“I can mean nothing to you,” Roydon said, “and that is why I intend to say goodbye to you now, at this very moment! As you have pointed out, I have no right to interfere in your life or what you wish to do with it. So you can stay here or join your friends in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. I shall leave first thing in the morning.”
“No! No! You cannot do that!” Valda cried desperately. “Stay – please stay – if only for one more – day?”
“And one more night?” Roydon asked. “Do you believe I could kiss you again as I did just now and not make you mine?”
Their eyes met and she saw the fire in his.
They looked at each other until Valda said in a voice he could hardly hear,
“That is – what I want – to belong to you – to be yours – ”
His lips tightened. Then he said,
“You don’t understand what you are saying.”
“I think – I do,” Valda answered slowly. “I love you and – if you ‘made love’ to me as you wanted to do – I should belong to you – completely – and I know now it would be the most – marvellous – perfect thing that could ever – happen to me.”
“And afterwards?” Roydon asked sharply.
“Afterwards?” she repeated in a puzzled voice.
“There is always an afterwards,” he said roughly, “when you would go your way and I would go mine.”
She looked at him, but she did not speak and, after a moment, he said,
“I cannot marry you. Let me make that quite clear.” Valda was very still. Then, in a voice that hardly seemed her own, she asked,
“Are you – married – already?”
“No,” he answered, “but I cannot marry anyone. I cannot afford to do so!”
There was a silence, which was almost suffocating.
“If you – could,” Valda asked at length, “would you – would you marry – me?”
There was a pause before he answered,
“The question does not arise, so there is no point in asking it.”
“Why can – you not marry – anyone?”
Roydon rose to his feet.
“I have said there is nothing to discuss,” he answered. “I am going to bed, Valda, and we will say goodbye now while I can do so.”
Instinctively she put out her hands towards him as he stood looking at her face in the candlelight.
“For God’s sake,” he ejaculated harshly, “do not look at me like that! I am doing what is right and some day you will understand.”
“Please – please – ” Valda implored him.
“I can stand no more,” he answered and, turning, walked from the room, shutting the door sharply behind him.
She heard the door of his room slam and to her it sounded the knell of doom.
‘He has gone!’ she told herself. ‘He will never come back and everything that is worthwhile in life – everything I wanted – everything that is beautiful – has gone with him.’
She thought despairingly that never again would she know real happiness, the ecstasy she had felt when he had first kissed her amongst the reeds and the wonder and rapture that had been theirs under the stars.
Now, with this last kiss, when he had started roughly, almost brutally, to hurt her, he had lit a fire that had swept through them both to evoke something wild and glorious.
She knew, although he would not say so, that Roydon had felt as she had.
He too had been swept away by a kiss so perfect that there were no words to express it.
And now he had gone!
It seemed to Valda that he had left only darkness behind him, a darkness that left her utterly depleted of everything she had faith in.
He had also taken away hope.
As if a voice told her so, she knew that she would never find a love again as she loved now.
This was the supreme wonder, a love that was both spiritual and physical. A love every man and woman sought but so few found.
She had found it, but it had already gone and there would be no return.
Despairingly she thought of what lay ahead.
She would go back to Merlimont. She would no longer fight against her stepfather’s plans for her, because whatever man he chose as her husband, she could never be anything but a cardboard figure of a wife!
A wife who no longer possessed either her heart or her soul, because they had been given to somebody else.
She thought of the years stretching ahead of her, years of emptiness, years bereft of Roydon.
It was, Valda thought, like being suddenly struck blind and knowing that you would never again see the sunshine and the flowers, the sky or the sea.
There would be only darkness – darkness that was not only in her eyes, but also in her heart.
‘I cannot bear it!’ she thought. ‘I cannot live like that!’ Hardly aware of what she was doing, she got out of bed and walked across the floor.
Very quietly she opened her door.
Standing just outside on the landing she listened.
There was no sound from Roydon’s room and no light beneath his door.
‘He is asleep,’ she thought. ‘I mean so little to him, after all that has happened, that he can leave me and – sleep! He will go away in the morning and I shall be alone – alone for the rest of my life!’
For one moment she contemplated going into his room to plead with him on her knees to love her if only for a little while. Then she knew it would be hopeless.
He had made up his mind, she had heard it in the steely determination in his voice, she had known it by the way he had left the room.
Nothing she could say would change it.
Slowly, walking almost silently on her bare feet, Valda went downstairs.
She could see the way from the light shining through the open door of her bedroom.
Below, the door of the salon was open and, as she entered it, she saw there was a faint radiance from the un-curtained window at the far end.
The window was open and she realised that Roydon must have left it unlatched when he had come upstairs after sending her to bed.
Valda crossed the room and stepping outside stood in the same place where Roydon had kissed her after they had heard the nightingales.
