“Unice,” she said in a voice of strict control, “do not encourage him in this theme, I beg of you. If it was true — if he did indeed entertain such feelings for me, it could only lead to his unhappiness.”
“I don’t believe you mean that, Verena,” Unice said. “If you wish to know what I really think, it is that you care more for Denzell than you dare to say.”
A flare of emotion ripped through Verena. An emotion she did not recognise. She felt her own trembling and a bursting in her chest. But the little corner of coherent thought that still remained urged her to refute this impossible idea. She thrust the words up through a throat that seemed to rasp at every sound.
“You would wish to imply that I amin lovewith him, is that it?”
“Yes, Verena, yes!”
A harsh sound that might have been a laugh escaped Verena’s lips. “How little you know, Unice.”
She rose from the chair, pushing herself to the window and staring out at the green of the trees and the way the sun dappled through their leaves to fall in uneven shadows on the ground below. The rough passage of feeling that had torn through her but a moment before was subsiding. A hollowness was descending upon her chest. That emptiness she knew she could never fill. Never — because Nathaniel had forever closed the doors on the possibility.
“I have no heart with which to love,” she said into the glass of the window, her tone bleak.
“That cannot be true,” cried Unice on a note of distress. “You have such warmth, Verena. You proved that the night my Julia was born.”
Verena turned slowly, and all the tortured past was reflected in her countenance for Unice to see.
“Look at me, Unice. Is this an object for devotion? I have grown too cold, too hard — toobitter. I cannot love — and I cannot bear tobeloved.” She saw doubt and concern in Unice’s face, and dredged up a faint smile. “You would do better to advise Denzell to forget me, than to try to win me to his heart.”
There was a moment of bleak silence. Then all at once, Unice shook her head, rising to face her.
“No! No, I won’t believe it. You speak as if you are past redemption, past all change. That cannot be. You are young, Verena.”
Verena sighed. “I feel a hundred today.” She moved a little and reached for Unice’s hands. “Pray give it up, Unice. Even were it possible — were I changeable as you insist — there is no power on earth that would persuade me to leave Mama.”
Unice returned the pressure of her hands. “I understand, my dear. But surely, when your Mama is well again, when she returns home…”
Verena dropped her hands, turning away. “She will never return home.”
“But Verena, you don’t mean that you intend — Lord above, you cannot devote your entire life to your mother.”
“But I will,” said Verena fiercely, turning on her. “I had rather lose ten thousand chances of happiness than see Mama endangered yet again.”
“Endangered?” echoed Unice, blinking at her. “I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t understand. Why should you?Lovein your world, Unice, is all sweetness and light, but I know better.”
Unice shrugged. “Verena, what is this? You speak of love as of some monstrous thing.”
Verena’s eyes filled. It was too much. She could no longer keep silent, not with the danger so close, with Nathaniel practically on the doorstep.
“Monstrous, yes.” Her voice grated on the word. Then, instinctively, it softened as she let it out at last. “Oh, Unice, if you had heard, as I have from a child, the cries of fear and pain, the blows falling, and then seen, when at last you dared to enter where you had no right, the piteous bruises that disfigured that once lovely face, then — oh, then, Unice, you would not talk to me oflove!”
“After that,” Unice said, ending her tale in a depressed manner, “she would say nothing more.”
“Dash it, Unice,” protested her spouse, pushing himself up on his elbow where he lay on the grass under the chestnut tree in the Ruishtons’ garden, whither he and Denzell had repaired in the morning heat to await Unice’s return and hear her report.They had both discarded their frock-coats, and were lounging in shirt-sleeves. “She can’t have left the matter there.”
“Can’t she?” said Denzell, moodily throwing twigs across the lawn. “You don’t know how close she is.”
He was seated with his back against the tree trunk, his legs outstretched and crossed before him, his hat thrown to one side with his coat, and his long fair hair untidily ruffled from its contact with the bark behind him.
He had listened to Unice’s account with a heart growing heavier by the minute. He had wanted to know what it was that caused Verena’s barriers. There could be no doubting the meaning of the little Verena had told Unice, but its portent did nothing to uplift his spirits.
His first reaction had been one of intense compassion — both for Verena’s mama, and for Verena herself to have borne witness to the cruelties of which she spoke. Then followed the inevitable realisation of a Herculean task: how to persuade Verena that all men did not beat their wives.
Small wonder she was afraid. Everything she was under that cool veneer had been crushed by a fear so intense he doubted his ability to assuage any part of it. Even would she permit him the smallest opportunity to make the attempt — which of course she would not.
