Such is love Page 2

  "The servants think you were away on an unexpected visit. At least, I have told them that," Aunt Eleanor added, with a grimness that would have forbidden speculation. "The few friends who inquired were told the same thing. I have sent what excuses I could to your parents for your not having written, and I hope you have not been such a fool as to write to them."

  "No," Gwyneth whispered. "I waited to see what attitude they wanted to take."

  "Thank God," Aunt Eleanor said, and she meant it quite literally. She thanked Him sincerely for having looked after her affairs so well, and for having inspired her niece with a grain of sense in all this welter of sinful absurdity.

  "Then—nobody really knows?" Gwyneth lay back again, feeling very weak and queer.

  "Nobody—except you and me."

  "Aunt Eleanor, can it really—remain like that?'*

  "So long as you have the good sense to hold your tongue,** was the sharp retort. "/ shall certainly not go tattling about anything so disgraceful. How the daughter of your father

  and mother could jever have come to such a pass " She

  broke off, because words did indeed fail to clothe her surprise and fury. Gwyneth closed her eyes, in order to shut out her aunt's hard, angry expression.

  "Your parents will be home in a fortnight's time,'* Aunt Eleanor's voice informed her warningly. "I had a letter from them yesterday. By that time, I hope you will have contrived to look your usual self again."

  So she had two weeks in which to grow back to the unknowing seventeen-year-old who had never even been kissed—let alone lain in a man's arms, learning passion and desire, and disillusionment.

  And she managed it. Incredible though it seemed, she had played the part so well that nothing was suspected in the two months which followed her parents' return home. There were few things later than a.d. 150 which commanded her father's complete attention, in any case, and her mother was always primarily concerned with her own immediate affairs.

  It had been a week after Aunt Eleanor's departure that the growing suspicion in Gwyneth's mind took on a horrible certainty. Aunt Eleanor might have planned magnificently. Gwyneth herself might have acted splendidly. But concealment was, after all, an impossibility. Those weeks with Terry were not to slip into the gulf of time, leaving no trace behind. Gvi^neth was going to have his child.

  Even now, she could remember the fearful, clammy chill which settled on her as she admitted the truth to herself. It had been almost like looking death in the face. She had sat here on the side of her bed, slowly rubbing the palms of her hands together in a sort of subconscious effort to bring some warmth to her chilled being.

  She had thought disjointedly of suicide, of running away —only that was too much hke the flight with Terry—of day-to-day concealment and deception. And then she had known suddenly that she could not possibly face any of those. There was one course, and one course only. With a

  determination which even now surprised her when she thought of it, she had gone to her mother and told her the whole story.

  This time there was no stammering, no half-whispered confession, as there had been with Aunt Eleanor. Just a cold, bald recital of the facts. Gwyneth had not only grown up in those last few weeks. She had grown hard— with a sort of desperate, weary hardness which meant that somehow the spring was broken.

  Mother's reception of the story had been characteristic. Like Aunt Eleanor, she, too, said at once: "Your father must not know." But she didn't add anything about breaking his heart, because Mother never concerned herself with anything like that. She said:

  "We couldn't possibly keep it quiet if he knew."

  That, to her, was the important point. And by a different path, she arrived at conclusions identical with Aunt Eleanor's.

  The ethics of the case commanded only a fraction of her attention, but the offence against common sense made her coldly furious.

  "What sort of judgment have you got, you little fool,'* she had asked in that soft, beautiful voice of hers, "to go running about the countryside with a penniless bounder who was afraid even to face your parents? Didn't even that give you some hint to keep away from register offices and cheap hotels with him?"

  Gwyneth had had no answer ready for that, and her mother had not expected any. She was prepared to find the answers to the problems confronting them. And she did find them all.

  Canon Vilner was told—with a wealth of convincing detail—that his daughter was run down and must have a long rest in the quiet Highland retreat which was Aunt Eleanor's home. For a man who believed he actively sought after truth, he accepted the lie with rather pathetic readiness, Gwyneth thought. And, with very little delay, she had been packed off North, to spend the waiting months with Aunt Eleanor.

