The news of Mrs. Hilyard’s visit to the Cottage soon spread abroad, and the following day, when she was allowed downstairs for the first time, Ann held quite a small reception.
Lady Susan, escorted by Forrester and the ubiquitous Tribes of Israel, was the first to arrive. Afterwards came the rector and Miss Caroline, and even Mrs. Carberry, a somewhat consequential dame whose husband was Master of the Heronsfoot Foxhounds, and who had hitherto held rather aloof from anything approaching intimacy and merely paid a stately first call on the Cottage people, unbent sufficiently to take tea informally with the invalid.
She did not, however, bring her daughter, a girl of Ann’s own age, with her. A shrewd, rather calculating woman, she had fully recognised the possible attraction that might lie in Robin’s steady, grey-green eyes. And since her plans for her daughter’s future most certainly did not include marriage with any one so unimportant—and probably hard up—as a young estate agent, she judged it wiser to run no risks. She extracted from Ann a full, true, and particular account of her bathing adventure, and the information that it had been the owner of Heronsmere who had come to the rescue did not appear to afford her much pleasure.
“He’s not here this afternoon?” She glanced quickly round the party of friends who had gathered in the pretty, low-ceiled room. “But I suppose he has called already to make sure that you’re safe and sound?” There was a kind of acrid sweetness in her tones.
“Oh, no,” replied Ann, sensing the woman’s latent antagonism. “Why should he?”
“Why, indeed?” Mrs. Carberry laughed dryly. “After all, he can’t really feel very grateful to you for procuring him a soaking, can he? A man does so hate to be made a fool of.”
“I really don’t know what he felt,” retorted Ann sweetly, but with heightened colour. “You see, I was unconscious.”
“Just as well for you, perhaps.” Again that unpleasant little dry laugh. “One feels sodraggled, doesn’t one, with one’s hair all lank and wet?”
Miss Caroline’s maidenly mind seemed chiefly oppressed with the immodesty of being rescued from drowning by a member of the other sex.
“How unfortunate it was that Mrs. Hilyard couldn’t reach you!” she said, when she got Ann to herself for a few moments. “You must have felt very uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable?” Ann’s clear eyes met Miss Caroline’s blue bead ones inquiringly.
“Dreadfullyuncomfortable, I should think”—with sympathy. “You—you had nothing on, I suppose”—lowering her voice impressively—“but your bathing-gown?”
“Nothing at all,” answered Ann, maintaining her gravity with difficulty. “One hasn’t usually, you know—to go into the water.”
“But you had to be carriedoutof the water, hadn’t you? You must have found it most embarrassing! Most embarrassing!”
“I don’t think I did,” said Ann.
“Not?”—chidingly. “Oh, Miss Lovell, I can’t believe that! Any nice-minded girl—I’m sure, if it had been me I should have fainted out of pure shame at finding myself in a man’s arms—without apeignoir!”
“Well, that was just it, you see. Ihadfainted. So”—the corners of her mouth trembling in spite of herself—“I wasn’t able to put on mypeignoir.”
“I see.” Miss Caroline looked slightly relieved. “Then you didn’t really know any more about it than one does when having a tooth out under gas? What a good thing! Dear me! What a good thing! And I’m sure Mr. Coventry will try to forget all about it. Any gentleman would. Really, such a—a contretemps makes one feel one ought almost to be fully clothed for bathing, doesn’t it?”
She hopped up like a hungry little bird that has just been fed and flitted across the room to talk to Mrs. Carberry, and Ann wondered dryly if she were confiding in the M.F.H.‘s wife particulars of the kind of costume she deemed suitable to the occasion when drowning.
Brett Forrester took her vacated seat at Ann’s side.
“I’m really very much obliged to Coventry,” he remarked, by way of opening the conversation.
“Are you?” she replied innocently. “What for?”
“Why, for saving you for me, of course. I couldn’t possibly have got there in time myself. And I don’t like losing my belongings”—placidly.
She stared at him.
“If you’re referring to me,” she said aloofly, “I’m not your ‘belongings.’”
His bright blue eyes flashed over her, and for a moment his face seemed to wake up as he responded swiftly:
“But you will be—some day. So”—with a resumption of his former placidity—“as I said, I’m very much obliged to Coventry for saving you for me.”
“Brett, don’t be so ridiculous! It isn’t even funny to make jokes like that,” she answered with some impatience.
