“Tomorrow I will make certain that the leopards do not disturb you again,” Lord Hawkston promised. “I will have the bedrooms opened up on the next floor. I should have insisted on it as soon as I arrived.”
“I would feel... safer up ... there,” Dominica said, “but not if I was ... alone.”
“My bedroom is there,” Lord Hawkston answered. “The one I built for myself. The ‘Palm Room’, but you know, wherever you might be, that I would protect you.”
“That is ... why I came to ... find you,” Dominica whispered.
Her face was no longer hidden against his shoulder, but she made no effort to move from the protection of his arms.
He was aware that even while she tried to speak naturally she was still tense, still listening, as if she feared the savage sounds of the leopards might break out again.
“I wanted you to have a good night,” he said. “You have been tired and perhaps upset by many things since we left Colombo.”
“I ... could not go ... back to ... that room.”
“No, of course not,” he agreed. “We will change places. You can sleep here and I will keep a watch for the leopards. But I promise you, they will not return.”
“Do not ... leave me yet,” Dominica begged. “Not for a ... moment.”
He felt her hand tighten once again on his nightshirt. “I will not leave you until you tell me to do so,” Lord Hawkston said, “but I think you ought to try to sleep. So what I am going to suggest is that you get into bed and I will stay beside you until it is dawn, or until you are asleep.”
“You must... think I am very ... foolish,” Dominica said with a little sob.
“I think you did exactly the right thing in coming to find me when you were frightened.”
Very gently he took his arms from her. Then as she sat up on the bed on which she had been lying against him he stepped out on to the floor and put out his hands to find his dressing-gown which was lying over an adjacent chair.
He put it on and as he did so Dominica got into bed and pulled the sheet over her.
“You will... not go ... away yet... will you?” she asked. Lord Hawkston sat down on the bed and putting out his hands found hers.
“I promise you I will stay.”
She gave a little sigh as if of relief. Then her fingers tightened on his.
“Are you ... very angry with ... me?”
“I am not angry, I do not despise you, and I do not think you in the least foolish,” he answered. “I think, as I have always thought, that you are a very exceptional and very brave person.”
“I am not... you know I am not!” Dominica said. “But I like you to ... think so.”
“I promise you I am speaking the truth.”
There was a silence and then he said:
“Shut your eyes, Dominica. I think you will find it easier to fall asleep and actually there is very little of the night left. I do not need to look at my watch to tell you that in under half an hour the dawn will be breaking over the mountains, bringing us another golden day of sunshine.”
He felt her fingers relax beneath his. She did not move and after a short while he heard her breathing evenly.
He had known that she had exhausted herself both by fear and with her tears, and he had been certain that once she relaxed she would sleep quickly and deeply as he had seen men sleep after some abnormal exertion or emotional stress.
He did not move but sat very still, his hands still on Dominica’s until, as he had expected, there was a faint light between the curtains as they stirred with the dawn breeze.
Still Lord Hawkston waited. Then as it grew lighter he could see first the outline of the furniture in the room, then Dominica’s face against the pillows.
Her hair covered her shoulders and he could see that her eyelashes were still wet as they lay dark against the pale cheeks of her little heart-shaped face.
She looked very young and very defenceless and Lord Hawkston looked at her for a long time. Then gently he disengaged his hands from hers and, rising, moved silently across the room to the half-open door.
He passed through it and closed it very quietly behind him.
He walked along the passage and entered Dominica’s room. He saw the bedclothes thrown back as she had left them when she ran away and the window open on the verandah.
He walked through it. The lawn where the leopards had fought was scratched up, flowers were broken and plants were lying with their roots in the air.
Lord Hawkston stood looking at the damage then his eyes dropped to the edge of the verandah.
Attached to one of the supporting pillars was a piece of broken string which would have held captive a small animal—such as the kid of a spotted deer!
Lord Hawkston stared at the thickly covered hills. Somewhere hidden in them Lakshman was waiting to avenge his daughter’s death.
If Dominica had gone to the assistance of the frightened kid last night, the leopards would have attacked her!
He knew that he must find Lakshman and quickly.
* * *
When Dominica awoke and found herself in a strange room and in another bed, the events of the night before came flooding back to her.
She glanced at the clock which stood beside the bed and realised that it was late and she had slept well into the morning.
It was not surprising. At the same time she felt ashamed of her own weakness and shy when she remembered that she had driven Lord Hawkston from his bed because she had been so afraid.
“How could I have been so stupid?” she asked herself.
At the same time even to think of the terrible noise of the leopards in the darkness was to feel a renewed tremor of fear.
She had been truthful when she told Lord Hawkston she had always been timid. She had forced herself not to show it, because she knew she must set an example to her younger sisters, but she had never forgotten the terrible experience her father had made her undergo when she was only seven years old.
