Margaret Pedler

“ Before her, mile after mile, lay the white road—a sword of civilisation cleaving its way remorselessly across the green wilderness of mossy turf, and on either side rose the swelling hills and jagged peaks of the great tors, melting in the far distance into a vague, formless blur of purple that might be either cloud or tor as it merged at last into the dim haze of the horizon.
“Oh, blessed, blessed Moor!” exclaimed Jean. “How I love it! You know, half the people in the world haven’t the least idea what Dartmoor is like. ”

“ Lady Anne, in recalling that bleak tragedy of the past, had accomplished more than she knew. She had shown Jean her own heart.
From those fierce, unexpected pangs of jealousy which had stabbed her as she realised the part played by another woman in Blaise’s life—the woman who had been his wife—had sprung the knowledge that she loved him. Only love could explain the instant, clamorous rebellion of her whole being against that other woman’s claim. ”

“ It is quite true what you say—that I love Jean Peterson and that she loves me. But we have given up our love, and with it our hope of happiness in this world, for you. In return, you will give up something for us. You will give up the infinite pleasure you appear to derive from vilifying and belittling a woman who is as much above you as the heavens are above the earth, whose conception of love is as fine and pure as yours is mean and commonplace and jealous. ”

“ Many had been the transparent little devices she had employed to beguile Jean into the saddle, knowing well that once she was on the back of her favourite mare the errand which was the ostensible purpose of the occasion would quite probably be entirely forgotten. But Jean would return from a long ride over the beloved hills and valleys that had been familiar to her from childhood with a faint colour in her pale cheeks, and with the shadow in her eyes a little lightened. There is no cure for sickness of the soul like the big, open spaces of the earth and God’s clean winds and sunlight. ”

“ There was a queer little throb in Jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. It plucked at the chords of memory, and Tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled Alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!” ”

“ CHAPTER XVI—THE GIFT OF LOVE THERE are some people to whom love comes in a single blinding flash; it is as though the heavens were opened and the vision and the glory theirs in a sudden, transcendant revelation. To others it comes gradually, their hearts opening diffidently to its warmth and light as a closed bud unfolds its petals, almost imperceptibly, to the sun.
With Jean, its coming partook in a measure of both of these. Love itself did not come to her suddenly. ”

“ After the agony of uncertainty of the last few months, the calm surety that Blaise loved her seemed happiness enough.
Other sharp edges of existence, too, had smoothed themselves down—as sharp edges have a knack of doing if you wait long enough. Burke seemed to have accepted her last answer as final, and now spared her the effort of contending further with his tempestuous love-making, so that she felt able to continue her friendship with Judith, and her consequent visits to Willow Ferry, with as little gêne as though the episode at the “honeymooners’ inn” had never taken place. ”

“ Henceforth their lives must lie apart.
“So be it,” said Blaise. “She shall come back and take her place again at Staple.”
Jean clung to him a little closer.
“Blaise, beloved—I know the harder part will be yours. But mine won’t be easy, dear. I shall go to Charnwood to be with Claire at once—to-morrow—and it won’t be easy, when I see in an evening the lights twinkle up at Staple, to know that you two are within, shut in from the world together, while I’m outside—always outside your life and your love.”
“You’ll never be outside my love,” he said swiftly. “That’s yours, now and forever. ”

“ He tried to thrust the thought away from him. It was just the kind of thing that Nesta would have done, playing off one man against the other with the innate instinct of the born coquette. But not Jean—not Jean of the candid eyes.
Presently, through the thinning mist, Tormarin discerned the sharp turn of the track which branched off from the road towards the bungalow, and quickening Orion’s pace, he was soon riding up the steep ascent, the moonlight throwing strange, confusing lights and shadows on the mist-wet surface of the ground. ”

“ It seemed to Jean that, as he spoke, the wall which he had built up between them since she came to Staple crumbled away. This was the same man she had known at Montavan, whose hands reached out to hers across some fixed dividing line which neither he nor she might pass. She knew now what that dividing line must be—the shadow flung by a past love, his love for Nesta Freyne which had ended in hopeless tragedy.
There must always be a limit set to any friendship of theirs. ”

“ In a few minutes Claire recovered consciousness, but she was horribly shaken and distraught, crying and clinging to Jean or to the housemaid—who was almost crying, too, out of sympathy—like a child frightened by the dark.
Jean, understanding just what was needed, shepherded Nick to the door of the room, where he lingered unhappily, his anxious gaze still fixed on the slender, shrinking figure upon the couch.
“Don’t worry, Nick,” she said reassuringly. “She’ll he all right; it’s only reaction. But I know what she wants—she wants a real mother-person. ”

“ Jean shook her head, smiling a little to herself. It had been part of the charm of that brief companionship that neither of the two comrades knew any of the everyday, commonplace details concerning the other.
“Perhaps you will see him again at the rink to-morrow,” suggested Madame de Varigny, still with that note of restrained eagerness in her tones. “The snow is not deep except where it has drifted; they will clear the ice in the morning.” ”

“ There is no gauge by which those first moments when two who love confess that they are lovers may be measured. It is the golden, timeless span when “unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday” cease to hem us round about and only love, and love’s ecstasy, remain.
To Blaise and Jean it might have been an hour—a commonplace period ticked off by the little silver clock upon the chimneypiece—or half eternity before they came back to the recollection of things mundane. ”

