Читать книгу The Guarded Halo - Margaret Pedler - Страница 9

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Shirley lay in her bunk, wide awake, staring into the darkness as the Paris train de luxe thundered its way through the night en route for Port St. Luc, a gay French watering place southernly situated on the Bay of Biscay.

For five weeks now she and Kit had rambled about Europe together, wandering from one place to another as the spirit moved them. They had spent a few days on the shores of Lake Como, then, driven away by the stuffy heat of a wet season there, had fled to Chamonix. Here Kit, who, as she had warned Shirley, was inclined to be fractious, declared that the mountains “got on top of her,” so they had quitted Chamonix and established themselves at Aix-les-Bains, where Kit commenced operations by taking the cure—“just for something to do,” as she said. Within ten days she was tired of it, and proposed a week in Paris.

“The season’s over, of course,” she said. “But we can pick up some clothes there, and then we’ll go on to Port St. Luc. I think,” she added restlessly, “I’m longing to be by the sea. It’s—it’s always so satisfying, somehow. And I’m used to it, you know. Our country home—Simon’s and mine—is near the sea, at a little place called Beriscombe, in Devonshire.”

Sometimes Shirley wondered sadly if Kit would ever be satisfied in life again. Out of these five weeks of companionship had sprung a very real friendship, and gradually, as they came to know each other better, Kit had confided the two tragic happenings which had contrived to spoil both her own and her brother’s happiness. It was at Chamonix that the assumption of cool mockery behind which she usually entrenched herself had first broken down—on the day when she had declared that the mountains got on top of her and that they must go elsewhere.

“You’re very patient with me, Shirley,” she had said apologetically. “It must be simply maddening to travel with someone like me, who wants to up sticks and go on somewhere else almost as soon as we’ve settled down anywhere. Aren’t you getting fed up with packing and unpacking?”

Shirley shook her head, smiling.

“No,” she had answered. “You must remember that every new place is a thrill to me, never having been out of England before. But I wish,” she added a trifle shyly, “that you were—were happier.”

“Happier?” There was an undertone of derision in Kit’s voice. “I never expect to be happy again anywhere. But I’d be glad if I could just get back my self-respect—haul my beastly little rag of pride up to the top of the mast once more.”

Shirley threw a quick glance at her.

“I don’t see why it need ever be anywhere else,” she returned coolly. “You weren’t in fault. You couldn’t help what happened.”

“Couldn’t help it that my husband grew tired of me—preferred another woman? No, I suppose I couldn’t,” replied Kit musingly. “It’s rather a humiliating confession of failure, though, isn’t it, when either husband or wife grow tired of the other?”

Shirley’s clear, candid eyes questioned her.

“Is that all you mind about?” she said.

“I think that’s all now,” answered Kit. Then with a sudden catch of her breath, as though at the memory of some sharp pain: “Except—sometimes.... But at first—at first, that didn’t enter into it at all. I—I’d worshipped Nap, you see. And he worshipped me—until he met Rita Conyers. Then, somehow, it was as if she just wiped me out—wiped me out of his mind. Like a sponge wipes something off a slate. I didn’t count any longer.... I could see it all happening under my eyes, every day. He only lived for the times when he was with her.”

“Was she very beautiful?” asked Shirley.

“Yes,” acknowledged the other frankly. “She was. But she’d got something more than beauty. That kind of attraction—physical, I think it is. She would have drawn men after her even if she hadn’t been lovely.... I put up a fight against it. For a year I fought, and Nap knew I was fighting. I think he was sorry about it, but he simply couldn’t help himself. Everybody could see it. And they were pitying me.” Her lip curled a little, defiantly. “Simon wanted me to divorce him long before I agreed to. I thought it might only be an infatuation which he’d get over.... I kept on hoping. And then one day Nap himself came to me. I shall never forget that day. ‘I want you to let me go, Kit,’ he said. ‘I’m a cur and I’m behaving rottenly to you, and I know it. But I can’t help it.’... I knew then, and I knew he knew, that we’d reached the end of things.” She paused. “I suppose you can’t really—ever—go back in life and pick up the pieces. When everything’s come to smash—it’s smashed. And that’s all there is to it. So I divorced him.”

Shirley made no answer, except to squeeze Kit’s hand very tightly. Words seemed out of place.

“I’d much rather Nap had died,” went on Kit presently. “Then I should have had something to remember, something I could keep. Now, you see”—in a small, bleak voice—“I’ve got nothing—not even a decent memory.”

From the day when Kit had made this confidence Shirley felt that she understood her much better—understood the irritable restlessness that drove her from place to place, the frequent sharp, satirical speeches she rapped out, which were nothing more, really, than a pathetic armour to hide the rawness of her hurt. And inwardly she hoped that some day in the future Kit might meet another man whose love should make up for the bitterness of the past. But on this subject she remained discreetly silent; she could well imagine the mocking irony with which any such suggestion would be greeted.

For some time after this confidential outburst it seemed as though Kit had retired into a shell of reserve once more, but on the day they were leaving Paris for Port St. Luc, a chance remark of Shirley’s, to the effect that they were both equally lucky in the possession of bachelor brothers to spoil them, elicited the happening which had darkened Drake’s life just as the wreck of her marriage had darkened his sister’s.

“Simon ought to have been married years ago,” Kit had vouchsafed bluntly. “But we’ve no matrimonial luck in our family. The girl he was engaged to chucked him.”

