Daisy's Aunt

Jeannie was prowling up and down the room rather in the manner of some restless caged thing. In spite of her tiredness and her disquietude, it seemed to Lady Nottingham that she had never seen her look so beautiful. She looked neither kind nor genial nor sympathetic, but for sheer beauty, though rather formidable, there were no two words to it.

"Sit down, Jeannie," said Alice quietly. "You are only exciting yourself. And tell me about it all. I understand nothing, it seems."

Jeannie paused a moment in her walk, and then fell to pacing the room again.

"No, I'm not exciting myself," she said, "but it is exciting me. I don't stir myself up by walking; I am merely attempting, not very successfully, to walk my excitement off. Oh, Alice, what wild beasts we are at bottom! Prey! Prey! Prey! It is one of the instincts that we – you and I, nice women – are rarely conscious of; but I doubt whether it is ever quite dormant. Yes, that comes later; I will explain from the beginning.

"The beginning of it all was easy," she said. "It is perfectly easy for any woman to capture the attention of a man like that, even when he is seriously thinking of getting married to a girl. There was no difficulty in making him take me to the concert, in making him neglect Daisy those first two days. He liked me immensely, and, oh! Alice, here was the first extra difficulty, I liked him. We became friends. We mentioned the word friend openly as applied to us. And I felt like – like a man who gets a wild bird to sit on his hand and eat out of it, in order to grab it, and if not to wring its neck, to put it into a cage. I meant to put him into a cage, shut the door, and go away. And then yesterday afternoon in the punt, just after we had made our discovery that we were friends, he confided in me. He told me he was going to settle down and marry! Judge of my rage, my disappointment! I saw that all my efforts up till then had been quite useless. He was still meaning to marry, and, as was right, poor dear, he told the news to his friend. Daisy's name did not come in. Something made us break off – a flash of lightning, I think, and the beginning of the storm. I should have found something to divert the conversation otherwise. It was much better, in view of what I have to do, that I should not officially know to whom he hoped to be married."

Already the calming effect of telling a trouble to a friend was being felt by Jeannie, and she sat down on the sofa near the window, clasping her hands behind her head, and looking not at Alice, but into the dark soft night. A little rain was falling, hissing among the bushes.

"I saw then," she said, "that I had made a stupid mistake. I had thought that by mere friendliness and sympathy and making myself agreeable, and making him admire me (which he did and does), I could get him away from Daisy. I see now how impossible that was. If it is I who am going to take him away, he must feel more than that. He will not leave the girl he intended to marry unless he falls in love in his own manner with some one else. Alice, I believe he is doing so."

Jeannie paused a moment.

"I hate it all," she said, "but I can't help being immensely interested. Now for the part you don't understand, the part that made you think that I had given it all up. It was a bold game, and, I believe, a correct one. I dropped him – d-r-o-p, drop. Why? Simply in order that he might miss me. Of course, I risked failure. He might have shrugged his shoulders, and wondered why I had taken so much trouble to flirt with him, and gone straight away and resumed operations with Daisy. He did go straight back to Daisy, but do you think they are getting on very nicely? I don't. The more he sees of her now, the more he thinks about me. I don't say he has kind thoughts of me; he is puzzled, but he doesn't dismiss me. He is angry instead, and hurt. That shows he wants me. He will never propose to Daisy while he feels like that."

There was a short silence. Then Lady Nottingham said, —

"Do you mean you want to make him propose to you?"

"Yes."

The monosyllable came very dryly and unimportantly, as if to a perfectly commonplace inquiry. Then Lady Nottingham, in her turn, got up. Jeannie's restlessness and disquiet seemed to have transferred themselves to her.

"But it is an intolerable rôle," she said. "You cannot play with love like that. It is playing heads and tails with a man's life, or worse. You are playing with his very soul."

"And a month afterwards it will be he who will be playing with another woman's soul," said Jeannie quietly. "You cannot call it love with that sort of man. How many times has he been in love, and what has happened to it all? I am only making myself the chance woman with whom he happens to think himself in love at the time when he proposes to settle down and marry. He shall propose marriage, therefore, to me."

