The Moon Out of Reach (Ainslee's serial)/Part 2
THE STORY SO FAR
Penelope Craig was always conscious of a sense of foreboding when she thought of Nan Davenant with whom she lived in London and whose brilliant future as a pianist was of more absorbing interest to her than her own career as a singer—for Nan was a gifted musician, She was afraid, too, of the effect of a recent unfortunate love affair on a girl of Nan's temperament. Maryon Rooke, a rising young artist, had won Nan's love, but while he cared for her, he frankly admitted that art came first with him—and love a poor second, So he left London to go abroad and Nan felt that her moon was, indeed, out of reach, Several weeks after his departure Nan started to Exeter alone to play at a charity concert. On the way to the station her taxicab broke down and, in her anxiety not to miss the train, Nan hailed another cab whose solitary passenger was a man. During the drive to the station she learned that her good Samaritan was Peter Mallory. Mallory left Nan after securing a seat for her, but because of an accident her train reached St. David's station an hour late and Nan missed her connection for Abbencombe. She was wondering helplessly what to do when Peter Mallory again appeared. He had traveled on the same train, in the smoker, and was bound for Abbencombe also. He hired a car and drove Nan to her destination. Back in London, later in the week, Nan met Mallory at the Seymours' dinner party. From Kitty Seymour she learned that Peter had written the most-talked-of book of the year—and that he was married to a woman who had almost wrecked his life, they had separated and his wife was living in India. Nan was conscious of a curious sense of loss at the discovery of Peter's marriage. And everything seemed to chant at her tantalizingly: “Peter's married!—Peter's married!”
CHAPTER V.
IN due course Mallory paid his call upon the occupants of the flat, and entertained both girls immensely by the utter lack of self-consciousness with which he assisted in the preparations for tea—toasting scones and coaxing the kettle to boil as naturally as they themselves would have done. He had none of the average Englishman's mauvaise honte.
This first visit was soon followed by others, and then by a foursome dinner at the Carlton, Ralph Fenton being invited to complete the party. Before long, Peter was on a pleasant footing of intimacy with the two girls at the flat, though beyond this he did not seek to progress.
The explanation was simple enough. Primarily, he was always aware of the cord which shackled him to a restless, butterfly woman who played at life out in India, and secondly, although he was undoubtedly attracted by Nan, he was not the type of man to fall headlong in love. He was too fastidious, too critical, altogether too much master of himself. Few women caused him a single quickened heartbeat. But it is to such men as this that, when at last love grips them, it comes as an irresistible force to be reckoned with throughout the remainder of their lives.
So it came about that, as the weeks grew into months, Mallory perceived dimly and with a quaint resignation to the inevitable that Nan and Love were coming to him hand in hand.
His first thought had been to seek safety in flight; then that gently humorous philosophy with which he habitually looked life in the face asserted itself, and with a shrug and a muttered “Kismet,” he remained.
Outwardly, all that Peter permitted himself was to give her an unfailing friendship, to surround her with an atmosphere of homage and protection and adapt himself responsively to her varying moods. This he did untiringly, demanding nothing in return, and he alone knew the bitter effort it cost him.
Gradually Nan began to lean upon him, finding, in the restfulness of such a friendship, the healing of which she was in need. She worked at her music with suddenly renewed enthusiasm, secure in the knowledge that Peter was always at hand to help and criticize with kindly, unerring judgment. She ceased to rail at fate and almost learned to bring a little philosophy, the happy philosophy of laughter, to bear upon the ills of life.
Consciously she thought of him only as Peter—Peter, her good pal—and so long as the pleasant, even course of their friendship remained uninterrupted, she was never likely to realize that something bigger and more enduring than mere comradeship lay at the back of it. She, too, like Mallory, reassured herself with the fact of his marriage, though the wife she had never seen and of whom Peter never spoke had inevitably receded in her mind into a somewhat vague and nebulous personality.
July in London, hot, dusty, and oppressive. Even the breezy altitude of the top-floor apartment could not save its occupants from the intense heat which seemed to be wafted up from the baking streets below. The flat was “at home” to-day, the festive occasion indicated by the quantities of flowers which adorned it.
Penelope trailed somewhat lethargically hither and thither, adding last touches to the small, green tables arranged in readiness for bridge, and sighing at the oppressive heat of the afternoon. First she opened the windows to let in the air, then closed them to shut out the heat, only to fling them open once again, exclaiming impatiently:
“Phew! I really don't know which is the cooler!”
“Neither!” responded a gay voice from the doorway. “The bottomless pit would probably be refreshingly drafty in comparison with town just now.”
Penelope whirled round to find Kitty, looking perfectly cool and composed, standing on the threshold.
“How do you manage it?” she said admiringly. “Even in this sweltering heat, when the rest of us look as though we had run in the wash, you give the impression of having just stepped out of a refrigerated bandbox.”
“Appearances are as deceitful as usual, then,” replied Kitty, sinking down into an armchair and unfurling a small fan. “I'm simply melted! Am I the first arrival?” she continued. “Where's Nan?”
“She and Peter are decorating the tea table, smilax and things, you know.” Penelope waved an explanatory hand.
“I think my plan was a good one, don't you? Peter's been an excellent antidote to Maryon Rooke,” Kitty observed complacently.
“I'm not so sure,” returned Penelope, with characteristic caution. “I think a married man, especially an unmarried married man like Peter, is rather a dangerous antidote.”
“Nonsense! They both know he's married! And they've both got normal common sense.”
“But,” objected Penelope, suddenly and unexpectedly, “love has nothing whatever to do with common sense.”
Kitty gazed at her in frank amazement.
“Penelope! What's come over you? We've always regarded you as the severely practical member of the community and here you are talking rank heresy!”
Penelope laughed a little, and a faint flush stole up into her cheeks.
“I'm not unobservant, remember,” she returned lightly, her eyes avoiding Kitty's. “And my observations have led me to the conclusion that love and common sense are distinctly antipathetic.”
“But you don't think she really cares for him, do you?” Kitty asked sharply.
The other reflected a moment before replying. Finally she said:
“If she does, it is quite unconsciously. Consciously, I feel almost sure that Maryon Rooke still occupies her thoughts.”
“I wonder where she finds the great attraction in him?' queried Kitty thoughtfully.
“Simply this: That he was the first and, so far, the only man who has ever appealed to her at all. And as he has treated her rather badly, he's succeeded in fixing himself in her mind.”
“Well, I've never understood the affair at all. Rooke was in love, if ever a man was.”
“Yes,” agreed Penelope slowly. “But I think Maryon Rooke is what I should describe as—a born bachelor. And I believe that Nan has such a tremendous fascination for him that he simply can't resist her. In fact, I think if the question of finance didn't enter into the matter, he'd be ready to shoulder the matrimonial yoke. But I don't see Maryon Rooke settling down to matrimony on a limited income! And, of course, Nan's own income ceases if she marries.”
“But Rooke will be making big money before very long,” protested Kitty. “He'll be able to settle a decent income on his wife in a few years.”
“Very possibly. He'll be one of the most fashionable portrait painters of the day. But until that day comes, Maryon isn't going to tie himself up with a woman whose income ceases when she marries. Besides, an unattached bachelor is considerably more in demand as a painter of society women's portraits than a benedict,” she concluded.
“So Nan is to be sacrificed?” threw out Kitty.
“It seems like it. And as long as Maryon Rooke occupies the foreground in her mind, no other man will be to her anything but a friend.”
“Then I wish somebody, or something, would sweep him out of her mind!”
“Well, he's away now, at any rate,” said Penelope soothingly. “So let's be thankful for small mercies.”
