Jeannie went straight to her room. It was done, even as she had said,
and her heart bled for her triumph. Yet she did not for a moment repent
it. Had it been necessary to do it again, she would again have gone
through the same hateful scene, and her scorn of herself weighed light
even now with the keeping of the promise she had made by the bedside of
Diana. But the thing had been worse than she had anticipated; it was no
superficial desire she had aroused in him, but the authentic fire. But
that made Daisy the safer: a man was not often in earnest like that.
But still the future was unplanned for; she had made her scene, scored
her point, and the curtain, dramatically speaking, should have
descended. But in real life the curtain did not descend; life insisted
that there were no such things as curtains; it made one go on. She
knew, too, that Lindfield would not take this as final; she had to
think of something which should make it final. In any case she could
not contemplate stopping in the house, with him there, and decided to
go back to town to-morrow, cutting her stay here short by a day. She
would go early, before any one was down; Alice would invent and
explain for her.
A note, hastily scribbled, settled this. "It is done, Alice," she wrote,
"and I feel satisfied and utterly miserable. Daisy does not exist for
him. I shall go back to town early to-morrow, dear. Will you make some
excuse? I know you will understand."
But the more important matter was not settled so easily. She had to show
poor Lindfield unmistakably that her rejection of him was quite
irrevocable. What interpretation he put on her conduct mattered but
little, as long as he clearly understood that. And then a means occurred
to her which was quite simple and quite sufficient. She wrote a couple
of lines to Victor.
"My dearest," she said, "I must go to town early to-morrow, and shall
not see you till you come up the day after. And I want you to announce
our engagement at once. I should like it to be in the evening papers
to-morrow. Tell them yourself down here. I write this in great haste.
All love."
Jeannie rang for her maid to get these delivered, dismissed her for the
night, and sat down to think over what she had done. She was still
tremulous from it. To a man she really liked, and to a girl whom she
tenderly loved, she had made herself vile, but it was still her sincere
hope that neither would ever know the reason for what she had done. They
must write her down a flirt; they had every reason for doing so.
She rose and looked at herself a moment in the long mirror beside the
dressing-table. "You beast!" she said to herself. But there was another
thought as well. "Diana, my dear," she said, as if comforting her.
* * * * *
It had been settled that Jeannie was to live with Lady Nottingham till
the end of the season, and the latter had given her two charming rooms
in the Grosvenor Square house, so that she could make things home-like
about her for the few weeks before she would go down to her own house in
the country. Little household gods had arrived and been unpacked while
she was in the country, and she occupied herself during this solitary
day in London with the arrangement of them. There were not many, for she
did not tend to buy, but there were a few "bits of things" which she had
got in Rome, a Cinque-cento bas-relief, a couple of Florentine copies of
the Della Robbia heads, and some few pieces of Italian needlework. All
these took some little time to dispose satisfactorily in the room, and
that done, she proceeded to the arrangement of her writing-table. She
liked to have photographs there: there was one of Daisy and Diana, two
mites of ten years old and four years old, lovingly entwined, Daisy's
head resting on her sister's shoulder; there was one of Victor as he was
now, and another as he had been when an Eton boy; there were half a
dozen others, and among them one of Diana, signed and dated, which Diana
had given her hardly more than a year ago in Paris.
All this arranging took up the greater part of the day, and she kept
herself to her work, forcing her mind away from those things which
really occupied it, and making it attend to the manual business of
putting books in shelves and pictures on the walls; but about tea-time
there was nothing more to occupy her here, and by degrees her thoughts
drifted back to Bray and her friends--or were they enemies?--there. It
was no use thinking of it or them, for there was nothing more to be
contrived or planned or acted, no problem for her to dig at, no crisis
to avert.
She had finished everything, and there was nothing left for her to do
except be silent, and hope perhaps by degrees to win Daisy back again.
How Daisy reconstructed things in her own mind Jeannie did not know,
and, indeed, the details of such reconstruction she did not particularly
want to know. She had taken Lord Lindfield away from the girl, for a
mere caprice, apparently, for the love of annexation characteristic of
flirts, while all the time she was engaged to Victor Braithwaite. And
having made mischief like this, she had run away. It was like a child
who, having from sheer wantonness set fire to something, runs to a safe
distance and watches it burn.
Jeannie had ordered the carriage to come round at six to take her for a
drive, and a few minutes before, though it was barely six yet, she had
heard something drive up and stop at the door, and supposed that before
long her maid would tell her that it was round. Even as she thought this
she heard steps come along the passage outside, then her door opened.
Daisy entered. She was very pale, but in each cheek there flamed one
high spot of colour. She stood quite still by the door for a moment,
looking at her aunt, then closed it and advanced into the room.