He remained quite unperturbed.
“I didn’t intend to be funny. And I’m not joking. I’m perfectly serious.”
“Then you were never more mistaken in your life.”
“Mistaken?”—with childlike inquiry.
“In what you said just now.”
Forrester’s eyes danced wickedly.
“I say such a lot of things,” he complained. “If you can specify which particular thing, now?”
“You know which I mean, perfectly well,” protested Ann indignantly. “That I—that you—what you said just now about ‘belonging’!” She brought it out with a rush.
“I meant it.”
They were alone in the room. The others, conducted by Robin, had all trooped out to inspect what Lady Susan gaily insisted upon referring to as the “Cottage Poultry Farm,” and distantly through the open window came the fluttered cackling of the White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds, resentful of this unaccountable intrusion of strangers into their domain.
Brett laid his hand suddenly on Ann’s arm and thrust his face near hers.
“I meant it,” he repeated, and his voice roughened oddly. “I’ve meant it ever since the day I found you fast asleep in the hammock.”
She drew back a little. The nearness of his arrogant, suddenly passionate face to hers filled her with a sense of panic. His eyes were like blue fire, scorching her.
“Don’t! Don’t be absurd, Brett,” she said hastily. “Why—why”—seeking for some good reason to set against his abruptly declared determination—“you hardly know me! Only just on the surface, that is.”
“I know all I need to, thank you. I know you’re the woman I want to marry. No”—checking with a gesture the impulsive negative with which she was about to respond—“you needn’t bother about refusing me. I’m not asking you to marry me—not at this moment.”
Ann took a fresh hold of herself.
“That’s just as well,” she said, trying to match his coolness with her own. “As I told you—you don’t really know anything about me. I may”—forcing a smile—“have a perfectly horrid character, for all you can tell.”
“You may,” he replied indifferently. “It wouldn’t worry me in the least if you had.” Then, with a strange intensity, he went on: “I shouldn’t let anything that had happened in the past stand between me and the woman I wanted—if I wanted her badly enough.”
Ann stiffened.
“I think you’re talking very funnily,” she observed. “I don’t understand you at all.”
“Don’t you?” Once more that swift, searching glance of the brilliant blue eyes. “In plain English, then, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest to me what the woman I loved had done in the past. She may have sown her little crop of wild oats if she likes. The past is hers. The future would be mine. And I’d take care of that”—grimly.
“This is all very interesting, of course,” said Ann repressively. “But I don’t see how it affects me.”
“Do you really mean that?” He rapped out the question sharply—so sharply that she almost jumped.
“Certainly, I mean it,” she replied with a slight accession of hauteur that sat rather charmingly upon her. She rose quickly, as a sound of voices heralded the return of the rest of the party. “And I’d prefer you not to talk to me any more—like that,” she added.
Forrester’s eyes followed her as she moved back into the room and began chatting pleasantly with her returning guests. There was a look of amusement in them mingled with a certain unqualified admiration.
“Game little devil!” he muttered to himself.
Soon afterwards the M.F.H.‘s wife rose to go, and, graciously offering the Tempests a lift home in her car, swept them away with her. When they had taken their departure Lady Susan declared that Ann was looking tired and that it was high time she and Brett started on their homeward tramp.
“You’ll be feeling quite yourself again by next week, my dear,” she said. “Just in time for Brett’s party on theSphinx,” she added, smiling.
A faint look of hesitation crossed Ann’s face. Brett saw it instantly.
“You promised to come,” he said swiftly, almost as though he dared her to retract her acceptance.
Ann forced herself to meet his glance. She was conscious of an inward qualm of fear and wished to heaven that she had never accepted the invitation to dine on board his yacht. But she was determined not to show the white feather and faced him coolly. After all, in these enlightened days a man couldn’t very well carry you off by force andcompelyou to marry him! Though she reluctantly conceded that if any man in the world were likely to attempt such a thing it would be some primitive, lawless male of the type of Brett Forrester.
“Certainly I promised,” she told him. “And I’ve every intention of keeping my promise.”
Lady Susan glanced quickly from one to the other of them and her dark brows puckered up humorously.
“What have you been doing to her, Brett?” she demanded, as she and her nephew trudged homeward side by side. “Have you quarrelled?”
