Away Went Love (17 page)

“Oh, Errol—it’s me—Hope.”

“Why, my dear, what is it?”

“N-nothing very urgent,” she lied hastily. “I wanted to know—does it matter if I don’t come into the Lab. tomorrow morning?”

She heard him laugh, and the sound was indulgent “What is it? Trousseau shopping or something?”
She felt slightly sick with nervousness and guilt.

“Not exactly. But, listen, Errol I don’t want to come in tomorrow, if possible, but I want you to come along here and see me in the afternoon. Would you—
please
?”

There was a second’s silence, and she knew immediately that it was a suddenly apprehensive silence. Then he said:

“Yes. of course. I’ll come. About three?”

“Yes. About three. Thank you, Errol.”

“Hope—there isn’t anything wrong, is there?”

“No.”

“You can’t tell me any more than that?”

“No. I—I’ll tell you everything there is to tell when you come.”

“Very well,” he said, and rang off rather abruptly.

And then there was the night to get through, and the whole of the next morning, and Hope wondered despairingly how she was to do it.

But somehow the time crawled past. She supposed she slept during part of the night. At any rate, she was not aware of all the hours striking. But the morning was so dreadful that she wished she had asked Errol to come earlier—only, of course, he was almost certainly busy.

She went out and did some shopping. Not “trousseau shopping,” as Errol had suggested—her mind simply shrank from the very idea. Just the purchase of one or two things which Bridget would need before she went back to school.

It was difficult to keep her mind on what she was doing, but the effort of forcing herself to do so was some little help in thrusting her nervous fears and anticipations to the back of her mind.

Even the few minor transactions she made, however, seemed to lead by roundabout lines of thought to the one overwhelming question, What was her future relationship with Errol to be?

These things which she was buying now for Bridget—In the old days her mother would have chosen and paid for them. Now they were, financially speaking, Errol’s responsibility. Was she buying them, on his behalf, in the character of his future wife and therefore part-guardian of Bridget? Or, if she was not to be anything in Errol’s life, should she, theoretically, have left these matters to be attended to by Mrs. Tamberly?

Not that the amount involved was large enough to matter one way or the other. Only—one wondered about the position.

‘If I am going to marry Errol’—again that intrusive “if”—’I shall be a very rich woman,’ Hope told herself without enthusiasm. ‘And I suppose, in that case, I should probably give myself the pleasure of being pretty extravagant over darling Bridget’s things. On the other hand, if I’m not going to marry Errol—’

She stopped there, and suddenly decided that it was silly to go on with the shopping. After all, if you didn’t know whose purse-strings you held, how could you decide how much you might spend?

She lunched at a quiet little place where she was unlikely to meet anyone she knew. Light conversation with even the dearest friend could only constitute a form of torture at the moment, and the idea of being questioned, even in the most sympathetic manner, about her future plans, made Hope shudder.

As she waited for her meal to be served she absently picked up a newspaper which had been left by a previous customer. She was not really interested in any news but her own at the moment, but the paper would serve to hold her attention for a blessed minute or two, Hope thought. It did.

As she idly turned the first page she was confronted by an excellent photograph of Richard.

“Fortune from aunt be had never seen,”
blithely ran the caption beneath the photograph, and, fascinated, Hope found herself unable to keep from reading every word of the rather highly colored interview which followed. An interview which, she realized, must have taken place yesterday, before Richard had seen her.

The interviewer appeared to have drawn rather lavishly on imagination for details, and Hope supposed she might discount some of the more improbable remarks attributed to Richard. One statement, however, did make her flush and bite her lip with vexation against Richard, rather than the interviewer.

“Mr. Fander was quite emphatic about one point in his future plans,” she read with considerable annoyance. “The first purchase out of his astonishing fortune is going to be a special licence and, though he refused to be drawn on the subject of names, I understand the lucky girl is the daughter of one of our most distinguished scientists, whose tragic death shocked the world earlier this year.”

Richard
had
been sure of himself! A special licence, indeed! And she, presumably, waiting patiently for him to appear with it.

Hope supposed indignantly that she might count herself lucky that “he refused to be drawn on the subject of names.”

And then, as her sudden spurt of nervous irritation subsided as quickly as it had come, she told herself that she was being unreasonable and unkind.

Why shouldn’t Richard have hoped that his aunt’s amazing fortune would give him his heart’s desire? What was there wrong in his allowing himself that oblique, happy reference to his hopes? Was it not, on the contrary, a little pathetic and endearing that his first thought had been of her and of the happiness they could now have together?

It must have been a terrible blow to him when she flatly refused to fall in with his plans.

Hope sighed. That was so like Richard. Somehow, he always expected that things would work out the way he wanted them. One felt an utter brute if one had to bring him down to earth, even for the most excellent of reasons.

‘He’s not really bad,” Hope assured herself earnestly. ‘In spite of that dreadful business over the five hundred pounds, he
isn’t
a bad man. Weak, perhaps—” But couldn’t one forgive weakness in the man one loved?

At that moment Hope knew that she, at least, could. And by the time she got up to go, her nervous distaste of the coming interview with Errol had reached a pitch which she could hardly bear.

‘How often have I to go through this?’ she thought with angry pain. ‘I’m always dreading difficult interviews with Errol. And if I marry him, they’re hardly likely to grow less.’

It was a melancholy reflection, but an inescapable one, and during most of the journey home Hope found herself thinking very bitterly and accusingly of Errol.