Lady Nottingham's air of comfort had quite left her. Her plump, contented face was puckered into unusual wrinkles.

"No, no, no," she said. "I can't imagine you act like that, Jeannie. It isn't you."

Jeannie's eyes grew suddenly sombre.

"Oh, my dear, it is me," she said, "though I am glad it is a me which is a stranger to you. I hope, as a rule, I don't play pitch-and-toss with other men's souls; but there are circumstances – and those have now arisen – in which I see no other way. At all costs to him I will fulfil my promise to Diana. I will do my best that Daisy shall never know. I do not care what it costs him. And yet that is not quite true. I do care, because I like him. But I cannot measure his possible suffering against Daisy's. It is through him that the need of doing this has come. He has got to suffer for it; and I assure you it isn't he alone who pays, it is I also."

Jeannie rose.

"And I do not yet know if I shall succeed," she said. "He may look with a scornful wonder on my – my somewhat mature charms. He may – though I do not really expect it – still intend to settle down and marry – Daisy. She will accept him, if he does – I have seen enough to know that – and we shall then have to tell her. But I hope that may not happen."

She took up her candle.

"I must go to bed," she said, "for I am dog-tired. But I don't feel so fretted now I have told you. I wish I did not like him. I should not care if I did not. Good-night, dear Alice."

All next day until evening Jeannie continued these tactics. Genial, eager, sympathetic with others, she treated Lord Lindfield, whenever it was necessary to speak to him at all, with the unsmiling civility which a well-bred woman accords to a man she scarcely knows, and does not wish to know better. And all day she saw the growing effect of her policy, for all day he grew more perplexed and more preoccupied with her. She gave him no opportunity of speaking with her alone, for she had planned her day and occupations so that she was all the time in the company of others, and hour by hour his trouble increased. Nor did the trouble spare Daisy. Nothing could be clearer to her eye, with such absolute naturalness did Jeannie manage the situation, than that she now, at any rate, was standing quite aloof from Lord Lindfield.

A few days ago Daisy had told herself that she was glad her aunt liked him, but it should be added that to-day she was equally glad that Jeannie apparently did not. Yet the trouble did not spare Daisy, for if Aunt Jeannie was utterly changed to Lindfield, he seemed to be utterly changed too. He was grave, anxious, preoccupied, and the meaning of it escaped the girl, even as it had escaped Lady Nottingham.

The party had been gradually gathering in the verandah before it was time to dress for dinner that night, and Jeannie, à propos of the dressing-bell, had just announced that a quarter of an hour was enough for any nimble woman, with a competent maid.

"She throws things at me, and I catch them and put them on," she said. "If I don't like them I drop them, and the floor of the room looks rather like Carnival-time until she clears up."

But the sense of the meeting was against Jeannie; nobody else could "manage," it appeared, under twenty minutes, and Jim Crowfoot stuck out for half an hour.

"You've got soft things to put on," he said; "but imagine a stiff shirt-cuff hitting you in the eye when your maid threw it. The floor of my room would look not so much like Carnival-time as a shambles."

Lord Lindfield, indeed, alone supported Jeannie.

"I want ten minutes," he said; "neither more nor less. Jim, it's time for you to go, else you will keep us waiting for dinner. I see that Mrs. Halton and I will be left alone at ten minutes past eight, and I at a quarter past."

Jeannie heard this perfectly, but she turned quickly to Lady Nottingham.

"Alice, is it true that you have a post out after dinner?" she said. "Yes? I must go and write a letter, then, before dressing; I particularly want it to get to town to-morrow."

She rose and went in. And at that Lindfield deliberately got up too and followed her. She walked straight through the drawing-room, he a pace or two behind, and out into the hall. And then he spoke to her by name.

She turned round at that. There was no way to avoid giving a reply, and, indeed, she did not wish to, for she believed that the policy of the last two days had ripened.

"Yes, Lord Lindfield?" she said.

"Am I ever going to have a word with you again?" he asked.

Jeannie leant over the banisters; she had already gone up some six stairs.

