Without waiting for her to answer, he kissed her quickly, with a warm tenderness that made her weep once more. She said over and over again, “I’m so happy, Jean … so happy.” And then, shamefacedly, “I must confess something. … I was afraid you’d never come back, and I wanted you always … from the very beginning. I meant to have you from the beginning … from that first day in Paris.”
He lay with his head in her lap while she stroked the thick, red hair, in silence. There in the graveyard, high above the sea, they lost themselves in the illusion which overtakes such young lovers … that they had come already to the end of life … that, instead of beginning, it was already complete and perfect.
“I meant to have you always … Jean. And after you came here and didn’t come over to see me … I decided to go after you … for fear that you’d escape again. I was shameless … and a fraud, too. … That morning by the river … I didn’t come on you by accident. I knew you were there all the while. I hid in the thicket and waited for you.”
“It wouldn’t have made the least difference. I meant to have you, too.” A sudden impatient frown shadowed the young face. “You won’t let anything change you, will you? Nothing that anyone might say … nothing that might happen … not anything?”
“Not anything,” she repeated. “Not anything in the world. Nothing could change me.”
“And you wouldn’t mind going away from here with me?”
“No. … I’d like that. It’s what I have always wanted. I’d be glad to go away.”
“Even to the Argentine?”
“Anywhere … anywhere at all.”
“We can be married very soon … before I leave … and then we can go to Paris to see my mother.” He sat up abruptly with an odd, troubled look on his face. “She’s a wonderful woman, darling … beautiful and kind and charming.”
“I thought she was lovely … that day in Paris … the most fascinating woman I’d ever seen, Jean dear.”
He seemed not to be listening to her. The wind was beginning to die away with the heat of the afternoon, and far out on the amethyst sea the two sailing ships lay becalmed and motionless. Even the leaves of the twisted wild-cherry tree hung listlessly in the hot air. All the world about them had turned still and breathless.
Turning, he took both her hands and looked at her. “There’s something I must tell you … Sybil … something you may not like. But you mustn’t let it make any difference. … In the end things like that don’t matter.”
She interrupted him. “If it’s about women … I don’t care. I know what you are, Jean. … I’ll never know any better than I know now. … I don’t care.”
“No … what I want to tell you isn’t about women. It’s about my mother.” He looked at her directly, piercingly. “You see … my mother and my father were never married. Good old Monsieur de Cyon only adopted me. … I’ve no right to the name … really. My name is really John Shane. … They were never married, only it’s not the way it sounds. She’s a great lady, my mother, and she refused to marry my father because … she says … she says she found out that he wasn’t what she thought him. He begged her to. He said it ruined his whole life … but she wouldn’t marry him … not because she was weak, but because she was strong. You’ll understand that when you come to know her.”
What he said would have shocked her more deeply if she had not been caught in the swift passion of a rebellion against all the world about her, all the prejudices and the misunderstandings that in her young wisdom she knew would be ranged against herself and Jean. In this mood, the mother of Jean became to her a sort of heroic symbol, a woman to be admired.
She leaned toward him. “It doesn’t matter … not at all, Jean … things like that don’t matter in the end. … All that matters is the future. …” She looked away from him and added in a low voice, “Besides, what I have to tell you is much worse.” She pressed his hand savagely. “You won’t let it change you? You’ll not give me up? Maybe you know it already … that I have a grandmother who is mad. … She’s been mad for years … almost all her life.”
He kissed her quickly. “No, it won’t matter. … Nothing could make me think of giving you up … nothing in the world.”
“I’m so happy, Jean … and so peaceful … as if you had saved me … as if you’d changed all my life. I’ve been frightened sometimes. …”
But a sudden cloud had darkened the happiness … the cloud that was never absent from the house at Pentlands.
“You won’t let your father keep us apart, Sybil. … He doesn’t like me. … It’s easy to see that.”
“No, I shan’t let him.” She halted abruptly. “What I am going to say may sound dreadful. … I shouldn’t take my father’s word about anything. I wouldn’t let him influence me. He’s spoiled his own life and my mother’s too. … I feel sorry for my father. … He’s so blind … and he fusses so … always about things which don’t matter.”
For a long time they sat in silence, Sybil with her eyes closed leaning against him, when suddenly she heard him saying in a fierce whisper, “That damned Thérèse!” and looking up she saw at the rim of the hill beyond the decaying tombstones, the stocky figure of Thérèse, armed with an insect-net and a knapsack full of lunch. She was standing with her legs rather well apart, staring at them out of her queer gray eyes with a mischievous, humorous expression. Behind her in
