CHAPTER XV
"To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose."—Shakespeare.
"Now I want you to listen to me, Leonie!"
"I am, Auntie!"
"I mean seriously! I want to talk about myself for one thing, and our very straitened means, which do not permit us to go on living even like this; and oh! lots of other things."
"Right, darling!" said her niece, moving across the room to sit on a broad stool at her relation's feet, but twisting her head to one side with a quick movement when her aunt laid her hand dramatically upon the tawny hair.
"Please, Auntie, don't! I can't bear to have my head touched!"
"Just what I want to talk about!" vaguely said Susan Hetth as she tried to disentangle an old-fashioned ring which had unfortunately caught a few shining hairs in its loose setting.
"Please don't touch my head, Auntie!" repeated Leonie as she sat back. "Let my hair go, please!"
"I'm not touching your hair, child," impatiently replied the elder woman. "It's got caught in one of my rings!"
Leonie's eyes were almost closed in a strange kind of psychological agony; then just as though she acted unconsciously she seized her aunt's hands and pulled them quickly from her head, tearing out the hair entangled in the ring by the roots.
"I can't stand it, Auntie. I have never been able to bear anyone touching my head," she said very quietly.
"I think you're insane at times, Leonie, really I do!"
The terrible words were out, and for one long moment the two women stared into each other's eyes.
"You think I am insane at times," whispered Leonie. "You—Auntie, you think I am insane!"
And the elder woman, floundering in dismay at the awful effect of her unconsidered words, sank to her neck in a bog of explanation.
"No! Leonie—no, of course not—I wasn't thinking—of course you're not mad—insane I mean. What an idea! only I am worried about you, you know that, don't you, dear! Do be sensible, dear. Of course your brain is not quite normal. It can't be with all that sleep-walking, can it, and all your abnormally brilliant exams!"
Susan Hetth's disjointed remarks sounded like the clatter of a pair of runaway mules, while Leonie clasped her hands tight as she sat crouched on her stool.
"Of course people will talk, you know, dear! They did when you were quite a baby and began walking in your sleep. And they did, you know, at school after that unfortunate child nearly got strangled by her sheets—I always do think that school fare is most indigestible—and so likely to cause blemishes on the skin!"
Leonie bowed her head.
"Most unfortunate that you should have snubbed young Mr—what's-his-name—so severely—and that his sister should have been at school with you. Out of revenge she has been talking about you and your sleep-walking. People are most unkind and most unjust—and you are far too pretty to receive any consideration from your own sex, how_ever_ much attention you may receive from the opposition—I mean sex—opposite sex, I mean——"
Leonie sat absolutely still.
"Anyway, my child, we need not worry—there is a way out of our little difficulties."
Sensing that something was coming Leonie sat back with the light of the oil lamp full on her face as she stared at the clutter on the mantelpiece.
"I do so want you to do something for me, darling."
The tone of Susan Hetth's voice and the touch of her hand on the girl's arm were as wheedling as if she were about to ask her to tramp into Ilfracombe on some trifling midnight errand.
Leonie answered quite mechanically.
"What is it, dear!" she said. "Say the word and I'll do it!"
"Is that a promise?"
"Ra-ther! Anything to please you, Auntiekins!"
Susan Hetth took her fence in a rush!
"I want you to get married," she said abruptly out of pure fright, and wrenched at her bead chain when Leonie leapt to her feet.
The girl stood quite still, outlined in her simple low-cut, short-sleeved dress by the wall, her hands pressed back against it.
There was no sound except the soft gurgle and murmur of the water until she spoke, quietly, but with a world of horror in her low-pitched voice.
"You want me to marry—you—when a moment ago you said that you thought I was mad—you want me to marry some honest, unsuspecting man, and bear him children!"
Susan Hetth, shocked to the limit of her Pecksniffian soul, made a nerveless fluttering gesture of protest with her hands.
"Don't speak," said Leonie quickly, "please don't speak until I have done. Marriage! I will tell you what I have thought about it while I have been waiting for my mate."
"Oh!" exploded Susan Hetth vehemently. "My dear! Surely you have not been corresponding with anyone!"