“Whatever for?” asked Shirley in astonishment. Drake, with his rather distinctive good looks, his innate personal charm, and his plentiful endowment of this world’s goods, did not seem precisely the kind of man to get lightly thrown over by any woman.

“It happened during the war,” Kit answered. “He was engaged to a girl called Maisie Foster. He was terribly in love with her. I don’t know”—sardonically—“why men nearly always fall in love with the wrong sort of woman... they never seem to see below the surface. Maisie was charming on top. But underneath she was nothing but a shallow little egotist—an only child, very pretty and very spoilt.” She paused, gazing broodingly in front of her for a minute or two, as though envisaging the past. Then she resumed: “They became engaged during the last year of the war, and they were to have been married the next time Simon came home on leave. He never had that leave. Instead, he got his leg nearly shot to pieces, and he lay out in a wood, in drenching rain, with a smashed leg, for three days and nights before he was found and brought in.”

Shirley gave a cry of sympathy.

“Then—then that’s why he still limps a little?” she ventured.

“That’s why. And the exposure crocked up his health for keeps. But at first they never thought they could save his leg. In fact, it was decided he must lose it. And the idea of being tied for life to a one-legged cripple was too much for Maisie. That wasn’t at all the kind of marriage she intended making. So she promptly wrote and broke off the engagement.” Kit paused again, and her face hardened. “Simon got the letter in hospital, on Armistice Day—just when the doctors had discovered that they could save his leg.”

And it was of this that Shirley was thinking as she lay in her bunk, speeding through the night toward Port St. Luc. The grim, brutal irony of it all! If poor shallow little Maisie Foster had only been able to stand the test, to hang on to her pluck for another four-and-twenty hours, till the news came through that Drake was not to be a cripple after all, she would have brought off the eligible marriage she had been seeking, and Simon’s face need never have worn that rather weary, thwarted expression which was habitual to it.

Or must the awakening still have come inevitably, sooner or later? Only, instead of the man’s faith being shattered by one irrevocable blow, would it have been gradually destroyed, bit by bit, day by day, as Maisie failed to meet the demands of life? That, Shirley thought, would be even worse—that slow, deadening decay of everything upon which one had counted. Perhaps, though, Maisie might not have fallen short so miserably over the ordinary current affairs of daily existence. It was just that that particular test had been too hard a one for her.

It was all very puzzling and confusing, these questionings of behaviour in life—of how much people were to be blamed for what they did, or failed to do, and of how much could be laid to the account of that dark fate which drives them on—fate with a stick in her hand, a stick of which the component fibres are heredity and environment and opportunity?

Shirley felt as though she had grown years older during the last few weeks—years older, at least, in knowledge and experience of life, even though some of that experience was vicarious and had come to her through the medium of Kit and Simon. She wondered how she herself would have acted—in Maisie’s place, with Maisie’s temperament and upbringing to contend against? In Kit’s place, with the man she loved, who had once loved her equally and to whom she had confided her whole life, now caring recklessly for someone else?

Life was not nearly so simple as she had imagined it to be in the old, unheeding days at Fen Wyatt. A first indication of its possible complexities had come to her with the necessity of making a choice between accepting or refusing Alan Wyatt’s offer. At the time it had seemed to her that there could be no question in the matter—to refuse was the only straight and decent thing to do. And she still thought so. Yet she was beginning to realize the linked consequences which hang on every decision which life puts up to us to make. By that refusal she had altered the whole course of her own and Bob’s existence. It was a curious, rather breath-taking reflection. An odd sense of panic, of foreboding, stirred within her, a frightened shrinking from the bewildering problems which—to judge by the experiences of these new friends of hers, of first one and then another—were bound sooner or later to crop up for her own solution as she took her way through the world.

She sat up in her swaying bunk, leaning on her elbow, suddenly conscious of an immense aloneness. The impalpable darkness, close and black around her like some intangible curtain, and the shattering roar of the train, shutting out all other sounds, seemed to emphasize it. They held terror—the terror that comes by night. She felt an almost desperate longing to open the communicating door between her own cabin and Kit’s adjoining one, just to convince her frightened senses that Kit was really there—lying in her berth, comfortably human and reassuring.

She threw back the bedclothes impulsively, bent on carrying out this intention, and then the recollection that Kit was a terribly bad traveller checked her abruptly. If she were by any chance asleep it would be sheer cruelty to waken her, since she would probably get no more sleep that night.

The spontaneous little thought, commonplace and sensible and natural, served to restore the balance of Shirley’s mind. All at once, that sheer dread of the future, of life itself, which had caught hold of her for a devastating moment, receded almost as swiftly as it had come. She stretched out her hand and switched on the light, and the familiar sight of her suitcase reposing in the rack above, of the flap-table with a book she had been reading lying on it, of her own clothes hanging from a couple of pegs at the side of the cabin, brought everything back to normal again. And then, most comforting of all, there floated into her mind the recollection of Nick Wyatt’s sturdy counsel: “Never get the wind up about life, kiddy.” She could almost hear him saying it.

“I won’t,” she said, unconsciously speaking aloud as though she were answering him.

Switching off the light, she lay down once more in her bunk. That queer sense of foreboding which had so suddenly overwhelmed her had passed, and before long she fell asleep, unconscious that any brooding Fate, armed with a triple goad, was standing back in the shadows—waiting, waiting to drive her as relentlessly as others had been driven.