Wife Without Kisses

by Violet Winspear

  “You’d know, of course,” he sneered, “besotted with love for Ryeland as you are! Well, you’re going to forget all that! You’re going to come with me!”

  “No! I—I can’t—I can’t!” She backed from him, her hands held out beseechingly. “Please, Jack . . .” “Please, Jack!” he mocked. He moved towards her, excited by the white appeal of her face, the dark, fear- drowned hazel of her eyes. “Damn these hands!” he said. “I want to kiss you, Rea! I want you!”

  “No! No!” She turned then, ran wildly from him, careering through the trees, blundering over the stretched roots of them, crying out as the lower branches plucked at her hair. When she reached the meadow gate she was sobbing dryly with fear, her legs barely supporting her over the white bars. She stumbled across the meadow, wanting only to get to the house, to get to the quiet sanctuary of her room. She would be safe there— Jack couldn’t touch her there . . . She glanced wildly back over her shoulder, but he hadn’t followed her. She gasped with relief—and even as she knew relief—as she reached the stable-yard and would have darted across the kidney-stones into the house, Rebel trotted round the side of the house and Rea was looking up at Burke.

  Her pounding heart turned all the way over as he swung from Rebel’s saddle and reached out a hand, pulling her towards him. His face was harsh in the rapidly fading daylight, and in the long seconds before he spoke, Rea listened to the dismal mewing of a few birds in the grey sky overhead and it seemed to her that their plaintive noise was exactly the right accompaniment to this moment, for her heart, too, felt as though it mewed and flapped sad wings in a winter sky.

  “I know where you’ve been, of course,” Burke said crisply. “You’ve been to see Larchmont!” His fingers suddenly bit into her shoulder and a spasm of intense anger flared his decisive nostrils. “It must have been sheer agony for you, my dear, having to control your eagerness to get to him until I was out of the house.”

  Abruptly, then, he released her shoulder and gave her a push towards the house. “Go to my study,” he said curtly. “We’ll talk there.”

  Drearily she obeyed him, and when he came to the study, about ten minutes later, she was crouched down in front of the log fire, staring into the blaze, the blaze lighting the side of her hair to a soft gold and dancing its shadows across her thin, pale cheek.

  Burke stood with his back to the door, his eyes. like blue stones as they moved over her. Her air of waiting humility, the childlike attitude she had assumed in front of the fire, seemed to drop him into an even deeper scorn. When he began to speak his voice was deadly still, each word an arrow of ice, aimed with the bitter intent to reveal not only his scorn for her, but his scorn for himself, because he had let her air of innocence fool him.

  “I’ll tell you here and now, Rea,” he said, “that I’ll not tolerate a wife who shares my roof and conducts a love affair with an abysmal creature like Larchmont every time I’m out of the house for a few hours. If you’re so eaten up with him that you can’t keep away from him, then I think it best you go to him altogether.” And as Rea’s eyes slowly drew away from the hypnotic flare of the apple logs and settled on the stone mask of his face, he said, quite impersonally now: “You are quite at liberty to go to him, Rea. Go now. That foolish bargain of ours is cancelled—I release you from it. You don’t have to snatch at chance moments to meet your pretty little lover any more, you’re free as air to go to him for good—and I’d prefer it if you went tonight.”

  With these words he walked across to the desk, stood with his back to her as he took and lit a cigarette. He heard her quiet steps move to the door, heard the door open and then close—and as it closed, his big shoulders slumped. Harsh anger and wounded pride drained out of and all that was left was the memory of how she had looked last night, white and fragile in the big fourposter, leaning without weight in the circle of his arm. He lifted his cigarette and drew deeply upon it. So this—this was what a lonely, one-sided love did to one, tore the heart wide open and left it naked and hurt and humiliated? Behind him a log broke open in the fireplace, and the

  small, sharp noise it made touched the raw exposure of his nerves and he swung round with a startled grimace.

  The room was very empty now, invaded by dusk and the sudden patter of rain on the windows. A small groan broke from him and he knew that in this moment he paid fully for Dani Larchmont’s lonely, one-sided love.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DINNER came to an end and Burke curtly declined to join his grandfather in a game of cards.

  The old man rose from the table, straightening his velvet dinner-jacket and watching Burke with sharp eyes. When Rea had not appeared for dinner he had enquired of her whereabouts, naturally, and though immediate satisfaction had lit up in him to hear his grandson dispassionately announce that she had left King’s Beeches, probably for good, that satisfaction had slowly turned rather sour in him as dinner progressed. Whatever had induced her departure from the house—and Burke had not enlightened him on that point—one thing was very clear to Mr. Ryeland, her departure was neither welcomed nor wanted by Burke. Dash it, the boy looked ill—actually looked ill!

  “Look here, boy, you’re not going to brood after that little chit, are you?” The stiff white brows worked rapidly, as they always did when the old man was disturbed. “In my opinion, you’re well rid of her!”

  “Am I?” Burke’s eyes held a sudden dangerous glint as they met his grandfather’s.

  “Certainly you are, my boy. I can’t what you ever saw in her. Her conversational powers were nil.” “Perhaps it wasn’t her conversational powers I admired,” Burke curtly rejoined, and his grandfather saw his hands slowly clench at his sides until the knuckles gleamed white under the brown skin. The old man cleared his throat, almost embarrassedly. “You’ve still got the boy,” he remarked, and as he mentioned the child whom he thought to be Rea’s, he was reminded of the many times he had come upon her with that chuckling, blue-eyed child in her arms. Burke’s boy, touching the pale satin of Rea’s hair with plump fingers; nuzzling her throat with a face adorned with rusk crumbs...

  “Dash it, Burke, if you want the girl, why have you let her go?” he demanded.

  “Because my wants don’t happen to coincide with hers,” Burke retorted.

  Mr. Ryeland received this with a snort of disgust “What’s the matter with you, boy—gone soft in the head? Her wants not coincide with yours! Go after her, give her a good old-fashioned shaking, bring her to heel!” The old hands went hard into the pockets of the velvet dinner-jacket and the fading blue eyes stared across the table into Burke’s brooding blue eyes. “She loves that child upstairs. Won’t she come back for him?”

  Burke didn’t answer. He turned aside to light a cigarette from a lighter on the sideboard and the action was jerky, fumbling, without the lithe ease of movement that usually characterized him, in and out of the saddle; sitting or standing. He took a deep lungful of cigarette smoke, then he walked to the dining-room door and jerked it open. “Rea won’t come back,” he said. “There’s nothing here she wants.” He turned his head briefly and gave his grandfather a cynical smile. “But you should be feeling pleased, sir—you’ve got what you wanted.”

  He stepped out into the hall with these words and was about to cross to his study when Tolliver’s voice arrested him. “Yes, Tolliver?” He swung round, eyeing the butler with impatience.

  “Mr. Jack Larchmont is here, sir,” Tolliver said. “I’ve shown him into the library.”

  “Jack Larchmont!” Quick colour ran up under the brown skin of Burke’s face and Tolliver’s eyes opened wide in his smooth, expressionless face as the thumb and forefinger of Burke’s right hand slowly buckled the cigarette he held. Then he turned sharply on his heel and crossed to the library with long strides.

  Jack lounged, with bandaged hands, against the back of the big couch in the library, watching the door with insolent eyes.

  “Good evening, Ryeland!” he said.

  Burke banged th
e door shut behind him and crossed the room to Jack, towering above him. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “I’ve come to ask you to release Rea,” Jack drawled. Burke’s nostrils flared, and for seconds on end his

  impulse to take hold of Jack by the scruff of his neck and soundly shake him was barely held in check. He said, at last, in a low, savage voice: “I told Rea I’d release her. She didn’t have to send you up here.” “Send me?” One of Jack’s slender black brows lifted enquiringly. “Rea didn’t send me, old man. What are you talking about?”

  “Well, she’s at your place, isn’t she? Naturally I assumed—”

  “At my place—at the farmhouse?” Jack suddenly straightened from his lounging position and his glance sharpened as it moved over Burke’s face. “Look here, Ryeland, what are you talking about? Rea isn’t at my place.”

  “She has to be!” The decisive bones of Burke’s face seemed suddenly more pronounced. “I tell you she has to be! I told her she was free to go to you.”

