CHAPTER XXXIV
THE WHITE FLAME
It was not till late in the afternoon of the day following upon her flight from Mallow that Nan and Peter met again. He had, so Sandy informed her, walked over to the Court in order to see Kitty.
"I think he has some private affair of his own that he wants to talk over with her," explained Sandy.
"It's about his wife, I expect," answered Nan dully. "She's had sunstroke—and is ordered home from India."
"Poor devil!" The words rushed from Sandy's lips. "How rotten everything is!" he added fiercely, with youth's instinctive revolt against the inevitableness of life's pains and penalties.
"And I've hardly mended matters, have I?" she submitted rather bitterly.
He slipped a friendly arm round her neck.
"Don't you worry any," he said, with gruff sympathy. "Mallory's fixed up everything—and it all dovetails in neatly with Kitty's saying you were staying with friends for the night. You're staying here—do you see? And Mallory and the mater between 'em have settled that you're to prolong your visit for a couple of days—to give more colour to the proceedings, so to speak! You'll emerge without a stain on your character!" he went on, trying with boyish clumsiness to cheer her up.
"Oh, don't, Sandy!" Her lip quivered. "I—I don't think I mind much about that. I feel as if I'd stained my soul."
"Well, if there were no blacker souls around than yours, old thing, the world would be a darned sight nicer place to live in! And that's that."
Nan contrived a smile.
"Sandy, you're rather a dear!" she said gratefully.
And then Peter came in, and Sandy hastened to make himself scarce.
A dead silence followed his hurried exit. Nan found herself trembling, and for a moment she dared not lift her eyes to Peter's face for fear of what she might read there. At last:
"Peter," she said, without looking at him. "Are you still—angry with me?"
"What makes you think I am angry?"
She looked up at that, then shrank back from the bitter hardness in his face almost as though he had dealt her a blow.
"Oh, you are—you are!" she cried tremulously.
"Don't you think most men would be in the same circumstances?"
"I don't understand," she said very low.
"No? I suppose you wouldn't," he replied. "You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word—faithfulness. Perhaps you can't help it—you're half a Varincourt! . . . Don't you realise what you've done? You've torn down our love and soiled it—made it nothing! I believed in you as I believed in God. . . . And then you run away with Maryon Rooke! One man or another—apparently it's all the same to you."
She rose and drew rather timidly towards him.
"Has it—hurt you—like that?" she said whisperingly. "You didn't mind—about Roger. Not in the same way."
"Mind?"
The word came hoarsely, and his hands, hanging loosely at his sides, slowly clenched. All the anguish of thwarting, the torture of a man who knows that the woman he loves will be another man's wife, found utterance in that one short word. Nan shivered at the stark agony in his tone. She did not attempt to answer him. There was nothing she could say. She could only stand voiceless and endure the pain-racked silence which followed.
It seemed to her that an infinity of time dragged by before he spoke again. When he did, it was in quiet, level tones out of which every atom of emotion had been crushed.
"You were pledged to Trenby," he said slowly. "That was different. I couldn't ask you to break your pledge to him, even had I been free to do so. You were his, not mine. . . . But you had given no promise to Maryon Rooke."
The incalculable reproach and accusation of those last words seemed to burn their way right into her heart. In a flash of revelation the whole thing became clear to her. She saw how bitterly she had failed the man she loved in that mad moment when she had thrown up everything and gone away with Maryon.
Dimly she acquiesced in the fact that there were excuses to be made—the long strain of the preceding months, her illness, leaving her with weakened nerves, and, finally, Roger's outrageous behaviour in the studio that day. But of these she would not speak to Peter. Had he not saved her from herself she would have wrecked her whole life by now, and she felt that, to him, she could not make excuses—however valid they might be.
She had failed him utterly—failed in that faithfulness of the spirit without which love is no more than a sex instinct. She knew it must appear like this to him, although deep within herself she was conscious that it was not really so. In her heart there was a white flame that would burn only for Peter—an altar flame which nothing could touch or defile. And the men who loved her knew it. It was this, the knowledge that the inmost soul and spirit of her eluded him, which had kept Roger's jealous anger at such a dangerous pitch.
