Why should she think of him now, so suddenly, sitting here beside Marianne waiting for the ball to begin? She saw him as she had seen him last, standing at the door of their farmhouse, where he was to live until they got back again, waving good-by to them. The ballroom was blotted out while she looked long at the strong, slow-moving figure and the tanned face with the penetrating, smiling eyes that saw so much, yet with such sympathy that those like herself who were fond of John rather welcomed than resented their scrutiny. Besides, she had never wanted to hide anything from John. From her childhood onward she had always been herself with him, never played a part, never prevaricated. But then they had always wanted to do the same things—dig in the garden, care for young animals and children, read the same books, pray the same prayers, love the same people, take the same walks through the green pastures while the dew was still on the grass . . .
“Véronique!”
She woke up from her reverie to find that the band was playing “The Blue Danube” and that Frederick was bowing before her; and to find also that for the first time since she had known him, she did not want to dance with him. Yet she jumped up eagerly.
And in a moment or two the intoxication of the music and of Frederick’s exquisite dancing had put the old spell on her and she was happy again. But she wanted to stay among the other dancers, she did not want to be carried off to the conservatory for that love-making behind the potted plants that hitherto she had found so wonderful. For the first dance she managed to evade the conservatory, but Frederick had something to say to her, and during their second dance together he inveigled her to the spot where he wanted her, a warm-scented corner entirely hidden by a huge bank of lilies. There was a seat that just held two, and sitting beside her, holding her hand tightly, his eyes on hers, he told her what he had to say.
He told her with great skill, with none of that violence of passion that had frightened her before. He had blundered then, he realized, and he did not mean to blunder again. He was genuinely in love with Véronique, the exquisite freshness of her beauty had gone completely to his head, and he wanted her as he had never wanted anything yet.
He had been married before, he told her. He was twenty-six now, and since his twenty-second year he had been married to a woman older than himself, a widow with two children, who had made him utterly wretched. He had known more misery, he said, in those four years, than he hoped Véronique would ever know in the whole of her life. His wife had been not only unfaithful but wildly extravagant too, and their unhappiness together had been made worse by their money worries. Then she had died, setting him free, but leaving him with so many bills to pay that he had got into serious financial trouble and had had to sell his commission and leave England. Well, it was all over. He had heard today that his father had straightened everything out and settled a little income upon him. All the unhappiness was behind him now. Véronique would never know how deeply he had suffered, so deeply that he had never expected to be happy again, though he had thought that in a new land he might be able to shake off something of the nightmare and at least recover his self-respect, his old vigor of body and mind, snapped by misery. But he had done more than that. He had met Véronique and recovered joy. Loving her had been like a miracle. With Véronique held gently in his arms, he pleaded with her that she should not turn from him because of the money trouble he had got into—it had been none of his fault—nor because he had been married before. His first marriage had been so disastrous that it simply did not count. With her as his faithfully loving wife he would be able to make a grand thing of the new life, but if she were to turn from him now, he would be lost. She had his life in her hands.
By the end of it he was whispering into her curls, and neither of them could see the face of the other. The scent of the lilies had for Véronique ceased to be intoxicatingly sweet and become so sickly that for one awful moment she thought she was going to faint. Then she took a grip upon herself and the sensation passed, but she felt so weak that she could only lean against Frederick without word or movement.
His story had given her a shock. Though she took his word for it that he had not been to blame for his troubles, yet she felt, somehow, betrayed by that first marriage. Child that she was, she had imagined that she was his first love, as he was hers. To find her fairy-tale lover a widower seemed to spoil things, and her instinct sensed a sordidness somewhere in his story.
Frederick felt her dismay and pulled her closer. “Véronique, little love, I knew you’d be loyal,” he whispered. “I knew you’d stick to me. Darling Véronique! I didn’t know a woman could be so straight and true.”
There was a lot more in the same strain, and it did the trick, as he had known it would. With something of the same mighty effort as her mother had made on board the Green Dolphin at Wellington, Véronique steadied herself and took her resolve. . . . “Did you say that you had the ring in your pocket?” she whispered. . . . But she had not the firm ground beneath her feet that her mother had had. The man’s character was not the same. Even as she spoke she felt the quicksands quaking.
3
William, meanwhile, had found a refuge in an obscure corner of the garden with old Obadiah Trimble. Sitting on a rustic bench, secured from the observation of their wives by a convenient screen of bushes, comforting drinks beside them on the seat, they puffed at their pipes and knew a momentary respite from the pleasures of society. Only momentary, for William was uneasy about Véronique, and Obadiah, by marrying above his station in life, had condemned himself to the to-and-fro existence of a fish who had snapped at a bright fly in the upper air and thereafter finds himself with a hook in his gills.
Obadiah was a crony of old Tom Anderson’s. He, too, had made his pile in gold and now was immersed in steam. But William liked him, for Obadiah, like himself, was an old sailor, and their best talk was of the sea and ships, and the old pioneering days that in retrospect seemed so much more enchanting than they really had been.
