And Be Thy Love

by Rose Burghley

  “Oh, come now, Carol!” he protested, lightly. “We had a very pleasant fortnight together!”

  “It was a fortnight I’d rather forget!”

  He shrugged.

  “It is a pity to forget some things, because they provide us with the memories that are often pleasant to recall long after the event is over. When you and I are both married, with families growing up around us, we’ll probably think often of these days—or, rather, the days at Le Fontaine, when we thought we’d found something rather magical, and it all happened because Marthe broke her ankle. We’ll be very grateful to Marthe for breaking her ankle because she gave us something to look back upon....”

  “I shan’t look back!”

  He sighed.

  “You are difficult to please. Almost,” on a note of dryness, “one would think you wish to have your cake and eat it, too! But this sort of cake either has to be eaten or rejected altogether, and I have made up my mind in the interest of us both that it is best to reject it altogether! One day you will agree with me that it was a wise decision!”

  The car sped on, and she felt as if misery pressed upon her like a live thing. But she kept her face averted so that he should not even guess at her distress.

  “Are you flying back to London?” he asked, at last, as if he was mildly interested. “I know Lady Pen is a little allergic to air travel, and she usually prefers to go by sea. With you, of course, she might feel different, and then there is Christopher to give her a feeling of solid British support! If you do go by air I’d like to see you off at the airport.... I’m not so fond of railway stations....” He caught a curious little sound above the smooth running of his engine, and the very next instant the car had started to slow, and finally it had come to rest beneath a gigantic, towering chestnut tree that spread its branches right across the road. He switched off his engine, and there was absolute silence on all sides of them— silence, that is, except for that vague little gasping noise, like someone or something unable any longer to cope with such an unbearable weight of loneliness and desolation that the tears were falling fast—and as the road was completely empty, and there was nothing but woods, and fields and a cottage or two in the distance to witness what he was doing, he reached out and drew her passionately close to him.

  “Carol...! You beloved, foolish little thing...! Don’t you know I’ve only been trying to punish you?” He pressed her head against him, and his own fingers were shaking now. “Oh, my darling, you hurt me so much by your lack of faith, and I was brute enough to want to hurt you back...! And now I can’t forgive myself!”

  She put back her head and looked up at him, and although her eyes were swimming with tears, there was the wonder of a new hope in them.

  “You mean...? Oh, Armand..! She clutched at him. “You mean it isn’t all over between us?”

  “Not while we’ve life and breath, and I can prevent it!”

  He held her so tightly that her breath was very nearly squeezed out of her, and she could feel the thundering of his heart against her. He dropped frantic kisses on her hair, and she closed her eyes and the bright drops rolled off her lashes and splashed down on to his hand. An anguished note entered his voice as he added: “Darling, don’t you know that we belong to one another?— And we belonged from the beginning! As if I’d let you go! As if I’d let you go!”

  “But, you said--------” her voice was more muffled, and

  she was nestling against him, feeling like someone who had been washed up by a storm into a safe place at last—“you said that our love would be in ruins in a short time if—if we stayed together! That I’d interfere with your work, and we’d bitterly regret it! But, oh, Armand,” stealing up a hand to touch his face, “oh, my dearest, my darling Armand! If I can’t be with you I don’t know what I’m going to do!” and her voice quivered abjectly, just as her whole slender body quivered in his clasp.

  He looked down at her with a tenderness that she remembered all the rest of her life, and he put the tumbled hair back from her brow with a tender hand.

  “When I said that I was beside myself with wretchedness,” he told her, “and also, as I’ve told you, I wanted to hurt you! I felt that you despised me, and I couldn’t bear it! I felt you’d never trust me, and that nearly drove me demented! All my life I’ve cared nothing for the opinions of other people, and then, when I met you, I cared so much for your opinion that I started off by telling you lies! But it was only because I loved you so much— right from the beginning!—and because I knew you were the only woman I ever could love! Sweetheart,” he implored, bending to her lips, “say you believe me now!”

