated Jean dazedly. “Blaise, is she mad? Nesta has been dead years—years.” Then, as he made no answer, she continued rapidly, a faint note of fear vibrating in her voice: “Isn’t it so? Blaise—speak! Quickly, tell her—Nesta has been dead some years!”
“He cannot tell me anything about her which I do not know already, Mees Peterson, seeing that she is my sister and has been living with me ever since her husband’s cruelty drove her from his home.”
“Is it true, Blaise?” whispered Jean.
Belief that some substance of terrible truth lay behind the Italian’s coolly uttered statements was beginning to lay hold of her.
“Blaise, Blaise”—her voice rising a little—“say it isn’t true—tell her it isn’t true.”
He looked at her speechlessly, but the measureless pain in his eyes answered her more fully, more convincingly than any words.
“You see?” broke in Madame de Varigny triumphantly. “He cannot deny it! It was I who told him of her death and I who now tell him that she still lives. Listen to me, mademoiselle, and I will recount you how——”
“No!” interrupted Jean proudly. “Whatever there may be for me to hear, I will hear it from Blaise—not from you.”
She turned again to Tormarin.
“Tell me everything, Blaise,” she said simply.
He took her outstretched hands and drew her slowly towards him. No one, reading now the calm sadness, the stern imprint of endurance on his face, could have imagined it was that of the same man who, a few moments earlier, had been swept by such a tempest of uncontrollable anger.
“Jean,” he said very gently and pitifully. “I’m afraid that what Madame de Varigny says may be true. I have no proof that it is not——”
“Nor have you any proof that it is,” broke in Jean swiftly. She swung round on Madame de Varigny. “Where is your proof—where is your proof?”
The Italian smiled.
“Monsieur Tor-ma-rin will find his wife in my car. I bade the chauffeur wait with it at the lodge gate.”
“Do you mean you have brought Nesta—here?” cried Blaise.
“Why not?” replied Madame do Varigny, with a return to the same exasperating complacency with which she had originally described her whole scheme of revenge. “And—here?Surely her husband’s house is the proper place to which to bring his wife?”
“She cannot remain here,” said Blaise with decision.
“No? For the moment that was not my idea. I brought her with me because I thought there could be no more convincing proof.”
Blaise looked at her searchingly. He fancied he detected a false note in her voluble speech, and a new idea presented itself to him. Was the woman simply putting up a gigantic bluff? Or was it really Nesta, his wife, waiting in the car at the lodge gates? It occurred to him as perfectly feasible that it might be merely some woman whose remarkable resemblance to the dead girl had suggested to the Countess’s fertile brain the scheme that she should impersonate her.
His mind seized eagerly upon the idea, bolstering it up with Madame de Varigny’s own admissions. “I made little changes in her appearance,” she had said. “The colour of her hair, the way of dressing it.” Probably she was relying on those “little changes,” and on the blurred recollection resulting from the length of time which had elapsed since Nesta’s death, to aid her in her plan of introducing as his wife a woman who closely resembled her. He felt morally sure of it, and the light of hope suddenly shone bravely.
“I believe you are deceiving me,” he said quietly. “Lying—as you have lied all through the piece. I’ll come and see this ‘wife’ you have waiting in the car for me”—grimly. He turned to Jean. “Keep up your courage, sweetheart” he said in a low voice full of infinite solicitude. “I believe the whole thing is a put-up job to separate us.”
Jean smiled at him radiantly. She felt all at once very confident. In a few minutes this nightmarish story of a Nesta still alive and claiming her rights as Blaise’s wife would be proved a lie.
Tormarin crossed the room and opened the door.
“Now, Madame de Varigny—will you come with me?”
The woman hesitated a moment.
“Come,” insisted Blaise firmly. “Or—are you afraid, after all, to bring me face to face with my wife?”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I am not afraid. It is only that I am so sorry—so sorry for the little Jean.”
Her eyes, soft and dark and liquid as the eyes of a deer, sought Jean’s beseechingly.
“I am so sorry,” she repeated. And passed, slowly,—almost unwillingly, it seemed, out of the room, followed by Tormarin.
