195. Moon Over Eden by Barbara Cartland

Author:Barbara Cartland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788670692
Publisher: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
Published: 2018-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Dominica lay awake thinking over what had happened during the day.

She had been tired when she came to bed, but she had been unable to sleep.

She found herself shrinking from the thought of Gerald Warren and, while she knew in her heart that she could never marry him, she dared not express such a decision in words.

The difficulty would be how to explain it to Lord Hawkston.

She had quite confidently believed that Gerald would look very like his uncle and she had repeated to herself over and over again Lord Hawkston’s description of him as tall and good-looking.

When she had seen the fat red-faced man waiting for them in the hall, she had not at first realised that this was in fact the man she had come to meet, the man she had promised to marry without having seen him.

She had been far too astute not to notice the amount of whisky that Gerald consumed during the evening.

She told herself that her father’s denunciation of alcohol of all sorts was one of his obsessions and that gentlemen like Lord Hawkston drank wine with their meals as a matter of course.

But Gerald Warren smelt of spirits and, as she saw the tumbler at his right hand being filled again and again by the servants, she knew without being told that he was drinking far too much and that this must account for his appearance.

Besides this, when she was alone in the darkness of her room, the horror of Seetha’s death swept over her so that it was difficult to think of anything else.

Dominica loved the Ceylonese women for their gentleness, their sweet natures, their friendliness and the loving childlike trust they had in those they served.

She had real friends amongst those women who attended her father’s Church, many of whom came to her with their problems and she knew them intimately.

She could imagine all too vividly Seetha being impressed by Gerald Warren because of his position, because of the fine house he lived in and which must have seemed to her to be luxurious beyond her wildest dreams.

Perhaps, Dominica told herself, she had loved him also with her heart whatever Lord Hawkston might say to the contrary.

Because she knew the people so well she was aware that a Ceylonese peasant who lived in the hill country was a gentleman with a philosophy of life that he was not prepared to barter for material prosperity.

If hunger made it imperative for him to work, he did so and he did it well since he was both skilled and intelligent.

But he preferred to be poor and his own Master rather than rich and at the beck and call of someone else.

Dominica had talked with the women who had come with their husbands into Colombo from many of the outlying provinces, so she knew that the Ceylonese had never become reconciled to the subjugation of their beautiful mountains to the needs of an alien agriculture.

They tried to stand aloof from both the coffee and

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