The Bars of Iron Part 68

He laughed too, his arm close about her. "I would give you the world if I had it. Avery, I hate to think we've come home--that the honeymoon is over--and the old beastly burdens waiting to be shouldered--" He laid his forehead against her neck with a gesture that made her fancy he did not wish her to see his face for the moment. "P'r'aps I'm a heartless brute, but I never missed the old chap all the time I was away," he whispered.

"It's like being dragged under the scourge again--just when the old scars were beginning to heal--to come back to this empty barrack."

She slid a quick arm round his neck, all the woman's heart in her responding to the cry from his.

"The place is full of him," Piers went on; "I meet him at every corner.

I see him in his old place on the settle in the hall, where he used to wait for me, and--and row me every night for being late." He gave a broken laugh. "Avery, if it weren't for you, I--I believe I should shoot myself."

"Come and sit down!" said Avery gently. She drew him to a couch, and they sat down locked together.

During all the ten weeks of their absence he had scarcely even mentioned his grandfather. He had been gay and inconsequent, or fiercely pa.s.sionate in his devotion to her. But of his loss he had never spoken, and vaguely she had known that he had shut it out of his life with that other grim shadow that dwelt behind the locked door she might not open. She had not deemed him heartless, but she had regretted that deliberate shirking of his grief. She had known that sooner or later he would have to endure the scourging of which he spoke and that it would not grow the lighter with postponement.

And now as she held him against her heart, she was in a sense relieved that it had come at last, thankful to be there with him while he stripped himself of all subterfuge and faced his sorrow.

He could not speak much as he sat there clasped in her arms. One or two attempts he made, and then broke down against her breast. But no words were needed. Her arms were all he desired for consolation, and if they waked in him the old wild remorse, he stifled it ere it could take full possession.

Finally, when the first bitterness had pa.s.sed, they sat and talked together, and he found relief in telling her of the life he had lived in close companionship with the old man.

"We quarrelled a dozen times," he said. "But somehow we could neither of us keep it up. I don't know why. We were violent enough at times. There's an Evesham devil somewhere in our ancestry, and he has a trick of cropping up still in moments of excitement. You've met him more than once. He's a formidable monster, what?"

"I am not afraid of him," said Avery, with her cheek against his black head.

He gave a shaky laugh. "You'd fling a bucket of water over Satan himself!

I love you for not being afraid. But I don't know how you manage it, and that's a fact. Darling, I'm a selfish brute to wear you out like this.

Send me away when you can't stand any more of me!"

"Would you go?" she said, softly stroking his cheek.

He caught her hand again and kissed it hotly, devouringly, in answer.

"But I mustn't wear you out," he said, a moment later, with an odd wistfulness. "You mustn't let me, Avery."

She drew her hand gently away from the clinging of his lips. "No, I won't let you," she said, in a tone he did not understand.

He clasped her to him. "It's because I worship you so," he whispered pa.s.sionately. "There is no one else in the world but you. I adore you! I adore you!"

She closed her eyes from the fiery worship that looked forth from his.

"Piers," she said, "wait, dear, wait!"

"Why should I wait?" he demanded almost fiercely.

"Because I ask you. Because--just now--to be loved like that is more than I can bear. Will you--can you--kiss me only, once, and go?"

He held her in his arms. He gazed long and burningly upon her. In the end he stopped and with reverence he kissed her. "I am going, Avery," he said.

She opened her eyes to him. "G.o.d bless you, my own Piers!" she murmured softly, and laid her cheek for a moment against his sleeve ere he took his arm away.

As for Piers, he went from her as if he feared to trespa.s.s, and her heart smote her a little as she watched him go. But she would not call him back. She went instead to one of the great bay windows and leaned against the framework, gazing out. He was very good to her in all things, but there were times when she felt solitude to be an absolute necessity. His vitality, his fevered desire for her, wore upon her nerves. His att.i.tude towards her was not wholly natural. It held something of a menace to her peace which disquieted her vaguely. She had a feeling that though she knew herself to be all he wanted in the world, yet she did not succeed in fully satisfying him. He seemed to be perpetually craving for something further, as though somewhere deep within him there burned a fiery thirst that nothing could ever slake. Her lightest touch seemed to awake it, and there were moments when his unfettered pa.s.sion made her afraid.