Jean raised her head from Blaise’s shoulder and pushed back her hair, damp with perspiration, from her forehead. It seemed to her as though she had been down, down into some awful, limitless abyss of darkness from which she was now feebly struggling back to a painful consciousness of material things. A great sea had surged over her head, blotting out everything, and remained poised above her like a huge black arch, imprisoning her in the vast, deserted chaos in which she found herself wandering. Then—after a long time, it seemed—it had surged away again and she could distinguish Blaise’s face bent above her.
“Then—then it’s true?” she said stupidly. Her voice sounded tiny, even to herself—a mere thread of sound.
Blaise made no answer. He only held her a little closer in his arms. She supposed he hadn’t heard that thin little thread of voice. She must try again.
“Is it true, Blaise? Is Nesta——” But somehow the last word wouldn’t come.
She felt his arm jerk against her side.
“Yes,” he said baldly. “It’s true. Nesta is alive. I’ve seen her.”
Jean said nothing. She knew it—had known it all the time the arched wall of sea had kept her down in that awful black waste where there had been neither warmth nor sunshine but only bitter, freezing cold and lightless space. She clung a little closer to Blaise, like a frightened, exhausted child.
“Heart’s beloved... littledearestJean...” She heard the wrung murmur of his voice above her head. Then suddenly, his arms tightening round her: “My soul!”
The sunlight still slanted in through the windows, mellow and golden. A gay shout of laughter came up from the boat on the lake. The clock on the chimney-piece struck the hour—twelve slow, maddening strokes.
Jean stared at its blank, foolish face. The hands had pointed to half-past eleven when the door of the room had closed behind Blaise and Madame de Varigny. It had taken just a brief half-hour to smash up her whole world—to rob her of everything that mattered.
“I must think—I must think,” she muttered.
“Belovedest”—Blaise’s voice was wonderfully tender—not with the passionate tenderness of a lover but with a solicitude that was almost maternal. “Belovedest, don’t try to think now. Try to rest a little, won’t you?”
And at that Jean came right back to an understanding of all that had happened, as the needle of a compass swings back to the frozen north.
“Rest?” she said. “Rest?Do you realise that I shall have all the remainder of life to—rest in? There’ll he nothing else to do.”
She released herself very gently from Tormarin’s arms and, crossing the room to the window, stood looking out.
“How funny!” she said in a rather high-pitched, uncertain voice. “It all looks just the same—although everything in the world is changed.”
He came and stood beside her.
“No,” he said quietly. “Nothing is changed, dear. Our love is the same as it was before. Always remember that.”
“But we can’t every marry now.”
“No. We can’t marry—now. You’ll never have the Tormarin temper to bear with, after all!”
She laid her hand swiftly across his lips.
“Oh, it was dreadful!” she said, recalling the terrible scene which she had interrupted. “It—it hardly seemed—you, Blaise.”
“For the moment it wasn’t. It was the Tormarin devil—the curse of every generation. But I think that Varigny woman could turn a saint into a devil if she tried! She said something about you—and I couldn’t stand it.”
“Was that it? Then I suppose I shall have to forgive you”—with a pale little attempt at a smile.
But the half-hearted smile faded again almost instantly.
“Oh, Blaise, what would your temper matter if we could still be together?” she cried passionately. “Nothing in the wide world would matter then!”
Presently she spoke again.
“But it’s worse for you than for me. I wish it were more equal.”
“How worse for me? I don’t understand. Unless”—with a brief, sad smile—“you love me less?”
“Ah, you know I don’t mean that! But I’ve only the separation to face. I’m not tied to somebody I don’t love. You’ve got Nesta to consider.”
“Nesta?” He gave a short, grim laugh. “Nesta can go back to where she came from.”
There was a long silence. At last Jean broke it.
“Blaise, you can’t do that—you can’t send her away again,” she said in quick, low tones. “She’s your wife.”
“My wife! She seems to have been oblivious of the fact—and to have wished me to be equally oblivious of it—for the last few years.”
“Yes, of course she’s been wrong, wickedly wrong. But that doesn’t alter the fact that she’s your responsibility, Blaise. You must take her back.”
“Take her back?”—violently. “I’ll be shot if I do! She’s chosen to live her life without me for the last few years—she can continue to do so.”
