CHAPTER XXXIII—THE RETURNING TIDE

TWO months had elapsed since Fate’s dividing sword had fallen, forever separating Jean from the man she loved, and the subsequent march of events, with the many changes involved and the bitter loneliness of soul entailed, had made the two months seem to her more like two years.

She had left Staple for Chamwood on the day following that of Madame de Varigny’s visit. It was no longer possible for her to remain under the same roof with Blaise, where the enforced strain of meeting each other daily, and of endeavouring to behave as though nothing more than mere commonplace friendship linked them together, would have been too great for either of them to endure even for the few remaining days which still intervened before the date originally planned for her departure.

Lady Anne, with her usual sympathetic insight, had made no effort to dissuade her, reluctant though she had been to part with her. For herself, the fact that Nesta was alive had come upon her in the light of an almost overwhelming blow. She had never liked the girl, whereas she had grown to look upon Jean as a beloved daughter, and no one had rejoiced more sincerely than his mother when Blaise had confided to her the news of his engagement. At last she would see that grey page in his life turned down for ever and the beginning of a newer, fairer page, illuminated with happiness! And instead, like a tide that has receded far out and then rushes in again with redoubled energy, the whole misery and sorrow of the past had returned upon him, a thousand times accentuated by reason of his love for Jean.

It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that Lady Anne, together with Nick, quitted Staple and established herself for the second time at the Dower House, retiring thither in favour of Nesta who was now installed once more at the Manor. And the thought of how gladly she would have effected the same change, had it been Jean whom Blaise was bringing home as his bride, added but a keener pang to her sorrow.

She watched with anxious eyes the progress of events at Staple. At the commencement of the new r茅gime Nesta had appeared genuinely repentant and ashamed of her conduct in the past, and there was something disarming in the little, half-apologetic air with which she had at first reassumed her position of ch芒telaine of Staple, deferring eagerly to Blaise on every point and trying her utmost to please him and conform to his wishes. It held something of the appeal of a forgiven child who tries to atone for former naughtiness by an almost alarming access of virtue.

She accepted with meek docility Blaise’s decision regarding the purely formal relations upon which their married life was henceforth to be based, apparently humbly thankful to be reinstated as his wife on any terms whatsoever that he chose to dictate..

“I know I have been bad—bad,” she declared, “to run away and leave you like that. I can’t”—forlornly—“hope for you to love me again——”

And Tormarin had replied with unmistakable decision:

“No, you can’t hope for that. And I’m glad you understand and recognise the fact. Still, we can try to be good friends, Nesta, at least.”

But this tranquil state of things only lasted for a comparatively short time. Very soon, as the novelty and satisfaction of her reinstatement began to wear off, Nesta became more self-assured and, apparently, considerably less frequently visited by spasms of repentance and remorse.

Her butterfly nature could retain no very deep impression for any length of time, and gradually the characteristics of the old Nesta—the pettish, self-willed, pleasure-loving woman of former times—began to reassert themselves.

Blaise tried hard to exercise forbearance with her and to treat her, at least with justice and with a certain meed of kindliness. But she did not second his efforts. Instead, she became more exigeant and difficult as time passed on.

She was no longer satisfied by the fact that she was once more installed as the mistress of Staple. She demanded a husband who would surround her with all the little observances that only love itself can dictate, whom she could alternately scold and cajole as the fancy took her, but who would always come back to her, after a tiff, ready anew to play the adoring lover.

She found Blaise’s cool, measured, elder-brotherly kindness unendurable, and she exhausted herself beating continually against the rock of his determination, without producing any effect other than to make his manner even more austere, less friendly than it had been before.

Then when she recognised her total inability to move him to any sort of responsive emotion, and that her beauty—which was undeniable—made no more impression upon him than if he had been blind, she resorted to the old, painfully, familiar weapons of tears and fits of temper, in the course of which she would upbraid him bitterly, pouring forth streams of reproaches which more often than not culminated in an attack of hysterics.

All of which Blaise bore with a curious, stoical self-control. It seemed as though the Tormarin temper had been exorcised, as if that fierce storm of anger provoked by Madame de Varigny’s taunts, and which had so nearly resulted in a tragedy, had shocked Blaise into realisation of the terrible latent possibilities of the family failing and the absolute necessity for an iron self-government.

For weeks he supported Nesta’s petty gibes and ebullitions of temper with illimitable patience, and it was only when, trading on his unaccustomed forbearance, she ventured too far, that she was brought very suddenly to understand that there was a limit beyond which she might not go.

