Chapter 27

THE WATCHER

Helen Everard’s pleasant face was beaming. Her smile expressed complete contentment and satisfaction, for everything was going as everything should go. Johnny was an accepted lover, Joan’s future would be protected; she herself would be left free to make her long journey to the dear ones at the other side of the world. All was well!

Joan had been to London yesterday, had rushed off with scarcely a word, and had returned at night, tired and seemingly dispirited.

Joan, quiet and calm, smiled at Helen and kissed her good morning, but spoke hardly at all.

“You had a tiring day in Town yesterday, dear?”

“Very!”

“Shopping?”

“No!”

Helen asked no more questions. She thought of Hugh Alston. Could it be anything to do with him? She could never quite understand the position of Hugh Alston. Of course the talk about a marriage having taken place years ago between Hugh Alston and Joan was absurd, was ridiculous. Joan was proving the absurdity of it even now by accepting Johnny.

“Connie is coming over this afternoon to see you, Joan,” she said. “She sent me a note over yesterday by a boy. Johnny has told her of course, and Connie is delighted beyond words. She sends you her dear love.”

“Thank you!” Joan said calmly.

“Of course,” Helen hesitated, “the marriage need not be long delayed. You see—” She paused, and then went into explanations about Jessie and the children out in Australia, and her own promise to go to them.

“So this afternoon I want you and Connie to have a long, long talk,” Helen said. “There will be so much for you to discuss. Connie is the business man, you know. Poor Johnny is hopeless when it comes to discussing things and—and arrangements. Of course, dear, you quite understand that Johnny is not well off.”

“I know, but that does not matter.”

“I know, but even though Johnny is one of the finest and straightest men living, it will be better if in some way your own money is so tied up that it belongs to you and to you only. Johnny himself would wish it. He doesn’t want to touch one penny of your money!”

“I am sure of that.” Joan rose. She went out into the garden. She wanted to get away from Helen’s well-meant, friendly, affectionate chatter about the future, and about money and marriage. She went to the bench beside the pool and sat there, staring at the green water.

“It was true,” she whispered to herself, “all true, what I said. I—I do despise him. How could I love a thing that I despised; and I do despise him!”

It was not of Johnny Everard she was thinking.

“He said—he said that he had a right, that my love for him gave him the right! How dared he?” A deep flush stole into her cheeks, and then died out.

She rose suddenly with a gesture of impatience.

“It is a lie! It is wrong, and it is nonsense. I am engaged to marry Johnny Everard, and there is no finer, better man living! I shall never see that other man again. Yesterday he and I parted for good and for always, and I am glad—glad!” And she knew even while she uttered the words that she was very miserable.

Connie Everard drove the pony-trap over to Starden. She brought with her a boy who would drive it back again. Later in the afternoon Johnny would drive the car over for her and take her back.

Connie, having attended carefully to her toilet, descended to the waiting pony-trap, and found, to her surprise and a little to her annoyance, that Ellice was already seated in the little vehicle.

“Ellice, dear, I am sorry, but—”

“You don’t want to take me, Connie; but, all the same, I am going. I want to see—her!”

“Why?”

“I want to see her,” the girl said. A dusky glow of sudden passion came into her face. “I want to see her. There is no harm, is there?” She laughed shrilly. “I shan’t hurt her by looking at her. I want to see her again, the woman that he loves.” There was a shake in her voice, a suggestion of passionate tears, but the child held herself in check.

“Ellice, darling, it will be better if you—”

“If I don’t go. I know, but I am going. You—you can’t turn me out, Connie. I am too strong; I shall cling to the sides of the cart.”

There was a look, half of laughter, half of defiance, in the girl’s eyes.

“Connie, I am going, and nothing shall prevent me!”

Connie sighed, and stepped into the cart and took up the reins. “Very well, dear!” she said resignedly.

“You are angry with me, Connie?”

“Why should you want to go to Starden?”

“I want to see her again. I want to—to understand, to—to know things.”

“What do you mean, to understand, to know things?”

“I want to watch her!”

“Ellice, you will make me angry presently. Ellice,” Connie added suddenly, “I suppose you don’t intend to make a scene, and make yourself foolish and—and cheap?”

“I shall say nothing. I only want to watch and to try and understand.”

“I think you are acting foolishly and wrongly, Ellice. I think you are a very foolish child!”

“I wish,” Ellice said, and said it without passion, but with a deep certainty in her voice, “I wish that I were dead, Connie.”

“You ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourself,” said Connie, who could think of nothing better to say.

She made one more attempt when Starden was reached.

“Ellice, child, why not go back with Hobbins?”

“I am coming with you,” Ellice said.

“You—you will not—I mean you will—not be silly or rude to—”

Ellice drew herself up with a childish dignity. “I shall not forget that I am a lady, Connie,” she said, and said it with such stateliness and such dignity that Connie felt no inclination to laugh.