"It is true, then, Aunt Jeannie," she said, "that you are engaged to
Victor Braithwaite? I came up from Bray to ask you that, to know it from
your own lips."
Jeannie did not move, nor did she give Daisy any word of conventional
greeting.
"It is quite true," she said.
Daisy began pulling off her gloves.
"I congratulate you," she said. "It came as rather a surprise to me.
Aunt Alice told me. I think she understood why it was a surprise to me.
I wonder if you do?"
Daisy appeared to be keeping a very firm hand on herself. There was no
question that she was speaking under some tremendous stress of emotion,
but her voice was quite quiet. It trembled a little, but that was all,
and it seemed to Jeannie that that tremor was of anger more than of
self-pity or sorrow. She was glad--in so far as she was glad of
anything--that this was so.
"I see you don't answer me," said Daisy, "and, indeed, there is no need.
But I want an answer to this question, Aunt Jeannie. Why did you do it?
Don't you think I have a right to know that?"
For one moment it occurred to Jeannie to profess and to persist in
professing that she did not know what Daisy meant. But that would have
been useless, and worse than useless--unworthy. In her utter perplexity
she tried another tack.
"Is it my fault that he fell in love with me?" she said.
"Did you not mean him to?" asked Daisy. "And all the time, while you
meant him to, you were engaged to Mr. Braithwaite."
There was still anger in Daisy's voice. Jeannie felt she could bear
that; what she felt she could not bear would be if Daisy broke down. So
she encouraged that.
"I do not see by what right you question me," she said. "Lord
Lindfield fell in love with me; last night he proposed to me. Ask
him why he did that."
"He did that because you fascinated and dazzled him," said Daisy;
"because you meant him to fall in love with you."
"Then I wonder you have not more spirit," said Jeannie. "You see how
easily he turned from you to me. Can you then believe he was ever in
love with you? You may have wanted to marry him; at least----"
And then she paused, knowing she had made the most ghastly mistake, and
not knowing how to remedy it. Daisy saw her mistake.
"Then you did know that it was possible he would ask me to marry him,"
she said. "I wondered if you knew that. It makes it complete now I know
that you did. So it comes to this, that you cut me out just in order to
flirt with him. Thank you, Aunt Jeannie, thank you."
And then there came into Daisy's voice what Jeannie dreaded to hear; the
hard tone of anger died out of it, it became gentle, and it became
miserable. She sat down at Jeannie's writing-table, covering her face
with her hands.
"Oh, I beseech you," she said, "cannot you undo the spell that you cast
so easily? Oh, Aunt Jeannie, do, do; and I will forget all that has
happened, and--and love you again. I want to do that. But I loved him;
it was only quite lately I knew that, but it is so. Have you not enough?
Isn't it enough that you will marry the man you love? I did not think
you could be so cruel. Do you hate me, or what is it?"
Jeannie made a little hopeless gesture with her hands.
"Oh, Daisy, I didn't know that you loved him," she said. "Indeed, I did
not. But, my dear, he did not love you. How could he have if he behaved
as he has behaved?"
"You made him," said Daisy. "You----" Then once again anger flamed into
her voice. "Ah, what a true friend you have been to me!" she said. "Were
you as true a friend to Diana too?"
She had taken up one of the photographs, that which represented her and
Diana together.
"Here we are together," she said, "and we thank you. Here is Diana
by herself----"
And then she stopped abruptly. Her eye had fallen on the photograph
of Diana which she had given only last year to Jeannie. It was
signed "Diana, 1907." She drew it out of its frame.
"Aunt Jeannie," she said, quickly, "in what year did Diana die?"
Jeannie turned to her suddenly at this most unexpected question, and saw
what it was that Daisy held in her hand. She made a desperate effort to
turn Daisy's attention away at any cost.
"Daisy, we were talking about Lord Lindfield," she said. "What reason
had he ever given you to make you think he loved you? And has he not
given you a strong reason for showing he did not?"
Daisy looked at her for a moment, and then back to the photograph.
"She died five years ago," she said. "But this is signed 1907, last
year."
Once again Jeannie tried to turn Daisy's attention.
"And if he did fall in love with me, what then?" she said. "You assume
it is all my fault."
Daisy looked at her steadily a moment, and then back at the photograph.
"Yes, yes," she said. "But you were with Diana when she died, were you
not? When did she die?"
Jeannie covered her face with her hands a moment, thinking intently, and
then Daisy spoke again.
"Why was I told she died five years ago?" she asked. "You told me so
yourself. Were you hiding anything?"
Again Daisy paused.
"Her husband came to England after her death," she said. "He stopped
with you, I remember, when I was living with you."
Once again she paused.
"Was there something dreadful, something disgraceful?" she asked. "Aunt
Jeannie, I must know. I must!"