Jeannie went that night to Lady Nottingham's room to talk to her. She
herself was feeling very tired, not with the sound and wholesome
tiredness that is the precursor of long sleep and refreshed awakening,
but with the restless fatigue of frayed nerves and disquiet mind that
leads to intolerable tossings and turnings, and long vigils through the
varying greys of dawn and the first chirrupings of birds.
"I have not come for long, dear," she said, "but I had to tell somebody
about--about what is happening. It's going so well, too."
Alice saw the trouble in Jeannie's face, and, as a matter of fact, had
seen trouble in other faces.
"I haven't had a word with you," she said, "and I don't know what is
happening. You seem to have had nothing to say to Lord Lindfield all
day. I thought, perhaps, you had given it up. It was too hard for you,
dear. I don't wonder you found you could not compass it."
Jeannie gave a little impatient sound; her nerves were sharply on edge.
"Dear Alice," she said, "that is not very clever of you. I thought you
would see. However, I am quite glad you don't, for if you don't I am
sure Daisy doesn't. I am getting a respite from Daisy's--well, Daisy's
loathing of me and my methods. She, like you, probably thinks I have
given him back to her."
Jeannie was prowling up and down the room rather in the manner of some
restless caged thing. In spite of her tiredness and her disquietude, it
seemed to Lady Nottingham that she had never seen her look so beautiful.
She looked neither kind nor genial nor sympathetic, but for sheer
beauty, though rather formidable, there were no two words to it.
"Sit down, Jeannie," said Alice quietly. "You are only exciting
yourself. And tell me about it all. I understand nothing, it seems."
Jeannie paused a moment in her walk, and then fell to pacing the
room again.
"No, I'm not exciting myself," she said, "but it is exciting me. I
don't stir myself up by walking; I am merely attempting, not very
successfully, to walk my excitement off. Oh, Alice, what wild beasts
we are at bottom! Prey! Prey! Prey! It is one of the instincts that
we--you and I, nice women--are rarely conscious of; but I doubt
whether it is ever quite dormant. Yes, that comes later; I will
explain from the beginning.
"The beginning of it all was easy," she said. "It is perfectly easy for
any woman to capture the attention of a man like that, even when he is
seriously thinking of getting married to a girl. There was no difficulty
in making him take me to the concert, in making him neglect Daisy those
first two days. He liked me immensely, and, oh! Alice, here was the
first extra difficulty, I liked him. We became friends. We mentioned the
word friend openly as applied to us. And I felt like--like a man who
gets a wild bird to sit on his hand and eat out of it, in order to grab
it, and if not to wring its neck, to put it into a cage. I meant to put
him into a cage, shut the door, and go away. And then yesterday
afternoon in the punt, just after we had made our discovery that we were
friends, he confided in me. He told me he was going to settle down and
marry! Judge of my rage, my disappointment! I saw that all my efforts up
till then had been quite useless. He was still meaning to marry, and, as
was right, poor dear, he told the news to his friend. Daisy's name did
not come in. Something made us break off--a flash of lightning, I
think, and the beginning of the storm. I should have found something to
divert the conversation otherwise. It was much better, in view of what I
have to do, that I should not officially know to whom he hoped to be
married."
Already the calming effect of telling a trouble to a friend was being
felt by Jeannie, and she sat down on the sofa near the window, clasping
her hands behind her head, and looking not at Alice, but into the dark
soft night. A little rain was falling, hissing among the bushes.
"I saw then," she said, "that I had made a stupid mistake. I had thought
that by mere friendliness and sympathy and making myself agreeable, and
making him admire me (which he did and does), I could get him away from
Daisy. I see now how impossible that was. If it is I who am going to
take him away, he must feel more than that. He will not leave the girl
he intended to marry unless he falls in love in his own manner with
some one else. Alice, I believe he is doing so."
Jeannie paused a moment.
"I hate it all," she said, "but I can't help being immensely interested.
Now for the part you don't understand, the part that made you think that
I had given it all up. It was a bold game, and, I believe, a correct
one. I dropped him--d-r-o-p, drop. Why? Simply in order that he might
miss me. Of course, I risked failure. He might have shrugged his
shoulders, and wondered why I had taken so much trouble to flirt with
him, and gone straight away and resumed operations with Daisy. He did go
straight back to Daisy, but do you think they are getting on very
nicely? I don't. The more he sees of her now, the more he thinks about
me. I don't say he has kind thoughts of me; he is puzzled, _but_ he
doesn't dismiss me. He is angry instead, and hurt. That shows he wants
me. He will never propose to Daisy while he feels like that."
There was a short silence. Then Lady Nottingham said,--
"Do you mean you want to make him propose to you?"
"Yes."
The monosyllable came very dryly and unimportantly, as if to a perfectly
commonplace inquiry. Then Lady Nottingham, in her turn, got up.
Jeannie's restlessness and disquiet seemed to have transferred
themselves to her.
"But it is an intolerable role," she said. "You cannot play with love
like that. It is playing heads and tails with a man's life, or worse.
You are playing with his very soul."
"And a month afterwards it will be he who will be playing with another
woman's soul," said Jeannie quietly. "You cannot call it love with that
sort of man. How many times has he been in love, and what has happened
to it all? I am only making myself the chance woman with whom he happens
to think himself in love at the time when he proposes to settle down and
marry. He shall propose marriage, therefore, to me."
Lady Nottingham's air of comfort had quite left her. Her plump,
contented face was puckered into unusual wrinkles.
