by Sara Seale
For a week, Nicky went no place where she was likely to meet Simon. She developed an unreasoning dread of meeting him and for the first time began to think seriously of accompanying Charles abroad. She didn’t understand her reaction to that evening. She only knew that Simon had routed her again, and that she felt ashamed. She wanted to swear at Charles for having put her in such a position, to talk to him for the first time in her life as child to parent, to seek solace from him somehow. But Charles wasn’t there to curse, and if he had been he would never have fulfilled the role of parent.
So Nicky went off for long walks alone and in the evening played the piano for hours on end in the big, unfamiliar drawing room. She felt, childishly, that had she been able to laugh at this proposal she would get back some of her self respect. But Simon wasn’t the kind of man you dismissed that easily. There was something about him. Nicky suddenly realized with unconceited simplicity that although in her travels with her father, many men had tried to make love to her, Simon was the first to tell her that he loved her.
The knowledge did something unexpected to her. She was conscious of an odd kind of gratitude to him for loving her, and an added humiliation in that, although he loved her, he had little respect for her.
Mouse watched her a little anxiously. It was plain to her sharp and experienced eyes that the girl was unhappy, and she had little difficulty in tracing that unhappiness to young Mr. Shand. Mouse was puzzled. For although Nicky had made it very plain that she had no interest in Simon, it was evident that something had passed between them.
One evening, helping Nicky to dress for a party at Liza Coleman’s, Mouse asked her straight out what the matter was.
“Matter?” echoed Nicky with an effort. “Nothing’s the matter.”
“Rubbish!” Mouse retorted promptly. “You don’t deceive me, my girl. Are you ill?”
“No.” Nicky tried to laugh.
“In love, then?”
“Of course not.”
“Why are you mooning around the place like a lost puppy dog, then?”
Nicky, seated on the bed stretched out one long lovely leg and regarded her painted toenails reflectively.
“A lost puppy dog,” she repeated slowly. “Perhaps that’s what I am. I never thought of that.”
“Then the sooner you find a master the better it’ll be for us all,” said Mouse decisively. “I don’t hold with all this modern upbringing, Nicky, and never did. If your father had left you in the schoolroom where you belonged, instead of traipsing half way around the world with you, I’d have seen that you had a good sound raising and no nonsense.”
“Oh, Mouse!” said Nicky helplessly.
“And what good has it done you, I should like to know?” Mouse was in full spate now. “Giving you ideas and none of them sensible ones. Your father should have remained single, for a more unsuited gentleman to the married state I never did see.”
“Perhaps if mother had lived—”
“If your mother had lived he’d have broken her heart, and you know it.”
“Oh, Mouse—” Nicky suddenly burst into tears, and immediately Mouse darted over to the bed and took the girl in her arms.
“There, there, what an old fool I am!” she soothed. “Don’t you cry, my pretty, you’ll spoil your eyes for the party, though why you ever want to have parties with that Mrs. Coleman, I’m sure I don’t know. Painted hussy, and been through the divorce courts at that. There, there. Sponge your eyes in cold water. You’ll have to be hurrying.”
But Liza’s party wasn’t a success. Nicky found them all noisy and artificial. Her head ached and she wished she hadn’t come. Liza made arch references to Shand’s Shoes in her shrill, carrying voice, and from the laughter Nicky knew that Liza had circulated some story of the Boxing night party that had titillated her guests’ amusement.
Nicky made some excuse and left early, feeling impatient and out of tune with everyone.
The thaw had set in and Smith the groom started exercising the horses again. It was at least some relief to be able to ride, and Nicky went to the stables on the first morning with a lighter heart than she had known for days.
“I’ll have Sunray this morning,” she told Smith.
“He’s very fresh, miss,” the man said doubtfully. “And the roads are shocking. Sir Charles didn’t want him ridden till he returns.”
“Oh, that doesn’t apply to me,” she said carelessly. “Saddle him up, will you?”
