“I did bring some jodhpurs with me, and I’ll go and change
into them,” she said. She turned on her heel. “I won’t be longer than a few minutes.”
Before she reached the angle of the wall he opened his mouth as if to call something after her, and then changed his mind. When she returned he was smoking a cigarette, and for the first time the fact that he was impeccably dressed struck her. His riding-breeches bore the hallmark of a first-class tailor, and the jacket he wore this morning could not have sat more snugly or beautifully on his arrogantly-held shoulders. His boots were polished and obviously hand-made, and once again his linen dazzled her by contrast with his dark skin. He was, she realised, an insolently handsome man, who could detract from the quality of his looks if he wished, or emphasise them just as easily.
Carter, the groom, led Lady Luck up to her, and he still looked a little worried as he helped her into the saddle.
“You don’t want to let her have her head too soon,” he said. “She can be as gentle as a kitten when she pleases, but she’s not feeling very kittenish this morning.”
“Refrain from offering Miss Willowfield advice, and she’ll probably do very well,” Sir Justin remarked, cantering up on a grey he had decided to exercise. He looked with something that might have been admiration in his eyes at Susan, as she sat very stiffly in the saddle. It was plain that she knew what to do, but she had neither pleasure nor confidence in doing it She looked younger than ever in her jodhpurs and a chunky white sweater, with her hair slightly tousled as a result of pulling the sweater quickly over her head.
She swung the mare round, and they started off along a narrow track that presently skirted the park of Storr Hall. For ever afterwards Susan remembered that morning, and the bare charm of the park, with the February sunlight slanting through the trees and lying in pale splashes on banks where the deeper gold of primroses would soon be lying. The trees were mostly beech, and they rose in serried ranks, like the pillars of a cathedral, to the soft blue of the sky, and the grey trunks added to the impression of a delicate colour etching.
If only, on such an enchanting morning, she had not been forced to do something that caused her to bite her lower lip in sheer sick terror, the girl thought. Behind her Sir Justin allowed her to keep the lead and he murmured:
“I don’t know whether you’ve met my fiancee, Rosalie Freer? She has a wonderful seat in the saddle, but you’re not too bad. You could do better if you weren’t so frightened of falling off, and still more frightened of Lady Luck! As a matter of fact, she’s behaving very nicely.... It must be that affinity!”
Susan felt as if her knees didn’t belong to her, and her hands wanted to clutch at the reins. Lady Luck’s ears were a little too well back, and she wanted to be given her head too soon. Carter was right about her. . . . She could be pliable, and even deceptively meek, but now she was beginning to feel impatient. The girl on her back was no horsewoman!
She jibbed at a hummock of earth, and then took a straight stretch at increasing speed. Susan forgot what her knees were supposed to do for her on these occasions, and she slumped like a sack over Lady Luck’s neck, clinging to the delicate chestnut arch with mounting terror. A tree arm brushed against her face, and almost dislodged her from her seat, and the wind tore past her ears. The ride narrowed, and suddenly it seemed to her that something more solid than a tree arm was going to hit her. . .
Justin Storr shouted something behind her, but she was too blind with terror to heed him. She was no longer capable of anything but just hanging on, and inevitably when she closed her eyes after a beech trunk sailed past, her nerveless fingers slackened, and she went over the little mare’s neck like a sack of potatoes.
She lay quite still beside the track until Storr thundered up, and when he dismounted he could see at once that there was blood on her face, trickling down from a gash
under the soft fringe.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him dazedly as he knelt at her side. The whole earth was heaving, and his face was revolving; but even so she thought that he looked violently angry. Or was he violently concerned?
“Little fool!” he said. “Little fool!” he repeated. “Why on earth didn’t you have the courage to stick to your guns as you did last night?”
She closed her eyes.
“Perhaps because I’ve the wrong sort of courage,” she whispered, and for the first time in her life fainted dead away.