“Quarrelled? Certainly not. I’ve only”—smiling reminiscently—“been giving her a peep into the future. It will be less of a shock when it comes,” he added matter-of-factly.
If he had wished to establish himself in Ann’s thoughts he had certainly succeeded. Odd snatches of his conversation kept recurring to her mind—his coolly possessive: “I don’t like losing my belongings,” followed by that equally significant: “The future would be mine.” It was outrageous! Apparently Brett Forrester had never got beyond the primitive idea of the cave-man who captured his chosen mate by force of his good right arm and club, and subsequently kept her in order by an elaboration of the same simple methods.
No question of other people’s rights and privileges ever seemed to enter his head. Splendidly unmoral, he had gone through life driving straight ahead for whatever he wanted, without a back thought as to whether it might be right or wrong. That aspect of the matter simply did not enter into his calculations. And because there was still a great deal of the “little boy” in him—that “little boy” who never seems to grow up in some men—women had always found excuses and forgiveness for him, and probably always would.
Even Ann could not feel as offended at his audacity as she would like to have done. There was something disarming in the very fact that he never seemed to expect you to feel offended. And though, on that first afternoon she had been allowed downstairs, he had shaken her nerve somewhat, she was inclined to attribute this to the circumstance that she was still physically a little weak—not quite her usual buoyant self. The impression of sheer dynamic force which he had left with her was very vivid, and might have lingered with her longer, troubling her peace of mind, but for an unexpected happening which served to direct her thoughts into another channel.
It was one afternoon a day or two later, and Ann, was sitting in a sunny corner of the garden, idly dipping into the books which Cara had lent her. The previous day the weather had been cloudy and rather cool, and Maria, the martinet, had sternly vetoed Ann’s modest suggestion that she was now sufficiently recovered to go outdoors again.
“My dear life! And take your death of cold ‘pon top of bein’ near drowned?” Maria had demanded witheringly. “I wish the Almighty had weighed you in a bit more common sense when He set about making you, Miss Ann—and no disrespect intended to Him!”
She flounced away indignantly. But on this balmy summer’s afternoon not even the kindly old despot of the Cottage could find any objections to such a mild form of dissipation, and accordingly Ann was basking contentedly in the hot sun, thankful at last to be released from the devoted but somewhat exacting ministrations of Maria.
She felt deliciously lazy—too lazy even to concentrate on any of the novels which Cara had brought her. She had no particular craving at the moment either to be thrilled by adventures or harrowed by the partings of lovers. But a slim volume of verse held her attention intermittently. It was more suited to her idle humour, she reflected. You could read one of the brief lyrics and let the book slide down on to your knee and enjoy the quivering blue and gold, and soft, murmurous, chirruping sounds of the summer’s day, while your mind played round the idea embodied in the poem.
She turned the pages idly, skimming desultorily through the verses till she came to a brief two-verse lyric which caught and held her interest. It was a very simple little song, but it appealed to the shining optimism and belief which was a fundamental part of her own nature—to that brave, sturdy confidence which had brought her, still buoyant and unspoiled and sweet, through the vicissitudes of a girlhood that might very easily have cradled an embittered woman.
“Beyond the hill there’s a garden,Fashioned of sweetest flowers,Calling to you with its voice of gold,Telling you all that your heart may hold,Beyond the hill there’s a garden fair—My garden of happy hours.“Dream-flowers grow in that garden,Blossom of sun and showers,There, withered hopes may bloom anew,Dreams long forgotten shall all come true,Beyond the hill there’s a garden fair—My garden of happy hours!”
[Footnote: This song, “Dream-Flowers,” has been set to music by Margaret Pedler. Published by Edward Schuberth & Co., 11 East 22nd Street, New York.]
Ann’s thoughts turned towards Eliot Coventry, the man who had told her he was “old enough to have lost all his illusions.” Need one ever be as old as that, she wondered rather wistfully? Surely for each one of us there should be a garden where our dream-flowers grow—dream-flowers which one day we shall pluck and find they have become beautiful realities.
She was reading the verses through for the second time when a shadow seemed to move betwixt her and the sun, darkening the page. She glanced up quickly to find Coventry himself standing beside her.
“I hope I haven’t startled you,” he said. “Maria told me you were in the garden and left me to find my own way here. I think”—smiling—“some cakes were in imminent danger of burning if she took her eye off them, so to speak.”
