The Vision of Desire Part 21

Ann drove on, and ten minutes later pulled her horse up at the Priory doors. Mrs. Hilyard stepped lightly out of the trap. She moved beautifully, with a deer-like ease and grace.

"Now when will you and your brother come over to lunch?" she asked, as she shook hands. "He promised--for you both--to come and help me with advice about arranging my rooms. You must go on as you've begun--being neighbourly, you know," she added quaintly.

"But we shall be cut out now by an older friend," said Ann, when they had fixed a day for the lunch appointment.

"Oh, no"--quickly. "No man can take the place of a woman friend--and I hope you're going to be that?"

Ann smiled down into the lovely upraised face with frank comrades.h.i.+p.

"I hope so, too," she returned heartily. "Still, it's jolly for you finding an old friend like Mr. Coventry living next door, so to speak, isn't it?"

For a moment Mrs. Hilyard hesitated. Then:

"Very jolly," she replied, with a brief, enigmatic smile.

CHAPTER XII

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

August had come in on a wave of such breathless heat that each day the weather-wise foretold a thunderstorm. But, although the heavy, sultry air and lowering skies seemed pregnant with impending tempest, with every evening would come a clearer atmosphere and all signs of thunder disappear until the following day, when the stifling heat closed down once more like an invisible pall.

The pleasantest spot in the vicinity of Oldstone Cottage was undoubtedly a certain corner of the garden where stood a venerable oak whose interlacing branches spread themselves into a cool green canopy, and here, in a hammock slung from one great limb of the tree to another, Ann had taken refuge. A book lay open on her knee, but, yielding to the languor induced by the oppressive heat, she had ceased to make even a pretence at reading and leaned back in the hammock, hands clasped behind her head, idly reviewing the happenings of the last few weeks.

The realisation that actually no more than a month had elapsed since her arrival at Silverquay amazed her. It seemed almost incredible, so swiftly and surely had the new life built itself up round her, with quick, deft touches--a friend here, an adopted custom there, new interests and occupations that had already become an accepted part of the day's routine.

Ann was the last person in the world to recognise how much of this was due to her own individual personality. That eager vitality of hers went half-way to meet life. She did not wait supinely for things to happen, but instinctively looked round to see what she could herself accomplish. As she had laughingly told Eliot Coventry, she was not in the least an idle person--and the newly-wired chicken-run and hen-coops already established in a corner of a field adjoining the Cottage garden testified to the veracity of the statement. It was a small thing, perhaps, but its prompt achievement was characteristic.

Equally characteristic were the new friends.h.i.+ps she was forming. Where some people would find only neighbours, Ann's spontaneous, warm-hearted nature discovered friends. Brian Tempest already counted as one, and her acquaintance with Cara Hilyard, begun so unconventionally, was rapidly deepening into a pleasant intimacy.

She had discarded her original theory that some long-ago romance linked Eliot Coventry and Mrs. Hilyard together. Neither of them appeared to her to be in the least thrilled by the fact of the other's proximity in the neighbourhood, nor did either make any obvious effort to avoid or cultivate the other's society. If they chanced to meet they exchanged civilities as the merest acquaintances might do, and gradually Ann came to believe that their knowledge of each other was based on nothing more profound than a slight friends.h.i.+p of many years ago, which had more or less petered out with the pa.s.sage of time.

Cara, for all her quick sympathy and eager friends.h.i.+p, was reticent as regards the past, and Ann's att.i.tude towards her held an element of that loyal, enthusiastic devotion which an older woman not infrequently inspires in one considerably younger than herself--a devotion which accepts things as they are and has no wish to pry into the secrets of the past.

One circ.u.mstance of Cara's former life had come to Ann's knowledge unavoidably--the fact that her husband, Dene Hilyard, had ill-treated her.

A most trifling accident had served to reveal it. She and Ann had been gathering roses together in the Priory garden, and, in straining up to reach a particularly lovely bloom that hung from the roof of the pergola, Cara's thin muslin sleeve had caught on a projecting nail which had ripped it apart from shoulder to elbow. As the torn sleeve fell hack it revealed a trickle of blood where the nail's sharp point had scored the skin, and above that, marring the whiteness of the upper arm, an ugly, discoloured scar. Cara made a hasty movement to conceal it, catching the gaping edges of the sleeve together with her hand. Then, realising that it was too late, she let them fall apart again and met Ann's horrified eyes with a long, inscrutable gaze.

"Yes, it's ugly, isn't it?" she said bitterly. "All my married life was--ugly."

"What do you mean?" Ann's voice shook. She felt as though she knew what was coming--the story of how Cara came by that dreadful scar--and fought against the knowledge with incredulous horror.

"Dene... my husband... he'd been reading a book which described how they branded a woman... and he tried..." She broke off, s.h.i.+vering violently.

"No--_no_!" Urgently the denial sprang from Ann's stricken lips, as though she sought by the sheer imperative violence of her disclaimer to make this horrible thing untrue.

Cara nodded her head slowly.

"It's quite true... he used to drink... he was half mad at times. That was one of them."

She had never again referred to the matter, nor to any other episode of her unhappy married life, but since that day Ann had always the consciousness of something unspeakably hideous which had lain in the background of Cara Hilyard's life, marring it utterly, and the intense sympathy it aroused within her had quickened the growth of the friends.h.i.+p between them.

