Then she tore herself out of his arms, and walked unsteadily to the door. She had already slipped on her shoes, and she caught up her coat.
“Will you please take me to the Red Lion?” she said, her eyes very darkly grey and full of reproach.
“Of course.” His lips twisted a little, and the dark flush just below his rather high cheek-bones receded gradually, leaving him noticeably pale. “But, remember I’m only human, Susan, and however much you may despise me at odd moments I do love you! And I want to marry you!”
“I’ll—remember!” she answered, very quietly, and they walked out to the car in the full, brave light of a splendid sunrise.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She met him in the park the following afternoon, and by that time her mind was fully made up. There had never, really, been the least doubt about the only course open to her, but she was not at all sure she could convince Justin that it was the only course.
It was a wild, windy afternoon—more like an afternoon in early March—and the trees in the park were threshing madly as she walked beneath them. She could feel raindrops spattering through the leaves and bouncing on her bare head, and there was even a roll of thunder in the distance. There was nothing seasonable about the weather, but the scent of the roses in the rose-garden at Storr reached her while she was still a considerable distance away from it, and still within the confines of the park.
She had told Justin over the telephone that she would arrive at the Hall sometime during the afternoon, but she hadn’t been very precise about it. The one thing she had been insistent about was that he should not attempt to visit her at the Red Lion. And actually she ran into him on the fringes of the park.
Like herself he was hatless, and he looked grim and impatient.
“I suppose you realise that you’re going to get soaked through?” he said, as he took her arm and they ran for the shelter of the little arbour where he had once sat her on a table and kissed her.
She shook back the raindrops from her hair, and he leaned against the closed door and regarded her.
“Well?”
She realised that he was sullenly prepared for the worst, and all at once her love for him rose paramount over everything else. If only there was nothing but their love, and no other consideration to which she need pay the slightest attention! . . . But there was, and she had already paid it attention!
“I’m sorry, Justin—” She swallowed, and he could see the small convulsive movement of her throat muscles— “but it’s no good! I—we can’t—I mean, you’ll just have to go on with your plans!...”
“Good!” he exclaimed harshly. “That will save someone a lot of time and expense sending out carefully worded little notes to the effect that the marriage arranged between Miss Rosalie Freer and Sir Justin Storr will not take place after all! And packing up wedding presents and returning them must be a bit of a bind. . . . Particularly as Rosalie fancied making use of quite a lot of them!”
Susan’s wide grey eyes wavered a little, but his were so hard and cold that they frightened her.
“You’ll come to the wedding, of course?” he went on, selecting a cigarette with great deliberation and speaking through locked teeth. “I wonder how we shall classify you? Friend of the bridegroom, or the bride? Somehow I think we must definitely allot you to the cause of the bride! . . . The bridegroom isn’t likely to number amongst his circle of close acquaintances anyone with quite your fervour for doing the right thing at all times however painful!”
The cigarette went out, and he ground it into nothing with the heel of his shoe.
“I’m not going to attempt to persuade you to alter your decision, because you’re the type who would never forgive me if I did! And I don’t want a bride who is so fond of her scruples that she puts them before me. . . . Rosalie, at least, is never likely to do anything of that sort!”
“Justin!” Susan heard herself whisper imploringly, and she even extended a hand to him, but he turned away.
“After this,” he said jerkily, “everything will be over between us! You probably feel tempted to retort that there was never very much between us, and what little there was, was entirely due to my methods of forcing things along! But, such little as there was, is something we’ll put right out of our minds and thoughts . . . hearts don’t enter into it! Hearts are seldom involved, even when two people inflame one another! And twenty years from now we’ll be telling our respective grandchildren to beware of the dangers of physical attraction!”
Her eyes were agonised, but he went on ruthlessly:
“I shan’t pursue you, and I’d prefer it if we never saw one another again. I shall never under any circumstances remind you of this afternoon or the early hours of yesterday morning, and if I found myself free to-morrow I wouldn’t come to you and beg you to marry me! I’d celebrate my freedom by catching the first plane to the opposite end of the world, and once there I’d drink a toast to freedom and vow that never again would a young woman with deceptively soft grey eyes and mousy-brown hair discover that I’d a slightly vulnerable side.” His eyes looked hard at her. “As things are, I can be thankful that there are many other sides, and not one
of them in the slightest degree vulnerable!”
Rain drummed on the roof of the summer-house, and for fully five minutes neither of them said a word, and he quietly and deliberately smoked another cigarette which this time he refrained from grinding out beneath his heel. Then when the rain stopped, and the dull patter on the surrounding leaves grew fainter and fainter, he walked to the door of the arbour, and looked out.
“I think you can safely make your way back to the Red Lion now without getting any wetter than you already are,” he said. “Or if you feel like some tea I’m sure Mrs. Hollyhead will be delighted to provide you with some up at the house. I never was very much of a tea-drinker, so I won’t offer to share a pot with you.” “Thank you, but I—I’ll go back to the Red Lion,” she gasped, and stepped past him blindly.
