Such is love (2 page)

Perhaps she had understood, even before that, that the man she had married was worthless land selfish and cruel. She had not understood that he was nothing but a common swindler, and a bigamist.

No wonder he had raged when she left home without her jewellery. That was to be the profitable part of the bargain. The rest—the enjoyment of a young, untried girl, still with the first bloom on her—^had been a secondary

consideration. He had tired of her even before his real wife turned up and made that hideous scene.

They had said things Gwyneth had never forgotten— used words she hoped never to hear again. And then they had gone out and left her—sitting stunned and wordless amid the ruins of her life. '

Perhaps the most sordid and ridiculous detail of all was that she had to pay the bill for their hotel. The management were very polite but very firm about that. The gentleman had said she would settle the bill before leaving. They understood he had had to leave urgently on business and that she was joining him later.

She paid. But she didn't join the gentleman later. She had never set eyes on Terry again. Perhaps he went to South America, after all. He had spoken of it with the dreadful woman who said she was his wife. But, in any case, he dropped as completely from her life as if he had been shot, as he deserved.

Now, looking back on him dispassionately, she could think that. He should have been shot. But then, of course, she had grown harder with the years, and she thought things now that would have made her shiver when she was younger.

Ihat seemed an odd thing to say of oneself kt twenty-three or four—except that one could not measure age by years alone. For instance, she had felt forty or fifty when she dragged her way back to Aunt Eleanor at the end of those tragic few weeks.

It was hard to recollect now just how she had stammered out the story. It took a very long while, because Aunt Eleanor refused to understand implications. One had to give the whole thing in black and white.

At the end, she had just remarked bitterly, like some absurd character in a goody-goody story:

"Then all these weeks you have been living in sin?"

'T thought I was married," Gwyneth had said faintly, but Aunt Eleanor merely repeated:

"You have been living in sin." And, in the end, Gwyneth had to admit that she had.

Aunt Eleanor sent her to bed after that—^whether on health grounds or as a punishment, Gwyneth had never been able to decide. Aunt Eleanor would see nothing in-

congruous in banishing an erring niece to bed, even if that niece had grown up sufficiently to live with a man as his wife for several weeks.

Gwyneth had lain there all that dreary evening, in the room where she had dreamed such romantic, heart-warming dreams. Yes—still this very same room where her wedding dress now hung, ready for her to wear when she married Van on Thursday.

Very late in the evening Aunt Eleanor had come and asked if she were awake, and Gwyneth, who felt she would never sleep again, admitted in a whisper that she was.

"We have got to decide what we are going to do about this terrible business." Sitting there in the half-light, Aunt Eleanor had looked absurdly unhke a conspirator—but she proved herself a masterly tactician.

"I have written absolutely nothing to your parents about your wicked running away," Aunt Eleanor announced. "So far as they are concerned, you have never left home."

"They—know—nothing?" she gasped, hardly daring to put the discovery into words. "Oh, Aunt Eleanor, how good of you! How wonderfully good of you!"

"It was not for your sake that I kept silent," Aunt Eleanor told her sharply. "It was for my poor brother, whose heart would certainly be broken if he knew what you have been doing." She said a great deal more about her brother's broken heart, though nothing at all about Gwyneth's. But perhaps that vvas understandable.

"The servants think you were away on an unexpected visit. At least, I have told them that," Aunt Eleanor added, with a grimness that would have forbidden speculation. "The few friends who inquired were told the same thing. I have sent what excuses I could to your parents for your not having written, and I hope you have not been such a fool as to write to them."

"No," Gwyneth whispered. "I waited to see what attitude they wanted to take."

"Thank God," Aunt Eleanor said, and she meant it quite literally. She thanked Him sincerely for having looked after her affairs so well, and for having inspired her niece with a grain of sense in all this welter of sinful absurdity.

"Then—nobody really knows?" Gwyneth lay back again, feeling very weak and queer.

"Nobody—except you and me."

