CHAPTER XXIII—ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS

THROUGHOUT the day following that of the expedition to Dartmoor, Nick seemed determined to keep out of Jean’s way. It was as though he feared she might force some confidence from him that he was loth to give, and, in consequence, deliberately avoided being alone with her.

On the second day, however, as luck would have it, she encountered him in the corridor just outside her own sitting-room. He was striding blindly along, obviously not heeding where he was going, and had almost collided with her before he realised that she was there.

He jerked himself backwards.

“I beg your pardon,” he muttered, still without looking at her, and made as though to pass on.

Jean checked him with a hand on his sleeve. She had not watched the dogged sullenness of his face throughout yesterday to no purpose, and now, as her swift gaze searched it anew, she felt convinced that something fresh had occurred to stir him. It was impossible for Jean to see a friend in trouble without wanting to “stand by.”

“Nick, old thing, what’s wrong?” she asked.

He stared at her unseeingly. “Wrong?” he muttered. “Wrong?”

“Yes. Come in here and let’s talk it out—whatever it is.” With gentle insistence she drew him into her sitting-room. “How,” she said, when she had established him in an easy-chair by the open window and herself in another, “what’s gone wrong? Are you still boiling over about that trick Sir Adrian played on Claire the day of the picnic?”

She spoke lightly—more lightly than the occasion warranted—of set purpose, hoping to reduce the tension under which Nick was obviously labouring. His face hurt her. The familiar lazy insouciance which was half its charm was blotted out of it by some heavy cloud of tragic significance. He looked as though he had not slept for days, and his eyes, the gaiety burnt out of them by pain, seemed sunken in his head.

He stared at her blankly for a moment. Then he seemed to awaken to the meaning of her question.

“No,” he said slowly. “No. The boiling over part is done with—finished.... I’m going to take her away from him.”

He spoke with a curious precision. It frightened Jean far more than any impetuous outburst of anger could have done. She made no answer for a moment, but her mind worked rapidly. She did not doubt the absolute sincerity of his intention. This was no mere reckless boast of an angry lover, but the sane, considered aim and object of a man who has come, by way of some long agony of thwarting, to a set determination.

“Do you mean that, Nick?” she asked at last, to gain time.

“Do I mean it?” he laughed. Then his hands gripped the arms of the chair and he leaned forward. “I saw her—last evening after dinner.... Her shoulder was black.”

A sharp cry broke from Jean’s lips.

“Not—not—he hadn’t——”

Nick nodded.

“He had struck her. There was one of the usual scenes when they got back from the Moor—and he struck her.... It’s the first time he has ever actually laid hands on her. It’s going to be the last”—grimly.

Jean was silent. Her whole soul was in revolt against the half-mad, drug-ridden creature who was making of Claire’s life a devil martyrdom; the instinct to protect her, to succour her in some way, asserting itself with almost passionate force. And yet—— She knew that Nick’s way was not the right way.

“Yes, it must be the last time,” she agreed. “But—but, Nick, your plan won’t do, you know.”

Nick stiffened.

“Think not?” he said curtly. “Can you suggest a better?” Then, as Jean remained miserably silent: “Nor can I. And one thing I swear—I won’t leave the woman I love in the hands of a man who is practically a maniac, to be tortured day after day, mentally and physically, just whenever he feels like it.”

It struck Jean as curious that Nick had been able, more or less, to keep himself in hand whilst Sir Adrian inflicted upon Claire whatever of mental and spiritual torture seemed good in his distorted vision. It was the fact that he had hurt her physically, laid his hand upon her in actual violence, which had scattered Nick’s self-control to the four winds of heaven. To Jean herself, it seemed conceivable that the mental anguish of Claire’s married life had probably far outstripped any mere bodily pain. Half tentatively she gave expression to her thoughts.

Nick sprang to his feet.

“Good God!” he exclaimed. “If you were a man, you’d understand! I see red when I think of that damned brute striking the woman I love. It—it was sacrilege!”

“And won’t it be—another kind of sacrilege—if you take her away with you, Nick?” asked Jean very quietly.

He flushed dully.

“He’ll divorce her, and then we shall marry,” he answered.

“Even so”—steadily—“it would be doing evil that good may come.”

“Then we’ll do it”—savagely. “It’s easy enough for you to sit there moralising, perfectly placid and comfortable. 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.

Presently she got up and moved rather slowly across to his side.

