Marry a Stranger (21 page)

After all, this had always been her home—she had loved Fenella Fountain, and for some reason she seemed to detest Martin Guelder. It was not therefore so very strange that she should feel antipathy for Martin Guelder’s second wife.

At ten o’clock they said good night to one another and went to bed. Jane even paused on the stairs to observe to Stacey that it had been quite a pleasant evening after all.

But for Stacey nothing was pleasant since Martin was not there.

She fell asleep almost immediately her head touched the pillow, however—perhaps because she had kept hidden so much emotion during the day, and it had exhausted her. She dreamed of Christmases past, when her father was alive, and they had laughed together over the flames of the brandy sauce when it was poured over the pudding and lighted, and over such childish delights as pulling crackers and donning paper hats. There had always been a lot of simple presents in those days, and opening them had been one of the highlights of breakfast. And listening to the music of Christmas bells, and going to church with her father, and being half hidden inside the ancient family pew, and trying to keep her father awake during the sermon by occasionally giving him a little prod, and very occasionally a little pinch.

The vicar had always been one to drone on
...
In her dreams she heard him again, and she could see how the candles flamed on the altar, and the vase of white chrysanthemums looked so unblemished and pure
...
The flames of the candles were growing longer and longer, and they seemed to be giving off a great deal of heat, which was odd, since the church was usually so cold. The vicar was always appealing for an up-to-date heating system
...

But there was no need to worry about heat. It was tremendously hot, and the heat was taking her breath away, and the fumes from the candles were making her choke. She coughed. She awoke coughing and feeling as if her lungs were choked, and something acrid and stifling stung her nostrils. The room was full of moonlight, since her curtains were drawn back, but it was also full of filmy white trails of vapor—it was full of smoke!

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Stacey s
prang out of bed, and somehow she fought her way to the door, and beyond that to the head of the stairs. There was a loud crackling and roaring noise on either side of her, and the heat was tremendous. Mrs. Elbe was calling to her from half-way up the stairs, holding a flapping dressing gown round her and looking like a wraith in her flying draperies.

“Hurry!—hurry!” called Mrs. Elbe. “The whole place is burning like tinder! I was trying to get up to your room
...”

“What started it?” Stacey choked, joining her on
the stairs. “And where is Hannah? Is she
—
”

“Outside, on the lawn. It’s deep snow, but it can’t be helped, and the fire brigade are coming.” They started to make their way down the stairs.

“Miss Fountain?” Stacey suddenly remembered her. “Is she outside, too?”

Mrs. Elbe looked back, but she was impatient to win free from the suffocating smoke and the scorching heat, and the danger of the staircase collapsing at any moment.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t seen her. But if she’s in her room she’ll have to stay there
now until the brigade arrives
—
”

“They might not get here in time,” Stacey replied, and she had a sudden vision of the spinster trapped in her room—perhaps overcome by fumes, and lying helpless in the middle of her bedroom floor. “I’d better go back and see if she’s still there,” she said, and before Mrs. Elbe could prevent her she had started to climb the stairs again and was fighting her way back along the corridors to the wing of the house which contained Miss Fountain’s chosen apartments. But when she reached them it was to find that Miss Fountain had already escaped to safety—or, at least, she was not in either of her rooms—and Stacey turned to win free from the burning building herself. But by this time the main staircase was blazing like an inferno, and the corridors leading to it were choked with flames and acrid fumes. Stacey knew that all hope of escape in that direction was cut off for her. So, coughing and gasping, her senses already reeling, she strove to reach the back staircase on a side of the house which the fire had not yet attacked as fiercely as it probably would do very soon—unless help arrived in the very nick of time!

But even as she strove to force herself forward a tongue of flame sprang up ahead of her, and she cowered in sudden, utter panic against the wall. It seemed to her that she was hopelessly trapped, and a little cry of horror left her throat. And then she thought she heard someone calling to her—a voice, anxious and imperative and desperately familiar, which reached her through the hiss and crackle of ancient timbers being relentlessly consumed before her eyes. A great roaring was in her ears, too, like the noise of a gigantic waterfall, and it was as much as she could do to hang on to her senses. Her lungs were bursting, and the hem of her dressing gown was on fire.

“Stacey!” the voice called, again and again. “Stacey!” imploringly, “Where are you?”

