“I don’t, oh, I don’t!” she assured him, looking at him with penitence and pleading — and she hoped so much he realized how grateful she was for all that he had already done for her—and his eyes softened before the distress in her face.
“Be a good girl, Rose,” he coaxed, “and don’t rush your fences! Stay at the Manor at least until I get back from my honeymoon.”
“But that will be — that will be a long time,” she faltered.
“A month,” he replied, “a month in Italy. And after that we’re going to the Bahamas. But there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t come with us to the Bahamas.”
Rose felt suddenly acutely wistful instead of rebellious. No reason? She wondered what Heather would have to say to that.
“Give me your promise that you’ll stay at the Manor with the Willoughbys for at least a month,” he insisted.
Rose realized that just then it would be unfair to withhold that promise from him. She couldn’t let him go away on his honeymoon with a mind disturbed by any back-thoughts about her.
“Very well,” she said, “I’ll promise you that.”
CHAPTER III
When they arrived back at Farnhurst, Heather was waiting for them in the hall.
One look at her face told Rose that she was angry. In fact, she appeared to be seething with resentment and indignation.
“I couldn’t think what had happened to you, Lance!” she declared. She shot a stormily furious look at Rose. “The Carters called this afternoon directly I got back from my fitting, and they brought their wedding present with them. It’s a simply lovely pair of antique silver salvers, and I felt so absolutely stupid when I couldn’t even tell them where you were, although you were supposed to be somewhere around. Naturally, it never occurred to me that you had taken your ward for a drive!”
“Why naturally?” Lance inquired in a peculiarly quiet voice. “Is it a crime to take my ward for a drive?”
Heather turned away from him. Her whole attitude told him that her annoyance was not in the least likely to simmer down quickly, and the way she tossed her golden head drove home the extent of that annoyance. While Rose placed the cardboard box containing the nylon nightdresses on the hall table, the daughter of the house swept through into the empty dining-room; but her fiance did not follow her. He went straight upstairs to his room, and Rose, following at a discreet distance behind him, thought miserably that she had been the cause of what might well be his first quarrel with Heather.
That night it seemed to her that they had still not made it up, for Heather was looking sulky and remote, and Lance had a grave detached look in his face. Rose had seen that look before, when she had wanted to approach him for some purpose and it had seemed to her that he had erected a wall between himself and the world of mundane things. It had been a wall she had always hesitated to attempt to scale—but Heather, she felt sure, had more courage. In addition to which Heather must know him immeasurably better than she, Rose, could ever hope to do.
At dinner, although there was a lot of merriment amongst the guests, it scarcely spread to the couple who were so soon to take one another for better or worse. They noticeably avoided saying anything very pointed to one another, and gradually their frozen attitudes affected the demeanour of the guests. Eyebrows were raised, looks exchanged—the bride’s mother looked faintly perturbed. And Rose felt more and more weighted down by a burden of guilt.
But after dinner, when the carpet in the drawingroom was rolled back for dancing, the engaged couple were the first to take the floor, and an almost audible sigh of relief went through the long, low room. For, even if Heather’s smile was not as unclouded as usual as she directed it up into her fiance’s face, at least she was smiling at him, and if there had been any danger of the wedding not taking place after all, that danger seemed now to have receded.
Rose danced one or two dances with young men who asked her—although none of them made any attempt to detain her for long; perhaps because her conversation was not of a sufficiently lighthearted and sparkling order—and at ten o’clock she decided to go upstairs to bed. But on her way she passed the library door, and an impulse caused her to enter it to collect a book from the shelves. No sooner, however, had she turned the handle and softly pushed open the door than the most extraordinary conviction rushed over her that she would have been wiser to have foregone reading matter for that night.
The room was in darkness, but as soon as her hand pressed the switch the two figures standing close together near the window became floodlighted, as it were, by mellow golden gleams. They were two figures standing very quietly in one another’s arms, and at the moment the light went on the girl’s lips were upturned in complete and blissful surrender to the man, and the man was easily recognizable as Peter Hurst.
Rose stood for a moment as if transfixed, and then she turned back hastily to the door. But before she could beat a retreat and recover to a certain extent her composure Heather Willoughby, without uttering a sound to the man, had detached herself swiftly from his arms and crossed the room and caught Rose firmly by the shoulders.
“No. don’t run away, Rose!” the bride-to-be said softly. “There’s something I want to show you, if you’ll come upstairs to my room! My going-away outfit arrived this morning, and I haven’t yet had a chance to try it on. Come with me, and you shall tell me just how nice I look in it, or whether the bill was too steep!”
Her voice had the sweetness of honey and the cooing of pigeons in it, but her eyes were hard and bright and full of a sinister warning. The warning was so unmistakable that Rose found it impossible to think up an excuse that would still have enabled her to escape, or even to register disapproval of what she had just witnessed. She was secretly so shocked by what she had seen that she even wondered in a kind of numb, confused way whether she had imagined it, especially as Heather’s scarlet lips were parted over her milky little even teeth in a smile of peculiar brilliance.
“Come along, Rose,” she repeated, and urged her with gentle force from the room.