The birds were still singing, but now they intensified the despair within her to the point when it became unbearable – an agony like a physical wound, and yet even more hurtful.
She looked up and felt that the stars, twinkling against the velvet of the sky, like the song of the birds mocked her.
How could she ever look at beauty again when Roydon was not there to share it with her?
How could she live without his arms round her, his lips on hers?
Blindly, miserably, driven by despair to escape not from the Mas but from herself, she moved away from the house, walking almost like a sleepwalker.
She passed the cypress trees and turned towards the sea. A salt wind lifted her hair against her forehead and seemed to draw her in the right direction.
Vaguely somewhere at the back of her mind, Valda remembered Roydon speaking of the dangers of the quicksands, of the bulls and the white stallions.
It was danger, she thought, that she was seeking, a danger to obliterate the agony within her, bringing relief from her unhappiness and her fear of the future.
She walked on. Now the ground was damp, moths touched her face with their soft wings and flew away and sometimes her feet sank into the mud.
The hem of her nightgown was soaked but it did not seem to matter.
She only knew that she could not go back and that oblivion lay ahead.
‘I will go to the sea,’ she thought. ‘I will swim out into it and go on swimming.’
A heavy, sweetly astringent fragrance hung on the air, the perfume of thyme and rosemary, of lavender and rockroses.
The starry sky was stretched out over the sleeping land, but the night was filled with sound.
There was the croak of tree-frogs, the hollow ho
ot of an owl, the high squeak of bats.
Valda was unaware of anything but the misery encompassing her like a cloud.
Vaguely she saw large, massive, shadowy figures ahead and there was the pungent smell of sleeping animals.
The taureaux had settled down for the night and were dozing. Only the twitching of ears, the flicking of tails and muted snorts proclaimed their presence.
She moved past them, her white nightgown standing out against the darkness. The ground now was harder and there was grass beneath her bare feet.
Suddenly she was aware of a noise behind her that signified danger!
A Camargue bull was driving her away from his herd.
She could hear not only his pounding hoofs but also the noise of his breathing. She knew he would be carrying his head low, muscles strained in his desire to attack an enemy with his deadly dagger-like horns.
She had no chance of escape – she would be gored, tossed and probably killed.
She screamed in terror but the sound was lost as she ran frantically – quicker than she had ever run in her life. “Help! Help!”
The cry was strangled in her breathlessness and she was desperate that no one would hear her.
Then, as the hoofs were thundering just behind her, with every nerve in her body alert to the thrust of the horns, she found herself falling forward and screaming again.
She hit water violently and was blinded by the splash of it.
She expected to sink, but found instead that she was on her hands and knees in what she realised after a stunned moment was an irrigation canal. It was several feet deep but since the weather was dry, only partially full.
Above her on the bank, she could hear the bull snorting and pawing the ground, ready to give battle.
She had eluded him and, as she did not move, he thought her poor sport and moved away, still blowing a protest through his wide nostrils, at her intrusion.
Slowly and with difficulty Valda stood up.
The front of her nightgown was soaked, but that was of no consequence. She must go on. The sea was still ahead.
She climbed up the further side of the canal to stand feeling weak and faint and curiously disembodied.
Overhead there was the protracted fluting of the stone-curlew, bats flitted against the stars.
The wind swept away her faintness and she moved on, dragging her legs as if they were crippled.
The ground was damp, another slip and her feet were in water. She thought she must have walked into an étang.
‘The sea – I must get to sea,’ she told herself.
The water grew deeper and it was cold.
Valda paused, she was too exhausted, she wanted to lie down and only the thought of the sea kept her moving forward.
There was a sound behind her of splashing water and she thought in a panic that the bull must still be following her.
She half-turned, terrified that in the deeper water she would be unable to run. Then Roydon’s arms were around her and she was close against his chest.
“My darling! What are you doing! Where are you going?” he asked and the words seemed to tumble over each other.
The relief at seeing him made it impossible to reply and, as if he understood what she was feeling, he picked her up in his arms.
The water from her wet nightgown dripped down into the stillness of the étang.
He waded back through the shallow waters onto the firm grass and she hid her face against his shoulder. She was in his arms, she was safe! Safe as she had thought she would never feel again.
“How could you have been so crazy as to walk through the herd?” he asked.
His tone was not angry, only deep with some emotion she could not fathom.
“I saw what was happening and thought that the bull would toss you,” he went on. “And I could only try to reach you from another direction.”
His voice was breathless and she could feel his heart pounding and knew he must have been running to reach her.
Valda closed her eyes.
His arms held her – they were together – nothing else mattered. She was close to him again.
“Where were you going?” Roydon asked her again.
“To the – sea,” she whispered.
He asked her no more questions, but carried her back towards the Mas. Surprisingly by the way he went, it was not as far as she had walked alone.
