THE FLICK OF A WHIP
Jenny spent a large part of the winter in Italy, Chat being with her,
Cartmell and I left in charge at home. But early in the New Year she
came back and then, her mourning being over, she launched out. Without
forgetting her father's injunction against spending all her income, she
organized the household on a more extensive scale; new carriages and
more horses, a couple of motors, and a little electric launch for the
lake were among the additions she made. The out-of-doors staff grew till
Cartmell had to ask for an estate-steward to take the routine off his
shoulders, while Mrs. Bennet and Loft blazed with pride at the swelling
numbers of their subordinates in the house itself. Jenny's taste for
splendor came out. She even loved a touch of the gorgeous; old Mr.
Driver's dark blue liveries assumed a decidedly brighter tint, and I
heard her express regret that postilions and four horses were in these
days thought ostentatious except for very great national or local
potentates. "If I were a peeress, I would have them," she declared
rather wistfully. If that were the condition and the only one, after all
we might perhaps live to see the four horses and the postilions at
Breysgate before we were many months older. By now, there was matter for
much speculation about her future; the closer you were to her, the more
doubtful any speculation seemed.
This was the time of her greatest glory--when she was fresh to her state
and delighting in it, when all the neighborhood seemed to be at her
feet, town and county vying in doing her honor--and in accepting her
hospitality.
Entertainment followed entertainment; now it was the poor, now it was
the rich, whom she fed and feted. The crown of her popularity came
perhaps when she declared that she would have no London house and wanted
no London season. Catsford and the county were good enough for her. The
_Catsford Herald and Times_ printed an article on this subject which was
almost lyrical in its anticipation of a return of the good old days when
the aristocracy found their own town enough. It was headed "Catsford a
Metropolis--Why not?" And it was Jenny who was to imbue the borough with
this enviable metropolitan character! This was _Redeunt Saturnia regna_
with a vengeance!
To all outward appearance she was behaving admirably--and her
acquaintance with Fillingford had reached to as near intimacy as it was
ever likely to get while it rested on a basis of mere neighborly
friendship. Lady Sarah had been convinced or vanquished--it was
impossible to say which. At any rate she had withdrawn her opposition to
intercourse between the two houses and appeared to contemplate with
resignation, if not with enthusiasm, a prospect of which people had now
begun to talk--not always under their breath. Fillingford Manor and
Breysgate were now united closely enough for folk to ask whether they
were to be united more closely still. For my own part I must admit that,
if Lord Fillingford were wooing, he showed few of the usual signs; but
perhaps Jenny was! I remembered the story of Rabbit--without forgetting
the subject of the other nickname!
Old Cartmell was a great advocate of the Fillingford alliance. House
laid to house and field to field were anathema to the Prophet; for a
family lawyer they have a wonderful attraction. An estate well-rounded
off, spacious, secure from encroachment and, with proper capital outlay,
returning three per cent.--he admires it as the rest of us a
Velasquez--well, some of us--or others, a thoroughbred. Careful man as
he was, he declined to be dismayed at Jenny's growing expenditure. "The
income's growing, too," he said. "It grows and must grow with the
borough. Old Nick Driver had a very long head! She can't help becoming
richer, whatever she does--in reason." He winked at me, adding, "After
all, it isn't as if she had to buy Fillingford, is it?" I did not feel
quite sure that it was not--and at a high price; but to say that would
have been to travel into another sphere of discussion.
"Well, I'm very glad her affairs are so flourishing. But I wish the new
liveries weren't so nearly sky-blue. I hope she won't want to put you
and me in them!"
Cartmell paid no heed to the liveries. He took a puff at his cigar and
said, "Now--if only she'll keep straight!" That would have seemed an odd
thing to say--to anyone not near her.
Yet trouble came--most awkwardly and at a most awkward moment. Octon
himself was the cause of it, and I--unluckily for myself--the only
independent witness of the central incident.
