CHAPTER XII—A SENSE OF DUTY

JEAN was immensely puzzled at the abrupt change which had occurred in Mrs. Craig’s manner immediately upon hearing that she was the daughter of Glyn Peterson, and, as soon as the visitor had taken her departure, she sought an explanation.

“What on earth made Mrs. Craig freeze up the instant my father’s name was mentioned? Did she hate him for any reason?”

Tormarin looked across at her.

“No,” he answered quietly. “She didn’t hate him. She loved him.”

Jean stared at him in frank astonishment. She had never dreamed that there had been any other woman than Jacqueline in Glyn’s life.

“Mrs. Craig—and my father?” she exclaimed incredulously.

“She wasn’t Mrs. Craig in those days. She was Judith Burke.”

“Well, but——” persisted Jean, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I still don’t see why.”

“Why what?”—unwillingly.

“Why she looked as if she loathed the very sight of me. That’s not”—drily—“quite the effect you would expect love to produce!”

There was a curiously abstracted look in Tormarin’s eyes as he made answer.

“Love is productive of very curious effects on occasion. More particularly when it is without hope of fulfilment,” he added in a lower tone.

“Well, I suppose my father couldn’t help not falling in love with Mrs. 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?”

He glanced at her in some surprise.

“Surely—— Don’t you know the circumstances?”

She shook her head.

“No. I simply don’t know in the least what you are talking about. Please tell me.”

Tormarin made no response for a moment. He was standing with his back to the light, but as he lit a cigarette the flare of the match revealed a worried expression on his face, as though he deprecated the turn the conversation was taking.

“Oh, well,” he said at last, evading the point at issue, “it’s all ancient history now. Let it go. There’s never anything gained by digging up the dry bones of the past.” Jean’s mouth set itself in a mutinous line of determination. “Please tell me, Blaise,” she reiterated. “As it is something which concerns my father and a woman I shall probably be meeting fairly often in the future, I think I have a right to know about it.”

He shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

“Very well—if you insist. But I don’t think you’ll be any happier for knowing.” He paused. “Still inflexible?” She bent her head.

“Quite”—firmly—“whatever it is, I’d rather know it.”

“On your own head be it, then.” He seemed trying to infuse a lighter element into the conversation, as though hoping to minimise the effect of what he had to tell her. “It was just this—that your father and Judith Burke were engaged to be married at the time he met your mother, and that—well, to make a long story short, he ran away with Miss Mavory on the day fixed for his wedding with Judith.”

A dead silence followed the disclosure. Then Jean uttered a low cry of dismay.

“My father did that? Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

Tormarin could see that the story had distressed her. Her eyes showed hurt and bewildered like those of a child who has met with a totally unexpected rebuff.

“Don’t take it like that!” he urged hastily. “After all, It was nothing so terrible. You look as though he had broken every one of the ten commandments”—smiling.

Jean smiled back rather wanly.

“I don’t know that I should worry very much if he had—in some circumstances. But—don’t you see?—it was so cruel, so horribly selfish!”

“You’ve got to remember two things in justification——”

“Justification?”—expressively. “There wasn’t any. There couldn’t be.”

“Well, excuse, then, if you like. One thing is that Jacqueline Mavory was one of the most beautiful of women, and the other, that your father’s engagement to Judith had really been more or less engineered by their respective parents—adjoining properties, friends of long standing, and so on. It was no love-match—on his side.”

“But on her wedding-day!”—pitifully. “Oh! Poor Judith!”

Tormarin smiled a trifle cynically.

“That was the root of the trouble. It was Judith’s pride that was hurt—as well as her heart. She married Major Craig not long after, and I believe they were really fond of one another and comparatively happy. But she has never forgiven Peterson from that day to this. And you, being Jacqueline Mavory’s daughter, will come in for the residue of her bitterness. Unless”—ironically—“you can make friends with her.”

“I shall try to,” said Jean simply. “Is Major Craig living now?”

