“My ‘little neck’ is quite all right,” she whispered to him, shakily. “In fact, I think I’m absolutely intact! But I seem to have lost one of my skis!”
“That confounded loose strap!” he exclaimed. “Oh, Susan, why doesn’t someone take care of you? You’re not fit to take care of yourself!”
She looked up at him with a shy, delicious light in her eyes, the tears magically evaporating.
“You said yourself that I’m not very good at keeping my men,” she reminded him. “So I have to look after myself!”
He put his fingers under her chin and lifted it, looking deeply, gravely, into her eyes.
“There’s one man you’ll never lose, little love,” he told her; “but until five minutes ago I wasn’t sure whether you wanted to keep him! Now I know that you’d rather be dead if he was dead, too! Did you really mean that, Susan?”
Her mouth quivered, and she clung to him. “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she breathed intensely. “Oh, Justin, yes!”
‘And it no longer matters that I stayed away from you so long? That I sulked like a raw schoolboy!”
“Nothing matters now that you’re back . . .” Suddenly, out of the tail of her eye, she caught sight of a yellow figure swooping back across the valley, and a concerned look flashed into her eyes. “But, what about — what about Miss Van Johnson— ?”
“Elizabeth?” He sounded as if he had almost forgotten who Elizabeth Van Johnson was. “She only came back with me from America because she thought she might be able to be of some use to me! You see, there were all those photographs. . . . And those idiotic captions! And Elizabeth thought you might not understand very easily. . . .” His look grew wry. “She was right! It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to explain away a summer’s deliberate idling, and courting unnecessary publicity! In a way, I suppose, it was designed as a deliberate punishment for you, but it was a punishment that got out of hand. I never intended so much publicity, and I don’t think I ever really thought you’d make a study of
American journals.... But it seems that you did!”
“Yes,” she agreed, sadly, “I did!”
“And then Bruce wrote that you’d been ill, but he didn’t say how ill. . . . And I flew back to London in a panic, only to find when I got down to Storr that you’d gone off to Switzerland. I got the address of this hotel from Bruce’s sister, and the first night I arrived here I could hardly contain myself with the longing to see you; but when I did see you, you looked at me as if nothing would ever induce you to soften towards me again, and I realised how badly I’d blundered. And Jennifer asked me outright when I was going to marry Elizabeth, and your face seemed to freeze. Elizabeth said afterwards that you’d never forgive me, and yesterday afternoon in the wood I began to be certain you’d never forgive me, either....”
“But there must have been something between you and Elizabeth,” Susan put in, with a kind of appeal in her voice, as if she wasn’t yet entirely convinced. “Otherwise why were you so constantly in the news. . . .? Society gossip, it’s true.”
“And that’s all it was—society gossip! Darling!” This time he cupped her face in both his hands. “With all my faults, and with all the reason you’ve had to think badly of me at one time or another, did you honestly—in your heart!—believe that I’d stopped loving you? That I could ever stop loving you?”
“I didn’t know what to think.” Her lips quivered. “And you stayed away so long....”
“I know, darling—cruelly long! But that’s the way I’m made. I’m a bit of a brute, and I was stunned when you wanted me to marry Rosalie, although you loved me—or you said you loved me! I couldn’t understand a love that was willing to condemn me to a lifetime of unhappiness, just to satisfy a few principles. And, in any case, Rosalie never really wanted to marry me. . . . She wanted to marry my money! And her mother wanted my money even more than Rosalie was tempted by it. But in the end she married for love!”
“Because you made things easy for her. Didn’t you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I told you the whole thing could be arranged in an amicable way, and that there would be no hard feelings. There weren’t—there aren’t! But you were willing to sacrifice our whole future!”
She buried her face against him, and once more the tears streamed miserably down her cheeks.
“I know now that I was wrong! . . . Lady Freer wrote and told me that I was wrong! No one should marry for anything but love!”
