CHAPTER XXVI—MOONLIGHT ON THE MOOR

THE moorland air, warm with its subtle fragrance of gorse—like the scent of peaches when the sun is shining on them—tonic with the faint tang of salt borne by clean winds that had swept across the Atlantic, came to Jean’s nostrils crisp and sparkling as a draught of golden wine.

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. I was enthusing to a woman about it only the other day and she actually said, ‘Oh, yes—Dartmoor. It’s quite flat, I suppose, isn’t it?’ Flat!” with sweeping disgust.

Burke, his hand on the wheel of the big car which was eating up the miles with the facility of a boa-constrictor swallowing rabbits, smiled at the indignant little sniff with which the speech concluded.

“You don’t like dead levels, then?” he suggested.

She shook her head.

“No, I like hills—something to look up to—to climb.”

“Spiritual as well as temporal?”

She was silent a moment.

“Why, yes, I think I do.”

He smiled sardonically.

“It’s just that terrible angelic tendency of yours I complain of. It’s too much for any mere material man to live up to. I wish you’d step down to my low level occasionally. You don’t seem to be afflicted with human passions like the rest of us”—he added, a note of irritation in his voice.

“Indeed I am!”

Jean spoke impulsively, out of the depths of that inner, almost unconscious self-knowledge which lies within each one of us, dormant until some lance-like question pricks it into spontaneous affirmation. She had hardly heeded whither the conversation was tending, and she regretted her frank confession the instant it had left her lips.

Burke turned and looked at her with a curious speculation in his glance.

“I wonder if that’s true?” he said consideringly. “If so, they’re still asleep. I’d give something to be the one to rouse them.”

There was the familiar, half-turbulent quality in his voice—the sound as of something held in leash. Jean sensed the danger in the atmosphere.

“You’ll house one of them—the quite ordinary, commonplace one of bad temper, if you talk like that,” she replied prosaically. “You’ve got to play fair, Geoffrey—keep the spirit of the law as well as the letter.”

“All’s fair in love and war—as I told you before,” he retorted.

“Geoffrey”—indignantly.

“Jean!”—mimicking her. “Well, we won’t quarrel about it now. Here we are at our journey’s end. Behold the carriage drive!”

The car swung round a sharp bend and then bumped its way up a roughly-made track which served to link a species of cobbled yard, constructed at one side of the bungalow, to the road along which they had come.

The track cleaved its way, rather on the principle of a railway cutting, clean through the abrupt acclivity which flanked the road that side, and rising steeply between crumbling, overhanging banks, fringed with coarse grass and tufted with straggling patches of gorse and heather, debouched on to a broad plateau. Here the road below was completely hidden from view; on all sides there stretched only a limitless vista of wild moorland, devoid of any sign of habitation save for the bare, creeperless walls of the bungalow itself.

As the scene unfolded, Jean became suddenly conscious of a strange sense of familiarity. An inexplicable impress sion of having seen the place on some previous occasion, of familiarity with every detail of it—even to a recognition of its peculiar atmosphere of loneliness—took possession of her. For a moment she could not place the memory. Only she knew that it was associated in her mind with something disagreeable. Even now, as, at Burke’s dictation, she waited in the car while he entered the bungalow from the back, passing through in order to admit his guest by way of the front door, which had been secured upon the inside, she was aware of a feeling of intense repugnance.

And then, in a flash, recollection returned to her. This was the house of her dream—of the nightmare vision which had obsessed her during the hours of darkness following her first meeting with Geoffrey Burke.

There stood the solitary dwelling, set amid a wild and desolate country, and to one side of it grew three wretched-looking, scrubby little fir trees, all of them bent in the same direction by the keen winds as they came sweeping across the Moor from the wide Atlantic. Three Fir Bungalow! Why, the very name itself might have prewarned her!

Her eyes fixed themselves on the green-painted door. She knew quite well what must happen next. The door would open and reveal Burke standing on the threshold. She watched it with fascinated eyes.

