CHAPTER XXVI
"THE WIDTH OF A WORLD BETWEEN"
Nan gave a final touch to Penelope's hair, drawing the gold fillet which bound it a little lower down on to the broad brow, then stood back and regarded the effect with critical eyes.
"That'll do," she declared. "You look a duck, Penelope! I hope you'll get a splendid reception. You will if you smile at the audience as prettily as you're smiling now! Won't she, Ralph?"
"I hope so," answered Fenton seriously. "It would be a waste of a perfectly good smile if she doesn't." And amid laughter and good wishes the Fentons departed for the concert, Peter Mallory accompanying them downstairs to speed them on their way.
Meanwhile Nan, left alone for the moment, became suddenly conscious of an overpowering nervousness at the prospect of spending the evening alone with Peter. There was so much—so much that lay behind them that they must either restrict their conversation to the merest trivialities, avoiding all reference to the past, or find themselves plunged into dangerous depths. Dinner had passed without incident. Sustained by the presence of Penelope and Ralph, Nan had carried through her part in it with a brilliance and reckless daring which revealed nothing at all of the turmoil of confused emotions which underlay her apparent gaiety.
She seemed to have become a new being this evening, an enchanting creature of flame and fire. She said the most outrageous things at dinner, talking a lot of clever nonsense but sheering quickly away if any more serious strain of thought crept into the conversation. For an instant she might plumb the depths, the next she would be winging lightly over the surface again, while a spray of sparkling laughter rose and fell around her. With butterfly touch she opened the cupboard of memory, daring Peter the while with her eyes, skimming the thin ice of bygone times with the adroitness of an expert skater.
She was wearing the frock which had called forth Lady Gertrude's ire, and from its filmy folds her head and shoulders emerged like a flower from its sheath, vividly arresting, her scarlet lips and "blue-violet" eyes splashes of live colour against the warm golden ivory of her skin.
It was Nan at her most emotionally distracting, now sparkling with an almost feverish vivacity, now drooping into sudden silence, while the lines of her delicately angled face took on a touching, languorous appeal.
But now, now that the need for playing a part was over, and she stood waiting for Mallory's return, something tragic and desperate looked out of her eyes. She paced the room restlessly. Outside a gale was blowing. She could hear the wind roaring through the street. A sudden gust blew down the chimney and the flames flickered and bent beneath it, while in the distance sounded a low rumble of thunder—the odd, unexpected thunder that comes sometimes in winter.
Presently the lift gates clanged apart. She heard Mallory's step as he crossed the hall. Then the door of the room opened and shut.
She did not speak. For a moment she could not even look up. She was conscious of nothing beyond the one great fact that she and Peter were alone together—alone, yet as much divided as though the whole world lay between them.
At last, with an effort, she raised her eyes and saw him standing beside her. A stifled cry escaped her. Throughout dinner, while the Fentons had been present, he had smiled and talked much as usual, so that the change in the man had been less noticeable. But the mask was off now, and in repose his face showed, so worn and ravaged by grief that Nan cried out involuntarily in pitiful dismay.
Her first impulse was to fold her arms about him, drawing that lined and altered face against her bosom, hiding from sight the stark bitterness of the eyes that met her own, and comforting him as only the woman who loves a man knows how.
Then, like a black, surging flood, the memory of all that kept them apart rushed over her and she drew back her arms, half-raised, falling limply to her sides. He made no effort to approach her. Only his eyes remained fixed on her, hungrily devouring every line of the beloved face.
"Why did you come?" she asked at last. Her voice seemed to herself as though it came from a great distance. It sounded like someone else speaking.
"I couldn't keep away. Life without you has become one long, unbearable hell."
He spoke with a strange, slow vehemence which seemed to hold the aggregated bitterness and pain of all those solitary months.
A shudder ran through her slight frame. Her own agony of separation had been measurable with his.
"But you said . . . at Tintagel . . . that we mustn't meet again. You shouldn't have come—oh, you shouldn't have come!" she cried tremulously.
He drew a step nearer to her.
"I had to come, I'm a man—not a saint!" he answered.
She looked up swiftly, trying to read what lay behind the harsh repression in his tones. She felt as though he were holding something in leash—something that strained and fought against restraint.
"I'm a man—not a saint!" The memory of his renunciation at King Arthur's Castle swept over her.
"Yet I once thought you—almost that, Peter," she said slowly.
But he brushed her words aside.
"Well, I'm not. When I saw you to-day at the studio . . . God! Did you think I'd keep away? . . . Nan, did you want me to?"
The leash was slipping. She trembled, aching to answer him as her whole soul dictated, to tell him the truth—that she wanted him every minute of the day and that life without him stretched before her like a barren waste.
