CHAPTER XXXIV
THE WHITE FLAME
It was not till late in the afternoon of the day following upon herflight from Mallow that Nan and Peter met again. He had, so Sandyinformed her, walked over to the Court in order to see Kitty.
"I think he has some private affair of his own that he wants to talkover with her," explained Sandy.
"It's about his wife, I expect," answered Nan dully. "She's hadsunstroke--and is ordered home from India."
"Poor devil!" The words rushed from Sandy's lips. "How rotteneverything is!" he added fiercely, with youth's instinctive revoltagainst the inevitableness of life's pains and penalties.
"And I've hardly mended matters, have I?" she submitted rather bitterly.
He slipped a friendly arm round her neck.
"Don't you worry any," he said, with gruff sympathy. "Mallory's fixedup everything--and it all dovetails in neatly with Kitty's saying youwere staying with friends for the night. You're staying _here_--do yousee? And Mallory and the mater between 'em have settled that you're toprolong your visit for a couple of days--to give more colour to theproceedings, so to speak! You'll emerge without a stain on yourcharacter!" he went on, trying with boyish clumsiness to cheer her up.
"Oh, don't, Sandy!" Her lip quivered. "I--I don't think I mind muchabout that. I feel as if I'd stained my soul."
"Well, if there were no blacker souls around than yours, old thing, theworld would be a darned sight nicer place to live in! And that's that."
Nan contrived a smile.
"Sandy, you're rather a dear!" she said gratefully.
And then Peter came in, and Sandy hastened to make himself scarce.
A dead silence followed his hurried exit. Nan found herself trembling,and for a moment she dared not lift her eyes to Peter's face for fearof what she might read there. At last:
"Peter," she said, without looking at him. "Are you still--angry withme?"
"What makes you think I am angry?"
She looked up at that, then shrank back from the bitter hardness in hisface almost as though he had dealt her a blow.
"Oh, you are--you are!" she cried tremulously.
"Don't you think most men would be in the same circumstances?"
"I don't understand," she said very low.
"No? I suppose you wouldn't," he replied. "You don't seem tounderstand the meaning of the word--faithfulness. Perhaps you can'thelp it--you're half a Varincourt! . . . Don't you realise what you'vedone? You've torn down our love and soiled it--made it nothing! Ibelieved in you as I believed in God. . . . And then you run away withMaryon Rooke! One man or another--apparently it's all the same to you."
She rose and drew rather timidly towards him.
"Has it--hurt you--like that?" she said whisperingly. "You didn'tmind--about Roger. Not in the same way."
"_Mind_?"
The word came hoarsely, and his hands, hanging loosely at his sides,slowly clenched. All the anguish of thwarting, the torture of a manwho knows that the woman he loves will be another man's wife, foundutterance in that one short word. Nan shivered at the stark agony inhis tone. She did not attempt to answer him. There was nothing shecould say. She could only stand voiceless and endure the pain-rackedsilence which followed.
It seemed to her that an infinity of time dragged by before he spokeagain. When he did, it was in quiet, level tones out of which everyatom of emotion had been crushed.
"You were pledged to Trenby," he said slowly. "That was different. Icouldn't ask you to break your pledge to him, even had I been free todo so. You were his, not mine. . . . But you had given no promise toMaryon Rooke."
The incalculable reproach and accusation of those last words seemed toburn their way right into her heart. In a flash of revelation thewhole thing became clear to her. She saw how bitterly she had failedthe man she loved in that mad moment when she had thrown up everythingand gone away with Maryon.
Dimly she acquiesced in the fact that there were excuses to bemade--the long strain of the preceding months, her illness, leaving herwith weakened nerves, and, finally, Roger's outrageous behaviour in thestudio that day. But of these she would not speak to Peter. Had henot saved her from herself she would have wrecked her whole life bynow, and she felt that, to him, she could not make excuses--howevervalid they might be.
She had failed him utterly--failed in that faithfulness of the spiritwithout which love is no more than a sex instinct. She knew it mustappear like this to him, although deep within herself she was consciousthat it was not really so. In her heart there was a white flame thatwould burn only for Peter--an altar flame which nothing could touch ordefile. And the men who loved her knew it. It was this, the knowledgethat the inmost soul and spirit of her eluded him, which had keptRoger's jealous anger at such a dangerous pitch.
