A QUESTION OF HONOUR
"Your Great-aunt Rachel is dead, Roger."
Lady Gertrude made this announcement the following morning at
breakfast. In her hand she held the letter which contained the
news--written in an old-fashioned, sloping style of penmanship on thin,
heavily black-bordered note-paper. No one made any reply unless a
sympathetic murmur from Isobel could be construed as such.
"Cousin Emily writes that the funeral is to take place next Thursday,"
pursued Lady Gertrude, referring to the letter she held. "We shall
have to attend it, of course."
"Must we?" asked Roger, with obvious lack of enthusiasm. "I haven't
seen her for at least five years."
"I know." The reply came so sharply that it was evident he had touched
upon a sore subject. "It is very much to be regretted that you
haven't. After all, she must have left at least a hundred thousand to
divide."
"Even the prospect of a share of the spoil wouldn't have compensated
for the infliction of visiting an old termagant like Great-aunt
Rachel," averred Roger unrepentantly.
"I shall be interested to hear the will read, nevertheless," rejoined
Lady Gertrude. "After all, you were her only great-nephew and, in
spite of your inattentiveness, I don't suppose she has overlooked you.
She may even have remembered Isobel to the extent of a piece of
jewellery."
Isobel's brown eyes gleamed--like the alert eyes of a robin who
suddenly perceives the crumbs some kindly hand has scattered on the
lawn.
"I'm afraid we shall have to leave you alone for a night, Nan," pursued
Lady Gertrude with a stiff air of apology.
Nan, engrossed in a long epistle from Penelope, failed to hear and made
no answer. The tremendous fact of great-aunt's death, and the possible
disposition of her property, had completely passed her by. It was
little wonder that she was so much absorbed. Penelope's letter had
been written on board ship and posted from Liverpool, and it contained
the joyful tidings that she and her husband had returned to England and
proposed going straight to the Edenhall flat. "You must come up and
see us as soon as your visit to Trenby comes to an end," wrote
Penelope, and Nan devoutly wished it could end that very moment.
"I don't think you heard me, Nan." Lady Gertrude's incisive voice cut
sharply across the pulsing excitement of the girl's thoughts.
"I--I--no. Did you speak to me?" she faltered. Her usual dainty
assurance was fast disappearing beneath the nervous strain of living
with Lady Gertrude.
The facts concerning great-aunt's death were recapitulated for her
benefit, together with the explanation that, since Lady Gertrude,
Roger, and Isobel would be obliged to stay the night with "Cousin
Emily" in order to attend the funeral, Nan would be reluctantly left to
her own devices.
"I can't very well take you with us--on such an occasion," meditated
Lady Gertrude aloud. "To Cousin Emily you would be a complete
stranger, you see. Besides, she will no doubt have other relatives
besides ourselves to put up at the house. Would you care for me to ask
someone over to keep you company while we're away?"
"Oh, no, thank you," replied Nan hastily. "Please don't worry about me
at all, Lady Gertrude. I don't in the least mind being left
alone--really."
A sudden ecstatic thought had come into her mind which could only be
put into execution if she were left alone at Trenby, and the bare
possibility of any other arrangement now being made filled her with
alarm.
"Well, I regret the necessity of leaving you," said Lady Gertrude,
meticulous as ever in matters of social observance. "But the servants
will look after you well, I hope. And in any case, we shall be home
again on Thursday night. We shall be able to catch the last train
back."
During the day or two which intervened before the family exodus, Nan
could hardly contain her impatience. Their absence would give her the
opportunity she longed for--the opportunity to get away from Trenby!
The idea had flashed into her mind the instant Lady Gertrude had
informed her she would be left alone there, and now each hour that must
elapse before she could carry out her plan seemed an eternity.
Following upon the prolonged strain of the preceding three months, that
last terrible scene with Roger had snapped her endurance. She could
not look back upon it without shuddering. Since the day of its
occurrence she had hardly spoken to him, except at meal times when, as
if by mutual consent, they both conversed as though nothing had
happened--for Lady Gertrude's benefit. Apart from this, Nan avoided
him as much as possible, treating him with a cool, indifferent reserve
he found difficult to break down. At least, he made no very determined
effort to do so. Perhaps he was even a little ashamed of himself. But
it was not in his nature to own himself wrong.
