Such is love (6 page)

"Do you mean that, even before you had spoken to me, you had ideas of—winning me—marrying me—whatever you like to call it."

"I like to call it "marrying"," he said with that dry little smile that was so very charming. "In that respect I am old-fashioned."

"Well, of course."

"I was terribly afraid that your detached air and your lack of interest in what Courtenay was saying meant that you were married already—unhappily married."

There was a short silence, and then, because she couldn't possibly leave things there, she said fascinatedly:'

"And when you found I was not married, what did you think then?"

"That you must marry me."

"Yes, but—apart from that. I mean, what—^what did you think was the matter?"

Glancing at him, she saw that his mouth had gone unusually gentle.

"You needn't say 'yes' or *no' Gwyn dear, but I suppose some bounder made you desperately fond of him in the day when you were—what was it?—ingenuous and shy, and then let you down brutally—^jilted you."

So that was what he thought! How innocent—how trivial, compared to the real truth!

"It was something like that," she heard herself say cahnly. "But it's all over, long ago."

"He doesn't matter in the least now?"

^'Matter? No, Van. He couldn't matter less," she exclaimed so passionately that he gave a peculiarly satisfied little smile. Then his expression became grave again, and he said with unusual gentleness:

"And I hope it doesn't hurt any more, my darling."

She felt the sudden tears come into her eyes.

"Nothing hurts when I have you," she told him slowly, and with a slight exclamation, he stopped the car and took her in his arms.

"Never think of it again, Gwyn. Promise me—for your own sake, as well as mine."

"I—promise. Of course I promise," Gwyneth said. And somehow that seemed even more irrevocable than the Bishop marrying them.

It was seven o'clock by the time they reached London, and after dinner in the great hotel restaurant, with its full-length windows opening on to the Park, they decided to go to the ballet.

She knew that the performance that evening was good, even without going into the finer points that might have delighted an expert, but she took in very little of it with her conscious mind. She was so keenly aware of Van beside her, and through her mind there ran Uke a happy refrain: "I'm married to Van. I am his wife. He loves me. It must be all right."

Their ten days' honeymoon was idyllically happy.

From the fost moment, when the plane took off, Gwyneth had the feeling of literally soaring away, free, into the future. Her worries and her fears were left behind. The world was hers once more, as it had been when she was a schoolgirl.

They spent most of the time in Italian Switzerland, idling away long, sun-filled days on the lakes, fascinated by the beauty around them, almost drugged by the colour and the sunshine and the scent of flowers. Van had been there before, but for Gwyneth it was her first visit, and her pleasure doubled his.

At the hotel they were just one married couple among several. Their extreme self-possession suggested no necessity for 'honeymoon suites' or discreet solitariness. But tp Gwyneth every hour had the hallmark of gold, the seal of pure happiness.

It was with real sadness that Gwyneth saw the last hours of her honeymoon slip away. But when they were actually on their way back to England, the thrill of going home—to a home which really was her own—^wiped out anything else.

In the weeks before her marriage she had already spent a good deal of time supervising the furnishing of the very beautiful mansion flat overlooking the Park. Van had allowed her an entirely free hand in the matter, and the result was a home which was artistically perfect and personally dear. There had never been anything in Gwyneth's life to make her feel like that before. Even her own room at home had been subject to the decided, unmistakable hand of her mother. And when, now, the smiling new maid opened the door to them, Gwyneth, for all her self-possessed answering smile, was really thinking:

"This is my home—^the centre of my new and wonderful life."

Almost immediately Van was caught up again in the network of his business life, and for the first few days she saw alarmingly little of him. He explained briefly that he had been away too long, and there were several things to bring up to date. After that he made no more apologies, and she had to make the best of his absence.

She imagined he scarcely spared a thought for her—but she found she was wrong. At the end of a week he came in one afternoon to find her having tea by herself in the green and cream lounge.

"You're early. Van." She glanced up and smiled at him.

