by Sara Seale
"Mark, won't you ever give in?" she pleaded, with one last attempt at breaking down his resolution.
"No, Gina," he said steadily.
She gave a little hopeless shrug. "And I can't," she said in exhausted tones.
"I can do nothing to help you, child. You must fight it out for yourself," he told her gravely.
"I have, and I think I'm right."
"And I know you're serving a false ideal."
She stared at him dumbly with eyes that were dark, and drowned with tears, then with another little shrug she quietly left the room.
CHAPTER XIV
I
MARK went back to London early the next morning, and Gina drove him to the station. They had scarcely spoken on the way, and now she stood beside him on the platform longing for, and yet dreading, the arrival of the train. It was cold and raw, and they began to walk up and down.
"Have you definitely turned me down, Mark?" Gina said at last, approaching the subject with difficulty.
"Isn't it rather the other way round?" he replied.
"Then you won't even consider it?" She was talking in stiff, unnatural little sentences.
"My dear, how can I?"
"Quite easily if you really want me."
"That's not very kind. I'm suffering every bit as much as you, Gina—" He stood still, and turned to look directly at her. "If there was a genuine barrier to our marriage, I would consent to your becoming my mistress, but the reason you put up as a bar can't, in my eyes, possibly justify such an action. Please try, my darling child, to see it from my point of view, which honestly is the only sane one."
She stood looking at the ground, her hands in the pockets of her old tweed coat. "I see, Mark," she said quietly. "Here's your train."
He found an empty carriage, and stood leaning out of the window and looking down at her. Her face wore that white stony look he knew so well.
"Take care of yourself," he said. "Eat proper meals and rest that foot."
"I always eat proper meals," she said mechanically.
Doors were being slammed now, and he held out his hand. "Only au revoir," he said. "I'll be down next weekend. Perhaps you'll have changed 5rour views by then."
She slowly shook her head, then, putting her hand suddenly in his, she said urgently:
"Write to me, Mark. Please write to me so that I'll have just something of you to myself."
The hardness had gone from her face, leaving it young and desperate and pinched with misery.
"Of course I'll write—this very day," he said quickly.
"Gina, you poor child, I wish I could help you—Good bye, darling—"
The train began to move, and she released his hand and stood motionless, looking up the line until the last carriage had disappeared in the distance.
His letter, when it came, was long, and he had tried to go over the whole situation again in detail, but Gina realized finally that she would never convert him to her own point of view, and she abandoned the idea of putting her own case again on paper.
The week dragged on uneventfully, and on Thursday Sebastian received a letter from a song agent enclosing a cheque for twenty-five guineas. They had managed to place two dance tunes for him, and he Was wild with excitement.
"Didn't I tell you, Ginny?" he cried, waving the cheque aloft. "Now I'll treat you to a holiday, though why you couldn't let Teacher pay when he was perfectly willing to, beats me. It seems just wanton waste of opportunity."
Gina smiled. "Darling Sebastian! Will you really spend it that way? There's nothing I should like better just at this moment."
"Yes, you do look peaky—whatever that may mean," said Sebastian. "Well, back to Ballyskillen we will go and stay as long as the money lasts. It ought to be enough, oughtn't it?"
"Tons," she agreed. "Why, twenty-five guineas is a lot of money—or does one say twenty-five guineas are a lot of money?—Anyway, the farm was cheap enough, and there's nothing to spend it on when you get there. It's really only the fare that's expensive. That'll cost us about twenty pounds for two returns, which leaves five pounds over. We could stay a fortnight."
They spent their whole time discussing ways and means and consulting maps.
"Though why we look at maps, I can't think. We aren't going to explore Ireland," Gina remarked.
"You always look at maps when you go to foreign parts," said Sebastian. "Besides, it's fun."
On Friday, Gina waited nervously for Mark's arrival, and when he came she searched his face anxiously, almost as if she had expected him to have changed since Monday. He looked rather tired, and his shrewd eyes examined her inquiringly when he first saw her, but his greeting was usual enough, and, although she longed to go to him and fling her arms about his neck, her nervousness vanished.
She told him almost at once of the proposed holiday, and couldn't quite make out his expression as he listened.
"Julie says we can go, so there's nothing to do now but take our tickets. We've already written to the Caseys. They took us in before," she told him excitedly. "It will be so lovely to get back and away from everything."
"Yes, it's probably a very good plan as things are," he agreed. "Otherwise it might have been wiser to have waited till Easter and some better weather."
"It always rains in Ireland anyhow," said Gina. She looked at him a little doubtfully. "Don't you want me to go, Mark?"
He hesitated, and stood jingling his keys in his pocket, without looking at her. "It isn't that exactly—" he began slowly "—but I get the absurd feeling that when you're in Ireland, Gina, you somehow elude me. It sounds silly. I can't explain—I felt it when I came to fetch you back from Ballyskillen in December—I'm afraid all the time of losing you."
He looked up suddenly, and smiled a little apologetically, and Gina felt the tears sting her eyes.
"Oh, Mark," she said softly. "You need never be afraid of losing me—never. How could I—" She stopped and suddenly ran over to him and put her arms round him.
