Her outstretched hands dropped to her sides. She was trembling, but she forced herself into speech.
"Why did you go?" she asked very low.
"I went--to see if I could live without you, to try and put you out of my life.... And I can"t do it." He spoke with a curious deliberation. "If ever a man fought against love, I fought against it. I"d done with love--it"s the thing I"ve cut out of my plan of life these ten years." His mouth twisted wryly as if even yet the memory of the past had power to stab him.
"I distrusted love. And I distrusted you." He stopped abruptly, still conveying that impression of a man forcibly holding himself in check.
"And--and now?" Ann"s voice was almost inaudible.
They had been standing very still, held motionless and apart by a strange intensity of feeling, but unconsciously she had drawn closer to him as she spoke. As though her instinctive little movement towards him snapped the last link of the iron control he had been forcing on himself, he suddenly bent forward, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing her up into his arms, held her crushed against his breast, kissing her with the overwhelming pa.s.sion of a man who has been denied through dreary months of longing. Heedless of past or future, Ann yielded, surrendering with her lips the whole brave young heart of her.
Presently his clasp relaxed, and she drew a little away from him.
"Ann," he said unsteadily, "little dear Ann!"
She met his gaze with eyes like stars--clear and unafraid.
"You haven"t said yon trusted me!" A note of tender amus.e.m.e.nt quivered in her voice. "Do you, Eliot?"
For a moment his eyes seemed to burn out at her from under his heavily drawn brows.
"Trust you?" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "I don"t know whether I trust you or not!...
But I know I want you!"
And once more he swept her up into his embrace.
"My beloved!"
His kisses rained down on her face--fierce, imperious kisses that seemed to draw the very soul out of her body and seal it his, and when at last he let her go she leaned against him, tremulously spent and shaken with the rapture of answering pa.s.sion which had kindled to life within her.
"Tell me you love me!" he insisted. "Let me hear you say it--to make it real!"
And turning to give herself to him again, she hid her face against his shoulder, whispering:
"Oh, you know--you know I do!"
Half an hour later found them still together, sitting by the big, old-fashioned hearth which Eliot had plied with logs till the flames roared up the chimney. Robin had not yet come back; he had ridden into Ferribridge early in the afternoon, leaving word that he would probably be late in returning. Once Maria had looked into the room to ask if she should light the lamps, and the lovers had started guiltily apart, Ann replying with hastily a.s.sumed indifference that they did not require them yet. Old Maria, whose eyesight was still quite keen enough to distinguish love, even from the further side of a room lit only by the lambent firelight, retired to her own quarters, chuckling to herself. "So "tez the squire as was courtin"
the chiel, after all. An" me thinkin" all along as how "twas young Master Tony! Aw, well, tez more suitin" like, for sure--him with his millions and my Miss Ann." Maria"s ideas as to the riches with which the owner of Heronsmere was providentially endowed might be hazy, but at least she did not err on the side of underestimating them.
Meanwhile, Eliot and Ann, placidly believing that Maria was none the wiser for her brief entrance into the room--all newly-acknowledged lovers being apparently blessed with an ostrich-like quality of self-deception--continued talking together by the firelight.
"That first day I saw you," Eliot was saying. "It was at the Kursaal. Do you remember?"
Ann laughed and blushed a little.
"I"m not likely to forget," she said mirthfully. "You were so frightfully rude."
"Rude? I?" He looked honestly astonished.
"Yes. Didn"t you mean to be? I was sympathising with you so nicely over losing at the tables--and you nearly bit my head off! You looked down your nose--it"s rather a nice nose, by the way!"--impertinently--"and observed loftily: "Pray don"t waste your sympathy"!"
Eliot laughed outright.
"Did I, really? What a boor you must have thought me!"
"Oh, I did"--fervently. "And then there was the day of the Fetes des Narcisses, when I hit you with a rosebud by mistake. You glared at me as if I"d committed one of the seven deadly sins."
"So you had--if occupying the thoughts of a "confirmed misogynist" who had forsworn women and all their ways counts as one of them!"
A silence fell between them. The lightly uttered speech suddenly recalled the past, and each was vividly conscious of the bitter root from which it sprang. The man"s face darkened as though he would push aside the memory.
"But that"s past," said Ann at last, very softly.
He turned to her curiously.
"So you know, then?"
She flushed.
"Yes, I know--I heard. People talk. But I"ve not been gossiping, Eliot--truly."
A brief smile crossed his face.
"You--gossiping! That"s good. But I might have guessed you would hear all about it. Even one"s own particular rack and thumbscrew aren"t private property nowadays"--bitterly. "I wonder how much you know. What have you heard?"
"Oh, very little--" she began confusedly, her heart aching for the bitterness which still lingered in his voice.
"Tell me," he insisted authoritatively. "I"d rather you knew the truth than some garbled version of it."
Very reluctantly Ann repeated what she had learned from Mrs. Hilyard--the bare facts of that unhappy episode in his life which had turned him into a soured, embittered man.
"Anything more? Do you know who the woman was--her name?"
"No. Only that she was very young"--pitifully.
"I believe," he said, cupping her face in his hand and turning it up to his, "I believe you are actually _sorry_ for her?"
"Yes, I am. I"m sorry for any one who makes a dreadful mistake and loses their whole happiness through it," she answered heartily.
"I"m afraid I don"t take such a broad-minded view of things," he returned grimly. "I haven"t a forgiving disposition, and I believe in people getting what they deserve. You"d better remember that"--smiling briefly--"if ever you feel tempted to try how far you can go."
"Do you know, I think you"re going to prove rather an autocratic lover, Eliot?" she said, laughing gently.
"All good lovers are," he answered, drawing her into his arms once more with a sudden, swift jealousy. "Don"t you know that? It"s the very essence of love--possession, A man asks everything of the woman he loves--past, present, and future. He will he satisfied with nothing less."
The words, uttered with an undercurrent of deep pa.s.sion, struck a familiar chord in Ann"s mind. They were like, and yet unlike, something she had heard before. For a moment she puzzled over it, the connection eluding her. Then, all at once, it flashed over her, and she remembered how Brett Forrester had said: _"The past doesn"t matter to me. It"s the future that counts."_ These two men, Eliot and Brett, loved very differently, she thought! With Brett, love meant a pa.s.sionate determination to possess the woman he desired whether she surrendered willingly or with every fibre of her spirit in revolt. But to Eliot, love signified something deeper and more enduring. He wanted all of the woman he would make his wife--soul as well as body, past as well as future, the supreme gift which only a woman who loves perfectly can give and which only a man whose love is on the same high plane should dare to ask.