"Yes." He came and leant his arms on the back of her chair and looked down at her. He didn't kiss her at first—

just watched her with an air of pleasure that softened his rather forbidding expression.

She went on pouring out tea.

"Aren't you going to sit down and have your tea?"

"In a minute. How lovely you are, Gwyn. It is wonderful to come home after a hell of a day and find you sitting here, as cool and lovely as ever, calmly pouring out tea."

She laughed—a soft, pleased little laugh, and leant back suddenly so that her hair brushed his hand.

"It's lovely to have you come in to tea—particularly as it's something of a novelty."

He bent and lightly kissed her cheek and then, rather unexpectedly, the side of her neck.

"I know. I'm quite aware that I've been a neglectful husband this last week. I couldn't help it, love. It will be better in future. Thank you for not making any trouble."

She put up her hand and touched his cheek.

"All right, Van."

That was all. But it was so strange and sweet to have him call her anything like that that she could have sung aloud.

He took his tea then, and presently asked her, with the air of a man who finds he has time to look round again and can now make plans to please himself:

"Are you free all day on Saturday?'*

"Of course—^if you want me."

"I always want you," he told her with a slight smile.

"Yes, but—Saturday? What are we going to do on Saturday?" She was aware of pleasurable anticipation.

"I want to go down to Greystones, the big orphanage in Hampshire, you know. I'm one of the chief trustees of the place—perhaps I told you before?" He paused a little interrogatively, and Gwyneth groped for words to reply.

"No," she said rather faintly, "I don't think you ever mentioned it."

"Well, I am. My father was, before me. He had a good deal to do witji founding the place forty years ago, and I continued the connection with it. It's a wonderful place— an absolute model of its kind—and there have been one or two alterations which they want me to go down and see. The drive down is beautiful, and I thought it would be interesting for you, too. You have never seen it, I suppose?"

"No." She wondered if he, too, could hear by now how strange her voice sounded. "No, I've never seen it."

"And you would like to come with" me?"

Terror and a sudden wild excitement seemed to envelop her in a sheet of flame. But she must answer calmly because, of course, he had asked a perfectly ordinary, un-dramatic question.

Very carefully she poured milk into her cup, taking care not to let her shaking hand rattle the jug against the cup.

"Yes,'Van," she said considerably, "I think it would be very nice indeed. I'd like to go with you to—Greystones."

CHAPTER THREE

Between the decision to go and the arrival of Saturday morning, Gwyneth's spirits soared and sank in almost sickening alternation.

One moment, she knew she was mad not to make any sort of excuse for keeping away from the place and all the vague, unformed dangers it might represent. The next, she told herself that nothing dangerous could possibly result. Here indeed was the perfect opportunity for satisfying herself that the child—her child—was in happy surroundings.

"I shouldn't know him, of course," she kept on telling herself feverishly. "There's no way in which I could know.

Only " She never let herself get any further, but deep

down in her heart was a strange, growing excitement. She knew it for something inexplicable and primitive—a queer, growing hunger to see the child she had believed to be dead for over five years.

And if she saw him—what then? If by some miracle she recognized him, knew him for-her own?

But there was no answer to that question. vShe must hope it would never really arise.

Or must she? Could she even bear to go there and not know him?

And then she would start all over again.

Saturday was a day of perfect sunshine, so that the last excuse for postponing the visit disappeared. Van and she left London early, the big black car eating up the distance in a way that seemed to Gwyneth's excited nerves to sug-

gest that they were rushing madly towards some dramatic denouement.

"I had a note from Dr. Kellaby this morning. He and his wife are expecting us to lunch and hope we will take enough time to see the place thoroughly," Van told her.

"Dr. Kellaby is the head of the place?"

"Yes. He's been Superintendent there for the last ten years. An excellent man for his job."

"Kind, you mean?"

"Oh, very, I should imagine. Exceedingly forceful and up-to-date in his views."