Like many men, he had a curiously implicit faith in the principle of
"letting things blow over." On occasion this may prove the wisest
course to adopt, but very rarely in regard to a quarrel between a man
and woman. Things don't "blow over" with a woman. They lie hidden in
her heart, gradually permeating her thoughts until her whole attitude
towards the man in question has hardened and the old footing between
them become irrecoverable.
Nan felt that she had made her effort--and failed. Roger had missed
the whole meaning of her attempt to bring about a mutual feeling of
good comradeship, brushed it aside as of no importance. And instead,
he had substituted his own imperious demands, rousing her, once the
stress of the actual interview itself was past, to fierce and bitter
revolt. No matter what happened in the future, she must get away
now--snatch a brief respite from the daily strain of her life at the
Hall.
But with an oddly persistent determination she put away from her all
thought of breaking off her engagement. To most women similarly
situated this would have been the obvious and simplest solution of the
problem. But it seemed to Nan that her compact with Roger demanded a
finer, more closely-knit interpretation of the word honour than would
have been necessary in the case of an engagement entered into under
different circumstances. The personal emergency which had driven her
into giving Roger her promise weighed heavily upon her, and she felt
that nothing less than his own consent would entitle her to break her
pledge to him. When she gave it she had thought she was buying safety
for herself and happiness for Penelope--cutting the tangled threads in
which she found herself so inextricably involved--and now, as Lord St.
John had reminded her, she could not honourably refuse to pay the
price. She could not plead that she had mistaken her feelings towards
him. She had pledged her word to him, open-eyed, and she was not free,
as other women might be, to retract the promise she had given.
Added to this, Roger's sheer, dominant virility had imbued her with a
fatalistic sense of her total inability to escape him. She had had a
glimpse of the primitive man in him--of the man with the club. Even
were she to violate her conscience sufficiently to end the engagement
between them, she knew perfectly well that he would refuse to accept or
acknowledge any such termination. Wherever she hid herself he would
find out her hiding-place and come in search of her, and insist upon
the fulfilment of her promise. And supposing that, in desperation, she
married someone else, what was it he had said? "I swear to you if any
man takes you from me I'll kill him first and you after!"
So, there was no escape for her. Roger would dog her footsteps round
the world and back again sooner than let her go free of him. In a
vaguely aloof and apathetic manner she felt as though it was her
destiny to marry him. And no one can escape from destiny. Life had
shown her many beautiful things--even that rarest thing of all, a
beautiful and unselfish love. But it had shown them only to snatch
them away again once she had learned to value them.
If only she had never met Peter, never known the secret wonder and
glory, the swift, sudden strength, the exquisite mingling of passion
and selflessness which go to the making of the highest in love, she
might have been content to become Roger's wife and bear his children.
His big strength and virile, primitive possessiveness would appeal to
many women, and Nan reflected that had she cared for him it would have
been easy enough to tame him--with his tempestuous love, his savage
temper, and his shamefaced "little boy" repentances! A woman who loved
him in return might have led him by a thread of gossamer! It was the
very fact that Nan did not love him, and that he knew it, which drove
the brute in him uppermost in his dealings with her. He wanted to
_make_ her care, to bend her to his will, to force from her some
response to his own over-mastering passion.
Wearily she faced the situation for the hundredth time and knew that in
the long run she must abide by it. She had learned not to cry for the
moon any longer. She wanted nothing now either in this world or the
next except the love that was denied her.
Her thoughts went back to the day when she and Peter had first met and
driven together through the twilit countryside to Abbencombe. She
remembered the sudden sadness which had fallen upon him and how she had
tried to cheer him by repeating the verses of a little song. It all
seemed very long ago:
"But sometimes God on His great white Throne
Looks down from the Heaven above,
And lays in the hands that are empty
The tremulous Star of Love."
The words seemed to speak themselves in her brain just as she herself
had spoken them that day, with the car slipping swiftly through the
winter dusk. She could feel again the throb of the engine--see Peter's
whimsical grey-blue eyes darken suddenly to a stern and tragic gravity.
For him and for her there could be no star. To the end of life they
two must go empty-handed.