He moved aside so that they didn’t even touch one another as she went out into the open, and she heard his footsteps crunching over the gravel in the opposite direction as she ran down the path. The tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was sobbing childishly as she ran. Only a miracle prevented her from stumbling over a tree root and measuring her length on the ground, for she felt as if her inner eyes as well as her outer eyes were drenched with the tears that flowed as if they would never stop, and she was more blind than a blind person.
She never knew how she returned to Town, or how she felt when she got back, or even what she said to Jennifer in explanation of her sudden reappearance.
Jennifer came in rather late, having been out to dinner with someone whom she later admitted was Bruce Fairburn. And as explanation of this piece of piracy she told Susan that Bruce was very much concerned about her, and had wanted to discuss with a mutual friend her peculiar behaviour in going off alone with Justin to Storr, after being involved with him in a rather ugly scene with his fiancee. Bruce couldn’t understand why
Susan had apparently countenanced atrociously bad conduct on the part of Justin—and the near-reducing of his future mother-in-law to tears! —and then made matters worse by setting off with him on a long lonely drive at midnight.
Even Jennifer looked somewhat askance at Susan, but the numb, anguished expression on her friend’s face—an expression utterly alien to anything she had even seen before—prevented her from asking awkward questions, and she even dropped the subject of Bruce’s concern after recognising, with a good deal of secret concern on her own part, that Susan was quite incapable of answering them even if she put them.
Susan was like someone bemused by shock, touched by a secret tragedy no one must guess at; and Jennifer sent her to bed with a hot-water bottle and a soothing drink, and could only hope they would have the desired effect, and ensure for her a good night’s rest. But she doubted it when she saw Susan’s face in the morning.
Susan received a
note from Lady Freer when she had been back in London a couple of days. It was written in spidery handwriting on delicate mauve note-paper, and there were only two lines to the message.
“You did the wrong thing, my dear! Your conscience may be clear, but a clear conscience can be cold comfort as you grow older! ” It was signed, “Constance Freer.”
Susan put away the note in her glove-box, and then wondered why she was keeping it.
To prove to herself that Lady Freer had been right, when she re-read it years later?
If she had been uncertain how she got back to London from Storr, she was still more uncertain how she got through the next three weeks and still managed to live and move and speak as if she was reasonably normal. They were the three weeks that intervened between her dismissal by Justin and the last day of his freedom—the bachelorhood he had so cherished! Three weeks and two days, in actual fact, and every one of those days, from
dawn till dusk, was like a special punishment to Susan.
She wondered what they were like to Justin, and then decided that he was almost certainly putting a good face on them. He might be seething with resentment underneath, seething with frustration, with enmity against Fate, with contempt for the littleness of herself— and her mousy-brown head and grey eyes! —and just a touch of genuine unhappiness, but he would take good care no one should ever analyse his state of mind. His dark, brackish eyes would probably flame with irritability at odd moments, he would be sarcastic, cold, perhaps a little cutting sometimes to his fiancee— sending Mrs. Freer’s heart (the maternal heart that beat so warmly for her daughter) into the depths. But when his wedding-day dawned he would be dark and assured, enigmatic and perhaps a little amused—especially if things went wrong at the last moment! —unafflicted by anything in the nature of nervousness, and as handsome as a man with a slightly twisted mouth, and a look in his eyes that was perpetually derisive, could look in formal morning-clothes, with a white flower in his buttonhole, and a best-man at his elbow to support him.
But the very thought of Justin in morning-clothes, wearing that crooked smile of his as he approached the altar, waiting for his bride without any visible signs of impatience—perhaps no impatience at all within, although the bride, when he received her, would be beautiful beyond belief—was too much for Susan to dwell upon. Justin, whose eyes had flamed for her, who had whispered to her how much he would adore his wife—certain that she wouldn’t refuse to become that wife! —bestowing his name upon another woman, and taking vows concerning her, was the one person on earth she mustn’t let her thoughts stray to too much during those days when nothing seemed quite real, and everything she undertook to do—even attempting to eat! —was an appalling effort
Sir Justin and Lady Storr! . . . Every time she heard
church bells she saw them coming out of the church together, standing side by side at the head of the steps. She saw the photographers taking pictures, the clouds of confetti, the old shoe tied to the back of the car as they drove away on their honeymoon. . . .
She had no idea what the final honeymoon plans were, and for this she could be thankful. At least she couldn’t pursue them in her imagination to the hotel where they would spend their first night as man and wife . . . or aboard the aircraft that would fly them to Paris, or the liner that would transport them by more leisurely means to brilliant seas and sunshine. Not the uncertain sunshine of an uncertain English summer!
One thing she did allow herself to wonder about was whether, if they travelled by sea, they would do so in one of the Storr Line ships. What a triumph that would be for Rosalie if they did, the captain receiving them with special empressement, a stateroom full of flowers to welcome them aboard, special staff allocated to wait on them. People in the dining-saloon craning their necks a little eagerly when they entered it. . . . The Head of the Line and his new, young, enchanting wife!