“Nick,” she said, and her eyes, looking into his, were very bright and clear and steady. Somehow for Nick they held the semblance of two flames, torches of pure light, burning unflickeringly in the darkness. “Nick, every word you say is true. I’m not tempted as you and Claire have been, and so it seems sheer cheek my interfering. But I’m only asking you to do what I pray I’d be strong enough to do myself in like circumstances. I don’t believe any true happiness can ever come of running away from duty. And if ever I’m up against such a thing—a choice like this—I hope to God I’d be able to hang on... to run straight, even if it half killed me to do it.”

The quick, impassioned utterance ceased, and half shrinkingly Jean realised that she had spoken out of the very depths of her soul, crystallising in so many words the uttermost ideal and credo of her being. In some strange, indefinable fashion it was borne in on her that she had reached an epoch of her life. It was as when a musician, arrived at the end of a musical period, strikes a chord which holds the keynote of the ensuing passage.

She faltered and looked at Nick beseechingly, suddenly self-conscious, as we most of us are when we find we have laid bare a bit of our inmost soul to the possibly mocking eyes of a fellow human being.

But Nick’s eyes were not in the least mocking.

Instead of that, some of the hardness seemed to have gone out of them, and his voice was very gentle, as, taking Jean’s two hands in his, he answered:

“I believe you would run straight, little Jean—even if it meant tearing your heart out of your body to do it. But, you know, you’re always on the side of the angels—instinctively. I’m only a man—just an average earthy man”—smiling ruefully—“and my ideals all tumble down and sit on the ground in a heap when I think of what my girl’s enduring as Latimer’s wife. I believe I might stick my part of the business—but I can’t stick it for her.”

“And yet,” urged Jean, “if you go away together, Nick, it’s she who’ll pay, you know. The woman always does. Supposing—supposing Sir Adrian doesn’t divorce her—refuses to? It would be just like him to punish her that way. What about Claire—then?”

“He would divorce her,” protested Nick harshly.

Jean shook her head.

“I don’t think so. Honestly, I believe he would get undiluted satisfaction out of the fact that, as long as he lived, he could stand between Claire and everything that a normal woman wants—home, and a sheltered life, and the knowledge that no one can ‘say things’ about her. Oh, Nick, Nick! Between you—you and Sir Adrian—you’d make an outcast of Claire, make her life a worse hell with you than it is without you.” She paused, then went on more quietly: “Have you said anything to her about this—told her what you want her to do?”

“No, not yet—not definitely.”

Jean breathed a quick sigh of relief.

“Then don’t! Promise me you won’t, Nick?”

“She might refuse, after all,” he suggested, evading a direct answer.

“Refuse! You know her better than that. If you wanted Claire to make a burnt-offering of herself for your benefit to-morrow, you know she’d do it! And—and”—laughing a little hysterically—“pretend, too, that she enjoyed the process of being grilled! No, Nick, it’s up to you to—to just go on helping to make her life bearable, as you have done for the last two years.”

“It’s asking too much of me, Jean.”

Nick spoke a little thickly. He was up against one of man’s most primitive instincts—the instinct to protect and comfort and cherish the woman he loved.

“I know. It’s asking everything of you.”

Jean waited. She felt that she had gained a certain amount of ground—that Nick’s resolution had weakened a little in response to her pleading, but she feared to drive him too far. She fancied she could hear steps crossing the hall below. If someone should come upstairs and disturb them now, while things were still trembling in the balance——

“See, Nick,” she began to speak again hurriedly. “You believe I’m your pal—yours and Claire’s?”

“I know it,” he replied quietly.

“And—and you do care a bit about me?”—smiling a little.

“You’re the third woman in my world, Jean. After Claire and my mother.”

“Then, to please me—for nothing else in the world, if you like, but because I ask it—will you let things stay as they are for a few weeks longer? Just that little while, Nick? We’re going to London next week. That’ll make a break—bring us all back to a calmer, more everyday outlook on things. Will you wait? Sir Adrian may never strike Claire again. And it wouldn’t be fair—just now, at a time when she is feeling horribly bitter and humiliated from that—that insult—to ask her to go away with you. Give her a fair chance to decide a big question like that when things are at their normal level—not when they are worse than usual. To ask her now would be to take advantage of the feeling she must have, just at this moment, that her life is unbearable. It wouldn’t be playing the game.”

He made no answer, and Jean waited with increasing trepidation. She was sure now that she could hear footsteps. Someone had mounted the stairs and was coming along the corridor towards her room.

“Nick!” The low, agitated whisper burst from her as the steps halted outside the door. “Promise me!”

It seemed an eternity before he answered.

“Very well. I promise. You’ve won for the moment—‘Saint Jean’!”

