by Susan Barrie
Dear Philip,
By the time you get this I shall have gone away. Thank you for all you've done, but I realise now that I shouldn't have married you—or I shouldn't have let you marry me! Don't worry about me. I shall be quite all right, and I'll send you an address as soon as I have one. But please don't try to interfere with what I am doing.
Lindsay.
The letter written, she sealed it in its envelope. Then, in her stockinged feet, she opened her door and crept like a shadow down to the darkened salon, and placed it in a prominent position on the desk. Then she returned to her room to wait for the first signs of daylight.
She had made up her mind to take nothing with her except her handbag, and to reach the inn and have breakfast there while she waited for the bus. The inn people scarcely knew her, so they would not be too surprised, and in any case it didn't greatly matter.
She kept telling herself that nothing greatly mattered, and as at the moment she was numb, and moving like an automaton, nothing really did matter.
But as she sat waiting for the light to increase she suddenly remembered that she had said nothing to Philip about not wanting any of her things. What she needed in future she would buy herself, and all the lovely things that Alison had chosen could go back to Alison if he wished. Or he could do what he liked with them.
The letter had to be recovered, and the postscript added before it was too late, and with a breathless feeling that she was running a race with Time itself she once more stole down to the salon. But now it was no longer wrapped in darkness; someone up at an early hour had been in and drawn back the curtains. A faint light —the first real light of day—was stealing in and falling across the desk where she had left her letter. But the letter was no longer propped up before an inkstand, and someone was seated at the desk. A man was crouching there with his head on his arms, and there was something painfully still and appallingly despairing in his attitude which shocked her out of all her self-pity; and feeling that the last hours had been part of an unreal nightmare and that the only real thing in the whole wide world just then was Philip —Philip for some reason bowed upon the desk—she rushed forward to kneel at his side.
"Philip!" She put out a hand and urgently touched his arm. "Oh, Philip, what is it?" she pleaded.
He stirred, lifted his head and looked down at her. She was shocked to make the discovery that his face was quite grey, and there was a curious blankness about his eyes.
"Oh!" he said, rather dully. "So it's you!"
"Philip—" Her eyes were imploring, and her fingers caught at and clung to his sleeve. "Won't you tell me what's the matter? Why—why are you down here at all at this hour?" She noticed that he was still wearing his dark trousers and white shirt, with a dressing-gown over them, which suggested that he had never been to bed, and her letter was crushed into a ball in one of his strong, long-fingered hands; but he let it go and it rolled from the desk and into the waste-paper basket even as she watched.
"Philip!" Her voice was a hoarse whisper. "I didn't mean you to have that—yet!"
"Didn't you?" She noticed that his greyness had spread to his lips, and they were almost ashen, but his eyes were suddenly hard. "So you blame me for marrying you, do you? I should have left you for Temsen? Is that what you mean?"
She recoiled as if he had hit her.
"Oh, Philip, of course not! Philip—you couldn't think that?"
"What else should I think?"
She was appalled. That he should imagine she was leaving him for Dane Temsen did something to her that made her feel almost abject. And looking up at him and meeting all the dull hostility of his look, seeing the rigid set of his lips, that frightening greyness of his face, her love for him burst its bonds, and without caring what he thought of her she caught his arm in both her hands, and words poured from her almost without her volition.
"Philip, I'd never leave you for anyone—anyone!.—only I can't stay with you if you don't—want me! I know all about Alison— the contessa told me about her—and if you're regretting things already, if you wish you'd waited to marry her instead of me, I don't mind! I'll understand perfectly. I'd never stand in your way, Philip—I couldn't! And that's why I thought it best to go away. I thought it would be easier for us both."
"What?" he asked, and it seemed to her as if he was coming slowly to life. "What are you trying to tell me, Lindsay?"
"Only that—" She swallowed, and her fingers clung convulsively to his sleeve. "Only that I can't stay with you if you— don't want me!"
Philip's greyness was passing, and it was plain that he was trying to get things into focus. He caught hold of her by her slender shoulders, and she thought he was going to shake her, in very much the same fashion that a terrier shakes a rat, for there was impatience mixed up with his determination to get at the truth, and in those moments he did not quite realise what he was doing.
"Lindsay, what are you talking about? What do you mean when you say that I don't want you?"
"Well, do you?" She was almost voiceless.
"What do you think I married you for?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
She shook her head. This time her voice failed her altogether, and as his vigour flowed back into him her strength seemed to ebb. Her head drooped and the shoulders he grasped were drooping, too, as if bent by a load of uncertainty and yearning that was too much for her.
He stood up and drew her with him, taking her over to the window where he could see her face clearly. He stood looking down into it for so long that the sudden pallor of it became dyed with a faint pink flush, and her eyes hung upon his appealingly. At last, a little hoarsely, he said to her.
"Do you know that last night you almost tried me beyond my strength? When you caught hold of my hand, and then started to cry…! Oh, Lindsay—" taking a long, deep breath—"if you only knew how much, and how badly, I've wanted you ever since you became my wife!… And for weeks before that I was just living for the moment when you would be my wife, terrified continually lest something should happen to set you back—to prevent your getting completely well and strong again! I endured a nightmare when you were critically ill, when no-one knew whether you would live or not, and after that I vowed that nothing—nothing!— should be allowed to prevent your having every chance to become your old self again! Certainly not my own desire to love you as every man craves to love the woman he adores!"