The old fellow, who avoided society as much as he could, was unaware of the friendship between Frederick Ackroyd and Ozanne’s pretty daughter. So it was not of Véronique’s welfare he was thinking, but of the welfare of the Union Steamship Company, when he remarked casually to William, “Hope Anderson don’t take that fellow Ackroyd too much into his confidence. Don’t trust ’im.”
William paused for a full moment, then asked in a tone of careful nonchalance, “Know anything against him?”
“Plenty,” grunted old Obadiah.
“How?” asked William, for it had not even occurred to him that Obadiah might know anything about Frederick.
“Heard it from a pal of mine—Roger Watts, mate on board one of our steamships—his sister was maid to Ackroyd’s late wife. Queer how small the world is. The young fellow thought he’d left his past behind him, maybe, when he came out here. Well, I told Watts to keep his mouth shut. Give the boy a chance, I said. But I doubt if he will. The girl, his sister, was attached to Mrs. Ackroyd.”
William said nothing at all, and thanked heaven for the gathering darkness that hid the trembling of his hands. He was aware that Obadiah was not usually garrulous. Only the feeling that William was uninterested, and likely to forget what he was told, combined with the mellowing influence of the hour and the comfortable drink, was causing his tongue to run away with him so unexpectedly. So William yawned and made not the slightest comment as bit by bit the story was related to him. It was not uglier than many others; just that of an extravagant young man who had been without scruple as to how he obtained the means to pay his debts. No doubt he had meant to deal faithfully with the rich woman he had married for her money, but meaning’s one thing and performing’s another, said Obadiah dourly, and he’d treated her very badly. A nice woman she had been, but a widow with two children should have known better than to marry a young scamp like Ackroyd. She’d borne a lot from him before she’d finally left him. She’d died soon after in a carriage accident
, poor soul, and by the terms of her will he’d had the handling of her children’s money until they came of age. The result had been the final mess that had made his family ship him off to the colonies. Roger Watts had hinted at embezzlement, no less, though he had no proof of that. Bad stock, said Obadiah, bad stock upon the father’s side. Good of old Anderson to take him on, for his own sister had had a bad enough time with the boy’s father—he’d told him so himself once, before the boy came out here. Good of Anderson. But he was fond of the boy and was doing a lot for him, and keeping the story very dark. Keen to marry him again to some nice girl, they said.
William yawned again and knocked out his pipe. “Shall we go in before we’re fetched?” he asked lazily. “How are the shares going now in the steamship business?”
Obadiah rose, his attention instantly diverted from Frederick. “Rising,” he said triumphantly. “You’ll be a fool, Ozanne, if you don’t close with that offer.”
“A fool,” said William slowly and bitterly, “is exactly what I am.”
A fool ever to let Véronique come to this place, Véronique with her beauty whose power over other men besides himself and John he had not gauged sufficiently in the Country of the Green Pastures, and her impressionability that he had not been sufficiently aware of either. . . . A thousand times a fool. . . .
They entered the house and found a dance in progress, and a group of older folk sitting in a flower-decked alcove watching it; Marianne and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson and the three or four most influential people of the town. William and Obadiah joined them, and William’s eyes instantly went round the ballroom in search of Véronique. There she was, dancing with Frederick. But she was a changed Véronique. Beautiful as ever, she yet seemed to him to have aged five years. And she had shed her modesty. Instead of dancing with eyes downcast, as a young girl should, she was dancing with her head up and her eyes gazing into Frederick’s, and there was a patch of burning color upon either of her cheekbones. Then he noticed that she had parted with her gloves as well as her modesty, and that upon the fourth finger of the hand that lay upon Frederick’s shoulder there shone a large emerald ring. So Frederick had captured her already, and without that preliminary word to her father without which no gentleman should dare speak his love to a lady. William’s rage nearly choked him. The damned scoundrel! And the ring—it looked worth a fortune, and to a surety had not been paid for. And how she was flaunting it, the little witch! The beautiful ballroom seemed to turn upside down with poor William. Never in his whole life had he felt more wretched. . . . No, not even on his wedding night. . . .
And then she saw him in the alcove, smiled and whispered a word to Frederick, who guided her skillfully through the dancers until the two of them stood side by side at the entrance to the alcove, confronting their elders hand in hand like a couple of beautiful children. But with no becoming shame. They stood there smiling, with heads up, and it was Véronique, the hussy, who spoke first.
“Please will you all congratulate us?” she said in a high clear voice that reached well beyond the alcove. “Frederick and I have become engaged to be married.”
A chorus of congratulations broke out, expressed chiefly by the gentlemen, for the ladies were all slightly scandalized by the brazen behavior of Véronique Ozanne. All, that is, except her own mother. Glancing at Marianne, William saw her face transfigured with joy, and his heart sank.
