The Vision of Desire
his temples. His hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically. She was so
slender a thing that it would be very easy ... very easy with those iron
muscles of his.... And then she would be dead. She was so beautiful and so
rotten at the core that she would be better dead....
It was only by a supreme effort that he mastered his overwhelming need
of some physical outlet for the passion of disgust and anger which swept
him bare of any gentler emotion as the incoming tide sweeps the shore
bare of sign or footprint. His body grew taut and rigid with the pressure
he was putting on himself. When at last he spoke his voice was almost
unrecognisable.
"I do understand," he said. "I understand thoroughly. You've
made--everything--perfectly clear."
And with that he turned swiftly, leaving her standing alone in a flickering
patch of shadow, and strode away across the grass. As he went, a little
breeze ran through the garden, wafting the caressing, over-sweet perfume of
heliotrope to his nostrils. It sickened him. He knew that he would loathe
the scent of heliotrope henceforth.
CHAPTER I
ANN'S LEGACY
The sunshine romped down the Grand' Rue at Montricheux, flickering against
the panes of the shop-windows and calling forth a hundred provocative
points of light from the silver and jewels, the shining silks and
embroidery, with which the shrewd Swiss shopkeeper seeks to open the purse
of the foreigner. It seemed to chase the gaily blue-painted trams as they
sped up and down the centre of the town, bestowing upon them a fictitious
gala air, and danced tremulously on the round, shiny yellow tops of the
tea-tables temptingly arranged on the pavement outside the pastrycook's.
It was still early afternoon, but already small groups of twos and threes
were gathered round the little tables. At one a merry knot of English
girl-tourists were enjoying an al fresco tea, at another staid Swiss
habitués solemnly imbibed the sweet pink or yellow _sirop_ which they
infinitely preferred to tea, while a vivid note of colour was added to the
scene by the picturesque uniforms of a couple of officers of an Algerian
regiment who were consuming unlimited cigarettes and Turkish coffee, and
commenting cynically in fluent French on the paucity of pretty women to be
observed in the streets of Montricheux that afternoon.
Typically aloof, a solitary young Englishman was sitting at a table
apart. He was evidently waiting for some one, for every now and again he
leaned forward and glanced impatiently up the street, then, apparently
disappointed, settled himself discontentedly to the perusal of the
Continental edition of the _Daily Mail_.
He was rather an arresting type. His lean young face looked older than
his five-and-twenty years would warrant. It held a certain recklessness,
together with a decided hint of temper, and he was much too good-looking
to have escaped being more or less spoiled by every other woman with whom
he came in contact. Like many another boy, Tony Brabazon had been rushed
headlong from a public school into the four years' grinding mill of the
war, thereby acquiring a man's freedom without the gradual preparation of
any transition period--a fact which, with his particular temperament, had
served to complicate life.
Physically, however, he had come through unscathed, and his white flannels
revealed a lithe, careless grace of figure. When he lifted his head to look
up the street there was a certain arrogance in the movement--a hint of
impetuous self-will that was attractively characteristic. The irritable
drumming of long, sensitive fingers on the table-top, while he scanned the
head-lines of the paper, was characteristic, too.
Suddenly a cool little hand descended on his restless one.
"You can stop beating the devil's tattoo on that table, Tony," said an
amused voice. "Here I am at last."
He sprang up, regarding the new-comer with a mixture of satisfaction and
resentment.
"You may well say 'at last'!" he grumbled. Then the satisfaction completely
swamping the resentment, he went on eagerly: "Sit down and tell me why I've
been deprived of your company for the whole of this blessed day."
Ann Lovell sat down obediently.
"You've been deprived of my society," she replied with composure, "by some
one who had a better right to it."
"Lady Susan, I suppose?"--in resigned tones.
She assented smilingly.
"Yes. A companion-chauffeuse isn't always at liberty to play about with the
scapegrace young men of her acquaintance, you know. And this morning my
employer was seized with a sudden desire to visit Aigle, so we drove over
and lunched at a quaint old inn there. We've only just returned."
As she spoke Ann stripped off her gloves, revealing a pair of slender hands
that hardly looked as though they would be competent to manipulate the
steering-wheel of a car. Yet there was more than one keen-eyed, red-tabbed
soldier whom she had driven during the war who could testify to the
complete efficiency of those same slim members.
"I'm dying for some tea, Tony," she announced, tossing her gloves on to the
table. "Let's go in and choose cakes."
Tony nodded, and they dived into the interior of the shop, and, arming
themselves with a plate and fork each, proceeded to spear up such as most
appealed to them of the delectable _pâtisseries_ arranged in tempting rows
along shining trays. Then, giving an order for their tea to be served
outside, they emerged once more into the sunlit street.
One of the Algerian officers followed Ann's movements with an appreciative
glance. Had she been listening she might have caught his murmured, "_V'la
une jolie anglaise, hein_?" But she was extremely unselfconscious, and took
it very much for granted that she had been blessed with russet hair which
gave back coppery gleams to the sunlight, and with a pair of changeful
hazel eyes that looked sometimes clearly golden and sometimes like the
brown, gold-flecked heart of a pansy. She was almost boyishly slender in
build, and there was a sense of swift vitality about all her movements that
reminded one of the free, untrammelled grace of a young panther.