"But by all means," she said. "I – I too have missed our talks. Things have gone wrong a little? Let us try after dinner to put them straight. We shall find an opportunity."

"Thanks," he said; and it was not only the word that thanked her.

Jeannie's maid must have been a first-rate hand at throwing, if by that simple process she produced in a quarter of an hour that exquisite and finished piece of apparelling which appeared at half-past eight. True, it was Jeannie who wore the jewels and the dress, and her hair it was that rose in those black billows above her shapely head; and the dress, it may be said, was worthy of the wearer. Still, if this was to be arrived at by throwing things, the maid, it was generally felt, must be a competent hurler.

It so happened that everybody was extremely punctual that night, and Jeannie, though quite sufficiently so, the last to appear. Lady Nottingham was even just beginning to allude to the necessary quarter of an hour when she came in.

Lord Lindfield saw her first; he was talking to Daisy. But he turned from her in the middle of a sentence, and said, —

"By Gad!"

It might have been by Gad, but it was by Worth. Four shades of grey, and pearls. Mrs. Beaumont distinctly thought that this was not the sort of dress to dash into the faces of a quiet country party. It was like letting off rockets at a five o'clock tea. Only a woman could dissect the enormity of it; men just stared.

"I know I am not more than one minute late," she said. "Lord Lindfield, Alice has told me to lead you to your doom, which is to take me in. – Alice, they have told us, haven't they?"

CHAPTER XXII

It seemed to Lord Lindfield that dinner was over that night with unusual swiftness, and that they had scarcely sat down when they rose again for the women to leave the room. Yet, short though it seemed, it had been a momentous hour, for in that hour all the perplexity and the anger that had made his very blood so bitter to him during these last two days had been charmed away from him, and instead, love, like some splendid fever of the spirit, burned there.

Until Jeannie had been friendly, been herself with him again, he had not known, bad as the last two days had been, how deeply and intimately he missed her friendship. That, even that, merely her frank and friendly intercourse, had become wine to him; he thirsted and longed for it, and even it, now that it was restored to him, mounted to his head with a sort of psychic intoxication. Yet that was but the gift she had for the whole world of her friends; what if there was something for him behind all that, which should be his alone, and not the world's – something to which this wine was but as water?

At dinner this had been but the side she showed to all the world, but there was better coming. She had promised him a talk that night, and by that he knew well she did not mean just the intercourse of dinner-talk, which all the table might share in, but a talk like those they had had before by the roadside when the motor broke down, or in the punt while the thunderstorm mounted in hard-edged, coppery clouds up the sky. The last thing they had spoken of then was friendship, and he had told her, he remembered, how he hoped to settle down and marry. He hoped that she would of her own accord speak of friendship again; that would be a thing of good omen, for again, as before, he would speak of his hope of settling down and marrying. Only he would speak of it differently now.

For him the hour had struck; there was no choice of deliberation possible any more to him. He did not look on the picture of quiet domesticity any more, and find it pleasing; he did not look on himself, count up his years, and settle, with a content that had just one grain of resignation in it, that it was time for him to make what is called a home. He looked at Jeannie, and from the ocean of love a billow came, bore him off his feet, and took him seawards. She, the beauty of her face, the soft curves of her neck, the grace and suppleness of her body, were no longer, as had been the case till now, the whole of the woman whom he loved. Now they were but the material part of her; he believed and knew that he loved something that was more essentially Jeannie than these – he loved her soul and spirit.

Late this love had come to him, for all his life he had stifled its possibility of growth by being content with what was more material; but at last it had dawned on him, and he stood now on the threshold of a world that was as new as it was bewildering. Yet, for all its bewilderment, he saw at a glance how real it was, and how true. It was the light of the sun that shone there which made those shadows which till now he had thought to be in themselves so radiant.

It was about half-past ten when Jeannie and Lord Lindfield cut out of a bridge-table simultaneously. They had been playing in the billiard-room, and strolled out together, talking. In the hall outside, that pleasant place of books and shadows and corners, Jeannie paused and held out her hand to him.

