CHAPTER XXII—“WILLING OR UNWILLING!”

IT was over. A bare twenty yards from the brow of the bill the man had won, and now the mare was standing swaying between the shafts, shaking in every limb, her flanks heaving and the sweat streaming off her sodden coat in little rivulets.

Burke was beside her, patting her down and talking to her in a little intimate fashion much as though he were soothing a frightened child.

“You’re all in, aren’t you, old thing?” he murmured sympathetically. Then he glanced up at Jean, who was still sitting in the cart, feeling rather as though the end of the world had occurred and, in some surprising fashion, left her still cumbering the earth.

“She’s pretty well run herself out,” he remarked. “We shan’t have any more trouble going home”—smiling briefly. “I hope not,” answered Jean a trifle flatly.

“You all right?”

She nodded.

“Yes, thank you. You must be an excellent whip,” she added. “I thought the mare would never stop.”

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.

“Yes. I rather thought our number was up,” agreed Burke absently. He was passing his hands feelingly over the mare to see if she were all right, and suddenly, with a sharp exclamation, he lifted one of her feet from the ground and examined it.

“Cast a shoe and torn her foot rather badly,” he announced. “I’m afraid we shall have to stop at the next village and get her shod. It’s not a mile further on. You and I can have tea at the inn while she’s at the blacksmith’s.”

With a final caress of the steaming chestnut neck, he came back to the side of the cart, reins in hand.

“Can you drive her with a torn foot?” queried Jean.

“Oh, yes. We’ll have to go carefully down this hill, though. There are such a confounded lot of loose stones about.”

He climbed into the dog-cart and very soon they had reached the village, where the chestnut, tired and subdued, was turned over to the blacksmith’s ministrations while Burke and Jean made their way to the inn.

Tea was brought to them upstairs in a quaint, old-fashioned parlour fragrant of bygone times. Oaken beams, black with age, supported the ceiling, and on the high chimneypiece pewter dishes gleamed like silver, while at either end an amazingly hideous spotted dog, in genuine old Staffordshire, surveyed the scene with a satisfied smirk. Through the leaded diamond panes of the window was visible a glimpse of the Moor.

“What an enchanting place!” commented Jean, as, tea over, she made a tour of inspection, pausing at last in front of the window.

Burke had been watching her as she wandered about the room, his expression moody and dissatisfied.

“It’s a famous resort for honeymooners,” he answered. “Do you think”—enquiringly—“it would be a good place in which to spend a honeymoon?”

“That depends,” replied Jean cautiously. “If the people were fond of the country, and the Moor, and so on—yes. But they might prefer something less remote from the world.”

“Would you?”

“I?”—with detachment. “I’m not contemplating a honeymoon.”

Suddenly Burke crossed the room to her side.

“We might as well settle that point now,” he said quietly. “Jean, when will you marry me?”

She looked at him indignantly.

“I’ve answered that question before. It isn’t fair of you to reopen the matter here—and now.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t fair. In fact, I’m not sure that it isn’t rather a caddish thing for me to do, seeing that you can’t get away from me just now. But all’s fair in love and war. And it’s both love and war between us two”—grimly.

“The two things don’t sound very compatible,” fenced Jean.

“It’s only war till you give in—till you promise to marry me. Then”—a smouldering light glowed in his eyes—“then I’ll show you what loves means.”

She shook her head.

“I’m afraid,” she said, attempting to speak coolly, “that it means war indefinitely then, Geoffrey. I can give you no different answer.”

“You shall!” he exclaimed violently. “I tell you, Jean, it’s useless your refusing me. I won’t take no. I want you for my wife—and, by God, I’m going to have you!”

She drew away from him a little, backing into the embrasure of the window. The look in his eyes frightened her.

“Whether I will or no?” she asked, still endeavouring to speak lightly. “My feelings in the matter don’t appear to concern you at all.”

“I’d rather you came willingly—but, if you won’t, I swear I’ll marry you, willing or unwilling!”

He was standing close to her now, staring down at her with sombre, passion-lit eyes, and instinctively she made a movement as though to elude him and slip back again into the room. In the same instant his arms went round her and she was prisoned in a grip from which she was powerless to escape.

“Don’t struggle,” he said, as she strove impotently to release herself. “I could hold you from now till doomsday without an effort.”

There was a curious thrill in his voice, the triumphant, arrogant leap of possession. He held her pressed against him, and she could feel his chest heave with his labouring breath.

“You’re mine—mine! My woman—meant for me from the beginning of the world—and do you think I’ll give you up?... Give you up? I tell you, if you were another man’s wife I’d take you away from him! You’re mine—every inch of you, body and soul. And I want you. Oh, my God, how I want you!”

“Let me go... Geoffrey...”

The words struggled from her lips. For answer his arms tightened round her, crushing her savagely, and she felt his kisses burning, scorching her face, his mouth on hers till it seemed as though he were draining her very soul.

When at last he released her, she leant helplessly against the woodwork of the window, panting and shaken. Her face was white as a magnolia petal and her eyes dark-rimmed with purple shadow.

A faint expression of compunction crossed Burke’s face.

“I suppose—I shall never be forgiven now,” he muttered roughly.

With an effort Jean forced her tongue to answer him.

“No,” she said in a voice out of which every particle of feeling seemed to have departed. “You will never be forgiven.”

A look of deviltry came into his eyes. He crossed the room and, locking the door, dropped the key into his pocket.

“I think,” he remarked coolly, “in that case, I’d better keep you a prisoner here till you have promised to marry me. It’s you I want. Your forgiveness can come after. I’ll see to that.”

