The Duchess, that evening, watched Brigit with dismayed surprise. What
had happened to the girl? Where were her happy expression and youthful
spirits?
Théo had not changed; that they had not quarrelled was quite evident,
for when she spoke to him there was something of the gentleness of the
day before in her manner; but this exception excepted, the girl had
reverted to her old air of silent, resentful indifference, and her
strange beauty was to the watchful old woman as repellent as she had
ever seen it.
Once, when Carron spoke to her, Brigit answered without turning her
head, and with her narrowed eyes and slow-moving lips looked almost
venomous.
If she had produced a knife and plunged it into him, the Duchess told
herself she would not have been surprised.
"An uncommonly unpleasant young person," thought the old lady, "with the
temper of a fiend. I wonder where she got it; poor Henry had no temper
at all, and her mother is at worst a spitfire."
Yelverton, too, noticed the disquieting change that had come over Lady
Brigit, and observed with some amusement that she had noticed his
observation and did not care about it, one way or the other.
Théo, seeing his love with the rosiest of spectacles, asked her gently
what was the matter, and was told in a quiet voice that she was cross.
"I have an abominable temper, poor boy," she said.
And possibly because it was the simple truth, it never occurred to him
to believe her, and he set this remark down as an example of her divine
humility.
Her mother, glaring at her toward the end of dinner, shrugged her
shoulders.
"Cross again," she thought; "what an infernal temper she has. I'm glad I
haven't, it makes so many wrinkles."
But Brigit had some reason for looking tragic, for she had made up her
mind, while dressing, to break her engagement. Perhaps, after all,
Joyselle would prove large-minded enough to continue to see Tommy, and
even if he did not, she must end matters.
Regarding herself, the girl had a curious prescience, and the vague
foreboding she had felt ever since her realisation of her love for
Joyselle had, as she sat before her glass while her maid dressed her
hair, suddenly developed into a definite terror. She knew that something
dreadful would happen if she continued to see Joyselle, and the fact
that he was quite innocent, and unsuspecting of the threatened danger,
gave her the sensation of one who sees a child playing with a poisonous
snake. _He_ was in danger as well as she, and not only they two, but his
son and his wife. Her beauty was so great, and she was so accustomed to
see its effect on men, that there was no vanity at all in her suddenly
awakened solicitude for him. At any moment he might see her with the
eyes of a man, instead of, as he had hitherto done, with those of a
father.
"And if he fell in love with _me_," she told herself as the maid clasped
her pearls round her neck, "there would be no hope for any of us."
It is remarkable that the possibility of Joyselle's loving her only
added to her misery, for most women in like cases would have clutched at
the bare chance of such a contingency in rapturous disregard of all
consequences.
She, however, who had been the object of more strong passions than many
women ever even hear of, knew although, or possibly because, she had
never before cared a jot for any man, that her time had come, and that
for her love must be a perilous thing. She had once been called a stormy
petrel, and now as, racked with the agony of her resolve, she sat
through the interminable dinner, she recalled the name, and smiled
bitterly to herself. Yes, she was a stormy petrel, and she had no right
to ruin Victor Joyselle and his family. She would break her engagement
and go to Italy for the winter. The Lenskys were going, and she would go
with them.
Joyselle was in high spirits that evening. He had had a letter from
Là-bas, as he always called Normandy, and his mother was better, and
greatly looking forward to his visit. "She is old, my mother," he told
the party, "eighty years old, but her cheeks are still rosy! They live
in Falaise, in a small little house near the parish church, and in her
garden she grows vegetables--ah, such vegetables!"
"It is a great age," observed someone, and he laughed aloud. "Yes--for
here. Là-bas with us, she is not so old as she would be here. I am an
old man here, but there, I am still _jeune_ Joyselle! And my big boy, my
betrothed boy, is still _le petit du jeune_ Joyselle."
It was not particularly interesting, but nevertheless everyone at the
table listened with delight. The man's vividness, his simple certainty
of their sympathy, were irresistible.
"Next September," he went on, draining his champagne glass and wiping
his moustache upward, in a martial way, "is their golden wedding, _mes
vieux_! It will be very fine. Very fine indeed, for all the children and
grandchildren," he glanced slily at Brigit, who clasped her hands
lightly on her lap, "will be there, and we shall eat until we can eat no
more, and tell each other old tales, and boast about our successes in
life--ah, it will be very pleasant!"
"You will come too, my Brigit," whispered Théo under his breath. "I can
show them my wonderful--wife?"
She could not answer, and he took her distress for girlish confusion,
and, manlike, rejoiced in it.
After dinner Joyselle came straight to her. "May I talk to you about
Tommy?" he began, "I love Tommy very much."
"He--adores you."
"Yes. Let us go into the library, Most Beautiful, where we can talk
quietly." Before she could protest he had turned to her mother and
announced his intention. "I leave to-morrow, before she will be up," he
declared, "and there are things I must say. You allow me, Lady
Kingsmead?"
Then he put his arm round the girl's waist and marched her down the hall
and up the stairs leading to the library.
"Isn't he quaint?" giggled Lady Kingsmead to the Duchess, and the old
woman assented with a laugh. "He is an amazing mixture of the boyish and
the paternal. I thoroughly like him."
Meantime Brigit had sat down in a tall-backed carved chair, and, her
hands on its arms, waited for Joyselle to speak. He walked about the
room for a few moments, looking up at the book-covered walls, opening
one of the windows, examining an ivory dragon that grinned on the
chimney-piece. Then he burst out, "_Eh, bien_, my dearest, and when is
it to be?"
"When is what to be?"
"The wedding."
A hot blush crept over her, leaving her cold.
"Théo wants his wife, and I want my daughter," he continued, sitting
down by her and taking her hand affectionately, "why waste time!"
She looked at him in hopeless dismay. He was so big, so strong, so
overpowering, she felt that her strength to resist his will was as
nothing.
"You think I ask too soon?" He looked at her, an anxious pucker in his
eyelids, "But no. There is never too much time in which to be happy, ma
Brigitte----"
For the first time in her recollection she was glad to see Gerald
Carron, as he came up the stairs, and approached them slowly.
"Does mother want me?" she asked, rising.
"No. I--just wondered what you were doing."
"I brought Lady Brigit here because I wanted to talk to her," explained
Joyselle, mildly. Carron laughed.
"So do I want to talk to her!"
Brigit gave a nervous laugh. "Let's all go downstairs and talk there. My
conversation isn't usually so appreciated."
The two men followed her in silence, and to her immense relief were both
promptly accosted by someone of the party, and she could escape to her
window seat.
What would have happened if Carron had not come, she asked herself with
a shudder. Would her strength have come back, and would she have been
able to tell Joyselle that he must make no plans for her wedding?
Until she had known his father, Théo had never seemed to her to lack
personality; he was young, but his very boyishness was individual. Yet
now with Joyselle clamouring for her to fix her wedding-day, Théo seemed
to fade into insignificance, and her task to become that of breaking the
news of her intended rupture with the son, to the father.
And as she sat there in the background watching the members of the
little party as they smoked and chatted to each other, she gave up and
resolved on flight. "If I told Théo he would rush to his father," she
thought, "and then Joyselle would come to me. And we'd quarrel, and then
anything might happen." His utter unconsciousness was at once a
safeguard and a menace.
"I'll say nothing until he is safe in Normandy," she decided.