He had--like Jenny--been away most of the winter, but I had no reason to
suppose that they had met or even been in communication; in fact, I
believe that he was in London most of the time, finishing his new book
and superintending the elaborate illustrations with which it was
adorned. He did, however, reappear at Hatcham Ford close on the heels of
Jenny's return to Breysgate, and the two resumed their old--and somewhat
curious--relations. If ever it were true of two people that they could
live neither with nor without one another, it seemed true of that
couple. He was always seeking her, and she ever ready and eager to
welcome him; yet at every other meeting at least they had a tiff--Jenny
being, I must say, seldom the aggressor, at least in the presence of
third persons: perhaps her offenses, such as they were, were given in
private. But there was one difference which I perceived quickly, but
which Octon seemed slower to notice: I hoped that he might never notice
it at all, or, if he did, accept it peaceably. Jenny preferred, if it
were possible, to receive him when the household party alone was
present; when the era of entertaining set in, he was bidden on the
off-nights. No doubt this practice admitted of being put--and perhaps
was put by Jenny--in a flattering way. But it was impossible to be safe
with him--there was no telling how his temper would take him. So long as
he believed that Jenny herself best liked to see him intimately, all
would go well; but if once he struck on the truth--that she was yielding
deference to the wishes of his enemies, her neighbors--there might very
probably be an explosion. "Volcano" would get active if he thought that
"Rabbit" and company--Jenny had concealed neither nickname from
him--were being consulted. Or he might get just a wayward whim; if his
temper were out, he would make trouble for its own sake--or to see with
how much he could make her put up; each was always trying the limits of
his or her power over the other.
The actual occasion of his outburst was, as usual, trivial, and
perhaps--far as that was from being invariably the case--afforded him
some shadow of excuse. Neither did Chat help matters. He had sent up
from Hatcham Ford a bunch of splendid yellow roses, and, when he came to
dinner the same evening, he naturally expected to see them on the table.
"Where are my roses?" he asked abruptly, when we were half-way through
dinner.
"I love them--they're beautiful--but they didn't suit my frock
to-night," said Jenny, smiling. She would have managed the matter all
right if she had been let alone, but Chat must needs put her oar in.
"They'll look splendid on the table to-morrow night," she remarked--as
though she were saying something soothing and tactful.
"Oh, you've got a dinner-party to-morrow?" he asked--still calm, but
growing dangerous.
"Nobody you'd care about," Jenny assured him; she had given Chat a look
which immediately produced symptoms of flutters.
"Who's coming?"
"Oh, only Lord Fillingford and Lady Sarah, the Wares, the Rector, the
Aspenicks, and one or two more."
"H'm. My roses are good enough for that lot, but I'm not, eh?"
Jenny's hand was forced; Chat had undermined her position. Not even for
the sake of policy did she love to do an unhandsome thing--still less to
be found out in doing one. To use the roses and slight the donor would
not be handsome. She knew Aspenick's objection to meeting Octon, but
probably she thought that she could keep Aspenick in order.
"I had no idea you'd care about it. I thought you liked coming quietly
better. I like it so much better when I can have you to myself."
No use now! His prickles were out; he would not be cajoled.
"So I may as a rule--but it's rather marked when you never ask me to
meet anyone."
"I shall be delighted to see you at dinner to-morrow," said Jenny. "Will
you come?"
"Yes, I will come--I hope I know how to behave myself, don't I?"
"Oh, yes, you know well enough," she answered, delicately emphasizing
the difference between knowledge and practice. "All right, I shall
expect you."
"I know the meaning of it. That little Aspenick minx and her fool of a
husband are trying to get me boycotted--that's it."
Jenny, as her wont was, tried to smooth him down, but with little
success. He went off early, still very sulky, and growling about the
Aspenicks. For what it is worth, there was no doubt that they were now
busy leaders in the cabal against him, and he knew it.
"It won't be very pleasant, but we must carry it off with brave faces,"
said Jenny, referring to the next day's dinner. She looked vexed,
though, at this crossing of her arrangements.
Probably the dinner would have passed off tolerably, if not
comfortably--for Aspenick was a gentleman, and even Octon might feel
that he ought to be on his good behavior--when his temper recovered. But
unluckily his temper had not recovered by eleven o'clock the following
morning, and it was then that the lamentable thing happened.