“And you love me? In spite of everything, you love me with your whole heart and soul? And you’re ready to forgive me?” He kissed away the tears, and for the first time since she had known him his eyes besought her. “Susan, I’ve lived through such a ghastly time. ... Trying to pretend that I didn’t care, that I was the eternal playboy! And all the time I was craving for some news of you, picturing you at the Dower House, living over and over again that dreadful afternoon when we parted . . . and you ran off into the rain! Susan, if you only knew how I wanted to rush after you.... And it was only badly lacerated pride that kept me from doing so. And pride has kept me away from you for nearly eight months!”
She put up a hand and touched his cheek, gently, tenderly, adoringly.
“Let’s forget the eight months, Justin, darling,” she whispered. “We’re together again!”
And as his lips closed over hers she knew that this time nothing would part them very easily. In fact, if she had anything to do with it, nothing would ever part them.
He insisted on carrying her back up the steep slope to the hotel, partly because she had only one ski, and partly because he seemed to enjoy doing it. He also said he wanted to be certain she hadn’t any broken bones, or a twisted ankle, and as she nestled against him she was blissfully aware that even a badly twisted ankle would have been worth it to experience the full extent of his concern.
As it was, she didn’t seem to have collected even a bad bruise, and when they reached the hotel she insisted on being allowed to walk into it as if nothing that might have proved disastrous had occurred. Jennifer and Bruce were both waiting for them, and Elizabeth Van Johnson was also amongst the motley assemblage of returning skiers in the hall, and she looked as if she had seen something she approved of. Jennifer and Bruce looked as if they had already received some inkling that affairs had sorted themselves out for Susan.
“Darling, I understand you had a bad spill!
.. .” Jennifer exclaimed. But there was no real anxiety in her face, for the American girl had made it clear that it would not be necessary to think in terms of first-aid.
Susan’s face gave away at once how extremely well things had sorted themselves out, and Jennifer had never seen Justin looking so quietly happy before. It was a happiness that transformed him, softening the harsh outlines of his face, and making his eyes look almost broodingly tender as they rested on Susan. He picked her up in his arms again and carried her into the bar and sat her on one of the high stools, and announced that they were all to drink a toast. It was a toast to his future happiness, and Susan’s as well, and Jennifer fell upon Susan and hugged her, and Bruce uttered a quiet exclamation of pleasure, and also kissed Susan.
“At one time I might not have been so glad,” he admitted, smiling a little wryly at the radiant young woman enthroned on the high stool, with her tall dark lover in close attendance. “But, in view of what has happened to me to-day, I can truthfully say that I’m delighted!”
Jennifer blushed revealingly, and she also cast a glance at Susan, but in her case it was tinged with faint apology.
“We weren’t going to say anything,” she admitted, “until we were a little more certain that things would work out as we wanted them to work out for you and Justin. But, now that they have....” She smiled round at Justin.
“Now I can congratulate you!” he said. “And Susan echoes my congratulations, of course! Whatever we do in future we’ll do
together, and this is only the beginning!”
“A
happy augury,” Bruce murmured. “Let’s drink to the lot of us!”
“I’ll give you the Dower House for a wedding-present,” Justin said. He looked across at Susan with that kindling light in his eyes. “I know you’re the present tenant, darling, but we’ll soon fix that. We’ll just tear up the agreement on the day you change your name to Storr, and draw up a deed of gift instead.”
He returned that night to the subject of Susan changing her name to Storr, and he did so when they were in the glassed-in veranda at the rear of the hotel. The lights were suitably dim, and he could just see Susan in her pink net dress, with the gay little close-fitting bodice. Her eyes were as bright as the rhinestones as she lifted them to his face, but in addition to the brightness there was a completely relaxed look of happiness—a soft and dreamy look of happiness.
Elizabeth Van Johnson had watched them disappear on to the veranda, but before they did so she had touched Justin on the shoulder and inquired with a gay smile in her eyes: “Happy now, playboy? I shall miss you when I go back, but I’m glad I came across! And I’m glad you let me come! I like to be in at the happy endings!”
