CHAPTER XIV.—A COMPACT

“Y OU don’t like Jean Peterson.”

Burke made the announcement without preface. He and Judith were sitting together on the verandah at Willow Perry, where their coffee had been brought them after lunch. Judith inhaled a whiff of cigarette smoke before she answered. Then, without any change of expression, her eyes fixed on the glowing tip of her cigarette, she answered composedly:

“No. Did you expect I should?”

“Well, hang it all, you don’t hold her accountable for her father’s defection, do you?”

A dull red crept up under Mrs. Craig’s sallow skin, but she did not lift her eyes. They were still intent on the little red star of light dulling slowly into grey ash.

“Not accountable,” she replied coolly. “I look upon her as an unpleasant consequence.” She bent forward suddenly. “Do you realise that she might have been—my child?” There was a sudden vibrating quality in her voice, and for an instant a rapt look cajne into her face, transforming its hard lines. “But she isn’t. She happens to be the child of the man I loved—and another woman.”

“You surely can’t hate her for that?”

“Can’t I? You don’t know much about women, Geoff. Glyn Peterson stamped on my pride, and a woman never forgives that.”

She leaned back in her chair again, her face once more an indifferent mask. Burke sat silent, staring broodingly in front of him. Presently her glance flickered curiously over his face.

“Why does it matter to you whether I like her or not?” she asked, breaking the silence which had fallen.

Burke shifted in his chair so that he faced her. His eyes looked far more red than brown at the moment, as though they glowed with some hot inner light.

“Because,” he said deliberately, “I’m going to marry her.”

Judith sat suddenly upright.

“So that’s the meaning of your constant pilgrimages to Staple, is it?”

“Just that.”

She laughed—a disagreeable little laugh like a douche of cold water.

“You’re rather late in the field, aren’t you?”

“You mean that Blaise Tormarin wants her?”

“Of course I do. It’s evident enough, isn’t it?”

Burke pulled at his pipe reflectively.

“I should have thought he’d had a sickener with Nesta Freyne.”

“So he had. But not in the way you mean. He never—loved—Nesta.”

“Then why on earth did he ask her to marry him?”

“Good heavens, Geoffrey! You’re a man—and you ask me that! There are heaps of men who ask women to marry them on the strength of a temporary infatuation, and then regret it ever after. Luckily for Blaise, Nesta saved him the ‘ever after’ part. But”—eyeing him significantly—“Blaise’s feeling for Jean isn’t of the ‘temporary’ type. Of that I’m sure.”

“All the same, I don’t believe he means to ask her to marry him.”

“No. I don’t think he does—mean to. He’s probably got some high-minded scruples about not asking a second woman to make a mess of her life as a result of the Tormarin temper. It would be just like Blaise to adopt that attitude. But he will ask her, all the same. The thing’ll get too strong for him. And when he asks her, Jean will say yes.”

“You may be right. I’ve always said you were no fool, Judy. But if it’s as you think, then I must get in first, that’s all. First or last, though”—with a grim laugh—“I’ll back myself to beat Blaise Tormarin. And you’ve got to help me.”

Followed a silence while Judith threw away the stump of her cigarette and lit another. She did not hurry over the process, but went about it slowly and deliberately, holding the flame of the match to the tip of her cigarette for quite an unnecessarily long time.

At last:

“I don’t mind if I do,” she said slowly. “I don’t think I—envy—your wife much, Geoffrey. She won’t be a very happy woman, so I don’t mind assisting Glyn Peterson’s daughter to the position. It would make things so charming all round if he and I ever met again”—smiling ironically.

Burke looked at her with a mixture of admiration and disgust.

“What a thorough-going little beast you are, Judith,” he observed tranquilly.

She shrugged her thin, supple shoulders with indifference.

“I didn’t make myself. Glyn Peterson had a good share in kneading the dough; why shouldn’t his daughter eat the bread? And anyhow, old thing”—her whole face suddenly softening—“I should like you to have what you want—even if you wanted the moon! So you can count on me. But I don’t think you’ll find it all plain sailing.”

“No”—sardonically. “She’ll likely be a little devil to break.... Well, start being a bit more friendly, will you? Ask her to lunch.”

Accordingly, a day or two later, a charming little note found its way to Staple, inviting Jean to lunch with Mrs. Craig.

“I shall be quite alone,” it ran, “as Geoffrey is going off for a day’s fishing, so I hope Lady Anne will spare you to come over and keep me company for an hour or two.”

Jean was delighted at this evidence that Judith was thawing towards her. She was genuinely anxious that they should become friends, feeling that it was up to her, as Glyn’s daughter, to atone—in so far as friendliness and sympathy could be said to atone—for his treatment of her. Beyond this, she had a vague hope that later, if she and Judith ever became intimate enough to touch on the happenings of the past, she might be able to make the latter see her father in the same light in which she herself saw him—as a charming, lovable, irresponsible child, innocent of any intention to wound, but with all a child’s unregarding pursuit of a desired object, irrespective of the consequences to others.

She felt that if only Judith could better comprehend Glyn’s nature, she would not only be disposed to judge him less hardly, but, to a certain extent, would find healing for her own bitterness of resentment and hurt pride.

Judith was an unhappy woman, embittered by one of those blows in life which a woman finds hardest to hear. And Jean hated people to be unhappy.

So that it was with considerable satisfaction that she set out across the park towards Willow Perry, crossing the river by the footbridge which spanned it at a point about a quarter of a mile below the scene of her boating mishap.

Judith welcomed her with unaccustomed warmth, and after lunch completely won her heart by a candour seemingly akin to Jean’s own.

“I’ve been quite hateful to you since you came to Staple,” she said frankly. “Just because you were—who you were. I suppose”—turning her head a little aside—“you’ve heard—you know that old story?”