"I—we—oh, you're making it so hard for me!" she said imploringly.
"Please go—go, now!"
Instead, he caught her in his arms, holding her crushed against his breast.
"No, I'm not going. Oh, Nan—little Nan that I love! I can't give you up again. Beloved!—Soul of me!" And all the love and longing, against which he had struggled unavailingly throughout those empty months of separation, came pouring from his lips in a torrent of passionate pleading that shook her heart.
With an effort she tore herself free—wrenched herself away from the arms whose clasp about her body thrilled her from head to foot. Somewhere in one of the cells of her brain she was conscious of a perfectly clear understanding of the fact that she must be quite mad to fight for escape from the sole thing in life she craved. Celia Mallory didn't really count—nor Roger and her pledge to him. . . . They were only shadows. What counted was Peter's love for her and hers for him. . . . Yet in a curious numbed way she felt she must still defer to those shadows. They stood like sentinels with drawn swords at the gate of happiness, and she would never be able to get past them. So it was no use Peter's staying here.
"You must go, Peter!" she exclaimed feverishly. "You must go!"
A new look sprang into his eyes—a sudden, terrible doubt and questioning.
"You want me to go?"
"Yes—yes!" She turned away, gesturing blindly in the direction of the door. The room seemed whirling round her. "I—I want you to go!"
Then she felt his hand on her shoulder and, yielding to its insistent pressure, she faced him again.
"Nan, is it because you've ceased to care that you tell me to go?" He spoke very quietly, but there was something in the tense, hard-held tones before which she blenched—a note of intolerable fear.
Her shaking hands went up to her face. It would be better if he thought that of her—better for him, at least. For her, nothing mattered any more.
"Don't ask me, Peter!" she gasped, sobbingly. "Don't ask me!"
Slowly his hand fell away from her shoulder.
"Then it's true? You don't care? Trenby has taken my place?"
A heavy silence dropped between them, broken only by the sullen roll of thunder. Nan shivered a little. Her face was still hidden in her hands. She was struggling with herself—trying to force from her lips the lie which would send the man's reeling faith in her crashing to earth and drive him from her for ever. She knew if he went from her like that, believing she had ceased to care, he would never come back again. He would wipe her out utterly from his thoughts—out of his heart. Henceforward she would be only a dead memory to him—the symbol of a shattered faith.
It was more than she could bear. She could not give up that—Peter's faith in her! It was all she had to cling to—to carry her through life.
She stretched out her arms to him, crying brokenly:
"Oh, Peter—Peter—"
At the sound, of her low, shaken voice, with its infinite appeal for understanding, the iron control he had been forcing on himself snapped asunder, and he caught her in his arms, kissing her with the fierce hunger of a man who has been starved of love.
She leaned against him, physically unable to resist, and deep down in her heart glad that she could not. For the moment everything was swept away in an anguish of happiness—in the ecstasy of burning kisses crushed against her mouth and throat and the strained clasp of arms locked round her.
"My woman!" he muttered unsteadily. "My woman!"
She could feel the hard beating of his heart, and her slender body trembled in his arms with an answering passion that sprang from the depths of her being. Forgetful of everything, save only of each other and their great love, their lips clung together.
Presently he tilted her head back. Her face was white, the shadowed eyes like two dark stains on the ivory bloom of a magnolia.
"Beloved! . . . Nan, say that you love me—let me hear you say it!"
"You know!" Her voice shook uncontrollably. "You don't need to ask me, Peter. It—it hurts to love anyone as I love you."
His hold tightened round her.
"You're mine . . . mine out of all the world . . . my beloved. . . ."
A flare of lightning and again the menacing roll of thunder. Then, sudden as the swoop of a bat, the electric burners quivered and went out, leaving only the glow of the fire to pierce the gloom. In the dim light she could see his face bent over her—the face of her man, the man she loved, and all that was woman and lover within her leaped to answer the call of her mate—the infinite, imperious demand of human love that has waited and hungered through empty days and nights till at last it shall be answered by the loved one.
For a moment she lay unresisting in his arms, helpless in the grip of the passion of love which had engulfed them both. Then the memory of the shadows—the sentinels with drawn swords—came back to her. The swords flashed, cleaving the dividing line afresh before her eyes.
Slowly she leaned away from his breast, her face suddenly drawn and tortured.
"Peter, I must go back—"
"Back? To Trenby?" Then, savagely: "You can't. I want you!"
He stooped his head and she felt his mouth on hers.
A glimmer of pale firelight searched out the two tense faces; the shadowy room seemed listening, waiting—waiting—
"I want you!" he reiterated hoarsely. "I can't live without you any longer. Nan . . . come with me . . ."
