“THEN that telegram--that telegram from Judy--I suppose that was all
part of the plan?”
Jean felt the futility of the question even while she asked it. The
answer was so inevitable.
“Yes”--briefly. “I knew that Judy meant staying the night with her
friends before she went away. She sent the wire--because I asked her
to.”
“_Judy did that?_”
There was such an immeasurable anguish of reproach in the low,
quick-spoken whisper that Burke felt glad Judith was not there to hear
it. Had it been otherwise, she might have regretted the share she had
taken in the proceedings, small as it had been. She was not a man,
half-crazed by love, in whose passion-blurred vision nothing counted
save the winning of the one woman, nor had she known Burke’s plan in its
entirety.
“Yes, Judy sent the wire,” he said.. “But give her so much credit, she
didn’t know that I intended--this. She only knew that I wanted another
chance of seeing you alone--of asking you to be my wife, and I told her
that you wouldn’t come up to the bungalow unless you believed that she
would be there too. I didn’t think you’d trust yourself alone with me
again--after that afternoon at the inn”--with blunt candour.
“No. I shouldn’t have done.”
“So you see I had to think of something--some way. And it was you
yourself who suggested this method.”
“I?”--incredulously.
“Yes. Don’t you remember what you told me that day I drove you hack from
Dartmoor ‘_A woman’s happiness depends upon her reputation_.’”
She looked at him quickly, recalling the scattered details of that
afternoon--Burke’s gibes at what he believed to be her fear of gossiping
tongues and her own answer to his taunts: “No woman can afford to ignore
scandal.” And then, following upon that, his sudden, curious absorption
in his own thoughts.
The remembrance of it all was like a torchlight flashed into a dark
place, illuminating what had been hidden and inscrutable. She spoke
swiftly.
“And it was then--that afternoon--you thought of this?”
He bent his head.
“Yes,” he acknowledged.
Jean was silent. It was all clear now--penetratingly so.
“And the Holfords? Are there any such people?” she asked drearily.
She scarcely knew what prompted her to put so purposeless and
unimportant a question. Actually, she felt no interest at all in
the answer. It could not make the least difference to her present
circumstances.
Perhaps it was a little the feeling that this trumpery process of
question and answer served to postpone the inevitable moment when she
must face the situation in which she found herself--face it in its
simple crudeness, denuded of unessential whys and wherefores.
“Oh, yes, the Holfords are quite real,” answered Burke. “And so is the
plan for an expedition to one of the tors by moonlight. Only it will
be carried out to-morrow night instead of to-night. To-night is for the
settlement between you and me.”
The strained expression of utter, shocked incredulity was gradually
leaving Jean’s face. The unreal was becoming real, and she knew now what
she was up against; the hard, reckless quality of Burke’s voice left her
no illusions.
“Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “you won’t really do this thing?”
If she had hoped to move him by a simple, straightforward appeal to the
best that might be in him, she failed completely. For the moment, all
that was good in him, anything chivalrous which the helplessness of her
womanhood might have invoked, was in abeyance. He was mere primitive
man, who had succeeded in carrying off the woman he meant to mate and
was prepared to hold her at all costs.
“I told you I would compel you,” he said doggedly. “That I would let
nothing in the world stand between you and me. And I meant every word I
said. You’ve no way out now--except marriage with me.”
The imperious decision of his tone roused her fighting spirit.
“Do you imagine,” she broke out scornfully, “that--after this--I would
ever marry you?... I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on
earth! I’d die sooner!”
“I daresay you would,” he returned composedly. “You’ve too much grit
to be afraid of death. Only, you see, that doesn’t happen to be the
alternative. The alternative is a smirched reputation. Tarnished a
little--after to-night--even if you marry me; dragged utterly in the
mire if you refuse. I’m putting it before you with brutal frankness, I
know. But I want you to realise just what it means and to promise that
you’ll be my wife before it’s too late--while I can still get you back
to Staple during the hours of propriety”--smiling grimly.
She looked at him with a slow, measured glance of bitter contempt.
“Even a tarnished reputation might be preferable to marriage with
you--more endurable,” she added, with the sudden tormented impulse of a
trapped thing to hurt back.
