The Privet Hedge Part 28

Mrs. Bradford was timid about being alone in the house after sunset since her sister's death, so Caroline usually went out between tea and early supper. On this occasion she hurried off directly tea was over, in her anxiety to avoid a possible meeting with G.o.dfrey. She did not even wait to go upstairs and change her dress, but kept on the old blouse and skirt she had been wearing beneath her overall, put on an old garden hat and ran down the drive, fearing all the time to hear Mrs. Bradford calling from the doorway.

However, she reached the road in safety, thankful that there was now no chance of being obliged to usher in G.o.dfrey with Mrs. Bradford's dull rather malicious gaze fixed on her. But even while she waited a second, out of breath, she caught sight of his figure coming along the road from the town, and hurried on again towards the cliff top. There was the bench on which she had sat that moonlight night with G.o.dfrey, when it seemed to her that they could love each other for ever just the same, no matter what might divide them. She had been filled then with the exultation which is so difficult to distinguish at the time from happiness--which seems so independent of human accident--a joy never to be a.s.sailed by common experience.

But all that had gone. Now she was going down the rough, muddy path on the side of the clay cliff--slipping, making her shoes and skirt dirty, grasping at the wiry gra.s.s as she slipped and not caring--simply because she wanted to escape any chance of meeting the same man who had inspired those wonderful emotions. The contrast seemed to hit a blow on her heart, even though she was not going to let it hurt her any more. But at last she reached the bottom, and stood for a moment to rest.

The sea, heaving with a strong ground-swell, reflected the pale blue of the sky in millions of pools of light on the dun-coloured surface. She was not conscious of looking at it, but she had a feeling of freshness and consolation--of freedom from herself. The truth was that, without knowing it, she had made a friend of the sea. She had done so during all those hours in the pay-box on the promenade when she endured that hard spiritual experience which turns people from children into men and women--and the sea remains faithful.

After resting a moment or two she walked on, her path skirting the wet sea-weed which showed that there had been heavy weather outside the bay. The brown streamers had blue lights on them like the sea and the sand was firm and hard. A thick froth churned up from the deeps rested among the sea-weed, or blew along the sh.o.r.e in front of her before the south-easterly wind.

She inhaled the smell of fresh sea-weed--not exactly noticing it, but with her senses influenced by it, as a person's may be by the heavy scent of roses on a June evening. Less than ever was she going to give in because she had to do without love. There were plenty of things in life besides love----

Then, as if in answer to that defiance, she saw part of a man's shadow thrown by the westering sun on the sand before her. She swerved sharp round--not startled--not afraid; but filled with an extraordinary fury against G.o.dfrey which may have been partly caused by these emotions.

"How dare you come creeping up after me on the sand like that?" she said. "Which way are you going? Tell me, and then I'll go the other."

He looked down at her with amus.e.m.e.nt and ardour in his glance; but all the same he bore the marks of some storm only just over in the strained lines of his face, and in the marks of sleeplessness under his eyes.

"You won't get rid of me so easily as that," he said. "I have come here to talk things out with you, and I mean to do it."

She turned back towards the promenade. "Of course, I can't prevent you walking with me if you will," she answered. But it was because she felt that her curiosity might betray her that she desperately slammed the door of opportunity in his face by adding: "I suppose you know you are safe here to worry me as much as you like. You won't come across Uncle Creddle on the sands."

"Your uncle----" He was rather thick-skinned and flushed seldom, but he did so now, growing crimson to the edge of the cap pulled down over his forehead. "Oh! I see. So you actually believed I was afraid.

Turn round!" He took her arm and made her face him. "Now! Do I look as if I should be afraid to fight old Creddle?" She obstinately refused to answer, and he went on, still holding her: "You know I should not. I was thinking of you, and you only. Do you realize what people say about a girl when her nearest male relative breaks, or even tries to break a big stick over her lover's back? Well, I wasn't going to have anything of that sort said about you, Carrie."

"You were very thoughtful about my reputation all of a sudden," said Caroline. She paused, but the words had to come. "It was not because you wanted to keep any talk from getting to Miss Laura's ears, I suppose?"

The question was a sneer, but it was there, all the same; she had had to ask it. And now her whole being hung trembling on the answer, though she was no less grimly resolved than before to have done with a man whom she could not trust. But now he did not reply; and that burning urge of curiosity made Caroline go on--against better judgment, intention, pride: "Does she know?"

He released Caroline's arm at once and walked on. "Let us leave her out of the discussion," he said stiffly. "I was just about to tell you that our engagement is broken off."

But Caroline could not understand--any more than the majority of women--the feeling which makes a decent man reluctant to discuss an old love with a new one, and she was now easily able to speak as coldly as she wished. "I've heard that piece of news," she said.

He turned sharp round. "Why, who told you? It only happened last night."

"Miss Laura told me," she answered.

"What more did she tell you?" he asked quickly.

"Nothing."

He looked away from her to the sea without replying, and this was her chance to walk away, if she had wished; but there was still that question which she must have answered.