I had finished my after-breakfast work with Jenny and had left the
house, to go down the hill to the Old Priory. The road through the park
crosses the path I had to follow, at about seventy yards from the house.
Approaching this road, I saw Lady Aspenick's tandem coming along on my
right. She was, as I have said before, an accomplished whip, and
tandem-driving was a favorite pastime of hers. To-day she appeared to be
trying a new leader; at any rate the animal was very skittish, now
rearing, now getting out of line, now sidling along--doing anything, in
fact, but his plain duty. She was driving slowly and carefully, while
the two grooms were half-standing, half-kneeling behind, looking over
her shoulders and evidently ready to jump down and run to the leader's
head at any moment. I stood watching their progress; it was pretty to
see her drive. Then I became aware of Octon's massive figure coming from
the opposite direction; he was walking full in the middle of the road,
which at this point is not very broad--just wide enough for two
carriages to pass one another between the banks, which rise sharply on
either side to the height of nearly three feet.
As Lady Aspenick drew nearer to Octon, one of the grooms whistled. Octon
gave way--a little. Apparently the groom--whether Lady Aspenick spoke to
him or not I could not see--thought that there was not yet room enough,
for he whistled again, waving his hand impatiently. Octon edged a little
more to the side of the road and then stood still, apparently waiting
for them to pass. He was by no means at the side of the road--neither
was he now in the middle; perhaps he was a third of the way across; and,
so far as I could judge, there was room for them to pass--and a
sufficient margin, at any rate for a steady team. Now the groom
shouted--a loud "Hi!" or some such word--in a peremptory way. I heard
Octon's reply plainly. "There's plenty of room, I tell you." Lady
Aspenick had her whip in her hand--ready, no doubt, to give her restless
leader a flick to make him mind his manners as they went by. While this
happened, I had begun to walk on again slowly, meaning to speak to Octon
when the lady had passed. I was about fifteen yards away--and the tandem
was just approaching where Octon stood. Just as she came up to him, Lady
Aspenick loosed the long lash of her whip; it flew out and I looked to
see a jump from the leader, who was dancing and capering in a very
restive way. But unless she took great care--or Octon moved a bit----
The next instant, while the idea was still incomplete in my mind, the
end of the lash caught him full on the face. He jumped back with a shout
of rage. The leader gave a wild plunge toward the other side of the
road; the cart swayed and rocked. The grooms leaped down and ran as hard
as they could to the leader's head. Octon sprang forward, caught hold of
the whip, wrenched it from Lady Aspenick's hand, almost pulling her out
of her seat, broke it in the middle across his knee, and flung the
fragments down on the road. I ran up hastily.
"You did that on purpose," he said, his voice shaking with rage. There
was a red streak across his face from the cheek bone to the chin.
She was pale, but she looked at him calmly through her eyeglasses.
"Nonsense," she answered, "but if I had, it would have been only your
deserts. Why didn't you give me room?"
"There was plenty of room if you knew how to drive; and, if you wanted
more, you could have asked for it civilly."
"You must have seen I had a young horse." She turned to me. "Give me my
whip, please, Mr. Austin. You saw what happened? I'll ask my husband to
come and see you about it." Then she ordered her men to take out the
refractory leader, and lead him home; she would drive back with the
wheeler. She took no more notice of Octon, nor he of her (unless to
watch her grooms' proceedings with a sullen stare), but as she started
off, holding the broken butt of the whip in her hand, she called to me,
"Tell Miss Driver we're looking forward to dinner to-night."
The grooms had looked dangerously at Octon, and were now saying
something to one another; but it needed at least one to hold the horse,
and Octon would be far more than a match for either of them singly. His
angry eyes seemed only to hope that they would give him some excuse for
violence.
"Follow your mistress," I said to them. "It's no affair of yours."
I think that they were glad to get my sanction for their retreat. Off
they went, and I was left alone with Octon.
"If it had been a man, I wouldn't have left a whole bone in his body.
