The Vision of Desire
whom, he has the most touching faith--has decreed Mentone. So
Mentone it is. Lady Doreen Neville and her mother will also be
there, at their villa, as Lady Doreen is ordered to winter in the
south of France. Afterwards the doctors hope she will be quite
strong."_
It was in the name Neville that Ann thought she detected a clue to Tony's
altered demeanour. She recollected having met Lady Doreen on one occasion,
about a year ago, when she herself had been paying a flying visit to the
Brabazons at their house in Audley Square--a frail slip of a girl with
immense grey eyes and hair like an aureole of reddish gold. She had been
barely seventeen at that time, slim and undeveloped, and her delicacy had
added rather than otherwise to her look of extreme youth. Ann had regarded
her as hardly more than a child. But she knew that a year can effect an
enormous alteration in a girl in her late teens--sometimes seeming to
transform her all at once from immature girlhood into gracious and charming
womanhood. Lady Doreen had "come out" since Ann had met her, made her
curtsy at Court and taken part in her first London season, and it was
not difficult to imagine her, delicate though she might be, as extremely
attractive and invested with a certain ethereal grace and charm peculiarly
her own.
And that Tony had seen a good deal of her in town last July Ann was aware.
He had mentioned her name more than once during his visit to the Cottage,
and it seemed to Ann quite likely that, sore because of her own definite
refusal of him, he had sought and found consolation in the company of Lady
Doreen.
Looking back, she fancied she remembered a certain shy embarrassment in
Tony's manner when he had spoken of her. She had thought nothing about it
at the time, being preoccupied with her own affairs, but now, in the light
of this new idea which had presented itself to her, she felt convinced that
there was something behind the slight hesitation Tony had evinced when
referring to the Nevilles.
A little smile, almost maternal in its tenderness, curved her lips. She had
always hoped that Tony's love for her might prove to be only a red-hot
boyish infatuation, grounded on propinquity and friendship, which the
passage of time would cure, and if, now, man's love was being born in him
and she could keep the old friendship, it would give her complete
happiness. But she questioned rather anxiously whether Doreen Neville was
possessed of a strong enough character to keep him straight. She was so
sweet and fragile--the kind of woman to be petted and cossetted and taken
care of by some big, kind-hearted man, not in the least the type to steady
a headstrong young fool, bent upon blundering on to the rocks.
Tony's letter was in the pocket of her coat, and, pulling it out, she ran
through it again. There was no further mention of Doreen Neville, but she
found that there was a postscript scribbled in a corner, in Tony's most
illegible scrawl, which she had overlooked when reading the letter at
breakfast time.
_"Much as you disapprove, little Puritan Ann, do wish me luck at
the tables! Such, luck as we had that night at Montricheux. Do you
remember?"_
Ann's heart contracted suddenly. Was she ever likely to forget--to forget
that day when, for the first time, Eliot Coventry's grey, compelling eyes
had met and held her own? Since then she had touched heights and depths of
happiness and despair which had changed her whole outlook on life. Love had
come to her--and gone again, and only through sheer pluck and a pride that
refused to break had she been able to face the fact and hide her hurt from
the world at large.
Eliot's sudden disappearance from Silverquay last month had made things
a little easier for her. He had left home the day following that of the
dinner-party on board the _Sphinx_, and the knowledge that there was no
danger of meeting him had helped to lessen the strain, she was enduring.
Previously she had been strung up to a high nervous tension by the
ever-present fear of running across him unexpectedly, and it had brought
her infinite relief when she learned that he had gone away. Since then a
strange numbness seemed to have taken possession of her. It was as though
some one had closed the door on the past, very quietly and carefully.
Dully she recalled the night after Eliot had shown her he had no intention
of claiming her love as a succession of interminable hours of mental and
physical agony. But now she was hardly conscious of pain--only of a
stupefied sense of loss. She felt as if her life were finished, as though
all the days and years that lay ahead of her were entirely empty and
purposeless. Sometime or other, she supposed, she would come alive again,
be able to feel and realise things once more. But she dreaded the coming of
that time. Better this apathy, like the stupor of one drugged, than a
repetition of the anguish she had already suffered.
It seemed as if she were endowed with a species of double consciousness--an
outward, everyday self which laughed and talked quite readily with the
people she knew, walked and rode, read and wrote letters just like any
one else, and a strange inner self which led a dumb, dreaming existence,
drearily remote from everything that made life keen and sentient.
Suddenly a tremor of wind ran between the great boulders of the cove,
whining eerily. It savoured of coming autumn, and Ann watched the quiet sea
bunch itself up into small, angry tufts of foam as the breeze which seemed
to have sprung up from nowhere fled across it. Then, feeling suddenly
chilled, she rose from where she was sitting and turned rather wearily
homeward.
Her way lay through the village, and as she climbed the steep hill which
rose abruptly from the bay, in first one cottage, then another, lights
twinkled into being, like bright, inquisitive eyes peering through the
falling dusk. Absorbed in her thoughts, she had lingered on the shore
longer than she intended, and when she reached the top of the hill she
instinctively quickened her pace and hastened along the somewhat lonely
stretch of road which led to the Cottage.
Just as she was within a short distance of the gate, she caught the sound
of footsteps coming from the opposite direction. There were few people
abroad in the lanes, as a rule, at this hour of the evening, and the idea
that the approaching pedestrian might prove to be a tramp leaped quickly to
Ann's mind. She was seized with a sudden nervousness, born of the dusk and
loneliness of the road and of her own bodily fatigue, and she broke into a
run, hoping to reach the Cottage gate before the supposed tramp should turn
the corner. But the steps drew nearer--striding, purposeful steps, not in
the least like those of a tramp--and an instant later the figure of Eliot
Coventry rounded the bend in the road and loomed into view.
Ann's heart gave a sudden leap, then started beating at racing speed. The
meeting was so utterly unlooked-for that for a moment a feeling akin to
terror laid hold of her. Taking the last few yards which still intervened
betwixt her and the safety of the Cottage at a rush, she almost fell
against the gate, seeking with blind, groping fingers for the latch. But it
seemed to be wedged in some way, and she tore at it unavailingly.
"Let me open that for you."
Eliot's voice, rather grave but with the ghost of a quiver in it which
might have betokened some inward amusement, sounded above her head. Then,
as she still struggled vainly to move the recalcitrant latch, he went on
quietly:
"Are you trying to run away from me--or what?"
Ann straightened herself and made a snatch at her fugitive dignity.
"No--oh, no," she said, endeavouring to steady her flurried tones. Her
heart was still playing tricks, throbbing jerkily in her side, and her
breath came unevenly. "Only you startled me. I thought you were a tramp."
She fancied he concealed a smile in the darkness.
"Not very complimentary of you," he answered composedly.
"It wasn't, was it? I'm so sorry," she agreed in eager haste. "Have you
come to see Robin? I'm afraid he's out. He said he should be back rather
late to-night."
"No," he replied evenly, "I've not come to see Robin." Then, with a sudden
leap in his voice: "I came to see you, Ann."
"To see me?" she murmured confusedly.
"Yes. Am I to tell you all about it out here in the cold, or may I come
in?"
Without waiting for her answer, he quietly lifted the latch which had
refused to move for her trembling fingers, and silently, half in a dream,
she led the way into the house.
There was no light in the living-room other than that yielded by the logs
which burned on the open hearth, but even by their flickering glow she
could discern how much he had altered since she had last seen him. He was
thinner, and his face had the worn look of a man who has recently passed
through some stern mental and spiritual conflict. There were furrows of
weariness deeply graven on either side the mouth, and Ann felt her heart
swell within her in an overwhelming impulse of tenderness and longing to
smooth away those new lines from the beloved face. Before she knew it, that
imperative inner need had manifested in unconscious gesture. Her hands went
out to him as naturally and instinctively as the hands of a mother go out
to her hurt child.
But he did not take them in his. Instead, he seemed almost to draw away
from her, his hands slowly clenching as though the man were putting some
immense compulsion of restraint upon himself.
"I've come back, Ann," he said slowly. "I've come back."
Her outstretched hands dropped to her sides. She was trembling, but she
forced herself into speech.
"Why did you go?" she asked very low.
"I went--to see if I could live without you, to try and put you out of my
life.... And I can't do it." He spoke with a curious deliberation. "If ever
a man fought against love, I fought against it. I'd done with love--it's
the thing I've cut out of my plan of life these ten years." His mouth
twisted wryly as if even yet the memory of the past had power to stab him.
"I distrusted love. And I distrusted you." He stopped abruptly, still
conveying that impression of a man forcibly holding himself in check.
"And--and now?" Ann's voice was almost inaudible.
They had been standing very still, held motionless and apart by a strange
intensity of feeling, but unconsciously she had drawn closer to him as she
spoke. As though her instinctive little movement towards him snapped the
last link of the iron control he had been forcing on himself, he suddenly
bent forward, and, snatching her up into his arms, held her crushed against
his breast, kissing her with the overwhelming passion of a man who has been
denied through dreary months of longing. Heedless of past or future, Ann
yielded, surrendering with her lips the whole brave young heart of her.
Presently his clasp relaxed, and she drew a little away from him.
"Ann," he said unsteadily, "little dear Ann!"
She met his gaze with eyes like stars--clear and unafraid.
"You haven't said you trusted me!" A note of tender amusement quivered in
her voice. "Do you, Eliot?"
For a moment his eyes seemed to burn out at her from under his heavily
drawn brows.
"Trust you?" he said hoarsely. "I don't know whether I trust you or not!...
But I know I want you!"
And once more he swept her up into his embrace.
"My beloved!"
His kisses rained down on her face--fierce, imperious kisses that seemed
to draw the very soul out of her body and seal it his, and when at last he
let her go she leaned against him, tremulously spent and shaken with the
rapture of answering passion which had kindled to life within her.
"Tell me you love me!" he insisted. "Let me hear you say it--to make it