The Moon Rock by Arthur J. Rees (each kindness read aloud .txt) 📖

expression at once restless and bored on his good-looking face.

He scrambled down the last few slippery yards of the path and had almost reached her side before she saw him.

“I have been sent for you,” he explained. “I knew I should find you here.”

She got up immediately from the rock where she had been sitting, and they stood for a moment in silence. She thought by his look that he had something to say to her, but as he did not speak she commenced the ascent of the stiff cliff path. He started after her, but the climb took all his attention, and she was soon far ahead. When he reached the top she was standing near the edge looking around her.

“This is my last look,” she said as he reached her side. Her hand indicated the line of savage cliffs, the tossing sea, the screaming birds, the moors beyond the rocks.

“Perhaps you will come back here again some day,” he replied.

She made no answer. He drew closer, so close that she shrank back and turned away.

“I must go now,” she hurriedly said.

“Stay, Sisily,” he said. “I want to speak to you. It may be the final opportunity—the last time we shall be alone together here.”

She hesitated, walking with slower steps and then stopping. As he did not speak she broke the silence in a low tone—

“What do you wish to say to me?”

“Are you sorry you are leaving Cornwall?” he hesitatingly began.

She made a slight indifferent gesture. “Yes, but it does not matter. Mother is dead, and my father does not care for me.” She flushed a deep red and hastily added, “No one will miss me. I am so alone.”

“You are not alone!” he impetuously exclaimed—“I love you, Sisily—that is what I wished to say. I came here to tell you.”

He caught a swift fleeting glance from her dark eyes, immediately veiled.

“Do you really mean what you say?” she replied, a little unsteadily.

“Yes, Sisily. I have loved you ever since I first met you,” he replied. “And, since then, I have loved you more and more.”

“Oh, why have you told me this now?” she exclaimed. “You think I am lonely, and you are sorry for me. I cannot stay longer. Aunt will be waiting for me.”

He sprang before her in the narrow path.

“You must hear what I have to say before you go,” he said curtly. “We are not likely to meet again for some time if we part now. I intend to leave England.”

She looked at him at those words, but he was at a loss to divine the meaning of the look.

“You are leaving England?” A quick ear would have caught a strange note in her soft voice. “Oh, but you cannot—you have responsibilities.”

“Are you thinking of the title, and your father’s money?” he observed, glancing at her curiously. “What do you know about it, Sisily?”

“I have heard of nothing but the title ever since I can remember,” she replied.

“I learnt for the first time this afternoon that I was brought down here to rob you,” he said gloomily.

“I am glad for your sake if you are to have it—the money,” she simply replied.

He answered with a bitter, almost vengeful aspect.

“I would not take the money or the title, if they ever came to me. They should be yours. I will show them. I will let them know that they cannot do what they like with me.” He brought out this obscure threat in a savage voice. “If I had only known—if I had guessed that your father—” He ceased abruptly, with a covert glance, like one fearing he had said too much.

She kept her eyes fixed on the lengthening shadows around the rocks.

“Do not take it so much to heart,” she timidly counselled. “It is nothing to me—the title or the money. They made my mother’s life a misery. My father was always cruel to her because of them, I do not know why. It is in his nature to be cruel, I think. He has a heart of granite, like these rocks. I hate him!” She brought out the last words in a sudden burst of passion which startled him.

“What nonsense it all is!” he exclaimed, suddenly changing his tone. “All this talk about a title which may never be revived. Let them have it between them, and the money too. Sisily, I love you, dear, love you better than all the titles and money in the world. I am not worthy of you, but I will try to be. Let us go Sway and start life … just our two selves.”

“I cannot.” She stood in front of him with downcast gaze, and then raised her eyes to his.

Had he been as experienced in the ways of her sex as he believed himself to be, he would have read more in her elusive glance than her words.

“You may be sorry if you do not,” he said, with a sudden access of male brutality. “There are reasons—reasons I cannot explain to you—”

“Even if there are I cannot do what you ask,” she replied. Her face was still averted, but her voice was steady.

“Then do you want to go with Aunt to London?” he persisted, trying to catch a glimpse of her hidden face.

She shook her head.

“Or to stay with your father?”

“No!” There was a strange intense note in the brief word.

“Then come with me, Sisily. I love you more than all the world. We have nobody to please except our two selves.”

“You have your duty to your father to consider.”

“Let us leave him out of the question,” said the young man hurriedly. “He is as selfish and heartless as—his brother. I tell you again, I’ll have nothing to do with this title or your father’s money. I will make my own way with you by my side. I have a friend in London who would be only too glad to receive you until we could be married. You are leaving your home to-night, and you are as free as air to choose. Will you come?”

“Of course,” he began again, in a different tone, as she still kept silent, “it may be that I have misunderstood. I thought that you had learnt to care for me. But if you dislike me—”

“Do not say that,” she replied, turning a deeply wounded face towards him. “It is not that—do not think so. You have been kind and good to me, and I—I shall never forget you. But I—I have a contempt for myself.”