“No. He died out in India, and after his death Judith came back to England. She has lived at Willow Ferry with her brother, Geoffrey Burke, ever since.”

There was a long silence, while Jean tried to fit in the new facts she had learned with her knowledge of her father’s character. She was a little afraid that Tormarin might misunderstand her impulsive outburst of indignation.

“Don’t think that I am sitting in judgment on my father,” she said at last. “In a way, I can—even understand his doing such a thing. You know, for the last two years of my mother’s life I was with them both constantly, and anyone living with them could understand their doing all kinds of things that ordinary people wouldn’t do.” She paused, as though seeking words that might make her meaning clearer. “They would never really mean to hurt anyone, but they were just like a couple of children together—gloriously irresponsible and happy. I always felt years older than either of them. Glyn used to say I was ‘cursed with a damnable sense of duty’”—laughing rather ruefully. “I suppose I am. Probably I inherit it from our old Puritan ancestors on the Peterson side. I know I couldn’t have cheerfully run off and taken my happiness at the cost of someone else’s prior right.”

A look of extreme bitterness crossed Tormarin’s face.

“Wait till you’re tempted,” he said shortly. “Wait till what you want wars against what you ought to have—what you’ve the right to take.”

For a moment she made no answer. Put bluntly like that, the matter suddenly presented itself to her as one of the poignant possibilities of life. Supposing—supposing such a choice should ever be demanded of her? She felt a vague fear catch at her heart, an indefinable dread.

When at last she spoke, the eyes she lifted to meet Tor-marin’s were troubled. In them he could read the innate honesty which was prepared to face the question he had raised, and behind that—courage. A young, untried courage, not sure of itself, it is true, but still courage that only waited till some call should wake it into fighting actuality.

“I hope,” she said with a wistful humility that was rather touching, “I hope I should stick it out One’s ideals, and duty, and other people’s rights—it would be horrible to scrap the lot—just for love.”

“Worth it, perhaps. You”—his voice was the least bit uneven—“you haven’t been up against love—yet.”

Again she was conscious of that little catch at her heart—the same convulsive tightening of the muscles as one experiences when a telegram is put into one’s hand which may, or may not, contain bad news.

“You haven’t been up against love yet.”

The words recalled her knowledge of the tragic episode that lay in Tormarin’s own past. The whole history she did not know—only the odds and ends of gossip which one woman had confided to another. But here, in the man’s curt brevity of speech, surely lay proof that he had suffered. And if he had suffered, it followed that he must have cared deeply for the woman who had thrown him aside for the sake of another man.

Jean’s first generous impulse of pity as she realised this was strangely intermingled with a fleeting disquiet, a subconscious sense of loss. It was only momentary, and not definite enough for her to express in words, even to herself—hardly more than the slightly blank sensation produced upon anyone sitting in the sunshine when a cloud suddenly intervenes and drops a shadow where a moment before there has been warmth and light.

An instant later it was overborne by her spontaneous sympathy for the man beside her, and, recognising the rather painful similarity between her father’s treatment of Judith Craig and the story she had heard of the unknown woman’s treatment of Tormarin himself, she tactfully deflected the conversation to something that would touch him less closely, launching into a description of the life her parents had led at Beirnfels.

“They were wonderfully happy together there. Not in the least—as I suppose they ought to have been—an awful example of poetic justice!” she declared. “Glyn used to call Beirnfels his ‘House of Dreams-Come-True’.”

“Glyn?”—suddenly remarking her use of Peterson’s Christian name.

She smiled.

“I never called them father and mother. They would have loathed it. Glyn used to say that anything which savoured so much of domesticity would kill romance!”

“That sounds like all that I have ever heard about him,” said Tormarin, smiling too. “So does the ‘House of Dreams-Come-True.’ It’s a charming idea.”

“He took it from one of Jacqueline’s songs. She had a glorious voice, you know.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. I suppose you have inherited it?”