Jean laid her hand on his arm. She was smiling wistfully. “Dear, you’ll have to take her back,” she persisted gently. “Don’t you see—she’s not wholly to blame? You’ve admitted that. You’ve blamed yourself in a large measure for her running away. It’s up to you now to put things straight, to—to give her the chance she didn’t have before.”
“You’re discounting these last few years,” he returned gravely. “These years in which she has lived a lie, allowing me to believe her dead—-cheating and deceiving me as no man was ever cheated before. She’s cheated me out of my happiness”—heavily—“takenyoufrom me!”
“Yes, I know.” Jean’s voice quivered, but she steadied it again. “But even in that, she was not solely to blame. You’ve told me how—how weak she is and easily led astray. And she’s very young. What chance would Nesta have of asserting her will against her sister’s, even had she wished to return to you? She ran away from Staple in a fit of temper and because you had frightened her. After that—you can see for yourself—Madame de Varigny is responsible for everything that has happened since.”
Tormarin remained silent. The quiet justice of Jean’s summing up of the situation struck at him hard.
She waited a moment, then added quietly:
“You must take her back, Blaise.”
He wheeled round on her violently.
“And you?” he exclaimed. “You? Did you ever love me, Jean, that you can talk so coolly about turning me over to another woman?”
She whitened at the bitter accusation in his tones, but she did not flinch.
“It’s justbecauseI love you, Blaise, that I want you to do this thing—to do the only thing that is worthy of you. Oh, my dear, my dear”—her hands went out to him in sudden, helpless pleading—“do you think it’seasyfor me to ask it?” The desolate cry pierced him. He caught her in his arms, kissing her fiercely, adoringly.
“Sweetheart!... Forgive me! I’m half mad, I think. Beloved, say that you forgive me!”
She leaned against him, glad to feel the straining clasp of his arms about her—to rest once more in her place against his heart.
“Dearest of all,” she said tremulously, “there is no question of forgiveness between us two. There never will be. We’re just—both of us—struggling in the dark, and there’s only duty”—brokenly—“only duty to hold to.”
They stood together in silence, comforted just a little by the mere human touch of each other in this communion of sorrow which had so suddenly come upon them, yet knowing in their hearts that this was the very comfort that must for ever be denied them in the lonely future.
At last Jean raised her head from its resting-place and her eyes searched Blaise’s face, asking the question she could no longer bring herself to put in words. He met their gaze. “Jean, is it your wish I do this thing—take Nesta back?” He felt a shudder run through her frame. Twice she tried ineffectually to answer. At last she forced her dry lips to utter an affirmative.
“So be it.”
His answer sounded in her ears like the knell to the whole meaning of life. The future was settled. Henceforth their lives must lie apart.
“So be it,” said Blaise. “She shall come back and take her place again at Staple.”
Jean clung to him a little closer.
“Blaise, beloved—I know the harder part will be yours. But mine won’t be easy, dear. I shall go to Charnwood to be with Claire at once—to-morrow—and it won’t be easy, when I see in an evening the lights twinkle up at Staple, to know that you two are within, shut in from the world together, while I’m outside—always outside your life and your love.”
“You’ll never be outside my love,” he said swiftly. “That’s yours, now and forever. And no other woman shall rob you of one jot or tittle of it, were she my wife twenty times over. I will bring Nesta back to Staple, and she shall bear my name and live as my wife in the eyes of the world. But my love—that is yours, utterly and entirely. Yours and no other’s.”
She lifted her face to his, and their lips met in a kiss that was the seal of love and all love’s faithfulness.
“So is mine yours,” she said. “How and forever, in this world and the next. Oh, Blaise—beloved!”—she clung to him in a passion of love and anguish and straining belief—“Some day, surely, in that other world, God will give us freedom to take our happiness!”
TWO months had elapsed since Fate’s dividing sword had fallen, forever separating Jean from the man she loved, and the subsequent march of events, with the many changes involved and the bitter loneliness of soul entailed, had made the two months seem to her more like two years.
She had left Staple for Charnwood on the day following that of Madame de Varigny’s visit. It was no longer possible for her to remain under the same roof with Blaise, where the enforced strain of meeting each other daily, and of endeavouring to behave as though nothing more than mere commonplace friendship linked them together, would have been too great for either of them to endure even for the few remaining days which still intervened before the date originally planned for her departure.