He smiled at her, rather sadly. Before she could reply, Blaise’s voice sounded outside the door, asking if he might come in, and with a feeling of intense relief that the battle was won for the moment, Jean gave the required permission. As his brother entered the room, Nick quitted it, brushing past him abruptly.

Tormarin’s eyes questioned Jean’s;

“We have been discussing Sir Adrian,” she explained, as the door closed behind Nick. “And—and Claire.”

He nodded comprehendingly.

“Poor old Nick!” he said. “It’s damned rough on him. Latimer ought to be carefully and quickly chloroformed out of the way. He’s as much a menace to society as a mad dog.”

Jean sighed.

“I’m afraid they’re very unhappy—Nick and Claire.”

“I wonder Claire doesn’t chuck her husband,” said Blaise. “And take whatever of happiness she can get out of the world.”

Jean shook her head.

“You know you don’t mean that. You don’t really believe in snatching happiness—at all costs.”

“I’d let precious little stand in the way. If I were Nick I think I should do it.”

“But being you?”

Jean did not know what unaccountable impulse induced her to give a personal and individual twist to what had been developing almost into an academic discussion. Perhaps it was the familiar, unsatisfied longing to hear Blaise himself define the thing which kept them apart—even though, since Lady Anne’s disclosure, she could guess only too well what it was. Or perhaps it was the faint, tormenting hope that one day his determination would weaken and his love sweep away all barriers.

He looked at her contemplatively.

“Sometimes the past makes claims upon a man which forbid him to snatch at happiness. I don’t believe in any man’s shirking his just punishment for the evil he has done. What he has brought on himself, that he must bear. But Nick and Claire have had no part in bringing about their own tragedy. They are just the sport of chance—of an ill fate. They are morally free to take their happiness in a way in which I shall never be free to take mine, as long as I live.” He regarded her steadily. “There are certain things for which I have proved myself unfitted—with which it is evident I am not to be trusted. And one of those is the safeguarding of any woman’s happiness.”

Jean felt her throat contract. It would always be the same, then! The long tentacles of the past would reach out eternally into the future. The woman who had been his wife—the woman who had destroyed herself, and, in so doing, hanged a millstone of remorse about his neck—would stand forever at the gateway of the garden of happiness, her dead lips silently denying him—and, with him, the woman who loved him—the right to enter.

With an effort Jean answered that part of his speech which had reference only to Claire and Nick.

“There are other ways, though, in which they have no moral right. I grant that Claire was persuaded, almost driven into marrying Sir Adrian by her parents, but, after all, we each have our individual free will. She could have refused to obey them. Or, if she felt there were reasons why she must marry him—the material advantage to her parents, and so on, why, she ought to have reckoned the cost I don’t mean to be hard, Blaise————-” She broke off wistfully.

“You—hard!” He laughed a little, as though amused.

“Only—only one must try to be fair all round—to look at things straight.”

She leaned her chin on her palm and her eyes grew thoughtful.

“I don’t know, but it seems to me that we weren’t meant to run away from things—hard things. If a man and a woman marry, they must accept their responsibilities—not evade them.”

So absorbed was she in her trend of thought that she never realised how directly this speech must strike at Blaise himself. His face changed slightly.

“You’re right, of course,” he said abruptly. “You—generally are. And if all women were like you, it would be easy enough.”

His eyes dwelt with a curious intentness on the pure outline of her face; on the parted, tenderly curved lips, and the golden eyes with their momentary touch of the idealist and the dreamer.

It seemed as if the quiet intensity of his regard drew her, for slowly she turned her head and met his gaze, flushing suddenly and faltering under it. The consciousness of him, of his nearness, swept her from head to foot, and it seemed to her as though now, in this moment, they were in closer touch, nearer understanding, than they had ever been.

The dreamer and idealist vanished and it was all at once just sheer woman, passionate and wistful and tremulous, and infinitely alluring, that looked at him out of the golden eyes.

With a stifled exclamation he caught her hands in his.

“Beloved——”

And the whole of a man’s forbidden, thwarted love vibrated in the word as he spoke it.

Then he bent his head, and for a moment his lips were against her soft palms....

She stood very still and quiet when he had gone, realising in every quivering nerve of her that whatsoever the future might bring—even though Blaise might choose to shut himself away from her again as in the past and the dividing wall between them rise as high as heaven—she knew now, without any shadow of doubt or questioning, that he loved her.

In the burning utterance of a single word, in the pressure of passionate, renouncing lips, the assurance had been given, and nothing could ever take it away again.

She spread out her hands, palms upward, and looked at them curiously.