She did her best to call an answer, but no sound would pass her lips. She stood leaning against the wall, aware that in the dimness and the vagueness of drifting smoke and darting tongues of fire a shadowy form was approaching near to her, fighting to get within reach of her, and although her will urged her to make a supreme effort and force herself forward to meet it half-way, she could not do so. She could only croak, through dry and cracked
li
ps: “Here! Here, Martin!
...”

And when Martin reached her she collapsed in his arms, and he swung her up into them and turned and fought his way back along the way he had come, their only hope the back staircase which had still been intact when he saw it last. And although the treads were smouldering it had still not burst into flames when he started to descend it, with Stacey, limp in his arms
...

It was the icy chill of the out of doors, and the heavenly sweetness and freshness after the conflagration within the house, that restored Stacey to her senses, and she was aware that she was being borne swiftly in a pair of arms which held her closely across lawns hidden by a white carpet of snow, while stars blazed like frosty fire away up in the deep night sky.

A sensation of lassitude, mingled with an extraordinary feeling of complete contentment, held her, and as she gazed up into the dark face which loomed above—and yet so near—to her own, a tiny half smile came into her eyes, and she whispered: “Martin?” It was an unbelieving, merest thread of a whisper, and it came again: “Martin
...
?” Martin stopped on the edge of the lawn, and with the starshine illuminating his face and disclosing the unutterable tenderness in it, he bent his head still lower.

“Oh, my beloved!” he exclaimed, and touched her cracked lips so gently with his own that, had her eyes been closed, she might never have known that he kissed her. But her eyes were open, and she did know. She nestled against him with a little sigh of happiness that was almost too great to be borne.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When S
tacey opened her eyes the following day she remembered at once that it was Boxing Day. And the sun was shining through a break in leaden clouds, and because the world was still carpeted in snow outside, a strange, white light was reflected on her ceiling, and the cheerful voices of energetic snow shovellers, as well as the ring of the implements they used, were queerly hushed and muffled in that wilderness of frozen beauty.

But in Stacey’s room an electric fire glowed comfortingly in the fireplace, and there was a good, thick carpet which prevented draughts from entering under the door. She looked round it a little wonderingly at first, realizing that it was slightly familiar, and then recognizing it as the spare bedroom—the most important spare bedroom!—in Beatrice Aden’s cottage. There were rosebuds on the chintz which hung at the window, and the same chintz covered the deep armchair. There was a little table beside the bed, and on it Beatrice set down a breakfast tray after coming quietly into the room.

“
Why, you’re awake!” she exclaimed. “Or did I wake you? How do you feel, my dear?”

“Perfectly all right,” Stacey assured her, although she realized that one of her arms, almost to the
shoulder, was swathed in bandages. “I think I’ve had a very good night—I must have slept like a log!

“That was the sedative your husband gave you,” Beatrice told her, and added: “What a mercy we didn’t have to send for a doctor! And after you’d had such a ghastly time! My poor sweet, I can’t tell you how sorry I am you had to endure anything so frightful.”

“But Martin must have been burned, too
—
?”
Stacey suddenly recollected. “Was he—is he ?”

“Here,” Martin’s voice answered for him, just inside the doorway, and it was a very quiet voice, and it sent the wildest of thrills through Stacey’s whole being. Beatrice could see the rush of color which came to her cheeks, and the way in which her eyes almost lit up. She decided to beat a tactful retreat, and leave together the husband and wife who had survived an ordeal by fire the night before.

Martin had a large piece of sticking plaster adhering to one side of his head, and his dark hair above his right temple had been badly singed. But otherwise there seemed to be very little the matter with him, and there was a look in his eyes as he took a seat on the edge of the bed and gazed down at the girl whom he had married in London very nearly six months before which caused Stacey to lower her own eyes for an instant. And then she remembered what he had called her, out there in the icy cold and the snow, the previous evening, and the feel of his arms as they had held her, and she looked up at him again with the same revealing look chasing all shyness away from the violet-blue depths, so that words between them for a moment were not really necessary.
And then he took her uninjured hand and held it gently, his professional instincts causing one finger
to hover for a few seconds over her wildly fluttering pulse.

“What about your breakfast?” he asked her. “You’ve got to eat it, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I will eat it in a moment.”

“When I’ve told you how I came to be at Fountains last night—just in the nick of time?”

“Yes.”

“Well, sit up,” he commanded her, with a smile which was virtually a caress. He caught her by the shoulders and drew her upright against her lace-edged feather pillows, and then draped a fleecy bed-jacket which was Beatrice’s property about her, and painstakingly tied the ribbon. “There you are!” he exclaimed, when he had finished. “And you look much better than I expected to see you look this morning.”

