CHAPTER VIII

THE MIDDLE OF THE STAIRCASE

Mallow Court, the Seymours' country home, lay not a mile from the village of St. Wennys. A low, two-storied house of creeper-clad stone, it stood perched upon the cliffs, overlooking the wild sea which beats up against the Cornish coast.

The house itself had been built in a quaint, three-sided fashion, the central portion and the two wings which flanked it rectangularly serving to enclose a sunk lawn round which ran a wide, flagged path. A low, grey stone wall, facing the sea, fenced the fourth side of the square, at one end of which a gate gave egress on to the sea-bitten gra.s.sy slope that led to the edge of the cliff itself.

A grove of trees half-girdled the house, and this, together with the sheltering upward trend of the downs on one side of it, tempered the violence of the fierce winds which sometimes swept the coast-line even in summer.

Behind the house, under the lee of the rising upland, lay the gardens of Mallow, witness to the loving care of generations. Stretches of lawn, coolly green and shaven, sloped away from a terrace which ran the whole length of the house, meeting the gravelled drive as it curved past the house-door. Beyond lay dim sweet alleys, over-arched by trees, and below, where a sudden dip in the configuration of the land admitted of it, were gra.s.sy terraces, gay with beds of flowers, linked together by short flights of gra.s.s-grown steps.

"I can't understand why you spend so much time in stuffy old London, Kitty, when you have this heavenly place to come to."

Nan spoke from a nest of half-a-dozen cushions heaped together beneath the shade of a tree. Here she was lounging luxuriously, smoking innumerable Turkish cigarettes, while Kitty swung tranquilly in a hammock close by. Penelope had been invisible since lunch time. They had all been down at Mallow the better part of a month, and she and Ralph Fenton quite frequently absented themselves, "hovering," as Barry explained, "on the verge of an engagement."

"My dear, the longer I stay in town, the more thoroughly I enjoy the country when we come here. I get the quintessence of enjoyment by treating Mallow as a liqueur."

Nan laughed. There was a faint flavour of bitterness in her laughter.

"Practically most of our good times in this world are only to be obtained in the liqueur form. The G.o.ds don't make a habit of offering you a big jug of enjoyment."

"If they did, you'd be certain to refuse it because you didn't like the shape of the jug!" retorted Kitty.

Nan smiled whole-heartedly.

"What a miserable, carping, discontented creature I must be!"

"I'll swear that's not true!" An emphatic masculine voice intervened, and round the corner of the clump of trees beneath which the two girls had taken refuge, swung a man's tall, well-setup figure clad in knickerbockers and a Norfolk coat.

"Good gracious, Roger, how you made me jump!" And Kitty hurriedly lowered a pair of smartly-shod feet which had been occupying a somewhat elevated position in the hammock.

"I'm sorry. How d'you do, Kit? And how are you, Miss Davenant?"

answered the new-comer.

The alteration in his voice as he addressed Nan was quite perceptible to anyone well-versed in the symptoms of the state of being in love, and his piercing light-grey eyes beneath their s.h.a.ggy, sunburnt brows--fierce, far-visioned eyes that reminded one of the eyes of a hawk--softened amazingly as they rested upon her charming face.

"Oh, we're quite all right, thanks," she answered. "That is, when people don't drop suddenly from the clouds and galvanise us into action this warm weather."

She regarded him with a faintly quizzical smile. He was not particularly attractive in appearance, though tall and well-built.

About forty-two, a typical English sportsman of the out-door, cold-tub-in-the-morning genus, he had a square-jawed, rather ugly face, roofed with a crop of brown hair a trifle sunburnt at its tips as a consequence of long days spent in the open. His mouth indicated a certain amount of self-will, the inborn imperiousness of a man who has met with obedient services as a matter of course, and whose forebears, from one generation to another, have always been masters of men. And, it might be added, masters of their women-kind as well, in the good, old-fashioned way. There was, too, more than a hint of obstinacy and temper in the long, rather projecting chin and dominant nose.

