Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

Jeannie paused in front of a mirror, looked long at herself, and spoke to her image there.

  “Yes, passable yet — just passable yet,” she said to herself.

  Lady Nottingham got up and came across the room to her.

  “Jeannie, what do you mean?” she asked. “What is it you mean?”

  Jeannie turned round quickly.

  “Ah! you guess,” she said. “I don’t say it is nice; I shan’t like myself much, I can promise you. But it is not so long since he ran after me a good deal. Perhaps you remember the fact. He didn’t receive much encouragement then. Well, I mean that he shall do it again. This time he shall receive much more encouragement. I will make it very easy for him. I will help him a great deal now. I will flirt with him all the time at Bray. Flirt — yes. Oh, it is not a nice word, and flirts are not nice people, as we settled only yesterday. We settled they were not worth talking about. But I am going to be one now — and a bad one, too — under Daisy’s very nose. Perhaps I shan’t succeed, but I shall do my best; and if I don’t succeed, we must try to think of something else. But I want Daisy to see how easily and readily he makes love to a woman. I want her to see herself slighted and neglected. I want her to be hurt — and finally to be angry, to be furious, to see that he means nothing. Then, provided only she is not in love with him now, she will hate and despise him.”

  Jeannie spoke rapidly, excitedly, her face flushing.

  “Or do you think it is a forlorn hope, Alice?” she said. “Am I but flattering myself that I am not quite passée yet? Oh, it is a heavy handicap, I know, for a woman of my age to try to cut out a brilliant young girl, and one who is beautiful; and, as you have told me, he never, as far as you know, flirted with a girl. Well, that proves he likes women best.”

  “Ah! but you can’t do it, Jeannie,” broke in Lady Nottingham. “Think of what you will appear to Daisy; think of your own self-respect; think of Victor. What will he make of it all? It is too dangerous.”

  “I have thought of all those things,” said Jeannie. “I have weighed and balanced them; and they seem to me lighter than that promise I made to Diana. I may have to tell Victor; about that I don’t know, but I shall do my utmost not to. It may not be necessary, for, Alice, I think he trusts me as utterly as I trust him. I think that if I saw him running after some other woman I should feel there must be some explanation, and I hope I should not ask him for it, or think he was faithless to me. And I believe he has that trust in me also. I don’t know. If he demands to know what it all means I shall tell him, because if you are asked anything in the name of love it is not possible to refuse. Heaven knows, this is a desperate measure! But show me any other that has a chance of success and will still keep Diana’s secret. This may fail; one cannot be sure of any plan going right. But show me any other plan at all, and from the bottom of my heart I will thank you.”

  Lady Nottingham shook her head.

  “I can think of no other plan,” she said; “but I can’t approve of this one. You are playing with serious things, Jeannie; you are playing with love and other people’s souls. Diana did not mean you to do anything like this in order to keep your promise to her.”

  “No, poor child! One does not easily see the consequences of one’s acts, or how they go on long after they are committed, bringing joy or sorrow to others. Oh, Alice, there is such a dreadful vitality about evil. Acts that one thinks are all over and dead have an awful power of coming to life again. What one has done never dies. It may be forgiven — Heaven grant it may be forgiven — but it exists still in the lives of others.”

  “But it is not as if she were alive,” said the other, “or as if she could suffer for it.”

  Jeannie shook her head.

  “Ah, my dear,” she said, “to my mind that is a reason the more for keeping my promise. Living people can defend themselves to some extent, or you can appeal to them and make them see, perhaps, that such a promise involves more than it is reasonable to demand. But the dead, Alice! The dead are so defenceless!”

  Lady Nottingham was silent, knowing that it is useless to argue over questions of feeling; for no amount of reasoning, however admirable, can affect a question about which the heart has taken sides. And after a moment Jeannie went on: —

  “And it is not the dead alone,” she said. “There is Daisy also to consider. Had I made no promise at all, I think I would do anything as distasteful and odious to me as that which I am going to do, for the sake of keeping that dreadful knowledge from her. Alice, think if you had had a sister like that! Could you ever get rid of the poison of it? And it is an awful thing to let a young soul be poisoned. When we grow older, we get, I suppose, better digestions; poisons affect us less. That is the worst of growing old.”