She shook her head.

“No, I wish I had. But Jacqueline insisted on trying to teach me singing, all the same. Poor dear! I was a dreadful disappointment to her, I’m afraid.”

“Couldn’t you sing the ‘House of Dreams’ song? I’m rather curious to hear the remainder of it.”

Jean rose and crossed to the piano.

“Oh, yes, I can sing you that. Jacqueline always used to say it was the only thing I sang as if I understood it, and Glyn declared it was because it agreed with my ‘confounded principles’!”

She smiled up at him as her fingers slid into the prelude of the song, but her little joke against herself brought no answering smile to his lips. Instead, he stood waiting for the song to begin with an odd kind of expectancy on his face.

Jean had most certainly not inherited her mother’s exquisite voice, but she had a quaint little pipe of her own, with a clouded, husky quality in it that was not without its appeal. It lent a wistful charm to the simple words of the song.

"It’s a strange road leads to the House of Dreams,
To the House of Dreams-Come-True,
Its Hills are steep and its valleys deep,
And salt with tears the Wayfarers weep,
The Wayfarers—I and you.

"But there’s sure a way to the House of Dreams,
To the House of Dreams-Come-True.
We shall find it yet, ere the sun has set,
If we fare straight on, come fine, come wet,
Wayfarers—I and you.”


The soft, husky voice ceased, and for a moment there was silence. Then Tormarin said quietly:

“Thank you. I don’t think your mother need have felt any great disappointment concerning your voice. It has its own qualities, even if it is not suited to the concert hall.”

“But the words of the song?” questioned Jean eagerly. “Don’t you like them?”

“It’s a pretty enough idea.” He laid a faint, significant stress on the last word. “But for some of us the ‘House of Dreams-Come-True’ has never been built. Or, if it has, we’ve lost the way there.”

There was a note of rigid acceptance in his voice, as though he no longer strove against the decisions of destiny, and Jean’s eager sympathy leaped impulsively to her lips.

“Don’t say that!” she began. Then checked herself, flushing a little. “I hate to hear you speak in that way,” she went on more quietly. “It sounds as though there were nothing worth trying for—worth waiting for. I like to believe that everyone has a house of dreams which may ‘come true’ some day.” She paused. “‘If we fare straight on, come fine, come wet,’” she repeated softly.

Her eyes had a far-away look in them, as though they were envisioning that narrow, winding track which leads, somewhen, to the place where dreams even the most wonderful of them—shall become realities.

Glorious faith and optimism of youth! If we could only recapture it in those after years, when time has added tolerance and a little wisdom to our harvest’s store, the houses where dreams come true might add themselves together until there were whole streets of them—glowing townships—instead of merely an isolated dwelling here or there.

As Tormarin listened to Jean’s young, eager voice, his face softened and some of the tired lines in it seemed to smooth themselves out “Little Comrade,” he said gently, and she felt her breath quicken as he called her again by the name which he had used at Montavan—and once since, when they had come suddenly face to face at Coombe Eavie Station. But that second time the words had escaped him unawares. Now he was using them deliberately, withholding no part of their significance. “Little comrade, I think the man who ‘fares straight on’ with you for fellow-traveller will find the House of Dreams-Come-True. But it isn’t—just any man who may start that journey with you. It mustn’t be”—his grave eyes held hers intently—“a man who has tried to find the road once before—and failed.”

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. So much he had implied at their first meeting. But, since then, he had taken even that friendship from her, substituting a deliberate indifference against which she had struggled in vain.

And now, without knowing quite how it had come about, the barrier was down. They were comrades once more—she and the Englishman from Montavan—and she was conscious of a great content that it should be so.

For the moment she asked nothing more, was unconscious of any further wish. The woman in her still slumbered, and, to the girl, this friendship seemed enough. She did not realise that something deeper, more imperative in its ultimate demands, was mingled with it—was, indeed, unrecognised by her, the very essence of it.