"Lord Lindfield," she said, "I have been a most utter beast to you these last two days, and I am sorry – I am indeed. You have got a perfect right to ask for explanations, and – and there aren't any. That is the best explanation of all; you can't get behind it. Will you, then, be generous and shake hands, and let us go on where we left off?"

He took her hand.

"That is exactly the condition I should have made," he said.

"What?"

"That we should go on where we left off. Do you remember what you were talking about?"

She had sat down in a low chair by the empty fireplace, and he drew another close up to hers, and at right angles to it. Just above was a pair of shaded candles, so that he, sitting a little further off, was in shadow, whereas the soft light fell full on to her. Had she seen his face more clearly, she might have known that her task was already over, that Daisy had become but a shadow to him, and that he was eager and burning to put the coping-stone on to what she had accomplished. But she remembered the scene in the punt; she remembered that immediately after she had spoken of friendship, he, like a friend, had confided to her his intention of settling down and marrying. This time, therefore, she would speak in a more unmistakable way.

"Yes, yes, I remember indeed," she said; "and it was the last good hour I have had between that and this. But I am not blaming you, Lord Lindfield, except, perhaps, just a little bit."

He leant forward, and his voice trembled.

"Why do you blame me," he asked, "even a little bit?"

Jeannie laughed.

"No, I don't think I can tell you," she said. "I should get scarlet. Yet, I don't know; I think it would make you laugh, too, and it is always a good thing to laugh. So turn away, and don't look at me when I am scarlet, since it is unbecoming. Well, I blame you a little bit, because you were a little bit tactless. A charming woman – one, anyhow, who was trying to be charming – had just been talking to you about friendship, and you sighed a smile in a yawn, as it were – do you know Browning? – he is a dear – and said: 'I am going to settle down and marry.' Now, not a word. I am going to scold you. Had we been two girls talking together, and had just made vows of friendship, it would have been utterly tactless for the one to choose that exact moment for saying she was going to be married; and I am sure no two boys in similar conditions would ever have done such a thing."

Again Jeannie laughed.

"It sounds so funny now," she said. "But it was such a snub. I suppose you thought we were getting on too nicely. Oh, how funny! I have never had such a thing happen to me before. So I blame you just a little bit. I was rather depressed already. A thunderstorm was coming, and it was going to be Sunday, and so I wanted everybody to be particularly nice to me."

He gave a little odd awkward sort of laugh, and jerked himself a little more forward in his chair.

"Mayn't I look?" he said. "I don't believe you are scarlet. Besides, I have to say I am sorry. I can't say I am sorry to the carpet."

Jeannie paused for a moment before she replied; something in his voice, though still she could not see his face clearly, startled her. It sounded changed, somehow, full of something suppressed, something serious. But she could not risk a second fiasco; she had to play her high cards out, and hope for their triumph.

"You needn't say it," she said. "And so let us pass to what I suggested, and what you would have made, you told me, a condition of your forgiving me. Friendship! What a beautiful word in itself, and what a big one! And how little most people mean by it. A man says he is a woman's friend because he lunches with her once a month; a woman says she is a man's friend because they have taken a drive round Hyde Park in the middle of the afternoon!"

Jeannie sat more upright in her chair, leaning forward towards him. Then she saw him more clearly, and the hunger of his face, the bright shining of his eyes, endorsed what she had heard in his voice. Yet she was not certain – not quite certain.

"Oh, I don't believe we most of us understand friendship at all," she said. "It is not characteristic of our race to let ourselves feel. Most English people neither hate nor love, nor make friends in earnest. I think one has to go South – South and East – to find hate and love and friends, just as one has to go South to find the sun. Do you know the Persian poet and what he says of his friend:

'A book of verses underneath the bough,A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thouBeside me singing in the wilderness,The wilderness were paradise enow.'

Ah, that is more my notion of friendship, of the ideal of friendship, the thing that makes Paradise of the desert."

He got up quickly and stood before her, speaking hoarsely and quickly.

"It does not matter what you call it," he said. "I know what you mean. I call it love, that is all – Jeannie, Jeannie – "

He seized both her hands in his roughly, brutally almost, and covered them with kisses.

"Ah, it is done!" said Jeannie quickly, and half to herself. Then she rose too, and wrenched her hands from him.