As she spoke, the maid, an improvement on their original “Adagio,” entered with a telegram on a salver which she offered to Penelope. The latter slit open the envelope without glancing at the address and uttered a sharp exclamation of dismay as she read the brief communication it contained.
“What is it, Penny?” Kitty asked quickly. “Not bad news?”
“It's for Nan,” returned Penelope shortly. “You can read it.”
Kitty perused it in silence.
- Am in town. Shall call this afternoon on chance of finding you in. Rooke.
“The very last person we wanted to blow in here just now,” commented Kitty, as she returned the wire.
Penelope slipped it back into its envelope and replaced it on the salver.
“Take it to Miss Davenant,” she told the maid quietly. “And explain that you brought it to me by mistake.”
CHAPTER VI.
Meanwhile, in the next room, Peter and Nan, having completed their scheme of decoration with “smilax and things,” were resting from their labors and smoking sociably together.
Nan cast a reflective eye upon the table.
“You don't think it looks too much like shrubbery where you have to hunt for the cakes, do you?” she suggested.
“Certainly I don't,” replied Peter promptly. “If there is some light confusion occasioned by that trail of smilax round the pink, sugar-icing cake, it merely adds to its attractiveness. The charm of mystery, you know!”
“I believe if Maryon were here he would sweep it all on to the floor in disgust!” observed Nan suddenly. “He'd say we'd forfeited simplicity.”
“Maryon Rooke, the artist, you mean?”
The warm color rushed into Nan's face and she glanced at Peter with startled, almost frightened, eyes. She could not conceive why the sudden recollection of Rooke should have sprung into her mind at this particular moment.
“Yes,” she answered with difficulty.
Peter bent forward.
“Nan”—Peter spoke very quietly—“Nan, was he the man?”
She nodded voicelessly. Peter made a quick gesture as though to lay his hand over hers, then checked it abruptly.
“My dear,” he said, “do you still care?”
“No, I don't think so,” she answered uncertainly. “I—I'm not sure. Oh, Peter, how difficult life is!”
He assented briefly. He knew very well how difficult.
“I can't imagine why I thought of Maryon just now,” went on Nan, a puzzled frown wrinkling her brows. “I never do, as a rule, when I'm with you.”
She smiled rather wistfully and, with a restless movement, he sprang to his feet and began pacing the room. A little cry of dismay broke from her and she came quickly to his side, lifting a questioning face to his.
“Why, Peter—Peter! What have I said? You're not angry, are you?”
“Angry!” His voice roughened a bit. “If I could only tell you the truth!”
“Tell me,” she said simply.
“Don't ask me, Nan,” he said, after a moment of silence. “There are some things that can't be told.”
As he spoke his eyes, dark and passionate with restrained emotion, met hers, and in an instant it seemed as though the thing he must not speak were spoken.
Nan flushed scarlet from brow to throat, her eyes widened, and the breath fluttered unevenly between her parted lips. She knew—she knew what he had left unsaid.
“Peter!”
She held out her hands to him, with a sudden, childish gesture of surrender, and involuntarily he gathered them into his own. At the same moment the door opened to admit the maid and he drew back quickly.
“This wire's just come for you, miss,” said the maid. “I took it to Miss Craig by mistake.”
Mechanically Nan extracted the thin sheet from its torn envelope and, as she read the few lines, her face whitened and she caught her breath sharply.
The next instant, however, she recovered her poise and, crumpling the telegram into a ball, she addressed the maid composedly.
“There's no answer,” she said, adding: “Has any one arrived yet?”
“Mrs. Seymour is here, miss. And I think Lord St. John may just have arrived.”
Nan turned to Mallory.
“Then we'd better go, Peter. Come along.”
Mallory, as he followed her into the sitting room, realized that she had all at once retreated a thousand miles away from him. He wondered what the contents of the telegram could have been. The oblong red envelope seemed to have descended suddenly between them like a shutter.
During the next half hour the remainder of the guests came dropping in by twos and threes, and after a little desultory conversation, every one settled down to the serious business of bridge.
Nan, as a rule, played a good game, but to-day her playing was nervous and erratic, and Mallory, her partner of the moment, instinctively connected this with the agitation she had shown on receiving the wire. Ignorant of its contents, he awaited developments.
He had not very long to wait. Shortly afterward the trill of the doorbell pealed through the flat and, a minute later, Maryon Rooke came into the room. A brief stir followed his entrance, as Penelope and one or two other nonplayers exchanged greetings with him. Then he crossed over to Nan. She was acutely conscious of his tall, loose-limbed figure as he threaded his way carefully between the tables.
After a few words of greeting, Rooke moved away from their table, but Nan's playing grew wilder and more erratic with each hand that was dealt, though she made an effort to focus her attention on the cards, until at last a good no-trump call, completely thrown away by her disastrous tactics, brought the rubber to an end.
“You're not in your usual form this afternoon, Nan,” remarked one of her opponents as they all rose from the table. Other tables, too, were breaking up and some of the guests were preparing to leave.
“No. I've played abominably,” she acquiesced. “I apologize, partner,” continued, turning to Peter. “It must be the weather. This heat's intolerable.”
He put her apologies aside with a quick gesture.
“There's thunder in the air, I think, You shouldn't have troubled to play, if you didn't feel inclined.”
Nan threw him a glance of gratitude; Peter never seemed to fail her, either in big or little things. Then she moved away to join the chattering knot of departing guests congregated round the doorway.
Mallory's eyes followed her thoughtfully. He had already surmised that Maryon Rooke was the sender of the telegram, and he could see how unmistakably the man's sudden reappearance had shaken her. He felt baffled. Did the man still hold her? Was all the striving of the last few months to prove useless?
He was roused from his thoughts to the realization that people were leaving. Every one appeared to be talking at once and the air was full of the murmur of winnings and losses. Maryon Rooke alone showed no signs of moving, but remained standing, a little apart, near the window.
“Penelope, do come back to Green Street with me.” Kitty's voice was beseeching. “My little milliner was to have had a couple of hats ready for me this afternoon, which means she will arrive with a perfect avalanche of boxes, each containing a dinkier hat than the last, and I shall fall a helpless victim.”
“Yes, do come along, Penny,” her husband urged.. “Then you can lay a restraining hand on Kitty when she's bought the first half dozen.”
“There'll just be time before dinner, and the car shall bring you back again,” entreated Kitty, and Penelope, knowing that the former would be but clay in the practiced hands of her little milliner, smiled acquiescence.
“Barry”—Kitty tapped her husband's arm—“go down and see if the car is there. Peter, can I drop you anywhere?”
In a couple of minutes the room was cleared, and Kitty, shepherding her flock before her, departed in a gale of good-bys, leaving Nan and Maryon Rooke together.
Each was silent. The girl's small head was thrown back, and in the poise of her slim young body there was a mingling of challenge and appealing self-defense. She looked like some trapped wild thing at bay.
Slowly Rooke crossed the room and came toward her, and as she met those odd, magnetic eyes of his, she felt the old fascination stealing over her once more. Her heart sank. She had dreaded this, fought against it, and in her inmost soul believed that she had conquered it. Yet now his mere presence sent the blood racing through her veins with a hurrying, leaping speed that frightened her.
“Nan!” As he spoke, he bent and took her two hands gently into his. Then, as though the touch of her slight fingers roused some slumbering fire within him, his grasp tightened suddenly. He drew her nearer, his eyes holding hers, and her slim body swayed toward him, yielding to the eager clasp of his arms.
“Kiss me, Nan!” he said, the roughness of passion in his voice. “You never kissed me—never in all those beautiful months we were together. And now—now when there's only parting ahead of us”
She could hear his hurried breathing. His lips were almost touching hers Then the door opened quickly and Peter Mallory stood upon the threshold.