Presently the horse was brought out, sidling and snorting. He was the young thoroughbred Charles had recently bought. Nicky hadn’t ridden him very much, and she and Charles had never agreed upon his merits. Charles said he was a flyer and carefully schooled would make a good point-to-pointer. Nicky said he was all' show and no stamina. She didn’t like his eye. Unreliable, she told Smith, and the man rather agreed with her.
Nicky mounted and trotted down the long avenue between the chestnuts. The road was wet and sloshy after the thaw, and slippery in places, for there was still ice about. Like most thoroughbreds, Sunray was temperamental. He saw ghosts in the hedges, snatched at his bridle at the slightest pressure on the bit, and was not a comfortable ride on slippery tarmac.
It might be nice to get away with Charles for a couple of months, Nicky thought, as she jogged along keeping a sharp lookout for icy puddles. A fresh outlook, a respite from money affairs. But she knew that would only be a postponement of the final day of reckoning. She had implicit faith in Charles’s skill in eventually raising the money, but her own problems couldn’t be shifted so easily. What of Simon and that lost five thousand? What of that wretched agreement as yet unhonored?
She had a sudden vivid recollection of his face as he said to her: “I’ve fallen in love with you, you little fool. God knows why, for you have little enough kindness.” Was that what he’d always thought of her? Hard, arrogant, and not always very honest?
Lost in her own thoughts, she had slackened her hold on the reins, and at that moment a noisy little sports car, spluttering and backfiring, shot past her and the horse squealed and reared. Perhaps Nicky tightened her grip too suddenly. Sunray began plunging, his feet slid on the treacherous tarmac and he was down, a mass of wildly kicking hoofs with the girl beneath him.
He struggled up almost at once, and unhurt, made off down the road. Nicky, the breath knocked out of her, and a sharp pain in her ribs, got dazedly to her feet and was violently sick in the hedge. When she felt she could walk she staggered down the road to the Nye Arms just ahead. People had run out at the sound of the galloping hoofs, and Nicky said to a chauffeur who seemed vaguely familiar, though she couldn’t for the moment place him:
“Do you think you could give me a lift home? I feel a bit queer.”
“Mr. Shand is just inside, miss,” the man said quickly. “I’ll tell him.”
“Oh, no,” said Nicky weakly and she sat down on the front seat of the car and ducked her head between her hands. But it was old John Shand who came hurrying out with a glass of brandy.
“Here, lass, drink this,” he said with rough kindliness. “Then I’ll take you home and we’ll get the doctor.”
She swallowed the brandy and was dimly conscious of somebody saying Sunray had been caught in the village and was being taken back to Nye. Old Shand got in beside his chauffeur, after having left orders for Dick Lucy to be telephoned at once.
The doctor was at Nye almost as soon as they were, and Nicky had a hazy impression of being helped up the stairs and put to bed by Mouse, who scolded and fussed alternately. Dick Lucy came and examined her and pronounced that, apart from a bad bruising, he didn’t think much damage had been done.
Gradually she felt more clear-headed. The sick, dazed feeling began to pass and she held out a grateful hand for the cup of hot soup that Mouse brought her.
“The doctor’s left a draught, and you’re to sleep all the afternoon,” she said severely. “The idea! Getting yourself squashed by a great brute of a horse.”
“I
didn’t do it on purpose, Mouse dear,” said Nicky with a laugh that hurt her in the region of her ribs.
“Well, you ought to know better than to go careering down the roads in this sort of weather. I’ll give that Smith a piece of my mind and no mistake.”
“It wasn’t his fault. Don’t go, Mouse. Stay with me a bit.”
“I must go,” said Mouse moving to the door. “Mr. Shand is still downstairs.”
“Hasn’t he gone yet?” said Nicky with faint surprise. “He was very kind.”
“Oh, not him,” Mouse made a gesture which dismissed John Shand to oblivion. “Mr. Simon Shand. He came soon after the doctor did. Quite put out he looked.”