One circ.u.mstance which had a.s.sisted greatly in the "settling down" process, as far as Ann was concerned, had been Lady Susan's unexpectedly early return from Paris. The end of the first fortnight of July had found her back at White Windows.

"The heat was intolerable, my dear!" she told Ann. "And the dust. Not even for the sake of a new rig-out could I endure it. I thought of cool little Silverquay with the nice clean sea was.h.i.+ng its doorstep every morning--and I bolted. Madame Antoinette has probably been, wringing her hands over my half-completed garments ever since!"

She was immensely entertained when Ann acquainted her with the ident.i.ty of the man who had come to her a.s.sistance on the night of the Venetian fete, and chuckled enjoyably.

"Poor man! He must be frightfully bored at finding you here--established on his very threshold, so to speak! Confirmed misogynists should never indulge in the rescuing stunt--it's so liable to involve them in unexpected consequences. How does he bear up under the discovery?"

"Not at all well," acknowledged Ann ruefully. "Sometimes I think he almost regrets he didn't let me drown comfortably in the lake while he had the chance!"

The wish she had expressed to Maria concerning her brother's then unknown employer--that she hoped he wouldn't make a habit of dropping in at the Cottage during the mornings--had certainly been very literally fulfilled.

Rarely did Eliot Coventry put in an appearance at Oldstone Cottage at all, and if the exigencies of business matters took him there on any occasion when Robin chanced to be out, he usually contrived only to leave a note or message for him with Maria. More often than not, however, he would merely send word to him, asking him to come up and see him at Heronsmere. To Ann, puzzled and secretly somewhat piqued, it seemed as though he were studiously avoiding her. Once she mentioned the subject to Robin, introducing it casually into the conversation as though it were a matter of no moment--as is the way of women in regard to anything which touches them closely. Robin had dismissed it easily.

"Oh, you mustn't think anything of that," he a.s.sured her. "I told you--women don't enter much into Coventry's life. He's a bit of a recluse as far as your s.e.x is concerned."

"He was quite friendly that first morning he came here," objected Ann.

It was that which puzzled her--the apparently causeless change in his att.i.tude. It was true that upon, first recognising in his agent's sister the girl he had rescued from her difficulties on the night of the Fete des Narcisses he had appeared disconcerted and by no means pleased to renew the acquaintance. But afterwards he had thawed considerably, and had even suggested that they should be friends. And now he was behaving as though he had repented the suggestion and were determined to show her that he had. It was not that he was a sn.o.b. She was absolutely certain that the fact that the unknown heroine of the lake episode had proved to be merely the sister of his estate agent would not have the most fractional weight with Eliot Coventry. And as she sat swinging idly in the hammock, letting her thoughts stray back over her few brief meetings with him, she felt utterly baffled to interpret his behaviour.

Rather irritably she tried to dismiss the matter from her thoughts, but it persisted in occupying the foreground of her mind, and at last, in desperation, she picked up her discarded book and began to read. For a few moments she succeeded in concentrating her attention. Then gradually, as the sunlight, piercing through the branches overhead, flickered dazzlingly on the surface of the paper, the black and white of the printed page ran together in a blur of grey and her eyes closed drowsily. With an effort she forced them open, although lifting her eyelids seemed like raising leaden shutters.

_"The rain was now coming down in torrents"_ was the first sentence which met her glance. She read the phrase over two or three times as though it were some abstruse statement in mathematics. Its incongruousness annoyed her. It was nonsense for any one to write like that. Why, it was so hot...

so hot that... The book, falling from her hand, slipped over the side of the hammock and dropped almost soundlessly on to the thick turf below.

The next thing of which she was conscious was of waking suddenly to the sound of a crisp masculine voice remarking succinctly and on a note of intense astonishment:

"Well, I'm hanged!"

Ann stirred and rather unwillingly opened her eyes to find herself gazing straight up into other eyes so vividly blue as to be almost startling. They were looking down at her with a mixture of amus.e.m.e.nt and unmistakable admiration.

"I've been asleep," she said unnecessarily, still hardly thoroughly awake.

"You have," agreed the owner of the blue eyes. "And I very nearly took the usual privilege accorded to the prince who's told off to waken the sleeping beauty."

At that Arm woke up very completely. The speech savoured of impertinence, and she resented it accordingly, yet it had been so gaily uttered, with a sort of confiding audacity which appeared to take it for granted that she would not be offended, that she found it difficult to feel as righteously indignant as the occasion merited.

"Who are you?" she demanded, sitting up hastily and eyeing the intruder with extreme disfavour. He was hatless, and the sun glinted on dark red locks of the same warm, burnished hue as the skin of a horse-chestnut. The intensely blue eyes gleamed at her from under dominant, strongly-marked brows, and the beaky, high-bridged nose, long-lipped mouth, and stubborn chin all connoted the same arrogant virility.

"I'm Forrester--Brett Forrester, and very much at your service," he replied cheerfully.

So this was Lady Susan's "scapegrace nephew"! This gay, confident person who strode forcefully into your garden without so much as a "by-your-leave," and who conveyed the impression that he would stride forcefully into your life, equally without permission, if it so pleased him. Ann was aware of something extraordinarily vital about the man that attracted her in spite of her first instinctive feeling of aversion.

"And what are you doing in my garden?" she asked.