CHAPTER XXI THE RETURN
The October sunshine slanted across Berrier Cove, flinging a broad ribbon of light athwart the water and over the wet, shining sands left bare by the outgoing tide. Its furthermost point reached almost to Ann’s feet, where she sat in a crook of the rocks, resting after a five-mile tramp along the shore before she tackled the steep climb up to the Cottage.
The sea was wonderfully calm to-day—placid and tranquil as some inland lake, and edged with baby wavelets which came creeping tentatively upward to curl over on the sand like a fringe of downy feathers. Ann could not help vividly recalling the day when she had so nearly lost her life at that very spot. It seemed incredible that this quiet sea, with its gentle, crooning voice no louder than a rhythmic whisper, could be one and the same with the turbulent, thunderous monster which had almost beaten the breath out of her body.
And then her thoughts turned involuntarily to Brett Forrester. He was not unlike the sea, she reflected, in his sudden, unexpected changes of mood—with the buoyant charm he could exert when he chose, and that contrasting turbulence of his which left whoever ventured to oppose him feeling altogether breathless and battered.
Latterly, Ann had been finding it very difficult to understand him. Since the night of the dinner on board the Sphinx he had studiously refrained from the slightest attempt to make love to her. Sometimes, indeed, she was almost tempted to ask herself if that violent scene on the yacht could really have occurred between them or whether she had only dreamt it. It seemed so entirely incompatible with the easy attitude of friendliness which he had adopted towards her ever since. She would have liked to interpret this as signifying that he had accepted her refusal as final, but some inward prompting warned her that Brett was not the man to be so easily turned aside from his purpose. Meanwhile, however, it was a relief to be free from the subtle sense of importunity, of imperious demand, of which, when he chose, he could make her so acutely conscious.
Thinking over all that had passed between them on the yacht, she wondered curiously why he had so persistently referred to Tony. It seemed almost as though he were jealous of the boy—regarded him as some one who might prove an obstacle to the accomplishment of his own desires. Yet she could not recall anything which might have given him that impression. There had been nothing in the least loverlike in Tony’s attitude towards her during his visit to the Cottage.
On the contrary, she had been inwardly congratulating herself upon the fact that he had evidently determined to abide by the answer she had given him that night in Switzerland, as they came down from the Roche d’Or—although she would not have been the true woman she was if she had not secretly wondered a little at the apparent ease with which he had adapted himself to the altered relations between them! Pride had counted for a good deal. That she guessed. But, since Tony’s departure, she had begun to speculate whether there might not perhaps be some other reason which would better account for his submitting without further protest to her decision. And in a brief sentence, contained in a letter she had received from him only that morning, she thought she had discovered the key to the mystery.
“Uncle Philip and I depart to Mentone next week,” he had written.
“Naturally, he hates the idea of my being anywhere in the vicinity
of Monte Carlo, but as he doesn’t seem able to throw off the
effects of a chill he caught out shooting, our local saw-bones—in
whom, he has the most touching faith—has decreed Mentone. So
Mentone it is. Lady Doreen Neville and her mother will also be
there, at their villa, as Lady Doreen is ordered to winter in the
south of France. Afterwards the doctors hope she will be quite
strong.”
It was in the name Neville that Ann thought she detected a clue to Tony’s altered demeanour. She recollected having met Lady Doreen on one occasion, about a year ago, when she herself had been paying a flying visit to the Brabazons at their house in Audley Square—a frail slip of a girl with immense grey eyes and hair like an aureole of reddish gold. She had been barely seventeen at that time, slim and undeveloped, and her delicacy had added rather than otherwise to her look of extreme youth. Ann had regarded her as hardly more than a child. But she knew that a year can effect an enormous alteration in a girl in her late teens—sometimes seeming to transform her all at once from immature girlhood into gracious and charming womanhood. Lady Doreen had “come out” since Ann had met her, made her curtsy at Court and taken part in her first London season, and it was not difficult to imagine her, delicate though she might be, as extremely attractive and invested with a certain ethereal grace and charm peculiarly her own.
And that Tony had seen a good deal of her in town last July Ann was aware. He had mentioned her name more than once during his visit to the Cottage, and it seemed to Ann quite likely that, sore because of her own definite refusal of him, he had sought and found consolation in the company of Lady Doreen.