  “Did you now?” Jack’s eyes had grown thoughtfully narrow. “When was this, may I ask?”

  “About two and a half hours ago.” Suddenly Burke’s control broke and he reached out and closed a hard, angry hand upon Jack’s shoulder. He jerked Jack towards him and shook him roughly, disregarding his heavily bandaged hands. “Don’t play with me, Larchmont,” he ground out. “I know full well Rea is at your place—where else could she go?”

  “That’s the question.” Jack, unable to use his hands to fight free of Burke’s grasp, bore the indignity with a rueful smile. “Where could she go, Ryeland? Where did she go, for I swear to you she isn’t at the farmhouse.” Burke stared down at him, searching the insolent, handsome face with fierce eyes. “I’m in no mood to be played with, Larchmont. If you’re lying to me—”

  “I’m many things, Ryeland,” Jack shot back, “but I’m no liar. I haven’t a notion where Rea is—if she isn’t here.”

  “She—she isn’t here.” Burke gave a sudden groan and released Jack. “I told her to go, to get out. I—I thought, naturally, she’d run to you—you’re her lover.” “Am I?” Jack watched Burke with curious eyes. “Is that what you

  really think?”

  “I’ve seen you making love to her!”

  “Ah, yes, under the cedars at Iris Mallory’s birthday dance.” Jack’s drawl had returned, with its old undercurrent of careless insolence. “You wanted to break my neck, didn’t you? You would have broken it, doubtless, if Rea hadn’t leapt into the breach. Rea has a gentle heart. I believe she’d walk right round a crawling beetle rather than cause it a moment’s pain by treading on it.” Jack glanced down at his bandaged hands and there came back to him that despairing cry of Rea’s in the wood that afternoon; the cry that begged him to understand even as she had to say: “I can’t, I can’t.”

  But he had to have her!

  Jack glanced up again at Burke, and hate shocked through him like the touch of sudden lightning as his eyes rested upon that strong, tawny face, stripped now of its pride and its self-containment, true, but still the face that had beguiled Dani into love and then coolly turned aside from that love. “So you’ve had a bust-up with Rea and thrown her out of the old ancestral home, eh?” Jack, white with hate, threw out a bandaged hand towards the windows, where rain drummed loudly behind the damask curtains. “I must say you’ve chosen a delightful night for it, Ryeland! Hear that rain? Rea’s out in it—”

  “God, don’t you think I know that!” Burke strode to the nearest window. He jerked aside the curtain and frowned out upon the rain-swept night. A high wind howled down from the Mendips and even the powerful beeches lowered their heads before it, their branches whipping sharply, angrily together. “I—I felt certain she’d come to you, Larchmont.” Burke swung round from the window and Jack saw the sudden pinched look about his nostrils, the pain and bewilderment in the blue eyes that usually regarded everyone and everything with such a self-assured coolness. “Have I misjudged Rea?” Burke moved from the windows and began to come across the carpet to Jack once more. “I’ve got to know, Larchmont!” Now he stood over Jack. “I’ve got to know what you mean to Rea.”

  “But you know, old man.” Jack’s thin lips barely moved to make these five words, but the world of meaning he managed to instill into them re-woke Burke to a flash of that intolerable jealousy he had known earlier on in the evening when he had ordered Rea to leave King’s Beeches; to go to Larchmont. Jealousy flared raw and sharp along his veins, fed by that insistent picture of Rea in this man’s embrace.

  “Damn it all, Larchmont,” he burst out, “you’re not good enough for her! She’s sweet and untried and you’ve dazzled her—”

  “I’ve dazzled her!” Jack stared up into Burke’s eyes, his own eyes grown as suddenly hard and glinting as black agate—and neither man knew that in that moment the library door opened and Burke’s grandfather stood tall and thin in the aperture. “You’d know all about dazzling a girl, wouldn’t you, Ryeland?” Jack cried out. “You practised plenty on my poor sap of a sister—and then ran out on her! She wasn’t good enough for you, was she? Not good enough to mingle her peasant blood with your wonderful Ryeland blood! But Philip didn’t like that, did he? Lord, no, Philip didn’t hesitate to cash in on Dani’s susceptibility to you damn Ryelands! That kid Peter belongs to Dani and Philip—”

  Then, with a sharp intake of breath, Jack swung to the sound of a groan by the library door. Burke did the same, a grimace of quick distress crossing his face as he saw his grandfather. Damn Larchmont to hell— so he had known about Peter!

  “That isn’t true! That’s a vile blasphemy against my boy—my Philip!” The old man stepped out from the shadows by the door and the suddenful play of overhead light on his face revealed the putty colour of the taut skin over his hawk nose and high cheekbones. He came steadily towards Jack, raising his fist and shaking it. “I’ll have you run off King’s Beeches for what you’ve just said, Larchmont!”

  “It happens to be true!” Jack retorted, that insolent courage of his not deserting him as Burke’s grandfather drew closer; a taunting smile springing upon his lips as the bony fist, shaking with anger, struck at his smile— struck twice, the sounds loud and painful in the room.

  “There’s no need for that, sir!” With one decisive stride Burke was behind his grandfather and holding his high, thin shoulders with restraining hands. “Larchmont’s talking rot, there’s no need for you to take any notice of him—”

  “To hell with that!” Jack’s eye burned deeply above the ugly marks Mr. Ryeland had made upon his mouth. “I’m thinking it’s about time some of this stiff-necked pride was let out of this house and some truth let in.” The slanting, burning eyes were fixed upon the grey proud face confronting him. “That kid Peter doesn’t belong to Burke. He’s your precious Philip’s kid—by my sister.”

  “Shut up, damn you!” Burke ordered “By—my— sister!” Jack repeated, slowly, ignoring Burke. “By— my—sister! Little Dani Larchmont! Little farm-girl Dani Larchmont! And do you want to know something else— something else that'll scorch that infuriating Ryeland pride of yours? Philip married my sister! Yeah—he married her! And he was so damned uncertain of that so-called love of yours for him that he begged Dani to keep the marriage a secret. He knew you’d throw him out of King’s Beeches if you found out he was human enough to want love. He knew you wouldn’t let him have King’s Beeches and love. He knew he had to give body and soul to the damn house—”

  “Are you speaking the truth, Larchmont?” Burke broke in, his eyes gone a brilliant, eager blue as he watched Jack’s face. “Dani’s aunt said nothing about a marriage between Dani and Phil—”

  “She didn’t know.” Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Aunt Polly Wilmot likes to gossip, so Dani let her think—well, what she did think. I only found out about the marriage because I spent a few days at Dani’s flat in London—I was down from Ireland to see about selling dogs. One of the brutes died and
I was short of cash.” Jack’s mouth twisted into his characteristic half bitter, half insolent smile. “I went through the drawers of Dani’s dressing-table, hoping she might have a quid or two tucked away among her undies. I found her marriage certificate instead. When I confronted her with it that evening, when she got back from the theatre, she got a bit hysterical. She’d found out by then that she didn’t really want Philip—that she wanted you—still wanted you!” Jack stared hatefully into Burke’s eyes. “D’you know what she did, then? She snatched her marriage lines out of my hand and threw them in the fire. As they flared up and went to ashes, she said: ‘Phil needn’t worry—I’m happy to keep this miserable little marriage a secret!’”

  “And a secret it remained,” Burke said quietly. Under his hands his grandfather’s shoulders were trembling hard, and Burke didn’t have to look at the elderly face to know that the blow he had just been dealt was agonizing him.

  “Look, sir,” Burke spoke in a low, passionate tone, “don’t go holding this against Phil. Dani Larchmont was an extremely lovely girl and Phil was young enough to be enchanted by her loveliness. I was myself—” “You!” With a jerk of his shoulders Mr. Ryeland pulled free of Burke’s hands. He flung round to face him. “You’re more despicable than Philip and this Larchmont fellow put together—playing your damn games with me! Why couldn’t you have told me that the child belonged to Philip?”

  “I didn’t dare!” Burke retted flatly. “It seemed only right to me that Peter come home here to King’s Beeches, but I knew he’d stand very little chance of doing so if you knew Dani Larchmont had borne him to Phil—out of wedlock, as I thought. God knows why you had to hate that girl!”

  “God knows why you had to love her!” His grandfather spat back at him. “Wild, dancing, gipsy creature!”