IN the task of arranging her roses in the various bowls and vases
Baines had set in readiness for her, Jean found a certain relief from
the feeling of terror which had invaded her. Something in the homely
everydayness of the occupation served to relax the tension of her mind,
keyed up and overwrought by the stress of her interview with Burke, and
it was with almost her usual composure of manner that she greeted Blaise
when presently he joined her.
“I’ve raided the rose garden to-day,” she said, smilingly indicating the
mass of scented blossom that lay heaped up on the table. “I expect
when Johns finds out he will proceed to meditate upon something for my
benefit with boiling oil in it.”
Johns was one of the gardeners to whom Jean’s joyous and wholesale
robbery of his first-fruits was a daily cross and affliction. Only
chloroform would ever have reconciled him to the cutting off of a
solitary bloom while still in its prime.
Blaise regarded the tangle of roses consideringly.
“I wonder you found time to gather so many. When I passed by the rose
garden, you were--otherwise occupied.” The quietly uttered comment sent
the blood rushing up into Jean’s face. When had he passed? What had he
seen?
She kept her eyes lowered, seemingly intent upon the disposition of some
exquisite La France roses in a black Wedge-wood bowl.
“What do you mean?” she asked negligently.
Tormarin was silent a moment.
Had she looked at him she would have surprised a restless pain in the
keen eyes he bent upon her.
“Jean”--he spoke very gently--“have I--to congratulate you?”
It was difficult to preserve her poise of indifference when the man
she loved put this question to her, but she contrived it somehow. Women
become adepts in the art of hiding their feelings. The conventions
demand it of them.
Jean’s answer fluttered out with the airy lightness of a butterfly in
the sunshine.
“I am sure I can’t say, unless you tell me upon what grounds?”
“You know of none, then”--swiftly.
“None.”
She nibbled the end of a stalk and surveyed the Wedge-wood bowl
critically. Tormarin felt like shaking her.
“Then,” he said gruffly, “let me suggest you revise your methods.
The woman who plays with Geoffrey Burke might as safely play with an
unexploded bomb.”
His voice betrayed him, revealing the personal element behind the
proffered counsel.
Jean glanced at him between her lashes. So that was it! He was
jealous--jealous of Burke! At last something had happened to pierce the
joints of his armour of assumed indifference! Her heart sang a little
pæan of thanksgiving, and all that was woman in her rose bubbling to
meet the situation. In an instant she had recaptured her aplomb.
“I think I rather enjoy playing with unexploded bombs,” she returned
meditatively. “There are always--possibilities--about them.”
“There are”--grimly. “And it is precisely against those possibilities
that I am warning you.”
“Don’t you think it’s rather bad taste on your part to warn me against a
man who is admittedly on terms of friendship with you all?”
“No, I don’t”--steadily. “Nor should I care if it were. When it’s a
matter of you and your safety, the question of taste doesn’t enter into
the thing at all.”
“My safety?” jeered Jean softly. (It was barely half an hour since Burke
had inspired her with that sudden fear of him and of his compelling
personality!)
“Well, if not your safety, at least your happiness,” amended Blaise.
“It’s very kind of you to interest yourself, but really my happiness has
nothing whatever to do with Geoffrey Burke.”
“Is that true?”
He flashed the question at her, and there was that in his tone which set
her pulses athrill, quenching the light-hearted spirit of banter that
had led her to torment him. It was the note of restrained passion which
she had heard before in his voice, and which had always power to move
her to the depths of her being.
“Perfectly true.” She faltered a little. “But”--forcing herself to a
defiance that was in reality a species of self-defence--“I fail to see
that it concerns you, Blaise.”
“It concerns me in so far as Burke is not the sort of man that a woman
can make a friend of. It’s all or nothing with him. And if you don’t
intend to give him all, you’d better give him--nothing.”
His glance, grave and steady, met hers, and she knew then, of a
certainty, that he had witnessed the scene which had taken place in the
rose garden, when Burke had held her in his arms and the flood of his
passion had risen and overwhelmed her. He had witnessed that--and had
misunderstood it.
She was conscious of a fierce resentment against him. It mattered
nothing to her that, in the light of her nonchalant answers to his
questions, he was fully justified in the obvious conclusion he had
drawn. She did not stop to think whether her anger was reasonable or
unreasonable. She was simply furious with him for suspecting her of
flirting--odious word!--with Geoffrey Burke. Well, if he chose to
think thus of her, let him do so! She would not trouble to explain--to
exculpate herself.
She regarded him with stormy eyes.
“Please understand, Blaise, that I want neither your advice nor your
criticism. If I choose to make a friend of Geoffrey Burke--or of any
other man--I shall do so without asking your permission or approval.
What I do, or don’t do, is no business of yours.”
For a moment they faced each other, his eyes, stormy as her own, dark
with anger. His hands clenched themselves.
“If I could,” he said hoarsely, “I would _make_ it my business.”
He wheeled round and left the room without another word. Jean stood
staring dazedly at the blank panels of the door which had closed behind
him. She wanted to laugh... or to cry. To laugh, because with every
sullen word he revealed the thing he was so sedulously intent on keeping
from her. To cry, because he had taken her pretended indifference at its
face value, and so another film of misunderstanding had risen to thicken
the veil between them--the veil which he would not, and she, being a
woman, could not, draw aside.