Justin put an arm about Susan’s shoulders as she stood, swaying a little, on her feet and he guided her towards a tiny garden gate. It was a new garden gate, and it gleamed whitely.
“Where are we?” she asked, bewilderedly. “This isn’t the Red Lion!”
He laughed softly.
“No: this isn’t the Red Lion!”
“But ------ ”
He laid a finger on her lips as she looked up at him, and his teeth gleamed as whitely as the gate. And now, at least, she knew that it was the gate of the Dower House.
“I thought we’d have breakfast at Storr when you feel like it, and there’s likely to be someone up. But, first, and since there isn’t likely to be anyone up as it’s only half-past four, I thought we’d have our little talk where we can’t be interrupted! This place isn’t in such bad trim now, and there should be an electric fire—perhaps even the wherewithal for making tea or coffee! I’m a very good coffee-maker, so you shall put up your feet until it’s ready!”
She allowed him to guide her into the house, still too bemused by sleep to think it altogether strange that he should even contemplate having a talk with her in an, as yet, unfurnished house, and at such an unseasonable hour. But she did receive a mild shock of surprise when they entered the sitting-room, for the carpet had been laid—or a carpet had been laid, and it was the glorious dark red Jennifer had wanted—and there were several magnificent examples of period chairs with rose-red damask covering the seats and backs; and a little table that would support a coffee-tray. There was a handsome oak settle drawn up close to an already laid fire, and on the settle there was a positive nest of red velvet cushions.
Justin lifted Susan into his arms and carried her to the settle, piling the cushions behind the polished brown of her head, and then knelt and put a match to the fire. Instantly it sprang into a wonderfully comforting blaze, and he piled on several more logs, and then he took off Susan’s shoes so that her small feet were free of constriction, and she could wriggle her toes in their fine nylon hose. She looked at him with a still very bewildered, and rather inquiring look in her eyes, and he went into the kitchen adjoining and she heard him filling a kettle with water. When he came back the fragrant aroma of coffee preceded him, and the percolator was gleaming on the tray in his hands. She recognised the china as part of one of the English porcelain sets in use at Storr Hall, and the biscuits looked as if they had been baked by Mrs. Hollyhead.
“There you are, my darling,” Justin said, softly, as he set the tray on the little table close to the settle. “It’s what you need—a cup of something hot to restore not only your morale, but your courage!” His eyes met hers—really met hers—and she felt the blood palpitate very close to her skin. “Don’t say anything but drink it up! . . . Sugar?” and he added two heaped spoonsful to her cup.
“Don’t! ... I mean, that’s enough!” she added hastily, her whole being one spreading sea of confusion, while the blood went on pounding through her veins. “It will be too sweet!”
“But not as sweet as you!” He stirred the sugar in his own cup, and his gaze rested on her broodingly. “Nothing—nobody!—could ever be as sweet as you!” Somehow she managed to finish her coffee, and he came and sat beside her on the settle. He picked up one of her hands and played with it.
“You know that you are my darling, don’t you?” he said, the dark depths of his eyes lit by little flames. “My own, very precious, completely wonderful, darling!” and he caught her into his arms and pressed her head down into the hollow of his shoulder, while he shut his eyes and let his lips rove amongst the softness of her hair.
After a moment she put back her head and looked up at him, and once again they gazed deeply and shatteringly into one another’s eyes. Then his mouth came hungrily close to hers, and as he took possession of her mouth she knew that her lips parted beneath the fierce, consuming ardour of his kiss, and when at last he lifted his head and would have allowed her to get her breath the pleading look in the deep grey eyes caused him to lower his head again swiftly. And this time the kiss went on and on as if time was a thing of no consequence, and they had all the right in the world to cling to one another like a couple who had just been saved from a wreck, and were the only survivors on a raft.
The silence in the cottage became a tangible thing, but at last it had to be broken, and it was Justin who broke it.
“I think I must have been very close to actual starvation,” he said. “I don’t think I could have survived any longer without that!”