“You don’t really believe that”--impetuously--“I know _I know_ I could
make you happy! You’d be the one woman in the world to me. And I don’t
think”--more quietly--“that you could endure a slurred name, Jean.”
She made no answer. Every word he spoke only made it more saliently
clear to her that she was caught--bound hand and foot in a web from
which there was no escape. Yet, little as Burke guessed it, the actual
question of “what people might say” did not trouble her to any great
extent. She was too much her father’s own daughter to permit a mere
matter of reputation to force her into a distasteful marriage.
Not that she minimised the value of good repute. She was perfectly aware
that if she refused to marry Burke, and he carried out his threat of
detaining her at the bungalow until the following morning, she would
have a heavy penalty to pay--the utmost penalty which a suspicious world
exacts from a woman, even though she may be essentially innocent, in
whose past there lurks a questionable episode.
But she had courage enough to face the consequences of that refusal, to
stand up to the clatter of poisonous tongues that must ensue; and trust
enough to bank on the loyalty of her real friends, knowing it would be
the same splendid loyalty that she herself would have given to any one
of them in like circumstances. For Jean was a woman who won more than
mere lip-service from those who called themselves her friends.
Burke had never been more mistaken in his calculations than when he
counted upon forcing her hand by the mere fear of scandal. But none the
less he held her--and held her in the meshes of a far stronger and more
binding net, had he but realised it.
Looking back upon the episode from which her present predicament had
actually sprung, Jean could almost have found it in her heart to smile
at the relative importance which, at the time, that same incident had
assumed in her eyes.
It had seemed to her, then, that for Blaise ever to hear that she had
been locked in a room with Burke, had spent an uncounted, hour or so
with him at the “honeymooners’ inn” would be the uttermost calamity that
could befall her.
He would never believe that it had been by no will of hers--so she had
thought at the time--and that fierce lover’s jealousy which had been
the origin of their quarrel, and of all the subsequent mutual
misunderstandings and aloofness, would be roused to fresh life, and his
distrust of her become something infinitely more difficult to combat.
But compared with the present situation which confronted her, the
happenings of that past day faded into insignificance. She stood, now,
face to face with a choice such as surely few women had been forced to
make.
Whichever way she decided, whichever of the two alternatives she
accepted, her happiness must pay the price. Nothing she could ever say
or do, afterwards, would set her right in the eyes of the man whose
belief in her meant everything. Whether she agreed to marry Burke,
returning home in the odour of sanctity within the next hour or two, or
whether she refused and returned the next morning--free, but with the
incontrovertible fact of a night spent at Burke’s bungalow, alone with
him, behind her, Blaise would never trust or believe in her love for him
again.
And if she promised to marry Burke and so save her reputation, it must
automatically mean the end of everything between herself and the man
she loved--the dropping of an iron curtain compared with which the wall
built up out of their frequent misunderstandings in the past seemed
something as trifling and as easily demolished as a card house.
On the other hand, if she risked her good name and kept her freedom, she
would be equally as cut off from him. Not that she feared Blaise would
take the blackest view of the affair--she was sure that he believed
in her enough not to misjudge her as the world might do--but he would
inevitably think that she had deliberately chosen to spend an afternoon
on the Moor alone with Burke--“playing with fire” exactly as he had
warned her not to, and getting her fingers burnt in consequence--and
he would accept it as a sheer denial of the silent pledge of love
understood which bound them together.
He would never trust her again--nor forgive her. No man could. Love’s
loyalty, rocked by the swift currents of jealousy and passion, is not
of the same quality as the steady loyalty of friendship--that calm,
unshakable confidence which may exist between man and man or woman and
woman.
Moreover--and here alone was where the fear of gossip troubled her--even
if the inconceivable happened and Blaise forgave and trusted her again,
she could not go to him with a slurred name, give him herself--when the
gift was outwardly tarnished. The Tormarin pride was unyielding as a
rock--and Tormarin women had always been above suspicion. She could not
break the tradition of an old name--do that disservice to the man she
loved! No, if she could find no way out of the web in which she had been
caught she was set as far apart from Blaise as though they had never
met. Only the agony of meeting and remembrance would be with her for the
rest of life!
Jean envisaged very clearly the possibilities that lay ahead--envisaged
them with a breathless, torturing perception of their imminence. It was
to be a fight--here and now--for the whole happiness that life might
hold.