CHAPTER FOUR
Much later she lay on a couch in her bedroom at Storr and watched Mrs. Hollyhead putting away one or two of her garments, and generally making the room look very neat.
“Sir Justin would like to have a word with you before he goes back to the Red Lion, ” she said to Susan. “He had lunch here, and he also had a long conversation with the doctor. But there’s nothing to worry about,” smiling at the patient. “You’ve no broken bones, and that scratch on your forehead will soon heal.”
“I never thought for one moment it wouldn’t,” Susan answered, a little irritably. Her head ached, and she felt a little sick, and rather trembly inside. “It was the branch that scraped across my face before I allowed myself to take that undignified toss.” She bit her lip. “What a horsewoman!” she exclaimed. “Sir Justin must have been really entertained!”
Mrs. Hollyhead looked at her shrewdly.
“Lady Luck was hardly a suitable mount for you if you haven’t been riding for some time,” she said. “Can I tell Sir Justin he can come up here and see you?”
Susan shook her head violently, and the pain of it made her wince.
“No, no, I don’t want to see him! I don’t want to see him under any circumstances!”
Mrs. Hollyhead put away a brush and comb.
“But he’s particularly anxious to see you, Miss Willowfield. He
won’t take up more than a few minutes of your time if you don’t feel up to it, but he asked me to say he’d be glad of those few minutes if you can stand them.”
“I can’t stand them.” Susan felt a wave of utter revulsion wash her away on a tide of dislike. “I don’t want to see Sir Justin Storr, and I won’t see him! You can tell him that! You can also tell him I’ll be leaving for London early to-morrow morning, and I never want to see Storr Hall again!” She called the words back. “No; don’t tell him that! . . . Tell him I’m leaving for London, but I’ll come back to Storr when I feel like it. When I feel like it!... Please say that!”
The housekeeper handed her a bottle of eau-de-Cologne, and recommended her to dab her temples with it.
“You look all in, Miss,” she said, gently. Then she added: “I’ll tell him!”
The next morning, looking a little white and shaken still, Susan packed her case and insisted upon having a taxi summoned for her. When informed that the Bentley was in the garage, and Carter could drive her, she still insisted upon having a taxi. Only in the train did she feel a little regretful that she had behaved rather hysterically in front of Mrs. Hollyhead. The housekeeper had been very kind, and she had done her utmost to dissuade Susan from making the journey, but Susan had felt she couldn’t get away from Storr Hall fast enough. It was a beautiful old house, and alone she could have enjoyed her week-end, but Justin Storr had viciously marred it for her.
Susan had the feeling (and even she recognised that it was probably highly exaggerated, and possibly slanderous) that Justin had hoped Lady Luck would break her neck for her, and if it was too much to hope that she would break her neck, that she would be taught such a sharp lesson that she would never willingly visit Storr again. He had said he was not a nice enemy, and the memory of his eyes as he knelt beside her in the park confirmed her in an unreasoning fear she had developed of him. They had looked dark and wild, as if he had gypsy blood in his veins; and for an instant she had seen him against a background of lonely heath, with a camp fire blazing in the background. And they had also blazed with some emotion.
She was certain it was not relief because the toss had d
one nothing more than take the wind out of her, even if the blood was running down from her hair, and she must have looked a gory spectacle.
When she reached London another taxi took her home to the flat she shared with a girl called Jennifer Bond, who aspired to paint miniatures, but earned her living as a magazine illustrator. Jennifer had just come back from an exhibition of miniatures in the West End, and she was walking on air because the work had been so exquisite. She declared that if she could paint like that, with the same miraculous attention to detail in such a limited space, she would live on a crust for the sheer pleasure of doing so.
“If only I could find myself a rich old boy who would die and leave me twenty thousand I needn’t live on a crust,” she sighed. “I could take a flat in Paris, and live surrounded by ivory ovals and all the evidences of a happy Bohemianism. Which wouldn’t prevent me buying all my clothes in the right quarter, and saying ‘Chez Maxim’s’ to a taxi-driver twice a week!”