A tremulous flicker of lightning shivered across the darkness. The dead electric burners leaped into golden globes of light once more, and in the garish, shattering glare the man and woman sprang apart and stood staring at each other, trembling, with passion-stricken faces. . . .
The long silence was broken at last, broken by a little inarticulate sound—half-sigh, half-sob—from Nan.
Peter raised his head and looked at her. His face was grey.
"God!" he muttered. "Where were we going?"
He stumbled to the chimneypiece, and, leaning his arms on it, buried his face against them.
Presently she spoke to him, timidly.
"Peter?" she said. "Peter?"
At the sound of her voice he turned towards her, and the look in his eyes hurt her like a physical blow.
"Oh, my dear . . . my dear!" she cried, trembling towards him. "Don't look like that . . . Ah! don't look like that!"
And her hands went fluttering out in the mother-yearning that every woman feels for her man in trouble.
"Forgive me, Nan . . . I'm sorry."
She hardly recognised the low, toneless voice.
Her eyes were shining. "Sorry for loving me?" she said.
"No—not for loving you. God knows, I can't help that! But because I would have taken you and made you mine . . . you who are not mine at all."
"I'm all yours, really, Peter."
She came a few steps nearer to him, standing sweet and unafraid before him, her grave eyes shining with a kind of radiance.
"Dear," she went on simply, throwing out her hands in a little defenceless gesture, "if you want me, I'll come to you. . . . Not—not secretly . . . while I'm still pledged to Roger. But openly, before all the world. I'll go with you . . . if you'll take me."
She stood very still, waiting for his answer. Right or wrong, in that moment of utter sacrifice of self, she had risen to the best that was in her. She was willing to lay all on love's altar—body, soul, and spirit, and that honour of the Davenants which she had been so schooled to keep untarnished. Her pledge to Roger, her uncle's faith in her—all these must be tossed into the fire to make her gift complete. But the agony in Peter's face when the mask had fallen from it had temporarily destroyed for her all values except the value of love.
Peter took the fluttering, outstretched fingers and laid his lips against them. Then he relinquished them slowly, lingeringly. Passion had died out of his face. His eyes held only a grave tenderness, and the sternly sweet expression of his mouth recalled to Nan the man as she had first known him, before love, terrible and beautiful, had come into their lives to destroy them.
"I should never take you, dear," he said at last. "A man doesn't hurt the thing he loves—not in his right senses. What he'll do when the madness is on him—only his own soul knows."
She caught his arm impetuously.
"Peter, let me come! I'm not afraid of being hurt—not if we're together. It's only the hurt of being without you that I can't bear. . . . Oh, I know what you're thinking"—as she read the negation in his face—"that I should regret it, that I should mind what people said. Dear, if I can give you happiness, things like that simply wouldn't count. . . . Ah, believe me, Peter!"
He looked down at her with the tenderness one accords a child, ignorantly pleading to have its way. He knew Nan's temperament—knew that, in spite of all her courage, when the moment of exaltation had passed not even love itself could make up for the bitterness of its price, if bought at such a cost. He pictured her exposed to the slights of those whose position was still unassailable, waiting drearily at Continental watering-places till the decree absolute should be pronounced, and finally, restored to respectability in so far as marriage with him could make it possible, but always liable to be unpleasantly reminded, as she went through life, that there had been a time when she had outraged convention. It was unthinkable! It would break her utterly.
"Even if that were all, it still wouldn't be possible," he said gently. "You don't know what you would have to face. And I couldn't let you face it. But it isn't all. . . . There's honour, dear, and duty. . . ."
Her gaze met his in dreary interrogation.
"Then—then, you'll go away?" Her voice faltered, broke.
"Yes, I shall go away . . . out of your life."
He fell silent a moment. Then, with an effort, he went on:
"This is good-bye. We mustn't see each other again—"
"No, no," she broke in a little wildly. "Don't go, Peter, I can't bear it." She clung to him, repeating piteously: "Don't go . . . don't go!"
He stooped and pressed his lips to her hair, holding her in his arms.
"My dear!" he murmured. "My very dear!"
And so they remained for a little space.
Presently she lifted her face, white and strained, to his.
"Must you go, Peter?"
"Heart's beloved, there is no other way. We may not love . . . and we can't be together and not love. . . . So I must go."
She lay very still in his arms for a moment. Then he felt a long, shuddering sigh run through her body.
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes. . . . Peter, go very quickly. . . ."
He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth—not passionately, but with the ineffably sad calmness of farewell.
"God keep you, dear," he said.
The door closed behind him, shutting him from her sight, and she stood for a few moments staring dazedly at its wooden panels. Then, with a sudden desperate impulse, she tore it open again and peered out.
But there was only silence—silence and emptiness. He had gone.