“ It was long before sleep visited Jean that night The events of the day marched processionally through her mind, and her thoughts persisted in clustering round the baffling, incomprehensible personality of Blaise Tormarin.
His extreme bitterness of speech she ascribed to the unfortunate episode that lay in his past. But she could find no reason for his strange, expressed wish to disregard their former meeting at Montavan—to wipe out, as it were, all recollection of it.
That he did not dislike her she felt sure; and a woman rarely makes a mistake over a man’s personal attitude towards her. ”

“ Within the room Jean could discern a confused hurly-burly of swaying, writhing figures—Blaise and Nick and the butler struggling to overpower Sir Adrian, who was fighting them with all the cunning and the amazing strength of madness. From beyond came the clamour of people battering uselessly at the door, the shrill, excited voices of the frightened servants who had collected in the hall outside the room. ”

“ I’ve learned now”—with a faint weary smile—“that you cannot force love. It can only be given. And I want nothing but just the right to take care of you, to shield you—to keep the sharp corners of life away from you.” Then, as he read her incredulous face, he went on gravely: “If I had wanted more than that, Jean, if I had not learned something—just from loving you, I should not have waited until now. I should have come at once—as soon as I learned from Madame de Varigny that Tormarin’s wife was still alive.” ”

“ Claire and I have borne all we can. It has been bad enough to care as we care for each other, and to live apart But when it means that Claire is to suffer unspeakable misery and humiliation while I stand by and look on—why, it’s beyond human endurance. You’re not tempted. You’ve no conception what you’re talking about.”
Jean sat very still and silent while Nick stormed out the bitterness of soul, recognising the truth of every word he littered—even of the gibes which, in the heedlessness of his own pain, he flung at herself. ”

“ He would never trust her again—nor forgive her. No man could. Love’s loyalty, rocked by the swift currents of jealousy and passion, is not of the same quality as the steady loyalty of friendship—that calm, unshakable confidence which may exist between man and man or woman and woman.
Moreover—and here alone was where the fear of gossip troubled her—even if the inconceivable happened and Blaise forgave and trusted her again, she could not go to him with a slurred name, give him herself—when the gift was outwardly tarnished. ”

“ The scent of a peat fire came warm and fragrant to her nostrils as she stepped out of the sunlight into the comparative dusk of the little shanty, mingling curiously with an aroma of savoury stew which issued from a black pot hung above the fire, bubbling and chuckling as it simmered.
The gipsy, as though by force of habit, gave a stir to its contents and then, settling herself on a three-legged stool, she took Jean’s hand in her wrinkled, claw-like fingers and peered at its palm in silence. ”

“ Other women, besides Jean had found it equally difficult to resist. His sheer virility, with its splendid disregard for other people’s claims and its conscienceless belief that the battle should assuredly be to the strong, earned him forgiveness where, for misdeeds not half so flagrant, a less imperious sinner would have been promptly shown the door.
But no woman—not even the women to whom he had made love without the excuse of loving—had ever shown Burke the door or given him the kind of treatment which he had thoroughly well merited twenty times over. And Jean was no exception to the rule. ”

“ Whichever way she decided, whichever of the two alternatives she accepted, her happiness must pay the price. Nothing she could ever say or do, afterwards, would set her right in the eyes of the man whose belief in her meant everything. Whether she agreed to marry Burke, returning home in the odour of sanctity within the next hour or two, or whether she refused and returned the next morning—free, but with the incontrovertible fact of a night spent at Burke’s bungalow, alone with him, behind her, Blaise would never trust or believe in her love for him again. ”

“ I’m sure it will be different each time—rather like a woman.”
“I think it’s loveliest of all by moonlight,” said Judith, her eyes soft and shining with recollection. She loved all the beauty of the world as much as Jean herself did. “I remember being on the top of one of the tors at night. All the surrounding valleys were hidden in a mist like a silver sea, and I felt as if I had got right away from the everyday world, into a sort of holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits. ”

“ Craig,” protested Jean with some warmth. “Nor could he have prevented her caring for him. And it’s certainly illogical of her to feel any resentment towards me on that score. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Love and logic have precious little to say to each other, as a rule,” replied Tormarin grimly. “To Judith, you’re the child of the woman who stole her lover away from her, so you can hardly expect her to feel an overwhelming affection for you.”
“The woman who stole her lover away from her?” repeated Jean slowly. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, Blaise?” ”

“ Madame de Varigny seized upon the unlucky word. “Yes—it may be easy enough for you to forget—you who took Nesta’s young, beautiful life and crushed it; you who came like a thief and stole from me the one creature in the whole world whom I loved—my bambina, my little sister. Oh, yes”—her voice rose passionately—“easy enough when there is another woman—a new love—with whom you think to start your life all over again! But I tell you, you shall not! There shall be no new beginning for you—no marriage with this Jean Peterson to whom you are now fiancé. ”

“ Probably even Jean hardly realised the fineness of the horsemanship of which she had just been a witness—the judgment and coolness Burke had evinced in letting the mare spend the first freshness of her strength before he essayed to check her mad pace; the dexterity with which he had somehow contrived to keep her straight; and finally, the consummate skill with which, that last half-mile, he had played her mouth, rejecting the dead pull on the reins—the instinctive error of the mediocre driver—which so quickly numbs sensation and neutralises every effort to bring a runaway to a standstill. ”