The Quiet Heart

by Susan Barrie

  “‘I remember.” He rose and walked across to her and took the duster out of her hand. He flung it down on the floor. “Must you always be doing something while I’m talking to you?” he asked.

  Alison looked mildly astonished.

  “I’m sorry if it annoys you—”

  “It does more than that ... it infuriates me!” He stooped, picked up the duster and tossed it on to the fire. “Sit down!” he then ordered. “I want to talk to you!”

  Alison sat down, wondering uneasily what was coming.

  He looked down at her with light grey eyes that were actually scowling a little.

  “You mentioned my going abroad,” he said. “I have every intention of going abroad in a few weeks’ time. First, I shall take Jessamy to Austria, and then I don’t quite know where I’ll go ... but it will be somewhere where the sun can be counted upon to shine, and where I can relax for a while.”

  “You won’t wait until ... you see how Jessamy responds to the treatment?” she enquired breathlessly.

  His dark eyebrows arched in surprise.

  “No. Why should I?”

  “I thought...”

  “What did you think? What, precisely, have you been thinking for the past five or six weeks?”

  He leant his shapely shoulder against the white mantelpiece, and sought to intimidate her with his look.

  “Five or six weeks...?”

  “Ever since I came here, in fact.”

  This was too embarrassing a direct question for Alison, and she tried to evade it.

  “I—I realise that you’ve taken a great deal of interest in Jessamy...”

  “Forget Jessamy. I want to hear what you think, what your plans are for the future, what you intend to do with your life?”

  She answered without enthusiasm.

  “Very much the same kind of thing that I’m doing now, I suppose. As you once told me, I’m a good cook...”

  “Forget that, too! Or I shall begin to think that you and a kitchen sink are inseparable.”

  Her smile grew distinctly wry.

  “You think that already, don’t you?”

  His light grey eyes appeared to be blazing down at her angrily.

  “If I do it’s your own fault,” he said. “For Christmas I very nearly gave you a set of dusters, a book on household management and a copper preserving-pan because I thought they were the only things you were likely to feel pleased about. Instead I decided you might feel pleased about a dressing-gown—”

  “A severely practical dressing-gown,” she put in quietly.

  “To match your severe, practical self.”

  “I’m not severe and practical.”

  “Then once again may I be permitted to ask ... what are you?”

  She looked at him resentfully. The colour was flaming in her cheeks and her eyes were filled with resentment. At the same time she felt slightly choked, and her voice was muffled when she spoke, because he was so utterly blind.

  “You can take it,” she told him, “that I’m wedded to the stove, and all the happiness I get out of life results from watching other people thrive on the meals I prepare for them. When Jessamy goes to Austria, wearing your fur coat, even she will look a little plumper than she might have looked because I’ve fed her properly. My husband might have died before he did die because I saw he was well nourished and cared for...”

  “Alison!” He pulled her up out of her chair, and his fingers gripped her shoulders. “What would you have liked for Christmas? A fur coat?”

  She shook her head and hid her face.

  “I’ve already got one.”

  “And how long have you had it?”

  “My father bought it for me, years ago.”

  “What else did your father buy you?”

  “Oh, lots of things. He—he spoiled me.”

  “And no one has spoiled you since?”

  She shook her head again. At the same time she despised herself for feeling so overwhelmingly sorry for herself ... so sorry for herself that he could see it.

  He gave her a little shake.

  “Alison, what did you do with the dressing-gown?”

  She spoke through her teeth.

  “I don’t intend to wear it!”

  Suddenly he laughed ... and to her astonishment it was an oddly triumphant laugh.

  “I hoped you wouldn’t!”

  “You—you hoped I wouldn’t...?” She couldn’t believe her ears. His light grey eyes were smiling, and the hardness of his fingers was bruising her flesh. “Then why on earth did you give it to me?”

  “To find out how you would react to being treated as if you were a dull, middle-aged woman instead of the girl you are. I think you have forgotten that you really are a girl, Alison ... and you’re such a devoted stepmother that you’ve also become a little blind. You think I’m planning to marry Jessamy, don’t you?”