Presently came the sound of steps, then the grating noise of a key turning stiffly in the lock. The door was flung open and Burke strode across the threshold and came to the side of the car to help her out. Jean waited, half terrified, for his first words. Would they be the words of her dream? She felt that if he chanced to say jokingly, “Will you come into my parlour?” she should scream.

“Go straight in, will you?” said Burke. “I’ll just run the car round to the garage and then we might as well get tea ready before the others come. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

The spell was broken. The everyday, commonplace words brought with them a rush of overpowering relief, sweeping away the dreamlike sense of unreality and terror, and as Jean nodded and responded gaily, “Absolutely famished!” she could have laughed aloud at the ridiculous fears which had assailed her.

The inside of the bungalow was in charming contrast to its somewhat forbidding exterior. Its living-rooms, furnished very simply but with a shrewd eye to comfort, communicated one with the other by means of double doors which, usually left open, obviated the cramped feeling that the comparatively small size of the rooms might otherwise have produced, while the two lattice windows which each boasted were augmented by French windows opening out on to a verandah which ran the whole length of the building.

Jean, having delightedly explored the front portion of the bungalow, joined Burke in the kitchen, guided thither by the clinking of crockery and the cheerful crackle of a hearth fire wakened into fresh life by the scientific application of a pair of bellows.

“I had no idea you were such a domesticated individual,” she remarked, as she watched him carefully warming the brown earthenware teapot as a preliminary to brewing the tea while she busied herself making hot buttered toast.

“Oh, Judy and I are quite independent up here, I assure you,” he answered with pardonable pride. “We never bring any of the servants from Willow Ferry, but cook for ourselves. A woman comes over every morning to do the ‘chores’—clean the place, and wash up the dishes from the day before, and so on. But beyond that we are self-sufficing.”

“Where does your woman come from? I didn’t see a house for miles round.”

“No, you can’t see the place, but there’s a little farmstead, tucked away in a hollow about three miles from here, which provides us with cream and butter and eggs—-and with our char-lady.”

Jean surveyed with satisfaction a rapidly mounting pile of delicately browned toast, creaming with golden butter.

“There, that’s ready,” she announced at last. “I do hope Judy and Co. will arrive soon. Hot buttered toast spoils with keeping; it gets all sodden and tastes like underdone shoe leather. Do you think they’ll be long?”

Burke threw a glance at the grandfather’s clock ticking solemnly away in a corner of the kitchen.

“It’s half-past four,” he said dubiously. “I don’t think we’ll risk that luscious-looking toast of yours by waiting for them. I’m going to brew the tea; the kettle’s boiling.”

“Won’t Judith think it rather horrid of us not to wait?”

“Oh, Lord, no! Judy and I never stand on any ceremony with each other. Any old thing might happen to delay them a bit.”

Jean, frankly hungry after her spin in the car through the invigorating moorland air, yielded without further protest, and tea resolved itself into a jolly little t锚te-脿-t猫te affair, partaken of in the shelter of the verandah, with the glorious vista of the Moor spread out before her delighted eyes.

Burke was in one of those rare moods of his which never failed to inspire her with a genuine liking for him—when the unruly, turbulent devil within him, so hardly held in check, was temporarily replaced by a certain spontaneous boyishness of a distinctly endearing quality—that “little boy” quality which, in a grown man, always appeals so irresistibly to any woman.

The time slipped away quickly, and it was with a shock of astonishment that Jean realised, on glancing down at the watch on her wrist, that over an hour and a half had gone by while they had been sitting chatting on the verandah.

“Geoffrey! Do you know it’s nearly six o’clock! I’m certain something must have happened. Judy and the Holfords would surely be here by now if they hadn’t had an accident of some sort.”

Burke looked at his own watch.

“Yes,” he acquiesced slowly. “It is—getting late.” A look of concern spread itself over Jean’s face.

“I think we ought to get the car out again and go and see if anything has happened,” she said decisively. “They may have had a spill. Were they coming by motor?”

“No. Judy drove down to Newton Abbot in the dog-cart, and the Holfords proposed hiring some sort of conveyance from a livery stable.”