  She wound her arms about his neck and held him with a touch of mother-love, as well as the fierce possessiveness of her woman’s adoration.

  “I believe you, Armand, my darling!—I’ll always believe you,” with passionate earnestness, “whether it’s important or unimportant that I should do so!”

  “And you’ll marry me?”

  “If—her soft lips trembling beneath his—if you really want me to!”

  “I really want you to!” He crushed her to him. “Carol, there are still moments when I could shake you...! When it seems to me that you are positively stupid! You, the loveliest, sweetest, most adorable woman who has ever entered my life, and you raise a query as to whether or not I want to marry you!” He put his fingers beneath her chin and looked long and earnestly into her eyes. “I want you to marry me so much that it’s an obsession with me! To-day I fully meant to beg you to marry me, even if you still showed signs of disdaining me a little, and I told Lady Pen when I telephoned her this morning that I would bring you back when you had agreed to become my wife, and not before!” “You—you did?” She could hardly believe the evidence of her ears, and her eyes were radiant. “Oh, Armand what did she say?” She thought it was a splendid idea, and congratulated me in advance.”

  “Then, she thought ------- ?”

  “I think she did—yes,” he said, gently. “Apparently where she was concerned, at least, you wore your heart on your sleeve!”

  She leaned her head against him, and sighed.

  “Lady Pen is terribly shrewd, and I don’t think it needed a very shrewd woman to tell I was in love with you! Helen Mansfield probably knew it, Christopher certainly knew it, and

  your Diane ----------------------- ”

  “Not my Diane, darling,” with slightly upraised brows. “We have been good friends for years, but nothing more— that much I can solemnly and truthfully reassure you about! I could have done so before, but I wasn’t so certain you merited the reassurance, since you seemed so eager to think badly of me. But now that I have your word that there are to be no more doubts” “No more doubts, my beloved!”

  He kissed her lingeringly.

  “It is true that I have been no saint, but even I have a code. In future I shall be a model husband, and the world will take a new view of Armand de Marsac.”

  She closed her eyes and rested her cheek against his. “And I will be a model wife!”

  “And we will have lots of children, and the first one will be a girl with violet eyes!”

  Although she blushed vividly at this she couldn’t resist disputing the statement a little.

  “No; a boy with brown eyes...! I love your eyes, Armand,” touching them gently, caressingly, with her finger-tip. “I have dreamed about them night after night for so many nights now, and last night I was so unhappy...”

  “And I could have picked Christopher Markham up by the scruff of the neck and thrown him out on to the pavement when I saw you with him last night. To think that the two of you have been seeing Paris together...!”

  “But you could have telephoned me earlier,” she reminded him, demurely.

  He looked at her with the old Puckish impishness in his eyes.

  “But I was inflicting my punishment...! I couldn’t cut it short too soon!”

  “Your punishment made me the unhappiest woman in the world just now,” she said s
oberly, sitting upright

  beside him. “I was so unhappy, I----------------”” She reached

  out a hand to him, and looked at him imploringly. “Oh, Armand, never punish me again, will you?” she begged.

  And only a car travelling towards them at speed prevented him from sweeping her back into his arms and assuring her, with more than words, that he would never punish her again.

  At last they were on their way once more to Paris, and he told her that he was taking her back to his flat for dinner.

  “I told Lady Pen that she would be lucky if she saw you again before midnight, but she knows you will be safe with me.” He touched her knee gently as they moved noiselessly along one of the broad avenues, and drew nearer to his flat. “And you are safe with me, little one! I mean to make you my wife in as short a time as possible, and Lady Pen has agreed to stay on in Paris and chaperone you until everything can be arranged. But in the meantime you will be as safe with me as with Lady Pen,” and he drew her hand inside his arm and kept it there until they drew up outside the gleaming block of flats Caroline had seen for the first time that morning.