Lady Anne, with her usual sympathetic insight, had made no effort to dissuade her, reluctant though she had been to part with her. For herself, the fact that Nesta was alive had come upon her in the light of an almost overwhelming blow. She had never liked the girl, whereas she had grown to look upon Jean as a beloved daughter, and no one had rejoiced more sincerely than his mother when Blaise had confided to her the news of his engagement. At last she would see that grey page in his life turned down for ever and the beginning of a newer, fairer page, illuminated with happiness! And instead, like a tide that has receded far out and then rushes in again with redoubled energy, the whole misery and sorrow of the past had returned upon him, a thousand times accentuated by reason of his love for Jean.
It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that Lady Anne, together with Nick, quitted Staple and established herself for the second time at the Dower House, retiring thither in favour of Nesta who was now installed once more at the Manor. And the thought of how gladly she would have effected the same change, had it been Jean whom Blaise was bringing home as his bride, added but a keener pang to her sorrow.
She watched with anxious eyes the progress of events at Staple. At the commencement of the new régime Nesta had appeared genuinely repentant and ashamed of her conduct in the past, and there was something disarming in the little, half-apologetic air with which she had at first reassumed her position of châtelaine of Staple, deferring eagerly to Blaise on every point and trying her utmost to please him and conform to his wishes. It held something of the appeal of a forgiven child who tries to atone for former naughtiness by an almost alarming access of virtue.
She accepted with meek docility Blaise’s decision regarding the purely formal relations upon which their married life was henceforth to be based, apparently humbly thankful to be reinstated as his wife on any terms whatsoever that he chose to dictate..
“I know I have been bad—bad,” she declared, “to run away and leave you like that. I can’t”—forlornly—“hope for you to love me again——”
And Tormarin had replied with unmistakable decision:
“No, you can’t hope for that. And I’m glad you understand and recognise the fact. Still, we can try to be good friends, Nesta, at least.”
But this tranquil state of things only lasted for a comparatively short time. Very soon, as the novelty and satisfaction of her reinstatement began to wear off, Nesta became more self-assured and, apparently, considerably less frequently visited by spasms of repentance and remorse.
Her butterfly nature could retain no very deep impression for any length of time, and gradually the characteristics of the old Nesta—the pettish, self-willed, pleasure-loving woman of former times—began to reassert themselves.
Blaise tried hard to exercise forbearance with her and to treat her, at least with justice and with a certain meed of kindliness. But she did not second his efforts. Instead, she became more exigeant and difficult as time passed on.
She was no longer satisfied by the fact that she was once more installed as the mistress of Staple. She demanded a husband who would surround her with all the little observances that only love itself can dictate, whom she could alternately scold and cajole as the fancy took her, but who would always come back to her, after a tiff, ready anew to play the adoring lover.
She found Blaise’s cool, measured, elder-brotherly kindness unendurable, and she exhausted herself beating continually against the rock of his determination, without producing any effect other than to make his manner even more austere, less friendly than it had been before.
Then when she recognised her total inability to move him to any sort of responsive emotion, and that her beauty—which was undeniable—made no more impression upon him than if he had been blind, she resorted to the old, painfully, familiar weapons of tears and fits of temper, in the course of which she would upbraid him bitterly, pouring forth streams of reproaches which more often than not culminated in an attack of hysterics.
All of which Blaise bore with a curious, stoical self-control. It seemed as though the Tormarin temper had been exorcised, as if that fierce storm of anger provoked by Madame de Varigny’s taunts, and which had so nearly resulted in a tragedy, had shocked Blaise into realisation of the terrible latent possibilities of the family failing and the absolute necessity for an iron self-government.
For weeks he supported Nesta’s petty gibes and ebullitions of temper with illimitable patience, and it was only when, trading on his unaccustomed forbearance, she ventured too far, that she was brought very suddenly to understand that there was a limit beyond which she might not go.
“I know why you no longer love me,” she told him at last, on an occasion when she had been vainly endeavouring, by every feminine blandishment and wile of which she was mistress, to evoke from him some sign of an awakeningtendresse. “I know!”
She nodded her dark head significantly, while pin-points of jealous anger flickered in her long, narrow eyes, black as midnight.
