"No, thank you," he said politely. "I want a wife."
Cara gasped a little.
"Robin!" she exclaimed faintly.
A lovely colour flooded her face. It had been a much happier face latterly--since Ann"s engagement. The look of settled sadness had gone out of her eyes. She felt now--now that everything was made straight betwixt Ann and Eliot--as though the heavy burden she had carried all these years had been suddenly loosed from her shoulders. Eliot had found happiness, at last, and that terrible sense of responsibility for his maimed and broken life was taken from her. Of the existence of the grey shadow she could not know, or guess.
So she turned to Robin with a sweet hesitancy that brought him swiftly to her side.
"Cara!" he said eagerly. "Cara, are you going to give me that "second-best," after all?"
Still she hesitated.
"It doesn"t seem fair, Robin," she faltered. "I"m older than you are, for one thing."
"One year--or two, is it?" he mocked joyfully.
"Half a century, I think!"--with a quick sigh.
"You"ll grow younger," he suggested optimistically. "And anyway, can you bear to think of me living all alone at the Cottage after Ann is married? I should probably commit suicide."
Cara stood twisting a spray of maidenhair fern round and round her fingers till the tiny pale green leaves shrivelled up and dropped off and only the wiry stem remained.
"When is--Ann going to be married?" she asked slowly, at last.
"In April. It"s all fixed. But the thing that matters is when are _we_ going to be married?"
April! Eliot was to be married in April! Cara was conscious of a m.u.f.fled stab of pain. But she felt no active rebellion. With a wistful sense of resignation she recognised that his life and hers were separate and apart.
She herself had sundered them more than ten years ago. But now, at last, Eliot had won through to happiness! She thanked G.o.d for that. And there was still something she could give Robin in return for his eager worship--good comradeship, and that second love which, though it bears but a faint semblance to the rushing ecstasy of young, pa.s.sionate, first love, yet holds, perhaps, a deeper, more selfless tenderness and understanding.
She turned to the man waiting so eagerly for her answer.
"Are you quite sure you want me, Robin?" she asked.
"Quite sure," he answered gravely.
"Then, if you"re really sure, I"ll marry you whenever you like--after Ann is married."
He kissed her with a deep, grave pa.s.sion, holding her closely in his arms.
"You shall forget the past, dearest--I promise you, you shall forget all the things that hurt you," he said with tender rea.s.surance. Presently, when the first few minutes were pa.s.sed, he smiled down at her, a gleam of mirth in his eyes.
"I shall see to it that Ann and Eliot don"t postpone their wedding--if it means postponing ours! You said "after," you know."
She nodded.
"Yes. I can"t possibly commandeer Ann"s natural protector"--smiling--"until she"s safely bestowed in some one else"s care."
But though she jested about the stipulation she had made, it was the outcome of a curiously definite idea. Since it was through her that Eliot"s happiness had once been wrecked, she felt as though, until this new-found happiness which had come to him were a.s.sured--secure beyond any shadow of doubt--she was not free to take her own. It was in a sense an expiation, a pathetic little human effort to propitiate fate and turn aside any blow; aimed at Eliot"s happiness by those jealous G.o.ds who exact payment to the very last farthing.
Ann was overjoyed when she heard of Robin"s engagement. To know that her adored brother would not be left lonely by her marriage, and to see Cara, whose former experience of matrimony had proved such a ghastly failure, with a new, brooding gladness in her eyes, added the last drop to her cup of happiness.
"_Dear_ Robin, I"m so pleased!" she told him. "If I"d been choosing a wife for you myself I couldn"t have chosen any one nicer than Cara!"
"Glad you"re pleased," Robin returned gruffly--the gruffness being merely the cloak to conceal his own riotous felicity which every Englishman in similar circ.u.mstances thinks it necessary to a.s.sume. But Ann saw through it, and was not to be deterred from frank rejoicing.
"It will be perfectly lovely to have my best friend married to my best brother," she continued. "Where shall you live? At the Priory or the Cottage?"
"We haven"t got as far as making such world-shaking decisions as that," he grinned. "Perhaps we might live at the Priory and week-end at the Cottage"--whimsically.
Ann found a further cause for rejoicing in the continued absence of Brett Forrester. She had never seen him again since the morning when, with an intense feeling of relief, she had watched the _Sphinx_ steam out from Silverquay harbour. Lady Susan was much too incensed against him to invite him to White Windows, and Ann rested fairly secure in the hope that she would never see him again, or, at least, not until she was Eliot"s wife.
After that, she felt she would not be afraid to meet him. He could work her no more harm then.