"There is only one thing." Peter was speaking again, still in the same curiously detached tones as before. It was almost as though he were discussing the affairs of someone else—affairs which did not concern him very vitally. "There's only one more thing to be said. You've made it easier for me to do—what I have to do."
"What you have to do?" she repeated.
"Yes. I've had a cable from India. My wife is no better, and I'm going out to bring her home."
"I'm sorry she's no better," said Nan mechanically.
He murmured a formal word of thanks and then once more the dreadful silence hemmed them round. A hesitating knock sounded on the door and, after a moment's discreet delay, Sandy's freckled face peered round the doorway.
"I'm afraid you must leave now, Mallory, if you're to catch the up train," he said apologetically. "Kitty is here, waiting to drive you to the station."
Together they all three went out into the drive where Kitty was sitting behind the wheel of the car, Eliza perched skittishly on the rubbered step, talking with her. Aunt Eliza's opinion of "that red-headed body" had altered considerably during the course of the last year.
"And mind an' look in on your way back," she insisted.
Kitty nodded.
"I will. I want to talk to Nan."
"Ye'll no' be too hard on her?" besought Eliza.
Kitty laughed.
"Aunt Eliza dear, you're the biggest fraud I know! Your severity's just a pretence,"—bending forward to kiss her—"and a very thin one at that."
Then she greeted Nan precisely as though nothing had happened since they had last met, and, with a handshake all round, Mallory stepped into the car beside her and was whirled away to the station.
"It seems years since yesterday morning," said Nan, when, after Kitty's return from the station, they found themselves alone together.
For once Kitty had diverged from her usual principle, and a little jar of red stuff was responsible for the colour in her cheeks. Her eyes still blenched at the remembrance of that day and night's anxiety which she had endured alone.
"Yes," she acquiesced simply. "It seems years." And then, bit by bit, she drew from Nan the whole story of her flight from Mallow and of the violent scene which had preceded it, when Roger had so ruthlessly destroyed the portrait.
"I don't think—Peter—will ever forgive me," went on Nan, with a quiet hopelessness in her voice that was infinitely touching. "He would hardly speak to me."
The coolly aloof man from whom she had parted an hour ago did not seem as though he could ever have loved her. He had judged and condemned her as harshly as might a stranger. He was a stranger—this new, stonily indifferent Peter who had said very little but, in the few words he had spoken, had seemed to banish her out of his life and heart for ever.
"My dear"—Kitty's accustomed vitality rose to meet the occasion. "He'll forgive you some day, when he understands. Probably only a woman could really understand what made you do it. In any case, as far as Peter's concerned, it was all so ghastly for him, coming when it did—last night! He must have felt as if the world were falling to pieces."
"Last night? Why should it have been worse last night?"
"Because he'd just had a cable from India—about ten minutes before Sandy arrived—telling him that his wife had gone mad, and asking him to fetch her home."
"Gone mad?" Nan's voice was hardly more than a whisper of horror.
"Yes. He'd had a letter a day or two earlier warning him that things weren't going right with her. You know, she's a frightfully restless, excitable woman, and after having sunstroke she was ordered to keep quiet and rest as much as possible until she was able to come home. She entirely declined to do either—rest, or come home. She continued to ride and dance and amuse herself exactly as if there were nothing the matter. Naturally, her brain became more and more excitable, and at the present moment she is practically mad. No one can manage her. So they've sent for Peter, and of course, like the angel he is, he goes. . . . I suppose it will end in his playing keeper to a half-crazed neurasthenic for the rest of his natural life. He'll be far too tender-hearted to put her in a home of any kind, however expensive and luxurious. He's—he's too idealistic for this world, is Peter!" And Kitty's voice broke a little.
Nan was silent. Her hands lay folded on her knee, but the slender fingers worked incessantly. Presently she got up very quietly and, without speaking, sought the sanctuary of her own room, where she could be alone.