“Simon?” A faint tinge of color crept into her face. “I’d like to see him, please.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind, my girl!” Mouse looked outraged. “The doctor said sleep, and sleep you will as soon as you’ve got that soup inside you. Make haste now and drink it up.”
“I’m not going to sleep until I’ve seen Mr. Shand,” said Nicky. “There’s something I want to say to him.”
Mouse tried coaxing.
“Now, childie, you don’t want to be having visitors just now. Won’t it keep? I’ll tell him to come back tomorrow.”
“Please, Mouse—”
“Oh, very well, but if he stays talking longer than ten minutes I’ll come myself and turn him out,” said Mouse crossly and left the room.
Nicky had very little idea of what she wanted to say to Simon Shand. Some sort of apology, some sort of bid for his good faith. She didn’t know.
He came in quietly and stood by the bed looking down at her propped against the pillows, her face pale and transparent-looking, her long brilliant eyes heavy with weariness.
“It was nice of you to come,” she said, smiling at him.
“I was with Stella when the call came through. I came along at once,” he said.
She thought he looked strained and anxious and once again she felt that little rush of gratitude toward him.
“I’m all right. Only shaken up and bruised,” she said with a gentleness that was rare in her. “Simon—I wanted to say something to you.”
“Yes?”
He sat down on the side of the bed and all at once she was very conscious of his nearness.
“I don’t quite know what I wanted to say,” she said, hesitating a little. “To apologize perhaps—to say that I’m not really so rotten as you think me—”
For no reason she had a fleeting impression of Mary Shand saying with simplicity: “I only had but one party dress until I married John.” She looked at Simon and her eyes filled with tears. She had nothing more to say.
Again that strange attraction assailed her, and with it, something more. Something strong and tender and protective. Something she had never known with Charles. She turned to Simon with a little sigh.
“I hadn’t meant to say this, but I’d like to marry you if you’ll have me, Simon,” she said simply, and it seemed to her the right answer to all those unhappy thoughts that had been harrying her.
For a moment he hesitated. He knew that she was turning to him as a child instinctively turns to a stronger nature—because she was hurt, because she was tired of fighting an unequal struggle. Yet he knew also that he attracted her, that somewhere in her strange little heart he had touched something new and tender. Perhaps in time...
He bent over her.
“You won’t slap my face again if I kiss you, will you—Nicolette?” he said very gently.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nicky said a little defiantly to Mouse:
“What would you say if I told you I was going to marry Simon Shand after all?”
Mouse pursed her lips with an expression well known in the nursery years ago.
“I’d say you didn’t deceive me, Nicky, with your talk of wine and good masculine food,” she said briskly. “I told you that you shouldn’t make eyes at the poor gentleman, and I tell you again.”
“But it’s true, Mouse. I really have got myself engaged to him,” Nicky said a little timidly. Mouse could be very uncompromising when she chose.
Mouse turned to look at her. “Are you speaking the truth, Nicky? Well! Whatever made you do such a daft thing I should like to know? It must have been that fall you had, I shouldn’t wonder. And what are you going to do about it now?”
“Marry him, I suppose. Don’t you approve?”
Mouse stood in silence for a moment looking down at Nicky crouched by the schoolroom fire on her first day out of bed. There was an unfamiliar softness in the girl’s face, a faint pleading that tugged at Mouse’s heart and upset all her downrightness.
“It’s time you got married and settled down—yes,” she said at last. “You need somebody to look after you—always did. But the Shands! They’re trade, as I always told you, Nicky—not but what I don’t like young Mr. Shand. He’s pleasant-spoken enough and knows his own mind. But you’re a Bredon, and the Bredons don’t marry with trade—even in these days.”
“I’d no idea you were such a snob, Mouse dear,” Nicky said lightly. “My happiness ought to be much more important to you than a few boots and shoes, you old hypocrite.”
“And do you think you’ll be happy with him?” Mouse asked bluntly.
Nicky stared into the fire and didn’t answer at once.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know.”
