The House of Dreams-Come-True

THE great spaces of the hall seemed to slope away into impenetrable gloom; velvet darkness deepening imperceptibly into sable density of panelled wall; huge, smoke-blackened beams, stretching wide arms across the roof, showing only as a dim lattice-work of ebony, fretting the shadowy twilight overhead.

At the furthermost end, like a giant golden eye winking sleepily through the dark, smouldered a fire of logs, and near this, in the luminous circle of its warmth, a man and woman were seated at a table lit by tall wax candles in branched candlesticks. With its twinkling points of light, and the fire’s red glow quivering across its shining surface, the table gleamed out like a jewel in a sombre setting--a vivid splash of light in the grey immensity of dusk-enfolded hall.

Dinner was evidently just over, for the candlelight shone softly on satin-skinned fruit, while wonderful gold-veined glass flecked the dark pool of polished mahogany with delicate lines and ripples of opalescent colour.

A silence had fallen on the two who had been dining. They had been gay enough together throughout the course of the meal, but, now that the servants had brought coffee and withdrawn, it seemed as though the stillness--that queer, ghostly, memory-haunted stillness which lurks in the dim, disused recesses of a place--had crept out from the four corners of the hall and were stealing upon them, little by little, as the tide encroaches on the shore, till it had lapped them round in a curious atmosphere of oppression.

The woman acknowledged it by a restless twist of her slim shoulders. She was quite young--not more than twenty--and as she glanced half-enquiringly at the man seated opposite her there was sufficiency of likeness between the two to warrant the assumption that they were father and daughter.

In each there was the same intelligent, wide brow, the same straight nose with sensitively cut nostrils--though a smaller and daintier affair in the feminine edition, and barred across the top by a little string of golden freckles--and, above all, the same determined, pointed chin with the contradictory cleft in it that charmed away its obstinacy.

But here the likeness ended. It was from someone other than the dark-browed man with his dreaming, poet’s eyes--which were neither purple nor grey, but a mixture of the two--that Jean Peterson had inherited her beech-leaf brown hair, tinged with warm red where the light glinted on it, and her vivid hazel eyes--eyes that were sometimes golden like the heart of a topaz and sometimes clear and still and brown like the waters of some quiet pool cradled among the rocks of a moorland stream.

They were like that now--clear and wide-open, with a certain pensive, half-humorous questioning in them.

“Well?” she said, at last breaking the long silence. “What is it?”

The man looked across at her, smiling a little.

“Why should it be--anything?” he demanded.

She laughed amusedly.

“Oh, Glyn dear”--she never made use of the conventional address of “father.” Glyn Peterson would have disliked it intensely if she had--“Oh, Glyn dear, I haven’t been your daughter for the last twenty years without learning to divine when you are cudgelling your brains as to the prettiest method of introducing a disagreeable topic.”

Peterson grinned a little. He tossed the end of his cigarette into the fire and lit a fresh one before replying.

“On this occasion,” he observed at last, slowly, “the topic is not necessarily a disagreeable one. Jean”--his quizzical glance raked her face suddenly--“how would you like to go to England?”

“To England?”

Her tone held the same incredulous excitement that anyone unexpectedly invited to week-end at El Dorado might be expected to evince.

“_England!_ Glyn, do you really mean to take me there at last?”

“You’d like to go then?” A keen observer might have noticed a shade of relief pass over Peterson’s face.

“Like it? It’s the one thing above all others that I’ve longed for. It seems so ridiculous to be an Englishwoman and yet never once to have set foot in England.”

The man’s eyes clouded.

“You’re not--entirely--English,” he said in a low voice. Jean knew from what memory the quick correction sprang. Her mother, the beautiful opera singer who had been the one romance of Glyn Peterson’s life, had been of French extraction.

“I know,” she returned soberly. “Yet I think I’m mostly conscious of being English. I believe it’s just the very fact that I know Paris--Rome--Vienna--so well, and nothing at all about England, that makes me feel more absolutely English than anything else.”

A spark of amusement lit itself in Peterson’s eyes.

“How truly feminine!” he commented drily.

Jean nodded.

“I’m afraid it’s rather illogical of me.”

Her father blew a thin stream of smoke into the air.

“Thank God for it!” he replied lightly. “It’s the cussed contradictoriness of your sex that makes it so enchanting. If women were logical they would be as obvious and boring as the average man.”

He relapsed into a dreaming silence. Jean broke it rather hesitatingly.

“You’ve never suggested taking me to England before.”

His face darkened suddenly. It was an extraordinarily expressive face--expressive as a child’s, reflecting every shade of his constant changes of mood.

“There’s no sense of adventure about England,” he said shortly. “It’s a dull corner of the world--bristling with the proprieties.”

Jean realised how very completely, from his own point of view, he had answered her. Romance, beauty, the sheer delight of utter freedom from the conventions were as the breath of his nostrils to Glyn Peterson.

Born to the purple, as it were, of an old English county family, he had stifled in the conventional atmosphere of his upbringing. There had been moments of wild rebellion, bitter outbursts against the established order of things, but these had been sedulously checked and discouraged by his father, a man of iron will, who took himself and his position intensely seriously.

Ultimately, Glyn had come to accept with more or less philosophy the fact of his heirship to old estates and old traditions, with their inevitable responsibilities and claims, and he was just preparing to fulfill his parents’ wishes by marrying, suitably and conventionally, when Jacqueline Mavory, the beautiful half-French opera singer, had flashed into his horizon.

In a moment the world was transformed. Artist soul called to artist soul; the romantic vein in the man, so long checked and thwarted, suddenly asserted itself irresistibly, and the very day before that appointed for his wedding, he and Jacqueline ran away together in search of happiness.

And they had found it. The “County” had been shocked; Glyn’s father, unbending descendant of the old Scottish Covenanters, his whole creed outraged, had broken under the blow; but the runaway lovers had found what they sought.

At Beirnfels, a beautiful old schloss on the eastern border of Austria, remote from the world and surrounded by forest-clad hills, Glyn Peterson and Jacqueline had lived a romantically happy existence, roaming the world whenever the wander-fever seized them, but always returning to Schloss Beirnfels, where Peterson had contrived a background of almost exotic richness for the adored woman who had flung her career to the winds in order to become his wife.

The birth of Jean, two years after their marriage, had been frankly regarded by both of them as an inconvenience. It interrupted their idyll. They were so essentially lovers that no third--not even a third born of love’s consummation--could be other than superfluous.