“I think you’re a little out of date,” Susan said, sinking rather wearily into a chair, and removing her hat “Maxim’s belongs to the era of hansom cabs and feathered head-bands. I’m sure there’s somewhere much more up-to-the-minute to suit modern trends.” Someone like Justin Storr would almost certainly know, she thought. “And why does everyone pick on Paris as the one place on earth where it would be heaven to live? I don’t agree!”
“That’s because you’re not an artist,” Jennifer murmured amiably. Then she peered rather hard at Susan, and particularly at the slight discolouration below her fringe. “But I imagine you thought Storr wonderful? Although you don’t look as if you’ve enjoyed every minute of your week-end!”
“I haven’t,” Susan admitted, and invited her to take a closer look at the bump below her fringe. “I’ve been horse-riding, and it’s the one thing I wasn’t cut out for! I knew that, but I allowed someone to inveigle me on to the back of a lively little chestnut, and she threw me!”
Jennifer frowned.
“Who inveigled you on to the back of this mettlesome steed?” “Sir Justin Storr.”
Jennifer lighted a cigarette, and put it into her hand. “Now, tell me everything!” she said.
Susan complied with the request, and when she had finished Jennifer sat back, knocked the ash off her cigarette, and made use of a few crisp sentences.
“The man’s an obvious bounder,” she said; “but I knew that before you went—I was probably more certain of it than you were!
At the same time, and in fairness to the new owner of Storr Hall, I must admit that Sir Adrian’s stipulation struck me as a little peculiar. For a highly conventional man it was an unconventional stipulation, and if you had any maiden aunts I feel sure they would share my views. However, you mustn’t let the Storr man get away with his tactics, and in return for that beauty-treatment over your left eye I’d make myself the biggest possible nuisance to him. Legally you’ve got the right, and I’d just go ahead!”
“How?” Susan asked, closing her eyes because the weariness that possessed her seemed mental as well as physical, as if she had recently received a shock that had jolted her in every conceivable way. “And, why?” she added, opening dull grey eyes that looked more than ever like dark, crushed violets—or heavy purple pansies.
“Why? Because you can’t afford to ignore a rent-free offer, even if you have just come into a large sum of money! You’ve got to live somewhere suitable, and Storr should suit you admirably until your fellow beneficiary decides to get married. And if I know anything at all of him and his dislike of match-making mamas, and females with MATRIMONY written large on their brows, that won’t be for a very long time!”
“He has already told me that he will marry to put me out of the picture, if I decide to be obstinate!”
Jennifer’s eyebrows lifted.
‘That should be of interest to someone, at least,” she observed obscurely.
Susan sighed and shut her eyes again, turning her face into the cushion.
“Let’s go away together—you and I!” she suggested. “Let’s go to Paris, or somewhere like that, and take the sort of flat you were talking about. I’ll give you half of my twenty thousand, which according to Sir Justin ought not to be mine in any case, and you can spend all your days haunting Parisian art galleries, if that’s the sort of thing you want to do. I’ll simply go into my shell for a bit.” Jennifer smiled at her.
“I think you’re suffering a bit from reaction,” she said gently. “But I do also think you need a bit of support just now, and it might be a good plan if we went down to Storr together. We could stay at the Red Lion, and that will annoy Sir Justin if he intends to go on putting up there, too. If he doesn’t, it will annoy him just the same to have you encamped on his doorstep, and every time he runs into you by accident he’ll be reminded of yesterday morning, when he might have killed you.”
She regarded Susan soberly.
“He might, you know, letting you ride a horse he knew to be dangerous!”
But Susan wouldn’t allow this, whatever she secretly thought and believed.
“The horse was perfectly manageable, if I hadn’t got in such a panic. I’ve always been secretly afraid of horses, and I think they know it.”
“And Justin Storr guessed it?”
“Perhaps.”