Swiftly though they started apart, it was impossible that he should not have seen Rooke holding Nan close in his arms, his head bent above hers. Their attitude was unmistakable; it could have but one significance.
Mallory paused abruptly in the doorway. Then, in a voice entirely devoid of expression, he said quietly:
“Mrs. Seymour left her fan behind. I came back to fetch it.” With a slight bow he picked up the forgotten fan and turned to go. “Good-by once more.”
The door closed behind him and Nan stood very still. But Maryon could read the stricken expression in her eyes, the desperate appeal of them. They betrayed her.
“What's that man to you?” he demanded.
“Nothing.”
Rooke caught her roughly by the shoulders.
“I don't believe it!” he exclaimed hotly. “He's the man you love. The very expression of your face gave it away.”
“I've told you,” she answered unemotionally. “Peter Mallory is nothing to me, never can be anything to me, except”—her voice quivered a little despite herself—“just a friend.”
Maryon's eyes searched her face.
“Then kiss me!” He repeated his earlier demand imperiously.
She drew back.
“Why should I kiss you?”
The quietly uttered question seemed to set him very far away from her. In an instant he knew how much he had forfeited by his absence.
“Nan,” he said, in his voice a curious charm of appeal. “Do you know it's nearly a year since I saw you? And now—now I've only half an hour!”
“Only half an hour?' she repeated vaguely.
“Yes, I go back to Devonshire to-morrow. But I craved a glimpse of the 'Beloved' before I went.”
The words brought Nan sharply back to herself. He was still the same incomprehensible, unsatisfactory lover as of old, and with the realization a cold fury of scorn and resentment swept over her, blotting out what she had always counted as her love for him. It was as though a string, too tightly stretched, had suddenly snapped.
“To cheer you on your way, I suppose?” she said indifferently.
“No. I shouldn't call it cheering. I've been back in England a month, alone in the damned desolation of Dartmoor, fighting—fighting to keep away from you.”
She looked at him with steady, scrutinizing eyes.
“Why need you have kept away?” she asked incisively.
“At the bidding of the great god Circumstance. Oh, my dear, my dear!” He spoke with passionate vehemence. “Don't you know, don't you understand that if only I weren't a poor devil of a painter, with my way to make in a world that can only be bought with gold—nothing should part us, ever again? But as it is”
He broke off with a gesture of renunciation.
Nan listened to the outburst with bent head. She understood now, oh, yes, she understood perfectly. He loved her well enough in his own way, but Maryon's way meant that the love and happiness of the woman who married him would always be a matter of secondary importance. The bitterness of her resentment deepened within her, flooding her whole being.
“If only!” repeated Rooke. “It's the old story, Nan, the desire of the moth for the flame.”
“The moth is a very blundering creature,” said Nan very quietly. “He makes mistakes sometimes, perhaps imagining a flame where there is none.”
“No!” exclaimed Rooke violently. “I make no mistake! You loved me as much as I loved you. I know it! By God, do you think a man can't tell when the woman he loves loves him?”
“Well, you must accept the only alternative, then,” she answered coolly. “Sometimes a flame flickers out—and dies.”
The coldness of her tone whipped him to greater passion. In a sudden madness he caught her in his arms, crushing her slender body against his, and kissed her savagely.
“There!” he cried, a note of fierce triumph ringing in his voice. “Whether your love is dead or not, I won't go out of your life with nothing Your lips are mine—mine!” Then he stumbled from the room.
Nan remained just where he had left her. She stood quite motionless for several minutes, almost as though she were waiting for something. Then, with a leap of her breath, half sigh, half exultation, the knowledge of what had happened to her crystallized into clear significance.
In one swift, overwhelming moment of illumination she realized that Maryon Rooke no longer meant anything to her, She felt completely indifferent as to whether she ever saw him again or not. She was free! While he had been with a her she had felt uncertain of herself. The interview had shaken her. But now that he had gone, it came upon her with a shock of joyful surprise that she was free—beautifully, gloriously free!
The ecstasy lasted only for a moment. Then with a sudden, childish movement she put her hand resentfully to her face where the roughness of his beard had grazed it. She wished he had not kissed her—it would be a disagreeable memory.
“I shall never forget now,” she muttered. “I shall never be able to forget.”
There was an odd note of fear in her voice.
CHAPTER VIII.
Having secured Kitty's forgotten fan, Mallory absent-mindedly descended the long stone flight of steps instead of taking the lift, and regaining the street, hailed a passing taxi and drove toward Green Street, whither the Seymours' car had already proceeded.
As the driver threaded his way through the traffic, Peter's thoughts revolved round the scene which his unexpected return to the flat had interrupted. There was only one deduction to be drawn from it, which was that Nan, after all, still cared for Maryon Rooke. The old love still held her.
The realization was bitter. Even though the woman who was his wife must always stand between himself and Nan, yet, loving her as he did, it had meant a good deal to Mallory to know that no other man had any claim upon her.
And earlier in the afternoon, just before the maid had intruded on them to deliver Rooke's telegram, it had seemed almost as if Nan, too, had cared.
A vague vision of the future had flashed through his mind—he and Nan never any more to one another than good comrades, but each knowing that underneath their friendship lay something stronger and deeper; the knowledge that, though unavowed, they belonged to each other. And even a love that can never be satisfied is better than life without love.
But now the whole situation was altered. Unmistakably, Maryon Rooke still meant a good deal to Nan, although Peter felt a certain consciousness that if he were to pit himself against Rooke he could probably make the latter's position very insecure. But was it fair?
She was not a woman to find happiness easily, and he himself had nothing to offer her except a love which must always be forbidden, unconsummated. In God's name, then, if Maryon Rooke could give her happiness, what right had he to stand in the way?
By the time the taxi had brought him to the door of Kitty's house, his decision was made. He would clear out—see as little of Nan as possible. It was the best thing he could do for her, and the consideration of what it would cost him, he relegated to a later period.
His steps lagged somewhat as he followed the manservant upstairs to Kitty's own particular den, and the slight limp which the war had left him seemed rather more marked than usual. Any great physical or nervous strain invariably produced this effect. But he mustered up a smile as he entered the room and held out the recovered fan,
The “little milliner” was nowhere to be seen, and Kitty herself was ensconced on the Chesterfield, enjoying an iced lemon squash, while Penelope and Barry were downstairs playing a desultory game of billiards. The irregular click of the ivory balls came faintly to Mallory's ears.
“Got my fan, Peter? Heaps of thanks. What will you have? A whisky and soda? Why, Peter!”
She stopped abruptly as she caught sight of his face. He was rather pale and his eyes had a tired, beaten look in them.
“What's wrong, Peter?”
He smiled down at her as she lay tucked up among the cushions.
“Why should there be anything wrong?”
“Something is,” replied Kitty decidedly. “Did I swish you away from the flat against your will?”
“I should be a very ungrateful person if I failed to appreciate my present privileges.”
Kitty shook her head disgustedly.
“You're a very annoying person!” she returned. “You invariably take refuge in a compliment.”
“Dear Madame Kitty”—Mallory leaned forward and looked down at her with his steady, gray-blue eyes—“dear Madame Kitty, I say to you what I mean. I do not compliment my friends,” his voice deepened, “my dear, trusted friends.”
“But that's just it!” she declared emphatically. “You're not trusting me! You're keeping me outside the door.”
“Believe me, there's nothing you'd wish to see on the other side.”
“Which means that, in any case, it's no use knocking at a door that won't be opened,” said Kitty, apparently yielding the point. “So we'll switch off that subject and get on to the next. We go down to Mallow Court at the end of the week. I can't stand town in July. What date are you coming to us?”