“I know why you no longer love me,” she told him at last, on an occasion when she had been vainly endeavouring, by every feminine blandishment and wile of which she was mistress, to evoke from him some sign of an awakening tendresse. “I know!”

She nodded her dark head significantly, while pin-points of jealous anger flickered in her long, narrow eyes, black as midnight.

“Then, if you know,” replied Tormarin patiently, “it is surely most foolish of you to keep asking why I do not. Why can’t you content yourself with things as they are, Nesta? We can only try to make the best of a bad job. You don’t help me much in the matter.”

“I don’t want to help you,” she retorted viciously. “I want you to love me. And you won’t, because of that washed-out-looking, carroty-haired woman who is living with Lady Latimer. And she’s in love with you, too!... No! I won’t be quiet! Oh!”—her voice rising hysterically—“you think I don’t notice things, but I do. I do, I tell you!”

She sprang up from the couch, where she had been lolling indolently amid a heap of cushions, and crossed the room to his side.

“Do you hear me?” she cried violently, shaking him by the arm. “You think I’m a blind fool! But I’m not! I’m not! I’ve seen that Peterson woman looking at you like a cat looking through the larder window——”

Suddenly she felt Blaise’s hand clapped against her lips, stemming the torrent of vulgar recrimination and abuse that poured from them. He held it there quite gently, so as not to hurt her, but immovably, and she had perforce to hear what he wished to say in rebellious silence.

“Listen to me,” he said gently. “It is quite true what you say—that I love Jean Peterson and that she loves me. But we have given up our love, and with it our hope of happiness in this world, for you. In return, you will give up something for us. You will give up the infinite pleasure you appear to derive from vilifying and belittling a woman who is as much above you as the heavens are above the earth, whose conception of love is as fine and pure as yours is mean and commonplace and jealous. You will never again speak to Miss Peterson with anything but respect, nor will you ever again refer to the love which you now know for a fact exists between us. Your lips soil such love as ours. If you do, if you disobey my commands in either of these respects, you go out of my house that same day. And you don’t return.”

He released her and had the satisfaction, for once, of perceiving that she believed he meant what he said. Presumably she came to the conclusion that, in the circumstances, discretion was the better part of valour, for she made no attempt to challenge his determination in the matter.

At the same time, unknown to him, she compelled Jean to pay for the silence enforced upon her at home. With a species of venom, absurdly childish in its manifestation, she essayed to excite Jean’s envy by constantly enlarging to her upon the subject of Blaise’s perfections as a husband, drawing entirely imaginary descriptions of the attention he paid her and of his constant solicitude for her welfare, and vaunting her happiness at being his wife.

“I am so proud to have won so fine and splendid a husband,” she would declare fervently. “Would you not feel the same, Miss Peterson, if you were me?”

And Jean would make answer, outwardly unmoved:

“Indeed I should. You ought to be a happy woman, Mrs. Tormarin.”

The quiet composure which Jean invariably opposed to these knat-like attacks annoyed Nesta intensely. Endowed with all the petty jealousy of a small nature, she herself, had the situation been reversed, would have found this pinprick kind of warfare insupportable, and it made her furious that her best thought-out and most spiteful efforts failed to goad Jean into any expression of either anger or distress. The “cold Englishwoman’s” armour of indifference and reserve seemed impervious to no matter what poison-tipped dart she loosed against her.

Nesta felt that, as the woman in possession, she was missing half the satisfaction in life by reason of her inability to triumph openly over the other woman—the woman without the gate. Finally, at the end of her resources of innuendo and allusion, she tried the effect of open warfare.

She had driven over to Charnwood to call and, as Claire was away, spending the afternoon with friends, Jean had perforce to entertain her undesired visitor alone. It was just as she was preparing to take her departure that Nesta launched her attack.

“You look so ill, Miss Peterson,” she remarked commiseratingly. “So pale and worn! It does not suit you, I am sure, for of course you must have been very pretty at one time for my husband to have wished to marry you.”

Jean stared at her without reply. The outrageous speech almost took her breath away, by its sheer, impudent bravado.

“There!” Nesta feigned dismay. “Now I have offended you! And I so want us to be good friends. But of course”—quickly—“it is difficult for you to feel friendly towards the wife of Blaise. I can understand that. I suppose”—her head a little tilted to one side like that of an enquiring robin and her eyes fastened on the other’s white face with a merciless, gimlet gaze that filled Jean with helpless rage—“I suppose you loved him very much?”

