The House of Dreams-Come-True. Margaret Pedler
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.
They had proceeded to shift the new responsibility with characteristic lightheartedness. A small army of nursemaids and governesses was engaged, and later, when Jean was old enough, she was despatched to one of the best Continental schools, whilst her parents continued their customary happy-go-lucky existence uninterruptedly. During the holidays she shared their wanderings, and Egypt and the southern coast of Europe became familiar places to her.
At the age of seventeen, Jean came home to live at Beirnfels, thenceforward regarding her unpractical parents with a species of kindly tolerance and amusement. The three of them had lived quite happily together, though Jean had remained always the odd man out; but she had accepted the fact with a certain humorous philosophy which robbed it of half its sting.
Then, two years later, Jacqueline had developed rapid consumption, and though Glyn hurried her away to Montavan, in the Swiss Alps, there had been no combating the disease, and the romance of a great love had closed down suddenly into the grey shadows of death.
Peterson had been like a man demented. For a time he had disappeared, and no one ever knew, either then or later, how he had first faced the grim tragedy which had overtaken him.
Jean had patiently awaited his return to Beirnfels. When at last he came, he told her that it was the most beautiful thing which could have happened—that Jacqueline should, have died in the zenith of their love.
“We never knew the downward swing of the pendulum,” he explained. “And when we meet again it will be as young lovers who have never grown tired. I shall always remember Jacqueline as still perfectly beautiful—never insulted by old age. And when she thinks of me—well, I’m still a ‘personable’ fellow, as they say——”
“My dear Glyn, you’re still a boy! You’ve never grown up,” Jean made answer. To her he seemed a sort of Peter Pan among men.
She had been amazed—although in a sense relieved—to find how