by Sara Seale
“Now I think I understand. Just at first you frightened me. Nicky talked so strangely. I thought—”
“Have you seen her then?” Simon asked.
“Only an hour or so ago. She had just come from Doctor Lucy’s. Would she have spoken to Stella there, do you suppose?”
“She probably went to see her.” Simon remembered Stella as he had last seen her, white and hysterical, in the garden. Could she have said something foolish to Nicky?
“No,” said Mary quietly. “She went to see the doctor.” Something in his mother’s manner caused him to look at her sharply.
“Did she tell you what he said?” he asked quickly.
“He told her she could never have a child,” she replied with simple directness. “I think she thought it would matter very much to you.”
He looked at her with eyes that slowly filled with pity.
“Oh, poor Nicky ... poor Nicky...” he said very softly.
“I think I understand now,” Mary Shand said. “I don’t know what this foolish talk of Stella might mean—she said nothing of that. She said nothing of anything except that she asked me if duty to someone you love was more important than duty to yourself. I think her thoughts were for you all the time—not for herself.”
He looked at her steadily, and there was a painful twist to his lips.
“Mother, don’t you know that Nicky has never loved me?” he said wearily.
She smiled.
“Maybe she didn’t learn till late,” she said. “But she loves you now, son, and the Lord knows where it will lead her. I think she doesn’t know you very well. The Shands are hard, lad, and they take much for granted. That’s a foolish way with a woman, and no way at all with your Nicky.”
He gave her a long look in which sadness was mingled with hope, then, with a quick exclamation, he began searching through the letters that had come that morning for the missing telegram.
“She’s gone with Michael,” he said curtly. “I might have guessed she’d choose that way. The little fool! Oh, the damned little fool!”
But the hastily turned-out waste-paper basket disclosed nothing, and Simon turned toward the staircase.
“Let’s try her bedroom,” he said, and raced up the stairs, three at a time.
In Nicky’s room chaos reigned. Cupboards stood open, drawers were turned out upside down on the floor, and in the middle of the littered dressing table Simon found Michael’s crumpled telegram.
The Smuggler’s Rest. Where on earth was that? He tried to remember where he had heard the name before, and couldn’t, although he was sure Nicky and Michael had mentioned it at dinner one night. He rang the bell for Mouse.
When she saw the state of the room she flung her hands above her head.
“Sakes alive!” she exclaimed. “What sort of a game have you and Nicky been having, I should like to know?”
“Nicky has been packing,” said Simon gravely. “Mouse, have you ever heard of a place called the Smuggler’s Rest? Think well now.”
“Think!” exclaimed Mouse indignantly. “I don’t need to think! That was the place where the pipes burst and Michael brought a goat into the bedroom.”
In spite of his anxiety, Simon’s lips twitched.
“Then you’ve been there?” he said. “Perhaps you’ll tell me where it is.”
“Little inn on the Romney Marshes, not far from Dymchurch,” Mouse replied promptly. “And why Sir Charles always would stay there when he went abroad instead of some decent hotel in Folkestone, I never did fathom. But none of the Bredons ever did behave like other people.”
“Bless you, Mouse! What a comfort you are!” Simon told her unexpectedly and glanced at his watch. Half past one. There was just time to make it comfortably.
“If that’s where Nicky’s taken herself, you tell her for me when you see her that I’ll have something to say about this fine mess when she comes back. It’s high time that child settled down and behaved herself,” Mouse grumbled as he went out of the room.
In the hall, Mary Shand was waiting for him.
“Well?” she said eagerly.
“I’ve found out where she is,” he said, kissing her. “Go home now, mother, and rest. We’ll be back tonight—that is, if she’ll come.”
But Mary only smiled as she watched him run down the front steps to his car.
Nicky went very white when she saw Simon standing in the doorway of the coffee shop. She sprang to her feet, and Michael, getting up more slowly, remarked with a grin:
“This has all the earmarks of a first-class melodrama. Do I say: ‘Too late!’ or do you say: ‘You cur!’ ”
Simon ignored him, but said to Nicky:
“Will you please come outside with me, Nicky? I want to speak to you.”
She stood looking at him beseechingly, and said nothing.
“Will you come?”
“There’s nothing to say,” she said then in a husky little voice.
“I think there’s a great deal to say,” he replied gravely.
“Didn’t you leave the usual note on the pincushion, my pigeon?” Michael asked.
“Shut up!” said Simon. “Nicky, will you please at least give me half an hour?”
She glanced at Michael, who shrugged expressive shoulders and looked at Nicky with an odd expression.
“Can it possibly be, Nick,” he drawled, “that you are doing a martyr act, after all?”
She gave him one panic-stricken look, then followed Simon out into the lobby.
