“I—love Dani?” Burke stepped back sharply from this accusation. “I never loved Dani!”
“You took the girl about! D’you think no one knew that down here? The girl’s mother bragged right and left about her precious daughter’s courtship.”
“I never loved Dani!” A nerve was pulsing hard in Burke’s jaw as he stared down at his grandfather. “I admired her beauty, valued her friendship, but I never wanted more than friendship from her. When I saw that she was giving me more, I—I ended our association. The only excuse I can offer is that I thought her too beautiful and popular to feel the loss of one boy friend for very long—my cynicism, you see, just couldn’t be dented in those days by any real belief in the substance of—love.” Burke half shrugged his wide shoulders, his eyes gone dark blue as his self-contempt clouded them. “I’ve learned since that the strongest wall of cynicism can fall, and don’t think I haven’t been punished for giving Dani stones to eat!”
For a long moment Burke stared at the library windows, listening to the rain and the raw moan of the lonely winds he had thrust Rea out in ...
His eyes came back to his grandfather’s face he went on: “I couldn’t see Dani’s boy thrust into an orphanage, and I thought it a wonderful stroke of luck when I met Rea—there’s an air of innocence about Rea that could make of any deception a reality, and I knew you’d be deceived by it, that you’d accept Peter without question when you saw him in—in Rea’s arms.”
“Clever of you!” Mr. Ryeland’s face was a livid mask above the claret of his dinner-jacket. “You’ve always thought yourself mighty clever, haven’t you—above being a mere farmer? Well,” the old man drew his thin, trembling body up very straight, the pinched whiteness about his nostrils sharpening and making suddenly cruel the hawk-like fashioning of his nose, "Well, this place doesn’t need you. I can employ a land-agent to do what you do, give service without love. King’s Beeches doesn’t need you—just as that girl doesn’t need you—nor I!” With a swift, contemptuous gesture, Mr. Ryeland snapped his fingers in Burke’s face. “Nor I!” “What of the boy?” Burke stared hard into his grandfather’s glacial eyes. “The law has now made me his father. What if I take him away? What there be left for you, apart from this house, this mere mass of bricks and mortar? Much as you love this house, can you hold it in your arms and hear it laugh and see it grow from day to day? Can you say with real honesty that you hate Peter?”
“I—I—” Old Mr. Ryeland drew back both physically and mentally from this question. “I—he’s Philip’s —” “Yes, he’s Philip’s son,” Burke agreed quietly. “Can you hate him—is it in you to hate him, to thrust to one side, when you know that Phil’s blood flows in him and that Phil’s love for King’s Beeches has probably been bequeathed to him? Dare you hate him and thereby persecute yourself to loneliness?”
“Be quiet!” The harsh command rang out loudly in the library, rang out almost with hysteria above the drumming of rain upon the windows, the deep beat of the pendulum clock upon the wall, the hiss of the bright burning logs in the fireplace ...
“Dare you?” Burke insisted. “Dare you shut Peter, along with me, outside that—that citadel of Ryeland pride you dwell in? If that’s to be the way of it, I’ll take the boy away. I’ll take him tonight—”
Faded blue eyes, full of pain and anger, warred with the sapphire eyes of Burke . . . The Ryeland eyes, that had been Philip’s ...
“No!” The word broke sharply in the room. “No!” The sharp-boned shoulders slowly lost some of their tautness and the anger began to drain out of the hawk face. “We’re fools, the pair of us, shouting at one another. The boy stays here, of course he does.” The white brows flickered, the faded blue eyes sharply examined Burke’s face. “You both stay—of course you do. I—I spoke in anger a moment ago. Anger that you couldn’t have told me the truth, for though the things I’ve learned tonight have hurt me, I can’t lose that little lad upstairs.”
“Dani was his mother,” Burke reminded him crisply. “If you hadn’t taken it into your head to dislike her because she was lovely in a wild, strange way, and because she danced for her living, none of the bitter words we’ve had to speak tonight would ever have been spoken and Phil wouldn’t have thought it wise instead of a folly to keep his marriage a secret. If you can accept Dani, at last, then Peter and I will stay. I don’t want to hurt you more than you have been hurt.”