Ann shook hands and hospitably indicated a garden chair.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said, though a trifle nervously. “Or are you in a hurry?” It had startled her to find the man of whom she had at that moment been thinking close beside her.
“I’m in no hurry,” he said, sitting down. “I came to inquire how you were getting on.”
A spark lit itself in her eyes.
“I wonder you didn’t send your groom instead,” she flashed out quickly. “It would have saved you the trouble.”
Coventry was silent a moment, while a slow flush rose under his sun-tanned skin.
“I think perhaps I deserved that,” he admitted at last. His glance met and held hers. “Will you at any rate try to believe I had a good reason for doing what I did?”
She hesitated.
“But—then why have you come now? What’s happened to the ‘good reason’?”
“I’ve scrapped it,” he said tersely. Then, almost as though he were arguing the matter out with himself, he added: “A man can take risks if he likes—if the game’s worth the candle.”
“And—is this particular game—worth the candle?”
A sudden smile broke up the gravity of those deep, unhappy eyes of his.
“I can’t answer that question—yet.”
Ann was silent. The sense of constraint left her and an odd feeling of contentment took its place. He was no longer cold and distant and aloof—in the mood to dispatch a groom with a message of inquiry! The friend in him was uppermost.
“I think you deserve a thorough good scolding,” he went on presently. “What possessed you to attempt bathing in a rough sea like that? Seriously”—speaking more earnestly. “It was a most foolhardy thing to do.”
Ann’s eyes, goldenly clear in the sunlight, met his frankly.
“I think I went—partly because I was told not to,” she acknowledged, smiling.
His lips twitched in spite of himself.
“Good heavens! What a woman’s reason!”
She nodded.
“I suppose it was. But I never dreamed the waves could be as strong as they were. I felt absolutely helpless to stand up against them, and the ground seemed to be slipping away under my feet all the time, dragging me with it—oh, it was horrible!”—with a shiver of recollection. “And I have to thank you—again—for coming to the rescue!” she resumed more lightly after a moment. “I think I must really be destined to end my days in Davy Jones’s locker—and you keep frustrating the designs of fate!”
“Well, don’t trouble to go out of your way to give me another opportunity,” he advised dryly.
Ann laughed.
“I won’t,” she promised. “Especially as it must go against all your principles to have to take so much trouble over a woman.”
He made no answer, and, fearing she had unwittingly wounded him in some way, she hastened to change the conversation. She had instinctively come to know that beneath his brusque exterior he concealed a curious sensitiveness, and, remembering all that Cara had told her of the man’s history she regretted her insouciant speech as soon as it was spoken.
“Are you going to the dinner-party on board theSphinx?” she asked, grasping hurriedly at the first topic that presented itself.
A quick ejaculation escaped him.
“I’d clean forgotten all about it,” he replied. “No, I didn’t intend going. I must send along a refusal, I suppose.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He looked at her rather blankly. The monosyllabic question, uttered so naturally, seemed to take him aback. “Why? Oh”—with a shrug—“these social gatherings don’t appeal to me. I prefer my own company.”
“It’s very bad for you,” observed Ann.
“What is? My own company?”
“Yes”—simply.
He was silent a moment. Then he asked abruptly:
“Will you be there—on the yacht, I mean?”
She bent her head, conscious of the sudden flush that came and went quickly in her face.
“Yes. Robin and I are going.”
“In that case”—there was an infinitesimal pause and, although she would not look up, she was sensitively aware of the intentness of his gaze—“in that case, I shall change my mind and go, too.”
“You’ll meet plenty of friends there,” replied Ann. “Lady Susan, of course, and the Tempests, and Mrs. Hilyard.”
“Acquaintances only,” he returned shortly.
“Well, at least you’ll admit that Mrs. Hilyard is an ‘auld acquaintance’,” she said, laughing. “And she’s so pretty! I do love people who are nice to look at, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Just the bare monosyllable, rather grudgingly uttered—nothing more.
“Don’t you think she’s very beautiful?” asked Ann in some astonishment at the lack of enthusiasm in his tones.
“Yes. But, after all, that’s only the outside of the cup and platter. It’s the soul inside the shell that matters.”
“Well, I should think Cara has a beautiful soul, too,” replied Ann loyally.
“Probably you know her better than I do,” he said indifferently. Then, as though to change the subject: “What book have you been reading?” He picked it up from her lap, where it lay face downward, open at the lyric which had been occupying her thoughts when he joined her. “Oh, verse?”
