CHAPTER THREE
Hamilton looked down at the girl who lay so still in his arms. “Anna, have I frightened you?”
“No.” It was scarcely more than a whisper.
He touched her cheek with fingers that trembled a little. “When I caught you, you struggled as though you were afraid.”
“Yes, I know. I didn’t understand then.”
“What didn’t you understand, my dearest?”
She looked away across the orchard. “I didn’t understand that I belonged to you.”
He kissed her again at that, but much more gently. “And now you do? And there’s no need to discuss your future with Mr. Orpington because that’s settled. You are mine—always.”
“Always is a long time,” she said, with an odd little touch of sadness. “But I’m yours—for as long as you want me.”
“Anna,” he was distressed at her way of putting it, “why do you say such things? Don’t you understand that I want you for my wife?”
She turned her head and looked full at him: “Are you sure that it is as your wife you want me?”
He flushed a slow, deep red at that. “Well, my God, what other suggestion did you suppose I was making?”
“I didn’t know,” she said quietly. “You said you loved me and that I was yours, that was all.”
He felt indescribably shocked at the calm way she said that. “But, Anna,” his voice was troubled, “what sort of a man do you think I am?”
She looked surprised, and suddenly began to stroke his arm with a little placatory gesture that he found unbearably touching, “I never thought about it. It was only—”
“Well?” he said gently, while he tried not to remember what the village had said of her.
“It was only—I was thinking—it’s so much more important that you should love me than that you should marry me, isn’t it?”
He gave a troubled glance down at her dark head. “Is it?” he said slowly. “I don’t really know.” And for a moment he wondered again whether to trust the innocence of her mouth or fear the wisdom of her eyes.
Then he deliberately shook off his misgivings and said smilingly: “Not that the relative values of love and marriage need worry us, because we’re going to have both.”
“You do know, don’t you,” she said slowly, “that I shall be quite unsuitable as your wife?”
“I know that no other woman will ever seem more suitable to me,” he retorted, with a laugh.
But she didn’t laugh. She looked indescribably grave, and he was conscious of a great desire to hold her and reassure her. Only it seemed that there was very little to say in reassurance, because what he proposed to do was utterly crazy, and quite impossible to explain to nice, conventional people—like his sister and his father, for instance.
Presently they went slowly towards the house, and he knew she shrank a little as they came up to the french windows. He thought the slight pressure of his arm would be sufficient to reassure her, but he didn’t notice that the thin line of her jaw tightened as though she were clenching her teeth.
Both the vicar and his wife looked up as they came in, and Hamilton realised that the first of the difficult explanations was upon him.
He was secretly annoyed that there was a touch of nervousness in his voice as he said: “We shan’t need to discuss Anna’s future after all, Mr. Orpington, because she and I have just settled it.”
Mr. Orpington took off his spectacles and said: “Oh?”—with a touch of something like apprehension; while over his wife’s face there spread an expression of extreme astonishment.
“Anna and I are going to be married,” Hamilton explained coolly, and then, for the life of him, could think of nothing to add to that bald statement.
“Going to be married?” Mrs. Orpington repeated, in a tone of stupefaction; and then, recovering herself, she added hastily: “But what a very sudden engagement.”
“My dear Roone—” began the vicar rather helplessly. “Well, Anna, this is a very wonderful end to your troubles.”
But he didn’t look as though he thought it at all wonderful, and to Hamilton—who was used to approval greeting most, things he did—it was odd and a little embarrassing to realise how appalled the Orpingtons actually were.
“Suppose we sit down and talk this over,” said Mr. Orpington.
“There isn’t much really to talk over,” Hamilton’s pleasant mouth set firmly, and his usually smiling grey eyes looked cool and very determined. “All we want is to have you marry us by special licence just as soon as it can be managed.”
“You don’t think it would be wiser to wait a little?” began the vicar.
“No.” Hamilton’s tone was final. “I see no point in waiting. Anna and I know what we want.” And he turned his head and smiled at Anna. She tightened her hand nervously on his arm, but she didn’t smile.
“There’s nothing to stop us—Anna is of age. You told me you were twenty, didn’t you?”
“I’m twenty-one now,” Anna, said, speaking for the first time.
“And when were you twenty-one, Anna?” For some reason Mr. Orpington sounded a little stern.
“Today,” said Anna shyly, and coloured.
“Oh, darling!” Hamilton’s arm was round her again. “Darling—and you never told any of us it was your twenty-first birthday!”
“It didn’t seem very important,” whispered Anna.
Quite suddenly Hamilton distinctly remembered Katherine’s twenty-first birthday, with the innumerable presents and good wishes, the dance at a famous hotel, the pearls from her father, and the superbly simple white dress. And the little ache which Anna seemed so easily to bring to his heart was there again.
“You’ll have to tell me what you want most in the world, and you shall have it for your present,” he promised her eagerly.
“I have had what I want most in the world for my present today,” she told him gently, and she looked at him with a tenderness that somehow made him feel years younger than she.