Because a kind of confusion suddenly overcame her she poured herself a cup of tea, and sipped it. And when she had finished he took it from her and set it down on the tray.

“Stacey, why did you ring off the other night when I telephoned you?”

She stared down at the sheet, and crumpled it with her fingers.

“Couldn’t you think why?” she asked, in a voice scarcely above a whisper.

“I can think now,” he told her, and his voice was low, and deep. “Ever since last night, when your eyes looked up at me and you said my name as if it meant everything to you that I had come at last—and it was nothing to do with the fact that I had got you out of that ghastly house alive!—and again this morning, just now, when I came in, and you looked at me
...
”

She looked at him again, finding unexpected courage to do so.

“Stacey!” he exclaimed. “Stacey! Were you very disappointed because I stayed in London, and rang you from London on Christmas Eve?”

“I wasn’t disappointed,” she answered simply. “I thought I should die of misery!”

He took her in his arms, and held her with her head cradled gently up against his shoulder, and with one hand he stroked her soft cheek. The hand shook a little, because but for the fact that she had recently survived a tremendous shock, and the scars of her experience were on her arm and not healed yet, he would have crushed her up against him, and she would have learned from the fierceness of his hold how desperately, and how often, he had longed to do just that in the days when they seemed like polite strangers to one another.

“My darling,” he exclaimed, his lips buried in her hair, “if you only knew what terrific strength of mind it took to stay away from you all those weeks! You see, you didn’t make it clear to me about that fellow Hatherleigh—you didn’t even deny it when I more or less accused you of being in love with him!”

“But I was never in love with him,” she told him, clinging to him. “And he was never in love with me! He only came to tell me that he was going to be
married, and I would have told you, only
—
”

“Only what?”

“You didn’t really give me much chance, and—and I thought you were in love with Vera Hunt!”

“I made use of her,” he admitted shamelessly. “I made use of her because I thought you might become jealous, and in any case she knew it was you I adored—and I do adore you, Stacey!” He groaned hollowly. “What a lot of time we’ve wasted, and it seems to me that the most sensible thing I could have done would have been to seize you in my arms and drag you off somewhere where I could marry
you that first day when you came into my consulting room! Because I honestly could think of little else but you from that moment.”

She looked up at him wonderingly.

“You mean that?” she whispered.

“Of course I mean it,” he answered. Suddenly his lips came near to hers, and she turned them up to him willingly. The kiss lasted a long time, and it was
incredibly sweet.

“Martin,” she whispered, at the end of it.
“
Oh, Martin, I love you!—and I’ve loved you from the very beginning, too!”

Later, she asked him about Fountains, and he had to admit that there was little enough left of it. Most of her possessions had gone up in smoke, too, but those could be replaced.

“And we’ll have another house, just as soon as we can get one, near to London—and, in the meantime, we’ll live in the flat. Will you hate living in the flat, in London, with me, Stacey?”

Her eyes reproached him.

“Hate it? Oh, Martin, you know
I—”
Her
voice
shook a little, and she could not
go
on.

His eyes regarded her with a sudden look of
infinite
tenderness.

“Well, I know you love the country, and as soon as we can we’ll have a country house. But I don’t honestly feel particularly upset about Fountains. Jane is the one who’ll mourn its passing, but no doubt we can find a niche for her. To me it was not a happy house—I was never happy in it, anyway. My first wife”—he paused
—
“Stacey, you’ve got to know that I was never deeply in love with my first wife, and I don’t think she was ever in love wit
h me. She—”

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, anxious to spare him. “Miss Fountain told me a lot—and I heard the rest from Vera. But, in any case, her end was so tragic that—that I think it will be best if we say nothing more about her.”

“I think you’re right,” he said sombrely. He stared at her for a moment, and then a thought occurred to him. “And to think that I might have lost you, too, last night!” He pressed her head down into his neck. “Stacey, I
couldn’t
have borne that!”

And then a lighter mood possessed him, and he put his fingers under her chin and lifted it, and smiled at her.

“And now I’d better start remembering that you’re an invalid, and that arm of yours requires dressing. But it’s not nearly such a bad bu
rn
as it might have been.” He kissed her, lingeringly. “In a few days we’ll go to an hotel, and then—and then, my darling, we'll begin to think about our honeymoon, shall we?”