"Have you gone mad?" she said. "Stand out of my way, please."

But she had not reckoned on the strength of the passion she had raised. For one moment he looked at her in blank astonishment, but he did not move. She could not get by him without violence. Then he advanced a step again towards her, as if he would have caught her to him. Jeannie put both her arms in front of her; she had turned pale to the lips.

"Not till you have told me – "

"I have nothing to tell you, except that I thought you were a gentleman and a friend. There is some one coming out of the billiard-room."

Daisy appeared in the doorway at the moment.

"The rubber's over already," she said, "just two hands. Won't you and Lord Lindfield – "

She stopped suddenly. It was clear he had not heard her, for, with arms still held out, he faced Jeannie, unconscious of any one but her.

"Jeannie – " he began again.

Jeannie did not look at him.

"Please let me pass," she said. – "No, Daisy, I think I have played enough. I am going upstairs. It is late. I am tired."

CHAPTER XXIII

Jeannie went straight to her room. It was done, even as she had said, and her heart bled for her triumph. Yet she did not for a moment repent it. Had it been necessary to do it again, she would again have gone through the same hateful scene, and her scorn of herself weighed light even now with the keeping of the promise she had made by the bedside of Diana. But the thing had been worse than she had anticipated; it was no superficial desire she had aroused in him, but the authentic fire. But that made Daisy the safer: a man was not often in earnest like that.

But still the future was unplanned for; she had made her scene, scored her point, and the curtain, dramatically speaking, should have descended. But in real life the curtain did not descend; life insisted that there were no such things as curtains; it made one go on. She knew, too, that Lindfield would not take this as final; she had to think of something which should make it final. In any case she could not contemplate stopping in the house, with him there, and decided to go back to town to-morrow, cutting her stay here short by a day. She would go early, before any one was down; Alice would invent and explain for her.

A note, hastily scribbled, settled this. "It is done, Alice," she wrote, "and I feel satisfied and utterly miserable. Daisy does not exist for him. I shall go back to town early to-morrow, dear. Will you make some excuse? I know you will understand."

But the more important matter was not settled so easily. She had to show poor Lindfield unmistakably that her rejection of him was quite irrevocable. What interpretation he put on her conduct mattered but little, as long as he clearly understood that. And then a means occurred to her which was quite simple and quite sufficient. She wrote a couple of lines to Victor.

"My dearest," she said, "I must go to town early to-morrow, and shall not see you till you come up the day after. And I want you to announce our engagement at once. I should like it to be in the evening papers to-morrow. Tell them yourself down here. I write this in great haste. All love."

Jeannie rang for her maid to get these delivered, dismissed her for the night, and sat down to think over what she had done. She was still tremulous from it. To a man she really liked, and to a girl whom she tenderly loved, she had made herself vile, but it was still her sincere hope that neither would ever know the reason for what she had done. They must write her down a flirt; they had every reason for doing so.

She rose and looked at herself a moment in the long mirror beside the dressing-table. "You beast!" she said to herself. But there was another thought as well. "Diana, my dear," she said, as if comforting her.

It had been settled that Jeannie was to live with Lady Nottingham till the end of the season, and the latter had given her two charming rooms in the Grosvenor Square house, so that she could make things home-like about her for the few weeks before she would go down to her own house in the country. Little household gods had arrived and been unpacked while she was in the country, and she occupied herself during this solitary day in London with the arrangement of them. There were not many, for she did not tend to buy, but there were a few "bits of things" which she had got in Rome, a Cinque-cento bas-relief, a couple of Florentine copies of the Della Robbia heads, and some few pieces of Italian needlework. All these took some little time to dispose satisfactorily in the room, and that done, she proceeded to the arrangement of her writing-table. She liked to have photographs there: there was one of Daisy and Diana, two mites of ten years old and four years old, lovingly entwined, Daisy's head resting on her sister's shoulder; there was one of Victor as he was now, and another as he had been when an Eton boy; there were half a dozen others, and among them one of Diana, signed and dated, which Diana had given her hardly more than a year ago in Paris.