“I think you would kill me, boy, if you took—if you took the little lad away. I’m not such a man of stone.” The old eyes stared into Burke’s eyes and now they were made humble by regret. “I’m not, y’know. I—God help me—I don’t want to spend the few months I’ve got left in loneliness, though I deserve it—though I deserve it!” One of the old hands came forward and touched Burke’s sleeve. “Dash it, this is your home. You inherit—and a provision always be made in your will about the boy following you, if you want it that way.”
“My home?" Burke’s smile was wry. “Perhaps it might have become that—if I could have kept Rea.” “No longer a house bondage, eh, if you could have kept that palehaired chit?” The old eyes swept over Burke’s face with sudden shrewdness. “But, my boy, the marriage was a farce altogether, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You damn young fool, no wonder she’s left you! French blood in your veins, too.”
Burke received this with wryly lifted brows. Jack Larchmont burst out laughing.
At once Mr. Ryeland swung round upon him, harsh anger back in his face. “Get out of my house Larchmont!” he ordered. “Walk out, now, before I have my dogs chase you out.”
“Oh, I’m going, don’t you fret yourself.” Still laughing a little, Jack walked to the open door, but at the door he turned a moment. He said to Burke: “You were mighty surprised that I knew about Dani and Philip, weren’t you, Ryeland?”
“Naturally.” Burke’s face was contemptuous. “I should have thought you’d have resorted to blackmail. What was holding you back? Peter’s story was a real plum for you—why did you hesitate to pluck it?” “Perhaps I didn’t hesitate!” Jack retorted, looking at once insolent and enigmatic. Then he went from the library, leaving the door wide open behind him.
Burke stood like a stone man, watching Tolliver in the hall with Jack, helping on with his shabby raincoat. Then Tolliver walked with Jack to the front door and a moment later it clapped shut on Jack’s departure.
“Perhaps I didn’t hesitate!” The words beat in Burke’s brain, and he was seeing Rea’s face again, as it had looked that afternoon—white, fearful, tormented! God, had he made a mistake about the white fear her face had worn? He had thought it borne there because he had caught her stealing back from her meeting with Jack . . .
“Perhaps I didn’t hesitate!”
Then Burke started violently as a hand touched his shoulder. He swung round, staring at his grandfather. “Boy,” Mr. Ryeland said, “where’s the girl gone, back to London?” He shook Burke’s shoulder impatiently. “If that’s it, go after her! The earliest train she can catch is the eight-forty-five.”
“I—” Burke’s blue eyes were suddenly boyishly diffident. “I don’t think she loves me, sir. I told her to go,
you see, and she went. I think she was glad to run from all the lies . . . How Rea hated all those lies! She said, right at the beginning of things, that I should tell you the truth—or what I thought of as the truth at the time. God, does there ever come a time when we human creatures stop making mistakes? The mistakes I’ve made! How do I ever remedy them?”
“Go to the station.” Burke’s grandfather gave a push. “If you don’t, boy, you may be making the biggest mistake you ever made!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THAT old man, Jack thought, trudging in the rain down the drive of King’s Beeches. That old man, talking as though God did recompense for losses! Jack held his face to the rain and he was near the gates when Burke’s grey car screeched to a halt beside him. Burke flung open the car door to yell at hi
m: “Jump in! I’ll drop you off at the farmhouse.”
“No, thanks,” Jack said.
“But it’s on my way—”
“To the railway station?” Jack’s smile was totally without humour. “And you feel you can be generous, eh, to a blackmailer?”
“Quite truthfully, Larchmont,” Burke said, “I’d like to wring your neck.”
“And then you remember that last night I saved Rea’s life and once again you feel you can be generous.” The reflections from the headlights lit Jack’s thin, handsome face, splashed with rain and cynical with self-mockery. “Sir Galahad,” he drawled, “you shouldn’t be streaking, to your knightly errand in that very modern racer. You should be sitting high and wide on a white charger.” His taunting grin came and went. “I thought of the railway station a good half hour ago—but then I had inside information, didn’t I?”
“You’re a swine!” Burke retorted succinctly. Then he slammed shut the door of the car and shot forward into the night.