  “And—aren’t you?” in a faint voice.

  In a whimsical voice he counter-questioned. “Would you like me to? Would you like me for a son-in-law, Alison?”

  She tried to wrench herself away from his hold, but he refused to let her go. Beginning to enjoy himself, he tilted her chin with one hand while he held her firmly with the other. He looked deep into her eyes, and then sighed with relief.

  “No, I can see you wouldn’t,” he said softly—so softly that it was like a caress. Although she still struggled to free herself he held her determinedly. “Prim warned me I mustn’t be taken in by you, Alison, and I’m not going to be any longer. Just tell me what you would really have liked to receive from me at Christmas?”

  “Please!” She tried to keep her face averted. “Let me go!”

  “Not until you answer my question. Possibly not even then. Would you like to go to the Bahamas with me, Alison? If we took Lorne along with us—Marianne, I feel certain, would rather remain here with her boy-friend—and left Jessamy safely stowed away in Austria, would you go with me? As my nurse, as my devoted companion, and possibly, also, my cook occasionally? As my housekeeper!”

  “Please!”

  Her face was painfully flushed, and her eyes were abashed, but he refused to relent.

  “Unless, of course, you’d rather go along with me as my—wife?”

  Alison collapsed against him. His fingers had hurt her arms, and she was ready to burst into tears. She thought he was being extraordinarily brutal, and he might still be making fun of her, but she no longer had any pride.

  “Do you really need a wife?” she whispered.

  “I need you, my darling.” The change that overcame him was complete. His arms fastened about her and she realised for the first time that his heart was beating wildly very close to hers, and his face had suddenly become so serious that she could no longer believe him capable of deliberately amusing himself at her expense. “Right from the beginning, you blind, stupid, adorable woman, I was attracted by you, and the night I sat watching you in the library I also fell in love for the very first time in my life. If you’d had the sense to search carefully when you swept the floor the following day, or hoovered, or whatever it is you do to floors—I’m sure you have the perfect answer!—you’d have found my heart lying there on the stone cold floor. No wonder I developed pneumonia ... the shock of falling in love at my time of life was enough to prostrate me. It did, and I tried to tell you all about it while you set about nursing me in that highly competent manner of yours, but I know now you’d have attributed it to rising temperature if I’d said anything about marrying you as quickly as possible.”

  “You—you did say something about casting my wedding-ring into the sea,” she reminded him, while she wondered whether she was awake or dreaming, and her head came to rest on his shoulder.

  He looked down at it, encircling her pale finger.

  “And that’s the one thing above everything else I’d like to do,” he told her viciously. “And no one can accuse me of being light-headed now!”

  Her shy grey eyes looked up at him.


  “Roger was never my husband, so you haven’t the smallest reason to be jealous,” she assured him. “If,” she added breathlessly, “you feel like being jealous.”

  “I do.”

  He took her face between his hands and examined it.

  “You’re the loveliest thing, Alison,” he said wonderingly. “And I paid good money for that hideous dressing-gown! We’ll cast that into the sea if you like.”

  But her thrifty instincts were offended by the idea.

  “Oh, no, I’ll keep it ... and one day I’m sure I’ll find a use for it.”

  “When your second husband is once more prostrate and you have to nurse him? It’ll be ideal for the cold night watches!” And then he smoothed the fine line of her brows. “Tell me, truthfully, Alison ... were you seriously afraid I was becoming interested in Jessamy? Apart from feeling sorry for her, I mean?”

  She nodded, studying the top button of his waistcoat.

  “I was quite sure you were grooming her, as it were, for marriage.”

  “And you would have let me marry her?”

  “Forget it.” He snatched her close, and for the first time she was really imprisoned by his arms. “I’m behaving very badly to you, my little love, and it’s high time I explained why I showered all those things on Jessamy at Christmas. One reason was because I like her, and I do think she’s a most engaging child who needs bringing out of her shell and encouraging a little, as she’s highly sensitive about that disability of hers. But the main reason was because of your absurd independence. I wanted to break it down, and I’ll admit now that I also wanted to make you jealous.” He smiled at her penitently all the same. “I thought, if I was able to read your expression aright when you received your present, and, later, Jessamy received hers, it would enable me to know the best way to proceed with you. If you were indifferent ... well, I’d go away and nurse my broken heart in London. If—and this is what happened—you looked so hurt that I was afraid, for one moment, you might even break down and cry and then protest violently, I would know you cared. For I’m perfectly well aware that you grudge Jessamy nothing ... nothing material; that is. But you would grudge her me.”

  “Oh, I would, I would,” she assured him and all at once she started clinging to him unashamedly, and he could feel her trembling in his hold. He said something huskily and bent his head impulsively, and then she felt his mouth touching hers at first lightly and experimentally, until her arms went up about his neck and he kissed her passionately.

  She would never have believed, when he arrived at Leydon Hall for the first time, that he was capable of such a kiss. And if the truth were told she would never have believed that she herself could become so abandoned under the influence of that kiss and his arms as to turn her face up to him eagerly for more, and give him back kiss for kiss.

  For at least ten minutes, while they stood locked in one another’s arms in the middle of the floor, they each had their first foretaste of pure, unadulterated ecstasy ... and when it was over Charles Leydon looked a little pale, while Alison was rosily flushed.

  Then he led her over to his chair, sat down in it, and pulled her down on to his lap.

  “Listen,” he commanded. “Listen while I outline my plans for our future and the future of Leydon Hall.”

  Contentedly—not even afraid that Mrs. Davenport might find her way into the room and be astounded by what she saw—she settled down with her head against his shoulder to listen.

  “We’ll live here—at least part of the time. I’ll have the wing we now occupy—or rather, you occupy, since we’re not actually married yet,” smiling down at her blushing face, “converted into an entirely separate wing—separate, that is, from the rest of the Hall—and install all the modern conveniences I can think of. When we’re not in London, or elsewhere, we’ll live here ... but the bulk of Leydon Hall will be adapted for other purposes. I’m not ruthless and unimaginative, as you once supposed, but I am practical, and I hate a lot of waste, so I shall either convert it into flats for old people, or run it as a school. I’m inclined to favour flats for old people, and if you’re the kind of girl I think you are—well, I think you’d prefer that, too.” Alison agreed that it was quite a novel idea, and she did approve of it.

  “And the gardens can still be maintained for the benefit of the public,” she suggested. Charles pinched her ear.

  “You and your gardens for the benefit of the public! But yes, I think that’s a good idea, too. And part of the estate can be run as a market-garden. That’s another good idea.”

  “And what about—what about Jessamy?” she asked. “When she returns from Austria, I mean?”

  “She will live with us, naturally ... until she marries, or gets herself a job, or wants to be on her own. But I hope she’ll marry soon. We must find her a nice, kind, considerate husband with enough money to keep her comfortably.”

  She smiled up at him.

  “And Marianne?”

  “She, too, will live with us—” He frowned. “I see I’ll have to get a much larger flat. When a man acquires a ready-made family he needs a house. I’ll have to build one in Surrey, or somewhere close to town.”

  “That,” Alison exclaimed, enchanted by the idea of being mistress in a really modern, up-to-the-minute house, “would be wonderful!” Then she remembered that she had yet another responsibility. Poor man, she hoped he realised what he was taking on.

  “And what about Lorne?” she asked. “She’s not sixteen yet.”

  “While we’re on our honeymoon the other two girls can take charge of her ... unless you want them all to come with us?” gazing down at her suspiciously as if he more than suspected that was what she might wish. “When we return from our honeymoon we’ll find her a good school. She might even do well at a boarding-school for a year or so.”

  Alison smiled up at him.

  “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “I won’t insist that they all come with us on our honeymoon.”

  He stroked her cheek thoughtfully for a moment, and then he stroked the slender column of her throat.

  “Little Quiet Heart,” he said, almost dreamily. “That’s a name I gave you long ago ... oh, long, long ago, for it seems we’ve known one another for years and years. Perhaps we met in a former incarnation, I don’t know! But I do know that the instant I set eyes on you you had me worried. You see, I knew I’d left my freedom—my complete freedom!—behind in London!”