"I can't bear you not to touch me," she said, her lips against his. "Darling, darling, you won't stop loving me because I can't—"
For a moment he held her to him, then he gently disengaged her hands.
"Swetheart, listen to me," he said quietly. "I can't possibly make love to you in my own house if you don't mean to marry me. Do you understand, Gina?"
She looked up at him, her green eyes widening in dismay. "But how can you help it now we know we love each other?" she asked naively, and he smiled.
"It's very difficult not to, certainly," he admitted. "But you can't have your cake and eat it."
"You told me that last week-end," she said quickly. "You're terribly hard, Mark."
He looked suddenly rather old. "Do you think that's altogether fair? You used to tell me I was just."
"I think just people sometimes are hard."
"Gina—all my life I've had to look ahead for the future rather than live in the present," he told her after a slight pause. "I think you know that I had next to nothing as a young man, and such income as I have now has only been achieved by hard work coupled with the fact that I was always looking ahead. When I would like to have married, I couldn't afford to, and now—You see, that sort of life often gives one a reputation for hardness, but I've learnt by now that if you can't have a thing, the only way is to cut it right out. Is that being hard, do you think?"
She drew away from him, and her young mouth was still bitter. "You may have learnt to live that way, Mark, but I haven't," she said in a flat voice. "I don't think that life's so simple that one can cheerfully do without any sort of happiness just for a principle,"
He looked at her, pityingly. "My dear, it isn't just a principle," he said gently. "It's common sense as well."
"I understand. I'll try to remember," she said quietly, and began discussing the Irish project with him.
"Twenty-five pounds seems awfully little to rely on for two people," he said once. "I wish you'd let me supplement it."
"Gu
ineas," she corrected gravely. "We shall have plenty. Don't spoil it, Mark. It's the first time we've ever paid for anything ourselves."
"Well, will you promise me that if you get in any difficulties you'll let me know 'at once."
"I believe you're quite worried about us," she said with a smile.
"I want that promise, Gina, before I let you go," he said seriously.
"It's yours, willingly."
"No nonsense about being under an obligation to me, or anything?"
"I've learnt that isn't important, Mark. You see, I love you."
His lips tightened. The situation was almost unbearable. "I'm glad you no longer mind," was all he could think of to reply.
II
It was decided that Sebastian and Gina should start on Thursday.
Mark came to see them off by the boat train, and filled Gina's arms with magazines and chocolates.
"Don't let Sebastian lead you off on some wild-goose chase this time," he said half-seriously. "And don't forget that promise, should anything go wrong."
"What should go wrong?" she said, laughing. "You talk as though we're going to the ends of the earth!"
"Perhaps you are as far as I'm concerned," he said a little cryptically. "Look after her, Sebastian."
"Ginny looks after herself," replied Sebastian. He got into the train and settled himself in a corner of their carriage with a box of Gina's chocolates.
"Gina—you'll let me know how you are?" Mark said.
"Of course."
"Often?"
She nodded, but suddenly felt she couldn't speak. There was something momentous in this parting with Mark. She wished suddenly that she wasn't going.
"You won't get ill while I'm away, will you?" she inquired anxiously.
"I'll try not to. And you—don't go falling into bogs or anything dangerous."
"I won't."
"And, Gina—think things over again in the peace and quietness of your own country, will you?"
They stood together in the noise and shifting movement of Euston Station. Gina, continually jostled by the hurrying people, was aware of nothing but Mark's tall figure, his strong, sensitive face, his grey eyes that were just a little bit weary, and she felt her throat contract sharply.
"I want you to be happy," she cried instinctively.
"You are all my happiness," he said.
"Oh, Mark, I love you so."
"But not enough to sink your pride."
She looked at him with startled eyes. "What do you mean?"
"Isn't it a queer sort of pride that makes you refuse to allow Sebastian as well as yourself to be dependent on me?"
"But I'm thinking of you!" she exclaimed. "I won't let you be made use of, sponged on—hurt."
"Well, think it over.—You ought to get in now, my dear. You're due to start in three minutes."
The guard was shouting his warning, doors were slammed, heads thrust out of windows.
Gina gave Mark a quick glance, then threw her arms round his neck and hugged him passionately.
"Good-bye, darling, darling," she said, then releasing him abruptly, she turned and got into her carriage.
"If anything happens to me, I bequeath Dogsbody to Sweeny," she called to Mark.
He stared at her without speaking, then came to the window and stood there looking up at her.
"Gina—you'll come back?—You promise?" he cried with an odd kind of despefation in his voice.
"Of course I'll come back!" she said, and the train began to move. She hung far out of the window, waving until she had long ago ceased to distinguish him among the crowd of people on the platform, then she pulled up the window, and sat down opposite her brother.
"We're free!" shouted Sebastian, his mouth full of chocolate creams. "We're free of the dirty English! Erin go brah!"
III
Ballyskillen was wrapped in mist when they arrived, and it remained like that nearly all the time they were there.
