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Various - "Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850"

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Steve Knopper’s stark accounting of the mistakes major record labels have made in the digital era suggests they are largely responsible for their own demise.

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Mr. Seaver defied censorship and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller and William Burroughs to American readers.

Margaret Pedler - The Moon out of Reach

M >> Margaret Pedler >> The Moon out of Reach




A shudder ran through her slight frame. Her own agony of separation
had been measurable with his.

"But you said . . . at Tintagel . . . that we mustn't meet again. You
shouldn't have come--oh, you shouldn't have come!" she cried
tremulously.

He drew a step nearer to her.

"I _had_ to come, I'm a man--not a saint!" he answered.

She looked up swiftly, trying to read what lay behind the harsh
repression in his tones. She felt as though he were holding something
in leash--something that strained and fought against restraint.

"_I'm a man--not a saint_!" The memory of his renunciation at King
Arthur's Castle swept over her.

"Yet I once thought you--almost that, Peter," she said slowly.

But he brushed her words aside.

"Well, I'm not. When I saw you to-day at the studio . . . God! Did
you think I'd keep away? . . . Nan, did you _want_ me to?"

The leash was slipping. She trembled, aching to answer him as her
whole soul dictated, to tell him the truth--that she wanted him every
minute of the day and that life without him stretched before her like a
barren waste.

"I--we--oh, you're making it so hard for me!" she said imploringly.
"Please go--go, now!"

Instead, he caught her in his arms, holding her crushed against his
breast.

"No, I'm not going. Oh, Nan--little Nan that I love! I can't give you
up again. Beloved!--Soul of me!" And all the love and longing,
against which he had struggled unavailingly throughout those empty
months of separation, came pouring from his lips in a torrent of
passionate pleading that shook her heart.

With an effort she tore herself free--wrenched herself away from the
arms whose clasp about her body thrilled her from head to foot.
Somewhere in one of the cells of her brain she was conscious of a
perfectly clear understanding of the fact that she must be quite mad to
fight for escape from the sole thing in life she craved. Celia Mallory
didn't really count--nor Roger and her pledge to him. . . . They were
only shadows. What counted was Peter's love for her and hers for
him. . . . Yet in a curious numbed way she felt she must still defer
to those shadows. They stood like sentinels with drawn swords at the
gate of happiness, and she would never be able to get past them. So it
was no use Peter's staying here.

"You must go, Peter!" she exclaimed feverishly. "You must go!"

A new look sprang into his eyes--a sudden, terrible doubt and
questioning.

"You want me to go?"

"Yes--yes!" She turned away, gesturing blindly in the direction of the
door. The room seemed whirling round her. "I--I _want_ you to go!"

Then she felt his hand on her shoulder and, yielding to its insistent
pressure, she faced him again.

"Nan, is it because you've ceased to care that you tell me to go?" He
spoke very quietly, but there was something in the tense, hard-held
tones before which she blenched--a note of intolerable fear.

Her shaking hands went up to her face. It would be better if he
thought that of her--better for him, at least. For her, nothing
mattered any more.

"Don't ask me, Peter!" she gasped, sobbingly. "Don't ask me!"

Slowly his hand fell away from her shoulder.

"Then it's true? You don't care? Trenby has taken my place?"

A heavy silence dropped between them, broken only by the sullen roll of
thunder. Nan shivered a little. Her face was still hidden in her
hands. She was struggling with herself--trying to force from her lips
the lie which would send the man's reeling faith in her crashing to
earth and drive him from her for ever. She knew if he went from her
like that, believing she had ceased to care, he would never come back
again. He would wipe her out utterly from his thoughts--out of his
heart. Henceforward she would be only a dead memory to him--the symbol
of a shattered faith.

It was more than she could bear. She could not give up that--Peter's
faith in her! It was all she had to cling to--to carry her through
life.

She stretched out her arms to him, crying brokenly:

"Oh, Peter--Peter--"

At the sound, of her low, shaken voice, with its infinite appeal for
understanding, the iron control he had been forcing on himself snapped
asunder, and he caught her in his arms, kissing her with the fierce
hunger of a man who has been starved of love.

She leaned against him, physically unable to resist, and deep down in
her heart glad that she could not. For the moment everything was swept
away in an anguish of happiness--in the ecstasy of burning kisses
crushed against her mouth and throat and the strained clasp of arms
locked round her.

"My woman!" he muttered unsteadily. "My woman!"

She could feel the hard beating of his heart, and her slender body
trembled in his arms with an answering passion that sprang from the
depths of her being. Forgetful of everything, save only of each other
and their great love, their lips clung together.

