by Susan Barrie
But Sir Peter spoke inflexibly.
“Change over, Johnny. If you behave in an exceptionally exemplary manner I may allow you to sit beside me on the way home.” His expression was amiable, but that note in his voice was not to be ignored. Johnny executed the change without even a protest, and Victoria landed in the seat beside the driver. But she thought it necessary to continue her protest.
“Poor Johnny! If you knew what a very great treat it is for him to sit beside you!” she said indignantly.
Sir Peter glanced at her sideways and smiled a little
peculiarly.
“I like to have a young thing in pink sitting beside me,” he remarked. “By the way, you should wear it more often ... although I think, when you’re sitting in the moonlight, blue is the color for you. That nightingale last night obviously agreed with me.”
Victoria said nothing, but she was beginning to feel a trifle self-conscious ... in fact, rather more than a trifle selfconscious. And despite Johnny’s disappointment she felt suddenly almost as excited as she had felt for a brief while the night before. Quite unreasonably excited, of course.
They took the same route to the river that they had taken before, and when they reached it they followed the same procedure as before. The hamper was unpacked, the contents disposed of, and after that Johnny wandered away and left his two elders. While he hunted for frogs instead of butterflies this time Victoria repacked the hamper and Sir Peter packed a pipe with tobacco and looked along the stem of it thoughtfully before applying a match.
He had done this on the previous occasion, but he had done it while he was lying flat on his back and displaying every intention of enjoying a short nap. But on this occasion there was no drowsiness in his eyes, and there was certainly no evidence of drowsiness in Victoria’s ... so he lowered his pipe and reached over and took the damask tablecloth away from her and flung it carelessly aside on the bank before he pulled her to her feet.
“Why should Johnny be the only active one among us?” he asked. “Let’s explore the woods.”
Victoria followed him into the woods, and obediently halted when he halted, and continued when he advanced. It was really far too hot for constant movement, and when they reached a kind of clearing where the ground was soft with pine needles and the rays of the sun were excluded by a lacy canopy overhead Sir Peter once more took the initiative and flung his coat on the ground for Victoria to sit on.
She was about to protest—and she had done a lot of protesting that day so far—that the pine needles were soft and inviting enough without his coat when she accidentally stumbled, and he caught her and held her for fully twenty seconds before they both realized that it was a somewhat unconventional pose. Victoria detached herself with primness and sank down on the pine needles, feeling a little breathless as he folded up his coat.
“So you decline to sit on it?” he said. “You’re an obstinate young thing, Victoria!”
They talked—both of them making an obvious effort at first—about all sorts of things they had never discussed before, and Victoria learned a good deal of his boyhood and his parents and his general background, while he heard about her parents and the comparatively lonely, and certainly insecure, life she had led since she was deprived of them.
“And instead of doing the sensible thing and taking a sensible job with prospects you attempt to burden yourself with Johnny,” he said censoriously. “You must be mad!”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so. You see, Johnny hasn’t anyone and I haven’t anyone.”
“He has now.”
“Yes; he has you. . . . ”
“You say that as if you consider me a dubious acquisition.” She turned and looked at him, and in her harebell blue eyes he detected a certain amount of consternation because that wasn’t what she had meant at all. What she had meant was that he wasn’t free to attach himself to Johnny, and in the interests of fairness Miss Islesworth had every right to object to him making the effort.
“How you will insist on dragging in Georgina,” he observed with a frown, as he leaned on one elbow and lighted himself a cigarette.
“But she has to be dragged in,” she insisted.
“She doesn’t. Because I’m not going to marry her.”
“You’re—not going to—marry her?”
“That was what I said.”
“But—”
“How full of buts you are!” He ground out the cigarette he had only just lighted, taking care it should not in its turn ignite the pine needles, and sat up and leaned toward her. He possessed himself of one of her hands, and while he examined the delicate fingernails and the insides of her slender wrists he told her somewhat jerkily why it was that he proposed terminating his association with Miss Islesworth. In actual fact, he did more than that. He accused her of breaking it up.
“That night you and Johnny turned up like a couple of waifs at the Park I knew that it had to end. The reason that it had become an established fact had ceased to exist! Before you came, Victoria,” bending her knuckles very slightly and gently, “my only interests were Wycherley and what was best for Wycherley, and that meant marriage and a suitable wife. Georgina, from most people’s point of view, I suppose, would make me a very suitable wife, and although she’s not in the least in love with me she does love the country and all that goes to make up a country way of life. In a way I admire her tremendously, and I’m lost in admiration when I see her on a horse, and that sort of thing ... but I’ve never had the smallest illusion about how much I love her, or how lost I’d feel if I had to do without her.” Victoria attempted to interrupt again, but he held up a lean brown forefinger.
“No! Not until I’ve said my piece and made everything clear!” He fumbled automatically for his cigarette case, then realized that he had just discarded one, and put it away again. “The night you and Johnny arrived we had been celebrating our engagement with a party. There were only a few of our special friends, but they were the ones who had been awaiting our engagement for a long time. Some of them no doubt thought I’d been a bit tardy in putting the question, but they couldn’t possibly know that even I, fairly prosaic chap that I am, had had my dreams occasionally.”