Leonie hesitated.
How was she to make her aunt, this shallow, unbalanced being, understand the joyous expectancy with which she had awaited the moment when she should meet the man born for her?
How was she to take the exquisite longings, the veiled desires, the beautiful virgin thoughts, from her heart and lay them before this woman who had taught her nothing but the twenty-third Psalm without its real interpretation, plus the correct Sunday collect and daily prayers.
How explain that to her the little golden ring would not represent a key opening the door to the so-called freedom from which fifty per cent of women descend, via the shallow flight of steps marked a good time, to the plain of discontent; or that to her the word love was sufficient, in that for her it included those of honour and obey, without any separate declaration in public.
When she spoke she spoke hurriedly, flushing from chin to brow.
"Auntie—I correspond with no man—but my—my mate is waiting for me somewhere—calling me all the time ever since—oh! ever since I can remember—and—and I should have married him when I had met him if—if——"
In anger at this fresh complication, piled upon her appalling want of tact of a few moments ago, Susan Hetth struck her hands on the arms of her chair.
"I think you absolutely indecent, Leonie, to go on like this about someone you have never even seen. Now listen to me, and don't be so theatrical. I have had an offer of marriage for you by someone who knows all about you, and who, after my assurance that there is nothing hereditary in your family on either side to account for the strangeness of your actions at times, is perfectly willing, even anxious, to marry you."
"To take the risk, you mean," broke in Leonie. "Oh!—well, go on."
Aunt Susan, somewhat out of breath from the rapidity and unaccustomed lucidity of her words, inhaled deeply and continued.
"He will make you an astounding marriage settlement, give you everything you want, and swears to make you per-fect-ly happy!"
"And his name?"
"Oh! don't be stupid, Leonie, of course you know whom I mean!"
Leonie leant forward, stretching out her hands, her face dead white in the light of the lamp.
"Tell me his name and don't drive me beyond breaking point, Aunt
Susan!"
"Tosh!" contemptuously remarked her aunt. "Don't be so childish—I mean Sir Walter Hickle, of course!"
Expecting some violent words of protest the elder woman half rose from her chair, but appalled by the deathly silence and the look on the girl's face, sank back, cowering in her seat, and stared in the direction her niece's hand was pointing.
"Look, Auntie, look!"
Leonie stood with one hand pointing at the mantelpiece and the other pressed against her throat as she tried to speak coherently.
The pupils of her eyes were pin-points as she gazed at a wooden frame which, adorned with edelweiss and the Lucerne Lion, held the snapshot of a complaisant individual leaning over the harbour wall, attired in a well-fitting but ill-placed yachting suit.
"Old Pickled Walnuts! You want me to marry him—when—when—oh! when I thought he wanted to marry you!"
She laughed, a laugh which sounded like the jangling of broken glass, and died almost before it was born; and her aunt, terrified at the sound and the expression on the girl's face, seized the outstretched arm and shook it violently.
"What are you talking about, Leonie!"
Leonie freed her arm with a shudder.
"Please don't touch me!" Then making a desperate effort she continued quietly, so quietly indeed that Susan Hetth looked anxiously over her shoulder towards the door.
"Don't you know that's his nickname? Oh! of course you do! You know he made his fortune by pickling walnuts too rotten to sell. Sir Walter Hickle—twist the name a bit and it's all in a nutshell—a—a pickled walnut shell"—the little unnatural laugh broke across the words—"and you want me to marry him—Auntie! Auntie! he's awful enough, heaven knows, but not bad enough, nobody could be, to have a—a mad wife foisted on him—no! never—I'll go out and work!"
There was something very decisive in the last words, but Susan Hetth, like most weak people, found her strength suddenly in a mulish obstinacy, which is a quite good equivalent for, and often more efficacious than mere strength of will.
This obstinacy, backed by the knowledge that people were beginning to gossip about the girl's aloofness and love of solitude; that the cashing of another cheque would see her overdrawn at the bank; and that until the girl was settled and off her hands she would not be able to solve her own matrimonial problem, drove her to a show of mental energy of which she would not have been capable in an everyday argument.