So that it was with a light Heart that she finally started on her journey to London to stay with the Brabazons. Eliot saw her off at the station.
"If you stop a day longer than a fortnight I shall come and fetch you back," he informed her despotically. "I"m not going to spare my girl to any one for more than two weeks. And I grudge even that."
And Ann, leaning out of the carriage window and waving her hand to the tall, beloved figure on the platform, felt no premonition, was conscious of no ominous foreboding that the train which was bearing her so swiftly away from him was actually carrying her straight towards the very danger from which she felt so sure she had escaped.
In the patch of brilliant sunshine which lay all about her, the grey shadow had paled until it had become almost imperceptible. But it was still there--only waiting for the sun to move a little in the heavens to fling itself blackly across her path once more.
CHAPTER x.x.x
THE KEEPING OF A PROMISE
Her first two or three days at the tall grey house in Audley Square sufficed to indicate to Ann that all was not going well there, Sir Philip had welcomed her warmly enough, and when she descended to breakfast on the morning after her arrival she found an envelope on her plate containing his cheque for two hundred pounds, together with a brief intimation that it was intended to "help towards the trousseau." But, apart from the bestowal of this signal mark of favour, Ann found her G.o.dfather"s behaviour extremely difficult to understand.
It was usually his custom to treat her with a species of crusty amiability, but, on this occasion, after the first warmth of his welcome had evaporated, she found that the crustiness became much more in evidence and the amiability conspicuously lacking. The old man was extraordinarily irritable, both towards her and towards Tony. It was as though he were labouring under a secret strain--prey to some anxiety which he was stubbornly bent on keeping to himself. Tony also, Ann observed, seemed to be living at high pressure of some kind. He was moody and restless, and unless some theatre or other plan had been proposed by his uncle he usually disappeared soon after dinner, and she saw him no more until the following morning.
It was all very unlike any previous visit which she had paid to the house at Audley Square. Formerly, if Sir Philip had felt disinclined to go out in an evening, Tony had always been eager with suggestions for their visitor"s amus.e.m.e.nt, and many had been the occasions on which he and Ann had dined gaily at some little restaurant and gone on afterwards to a dance or theatre alone together.
But now the change was noticeable. Tony seemed entirely preoccupied with his own thoughts, and to judge by his manner, they were anything but pleasant ones. Sometimes he would sit in moody silence for an hour at a time, making a pretence at reading a magazine. Or he would get up suddenly when they were all three sitting together, and, without a word to any one, put on his hat and go out of the house. He never volunteered any information as to where he spent his evenings, and although Sir Philip would peer after him with angry, suspicious eyes when he took his departure, it seemed as if pride--or was it fear of what the answer might be?--kept the old man from questioning him. When eleven o"clock came, bringing no Tony, he would get up abruptly, fold his newspaper, and remark curtly to Ann: "Time we went to bed. No need to wait up for Tony. He has his latch-key." It was always the same formula, and the next day at breakfast uncle and nephew would exchange a brief greeting, and no further reference would be made to the previous evening. It was as though a kind of armed neutrality prevailed between them.
Decidedly something was radically awry, Ann reflected unhappily. Her visit, of course, was spoilt. But this troubled her very little in comparison with her increasing anxiety concerning Tony. He had never kept her out of his confidence before. She had always been able to stand by him--as she had promised his mother that she would. But now it seemed as if he had deliberately a.s.sumed an armour of reserve, not only in his relations with his uncle, but also in his att.i.tude towards Ann herself, and her helplessness worried her intensely. She felt convinced that there must be something seriously amiss to account for Tony"s extraordinary behaviour, and finally, the day before her visit was due to terminate, she decided to consult Mrs. Mellow, Sir Philip"s faithful old housekeeper, whom Ann had known ever since those childhood days when she and Robin had been invited over to Lorne to have nursery tea with Tony.
Mrs. Mellow was one of the old-fashioned type of housekeeper--a comfortable black satin person, with pink cheeks and kind blue eyes and crinkly grey hair surmounted by a lace cap. Her name suited her admirably. When Ann put her head round the door of the housekeeper"s room with the announcement, "Mellow, dear, I"ve come to have tea with you, if I may," she welcomed her with respectful delight.
"Now, come straight in, Miss Ann. As if you even needed to ask! I was afraid you meant going away this time without coming to have a cup of tea with your old Mellow."
Ann shook a reproving forefinger at her.
"Now, Mellow, you arch-hypocrite, you know I"d never dare! If I did, I expect the next time I wanted to come up and frivol in town you"d tell Sir Philip that you were spring-cleaning or something of the kind and that you couldn"t put me up."