He smiled a little twistedly, and his gray eyes forced Victoria’s to meet them.
“When I was twenty-one I dreamed quite a lot and my dreams always had something to do with a slip of a girl like you—one for whom the nightingales would sing even if they wouldn’t sing for other people, and who had moonbeams in her hair when there wasn’t even a gleam of moonlight! That night of the accident, when Johnny was deprived of his father and I had suddenly become officially pledged to marry someone, you turned up out of the night and I simply couldn’t believe that you were real. Then, when it got through to me that you were real enough, it also got through to me that I was no longer free. I had been just that little bit too precipitate. So I thought up the next best thing to keep you near me. I decided to adopt Johnny, and as you were so attached to him I counted upon you being eager to stay and take charge of him ... at any rate for a time. When that time had expired I suppose I understood perfectly that I would have to let you go.”
“And what about me?” Victoria asked, so quietly that it was almost a whisper in the warmth of the afternoon. “What about me? Or didn’t I really count at all?”
He dropped her hand and put his fingers under her chin, lifting it. He looked deep into the harebell blue eyes.
“What about you? Well, the only thing happened that could happen. I succeeded in freeing myself, and now I’m going to marry you!”
“Instead of Miss Islesworth?”
“Well, obviously, I don’t intend to marry both of you.”
“But you’re not free!” She spoke insistently. “You can’t say that just having a quarrel and walking out instead of staying to dinner is being released from an engagement! For one thing, she hasn’t officially released you, has she?”
“I told you it was s
he who flounced out on me, and then I left. She said some very unpleasant things about you ... and I left!”
She was looking up at him very earnestly, and although her pulses were behaving most eccentrically and her heart was hammering away like a wild thing seeking to burst forth from a cage, the obstinate streak in her nature would not allow her to accept the easy way out and acknowledge that he really was free. How could he be free, unless Georgina Islesworth didn’t want to marry him after all?
“But she doesn’t,” he assured her, stroking one side of her cheek in a somewhat unsteady manner. His eyes were pleading with her, eager but a little apprehensive at the same time. “She actually told me I could go to you in some sort of love-nest, and that the whole district was talking. I told her I didn’t care how much it talked, and that even if she didn’t realize it I had long since admitted the fact to myself that she and I were not suited to one another. I said that if she had serious suspicions about you—which I declined to refute—she was as free as air to marry someone else, and she took my ring off and flung it on the floor at my feet, and said that she would be very happy indeed to be released.
“This morning I sent her back the ring with a note urging her to keep it, but I told her quite plainly that I considered myself to be absolved from all obligation to marry her. In
fact, I told her that I was going to marry you ... if you would have me!” with sudden humbleness.
But still Victoria could not reach out and clasp the golden ball of happiness that was dangling so close to her eyes. For one thing, she was not entirely sure she was awake and not dreaming; and for another, Georgina Islesworth couldn’t possibly have wanted to release him. She was so sure of that that it was like an insurmountable barrier she could neither get round nor climb over.
She felt him relax his hold a little, and he spoke jerkily: “Perhaps I made a mistake. Did I make a mistake? Is it Johnny’s interests you’ve been considering all this time, and did you never once think of me as anything other than Johnny’s guardian?”
“No.” She could hardly believe it, but this was the truth. From the very beginning he had affected her as no other man had affected her ... Even while she was still fuzzy from the accident she had been aware of him, in some strange way, as a being apart from all other beings. She had been so unhappy when she thought she had to go away from him and take Johnny with her that her unhappiness had been a solid burden she had had to carry around with her.
So she looked up frankly directly into his eyes, and made her admission:
“Oh, no, no! The happiest day of my life was that other day we spent here beside the river, and when I thought it all had to end very soon ... that, in actual fact, it had ended—” “You were unhappy?”
Her transparent blue eyes filled with amazement. “Unhappy? I wonder whether you know the meaning of the word?”
“Then you’re a remarkably good actress! ”
“So are you! I thought that the idea of settling down with
Miss Islesworth filled you with a sort of contentment. I don’t think I ever thought you were madly in love with her—”
“And now that you know I’m not?”
“I—I”
All at once he kissed her—full on the lips. It was a novel experience for her, because she had never been kissed by a man like that before, and something about the contact shook her to her foundations. And then he kissed her again, more gently and more lingeringly, and this time his arms closed round her.
She found that she simply hadn’t the power to resist him, and there in the heart of the little wood, with the sunlight gilding the river as it flowed murmurously not many feet away, kingfishers sporting among the reeds, and Johnny—or so they imagined—still hunting for frogs, they melted into one another’s arms and the man who had been willing to marry without love trembled at the thought of what he had so nearly lost, and Victoria felt bemused by what she had apparently gained.
Until Johnny came bursting in on their sanctuary and announced that he had captured a grass snake.