She struck me deliberately--on purpose."
"It wasn't a man. Why didn't you give her more room?"
"There was plenty of room?" he persisted. "The whole road isn't hers, is
it?" With that he turned on his heel and sauntered off toward the south
gate, in the direction of his own house.
There was the incident--and I had the grave misfortune of being the only
independent witness of it. There was the incident--and there was the
dinner-party in the evening, to which both the Aspenicks and Leonard
Octon were bidden. Clearly the matter could not stand where it was; it
was, alas! no less clear that I should have to give my evidence. Of
course the meeting at dinner must not take place; whatever else might or
might not follow from the affair, that much was certain. I went back to
the house and asked to see Jenny.
I told her the story plainly and fully--all that I had seen and all that
had been said; she did not interrupt me once.
"There it is," I ended. "His case is that he gave her plenty of room and
that she purposely lashed him over the face. Hers is that he gave her
too little room, deliberately annoying her, that her leader was restive
and she had to use her whip, and that, if she hit him, it was his own
fault for standing where he did."
"His snatching away the whip and breaking it--isn't that bad?" she
asked. "Or if he thought she meant to hit him?"
"Then it's still bad, I suppose, since she's a woman; but it's perhaps
understandable--above all in him."
"Well, what's your own opinion about it?"
"That's just what I don't want to give," I objected.
"But you must. I have to come to some decision about this."
"Well, then--I think he did leave her room--enough and a little more
than enough; but I also think that he meant to annoy her. I'm sure he
didn't mean to put her in danger of an upset, but I do think that, with
such a horse as she was driving, an upset might have been the result,
and he ought to have thought of that--only he doesn't know much about
horses. On the other hand I don't think she deliberately made up her
mind to hit him--but I do think she meant to go as near to it as she
could without actually doing it; I think she meant to make him jump.
That's about my idea of the truth of the matter."
"Yes, I daresay," she said thoughtfully. "When Sir John comes to you,
bring him straight up here. They mustn't meet to-night, of course, but I
should like to see Sir John first--if he comes this morning or soon
after lunch."
"It's all very tiresome," said I lugubriously.
She suddenly put her hands in mine--in one of her moments of impulse.
"Oh, yes, yes, dear friend!" she murmured with an acute note of distress
in her voice. Tiresome as the affair was, it hardly seemed to call for
that; but I had not yet realized her position in its full difficulty; I
did not know what every new proof of Octon's "impossibility" meant to
her.
Sir John arrived, hot-haste, before lunch. Happily Fillingford was with
him. I say happily, for I gathered that the angry husband's first
intention had been to go straight to Hatcham Ford and undertake the
horse-whipping of Leonard Octon--which enterprise must have ended in
broken bones for Sir John, and probably the police court for both
combatants. Fillingford happened to be with him when Lady Aspenick
arrived at home and told her story; with difficulty he dissuaded
Aspenick from violent measures; above all, nothing must get into the
papers; all the same, it was a case for decisive private action.
According to my orders I took Sir John up to Jenny, and Fillingford came
with us.
There--before her--we had the whole story over again. Sir John told his
wife's version, I put Octon's forward against it--if only for fair
play's sake. Sir John naturally would have none of Octon's, nor would
Fillingford. Then I repeated my own impression of the affair. Any points
in it which made for Octon Sir John violently rejected; Fillingford's
attitude was wiser, the position he took up less open to the charge of
prejudice; he disliked Octon intensely, but he would not rest his case
on the weak foundation of an angry temper.
"I'm quite content to accept Mr. Austin's view of the facts, which he
has given us so clearly and so impartially. Where does his view lead?
Why to this--Not only was Mr. Octon inexcusably violent at the end, but
he was the original aggressor. He did not, Mr. Austin is convinced, mean
to cause danger to Lady Aspenick, but he did mean to cause her
vexation--in fact to offer her an affront. In my opinion anything on her
part that followed is imputable to his own fault, and he had no title to
resent it. I base my decision not on Lady Aspenick's account, but on Mr.
Austin's independent testimony; and I say that Mr. Octon behaved as no
gentleman and as no good neighbor should."