  Aunt Eleanor had rented a cottage even more remote from civilization than her own home, and, as her sole attendant, she engaged an elderly woman who had once

  been a district nurse, but who had long ago been forced by deafness to give up her occupation.

  And with only this strange, silent woman and Aunt Eleanor for company, Gwyneth had spent the months waiting for her baby's arrival. All the time

  "Miss Vilner." There was a knock at the door, and with an almost physical start, Gwyneth came back from her memories of sombre Highland glens to the warm sunshine of her own bedroom.

  "Yes, Cranston?"

  "Madam said for you not to forget that you are taking the car to meet the five-twenty. It's five to five now."

  "All right. Thank you, Cranston."

  The five-twenty—and Aunt Eleanor. She would have to hurry. She couldn't indulge in memories any longer. And who wanted to, anyway? What was the good—^what was the good? It was all past and done with. Why could she never persuade herself to believe that? Mother believed it —even Aunt Eleanor believed it. They had made it so, themselves. The past was dead.

  Gwyneth reached for her powder blue coat and tied a blue scarf over her hair. She scarcely glanced at herself in the mirror—at the sUm, sophisticated, faintly enigmatic creature who had made Evander Onslie suddenly decide that women had a place in his life after all—even if he were a powerful, cool-thinking steel magnate.

  So different, so indescribably different, from the girl who had captured Terry Muirkirk's wandering fancy more than six- years ago. Still the same soft brown hair with 'sunshine caught in it', still the wide-set blue eyes that darkened or lightened with every change of mood, still the faintly golden bloom on her skin and the touch of colour where her cheeks hoUowed slightly under the wide cheekbones. But the mouth was different. That was what changed her so much. No longer was it soft and pliant, ready to curve upwards in the half-placatory smile of her girlhood. It was cool and firm and very faintly hard, and often when Gwyneth smiled now, an observer might have wondered a little uneasily just what knowledge lay behind that smile.

  She went out of the room and down the wide, sunny staircase. Outside the open front door stood her own little dark blue sports car, and getting into the car, she glanced

  up at the windows of the house to see if her mother were watching. There was no sign of her, but that did not banish the queer feeling Gwyneth always had that her mother did watch her, and the faint, involuntary shrug which she gave was really her assurance to herself that she didn't care anyway.

  The dark blue car shot down the drive, slowed at the gate as it turned into the country road, and then stopped altogether. At the same moment a tall figure in grey flannels crossed from the footpath and came to a standstill beside her.

  "HeUo, Van."

  "Hello, my dear. Where are you off to now?*'

  "Only to the station to meet Aunt Eleanor."

  "And Aunt Eleanor is the grim lady from the Highlands, isn't she? I thought she was not coming to our wedding."

  "She wasn't, but now she is. First thoughts were best, but it can't be helped." Gwyneth smiled up at her fiance as he towered above her.

  At seventeen, she would have been awed and possibly repelled by Evander Onslie.
At twenty-three, she found him so disturbingly dear that sometimes she was half afraid, because he meant so much to her.

  She loved the slight smile that often softened his very firm mouth when he looked at her. She loved his tall figure and his dark hair, slightly greying at the temples. She knew that other people were a good deal afraid of those direct, uncompromising dark eyes, and the stem, often abrupt manner. But, oddly enough, she was not. There was something clear-cut and astringent about everything he did and said, and that in itself gave her a sense of security.

  "I'm sorry about the aunt," he said with that slight smile. "That is, if she really vexes you. But it would take more than an aunt to spoil Thursday, I think."

  Gwyneth laughed, and Aunt Eleanor immediately became less menacing.

  "She doesn't matter, really. Were you going up to the house. Van?"

  "Yes. I wanted to see your father about one or two things."

  "He's not in, I'm afraid."

  "Not? Then I'll come in later and see him just before dinner."

