The geography of breakfast at Lady Nottingham's was vague and
shifting. Sometimes it all happened in the dining-room, sometimes, and
rather oftener, little of it happened there, but took place, instead
of on that continent, in the scattered islands of bedrooms. Gladys,
however, was generally faithful to the continent, and often, as
happened next morning, breakfasted there alone, while trays were
carried swiftly upstairs to the bedrooms of the others. She alone of
the inmates of the house had slept well that night. But she always
slept well, even if she had the toothache.
Daisy had not slept at all well. It would be nearer the mark, indeed,
to say that she had not even lain awake at all well, but had tossed
and tumbled in a manner unprecedented. There was no wonder that it was
unprecedented, since that which caused it had not occurred before to
her. She had left the dance quite early, dragging Gladys away, because
she had got something to think about which absorbed her. She had never
been really absorbed before, though it was a chronic condition with
her to be intensely and violently interested in a superficial manner.
But this went deeper; from the springs of her nature now there came
forth something both bitter and sweet, and tinged all her thoughts and
her consciousness.
In herself, as she lay awake that night hearing the gradual diminuendo
of the noises of traffic outside, till, when she thought there would
be a hush, the crescendo of the work of the coming day began, she felt
no doubt as to what this was which absorbed her and kept sleep so far
aloof from her eyelids. It had started from as small a beginning as a
fire that devastates a city, reducing it to desolation and blackened
ash. A careless passenger has but thrown away the stump of a cigarette
or a match not entirely extinguished near some inflammable material,
and it is from no other cause than that that before long the walls of
the tallest buildings totter and sway and fall, and the night is
turned to a hell of burning flame. Not yet to her had come the
wholesale burning, there was not yet involved in it all her nature;
but something had caught fire at those few words of Lord Lindfield's;
the heat and fever had begun.
Well she knew what it was that ailed her. Hitherto love was a thing
that was a stranger to her, though she was no stranger to intense and
impulsive affection like that which she felt for Aunt Jeannie. But how
mysterious and unaccountable this was. It seemed to her that the
phenomenon known as "love at first sight," of which she had read, was
a thing far less to be wondered at. There a girl meets some one she
has not seen before whom she finds holds for her that potent spell.
That could be easily understood; the new force with which she comes in
contact instantly exercises its power on her. But she, Daisy, had come
across this man a hundred times, and now suddenly, without apparent
cause, she who thought she knew him so well, and could appraise and
weigh him and settle in her own mind, as she had done after her talk
to Lady Nottingham the afternoon before, whether she would speak a
word that for the rest of her life or his would make her fate and
destiny, and fashion the manner of her nights and days, found that in
a moment some change of vital import had come in turn on her, so that
she looked on him with eyes of other vision, and thought of him in
ways as yet undreamt of.
This was disquieting, unsettling; it was as if the house in which she
dwelt--her own mind and body--which she had thought so well-founded and
securely built--was suddenly shaken as by an earthquake shock, and she
realized with a touch of panic-fear that outside her, and yet knit into
her very soul, were forces unmanifested as yet which might prove to be
of dominant potency.
Then, suddenly, her mood changed; their power was frightening no longer,
they were wholly benignant and life-giving. It was not an earthquake
shock that had frightened her, it was but the first beam of some
new-rising sun that had struck on to the darkness of the world in which
she had lived till now. She was smitten "by the first beam from the
springing East," she who had never known before what morning was, or how
fair was the light which it pours on to the world. And this morning beam
was for her; it had not struck her fortuitously, shedding its light on
her and others without choice. It had come to shine into her window,
choosing that above all others. It was she that the first beam sought.
It came to gild and glorify her house, her body and mind, the place
where her soul dwelt.
How blind she had been! There was no difference in him; the difference
had been in her alone. She had sat with sealed eyes at her window, or,
at the most, with eyes that could but see the shadows and not the sun.
Now they saw the sun only; there were no shadows, for the shadows had
been but her own blindness.
Dawn was in the sky outside; here in the quiet, white-curtained room
another dawn had come, not quiet, but with gleam of sun alternating with
cloud and tempest, making the beholder wonder what the day would bring
forth.
* * * * *
Aunt Jeannie, too, had lain long awake, but when sleep came it came
deeply and dreamlessly, demanding the repair of two nights in the
train and the agitation of her talk. She had given orders that she was
not to be called till she rang, and when she woke the sun was already
high, and the square outside lively with passengers and traffic. But
it was with a sense of coming trial and trouble, if not quite of
disaster, that she woke.
It was disaster she had to avert; she had to think and scheme. But had
she known of Daisy's sleepless night, and the cause of that, she would
have felt that the anchor which prevented the situation drifting into
disaster had been torn up. For the anchor was the belief, as Lady
Nottingham had told her, that Daisy was not in love with Tom Lindfield,
and by one of fate's little ironies, at the very moment when she was
comforting herself last night with that thought it was true no longer.
Her sleep had quite restored her, giving vigour to her body and the
power of cool reflection to her brain, and when Victor came, according
to promise, to see her during the morning there was no hint of trouble
in her welcome of him, nor did he guess that any disquieting news had
reached her. And his conclusion, though not actually true, was justly
drawn, for the peace and the sense of security which she felt in his
presence was of a kind that nothing else, except danger and disaster to
it itself, could disturb.
It was a very tender, a very real part of her nature that was
troubled, but the trouble did not reach down into these depths. Nor
did she mean to speak of this trouble to him at all; a promise had
been made by her to keep it as secret as could be. Hitherto the secret
had been completely kept; it had passed the lips of none of the few
who knew. But to-day she would be obliged to speak of it to Alice, for
her plan to avert disaster was already half formed, but she dared not
embark on it alone without counsel from another. For an utterly
unlooked-for stroke of fate, supreme in its irony, that Daisy should
be meditating marriage with the one man in the world whom it was
utterly impossible that she should marry, had fallen, and at all costs
the event must be averted.