The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  For him the hour had struck; there was no choice of deliberation possible any more to him. He did not look on the picture of quiet domesticity any more, and find it pleasing; he did not look on himself, count up his years, and settle, with a content that had just one grain of resignation in it, that it was time for him to make what is called a home. He looked at Jeannie, and from the ocean of love a billow came, bore him off his feet, and took him seawards. She, the beauty of her face, the soft curves of her neck, the grace and suppleness of her body, were no longer, as had been the case till now, the whole of the woman whom he loved. Now they were but the material part of her; he believed and knew that he loved something that was more essentially Jeannie than these—he loved her soul and spirit.

  Late this love had come to him, for all his life he had stifled its possibility of growth by being content with what was more material; but at last it had dawned on him, and he stood now on the threshold of a world that was as new as it was bewildering. Yet, for all its bewilderment, he saw at a glance how real it was, and how true. It was the light of the sun that shone there which made those shadows which till now he had thought to be in themselves so radiant.

  It was about half-past ten when Jeannie and Lord Lindfield cut out of a bridge-table simultaneously. They had been playing in the billiard-room, and strolled out together, talking. In the hall outside, that pleasant place of books and shadows and corners, Jeannie paused and held out her hand to him.

  “Lord Lindfield,” she said, “I have been a most utter beast to you these last two days, and I am sorry—I am indeed. You have got a perfect right to ask for explanations, and—and there aren’t any. That is the best explanation of all; you can’t get behind it. Will you, then, be generous and shake hands, and let us go on where we left off?”

  He took her hand.

  “That is exactly the condition I should have made,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That we should go on where we left off. Do you remember what you were talking about?”

  She had sat down in a low chair by the empty fireplace, and he drew another close up to hers, and at right angles to it. Just above was a pair of shaded candles, so that he, sitting a little further off, was in shadow, whereas the soft light fell full on to her. Had she seen his face more clearly, she might have known that her task was already over, that Daisy had become but a shadow to him, and that he was eager and burning to put the coping-stone on to what she had accomplished. But she remembered the scene in the punt; she remembered that immediately after she had spoken of friendship, he, like a friend, had confided to her his intention of settling down and marrying. This time, therefore, she would speak in a more unmistakable way.

  “Yes, yes, I remember indeed,” she said; “and it was the last good hour I have had between that and this. But I am not blaming you, Lord Lindfield, except, perhaps, just a little bit.”

  He leant forward, and his voice trembled.

  “Why do you blame me,” he asked, “even a little bit?”

  Jeannie laughed.

  “No, I don’t think I can tell you,” she said. “I should get scarlet. Yet, I don’t know; I think it would make you laugh, too, and it is always a good thing to laugh. So turn away, and don’t look at me when I am scarlet, since it is unbecoming. Well, I blame you a little bit, because you were a little bit tactless. A charming woman—one, anyhow, who was trying to be charming—had just been talking to you about friendship, and you sighed a smile in a yawn, as it were—do you know Browning?—he is a dear—and said: ‘I am going to settle down and marry.’ Now, not a word. I am going to scold you. Had we been two girls talking together, and had just made vows of friendship, it would have been utterly tactless for the one to choose that exact moment for saying she was going to be married; and I am sure no two boys in similar conditions would ever have done such a thing.”

  Again Jeannie laughed.

  “It sounds so funny now,” she said. “But it was such a snub. I suppose you thought we were getting on too nicely. Oh, how funny! I have never had such a thing happen to me before. So I blame you just a little bit. I was rather depressed already. A thunderstorm was coming, and it was going to be Sunday, and so I wanted everybody to be particularly nice to me.”

  He gave a little odd awkward sort of laugh, and jerked himself a little more forward in his chair.

  “Mayn’t I look?” he said. “I don’t believe you are scarlet. Besides, I have to say I am sorry. I can’t say I am sorry to the carpet.”

  Jeannie paused for a moment before she replied; something in his voice, though still she could not see his face clearly, startled her. It sounded changed, somehow, full of something suppressed, something serious. But she could not risk a second fiasco; she had to play her high cards out, and hope for their triumph.

  “You needn’t say it,” she said. “And so let us pass to what I suggested, and what you would have made, you told me, a condition of your forgiving me. Friendship! What a beautiful word in itself, and what a big one! And how little most people mean by it. A man says he is a woman’s friend because he lunches with her once a month; a woman says she is a man’s friend because they have taken a drive round Hyde Park in the middle of the afternoon!”

  Jeannie sat more upright in her chair, leaning forward towards him. Then she saw him more clearly, and the hunger of his face, the bright shining of his eyes, endorsed what she had heard in his voice. Yet she was not certain—not quite certain.

  “Oh, I don’t believe we most of us understand friendship at all,” she said. “It is not characteristic of our race to let ourselves feel. Most English people neither hate nor love, nor make friends in earnest. I think one has to go South—South and East—to find hate and love and friends, just as one has to go South to find the sun. Do you know the Persian poet and what he says of his friend:

  ‘A book of verses underneath the bough,

  A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou

  Beside me singing in the wilderness,

  The wilderness were paradise enow.’

  Ah, that is more my notion of friendship, of the ideal of friendship, the thing that makes Paradise of the desert.”

  He got up quickly and stood before her, speaking hoarsely and quickly.

  “It does not matter what you call it,” he said. “I know what you mean. I call it love, that is all—Jeannie, Jeannie—”

  He seized both her hands in his roughly, brutally almost, and covered them with kisses.

  “Ah, it is done!” said Jeannie quickly, and half to herself. Then she rose too, and wrenched her hands from him.

  “Have you gone mad?” she said. “Stand out of my way, please.”

  But she had not reckoned on the strength of the passion she had raised. For one moment he looked at her in blank astonishment, but he did not move. She could not get by him without violence. Then he advanced a step again towards her, as if he would have caught her to him. Jeannie put both her arms in front of her; she had turned pale to the lips.

  “Not till you have told me—”

  “I have nothing to tell you, except that I thought you were a gentleman and a friend. There is some one coming out of the billiard-room.”

  Daisy appeared in the doorway at the moment.

  “The rubber’s over already,” she said, “just two hands. Won’t you and Lord Lindfield—”

  She stopped suddenly. It was clear he had not heard her, for, with arms still held out, he faced Jeannie, unconscious of any one but her.

  “Jeannie—” he began again.

  Jeannie did not look at him.

  “Please let me pass,” she said—“No, Daisy, I think I have played enough. I am going upstairs. It is late. I am tired.”

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  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 tomorrow, 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 tomorrow, 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 tomorrow, 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 tomorrow. 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 J
eannie, 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?”