"No, no, no," she said. "I can't imagine you act like that, Jeannie.
It isn't you."
Jeannie's eyes grew suddenly sombre.
"Oh, my dear, it is me," she said, "though I am glad it is a me which
is a stranger to you. I hope, as a rule, I don't play pitch-and-toss
with other men's souls; but there are circumstances--and those have
now arisen--in which I see no other way. At all costs to him I will
fulfil my promise to Diana. I will do my best that Daisy shall never
know. I do not care what it costs him. And yet that is not quite
true. I do care, because I like him. But I cannot measure his
possible suffering against Daisy's. It is through him that the need
of doing this has come. He has got to suffer for it; and I assure you
it isn't he alone who pays, it is I also."
Jeannie rose.
"And I do not yet know if I shall succeed," she said. "He may look with
a scornful wonder on my--my somewhat mature charms. He may--though I do
not really expect it--still intend to settle down and marry--Daisy. She
will accept him, if he does--I have seen enough to know that--and we
shall then have to tell her. But I hope that may not happen."
She took up her candle.
"I must go to bed," she said, "for I am dog-tired. But I don't feel so
fretted now I have told you. I wish I did not like him. I should not
care if I did not. Good-night, dear Alice."
* * * * *
All next day until evening Jeannie continued these tactics. Genial,
eager, sympathetic with others, she treated Lord Lindfield, whenever it
was necessary to speak to him at all, with the unsmiling civility which
a well-bred woman accords to a man she scarcely knows, and does not wish
to know better. And all day she saw the growing effect of her policy,
for all day he grew more perplexed and more preoccupied with her. She
gave him no opportunity of speaking with her alone, for she had planned
her day and occupations so that she was all the time in the company of
others, and hour by hour his trouble increased. Nor did the trouble
spare Daisy. Nothing could be clearer to her eye, with such absolute
naturalness did Jeannie manage the situation, than that she now, at any
rate, was standing quite aloof from Lord Lindfield.
A few days ago Daisy had told herself that she was glad her aunt liked
him, but it should be added that to-day she was equally glad that
Jeannie apparently did not. Yet the trouble did not spare Daisy, for if
Aunt Jeannie was utterly changed to Lindfield, he seemed to be utterly
changed too. He was grave, anxious, preoccupied, and the meaning of it
escaped the girl, even as it had escaped Lady Nottingham.
The party had been gradually gathering in the verandah before it was
time to dress for dinner that night, and Jeannie, _a propos_ of the
dressing-bell, had just announced that a quarter of an hour was enough
for any nimble woman, with a competent maid.
"She throws things at me, and I catch them and put them on," she said.
"If I don't like them I drop them, and the floor of the room looks
rather like Carnival-time until she clears up."
But the sense of the meeting was against Jeannie; nobody else could
"manage," it appeared, under twenty minutes, and Jim Crowfoot stuck out
for half an hour.
"You've got soft things to put on," he said; "but imagine a stiff
shirt-cuff hitting you in the eye when your maid threw it. The floor of
my room would look not so much like Carnival-time as a shambles."
Lord Lindfield, indeed, alone supported Jeannie.
"I want ten minutes," he said; "neither more nor less. Jim, it's time
for you to go, else you will keep us waiting for dinner. I see that Mrs.
Halton and I will be left alone at ten minutes past eight, and I at a
quarter past."
Jeannie heard this perfectly, but she turned quickly to Lady Nottingham.
"Alice, is it true that you have a post out after dinner?" she said.
"Yes? I must go and write a letter, then, before dressing; I
particularly want it to get to town to-morrow."
She rose and went in. And at that Lindfield deliberately got up too and
followed her. She walked straight through the drawing-room, he a pace or
two behind, and out into the hall. And then he spoke to her by name.
She turned round at that. There was no way to avoid giving a reply, and,
indeed, she did not wish to, for she believed that the policy of the
last two days had ripened.
"Yes, Lord Lindfield?" she said.
"Am I ever going to have a word with you again?" he asked.
Jeannie leant over the banisters; she had already gone up some six
stairs.
"But by all means," she said. "I--I too have missed our talks. Things
have gone wrong a little? Let us try after dinner to put them straight.
We shall find an opportunity."
"Thanks," he said; and it was not only the word that thanked her.
Jeannie's maid must have been a first-rate hand at throwing, if by that
simple process she produced in a quarter of an hour that exquisite and
finished piece of apparelling which appeared at half-past eight. True,
it was Jeannie who wore the jewels and the dress, and her hair it was
that rose in those black billows above her shapely head; and the dress,
it may be said, was worthy of the wearer. Still, if this was to be
arrived at by throwing things, the maid, it was generally felt, must be
a competent hurler.
It so happened that everybody was extremely punctual that night, and
Jeannie, though quite sufficiently so, the last to appear. Lady
Nottingham was even just beginning to allude to the necessary quarter of
an hour when she came in.
Lord Lindfield saw her first; he was talking to Daisy. But he turned
from her in the middle of a sentence, and said,--
"By Gad!"
It might have been by Gad, but it was by Worth. Four shades of grey, and
pearls. Mrs. Beaumont distinctly thought that this was not the sort of
dress to dash into the faces of a quiet country party. It was like
letting off rockets at a five o'clock tea. Only a woman could dissect
the enormity of it; men just stared.
"I know I am not more than one minute late," she said. "Lord Lindfield,
Alice has told me to lead you to your doom, which is to take me
in.--Alice, they have told us, haven't they?"