The End of Her Honeymoon, Marie Belloc Lowndes [desktop ebook reader .TXT] 📗

had hesitated as if rather ashamed of what he was about to say, “would be for Gerald to tell her the search for Mr. Dampier must now end—and that the time has come when he must go back to America—and work.”

Small wonder that Senator Burton found it hard to sleep last night, small wonder he has risen so early. He knows that his son is going to speak to Nancy, to tell her what Mr. Stephens has suggested she should do, and he suspects that now, at this very moment, the decisive conversation may be taking place.

II

Though unconscious that anxious, yearning eyes are following them, both Nancy Dampier and Gerald Burton feel an instinctive desire to get away from the house, and as far as may be from possible eavesdroppers. They walk across the stretch of lawn which separates the moat from the gardens in a constrained silence, she following rather than guiding her companion.

But as if this charming old-world plesaunce were quite familiar to him, Gerald goes straight on, down a grass path ending in what appears to be a high impenetrable wall of yew, and Nancy, surprised, then sees that a narrow, shaft-like way leads straight through the green leafy depths.

“Why, Gerald?” she says a little nervously—they have long ago abandoned any more formal mode of address, though between them there stands ever the spectre of poor John Dampier, as present to one of the two, and he the man, as if the menacing shadow were in very truth a tangible presence. “Why, Gerald, where does this lead? Have you ever been here before?”

And for the first time since they met the night before, the young man smiles. “I thought I’d like to see an English sunrise, Nancy, so I’ve been up a long time. I found a rose garden through here, and I thought it would be a quiet place for our talk.”

It is strangely dark and still under the dense evergreen arch of the slanting way carved through the yew hedge; Nancy can only grope her way along. Turning round, Gerald holds out his strong hands, and taking hers in what seems so cool, so impersonal a grasp, he draws her after him. And Nancy flushes in the half darkness; it is the first time that she and Gerald Burton have ever been alone together as they are alone now, and that though they have met so very, very often in the last two years.

Nancy is at once glad and sorry when he suddenly loosens his grasp of her hands. The shadowed way terminates in a narrow wrought-iron gate; and beyond the gate is the rose garden of Barwell Moat, a tangle of exquisite colouring, jealously guarded and hidden away from those to whom the more familiar beauties of the place are free.

It is one of the oldest of English roseries, planned by some Elizabethan dame who loved solitude rather than the sun. And if the roses bloom a little less freely in this quiet, still enclosure than they would do in greater light and wilder air, this gives the rosery, in these hot June days, a touch of austere and more fragile beauty than that to be seen beyond its enlacing yews.

A hundred years after the Elizabethan lady had designed the rosery of Barwell Moat a Jacobean dame had added to her rose garden a fountain—one brought maybe from Italy or France, for the fat stone Cupids now shaking slender jets of water from their rose-leaved cornucopias are full of a roguish, Southern grace.

When they have passed through into this fragrant, enchanted looking retreat, Nancy cries out in real delight: “What an exquisite and lovely place! How strange that Daisy and I never found it!”

And then, as Gerald remains silent, she looks, for the first time this morning, straight up into his face, and her heart is filled with a sudden overwhelming sensation of suspense—and yes, fear, for there is the strangest expression on the young man’s countenance, indeed it is full of deep, of violent emotion—emotion his companion finds contagious.

She tells herself that at last he has brought news. That if he did not tell her so last night it was because he wished her to have one more night of peace—of late poor Nancy’s nights have become very peaceful.

John Dampier? There was a time—it now seems long, long ago—when Nancy would have given not only her life but her very soul to have known that her husband was safe, that he would come back to her. But now? Alas! Alas! Now she realises with an agonised feeling of horror, of self-loathing, that she no longer wishes to hear Gerald Burton say that he has kept his word—that he has found Dampier.

She prays God that nothing of what she is feeling shows in her face; and Gerald is far too moved, far too doubtful as to what he is to say to her, and as to the answer she will make to him, to see that she looks in any way different from what she always does look in his eyes—the most beautiful as well as the most loved and worshipped of human creatures.

“Tell me!” she gasps. “Tell me, Gerald? What is it you want to say to me? Don’t keep me in suspense—” and then, as he is still dumb, she adds with a cry, “Have you come to tell me that at last you have found Jack?”

And he pulls himself together with a mighty effort. Nancy’s words have rudely dispelled the hopes with which his heart has been filled ever since his father came to his room last night and told him what Mr. Stephens had suggested as a possible way out of the present, intolerable situation.

“No,” he says sombrely, “no, Nancy, I have brought you no good news, and I am beginning to fear I never shall.”