It took Burke twenty minutes to reach the railway station, and when he strode into the waiting-room, very wet and very angry with the night and himself and the whole wretched web of intrigue he had involved Rea in,
he was looking strangely unlike himself. He stared round the waiting-room, his eyes a blind, shocked blue, for the room held only a fume-belching oil-stove and a snore-racked farmer in muddied leggings and boots. There was no Rea, with her fringe tumbling above her wide eyes. No Rea—
He swung sharply on his heel and made for the ticket office, banging impatiently on the window.
The window shot up and the ticket man eyed Burke irritably from behind rimless spectacles. “What’s all the noise?” he demanded. He wasn’t a Somerset man and the aggression of the town voice seemed to increase for Burke his feeling of unrest. “Where d’you want to go?” “Look,” Burke swept the raindrops from his face as he peered through the window, “I thought the London train didn’t get in til eight-forty-five?”
“Nor it don’t.” The ticket man glanced round at the clock on the wall of his office. “You’ve got another ten minutes. Want a ticket?”
“No.” Burke shook his head. “The fact of the matter is, I thought a young lady might be waiting for the train. Has a young lady been in to buy a ticket?” His wild blue eyes searched the man’s face. “Please—it’s rather important.” “Well, now,” the ticket man rubbed the side of his nose and eyed Burke’s desperation of expression with something of suspicion, “there was a young gel in here — young, thin thing, all eyes—”
“That’s her—that’s Rea” Burke’s eyes lit up and his cry of relief rang round the hollow, damp-smelling station. His hands clasped the sill of the ticket-office window and he seemed ready to shake the sill from its bearings. “How long ago was this—why didn’t she wait?” he demanded.
“Now, now, there’s no need to get so rattled,” retorted the ticket man testily, a slight sneer to his lip that anything male could display so much excitement over that skinny half-drowned creature who had wandered into the station around about seven o’clock and bought a ticket for London. “It’s like this mister. Young Doctor Gresham turned up ’ere about an hour ago, came to collect a parcel he’s been expecting, new microscope or something, and I happened to mention this ’ere gel to him, for she looked kind of queer and ill to me when she bought ’er ticket. So he goes off to the waiting-room, like, just to take a look at ’er, and the next thing I know—he’s carting ’er out of ’ere. And that, mister, was an hour ago.”
“Thanks! Thanks a million!”
“That’s all right—” The words trailed off, for Burke’s tall, black-clad figure was gone, the loud clap-clap-clap of the station doors echoing out behind him, testifying to the whirlwind manner in which he had passed through them.
Burke swung his car out of the station yard and made rapidly for Tab’s house, the other side of the village. He was there in under seven minutes and it was Mrs. Jarrett, Tab’s housekeeper, who answered the door to his imperative rat-tat.
“The doctor isn’t in, dearie, he’s to go over t’road to birth the smithy’s wife’s twins.” She pulled the door open a little wider and as the light showed her the doctor’s caller with more clearness, her kindly, elderly mouth emitted an ‘ooh’ of startled surprise. “You, sir!” she gasped.
“Mrs. Jarret,” Burke’s voice held a tremor, his eyes a plea, “is my wife here?”
There was an old-fashioned horsehair sofa in Tab’s rather old-fashioned parlour, and Rea was curled up on this, gazing into the fire. She had not yet had a real chance to talk to Tab, for immediately on their arrival here from the station, Mrs. Jarret had informed Tab that he was urgently wanted over at the blacksmith’s, where the blacksmith’s wife was on the verge of giving birth to twins. Tab had had to go, but he had exacted a promise from Rea that she would stay in the house, in the warm, until they had talked. And Rea, wearied and damp, and overwhelmingly comforted by Tab’s concern for her, had agreed. In any case, running away to London wouldn’t really have helped matters—and she knew tiredly that in the end she wouldn’t have boarded the train.
With a little moan she turned her face into the leather of the sofa. What was she going to do about Jack—would Tab know what to do about Jack?