Her mother being ill at the time had not realised what was happening, although afterwards she had in fact been very angry.
Her father had been giving her a Scripture lesson on which he had talked of angels guarding people and saving them from the devils which existed in Hell.
He made it all seem very vivid and very real to the child he was teaching, and as usual he was carried away by his own oratory and described Hell in such vivid terms that Dominica had cried:
“I am frightened of devils, Papa. I am frightened they will catch hold of me.”
“You will be safe as long as you are good,” her father replied. “God sends his angels to protect you, and angels are always around you, Dominica, saving you from sin.”
“I am frightened of angels too,” Dominica said. “I do not want anything around me ... I want to be alone!”
The Vicar had looked on this as sacrilege and had rebuked Dominica. Because even at seven years old she had a great deal of spirit and she had defied him.
“I am afraid of angels, Papa, whatever you may say about them ... I am, I am!”
It ended in her being shut in the Church all night so that she could meditate on the angels and realise she was safe in God’s hands.
Dominica remembered it all vividly, how the darkness had seemed peopled not with angels, but with devils.
Finally in her terror she had crouched down on the floor in the Governor’s pew, making herself as small as possible, and put her hand over her ears in case she should hear the angels talking to her.
They found her in the morning asleep from sheer exhaustion with her head on one of the crimson hassocks.
The Vicar had never inflicted such a punishment on any of his other children. He had been far too afraid of his wife’s anger.
But it had given Dominica a sense of insecurity that she had never lost. It had made her afraid of the dark, so that it had always been a comfort to have Faith sharing a room with her.
She had, however, as she was the eldest, forced h
erself to assume authority, and when her mother died she tried to take her place not only with her sisters, but also with her father.
It was not always easy where he was concerned, but she could sometimes soften the strictness of his orders or divert him from his most austere demands on them.
Only when it came to obtaining money from him for payment for food and other necessities did she admit to herself that she was a hopeless failure.
At the same time she had never in her life behaved quite so weakly or, she thought, so humiliatingly as she had last night.
She was aware that it must have been the culmination of many things—shock at Lord Hawkston’s proposition; unhappiness at leaving home; the revulsion she had felt when she met Gerald, most of all the horror of his lips when he had kissed her shoulder and the terror she felt for the future.
She wondered what Lord Hawkston was thinking about her this morning and whether he regretted having brought her with him to the house he had built himself.
If he had thought her worthy of living here, if he had imagined her as its hostess and chatelaine, surely now he would be terribly disillusioned at finding her so timid and so dishonest in not being prepared to fulfil her part of the bargain.
“He has given me so much,” Dominica told herself miserably, “and now I am failing him when he relied on me.”
The idea brought the tears once again to her eyes and she realised she felt tired and limp after her experience of the night before.
“I must get up,” she told herself.
But she lay watching the sunshine creeping into the room through the sides of the curtains and illuminating the decorations which depicted the red lotus.
The bed had been carved in the same style as the one in her room, with petals painted the deep rose red of the King of flowers. The curtains had a symbolic motif of lotuses, but the picture on the wall was different.
This was not of the Buddha. It was a beautifully painted picture of the lake in Kandy with the red lotus growing on it.
In the distance on the other side of the lake there was a glimpse of the Temple of the Sacred Tooth and hanging over the water were the Temple flower-trees in bloom as Dominica had seen them when she had driven there with Lord Hawkston.
It seemed to her in retrospect that it had been a day of inescapable magic.
She had never known such beauty existed! She could still feel the intensity of it.
Then as she lay there looking at the picture and remembering the scene she suddenly understood why Kandy had seemed so beautiful; why the lake had shone with a strange mystical brilliance; why the beauty and colour of the flowers had seemed more vivid than she had ever known them.
It was because she had been with Lord Hawkston; because he was beside her; because she was acutely conscious of him and she was happy—happier than she had ever been in her whole life.
And the reason for her happiness came to her in a blinding light.
It was all so simple, and yet she had not understood until now that what she felt had been love.
Love for Lord Hawkston!
The man who had brought her up into the hills to marry his nephew!
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was nearly noon before Dominica arose. But when she was dressed and went from her room it was to find the house was empty: neither Lord Hawkston nor Gerald were anywhere to be seen.
She picked up her sunshade thinking she would go into the garden.
The new way in which she had arranged her hair in a corolla on top of her head was, she thought, becoming, so that she decided she would not spoil it by wearing a bonnet.
Anyway there was no-one to see her.
She had however just reached the front door when she heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs and saw Lord Hawkston come riding down the path which led up the mountain.
He dismounted and she thought his horse looked as if he had ridden it hard.