She turned to Burke, breaking at last the long silence which had
descended between them.
“And what do you suppose I feel towards you, Geoffrey? Will you be
content to have your wife think of you--as I must think?”
A faint shadow flitted across his face. The quiet scorn of her
words--their underlying significance--flicked him on the raw.
“I’ll be content to have you as my wife--at any price,” he said
stubbornly. “Jean”--a sudden urgency in his tones--“try to believe I
hate all this as much as you do. When you’re my wife, I’ll spend my life
in teaching you to forget it--in--wiping the very memory of to-day out
of your mind.”
“I shall never forgot it,” she said slowly. Then, bitterly: “I wonder
why you even offer me a choice--when you know; that it is really no
choice.”
“Why? Because I swore to you that you should give me what I want--that
I wouldn’t take even a kiss from you again by force. But”--unevenly--“I
didn’t know what it meant--the waiting!”
Outside, the mist had thickened into fog, curtaining the windows. The
light had dimmed to a queer, glimmering dusk, changing the values of
things, and out of the shifting shadows her white face, with its scarlet
line of scornful mouth, gleamed at him--elusive, tantalising as a flower
that sways out of reach. In the uncertain half-light which struggled
in through the dulled window-panes there was something provocative,
maddening--a kind of etherealised lure of the senses in the wavering,
shadowed loveliness of her. The man’s pulses leaped; something within
him slipped its leash.
“Kiss me!” he demanded hoarsely. “Don’t keep me waiting any longer. Give
me your lips... now... now...”
She sprang aside from him, warding him off. Her eyes stormed at him out
of her white face.
“You promised!” she cried, her voice sharp with fear. “You promised!”
The tension of the next moment strained her nerves to breaking-point.
Then he fell back. Slowly his arms dropped to his sides without touching
her, his hands clenching with the effort that it cost him.
“You’re right,” he said, breathing quickly. “I promised. I’ll keep my
promise.” Then, vehemently: “Jean, why won’t you let me take you home? I
could put the car right in ten minutes. Come home!”
There was unmistakable appeal in his tones. It was obvious he hated
the task to which he had set himself, although he had no intention of
yielding.
She stared at him doubtfully.
“Will you? Will you take me home, Geoffrey?... Or”--bitterly--“is this
only another trap?”
“I’ll take you home--at once, _now_--if you’ll promise to be my wife.
Jean, it’s better than waiting till to-morrow--till circumstances
_force_ you into it!” he urged.
She was silent, thinking rapidly. That sudden break in Burke’s control,
when for a moment she had feared his promise would not hold him, had
warned her to put an end to the scene--if only temporarily--as quickly
as possible.
“You are very trusting,” she said, forcing herself to speak lightly.
“How do you know that I shall not give you the pledge you ask
merely in order to get home--and then decline to keep it? I
think”--reflectively--“I should be quite justified in the
circumstances.”
He smiled a little and shook his head.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not afraid of that. If you give me your
word, I know you’ll keep it. You wouldn’t be--you--if you could do
otherwise.”
For a moment, Jean was tempted, fiercely tempted to take his blind
belief in her and use it to extricate herself from the position into
which he had thrust her. As she herself had said, the circumstances were
such as almost to justify her. Yet something within her, something that
was an integral part of her whole nature, rebelled against the idea of
giving a promise which, from the moment that she made it, she would have
no smallest intention of keeping. It would be like the breaking of a
prisoner’s given parole--equally mean and dishonourable.
With a little mental shrug she dismissed the idea and the brief
temptation. She must find some other way, some other road to safety.
If only he would leave her alone, leave her just long enough for her
to make a rush for it--out of the house into that wide wilderness of
mist-wrapped moor!
It would be a virtually hopeless task to find her way to any village or
to the farmstead, three miles away, of which Burke had spoken. She knew
that. Even moorwise folk not infrequently entirely lost their bearings
in a Dartmoor mist, and, as far as she herself was concerned, she had
not the remotest idea in which direction the nearest habitation lay.
It would be a hazardous experiment--fraught with danger. But danger was
preferable to the dreadful safety of the bungalow.