Then she slipped her hand casually in the arm of a blond giant with whom she had been dancing most of the evening, and whom she had arranged to meet on the ski-slopes the following morning, and returned with him to the dance floor. Watching the zest with which she went through all the sensuous movements of the tango with this same young man Susan realised that she wasn’t in the least brokenhearted. To her Justin had been just a playmate, and the fact that they both had plenty of money had kept it all very light and airy and expensive.
But, even so, Susan couldn’t understand how anyone could let Justin go and not feel that with his going the sun dropped out of the world. And not merely the sun, the moon and the stars as well.
She confided as much to him when he took her in his arms.
“I can’t believe that Elizabeth is really so indifferent about you!”
He laughed softly, against her hair. “Elizabeth is the sort of young woman who collects men friends. She’s done so since she started using lipstick long before she left school! She’ll go on doing it until she meets the right man!”
Susan hid her face on his shoulder. “Supposing you’d been the right man! Supposing she’d fallen in love with you!”
“Then, my little sweet,” he murmured into her ear, “I’d have avoided her like the plague!”
Susan looked up into his eyes, that even now held expressions that were occasionally a little inexplicable to her. At that moment, in the veiled twilight of the veranda, with the great stars wheeling in the violet sky outside, and nothing but thick plate glass separating them from the frozen wastes that were a playground in the daytime, but a white wilderness at night, she found herself encountering the leaping fires that, many months before, had warned her how intensely he could feel.
“Stop talking about Elizabeth,” he ordered her quietly, “and let’s talk about ourselves! There is no other subject that interests me at the moment! And if I might make a prediction, there never will be any subject that will interest me unless it revolves around
_ 155
you!”
“Oh, darling,” she whispered. “Oh, Justin!”
He kissed her lips lingeringly, until she felt the need to cling to him helplessly, and the stars outside the window did a crazy dance. Then she heard him speaking to her huskily, pleadingly:
“Marry me soon, darling! And by soon, I mean really soon! I’ve had to do without you so long, and I can’t wait much longer! ... This afternoon I was talking to Jennifer, and she thinks it would be unwise for you to return to England until the weather is warmer, and I can’t see the slightest need. We could be married here in Switzerland, or fly to France and be married in Paris. Then we could take another plane to Marseilles and board a pleasure-cruising vessel—one that was making for warm waters—and be dropped off somewhere where we wouldn’t have to contend with people. Where we could be alone together!”
“Wasn’t that what you were planning to do with— Rosalie?” she asked, after a moment of silence.
“No,” he answered, and his lips grew a little grim even at the thought of the nearness he had approached to sharing a life with Rosalie. “She wanted to be in the limelight a little more than that, and very large hotels on the French Riviera, and later on an even larger one in Nassau—something very new and very modern—figured prominently on her list of essential stopping places during a somewhat protracted honeymoon. But I’m not taking you to any smart hotels. I want to get you as quickly as possible to a green island and a white house which until recently belonged to a friend of mine, but which I bought with the sole object of taking you there and watching you grow brown and happy! And each year, for a while, we’ll return to it, if you like it; and perhaps one day we’ll take our children there....”
She caught her breath.
“Oh, Justin, I------!”
“What, my darling, darling, darling?” he whispered, laying his cheek against hers.
“Justin, do you remember that day at Storr, when you showed me the nurseries, and told me all about Rosalie’s plans for them?”
He looked down at her queerly in the gloom.
“I remember!”
“I wanted to die of misery—and the most agonising form of jealousy! I couldn’t bear to think that one day she would be the mother of your children!”
He was silent for perhaps half a minute, and then she felt his arms straining her passionately close.
“Only one woman will be the mother of my children, Susan, beloved!” he told her. “You! ... I knew it in the beginning, I knew it when we stood together that night in the nurseries, I knew it when I sent you white roses at Christmas! Paper-white roses, because so often you’ve made me think of a paper-white rose! And now I can’t wait to fill the nurseries!” He looked down at her, and laughed to hide his mounting passion. “Oh,
Susan, you’re such a little thing to be surrounded by a large family, but what’s the use of winning a house like Storr if you can’t fill it?”
Dangerous Love Page 17