But, upstairs in her own room—a room with an almost pure white carpet, pale primrose walls and ceiling, and a bed with a kind of canopy of draped white velvet above it—she suddenly shed the mask of friendliness and revealed claws far sharper than even Rose had suspected existed inside her lacquered finger-nails.
“So you add prying to your other accomplishments, do you?” she said, turning on Rose with unleashed fury. “All the things you learned at that expensive finishing-school of yours in Lausanne, for which Lance paid your fees! Well, let me warn you, my dear, that if you so much as breathe a word of what you saw tonight to anyone—anyone, inside or outside this house!—I’ll open Lance’s eyes to one or two things about you! In particular one thing! . . . I’ll let him know that far from being a tractable little ward you’ve already fallen in love with him! It’s so obvious to me, and has been from the night you arrived, that he ought to be aware of it himself, but he’s simple in some ways! Those moon-struck eyes of yours don’t convey a thing to him, but I realized immediately that one day you might become a nuisance, and I’ll see that Lance is put on his guard—if you’re so indiscreet as to give me away!”
Rose shrank back as if the other had actually struck her, and the venom in Heather’s voice was enough to make anyone unprepared for it recoil. But, at the same time, Rose felt sick and appalled — appalled because her guardian was to marry this woman, and because she herself had been accused of something she could not deny.
“And now you can go,” Heather said, icily, indicating the door. “But don’t forget I meant every word I said just now! Every word! So if you think you’ve got me in the palm of your hand—think again!”
CHAPTER IV
The day of the wedding drew nearer, and confusion reigned at Farnhurst Manor. There was a constant stream of tradesmen’s vans driving up to the impressive front door, and express delivery boys, telegraph boys—because the telephone lines were always choked, and the vil
lage postmistress gave up trying to transmit telegrams over them—added to the congestion in the winding drive. The man responsible for the catering arrangements came and went, and it was discovered that the seating arrangements for the wedding breakfast were inadequate, and the whole plan had to be revised, and Colonel Carpenter was persuaded to supply
Hepplewhite chairs as well as the greater part of the floral decorations.
The day before the wedding the wedding-dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses arrived from London in a special van. All four bridesmaids went into ecstasies over the lovely creations of palest green organza they were to wear, and although Rose’s ecstasies were a little more subdued than the others, it was not because her own particular dress failed to arouse as much admiration. She was feminine enough to realize that a more suitable colour could not have been chosen for herself, and as there were long gloves of lavender suede to go with the dresses, lavender straw bonnets, and bouquets of half-opened yellow rosebuds to be carried on the day, the colour-scheme was well-nigh perfect.
The wedding dress, and the beauties of it, were to be kept a secret until the bride appeared in the aisle of the ancient village church on the arm of her father, and everyone had a chance to admire.
But one look at Heather’s face when she re-appeared downstairs after remaining closeted with her mother upstairs in her bedroom for some little while, with the dress almost certainly spread out on the bed to gaze at, convinced Rose that the bride was entirely satisfied. She looked like a cat that had greedily lapped up all the cream, and was temporarily altogether content. It was only as the hours between her and her wedding started to diminish until anyone very dull at arithmetic would count them easily that her temper started to become noticeably rather short, and sometimes there was a slightly strained expression on her fair-skinned face.
Rose she almost entirely ignored, but whether her guardian noticed it Rose was unable to tell. She was in too unhappy a state of mind in those days to care very much about anything, and the only thing that constantly troubled her was the remembrance of that night in the library. She had made up her mind that whatever she saw that night it had really nothing to do with herself, and that under no circumstances could she have offered anything in the nature of a warning to Sir Laurence. For one thing, he would probably not have believed her—very few men are willing to believe ill of the woman they were going to marry almost on the very eve of the wedding—and for another, if Heather had carried out her threat and informed him that his ward (whom he still looked upon as an undeveloped child!) had formed a far warmer attachment for him than a ward normally feels for a guardian, it would look very much as if her story of what took place in the library was coloured largely by jealousy, and for that reason alone could be discounted.
No; Rose decided that if disillusionment was to come to Laurence Melville it would have to come after his marriage, and not before. She felt heavier at heart than she had ever felt in her life before as she made this decision, and if exposure of her own feelings for him could have guaranteed him nothing but happiness in the future she would willingly have submitted to Heather making a kind of mock of her. For there are some things, in certain causes, one can endure—and Rose would have endured a great deal for Sir Lance.
Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett, who spent her days observing people and their various reactions, did not fail to observe that on Rose’s face sometimes, when she was looking at her guardian and the woman he was to marry, there was a very unchildlike look of doubt, and even a vague anxiety.
“You’re not very happy about this match, are you?” she said to the girl once. “Well, I wouldn’t worry,” as Rose looked around at her in instant concern, because apparently she kept so little guard over what she was thinking and feeling. “Modern marriages are more like trial engagements, I often think, and so often they don’t stand up to even the period of trial. It was different when I was young. Then a young woman didn’t enter into a contract which should, of course, be binding with the back-thought in her head that, if everything didn’t turn out as she hoped it would, she could go home to mother, or simply cut loose and get herself a job, and later on another husband! Husbands in those days were permanent institutions, like the home, and the background of family life.”
