John Dampier? Grim, relentless spectre who pursues them unceasingly, and from whose menacing, shadowy presence they are never free--from whom, so the Senator has now despairingly come to believe, they never, never will be free....
He had stopped his diary abruptly on the evening of that now far-off day when his eyes had been so rudely opened to his son's state of mind and heart. But though he has no written record to guide him the Senator finds it only too easy, on this beautiful June morning, to go back, in dreary retrospective, over these two long years.
Gerald had not found it possible to keep his rash vow; there had come a day when he had had to go back to America--indeed, he has been home three times. But those brief visits of his son to his own country brought the father no comfort, for each time Gerald left behind him in Europe not only his heart, but everything else that matters to a man--his interests, his longings, his hopes.
Small wonder that in time Senator Burton and Daisy had also fallen into the way of spending nearly the whole of the Senator's spare time in Europe, and with Nancy Dampier.
Nancy? The mind of the watcher by the window turns to her too, as he visions the slender, graceful figure now pacing slowly by his son's side.
Is it unreasonable that, gradually withdrawing herself from her old friends, those friends who did not believe that Dampier had left her save of his own free will, Nancy should cling closer and closer to her new friends? No, not at all unreasonable, but, from the Senator's point of view, very unfortunate. Daisy and Nancy are now like sisters, and to the Senator himself she shows the loving deference, the affection of a daughter, but with regard to the all-important point of her relations to Gerald, none of them know the truth--indeed, it may be doubted if she knows it herself.
But the situation gets more difficult, more strained every month, every week, almost every day. Senator Burton feels that the time has come when something must be done to end it--one way or the other--and the day before yesterday he sought out Mr. Stephens, now one of his closest friends and advisers, in order that they might confer together on the matter. As he stands there looking down at the two figures walking across the dewy grass, he remembers with a sense of boding fear the conversation with Nancy's lawyer.
"There's nothing to be done, my poor friend, nothing at all! Our English marriage laws are perfectly clear, and though this is a very, very hard case, I for my part have no wish to see them altered."
And the Senator had answered with heat, "I cannot follow you there at all! The law which ties a living woman to a man who may be dead, nay, probably is dead, is a monstrous law."
And Mr. Stephens had answered very quietly, "What if John Dampier be alive?"
"And is this all I can tell my poor son?"
And then it was that Mr. Stephens, looking at him doubtfully, had answered, "Well no, for there is a way out. It is not a good way--I doubt if it is a right way--but still it is a way. It is open to poor little Nancy to go to America, to become naturalized there, and then to divorce her husband, in one of your States, for desertion. The divorce so obtained would be no divorce in England, but many Englishmen and Englishwomen have taken that course as a last resort--" He had waited a moment, and then added, "I doubt, however, very, very much if Nancy would consent to do such a thing, even if she reciprocates--which is by no means sure--your son's--er--feeling for her."
"Feeling?" Senator Burton's voice had broken, and then he had cried out fiercely, "Why use such an ambiguous word, when we both know that Gerald is killing himself for love of her--and giving up the finest career ever opened to a man? If Mrs. Dampier does not reciprocate what you choose to call his 'feeling' for bet, then she is the coldest and most ungrateful of women!"
"I don't think she is either the one or the other," had observed Mr. Stephens mildly; and he had added under his breath, "It would be the better for her if she were--Believe me the only way to force her to consider the expedient I have suggested--" he had hesitated as if rather ashamed of what he was about to say, "would be for Gerald to tell her the search for Mr. Dampier must now end--and that the time has come when he must go back to America--and work."
Small wonder that Senator Burton found it hard to sleep last night, small wonder he has risen so early. He knows that his son is going to speak to Nancy, to tell her what Mr. Stephens has suggested she should do, and he suspects that now, at this very moment, the decisive conversation may be taking place.
II
Though unconscious that anxious, yearning eyes are following them, both Nancy Dampier and Gerald Burton feel an instinctive desire to get away from the house, and as far as may be from possible eavesdroppers. They walk across the stretch of lawn which separates the moat from the gardens in a constrained silence, she following rather than guiding her companion.
But as if this charming old-world plesaunce were quite familiar to him, Gerald goes straight on, down a grass path ending in what appears to be a high impenetrable wall of yew, and Nancy, surprised, then sees that a narrow, shaft-like way leads straight through the green leafy depths.
"Why, Gerald?" she says a little nervously--they have long ago abandoned any more formal mode of address, though between them there stands ever the spectre of poor John Dampier, as present to one of the two, and he the man, as if the menacing shadow were in very truth a tangible presence. "Why, Gerald, where does this lead? Have you ever been here before?"
And for the first time since they met the night before, the young man smiles. "I thought I'd like to see an English sunrise, Nancy, so I've been up a long time. I found a rose garden through here, and I thought it would be a quiet place for our talk."
It is strangely dark and still under the dense evergreen arch of the slanting way carved through the yew hedge; Nancy can only grope her way along. Turning round, Gerald holds out his strong hands, and taking hers in what seems so cool, so impersonal a grasp, he draws her after him. And Nancy flushes in the half darkness; it is the first time that she and Gerald Burton have ever been alone together as they are alone now, and that though they have met so very, very often in the last two years.
Nancy is at once glad and sorry when he suddenly loosens his grasp of her hands. The shadowed way terminates in a narrow wrought-iron gate; and beyond the gate is the rose garden of Barwell Moat, a tangle of exquisite colouring, jealously guarded and hidden away from those to whom the more familiar beauties of the place are free.
It is one of the oldest of English roseries, planned by some Elizabethan dame who loved solitude rather than the sun. And if the roses bloom a little less freely in this quiet, still enclosure than they would do in greater light and wilder air, this gives the rosery, in these hot June days, a touch of austere and more fragile beauty than that to be seen beyond its enlacing yews.
A hundred years after the Elizabethan lady had designed the rosery of Barwell Moat a Jacobean dame had added to her rose garden a fountain--one brought maybe from Italy or France, for the fat stone Cupids now shaking slender jets of water from their rose-leaved cornucopias are full of a roguish, Southern grace.
When they have passed through into this fragrant, enchanted looking retreat, Nancy cries out in real delight: "What an exquisite and lovely place! How strange that Daisy and I never found it!"
And then, as Gerald remains silent, she looks, for the first time this morning, straight up into his face, and her heart is filled with a sudden overwhelming sensation of suspense--and yes, fear, for there is the strangest expression on the young man's countenance, indeed it is full of deep, of violent emotion--emotion his companion finds contagious.
She tells herself that at last he has brought news. That if he did not tell her so last night it was because he wished her to have one more night of peace--of late poor Nancy's nights have become very peaceful.
John Dampier?