by E. F. Benson
“I have hardly had a word with you since you came back, Aunt Jeannie,” said Daisy.
“I know, dear, but in a house full of people what can one expect? We must have a great talk when we get back to London. Every moment seems occupied here. Dear child, I hope your headache will be better soon. Will you not go and lie down? Or shall I tell Alice you are not well, and won’t you have a little dinner quietly in your room by yourself? No? Let us go down, then.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
The storm was violent for an hour or two, but before sunset it had moved away again, and a half-hour of sunshine, washed, clean sunshine, preceded sunset. But somehow the storm had not done its proper work; it had scolded and roared and wept, but it had not quite got the trouble out of the air. There was more to come.
The same sense that there was more to come invaded the spirits of Lady Nottingham’s guests. She herself was a little distraite, Daisy’s headache had left her rather white and tired, Gladys lamented the wreck of the garden, and there was not much life about. Then after dinner it clouded over again, the clouds regathered, lightning began to wink remotely and thunder to grumble, and even Mrs. Halton, whom the sultry heat had so invigorated, according to her own account, that afternoon, was inclined to join in the rather early move to bed. Also, the next day was Sunday, and Sunday was not particularly wanted. The fact of it was felt to be a little depressing, and nobody quite knew what was the matter with everybody else.
It is a fact that in every gathering of friends and acquaintances there is some one person who makes la pluie et le beau temps, and in this party it was emphatically Jeannie Halton who arranged the weather. The spirits of every person are, to a certain extent, infectious, but the spirits of some few people run through a house like influenza, and there was no doubt that she had, all the evening, been in a rather piano mood. She had not, of course, committed the unpardonable social crime of showing that she was depressed, but she had been a little retrospective, and tended to “remember how” in general conversation, rather than to “hope that.”
But it must not be supposed that she had behaved in any way outside the lines of normal social intercourse. She had, for instance, just gone out into the garden after dinner with Lord Lindfield, and had quoted the line, “In the darkness thick and hot.” It was apt enough and harmless enough, but it had vaguely made him feel that something was a little wrong. Then she had made him and Daisy play billiards together, while she marked for them. She marked with weary accuracy, and said, “Oh, what a beautiful stroke” rather too often to make it credible that she always meant it. And with the rest of the women she had gone up to bed rather early.
Tom Lindfield, on the other hand, though he did not feel at all inclined to go to bed early, felt that there was trouble somewhere. He could not date it in the least, nor could he put his finger on the moment when trouble began. Or could he? He asked himself that question several times. Jeannie had been so pleasant and so good a comrade till they had gone out in the punt. Then came the compact of friendship, and somehow at once almost she seemed to slip away from him. He had wanted to tell her much more, to tell her even how in Paris he had been desperately in love, and that what he felt now for Daisy was not that. Somehow that woman in Paris reminded him of Daisy, and yet what two women could be more different than these! She had an apartment in the Rue Chalgrin. It was very much gilded, and yet very simple.
That did not occupy him much. What occupied him so much more was that till the storm had begun, till he and Jeannie had run hurriedly to the house, he had found such an extreme content in her society. She had been — for these last thirty hours or so — such an admirable comrade. There was the Brahms concert, the ridiculous motor-drive, the evening at billiards, the morning in the motor, the afternoon in the punt. Then quite suddenly she had seemed to shut up, to enclose herself from him. Yet some little spirit of companionship had escaped her again, when she quoted the line, “In the darkness thick and hot.” And then, after that, she had walked back to the house, made him play billiards with Daisy, and had gone upstairs at the earliest possible opportunity.
Nobody with the slightest prospect of winning his case could have accused Tom Lindfield of being sensitive in his perceptions, but nobody without the certainty of losing it could have accused him of not being fairly sound in his conclusions. What had happened to Mrs. Halton to make her so different to him (and, for that matter, to everybody else) since four o’clock that afternoon he did not try to decide, since he had no means of knowing.
But what he did know was that this was a woman of enchanting moods. At one time she was good comrade, then she was friend, then for some reason she was some sort of shadow of these excellent things. They were there, but they were obscured by something else. And that obscuration rendered her the more enchanting. He did not understand her; she was away somewhere beyond him, and he longed to follow her.
All his life women had been to him the most delectable of riddles, and his expressed desire to marry and settle down was perhaps only another statement of the fact that he longed to solve one example of the riddle, one form in which it was presented to him. He felt now that he wished he had married years ago, that he had already become quiet and domesticated. There was a time for youth’s fiery passions, its ecstatic uncontent, and there was also most assuredly a time when those fevers should cease.
He had so repeatedly told himself that it was time they should cease for him, that of late he had come to believe it. He believed it still, and it was for that reason that he had determined to settle down, to choose, as he had done in his own mind, this pretty and charming girl, much younger than himself, as was right, and ask her to settle down with him.
He was not in love with her in any absorbed or tumultuous way, but he meant to do his best to make her happy, and looked forward to being immensely happy himself. All that had seemed very right and reasonable and satisfactory, but to-night, in some way, the mirror of his future tranquillity was disturbed; it was as if little sudden puffs of wind, like those that rustled every now and then through “the darkness thick and hot” outside, ruffled and broke its surface, making it dim and full of shattered images that seemed to have swum up from below.