The result of his action was unexpected. Jean turned to the window, unlatched it, and flung open the casement.

“If you don’t unlock that door at once, Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “I shall leave the room—this way”—with a gesture that sufficiently explained her meaning.

Her voice was very steady. Burke looked at her curiously.

“Do you mean—you’d jump out?” he asked, openly incredulous.

Her eyes answered him. They were feverishly bright, with an almost fanatical light in them, and suddenly Burke realised that she was at the end of her tether, that the emotional stress of the last quarter of an hour had taken its toll of her high-strung temperament and that she might even do what she had threatened. He had no conception of the motive behind the threat—of the imperative determination which had leaped to life within her to endure or suffer anything rather than stay locked in this room with Burke, rather than give Blaise, the man who held her heart between his two hands, ground for misunderstanding or mistrusting her anew.

Burke fitted the key into the lock of the door and turned it sulkily.

“You prim little thing! I was only teasing you,” he said. “Do you mean you’re really as frightened as all that of—what people may say? I thought you were above minding the gossip of ill-natured scandal-mongers.”

Jean grasped eagerly at the excuse. It would serve to hide the real motive of her impulsive action.

“No woman can afford to ignore scandal,” she answered quickly. “After all, a woman’s happiness depends mostly on her reputation.”

Burke’s eyes narrowed suddenly. He looked at her speculatively, as though her words had suggested a new train of thought, but he made no comment. Somewhat abstractedly he opened the door and allowed her to pass out and down the stairs. Outside the door of the inn they found the mare and dog-cart in charge of an ostler.

“The mare’s foot’s rather badly torn, sir,” volunteered the man, “but the blacksmith thinks she’ll travel all right. Far to go, sir?”

“Nine or ten miles,” responded Burke laconically.

He was curiously silent on the way home. It was as though the chain of reasoning started by Jean’s comment on the relation scandal bears to a woman’s happiness still absorbed him. His brows were knit together morosely.

Jean supposed he was probably reproaching himself for his conduct that afternoon. After all, she reflected, he was normally a man of decent instincts, and though the flood-tide of his passion had swept him into taking advantage of the circumstances which had flung them together in the solitude of the little inn, he would be the first to agree, when in a less lawless frame of mind, that his conduct had been unpardonable. Although, even from that, one could not promise that he would not be equally culpable another time!

Blaise had proved painfully correct in his estimate of the dangers attaching to unexploded bombs. Jean admitted it to herself ruefully. And she was honest enough also to admit that, with his warning ringing in her ears and with the memory of what had happened in the rose garden to illumine it, she herself was not altogether clear of blame for the incidents of the afternoon.

She had played with Burke, even encouraged him to a certain extent, allowing him to be in her company far more frequently than was altogether wise, considering the circumstance of his hot-headed love for her.

It was with somewhat of a mental start of surprise that she found herself seeking for excuses for his behaviour—actually trying to supply adequate reasons why she should overlook it!

His brooding, sulky silence as he drove along, mile after mile, was not without its appeal to the inherent femininity of her. He did not try to excuse or palliate his conduct, made no attempt to sue for forgiveness. He loved her and he had let her see it; manlike, he had taken what the opportunity offered. And she didn’t suppose he regretted it.

The faintest smile twitched the comers of her lips. Burke was not the type of man to regret an unlawful kiss or two!

She was conscious that—as usual, where he was concerned—her virtuous indignation was oozing away in the most discreditable and hopeless fashion. There was an audacious charm about the man, an attractiveness that would not be denied in the hot-headed way he went, all out, for what he wanted.

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.

At least he had some genuine claim on her forgiveness—the claim of a love which had swept through his very bung like a flame, the fierce passion of a man to whom love means adoration, worship—above all, possession.

And what woman can ever long remain righteously angry with a man who loves her—and whose very offence is the outcome of the overmastering quality of that love? Very few, and certainly none who was so very much a woman, so essentially feminine as Jean.

It was in a very small voice, which she endeavoured to make airily detached, that she at last broke the silence which had reigned for the last six miles or so.

“I suppose I shall have to forgive you—more or less. One can’t exactly quarrel with one’s next door neighbour.” Burke smiled grimly.

“Can’t one?”

“Well, there’s Judith to be considered.”

“A rather curious expression came into her eyes.

“Yes,” he agreed. “There’s Judith to be considered.” There was a hint of irony in the dry tones.

“It would complicate matters if I were not on speaking terms with her brother,” pursued Jean.

She waited for his answer, but none came. The threatened possibility contained in her speech appeared to have fallen on deaf ears, and the silence seemed likely to continue indefinitely.

Jean prompted him gently.

“You might, at least, say you are sorry for—for——”

“For kissing you?”—swiftly.

“Yes”—flushing a little.

“But I’m not. Kissing you”—with deliberation—“is One of the things I shall never regret. When I come to make my peace with Heaven and repent in sackcloth and ashes for my sins of omission and commission, I shan’t include this afternoon in the list, I assure you. It was worth it—if I pay for it afterwards in hell.”

He was silent for a moment. Then:

“But I’ll promise you one thing. I’ll never kiss you again till you give me your lips yourself.”

Jean smiled at the characteristic speech. She supposed this was as near an apology as Burke would ever get.

“That’s all right, then,” she replied composedly. “Because I shall never do that.”

He flicked the chestnut lightly with the whip.

“I think you will,” he said. “I think”—he looked at her somewhat enigmatically—“that you will give me everything I want—some day.”