"By sitting where he did. Not even opposite side of the table! My
luck, even, was better."
"Your luck? How?"
"Because--I could at least _see_ you!"
Lady Harden was an adept in the gentle art of snubbing.
"My dear child," she said, very gently, pulling off her gloves,
"_don't_ be absurd. I can't bear being made love to by boys!"
"I haven't the slightest intention----" he began, fiercely, but she
had turned, and, opening her violin case, took out what she always
called her fiddle.
She was not a musical artist--so few people are--but she had worked
hard, and knew the things she played.
If there was no Heaven-shaking inspiration about her, there was no
flatting, no slipping from note to note. She played simple,
little-known things, plaintive for the most part, and played them
well.
She also looked her best with fiddle in her arms, a rapt, far-off
expression in her half-closed eyes.
Teddy Cleeve, watching her, hated her for the moment.
And, while he had, in a youthful way, loved several women, this was
the first one he had hated.
He was, however, too young to see the signification of this fact, and
as soon as she had ceased playing, escaped to the smoking room with a
major of hussars, who declared that fiddling was the one thing he
couldn't stand.
"Lovely creature, Lady Harden," the unmusical major began, as he lit
his cigar.
"Too thin," returned Teddy, the crafty.
The major stared. "Are you drunk?" he asked, severely. "Her figger's
the best in England! And amusin'. Tells the best stories of any woman
I know. Only thing I don't like about her is that infernal fiddlin'."
But the fiddling continued, and Teddy, who loved it, felt his hatred
melt. After a bit he went back to the drawing room, only to see the
violin being returned to its case. Lady Harden smiled absently at him,
and soon afterward was settled at a bridge table, opposite Colonel
Durrant.
* * * * *
The next morning Lady Harden went for a ride with a man who had just
arrived--a fellow named Broughton. Cleeve watched them go. Then,
finding Bess Fraser at his elbow, he asked her to play "fives" with
him.
Bess had become non-interesting since Lady Harden's revelation. Poor
old Bess--he wondered whether she really---- And to think of
Cornwall's wanting to marry her! She really was a splendid creature.
Much better looking than Lady Harden. Lady Harden was too pale by
daylight.
"I say, Bess, what is Lady Harden's first name?"
"Dagny. Her mother's mother was a Norwegian, you know."
"Dagny," repeated Cleeve, slowly. "I never heard the name before. I
like it; it suits her, somehow."
Alas for poor Mrs. Fraser, she was not clever.
Pausing in the game, she looked up.
"Mind you don't fall in love with her, Teddy," she said, sharply.
"What rot!" he answered, smashing the ball into a pocket. "Why should
I fall in love with her?"
"Well, a good many men do. And she's frightfully attractive, and
you're so--young."
He frowned. "I'm twenty-five, and--a fellow sees a lot by that
time--if he's ever going to see anything. Play."
When Lady Harden came in from her ride, she found Teddy waiting for
her.
"I've been warned against you," he said, abruptly, his blue eyes
dancing.
"Against me?"
"Yes. Against falling in love with you."
The personal note was strong now. Lady Harden sank into a chair with a
laugh.
"How perfect! Who warned you? _Dear_ old Lady Carey? Did you tell her
a man may not fall in love with his great-aunt?"
"I'm even not sure that yesterday I was not in love with some one who
is five years older than you."
Her charming face, flushed with exercise, grew suddenly serious. "Oh!
but that was--different."
"I don't see why."
"Why, because she is married."
Cleeve burst out laughing. "I may be an infant," he said, "but I'm not
such an infant as to think that 'married or not married' has anything
to do with the question."
She laughed, too. "You are a charming infant, at all events. Perhaps
if you were a little older----"
"Well?"
"I might allow you to--do what you were warned against."
"Allow me?"
She rose, and went slowly to the foot of the stairs. Then she gathered
up her habit and turned.
"Yes, allow you to."
"You grant a great deal by that remark. How about the old 'I had no
idea of such a thing?'" he retorted.
She looked at him meditatively. "You know more than I had thought. How
old are you?"