Jean felt the blood rush into her cheeks and caught a responsive gleam of satisfaction in the other’s half-closed eyes.

“I think that is hardly a subject which can be discussed between us,” she said, with a supreme effort at self-control.

And then, to her unbounded thankfulness, Tucker threw open the door and announced that Mrs. Tormarin’s car was waiting.

This open declaration of hostility on Nesta’s part gave Jean food for reflection. Briefly she recounted the incident to Claire, adding:

“It means I must not go to Staple again. If she intends to adopt that attitude, it would make a situation which is already quite difficult enough hopelessly impossible.”

The two girls were pacing up and down the terrace at Charnwood together when Jean indicated the consequences of Nesta’s visit, and Claire, sensing the pain in her friend’s voice, pressed her arm sympathetically. But she said nothing. What was there to say? Within herself, she felt that Jean’s determination to eschew the Tormarin menage altogether was the only wise one.

“Poor Blaise!” pursued Jean, a slight tremor in her voice. “He has the hardest part to bear. She must make life hideously difficult for him.”

Claire nodded.

“Yes. He is looking very fagged and strained. Horrid little beast!” she added with unusual vehemence. “Why on earth couldn’t she have stayed dead?”

Jean laughed joylessly.

“Why indeed?—Only she never really died, you see.”

“Jean”—Claire’s hand crept further along the other’s arm and the kind little fingers sought and clasped Jean’s own—“if you knew how miserable I am about you! It makes me feel wicked—disgustingly selfish and wicked!—to be so happy myself when you have so much to bear.”

There were tears in her voice, and Jean squeezed her hand reassuringly.

“My dear,” she said earnestly, “you had your black years if anyone ever had! If a woman ever deserved her happiness at last, you do.... I suppose we all get our share of trouble in this world,” she went on thoughtfully. “I remember the first time I ever met Blaise—that day at Montavan, you know—he said that Destiny, with her snuffers, came to most of us sooner or later and snuffed out our light of happiness. Well”—rather drearily—“I suppose it’s my turn now and she’s come to me. That’s all.”

A little wind blew up from the valley, chill and complaining. Autumn had the world at her mercy now, and a grey mist was rising from the sodden fields, soaked by the continual rains of the preceding fortnight.

Claire shivered.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “It’s growing too cold to stay out any longer. Besides, it’s depressing. Grey skies, bare branches—Oh! How I detest the autumn!” They turned and retraced their steps to the house. As they entered by way of the front door, they caught a glimpse of the postman making his way briskly down the drive. A solitary letter lay upon the hall table, addressed to Jean in a rather flourishy copper-plate style of writing.

“A bill, I suppose!” she commented indifferently.

She picked it up carelessly, carrying it unopened to her room. Nor did she open it immediately upon arriving there, stopping first to remove her hat and coat.

When at last she slit the envelope she found that it was no tradesman’s bill, as she had imagined, but a letter from Glyn Peterson’s family solicitor, announcing, in the stiff phraseology without which no lawyer seems able to express himself, the sudden death of her father.

Jean sat down abruptly, her legs seeming all at once to give way under her. She could not grasp it—could not realise that the witty, charming personality which, after all, in spite of Peterson’s lack of the more conventional paternal attributes, had meant a great deal to her, had been swept without warning out of her life for ever.

Glyn Peterson had, it seemed, died very suddenly, in a remote corner of Africa whither his restless wanderings had led him, and it had been some weeks before the news of his death had reached his lawyer, who had immediately communicated it to Jean.

By his will, everything he possessed, except for a certain sum set aside to cover a few legacies to old and valued servants, was left to Jean, and with the quaint whimsicality which was characteristic of him he had particularly mentioned: “Beirnfels, the House of Dreams-Come-True.”

The little phrase, with its suggestion of joyous consummation, stabbed her with a sharp thrill of pain. Greeting her, as it did, at the moment when all her hopes of happiness were lying trampled beneath the iron heel of hostile destiny, it seemed to add a last touch of irony to the bitterness of the burden she had to bear.

The House of Dreams-Come-True! In the solicitude and silence of her room Jean laughed out loud at the mockery of it! But her breath caught in her throat, sobbingly, and then quite suddenly the merciful, healing tears began to fall, and, laying her head down on her arms, she cried unrestrainedly.