Jenny had listened to all the stories in silence, and in silence also
she heard Fillingford's summing-up. Now she looked at him and asked
briefly, "What follows?"
"It follows that he must be cut," interposed Aspenick in dogged anger.
"We have a right to protect ourselves--above all the ladies of our
families--from the chance of such occurrences. They mustn't be exposed
to them if we can help it; they certainly need not and must not be
exposed to the unpleasantness of meeting the man who causes them. We
have a right to act on that line--and I, for one, feel bound to act on
it, Miss Driver."
"Not a man in the place will do anything else," declared Aspenick.
But I was wondering what Jenny would do. Almost without disguise they
were presenting to her an ultimatum. They were saying, "If you want him,
you can't have us. We can't come where he comes. Is he to go on coming
to Breysgate? Is he to go on using your park?" She did not like
dictation--nor did she like sending her friends away. To send them away
on dictation--would she do that? Or would she fall into one of her
rages, bid them all go hang, and throw in her lot with boycotted Octon?
She turned to me.
"Do you agree with what these gentlemen say?" she asked.
In the end I liked Octon or, at any rate, found him very interesting,
and I was therefore ready, for myself, to put up with his tempers and
his tantrums. People who did not like him nor find him interesting could
not be asked to do that. And he stood condemned on my own evidence.
"They are quite within their rights," I had to answer.
She was not in a rage; she was anxious and distressed. Nor was the
anxiety all hers. Aspenick indeed had at the moment no thought but of
anger on his wife's account, but Fillingford must have had other things
in his mind. To put it at the lowest, he valued his acquaintance with
the mistress of Breysgate Priory; there were good grounds for guessing
that he valued it very much. If he had learned anything at all about
her, he must have known that he was risking it now. But he showed no
hesitation; he awaited her answer with a grave deference which declared
the importance he attached to it but gave no reason to hope that his own
course of action could be affected, whatever the answer might be.
Neither did she give the impression of hesitating--it was not exactly
that. Whether in her heart she hesitated I cannot tell; if she did, she
would not let them see it. Her demeanor betrayed nothing more than a
pained reluctance to condemn utterly, to recognize that one who had been
received as a friend and as a gentleman had by his own fault forfeited
his claim to those titles. Her delay in giving her decision--for the
real question now was whether she would join in Octon's ostracism--did
not impugn their judgment nor seem to weigh their merits against the
culprit's. It did not declare a doubt of their being right; it said only
with what pain she would recognize that they were right.
"Yes--it's the only thing," she said at last.
"I was sure you would agree with us--painful as such a course is,"
Fillingford said.
"It's only cutting a cad," Aspenick grumbled, half under his breath.
Jenny did not or would not hear him.
The bargain was struck, and fully understood without more words. Jenny's
friends must not be exposed to meeting Octon at Breysgate or in
Breysgate park. They would be strangers to Octon; if Jenny would be
their friend, she must be a stranger to him. Dropping Octon was the
condition of holding her place in their society. She understood the
condition and accepted it. There was no more to be said.
They took leave and she did not ask them to stay to lunch. Her farewell
to Aspenick was cold, though she made a civil reference to seeing him
again at dinner--nothing was said about Octon in that connection! But
toward Fillingford she showed a marked, if subdued, graciousness.
Clearly she meant to convey to him that, distressed as she was by the
incident and its necessary consequences, she attached no blame to him
for the part he had taken--nay, was grateful to him for his counsel and
guidance.
"I never had any doubt of your coming to a right decision," he told her,
holding her hand for a moment longer than he need. She looked into his
eyes, but said nothing; she gave the air of being heartily content to
surrender her judgment to his.
I saw them off and came back to her. She was still standing in the same
place, looking very thoughtful and frowning slightly; it was by no means
the trustful expression with which her eyes had dwelt on Fillingford's.
"Directly after lunch I must go down to Hatcham Ford and see Mr. Octon.
I want you to come with me."
"I? Not Miss Chatters?"
"You--not Chat. Don't be stupid," she said.