Then, as Jean murmured an affirmative, she went on quickly:

“Well, it was idiotic of me to feel unfriendly to you because you happened to be Glyn’s daughter, and I’m honestly ashamed of myself. I should have loved you at once—you’re rather a dear, you know!—if you had been anyone else. So will you let me love you now, please—if it isn’t too late?”

It was charmingly done, and Jean received the friendly overture with all the enthusiasm dictated by a generous and spontaneous nature.

“Why, of course,” she agreed gladly. “Let’s begin over again”—smiling.

Judith smiled back.

“Yes, we’ll make a fresh start.”

After that, things progressed swimmingly. The slight gene which had attended the earlier stages of the visit vanished, and very soon, prompted by Judith’s eager, interested questions, Jean found herself chatting away quite naturally and happily about her life before she came to Staple and confessing how much she was enjoying her first experience of England.

“It’s all so soft, and pretty, and old,” she said. “I feel as if Staple must always have been here—just where it is, looking across to the Moor, and nodding sometimes, as much as to say, ‘I’ve been here so long that I know some of your secrets.’ The Moor always seems to me to have secrets,” she added dreamily. “Those great tors watch us all the time, just as they’ve watched for centuries. They remind me of the Egyptian Sphinx, they are so still, and silent, and—and eternal-looking.”

“You’ve not been on to Dartmoor yet, have you?” asked Judith. “We have a bungalow up there—Three Fir Bungalow, it’s called. You must come and spend a few days there with us when the weather gets warmer.”

“I should love it,” cried Jean, her eyes sparkling. “I’m aching to go to the Moor. I want to see it in all sorts of moods—when it’s raining, and when the sun’s shining, and when the wind blows. 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 wore 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. One almost forgot that one was just an ordinary, plain-boiled human being tied up in a parcel of flesh and bone.”

“Only people aren’t really in the least plain-boiled or ordinary,” observed Jean quaintly.

“You aren’t, I verily believe.” Judith regarded her curiously for a moment. “I think I wish you were,” she said abruptly.

She was not finding the part assigned to her by her brother any too easy. It complicates matters, when you are deliberately planning a semblance of friendship towards someone, if that someone persists in inspiring you with little genuine impulses of liking and friendliness.

Jean herself was delighted with the result of her visit to Willow Perry. She was convinced that Judith was a much nicer woman than she had imagined, or than anyone else imagined her to be, and when she took her departure she carried these warmer sentiments with her, characteristically reproaching herself not a little for her first hasty judgment. People improved upon acquaintance enormously, she reflected.

She did not go straight back to Staple, but took her way towards Charnwood on the chance of finding Claire at home, and, Fate being in a benevolent mood, she discovered her in her garden, precariously mounted upon a ladder and occupied in nailing back a creeper.

Claire greeted her joyfully and proceeded to descend.

“I’ve been lunching at Willow Perry,” explained Jean, “so I thought I might as well come on here and cadge my tea as well!”

“Of course you might Adrian has gone into Exeter to-day, so we shall be alone.”

Jean was conscious of an immense relief. The knowledge that Sir Adrian was not anywhere on the premises seemed like the lifting of a blight.

Claire’s blue eyes smiled at her understandingly.

“Yes, I know,” she nodded, as though Jean had given voice to her thought. “It’s just as if someone had opened a window and let the fresh air in, isn’t it?”

She collected her tools, and slipping her arm within Jean’s led her in the direction of the house.

“We’ll have tea at once,” she said, “and then I’ll walk back with you part way.”

“You’re bent on getting rid of me quickly, then?”

“Yes”—seriously. “He”—there was little need to specify to whom the pronoun referred—“will be back by the afternoon train, and for some reason or other he is very unfriendly towards you just now.”

“What have I done to offend?” queried Jean lightly. Somehow, with Sir Adrian actually away, it didn’t seem a matter of much importance whether he was offended or not. Even the house had a different “feel” about it as they entered it.

“It’s not anything you’ve done; it’s what you are, I think, sometimes, that when a man is full of evil and cruel thoughts and knows he has given himself up to wickedness, he simply hates to see anyone young and—and good, like you are, Jean, with all your life before you to make a splendid thing of.”

“And what about you?” asked Jean, her eyes resting affectionately on the other’s delicate flower face with its pathetically curved lips and the look of trouble in the young blue eyes. “He sees you constantly.”

“Oh, he’s used to me. I’m only his wife, you see. Besides”—wearily—“he knows that he can effectually prevent me from making a splendid thing of my life.”

The note of bitterness in her voice wrung Jean’s heart.

“I don’t know how you bear it!” she exclaimed.

“One can bear anything—a day at a time,” answered Claire with an attempt at brightness. “But I never look forward,” she added in a lower tone.

The words seemed to Jean to contain an epitome of tragedy. Not yet twenty, and Claire’s whole philosophy of life was embodied in those four desolate words: “I never look forward!”

The world seemed built up of sadness and cross-purposes. Claire and Nick, Judith, and Blaise Tormarin—all had their own particular burdens to carry, burdens which had in a measure spoiled the lives of each one of them. It seemed as though no one was allowed to escape those “snuffers of Destiny” of which Blaise had spoken as he and Jean had climbed the mountain-side together. She felt a depressing conviction that her own turn would come and wondered whether it would be sooner or later.

“Don’t look so blue!” Claire’s voice broke in upon her gloomy trend of thought. She was laughing, and Jean was conscious of a sudden uprush of admiration for the young gay courage which could laugh even while it could not look forward. “After all, there are compensations in life. You’re one of them, my Jean, as I’ve told you before! Now let’s talk about something else.”

Jean responded gladly enough, and presently Sir Adrian was temporarily forgotten in the little intimate half-hour of woman-talk which followed.