“I felt too lazy to begin a novel,” she explained.
His eyes travelled down the brief lines of the little song she had been reading, his face hardening as he read.
“Charmingly optimistic,” he observed ironically, as he closed the book. “I’m afraid, however, that the ‘garden of happy hours’ is a purely imaginary one for most of us.”
“Of course it’s bound to be—if you don’t believe in it. You’ve got tohavedream-flowers first, or naturally they can’t materialise.”
“I suppose all of us have had our dream-flowers at one time or another,” he replied quietly. “And then the frost has come along and scotched them. But I forgot!”—with a short laugh. “You’re one of the people who believe that if you think and believe them hard enough, your dreams will come true, aren’t you? I remember your flinging that bit of philosophy in my face the first time we met—at the Kursaal.”
“Yes,” she acquiesced. “But if you haven’t any, they can’t come true, can they?”
“I don’t imagine that what we hope or think makes any perceptible difference,” he said shortly.
“That’s because you’re a cynic! I think it makesallthe difference. Robin and I are a concrete example of it. We’ve always wanted to live together—we hung on to the thought in our minds all the time circumstances kept us apart. And now, you see, here we are—doing precisely what we wanted to do.”
“I see that you’re a very good advocate,” he replied smiling. And then Robin came out of the house and joined them and the conversation drifted away on to more general lines.
It was late in the afternoon before Coventry finally proposed taking his way homeward—so late that Robin suggested he might as well make it still later and stay to dinner with them. Rather to Ann’s surprise he consented, and, in spite of his assertion, earlier on, that he “preferred his own company,” he seemed thoroughly to enjoy the little home-likedîner à trois. There was something about the cosy room and the gay, good-humoured chaff and laughter of brother and sister which conveyed a sense of welcome—partaking of that truest kind of hospitality which creates no special atmosphere of ceremony for a guest but encompasses him with a frank, informal friendliness.
Perhaps, as Maria moved briskly in and out, changing the plates and dishes, and not forbearing to smile benignly upon her young master and mistress if she chanced to catch the eye of one or other of them, some swift perception of the pleasant, simple homeliness of it all woke Eliot to comparisons, for just as he was leaving he said with characteristic abruptness:
“Thank you both immensely. To-night’s been a great contrast to my usual evenings in that great empty barrack of a dining-room at Heronsmere.”
Unconsciously he spoke out of a great loneliness, and Ann’s heart ached for this supremely hurt and bitter soul which sought security from further hurt behind the iron barriers of a self-imposed reserve and solitude.
Presently the sweet summer dusk, fragrant of herb and flower, enfolded them as they stood together at the Cottage gate. A sudden silence had fallen between them. Ann tried to break it, utter some commonplace, but no words would come. At length he held out his hand, and, as hers slid within it, he spoke with a curiously tender gravity.
“Good-bye,” he said. “Don’t let the cynics spoil the world for you. I hope you’ll find your happy garden—whoever doesn’t.”
“I hope every one will, some day,” she answered rather low. Somehow her voice didn’t seem very manageable. “Even cynics.”
“I’m afraid I’ve missed the way there.” Still holding her hand in his, he stared down at her with an odd, tense expression in his eyes. “Ann, do you think I shall ever find it again?”
His voice vibrated to some unlooked-for emotion, and Ann, hearing and dimly sensing the demand it held, was suddenly afraid, shrinking back into the reserves of her young, unconquered womanhood. She tried to withdraw her hand from his clasp.
Then, from somewhere above her bent head, she heard a low laugh, half tender, half amused.
“You shall tell me to-morrow, little Ann,” he said.
She felt his lips against her palm, and a minute later she was standing alone by the gate with the sound of Eliot’s receding steps coming faintly to her ears through the scented dusk.
The light of a pale young moon filtered in through the chinks of the blind and crept towards the bed where Ann lay tremulously awake, overwhelmed by the sudden revelation—which had come to her—the revelation of her love for Eliot Coventry.
Too unselfconscious to be much given to introspection, she had never asked herself whither the last few months had been leading her. But now, an hour ago, the touch of Eliot’s lips against her hand and the sudden, passionate demand in his voice had torn aside the veil and shown her her own heart.