She felt utterly crushed and despairing as she realised that just at the moment of Peter's greatest need she had failed him—spoiled the one thing that had counted in a life bare of happiness by robbing him of his faith and trust in the woman he loved.
If the Death-Angel had come at that moment and beckoned her to follow him, she would have gone gladly. But Death is not so kind. He does not come just because life has grown so hard and difficult to endure that we are asking for him.
Later on, when Nan came downstairs to dinner, she spoke and moved almost mechanically. Only once did she show the least interest in anything that was said, and that was when Eliza remarked with relish:
"Roger Trenby will be wishin' Isobel Carson back home! I hear Lady Gertrude keeps him dancing attendance on her from morn till night, declaring she's at death's door the while."
Sandy grinned.
"Yes, Roger 'phoned an hour ago and asked to speak to you, Nan—he'd heard you were staying here. I said you were taking a nap."
Nan smiled faintly across at him.
"Thank you, Sandy," she said. She had no wish either to see or speak to Roger just now. There was something that must be fought out and decided before he and she met again.
Aunt Eliza bustled her off early to bed that night and she went thankfully—not to sleep, but to search out her own soul and make the biggest decision of her life.
It was not till the moon-pale fingers of dawn came creeping in through the chinks betwixt blind and window that Nan lay back on her pillows knowing that for good or ill she had taken her decision.
Something of the immensity of love, its heights and depths, had been revealed to her in those tense silences she had shared with Peter, and she knew that she had been untrue to the love within her—untrue from the very beginning when she had first pledged herself to Roger.
She had rushed headlong into her engagement with him, driven by cross-currents that had whirled her hither and thither. Afterwards, when the full realisation of her love for Peter had overwhelmed her, her pride—the dogged, unyielding pride of the Davenants, whose word was their bond—had held her to her promise.
It had been a matter of honour with her. Now she was learning that utter loyalty to love involved a higher, finer honour than a spoken pledge given by a reckless girl who had thought to find safety for herself and happiness for her friend by giving it.
For Peter, that faithfulness of the spirit, of which he had spoken, alone was possible. The woman he had married had her claims upon him. But as far as she herself was concerned, Nan realised that she could yet keep her love pure and untouched, faithful to the mystic three-fold bond of spirit, soul, and body.
. . . She would never marry Roger now. To-morrow she would write and tell him so. That he would storm and rage and try to force her to retract this new decision she was well aware. But that would only be part of the punishment which she must be prepared to suffer. There would, too, be a certain amount of obloquy and gossip to be faced. People in general would say she had behaved dishonourably. But, whatever the result, she was ready to bear it. It would be a very small atonement for her sin against love!
* * * * * *
The following day she returned to Mallow Court to be greeted warmly by Kitty. Once or twice the latter glanced at her a trifle uneasily as though she sensed something different in her, but it was not until later on, over a fire lit to cheat the unwonted coolness of the evening, that Nan unburdened herself.
Kitty said very little. But she and Barry were as much lovers now as they had been the day they married, and she understood.
"I think you're right," she commented slowly.
"I know I am," answered Nan with quiet conviction. "I feel as though all this time I had been profaning our love. Now I want to keep it quite, quite sacred—in my heart. It wouldn't make any difference even if Peter ceased to care for me. It's my caring for him that matters."
"Shall you—do you intend to see Roger?"
"No. I shall write to him to-morrow. But if he still wishes to see me after that, of course I can't refuse."
"And Peter?"
"He will have gone."
Kitty shook her head.
"No. He sails the day after to-morrow. He couldn't get a berth before."
"Then"—very softly and with a quiet radiance in her eyes—"then I will write to him to-morrow—after I've written to Roger."
Nan fell silent, gazing absently into the fire. There was a deep sense of thankfulness in her heart that she would be able to heal the hurt she had done Peter before he went East to face the bitter and difficult thing which awaited his doing. A strange sense of comfort stole over her. When she had written her letter to Roger, retracting the promise she had given him, she would be free—free to belong wholly to the man she loved.
Though they might never be together, though their love must remain for ever unconsummated, still in her loneliness she would know herself utterly and entirely his.