She also noticed that he wore a pistol in the belt that encircled his waist.
She supposed he had been out looking for the leopards, but it was difficult to think of anything except that her heart leapt at his appearance. At the same time she felt overwhelmingly shy.
His white shirt was open at the neck as it had been when she had seen him riding the previous morning, and his sleeves were rolled up above his sun-burnt arms.
“Where are you going?” he asked with a smile.
She thought his eyes rested appreciatively on the colourful muslin gown she wore with its full skirts and ribbons at the neck.
“I was just ... going for a walk in the ... garden before ... luncheon,” she replied wondering why it was hard to speak and the words seemed somehow constricted in her throat.
A servant led Lord Hawkston’s horse away and he said:
“We have time, if it will please you, to look at the giant lotus.”
“I would ... like it ... very much,” Dominica exclaimed breathlessly.
He turned to walk beside her across the lawn, and she thought as she had done before how young and athletic he looked when he was dressed unconventionally.
At the same time, because she loved him and was receptive to his moods, she had the feeling he was worried about something and she hoped he would tell her what it was.
But instead he talked of the garden, showing her the different flowers he had planted and pointing out the rare trees and shrubs, some of which Dominica had never even heard of before.
“In two months’ time,” he said, “the rhododendrons will be in flower. They blossom later in these high altitudes, but their colours are indescribable.”
Dominica longed to ask if he thought she would be there in two months’ time, then even as the words trembled on her lips she knew she could not say them.
He trusted her; he believed in her and she remembered how, when they were in Kandy, she had told him that if one was really in love there was no sacrifice one would not make.
Well, she was in love, and the sacrifice required of her was that she should do what Lord Hawkston wished and marry his nephew.
Even to think of it made her want to cry as she had cried last night on his shoulder, but she knew that to do so would make him despise her even more than he must do already.
He was being courteous and charming, because he wished to make it easy for both to forget the way she had run to him for protection and lain in his arms to cry against his shoulder.
At the time it had seemed the only thing she could do; but now that she was with him again, Dominica could not help blushing at the thought of how she had behaved.
It was true that at that moment she had not thought of him as a man, but rather as a tower of strength, a comfort and a protector.
But he was a man, and she had known it when she had awoken in his bed to look at the picture on the wall in his room.
“I love him! I love him!” she told herself.
But she knew she must never let him know of her feelings for him. Instead she must sacrifice her whole life to doing what he wished.
She tried to concentrate on what Lord Hawkston was saying, and yet she could only think how thrilling it was to be beside him and how if he touched her arm accidentally or drew close to her as they inspected a flower or a bush, it sent a little tremor of excitement all through her body.
She wondered why she had not realised last night when she had wept against him and felt his arms holding her so securely that this was what she had wanted more than anything in the whole world.
She wondered now what he would think if she asked him to hold her once again; to give her that sense of security and protection which had finally swept away her fears, so that she had fallen asleep holding his hand.
“Could any man,” she asked herself, “have been kinder, more understanding than he was?”
She knew how angry her father would have been at her behaviour; she knew that everyone, if they learnt of it, would be shocked at the thought of her clinging to Lord Hawkston, wearing nothing but the thin, l
aced-trimmed nightgown which had been part of her trousseau.
Had he thought her fast and brazen because of her behaviour?
She was certain that he thought of her merely as a rather tiresome child; a foolish girl who was afraid of the dark, and who, though having lived all her life in Ceylon, was yet scared of two leopards fighting each other and being of no danger to her personally.
“I may seem a child to him,” Dominica told herself, “but I love him as a woman. I love him with my whole being, and I know this is love as it was meant to be; love which has existed since the beginning of time.”
She knew that what she felt for Lord Hawkston was a spiritual yearning which was in fact part of the Divine.
It was something, she told herself, that Gerald would never understand.
How could she stay with a man year after year who was coarse and materialistic and without any sensitivity whatsoever?
How could she endure his whole attitude to life and, worst of all, how could she contemplate the moment when he would not only kiss her, but they would be united as man and wife?
Instinctively, because she was once more afraid, she moved a little closer to Lord Hawkston.
As if he realised that something perturbed her he said:
“Perhaps we are lingering too long. Come, I promised to show you the giant lotus before we return to the house for luncheon.”
He led her from the garden down a path which had obviously been cut through the jungle.
On either side there were trees in bloom, but Dominica realised that the original path had narrowed because it had been left unattended and the undergrowth on either side of it had encroached so that in some places they had to walk singly.
At the same time it was very beautiful and the scent of the magnolias, the jasmines and the champees made her feel as if she was really in the Garden of Eden.
Then, almost unexpectedly, they came upon the pool they were seeking.
Moon Over Eden (Bantam Series No. 37) Page 14