“I have a contempt for myself also after this afternoon,” he retorted. “Come, Sisily—”

“No, it is impossible. Hark, what was that?” The girl spoke with a sudden uplifting of her head. Above them, from the direction of the house, the sound of a voice was heard.

“It is Aunt calling me,” she said, “I must go. Good-bye.”

“Is it good-bye, then?”

“It must be. But I shall often think of you.”

He had the unforgettable sensation of two soft burning lips touching the hand which hung at his side, and turned swiftly—but too late. She was speeding along the rocky pathway which led to the house.

“Wait, Sisily!” he cried.

A seabird’s mournful cry was the only answer. He glanced irresolutely towards the path, and then retraced his steps towards the edge of the cliffs.

A cold sun dipped suddenly, as though pulled down by a stealthy invisible hand. The twilight deepened, and in the lengthening shadows the rocks assumed crouching menacing shapes which seemed to watch the solitary figure standing near the edge, lost in thought.

Chapter V

Through the flowers on the hotel dining-table Mrs. Pendleton was able to watch her niece unnoticed, because the flowers occupied such an unreasonably large space on the little round table set for three. Besides, Sisily had been engrossed in her own thoughts throughout the meal. Mrs. Pendleton was disturbed by her quietness. There was something unnatural about it—something not girlish. She had not spoken once during the drive from Flint House to Penzance, and she sat through dinner with a still white face, silent, and hardly eating anything.

Mrs. Pendleton supposed Sisily was fretting over her mother, but she did not understand a girl whose grief took the form of silence and stillness. She would have preferred a niece who would have sobbed out her grief on her shoulder, been reasonably comforted, and eaten a good dinner afterwards. But Sisily was not that kind of girl. She was strange and unapproachable. There was something almost repellent in her reserve, something in her dark preoccupied gaze which made Mrs. Pendleton feel quite nervous, and unfeignedly relieved when Sisily had asked to be allowed to go to her room immediately the meal was concluded.

As she sat at the table, reviewing the events of the afternoon, after the girl had taken her departure, Mrs. Pendleton regretted that she had consented to take charge of Sisily. She flattered herself that she was sufficiently modern not to care a row of pins for the stigma on the girl’s birth, but there were awkward circumstances, and not the least of them was her own rash promise to break the news to Sisily that she was illegitimate. That disclosure was not likely to help their future relations together. Mrs. Pendleton reflected that she knew very little about her niece, whom she had not seen since she was a small girl, but the recollection of her set face and tragic eyes at the dinner table impelled prompt recognition of the fact that she was going to be difficult to manage.

But there was more than that. With a feeling of dismay Mrs. Pendleton’s mind awoke to a belated realization of the scandal which would fasten on Sisily and her birth if Robert succeeded in establishing his claim to the title. A peer of the realm with an illegitimate, disinherited daughter! The story would be pounced upon by a sensational press, avid for precisely such topics. In imagination Mrs. Pendleton saw the flaming headlines, the photographs, and the highly spiced reports in which every detail of her brother’s private life was laid bare for a million curious eyes.

Such an exposure was too terrible to be faced. Mrs. Pendleton saw her own comfortable life affected by it; saw her position in her small social circle shaken and overwhelmed by the clamour of notoriety. She saw herself the focus of the malicious tea-table gossip of all her friends. Decidedly, it would not do.

She did her brother the justice to realize that he had overlooked the public effect of the disclosure of his painful domestic secret as completely as she had. He had forgotten that his accession to the peerage would make him, as it were, a public figure, and the glamour which the newspapers would throw over his lifelong quest would invest every act of his life with a publicity from which he could not hope to escape. If he had foreseen this, he would have made some other arrangement for his daughter’s future, not for the girl’s sake, but for the honour of the famous old name of which he was so fanatically proud.

The question remained, what was to be done? Robert would have to be told, of course. Mrs. Pendleton’s first impulse was to retract her promise to take charge of Sisily, and wash her hands of the whole affair. Then she thought of the money, and wavered. Robert had made her a generous offer, and the money would have helped so much! She had already planned the spending of the cheque he had given her that afternoon. She had thought of a new suite of drawing-room furniture, and bedroom carpets. She had a vision of a small motor-car, later on.

As she pondered over the situation she thought she saw a way out—a way so simple and practical that she was astonished that it had not occurred to her before.

Mrs. Pendleton was a woman of decision and prompt of action when she made up her mind. Her mind was made up now. She glanced across the table at her husband. “Joseph!” she said.

Mr. Pendleton, hidden behind the sheets of a newspaper just arrived from London, had the temerity not to hear. He was in a grumpy mood, arising, in the first instance, from having been dragged away from his business and his club to Cornwall. It was nothing to him that he was in the Land of Lyonesse. His brief impression of the Duchy was that it was all rocks, and that Penzance was a dull town without a proper seafront, swarming with rascally shopkeepers who tried to sell serpentine match-boxes at the price of gold ones, and provided with hotels where dull tourists submitted to a daily diet of Cornish pasties and pollock under the delusion that they were taking in local colour