“—SHE HAS GIVEN!”
Never so slowly as to-day had John Everard driven the six and a half
miles that divided Buddesby and Little Langbourne from Starden. Never
had his frank and open and cheerful face been so clouded and overcast.
Many worries, many doubts and fears and uncertainties, were at work in
John Everard’s mind.
No doubts and uncertainties of anyone but of himself. It was
himself—his own feelings, his own belief in himself, his own belief in
his love that he was doubting. So he drove very slowly the six and a
half miles to Starden, because he had many questions to ask of himself,
questions to which answers did not come readily.
“Gipsy is right, she always is,” he thought. “She is finer-minded,
better, more generous than I am. Her mind could not harbour one doubt
of anyone she loved, and I—” He frowned.
Helen Everard, from an upper window, saw his arrival, and watching him
as he drove up the approach to the house, marked the frown on his brow,
the lack of his usual cheerfulness.
“There is something wrong; there seems to be nothing, but something
wrong all the time,” she thought with a sigh.
“If, after all the trouble I have taken, my plans should come to
nothing, I shall be bitterly disappointed. I blame Connie. Con’s
unworldliness is simply silly. Oh, these people!”
“It is a long time since I saw you, Johnny—four or five days, isn’t
it?” Joan said. She held out her hand to him, and he took it. He seemed
to hesitate, and then drew a little closer and kissed her cheek.
Something wrong. She too saw it, but it did not disturb her as it did
Helen.
“Yes, four days—five—I forget,” he said, scarcely realising what an
admission was this from him, who awhile ago had counted every hour
jealously that had kept them apart.
For a few minutes they talked of indifferent things, each knowing it
for a preliminary of something to follow.
He had come to tell her something, Joan felt.
“She has something to say to me,” Johnny knew. So for a few minutes
they fenced, and then it was he who broke away.
He rose, and began to move about the room, as a man disturbed in his
mind usually does. She sat calm and expectant, watching him, a faint
smile on her lips, a kindness and a gentleness in her face that made it
inexpressibly sweet.
“I think, Johnny, you have something to say to me.”
“Something that I hate saying. Joan, last night a man—a man I have
never seen before—came to see me.”
She stiffened. The faint smile was gone; her face had become as a mask,
hard and cold, icy.
“Yes?”
“A man who had something to tell me—you will do me the justice to
believe that I did not wish to hear him, that I tried to silence him,
but he would not be silenced. He told me lies! foul lies about you!
lies!” Johnny said passionately, “things which I, knowing you, know to
be untrue. Yet he told them. I drove him out of the place. Then he came
back. He had remembered what his errand was—blackmail. He came to me
for money. But—but he did not stay, and then—” Johnny paused. He had
reached the window, and stood staring out into the garden, yet seeing
nothing of its beauty.
“You know,” he went on, “that I do not ask you nor expect you to
deny—there is no need. What he said I know to be untrue. The man was a
villain, one of the lowest, but he has been paid.”
“Paid?” she said. She stared.
“Not in money,” Johnny said shortly, “in another way.”
“You—you struck him?”
“No. I would have; but he saw the danger and fled from it—fled from the
punishment that I would have meted out to him to a harder that Fate had
in store for him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just outside my gate he was knocked down by a car and very badly
injured; it is hardly probable that he will live. The people who
knocked him down came hammering on my door. We got him to the Cottage
Hospital. In spite of everything I felt sorry for the poor wretch—but
that has nothing to do with it now. I came to tell you what happened.”
“And yet do not ask me to explain?”
“Of course not!” He swung round and faced her for a moment. “Do you
think I would put that indignity on you, Joan?”
“You are very generous, Johnny—why?”
She waited, listening expectantly for his answer. It was some time in
coming.
“I am not generous. I simply know that for you to be other than
honourable and innocent, pure and good, would be an impossibility.”
“Why do you know that?”
“Because I know you.”
She smiled. The answer she had almost dreaded to hear had not come. Yet
it should have been so simple, so ample an answer to her question. Had
he said, “Because I love you,” it would have been enough; but he had
said, “Because I know you”; and so she smiled.