Presently he tilted her head back. Her face was white, the shadowed
eyes like two dark stains on the ivory bloom of a magnolia.

"Beloved! . . . Nan, say that you love me--let me hear you say it!"

"You know!" Her voice shook uncontrollably. "You don't need to ask
me, Peter. It--it _hurts_ to love anyone as I love you."

His hold tightened round her.

"You're mine . . . mine out of all the world . . . my beloved. . . ."

A flare of lightning and again the menacing roll of thunder. Then,
sudden as the swoop of a bat, the electric burners quivered and went
out, leaving only the glow of the fire to pierce the gloom. In the dim
light she could see his face bent over her--the face of her man, the
man she loved, and all that was woman and lover within her leaped to
answer the call of her mate--the infinite, imperious demand of human
love that has waited and hungered through empty days and nights till at
last it shall be answered by the loved one.

For a moment she lay unresisting in his arms, helpless in the grip of
the passion of love which had engulfed them both. Then the memory of
the shadows--the sentinels with drawn swords--came back to her. The
swords flashed, cleaving the dividing line afresh before her eyes.

Slowly she leaned away from his breast, her face suddenly drawn and
tortured.

"Peter, I must go back--"

"Back? To Trenby?" Then, savagely: "You can't. I want you!"

He stooped his head and she felt his mouth on hers.

A glimmer of pale firelight searched out the two tense faces; the
shadowy room seemed listening, waiting--waiting--

"I want you!" he reiterated hoarsely. "I can't live without you any
longer. Nan . . . come with me . . ."

A tremulous flicker of lightning shivered across the darkness. The
dead electric burners leaped into golden globes of light once more, and
in the garish, shattering glare the man and woman sprang apart and
stood staring at each other, trembling, with passion-stricken
faces. . . .

The long silence was broken at last, broken by a little inarticulate
sound--half-sigh, half-sob--from Nan.

Peter raised his head and looked at her. His face was grey.

"God!" he muttered. "Where were we going?"

He stumbled to the chimneypiece, and, leaning his arms on it, buried
his face against them.

Presently she spoke to him, timidly.

"Peter?" she said. "Peter?"

At the sound of her voice he turned towards her, and the look in his
eyes hurt her like a physical blow.

"Oh, my dear . . . my dear!" she cried, trembling towards him. "Don't
look like that . . . Ah! don't look like that!"

And her hands went fluttering out in the mother-yearning that every
woman feels for her man in trouble.

"Forgive me, Nan . . . I'm sorry."

She hardly recognised the low, toneless voice.

Her eyes were shining. "Sorry for loving me?" she said.

"No--not for loving you. God knows, I can't help that! But because I
would have taken you and made you mine . . . you who are not mine at
all."

"I'm all yours, really, Peter."

She came a few steps nearer to him, standing sweet and unafraid before
him, her grave eyes shining with a kind of radiance.

"Dear," she went on simply, throwing out her hands in a little
defenceless gesture, "if you want me, I'll come to you. . . . Not--not
secretly . . . while I'm still pledged to Roger. But openly, before
all the world. I'll go with you . . . if you'll take me."

She stood very still, waiting for his answer. Right or wrong, in that
moment of utter sacrifice of self, she had risen to the best that was
in her. She was willing to lay all on love's altar--body, soul, and
spirit, and that honour of the Davenants which she had been so schooled
to keep untarnished. Her pledge to Roger, her uncle's faith in
her--all these must be tossed into the fire to make her gift complete.
But the agony in Peter's face when the mask had fallen from it had
temporarily destroyed for her all values except the value of love.

Peter took the fluttering, outstretched fingers and laid his lips
against them. Then he relinquished them slowly, lingeringly. Passion
had died out of his face. His eyes held only a grave tenderness, and
the sternly sweet expression of his mouth recalled to Nan the man as
she had first known him, before love, terrible and beautiful, had come
into their lives to destroy them.

"I should never take you, dear," he said at last. "A man doesn't hurt
the thing he loves--not in his right senses. What he'll do when the
madness is on him--only his own soul knows."

She caught his arm impetuously.

"Peter, let me come! I'm not afraid of being hurt--not if we're
together. It's only the hurt of being without you that I can't
bear. . . . Oh, I know what you're thinking"--as she read the negation
in his face--"that I should regret it, that I should mind what people
said. Dear, if I can give you happiness, things like that simply
wouldn't count. . . . Ah, believe me, Peter!"