With a shy, almost childlike sense of wonder, she realised that her love for him was not a thing of new or sudden growth. It had been slumbering deep within her, unrecognised and unacknowledged, ever since that moment when their eyes had first met across the Kursaal terrace at Montricheux. Like a little closed bud it had lain curled in her heart, to open wide when the sun kissed its petals.
And that Eliot loved her in return she had now no doubt. In that brief, poignant moment of understanding, as they stood together in the warm starlit dusk, he had revealed it. She could still feel his lips crushed suddenly against her palm, and hear his shaken voice: “Ann, do you think I shall find the way?”
The way to the garden of happy hours! They would find it together. He had known many bitter hours, and out of them had learned a dogged scepticism—a cynical mistrust of the thing which is called love. And with all the young, uplifting faith that was in her Ann vowed to herself that what one woman had pulled down, destroyed, she would build up and make live again.
She was no longer frightened of love—not even of a love that by the very nature of things might exact far more from her than from most women. She would never be afraid of the big claims which life might make on her. Hitherto, whatever had come her way she had met with a gay courage and confidence, and now that the biggest thing of all had come to her, with its shadow of incalculable demands upon her womanhood, she would go to meet that, too, with the same brave steadfastness.
With the unerring instinct of the mother-woman, she realised how Eliot had fought against his love for her, tried to withstand it, utterly distrustful of her sex, and she smiled with a tenderly amused indulgence as she recalled his sudden withdrawals and brusquenesses. His sending down a groom to inquire how she was—it had hurt her badly at the time to think he cared so little. But now she recognised that it was because he cared so much—so much that he had begun to be afraid. So he had hidden behind his groom!
And with the realisation of how much he cared—mustcare, to have striven so hard to hide and fight it down—she was shaken with a shy, quivering ecstasy, a hesitant sweetness of need and longing that pulsed through every nerve of her. The thought of the morrow almost frightened her. He would come to-morrow—come to tell her all that he had left unsaid, to claim that promise of surrender which a woman both loves and fears to give.
... It was late when at last she slept, and she woke to find the sunlight streaming in through her window, and Maria standing at her bedside, an appetising breakfast-tray in her hands and a world of shrewd suspicion in her twinkling eyes. Last night she had chanced to look out of her kitchen window—which admitted of a slanting glimpse of the Cottage gateway—and had drawn her own deductions accordingly.
“You’ve had a brave sleep, Miss Ann,” she observed, as she deposited the tray she was carrying on a small table beside the bed. “Mr. Coventry stayed late, I reckon?”
Ann flushed a little, smiling. She did not resent the kindly inquisitiveness which gleamed at her out of Maria’s sharp old eyes, but she had no mind to gratify it at the moment.
“Not very late. I think he left by about eleven o’clock,” she answered, with quite a good assumption of indifference. “But I expect being out in the fresh air for the first time for several days made me sleep rather soundly. Why didn’t you call me as usual? I’m not an invalid any longer, you know.”
“I thought if so be you’d a mind to sleep on, ‘twouldn’t do you no harm,” vouchsafed Maria rather grumpily. She was inwardly burning with curiosity, but felt unequal to the task of coping with her young mistress’s facility for eluding tentative inquiries, so she stumped downstairs to the kitchen regions, and left her to consume her breakfast in solitude.
Ann hurried through the meal as quickly as possible. She felt tremendously alive to-day, and the breezy sunshiny morning, the blue sky with white fleecy clouds blowing across it, the wheeling swallows, all seemed curiously in accord with her mood. She rose and, dressing quickly, went about her various household duties with a subconscious desire to get them finished and out of the way as soon as possible, and thus be free for whatever the day might bring forth.
That afternoon she and Robin were due at the rectory for tea. It was what Miss Caroline called her “day,” a bi-monthly occasion when she sat in state—and a villainous shade of mauve satin—to receive visitors. During the winter this sacred rite resolved itself chiefly into an opportunity for tea and feminine gossip in a hot, ill-ventilated room, but in the summer it was rather a pleasant little function. Tea was served in the pretty old rectory garden, and the proceedings developed on the lines of an informal garden-party at which most of the neighbours, of both sexes, showed up. For although Miss Caroline was of too inquiring a mind to be very popular, the rector himself was beloved by men and women alike.
