The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 33

Terry's eyes shifted from Lady Dawn to Tabs. They were startled and misty with sleep. She seemed only half-awake. Her hand rested on the door as if ready for retreat. Her square little face was flushed; her gold, bobbed hair was flattened where it had pressed against the pillow.

She was clad in a filmy negligee; her bare feet had been pushed hastily into slippers and peeped out rosily from beneath the hem. She looked immature--the way she had in days gone by when he had tiptoed to her bedside through the darkness to feel her tight little arms leap stranglingly about his neck. She had been really a tiny girl then. Why couldn't she have stayed like that always? Why need she have roused in him this torturing desire which she did nothing but rebuff?

"I was asleep. I heard voices. I thought----"

What had she thought? How much had she seen and heard? How long had she been standing there?

Tabs attempted to bridge the awkward silence. "I drove down from London." Then he added, "That was last night."

None of them had stirred. Lady Dawn advanced from the window into the pool of lamplight. "I think I know what you thought--that something was wrong. It was. I nearly fainted. If it hadn't been for Lord Taborley----But come inside. Why do you remain standing there?"

Terry stepped just across the threshold. Having closed the door, she leant against it, still holding the k.n.o.b in her hand. It was plain that she was making an effort to be valiant. She looked fragile as a peeled white wand; like a flower, shy and dew-wet. Life had not yet commenced to break her. The clinging folds of her wrap emphasized her slenderness, the grace of her lines and the girlish contours of her figure.

Lady Dawn went to her and put her arm about her. "You're afraid. Of what are you afraid? Surely not of Lord Taborley? He's been telling me---- To be loved like that---- There was a time when I would have been proud."

Terry's left hand went up to her breast. Her wild violet eyes looked straight before her, seeking always the face of Tabs. They seemed to call to him. He came slowly to the table where she could see him. It was his chance. Lady Dawn was his advocate. It was the chance for which he had waited.

He was contrasting the two women before him; the one in her dainty, enviable promise and the dumb hostility of her youth; the other in the gentleness of her experience and the charity of her dearly purchased understanding. Terry, whom he had loved since she was a child, had become inscrutable. But Lady Dawn---- Was it her suffering that made him know her as he knew himself?

"I hadn't meant to intrude on you," he apologized. "I hadn't the least idea you were here. How should I have had? You disappeared without warning; at your father's house your address was refused me. Lady Dawn will bear me out that, at the very moment you entered, I was a.s.suring her that my visit had nothing to do with you. Probably you heard."

"Nothing to do with me!" There was relief in her way of saying it. She visibly relaxed. "Then it isn't because of me at all that you're here?"

The suppressed eagerness of her question was wounding. She wanted to hear him state more positively that she had had nothing to do with his visit. Whatever she had seen before they had become aware of her, had had no power to rouse her jealousy. She could have given him no stronger proof of how absolutely he had ceased to count. He smiled bitterly. "Not because of you at all, Terry. The reason for my being here is strictly private between Lady Dawn and myself. I didn't come to worry you. You may set your mind at rest."

"Then you didn't know or even suspect----"

He laughed unhappily. "What more can I say to convince you? I haven't the least idea what you suppose I could suspect. What business is it of mine to suspect anything? And if I did, what license should I have to interfere? We're not as we once were. There are no longer any sentimental obligations that would hold us accountable to each other.

You've shown me that you consider our relation ended. In the face of that, I should scarcely follow you into the country where, by all accounts, you've come to escape me. It's purely a coincidence that you find me here."

He caught Lady Dawn's eyes resting on him. They were wide and clear and interrogating. He knew what she was remembering: that it was in this room within the hour that he had said, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no one else." Self-ridicule tempered his spirit into sharpness. He turned again to Terry.

"Once and for all I should like to set your doubts at rest. You need have no fear that I shall ever inconvenience you. We're bound to meet from time to time, but I pledge you my word that I shall never refer to the past. You're of an age to make decisions for yourself; you've decided against me. You're acting quite within your privilege when you discard old friends. You'll wonder why I state obvious facts. I'm doing so in order that you may feel certain that I've withdrawn whatever claims I had for influencing your movements. I shall always be interested---- But as for presuming that anything that I might say or do would make the least difference to your plans, I shouldn't be so foolish----"

Breaking away from Lady Dawn, she crossed over to him. Resting her hand on his arm, she sank her voice and commenced speaking so hurriedly that he alone could make out what she said.