Looking back, she fancied she remembered a certain shy embarrassment in Tony’s manner when he had spoken of her. She had thought nothing about it at the time, being preoccupied with her own affairs, but now, in the light of this new idea which had presented itself to her, she felt convinced that there was something behind the slight hesitation Tony had evinced when referring to the Nevilles.
A little smile, almost maternal in its tenderness, curved her lips. She had always hoped that Tony’s love for her might prove to be only a red-hot boyish infatuation, grounded on propinquity and friendship, which the passage of time would cure, and if, now, man’s love was being born in him and she could keep the old friendship, it would give her complete happiness. But she questioned rather anxiously whether Doreen Neville was possessed of a strong enough character to keep him straight. She was so sweet and fragile—the kind of woman to be petted and cossetted and taken care of by some big, kind-hearted man, not in the least the type to steady a headstrong young fool, bent upon blundering on to the rocks.
Tony’s letter was in the pocket of her coat, and, pulling it out, she ran through it again. There was no further mention of Doreen Neville, but she found that there was a postscript scribbled in a corner, in Tony’s most illegible scrawl, which she had overlooked when reading the letter at breakfast time.
“Much as you disapprove, little Puritan Ann, do wish me luck at
the tables! Such, luck as we had that night at Montricheux. Do you
remember?”
Ann’s heart contracted suddenly. Was she ever likely to forget—to forget that day when, for the first time, Eliot Coventry’s grey, compelling eyes had met and held her own? Since then she had touched heights and depths of happiness and despair which had changed her whole outlook on life. Love had come to her—and gone again, and only through sheer pluck and a pride that refused to break had she been able to face the fact and hide her hurt from the world at large.
Eliot’s sudden disappearance from Silverquay last month had made things a little easier for her. He had left home the day following that of the dinner-party on board the Sphinx, and the knowledge that there was no danger of meeting him had helped to lessen the strain, she was enduring. Previously she had been strung up to a high nervous tension by the ever-present fear of running across him unexpectedly, and it had brought her infinite relief when she learned that he had gone away. Since then a strange numbness seemed to have taken possession of her. It was as though some one had closed the door on the past, very quietly and carefully.
Dully she recalled the night after Eliot had shown her he had no intention of claiming her love as a succession of interminable hours of mental and physical agony. But now she was hardly conscious of pain—only of a stupefied sense of loss. She felt as if her life were finished, as though all the days and years that lay ahead of her were entirely empty and purposeless. Sometime or other, she supposed, she would come alive again, be able to feel and realise things once more. But she dreaded the coming of that time. Better this apathy, like the stupor of one drugged, than a repetition of the anguish she had already suffered.
It seemed as if she were endowed with a species of double consciousness—an outward, everyday self which laughed and talked quite readily with the people she knew, walked and rode, read and wrote letters just like any one else, and a strange inner self which led a dumb, dreaming existence, drearily remote from everything that made life keen and sentient.
Suddenly a tremor of wind ran between the great boulders of the cove, whining eerily. It savoured of coming autumn, and Ann watched the quiet sea bunch itself up into small, angry tufts of foam as the breeze which seemed to have sprung up from nowhere fled across it. Then, feeling suddenly chilled, she rose from where she was sitting and turned rather wearily homeward.
Her way lay through the village, and as she climbed the steep hill which rose abruptly from the bay, in first one cottage, then another, lights twinkled into being, like bright, inquisitive eyes peering through the falling dusk. Absorbed in her thoughts, she had lingered on the shore longer than she intended, and when she reached the top of the hill she instinctively quickened her pace and hastened along the somewhat lonely stretch of road which led to the Cottage.
Just as she was within a short distance of the gate, she caught the sound of footsteps coming from the opposite direction. There were few people abroad in the lanes, as a rule, at this hour of the evening, and the idea that the approaching pedestrian might prove to be a tramp leaped quickly to Ann’s mind. She was seized with a sudden nervousness, born of the dusk and loneliness of the road and of her own bodily fatigue, and she broke into a run, hoping to reach the Cottage gate before the supposed tramp should turn the corner. But the steps drew nearer—striding, purposeful steps, not in the least like those of a tramp—and an instant later the figure of Eliot Coventry rounded the bend in the road and loomed into view.
Ann’s heart gave a sudden leap, then started beating at racing speed. The meeting was so utterly unlooked-for that for a moment a feeling akin to terror laid hold of her. Taking the last few yards which still intervened betwixt her and the safety of the Cottage at a rush, she almost fell against the gate, seeking with blind, groping fingers for the latch. But it seemed to be wedged in some way, and she tore at it unavailingly.