Rose noted the cynical expression of her face and sought to defend her generation.
“I shouldn’t think there are very many young women who actually marry with the thought that their marriage could be anything other than permanent.”
“No?” a strongly cynical note in the rather harsh voice. “Well, I don’t imagine you would, because with that hair of yours there will never be any half measures where you’re concerned, and you’re the type I should think, to remain loyal under any circumstances. But my-god-daughter and your guardian are oil and water—they’ll never mix! He’s old enough to know it, but there’s nothing quite so besotted as a man in love, and he’ll take his awakening very hardly when it comes! I’ll give them a couple of years at the outside!”
“Oh, no!” Rose exclaimed.
“Oh, yes, child!” The shrewd old eyes beneath the bobbing false curls seemed to mock her gently. “And, in your heart of hearts, don’t you think that yourself? Haven’t you got some doubts? You know that Sir Laurence is a serious man at heart—a very serious man—and Heather lives simply for the gratification of all her creature instincts. For her this is a good match — an excellent match—and her parents know it as well. She’s extravagant, and only a well-to-do man could give her all she needs. Sir Laurence is rather more than well-to-do.”
“But, there must be—there must be something more than that . . .” Rose said, hoping ardently for her guardian’s sake that what she was saying was no more than truth.
“Must there?” They were walking in the sunken rose garden, where the paths were littered with fallen petals, and the air was heavy with perfume in spite of the lateness of the season, and the fact that only a few blooms were still at their best, and Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett was leaning heavily on a slender ebony cane that tap-tapped sharply on the flags. “Well, in a couple of years time we’ll all know just what there is—or, rather, was! But when a man with a good deal of intelligence starts to remember his old interests, and those interests are not shared by the woman with whom he has imagined himself spending the rest of his life, well—that’s the time when almost anything might happen!”
Rose walked on quietly ahead of her, and when they came to a white-painted garden seat Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett insisted on sitting down.
“I’m not as young as I was, and I get tired easily,” she said. As usual, she was sparkling with ornamentation, and her coquettish but old-fashioned hat was trimmed with expensive mink that matched the cape about her bony shoulders. Sometimes Rose found herself wondering exactly how old she was, and decided that in order to hazard a guess one would have to see her without the makeup she applied liberally to all the exposed portions of her face and neck. “And now let’s forget about the ‘happy pair’ for the time being,” she continued surprisingly, “and talk about you.”
“Me?” Rose looked round at her in astonishment.
“Yes, my dear, you!” Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett actually beamed at her kindly. “What are you going to do with yourself once Sir Laurence goes off and leaves you? You’re his ward, aren’t you? What arrangements has he made for your future?”
Rose explained that her guardian desired her to stay on for a time at the Willoughbys, and the old lady made a clucking noise of disagreement and displeasure.
“All wrong! Stuck away here in the heart of the country when you’ve only just finished with being a school-girl! That won’t do at all! You must come and stay with me. I’ve a flat in town where I spend a few months of every year, and the remaining months I travel. You must join me on my travels! No use talking to your guardian—he isn’t capable of listening to anything that doesn’t concern his beloved at the moment, so there’s no use wasting time on him. We’ll just write to him and tell what I’m do
ing with you once I’ve actually started to do it.”
“Oh, but—” Rose exclaimed.
“No buts! You’d like to come away with me, wouldn’t you?”
Rose felt a temporary uplifting of her heart, a sudden resurgence of her spirit. Above everything else she wished to become completely independent of her guardian and his bride, and if Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett meant that she would employ her. . . .
“You—you do mean that, don’t you?” she stammered. “That you want a — a companion, or a secretary, or something ------?”
“You can put it like that if you like,” the old lady answered with a smile. “I’ll pay you a salary—I’m a very rich woman, I don’t mind telling you, and I’ll pay you a very generous salary—and in return you can play chess with me in the evenings, read to me and answer a few of my letters. And we’ll travel about the world together, and I’ll pay all your expenses. I like you, my dear — your hair is just the colour mine used to be, the colour of autumn leaves. I think you’re the loveliest young woman I’ve ever seen, and with a little pride taken in you, a little money spent on you . . .” She nodded her head as if she was suddenly immensely pleased with her own idea, and could see that idea expanding most satisfactorily. “Yes; leave it to me, child, and we’ll get away from here as soon as this wedding’s over. Do you know Venice? Have you seen Rome? . . . No? . . . Well, wait until you’ve seen the Colosseum by moonlight! . . . Wait until you’ve seen the spires of Florence! . . . I love Italy. It will be a pleasure for me to take you there. . . .”
And she went on and on, bemusing Rose with her talk of fascinating corners of the world, and making it impossible for her to interrupt because by degrees she didn’t want to interrupt. And although she felt certain her guardian would have to be consulted— that the least she could do after all his kindness to her was to consult him—just then she had to be content with waiting to drive that point home to Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett at a later stage.
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