Jennifer’s brows knitted themselves together. They were very fair brows, and by contrast with Susan she was tall and athletic, and the type who would never be afraid of horses. In fact, she was not easily intimidated by anything or anyone, apart from irate art editors when her work failed to come up to standard. Then she was easily deflated and inclined to lose confidence in her own abilities.
“I tell you what,” she said, leaning her chin on her hand and looking suddenly decisive. “I’m not going to be very busy for the next week or so, once I’ve finished that thing over there on the easel ...” She glanced at it disparagingly, and admitted that she was not very popular in a certain quarter at that moment, but would be more popular if she held herself aloof for a bit. She might even find herself in great demand after a spell of playing hard to find. “I’d love the smell of a loose-box after the smell of London buses, and if Sir Justin wants to make up for endangering your life he can offer me a mount when we get down to Storr! And February mornings are ideal for good brisk walks in the country, and in the afternoons you have tea and plum-cake in front of a roaring fire! ... I’ll buy myself something tweedy and suitable, and it wouldn’t hurt you to have an orgy of spending and set yourself up with a few new things.” Her disparaging look this time rested on Susan’s rather well-worn suit. “It’s one of the things I’d have done straight away. ... Not gone down to Storr looking as if I needed the money a benevolent employer had left me!”
Susan remembered Sir Justin’s slighting remarks about her little black cocktail-dress—which he must have recognised as coming “straight off the peg”—and she felt herself growing hot and humiliated at the memory.
“I’ll have an orgy of spending—we’ll have an orgy of spending, if that’s what you want—but I won’t show my face at Storr again,” she said obstinately to Jennifer.
The latter disregarded her, apart from observing that she could pay for her own things, thank you very much; and then she remembered that she had had rather an exciting invitation to rather a special party two nights hence, and she had been requested to bring a friend. Susan, she was sure, would enjoy it.
“Merlin Sinclair is going to be there. . . . He painted that wonderful portrait last year of Lady Freer’s granddaughter, and the girl was acclaimed the deb of the year. I don’t remember her name, but Lady Freer was a beauty in her day, and her granddaughter is said to be exactly like her.”
“Then I don’t think I want to be there,” Susan said. “Smart portrait-painters are hardly in my line, and I never shine at parties.”
“You will at this one,” Jennifer promised her. “Don’t forget you’re a young woman of means . . . twenty thousand pounds securely t
ucked away in the bank! The difficulty in a few months time will be preventing your marrying a fortune-hunter!”
Susan stared thoughtfully into the fire.
“Sir Adrian used to call me Miss Mouse,” she recalled. “What sort of man would want to marry a mouse, with or without a fortune?”
“Sir Adrian would have done so if he’d been thirty years younger,” Jennifer replied promptly. “That’s why he left you all that money.”
Susan removed her gaze from the fire and stared at her. When Sir Justin had inferred something similar, but less pleasant, she had been furious. Now she asked herself whether, if Sir Adrian had been thirty years younger, she would have wanted to marry him. He would have been gentle and kind and understanding . . . But were those the qualifications most desirable in a husband?
What sort of a husband would be fit mate for a mouse? Surely not one with similar characteristics!
For the next two days the two girls who had shared a small London flat very amicably for two years enjoyed a wonderful shopping spree. Jennifer drew a nice round sum out of her bank and spent lavishly, declining to allow Susan to pay for anything more than a very special nightdress, which Jennifer said should take pride of place in her bottom drawer, and an elegant piece of costume jewellery. Susan found herself, as a result of listening to the persuasive voice of her friend, the possessor of a complete new wardrobe.
They both had new hair-dos, and Susan’s straight brown locks were re-styled so that they looked more than ever like a shining cap of rather ordinary metal with some unmistakably coppery gleams in it. Her soft fringe waved gently on her attractive wide white brow, and she listened to an extra persuasive outburst from Jennifer who believed in experimenting with make-up, and bought herself an extra vivid lipstick, and some eye-shadow to be worn on her delicate white eyelids in the evenings only—that much she insisted on.
Dangerous Love Page 3