“Well, that settles the question of age,” said Mr. Orpington, bringing them back to the matter in hand. “Your own people, Mr. Roone, of course will—will—”
“Will hear any necessary information from me,” Hamilton finished, with the slightest touch of hauteur. And that settled the thorny subject of the family.
But of course it was not quite as simple as that. Hamilton had to face the fact. Until today they had always been very much the pleasant background of his life. Now they rose as something almost formidable in the path of his intentions. And with a lively feeling of anxiety he realised how little he liked being ranged up in opposition to his own people.
In the end, as, explanations seemed so difficult, he determined not to argue things out before his marriage. Once Anna was his wife, he reflected rather mistakenly, there was not much his family could say.
So he wrote, from the little inn where he was staying for the few days necessary to complete the wedding arrangements, explaining that he was going to marry her. But he did not add that the wedding would be some time in the next few days.
Back came a telegram from his father on the day before his wedding-day:
Please reconsider ridiculous proposal. Am coming north at week-end. Will discuss it then.
With an anger entirely foreign to him, Hamilton crumpled the telegram in his hand. His mouth was very grimly set as he went down to the little village post-office and telegraphed back with almost brutal curtness:
Anna and I are being married tomorrow and will be home in the evening.
Then he determinedly thrust the matter into the back of his mind and went picnicking in the sunlit woods with Anna, where it was so very easy to forget that such things as family explanations existed.
It was a hot, still afternoon, but under the trees the faintest breeze was stirring; and presently they sat down on the grass and ate their tea and threw crumbs to an adventurous squirrel that came and peeped at them with beady bright eyes.
And Anna was so gay, and her hazel eyes looked so wide and serene, that he was surprised to remember that he had sometimes thought them secretive.
“Happy?” he wanted to know, as he flung himself down contentedly and put his head in her lap.
She looked down at him with her grave smile.
“Very happy.”
“I used to think you such a sad little thing,” he said slowly.
“Well, I am sad sometimes,” she admitted.
“You mean you were sad sometimes,” he retorted quickly.
She said, “Very well,” but she gave a funny little smile as though she were indulging a child, and it made Hamilton feel oddly disconcerted and as though he really knew very little about her.
He looked at her thoughtfully and then presently he said: “Were you very unhappy as a child, Anna?”
She looked surprised. “No, not at all. My father—my real father—was an artist, and we travelled all over the continent. Why?”
“Oh, I just thought—it must have been an unsettled life, surely, roaming around like that.”
“I suppose so. But I didn’t feel it much. My mother and father were very fond of me. And besides, it was an exciting, friendly life, too, you know.
“Anyway, I was only thirteen when my father was killed, and we came back to England,” Anna’s voice went on calmly.
“Yes? And then?”
“Then we lived for some years in a town in the Midlands. My mother had a small amount of money and we lived in a house that belonged to a little old French music-master. I think he had been in quite a good French orchestra at one time, but his health had failed, and when we knew him he taught singing and the violin for two pounds a lesson.”
“My God!” murmured Hamilton.
“Oh, we were not at all unhappy,” Anna said tranquilly. “He taught me French and a little Italian, and he taught me how to sing. I went to school too, of course, much more regularly than I had until then. I hadn’t really learned very much then, I suppose, except from my mother.”
Hamilton looked smilingly interested in this picture of an Anna he had never known.
“And do you sing very sweetly, my darling?” he wanted to know.
“He used to say it would be a great voice one day,” she said, and then she smiled in the curiously gentle way she did sometimes. “But when people grow old, and the great days of their youth are only memories. I think they often create something out of their imagination just to comfort themselves for what is gone.”
“You strange, wise little thing,” said Hamilton slowly. “I believe you know a lot about human nature.”
“Don’t you too?” she asked gravely.
He frowned a little and shook his head. “No. I sometimes think I’m really rather stupid about people. In fact, at times, I wonder if I even know my own people very well.”
She was silent for a moment and then said: “They will be very angry about me, won’t they?”
“They won’t be pleased at first, Anna,” he admitted. “But they can’t help loving you as soon as they really know you.”
Anna said nothing in answer to that, and after a moment he said impulsively: “Sing to me, Anna—in the voice that would have been great one day if you hadn’t married me instead.”
She smiled a little. “What shall I sing?”
“Whatever you like. I don’t know any more about singing than I do about human nature,” and he grinned at her.
“Very well,” she said, and after a moment she began to sing.
At first he could think of nothing but the beauty of her voice and the astonishing purity of her French. And then suddenly he realised what she was singing.
“Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment...
Chagrin d’amour dure tout la vie.”
He lay quite still against her until she had finished, and then he started up.
“Why did you choose that, of all things?” he demanded roughly.
She shrank a little. “I don’t know, You said you didn’t mind what I chose. Why shouldn’t I sing that?”