Peter was silent a moment. Then he said quietly:
“I'm afraid I shan't be able to come down this year.”
“But you promised us!” objected Kitty. “Peter, you can't go back on a promise!”
“Sometimes one has to do—even that,” he said gravely.
Kitty, discerning in his refusal another facet of that “something wrong” she had suspected, clasped her hands round her knees and faced him with deliberation.
“Look here, Peter, it isn't like you to break a promise without some very good reason. You say you can't come down to us at Mallow. Why not?”
Peter met her eyes steadily.
“I can't answer that,” he replied.
Kitty remained obdurate.
“I want an answer, Peter. We've been pals for a good many years, and I'm not going to be kept out of whatever it is that's hurting you now.”
He made no answer, and she slipped down from the Chesterfield and came to his side.
“Has it anything to do with Nan?” she asked gently, her thoughts going back to the talk she had had with Penelope before the bridge party began.
A rather weary smile curved his lips.
“It doesn't seem much use trying to keep you in the dark, does it?”
“I must know,” she urged. Adding with feminine guile: “Of course, I should be frightfully hurt if I thought you weren't coming just because you didn't want to. But still I'd rather know—even if that were the reason.”
“Not want to?” he broke out, his control suddenly snapping. “I'd give my soul to come!”
The bitterness in his voice, in the lazy, drawling tones she knew so well, let in a flood of light upon the darkness in which she had been groping.
“Peter—oh, Peter!” she cried tremulously. “You're not—you don't mean that you care for Nan, seriously?”
“I don't think many men could be with her much without caring,” he answered simply.
“Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I—I never thought of that when I asked you to be a pal to her.” Her voice shook uncontrollably.
“You needn't be sorry,” he said speaking with great gentleness. “I shall never be sorry that I love her. It's only that, just now, she doesn't need me. That's why I won't come down to Mallow.”
“Doesn't need you?”
“No. The man she needs has come back. I can't tell you how I know, you'll have to trust me about that, but—I do know that Maryon Rooke has come back to her and that he is the man who means everything to her.”
“I don't think you're right,” Kitty said, in tones of conviction. “I don't believe she 'needs' him at all. I dare say he still fascinates her. He has”—she hesitated—“a sort of damnable fascination for some women. And the sooner Nan is cured of it the better.”
“I've done—all that I could,” he answered briefly.
“Don't I know that? You've been splendid! That's just why I want you to come down to us in Cornwall.”
“But if Rooke is there”
“Maryon?” She paused, then went on with a chilly little note of haughtiness in her voice, “I certainly don't propose to invite Maryon Rooke to Mallow.”
“Still, you can't prevent him from taking a summer holiday at St. Wennys.”
St. Wennys was a small fishing village on the Cornish coast, barely a mile away from Mallow Court.
“He won't come, I'm sure!” asserted Kitty. “Sir Robert Burnham lives quite near there—he's Maryon's godfather—and they hate each other like poison.”
“Why?”
“Oh, old Sir Robert was Maryon's guardian till he came of age, and then, when Maryon decided to go in for painting, he presented him with the small patrimony to which he was entitled and declined to have anything further to do with him—either financially or otherwise. Simply chucked him. Maryon went through some very bad times, I believe, in his early days,” continued Kitty, striving to be just. “That's the one thing I respect him for. He stuck to it and won through to where he stands now.”
“It shows he's got some grit, anyway,” agreed Peter. “And do you think that that's the type of man who's going to give in over winning the woman he wants? Should I, if things were different, if I were free?”
Kitty laughed reluctantly.
“You? No. But you're not Maryon Rooke. He could never be the kind of lover you would be, my Peter. With him, art comes before anything else in the wide world. And that's why I don't think he'll come to St. Wennys. He's in love with Nan, as far as his type can be in love, but he's not going to tie himself up with her. So he'll keep away. Peter, dear, if Rooke doesn't show up there, will you come to Mallow?”
Peter still hesitated. And all at once Kitty saw the other side of the picture—Peter's side, and when she spoke again it was in a very subdued tone of voice and with an accent of keen self-reproach.
“Peter, I'm a selfish pig! All this time I've never been thinking of you, only of ourselves. I believe it's your own fault,” she scolded, with a rather quavering little laugh; “you've taught us all to expect so much from you and to give so little.”
Mallory made a quick gesture of dissent.
“Oh, yes, you have,” she insisted. “You're always giving and we just take! I never thought how hard a thing I was asking when I begged you to come down to Mallow while Nan was with us. Please forgive me, Peter!” Her voice trembled a little.
“My dear, there's nothing to forgive. You know I love Nan, that she'll always be the one woman for me. But you know, too, that there's Celia, and that Nan and I can never be more to each other than we are now, just friends. I'm not going to forfeit that friendship unless I think it would be best for Nan that we should forget we were even friends. And I won't say it doesn't hurt to be with her. But there are some hurts that one would rather bear than lose what goes with them.”
The grave voice, with the undertone of pain running through it, ceased. Kitty's tears were flowing unchecked.
“Oh, Peter, Peter!” she cried brokenly. “Why aren't you free? You and Nan are just made for each other.”
He winced a little as though she had laid her finger on a raw spot.
“Hush, Kitten,” he said quietly. “Don't cry so! These things happen and we've got to face them.”
Kitty subsided into a chair and mopped her eyes.
“It's wicked—wicked that you should be tied up to a woman like Celia—a woman who's got no more soul than this chair!” She banged the arm of her chair viciously.
“And you mustn't say things like that, either,” chided Peter.
As he spoke there came the sound of footsteps and the voices of Barry and Penelope could be heard as they approached Kitty's den by way of the corridor. Kitty sprang up, suddenly conscious of her tear-stained face.
“Oh, I can't see them, not now! Peter, stop them from coming here!”
A moment later Mallory came out of the room and met the approaching couple before they had reached the door.
“I was just coming to say good-by to Kitty,” began Penelope. “I'd no idea the time had flown so quickly.”
“Charm of my society,” murmured Barry.
Peter's face was rather white and set, but he managed to reply in a voice that sounded fairly normal.
“Kitty's very fagged and she's going to rest for a few minutes before dressing for dinner. She asked me to say good-by to you for her, Penelope.”
“Then it falls to my lot to speed the parting guest,” said Barry cheerily. “Peter, old son, can the car take you on anywhere after dropping Penny at the Mansions?”
Peter was conscious of a sudden panic. He felt that, at the moment, he could not endure the companionship of any living soul.
“No, thanks,” he answered jerkily. “I'll walk.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Mallow Court, the Seymours' country home, lay not a mile from the village of St. Wennys. A low, two-storied house of creeper-clad stone, it stood perched upon the cliffs, overlooking the wild sea which beats up against the Cornish coast.
The house itself had been built in a quaint, three-sided fashion, the central portion and the two wings, which flanked it rectangularly, serving to inclose a sunken lawn round which ran a wide, flagged path. A low, gray stone wall, facing the sea, fenced. the fourth side of the square, at one end of which a gate gave egress on to the sea-bitten grassy slope that led to the edge of the cliff itself.
“I can't understand why you spend so much time in stuffy old London, Kitty, when you have this heavenly place to come to.”
Nan spoke from a nest of half a dozen cushions heaped together beneath the shade of a tree. Here she was lounging luxuriously while Kitty swung tranquilly in a hammock close by, Penelope had been invisible since lunch time. They had all been down at Mallow the better part of a month and she and Ralph Fenton quite frequently absented themselves. “Hovering,” as Barry explained, “on the verge of an engagement.”