“Then, if you know,” replied Tormarin patiently, “it is surely most foolish of you to keep asking why I do not. Why can’t you content yourself with things as they are, Nesta? We can only try to make the best of a bad job. You don’t help me much in the matter.”
“I don’t want to help you,” she retorted viciously. “I want you to love me. And you won’t, because of that washed-out-looking, carroty-haired woman who is living with Lady Latimer. And she’s in love with you, too!... No! Iwon’tbe quiet! Oh!”—her voice rising hysterically—“you think I don’t notice things, but I do. I do, I tell you!”
She sprang up from the couch, where she had been lolling indolently amid a heap of cushions, and crossed the room to his side.
“Do you hear me?” she cried violently, shaking him by the arm. “You think I’m a blind fool! But I’m not! I’m not! I’ve seen that Peterson woman looking at you like a cat looking through the larder window——”
Suddenly she felt Blaise’s hand clapped against her lips, stemming the torrent of vulgar recrimination and abuse that poured from them. He held it there quite gently, so as not to hurt her, but immovably, and she had perforce to hear what he wished to say in rebellious silence.
“Listen to me,” he said gently. “It is quite true what you say—that I love Jean Peterson and that she loves me. But we have given up our love, and with it our hope of happiness in this world, for you. In return, you will give up something for us. You will give up the infinite pleasure you appear to derive from vilifying and belittling a woman who is as much above you as the heavens are above the earth, whose conception of love is as fine and pure as yours is mean and commonplace and jealous. You will never again speak to Miss Peterson with anything but respect, nor will you ever again refer to the love which you now know for a fact exists between us. Your lips soil such love as ours. If you do, if you disobey my commands in either of these respects, you go out of my house that same day.And you don’t return.”
He released her and had the satisfaction, for once, of perceiving that she believed he meant what he said. Presumably she came to the conclusion that, in the circumstances, discretion was the better part of valour, for she made no attempt to challenge his determination in the matter.
At the same time, unknown to him, she compelled Jean to pay for the silence enforced upon her at home. With a species of venom, absurdly childish in its manifestation, she essayed to excite Jean’s envy by constantly enlarging to her upon the subject of Blaise’s perfections as a husband, drawing entirely imaginary descriptions of the attention he paid her and of his constant solicitude for her welfare, and vaunting her happiness at being his wife.
“I am so proud to have won so fine and splendid a husband,” she would declare fervently. “Would you not feel the same, Miss Peterson, if you were me?”
And Jean would make answer, outwardly unmoved:
“Indeed I should. You ought to be a happy woman, Mrs. Tormarin.”
The quiet composure which Jean invariably opposed to these knat-like attacks annoyed Nesta intensely. Endowed with all the petty jealousy of a small nature, she herself, had the situation been reversed, would have found this pinprick kind of warfare insupportable, and it made her furious that her best thought-out and most spiteful efforts failed to goad Jean into any expression of either anger or distress. The “cold Englishwoman’s” armour of indifference and reserve seemed impervious to no matter what poison-tipped dart she loosed against her.
Nesta felt that, as the woman in possession, she was missing half the satisfaction in life by reason of her inability to triumph openly over the other woman—the woman without the gate. Finally, at the end of her resources of innuendo and allusion, she tried the effect of open warfare.
She had driven over to Charnwood to call and, as Claire was away, spending the afternoon with friends, Jean had perforce to entertain her undesired visitor alone. It was just as she was preparing to take her departure that Nesta launched her attack.
“You look so ill, Miss Peterson,” she remarked commiseratingly. “So pale and worn! It does not suit you, I am sure, for of course you must have been very pretty at one time for my husband to have wished to marry you.”
Jean stared at her without reply. The outrageous speech almost took her breath away, by its sheer, impudent bravado.
“There!” Nesta feigned dismay. “Now I have offended you! And I so want us to be good friends. But of course”—quickly—“it is difficult for you to feel friendly towards the wife of Blaise. I can understand that. I suppose”—her head a little tilted to one side like that of an enquiring robin and her eyes fastened on the other’s white face with a merciless, gimlet gaze that filled Jean with helpless rage—“I suppose you loved himverymuch?”
Jean felt the blood rush into her cheeks and caught a responsive gleam of satisfaction in the other’s half-closed eyes.
