The Way of an Eagle - Ethel May Dell (i read books TXT) 📗

as happy as you can, poor child."
Muriel was laughing helplessly when he stopped. The mimicry of voice and action was so perfect, so free from exaggeration, so sublimely spontaneous.
Nick did not laugh with her. Behind his mask of banter he was watching, watching closely. He had clad himself in jester's garb to feel for the truth. Perhaps she realised something of this as she recovered herself, for again that glance, half-questioning, half-frightened, flashed up at him as she made reply.
"No, Nick. She never said that, indeed. I wouldn't have cared if she had. It was only--only--"
"I know," he broke in abruptly. "If it wasn't that, there is only one thing left that it could have been. I don't want you to tell me. It's as plain as daylight. Let me tell you instead. It's all for the sake of your poor little personal pride. I know--yes, I know. They've been throwing mud at you, and it's stuck. You'd sooner die than marry me, wouldn't you? But what will you do if I refuse to set you free?"
She turned suddenly crimson. "You--you wouldn't, Nick! You couldn't! You haven't--the right."
"Haven't I?" said Nick, with an odd smile. "I thought I had."
He looked down at her, and a queer little flame leaped up like an evil spirit in his eyes, flickered an instant, and was gone. "I thought I had," he said again, in a different tone. "But we won't quarrel about that. Tell me what you want to do."
Her answer came with a vehemence that perhaps he had hardly expected. "Oh, I want to get away--right away. I want to go home. I--I hate this place."
"And every one in it?" suggested Nick.
"Almost." Muriel spoke recklessly, even defiantly. She was fighting for her freedom, and the battle was infinitely harder than she had anticipated.
He nodded. "The sole exception being Mrs. Musgrave. Do you know Mrs. Musgrave is going home? You would like to go with her."
Muriel looked at him with sudden hope. "Alone with her?" she said.
"Oh, I'm not going," declared Nick. "I'm going to Khatmandu for my honeymoon."
The hope died out of Muriel's eyes. "Don't--jeer at me, Nick," she said, in a choked voice. "I can't bear it."
"Jeer!" said Nick. "I!" He reached down suddenly and took her hand. The light sparkled on the ring he had given her, and he moved it slowly to and fro watching it.
"I am going to ask you to take it back," she said.
He did not raise his eyes. "And I am going to refuse," he answered promptly. "I don't say you must wear it, but you are to keep it--not as a bond, merely in remembrance of a promise which you will make to me."
"A promise--" she faltered.
Still he did not look up. He was watching the stones with eyes half-shut.
"Yes," he said, after a moment. "I will let you go on the sole condition that you give me this promise."
She began to tremble a little. "What is it?" she whispered.
He glanced at her momentarily, but his expression was enigmatical. She felt as if his look lighted and dwelt upon something beyond her.
"Simply this," he said. "You'll laugh, I daresay; but if you are able to laugh it won't hurt you to promise. I want your word of honour that if you ever change your mind about marrying me, you will come to me like a brave woman and tell me so."
Thus, quite calmly, he made known to her his condition, and in the amazed silence with which she received it he continued to flash hither and thither the wonderful rays that shone from the gems upon her hand. He did not appear to be greatly concerned as to what her answer would be. Simply with an inscrutable countenance he waited for it.
"Is it a bargain?" he asked at last.
She started with an involuntary gesture of shrinking. "Oh, no, Nick! How could I promise you that? You know I shall never change my mind."
He raised his eyebrows ever so slightly. "That isn't the point under discussion. If it's an impossible contingency, it costs you the less to promise."
He kept her hand in his as he said it, though she fidgeted to be free. "Please, Nick," she said earnestly, "I would so much rather not."
"You prefer to marry me at once?" he asked, and suddenly it seemed to her that this was the alternative to which he meant to drive her.
She rose in a panic, and he rose also, still keeping her hand. His face looked like a block of yellow granite.
"Must it--must it--be one or the other?" she panted.
He looked at her under flickering eyelids. "I have said it," he remarked.
Her resistance flagged, sank, rose again, and finally died away. After all, why should she hesitate? What was there in such an undertaking as this to send the blood so wildly to her heart?
"Very well," she said faintly at last. "I promise. But--but--I never shall change my mind, Nick--never--never."
He was still looking at her with veiled, impenetrable eyes. He paid no attention to her protest. It was as if he had not so much as heard it.
"You've done your part," he said. "Now hear me do mine. I swear to you--before God--that I will never marry you unless you ask me to."
He bent with the words, and solemnly, reverently, he pressed his lips upon the hand he held.
Muriel waited, half-frightened still, and wholly awestruck. She did not know Nick in this mood.
But when he straightened himself again, the old whimsical smile was on his face, and she breathed a sigh of relief. With a quick, caressing movement he took her by the shoulders.
"That's over then," he said lightly. "Turn over and start another page. Go back to England, go back to school; and let them teach you to be young again."
They were his last words to her. Yet an instant longer he waited, and very deep down in her heart something that was hidden there stirred and quivered as a blind creature moves at the touch of the sun. It awoke a vague pain within her, that was all.
The next moment Nick had turned upon his heel and was departing.
She heard him humming a waltz tune under his breath as he went away with his free British swagger. And she knew with no sense of elation that she had gained her point.
For good or ill he had left her, and he would not return.