  Again she paused.

  “And now, dear — as they say at the end of sermons — let us talk no more about it. You will see me in an odious rôle down at Bray; but it will be something to know that you are aware it is a rôle, an odious rôle assumed for a good purpose. I shall seem detestable to Daisy, and she will not be able to believe her eyes, until she is forced to. I shall seem charming to him, Tom Lindfield, until at the end, when, as we hope, Daisy is convinced, I shall turn round like the flirt and say, ‘What do you mean?’ I shall seem odious to myself, but I do not believe I shall seem odious to Victor. I think he will know there is something he does not understand. Perhaps I shall do it all very badly, and not succeed in detaching him at all from Daisy. It is true I have not had much practice, for I assure you I am not a flirt by nature. Oh, Alice, can’t you think of any other plan? I can’t, and I have thought so hard. Have you got a very large party? I don’t want a full house to witness this disgusting performance. I shall have to be so cheap. I wish Victor was not going to be there. At least, I am not sure. I think he will see he does not understand. It is bad luck, you know, that of all men in the world this should be the one whom Daisy thinks about marrying. Now let us dismiss it altogether.”

  Lady Nottingham felt a certain sense of injustice.

  “Dear Jeannie,” she said, “you have done all the talking, and, having expressed your views, you say, ‘Let us dismiss it altogether.’ By all means, if you choose; but I haven’t had a chance. You have prophesied success to your scheme; I prophesy disaster. You are not fitted for your rôle; you will break down long before you accomplish anything. You will see Daisy looking at you with reproach; you will see Victor looking at you with wonder; you will see Lord Lindfield looking at you with — with admiration. You won’t be able to bear any of those things, least of all the last. You will have some involuntary shudder of horror at him, or you will obey your heart and run to comfort Daisy, and give it all away. Yours is one of the schemes that don’t come off, because they are unthinkable.”

  But Jeannie interrupted again.

  “You mustn’t discourage me,” she said, “because I want all the spirits I am capable of to carry it through. It has to be done with a light heart, else it will deceive nobody. And so, my dear, to-morrow you will say ‘good-bye’ to me, and have a sort of wraith of me instead for a little while. Oh, Alice, I hope it won’t take very long!”

  The intense heat of the afternoon had a little abated, and after tea the two drove out for a while, returning early in order to dine and go to the opera. It began at eight, and Jeannie, after her year’s sojourn in the country, demanded a full dose, and they arrived before the beginning of the first act. Outside it was still not quite the hour of sunset, and the streets and houses were gilded by the soft reddish glow of the superb summer evening. At the porch of the opera-house were a few men standing about, clearly waiting for friends, and for that purpose examining the disembarking carriages. As the two got out, one of these gently but quite firmly shouldered his way towards them.

  “Looking out for an acquaintance, I find a friend, Lady Nottingham,” he said. “That’s my luck all over. — Why, Mrs. Halton! Have you the smallest remembrance of me?”

  Jeannie had seen him, and for one moment of weakness
and indecision had tried to pass by without seeming to recognize him. But it was impossible to ignore this, and though she had hoped her rôle would not begin till to-morrow, it was clear now that she must start to-day.

  “Why, but how charming to see you, Lord Lindfield,” she said. “I am delighted. I am only just home, you know — or perhaps you don’t, for why should you? Do leave your acquaintance in the lurch, now you have found a friend — it would have been prettier of you, by the way, to have said two friends — and join us. Alice dear, carry Lord Lindfield off under your cloak to the box. Kidnap him.”

  “Jove! yes, I’ll be kidnapped,” said he. “Kidnap me quick, please, Lady Nottingham, because I see Mrs. Streatham’s carriage. Too late; she sees me. May I come up for — for an hour or two, after the first act?”