  "Yes, do. I must go now or I shall be keeping Aunt Eleanor waiting, and that's the eighth deadly sin."

  Gwyneth pressed the self-starter and tossed him a farewell smile.

  "See you in an hour or two." And the car was off down the road once more.

  She was terribly glad she had seen him. Somehow it took the sting out of all the dreadful memories which Aunt* Eleanor's coming had evoked. He represented her new world, her absolutely fresh beginning. The years which had passed were nothing but a bridge between. At this end stood Van—quiet, strong, sane. At the far end, a confused group composed of Aunt Eleanor, the deaf woman who said almost nothing, later her mother and an elderly doctor from a village five miles from the cottage.

  With a little groan of impatience, Gwyneth realissed she had crossed the bridge again. Van hadn't banished the memories, after all. She had picked up her train of thought exactly where she had dropped it when Cranston had summoned her just now.

  Well then, let her thoughts run on! If she set her teeth and went over every inch of the way, perhaps that would lay the ghosts at last. Didn't psychologists have some theory like that? You faced the fears buried deep in your subconscious mind—and then they didn't exist any longer.

  Fears! Yes, fear was the overwhelming impression from that night she was remembering now. Fear of the future, fear of the raging storm outside which delayed the doctor, fear of the pain which came in sickening, paralysing waves —fear of death which, she knew with certainty, stood very near.

  Frowning slightly, Gv^^neth stared ahead down the dusty road, not seeing the fields or the hedges or the sunlight, but only the little cottage bedroom where her child had been born. It seemed a strange, far-off delirious kind of dream now. And at the time, it had scarcely been any more real. She could hardly believe that the central figure had been herself. The whole thing had been just the culmination of the impossible unrealities which had happened to her over a period of a year. The climax of a ghastly

  nightmare from which it was quite impossible to wake up —until suddenly the baby—her baby—was in the world and a real being at last.

  Until the moment when she heard it crying she had never thought of it as a person at all. She had accepted her mother's and Aunt Eleanor's view that, along with all the other circumstances of this unhappy business, the child must be firmly ruled out of any future she might try to build.

  A great many things had been said about the imperative need for secrecy, the impossibility of Canon Vilner's daughter appearing before the world as an unmarried mother, the excellent and immediate arrangements that could and would be made.

  Gwyneth had silently acquiesced in all this when they talked things over before the baby came. They were right, of course, Mother and Aunt Eleanor. For her father's sake, for her own future's sake, even for the child's sake, it was better that this terrible episode should be finally and irrevocably closed. The arguments had all seemed so good at the time. In an orphanage the child would grow up just like all the other children round it, unaware of any difference. In any other circumstances it could only be an unhappy little outcast.

  She had quite seen the common sense of it all—^in theory. The only difficulty was that everything altered completely when she first heard that rather weak little wail, and saw the small fluffy head of the baby she had borne.

  To this day, Gwyneth supposed. Mother and AUnt Eleanor considered that some madness of delirium had descended on her immediately after the baby's birth. There had been the most terrible scene—Gwyneth insisting with the violence of despair that she must keep her child after all, that she didn't believe in the force of their arguments any more, and Mother and Aunt Eleanor holding to their first decision.

  It had ended, as it was almost bound to end, with terrifying collapse on Gwyneth's part, and a few days of illness so severe that she knew nothing at all of what was going on round her.

  The car turned into the small station yard. She was five minutes too early after all and, pulling up, she leaned her

  arms on the wheel and sat gazing along the winding railway track where Aunt Eleanor's train would come.

  The outlines of the scene seemed to quiver a little in the afternoon heat, and Gwyneth closed her eyes.

  She remembered that afternoon when she had slowly come back to life again. She had lain there in bed, watching the grey sky through the window, and planning how she would persuade her mother and Aunt Eleanor instead of forcing them, as she had tried to do in her hysterical despair. She would explain that she was willing to go away somewhere and live very quietly for the rest of her life, if only she might keep the baby. No scandal should invade her father's world. She would even go abroad if necessary—

  She had had her case almost complete by the time her mother had come in to see her. But it had all been quite unnecessary, after all. With a brusqueness which perhaps was kinder than evasion, her mother had explained that the problem had solved itself. During the days when Gwyneth had been so ill, her weakly little baby had died.