“Well, I expect they’ve had a smash of some kind. I’m sure we ought to go and find out! Was Judy driving that excitable chestnut of yours?”

He shook his head.

“No—a perfectly well-conducted pony, as meek as Moses. We’ll give them a quarter of an hour more. If they don’t turn up by then, I’ll run the car out and we’ll investigate.”

The minutes crawled by on leaden feet. Jean felt restless and uneasy and more than a trifle astonished that Burke should manifest so little anxiety concerning his sister’s whereabouts. Then, just before the quarter of an hour was up, there came the shrill tinkle of a bicycle bell, and a boy cycled up to the gate and, springing off his machine, advanced up the cobbled path with a telegram in his hand.

Jean’s face blanched, and she waited in taut suspense while Burke ripped open the ominous orange-coloured envelope.

“What is it?” she asked nervously. “Have they—is it bad news?”

There was a pause before Burke answered. Then, he handed the flimsy sheet to her, remarking shortly:

“They’re not coming.”

Jean’s eyes flew along the brief message.

     “Returning to-morrow. Am staying the night with Holfords.
     Judy.”
 

Her face fell.

“How horribly disappointing!” Her glance fluttered, regretfully to the faint disc of the moon showing like a pallid ghost of itself in a sky still luminous with the afternoon sunlight.

“I shan’t see my moonlit Moor to-night after all!” she continued. “I wonder what has happened to make them change their plans?”

Burke volunteered no suggestion but stood staring moodily at the swiftly receding figure of the telegraph boy.

“Well,” Jean braced herself to meet the disappointment, “there’s nothing for it but for you to run me back home, Geoffrey. We ought to start at once.”

“Very well. I’ll go and get the car out,” he answered. “I suppose it’s the only thing to be done.”

He moved off in the direction of the garage, Jean walking rather disconsolately beside him.

“I am disappointed!” she declared. “I just hate the sight of a telegraph boy! They always spoil things. I rather wonder you get your telegrams delivered at this outlandish spot,” she added musingly.

“Oh, of course we have to pay mileage. There’s no free delivery to the ‘back o’ beyond’!”

As he spoke, Burke vanished into the semi-dusk of the garage, and presently Jean heard sounds suggestive of ineffectual attempts to start the engine, accompanied by a muttered curse or two. A few minutes later Burke reappeared, looking Rather hot and dusty and with a black smear of oil across his cheek.

“You’d better go back to the bungalow,” he said gruffly.

“There’s something gone wrong with the works, and it will take me a few minutes to put matters right.”

Jean nodded sympathetically and retreated towards the house, leaving him to tinker with the car’s internals. It was growing chilly—the “cool of the evening” manifests itself early up on Dartmoor—and she was not at all sorry to find herself indoors. The wind had dropped, but a curious, still sort of coldness seemed to be permeating the atmosphere, faintly moist, and, as Jean stood at the window, gazing out half absently, she suddenly noticed a delicate blur of mist veiling the low-lying ground towards the right of the bungalow. Her eyes hurriedly swept the wide expanse in front of her. The valleys between the distant tors were hardly visible. They had become mere basins cupping wan lakes of wraithlike vapour which, even as she watched them, crept higher, inch by inch, as though responding to some impulse of a rising tide.

Jean had lived long enough in Devonshire by this time to know the risks of being caught in a mist on Dartmoor, and she sped out of the room, intending to go to the garage and warn Burke that he must hurry. He met her on the threshold of the bungalow, and she turned back with him into the room she had just quitted.

“Are you ready?” she asked eagerly. “There’s a regular moor mist coming on. The sooner we start the better.”

He looked at her oddly. He was rather pale and his eyes were curiously bright.

“The car won’t budge,” he said. “I’ve been tinkering at her all this time to no purpose.”

Jean stared at him, a vague apprehension of disagreeable possibilities presenting itself to her mind. Their predicament would be an extremely awkward one if the car remained recalcitrant!

“Won’t budge?” she repeated. “But you must make it budge, Geoffrey. We can’t—we can’t stay here! What’s gone wrong with it?”

