Mine for a Day Read online

  “Oh, Leila, a little rearrangement of the truth!”

  “—for the very unworthy reason that you want to have fun with one admirer, just a week before you marry another. Can’t you see it’s impossible?”

  “Darling, don’t be so moral and so easily shocked. You make my conscience come out in goose pimples when you talk like that,” Rosemary declared with a laugh. “If you don’t want to do it—there’s an end of it. No one is pressing you.”

  And she appeared to dismiss the incident with a careless good nature which made Leila feel a little as though she had stepped on a stair that wasn’t there.

  Indeed, afterwards, when she thought about it, she wondered if she had sounded ridiculously smug and virtuous. But she was not inclined to waste much thought on that. She was too much absorbed in the overwhelming fact that this evening would probably be the last time she would see Simon before his wedding day.

  He came early and, because Rosemary was not yet ready, and her uncle and aunt were busy on affairs of their own, it fell to Leila to greet him and talk to him in the first quarter of an hour.

  They had always been on easy, though not specially intimate, terms. But Leila was glad that on this occasion she had some definite topic to discuss with him. She enquired after his mother immediately and, in concentrating on just the right degree of friendly sympathy, she found it easier to control and steady her own feelings.

  “She’s very ill, Leila.” Simon gave a quick sigh and frowned slightly. “I wish I could have gone to her today, but it was impossible.”

  “Was she expecting you today?”

  “Oh, no. Not expecting. In fact she probably doesn’t even know that my sister sent for me. Her idea would have been to keep from me anything which might spoil my wedding. She is like that.”

  He walked over to the window restlessly, his hands thrust into his pockets, and for a moment he leant against the side of the shutter and stared out into the garden as though he had forgotten Leila’s presence.

  “I’m so very sorry.” Leila stood at a little distance from him, wishing that she had the right to go to him and put her arms round him. “I know how terrible it is to love one’s parents very much and have to be anxious about them.”

  He looked at her then, his glance softening in one of those quick and complete changes of expression which transformed his face.

  “Poor child!” He held out his hand to her, in an unselfconscious and instinctive impulse to communicate and receive comfort by the simplest of all means. “I remember—Rosemary told me. You lost both your parents less than a year ago, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” She went to him and put her hand in his, indescribably touched by the gesture, and hardly knowing if the feel of his strong, warm fingers round hers gave her more pleasure or pain.

  For a moment they stood there, side by side, in silence, in a mood of completely shared sympathy and understanding. Then he gave her hand a slight squeeze and let it go, before he said, in his normal, energetic tone of voice:

  “Not that I want to accentuate the anxiety. Frances—my sister—said there was little immediate danger. But probably there will have to an operation, and her heart isn’t too good.”

  Leila started to say something else encouraging. Then she saw the expression in his keen, dark eyes change once more. Rosemary’s voice was heard in the hall, and his attention, which had been all Leila’s until that moment, was switched off like a light.

  He went eagerly, forward, as Rosemary came in, with a gay, remorseful:

  “Hello, darling. Have I kept you?”

  It was an evening like many others that Leila had spent during the last few weeks. Though Rosemary and Simon had an acknowledged prior claim on each other, they spent more than half the evening with the rest of the family, discussing and settling final details, which had become the more urgent since Simon might not be available again until just before the wedding. Leila talked to him, looked at him, listened to him, as she had on many previous occasions. Only this time she could not altogether suppress the thought—

  “This, in a sense, is the last time.”

  No one in the house, she was certain, had the remotest idea how she felt about Simon—much less Simon himself. And that was all the comfort she could take to bed with her, when she went finally to her own room. That, and the remembered feel of her hand in his.

  During the next, busy days, Leila contrived somehow to keep her own feelings just below the level of her consciousness. She half dragged herself with work and details of organization, and a rigidly determined absorption in anything but her own personal feelings.

  It was no wonder that her aunt said, more than once:

  “I don’t know what I should have done without you, Leila! You really are a good girl, the way you’re ready to take almost everything off my shoulders.”

  “I like doing it, Auntie,” Leila assured her. And wondered if any girl before had ever worked so hard to marry the man she loved to someone else.

  Rosemary, the heroine and centre of all this, drifted in and out from time to time, smiled charmingly on everyone, said how good and sweet Leila and her mother were, and seemed willing to let them make all the decisions.

  It was as though she were in some world of her own, and when she spoke to them and smiled at them, her mind and spirit were elsewhere. A not entirely inexplicable condition in a bride whose future husband had been snatched away from her, of course. But, somehow, Leila didn’t believe that thoughts of Simon accounted for Rosemary’s dreamy remoteness. For when she spoke of him—which she did quite often—it was with the same faintly detached air that she used towards her family.

  Aunt Hester, too, was evidently not without her puzzled impressions, because she said sharply, when only two or three days divided them from the wedding day:

  “My dear child, it is your wedding, you know! Sometimes you behave as though you aren’t expecting to be married at all on Wednesday.”

  Rosemary bit her lip and, for a moment, a look of such unwanted distress came into her face that Leila’s heart melted.