And then she wondered why she bothered to preoccupy her mind with such details as that. If it was she who was marrying Justin—if it was she who was marrying Justin (and, oh, how every responsive part of her body leapt at the thought!)—the only thing she would want them to do would be to go away quietly where they could be absolutely alone together, and where no one and nothing could come between them and their love! Where every moment of every hour would be their own, time created especially for them, with no outside influence of the smallest account! A lonely caravan on a deserted heath. ... A tiny, forgotten cottage clinging to the edge of a cliff!...
For them, either of those backgrounds would provide the perfect background for the honeymoon that would be
the most momentous phase of their lives!
She felt herself trembling in every limb after she had thought this and dashed out to do some unessential shopping in the west-end in order to try and distract her thoughts. She wandered aimlessly between bales of silks and brocades, piled-up cosmetic counters, and displays of gloves and hosiery. She bought herself a handbag she could do without, and a matching pair of shoes, and then looked round for something to take back to Jennifer, to prove that she hadn’t been overlooked. And, forcing herself to concentrate on Jennifer’s most urgent needs, and remembering that she didn’t possess such a thing as a really well fitted-up week-end case, she found herself in the leather-goods department of a well-known London store, and there, looking somewhat gloomily at trunks, was Bruce Fairburn.
His face lighted up when he saw her, but all Susan could think—all his face reminded her of—was that on the following day he would be a prominent figure at an event later to be described in the glossy magazines as “one of the most fashionable weddings of the year!” For he was to be Justin’s best-man, having known him for years, and that night he would also be attending Justin’s stag-party.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” Susan said, trying to smile at him naturally. “You’ve got an important evening ahead of you, and a very important day to-morrow, and I imagined you taking things very quietly as a sort of preparation.”
“But haven’t you heard!” Bruce asked, raising his eyebrows. “There is to be no wedding!... At any rate, not to-morrow! Rosalie’s got measles, or some similar infectious complaint, and everything’s postponed!”
Susan felt herself going weak at the knees, and the stacks of leather goods whirled round her. Out of a mist of unbelief, and the certainty that she was not hearing things correctly, she heard herself echoing him: “Measles? But,—but, how unfortunate! Poor Mrs.
Freer!”
“Poor Rosalie, I should say,” Bruce murmured, smiling down at her curiously. “Surely she is the one deserving of sympathy? Apart from the fact that measles is a singularly undignified complaint to catch on the eve of one’s wedding, to have to postpone the ceremony and cancel practically all the arrangements is a bit of a blow for the girl! And Justin, too, of course!”
“Yes, Justin, too, of course!”
Suddenly Bruce put a hand beneath her elbow.
“I say, you look a bit pale!” he said. “The lift’s quite close, and the restaurant’s on the floor above. I think you could do with a cup of tea, and so could I!”
“Thank you.” She smiled at him tremulously, making a terrific effort to control her limbs as they walked towards the lift; and, now that she was no longer afraid there was something wrong with her ears, feeling like a swimmer who had been preserved from drowning at the very moment of going down for the third time.
Bruce looked at her long and speculatively once they were seated at a table in the restaurant. The colour was seeping back into her cheeks, but her hand was shaking a little as she held the cigarette he had just put into her fingers. He smiled with distinct wryness.
“You don’t have to pretend with me, Susan,” he said. “You started off by loathing Justin, but you don’t loathe him now, do you?”
The expression in her grey eyes touched him.
“No,” she answered, in a whisper.
“In fact, my dear—” and he slid a hand across the table and t
ouched hers gently—“this has been rather a dreadful day for you, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she whispered again.
His attractive face grew concerned.
“Knowing nothing whatsoever of the state of affairs between you and Justin, but having drawn a few conclusions lately—particularly about Justin, who was
looking forward to to-morrow pretty much as a prisoner under sentence of execution looks forward to the day when he’s to be taken out and shot!—I would still remind you that this is only a postponement of a marriage, Susan! A postponement, for purely unavoidable reasons!”
“Yes, I know.” Her spoon rattled against her cup as she attempted to pick it up and stir her tea. “But I was feeling—as if the end of the world had come!”
“I gathered that,” he told her, gently. And then, after rather a long moment: “And I’ve also gathered that, for me, there isn’t a hope! Is that really so, Susan?”
A wave of sympathy for him—who hadn’t even the evanescent comfort she was holding to herself at that moment—flooded over her, and as he looked into her eyes and saw how regretful she was, he thought bitterly that although he had never before envied Justin, he could—and did—envy him now.
But disappointment never brought out the worst in him, and even the defeat of a good many hopes couldn’t alter the tenderness that surged through him just then for Susan. Besides. . . . One could always live in hopes, even if ultimately he was made to feel a little sick! He squeezed Susan’s hand hard.
“I’d better go back and have a look at the trunks,” he said. “Or perhaps a couple of stout suit-cases would suit me better! If Justin doesn’t want me for a best-man, and you won’t have me for anything nearer and dearer than a very devoted friend, the best thing I can do is disappear somewhere for a while. And then perhaps I’ll be missed!”
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