"Has Miss Laura heard anything about us? Was that why the engagement was broken off?"

He waited a moment. "No," he said. "After all, you have a right to know that you had nothing to do with it. Nothing. She had never heard a word about you and me until I told her myself; and that was after our engagement was broken off."

"Then why did you----?" She paused, so filled with all sorts of conflicting desires and emotions--longing to know, and yet pa.s.sionately telling herself it didn't matter to her--that she had lost all certainty in herself, and her voice came sharp and tremulous.

"She simply threw me over," he said at last. "Found out she didn't like the idea of married life, though she was very fond of me. I suppose there are women like that in every civilized community. No doubt if she were a Roman Catholic she would be a nun, and she would be a good one. She's good all through. I realize that, in spite of what has happened."

Caroline looked at him as he faced the sea in the strong light--at his heavy features, his broadly set figure, his whole air of knowledge and virility and strength. Then the words fluttered up into her throat without any volition of her own: "Oh, you well may think her good! You well may!"

For in that moment she guessed what Laura had come to tell her but had not been able to say after all. That heavenly kindness of Laura's was actually deep enough and real enough to make her spare her lover the knowledge of how he had wounded her. It was clear enough that she--who always seemed so easy and simple--had detected the first little change in him when he became attracted to Caroline. So she had put off her wedding to make sure, and she had become sure.

Caroline opened her lips to say with pa.s.sion: "Can't you _see_ what she did it for?" But before the words left her lips, there came into her mind a memory of Laura's face as it looked when she left the door of the Cottage, which was so vivid as to be almost an illusion. Now she knew what the anxious, uncertain gaze of those brown eyes into her own had really meant.

Laura had been trying to say all the time: "Don't tell him! don't tell him!" But the complexities involved had been too great, when it came to the point, for anything to be actually said.

Caroline waited to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden loyalty to her own s.e.x which made her long to pierce his masculine obtuseness--to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of aloofness--of something fresh and cool despite her pa.s.sion--which had caused him to think of a nymph on fire when he first held her in his arms.

"Well?" he said at last. "It's all right now, isn't it?"

She shook her head. "I'm not going to begin that all over again," she said rather drearily. "You made me look silly once, but you won't have a chance a second time. So long as you thought you might marry Miss Laura, you were afraid of the talk and kept out of my way. Now she has turned you down, you come after me again. I don't know why. Just for your own fun, I suppose. You can't deny you avoided me."

"No." He stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. "I don't.

But I was in a devil of a hole, Caroline. I was engaged to marry a good girl, and a nice girl, and shortly after the wedding day was fixed I did a thing which only a cad would have done." He paused, Caroline gazing at him with wide eyes. Then he went on: "I borrowed a large sum of money from her."

"Is that all?" breathed Caroline. "I don't see what difference that made."

"Don't you? Well, perhaps not--but any man would," he answered. "I was faced with ruin unless I could tide things over, and I couldn't take the money and be philandering with another girl at the same time."

"You didn't seem to hold those views until the last week or two," she said.

"I had not borrowed the money before," he said shortly. "Though I knew well enough I was not doing the square thing there, either by you or her."

She looked at him with a keen, set, impersonal intentness in her gaze which he could not understand. "Then you are sure she does not care enough for you to marry you? She threw you over because she wanted to stop single?"

"No doubt of that," he said with a sort of rueful conviction. "Though, of course, being the girl she is, she was frightfully upset at the idea of behaving badly to me. As a matter of fact, she seemed so distressed during the whole interview that I couldn't help feeling ashamed of myself. I couldn't let her reproach herself so acutely; I had to tell her I--I wasn't broken-hearted."

"She would wonder why, didn't she?" said Caroline, in a tone which he could not understand.

"Yes," he answered. "So I told her."

"What did you say?"

He waited a moment, looking down at the slim figure outlined darkly against the immense radiance of the sea. But he did not touch her.

This was a different thing indeed from that hot wooing on the top of the cliff.

"I told her," he answered bluntly, at last, "that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you."

"And she----?" Caroline did not respond any more than that; incredibly, to him, she was still thinking about Laura---- And he stood looking at her with the same odd mixture of curiosity and desire which had all along marked his pursuit of her, though beneath it there was now something deeper, more human, more permanent. He wanted to know---- But even when he did know, she would be his--his to take care of and fight for and help up in the world.

At last he gave the answer she was waiting for. "Laura took it quite differently from what I expected," he said. "She was awfully decent about it. I think she was relieved, in a way, to find she had not got me on her mind. She must have been afraid I should be very unhappy, of course. She would always be so sorry about anything like that, that I wonder she had the heart to throw me over, even though she didn't want me."

Caroline said nothing. Oddly enough, though she had not heard the sound of the waves before, the melancholy swis.h.!.+ swis.h.!.+ now echoed through her very soul. When she felt a salt taste on her lips she thought it was a drop of spray from the sea, then she felt the faint trickling sensation of another and another running down her cheeks.

"Caroline!" he said, putting his arm about her and bending his face to hers. "You're crying! What is it, little girl?"