"Nearly twenty-six," he answered, stretching a point. "Why?"
"Because my boy is only eleven. I am so curious as to how he will turn
out. He is blond, too. Well, _au 'voir_. I must go and dress."
* * * * *
If anyone had asked Dagny Harden, at that period, just what she wanted
of young Cleeve, she would not have known what to answer.
She was a great flirt, but, at the same time, she was a very kind
woman, and never willfully gave pain to anyone.
A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and
mistresses would probably prove that the greatest--in the sense of
artistic skill--flirts are those people who have excitable brains and
little imagination.
Dagny Harden had been fond of him in a mild, domestic, sincere way
that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.
She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this
needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully
conducted, scandal-avoiding flirtations, in which she appeared to each
man as a very good woman, found by him personally to be more charming
than she intended.
These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but
they had no bitterness for her.
And she, liking them all--for she was discriminating, and never let
herself in for an affair with a dull man--had really no appreciation
of their suffering.
When she had turned a victim's mind and heart wrong side out; when she
had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be
said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the
side of either too great severity or too great indulgence, it was
good-by.
She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel.
And she never talked of her victims to each other or to other women.
She was, in a way, great.
* * * * *
"I wish," said Teddy Cleeve, folding his arms as he sat on the low
stone wall, and looking at her, "that I was clever."
"Aren't you clever?"
"No."
"And if you were?"
"If I were, I'd know what you are thinking about."
This, too, is a milestone on the Dover Road.
"What I am thinking about? Well, at that moment I was thinking about
you."
"Honor bright?"
"Honor bright. I was wondering what you will be like in fifteen
years."
"Why fifteen?"
She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in
the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.
"Well, because if you were forty you would be just my age."
"You are thirty."
"_Voila!_ That's exactly what I said. A woman of thirty is as old as a
man of forty. As it is, you are a child, and I a middle-aged person."
Cleeve watched her for a moment. Then he said, slowly: "I'd give up
those intervening years to be forty today."
"Then you'd be an awful idiot!"
"I'd not be an idiot at all. You treat me like a child."
"You are one--to me."
"I'm not a child."
"Very well--you are old. You are a padded veteran of sixty--like Mr.
Blake. Do you like that better?"
He was silent, and after a pause they started slowly down the hill.
Two days passed since she had told him that Mrs. Fraser was in love
with him. They had been much together, but never alone until now, and
she knew that he was furious with himself for letting the minutes slip
unmarked by. Suddenly he burst out: "Will you wear that gray frock you
wore the first night, to-night? And the low diamond thing in your
hair?"
"Why?"
"Because--I want to see you again as I saw you then. I--I have lost my
bearings. I can't remember how you looked, and I--want----"
"I looked like a well-preserved, middle-aged lady. Please don't begin
to think me young, Teddy."
Under her broad hat brim her eyes gleamed maliciously.
"You _are_ young! I was an idiotic----"
She raised her head.
"Oh, don't! Don't fall in love with me; it would bore us both to
death; be my nice adopted son."
"Dear Lady Harden," he returned, flushing, "I assure you that I have
not the slightest idea of falling in love with you."
"Thank Heaven! I adore boys, but a boy in love is really _too_
appalling."
He caught her hand and looked down at her, something suddenly
dominating in his eyes.
"That is nonsense," he said, shortly. "I am young, but I am not a
child, and if I fell in love with you----"
"Well?"
"It would not be as a child loves. That is all."
He released her hand, and they walked on in silence.
* * * * *
The extraordinary delight that most charming women take in playing
with fire had ever been Dagny Harden's, for the reason that she had
never, in all her experiences, been in the slightest danger of burning
her delicate fingers. Purely cerebral flirt that she was, her
unawakened heart dozed placidly in the shadow of her husband's strong
affection for her.
Once or twice when the suffering she inflicted was plainly written on
the face of her victim, her mind shrank fastidiously away from closer
examination of pain she had caused, and the disappearance of the man
was a relief to her.