Van, of course, was considering him from the point of view of a trustee. She was considering him, she realized with a faint shock, from the point of view of a mother.

"He won't mind if I want to go round and see absolutely everything?" She wondered if that sounded like the reasonable interest of an ordinary visitor.

"I think both he and Mrs. Kellaby will be delighted."

"That's good. I—I'm really beginning to be awfully interested in the place."

It was not much more than half past eleven when they drove up to the picturesque grey stone building which represented 'home' to nearly a hundred children. It stood in several acres of very beautiful parkland, and Gwyneth thought with wistful eagerness: "He ought to be very happy here."

They were a little early, it seemed. Both Dr. and Mrs. Kellaby were stiU at a local committee meeting in connection with the arrangements for Founders' Day next month, but they would not be long. If Mr. and Mrs. Onslie would care to wait in the drawing room ?

They went through to the long drawingroom, where large french windows opened on to a very magnificent stretch of lawn. Groups of children were dotted about the green expanse, and someone in a nurse's uniform was sitting in a garden chair, knitting.

Almost immediately they were joined by an extremely alert-looking young man in horn-rimmed glasses, whom Van introduced as "Mr. Fothergill, the secretary and treasurer." He shook hands with Gwyneth, made an affable comment or two about the weather, and then engaged Van in an earnest conversation in which running expenses,

overhead charges and capital expenditure seemed to play about equal parts.

Gwyneth was not interested. She had not come down here to hear figures discussed. She wanted to go nearer to the children out there on the lawn—look at them for herself.

Turning to the two men, she said:

"Don't stop your discussion for me—but I'm going out on to the lawn. I want—I want to watch the children playing."

She smiled very charmingly at Mr. Fothergill and nodded casually to Van. Then, stepping out on^to the terrace, she strolled across the lawn to where a group of the younger children were playing.

Van would think she was mildly interested in them, possibly even reflect: "Of course, the younger ones are always the most amusing to visitors."

That was what she was—^just a visitor, with a passing interest in the younger children at the orphanage.

She stood a little way off from a small group, watching them playing, feeling strangely alien and lonely. One of those children might easily be her own, but she could not find words even to speak to them. It frightened her, and yet it excited her to watch them, and she could not tear herself away.

Which of those children was hers? Which—which— which? In a sense, it was not even her business, of course —but her blue eyes went searchingly from one little face to another, while her heart beat heavily and slowly.

The child with the smooth bright hair not unlike her own?—or perhaps that likeness was imagined. The dark, slightly aggressive one who insisted on the others doing what he wanted? That would be like Terry—dark, and slightly aggressive about his personal wishes. But again that likeness was probably the purest imagination. Her child might just as well be that pale, self-effacing little fellow in the green smock, or the tall, lanky child who seemed to have no special interest in anything or anyone, or the picture-book child who was trying to stand on his head.

Yes, that was the kind of child that every mother hoped her baby would be. Tight, golden curls, round pink cheeks,

chubby legs and arms, laughing blue eyes—^he was almost too good to be true. Anyone would want to adopt him if they could see him now, planting his curly head on the grass and cautiously raising first one fat leg and then the other. Suppose that were her child, and someone else had the idea of adopting

"I can do that, too," observed a gruff little voice immediately beside her, and Gwyneth looked down to see a quaint little creature in a blue jersey suit, gazing with ill-concealed envy at the beautiful acrobat.

"Can you?" Gwyneth said, rather shyly because she scarcely knew how one treated small children.

"Yes, I can."

"Show me, then," she suggested coaxingly.

With great gravity and much puffing he proceeded to demonstrate very clearly that he could not. When he had fallen over several times, he rose to his feet once more, slowly dusting his hands together, and said:

"I can do it when people aren't looking."

"Can you really? Yes, I expect you can. I can do things best when people aren't looking," Gwyneth told him, carefully concealing her amusement.

"Can you stand on your head when people aren't looking?"