“Let me open that for you.”
Eliot’s voice, rather grave but with the ghost of a quiver in it which might have betokened some inward amusement, sounded above her head. Then, as she still struggled vainly to move the recalcitrant latch, he went on quietly:
“Are you trying to run away from me—or what?”
Ann straightened herself and made a snatch at her fugitive dignity.
“No—oh, no,” she said, endeavouring to steady her flurried tones. Her heart was still playing tricks, throbbing jerkily in her side, and her breath came unevenly. “Only you startled me. I thought you were a tramp.”
She fancied he concealed a smile in the darkness.
“Not very complimentary of you,” he answered composedly.
“It wasn’t, was it? I’m so sorry,” she agreed in eager haste. “Have you come to see Robin? I’m afraid he’s out. He said he should be back rather late to-night.”
“No,” he replied evenly, “I’ve not come to see Robin.” Then, with a sudden leap in his voice: “I came to see you, Ann.”
“To see me?” she murmured confusedly.
“Yes. Am I to tell you all about it out here in the cold, or may I come in?”
Without waiting for her answer, he quietly lifted the latch which had refused to move for her trembling fingers, and silently, half in a dream, she led the way into the house.
There was no light in the living-room other than that yielded by the logs which burned on the open hearth, but even by their flickering glow she could discern how much he had altered since she had last seen him. He was thinner, and his face had the worn look of a man who has recently passed through some stern mental and spiritual conflict. There were furrows of weariness deeply graven on either side the mouth, and Ann felt her heart swell within her in an overwhelming impulse of tenderness and longing to smooth away those new lines from the beloved face. Before she knew it, that imperative inner need had manifested in unconscious gesture. Her hands went out to him as naturally and instinctively as the hands of a mother go out to her hurt child.
But he did not take them in his. Instead, he seemed almost to draw away from her, his hands slowly clenching as though the man were putting some immense compulsion of restraint upon himself.
“I’ve come back, Ann,” he said slowly. “I’ve come back.”
Her outstretched hands dropped to her sides. She was trembling, but she forced herself into speech.
“Why did you go?” she asked very low.
“I went—to see if I could live without you, to try and put you out of my life.... And I can’t do it.” He spoke with a curious deliberation. “If ever a man fought against love, I fought against it. I’d done with love—it’s the thing I’ve cut out of my plan of life these ten years.” His mouth twisted wryly as if even yet the memory of the past had power to stab him. “I distrusted love. And I distrusted you.” He stopped abruptly, still conveying that impression of a man forcibly holding himself in check.
“And—and now?” Ann’s voice was almost inaudible.
They had been standing very still, held motionless and apart by a strange intensity of feeling, but unconsciously she had drawn closer to him as she spoke. As though her instinctive little movement towards him snapped the last link of the iron control he had been forcing on himself, he suddenly bent forward, and, snatching her up into his arms, held her crushed against his breast, kissing her with the overwhelming passion of a man who has been denied through dreary months of longing. Heedless of past or future, Ann yielded, surrendering with her lips the whole brave young heart of her.
Presently his clasp relaxed, and she drew a little away from him.
“Ann,” he said unsteadily, “little dear Ann!”
She met his gaze with eyes like stars—clear and unafraid.
“You haven’t said you trusted me!” A note of tender amusement quivered in her voice. “Do you, Eliot?”
For a moment his eyes seemed to burn out at her from under his heavily drawn brows.
“Trust you?” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know whether I trust you or not!... But I know I want you!”
And once more he swept her up into his embrace.
“My beloved!”
His kisses rained down on her face—fierce, imperious kisses that seemed to draw the very soul out of her body and seal it his, and when at last he let her go she leaned against him, tremulously spent and shaken with the rapture of answering passion which had kindled to life within her.
“Tell me you love me!” he insisted. “Let me hear you say it—to make it real!”
And turning to give herself to him again, she hid her face against his shoulder, whispering:
“Oh, you know—you know I do!”