Was it that once again he was beginning to fall in love with Daisy in the old passionate way? But at that moment he was aware that he was not thinking about Daisy at all.
All this passed very rapidly through his mind; it was no effort of conscious or reasoned thought, but more as if without volition of his own these pictures had been drawn across his brain, as he stood in the hall while the rustling procession of women went upstairs. And with their going, he became aware that the rest of the evening was likely to be rather boring.
It was still not after half-past ten, an hour impossible to go to bed at, impossible, anyhow, to go to sleep at, and he fancied that his own company and his own thoughts were not likely to be very comfortable or very profitable. He did not want to think; he wanted the hours to pass as quickly and unreflectingly as possible until it was morning again. No doubt then things would present themselves in a more normal light. Certainly the events of the day had proved rather exciting and unsettling, or, to be perfectly honest, Jeannie had somehow unsettled him. How quickly their friendship had sprung up! And what had happened then? She seemed to have left him altogether, glided away from him.
He strolled back into the billiard-room, where he would find company of some sort, but there already the hour of yawns and fitful conversation had begun, and first one and then another man nodded good-night and left the room. Jim Crowfoot, however, who hated going to bed as much as he disliked getting up, had a brilliant cargo of conversation on board, which he proceeded to unload. The two knew each other well, and when they were left alone conversation rapidly became intimate.
“Thunderstorms always are simultaneous with sombreness,” he said, “and I sometimes wonder whether it is our sombreness that produces the storm or the storm that produces sombreness. Every one has been sombre
to-day, except, perhaps, you, Tom, and the merry widow.”
“Are you referring to Mrs. Halton?”
“I don’t know of any other. Lady Nottingham isn’t merry. I can’t think how you manage to produce so much impression with so little material. I have to talk all the time to produce an impression at all, and then it is usually an unfortunate one.”
“I think your description of Mrs. Halton as the merry widow is a particularly unfortunate one,” remarked Lindfield.
“You guessed whom I meant,” said Jim.
“I know. It was characteristic of you if not of her. You always see people in — in caricature. Besides, I thought Mrs. Halton was anything but merry.”
“You should know best.”
“Why?”
“Because you have spent the entire day with her, chiefly tête-à-tête. Also yesterday.”
Tom Lindfield was apparently not in a very genial frame of mind to-night. He let this remark pass in silence, and then went back to what Jim had previously said.
“You always talk a good lot of rot, old chap,” he said, “and I want to know if you were talking rot when you said something about my producing an impression with little material. It sounds pretty good rot, but if you meant something by it, I wish you would tell me what it was. Does it have any special application?”
“Yes, certainly. I referred to your ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ with Mrs. Halton. You laid firm hold of her yesterday, and have not let her go since. I don’t imply that she has wanted to go.”
Jim, in spite of the large quantities of outrageous nonsense which he often talked, had a very fair allowance of brains, and when he chose to talk sense was worth listening to. So, at any rate, Tom Lindfield thought now.
“I wish you’d go on,” he said, “and just tell me all that is in your mind.”
“By all means, if you promise not to knock me down or anything. It’s just this — that we’ve all been asking ourselves, ‘Is it to be the aunt or the niece?’”
“And who has been asking themselves that?” asked Lindfield.
“Oh, everybody except, perhaps, Braithwaite and poor wandering Willie. Mrs. Beaumont and Lady Sybil were hard at it when you and Mrs. Halton strolled out after dinner. They tore Mrs. Halton open as you tear open a — a registered envelope. With the same greed, you understand.”
“Cats!” remarked Lindfield.
“Oh, yes. But I like to hear them ‘meaow.’ Braithwaite didn’t; he listened to just one remark and then went away looking black.”
“What has he got to do with it?” asked Tom.
“Oh, he’s great friends with the M. W.,” said Jim, “and he is one of those nice old-fashioned people who never talk evil of people behind their backs. But where are you to talk evil of people except behind their backs? That’s what I want to know. You can’t do it in front of their faces, as it would not be polite.”
“Don’t be epigrammatic, there’s a good fellow,” said Tom. “It only confuses me.”
“Well, you’ve confused us. You were supposed to be walking out, so to speak, with Miss Daisy. Instead of which you leave her completely alone, and walk out all the time with Mrs. Halton. Oh, I don’t deny that she is running after you. She is; at least, so the cats said. It’s confusing, you know; I don’t think any one knows where we all are.”
Lindfield took a turn or two up and down the room, took up a cue, and slapped the red ball into a pocket.
“I’m sure I don’t know where I am,” he said, “but I expect we shall all be in the deuce of a mess before long. About Mrs. Halton running after me, that is absolutely all rot. What brutes women are to each other! And they say, to use your expression, that I’ve been walking out with Miss Daisy?”
“It has been supposed that you were going to ask her to marry you.”
Lindfield sent one of the white balls after the red.
“And they weren’t far wrong,” he said. “Well, I shall go to bed, Jim. Your conversation is too sensational.”