Burke launched out into a string of technicalities which left Jean with a confused feeling that the mechanism of a motor must be an invention of the devil designed expressly for the chastening of human nature, but from which she succeeded in gathering the bare skeleton fact that something had gone radically wrong with the car’s running powers.

Her apprehensions quickened.

“What are we to do?” she asked blankly.

“Make the best of a bad job—and console each other,” he suggested lightly.

She frowned a little. It did not seem to her quite the moment for jesting.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Geoffrey,” she said sharply. “We’ve got to get back somehow. What can you do?”

“I can’t do anything more than I’ve done. Here we are and here we’ve got to stay.”

“You know that’s impossible,” she said, in a quick, low voice.

He looked at her with a sudden devil-may-care glint in his eyes.

“You never can tell beforehand whether things are impossible or not. I know I used to think that heaven on earth was—impossible,” he said slowly. “I’m not so sure now.” He drew a step nearer her. “Would you mind so dreadfully if we had to stay here, little Miss Prunes-and-Prisms?”

Jean stared at him in amazement—in amazement which slowly turned to incredulous horror as a sudden almost unbelievable idea flashed into her mind, kindled into being by the leaping, half-exultant note in his tones.

“Geoffrey———” Her lips moved stiffly, even to herself, her voice sounded strange and hoarse. “Geoffrey, I don’t believe there is anything wrong with the car at all!... Or if there is, you’ve tampered with it on purpose.... You’re not being straight with me——”

She broke off, her startled gaze searching his face as though she would wring the truth from him. Her eyes were very wide and dilated, but back of the anger that blazed in them lurked fear—stark fear.

For a moment Burke was silent. Then he spoke, with a quiet deliberateness that held something ominous, inexorable, in its very calm.

“You’re right,” he said slowly. “I’ve not been straight with you. But I’ll be frank with you now. The whole thing—asking you to come here to-day, the moonlight expedition for to-night—everything—was all fixed up, planned solely to get you here. The car won’t run for the simple reason that I’ve put it out of action. I wasn’t quite sure whether or no you could drive a car, you see!”

“I can’t,” said Jean. Her voice was quite expressionless.

“No? So much the better, then. But I wasn’t going to leave any weak link in the chain by which I hold you.”

“By which you hold me?” she repeated dully. She felt stunned, incapable of protest, only able to repeat, parrotlike, the words he had just used.

“Yes. Don’t you understand the position? It’s clear enough, I should think!” He laughed a little recklessly. “Either you promise to marry me, in which case I’ll take you home at once—the car’s not damaged beyond repair—or you stay here, here at the bungalow with me, until tomorrow morning.”

With a sharp cry she retreated from him, her face ash-white.

“No—no! Not that!” The poignancy of that caught-back cry wrenched the words from his lips in hurrying, vehement disclaimer. “You’ll be perfectly safe—as safe as though you were my sister. Don’t look like that.... Jean! Jean! Could you imagine that I would hurt you—you when I worship—my little white love?” The words rushed out in a torrent, hoarse and shaken and passionately tender. “Before God, no! You’ll be utterly safe, Jean, sweetest, beloved—I swear it!” His voice steadied and deepened. “Sacred as the purest love in the whole world could hold you.” He was silent a moment; then, as the tension in her face gradually relaxed, he went on: “But the world won’t know that!” The note of tenderness was gone now, swept away by the resurgence of a fierce relentlessness—triumphant, implacable—that meant winning at all costs. “The world won’t know that,” he repeated. “After tonight, for your own sake—because a woman’s reputation cannot stand the breath of scandal, you’ll be compelled to marry me. You’ll have no choice.”

Jean stood quite still, staring in front of her. Once her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Slowly, laboriously almost, she was realising exactly what had happened, her mind adjusting itself to the recognition of the trap in which she had been caught.

Her dream had come true, after all—horribly, inconceivably true.

The heavy silence which had fallen seemed suddenly filled with the dream-Burke’s voice—mocking and exultant:

“... you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast for ever. It’s too late to try and run away.... It’s too late.”