Tony Brabazon watched her consideringly while she poured out tea.
"Montricheux has been like a confounded desert to-day," he remarked
gloomily. He was obviously feeling very much ill-used. "Tell Lady Susan
she'll drive me to take the downward path if she monopolises you like
this."
"Tony, you've not been getting into mischief?"
Ann spoke lightly, but a faint expression of anxiety flitted across her
face as she paused, the teapot poised above her cup, for his answer.
He hesitated a moment, his eyes sullen, then laughed shortly.
"How could I get into mischief--my particular kind of mischief--in
Montricheux, with the stakes at the tables limited to five measly francs?
If we were at Monte, now--"
If Ann noticed his hesitation she made no comment on it. She finished
pouring out her tea.
"I'm very glad we're not," she said with decision. "You'd be too big a
handful for me to manage there."
"I've told you how you can manage me--if you want to," he returned swiftly.
"I'd be like wax in your hands if you'd marry me, Ann."
"I shouldn't care for a husband who was like wax in my hands, thank you,"
she retorted promptly. "Besides, I'm not in the least in love with you."
"That's frank, anyway."
"Quite frank. And what's more, you're not really in love with me."
Tony stiffened.
"I should think I'm the best judge of that," he said, haughtily.
"Not a bit. You're too young to know"--coolly.
A look of temper flashed into his face, but it was only momentary. Then he
laughed outright. Like most people, he found it difficult to be angry with
Ann; she was so transparently honest and sincere.
"I'm three years your senior, I'd have you remember," he observed.
"Which is discounted by the fact that you're only a man. All women are born
with at least three years' more common sense in their systems than men."
Tony demurred, and she allowed herself to be led into a friendly wrangle,
inwardly congratulating herself upon having successfully side-tracked
the topic of matrimony. The subject cropped up intermittently in their
intercourse with each other and, from long experience, Ann had brought the
habit of steering him away from it almost to a fine art.
He had been more or less in love with her since he was nineteen, but she
had always refused to take him seriously, believing it to be only the
outcome of conditions which had thrown them together all their lives in a
peculiarly intimate fashion rather than anything of deeper root. But now
that the boy had merged into the man, she had begun to ask herself, a
little apprehensively, whether she were mistaken in her assumption, and she
sometimes wondered if fate had not contrived to enmesh her in a web from
which it would be difficult to escape. Tony was a very persistent lover,
and unfortunately she was not free to send him away from her as she might
have sent away any other man.
Fond as she was of him, she didn't in the least want to marry him. She
didn't want to marry any one, in fact. But circumstances had combined to
give her a very definite sense of responsibility concerning Tony Brabazon.
His father had been the younger son of Sir Percy Brabazon of Lorne, and,
like many other younger sons, had inherited all the charm and most of
the faults, and very little of the money that composed the family dower.
Philip, the heir, and much the elder of the two, pursued a correct and
uneventful existence, remained a bachelor, and in due course came into
the title and estates. Whereas Dick, lovable and hot-headed, and with the
gambling blood of generations of dicing, horse-racing ancestors running
fierily in his veins, fell in love with beautiful but penniless Virginia
Dale, and married her, spent and wagered his small patrimony right royally
while it lasted, and borrowed from all and sundry when it was squandered.
Finally, he ended a varied but diverting existence in a ditch with a broken
neck, while the horse that should have retrieved his fortunes galloped
first past the winning-post--riderless.
Sir Philip Brabazon let fly a few torrid comments on the subject of his
brother's career, and then did the only decent thing--took Virginia and her
son, now heir to the title, to live with him.
It was then that Ann Lovell, who was a godchild of Sir Philip's, had
learned to know and love Tony's mother. Motherless herself, she had soon
discovered that the frailly beautiful, sad-faced woman who had come to live
with her somewhat irascible godparent, filled a gap in her small life of
which, hitherto, she had been only dimly conscious. With the passing of the
years came a clearer understanding of how much Virginia's advent had meant
to her, and ultimately no bond between actual mother and daughter could
have been stronger than the bond which had subsisted between these two.
It was to Ann that Virginia confided her inmost fears lest Tony should
follow in his father's footsteps. From Sir Philip, choleric and tyrannical,
she concealed them completely--and many of Tony's youthful escapades as
well, paying some precocious card-losses he sustained while still in his
early teens out of her own slender dress allowance in preference to rousing
his uncle's ire by a knowledge of them. But with Ann, she had been utterly
frank.
"Tony's a born gambler," she told her. "But he has a stronger will than his
father, and if he's handled properly he may yet make the kind of man I want
him to be. Only--Philip doesn't know how to handle him."
The last two years of her life she had spent on a couch, a confirmed
invalid, and oppressed by a foreboding as to Tony's ultimate future. And