Half an hour later found them still together, sitting by the big, old-fashioned hearth which Eliot had plied with logs till the flames roared up the chimney. Robin had not yet come back; he had ridden into Ferribridge early in the afternoon, leaving word that he would probably be late in returning. Once Maria had looked into the room to ask if she should light the lamps, and the lovers had started guiltily apart, Ann replying with hastily assumed indifference that they did not require them yet. Old Maria, whose eyesight was still quite keen enough to distinguish love, even from the further side of a room lit only by the lambent firelight, retired to her own quarters, chuckling to herself. “So ‘tez the squire as was courtin’ the chiel, after all. An’ me thinkin’ all along as how ‘twas young Master Tony! Aw, well, tez more suitin’ like, for sure—him with his millions and my Miss Ann.” Maria’s ideas as to the riches with which the owner of Heronsmere was providentially endowed might be hazy, but at least she did not err on the side of underestimating them.
Meanwhile, Eliot and Ann, placidly believing that Maria was none the wiser for her brief entrance into the room—all newly-acknowledged lovers being apparently blessed with an ostrich-like quality of self-deception—continued talking together by the firelight.
“That first day I saw you,” Eliot was saying. “It was at the Kursaal. Do you remember?”
Ann laughed and blushed a little.
“I’m not likely to forget,” she said mirthfully. “You were so frightfully rude.”
“Rude? I?” He looked honestly astonished.
“Yes. Didn’t you mean to be? I was sympathising with you so nicely over losing at the tables—and you nearly bit my head off! You looked down your nose—it’s rather a nice nose, by the way!”—impertinently—“and observed loftily: ‘Pray don’t waste your sympathy’!”
Eliot laughed outright.
“Did I, really? What a boor you must have thought me!”
“Oh, I did”—fervently. “And then there was the day of the Fêtes des Narcisses, when I hit you with a rosebud by mistake. You glared at me as if I’d committed one of the seven deadly sins.”
“So you had—if occupying the thoughts of a ‘confirmed misogynist’ who had forsworn women and all their ways counts as one of them!”
A silence fell between them. The lightly uttered speech suddenly recalled the past, and each was vividly conscious of the bitter root from which it sprang. The man’s face darkened as though he would push aside the memory.
“But that’s past,” said Ann at last, very softly.
He turned to her curiously.
“So you know, then?”
She flushed.
“Yes, I know—I heard. People talk. But I’ve not been gossiping, Eliot—truly.”
A brief smile crossed his face.
“You—gossiping! That’s good. But I might have guessed you would hear all about it. Even one’s own particular rack and thumbscrew aren’t private property nowadays”—bitterly. “I wonder how much you know. What have you heard?”
“Oh, very little—” she began confusedly, her heart aching for the bitterness which still lingered in his voice.
“Tell me,” he insisted authoritatively. “I’d rather you knew the truth than some garbled version of it.”
Very reluctantly Ann repeated what she had learned from Mrs. Hilyard—the bare facts of that unhappy episode in his life which had turned him into a soured, embittered man.
“Anything more? Do you know who the woman was—her name?”
“No. Only that she was very young”—pitifully.
“I believe,” he said, cupping her face in his hand and turning it up to his, “I believe you are actually sorry for her?”
“Yes, I am. I’m sorry for any one who makes a dreadful mistake and loses their whole happiness through it,” she answered heartily.
“I’m afraid I don’t take such a broad-minded view of things,” he returned grimly. “I haven’t a forgiving disposition, and I believe in people getting what they deserve. You’d better remember that”—smiling briefly—“if ever you feel tempted to try how far you can go.”
“Do you know, I think you’re going to prove rather an autocratic lover, Eliot?” she said, laughing gently.
“All good lovers are,” he answered, drawing her into his arms once more with a sudden, swift jealousy. “Don’t you know that? It’s the very essence of love—possession, A man asks everything of the woman he loves—past, present, and future. He will he satisfied with nothing less.”
The words, uttered with an undercurrent of deep passion, struck a familiar chord in Ann’s mind. They were like, and yet unlike, something she had heard before. For a moment she puzzled over it, the connection eluding her. Then, all at once, it flashed over her, and she remembered how Brett Forrester had said: “The past doesn’t matter to me. It’s the future that counts.” These two men, Eliot and Brett, loved very differently, she thought! With Brett, love meant a passionate determination to possess the woman he desired whether she surrendered willingly or with every fibre of her spirit in revolt. But to Eliot, love signified something deeper and more enduring. He wanted all of the woman he would make his wife—soul as well as body, past as well as future, the supreme gift which only a woman who loves perfectly can give and which only a man whose love is on the same high plane should dare to ask.
“I should never be content with less,” Eliot went on. “I think if you were ever to fail me, Ann—” He broke off abruptly, as though the bare idea were torture.
“But I shan’t fail you!” she replied confidently. “I love you”—simply. “And when one loves, one doesn’t fail.”
His arms tightened their clasp about her till she could feel the hard beating of his heart against her own.
“Heart’s dearest!” he murmured, his lips against her throat.
Presently she lifted her head from his shoulder and regarded him with questioning eyes.
“You didn’t tell me what would happen to me if I did fail you?”
“Don’t speak of it!” he said sharply.
“But it’s just as well to know the worst,” she persisted laughingly. She felt so sure—so safe—with his arms round her that she could afford to joke a little about something that could never happen. “Would you cut off my head—as Bluebeard cut off the heads of his wives?”
For a moment he made no answer. Then:
“I should simply wipe you out of my life. That’s all.”
He spoke very evenly, but with such a note of absolute finality in his quiet voice that Ann quivered a little as she lay in his arms—as one might wince if any one laid the keen edge of a naked blade against one’s throat, no matter how lightly.
“Ah! Don’t let’s talk of such things!” she cried hastily. “Don’t let’s spoil our first day, Eliot. Do you realise”—with a radiant smile—“that this is the first—the very first—day we have really belonged to each other?”
So they talked of other things—the foolish, sweet, and tender things which lovers have always talked and probably always will—things which are of no moment to the busy material-minded world as it bustles on its way, but which are the frail filaments out of which men and women fashion for themselves dear memories that shall sweeten all their lives.
But time will not wait, even for lovers, and Eliot had been gone over an hour when at last Robin returned from Ferribridge.
“Cast a shoe and had to wait an unconscionable time to get my horse shod,” he explained briefly.
“You must be starving,” commiserated Ann, “I’ll tell Maria to bring you in some supper at once. I’ve had mine.” But she omitted to add she had hardly eaten anything at the little solitary meal which succeeded Eliot’s departure.
Maria’s indignation as she carried out the half-touched dishes had been tinctured with a certain philosophic indulgence. “Ah, well!” she commented. “They do say folks that be mazed wi’ love can’t never fancy their victuals. Seems like tez true.” In response to which Ann had merely laughed and kissed her weather-beaten old cheek.
In true masculine fashion, it was not until the cravings of his inner man were satisfied that Robin began to observe anything unusual in the atmosphere. But when at last he had finished supper, and was filling his beloved pipe preparatory to enjoying that best of all smokes which follows a long day’s riding and a cosy meal, it dawned upon him that there was something unaccustomed in Ann’s air of suppressed radiance. She was hovering about him, waiting to strike a match for him to light up by, when the idea struck him. He regarded her attentively for a minute or two with his nice grey-green eyes and finally inquired in a tone of mild amusement:
“What is it, sister mine? Has some one left us a fortune, or what? There’s something odd about you to-night—an air of—je ne sais quoi!”—with an expansive wave of his hand.
“‘I’m engaged to be married, sir, she said,’” remarked Ann demurely.
“Engaged? Great Scott! Who to?” Robin manifested all the unflattering amazement common to successive generations of brothers when confronted with the astounding fact that the apparently quite ordinary young woman whom they have hitherto regarded merely as a sisterly adjunct to life has suddenly become the pivot upon which some other man’s entire happiness will henceforth turn.
But afterwards, when he had had time to assimilate the unexpected news, he was ready to enter whole-heartedly into Ann’s happiness—just as throughout all their lives he had been always ready to share with her either happiness or pain, like the good comrade he was.
“I shall miss you abominably,” he declared. “In fact, I shall forbid the banns if Coventry wants to carry you off too soon.”
“You absurd person!” She laughed and kissed him. “Why, living at Heronsmere, I shall be able to look after you both. Little brother shan’t be neglected, I promise you!”
They sat over the fire talking till the grandfather’s clock in the corner struck twelve warning strokes. Robin knocked out the ashes of his pipe.
“We’d better be thinking of turning in, old thing,” he observed. “Even newly-engaged people require a modicum of sleep, I suppose”—smiling across at her.
“We’re not telling people we’re engaged, yet,” Ann. cautioned him.
Robin looked up.
“No? Why not?” he asked laconically.
“I wanted—I thought it would be nice to have a few days just to ourselves,” she replied uncertainly.
“That’s not the only reason.”
Ann hesitated.
“No,” she acknowledged at last. “It isn’t. Perhaps I’m ‘fey’ to-night. I don’t feel quite material Ann yet”—with a faint smile. “And—somehow—I’d rather no one knew for a little while.”