“Well, you’d better see what your father has to say,” said Mouse, closing the subject with her usual finality.
But Charles, when told, offered very little objection.
“Not perhaps quite what I would have chosen for you, my pretty,” he said with his ironic, twisted smile. “But good enough in these uncivilized days, I suppose. At least there’ll be plenty of money behind you.
Money, thought Nicky in an uncomfortable moment of honesty. Was that why she was marrying Simon? Neither she nor Charles had troubled much about ways and means in their rackety life together, but there was no denying things had been pinching a bit lately, and Charles was worried. There was his debt to Simon, never to be repaid now. There was Simon standing over her in the firelight saying in that quiet voice: “You aren’t forgetting, are you, that I have my security?”
But there had been no thought of money in her heart when she had agreed to marry him. That had been one of the odd unexpected things that had happened to her, some instinct outside her control giving herself into the keeping of this man who was still half an enemy, and whom she knew so little.
He was strange, too. He didn’t come to see her again after the day of her accident. She knew he had talked to Charles. Charles had stood by her bed afterward and grinned at her, saying:
“Made me feel very Edwardian, darling—asking my daughter’s hand in marriage. I didn’t know people troubled these days. I gave him a stiff drink and told him not to be a fool.”
But the first day Nicky was allowed out, Simon was downstairs in the library waiting to take her up to the Towers. He stood looking down at her in silence for a moment, an expression in his eyes that puzzled her, then he took her face gently between his hands and kissed her.
“Funny little Nicky,” he said. “I believe you weren’t quite sure it had all happened.”
“Were you?” she asked a little lamely. ’
“Why not? It was a bargain,” he replied, and she was aware of how little she knew him.
He didn’t ask if she was quite sure if she was happy, any of the expected things. He said instead:
“I hope you will try and like my people. They’ve been very good to me.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
His lips twitched a little.
“You may find my father a little difficult,” was all he said.
What use to tell her of John Shand’s reception of the news? He could see the old man now, his large head thrust forward in aggression, his stocky shoulders hunched to his ears.
“Marry that Bredon girl! You
a fine honest young fellow with hard-working traditions behind you, marry into a family that’s rotten through and through! I’ll never countenance it,” he shouted, but Mary Shand said:
“I like the girl, John. She has quality.”
“Quality!” roared old Shand. “Don’t tell me that you’ve fallen for this old family stuff too! I gave you credit for more sense.”
“That’s not what I meant, dear. Simon knows.”
Simon smiled at his mother in understanding. And looking at Nicky now as he followed her down the steps of Nye to the waiting car, he thought again how well that word described her. Thoughtless, sometimes a little arrogant, often as absurd as a precocious child, yet there was something about her that was fine and likable, the quality that had made him love her.
The interview could hardly be described as a success. There was a warmth in Mary Shand’s embrace as she said a little shyly: “I’ve always wanted a daughter, my dear, and now I’m to have my wish,” which brought unexpected tears to Nicky’s eyes. But old Shand stubbornly resisted all the girl’s efforts to charm and said bluntly:
“I don’t approve, young woman, and it’s no manner of good saying I do. We may be comfortable now, but you’re marrying into a working family for all that. I doubt it’ll suit you. My boy’s had advantages I never had myself, but that doesn’t alter him. He’s a good lad, Simon, and we hoped he’d wed some sensible upstanding young lass.”
“Aren’t we good enough for you, Mr. Shand?” said Nicky with a flash of her old arrogance, but Shand made no attempt to soften his words.
“No, my girl, if you’ll excuse me saying so, you’re not,” he replied, and the hot color flamed into Nicky’s pale face. “The Bredon’s are played-out stock. I want my grandchildren to carry good blood on both sides.”
“You shouldn’t count your chickens, John,” Mary broke in with unexpected humor. “There may not be any grandchildren. Not but what,” she added quickly to Nicky, “it would be a great grief to us, my dear, if there were never any little ones. But this is no talk for a newly engaged girl. Come and sit here beside me and tell me how it all came about.”