  “Not for an hour, for two,” said Jeannie, as Mrs. Streatham waved her hand to him, but without a smile, for she was busy wondering who Mrs. Halton was, and whether there was a chance of getting her to dine two or three times during the next week.

  Mrs. Streatham used her friends and acquaintances much as a clematis uses the wires or trellis put up for it. She strongly and firmly climbed along them (without ever letting go), to find fresh friends and acquaintances.

  “Who was that charming-looking woman you were talking to, Lord Lindfield,” she said, “with Lady Nottingham? By the way, you lunch with us on Thursday, do you not?”

  “Mrs. Halton,” said he.

  “Really! That sweetly pretty Miss — Miss Hanbury’s aunt? Are she and Lady Nottingham in the stalls? They might like to come to my box instead. It is so far more comfortable in a box. Will you ask them? I do know Lady Nottingham. She dined with us last year — at least, I asked her.”

  “They have a box of their own,” said he.

  “Ah, what a pity! Let us go in. I expect a few friends this evening, but they will find their way. It is such a pity to miss a note of ‘Faust.’ Oh, I see, it is ‘Lucia.’ That is by Gounod too, is it not?”

  Three hours later they were all standing in the vestibule waiting for the arrival of carriages. Mrs. Streatham had been unable to arrange anything definite with regard to Mrs. Halton lunching with her, but had just said she would write, and hope to find her disengaged the week after next, when her carriage was bawled out. Lord Lindfield shut her firmly into it, with profuse thanks, and returned to the others. Crowds of people — some of whom, apparently, Mrs. Streatham did not know by sight — had swarmed into her box during the evening, and he had spent most of it in Lady Nottingham’s without any sense of deserting his hostess, since it was impossible even to stand in her box, far less sit down.

  Then Lady Nottingham’s carriage had come up too, and he put them into it.

  “Till to-morrow, then,” said Jeannie. “I am looking forward to it immensely. You lunch with us first, and then take me to the concert.”

  The motor bubbled and slid off, and she put down the window.

  “It moves,” she said laconically.

  CHAPTER X.

  Lady Nottingham’s house at Bray was one of those styleless nondescript river-side residences which, apart from the incomparable beauty of their surroundings, have a charm of their own, elusive but distinct. Originally it had been no more than a couple of cottages, thatched and low-eaved, but her husband in his lifetime had dealt with these so successfully by building out a dining-room with bedrooms above on one side, a drawing-room and billiard-room, again with bedrooms above, on the other, and a long row of servants’ rooms and offices, that now it was commodious enough to take in a tolerably large party in extreme comfort.

  It is true that he might have built something quite as commodious at far less expense by pulling down the old and beginning again, but, on the other hand, the amusement and employment he got out of it was cheap at the additional price.

  The house stood screened from the river by a thick-set hawthorn hedge, inside which was a garden of a couple of acres in extent, in which was combined the charm of antiquity with the technique of skilful modern gardening. Unlike many English gardens, which are laid out to be active in, this was clearly a place for the lazy and the lounger. There were no tennis courts, no croquet lawns, no place, in fact, where any game could be played that demanded either extent or uniformity of surface. A wavy, irregular lawn, all bays and angles and gulfs of green, was fitted into the headlands and promontories of garden beds, as the sea is fitted into the land; but the voyager never got to open sea, so to speak, but was always turning round corners into other gulfs.

  It was impossible to imagine a place less formally laid out, or one, considering the extent of it, where you could walk so short a way in the same direction.

  There were no straight lines anywhere, an omission fatal in the eyes of a formalist, but paths, broad paths of grass, or narrower paths of old paving-stone, meandered about in a manner that could hardly fail to please.

  On each side of such paths were garden beds, no mere ribbons, but wide, deep spaces of well-nourished earth, where just now June made jungle. Here you could sit and become part of the general heat and fragrance, and lose your identity in summer, or, moving a little, find a tree, no shrub, but a big living elm in tower of leaf and panoply of spreading bough, to be cool under. Pigeons from the big dovecot in front of the house afforded to a leisure mind a sufficiency of general conversation, or formed a cooing chorus of approval if anybody wished to talk himself; but one thing clearly prohibited in these warm, green places was to be active. The actively inclined had to pass through the gate in the hedge, and there, by turning to the left, they would find a back-water with a whole village of boat-houses. There, to suit the measure of their activity, they could equip themselves with the required materials; there were punts at their disposal, or they could take unto themselves a canoe, or a portly, broad-beamed ark, or risk themselves in outriggers of extreme length and uncertain stability.

