Easter fell late next year, but spring had come early, and had behaved
with unusual sweetness and constancy, for from the middle of March to
mid-April there had been a series of days from which winter had
definitely departed. In most years April produces two or three west-wind
days of enervating and languorous heat, but then recollects itself and
peppers the confiding Englishman with hail and snow, blown as out of a
pea-shooter from the northeast, just to remind him that if he thinks
that summer is going to begin just yet he is woefully mistaken. But this
year the succession of warm days had been so uninterrupted that Lady
Nottingham had made the prodigious experiment of asking a few people
down to Bray for a week-end party at Easter itself.
She was conscious of her amazing temerity, for she knew well that
anything might happen; that the river, instead of being at the
bottom of the garden, might so change its mind about their relative
positions that in a few hours the garden would be at the bottom of
the river, or, again, this bungalow of a house might be riddled and
pierced with arctic blasts.
But, in spite of these depressing possibilities, she particularly
wanted to have a few, a very few, people down for that Sunday. They
had all a special connection with Bray. Things had happened there
before, and it was a party of healed memories that was to gather
there. If, after all, the weather turned out to be hopelessly
unpropitious, they could all sit in a ring round the fire, holding
each other's hands. She felt sure they would like to do that.
Probably there would be a great many _tete-a-tetes_ in various
corners, or, if it were warm, in various punts. But she felt sure
that they would all hold hands in the intervals of these.
Jeannie and Victor had been married in the autumn, and since then
they had practically disappeared, surrounded by a glow of their own
happiness. They had sunk below the horizon, but from the horizon
there had, so to speak, come up a brilliant illumination like an
aurora borealis.
But Lady Nottingham considered that they had aurora-ed quite long
enough. They had no right to keep all their happiness to themselves;
it was their duty to diffuse it, and let other people warm their
hands and hearts at it. She had written what is diplomatically known
as a "strong note" to say so, and she had mentioned that she was not
alone in considering that they were being rather selfish. Tom
Lindfield thought so too. He openly averred that he was still
head-over-ears in love with Jeannie, and he wished to gratify his
passion by seeing her again, and having copious opportunities given
him of solitary talks with her. He did not object (this was all part
of the message that Lady Nottingham sent Jeannie from him) to
Victor's coming with her, but he would be obliged if Victor would
kindly make up his mind to efface himself a good deal. Otherwise he
had better stop away.
Tom proposed to come down to Bray for Easter, and would be much obliged
if Jeannie would come too. He did not ask her to set aside any other
engagements she might have, because he was perfectly well aware that she
had no other engagement than that tiresome and apparently permanent one
of burying herself in the country with Victor.
Jeannie received this letter at breakfast down at their house in
Hampshire. She read it aloud to her husband.
"What a darling he is," she said. "Victor, I shall go. I love that man."
"I know you do. He isn't a bad sort. Do you want me to come too?"
"Oh, I shan't go unless you do," said Jeannie, quickly.
"Right. It's a confounded nuisance, though, but I suppose you must. How
many days do you want to stop there?"
"Oh, till Tuesday or Wednesday, I suppose. Perhaps Tom would come back
with us here after that."
Victor got up and moved round the table, till he stood by his wife's
chair.
"No, I don't think he will," he said. "Fact is, Jeannie, I asked him
to come here a week or two ago, and he wrote me an awfully nice
letter back, but said he thought he wouldn't. I didn't tell you
before, for there was no use in it. But after that I don't think I
should ask him if I were you."
Jeannie was silent a moment.
"But he wants to see me now," she said.
"I know. But I don't think he wants to be with us alone. You understand
that, I expect."
Jeannie sighed.
"Poor Tom!" she said. "Yet I don't know why I say 'poor.' I think he
likes life."
"I don't think he loves it as you and I do."
Jeannie's eyes suddenly filled with tears.
"I am awfully sorry for that," she said. "Sometimes I feel frightfully
guilty, and then suddenly on the top of that I feel innocent. Oh, to be
plain, I feel more than innocent. I feel dreadfully laudable. And then,
to do me justice, I put up a little prayer that I may not become a prig
or a donkey."
He laughed.
"Please, don't," he said. "I should not know you. But you made a man of
him."
"Ah, yes; he has told you that. It is not the case. He made a man of
himself."
Victor held up his hand.
"I don't want to know what happened," he said. "I am quite content to
leave it. He became a man, and you were always my beloved."
Some backward surge of memory stirred in Jeannie.
"Quite always?" she said. "You never wanted to ask me about it?"
"No, dear, never," he said. "Not because I was complacent or anything of
that kind, but simply because we loved each other."
This, then, was the foundation of Lady Nottingham's Easter party.
Jeannie and her husband would come, and so, as a corollary, Lord
Lindfield would come. Then there would be the newly-engaged couple,
namely, Daisy and Willie Carton. Either of them would go, as steel
filings go to the magnet, wherever the other was, and without the least
sense of compunction Lady Nottingham told each of them separately that
the other was coming to her. She had been rather late in doing this,
and, as a matter of fact, Willie, no longer hoping for it, had made
another engagement. But he did not even frown or consider that. He wrote
a cheerful, scarcely apologetic note to Mrs. Beaumont, merely saying he
found he could not come. Nature and art alike--and Mrs. Beaumont was a
subtle compound of the two--allow much latitude to lovers, and she did
not scold him.
At this stage in her proceedings Lady Nottingham suddenly abandoned the
idea of a party at all. There was Victor and Jeannie, and their
corollary, Tom Lindfield; there was Daisy and her corollary, Willie;
there was herself. Gladys would be there too, and--and it was necessary
to provide light conversation in case everybody was too much taken up
with everybody else, and Jim Crowfoot would, no doubt, supply it. A very
short telephonic pause was succeeded by the assurance that he would.