Marianne and the Privateer

'Yes, he has,' Jason agreed placidly, 'but I wished to hear it from your own lips. The first thing he told me was that there was a letter waiting for me with Patterson in Nantes – where I did not put in because I was being chased by an English privateer and was obliged to run to avoid a fight.'

'You! Avoid a fight?'

'The United States are not at war with England. But I'm sorry now I didn't go about and sink that Englishman and then put in to Nantes. It would have made a world of difference. I'm regretting my law-abiding impulse more than you can think.'

He turned and, like Fortunée a little while before, walked slowly over to the window. His broad shoulders and clear-cut profile were etched against the green, leafy garden outside. Marianne held her breath, overwhelmed by a delicious anguish at the real anger she now heard in his voice.

'You are sorry you did not receive the letter? Does – does that mean you would have done what I asked of you?'

In three steps he was at her side, on his knees by her bed, her two hands locked fast in his.

'And you?' he asked eagerly. 'Would you have honoured your pledge to me? Would you have gone with me? Left everything? You would really have become my wife, meaning it, with no regrets?'

Marianne gazed wonderingly into his eyes, searching for confirmation of the truth of what she already knew yet scarcely dared to believe.

'With no regrets, Jason. With a happiness I have only been fully aware of myself for a little while. You will never know how I waited for you… to the last moment, Jason, to the very last moment. And when it was too late—'

'Stop!'

His face was buried in the white sheets and Marianne felt his lips warm on her hand. Gently, half-tremblingly, she laid her free hand on the mariner's thick, black hair, lightly caressing the unruly curls and happy in this sudden display of weakness in him, the iron man, happier still in the knowledge that his confusion was as great as her own.

'You see now,' she said softly, 'why it was I wished to die the other night. When I saw you with—Oh, Jason! Jason! Why did you marry?'

As abruptly as he had come to her, he rose and tore himself away, not looking at her.

'I believed that I had lost you for ever,' he said grimly. 'There is no opposing Napoleon, least of all when he loves. And I knew that he did love you. As for Pilar… she needed my help. Her life was in danger. Her father, Don Agostino, made no secret of his American sympathies. When he died, some weeks ago, the Spanish governor of Fernandina immediately turned on Pilar who was his sole heiress. He sequestrated her lands and she was on the point of being thrown into prison with little hope of release. The one way to save her and to keep her safe was to make her an American citizen. I married her.'

'Was it necessary for you to go to such lengths? Surely you could have taken her to your own country and established her respectably there, under your eye?'

Jason shrugged. 'She is a Spaniard. Things would have been rather more awkward than that. And I owed a great deal to her father. When my own parents died, Don Agostino was the one person who came to my assistance. I have known Pilar all her life.'

'And, naturally, she has loved you all her life?'

'I think so… yes.'

Marianne was silent. Dazzled by the revelation of her own love, she was only just beginning to discover that she knew hardly anything of Jason Beaufort's life before that autumn afternoon when he had walked into the drawing-room at Selton Hall. He had lived so many years without her, unaware of her very existence! Until that moment, she had thought of Jason only in relation to herself, to the part he played in her own life but before that, away in that distant, vast and, to Marianne, mysterious and vaguely frightening country of his, he had formed other ties of his own and beaten out a path for himself. His memory was full of scenes in which she, Marianne, had never figured, of faces she had never seen yet which aroused in Jason feelings that might vary from hatred to love. That world, or some of it, was Pilar's also. To her, it was familiar, she was at home there and their common experience must have woven between her and Jason one of those bonds which, derived from the same tastes and the same memories, often proved stronger and more enduring than the flamboyant chains of passion. All these thoughts were in Marianne's mind as she said in a small, unhappy voice: 'I love you, yet I do not know you at all.'

'I feel as if I had known you always,' he answered quickly, devouring her with haggard eyes. 'But what is the use? We let go the moment when fate decreed our paths should cross. Now it is too late.'

'Why should it be too late?' Rebellion jerked Marianne out of her natural reserve. 'You do not love this Pilar. You said so.'

'No more than you love the man whose name you have taken, but the fact remains: you bear his name, just as Pilar bears mine. I am no moralist, God knows, and I must be the last person on earth to preach morality to you, but, Marianne, we have no choice. We cannot abandon those who have trusted us. We have no right to make them suffer.'

'I see,' Marianne said. 'She is jealous…'

'She is a Spaniard. She knows I am not in love with her but she does expect respect, some affection, that I will preserve at least the outward appearance of a contented, if not a loving marriage.'

There was silence again, a silence occupied by Marianne in examining what Jason had just said. Her joy of a moment before evaporated before harsh reality. An adventurer Jason might be, equal to any risks, bold enough for anything, but one thing he would not do, and Marianne knew it: he would never deal dishonestly with himself, and he would expect the woman he loved to show the same strength. There was no arguing with such determination. Marianne sighed:

'I see. Then you have come to say good-bye. I suppose you are leaving. Your wife did not appear to care for it here.'

A glint of laughter shone briefly in the American's eyes. 'She finds the women too pretty and too bold. She trusts me, naturally, but when I am not with her, she would rather have me at sea than in a salon. We remain for another fortnight. A friend of my father's, Baguenault, the banker, has offered us the use of a place at Passy – a charming house in the rue de Seine set in extensive grounds. It belonged once to a friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Pilar is happy enough there so long as she need not go out and I still have some business to settle. Then we return to America. My ship is waiting at Morlaix…'

His tone had resumed its ordinary, conversational level and Marianne, sinking back in her lacy nest, gave a small, regretful sigh. The passionate outburst of a moment ago had been suppressed by the iron force of Jason's will, most probably never to be reborn. That will divided them as surely as all the width of the vast ocean which would soon lie between them. The vessel which had sometimes haunted her dreams would sail with another woman on board. Something was coming to an end before it had even begun and Marianne knew suddenly that she could not long hold back her tears. She closed her eyes for an instant and gritted her teeth, then she took a deep breath and said at last: 'Well then… let us say good-bye now, Jason. I wish you… every happiness.'

He had risen but still stood, staring fixedly at the floor, without looking at her.

'I do not ask for that,' he said, more harshly than perhaps he meant. 'Wish me peace of mind, that will do very well. And for you—'

'No. For pity's sake wish me nothing.'

He turned and walked to the door. Marianne's eyes followed his tall figure helplessly. He was going, going out of her life, back to the world of Pilar, when the sum of their common memories was still so slight. She was seized by a kind of panic and as he laid his hand on the door handle was powerless to stop herself crying out:

'Jason!'

Slowly, very slowly, the blue eyes came back to her, filled with such weariness that Marianne was deeply shaken. At that moment, Jason seemed to have grown much older.