PART III

CHAPTER XVII
AN OLD FRIEND

"There!" said Daisy, standing back from the table to review her handiwork with her head on one side. "I may be outrageously childish, but if Blake fails to appreciate this masterpiece of mine, I shall feel inclined to turn him out-of-doors, and leave him to spend the night on the step."
Muriel, curled up in the old-fashioned window-seat, looked round with her low laugh. "It's snowing hard," she remarked.
Daisy did not heed her. "Come and look at it," she said.
The masterpiece in question consisted of an enormous red scroll bearing in white letters the words: "Welcome to the Brave."
"It never before occurred to me that Blake was brave," observed Daisy. "He is so shy and soft and retiring. I can't somehow feel as if I am going to entertain a lion. He ought to be here by this time. Let's go and hang my work of art in the hall."
She slipped her hand through Muriel's arm, and glanced at her sharply when she felt it tremble.
"It will be good to see him again, won't it?" she said.
"Yes," Muriel agreed, but there was a little tremor in her voice as well.
Very vividly were the circumstances under which she had last seen this man in her mind that night. Eight months that were like as many years stretched between that tragic time and the present, but the old wild horror had still the power to make her blood turn cold, the old wound had not lost its ache. These things had made a woman of her before her time, but yet she was not as other women. It seemed that she was destined all her life to live apart, and only to look on at the joys of others. They did not attract her, and she had no heart for gaiety. Yet she was not cold, or Daisy had not found in her so congenial a companion. But even Daisy seldom penetrated behind the deep reserve that had grown over the girl's sad young heart. They were close friends, but their friendship lay mainly in what they left unsaid. For all her quick warmth, Daisy too had her inner shrine--a place so secret that she herself never entered it save as it were by stealth.
But something of Muriel's mood she understood on that bitter night in January on which they awaited the coming of Blake Grange, and her close hand-pressure conveyed as much as they passed out together into the little hall that glowed so snugly in the firelight.
"He is sure to be frozen, poor boy," she said. "I hope Jim Ratcliffe won't forget to send the motor to the station as he promised."
"I am quite sure he never forgets anything," Muriel declared, with reassuring confidence.
Daisy laughed lightly. "Yes, he's very dependable, deliciously solid, isn't he? A trifle domineering perhaps, but all doctors are. They rule us weak women with a rod of iron. I am a little afraid of Dr. Jim myself, and most unfortunately he knows it."
Muriel's silence expressed a certain scepticism that provoked another laugh from Daisy. She was almost frivolously light-hearted that night.
"It's a fact, I assure you. Have you never noticed how docile I am in his presence? I always feel as if I want to confess all my sins to him. I should like intensely to have his opinion upon some of them. I think it would do me good."
"Then why not ask for it?" suggested Muriel.
"For the reason aforementioned--a slavish timidity." Daisy broke off to carol a few bars of a song. "I've known the Ratcliffe family ever since I became engaged to Will," she said presently. "Jim Ratcliffe, you know, was left his guardian, and he was always very good to him. Will made his home with them and he and Nick are great pals, just like brothers. I should think Dr. Jim had his hands full with the two of them." Again Daisy stopped to sing. Muriel was stooping over the fire. It was seldom that Nick's name was mentioned between them, though the fact that Daisy had placed herself and her baby in the hands of his half-brother formed a connecting link which could not always be ignored. She always dropped into silence when a reference was made to him. Not in the most casual conversation had Daisy ever heard her utter his name.
Having successfully fixed her message of welcome in a prominent position, she joined the girl in front of the fire. Her face was flushed and her eyes were sparkling. Muriel thought that she had never seen her look so well or so happy.
"You're quite excited," she said.
Daisy put up a hand to her hot cheek. "Yes, isn't it absurd? I hope Dr. Jim won't come with him, or he will be cross. But I can't help it. Blake and I have been chums all our lives, and of course I am glad to see him after all this while. So nice, too, not to have Lady Bassett looking on."
There was a spice of venom in this, over which Muriel smiled in her sad way.
"Does she disapprove?" she asked.
Daisy nodded impatiently. "She chose altogether to