Helen frowned. She was annoyed at the sight of Ellice, frankly she did not like the girl. Helen was a good, honest woman who liked everything that was good and honest. Ellice Brand might be good and honest, but there was something about the girl that was beyond Helen’s ken. She was so elfin, so gipsy-like, so different from most girls Helen knew, and had known.

During the long afternoon, when they sat for a time in the garden, or in the shady drawing-room, Joan was aware of the fixed and intent gaze of a pair of dark eyes. Strangely and wonderfully dark were those eyes, and they seemed to possess some magnetic power, a power of making themselves felt. More than once in the middle of saying something to Helen or to Connie, Joan found herself at a loss for words, and impelled by some unknown force to turn her head and look straight into those eyes that blazed in the little white face.

Why did the girl stare at her so? Why, Joan wondered? A strange, elfin-like child, a bud on the point of bursting into a wondrous beauty, Joan realised, and realised too that there was enmity in the dark eyes that stared at her so mercilessly.

“Ellice, child, go out into the garden,” Helen said presently. “Come with me, we will leave Connie and Joan to have a little talk. Come, there are lots of things to see. This is a wonderful garden, you know—far, far better than Buddesby.”

“It isn’t,” Ellice said quietly. “There’s no garden in the world like Buddesby garden, and no place in the world like Buddesby, but I will come with you if you want me to.”

“A strange girl!” Joan said.

“A very dear, good, lovable, but passionate child,” Connie said. “Now let us talk of you and Johnny, Joan, of the future. Helen has told you that—that she—”

“She wishes to leave us soon? Yes.”

“And so,” Connie slipped her hand into Joan’s, “the marriage need not be long delayed.”

“Whenever—he wishes it,” Joan said, and for her life she could not put any warmth into her voice, and Connie, who noticed most things, noticed the chill coldness of it.

“And yet she must love Johnny, or she would not marry him,” Connie thought.

“I leave everything to you, and to Helen and to him.”

It seemed almost as if Joan had a strange disinclination to utter Johnny’s name. Johnny sounded so babyish, so childlike, so affectionate, yet she felt that she could not speak of him as “John.” It would sound hard and crude in the ears of those who loved him, and called him by the more tender name.

It was another shock to Connie later when Johnny came. She watched for the greeting between these two, and felt shocked and startled when Johnny took Joan’s hand and held it for a moment, then lifted it to his lips. No other kiss passed between them.

And Connie felt her own cheeks burning, and wondered why.

How strange! Lovers, and particularly accepted lovers, always kissed!

There was that about Johnny that for the first time in her life almost irritated Connie. She watched him, and saw that his eyes were following Joan with that look of strange, dog-like devotion that Connie remembered with a start she had herself surprised in Ellice’s eyes before now.

And as she watched, so watched another, herself almost forgotten as she sat in a corner of the room. The big black eyes were on these two, drifting from the face of one to the face of the other, taking no heed, and no count of anything else but of these two affianced lovers.

Very clearly and almost coldly Joan had expressed her own wishes.

“If you wish the marriage to take place soon, I am content. I would like it to—to be—not very soon—not just yet,” she added, and seemed to be speaking against her own will, and as though in opposition to her own thoughts. “Still, whatever you arrange, I will willingly agree to. I prefer to leave it all to you, Helen, and you, Connie, and—and you, Johnny. But it might take place just before Helen goes away. That would be time enough, would it not?”

“It was the very thing I was going to suggest,” Helen said. “In three months’ time then, Joan.”

Joan bowed her head. “In three months’ time then,” she said.

They were all three very silent as Johnny drove the little car back to Buddesby that evening. The sun was down, but the twilight lingered. Ellice sat crushed in between Johnny’s big bulk and Connie, and she would not have changed places with the queen on her throne.

“There’s Rundle with that horrible lurcher dog of his,” said Johnny, and spoke more to make conversation than anything else.

They could see the man, the village poacher, slouching along under a hedge with the ever-faithful dog close at heel.

“A horrible, fierce-looking beast,” said Connie. “It fights with every dog in the place, and—”

“But it loves him; it loves its master,” Ellice said passionately. “It would die for its master, wouldn’t it?”

“Why, I daresay it would, Gipsy,” Johnny said. “But why so excited about it, little girl?”

“If you—if you,” Ellice said, “had the offer of two dogs, the one splendid, a thoroughbred deerhound, graceful, beautiful, fine to look at, but cold and with no love to give its master, and the other—a hideous beast like Rundle’s lurcher—but a beast who could love and die for its master, and dying lick the hand of the master it loved, glad and grateful to—to die for him—which would you have, which would you have, Johnny?”

Johnny was hardly listening. He was looking down the dusky road and seeing in imagination a face, the most beautiful, wonderful face that his world had ever held.

“I don’t know, Gipsy girl,” he said. “I don’t know!”

“No!” Ellice said; and her voice shook and quavered in an unnatural laugh. “You don’t know, Johnny; you don’t know!”

And Connie, who heard and understood, shivered a little at the sound of the girl’s laughter.