The House of Dreams-Come-True. Margaret Pedler

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СКАЧАТЬ came home to live at Beirnfels, thenceforward regarding her unpractical parents with a species of kindly tolerance and amusement. The three of them had lived quite happily together, though Jean had remained always the odd man out; but she had accepted the fact with a certain humorous philosophy which robbed it of half its sting.

      Then, two years later, Jacqueline had developed rapid consumption, and though Glyn hurried her away to Montavan, in the Swiss Alps, there had been no combating the disease, and the romance of a great love had closed down suddenly into the grey shadows of death.

      Peterson had been like a man demented. For a time he had disappeared, and no one ever knew, either then or later, how he had first faced the grim tragedy which had overtaken him.

      Jean had patiently awaited his return to Beirnfels. When at last he came, he told her that it was the most beautiful thing which could have happened—that Jacqueline should, have died in the zenith of their love.

      “We never knew the downward swing of the pendulum,” he explained. “And when we meet again it will be as young lovers who have never grown tired. I shall always remember Jacqueline as still perfectly beautiful—never insulted by old age. And when she thinks of me—well, I’m still a ‘personable’ fellow, as they say——”

      “My dear Glyn, you’re still a boy! You’ve never grown up,” Jean made answer. To her he seemed a sort of Peter Pan among men.

      She had been amazed—although in a sense relieved—to find how swiftly he had rallied. It seemed almost as though his intense loathing of the onset of old age and decay, of that slow cooling of passion and gradual decline of faculties which age inevitably brings, had served to reconcile him to the loss of the woman he had worshipped whilst yet there had been no dimming of her physical perfection, no blunting of the fine edge of their love.

      It was easily comprehensible that to two such temperamental, joy-loving beings as Glyn and Jacqueline, England, with her neutral-tinted skies and strictness of convention, had made little appeal, and Jean could with difficulty harmonise the suddenly projected visit to England with her knowledge of her father’s idiosyncrasies.

      It was just possible of course, since all which had meant happiness to him lay buried in a little mountain cemetery in Switzerland, that it no longer mattered to Peterson where he sojourned. One place might be as good—or as bad—as another.

      Rather diffidently Jean voiced her doubts, recalling him from the reverie into which he had fallen.

      “I go to England?” he exclaimed. “God forbid! No, you would go without me.”

      “Without you?”

      Peterson sprang up and began pacing restlessly to and fro.

      “Yes, without me. I’m going away. I—I can’t stay here any longer. I’ve tried, Jean, for your sake”—he looked across at her with a kind of appeal in his eyes—“but I can’t stand it. I must move on—get away somewhere by myself. Beirnfels—without her——”

      He broke off abruptly and stood still, staring down into the heart of the fire. Then he added in a wrung voice:

      “It will be a year ago … to-morrow.”

      Jean was silent. Never before had he let her see the raw wound in his soul. Latterly she had divined a growing restlessness in him, sensed the return of the wander-fever which sometimes obsessed him, but she had not realised that it was pain—sheer, intolerable pain—which was this time driving him forth from the place that had held his happiness.

      He had appeared so little changed after Jacqueline’s death, so much the wayward, essentially lovable and unpractical creature of former times, still able to find supreme delight in a sunset, or an exquisite picture, or a wild ride across the purple hills, that Jean had sometimes marvelled, how easily he seemed able to forget.

      And, after all, he had not forgotten—had never been able to forget!

      The gay, debonair side which he had shown the world—that same rather selfish, beauty-loving, charming personality she had always known—had been only a shell, a husk hiding a hurt that had never healed—that never would find healing in this world.

      Jean felt herself submerged beneath a wave of self-reproach that she could have thus crudely accepted Glyn’s attitude at its face value. But it was useless to give expression to her penitence. She could find no words which might not wound, and while she was still dully trying to readjust her mind to this new aspect of things, her father’s voice broke across her thoughts—smooth, polished, with just its usual inflection of whimsical amusement, rather as though the world were a good sort of joke in which he found himself constrained to take part.

      “I’ve made the most paternal arrangements for your welfare in my absence, Jean. I want to discuss them with you. You see, I couldn’t take you with me—I don’t know in the least where I’m going or where I shall fetch up. That’s the charm of it”—his face kindling. “And it wouldn’t be right or proper for me to drag a young woman of your age—and attractions—half over the world with me.”

      By which Jean, not in the least deceived by his air of conscious rectitude, comprehended that he didn’t want to be bothered with her. He was bidding for freedom, untrammelled by any petticoats.

      “So I’ve written to my old pal, Lady Anne Brennan,” pursued Peterson, “asking if you may stay with her for a little. You would have a delightful time. She was quite the most charming woman I knew in England.”

      “That must be rather more than twenty years ago,” observed Jean drily. “She may have altered a good deal.”

      Peterson frowned. He hated to have objections raised to any plan that particularly appealed to him.

      “Rubbish! Why should she change? Anne was not the sort of woman to change.”

      Jean was perfectly aware that her father hadn’t the least wish to “discuss” his proposals with her, as he had said. What he really wanted was to tell her about them and for her to approve and endorse them with enthusiasm—which is more or less what a man usually wants when he suggests discussing plans with his womankind.

      So, recognising that he had all his arrangements cut and dried, Jean philosophically accepted the fact and prepared to fall in with them.

      “And has Lady Anne signified her readiness to take me in for an indefinite period?” she enquired.

      “I haven’t had her answer yet. But I have no doubt at all what form it will take. It will be a splendid opportunity for you, altogether. You know, Jean”—pictorially—“you ought really to see the ‘stately homes of England.’ Why, they’re—they’re your birthright!”

      Jean reflected humorously that this point of view had only occurred to him now that it chanced to coincide so admirably with his own wishes. Hitherto the “stately homes of England” had been relegated to a quite unimportant position in the background and Jean’s attention focussed more directly upon the unpleasing vagaries of the British climate.

      “I should like to go to England,” was all she said. Peterson smiled at her radiantly—the smile of a child who has got its own way with much less difficulty than it had anticipated.

      “You shall go,” he promised her. “You’ll adore Staple. It’s quite a typical old English manor—lawns СКАЧАТЬ