"Work!" she cried, "work! What can you do? Nothing—except go out as a companion or nursery governess!—and who would take you without a reference—and who would give you one? Tell me!"
Leonie remained silent—stunned.
"As I have told you, we simply cannot afford to live even like this!
I'm overdrawn as it is, and——"
"But," broke in Leonie with a gleam of hope, "but I have father's money coming to me. I'm not quite sure how much it is, but you can have it—all!"
"It's two thousand pounds down for yourself, and two hundred and fifty a year in trust for your children—to be given you on your wedding day."
"Oh!"
It was just a little pitiful exclamation as the girl realised the net which was closing about her feet, but from the meshes of which she made a last desperate effort to extricate herself.
"I think I—see—a way," she said slowly. "Yes—listen—this terrible mystery that surrounds me, this—this curse which seems to bring disaster or pain to everyone I love, simply makes life not worth living—so if—if I make a will in your favour, Auntie, dear, and go for a swim at Morte Point where the cross currents are—it will——"
But Susan Hetth interrupted violently, horror-stricken at the suggestion made indifferently by the girl she loved as far as she was capable of loving.
"How is suicide going to help?" she demanded shrilly. "There would be an inquest, every bit of gossip, everything you had ever done would be brought to light; the verdict would be insanity——"
"Oh, Auntie!"
Driven to desperation and without finesse Susan Hetth flung down her trump card.
"But—I—I haven't told you the—the worst," she stammered, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, and peering from behind it at Leonie who, wearily pushing the hair off her forehead, stood apathetically waiting.
"That—that man"—she jerked her head at the mantelpiece—"has—has a hold on me!"
"What—-do you mean Sir Walter—do you owe him money?" Leonie stared in amazement as she spoke.
"Oh, no—it's worse!" came the reply, followed by a curtailed but sufficiently dramatic recital of the past indiscretion, to which Leonie listened spellbound.
"And you do believe that it was just a bit of bad luck, and that there was nothing really wrong in it all, don't you, dear," insisted the woman who, like ninety-nine per cent of humans, forgot the real tragedy of the moment in the recital of her own pettifogging escapade.
"Absolutely," replied Leonie flatly.
"And you do see the necessity of giving in, now that he has threatened me with exposure if you refuse him when he proposes, don't you, dear?"
"Absolutely," replied Leonie for the second time.
There followed long minutes of silence which the swirl of the waters alone dared to break, and then the girl spoke.
"My life," she said very softly to herself; "my lovely, beautiful free life done. The wind, and the birds, and the sea—Auntie—oh, Auntie—Auntie!"
And she turned and flung herself against the wall with her face crushed into her upstretched arms. "Think of it," she whispered hoarsely, "think of it, my youth, my spirit, my body given into that old man's keeping. I who have kept my thoughts, my lips, my eyes for my mate that was to be; I who have longed for his love, for the hours and the days, and the months, and the years, even unto death, with him. How could——"
There was a click of the gate, and she flung round from the wall, dry-eyed, dry-lipped, desperate, as her aunt hurriedly rose.
"It's him—Sir Walter, Leonie—are you going to accept him?"
"Of course," came the steady reply, and Leonie looked the elder woman straight in the eyes, which darted this, that, and every way. "Will you go upstairs, please."
* * * * * * * *
Just before dawn Leonie slid in through the window, and the water, trickling from the bathing dress which clung to the wonderful figure, formed little pools on the faded carpet.
"Nothing will ever make me clean," she whispered, "nothing—nothing—nothing. There is no ocean big or wide or deep enough for that, oh! God—my God!"
For five long minutes she stood absolutely still, looking straight and unseeingly at the mantelpiece.
Then as a rooster somewhere shrilly heralded the coming day she awoke to her surroundings and moved.
Like a beaten dog she crept to her bedroom, and stood staring at the reflection of her haggard face in the mirror. A bird suddenly burst into a song of welcome to the dawn which was dyeing the sky rose pink, and she crossed to the window-seat, dropped to her knees, and buried her lovely head in her outstretched arms, amid the ruins of her beautiful Castle of Dreams.