“My dear, the longer I stay in town, the more thoroughly I enjoy the country when we come here. I get the quintessence of enjoyment by treating Mallow as a liqueur.”
Nan laughed, but there was a faint flavor of bitterness in her laughter.
“Practically most of our good times in this world are only to be obtained in the liqueur form. The gods don't make a habit of offering you a big jug of enjoyment.”
“If they did, you'd be certain to refuse it because you didn't like the shape of the jug!” retorted Kitty.
“What a miserable, carping, discontented creature I must be!”
“I'll swear that's not true!” An emphatic masculine voice intervened, and round the corner of the clump of trees beneath which the two girls had taken refuge swung a man's tall, well-set-up figure, clad in knickerbockers and a Norfolk coat.
“Good gracious, Roger, how you made me jump!” Kitty hurriedly lowered a pair of smartly shod feet which had been occupying a somewhat elevated position in the hammock.
“I'm sorry. How d'you do, Kit? And how are you, Miss Davenant?” asked the newcomer.
His piercing eyes beneath shaggy, sunburned brows—fierce, far-visioned eyes that reminded one of the eyes of a hawk—softened amazingly as they rested upon Nan's charming face.
“Oh, we're quite all right, thanks,” she answered. “That is, when people don't drop suddenly from the clouds and galvanize us into action this warm weather.”
She regarded him with a faintly quizzical smile. He was not particularly attractive in appearance, though tall and well built. About forty-two, a typical English sportsman of the outdoor cold-tub-in-the-morning genus, he had a square-jawed, rather ugly face, roofed with a crop of brown hair a trifle sun-burned at its tips. His mouth indicated a certain amount of self-will, the inborn imperiousness of a man whose forbears, from one generation to another, have always been masters of men. And, it might be added, masters of their womankind as well, in the good, old-fashioned way. There was, too, more than a hint of obstinacy and temper in the long, rather projecting chin and dominant nose.
But the smile which he bestowed on Nan when he answered her redeemed the ugliness of his face considerably. It was the smile of a man who could be both kindly and generous where his prejudices were not involved, who might even be capable of something rather big. if the occasion warranted it.
“It was too bad of me to startle you like that,” he acknowledged. “Please forgive me.” Then he added hastily: “I've been exercising hounds to-day.”
Trenby was master of the Trevithick foxhounds and had the reputation of being one of the finest huntsmen in the county.
“Oh,” cried Nan warmly, “why didn't you bring them round by Mallow before you went back to the kennels?”
“We didn't come coastward at all,” he replied. “I never thought of your caring to see them.”
Nan was not in the least a sportswoman by nature, though she had hunted as a child, albeit much against her will, to satisfy the whim of a father who had been a dare-devil rider across country and had found his joy in life—and finally his death—in the hunting field he had loved. But she was a lover of animals, like most people of artistic temperament, and her reply was enthusiastic.
“Of course I'd like to have seen them!”
“Then will you let me show you the kennels one day?” Roger asked eagerly. “I could motor over for you and bring you back afterward.”
“I'd like to come very much. When shall we do it?”
Kitty stirred idly in her hammock.
“You've let yourself in for it now, Roger,” she remarked. “Nan is the most impatient person alive.”
“Don't be alarmed by what Kitty tells you, Mr. Trenby.” Nan smiled gently as she spoke, and Roger delightedly watched the adorable way her lips curled up at the corners and the faint dimple which came and went. “She considers it a duty to pick holes in poor me, good for my morals, you know.”
“It must be a somewhat difficult occupation,” he returned, bowing awkwardly.
Into Nan's mind flashed the recollection of a supple, expressive, un-English bow, and of a deftness of phrase compared with which Trenby's labored compliment savored of the elephantine. Swiftly she dismissed the memory, irritably chasing it from her mind, for was it not five long, black, incomprehensible weeks since Peter had vanished from her ken? From the day of the bridge party at the Edenhall flat she had neither seen nor heard from him, and during those five silent weeks she had come to recognize the fact that Peter meant much more to her than just a friend.
“Well, then, what about Thursday next for going over to the kennels? Are you disengaged?”
Trenby's voice broke suddenly across her reverie. She threw him a brilliant smile.
“Yes, Thursday would do very well.”
“Agreed, then. I'll call for you at half past ten,” said Trenby. “Well, I must be moving on now. I have to go over one of my farms before dinner, so I'll say good-by.”
He lifted his cap and strode away. Nan watched his broad-shouldered, well-knit figure with reflective eyes, the while irrepressible little gurgles and explosions of mirth emanated from the hammock.
“What on earth are you giggling about, Kitty?” Nan burst out irritably.
“At the lion endeavoring to lie down with the lamb,” submitted Kitty meekly.
“Don't talk in parables.”
“It's a very easy one to interpret.” Kitty succumbed once more to a gale of laughter. “It was just too delicious to watch you and Roger together! You'd much better leave him alone, my dear, and play with the dolls you're used to.”
“How detestable you are, Kitty! I promise you one thing, it's going to be much worse for the lion than for the lamb.”
Mrs. Barry Seymour sat up suddenly, the laughter dying out of her eyes.
“Nan,” she admonished, “you leave Roger alone. He's as nature made him and not fair game for such as you. Leave him to some simple country maiden. Edna Langdon, for instance.”
“Surely I can outgeneral her?” Nan retorted impertinently.
“Outgeneral her? Of course you can. But that's just what you mustn't do. I won't allow you to play with Roger. He's too good a sort, even if he is a bit heavy in hand.”
“I agree. He's quite a good sort. But he needs educating. Anyway, perhaps I'm not going to 'play' with him.”
“Not? Then what Nan, you never mean to suggest that you're in earnest?”
“And why not, pray?”
“Seriously, Nan, you and Roger Trenby are about as unsuited to each other as any man and woman could possibly be. In addition to which he has the temper of a fiend, when aroused, and you'd be sure to rouse him! You know a dozen men more suitable!” Kitty declared firmly.
“Do I? It seems to me I'm particularly destitute of men friends just now, either 'suitable' or otherwise. They've been giving me the cold shoulder lately with commendable frequency. So why not the M. F. H. and his acres?”
Kitty detected the bitter, hurt note in her voice, and privately congratulated herself on a letter she had posted the previous evening telling Peter that everything was obviously over between Nan and Maryon Rooke, as the latter had failed to put in an appearance at St. Wennys, and would he come down to Mallow Court? With Peter once more at hand, she felt sure he would be able to charm Nan's bitterness away and even prevent her, in some magical way of his own, from committing such a rash blunder as marriage with Trenby could not fail to be.
“Nan, don't be a fool!” she insisted vehemently. “You'd be wretched if you married the wrong man, far, far more wretched in the future than you've ever been in the past. You'd only repent that last step once, and that would be—always!”
Nan rose from her cushions, swinging her hat in her hand.
“Always remember that a prophet hath no honor in his own country,” she commented curtly, over her shoulder, and sauntered away toward the house, defiantly humming the air of a scandalous little French song as she went, leaving Kitty to her troubled meditations.
CHAPTER IX.
It was a soft, misty day when Trenby called to drive Nan over to the Trevithick kennels, one of those veiled mornings which break, about noon, into a glory of blue sky and golden sunlight.
She stepped into the waiting car, and Roger proceeded to tuck the rugs well round her. Then he started the engine and soon they were spinning down the drive which ran to the left of the Mallow Court gardens toward the village. They flashed through St. Wennys and turned inland along the great white road that swept away in the direction of Trenby Hall, ten miles distant. The kennels themselves lay four miles beyond the Hall.