“Oh, my heaven, can’t you see these things?” he exclaimed, careless, in his most superstitious anger, of whether he hurt her or not. “We’re going to be married tomorrow ... I’m lying here against you in a sunlit wood with all the romance of the world around us ... I ask you to sing to me—and you choose some damned song about the joy of love lasting only for a moment, and the pain of love enduring for a lifetime. Do you expect me to be pleased?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a whisper, and his anger left him as quickly as it had come. He was astonished and ashamed to find that such a small thing had provoked it.
“No, my dear, my dear—it’s I who should be sorry.” He caught her in his arms and covered her face with contrite kisses. “It was ridiculous of me to mind. Of course you didn’t mean anything, and your voice is adorable.”
“It’s all right,” she said, but she didn’t smile.
“Are you sure?” he begged eagerly. “You have forgiven me, haven’t you?”
“Yes, of course.” She spoke gently, but he thought her downcast lashes looked a little sulky.
It was not until much later, when he had left her at the Vicarage with a tender last goodnight, that the thought came to him, as it had once before—perhaps those downcast lashes had meant unshed tears and not sullenness at all.
“Oh, I will be good to her,” he told himself passionately. “There shan’t be any more tears because of me—shed or unshed.”
When he reached the inn there was a letter waiting for him from Katherine, sent even earlier than his father’s telegram. It was fairly short but very much to the point.
“I’m sure you will agree, Hamilton,” she wrote, “that only a perfect fool would rush into a marriage of this sort, and Aunt Charlotte and I suggest that it would be a good idea for you to bring this girl home to stay for a while. Then you could see her in the surroundings to which you are used.
“Some girls might adapt themselves successfully, of course, but others could only make you—and themselves—perfectly miserable. There isn’t anything like a little practical experience to clear the situation, is there?
“In any case, there is nothing whatever to be gained by rushing into things, and everything to be said for considering them coolly and dispassionately. I need hardly say how anxious and upset we are about the whole thing, and we do beg you to do nothing rash.
Affectionately, Katherine.”
“Oh, lord! Kate’s going to be sticky,” was Hamilton’s muttered comment.
And his peace of mind was not increased when, a moment later, the door of the inn parlour opened and he heard Mrs. Bates, the innkeeper’s wife, come out in earnest converse with her friend the postmistress.
“You can see from the telegram,” Mrs. Bates was saying with gusto, “that his father’s terrible mad.”
“Still, what can he do?” The postmistress’s tone expressed limitless contempt for parents in general. “Probably the young man’s got to marry her—or thinks he has.”
“Got her into trouble, you mean?” Mrs. Bates’s voice was full of pleasurable shock.
“Him or another,” amended the postmistress succinctly. Hamilton wished furiously that they were men, so that he could have gone out and knocked their heads together. Then he asked himself angrily where his sense of humour had gone. There was surely something amusing in a suggestion so ridiculously wide of the mark. But somehow he failed to find it.
He had expected to lie awake that night, but actually he fell almost immediately into a sleep that was tranquil at first, but gradually broken by disturbing dreams.
He became aware that he was deadly afraid, though he didn’t know quite why—something to do with Anna. Everything was to do with Anna nowadays.
And then he knew what it was. Katherine was somehow forcing her into a cage where there were lions. There didn’t seem to be anything preposterous about it in the dream; only a terrible fear because he was unab
le to reach her, and when he called out to her she didn’t seem to hear him.
Hamilton woke with a choked cry, to find himself grasping the bars at the head of the old-fashioned bedstead. But the horror of the dream was still so clearly on him that he said: “Anna!”—like a frightened child; and then again: “Anna!”
Then, with a little moan of utter relief, he rolled over and buried his damp face in the pillow.
Somewhere a long way off a clock struck four, and he knew it was his wedding morning. Soon the light would be growing stronger, the birds would twitter sleepily outside the window, and by and by he would go down to the little grey stone church and Anna would come to him there... Anna, with her innocent red mouth and her large hazel eyes that held so many secrets.
It was broad daylight when he woke again, and the sun was pouring in at his window. In a second his spirits were soaring and the misgivings of the evening before were gone. As for the strange and horrible dream, it was wiped so completely from his mind, in the manner of dreams, that, not until he saw her, two hours later, coming down the little Norman aisle to meet him, did it touch the fringe of his consciousness again.
And then it was only because, as she raised her head and smiled at him, he remembered the smile in his dream.
Nothing could have been simpler than the short ceremony. There were no visitors, no relatives, no curious onlookers, for it was very early in the morning. Only the Orpingtons, a churchwarden to act as a second witness, and Dr. Irwin, who had offered to begin his busy day by giving Anna away.
They walked across to the Vicarage afterwards, past a few stragglers who hung about the old lych-gate, to stare at them in unnatural and disconcerting silence.
Mrs. Orpington, with unfailing kindness, had insisted on giving them something in the nature of a simple wedding breakfast. And then there was nothing left to do but to say goodbye, with what thanks they could put into words, and to set out on their journey in Hamilton’s long black racing car.
For a little while they drove in silence, and then Hamilton glanced at her. She had taken off her hat, and the wind just stirred the smoothness of her silky brown hair, and touched the faintest colour into her serious face.
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