To Love Part 18

"No more we do, and I don't want to, do you?" He smiled down at her undecided eyes. "I would rather think of you as Pierrette than Miss anything, and I shall be Pierrot. It is a romance, Pierrette; will you play it?"

"Yes," she answered slowly, but her eyes fell away from his.

CHAPTER XVII

"Aye, thought and brain were there, some kind Of faculty that men mistake For talent, when their wits are blind,-- An apt.i.tude to mar and break What others diligently make."

A. L. GORDON.

Impulse had always been a guiding factor in Robert Landon's life. If he saw a thing and wanted it, impulse would prompt him to reach out his hand and s.n.a.t.c.h it; if the thing were beyond his reach, he would climb--if necessary--over the heart of his best friend to obtain it; should it prove of very fragile substance and break in his hands, he would throw it away, but its loss, or the possible harm he had inflicted in his efforts to obtain it, brought no regrets. He made love deliriously, on fire himself for the moment, but never once had he so far forgot himself as to come from the flame in any way singed. Many tragedies lay behind the man, for impulse is hardly a safe guide through life; but he himself was essentially too level-headed, too selfish, to be the one who suffered.

He had spoken and danced and made love to Joan on an impulse. Beyond that, he set himself down seriously and painstakingly to win her. Most women, he knew, like to be carried forward on the wings of a swift-rus.h.i.+ng desire, but there was some strange force of reserve behind this girl's constant disregard of his real meaning in the game they played. She was willing, almost anxious to be friends; it did not take him long to find out how lonely and dreary had been the life she was leading. She went out with him daily; it became a recognized thing for him to fetch her in his small car every evening at office. Sometimes they would dine together at one of the many little French restaurants in Soho, and go to a theatre afterwards; sometimes they would just drive about the crowded lighted streets, or slip into the Park for a stroll, leaving the car in charge of some urchin for a couple of pennies. Since he was out on the trail, as his friends would have said, every other interest in his life was given up to his impulse to beat down this girl's reserve, but all his attempts at pa.s.sionate love-making left her unresponsive. She would draw back, as it were, into her sh.e.l.l, and for days she would avoid meeting him. Going out some back way at the office and never being at home when he called at Montague Square. Then he would write little notes to her and bribe the office-boy to deliver them, begging her pardon most humbly--he played his cards, it may be noticed, very seriously--imploring her to be friends again. And Joan would forgive him and for a little they would be the best of companions.

But through it all, and though she shut her eyes more or less to the trend of events, Joan's mind refused to be satisfied. She was restless and at times unhappy; she had her hours of wondering where it would all end, her spells of imagination when she saw Landon asking her to marry him. When she thought about it at all it always ended like that, for she could not blind her eyes to the fact of the man's love for her. Then she would shun his society, and endeavour to build up a wall of reserve between them, for it was her answer to his question that she could not bring herself to face.

It was on one of these occasions that she made up her mind definitely to break with him altogether. She wrote him a short note, saying that she was going to be dreadfully busy at office and that as she had another girl coming to stay with her--both statements equally untrue--she was afraid it would be no use his calling to fetch her.

Landon accepted this att.i.tude in silence, though one may believe it did something to fan the flame of his pa.s.sion, and for ten whole days he left her entirely alone. Then he wrote.

Joan found the letter waiting for her on the hall table when she came home one evening after a peculiarly dull and colourless day. It had been delivered by hand and was addressed simply to "Pierrette, In the Attic."

Mrs. Carew must have been a little surprised at such a designation. Joan took it upstairs to read, lingering over the opening of it with a pleasurable thrill. The days had been very grey lacking his companions.h.i.+p.

"Dear Pierrette," Landon had written, "is our romance finished, and why?

The only thing I have left to comfort me is a crushed red rose. You wore it the first evening we ever met. Pierrette, you are forgetting that it is summer. How can you wake each morning to blue skies and be conventional? Summer is nearly over, and you do not know what you are missing. Come out and play with me, Pierrette; I will not kiss even your hands if you object. I can take you down next Sunday to a garden that I know of on the river, and you shall pick red roses. Will you not come, Pierrette?"

Joan sat on in the dark of her little attic (for if the lamp was not required before supper Mrs. Carew had a way of not bringing it up until it was quite dark) with the letter on her lap. She was making up her mind to tell Landon about Gilbert, about her principles which had been rather roughly shaken, about her ideas, which still held obstinate root in her mind. If he loved her enough not to mind what was past, why should she not marry him? She had proved once how bitter it was to stand against the convictions of the world alone. His fortnight's absence had shown her how unbearable the dullness of her days had become; she could not struggle on much longer. Her mind played with the prospect of consenting, of how it would open up new worlds to her, of what a change it would bring into her life.

It was with a conviction anyway that great things might be in the balance that she stepped into Landon's car on Sunday afternoon and settled herself back against the cus.h.i.+ons. They disregarded the fortnight's lapse in their friends.h.i.+p; neither referred to it in any way, and Landon was exceptionally cheerful and full of conversation on the drive out. Joan was content to sit quiet and listen and to let her eyes, tired of dusty files and hours of typewriting, feast on the country as they flashed past.

The garden that he had promised her proved all that his descriptions had claimed. It lay at the back of an old stone house, off the high road and away from the haunts of the ordinary holiday makers. Landon had chanced on it once and the place had taken a great hold on his imagination. One could be so alone at the foot of the garden, where it sloped down to the water's edge, that one could fancy oneself in a world of one's own.

The house itself was a quaint, old-fas.h.i.+oned building with small rooms and tiny windows, but the walled-in garden where the roses grew, and the river garden, which stretched right down to the brim of the river with its fruit trees and tall scented gra.s.ses, were both beautiful. They had tea out there, and they picnicked on the gra.s.s, watching the sun's reflections playing hide and seek in the river.