"There is only one thing." Peter was speaking again, still in the samecuriously detached tones as before. It was almost as though he werediscussing the affairs of someone else--affairs which did not concernhim very vitally. "There's only one more thing to be said. You'vemade it easier for me to do--what I have to do."
"What you have to do?" she repeated.
"Yes. I've had a cable from India. My wife is no better, and I'mgoing out to bring her home."
"I'm sorry she's no better," said Nan mechanically.
He murmured a formal word of thanks and then once more the dreadfulsilence hemmed them round. A hesitating knock sounded on the door and,after a moment's discreet delay, Sandy's freckled face peered round thedoorway.
"I'm afraid you must leave now, Mallory, if you're to catch the uptrain," he said apologetically. "Kitty is here, waiting to drive youto the station."
Together they all three went out into the drive where Kitty was sittingbehind the wheel of the car, Eliza perched skittishly on the rubberedstep, talking with her. Aunt Eliza's opinion of "that red-headed body"had altered considerably during the course of the last year.
"And mind an' look in on your way back," she insisted.
Kitty nodded.
"I will. I want to talk to Nan."
"Ye'll no' be too hard on her?" besought Eliza.
Kitty laughed.
"Aunt Eliza dear, you're the biggest fraud I know! Your severity'sjust a pretence,"--bending forward to kiss her--"and a very thin one atthat."
Then she greeted Nan precisely as though nothing had happened sincethey had last met, and, with a handshake all round, Mallory steppedinto the car beside her and was whirled away to the station.
"It seems years since yesterday morning," said Nan, when, after Kitty'sreturn from the station, they found themselves alone together.
For once Kitty had diverged from her usual principle, and a little jarof red stuff was responsible for the colour in her cheeks. Her eyesstill blenched at the remembrance of that day and night's anxiety whichshe had endured alone.
"Yes," she acquiesced simply. "It seems years." And then, bit by bit,she drew from Nan the whole story of her flight from Mallow and of theviolent scene which had preceded it, when Roger had so ruthlesslydestroyed the portrait.
"I don't think--Peter--will ever forgive me," went on Nan, with a quiethopelessness in her voice that was infinitely touching. "He wouldhardly speak to me."
The coolly aloof man from whom she had parted an hour ago did not seemas though he could ever have loved her. He had judged and condemnedher as harshly as might a stranger. He was a stranger--this new,stonily indifferent Peter who had said very little but, in the fewwords he had spoken, had seemed to banish her out of his life and heartfor ever.
"My dear"--Kitty's accustomed vitality rose to meet the occasion."He'll forgive you some day, when he understands. Probably only awoman could really understand what made you do it. In any case, as faras Peter's concerned, it was all so ghastly for him, coming when itdid--last night! He must have felt as if the world were falling topieces."
"Last night? Why should it have been worse last night?"
>
"Because he'd just had a cable from India--about ten minutes beforeSandy arrived--telling him that his wife had gone mad, and asking himto fetch her home."
"Gone mad?" Nan's voice was hardly more than a whisper of horror.
"Yes. He'd had a letter a day or two earlier warning him that thingsweren't going right with her. You know, she's a frightfully restless,excitable woman, and after having sunstroke she was ordered to keepquiet and rest as much as possible until she was able to come home.She entirely declined to do either--rest, or come home. She continuedto ride and dance and amuse herself exactly as if there were nothingthe matter. Naturally, her brain became more and more excitable, andat the present moment she is practically mad. No one can manage her.So they've sent for Peter, and of course, like the angel he is, hegoes. . . . I suppose it will end in his playing keeper to ahalf-crazed neurasthenic for the rest of his natural life. He'll befar too tender-hearted to put her in a home of any kind, howeverexpensive and luxurious. He's--he's too idealistic for this world, isPeter!" And Kitty's voice broke a little.
Nan was silent. Her hands lay folded on her knee, but the slenderfingers worked incessantly. Presently she got up very quietly and,without speaking, sought the sanctuary of her own room, where she couldbe alone.