She was still lying like that when she heard the parlour door open. She raised her head and glanced round. “Tab—” she began. Then all sound died out of her—the world tilted—for it was at Burke she was gazing. Burke, his hair pasted wetly on his frowning forehead, his eyes fixed upon her as he crossed the shabby, old-fashioned parlour to her. She shrank low in the sofa, but there was no escaping him. His hands came down, found her and pulled her with a certain blindness into his arms. “Don’t be frightened of me, Rea,” he spoke shakily, humbly. “Oh, my dear, why didn’t you tell me Larchmont was blackmailing you? Why did you let me say the things I said to you this afternoon? I’m in hell, remembering—” “You—you know, Burke?” She touched his face, tentatively, as though to make sure he was real and close to her and saying the things he was saying.
“I know, Rea. Grandfather knows. The whole story, and more, came out tonight, and all the lies are finished with.” And swiftly, then, he recounted to her all that had been discovered and said, that night, up at King’s Beeches. When the story drew to a close, Burke at last became aware of how lovingly Rea was craving his neck. Lovingly, her arms sweet and young and close. “Rea, Rea,” he whispered, “can you ever forgive me for doubting you? Can you?”
“I could forgive you anything—everything,” she said simply. “If you killed me in anger it wouldn’t matter, if you did it.”
“If I killed you!” The words blurred against her lips. “I love you—love you!” His shaky murmuring died and his lips were warm in the young hollows beneath her cheekbones, tender against the silken warmth of her throat, ardent and wanting as he found again the trembling gentleness of her mouth. When he finally lifted his head, his sapphire eyes were shimmering, and with his dark, wet hair untidy above them he looked exciting and rakish and slightly dangerous.
“Do—do I know you?” Rea whispered.
Burke gazed down into her eyes, gone drowsy under the storm of kisses. “I’m the man you married,” he murmured. “I’d like to be your husband.”
“Would you?” She gave a breathless little laugh. “I think that could be arranged, you know.”
“Could it really, Rea?” He brushed caressingly at her fair, tumbled fringe; the fringe that made her a child. Yet her eyes, under that fringe, were no longer the child’s eyes he remembered. He was half sorry, yet he was also glad, for now he saw that her eyes had become a woman’s eyes. “I love you, Rea,” he said again, softly. “All the more, I think, because love has been such a long time coming to me.”
“But—Burke—there was Dani Larchmont.” Rea drew back a little from him, her eyes searching his face. “I thought you loved Dani—there was so much regret in you—and pain—”
“Dani
?” His mouth had a sudden wounded look. “Dani was my friend—you are my love. But I hurt Dani, because I couldn’t love her. And in her hurt she turned to Phil, and there was nothing there for her but death, when she bore his child.”
“Oh, Burke,” Rea held him hard, “you couldn’t help it, my dear, that you couldn’t love her. I expect she knew that, really. She wouldn’t want you to go on aching and hurting because of it. I know I shouldn’t.” “You!” He spoke into her throat. “You’re all heart! I can feel your heart, beating against my mouth. Rea, I’m not too old for you, am I? You once asked to be my daughter—”
“Wasn’t I silly?” She smiled and touched the smattering of silver at his temple, a shyness in her, and yet a new self-possession in her as she came to the realization that love turns a girl into a woman, and a man into a boy. “I don’t want to be your daughter now. I’m quite grown up now,” she said.
“When did you grow up, Rea?” She felt his lips move and she knew he smiled.
“That night we were together in London, “ she told him. “I—I kissed you, remember? I tried, afterwards, to tell myself I only kissed you because I was grateful for all your lovely presents. But my heart knew differently. My heart ached all that night. Oh, Burke,” she clung to him, “Burke darling, I love you so much that I’d never try to keep you from doing the things you really want to do. I’d never try to stop you from going to the ends of the earth, if you want to go. I— I’d never chain you.”
“I know that, Rea.” Carefully he sat down on the horsehair sofa with her, holding her so that he could watch her face against his arm. “But I’m never going away from you. All my searching has led me to you and I’m content now; the fever to find is quiet.” He smiled. “Now I shall settle down to be a thoroughly domesticated English gentleman, adored by you, my cows, and my tenants.”
“And little Peter,” she said.
“Little Peter!” She felt Burke’s arms tighten about her. Then he s a i d : “ I want Peter to have King’s Beeches, but not if it’s going to hurt you. We—we may have a boy of our own.”
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