"Aunt Eleanor, can it really—remain like that?'*

"So long as you have the good sense to hold your tongue,** was the sharp retort. "/ shall certainly not go tattling about anything so disgraceful. How the daughter of your father

and mother could jever have come to such a pass " She

broke off, because words did indeed fail to clothe her surprise and fury. Gwyneth closed her eyes, in order to shut out her aunt's hard, angry expression.

"Your parents will be home in a fortnight's time,'* Aunt Eleanor's voice informed her warningly. "I had a letter from them yesterday. By that time, I hope you will have contrived to look your usual self again."

So she had two weeks in which to grow back to the unknowing seventeen-year-old who had never even been kissed—let alone lain in a man's arms, learning passion and desire, and disillusionment.

And she managed it. Incredible though it seemed, she had played the part so well that nothing was suspected in the two months which followed her parents' return home. There were few things later than a.d. 150 which commanded her father's complete attention, in any case, and her mother was always primarily concerned with her own immediate affairs.

It had been a week after Aunt Eleanor's departure that the growing suspicion in Gwyneth's mind took on a horrible certainty. Aunt Eleanor might have planned magnificently. Gwyneth herself might have acted splendidly. But concealment was, after all, an impossibility. Those weeks with Terry were not to slip into the gulf of time, leaving no trace behind. Gvi^neth was going to have his child.

Even now, she could remember the fearful, clammy chill which settled on her as she admitted the truth to herself. It had been almost like looking death in the face. She had sat here on the side of her bed, slowly rubbing the palms of her hands together in a sort of subconscious effort to bring some warmth to her chilled being.

She had thought disjointedly of suicide, of running away —only that was too much hke the flight with Terry—of day-to-day concealment and deception. And then she had known suddenly that she could not possibly face any of those. There was one course, and one course only. With a

determination which even now surprised her when she thought of it, she had gone to her mother and told her the whole story.

This time there was no stammering, no half-whispered confession, as there had been with Aunt Eleanor. Just a cold, bald recital of the facts. Gwyneth had not only grown up in those last few weeks. She had grown hard— with a sort of desperate, weary hardness which meant that somehow the spring was broken.

Mother's reception of the story had been characteristic. Like Aunt Eleanor, she, too, said at once: "Your father must not know." But she didn't add anything about breaking his heart, because Mother never concerned herself with anything like that. She said:

"We couldn't possibly keep it quiet if he knew."

That, to her, was the important point. And by a different path, she arrived at conclusions identical with Aunt Eleanor's.

The ethics of the case commanded only a fraction of her attention, but the offence against common sense made her coldly furious.

"What sort of judgment have you got, you little fool,'* she had asked in that soft, beautiful voice of hers, "to go running about the countryside with a penniless bounder who was afraid even to face your parents? Didn't even that give you some hint to keep away from register offices and cheap hotels with him?"

Gwyneth had had no answer ready for that, and her mother had not expected any. She was prepared to find the answers to the problems confronting them. And she did find them all.

Canon Vilner was told—with a wealth of convincing detail—that his daughter was run down and must have a long rest in the quiet Highland retreat which was Aunt Eleanor's home. For a man who believed he actively sought after truth, he accepted the lie with rather pathetic readiness, Gwyneth thought. And, with very little delay, she had been packed off North, to spend the waiting months with Aunt Eleanor.

Aunt Eleanor had rented a cottage even more remote from civilization than her own home, and, as her sole attendant, she engaged an elderly woman who had once

been a district nurse, but who had long ago been forced by deafness to give up her occupation.

And with only this strange, silent woman and Aunt Eleanor for company, Gwyneth had spent the months waiting for her baby's arrival. All the time

"Miss Vilner." There was a knock at the door, and with an almost physical start, Gwyneth came back from her memories of sombre Highland glens to the warm sunshine of her own bedroom.

"Yes, Cranston?"

"Madam said for you not to forget that you are taking the car to meet the five-twenty. It's five to five now."

"All right. Thank you, Cranston."

The five-twenty—and Aunt Eleanor. She would have to hurry. She couldn't indulge in memories any longer. And who wanted to, anyway? What was the good—^what was the good? It was all past and done with. Why could she never persuade herself to believe that? Mother believed it —even Aunt Eleanor believed it. They had made it so, themselves. The past was dead.

Gwyneth reached for her powder blue coat and tied a blue scarf over her hair. She scarcely glanced at herself in the mirror—at the sUm, sophisticated, faintly enigmatic creature who had made Evander Onslie suddenly decide that women had a place in his life after all—even if he were a powerful, cool-thinking steel magnate.

So different, so indescribably different, from the girl who had captured Terry Muirkirk's wandering fancy more than six- years ago. Still the same soft brown hair with 'sunshine caught in it', still the wide-set blue eyes that darkened or lightened with every change of mood, still the faintly golden bloom on her skin and the touch of colour where her cheeks hoUowed slightly under the wide cheekbones. But the mouth was different. That was what changed her so much. No longer was it soft and pliant, ready to curve upwards in the half-placatory smile of her girlhood. It was cool and firm and very faintly hard, and often when Gwyneth smiled now, an observer might have wondered a little uneasily just what knowledge lay behind that smile.

She went out of the room and down the wide, sunny staircase. Outside the open front door stood her own little dark blue sports car, and getting into the car, she glanced

up at the windows of the house to see if her mother were watching. There was no sign of her, but that did not banish the queer feeling Gwyneth always had that her mother did watch her, and the faint, involuntary shrug which she gave was really her assurance to herself that she didn't care anyway.

The dark blue car shot down the drive, slowed at the gate as it turned into the country road, and then stopped altogether. At the same moment a tall figure in grey flannels crossed from the footpath and came to a standstill beside her.

"HeUo, Van."

"Hello, my dear. Where are you off to now?*'

"Only to the station to meet Aunt Eleanor."

"And Aunt Eleanor is the grim lady from the Highlands, isn't she? I thought she was not coming to our wedding."

"She wasn't, but now she is. First thoughts were best, but it can't be helped." Gwyneth smiled up at her fiance as he towered above her.

At seventeen, she would have been awed and possibly repelled by Evander Onslie. At twenty-three, she found him so disturbingly dear that sometimes she was half afraid, because he meant so much to her.

She loved the slight smile that often softened his very firm mouth when he looked at her. She loved his tall figure and his dark hair, slightly greying at the temples. She knew that other people were a good deal afraid of those direct, uncompromising dark eyes, and the stem, often abrupt manner. But, oddly enough, she was not. There was something clear-cut and astringent about everything he did and said, and that in itself gave her a sense of security.

"I'm sorry about the aunt," he said with that slight smile. "That is, if she really vexes you. But it would take more than an aunt to spoil Thursday, I think."

Gwyneth laughed, and Aunt Eleanor immediately became less menacing.

"She doesn't matter, really. Were you going up to the house. Van?"

"Yes. I wanted to see your father about one or two things."

"He's not in, I'm afraid."

"Not? Then I'll come in later and see him just before dinner."

"Yes, do. I must go now or I shall be keeping Aunt Eleanor waiting, and that's the eighth deadly sin."

Gwyneth pressed the self-starter and tossed him a farewell smile.

"See you in an hour or two." And the car was off down the road once more.

She was terribly glad she had seen him. Somehow it took the sting out of all the dreadful memories which Aunt* Eleanor's coming had evoked. He represented her new world, her absolutely fresh beginning. The years which had passed were nothing but a bridge between. At this end stood Van—quiet, strong, sane. At the far end, a confused group composed of Aunt Eleanor, the deaf woman who said almost nothing, later her mother and an elderly doctor from a village five miles from the cottage.

With a little groan of impatience, Gwyneth realissed she had crossed the bridge again. Van hadn't banished the memories, after all. She had picked up her train of thought exactly where she had dropped it when Cranston had summoned her just now.

Well then, let her thoughts run on! If she set her teeth and went over every inch of the way, perhaps that would lay the ghosts at last. Didn't psychologists have some theory like that? You faced the fears buried deep in your subconscious mind—and then they didn't exist any longer.