"Explain? Can"t you understand?" His face darkened. "You said you couldn"t marry me--you asked me to release you! And then--after that!--I come home to find you gone--gone with no word of explanation, and the whole household buzzing with the story that you"ve run away! I waited for a letter from you, and none came. Then I wired--to safeguard you I wired from Exeter. No answer! What was I to think? . . . What _could_ I think but that you"d gone? Gone to some other man!"
"Do you suppose if I"d left you for someone else I should have been afraid to tell you? That I should have written an idiotic note like that? . . . How dared you wire to Penelope? It was abominable of you!"
"Why didn"t she reply? I thought they must be away--"
"That clinched matters in your mind, I suppose?" she said contemptuously. "But it"s quite simple. Penelope didn"t wire because I wouldn"t let her."
He was silent. It was quite true that since Nan"s disappearance from Trenby Hall he had been through untold agony of mind. The possibility that she might have left him altogether in a wild fit of temper had not seemed to him at all outside the bounds of probability. And it was equally true that when another day had elapsed without bringing further news of her, he had become a prey to the increasing atmosphere of suspicion which, thanks to the gossip that always gathers in the servants" hall, had even spread to the village.
Nor had either his mother or cousin made the least attempt to stem his rising anger. Far from it. Lady Gertrude had expressed her opinion with a conciseness that was entirely characteristic.
"You made an unwise choice, my son. Nan has no sense of her future position as your wife."
Isobel had been less blunt in her methods, but a corrosive acid had underlain her gentle speech.
"I can"t understand it, Roger. She--she was fond of you, wasn"t she?
Oh"--with a quick gesture of her small brown hands--"she _must_ have been!"
"I don"t know so much about the "must have been,"" Roger had admitted ruefully. "She cared--once--for someone else."
"Who was it?"
Isobel"s question shot out as swiftly as the tongue of an adder.
"I can"t tell you," he answered reluctantly. He wished to G.o.d he could! That other unknown man of whom, from the very beginning, he had been unconsciously afraid! He was actively, consciously jealous of him now.
Then Isobel"s subdued, shocked tones recalled him from his thoughts.
"Oh, Roger, Nan couldn"t--she would never have run away to be--with him?"
She had given words to the very fear which had been lurking at the back of his mind from the moment he had read the briefly-worded note which Nan had left for him.
Throughout the night this belief had grown and deepened within him, and with the dawn he had motored across country to Exeter, driving like a madman, heedless of speed limits. There he had dispatched a telegram to Penelope, and having waited unavailingly for a reply he had come straight on to town by rail. The mark of those long hours of sickening apprehension was heavily imprinted on the white, set face he turned to Nan when she informed him that it was she who had stopped Penelope from sending any answer.
"And I suppose," he said slowly, "it merely struck you as . . .
amusing . . . to let me think what I thought?"
"You had no right to think such a thing," she retorted. "I may be anything bad that your mother believes me, but at least I play fair! I left Trenby to stay with Penelope, exactly as I told you in my note.
If--if I proposed to break my promise to you, I wouldn"t do it on the sly--meanly, like that." Her eyes looked steadily into his. "I"d tell you first."
He s.n.a.t.c.hed her into his arms with a sudden roughness, kissing her pa.s.sionately.
"You"d drive a man to madness!" he exclaimed thickly. "But I shan"t let you escape a second time," he went on with a quiet intensity of purpose. "You"ll come back with me now--to-night--to Trenby."
She made a quick gesture of negation.
"No, no, I can"t--I couldn"t come now!"
His grip of her tightened.
"Now!" he repeated in a voice of steel. "And I"ll marry you by special licence within a week. I"ll not risk losing you again."
Nan shuddered in his arms. To go straight from that last farewell with Peter into marriage with a man she did not love--it was unthinkable!
She shrank from it in every fibre of her being. Some day, perhaps, she could steel herself to make the terrible surrender. But not now, not yet!
"No! No!" she cried strickenly. "I can"t marry you! Not so soon!
You must give me time--wait a little! Kitty--"
She struggled to break from him, but he held her fast.
"We needn"t wait for Kitty to come back," he said.
"No." The door had opened immediately before he spoke and Kitty herself came quickly into the room. "No," she answered him. "You needn"t wait for me to come back. I returned yesterday."
"Kitty!"
With a cry like some tortured captive thing Nan wrenched herself free and fled to Kitty"s side.
"Kitty! Tell him--tell him I can"t marry him now! Not yet--oh, I can"t!"
Kitty patted her arm rea.s.suringly.
"Don"t worry," she answered. Then she turned to Roger.
"Your wedding will have to be postponed, Roger," she said Quietly.
"Nan"s uncle died early this morning."
She watched the tense anger and suspicion die swiftly out of his eyes.
The death of a relative, necessarily postponing Nan"s marriage, appealed to that curious conventional strain in him, inherited from Lady Gertrude.
"Lord St. John dead?" he repeated. "Nan, why didn"t you tell me? I should have understood if I"d known that. I wouldn"t have worried you." He was full of shocked contrition and remorse.
Kitty felt she had been disingenuous. But she had sheltered Nan from the cave-man that dwelt in Roger--oddly at variance with the streak of conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up.
And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had always sought to serve her.
"I want Nan to come and stay with me for a time," pursued Kitty steadily, on the principle of striking while the iron is hot. "Later on I"ll bring her down to Mallow, and later still we can talk about the wedding. You"ll have to wait some months, Roger."
He a.s.sented, and Nan, realising that it was his mother in him, for the moment uppermost, making these concessions to convention, felt conscious of a wild hysterical desire to burst out laughing. She made a desperate effort to control herself.
The room seemed to be growing very dark. Far away in the sky--no, it must be the ceiling--she could see the electric lights burning ever more and more dimly as the waves of darkness surged round her, rising higher and higher.
"But there"s honour, dear, and duty. . . ." Peter"s words floated up to her on the shadowy billows which swayed towards her.
"Honour! Duty!"
There was a curious singing in her head. It sounded like the throb of a myriad engines, rhythmically repeating again and again:
"Honour! Duty! Honour! Duty!"