But that too, she finally had to admit, was not strictly fair. At her earnest request, he had helped her on certain terms. That she had lost on the gamble was hardly his fault. And certainly he had less than nothing to do with this final ironic twist of circumstances.

It was three o’clock exactly when Errol, with his usual punctuality, rang the bell of her flat, and Hope—more calmly than she had dared to expect—went to admit him.

He kissed her so naturally that she found herself returning the kiss automatically, and then he looked round him with a good deal of interest.

“This is nice, Hope. Very much like you.”

“Is it?” She smiled faintly. “Oh, of course, you haven’t been here before, have you?”

“No.”

Somehow that seemed to put him at an unfair disadvantage. Richard had been here so often, but Errol was a stranger in strange surroundings.

Hope determinedly stopped herself before she could become more fanciful. He was sitting down now, looking very much at his ease, and she wondered how she was going to start the subject without shattering all his pleasant content.

But it was he who spoke first.

“Well, Hope, I suppose it’s about this sensational inheritance of Fander’s.”

“Why—yes! How did you know?” She was breathless with the relief of not having to open the subject.

“There was some story about it in one of the daily papers.”

“Then—then I don’t have to explain very much.”

“Don’t you?” His smile was a little grim. “What is the position now, then, Hope?”

“You mean—our position?”

“Isn’t that what we’re going to discuss?”

She wished he were not quite so cool and self-contained about it.

“Errol”—she started from another point—“Richard came here to see me yesterday evening. I—I’m afraid I let him in before I remembered having promised you not to see him again.”

‘To tell the truth, I’d forgotten that too,” Errol admitted unexpectedly. “Anyway, it seems a rather melodramatic prohibition now. The point is—he came. What had he got to say?”

“He wants—to marry me.”

“He feels he can afford the luxury now, I take it?” Errol’s tone was dry in the extreme.

“Errol, don’t let’s go into that now. Don’t let’s discuss whether Richard behaved badly or can be excused, or whether he should have been bigger than circumstances. It’s all—”

“—rather unimportant now?” Errol said. “Well, perhaps you’re right. What do you want me to do, Hope? Or perhaps I should say—what do you expect me to do?”

She stared at him helplessly.

What
did
she expect him to do? Was she really going to throw herself on his generosity?—ask him to release her, and then, as she grand and happy climax, marry Richard?

A week ago she could not have imagined a happier or more natural solution of the problem, but now—

It was not only that now she knew so much more about Richard. She also knew so much more about Errol. The issue was no longer clear-cut and simple.

“Errol—” she began rather uncertainly, and then stopped.

“Yes, I know.” He smiled straight at her, and suddenly she felt the sense of bewilderment and tension lessen. “You’ve been so badgered and harassed lately, and had so little chance of making a free choice, that you hardly know what to do
with
a free choice, do you? You’re asking yourself whether you want Richard—or perhaps even me
—
or just neither of us. And you don’t really know the answer.”

“Oh, Errol!” She didn’t know whether she was more relieved or horrified to hear her own feelings put so accurately into words. “It
m
ust sound so feeble—”

“No,” he told her. “It’s not feeble. It’s natural. And it’s largely my fault.”

“
Your
fault?”

“Yes, of course. It was I who forced a whole set or false circumstances on you. I think I knew, even as did it, that I was a fool—and worse. But the chance came so unexpectedly. I’d—loved you for rather a long time, Hope—”

“
Had
you?”

“Um-hm.” He smiled thoughtfully. “So much so that I was scared at the very idea of your coming to work at the Lab, and tried to put you off. Then that made you angry, of course, and after that there never seemed a way of even making you conscious of me in anything but a rather hostile sense.”

“Oh, Errol, I’m sorry. I seem to have been rather blind and stupid.”

“No, no, you weren’t. But when you suddenly came and appealed to me for that money, it seemed—quite absurdly I know—that here was a heaven-sent chance of
making
you consider me in an entirely different light. It was idiotic of me, of course, and it was despicable too. I suppose”—he made a slight face—“I’ve been very rightly served by having the one weapon I chose break in my hand.”

“You mean—because Richard can return your five hundred pounds now?”

He nodded.

“But there’s another part to it too, Errol. I promised you—”

“Darling, I couldn’t hold you to a promise which I know would never have been made if I’d asked you a week sooner or a week later. When the need for the money disappeared, the falseness of the whole situation was shown up.”

“Do you mean”—she paused and passed the tip of her tongue over her lips—“do you mean that you’re releasing me?” She stared at him and noticed subconsciously that he looked tired now and very much his age.

“I
mean,” he said slowly, “but
I
want you to have a chance of thinking things over, absolutely free from the false situation that’s grown up. I thought I wanted to marry you more than anything else in the world. Now I know that’s not true. I want you to be happy.”

He spoke quietly, almost unemotionally. An absolute contrast to Richard. Errol didn’t even attempt to touch her.

“And do you think my happiness might lie with Richard, after all?”

“Like you, Hope, I simply don’t know. I only know that I want you to find out. And you’ll never do that if we both start battering you with our rival claims. Go away somewhere by yourself, child. Take a fortnight’s holiday
—
a month if you like. I’ll arrange it at the Laboratory. We’ll both undertake not to write to you or see you. And if at the end of the time you don’t want either of us—well, that’s the decision we must all accept without any sense of grievance.”

There was a short silence, and then she said quite simply: