A Nightingale in the Sycamore

by Jane Beaufort

  “But Annette seems so very much part of his life,” she murmured, with flaming throat and brow as well now.

  Martin slowly shook his head.

  “Annette isn’t the woman for Charles—even if she thinks he’s the man for her! And Charles is nothing if not wary! I don’t think he’ll be caught there!...” Besides, the only thing that would induce him to ask any woman to marry him would be if he fell desperately in love with her and couldn’t live without her. Charles could live quite comfortably without Annette, I feel sure—whatever impression she may have passed on to you,” giving her another shrewd look.

  But Virginia didn’t feel justified in betraying Annette’s confidence just then.

  “No, my dear one,” regarding her tenderly, “Charles isn’t in love with Annette, or any other woman—not so far as I’ve been able to observe anyway! Not really in love! He may one day succumb, and then we shall be treated to the spectacle of a transformed Charles—but even a transformed Charles would not be good enough for you!”

  Her lips smiled at him shakily.

  “You’re so terribly nice, Martin,” she told him tremulously. “I only wish I—I could do what you want!”

  “Well, I’m going to persuade you to do what I want! To-night I’ve taken you by surprise, but I’m prepared to wait a few days—even a few weeks for you to get used to the idea! And although at the moment you’re not violently in love with me—not even, perhaps, in love with me at all!—I’m so much in love with you that I’m quite confident I can make you love me in time, and in the meantime what I’ve got is enough for the two of us! More than enough!...” he finished, a little huskily.

  The grandfather-clock in the hall distilled fresh music through the house. They had been sitting there for an hour.

  “But I’m not going to worry you any more to-night,” he said. “I’m going to get you a drink, and then I’m going to take you back to town.”

  He went to a beautifully fitted-up cabinet in a corner, and brought her a glass of the dry sherry he knew she occasionally enjoyed. Then, when they had finished their drinks, he asked her to go round the house with him while he wound up the collector’s pieces in the way of clocks he had already installed in several of the rooms, and she went willingly enough.

  There was another grandfather-clock on the first upstairs landing—an even finer example than the one in the hall—and she stood by and watched while he dealt with the weights and chains. Then he took her into a big bedroom where there was a lovely French clock, and attended to that. After that there was an ormolu, an infinitely graceful grandmother-clock, and then they returned to the one in the hall.

  Virginia, remembering her father winding up the clocks at the Meadow House as a nightly ritual, and studying Martin’s absorbed face, thought warmly that here was a man who would never neglect, or turn aside from, his responsibilities, and the thought made her heart feel suddenly rather leaden. For she also remembered Charles.

  The journey back seemed to take less time than the outward journey, unless it was that Virginia fell partly asleep. When she awakened outside Charles’s flat it was to realise that Martin had paused during the drive to carefully tuck a rug over her, and she was very warm and comfortable and loath to leave his car. But he smiled and shook her gently.

  “Come along! It will never do to keep you sitting here all night. The occupants of these flats might think it a little strange.”

  So she roused herself and allowed him to assist her out on to the pavement. Then he walked with her into the entrance to the block.

  “Shall I come up with you?”

  “No—no, thank you. It really isn’t necessary.”

  He looked down at her in the dim light that was burning, and a wave of passionate longing for her because she looked so small, and sweet, dreamy-eyed and helpless, swept over him. His arms closed round her and he held her strongly.

  “Virginia,” he whispered, “I want to care for you, and protect you, and guard you even against yourself! Won’t you say now that you’ll marry me? Say yes, please!” he begged.

  Virginia looked up at him and made out the strong, quiet lines of his face. He was probably twenty years older than she was, but it didn’t seem to matter, somehow. He was utterly reliable she felt sure, and his gentleness and his protectiveness warmed her like a fire. All at once she felt sure that that was all one really needed from life to be happy—the assurance of being cared-for, loved and protected, the absolute assurance that one’s whole future was safe in the right hands.

  In those moments she didn’t even think of Midge and Iris, and the fact that their futures, too, might hold many advantages if she married Martin Sutherland. She didn’t think that security might pall in time, that it was possible to be over cared-for, and that marriage was not just a one-sided partnership in which one took all and gave a little. She forgot that it was part of her nature to wish to give a great deal.

  “You really want me to marry you, Martin?” she asked, thinking how distinguished the snowy patches at his temples made him look in that softened light that was burning in the luxurious entrance to the flats. “You want it—more than anything else?”

  “Much more,” he answered, so fervently that she couldn’t possibly doubt him.

  She turned her face up to his.

  “Then, if you really—really want me to say yes...”

  He kissed her—not in the least as Charles had kissed her, but gently, adoringly, as if she was a rare and precious thing he was afraid he might damage. Then he pressed the lift button, and the lift swung down to meet them, and he insisted after all on seeing her up to her door. He even inserted her key in the lock for her and opened it and switched on the hall light.

  Then he took her in his arms again and kissed her good-night.