“Can you let me have a private room for half an hour, where I won’t be disturbed?” she heard him ask the manageress brusquely.
They were shown into a small parlor that looked out over the marshes. The coarse, sun-bleached grasses stretched endlessly away to the sparkling sea beyond.
Nicky faced Simon across a small, round, polished table. He looked grave and a little forbidding.
“Nicky,” he said quietly, “before we proceed any further, I want you to tell me one thing. Are you in love with Michael?”
She looked him in the face, and said “Yes” defiantly, but her eyes fell before that disconcerting look of his.
Unexpectedly he smiled.
“You never were a good liar,” he told her, and an unfamiliar tenderness had crept into his voice. Looking at him, she saw there was a hint of silver in his dark hair that she hadn’t noticed before, and she put her hands behind her back and gripped them so tightly together that the nails hurt her flesh.
“I don’t understand why you’ve come after me,” she said in a high, hard voice. “You never did have any opinion of me, Simon, did you? After all it’s only to be expected that I should run out on you in the end. Just cheating.”
He looked at her steadily.
“What’s hurt you so badly, Nicolette?” he asked gently.
The quaint variation of her name which only Simon had ever used struck her with pain. It was so long since he had called her that. He saw her face quiver suddenly, and said:
“Do you honestly want to leave me?”
She looked him straight in the eyes:
“Yes,” she said, “I do.”
For a moment he hesitated. Had Mary been wrong after all? This was the Nicky he knew and understood, the Nicky who had always defied him for marrying her.
“Why?” he asked her then.
“Well,” she said on a deep breath, “the best reason is that you were crazy to marry me. You never loved me, so you hadn’t any right to marry me just out of cussedness.”
“On the contrary,” he replied. “I had such a good opinion of you that I never really believed you were fundamentally dishonest. I thought that I could teach you that life lived by the Bredon rule would become impossible for everyone. Like a fool, I imagined that because I loved you I could break down the traditions of generations. You proved me wrong, Nicky, for I was unable to make you love me.”
She stared at him in silence, and an odd translucent look came into her face.
; “Did you love me?” she asked him, almost in a whisper.
In a moment his face softened.
“I loved you so much that I made one fatal mistake after another,” he said. “Nicky, the other night you told me you were willing to start again. I thought then you were in love with Michael, and I wasn’t prepared to accept a burnt offering under any circumstances. But you don’t love Michael, and you’re coming back, with me tonight.” He straightened his back, and stood looking down at her, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. “We’re going to live very differently, my dear. I’ll take you away—abroad—anywhere you like—until you’re fit and strong again, but after that I’m going back into my father’s business, which will mean living in the north again. My worst mistake of all was taking over Nye. I wasn’t your husband. I was just the man who paid the bills. No doubt you all thought me a mug. You made a fool of me in more ways than one, Nicky, and I asked for it.”
“You never once showed me that you cared at all,” Nicky said, half to herself. “Not once we were married.”
“You didn’t make it very easy,” he said sadly.
The pain in his voice reached her at last and her eyes grew bright with tears.
“There was Stella,” she said.
“Stella?”
“She told me—she told me that if it hadn’t been for me you would have married her,” Nicky said not daring to raise her eyes for fear of what she might read in his face.
He moved then and came around the little table and stood close to her.
“Look at me, Nicky,” he said, and when at last she raised her eyes, he saw her lashes were wet and heavy as she stood blinking back the tears. “There has only been you all my life,” he said very gently. “I’ve been clumsy and often stupidly blind. I haven’t got that easy way with the small things of life, but I love you, Nicky, and the waiting has been very lonely.”
“But I’m no use to you,” she cried with anguish. “I can’t even have children...”
“I know,” he said, and held out both hands to her.
She saw them tremble. Quite suddenly she could fight no longer, and she was in his arms sobbing out the story of that pitiful adventure.
“It’s you I love!” she cried. “It’s you I’ve loved all the time!”
As he held her, trembling, she felt a surge of love, of desire. And she knew she had come home.
It seemed a long time later that there came a banging on the door and Michael’s voice called:
“I’m going out to the car, Nick. I’ll give you five minutes.”
They went out together into the bright sunlight where Michael sat at the wheel of his car.
“You’ll have to take my luggage out again,” Nicky said.
“I never put it in,” he said and gave her his sudden grin. The car began to move.
She watched the car growing smaller and smaller in the distance and for a moment the old vagrant spirit caught her. She had an instant’s vision of the ghost of herself rollicking over the world with Charles and Michael into a nameless future, and she flung up one hand in a last salute.
A wagon-load of hay lumbered slowly by, the sweating horses steaming in the summer heat, and the last small cloud of dust was hidden from her sight.
