Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  For the afternoon there were several possibilities. Jeannie, appealed to, said she would like to go up to Boulter’s Lock and see the Ascot Sunday crowd. That, it appeared, was very easy of management, as Lord Lindfield would punt her up.

  “That will be delightful,” said Jeannie. “Daisy dear, I haven’t simply set eyes on you. Do let us go up together, and Lord Lindfield will punt us. We will be the blest pair of sirens, of extraordinarily diverse age, and he shall give the apple of discord to one of us. If he gives it you I shall never speak to you again. — Lord Lindfield, will you take us up?”

  “I shall have two apples,” said he.

  “Then Daisy and I will each of us want both.”

  This had been the last of the arrangements, and it was like Mrs. Halton, such was the opinion of the cats, to manage things like that. There could be no doubt that when the launch and the Noah’s Ark and the punt met below Boulter’s, it would be found that Daisy had another convenient headache.

  The three vessels met there. But on the punt were Lord Lindfield and Daisy all alone. Mrs. Halton, it seemed, had stopped at home. There was no explanation; she had simply not come, preferring not to.

  Nobody could understand, least of all Lord Lindfield. She had swum further away.

  But Daisy had not had a very amusing time. Punting appeared to monopolize the attention of the punter.

  CHAPTER XX.

  All that day and throughout the greater part of the next Jeannie kept up with chill politeness and composure this attitude towards Lord Lindfield, which he, at any rate, found maddening. What made it the more maddening was that to all the rest of the party she behaved with that eager geniality which was so characteristic of her. Only when he was there, and when he addressed her directly, something would come over her manner that can only be compared to the forming of a film of ice over a pool. To an acquaintance merely it would have been unnoticeable; even to a friend, if it had happened only once or twice, it might have passed undetected; as it was, he could not fail to see that it was there, nor could he fail to puzzle his wits over what the cause of it might be.

  During the day he tried to get a word with her in private, but she seemed to anticipate his intention, and contrived that it should be impossible for the request to be made. Once, however, just after the return that afternoon from Boulter’s Lock, he had managed to say to her: “There is nothing the matter, is there?” and with complete politeness she had replied: “I have just a touch of a cold. But it is nothing, thanks.” And thereupon she had taken up a newspaper, and remarked to Lady Nottingham that the Eton and Harrow match seemed to have been extraordinarily exciting.

  Now, no man, unless he is definitely in love with and enthralled by a woman, will, if he has anything which may be called spirit, stand this sort of thing tamely. Lindfield honestly examined himself to see “if in aught he had offended,” could find no cause of offence in himself, and then went through a series of conflicting and unsettling emotions.

  He told himself that for some reason she had wished to get on intimate terms with him, and then, her curiosity or whatever it was being satisfied, she had merely opened the hand into which she had taken his and, so to speak, wiped his hand off. This seemed to him a very mean and heartless proceeding, but there it was. She had clearly done this, and if a woman chose to behave like that to a man the only rejoinder consistent with ordinary dignity and self-respect was to take no notice at all, and dismiss her from his mind.

  Clearly that was the right thing to do, but instead of doing the right thing he first felt angry, and then sick at heart. Women — those witches — were really rather cruel. They cast a spell over one, and then rode away on their broomsticks, disregarding the poor wretch over whom they had cast it. He was left to go mooning about, until in the merciful course of Nature the spell began to lose its potency and die out. Then, again, he would remember the dignity of man, and repeat to himself his determination to dismiss her and her incomprehensibilities from his mind, and challenge Daisy to some silly game. She, poor wretch, would accept with avidity; but the game, whatever it was, soon seemed to lose its edge and its gaiety. There was something that had clearly gone wrong.

  Daisy guessed what that was, and her guess was fairly correct. It seemed to her that for a couple of days Aunt Jeannie had, to put it quite bluntly, run after Lord Lindfield. She had pretty well caught him up, too, for Daisy was fair-minded enough to see that he had not been very agile in getting away from her. He had been quite glad to be caught up, and was evidently charmed by her.

  Then, clearly, about the time of her own headache, something had happened; Daisy could see that. Aunt Jeannie, though positively melting with geniality and charming warmth to everybody else, turned on him a shoulder that was absolutely frozen. Why she had done this Daisy could not help guessing, and her solution was that Jeannie had been tremendously attracted by him, and then suddenly seen that somehow it “wouldn’t do.” Perhaps at this point the sight that Daisy had caught of her aunt and Victor Braithwaite together in the garden supplied a gap in the explanation. Daisy did not like to think that that was it; for, in truth, if it was, there was no doubt whatever that darling Aunt Jeannie had been flirting. But, as Aunt Jeannie had quite ceased to flirt, Daisy was more than willing to forgive her for the miseries of those two dreadful days; she was even willing to forget.

  Only Lord Lindfield, it was clear to her, did not quite forget. He was altogether unlike himself. For a little while he would be uproariously cheerful, then his gaiety would go out without a gutter, like a candle suddenly taken out into a gale of wind. And then, perhaps, his eyes would stray about till, for a moment, they fastened on Jeannie, who was probably as entranced by the general joy of life as he had been a minute before. Then he would look puzzled, and then angry, and then puzzled again.

  Whatever was passing in Jeannie’s mind, she concealed it with supreme success, so that nobody could possibly tell that anything was passing there, or that she had any currents going along below the surface. But she had — currents that were going in the direction she had willed to set them; but for all that they flowed in so strong a tide she hated the flowing of them, and hated herself who had set them moving. She was playing a deep game, and one that had required all her wit to invent, and all her tact to play; but during all this Sunday and the day that followed she observed the effect of her moves, and, though hating them, was well satisfied with their result.

  With the tail of her eye, or with half an ear, even while she was in full swing of some preposterous discussion, punctuated with laughter, with Jim Crowfoot, she could observe Lord Lindfield, could see his perplexity and his anger, could hear his attempts to talk and laugh, as if there was nothing to trouble him; could note, before long, the sudden change in his tone, the short monosyllables of answers, the quenched laugh. He was much with Daisy, but Mrs. Halton did not mind that; indeed, it was as she would have had it, for it was clear how little Daisy had the power to hold him, and it was just that which he was beginning now to perceive. She wanted him to understand that very completely, to have it sink down into his nature till it became a part of him.

  Yes, her diplomacy was prospering well; already the fruit of it was swelling on the tree. It might be salutary; it was certainly bitter.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  Jeannie went that night to Lady Nottingham’s room to talk to her. She herself was feeling very tired, not with the sound and wholesome tiredness that is the precursor of long sleep and refreshed awakening, but with the restless fatigue of frayed nerves and disquiet mind that leads to intolerable tossings and turnings, and long vigils through the varying greys of dawn and the first chirrupings of birds.

  “I have not come for long, dear,” she said, “but I had to tell somebody about — about what is happening. It’s going so well, too.”

  Alice saw the trouble in Jeannie’s face, and, as a matter of fact, had seen trouble in other faces.

  “I haven’t had a word with you,” she said, “and I don’t kno
w what is happening. You seem to have had nothing to say to Lord Lindfield all day. I thought, perhaps, you had given it up. It was too hard for you, dear. I don’t wonder you found you could not compass it.”

  Jeannie gave a little impatient sound; her nerves were sharply on edge.

  “Dear Alice,” she said, “that is not very clever of you. I thought you would see. However, I am quite glad you don’t, for if you don’t I am sure Daisy doesn’t. I am getting a respite from Daisy’s — well, Daisy’s loathing of me and my methods. She, like you, probably thinks I have given him back to her.”

  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.