“Oh, how gorgeous it is!” exclaimed Nan, as their road cut through a wild piece of open country where, with the sea and the tall cliffs behind them, vista after vista of wooded hills and graciously sloping valleys unfolded in front of them.
“Yes, you get some fine scenery inland,” replied Trenby. “And the roads are good for motoring. I suppose you don't ride?” he added.
“Why should you suppose that?”
“Well, one doesn't expect a Londoner to know much about country pursuits.”
“Are you imagining I've spent all my life in a Seven Dials' slum?” Nan asked serenely.
“No, no, of course not. But”
“But country people take a very limited view of a Londoner! We do sometimes get out of town, you know, and some of us can ride and play games quite nicely! As a matter of fact, I hunted when I was about six.”
“Oh, then I hope you're staying at Mallow till the hunting season starts? I've a lovely mare I could lend you if you'd let me,” Roger offered eagerly.
Nan shook her head and made a hasty gesture of dissent.
“Oh, no, no. Quite honestly, I've not ridden for years, and even if I took up riding once more I should never hunt again. I think”—she shrank a little—“it's too cruel.”
Trenby regarded her with ingenuous amazement.
“Cruel!” he exclaimed. “Why, it's sport!”
“Magic word!” Nan's lips curled a little. “You say it's 'sport' as though that made it all right.”
“So it does,” answered Trenby contentedly.
“It may—for the sportsman. But as far as the fox is concerned, it's sheer cruelty.”
Trenby drove on without speaking for a short time. Then he asked suddenly:
“What would you do if your husband hunted?”
“Put up with it, I suppose, just as I should put up with his other faults, if I loved him.”
Roger made no answer, but quickened the speed of the car, racing over the level surface of the road, and when next he spoke it was on some other topic.
Half an hour later a solid-looking gray house, built in the substantial Georgian fashion and surrounded by trees, came into view. Roger slowed up as the car passed the gates which guarded the entrance to the drive.
“That's Trenby Hall,” he said. “You've never been over yet, but I want you to come some day. I should like you to meet my mother.”
A queer little dart of fear shot through Nan as he spoke. She felt as though she were being gradually hemmed in.:
“It's a beautiful place,” she answered conventionally, though thinking inwardly how she would loathe living in a solid, square mansion of that type, prosaically ugly and shut away from the world by inclosing woods.
Roger looked pleased,
“Yes, it's a fine old place,” he said. “Now for the kennels.”
Another fifteen minutes brought them to the kennels, Denman, the first whip, meeting them at the gate. He touched his hat and threw a keen glance at Nan.
“Hounds all fit, Denman?” asked Trenby in quick, authoritative tones.
“Yes, sir. All except Wrangler there—he's still a bit stiff on that near hind leg he sprained.”
As he spoke, he held open the gate for Nan, who glanced round with lively interest.
“How beautifully clean it all is!” exclaimed Nan.
The whip smiled with obvious delight.
“If you keep hounds, miss, you must keep 'em clean, or they won't be healthy and fit to do their day's work. And a day's hunting is a day's work for hounds, and no mistake.”
“How like a woman to remark about cleanliness first of all!” laughed Roger. “A man would have gone straight to look at the hounds before noticing anything else!”
“I'm going now,” replied Nan, approaching the bars of one of the inclosures.
It seemed to her as though she was looking at a perfect sea of white-and-tan bodies with slowly waving sterns, while at intervals from the big throats came a murmurous sound rising now and again into a low growl, or the sharp snap of powerful jaws and a whine of rage as several hounds scuffled together Over some private disagreement. At Nan's appearance, drawn by curiosity, some of them approached her gingerly, half suspicious, half as though anxious to make friends, and, knowing no fear of animals, she thrust her hand through the bars and stroked the great heads.
“Can't we go in? They're such dear things!” she begged.
Better not,” answered Roger, “They don't always like strangers.”
“I'm not afraid,” she replied mutinously. “Do just open the gate, anyway, please!”
Trenby hesitated.
“Well” He yielded unwillingly, but Nan's eyes were rather difficult to resist when they appealed. “Open the gate, then, Denman.”
He stood close behind her when the gate was opened, watching the hounds narrowly, and now and again uttering an imperative, “Down, Victor! Get down, Marquis!” when one or the other of the great beasts playfully leaped up against Nan's side, pawing at her in friendly fashion. Meanwhile Denman had quietly disappeared, and when he returned he carried a long-lashed hunting crop in his hand.
Nan was smoothing first one tan head, then another, receiving eager caresses from rough, pink tongues in return, and insensibly she had moved step by step farther into the yard to reach this or that hound as it caught her attention.
“Come back!” called Trenby hastily. “Don't go any farther.”
Perhaps the wind carried his voice away from her, or perhaps she was so preoccupied with the hounds that the meaning of his words hardly penetrated her mind. Whichever it may have been, with a low cry of “Oh, you beauty!” she stepped quickly toward Vengeance, a fierce-looking beast with a handsome head and sullen mouth, who had been standing apart, showing no disposition to join the clamorous, slobbering throng at the gate.
As Nan stretched out her hand to stroke him, the sulky head lifted with a thunderous growl. As though at a given signal, the whole pack seemed to gather round her.
Simultaneously Vengeance leaped, and Nan was only conscious of the ripping of her garments, the sudden pressure of hot bodies round her, and of a blurred sound of hounds baying, the vicious cracking of a whip, and the voices of men shouting.
She sank almost to her knees, instinctively shielding her head and throat with her arms, borne to the ground by the force of the great, padded feet which had struck her. Instantaneously there flashed through her mind the recollection of something she had once been told—that if one hound turns on you, the whole pack will turn with him, like wolves.
She struck out, struggling gamely to her feet, but Vengeance, the untamed, heedless of the lash with which Denman scored his back a dozen times, caught at her ankle and she pitched headforemost into the steam of hot-breathed mouths and struggling bodies. She felt a huge weight fling itself upon her—and even as she waited for the agony of piercing fangs plunged into her flesh, Trenby caught the big, powerful brute by its throat and by sheer physical strength dragged the hound away from her.
Meanwhile, the second whip had arrived to render assistance, and the whistling of the long-lashed hunting crops drove through the air, gradually forcing the yelping hounds into submission. In the midst of the shouting and commotion, Nan felt herself lifted up by Roger as easily as though she were a baby, and at the same moment the whirling lash of one of the men's hunting crops cut her across the throat and bosom. The red-hot agony of it was unbearable, and as Trenby bore her out of the yard he felt her body grow suddenly limp in his arms and, glancing down, saw that she had lost consciousness.
When Nan came to herself again it was to find that she was lying on a little horsehair sofa, and the first object upon which her eyes rested was a nightmare arrangement of wax flowers, carefully preserved from risk of damage by a glass shade. She was feeling stiff and sore, and the strangeness of her surroundings bewildered her.
“Where am I?” she asked in a weak voice that was hardly more than a whisper.
Some one—a woman—said quickly:
“Ah, she's coming round!” and bustled out of the room. Then came Roger's voice:
“You're all right, Nan, all right.” And she felt his big hands close round her two slender ones, reassuringly. “Don't be frightened.”
She raised her head to find Roger kneeling beside the sofa on which she lay.
“I'm not frightened,” she said. “Only, what's happened? Oh, I remember! I was in the yard with the hounds. Did one of them bite me?”
“Yes, Vengeance just caught your ankle. But we've bathed it thoroughly—luckily he'd only torn the skin a little—and now I'm going to bind it up for you. Mrs. Denman's just gone to fetch some stuff for me to bind it with. You'll be quite all right again to-morrow.”
With some difficulty Nan raised herself to a sitting position and immediately caught sight of a bowl on the floor filled with an ominous-looking, reddish-colored liquid.