And he does not see even now that the long quivering sigh which escapes from her pale lips is a sigh of unutterable—if of pained and shamed—relief.

But what is this he is now saying, in a voice which is so unsteady, so oddly unlike his own?

“I think—God forgive me for thinking so if I am wrong—that I have always been right, Nancy, that your husband is dead—that he was killed two years ago, the night he disappeared—”

She bends her head. Yes, she too believes that, though there was a time when she fought, with desperate strength, against the belief.

He goes on breathlessly, hoarsely, aware that he is making what Mr. Stephens would call a bad job of it all: “I am now beginning to doubt whether we shall ever discover the truth as to what did happen. His body may still lie concealed somewhere in the Hôtel Saint Ange, and if that is so, there’s but small chance indeed that we shall ever, ever learn the truth.”

And again she bends her head.

“I fear the time is come, Nancy, when the search must be given up.”

He utters the fateful words very quietly, very gently, but even so she feels a pang of startled fear. Does that mean—yes, of course it must mean, that Gerald is going away, back to America?

A feeling of dreadful desolation fills her heart. “Yes,” she says in a low tone, “I think you are right. I think the search should be given up.”

She would like to utter words of thanks, the conventional words of gratitude she has uttered innumerable times in the last two years—but now they stick in her throat.

Tears smart into her eyes, stifled sobs burst from her lips.

And Gerald again misunderstands—misunderstands her tears, the sobs which tear and shake her slender body. But he is only too familiar with the feeling which now grips him—the feeling that he must rush forward and take her in his arms. It has never gripped him quite as strongly as it does now; and so he steps abruptly back, and puts more of the stone rim of the fountain between himself and that forlorn little figure.

“Nancy?” he cries. “I was a brute to say that. Of course I will go on! Of course we won’t give up hope! It’s natural that I should sometimes become disheartened.”

He is telling himself resolutely that never, never will he propose to her the plan his father revealed to him last night. How little either his father or Mr. Stephens had understood the relation between himself and Nancy if they supposed that he, of all men, could make to her such a suggestion.

And then he suddenly sees in Nancy’s sensitive face, in her large blue eyes that unconscious beckoning, calling look every lover longs to see in the face of his beloved….

They each instinctively move towards the other, and in a flash Nancy is in his arms and he is holding her strained to his heart, while his lips seek, find, cling to her sweet, tremulous mouth.

But the moment of rapture, of almost unendurable bliss is short indeed, for suddenly he feels her shrinking from him, and though for yet another moment he holds her against her will, the struggle soon ends, and he releases her, feeling what he has never yet felt when with her, that is, bewildered, hurt, and yes, angry.

And then, when she sees that new alien glance of anger in eyes which have never looked at her but kindly, Nancy feels a dreadful pang of pain, as well as of shamed distress. She creeps up nearer to him, and puts her hand imploringly on his arm—that arm which a moment ago held her so closely to him, but which now hangs, apparently nerveless, by his side.

“Gerald!” she whispers imploringly. “Don’t be angry with me,” and her voice drops still lower as she adds piteously, “You see, I knew we were doing wrong. I—I felt wicked.”

And then, as he still makes no answer, she grows more keenly distressed. “Gerald?” she says again. “You may kiss me if you like.” And as he only looks down at her, taking no advantage of the reluctant permission, she falters out the ill-chosen words, “Don’t you know how grateful I am to you?”

And then, stung past endurance, he turns on her savagely:—“Does that mean that I have bought the right to kiss you?”

But as, at this, she bursts into bitter tears, he again takes her in his arms, and he does kiss her, violently, passionately, hungrily. He is only a man after all.

But alas! These other kisses leave behind them a bitter taste. They lack the wild, exquisite flavour of the first.

At last he tells her, haltingly, slowly, of Mr. Stephens’ suggestion, but carefully as he chooses his words he feels her shrinking, wincing at the images they conjure up; and he tells himself with impatient self-reproach that he has been too quick, too abrupt—that he ought to have allowed the notion to sink into her mind slowly, that he should have made Daisy, or even his father, be his ambassador.

“I couldn’t do that!” she whispers at last, and he sees that she has turned very white. “I don’t think I could ever do that! Think how awful it would be if—if after I had done such a thing I found that poor Jack was not dead? Some time ago—I have never told you of this—some friend, meaning to be kind, sent me a cutting from a paper telling of a foreigner who had been taken up for mad in Italy, and confined in a lunatic asylum for years and years! You don’t know how that story haunted me. It haunted me for weeks. You wouldn’t like me to do anything I thought wrong, Gerald?”

“No,” he says moodily. “No, Nancy—I will never ask you to do anything you think wrong.” He adds with an effort,