  “I’ll ring you first thing in the morning,” he said. “And to-morrow you’ll lunch with me. Good night, sweetheart—we’re going to be very happy, you and I!”

  Virginia pushed open the sitting-room door and blinked a little because someone had left a reading-lamp burning beside Charles’s chair. And this was strange, because there was no one who should have been using Charles’s chair, as the flat should, by rights, be empty. Iris was spending the night with Meg Andrews, and unless something had gone wrong with her arrangements she did not propose to return until the following day.

  But Charles’s chair was definitely occupied, and it was occupied by Charles himself. His voice, from the comfortable depths of it, said a little peevishly:

  “You keep far too late hours nowadays, Virginia, my sweet! The sooner you return to the depths of the country the better for your schoolgirl complexion!” Virginia had been only half awake, but abruptly all remnants of drowsiness fled away from her. She stared at Charles, noted that he was wearing a lounge suit, and that he looked very casual and relaxed, and demanded on a note of almost fierce protest:

  “What are you doing here, Charles? And at this hour!”

  “I’ve just said it’s extremely late!” He stood up and looked at her with a faint smile under his languid lids. “But I was prepared for you returning in the custody of Martin. Where is he?”

  “Martin wouldn’t force himself upon me at two o’clock in the morning!”

  “Two o’clock in the morning?” He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Dear me! So it is! Now, what have you and Martin been up to together until two o’clock in the morning?” But although his eyes mocked her his mouth seemed slightly taut, and there was an unusual edge to his voice. “Tell me, Virginia!”

  Virginia advanced into the middle of the room, and slipped out of her wrap. She stood revealed in the filmy net dress, and by contrast with it her arms and shoulders looked very white and slender, her heart-shaped face very pure and pale under the short bright hair. She put up a hand and rather wearily pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead, and he instantly pulled forward a chair for her.

  “Sit down, Virginia, and let’s have a cosy chat,” he suggested. “I want to
learn all about your doings.”

  “I have nothing to tell you about my doings, and I do object to your walking in like this in my absence,” she told him stiffly. “You have absolutely no right!”

  “Oh, come now!” Charles exclaimed, turning on the full battery of his charm as he smiled at her. “Is that quite true? The last time I was in this flat you allowed me to hold you in my arms, and you said you were very proud of me! It was quite a poignant moment between us. Don’t you recollect it?”

  “I don’t wish to recollect it,” she answered, flushing slowly and rather painfully.

  “Don’t you?” But he still smiled, a little more teasingly, perhaps a shade more gently. “Why not, Virginia?”

  Virginia made a restless—almost a despairing—movement, and looked away from him. She really was tired—desperately tired after the unexpected events of the evening, and the decision she had so recently arrived at. Finding Charles here had taken her so much aback that she was not really capable of coping with him, and at the same time his light manner of referring to the occasion of his last visit made her feel actually a little sick—sick and degraded. She wanted to tell him to go, and never to do this sort of thing again, but she felt curiously bereft of strength.

  “Darling,” he inquired softly, “what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She managed to stand up, and to confront him with a firm look on her face. “Only, please go! If there’s anything you came here to collect, you can do so in the morning. I shall be out, but—”

  “I didn’t come here to collect anything.” He, too, stood up, and she felt as if he was dwarfing her. “I came to see you, my sweet—I’ve waited for hours to see you, a thing I seem doomed to do here in my own flat, and although I had a pretty shrewd idea you were with Martin, I still waited.”

  “What for?” she asked, tilting her chin a little, and looking up straight into the cairngorm eyes.

  He moved until he stood so close to her that the skirts of her black dress actually touched him.

  “What for?” he echoed softly. “Why, to tell you I love you! ... Do you know, Virginia, I never realised it before—not until I was sitting at the piano the other day, and it suddenly struck me that what I had been doing for the past few weeks was fooling myself! The music for Summer Symphony—the music I imagined I was composing for Annette—would never have been composed at all but for you. It’s you who should be playing the leading role—you, with your Lorelei charm, and your house by the river! You and the river are inseparable in my thoughts these days—I don’t know what it is you’ve both done to me, but it’s certainly something...

  “It will pass,” Virginia assured him, bitterly. “Don’t worry!”

  “I don’t want it to pass! At least...” He looked down at her, his eyes dark and disturbed, and strangely appealing. “I’ve known from the first that you did things to me that no other woman has ever done to me, but I didn’t want to fall in love, Virginia! ... It’s a mistake for a man of my temperament to fall in love. It could prove disastrous to a carefully planned-out future.”

  “Did you think of that when you asked Annette to marry you?” she inquired, in a coolly interested voice that sounded most unlike herself in her own ears.

  “I never asked Annette to marry me. If she told you I did she was lying!”

  Looking into his face she found it difficult to disbelieve him, especially as his voice was quite hard and ruthless. But, although that disposed of Annette, it did not dispose of so many undisposable things.

  “Well?” she asked, as if she was waiting. “Why did you have to come here to-night to tell me of your—sudden discovery?”

  “Because the other day, when we were together at the Meadow House, I felt fairly certain that it was not going to be an easy thing to avoid falling in love with you! And your eyes told me so many things that I was worried.” He held out his hands to her, and when she kept hers gripped tightly down at her sides, took her by her shoulders instead. “Virginia, you and I set one another on fire—you can’t deny that! But I’m not the type to make sacrifices, and I’ve never thought seriously of marriage—never, whatever Annette may have told you! Most of my friends would assure you that I’m not the marrying kind, and I think they’re probably right. If I asked you to be my wife you’d almost certainly regret it—that is to say, if you listened to me—”

  “I shan’t listen to you,” Virginia said very quietly.

  He looked almost unhappy.

  “But, I love you!”

  “But not enough to make sacrifices, to quote your own words!”

  He made a helpless gesture with his beautiful hands.

  “Can you only think in terms of marriage, Virginia?” appealingly. “Isn’t love enough?—or couldn’t it be enough? You’re coming between me and my work—I can’t clear my head of you these days, and I want you so desperately. I’ve never wanted anything in my life as desperately as I want you, Virginia,” with something beseeching in his voice now as he carried one of her hands up to his lips and buried his mouth in the soft palm.

  Virginia snatched away her hand, thinking that if one wanted anything as desperately as all that one should at least be prepared to make some sacrifice in order to get it.

  But this was Charles who was making exaggerated statements to her—Charles, who had never been denied very much in his life!

  “Before you say anything more,” she told him quietly, “I think I’d better let you know that I’m not free any longer to consider any sort of proposals you might have thought up to take the place of the rather more usual one—when, and if, two absolutely unattached people admit a violent attraction for one another! To-night I promised to marry Martin Sutherland, and I feel very strongly that he wouldn’t like it at all if he knew you were here at this hour!”

  “You—what?”

  There was no doubt about it, the amazement in his voice was so absolutely genuine that it should have brought a little, wry twist to her lips, for he must have been very, very sure of her! And she did spare a moment to despise herself for giving away so much when she had never been asked for anything at all.

  “I’m going to marry Martin,” she repeated, wishing he would go, and that this would be the last time they need see one another.

  “You can’t mean it!”

  “I do mean it. To-night he took me to see his new house, and we discussed the arrangements for our honeymoon. We’re going to the Bahamas ... Midge will be sent away to school, and Iris will live with us when we come back. In the meantime, we shall arrange for her to stay with friends.” She sounded as if she was reciting a list of items on a programme, but he was so stupefied by what she had told him that he did not notice that. His face had actually turned quite white, and his eyes were as dark as night. “I think Martin is the type of man who will make an absolutely perfect husband, because he’s taking on so many of my responsibilities, and lightening the burden for me. Not that Midge and Iris are really a burden, but—but—”

  She seemed to run out of words all at once, and he asked hoarsely:

  “And the Meadow House? What are you going to do with the Meadow House?”

  “I shall probably sell it—I don’t think I ever want to live there again.”

  “I see.”

  The small, pale mask of her face told him nothing, except that her eyes were glinting a little, and they were very large and distended.

  “If you’d like to buy it, Charles, you shall have first offer—or first refusal. Isn’t that what they say?” smiling in a mask-like fashion. “You might find it a pleasant place in which to work, if you can work easily there—in between trips abroad, and fleeting visits to this flat. Although really,” looking around the flat as if she was seeing it for the first time, “this should be enough for anyone like you, who doesn’t require a real and permanent home. And I do understand that a home is a bit of a tie.”

  “Do you?” through stiff lips.

  “Yes.” She smiled at him more gently. “We’
re all so different, Charles, and Martin and I both feel that a home is—important. I discovered to-night that he has the same passion as my father for going round the house last thing at night and winding up all the clocks! As a child I used to think it a bit pompous and unnecessary, but now I realise that it’s merely a kind of gesture the head of the house likes to make—like fastening the bolts on the front door, and being the last upstairs to bed. My father always used to insist on being the last upstairs, drinking a whisky-and-soda in the library while my brother was occupying the bathroom, and making sure that Annie, our old maid, switched off her light before he switched off his own.”

  “And are you marrying Martin because he, too, will switch off the last light, and wind up the clocks as a matter of routine?” Charles inquired, with a dryness she had never heard from him before.

  But she shook her head.

  “Not exactly. There are so many things about Martin that it would be difficult to say for which, or any one of them, I am marrying him.”

  Charles turned away. His voice, as he spoke, was curt.

  “Well, at least you had the sense to pick a rich man, Virginia. With me it’s music and a desire for freedom—with you it’s wealth and security! I wonder which of us will regret it most?”

  And then she listened to the front door closing, and knew that she was alone in the flat.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Virginia discovered, when her engagement to Martin Sutherland was made public, that many people she had not hitherto numbered amongst her friends—whom she would have considered it a little presumptuous to number amongst her friends—decided suddenly to know her, and wrote to her and offered their congratulations. Lady Wickham also wrote to her, and from the gushing tone of her felicitations it was obvious that the news had delighted her.