She put up a hand and touched his cheek, and her eyes were swimming with love and tenderness.
“All the same . . . We haven’t any right!”
“Ssh! . . . For the moment we will not talk of right! Only of the utter bliss of being here together like this!”
“Is it bliss?”
“Oh, my darling! Is it bliss . . .? Is it bliss!” He covered every inch of her face with the demanding kisses that thrilled her to the very roots of her being, then kissed every inch of her slender neck, the white brow with the feathers of fringe on it, the drugged grey eyes. And between his kisses he murmured that she was the most adorable thing that had ever happened in the world, and that he loved her with every beat of his heart.
“Do you hear that, Susan? I, who have never loved any woman before—or wanted to! —love you so abjectly that I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life crawling at your feet and kissing them!” He bent and dropped several kisses swiftly on the slender little feet that rested beside him on the cushions. “I started off by wanting to wring your flower-like neck, and now I want to wring the neck of a lifelong friend like Bruce Fairburn just because I’ve seen the way he looks at you!” He crushed her against him. “Susan! Tell me that you only go about with him to annoy me, not because you like him!”
“But I do like him,” she said, very gently. And then —at the look in his eyes, wounded, dismayed, resentful, even a little fanatical—she added quickly: “But only as a very pleasant friend!”
“You’re not the least little bit in love with him?” “What do you think?” she asked, and felt his hands run over her face and neck and shoulders, and knew that they were trembling a little, and that he was breathing rather hard and fast.
“I think that you love me as much as I love you!... In fact, I know you do! But I like to torture myself sometimes, and to-night, in that ghastly theatre bar, I was so tormented that I forgot how a gentleman behaves, and had Rosalie’s mother practically dissolving into tears right under my eyes! Under the eyes of quite a lot of people who know how hard she has worked to secure me for a son-in-law!”
At that Susan started to tremble, and her voice came indistinctly, and she even attempted to withdraw from him.
“Justin! ... We’re forgetting Rosalie, and that’s the one thing we mustn’t do! It’s no use pretending that we can behave like this, because we both know that you’re marrying Rosalie in a matter of weeks! A little more than three weeks now! ...”
“Do you keep a calendar!” he inquired, with sudden violence. ‘“And tick off the days as they pass!”
“No, no!... But it’s true! There are only three weeks to go—and one or two days!”
“And who’s fault is that?” he demanded, gripping her by the shoulders and bruising her soft flesh with the fierceness of his fingers. “Who was responsible for making me take the bull by the horns and clinch matters with Rosalie? Didn’t I tell you that because of you I’d sold my birthright for a mess of potage! In other words, bartered my freedom, and all my future happiness!”
“But I couldn’t have made you do that!” The wide grey eyes hung upon his. “I was quite unimportant to you in the beginning, and you knew very well that I would never be a serious trouble to you. I never had any intention of taking advantage of that stipulation in your uncle’s will, and if you hadn’t been so terribly rude to me. . . .”
“I was rude to you because you were a complete surprise to me, and I wasn’t prepared to accept
you at your face valuation! I thought there must be a snag somewhere. . . . And then I discovered the snag, when I knew that I was hopelessly in love with you! You were so plucky in your defiance, and when I thought that I’d killed you by letting you ride Lady Luck I had a kind of a brainstorm. If I hadn’t killed you, then I was your slave for life. . . . And I didn’t want to be anyone’s slave! And at least if I married Rosalie I could still be master of my soul! And put her mother out of a certain amount of misery!”
“So you decided to get married in order to keep your soul intact, and please Mrs. Freer?” with a withering note in her voice. “And you blame me! ”
“I blame you because, if you’d never appeared on the scene at all, I’d still be what I intended to remain, a carefree bachelor who could look forward to a lifetime of doing exactly what he wanted to do, without feminine interference and domination! That’s why I say that, through you, I’ve bartered my freedom!” He laughed suddenly in a curiously triumphant and rather unsteady fashion. “But now, also through you, I’ve discovered that what I really want are shackles, and not freedom. ... A woman to adore, a wife to cherish, all sorts of responsibilities, and the unswerving domination of the cleverest woman in the world! You, my little sweet, who not only found your way to the heart of Uncle Adrian at the wrong end of his life, but defeated all the defences of his nephew!”
He smiled at her lovingly, and kissed her concerned eyes, cupping her face in his hands while he did so.
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“You know very well that there is nothing we can do!”
His long finger smoothed one of her feathery eyebrows.
“On the contrary, I am only too keenly aware that we have to do something very quickly!” He frowned thoughtfully. “Uncle Adrian wanted this to happen, I am sure, and that’s why he suggested you should live at Storr. Rosalie’s grandmother wants us to marry, too.”
“Rosalie’s grandmother? Lady Freer! . . . But how could she?”
He smiled at her quizzically.
“Because she took an enormous fancy to you—quite understandable! —and your grandfather was one of her earliest boy-friends! But the reason she gave that she considers really important is the belief that she holds that Rosalie and I wouldn’t be happy together for a fortnight, whereas you and I can look forward to a lifetime of happiness together. Is that clear enough, my darling? And is it sound enough for you!”
“No—no, it isn’t!” Susan struggled to get away from him, and she stood in front of the fire. These two dominant personalities—her grandfather’s lost love, and the man who had once told her he would make a very bad enemy—were forgetting altogether that a marriage had been arranged between Rosalie and Justin, and not merely had it been arranged but every detail had been fixed. Justin had allowed things to go forward at such a pace that he must be mad if he thought they could be halted now—a girl jilted on the very eve of her wedding, all the wedding plans cancelled, presents returned with no sound explanation, and Mrs. Freer thrown into a fit of strong hysterics.
For, judging by the wrought-up look in her face the night before, Susan was certain it wouldn’t take much to plunge Mrs. Freer into hysterics. And the mental picture that she had of the widow’s face, skilfully made-up but furrowed with care just the same, the faded eyes bewildered, the mascara running as the hopeless tears coursed their way down her cheeks, her mouth quivering as she thought of all the creditors who would begin to pounce on her, was too much for Susan. It wasn’t merely too much—it shook her.
She had no time, or thought, or pity, to spare for Rosalie. But the thought of Rosalie’s mother’s face was an insuperable barrier between herself and Justin.
She put her hands up to her face and shuddered away from it.
Justin’s brow grew a little black.
“Don’t you want to marry me?” he asked. “Perhaps I’ve been besottedly deceiving myself?”
She shook her head bleakly.
“No, of course it isn’t that! But, you and Lady Freer.... You don’t seem to realise! . . . There is such a thing as being committed. You are committed to marry Rosalie!”
He smiled in a way she didn’t quite like.
“As to that, Rosalie has only to name her price.... Or her mother has! We’ll settle things very amicably and
smoothly!”
“You mean you—you’ll buy back your freedom?”
“Only for a few weeks, my darling!” He lighted a cigarette and strolled across and joined her on the thick skin rug before the fireplace—the tiger-skin Jennifer had decided would look so right in that room—and the passionate warmth was creeping back between his thick eyelashes. “Then I’ll offer it to you to do whatever you like with!”
“But what will people say? How will Rosalie explain
“She can explain simply that she changed her mind about me! And that shouldn’t surprise such a large number of people, since it must be becoming increasingly obvious that we’re not madly in love.”
“Then you want them to believe that she was marrying you for your money?”
He shrugged.
“Amongst other things! ... At one time she may have had a certain fondness for me, but it’s wilted a bit lately. We seldom meet without quarrelling, and it’s possible she’s suspected how I feel about you. We’ve had several arguments when your name has been introduced, when her dog tried to maul you, for instance, we had quite a storm!”
“But, her mother! . . . This marriage has been the one thing she’s been looking forward to for months! The humiliation will be unbearable when she has to face up to the truth that, instead of security for her daughter for life, and a lovely home like Storr, there’s to be nothing but a cheque that in itself will be a kind of insult!”