  And there the terrible episode with Terry had finally ended. A great blankness and emptiness had seemed to succeed that tragic year, and then a very different Gwyneth had emerged from the fire of experience—the sophisticated, cool, slightly hard Gwyneth whom Evander Onslie had met, much later, and asked to marry him.

  The local train puffed slowly into the station, as though rather pleased with itself that once more it had negotiated that slope successfully. Aunt Eleanor and two other passengers descended. One was a large, hot, gaitered farmer, and the other a scrawny little woman weighed down by innumerable parcels.

  But, in any case, neither of them counted for anything beside Aunt Eleanor. She was not very fashionably dressed and there was nothing about her to suggest vulgar prosperity, but she was such a perfect, perfect lady that it was only with the greatest diffidence that the stationmaster (now ticket-collector) ventured to ask her for her ticket.

  By that time she had already pecked conventionally at her niece's cheek and said:

  "Well, Gwyneth, how d'you do? You certainly look better than last time I saw you"—quite as though 'last

  time' had not been five years ago and the circumstances such as one might have preferred to forget.

  Gwyneth assured her aunt coolly that her health was now excellent and inquired dutifully after her own.

  "Nothing to complain of," retorted Aunt Eleanor, a little as though she was graciously absolving the Almighty from any blame. "Some rheumatism sometimes, but at sixty-five one must expect that." And she climbed into the car with an agility out of keeping with her statement about her age.

  The stationmaster (now in his capacity as porter) put her luggage in the back of the car, Gwyneth gave him a slight smile and a nod of thanks, and then drove the car away from the station at the decorous twenty-five miles an hour which Aunt Eleanor considered a sufficiently dashing speed.

  "Thank you very much for the silver candlesticks, Aunt Eleanor," Gwyn
eth began, mindful perhaps of her mother's remark that wedding presents made a safe topic of conversation. "They are really beautiful."

  "Genuine Georgian. Exquisite things," said Aunt Eleanor, who saw no reason whatever to disparage her own generosity.

  "Yes, I could see they were. Van admired them very much, too. He is very fond of old silver."

  There was silence for a moment, • then Aunt Eleanor said:

  "So you're going to marry Evander Onslie. He is rather old for you, but an excellent match."

  "Van is only thirty-five," Gwyneth informed her curtly.

  "Quite. Eleven and a half years older than you," Aunt Eleanor insisted. "A little old for you, as I remarked." And conversation languished once more.

  Presently Gwyneth tried again.

  "We have had some very lovely presents. You'll have to come and see them in the library after dinner."

  "I should like to. Are there many guests coming to the wedding?"

  "About a hundred."

  Aunt Eleanor gave a sigh of satisfaction.

  "And the Bishop is marrying you, of course?"

  "Oh yes."

  "And to think that once " Aunt Eleanor broke off,

  and then added pointedly: "You have great reason to be thankful to your mother and me, Gwyneth."

  "I hope I am not ungrateful," Gwyneth said so dryly that her aunt observed a little stiffly:

  "I find something of a change in you."

  "One must change a good deal between eighteen and twenty-three, I suppose." Gwyneth made that sound light and careless, and a puzzled look flickered over Aunt Eleanor's face.

  "What sort of man is Evander Onslie?" was her next inquiry.

  "To look at, do you mean?"

  "Good gracious, no!" Personal appearance was of less than no importance to Aunt Eleanor. "Is he grave or gay —frivolous or responsible, a decent, God-fearing man or a scoundrel like ?"

  "He is not a scoundrel," Gwyneth interrupted coldly, "And he is not in the least frivolous. I don't know whether he's afraid of God, but I shouldn't think so. I can't iniagine Van at all afraid of anything."