Not for worlds would she have had him know it. Her love for him was too deep to let her shrink; and she knew that only by that love did she maintain her ascendancy, appealing to his higher nature as only true love can appeal. But the perpetual strain of it told upon her, and that night she felt tired in body and soul.

The great bedroom behind her with its dark hangings and oak furniture seemed dreary and unhome-like. She viewed the ancient and immense four-poster with misgiving and wondered if Queen Elizabeth had ever slept in it.

After a time she investigated Piers' room beyond, and found it less imposing though curiously stiff and wholly lacking in ordinary cheery comfort. Later she discovered the reason for this grim severity of arrangement. No woman's touch had softened it for close upon half a century.

She went back to her own room and dressed. Piers had wanted her to have a maid, but she had refused until other changes should be made in the establishment. There seemed so much to alter that she felt bewildered. A household of elderly menservants presented a problem with which she knew she would find it difficult to deal.

She put the matter gently before Piers that night, but he dismissed it as trivial.

"You can't turn 'em off of course," he said. "But you can have a dozen women to adjust the balance if you want 'em."

Avery did not, but she was too tired to argue the point. She let the subject slide.

They dined together in the oak-panelled dining-room where Piers had so often sat with his grandfather. The table seemed to stretch away inimitably into shadows, and Avery felt like a Lilliputian. From the wall directly facing her the last Lady Evesham smiled upon her--her baffling, mirthless smile that seemed to cover naught but heartache. She found herself looking up again and again to meet those eyes of mocking comprehension; and the memory of what Lennox Tudor had once told her recurred to her. This was Piers' Italian grandmother whose patrician beauty had descended to him through her scapegrace son.

"Are you looking at that woman with the smile?" said Piers abruptly.

She turned to him. "You are so like her, Piers. But I wouldn't like you to have a smile like that. There is something tragic behind it."

"We are a tragic family," said Piers sombrely. "As for her, she ruined her own life and my grandfather's too. She might have been happy enough with him if she had tried."

"Oh, Piers, I wonder!" Avery said, with a feeling that that smile revealed more to her than to him.

"I say she might," Piers reiterated, with a touch of impatience. "He thought the world of her, just as--just as--" he smiled at her suddenly--"I do of you. He never knew that she wasn't satisfied until one fine day she left him. She married again--afterwards, and then died. He never got over it."

But still Avery had a vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been Sir Beverley's bride. "I expect they never really understood each other," she said.

Piers' dark eyes gleamed. "Do you know what I would have done if I had been in his place?" he said. "I would have gone after her and brought her back--even if I'd killed her afterwards."

His voice vibrated on a deep note of savagery. He poured out a gla.s.s of wine with a hand that shook.

Avery said nothing, but through the silence she was conscious of the hard throbbing of her heart. There was something implacable, something almost cruel, about Piers at that moment. She felt as if he had bruised her without knowing it.

And then in his sudden, bewildering way he left his chair and came to her, stooped boyishly over her. "My darling, you're so awfully pale to-night. Have some wine--to please me!"

She leaned her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes. "I am a little tired, dear; but I don't want any wine. I shall be all right in the morning."

He laid his cheek against her forehead. "I want you to drink a toast with me. Won't you?"

"We won't drink to each other," she protested, faintly smiling. "It's too like drinking to ourselves."

"That's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me," he declared. "But we won't toast ourselves. We'll drink to the future, Avery, and--" he lowered his voice--"and all it contains. What?"

Her eyes opened quickly, but she did not move. "Why do you say that?"

"What?" he said again very softly.

She was silent.

He reached a hand for his own gla.s.s. "Drink with me, sweetheart!" he said persuasively.