“Johnny, I have something to say to you. Do you remember the day when
you asked me to be your wife? I was frank and open to you then, was I
not?”
“You always are.”
“I told you that if you wished it I would agree, but that I did not
love you as a woman should love the man to whom she gives her life.”
“I do not forget that.”
“Perhaps in your heart you harboured a hope that one day the love that
I denied you then might come?”
“I think I did.”
“You were giving so much and asking for so little in return. That was
not fair, and it would not be fair for me to allow you to harbour a
hope that can never come true.”
He turned slowly and looked at her.
“A woman cannot love—twice,” she said slowly.
Johnny Everard flushed, then paled.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it is true.” She paused; the red dyed her cheeks. “What you
were told last night were lies—poor lies. You do not ask me to deny
them, dear, and so I won’t. Yet, behind those lies, there was a little
truth. There is a man, and I cared for him—care for him now and always
shall care for him. He has been nothing to me, and never will be; but
because he lived, because he and I have met, the hope that you had in
your heart that day, can come to nothing. And now—now I have something
more to tell you. It is this. You, who can love so finely, must ask for
and have love in return. You think you love me, yet because I do not
respond you will tire in time of that love. You will realise how bad a
bargain you have made, and then you will regret it. Is there not
someone”—her voice had grown low and soft—“someone who can and does
give you all the love your heart craves for, someone who will be
grateful to you for your love, and who will repay a thousandfold? Would
not that be better than a long hopeless fight against lovelessness,
even—even if you loved her a little less than you believe you love—me?
Remember that it would rest with you and not with another, you who are
generous, who could not refuse to give when so much is given to you.”
Joan’s voice faltered for a moment. “It would be your own heart on
which you would have to make the call, Johnny, not on the heart of
another. You would have more command over your own heart than you ever
could over the heart of another.”
“Joan, what do you mean? What does this mean?”
“I am trying so hard to be plain,” she said almost pitifully.
“Who is this other you are talking about, this other—who loves me?”
She was silent.
“What do you know of her, Joan, this other?”
And still she was silent, for how could she betray Ellice’s secret?
“Tell me,” he said.
“Don’t you know? Can’t you guess?”
His face flushed. A week ago he might have answered, “I cannot guess!”
To-day he knew the answer, yet how did Joan know?
“I gave you my promise,” she said, “and I will abide by that promise.
It is for you to decide, and no one else. My life, your own and—and the
life of another is in your hands—three futures, Johnny, decide—”
“You want to—to give me up?”
“Is that generous?”
“No, it isn’t,” he admitted. He took a turn up and down the room. “And
you say this other—this girl—cares for me?”
“I know she does?”
“Did she tell you?”
“Must I answer?”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Joan repeated. “Yes, she did. She came to me, openly and
frankly, straightforward child that she is, and she said to me, ‘Why
are you marrying him, not loving him? If you loved him, and he loved
you, I would not come to you; but you do not love him, and it is not
fair. You are taking all and giving nothing!’ And, she was right!”
“And she—she—” he said in a low voice, “would give—”
“Has given.”
A silence fell between them. Then he turned to her, and it seemed as if
the cloud had lifted from him. He held out his hands and smiled at her.
“I understand. You and she are right. A starved love could not live for
ever; it must die. Better it should be strangled almost at birth, Joan.
So—so this is good-bye?”
She shook her head. “Friends, always, Johnny,” she said.
“Friends always, then.”
She came close to him. She lifted her hand suddenly, and thrust back
the hair from his forehead, she looked him in the eyes and, smiling,
kissed him on the brow.
“Go and find your happiness—a far, far better than I could ever offer
you.”
“And you?”
She shook her head, and her eyes, looking beyond him into the garden,
were dreamy and strangely soft.
“Tell me about that man, Johnny,” she said. “Will you take me back to
Little Langbourne with you?”
“Why?”
“To see him.”
“But he maligned, he lied—”
“He is hurt, and why should I hate him? You did not believe. Will you
take me back with you?”
“You know I will.”
Helen, watching from the upper window, saw them drive away together,
never had they seemed better friends. The cloud had passed completely
away, and so too had all Helen’s plans; yet she did not know it.