“Good gracious! Has my foot been bleeding like that?” she asked.
“Bless you, no, my dear!” Mrs. Denman, a cheery-faced country woman, had bustled in again with some long strips of linen for a bandage. “Bless you, no! That's just a drop of Condy's Fluid, that is, so's your foot shouldn't get any poison in it.”
“That's right, Mrs. Denman,” said Roger. “Give me that linen stuff now, and then get me some more hot water.”
Nan watched Trenby lift and skillfully bandage the injured foot. He held it carefully, as though it were something very precious, but, delicate as was his handling, she could not help wincing once as the bandage accidentally brushed a rather bad scratch. Trenby paused almost breathlessly. The hand in which he held the white, blue-veined foot shook a little.
“Did I hurt? I'm awfully sorry.” His voice was gruff. What he wanted to do was to crush the slim, bruised foot against his lips. The very touch of its satiny skin against his hand sent queer little tremors through every nerve of his big frame.
“There!” he said at last, letting her foot rest once more on the sofa. “Is that comfortable?”
“Quite, thanks.” Then, turning to the whip's wife as she reëntered the room, carrying a jug of hot water, she went on, with that inborn instinct of hers to charm and give pleasure: “What a nice, sunny room you have here, Mrs. Denman. I'm afraid I'm making a dreadful mess of it. I'm so sorry.”
“Don't mention it, miss. It's only a drop of water to clear away, and it's God's mercy you weren't killed by them savage hounds.”
Nan bestowed one of her delightful smiles upon the good woman, who left the hot water and hurried out to tell her husband that if Miss Davenant was going to be mistress of the Hall, why, then 'twould be a lucky day for every one concerned, for a nicer, pleasanter-spoken young lady she never wished to meet.
Nan put her hand up to her throat.
“Something hurts here,” she said said in a troubled voice. “Did one of the hounds leap up at my neck?”
“No,” replied Trenby, frowning as his eyes rested on the long, red welt striping the white flesh disclosed by the V-shaped neck of her frock. “One of those dunder-headed fools cut you with his whip by mistake. I'd like to shoot him—and Vengeance, too!”
With a wonderfully gentle touch he laid a cloth wrung out in hot water across the angry-looking streak, and repeated the process until some of the swelling went down. At last he desisted, wiping dry the soft, girlish throat as tenderly as a nurse might wipe the throat of a baby.
More than a little touched, Nan smiled at him.
“You're making a great fuss about me,” she said. “After all, I'm not seriously hurt, you know.”
“No,” he replied briefly. “But you might have been killed. For a moment I thought you were going to be killed before my eyes.”
“I don't know that it would have mattered very much if I had been,” she responded indifferently.
“It would have mattered to me.” His voice was rough again. “Nan—Nan”
He broke off huskily and, casting a swift glance at his face, she realized that the tide which had been gradually rising throughout the foregoing weeks of close companionship had suddenly come to its full and that no puny effort of hers could now arrest it.
Roger had risen to his feet. His face was rather white, as he stood looking down at her, and the piercing eyes beneath the sunburned brows held a new light in them. They were no longer cold, but burned down upon her with the fierce ardor of passion.
“What is it?” she whispered. The words seemed wrung from her against her will.
For a moment he made no answer, and in the pulsing silence which followed her low-breathed question, Nan was aware of a swiftly gathering fear. She would have to make a decision within the next few moments, and she was not ready for it.
“Do you know”—Roger spoke very slowly—“do you know what it would have meant to me if you had been killed just now?”
Nan shook her head.
“It would have meant the end of everything.”
“Oh, I don't see why!” she responded quickly.
“Don't you?” He stooped over her and took her two slight wrists in his. “Then I'll tell you. I love you and I want you for my wife. I didn't intend to speak so soon, you know so little of me. But this last hour! I can't wait any longer. I want you, Nan, I want you unutterably.”
Nan tried to rise from the sofa. But in an instant his arms were round her, pressing her back, tenderly but determinedly, against the cushions.
“No, don't get up! See, I'll kneel here beside you. Tell me, Nan, when will you marry me?”
She was silent. What answer could she give him?
At her silence, a swift fear seized him.
“Nan,” he said, his voice a little hoarse, “Nan, is it—no good?” Then, as she still made no answer, he let his arms fall heavily to his sides, and his eyes held a blank, dazed look.
Nan caught him by the arm.
“No, no, Roger!” she cried quickly. “Don't look like that! I didn't mean that I”
The sudden expression of radiance that sprang into his face silenced the remainder of her words upon her lips, the words of explanation that should have been spoken.
“Then you do care, Nan, after all? there's no one else, is there?”
“No,” she said, very low.
He stretched out his arms and drew her gently within them, and for a moment Nan had neither the heart nor the courage to wipe that look of utter happiness from his face by telling him the truth, by saying blankly: “I don't love you.”
He turned her face up to his and, stooping, kissed her with sudden passion.
“My dear!” he said. “My dear! Oh, Nan, Nan, I can hardly believe that you really belong to me!”
Nan could hardly believe it, either. It seemed just to have happened, somehow, and her conscience smote her. For what had she to give in return for all the love he was offering her? Merely a little liking of a lonely heart that wanted to warm itself at some one's hearth, and beyond that a terrified longing to put something more between herself and Peter Mallory, to double the strength of the barrier which kept them apart. It wasn't giving Trenby a fair deal!
“Roger,” she said, at last, “I don't think I'd better belong to you. I must tell you. There is some one else—only we can't ever be more than friends.”
Roger stared at her with the dawning of a new fear in his eyes. When he spoke, it was with a savage defiance.
“I'm not going to listen. You've said you'll marry me. I don't want to hear anything about the other men who were. I'm the man who is. And I'm going to drive you straight back to Mallow and tell everybody about it. Then I'll feel sure of you.”
Faced by the irrevocableness of her action, Nan was overtaken by dismay. How recklessly, on the impulse of the moment, she had bartered away her freedom! A voice inside her head kept urging: “Time! Time! Give me time!”
“Please, Roger,” she began with unwonted humility, “I'd rather you didn't tell people just yet.”
But Trenby objected.
“I don't see that there's anything to be gained by waiting,” he said doggedly.
“Time! Time!” reiterated the voice inside Nan's head.
“To please me, Roger,” she begged. “I want to think things over a bit, first.”
“It's too late to think things over,” he answered jealously. “You've given me your promise. You don't want to take it back again?”
“Perhaps, when you know everything, you'll want me to.”
“Tell me 'everything' now, then,” he said grimly, “and you'll soon see whether I want you to or not.”
Nan was fighting desperately to gain time. The past was pulling at her heartstrings, filling her with a sudden terror of the promise she had given him.
“I can't tell you anything now,” she said, a little breathlessly. “I did try—a little while ago and you wouldn't listen. You—you must give me a few days, you must! If you don't, I'll say 'no,' now—at once!”
She was overwrought, strung up to such a pitch that she hardly knew what she was saying. She had been through a good deal in the last hour or two and Trenby realized it. Suddenly that grim determination of his to force her promise, to bind her here and now, yielded to an overwhelming flood of tenderness.
“It shall be as you wish, Nan,” he said very gently. “I know I'm asking everything of you, and that you're frightened and upset to-day. I ought not to have spoken. And—and I'm a lot older than you.”
“Oh, it isn't that,” replied Nan hastily. She did not want him to be hurt about things that would never have counted at all had she loved him.
“Well, if I wait till Monday—that's four days—will that do?” he asked.
“Yes. I'll tell you then.”
“Thank you.” He lifted her hands to his lips. “And remember,” he added desperately, “that I love you, Nan. You're my whole world!”