“I think that is hardly a subject which can be discussed between us,” she said, with a supreme effort at self-control.
And then, to her unbounded thankfulness, Tucker threw open the door and announced that Mrs. Tormarin’s car was waiting.
This open declaration of hostility on Nesta’s part gave Jean food for reflection. Briefly she recounted the incident to Claire, adding:
“It means I must not go to Staple again. If she intends to adopt that attitude, it would make a situation which is already quite difficult enough hopelessly impossible.”
The two girls were pacing up and down the terrace at Charnwood together when Jean indicated the consequences of Nesta’s visit, and Claire, sensing the pain in her friend’s voice, pressed her arm sympathetically. But she said nothing. What was there to say? Within herself, she felt that Jean’s determination to eschew the Tormarin menage altogether was the only wise one.
“Poor Blaise!” pursued Jean, a slight tremor in her voice. “He has the hardest part to bear. She must make life hideously difficult for him.”
Claire nodded.
“Yes. He is looking very fagged and strained. Horrid little beast!” she added with unusual vehemence. “Why on earth couldn’t she havestayeddead?”
Jean laughed joylessly.
“Why indeed?—Only she never really died, you see.”
“Jean”—Claire’s hand crept further along the other’s arm and the kind little fingers sought and clasped Jean’s own—“if you knew how miserable I am about you! It makes me feel wicked—disgustingly selfish and wicked!—to be so happy myself when you have so much to bear.”
There were tears in her voice, and Jean squeezed her hand reassuringly.
“My dear,” she said earnestly, “you had your black years if anyone ever had! If a woman ever deserved her happiness at last, you do.... I suppose we all get our share of trouble in this world,” she went on thoughtfully. “I remember the first time I ever met Blaise—that day at Montavan, you know—he said that Destiny, with her snuffers, came to most of us sooner or later and snuffed out our light of happiness. Well”—rather drearily—“I suppose it’s my turn now and she’s come to me. That’s all.”
A little wind blew up from the valley, chill and complaining. Autumn had the world at her mercy now, and a grey mist was rising from the sodden fields, soaked by the continual rains of the preceding fortnight.
Claire shivered.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “It’s growing too cold to stay out any longer. Besides, it’s depressing. Grey skies, bare branches—Oh! How I detest the autumn!” They turned and retraced their steps to the house. As they entered by way of the front door, they caught a glimpse of the postman making his way briskly down the drive. A solitary letter lay upon the hall table, addressed to Jean in a rather flourishy copper-plate style of writing.
“A bill, I suppose!” she commented indifferently.
She picked it up carelessly, carrying it unopened to her room. Nor did she open it immediately upon arriving there, stopping first to remove her hat and coat.
When at last she slit the envelope she found that it was no tradesman’s bill, as she had imagined, but a letter from Glyn Peterson’s family solicitor, announcing, in the stiff phraseology without which no lawyer seems able to express himself, the sudden death of her father.
Jean sat down abruptly, her legs seeming all at once to give way under her. She could not grasp it—could not realise that the witty, charming personality which, after all, in spite of Peterson’s lack of the more conventional paternal attributes, had meant a great deal to her, had been swept without warning out of her life for ever.
Glyn Peterson had, it seemed, died very suddenly, in a remote corner of Africa whither his restless wanderings had led him, and it had been some weeks before the news of his death had reached his lawyer, who had immediately communicated it to Jean.
By his will, everything he possessed, except for a certain sum set aside to cover a few legacies to old and valued servants, was left to Jean, and with the quaint whimsicality which was characteristic of him he had particularly mentioned: “Beirnfels, the House of Dreams-Come-True.”
The little phrase, with its suggestion of joyous consummation, stabbed her with a sharp thrill of pain. Greeting her, as it did, at the moment when all her hopes of happiness were lying trampled beneath the iron heel of hostile destiny, it seemed to add a last touch of irony to the bitterness of the burden she had to bear.
The House of Dreams-Come-True! In the solicitude and silence of her room Jean laughed out loud at the mockery of it! But her breath caught in her throat, sobbingly, and then quite suddenly the merciful, healing tears began to fall, and, laying her head down on her arms, she cried unrestrainedly.