  His housekeeper, who departed for her own home in the evenings, had left them a cold meal all beautifully laid out in the dining alcove, and Caroline’s heart leapt when she saw the table arrangements. In future, and very soon now, this would be her own home, and she could hardly believe it.

  Then she went and washed and refreshed herself in the bathroom, and when she rejoined Armand he was waiting for her in the big living-room. He put a glass into her hand, and then looked at her deliberately over the top of his own.

  “To our future happiness, my darling, and to the lovely woman I waited for!”

  Later—much later—he drew her out on to the balcony, and the moon was climbing into the sky above the feathery tops of the trees, that were rustling gently in the night wind. Caroline, looking breathlessly up at the silvery slice of moon, thought that last night it had looked very young and slim, whereas to-night it was already shedding a radiant light across the roof-tops of Paris.

  Paris...! She could hear the hiss of tyres on the smooth, beautifully-kept road below her, and a low but constant murmur, that was the murmur of other Paris traffic, came up to them. Above them the stars shone like diamonds on a blue-black dinner-gown, the moon peered at its reflection in the river.

  Armand’s arms held her close. He held her as if he could never let her go again.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “Oh, cherie, I love you!”

  She put back her head until the bright brown hair strayed across his jacket and covered his shoulder.

  “Do you need me to tell you I love you?” she whispered.

  “I shall always need you to tell me that,” he assured her. He looked at her almost humbly in the deepening dusk. “I don’t know why you should love me, my dear one, since I am ten complete years older than you are! But I promise you that I will make you happy! If you will only bear with me sometimes—just sometimes, when I am not all that you would desire!—then there will be no happier couple in Paris than you and I, my sweet!”

  She looked up at him seriously.

  “And sometimes—sometimes we will go and stay at the chateau?”

  “I was going to talk to you about that.” He touched her cheek gently. “I have thought of turning it into some sort of a convalescent home for children, since it is a pity that it should serve no useful purpose; but for you and I there could always be the tower rooms—my mother’s suite! Would you like it if we kept those rooms for ourselves, darling?”

  “Oh, Armand, I would love that!”

  “And Monique shall look after them for us.... Marthe is growing too old, and I will have to retire her somewhere. But both she and Monique must come to our wedding.... At least, I don’t think we can wait for Marthe to be fit, but Monique must certainly be there.”

  “It was Monique who told me how good, and kind, and wonderful you are,” she told him, her adoring eyes never leaving his face.

  “Wonderful—me?” He sounded genuinely amazed. “My sweet one, that is somewhat of a departure from your original opinion of me!”

  But she shook her head.

  “No, even in the beginning I think I must have known —when Robert told me how generous you are!”

  “Robert!” he exclaimed, softly. “That is another one we must invite to the wedding! We couldn’t possibly leave him out!” Caroline smiled.

  “No, we couldn’t leave him out.”

  “There will probably be occasions,” he warned her, “when I shall be jealous of Robert! I remember you told me that you loved him, but you could only loathe me?”

  “Oh, don’t!” she begged.

  “Very well.” He held her from him. “Where shall we go for our honeymoon?”

  She blushed deliciously under cover of the darkness. “Do we need to have a honeymoon? You said that you were going to be busy this autumn.... Why don’t we just come back here?”

  “Because you need a real change, and I have got to look after you, and get you tanned and fit-looking. You are looking much better than a few weeks ago, but your natural delicacy makes my heart turn over at times. We will go to the West Indies, or somewhere like that.... And we will go by sea. Then, after that, we will come back here!” He drew her close, very close. “I could never have tempted you with anything but my love, could I?” he asked. “You are like the nymph who would not be tempted by the passionate shepherd because she could not be certain that underneath the passion there was love!” And he quoted, in such excellent English that the words did not sound odd on his lips:

  “If all the world and love were young,

  And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,

  These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee, and be thy love.”

  “And be thy love” he repeated, against her lips. “And, oh, you are my very, dear love!”