After tea, Landon insisted on strolling round and collecting all the roses he could lay his hands on for Joan. He threw them finally, a heavy heap of scented blossoms, on to her lap. He said their colour was reflected in her cheeks, their beauty in her eyes.

"It is a shame to have picked them so early," Joan remonstrated; "they will die now before we get home."

"Let them," he answered, "at least they have had their day and done well in it." He threw himself down on the gra.s.s beside her. "Aren't they glorious, Pierrette?" he said; but his eyes were not on the flowers.

Joan stirred uneasily. The great moment was drawing closer and closer, she was growing afraid, as are all women when the sound of Love's wings comes too near them.

"I wish you wouldn't call me by that name any more," she said, "because----"

"Well, why because?" Landon asked as she hesitated. "One of the things that do not seem quite right to you, like kissing, or holding hands?" He took up one of the roses from her lap and pulled it to pieces with ruthless hands. "What a puritan you are!" he went on abruptly. "Do you know we can only love once, isn't your heart hungry for life, Pierrette?

Sometimes your eyes are."

"Don't!" said Joan quickly, "that is another thing I wish you would not do, make personal remarks; it makes me feel uncomfortable."

"Why don't you tell the truth?" he asked fiercely. "Why don't you say afraid?"

"Because it does not," she answered; her eyes, however, would not meet his. "I think uncomfortable describes it better."

Landon stared at her with sombre eyes. He was beginning to tire of their pretty game of make believe; perhaps impulse was waning within him.

Anyway he felt he had wasted enough time on the chase. But to-day Joan seemed very charming, and her fear, for he could see plainly enough that she was afraid, was fanning the flame of his desire into a new spurt of life.

"I am going to make love to you, Pierrette," he said; "I am going to wake up that cold heart of yours. Does the thought frighten you, Pierrette? because even that won't prevent me doing it."

He had drawn her close to him, she could feel his arms round her like strong bands of iron. Joan lifted a face from which all the colour had fled to his.

"Don't, please don't!" Her bewildered mind struggled with all the carefully thought-out things she was going to have said to him. But the crisis was too overwhelming for her; she could only remember the one final thought that had been with her. "You may not want to marry me when you know about me," she whispered, and ended her words with a sob.

The man laughed triumphantly. "I don't want to marry you," he answered, "I want to love you and make you for a little love me, and this is how I begin the lesson." He bent his face to hers quickly, kissing her pa.s.sionately, fiercely, on the lips.

For a second such a tumult of pa.s.sionate amazement shook Joan that she stayed quiet in his arms. Then everything that was strong, all the inherited purity in her nature, came to her aid and summoned her fighting forces to resist. She struggled in his arms furiously, she had not known she held such stores of strength; then she wrenched herself free and stood up. Fear, if fear had been the cause of her early discomfort, had certainly left her; it was blind, pa.s.sionate rage that held her silent before him.

The man rose to his feet and essayed a laugh, but it was rather a strained effort. "That was a most undignified proceeding, Pierrette," he said; "what on earth made you do it?"

"How dared you?" flamed Joan. "How dared you speak to me, touch me like that?"

"Dared?" the man answered; he was watching her with mocking eyes and something evil had come to life on his face. Cold anger that she should have made a fool of him and a baulked pa.s.sion which could very easily turn to hate. "This outburst is surely a little ridiculous. What did you think I wanted out of the game? Did it really occur to you that I was going to ask you to marry me? My dear girl!" He shrugged his shoulders, conveying by that movement a vast amount of contempt for her dreams. "And as for the rest, I have never yet met a woman who objected to being kissed, though some of them may pretend they do."

Joan stared at him; he had stooped and was gathering up the roses that lay between them. Rage was creeping away from her and leaving her with a dull sense of undignified defeat. Once again she had pitted the ideal of a dream against a man's harsh reality, and lost. Love! She had dreamed that this man loved her, she had held herself unworthy of the honour he paid her. This was what his honour amounted to--"I have never yet met a woman who objected to being kissed."

She turned away and walked blindly towards the house.

Landon caught her up before she reached the gate of the garden. His arms were full of the roses and apparently he had won back to his usual good nature.

"Having made ourselves thoroughly disagreeable to each other," he said, "let us make it up again for the time being. It is all rather absurd, and you have got to get back to town somehow or other."

He helped her into the car with just his usual solicitude, tucking the rug round her and laying the pile of roses on her lap; but on the way home he was very silent and from the moment they started till the time came for saying good-bye he did not speak a word to her.

As they stood together, while Joan was opening the door with her latch key, he put his hand for a moment over hers.

"Good-bye, Pierrette," he said, "I am sorry you won't have anything to do with me. I should have made you happy and given you a good time.

Sometimes it is a pity to aim too high; you are apt to miss things altogether."

f.a.n.n.y was waiting in Joan's room when she got back, tucked up in her favourite position in the arm-chair. She had been away for the last ten days on one of her periodical trips. "My!" she gasped, disentangling herself to greet the other; "what roses, honey! Straight from the country, aren't they, and a car--I can hear it buzzing outside. Is it your young man?" She paused on the thought tip-toe with excitement, her eyes studying Joan across the flowers she had seized. "And is he straight? the other sort won't do for you; you would hate yourself in a week."

Joan subsided on to the bed, taking off her hat with hands that shook over the task.

"No," she answered, "he is not straight, f.a.n.n.y; but it doesn't matter, because I have finished with him. Take away the flowers with you, will you? they seem to have given me a headache."

f.a.n.n.y dropped the roses in a shower and trod them under foot as she ran to Joan. "He has hurt you;" she spoke fiercely, flinging her arms round the other girl. "G.o.d, how I hate men at times! He has hurt you, honey."