Then he looked again at Véronique, and her eyes met his, full of misery. William’s heavy heart suddenly lightened. For a moment he held her eyes with his steady glance, then she quickly veiled them. Not again, he realized, would she let him see her wretchedness, and her mother and her friends would never see it. But he understood her, and it was because he understood that his heart was suddenly light. For this was the old Véronique after all. He realized what had happened. Frederick had first secured her promise to marry him and then, only then, told his story—his own version of it—and flung himself upon her loyalty and compassion. And she was sticking to her promise. She was no quitter—William himself had taught her, as Tai Haruru had long ago taught him, not to quit! She was his nymph after all, and that one quick look of misery had been a call for help that he would not fail to answer.
Chapter IV
1
Easier said than done, thought William in the days that followed. He knew better than straight away to refuse his consent to the marriage—that would have been to increase Marianne’s obstinacy tenfold and might not inconceivably have driven Véronique and Frederick to elopement.
He related Obadiah’s version of Frederick’s story to Marianne, but it was not to be expected that Marianne, passionately attached to the Andersons and disliking Obadiah quite intensely, should give more credence to his unsubstantiated story than to theirs. It was true that the discovery that Frederick was a widower had given her a momentary pang of disappointment, but she soon forgot it. Frederick’s unhappy past was an old sad story that could be forgotten now that the dear boy was beginning a new life in a new land. As for his financial troubles, the Andersons assured her he had been in no way to blame for those, and though it gave her a further pang to discover that except for the small income settled upon him by his father the apparently rich young man was totally without wealth, yet his further prospects with the Union Steamship Company were good, and the Andersons, a childless couple, were genuinely attached to him and could probably be persuaded to make him their heir.
So Marianne was intensely happy at this time. Having detected the two flies in the ointment, taken them out and thrown them away, she flung herself with wholehearted enthusiasm into the preparations for the wedding. William was not surprised that his arguments made no headway with her.
He fared no better with Véronique. He gave her a carefully edited edition of the tale Obadiah had told him, but she naturally refused to believe any version of the story except Frederick’s own. He told her straight out that he neither liked nor trusted Frederick, and she looked at him with the eyes of a wounded doe and turned again to the everlasting sewing of her wedding clothes. . . . She was no quitter.
The word “trousseau” dominated their whole life now, and to William they seemed to wade all day long through a sea of silk and satin, muslin and lace, yards and yards of it that seemed to coil about his ankles whenever he moved. And he was choked by the perfume of the little scent sachets that Marianne was making to lie between the folds of Véronique’s petticoats, and by the smell of the frangipani and opopanax which the ladies sniffed from cut-glass smelling bottles when they felt too tired to set another stitch. . . .
And then Véronique fell ill with a feverish attack. The indisposition seemed slight, and Marianne declared that a couple of days in bed would put her to rights, but William was seized by panic and demanded the doctor.
He came, examined Véronique, found no cause for alarm, and wrote out a prescription for a soothing mixture. In the parlor he concurred with Marianne’s opinion, but when William was showing him out at the front door he said, “I did not wish to alarm your wife, but your daughter is by no means strong, sir. There is no disease, you understand, but there is a slight weakness of the chest, and a general tendency to debility.”
Once more the world seemed to turn upside down with William. “She was a seven-months child,” he murmured.
“So I should have guessed,” said the doctor. “It would be her salvation to live in the country—preferably in mountain air. Town life is not the best possible for a constitution such as hers. Good morning.”
William did not share the doctor’s reluctance to alarm Marianne. He went back up the stairs two steps at a time and repeated the conversation with heavy underlinings.
“Nonsense!” said Marianne. “I am a seven-months child, and look what I’ve been through since I married you!”
“But in country air,” said William. “Marriage with me has meant some pretty stiff experiences for you, my girl, I know that, b
ut always in country air.”
“The air of Dunedin is excellent,” snapped Marianne. “Straight off the sea.”
“One doesn’t notice that in crowded ballrooms and stuffy shops,” William reminded her.
Marianne came to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “Véronique will be all right, William,” she said gently. “Believe me, my dear, she will be all right. And you and I will always be at hand to look after her. For of course, as things are now, you’ll accept Mr. Anderson’s offer, won’t you, darling?”
William looked at her. Her beautiful dark eyes met his with the straight glance of sincerity. He knew her now. When she had seen a new magic city on the horizon, a new way of life that she wanted, she would look at every circumstance in the light of her desire and not realize that by doing so she had changed its natural hue. She could not help this, perhaps, but yet he was angry with her, for this characteristic of hers was a danger to Véronique.
“I shall not accept Anderson’s offer,” he said coldly.
“You’ll surely not want to go back to the valley with Véronique living in Dunedin?”
“I love that valley, and I’ll never leave it,” said William wildly. “As it happens,” he went on, “I am going home this very day to see how things are faring without me.”
“Leaving me alone with Véronique ill?” asked Marianne, her eyes flashing sparks.
“I’m only in the way in times of illness,” said William. “At least, so you always tell me. And I shall be gone for four nights only. I’ll borrow a horse off Anderson. Where did you put my riding boots?”