"I've been false and foolish. I don't need you to tell me. If you knew how miserable I've been and how I've despised myself---- But I can't help it. I go on doing things. I never used to be a beast--least of all to you; never until you wanted me to marry you. If I can act like this now, what sort of a wife---- Can't you understand? I'm trying to spare you. But I won't have you hate me, Tabs. I can't endure that. Every second that I've kept away from you, I've been wanting--not the _you_ that you are now, but the old you. Won't you start afresh, liking me the way you did when--before this happened?" She seized his hand on the impulse and pressed it to her lips. It was the humble act of a small girl. "Love me just a little. I'm not really bad. Please, please forgive me my wickedness, dear Tabs."

He stood dumbfounded and embarra.s.sed. If they had been alone, he would have known what to do. He was at a loss to find a motive for this display of pa.s.sion. Was it a ruse to get him back? He crushed the suspicion as unworthy. Then was it what she had seen that had made her possessive? Her tears fell scalding on his hands.

He drew her to him. "There, there, little Terry! You mustn't. There's nothing to cry about. There's nothing wicked in not having loved a man.

It's a thing that can't be helped."

At the sign of his relenting, she threw away the last of her control.

Burying her face against his coat, she clung to him. All that he could see of her was her golden head and her slight body, quivering with sobbing. Her voice reached him m.u.f.fled. "But I am wicked. I've pushed you from me. If you knew---- If you did, you wouldn't touch me."

There had been no sound, yet something warned him. He looked up. The door was closing.

"Lady Dawn," he called. In his voice there was the tremor of anxiety.

On the point of vanishing, she glanced back across her shoulder. "What is it, Lord Taborley?"

The calmness of her austerity made emotion seem shallow. There was a touch of scorn in her repose.

"Won't you help?"

She smiled faintly. "I was. I was going."

"Then please don't. It's late. Both you and she must be worn out."

Like a figure of silver, she came coldly back. But there was only tenderness in her voice when she spoke. "Terry, did you hear what Lord Taborley said? He thinks he ought to be going."

Slipping her arm about the girl, she led her from him. Their footsteps died out on the turret stairs.

He waited, hoping that Lady Dawn would return. Now that she was gone, he was invaded with his old loneliness. The dead lords eyed him cynically from their canvases. Through leaded panes the moonlight fell. It seemed the sorcery of her spirit. The perfume of the rose-garden was her breath. How pale she had made his dream of Terry! How trivial she made all women look when she stood beside them! There was nothing in this gift of youth for which he had clamored. Terry's youth, had he married her, would have been his scourge. He knew at last what it was that he required at the hands of a woman--it was rest.

There was no sound. The Castle was intensely still. He lowered the wick of the lamp before he left, watched the flame splutter and waited till it sank. Tiptoeing softly down the stairs, he slipped out noiselessly into the romance of the summer's night.

II

Next morning, for the first few seconds after he had wakened, he lay wondering why he was so happy. Then he remembered.

He had never had a friendship with a woman. From the start, though he had hidden the fact from himself, his supposed friendship with Maisie had been nothing less than lazy courtship. Terry had detected that when she had said that he wouldn't have been so interested in Maisie if she hadn't been so desperately good-looking. Until this morning he had had no faith in such friendships. He had believed that their fundamental attraction, however well concealed, must always be s.e.x. They could never be more than a pretense, in which either the man or the woman was cheating--the one being anxious to give more than friendship, the other deriving amus.e.m.e.nt from giving less. He had held that such relations between men and women were inherently dishonest, doomed to end in a clash of desire or to broaden into an honorable love affair. There was no middle course between coveting a woman and neglecting her as entirely dispensable.

But this morning his point of view was altered. He was confident that his interest in Lady Dawn was on an utterly different footing. He had never had this peacefulness of feeling for any woman. He marveled at it.

He had to fight the disillusion that it might be no more than a mood.