“Do you think we could find a box to put it in?” He was holding it up by its tail. “Or perhaps we might make it a nest in the picnic hamper—”
He stood still, staring at them, as if he honestly couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes. And then he gave one of his short, triumphant whoops.
“I read in a book that if a gentleman kisses a lady he’s got to marry her,” he cried. “So now you’ve got to marry him, Victoria, and he won’t have to marry Miss Islesworth after all! Isn’t it fun? Because I don’t like Miss Islesworth and I do love you, Victoria ... and I like Sir Peter, too.”
“Thanks,” Sir Peter returned, with a certain amount of dry appreciation.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The homeward drive was a revelation to Victoria. She had never known that one could feel so happy and so entirely delighted with life that there was no longer a single cloud on her horizon.
Sir Peter had talked her out of even the smallest tinge of conscience where Georgina Islesworth was concerned. If she really had thrown her ring at his feet and told him he could marry her, Victoria, then he was entirely within his rights if he took her at her word. After all, it was a serious insult in itself when a woman flung her engagement ring at the feet of the man who had given it to her, and one could hardly expect a man of Sir Peter’s background and upbringing to relish being humiliated in that fashion. And if he had never been in love with Georgina, and she had never been in love with him, then the chances of their being really happy together were remote ... so the fact that they had parted was a happy escape for them both.
And as Victoria, after an afternoon beside the river with the man she herself loved, could no longer doubt that he loved her quite as much as she loved him, then she would have been wilfully destroying her own happiness and his if she had persisted in championing the cause of Georgina.
So the drive back to Alder Cottage was an experience for Victoria that she knew she would never forget.
Johnny sat in the back of the car and was sufficiently diplomatic to make no complaints about being relegated once more to a seat he despised. His fingers itched to get at the controls of the big car, and he loved to watch Sir Peter manipulating the gears, but he understood with a lucidity that was extraordinary in one so young that Victoria’s place was now—and until she got tired of it, anyway, or was prepared to make an occasional sacrifice—beside the man she intended to marry.
And the fact that she was going to marry him had delighted Johnny so much that he, in his turn, was a trifle bemused by the turn of events, and the rightness of everything that was happening to him.
So he sat in the back and wondered, in his childish fashion, why life that could be so unexpectedly cruel and deprive him of his rightful parent could also, a very short while afterward, unbend to such an extent that his cup of sheer childish bliss was full. It was something to marvel at, and as they sped through the lanes and the warmth of the afternoon persisted he found his head nodding from time to time, and the effort to explain matters satisfactorily to himself was so great in such a temperature that he finally fell fast asleep. And when Victoria glanced back at him she smiled because there was a look of supreme contentment on his face.
She knew that she would never experience another drive like this. There would be others—perhaps far more wonderful ones—but this one represented a gateway of promise, a door to delights hitherto undreamed of simply because she hadn’t dared to dream of them.
But now Peter allowed one of his hands to desert the wheel occasionally, and it felt for hers and gripped them so strongly that she knew she was not dreaming. And sometimes he turned his eyes toward her and they just looked at one another, and she felt as if her breathing was interfered with, and every pulse in her body throbbed with happiness and wonder.
The fields and the woods sped past. They didn’t actually discuss what had happened to them, and they made no plans for the future, but with past and future suspended and
merged into the present it didn’t matter.
In a way, Victoria realized, they were floating on unreal clouds of bliss ... but at least it was bliss, and that was all that mattered.
When they arrived back at the cottage it was close upon six o’clock, and Victoria wakened Johnny, and he entered the cottage rubbing his eyes and feeling slightly bewildered. Something had happened which merited a celebration—Sir Peter was staying to supper—but he couldn’t quite recall what it was at the moment.
Victoria had no need to recall anything. She trod air as she walked the length of the garden path, and she knew Peter did the same thing as he followed her.
He absolutely refused to go back to Wycherley Park for dinner, and that meant she had to provide him with an eatable meal. This wasn’t such a problem, for she had well stocked her larder, and every time she glanced at Peter she felt convinced that he was no more hungry than she was. And but for the fact that Johnny had to be provided with something to eat they would probably have wandered into the garden and sat there and forgotten everything but the fact that the two of them were together.
As soon as supper was over and Johnny was in bed they did wander into the garden, and for once Victoria consented to stack the dishes and leave them for Mrs. Wavertree when she arrived the following day.
“There’s one think I must make clear to you,” Peter said, when they sat side by side on the white-painted garden seat and he toyed with her ringless hand. “It’s absolutely true that I’ve never been in love before ... and I’d like to be assured that you’ve never been in love, either.”
Victoria felt amused by his craving for assurance. If only she could make him see, with her eyes, the kind of life she had led up till now! She had changed, before supper, into her light blue dress, and as the moon rose it once more acquired that quality of delicacy and entire lack of substance that it had had the night before. Unfortunately there were a few clouds tonight, and the moon was occasionally obscured by them, but even in the soft scented dark there was a sort of shimmer about her, and it wasn’t confined to her hair and her dress.
