“Don’t say such things!” he interrupted almost angrily. “I won’t have anyone say such things of the woman I love. They’re not true, anyway—any more than those absurd, self-pitying phrases in that odious letter of mine were true.”
“Some of them were,” she murmured.
“None of them,” he insisted. “When I received your letter—”
“Oh, Nicholas I you did get it, then?”
“But only yesterday, tragically late. And every dear and warm and generous sentence in it was a reproach to me. So utterly different from the way I wrote to you. And when you were ill, too! though I didn’t know that. How can you ever forgive me?”
“Very easily. If you can forgive me too.”
“Come, darling, and sit beside me.” He drew her down on to a sofa. Then he deliberately unfastened the chain round her neck and released the ring. “May I put it where it really belongs?” He took her left hand lightly in his.
“If you’re sure—if you’re absolutely sure—”
“Of what, my dear?”
“That you can trust me to be generous and sensible and understanding, and never, never, never to be jealous and unreasonable again.”
“It isn’t I who needs to be reassured, Mary.” He slipped the ring on her finger and put her hand to his lips. “Are you sure that you want a temperamental, unpredictable opera singer for a husband?”
“I want you,” Mary said. “That’s all. It’s quite simple. Like all great truths.”
“I don’t deserve it,” he said humbly. “At least, I don’t think I do,” and he smiled at her with that sudden quirk of humour which had first endeared him to her.
“Of course you do,” she insisted. “Or if not, I don’t deserve my happiness either. For we’ve both made mistakes, Nicholas dear, and both have something to forgive. Let the reproaches and the remorse cancel out each other.”
“Which is a way of saying—let the past bury the past,” he said, smiling as he took her in his arms again. “It’s the future that matters, and the future is ours, Mary—all of it.”
Then he looked beyond her with an expression of extraordinary tranquillity, and in that moment she was nearly sure that he said a final good-bye to his unhappy past—senza rancor.
Unbidden Melody Page 17