But the smile he bestowed on Nan when he answered her redeemed the ugliness of his face considerably. It was the smile of a man who could be both kindly and generous where his prejudices were not involved, who might even be capable of something rather big if occasion warranted it.

"It was too bad of me to startle you like that," he acknowledged.

"Please forgive me. I caught sight of you both through the trees and declared myself rather too suddenly."

"Always a mistake," commented Nan, nodding wisely.

Roger Trenby regarded her doubtfully. She was extraordinarily attractive, this slim young woman from London who was staying at Mallow, but she not infrequently gave utterances to remarks which, although apparently straight-forward enough, yet filled him with a vague, uneasy feeling that they held some undercurrent of significance which had eluded him.

He skirted the quicksand hastily, and turned the conversation to a subject where be felt himself on sure ground.

"I've been exercising hounds to-day."

Trenby was Master of the Trevithick Foxhounds, and had the reputation of being one of the finest huntsmen in the county, and his heart and his pluck and a great deal of his money went to the preserving of it.

"Oh," cried Nan warmly, "why didn't you bring them round by Mallow before you went back to the kennels?"

"We didn't come coastward at all," he replied. "I never thought of your caring to see them."

Nan was not in the least a sportswoman by nature, though she had hunted as a child--albeit much against her will--to satisfy the whim of a father who had been a dare-devil rider across country and had found his joy in life--and finally his death--in the hunting field he had loved.

But she was a lover of animals, like most people of artistic temperament, and her reply was enthusiastic.

"Of course I'd like to have seen them!"

Roger's face brightened.

"Then will you let me show you the kennels one day? I could motor over for you and bring you back afterwards."

Nan nodded up at him.

"I'd like to come very much. When shall we do it?"

Kitty stirred idly in her hammock.

"You've let yourself in for it now, Roger," she remarked. "Nan is the most impatient person alive."

Once more Nan looked up, with lazy "blue violet" eyes whose seductive sweetness sent an unaccustomed thrill down Roger's spine. She was so different, this slender bit of womanhood with her dusky hair and petal skin, from the st.u.r.dy, thick-booted, sporting type of girl to which he was accustomed. For Roger Trenby very rarely left his ancestral acres to essay the possibilities of the great outer world, and his knowledge of women had been hitherto chiefly gleaned from the comely--if somewhat stolid--damsels of the countryside, with whom he had shot and fished and hunted since the days of his boyhood.

"Don't be alarmed by what Kitty tells you, Mr. Trenby," Nan smiled gently as she spoke and Roger found himself delightedly watching the adorable way her lips curled up at the corners and the faint dimple which came and went. "She considers it a duty to pick holes in poor me--good for my morals, you know."

"It must be a somewhat difficult occupation," he returned, bowing awkwardly.

Into Nan's mind flashed the recollection of a supple, expressive, un-English bow, and of a deftness of phrase compared with which Trenby's laboured compliment savoured of the elephantine. Swiftly she dismissed the memory, irritably chasing it from her mind, for was it not five long, black, incomprehensible weeks since Peter had vanished from her ken? From the day of the bridge-party at the Edenhall flat, she had neither seen nor heard from him, and during those five silent weeks she had come to recognise the fact that Peter meant much more to her than merely a friend, just as he himself had realised that she was the one woman in the world for him. And between them, now and always, stood Celia, the woman in possession.

"Well, then, what about Thursday next for going over to the kennels?

Are you disengaged?"

Trenby's voice broke suddenly across her reverie. She threw him a brilliant smile.

"Yes. Thursday would do very well."

"Agreed, then. I'll call for you at half-past ten," said Trenby.

"Well"--rising reluctantly to his feet--"I must be moving on now. I have to go over one of my off-farms before dinner, so I'll say good-bye."

He lifted his cap and strode away, Nan watching his broad-shouldered well-knit figure with reflective eyes, the while irrepressible little gurgles and explosions of mirth emanated from the hammock.

At last Nan burst out irritably: