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."