  The house itself afforded no less scope for the various inclinations of its inhabitants. There was a charming drawing-room where any one could sit up, take notice, and be formal. There was an immense billiard-room, with an alcove containing a couple of card tables, so far away from the billiards that the sound of cannons reached the ear of the bridge-player in a manner that could not disconcert; while for wet days and the more exuberantly inclined there was a squash-racquet court where any amount of exercise could be enjoyed with the smallest possible expenditure of time.

  The two original cottages had been run together, and a hall now comprised the whole ground floor of both. Wooden joists of the floors above made parallels down the ceiling, and it was still lit through the small-paned windows of the original cottages, through the squares of which the landscape outside climbed up and down over the ridges of the glass. At one end was the fireplace, which had once been a kitchen-range; but that removed, a large open hearth, burning a wood fire when fires were necessary, was flanked by two settles within the chimney-space.

  At the other end, and facing it, the corresponding kitchen range of the second cottage had also been cleared out, but the chimney above it had been boarded in, and a broad, low settee ran round the three sides of it. Above this settee, and planted into the wall, so that the heads of those uprising should not come in contact with the shelves, was a bookcase full of delectable volumes, all fit to be taken down at random, and opened at random, all books that were familiar friends to any who had friends among that entrancing family. Tennyson was there, and all Thackeray; Omar Khayyam was there, and Alice in Wonderland; Don Quixote rubbed covers with John Inglesant, and Dickens found a neighbour in Stevenson.

  But this was emphatically a room to sit down in, not to move about in, for the levels of the floor were precarious, and a sudden step would easily disconcert those who tried to make a promenade of it. It was as inactive in tendency as the garden.

  Outside the house was charmingly irregular. The billiard-room with the bedrooms above it was so markedly Queen Anne that it was impossible to believe it could be Queen Anne.
Nor was it, for it was Queen Victoria. Then came the cottage section, which had a thatched roof, on which grew wallflowers and the pink pincushions of valerian, and following that was a low, stern line of building containing kitchens and servants’ rooms, which made no pretence to be anything except that which it was.

  But over pseudo-Queen Anne, genuine George I. cottages, and frankly Edwardian kitchens, there rose a riot of delectable vegetation. White jasmine and yellow jasmine strove together like first cousins who hate each other, jackmanni and tropæolum were rival beauties, and rambler roses climbed indifferently about, made friends where they could, and when they found themselves unable, firmly stabbed their enemies and strangled their remains.

  Charming, however, as it all was, it had no mood to suggest. It but accentuated the moods of those who came there, and by its very vagueness and softness reflected the spirits of its visitors. It was impossible to imagine a place more conducive to foster and cherish a man’s inclinations; to the lover it would be a place ideal for a honeymoon, to the studious an admirable study. In the Italian phrase the whole place was simpatico; it repeated and crooned over to every one the mood in which he came to it. And if a lover would find it an adorable setting for his beloved and himself, so, too, it would mock and rail in sympathy with one who was cynical and bitter. But since most people are not in any particular mood, and when they come into the country require light and agreeable diversion, Lord Nottingham had been quite right in providing so ample a billiard-room, so engaging a library, so varied a fleet of river-craft.

  Daisy and Gladys had come down here the day before Lady Nottingham and the rest of the party were to arrive, and they found plenty to occupy them. The house had not been used since Easter, and wore that indescribable look of uninhabitableness which results from a thorough house-cleaning. Everything, even in the irregular hall, looked angular and uncomfortable; chairs were set square to tables; tables were set at mathematically precise angles; blinds were all drawn down exactly four inches from the tops of the windows; and all the books were in their shelves.