As she descended the stairs that evening, in the gray frock and the
diamond circlet, she smiled the little smile that meant pleased
anticipation.
Teddy was a dear boy, and he had grown older in the last day or two.
After dinner she would play on her fiddle and--watch the dear boy.
Then there would be a rather picturesque good-by, for he was leaving
at dawn, and--that would be all.
Fate, grinning in his monk's sleeve, had settled things otherwise.
There was no music, and at half-past ten Lady Harden found herself in
a little boat on the lake, one of several parties, alone with Teddy
Cleeve. In the shadow of some willows he pulled in his oars.
His face was very white, his mouth fixed.
"Why have you done this?" he asked, abruptly.
She hesitated, and then, the obvious banality refusing to be uttered,
answered, slowly: "It isn't really done, Teddy, you only think it is."
"That is--a damned lie."
The woman never lived who did not enjoy being sworn at by the right
man, in the right way.
"Teddy!"
"Oh, yes, 'Teddy'! It _is_ a lie. Why tell it?"
"I mean that--if it hadn't been me it would have been--some one else.
Your time had come," she returned, nervously.
From across the lake came singing--some "coon song" anglicized into
quaint incomprehensibility. Cleeve folded his arms.
"Don't--look like that, Teddy."
"I look as I feel. I am not--you."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that you looked at me at dinner as if----"
"Hush! Don't say horrid things."
"You looked at me as though you loved me. And if truth is better than
lying, it was worse to look like that--without feeling it, than it
would have been to really feel it."
"You are talking nonsense. I am very nearsighted, and----"
He laughed harshly. "Can't you play the game even for five minutes? I
understood that it amused you to make a fool of me, but it didn't end
with that. You have made me really love you. Really love you, do you
understand?"
As he spoke, they heard peals of distant laughter, and saw six or
seven of the people who had been boating scampering across the moonlit
lawn toward the nearest park gates.
"They must be going over to the Westerleighs'--we must go, too," said
Lady Harden. "Will you row in?"
Cleeve did not answer; he did not appear to have heard her remark.
After a pause he said, slowly: "You have made me really love you. I
don't know why you did it, for I surely had not hurt you in any way.
However, you did it, and you must have had some reason. You found me a
boy; you have made me a man. Well--you must love me, too."
The boat had begun to drift, and was alone on the burnished water.
Lady Harden clasped her hands nervously.
"I must love you! What _rot_! Come, row to the landing, please. I am
going back to the house, and you must go on to the Westerleighs'."
"Dagny--I say, you must love me, too."
"You are crazy."
"I am not."
"Well, I do not love you, and I never shall. Now let us end this
melodrama."
Cleeve took up the oars and rowed rapidly to the landing place. Then,
as she stepped onto the platform, he took her into his arms.
"You _must_," he said, looking down at her. "It's all your own fault.
You did it willfully. Now you must love me."
His dogged persistency puzzled her and routed all her usual array of
graceful phrases.
"Am I being invited to--elope with you?" she asked, laughing a little
shrilly.
He flushed. "No. I--love you. But--you must feel something of this
that is hurting me. Hurting? Why, it's _hell_."
"Hell! I am sorry--indeed I am----"
"Oh, _that_ does no good. Words can't help. You have got to suffer,
too," he returned, still holding her round the shoulders.
It was, in spite of the thrill of the unusual that she distinctly
felt, absurd. It ought to be laughed at. So she laughed.
"How can you make me suffer, you baby?" she asked.
"Well, I can. Woman have their weapons, and men have theirs. You've
made a man of me. I know a lot of things I didn't know last week.
Among others, I know that you couldn't have been as you have been
unless I had attracted you pretty strongly. You are"--he went on, with
the green coolness that sat so oddly on his tense young face--"pretty
near to loving me at this moment."
"That is not true."
"Oh, yes, it is, Lady Harden. It's because I am young, and big,
and--good looking. These things count for you as well as for us. And
you are thirty. I read a book the other day about a woman of thirty.
Thirty is young enough, but thirty-five isn't, and--thirty-five is
coming."