Lindsay stood looking up at him with a sudden light in her eyes that made them appear enormous. Her lips trembled.
"Oh, Philip!" she whispered.
"And then you write me a letter like—like that!" He turned and stared at the waste-paper basket.
Suddenly all the nightmare hours she had stayed awake through during the night, the shock of finding him with his head upon the desk, the unbelievable wonder of hearing him say all that he had just said to her, became too much for her, and she started to weep silently. He turned to her and his arms went round her and he held her close, his fingers gently stroking her hair. And all the time he could feel her clinging to him as if she could not bear to let him go, could not bear to go out of his arms.
"Darling, I'll never let you go again," he promised her at last.
"I think we've both waited far, far too long, and in my anxiety for you I very nearly drove you to do something that would have wrecked us both! Oh, Lindsay, my darling, forgive me!"
He picked her up in his arms, carried her out into the veranda, and sat down with her in one of the big basket chairs. He rested his cheek on hers while he cradled her up against him and looked out over the garden at the sun that was making a rising golden splendour of everything—flowers, the tall cypress trees, the winding paths that led to the lake. They were both blissfully still and blissfully silent, while the warmth of the early morning poured over them and seeped into the very heart of their beings, dissolving away the last, faint traces of doubt and uncertainty that still clung to the edge of their happiness.
&nbs
p; At last, Lindsay stirred, and looked into the face so near her own, and she whispered:
"And it isn't true about Alison?"
Philip looked down at her with worshipping eyes, but he shook his head at her reproachfully.
"Oh Lindsay, what a goose you are! As if I would have endured so much for you, whilst breaking my heart for Alison! But," more soberly, "I think I was unwise to bring you here. I never thought that my godmother would talk to you as she did. She knows as well as Alison and I both do that, although once upon a time, when I was very young, I did want to marry Alison, I was completely cured when she married someone else, and the fact that we've kept in touch all these years simply means that we're genuinely fond of each other—as Alison now is of you! She wanted me to marry you; she knew that if anything had happened to you I wouldn't have survived that blow as I survived her. She knew, in fact—"
"Yes?" she whispered.
"Oh, we won't discuss it." His face seemed to become very fine-drawn, and the eyes went very dark, as if there were some things he couldn't bear to look back on. "Whenever I think of you and the days—and the nights!—when you were ill, I wonder how I survived in any case! They were days I wouldn't care to live over again."
"Oh, Philip," she breathed, and gently touched his face.
He caught her hand and held it against his cheek.
"And that is all you want to know—about Alison?"
She remembered the day that he had asked her to fill Alison's room at the Windrush with flowers, and she reminded him of it.
"I thought," she confessed, her face half-hidden against him, "that you must be—very interested in her!"
He smiled whimsically above the soft gold of her hair.
"Naturally I wanted to make her welcome," he conceded, "but it is possible I also wanted to discover whether, loathing me as you did at that time, you could be made just a little bit jealous."
"I never loathed you, Philip," she told him, her whole body suddenly racked with a kind of anguish that he should even imagine that she had. "I was frightened of you, I think, and at first I resented you—and you made me feel young and incompetent! But it was just a kind of antagonism between us. It wasn't—it never could be!—loathing, or even a very real dislike. Oh, Philip, it couldn't'."—clutching at him with tense fingers.
"And now?" he asked, putting his own fingers under her chin and lifting it, so that he could look deep into her eyes.
"Now—" he saw how her lips quivered—"now, I—"
"Wait a moment," he said softly. "Don't tell me until I've helped you to get the whole thing thoroughly clear in your mind and completely sorted out. Then you can tell me!"
And before she quite realised what he was proposing to do he bent his head, and his lips fastened on hers and remained fastened to them so long that everything else—even the power to think of anything at all—became blotted out. There was only one sensation she was capable of just then, and that was a sensation of ecstasy—wonderful, undreamed-of ecstasy. And when at last he lifted his head, her eyes were so huge and misted with happiness that he simply held her quietly and strongly until he could feel the trembling response of her body become stilled. And then he questioned with almost a touch of gravity:
"Well?"
Lindsay answered as if she was still bemused, a faint, tremulous smile curving her lips:
"You're my sun, moon and stars, Philip," she told him, as if it was a relief to unburden herself at last of the suppressed agony of loving him. "Without you, life would be nothing—just an… an empty void. If ever you stopped loving me, Philip, or went away from me, I think I would die…" She reached up and ran her hand gently down the line of his cheek.
He caught it and carried it to his lips.
"If ever I stopped loving you, my darling, or went away from you, I think I would die myself! Does that satisfy you?"
"Yes," she whispered and wound her arms about him. "Oh yes, Philip."
"Can't you call me anything but Philip?" he asked her, smiling down into her blue eyes.
She smiled back at him, lovingly, adoringly.
"Dear Philip," she responded, "dearest Philip—darling Philip!"
His kiss this time left her with no opportunity to recognise anything but the depth and urgency of his love.