He looked down at her with the tenderness one accords a child,
ignorantly pleading to have its way. He knew Nan's temperament--knew
that, in spite of all her courage, when the moment of exaltation had
passed not even love itself could make up for the bitterness of its
price, if bought at such a cost. He pictured her exposed to the
slights of those whose position was still unassailable, waiting
drearily at Continental watering-places till the decree absolute should
be pronounced, and finally, restored to respectability in so far as
marriage with him could make it possible, but always liable to be
unpleasantly reminded, as she went through life, that there had been a
time when she had outraged convention. It was unthinkable! It would
break her utterly.

"Even if that were all, it still wouldn't be possible," he said gently.
"You don't know what you would have to face. And I couldn't let you
face it. But it isn't all. . . . There's honour, dear, and
duty. . . ."

Her gaze met his in dreary interrogation.

"Then--then, you'll go away?" Her voice faltered, broke.

"Yes, I shall go away . . . out of your life."

He fell silent a moment. Then, with an effort, he went on:

"This is good-bye. We mustn't see each other again--"

"No, no," she broke in a little wildly. "Don't go, Peter, I can't bear
it." She clung to him, repeating piteously: "Don't go . . . don't go!"

He stooped and pressed his lips to her hair, holding her in his arms.

"My dear!" he murmured. "My very dear!"

And so they remained for a little space.

Presently she lifted her face, white and strained, to his.

"_Must_ you go, Peter?"

"Heart's beloved, there is no other way. We may not love . . . and we
can't be together and not love. . . . So I must go."

She lay very still in his arms for a moment. Then he felt a long,
shuddering sigh run through her body.

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes. . . . Peter, go very quickly. . . ."

He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth--not
passionately, but with the ineffably sad calmness of farewell.

"God keep you, dear," he said.

The door closed behind him, shutting him from her sight, and she stood
for a few moments staring dazedly at its wooden panels. Then, with a
sudden desperate impulse, she tore it open again and peered out.

But there was only silence--silence and emptiness. He had gone.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE DARK ANGEL

The following morning Ralph and Penelope breakfasted alone, the latter
having given orders that Nan was on no account to be disturbed. It was
rather a dreary meal. They were each oppressed by the knowledge which
last night had revealed to them--the knowledge of the tragedy of love
into which their two friends had been thrust by circumstances.

On their return from the concert at the Albert Hall they had
encountered Mallory in the vestibule of the Mansions, and the naked
misery stamped upon his face had arrested them at once.

"Peter, what is it?"

The question had sped involuntarily from Penelope's lips as she met his
blank, unseeing gaze. The sound of her voice seemed to bring him back
to recognition.

"Go to Nan!" he said in queer, clipped tones. "She'll need you. Go at
once!"

And from a Nan whose high courage had at last bent beneath the storm,
leaving her spent and unresisting, Penelope had learned the whole
unhappy truth.

Since breakfast the Fentons had been dejectedly discussing the matter
together.

"Why doesn't she break off this miserable engagement with Trenby?"
asked Ralph moodily.

"She won't. I think she would have done if--if--for Peter's sake. But
not otherwise. She's got some sort of fixed notion that it wouldn't be
playing fair." Penelope paused, then added wretchedly: "I feel as if
our happiness had been bought at her expense!"

"Ours?" Completely mystified, Ralph looked across at her inquiringly.

"Yes, ours." And she proceeded to fill in the gaps, explaining how,
when she had refused to marry him, down at Mallow the previous summer,
it was Nan who had brought about his recall from London.

"I asked her if she intended to marry Roger, anyway--whether it
affected my marriage or not," she said. "And she told me that she
should marry him 'in any case.' But now, I believe it was just a
splendid lie to make me happy."

"It's done that, hasn't it?" asked Ralph, smiling a little.

Penelope's eyes shone softly.

"You know," she answered. "But--Nan has paid for it."

The telephone hell buzzed suddenly into the middle of the conversation
and Penelope flew to answer it. When she came back her face held a
look of mingled apprehension and relief.

"Who rang up?" asked Ralph.

"It was Kitty. She's back in town. I've told her Nan is here, and
she's coming round at once. She said she'd got some bad news for her,
but I think it'll have to be kept from her. She isn't fit to stand
anything more just now."

Ralph pulled out his watch.

"I'm afraid I can't stay to see Kitty," he said. "I've that oratorio
rehearsal fixed for half-past ten."

"Then, my dear, you'd better get off at once," answered Penelope with
her usual common sense. "You can't do any good here, and it's quite
certain you'll upset things there if you're late."

So that when Kitty arrived, a few minutes later, it was Penelope alone
who received her. She was looking very blooming after her sojourn in
the south of France.