Valda thought that once she felt him kiss her hair and yet she was not sure.
Only when they reached the farm and he had carried her in through the window of the salon and up the stairs, did she open her eyes and raise her head from his shoulder.
He carried her to the threshold of her room and then put her down on the floor.
“Have you another nightgown?” he asked.
For a moment the question seemed hardly to make any sense, until, as she knew he was waiting for her reply, she managed,
“Y-yes.”
“Put it on and get into bed.”
He had not taken his arms from her, but now as he would have done so she clung to him.
“Please – don’t leave – me.”
“I am going to talk to you,” he said gravely, “but, as I don’t wish you to catch cold, you must do as I tell you. I am going downstairs to get us both a drink.”
Still her hands were clinging to the lapels of his robe and he said gently as if reassuring a child,
“I will come back – I promise!”
She turned away with a little sigh. He closed the door and she heard him going downstairs.
She had brought two nightgowns with her. She took off the one she was wearing which was soaked and stained by the weeds in the canal and left it in a heap on the floor.
She dried herself with a towel, drew from a drawer the other nightgown and having put it on crept into bed.
She was now trembling violently, not only owing to the cold but also as a reaction to the intensity of the emotions that had made her behave as she had.
She could understand Roydon thinking her crazy and yet it had seemed the only course that she could take was to drown the pain and misery within herself.
It was a little time before she heard him coming back upstairs and, when he entered the room, she saw that he carried a tray in his hands on which there was a pot of coffee, two cups and a small glass.
He set the tray down on the bed beside her and, picking up the glass, he held it out to her.
“Drink this, it will save you from catching a chill.” “What – is it?”
“Brandy.”
She took the glass from him, sipped it and wrinkled her nose as the fiery liquor seared her throat.
“All of it!” Roydon commanded.
She obeyed him and he said,
“Pour out the coffee while I change.”
For the first time she realised that he had followed after her still wearing the robe in which he had come to her bedroom.
It was wet where he had waded after her into the étang and she imagined that the nightshirt he wore under it was soaking wet too.
He went to his room and she poured out the coffee. Already the brandy had stopped her trembling, but she still felt cold and started to take tiny sips from one of the cups.
Roydon came back to her in a few minutes in a white shirt and a pair of trousers he had fastened round his waist with a belt. He wore no tie but instead there was a coloured handkerchief tied like a scarf inside the collar of his shirt.
It gave him a somewhat raffish appearance and she thought as he came towards her that no other man could be so attractive.
Her love made her feel weak and helpless and she watched as he lifted the tray to put it on the floor and, taking the cup of coffee she had poured out for him, drank it.
Then he sat down on the bed.
Now Valda looked at him a little apprehensively, expecting him to be angry.
For what seemed to her a long time his eyes rested on her pale face and worried eyes. He seemed to be studying
her.
But his silence seemed ominous and at last Valda could bear it no longer as the tears gathered in her eyes.
“I – I am – sorry.”
The words were only a murmur, but as she spoke them the tears ran down her cheeks.
“I am – sorry – please – please – don’t be angry with me.”
“I am not angry. I am trying to understand.”
“I – had to go – I could not bear the pain – of losing – you – I wanted to forget and I – thought – ” Tears choked her.
“What did you think?”
“That – if I was in – d-danger – I would not mind – any more – I wanted – to be hurt, but when the bull – chased me – I ran away.”
Her voice faltered, her tears were blinding her. Roydon drew a white linen handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her eyes.
Because he was gentle it made her cry more bitterly. “Can you really love me so much?” he asked.
“There is – nothing in the – world but – you.” “Are you sure?”
“More sure than I have ever been of – anything in my – whole life!”
“You are very young.”
“I do not think that – age has anything to do with – love. I know now a person may live to be a hundred and never find it – when it comes, there is – nothing to discuss – nothing to say – it is there and one knows that it is real and very – very wonderful!”
Roydon drew a deep breath and said,
“I understand what you are saying to me – how could I not understand when I feel the same? But I have to make you realise how little I have to offer you.”
Looking at her with an expression in his eyes, which seemed to her to be hard and almost indifferent, he said,
“I am a man with no money, no roots and, at the moment, no future!”
“That does not matter to – me?”
“You have to know what you would be taking on,” he answered.
She wanted to put out her hands towards him, to draw him nearer to her, but she knew he was determined not to touch her until she had heard him out. She waited.
Her eyes were very large in her small face but her heart began to thump wildly.
He was here and she was near to him. She no longer had to reach the sea.
“I told you that I was a rolling stone,” Roydon went on. “When I was twenty-one, I quarrelled with my father, who is a very truculent man and went my own way, determined not to be beholden to him.”
The Wild Cry of Love Page 12