“The sort of insult Mrs. Freer will know how to cope with,” he assured her easily, and his very complacence— added to the unmistakable look of contempt in his eyes—aroused all Susan’s sympathies for a woman who seemed to have spent the whole of her lifetime fighting—possibly first for a husband for herself, who could keep her in the comfort she craved, then for survival and the sort of upbringing for her daughter that she wanted for her, and finally for a fitting husband for her. A man of substance, and preferably a man of whom she could be proud to say:
“This is my son-in-law!”
Susan turned away, making a helpless little gesture with her hands, and feeling as if she had been caught up in the meshes of a dangerous but fascinating web that, if she allowed it to close upon herself, would affect adversely the affairs of two other human beings.
“Darling!” Justin said, and went and lifted up her face and looked into her eyes. For the first time anxiety showed at the back of his, but they were also smiling a little. “There is no other way out, if we’re to be happy. And you do want us to be happy, don’t you?”
“Yes, but—not at the expense of other people!”
He frowned again swiftly.
“Rosalie hasn’t the capacity for genuine unhappiness —I doubt whether she has the capacity for genuine happiness! —and her mother is a born match-maker. As soon as I’ve escaped from her clutches she’ll be looking round for someone else to lead Rosalie to the altar. And with Rosalie’s looks that won’t be difficult.”
“No, I know, but ------ ”
“Not another ‘but,’ darling!” He kissed the furrowed lines of her white brow softly, and then laid his cheek against her chair. “Instead, give me your promise that you’ll marry me the instant I’m free, and I’ll go back to London to-day and sort things out with Rosalie. And with her mother, of course! . . . For she’s the one who knows how much her little daughter is worth, and how much it will take to salvage pride, and so forth. Probably a good round sum, but it will be worth it!”
“It sounds horrible!” Susan declared, and suddenly clung to his arm. “Let me think it over.... Let us both think it over! Oh, Justin, we’ve got to give the matter a lot of thought!...”
“I have
n’t,” Justin replied. He drew her possessively up against him, and she could feel the hard strength of his body, and the violent hammering of his heart beneath her own. His eyes glinted a little as she looked up into them. “Marriage is the only thing I can offer you, otherwise the situation might be much simpler. It could be a good deal simpler! ... But I don’t think even in the beginning of our acquaintance I could have offered you anything else, if I’d been overcome by a wild desire to possess you! Fortunately, however, the desire came later.... For I don’t know what I might, or might not, have offered you then!”
She leaned against him, looking and feeling a little afraid of that harsh glint in his eyes. But she understood that he was hurt by her unwillingness to agree to all his suggestions immediately, and that like a spoiled boy he was reacting a little badly.
“Please wait,” she begged him, “and we’ll discuss the whole thing later.”
“Later to-day?”
“No. . . . To-morrow. . . .”
His arms fastened about her almost brutally, and his mouth when it descended on hers had none of the loving tenderness in the way it devoured hers that his kisses had had before. She had the feeling, too, that his ugly mood was trying to claim him.
“I don’t know why I don’t settle the matter here and now,” he said huskily, as he lifted his head a little. “If you love me—if you love me!—you won’t love me any the less, and at least you won’t be so eager to let Rosalie carry me off in triumph after all!”
“I’m not eager to let Rosalie carry you off in triumph! I can’t bear the thought of it!”
And her face was so white and strained that he believed her.
“Then, sweetheart—my precious sweetheart!—let’s make certain of our happiness now! You’re mine, and you know it, and I’m yours—and you know that, too! And, whatever happens, this is a moment in our lives that will never be repeated! The moment when we’ve discovered how infinitely much we mean to one another, and it’s how much we mean to one another that is of importance. Darling!” and his kiss scorched along all her veins, searing her nerve-ends, melting her bones. But only until she was provided with an opportunity to draw breath.
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