"I've left Barry behind at Cannes," she announced. "The little green
tables have such a violent attraction for him, and he's just evolved a
new and infallible system which he wants to try. Funnily enough, I had
a craving for home. I can't think why--just in the middle of the
season there! But I'm glad, now, that I came." Her small, piquant
face shadowed suddenly. "I've bad news," she began abruptly, after a
pause. Penelope checked her.

"Hear mine first," she said quickly. And launched into an account of
the happenings of the last three days--Nan's quarrel with Roger, her
sudden rush up to town and unexpected meeting with Peter at Maryon's
studio, and finally the distraught condition in which she had
discovered her last night after Peter had gone.

"Oh, Penny! How dreadful! How dreadful it all is!" exclaimed Kitty
pitifully, when the other had finished. "I knew that Peter cared a
long time ago. But not Nan! . . . Though I remember once, at Mallow,
wondering the tiniest bit if she were losing her heart to him."

"Well, she's done it. If you'd seen them last night, after they'd
parted, you'd have had no doubts. They were both absolutely broken up."

Kitty moved restlessly.

"And I suppose it's really my fault," she said unhappily. "I brought
them together in the first instance. Penny, I was a fool. But I was
so afraid--so afraid of Nan with Maryon. He might have made her do
anything! He could have twisted her round his little finger at the
time if he'd wanted to. Thank goodness he'd the decency not to
try--that."

Penelope regarded her with an odd expression.

"Maryon's still in love with Nan," she observed quietly, "I saw that at
the studio."

Kitty laughed a trifle harshly.

"Nan must be 'Maryon-proof' now, anyway," she asserted.

Penelope remained silent, her eyes brooding and reflective. That odd,
magician's charm which Rooke so indubitably possessed might prove
difficult for any woman to resist--doubly difficult for a woman whose
entire happiness in life had fallen in ruins.

The entrance of the maid with a telegram gave her the chance to evade
answering. She tore open the envelope and perused the wire with a
puzzled frown on her face. Then she read it aloud for Kitty's benefit,
still with the same rather bewildered expression.


"_Is Nan with you? Reply Trenby, Century Club, Exeter._"


"I don't understand it," she said doubtfully.

"_I_ do!"

She and Kitty both looked up at the sound of the mocking, contemptuous
voice, Nan was standing, fully dressed, on the threshold of the room.

"Nan!" Penelope almost gasped. "I thought you were still asleep!"

Nan glanced at her curiously.

"I've not been asleep--all night," she said evenly. "I asked your maid
for a cup of tea some time ago. How d'you do, Kitty?"

She kissed the latter perfunctorily, her thoughts evidently
preoccupied. She was very pale and heavy violet shadows lay beneath
her eyes. To Penelope it seemed as though she had become immensely
frailer and more fragile-looking in the passage of a single night.
Refraining from comment, however, she held out the telegram.

"What does it mean, Nan?" she asked. "I thought you said you'd left a
note telling Roger you were coming here?"

Nan read the wire in silence. Her face turned a shade whiter than
before, if that were possible, and there was a smouldering anger in her
eyes as she crushed the flimsy sheet in suddenly tense fingers and
tossed it into the fire.

"No answer," she said shortly. As soon as the maid had left the room,
she burst out furiously:

"How dare he? How _dare_ he think such a thing?"

"What's the matter?" asked Penelope in a perturbed voice.

Nan turned to her passionately.

"Don't you see what he means? _Don't you see_? . . . It's because I
didn't write to him yesterday from here. He doesn't _believe_ the note
I left behind--he doesn't believe I'm with you!"

"But, my dear, where else should you be?" protested Penelope. "And why
shouldn't he believe it?"

Nan shrugged her shoulders.

"I told you we'd had a row. It--it was rather a big one. He probably
thinks I've run away and married--oh, well"--she laughed
mirthlessly--"anyone!"

"Nan!"

"That's what's happened"--nodding. "It was really . . . quite a big
row." She paused, then continued, indignantly:

"As if I'd have tried to deceive him over it--writing that I was going
to you when I wasn't! Roger's a fool! He ought to have known me
better. I've never yet been coward enough to lie about anything I
wanted to do."

"But, my dear"--Penelope was openly distressed--"we must send him a
wire at once. I'd no idea you'd quarrelled--like that! He'll be out
of his mind with anxiety."

"He deserves to be"--in a hard voice--"for distrusting me. No,
Penny"--as Penelope drew a form towards her preparatory to inditing a
reassuring telegram. "I won't have a wire sent to him. D'you hear? I
won't have it!" Her foot beat excitedly on the floor.