His liking for her had come to him so suddenly. Suddenness in the emotions prompted him to distrust. Yet his present contentment seemed as secure as it was incomprehensible. His new affection compensated him for all previous failures and atoned for the humiliation of every past regret.

At that word "affection" he halted himself. Was it affection that he entertained for Lady Dawn? He took a good look at the suspected word and decided that it was. But it was the affection of reverence. In owning this much he qualified his admission by insisting that his affection was totally devoid of pa.s.sion. Pa.s.sion in the presence of Lady Dawn looked hysteric and paltry. She inspired a serenity which had nothing to do with the physical. It was the charm of her character that entranced him.

Her body scarcely figured in his thoughts; when it did, it failed to stir him. It was no more than the gracious vehicle through which the beauty of her spirit was expressed.

His paramount emotion was grat.i.tude--grat.i.tude that she, who was reputed to be so cold, should so instantly have unveiled herself. There was a startling purity in the frankness with which she had bared her spirit to him. It left him awed and touched. He recognized the generosity which had prompted her; she had realized his need of a woman's trust. And so she had withheld nothing that would comfort him. She had made him feel safe, the way a mother does. She had picked up the little boy that lies hidden in the heart of every man, and had folded him in her breast.

It had been shameless of her. He had not guessed that a woman could be so good.

And she had made him so finally sure of her. He felt that he could leave her and know that her protection would follow him. He could return and be equally certain that none of her understanding would have vanished.

She was the first woman who had impressed him with her wisdom; the only one who had had the courage to offer him her strength.

And this was not love. He smiled exultantly. It was n.o.bler and infinitely more rare. Love, as he had read of it and mistaken it in his experience, was a devastating energy, greedy and devouring. It was a continual, nagging contention between self-abas.e.m.e.nt and hostility. It was a humiliating attempt on the part of a man to barter something, which was persistently undervalued, for the feminine equivalent which was as persistently h.o.a.rded. It was an amalgam of physical yearning, wounded vanity and resentment of contempt. It was egotism masquerading as altruism. It was a dancing bear lumbering at the heels of insanity.

Of all the pa.s.sions it was the most hypocritical--a snare-setter, a digger of pitfalls, an enemy disguised as one's dearest friend. He thanked G.o.d there was no hint of love in his new-found friendship. Like an outcast fleeing from a storm, he had blundered against the door of this woman's charity, had felt it yield beneath his touch, and had found himself immersed in the blessedness of instant and unmerited rest.

Lazily he commenced to dress. From his window he could see the Castle, perched grave and gray against the forehead of the clouds. He wondered whether she was up, how she was occupying herself, whether she was expecting him? He listened to her voice in the silence of his brain, like the far-away singing of contralto bells. He saw her still face, her slow smiling, the proud, sweet stateliness of her pacing steps. Then his thoughts went back to whether he was expected.

If he were not---- The thought chilled him. She had said nothing to encourage him to seek her afresh. What if his reappearance should cause her embarra.s.sment--an embarra.s.sment which she would betray by withholding herself? It was quite likely she would impute to him wrong motives. Already she might have repented of intimacies she had allowed.

He had placed his arm about her. With the injustice of most women, though she had permitted it, she might be blaming him because the act had been witnessed by Terry. Terry of all persons! Having had time to reflect, she might be accusing him of gallantries. It was not so long since she had confused him with Adair. From her untypical knowledge of him she was ent.i.tled to estimate him as the kind of man to whom promiscuous caresses were a practice. He turned coward at the recollection of his daring. Last night it had been so involuntary and had seemed so natural. Why had he done it? Why had she allowed it? It had been the liberty of a plow-boy with a village-girl. There would be little room for wonder if, when next they met, she fixed a No Man's Land of pride between herself and his familiarity. She would have good reason, for their companionship would be shared by Terry. Poor little Terry, with her exaggerated sins and distorted self-accusations!

He wandered down to breakfast disturbed by these apprehensions. As the morning dragged by they took shape as facts. Towards noon he could tolerate his uncertainty no longer. He turned his steps in the direction of the Castle, having first determined, if he found himself unwelcome, to announce that the purpose of his visit was to bid good-by before setting out for London.