Every day they walked for miles through the wet heather, the soft Irish rain falling gently on their glowing faces, and the rich peat caking their boots. The days went by, each one like the last, but they never knew what day it was—in Ireland there is very little sense of time. They ate when they were hungry, stopping at any poor farmhouse for a taste of potato-cake and tea, and slept long and dreamlessly in their hard little beds at Casey's.
Sebastian was completely happy for the time being, but Gina felt restless. Ireland was too sad a country to comfort her in her own sadness, and she was torn with doubts 'as to the wisdom of her decision.
She loved Mark so completely that there was no room for the trivial likes and dislikes which went to make up Sebastian's life; and how, if she loved him, could she harbour the kind of pride which could stand between them? Yet he had said she didn't love him enough to sink that pride.
For the first time she began to query the honesty of her own motive in refusing to marry him. Wasn't he right perhaps when he had said that it was pride which made her shrink from allowing her brother as well as herself to be dependent on him? Unhappily she argued with herself, night after night, listening to the softly pattering rain on the roof, and the occasional plaintive cry of plover. She might deny herself happiness for the sake of a false ideal, but what right had she to deny him? She would remember his face when he had said, "You are all my happiness," and bury her own in her pillow and cry herself to sleep.
She received frequent letters from him. Friendly, dispassionate little notes containing odd scraps of news which he thought might interest her.
"Julie is to be married on May 8th. . . . Dogsbody has killed one of Sweeny's hens under the dining-room table. ... There is a rumour that the Evan-Pratt engagement will be announced shortly. . . ."
Gina smiled at this. So Nancy had got her man in the end! She supposed they would be married in a year's time with full pomp and ceremony and then settle down to a polite married existence together, with babies appearing at discreet intervals.
She had a brief vision of herself as wife to Evan, and laughed at the prospect. She would have had very little satisfaction out of giving to him. But bearing children to Mark would be proud and thrilling. To create something for him from the patience and labour of her own body would bring the only true satisfaction of giving she could ever know, and she realized clearly that by denying him herself in the only way in which he would take her, she was denying them both all meaning in life.
She pulled a pad and pencil towards her, and sitting on the floor by the fire, began to write a letter to Mark. . . .
Sebastian came in a little later, flinging his wet mackintosh over a chair, and threw a letter to Gina.
"Doyle's coming to see us this afternoon," he announced. "He's awfully sorry he missed us going through Dublin. He wants to put up a new scheme."
Gina looked up dreamily from her pad. "Does he? What a bore," she said vaguely. "Tell Mrs. Casey we'll be extra then."
She began to read over the last sheet:
". . . so you see I've decided you were right after all. I'll marry you, Mark, with all my heart, and if I can give you what you want most in life, my own reasoning will be proved utterly false. I love you so much that nothing matters except your happiness—nothing in all the world but you. . . ."
She wrote a few more lines and signed her name, then, borrowing her brother's mackintosh, went out into the wet to post her letter.
Fred Doyle arrived after lunch, as freckled and noisily cheerful as ever, and he greeted Sebastian with every semblance of delight.
"Aren't you the very boy I was wanting?" he exclaimed, shaking him warmly by the hand, "I've a proposition to put up to you, me lad. Tell me, did you go back to your buks the last time I saw you?"
"Oh, yes, and I got through," replied Sebastian. "I'm going up to Oxford after Easter."
"You are, now?" said Doyle, frankly disappointed. "Isn't that the great shame? I had a neat little scheme that would make us both some money and. give you a chance to write yo
ur stuff. Have you been doing anything with it of late?"
Gina, warm and snug in her secret knowledge, listened comfortably while Sebastian spoke of his work, and outlined his vague hopes for the future, but she became alarmed as the talk proceeded, and Doyle, describing his proposition with a wealth of 'alluring detail, found a ready listener in her brother.
Sebastian was just beginning to get the smallest degree bored with his holiday. He was tired of continual days in the rain with no one but herself for companion, and he was always complaining of the fact that there was no piano in the house and he couldn't try out new compositions. Doyle, with his wild-cat scheme of running a small revue in Dublin, consisting of his lyrics, Sebastian's music and an orchestra composed of out-of-work Irish musicians, fired his imagination immediately.
"All we need is a little capital to start the show," Doyle finished. "We have the old Playhouse cinema promised us at a low rent, and Mick Boyle will be responsible for the artistes. I thought perhaps the English lawyer might be interested in the financial side."
"Mark wouldn't put up any money for that sort of thing," Gina said immediately. "It would be waste of time to ask him, Sebastian."
"I don't see why not," Sebastian replied obstinately. "It sounds a grand scheme to me."
"It would," said Gina sarcastically. "And when the next grand scheme came along and you decided you'd had enough of this one, Mark would have lost his money."
"Why should he lose his money?" demanded Doyle truculently. "It's a very good business offer. We only need to get started, and the money will come rolling in. He'd get his own bit back in less than a year."
Gina gave him an eloquent look, but said nothing, and Sebastian broke in impatiently:
"You always pour cold water on any scheme I have for making money, Ginny, and then you turn round and curse me when I talk of sitting at home in comfort. What do you want? I don't know what's happened to you 'at all. Last summer you were on my side and telling me to stick to jazz, and now you've completely changed."
