Unknown (19 page)

“Other people talk,” Gemma pointed out. “Also they think. They think things they should never think. Like—Chris and me.”

“I know. I know. But I could have killed you that day. You were tender with him, but for me you had only snarls.”

“You couldn’t have believed—” Gemma began.

“I didn’t. Not really. But I tried to make myself. This wretched girl, I told myself, what’s she playing me for?”

“Does anyone ever play you for anything?” Gemma disbelieved.

“Yes. Society, so-called, does. The nice, the oh-so-nice society you were engaged into, they played me as ruthless, forthright, greedy, overbearing—”

“Presumptuous, spiteful,” finished Gemma. Bruce, she remembered, had used exactly those words.

“Well?” he asked. “Is it true?”

“You are forthright,” she pointed out.

“Standing back would never gain me twenty trains, more than that of trucks, plus a fleet of little beetles to run up and down the Bitumen as trouble-shooters.”

“Do you have to tabulate everything?” she said crossly.

“I just want you to know what you’re getting, or” ... at a frozen look in Gemma’s face . . . “what you’re turning down.”

“Presumptuous,” she chose next.

"Why not? Why shouldn’t I presume I’m going to win you where others failed.”

“You’re impossible! I think it’s really only achievement for you. Something to cap the Mannerings. Something to notch on your belt.”

"And,” he said quietly, “to notch on my heart. I love you, Gemma. I loved you the moment I brought a helpless calf to you and saw, in spite of your dismay, all the love in you that was waiting there. I had love in me myself, waiting, longing for an outlet. But it had to be for the right one, for a gem in a box. I knew it right then.”

“Knew what?”

“Us, of course.”

“But you couldn’t have known.”

“I knew',” he said obstinately. “Now stay there. Don’t move. There’ll be cars coming through.” He ran back and lighted the road train.

When he returned he was still empty-armed. She asked where was the passenger he had asked her to take.

“Not born yet,” he grinned. “I checked.”

“But you said—”

“Yes, I said, but I wanted to shock you. ‘Not all this again!’ I wanted to hear you say.” He opened the door and got in.

“You can have your—our—home anywhere you like,” he told her magnanimously. “It doesn’t matter. You won't be in it much, anyway. You’ll be out on the road with me, aloft in a safe eyrie, no one to break the fortress, and outside there’ll be star shadows on the good earth.”

“Star shadows are at night,” Gemma said softly. “So will we be there at night.”

He waited, then added: “In each other’s arms.”

A few moments went by, Gemma still dumbfounded.

“Hannah,” he went on, “will look after our town house for us while we’re gone. I’ve promised her that already. She’s very pleased.”

“You
promised her?” Gemma gasped.

“Yes.”

“But how did you know ... how could you ... well, how could you be so certain?”

“If persuasion failed,” he said frankly, “I intended blackmail. I meant to tell a little story of a night in The Alice.”

“But nothing happened in Alice?”

He looked at her implacably, then he said:

“It did, you know, in my heart.”

She was half laughing, half crying. What a man, what a mad, crazy man!

“Yet successful, too,” he reminded her.

“How do you know what I’m thinking? How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

“I just know with you. I knew something, too, that day when I saw you ahead of me going up the Bitumen, and I decided if there wasn’t a blessed event to put me in your picture, I’d get in that picture all the same.”

“How?”

“By throwing myself in front of you. Or by pleading thirty-six flat tyres. Or by leaning over and kissing you.”

Which Tim did now.

"I’m twenty-six,” Gemma said disbelievingly. It couldn’t be like this at twenty-six, she thought, not achingly sweet, not beautifully crazy, not unbelievable like this.

“I’m thirty-eight,” he replied.

“But you don’t understand. At twenty-six you don’t have rainbows. You don’t stand on tiptoe. There’s no cloud nine. And you’re not swept.”

“Aren’t you?” he said, and he swept her to him and kissed her again.

There was triumph in his eyes, but there was also tenderness. There was conquest ended, but there was also adventure beginning.

He was pulling up the slender chain, touching the warmth of it and smiling at her for where she had put it. He was slipping the ring on her finger. Then—

There was a movement in the train, in the second articulation of the train, a bellow, a disturbance. The Territorian was out of Gemma’s car in a flash . . . coming back before Gemma could follow what he was doing.

He carried a calf with him. Two sticky calf ears, soft and peaked and covered with downy gold hair and with insides of pink plush. A bewildered expression. An india-rubber nose.

“A bull calf,” he told Gemma, “and that, for the
un
-future Mrs. Mannering, means that our second born is a boy.

“Mind him now, sweetest” . . . sweetest! . . . “of else he’ll be trampled on. I’ll pick him up when I meet you at The Alice.

“And Gem-in-my-box, while you mind him, mind my heart.”

Gemma nodded, and found words at last.

She corrected:

“Our heart.”