The morning hours seemed to Ann interminably long. Insensibly she was keyed up to a delicate pitch of expectancy, her ear nervously alert for the sound of a familiar footstep on the flagged path. And as the leaden moments crawled by, and the warm, sunshiny silence which enfolded the Cottage remained unbroken, a vague sense of apprehension crept into her heart. The glamour of those moments alone with Eliot at the gate, the pulsating sweetness of the thoughts which, in the night, had sent little quivering rivulets of fire racing through her veins, grew dim and uncertain. Had she misunderstood—mistaken him? The bare idea sent a swift stab of fear through her whole being. But in a few moments her faith in the man she loved returned, and with it her serenity. She was ready to laugh at herself. Probably, she reflected, he had merely been detained by some unexpected piece of business which had cropped up necessitating his attention—and, as a matter of fact, this was precisely what had occurred.
So that when at length she and Robin made their way down a shady path and emerged on to the rectory lawn, dotted about with groups of people, and she perceived Coventry’s tall, lean figure in the distance, leaning rather moodily against a tree, she reproached herself for having doubted him even for an instant. While she was greeting Miss Caroline and the rector her heart seemed to be singing a little pæan of happiness all to itself.
“... so glad to see you.” Ann came suddenly down to earth, and tried to focus her attention on. Miss Caroline’s hospitable gabble. “Such a lot of people here this afternoon, too.... I’m so pleased. And abeautifulday, isn’t it? Even Mr. Coventry has been tempted out of his shell. He’ll be quite a social acquisition to the neighbourhood soon, at this rate.”
She turned to envelop Robin in a similar flood of meaningless prattle, while Ann and Tempest sauntered on together.
“Yes,” said the latter, his eyes resting thoughtfully on Eliot’s distant figure. “It’s a real joy to me to see Coventry here. He’s too much of a hermit. I’m afraid, though,” he admitted with a rueful laugh, “I rather badgered him into coming. And I expect now he is here he’s not exactly blessing me for my persistency! Will you go and be very nice to him, Ann”—he had dropped into the friendly usage of her Christian name, and Ann liked it—“and get me out of hot water?”
“I don’t suppose you’re in it very deeply,” she returned, with some amusement at his air of apprehension.
“Well, I reallymadehim come,” confessed the rector apologetically: “I simply wouldn’t take ‘no’.”
“And you know perfectly well that nobody ever resents what you ‘make’ them do,” said Ann, smiling. “‘The rector have a way with him,’ as Maria remarked the other day.”
Tempest’s mouth curved in a responsive smile
“Did she? Nice woman, your Maria Coombe. But I expect the real truth of the matter is that the rector has a particularly kind and long-suffering flock.”
“A good shepherd makes a good flock, I think,” said Ann softly. And for the hundredth time wondered how so human and lovable a man came to possess a sister of Miss Caroline’s description.
“Ha! There you are, Coventry!” exclaimed Tempest, as they came abreast of the solitary figure. “I’ve just been telling Miss Lovell that I fancied you weren’t altogether blessing me for having lured you out of your lair to this sort of parish pow-wow.”
“Not at all. It’s very good of people like you and Lady Susan to bother about me, seeing that, even when I am dug up, I’m afraid I’m very poor company.”
Eliot smiled rather briefly as he answered, but there was a certain friendly good-humour in his eyes as they rested on the other man’s face. As Ann had remarked, no one ever resented the rector’s kindly strategy.
“Have either of you seen the greenhouses?” demanded Tempest presently. “No? Oh, you must. We’re rather conceited over our show of flowers this year.”
Accordingly they progressed towards the hot-houses, collecting Lady Susan and Cara, and one or two other scattered guests, as they went. Ann felt hemmed in. It began to look rather as though she and Eliot would not get a moment to themselves throughout the afternoon. Then she found him at her side, and something in the quickly amused glance of his eyes, as they swept over the gradually increasing numbers of the party, and then met her own, served to comfort her.
“The world is too much with us,” he murmured.
After that it seemed as though they were companions in distress, linked by a secret, wordless understanding, and Ann walked on with a lighter heart.
Cara was a few paces ahead, flanked by Robin and the local doctor, who were each endeavouring to secure her undivided attention. She was looking very lovely, in an elusive frock of some ephemeral material veiling a delicate prismatic undertone of colour. She always dressed rather wonderfully, every detail perfect. There was a kind of frail, worldly charm about her clothes—the sort of charm you never find in the clothes of a thoroughly good and virtuous woman, as Lady Susan trenchantly observed one day.
Ann herself was acutely conscious of that faintly languorous, mysterious atmosphere of charm with which Mrs. Hilyard seemed to be invested, and she had sometimes wondered how Eliot was able to resist it and treat her with the same cool detachment which he accorded to other people. To her there was something magnetic in Cara’s personality. Perhaps her very silence about herself, and the vague background of an unhappy marriage of which Ann was dimly aware, contributed towards it. She glanced up to see Eliot gazing straight ahead, apparently supremely oblivious of that slender, gracious figure in front, moving lightly betwixt Robin and the stooping, rather clever-looking doctor.
Presently they all trooped into the hot-houses—warm and fragrant with the smell of freshly-watered earth, and a rather fierce-looking gardener paused in his work to exhibit this or that particular plant in which he took a special interest. But the pride of the rectory was the orchid-house, and insensibly everybody gravitated towards it.
Ann and Eliot were strolling along a little behind the rest, and she paused a moment to rifle a pot of heliotrope of a spray of clustered blossom.
“Heavenly stuff!” she exclaimed, sniffing it rapturously. “Smell it!” And she held it out just under Eliot’s nose, obviously expecting him to share her enthusiasm.
Nothing in the world brings back the past so poignantly as remembered scents—neither sight nor sound. A pictured face, the refrain of a song, may chance to stir the pulse of memory, but a remembered fragrance—intangible, unseen—seems to penetrate to the inmost soul itself, ripping asunder the veil which the years between have woven and refashioning the dead past for us as vividly as though it had never died. Even the very atmosphere of the moment rushes back, and thoughts and feelings we had begun to believe inert and negligible reassert themselves with the old irresistible force with which they swayed us years ago.
As Ann light-heartedly proffered her sprig of heliotrope, Eliot’s face whitened beneath its tan, and with a swift, almost violent movement he snatched the spray from her hand and, flinging it on to the ground, set his foot upon it.
She looked up in astonishment, then shrank back with a low exclamation of dismay as she saw his face. It was altered almost out of recognition—the mouth set in a grim straight line of bitterness, the eyes so hard that they looked cruel.
“What is it?” she faltered. “What have I done?”
With an immense effort he seemed to recover himself.
“Nothing,” he returned harshly. “Only reminded me that a man is a double fool who tempts Providence a second time.”
Ann quivered as though he had struck her.
“I—I don’t understand,” she said, her voice hardly; more than a mere thread of sound.
He gave a short laugh.
“Don’t you? Will you understand if I tell you this—that I’m shut out from the ‘happy garden’ by the gates of memory, now and always.”
She made no answer. For the moment she was physically unable to reply. But she understood—oh, yes, she understood quite well. He had repented that short, poignantly sweet moment of last night, repudiated all that it implied. He did not trust her—did not believe in her! And he was telling her in just so many words.
The revulsion of feeling left her stunned and dazed. She had been so entirely happy—had already given herself in spirit in response to his unspoken demand, and now with a single roughly uttered phrase he had closed the gates—those unyielding gates of memory—and thrust her outside.
And then her pride came to her aid. He should never know—never guess—how he had hurt her. With the pluck that is born of race, she smiled at him quite naturally.
“Well, you needn’t have closed your gates so hard on my wee bit of heliotrope! Look, you’ve crushed it completely!” She pointed to where it lay, broken and bruised, between them.
He picked it up, and tossed it aside—a poor little corpse of heliotrope.
“I’ll get you another piece,” he said shortly.
“No, no!” she checked him, laughing. “We shall have that alarming-looking gardener on our track if we steal any more! Mr. Tempest says he doesn’t even allow him to pick his own flowers. Let’s join the others, and escape from the wrath to come.”
It was pluckily done, and when they rejoined the rest of the party few would have suspected from her insouciant manner that she and Eliot Coventry had been engaged upon anything more heart-searching than a botanical discussion.
But that night Ann lay wakeful until the pale streamers of dawn fanned out across the sky, while Eliot Coventry, pacing restlessly to and fro in his silent study, gibed at himself with a savage irony because, though he had successfully steeled himself to meet, unmoved, the woman who had violated all his trust in her, a whiff of the sweet, heady scent of heliotrope had flooded his whole being with a resurgent bitterness so deep and so indomitable that it had utterly submerged his dawning faith.