In a brief space, stung to swift decision by that tense moment when
Burke’s self-mastery had given way, she had made up her mind to risk the
open moor. But, for that she must somehow contrive to be left alone. She
must gain time--time to allay Burke’s suspicions by pretending to make
the best of the matter, and then, on some pretext or other, get him out
of the room. It was the sole way of escape she could devise.
“Well, which is it to be?” Burke’s voice broke in harshly upon the wild
turmoil of her thoughts. “Your promise--and Staple within an hour and a
half? Or--the other alternative?”
“I don’t think it can be either--yet,” she said quietly. “What you’re
asking--it’s too big a question for a woman to decide all in a minute.
Don’t you see”--with a rather shaky little laugh--“it means my whole
life? I--I must have time, Geoffrey. I can’t decide now. What time is
it?”
He struck a match, holding the flame close to the dial of his watch.
“Seven o’clock.”
“Only that?” The words escaped her involuntarily. It seemed hours, an
eternity, since she had read those few brief words contained in Judith’s
telegram. And it was barely an hour ago!
“Then--then I can have a little time to think it over,” she said after
a moment. “We could get back to Staple by ten if we left here at
eight-thirty?”
“There or thereabouts. We should have to go slow through this infernal
mist Jean”--his voice took on a note of passionate entreaty--“sweetest,
won’t you give me your promise and let me take you home? You shall never
regret it. I----”
“Oh, hush!” she checked him quickly. “I can’t answer you now, Geoffrey.
I must have time--time. Don’t press me now.”
“Very well.” There was an unaccustomed gentleness in his manner. Perhaps
something in the intense weariness of her tones appealed to him. “Are
you very tired, Jean?”
“Do you know”--she spoke with some surprise, as though the idea had only
just presented itself to her--“do you know, I believe I’m rather hungry!
It sounds very material of me”--laughing a little. “A woman in my
predicament ought to be quite above--or beyond--mere pangs of hunger.”
“Hungry! By Jove, and well you might be by this hour of the day!” he
exclaimed remorsefully. “Look here, we’ll have supper. There are some
chops in the larder. We’ll cook them together--and then you’ll see what
a really domesticated husband I shall make.”
He spoke with a new gaiety, as though he felt very sure of her ultimate
decision and glad that the strain of the struggle of opposing wills was
past.
“Chops! How heavenly! I’m afraid”--apologetically--“it’s very unromantic
of me, Geoffrey!”
He laughed and, striking a match, lit the lamp. “Disgustingly so!
But there are moments for romance and moments for chops. And this is
distinctly the moment for chops. Come along and help me cook ’em.”
He flashed a keen glance at her face as the sudden lamplight dispelled
the shadows of the room. But there was nothing in it to contradict the
insouciance of her speech. Her cheeks were a little flushed and her
eyes very bright, but her smile was quite natural and unforced. Burke
reflected that women were queer, unfathomable creatures. They would
fight you to the last ditch--and then suddenly surrender, probably
liking you in secret all the better for having mastered them.
He had forgotten that he was dealing with a daughter of Jacqueline
Mavory. All the actress that was Jean’s mother came out in her now,
called up from some hidden fount of inherited knowledge to meet the
imperative need of the moment.
No one, watching Jean as she accompanied Burke to the kitchen premises
and assisted him in the preparation of their supper, would have imagined
that she was acting her part in any other capacity than that of willing
playmate. She was wise enough not to exhibit any desire to leave him
alone during the process of carrying the requisites for the meal from
the kitchen into the living-room. She had noticed the sudden mistrust
in his watchful eyes and the way in which he had instantly followed
her when, at the commencement of the proceedings, she had unthinkingly
started off down the passage from the kitchen, carrying a small tray of
table silver in her hand, and thereafter she refrained from giving him
the slightest ground for suspicion. Together they cooked the chops,
together laid the table, and finally sat down to share the appetising
results of their united efforts.
Throughout the little meal Jean preserved an attitude of detached
friendliness, laughing at any small joke that cropped up in the course
of conversation and responding gaily enough to Burke’s efforts to
entertain her. Now and again, as though unconsciously, she would fall
into a brief reverie, apparently preoccupied with the choice that lay
before her, and at these moments Burke would refrain from distracting
her attention, but would watch intently, with those burning eyes of
his, the charming face and sensitive mouth touched to a sudden new
seriousness that appealed.