He paced the short length of the room and back, and when he came to her side again, every trace of emotion was wiped out of his face.
“Now I'm going to take you back home. Mrs. Denman says she'll put a hassock in the car for your damaged leg to rest on, and with rugs and your coat, I think you'll be all right.”
He went to the table and poured out something in a glass.
“Drink that,” he said, holding it toward her. “It'll warm you up.”
Nan sniffed at the liquid in the glass and gave it back to him with a grimace.
“It's brandy,” she said. “I hate the stuff.”
“But you'll drink it, won't you? It will be good for you.” He stood in front of her, glass in hand. “Come, Nan, don't be foolish. You need something before we start. Please drink it.”
He held it to her lips, and Nan, too proud to struggle or resist like a child, swallowed the obnoxious stuff. As Trenby drove her home she had time to reflect upon the fact that, if she married him, there would be many a contest of wills between them. He roused a sense of rebellion in her, and he was, unmistakably, a man who meant to be obeyed.
Her thoughts went back to Peter Mallory. Somehow, she did not think she would ever have found it difficult to obey him.
CHAPTER X.
Kitty and her husband were strolling together on the terrace when Trenby's car purred up the drive to Mallow, and both ran forward as they recognized Nan and Roger.
“You're back very early!” exclaimed Kitty gayly. “Did you get bored stiff with each other, or what?” Then, as Roger opened the car door and she caught sight of Nan's leg stretched out in front of her under the rugs, she asked, with a note of fear in her voice: “Is Nan hurt? You've not had an accident?”
Roger hastily explained what had occurred.
“She's had a wonderful escape,” he concluded.
He was looking rather drawn about the mouth, as though he, too, had passed through a big strain of some kind.
“I'm as right as rain, really,” called out Nan reassuringly. “If some one will only unpack the collection of rugs and coats I'm bundled up with, I can hop out of the car as well as anybody.”
Barry was already at the side of the car, and as he lifted off the last covering, revealing beneath a distended silk stocking the bandaged ankle, he exclaimed quickly:
“Hullo! This looks like some sort of damage. Is your ankle badly hurt, old thing?”
“Not a bit, nothing but a few scratches,” she answered. “Only Mrs. Denman insisted on my driving back with my leg up, and it would have broken her heart if I hadn't accepted her hassock for the journey.”
She stepped rather stiffly out of the car, for her joints still ached, and Barry, seeing her white face and the heavy shadows beneath her eyes, put a strong, friendly arm around her shoulders to steady her.
“You've had a good shaking up, my dear, anyway,” he observed, with concern in his voice. “Look, I'm going to help you into the hall and put you on the big divan. Then we'll discuss what's to be done with you,” he added, smiling down at her.
“You won't let them keep me in bed, Barry, will you?” urged Nan, as he helped her up the steps and into the great hall.
Barry pulled thoughtfully at his big, fair mustache.
“If Kitty says 'bed,' you know it'll have to be bed,” he answered, his eyes twinkling a little.
“Nonsense!” she exclaimed crossly. “You don't stay in bed because you've scratched your ankle.”
“No. But you must remember you've had a bit of a shock.”
By this time Kitty and Roger had joined them, overhearing the last part of the conversation.
“Of course you'll go to bed at once,” asserted Kitty firmly. “Will you give her a hand upstairs, Barry?”
“You see?” said Barry, regarding the patient humorously. “Come along, Nan! Shall I carry you or will you hobble?”
“I'll walk,” returned Nan, with emphasis.
“Bed's much the best place for you,” put in Roger.
He followed her to the foot of the stiarcase and, as he shook hands, he said quietly:
“Till Monday, then.”
Barry assisted Nan upstairs, in spite of her protests, and they paused outside the door of her bedroom, to discuss the happenings of the day. They were still chatting when Kitty swished round the bend.
“Nan, you ought to be in bed by now!” protested Kitty severely. “You're not to be trusted one minute, Barry, keeping her standing about talking like this.”
She shooed her big husband away with a single wave of her arm and marshaled Nan into the bedroom. In her hand she carried a tray on which was a glass of hot milk.
“There,” she continued, addressing Nan. “You've got to drink that while you're undressing, and then you'll sleep well. And you're not to come down to-morrow except for dinner. I'll send your meals up—you shan't be starved! But you must have a thorough rest.”
“Oh, Kitty!” Nan's exclamation was a positive wail of dismay.
Kitty cheerfully dismissed any possibility of discussion.
“It's quite settled, my dear. You'll be feeling it far worse to-morrow than you do to-day. So get into bed now as quickly as possible.”
“This milk's absolutely boiling,” complained Nan irritably. “I can't drink it.”
“Then undress and drink it when you're in bed. I'll brush your hair for you.”
It goes without saying that Kitty had her way and before long Nan was sipping her glass of milk and gratefully realizing the illimitable comfort which a soft bed brings to weary limbs.
“By the way, I've some news for you,” announced Kitty, as she sat perched on the edge of the bed.
“News? What news?”
“Well, guess who's coming here?”
Nan named one or two mutual friends only to be met by a triumphant negative. Finally Kitty divulged her secret.
“Why, Peter Mallory!”
The glass in Nan's hand jerked suddenly, spilling a few drops of the milk.
“Peter?” She strove to keep all expression out of her voice.
“Yes. He finds he can come, after all. Isn't it jolly?”
“Very jolly.”
Nan's tones were so noncommittal that Kitty looked at her with some surprise.
“Aren't you pleased?” she asked blankly.
“Of course, I'm pleased!” Nan forced the obviously expected enthusiasm into her affirmative, then, swallowing the last mouthful of milk with an effort, she added: “It'll be topping.”
Kitty took the glass from her.
“Now try and have a good sleep,” she admonished and departed, blissfully unconscious of how effectually she herself had just destroyed any possibility of slumber.
Peter coming! The first thrill of pure joy at the thought of seeing him again was succeeded by a rush of apprehension. She felt herself caught up into a whirlpool of conflicting emotions. The idea of marriage with Roger Trenby seemed even more impossible than ever with the knowledge that, in a few days, Peter would be there, close beside her with his quiet, comprehending gaze, while every nerve in her body would be vibrating at the mere touch of his hand.
She could visualize each line of his face; the level brows and the steady, gray-blue eyes under them, eyes that missed so little and understood so much; the sensitive mouth with those rather tired lines which cleft each side of it and deepened when he smiled; the lean cheek bones and squarish chin. The memory of Peter was like a hand holding her back from casting in her lot with Roger.
And then the pendulum swung back and she felt that to marry some one, any one, was the only thing left to her. She was frightened by her love for Peter. Marriage, she argued, would be—must be—a shield and buckler against the cry of her heart. If she were married, she would be able to stifle her love, crush it out, behind those solid, unyielding bars of conventional wedlock.
The fact of Peter's own marriage seemed to her rather dreamlike. There lay the danger. They had not met until long after his wife had left him, so that her impression of him as a married man was necessarily somewhat vague and shadowy.
But there would be nothing vague or shadowy about marriage with Trenby! That Nan realized. And, utterly weary of the persistent struggle in her heart, she felt that it might cut the whole tangle of her life once and for all, if she passed through the narrow gate of matrimony into the carefully shepherded fold beyond it. After all, most women settled down to it, finally, whether their husbands came up to standard or not. If they didn't, the majority of wives contrived to put up with the disappointment, and probably she herself would be so fully occupied with the putting up part of the business, that she would not have much time in which to remember Peter.
But perhaps, had she known the inner thoughts of those women who had been driven into the “putting up” attitude toward their husbands, she would have realized that memories do not die so easily.