“Good-night. Mind you let me know when you have made up your mind,” said Jim.
CHAPTER XIX.
It was this certainty that he had got to make up his mind, whereas till to-day he had believed that his mind was made up, that Lindfield carried upstairs with his bedroom candle. But, unlike that useful article, which could be put out at will, the question refused to be put out, and burnt with a disconcerting and gem-like clearness. It was perfectly true, and he confessed it to himself, that for the last two days he had distinctly preferred to cultivate this wonderful quick-growing friendship which had shot up between him and Jeannie, rather than bring things to a head with Daisy.
He had meant while down here to ask her to marry him; now, if he looked that intention in the face, he was aware that though it was still there (even as he had begun to tell Mrs. Halton that afternoon), it had moved away from the immediate foreground, and stood waiting at a further distance. The cats and Jim Crowfoot, he told himself with some impatience, were altogether at fault when they so charmingly said that he had to make up his mind between aunt and niece. It was not that at all; the only question with which the making up of his mind was concerned was whether he was going to ask Daisy now, to-morrow, to be his wife. And the moment he asked himself that question it was already answered. But that he did not know.
As always, he was quite honest with himself, and proceeded ruthlessly to find out what had occasioned the postponement of his intention. That was not hard to answer; the answer had already been indirectly given. It was the enchantment of this new friendship which had forced itself into the foreground.
That friendship, however, was now agreed upon and ratified, and the postponed intention should come forward again. But these last few hours had made him feel uncertain about that friendship. There was no use in denying it; she had been quite different since they came in from the punt. How maddening and how intoxicating women were! How they forced you to wonder and speculate about them, to work your brain into a fever with guessing what was going on in theirs.
He turned over in bed with his face to the wall, and shut his eyes with the firm and laudable intention of not bothering any more about it, but of letting sleep bring counsel. He did intend to ask Daisy to marry him, but he was not quite certain when he should do so. And then there outlined itself behind the darkness of his closed lids Jeannie’s face, with its great dark eyes, its mass of hair growing low on the forehead, the witchery of its smiling mouth.
So perhaps the cats and Jim Crowfoot, though a little “previous,” were not so wrong about the reality of the question on which he must make up his mind.
Jeannie announced her intention of going to church next morning at breakfast, and Victor Braithwaite, who was sitting by her, professed similar ecclesiastical leanings. Jeannie had apparently completely recovered from the piano mood of the evening before, and commented severely on the Sunday habits of this Christian country. She personally taxed every one who had at present come down with having had no intention whatever of going to church, and her accusations appeared particularly well founded. In the middle of this Lord Lindfield entered.
“Good-morning, Lord Lindfield,” said Alice. “We are all catching it hot this morning from Jeannie, who has been accusing us by name and individually of being heathens.”
“Worse than heathens,” said Jeannie, briskly.— “Oh, good-morning, Lord Lindfield. I didn’t see you. — Worse than heathens, because heathens don’t know any better. Alice, you must come. You are a landlady of Bray, and should set an example.”
“But it is so hot,” said Alice, “and I don’t take out the carriage on Sunday. I like to give the coachman an — an opportunity of going to church.”
“You give him fifty-two every year,” said Jeannie.
“The motor is eating its head off,” remarked Lindfield. “I’ll drive you. Do come with me, Mrs. Halton.”
“Oh, thanks, no. I’ll walk,” she said. “Mr. Braithwaite is coming with me.”
Jeannie rose as she s
poke, and went out through the French window into the garden.
“Half-past ten, then, Mr. Braithwaite,” she said.
Lindfield helped himself to some dish on the side-table.
“Can’t stand being called a heathen,” he said. “I shall go to church too.”
Victor soon strolled out after Jeannie.
“Hang it all, Jeannie!” he said. “I want to go to church with you, and now Tom Lindfield says he is coming. Considering how much — oh, well, never mind.”
Jeannie looked hastily round, found they had the garden to themselves, and took his arm.
“How much he has seen of me, and how little you have,” she said.
“Quite correct. But it wasn’t a difficult guess.”
“No. We will be cunning, Victor. I said half-past ten quite loud, didn’t I? Let us meet in the manner of conspirators at the garden-gate at a quarter-past.”
They turned towards the house again, and Jeannie detached her arm from his.
“Remember your promise, dear,” she said. “I am I, and I am yours. Never doubt that.”
All that day there was no possible cause for his doubting it. The conspirator-plan succeeded to admiration, and Lord Lindfield and Daisy, with a somewhat faint-intentioned Gladys, had waited in the hall till a quarter to eleven. Then it was discovered that Jeannie had not been seen in the house since ten, and Gladys, victorious over her faint intentions, had stopped at home, while Daisy and Lord Lindfield walked rapidly to church, arriving there in the middle of the psalms.
Jeannie had been gaily apologetic afterwards. She had not heard at breakfast that anybody except herself and Mr. Braithwaite meant to go to church, and, coming home, she paired herself off with Daisy. At lunch again there were, when she appeared, two vacant places, one between Willie Carton and one of the cats, the other next Lord Lindfield. She walked quietly round the table to take the first of these, instead of going to the nearest chair.