She felt utterly crushed and despairing as she realised that just atthe moment of Peter's greatest need she had failed him--spoiled the onething that had counted in a life bare of happiness by robbing him ofhis faith and trust in the woman he loved.
If the Death-Angel had come at that moment and beckoned her to followhim, she would have gone gladly. But Death is not so kind. He doesnot come just because life has grown so hard and difficult to endurethat we are asking for him.
Later on, when Nan came downstairs to dinner, she spoke and movedalmost mechanically. Only once did she show the least interest inanything that was said, and that was when Eliza remarked with relish:
"Roger Trenby will be wishin' Isobel Carson back home! I hear LadyGertrude keeps him dancing attendance on her from morn till night,declaring she's at death's door the while."
Sandy grinned.
"Yes, Roger 'phoned an hour ago and asked to speak to you, Nan--he'dheard you were staying here. I said you were taking a nap."
Nan smiled faintly across at him.
"Thank you, Sandy," she said. She had no wish either to see or speakto Roger just now. There was something that must be fought out anddecided before he and she met again.
Aunt Eliza bustled her off early to bed that night and she wentthankfully--not to sleep, but to search out her own soul and make thebiggest decision of her life.
It was not till the moon-pale fingers of dawn came creeping in throughthe chinks betwixt blind and window that Nan lay back on her pillowsknowing that for good or ill she had taken her decision.
Something of the immensity of love, its heights and depths, had beenrevealed to her in those tense silences she had shared with Peter, andshe knew that she had been untrue to the love within her--untrue fromthe very beginning when she had first pledged herself to Roger.
She had rushed headlong into her engagement with him, driven bycross-currents that had whirled her hither and thither. Afterwards,when the full realisation of her love for Peter had overwhelmed her,her pride--the dogged, unyielding pride of the Davenants, whose wordwas their bond--had held her to her promise.
It had been a matter of honour with her. Now she was learning thatutter loyalty to love involved a higher, finer honour than a spokenpledge given by a reckless girl who had thought to find safety forherself and happiness for her friend by giving it.
For Peter, that faithfulness of the spirit, of which he had spoken,alone was possible. The woman he had married had her claims upon him.But as far as she herself was concerned, Nan realised that she couldyet keep her love pure and untouched, faithful to the mystic three-foldbond of spirit, soul, and body.
. . . She would never marry Roger now. To-morrow she would write andtell him so. That he would storm and rage and try to force her toretract this new decision she was well aware. But that would only bepart of the punishment which she must be prepared to suffer. Therewould, too, be a certain amount of obloquy and gossip to be faced.People in general would say she had behaved dishonourably. But,whatever the result, she was ready to bear it. It would be a verysmall atonement for her sin against love!
* * * * * *
The following day she returned to Mallow Court to be greeted warmly byKitty. Once or twice the latter glanced at her a trifle uneasily asthough she sensed something different in her, but it was not untillater on, over a fire lit to cheat the unwonted coolness of theevening, that Nan unburdened herself.
Kitty said very little. But she and Barry were as much lovers now asthey had been the day they married, and she understood.
"I think you're right," she commented slowly.
"I know I am," answered Nan with quiet conviction. "I feel as thoughall this time I had been profaning our love. Now I want to keep itquite, quite sacred--in my heart. It wouldn't make any difference evenif Peter ceased to care for me. It's my caring for him that matters."
"Shall you--do you intend to see Roger?"
"No. I shall write to him to-morrow. But if he still wishes to see meafter that, of course I can't refuse."
"And Peter?"
"He will have gone."
Kitty shook her head.
"No. He sails the day after to-morrow. He couldn't get a berthbefore."
"Then"--very softly and with a quiet radiance in her eyes--"then I willwrite to him to-morrow--after I've written to Roger."
Nan fell silent, gazing absently into the fire. There was a deep senseof thankfulness in her heart that she would be able to heal the hurtshe had done Peter before he went East to face the bitter and difficultthing which awaited his doing. A strange sense of comfort stole overher. When she had written her letter to Roger, retracting the promiseshe had given him, she would be free--free to belong wholly to the manshe loved.
Though they might never be together, though their love must remain forever unconsummated, still in her loneliness she would know herselfutterly and entirely his.
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