  “It’s a difficult time for her, with Simon away, Auntie,” she exclaimed a little protectively.

  Rosemary flashed an endearing smile at her.

  “Dear Leila always makes excuses for me,” she said, and putting her arm round her cousin she suddenly pressed her warm cheek against Leila’s in a most unusual gesture of affection. “Sorry, Mother. It’s tiresome of me, I know. But it won’t be long now before—everything is settled.”

  Leila wondered if she fancied that faint hesitation before the last three words, and whether her aunt was entirely satisfied with this way of describing a happily planned marriage. Then she told herself not to be fanciful.

  During the weekend Simon wrote to say that he would be back in Durominster by Tuesday.

  “I should think so, indeed!” Aunt Hester exclaimed, when Rosemary read out this information at the breakfast table on Monday. “Even that doesn’t give him a clear day before the wedding.”

  “There’s never very much for the bridegroom to do, except get in the way, just before a wedding,” Leila reminded her consolingly.

  While Rosemary simply smiled a little absently and said nothing.

  “How can she be so calm about his coming?” Leila thought, her own heart beating faster at the realization that she would see Simon again tomorrow. But she could not be impatient with her cousin that day, because Rosemary seemed to seek her out and to draw some sort of needed reassurance from her company.

  It was such an unusual thing for Rosemary to require any sort of reassurance from anyone that Leila was puzzled and touched. She was probably only suffering from natural, pre-wedding nerves at the moment, but instinctively Leila took pains to show all her very real affection for her, as though she felt Rosemary might need it. And her young cousin responded with a demonstrativeness which Leila had hardly expected.

  Indeed, that evening she came to Leila’s room to say good night to her, and sat
on the bed and talked for a while. Mostly of the times when they had been children together—and of occasions when Leila’s good sense had saved her from scrapes.

  “I didn’t know you remembered so much,” Leila declared, with a laugh. “I’d forgotten most of this myself, until you reminded me.”

  “I only remembered rather lately,” Rosemary admitted. “But you’ve been so good to me during the last weeks, Leila. I guess that reminded me that this wasn’t the first time. But I want you to know—and remember—that I appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

  “Dear, I know you do!” Leila was vaguely disturbed that the usually flighty Rosemary should talk like this.

  “Don’t make so much of it.” And, on a sudden impulse, she reached out and took her cousin’s hand. “There isn’t anything—wrong, is there?”

  “No, of course not!” All at once Rosemary laughed, and was herself again. “I didn’t mean to get all solemn. Only—I wanted to say that. And now I’m going, and you can go to sleep at last.”

  She kissed Leila lightly then and went away. But even after she had gone, to the sound of that reassuring little laugh, Leila lay awake, unable to banish the vague sense of worry. She had expected to fill her thoughts of Simon, on this night before his return. But it was Rosemary who thrust her way to the front of her consciousness, and Rosemary who followed her into her somewhat troubled dreams when she slept.

  Like most dreams, they had nothing very clearly defined about them. Only Leila was conscious of a sense of foreboding—and always in connection with Rosemary—as though some danger were coming near.

  Indeed, the idea of approaching danger was so clear that at last she actually woke up, with the unpleasant sensation that someone was in the room, or had only just left it.

  As she looked rather fearfully round the moonlit room—quite empty except for herself—the thumping of her heart subsided, however, and she dropped back on the pillows again, telling herself that she was absurd to frighten herself with her own imaginings.

  When she woke once more, the September sunlight was pouring into the room, and she lay for a few minutes, drowsy and relaxed. Then she recalled her scare of the night before, and smiled a little as her sleepy gaze travelled once more over the room, so bright and reassuring now in the morning light. One had such preposterous ideas in the middle of the night! By daylight—

  Leila’s thoughts and glance came to a simultaneous stop, both of them focusing wonderingly on the alien object propped against the dressing-table mirror.

  That letter had not been there last night when she had put out the light.

  She jumped out of bed and ran across the room, the vague misgiving of the night before suddenly returning in full force. Standing there in a long shaft of sunlight from the window, she tore the single sheet of paper from its envelope and began to read. At a glance she had recognized Rosemary’s round, rather schoolgirlish hand writing, and the very first sentence drove the colour from her cheeks.

  Dear Leila [the letter informed her quite simply],

  I can’t marry Simon after all, and I’m going on with Jeremy. When you get this, I shall be on my way to London where I’m going to be married to him. I know it’s not the right way to break off an engagement, and I’m very sorry to hurt Simon like this. But it would be worse if I went on with the marriage and made us all unhappy.

  You’ve been so sweet about everything in the last few weeks—just as you always have, really—and I want you to do something very difficult for me, Leila. I quite admit I’m a coward not to be able to do it myself, but I couldn’t face all the reproaches and fuss there would be. Please explain to Mother and Daddy, and tell them that I’m really happy with Jeremy, and I’ll get in touch with them as soon as everything is satisfactorily settled. And then [Leila turned over the sheet, with gathering dismay, fatally sure of the next sentence even before she read it] will you tell Simon for me? He’ll take it better from you than from Mother. She’d be so upset and emotional. These things always come best from a stranger. And, though of course you and Simon aren’t strangers, you aren’t anything to each other, whereas I suppose he looks on Mother almost as a relation.

  I’m dreadfully sorry about all this, but it was the only thing to do. And when all the fuss is over, life will go on quite normally again. One just has to remember that. Thank you most awfully, Leila, for doing this for me. You’ll do it better than anyone else. My love to you, and you must come and see Jeremy and me when all the upset is over.

  Rosemary.

  Leila sat down slowly on the side of her bed, curling a corner of the letter nervously in her hand. And the sensation that was uppermost in her shocked mind was now surprise that she had not seen what was coming.

  Why had she not realized that Rosemary’s absences and generally absorbed air could only be explained by interest in another man? Why, she had even told Leila of Jeremy’s presence. And for an angry, remorseful moment, Leila wondered if she had herself contributed to the danger of the situation by so emphatically rejecting any idea of Rosemary meeting Jeremy in the safer atmosphere of her own home.

  “But how could I know she would do this?” Leila exclaimed out loud. And her gaze dropped again to the letter in her hand, and odd phrases started out at her once more. “I couldn’t face all the reproaches and fuss...” “I’ll get in touch with them as soon as everything is satisfactorily settled...” “when all the fuss is over...” “when all the upset is over...

  Alas, that had always been charming Rosemary’s way! She created this appalling situation, she appealed to her cousin to handle it for her. And “when all the fuss was over,” she would drift back into the picture and, in her own optimistic phrase, life would go on quite normally again.

  Leila knew she ought to feel very angry with her cousin. Indeed, she did feel very angry with her when she thought of the hurt she was inflicting on Simon. But she also felt pity and alarm for her. What sort of mistake might she not have made over this Jeremy? “If I hadn’t been so absorbed in my own affairs—”

  But she had been absorbed in them. .And there was no reproach to her in that. There was her life to live, as well as Rosemary’s.

  And suddenly it came fully home to Leila, with all the force of a delayed shock, how vitally this action of her cousin’s would affect her own affairs.

  Simon was not to be married tomorrow after all. But—and the second realization was more than enough to check any wild uprush of happiness she might have experienced—he was to receive the kind of blow that would make him regard with distaste, and even repulsion, everyone connected with it.

  “I can’t tell him—I won’t,” Leila exclaimed. She was beginning to dress now, almost without knowing it. “Aunt Hester will have to do it. I’ll tell Aunt Hester, and then she must tell him. I’m sorry, and it’s a horrible task for her, too. But I can’t do it. Why should I? It’s not fair. Why should I make him hate me?”

  She knew she was not arguing very coherently with herself. But she didn’t feel very coherent. It was going to be bad enough to have to tell her uncle and aunt. But tell Simon she would not.

  Not until she was dressed and ready to go downstairs did Leila realize that she had got up an hour earlier than usual.

  In the kitchen, Doris, Aunt Hester’s maid, was already at work, singing “I’m in love with you” in a rather subdued way and with a certain disregard for key.

  She looked surprised as Leila came in, and broke off her somewhat doleful statement of love to say: “You’re early, Miss Leila.”

  “Yes. I—I woke early. It seemed too beautiful a day to stay in bed.”

  Doris nodded.

  “If it’s like this tomorrow, Miss Rosemary won’t have cause to complain. Happy the bride that the sun shines on,” quoted Doris with relish.

  “Ye-es,” Leila agreed, feeling a fraud, but not quite knowing how to deal with this small initial difficulty. “Can I help you, Doris?”

  “No, thank you, miss. I have my method,” explained Doris
, who had. “But you might go and cut some flowers, if you like. We’ll need some for the sitting-room.”

  So Leila went into the garden, where the dew was already drying from the grass and flowers, and she wandered about and picked a few flowers at random, and wondered how she was going to break the news to Aunt Hester.

  Then she experienced sudden panic in case her aunt should go to Rosemary’s room for any reason and discover signs of the night before she had been prepared. She turned to retrace her steps.

  As she did so, Doris opened the side door which led into the garden and called:

  “Here’s an early visitor, Miss Leila. I’ve told him you’re the only one up.”

  Then she stood aside, and Simon came out of the doorway and along the garden path towards Leila.

  CHAPTER II

  LEILA was ashamed to remember afterwards that, in a moment of unreasoning panic, she quite literally turned to run away. But common sense reasserted itself almost at once, and she knew she could not do anything so foolish.

  So she stood there, waiting for him to come up to her. And as he came, she saw suddenly how tired and strained he looked, and she remembered that she was not the only one with troubles.

  “Oh, Simon,” she exclaimed impulsively, “is it bad news?”

  “It isn’t good,” he replied briefly. “Where’s Rosemary?”

  She stared at him in silent dismay. But he was too preoccupied to see that anything was wrong, and almost immediately answered his own question.

  “Of course—Doris told me. You’re the only one who is up. I’m glad, Leila. I want a word with you first. You’re so practical and understanding.”

  She allowed herself a modified glow of pleasure over that, in spite of everything. Then she said: