A SECRET TREATY
Jenny's first remark as we drove down together to Hatcham Ford seemed to
have very little to do with the matter in hand. Still less to do with
it, as one would think, had the fact that, just before starting, she
had--I learned it afterwards--given Chat a piece of handsome old lace.
"I like your name," she remarked. "'Austin Austin'--quite a good idea of
your parents'! One's only got to drop the 'Mr.' to be friendly at once.
No learning a strange Algernon, or Edward, or things of that kind!"
"Do drop it," said I.
"I have, Austin," said Jenny. She edged ever so little nearer to me, yet
looked steadily out of the window on the other side of the brougham.
"I'm frightened," she added in a low voice.
"Upon my honor," said I, "I don't wonder at it."
Such was the beginning of a remarkable kindness, a gentleness, almost an
appealing attitude, which Jenny displayed during several weeks that
followed. I must not flatter myself--Chat shared the rays of kindly
sunshine. If I were promoted to the Christian name, Chat got the lace.
"What will you call me?" she asked. "'Miss Driver' sounds--Say 'Jenny'!"
"Before the county? Impossible!"
"Well, then, when we're alone?"
"Shall it be Lady Jenny? For ourselves?"
She sighed acquiescence. "You're a great comfort to me," she added.
"You'll come in, won't you, if you hear me scream?"
"Come in?"
"I've got to see him alone, you know." She raised her hands for an
instant, as though in lamentation; "Oh, why is he like that?"
There was no treating this lightly--for one who felt for her what I did.
I was no such fool as not to see that her sudden access of graciousness
had a purpose--I had to be conciliated and stroked the right way for
some reason; so doubtless had Chat. But again I was, so I humbly trust,
no such churl as to resent the purpose--though I did not know precisely
what it was. I was her 'man,' as the old word was--her vassal. If my
liking or my honor refused that situation, well and good--I could end
it. While it lasted, I was hers. Within me the thing went deeper still
than that.
She was frightened. Therefore she was very gracious, seeking allies
however humble. I declare that I have always limited my expectation of
attachments entirely disinterested. Are there any? Who cherishes a
friend from whom there is neither profit nor pleasure to be had? Or, at
any rate, from whom neither has been had? The past obligation is often
acknowledged--and acquitted--with a five-pound note.
The westering sun caught her face through the window as we entered the
outskirts of Catsford; her eyes looked like a couple of new sovereigns.
"Yes, I'm frightened."
"Not you! You've courage enough for a dozen."
"Ah, I like you to say that! But I must make terms with him, you know."
She caught and pressed my hand. "But I don't believe I'm quite a
coward."
All this could mean but one thing--Octon had a great hold on her; yet
against him was a powerful incentive. Between the two--between his
power, which was great, and the power against him whose greatness she
had acknowledged to Fillingford that morning, she must patch up
conditions of peace--a secret treaty. I had no idea what the terms could
or would be. If Octon had the naming of them, they would not be easy.
Hatcham Ford just held its freedom against the encroaching town. No more
than fifty yards from its gates was the last villa--a red-brick house
of eccentric architecture but comfortable dimensions; its side windows
looked toward the gate of the Ford, and on the left its garden ran up to
the road on to which the shrubberies encircling the old house faced. A
tall oak fence surrounded the garden--on the gate was written, in large
gilt letters, "Ivydene." That house, like so many in Catsford, was on
Jenny's land. I wished that Cartmell would keep a tighter hand on his
builders.
Nearly swallowed by the flood of modern erections as it was, the old
house still preserved its sequestered charm. The garden was hidden from
the road by a close screen in front; at the back it ran gently down to
the murmuring river. Within were low ceilings crossed by old beams, and
oak paneling everywhere. Octon's tenancy and personality were marked by
clusters of barbaric spears and knives, hung against the oak, burnished
to a high polish, flashing against their time-blackened background.
Visitors were not expected. Octon's man--a small wizened fellow of full
middle age--seemed rather startled by the sight of Jenny; he hastily
pushed, rather than ushered, us into the dining room, a room on the left
of the doorway. In a moment or two Octon came to us. He stood in the
doorway, his big frame looking immense under the low lintel which his
head all but touched.
"You're not the visitors I expected," he said with a laugh. "I've stayed
in, waiting for Aspenick."
"Sir John won't come," said Jenny. "But I must speak to you--alone." She
turned to me. "You're sure you don't mind, Austin?"
"Of course you must see him alone. Where shall I go?"
"Stay here," he said. "We'll go next door--in the study."
He held the door for her, and she went out. I heard them enter a room
next to the one in which I was; the door was shut after them. Then for a
long while I heard nothing more, except the murmur of the little river,
which seemed loud to my unaccustomed ears, though probably people living
in the house would soon cease to notice it.
Presently I heard their voices; his was so loud that, for fear of
hearing the words, I had deliberately to abstract my mind by looking at
this, that, and the other thing in the room--more spears and knives on
the walls, books about his subject on the shelves, a couple of fine old
silver tankards gleaming on the mantelpiece. The voices died down again
just as I had exhausted the interest of the tankards, and taken in my
hand a miniature which stood on the top of the marble clock.
His voice fell to inaudibility; the welcome silence left me alone with
the little picture. It represented a child perhaps fourteen years old--a
small, delicate face, dark in complexion, touched on the cheeks with a
red flush, with large dark eyes, framed in plentiful black hair which
curled about the forehead. Whoever the young girl was, she was
beautiful; her eyes seemed to gaze at me from some remote kingdom of
childish purity; her lips laughed that I should feel awe at her eyes.
How in the world came she on Octon's mantelpiece?
Picked up somewhere for half a sovereign--as a pretty thing! That was
the suggestion of common sense, in rebellion against a certain sense of
over-strained nerves under which I was conscious of suffering. Yet,
after all, Octon, like other men, must have kith and kin. The style of
the picture was too modern for it to be his mother's. There were such
things as sisters; but this did not look like Octon's stock. An old
picture of a bygone sweetheart--that held the field as the likeliest
explanation; well, except the one profanely offered by common sense.
Octon was, to and for me, so much a part of Jenny's life and
surroundings that it was genuinely difficult to realize him as a man
with other belongings or associations; yet I could not but recognize
that in all probability he had many--perhaps some apart from those which
he might chance to have inherited.
Suddenly, through the wall, I heard a wail--surely I heard a little sob?
The picture was instantly forgotten. I stood intensely awake, alert,
watchful. If that sound came again, I determined that I would break in
on their conference. For minutes I waited, but the sound came no more. I
flung myself into a chair by the fire and began to smoke. I fell into a
meditation. No further sound came to break it; the murmur of the river
already grew familiar.
I heard a door open; the next moment they were in the room with me.
"What a time we've kept you! Have you been very bored?" asked Jenny.
Her words and her tone were light, but her face was as I had never seen
it. It was drawn with the fatigue of deep feeling: she had been
struggling; if I did not err, her eyes bore signs of crying--I had never
known her cry. At that moment I think I knew to the full that Octon was,
for good or evil, a great thing in her life. How could it be for good?
She herself, she alone, must bear the burden of answering that question.
But he, standing behind her, wore an unmistakable air of victory. So
confident was it, and so assured the whole aspect of his dominant
figure, that I prepared myself to hear that the verdict of the morning
was reversed and that the neighborhood--and all that meant--were to go
hang. Yet his first words contradicted both my forecast and his own
appearance. He spoke in a chafing tone.
"Behold in me, Austin, the Banished Duke! Never again may I tread the
halls of Breysgate--at any rate, not for the present! I have offended a
proud baronet--a belted earl demands my expulsion. And my liege lady
banishes me!"
"Don't be so silly," said Jenny--but gently, ever so gently, and with a
smile.
"Serves you right, in my opinion," said I.
"I suppose so," he answered, "and I bear no malice. I'm glad Aspenick
didn't force me to wring his neck. But I shall be very lonely--nobody
comes here--well, not many are invited! Will you drop in on the exile
and smoke a pipe now and then after dinner?"
"Oh, yes, I'll look you up." My tone was impatient, I know: his
burlesque was neither intelligible nor grateful to me.
"After dinner, if that suits you. I'm going to take advantage of my
solitude to work in the daytime. The door will be barred till nine
o'clock."
I nodded--and looked at my watch.
"Yes," said Jenny, "we must be going. Everything's settled, Austin,
and--and Mr. Octon has been very kind."
"I'm glad to hear that anyhow," I said grumpily. If he had been kind,
why had I heard that wail?
In fact I was thoroughly puzzled--and therefore both vexed and uneasy.
He accepted his banishment--and yet was friendly. That result seemed a
great victory for Jenny--yet she did not look victorious. It was Octon
who wore the air of exultation and self-satisfaction; yet he had been
thrown to the wolves, abandoned to the pack of Fillingfords and
Aspenicks. Well, that could not be the whole truth of it, though what
more there might be I could not guess.
He came with us down the gravel path which led from the hall door to the
road, where the brougham was waiting. Jenny pointed across the
road--where Ivydene stood with its strip of garden.
"That's the house I meant, you know," she said, evidently referring to
something that had passed in their private conversation.
He stood smiling at her, with his hands in his pockets. He really was,
for him, ridiculously amiable, though his amiability, like everything
else about him, was rough, almost boisterous.
"If you must go on with your beastly Institute," he said, "and must have
a beastly house for a beastly office, to make your beastly plans and do
your other beastly work in, why, I daresay that beastly house will do as
well as any other beastly house for your beastly purpose. Only do choose
beastly clerks, or whatever they're going to be, who haven't got any
beastly children to play beastly games and make a beastly noise in the
garden."
Quite the first I had heard of this idea! Quite the first time, too,
that Leonard Octon had been so agreeable--he meant to be agreeable,
though the humor was like a schoolboy's--about the Institute!
"I think I'll speak to Mr. Bindlecombe about it," said Jenny, as she
gave him her hand. Her farewell was more than gracious; it was grateful,
it was even appealing. Nor for all my anger and vexation could I deny
the real feeling in his eyes as he looked at her; he was admiring; he
was affectionate; nay more, he seemed to be giving her his thanks.
She was very silent all the way home, answering only by a "yes" or a
"no" the few remarks I ventured to make. On her own account she made
only one--as the result of a long reverie. "It'll all blow over some
day," she said.
If it was her only observation, at least it was a characteristic one.
Jenny had a great belief in things "blowing over"--a belief that
inspired and explained much of her diplomacy. What seemed sometimes in
retrospect to have been far-sighted scheming or elaborate cunning had
been in reality no more than waiting for a thing to "blow over"--holding
the balance, maintaining an artificial equilibrium by a number of clever
manipulations, until things should right themselves and gain, or regain,
a proper and natural basis. The best opinion I could form of her present
proceedings was that they rested on some such idea. For the moment she
banned Octon under the pressure of her other neighbors; but in time the
memory of his offenses would grow dimmer--and in time also her own
position and power would be more firmly established. Then he could come
back. She might have persuaded him into good humor by such a plea as
that. If it were so, I thought that she had misled him and perhaps
deceived herself. People have long memories for social offenses.
And--one could not help asking the question--what of Fillingford? Where
was he to fit in, what part was he to play? Was a millennium to come
when he was to lie down on Jenny's hearthrug side by side with Octon?
There was a lady too many at dinner--a man short! Jenny could have
avoided this blot on her arrangements by eliminating Chat--and poor Chat
was quite accustomed to being eliminated. But she chose not to adopt
this course. I rather think that she liked to feel herself a bit of a
martyr in the matter, but possibly she was also minded to make a little
demonstration of her submission, to let them guess that Octon had been
coming and that she had acted on their orders with merciless
promptitude. In other respects the party was one of her most successful.
Great as was the strain which she had been through in the afternoon, she
herself was gay and sparkling. And how they petted her! Lady Aspenick
might naturally have looked to be the heroine of the occasion--nor had
she any reason to complain of a lack of interest in her story (I had to
complain of a great deal too much interest in mine)--but it was for
Jenny that the highest honors were reserved; the most joy was over the
one sinner that repented.
Fillingford, of course, took her in to dinner. It was not in the man to
pay what are called "marked attentions" before the eyes of others, but
his manner to her was characterized by a pronounced friendliness and
deference; he seemed to be trying to atone for the coercion which he had
been compelled to exert earlier in the day. He did not fall into the
mistake of treating her acquiescence as a trifle or the case as merely
that of "cutting a cad," to use Aspenick's curtly contemptuous phrase.
He raised her action to the rank of an obligation conferred on her
neighbors and especially on himself. He was man of the world enough to
convey this impression without departing too far from the habitual
reserve of his demeanor.
Lady Aspenick looked at the pair through her eyeglasses; we had at last
exhausted the incident of the morning--though we had not settled the
precise degree of accidentality which attached to the collision between
her whip and Octon's face; under a veiled cross-examination she had
become rather vague about it--that may weigh a little in Octon's favor.
"It's a long while since I've seen Lord Fillingford so lively," she
remarked. "He seems to get on so well with Miss Driver. As a rule, you
know, we women despair of him."
"Has he such a bad character among you as that?"
"He seemed to have given himself up to being old long before he need.
He's only forty-three, I think." She laughed. "There, in my heart I
believe I'm matchmaking, like a true woman!"
"Yes, I believe you are. Well, these speculations are always
interesting."
"We're beginning to make them in the neighborhood, I can tell you, Mr.
Austin."
"And--knowing the neighborhood--I can believe you, Lady Aspenick."
"You've no special information?" she asked, laughing. "It would make me
so important!"
"Oh, you're important enough already--after this morning. And I know
nothing--absolutely nothing."
"You mean to say Miss Driver doesn't tell you----?"
"Actually she does not--and I'm not sure I should know if she did."
"Of course I'm only chaffing. But it would be rather--ideal."
"H'm. Forty-three may not be senile, but would you call it ideal? For a
romance?"
"Who's talking of romances? I'm on the question of marriage, Mr.
Austin."
"But if one can afford a romance? What's the use of being rich?"
"No, no, it's the poor people who can go in for romance. They've nothing
to lose! Divide nothing a year between two--or, presently, four--and
still it's no less."
"But the rich have nothing to gain--except romance."
"Oh, yes, sometimes. At the time of the Coronation I had quite a quarrel
with Jack because he wasn't a peer. He said I ought to have thought of
it before, but I said that that would have been quite disloyal." She
lowered her voice to a discreet whisper. "I do hope she's not distressed
about this morning?"
"A little, I'm afraid. Octon had his interesting side for her."
"I'm so sorry! I must be very nice to her after dinner."
Lady Aspenick was very "nice" to Jenny after dinner, and so were all of
them. She seemed to take new rank that evening--to undergo a kind of
informal but very real adoption into the inner circle of families which
made the local society. She was no longer a stranger entertaining them;
she had become one of themselves. This could not all be reward for
ostracizing Octon. Lady Aspenick's conversation, in itself not
remarkable for depth or originality, was a surface sign of another
current of opinion bearing strongly on Jenny's position. But no doubt
acquiescence in the ostracism was a condition precedent both to the
adoption and to that remoter prospect which inspired it.
Jenny's eyes were very clear. After they had all gone, I returned to the
drawing-room to bid her good night. Chat had already scuttled off to
bed--dinner parties kept her up later than was to her liking. Jenny was
leaning her elbow on the mantelpiece.
"Well," she said, "I've been good--and I've had my sugar-plums."
"Yes, and they've got plenty more for you if you go on being good."
"Oh, yes." Her voice sounded tired, and her face looked strained.
"Even some very big ones!"
Up to now she had shown no sign of resenting the pressure put upon her;
she had been sorrowful, but had displayed no anger. She did not even now
challenge the justice of Fillingford's decision; but she broke out into
a rage against the control claimed over herself.
"They force me to things," she said in a low voice, but in a tone full
of feeling. "They tell me I must do this or do that, or else I can't be
one of them, I can't rank with them, I can't, I suppose, marry Lord
Fillingford! Well, I yield where I must, but sometimes I get my own way
all the same. Let them look out for that! Yes, I get my own way in the
end, Austin."
"No doubt--not that I know what is your way in this particular matter."
Her little outbreak of anger passed as quickly as it had come. She
shrugged her shoulders with a woeful smile.
"My own way! So one talks. What is one's way? The way one would choose?
No--it's generally the way one has to tread. It's in that sense that I
shall get my own way."
"You'll try for it in the other sense, though, I fancy."
"Yes, perhaps I shall--and I shan't try less because Lord Fillingford
and the Aspenicks either scold or pet me."
"Well, but it's hardly reasonable to expect to have things both ways, is
it?"
She came to me, laughing, and took hold of my hands: "But if I choose to
have them both ways, sir?" she asked.
"Then, of course," said I, "the case is different."
"I will have them both ways," said Jenny.
"You can't."
"See if I don't!" she cried in merry defiance. "Only, mind you, not a
word of it--to the county!" She pressed my hands and let them go. "Oh,
I'm so tired!"
"Stop thinking--do stop thinking--and go to sleep."
She nodded at me kindly and reassuringly as Loft came in to put out the
lights. I left her standing there in her rich frock, with her jewels
gleaming, yet with her eyes again weary and mournful. She had had a bad
day of it, for all her triumph in the evening. Trying to have it both
ways was hard work.