Penelope signed and laid the telegraph form reluctantly aside.

"You agree with me, Kitten?" Nan whirled round upon Kitty for support.

"I'm not quite sure," came the answer. "You see, I've been away so
long I really hardly know how things stand between you and Roger."

"They stand exactly as they were. I've promised to marry him in April.
And I'm going to keep my promise."

"Not in April," said Kitty very quietly. "You won't be able to marry
him so soon. Nan, dear, I've--I've bad news for you." She hesitated
and Nan broke in hastily:

"Bad news? What--who is it? Not--_not_ Uncle David?" Her voice rose a
little shrilly.

Kitty nodded, her face very sorrowful. And now Nan noticed that she
had evidently been crying before she came to the flat.

"Yes. He died this morning--in his sleep. They sent round to let me
know. He had told his man to do this if--whenever it happened. He
didn't want you to have the shock of receiving a wire."

"I don't think it would have been a shock," said Nan at last, quietly.
"I think I knew it wouldn't be very long before--before he went away.
I've known . . . since Christmas."

Her thoughts went back to that evening when she and St. John had sat
talking together by the firelight in the West Parlour. Yes, she had
known--ever since then--that the Dark Angel was drawing near. And now,
now that she realised her old friend had stepped painlessly and
peacefully across the border-line which divides this world we know from
that other world whose ways are hidden from our sight, it came upon her
less as a shock than as the inevitable ending of a long suspense.

"I wish--I wish I'd seen him just once more," she said wistfully.
"To--to say good-bye."

Kitty searched the depths of her bag and withdrew a sealed envelope.

"I think he must have known that," she said gently. "He left this to
be given to you."

She gave the letter into the girl's hands and, signing to Penelope to
follow her, quitted the room, leaving Nan alone with her dead.

In the silence of the empty room Nan read the last words, of her
beloved Uncle David that would ever reach her.


"I think this is good-bye, Nan," he had written. "But don't grieve
overmuch, my dear. If you knew how long a road to travel it has seemed
since Annabel went away, you would be glad for me. Will you try to be?
Always remember that the road was brightened by many flowers along the
wayside--and one of those flowers has been our good friendship, yours
and mine. We've been comrades, Nan, which is a far better thing than
most relatives achieve. And if sometimes you feel sad and miss the old
friendship--as I know you will--just remember that I'm only in the next
room. People are apt to make a great to-do about death. But, after
all, it's merely stepping from one of God's rooms into the next.

"I don't want to talk much about money matters, but I must just say
this--that all I have will be yours, just as all my heart was yours.

"I hope life will be kind to you, my dear--kinder than you hope or
expect."


There were many who would find the world the poorer for lack of the
kindly, gallant spirit which had passed into "God's next room," but to
Nan the old man's death meant not only the loss of a beloved friend,
but the withdrawal from her life of a strong, restraining influence
which, unconsciously to herself, had withheld her from many a rash
action into which her temperament would otherwise have hurried her.

It seemed a very climax of the perversity of fate that now, at the very
moment when the pain and bitterness of things were threatening to
submerge her, Death's relentless fingers should snatch away the one man
on earth who, with his wise insight and hoarded experience of life,
might have found a way to bring peace and healing to her troubled soul.

She spent the rest of the day quietly in her room, and when she
reappeared at dinner she was perfectly composed, although her eyes
still bore traces of recent tears. Against the black of the simple
frock she wore, her face and throat showed pale and clear like some
delicate piece of sculpture.

Penelope greeted her with kindly reproach.

"You hardly touched the lunch I sent up for you," she said.

Nan, shook her head, smiling faintly.

"I've been saying good-bye to Uncle David," she answered quietly. "I
didn't want anything to eat."

Kitty, who had remained at the flat, regarded her with some concern.
The girl had altered immensely since she had last seen her before going
abroad. Her face had worn rather fine and bore an indefinable look of
strain. Kitty sighed, then spoke briefly.

"Well, you'll certainly eat some dinner," she announced with firmness.
"And, Ralph, you'd better unearth a bottle of champagne from somewhere.
She wants something to pick her up a bit."

Under Kitty's kindly, lynx-eyed gaze Nan dared not refuse to eat and
drink what was put before her, and she was surprised, when dinner was
over, to find how much better she felt in consequence. Prosaic though
it may appear, the fact remains that the strain and anguish of parting,
even from those we love best on earth, can be mitigated by such
material things as food and drink. Or is it that these only strengthen
the body to sustain the tortured soul within it?

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