By the time the meal had drawn to an end, his earlier suspicions had
been lulled into tranquillity, and over the making of the coffee he
became once more the big, overgrown schoolboy and jolly comrade of his
less tempestuous moments. It almost seemed as though, to please her, to
atone in a measure for the mental suffering he had thrust on her, he was
endeavouring to keep the vehement lover in the background and show her
only that side of himself which would serve to reassure her.
“I rather fancy myself at coffee-making,” he told her, as he dexterously
manipulated the little coffee machine. “There!”--pouring out two
brimming cups--“taste that, and then tell me if it isn’t the best cup of
coffee you ever met.”
Jean sipped it obediently, then made a wry face.
“Ough!” she ejaculated in disgust. “You’ve forgotten the sugar!”
As she had herself slipped the sugar basin out of sight when he
was collecting the necessary coffee paraphernalia on to a tray, the
oversight was not surprising.
It was a simple little ruse, its very simplicity it’s passport to
success. The naturalness of it--Jean’s small, screwed-up face of disgust
and the hasty way in which she set her cup down after tasting its
contents--might have thrown the most suspicious of mortals momentarily
off his guard.
“By Jove, so I have!” Instinctively Burke sprang up to rectify the
omission. “I never take it myself, so I forgot all about it. I’ll get
you some in a second.”
He was gone, and before he was half-way down the passage leading to the
kitchen, Jean, moving silently and swiftly as a shadow, was at the doors
of the long French window, her fingers fumbling for the catch.
A draught of cold, mist-laden air rushed into the room, while a slender
form stood poised for a brief instant on the threshold, silhouetted
against the white curtain of the fog. Then followed a hurried rush of
flying footsteps, a flitting shadow cleaving the thick pall of vapour,
and a moment later the wreaths of pearly mist came filtering unhindered,
into an empty room.
*****
Blindly Jean plunged through the dense mist that hung outside, her feet
sinking into the sodden earth as she fled across the wet grass. She had
no idea where the gate might be, but sped desperately onwards till
she rushed full tilt into the bank of mud and stones which fenced the
bungalow against the moor. The sudden impact nearly knocked all the
breath out of her body, but she dared not pause. She trusted that his
search for the hidden sugar basin might delay Burke long enough to give
her a few minutes’ start, but she knew very well that he might chance
upon it at any moment, and then, discovering her flight, come in
pursuit.
Clawing wildly at the bank with hands and feet, slipping, sliding,
bruised by sharp-angled stones and pricked by some unseen bushy growth
of gorse, she scrambled over the bank and came sliding down upon her
hands and knees into the hedge-trough dug upon its further side. And
even as she picked herself up, shaken and gasping for breath, she heard
a cry from the bungalow, and then the sound of running steps and Burke’s
voice calling her by name.
“Jean! Jean! You little fool!... Come back! Come back!” She heard him
pause to listen for her whereabouts. Then he shouted again. “Come back!
You’ll kill yourself! Jean! Jean!....”
But she made no answer. Distraught by fear lest he should overtake her,
she raced recklessly ahead into the fog, heedless of the fact that she
could not see a yard in front of her--even glad of it, knowing that the
mist hung like a shielding curtain betwixt her and her pursuer.
The strange silence of the mist-laden atmosphere hemmed her round like
the silence of a tomb, broken only by the sucking sound of the oozy
turf as it pulled at her feet, clogging her steps. Lance-sharp spikes of
gorse stabbed at her ankles as she trod it underfoot, and the permeating
moisture in the air soaked swiftly through her thin summer frock till it
clung about her like a winding-sheet.
Her breath was coming in sobbing gasps of stress and terror; her heart
pounded in her breast; her limbs, impeded by her clinging skirts, felt
as though they were weighted down with lead.
Then, all at once, seeming close at hand in the misleading fog which
plays odd tricks with sound as well as sight, she heard Burke’s voice,
cursing as he ran.
With the instinct of a hunted thing she swerved sharply, stumbled, and
lurched forward in a vain effort to regain her balance. Then it seemed
as though the ground wore suddenly cut from under her feet, and she
fell... down, down through the mist, with a scattering of crumbling
earth and rubble, and lay, at last, a crumpled, unconscious heap in the
deep-cut track that linked the moor road to the bungalow.