_ CHAPTER XXI
Jeannie went that night to Lady Nottingham's room to talk to her. She herself was feeling very tired, not with the sound and wholesome tiredness that is the precursor of long sleep and refreshed awakening, but with the restless fatigue of frayed nerves and disquiet mind that leads to intolerable tossings and turnings, and long vigils through the varying greys of dawn and the first chirrupings of birds.
"I have not come for long, dear," she said, "but I had to tell somebody about--about what is happening. It's going so well, too."
Alice saw the trouble in Jeannie's face, and, as a matter of fact, had seen trouble in other faces.
"I haven't had a word with you," she said, "and I don't know what is happening. You seem to have had nothing to say to Lord Lindfield all day. I thought, perhaps, you had given it up. It was too hard for you, dear. I don't wonder you found you could not compass it."
Jeannie gave a little impatient sound; her nerves were sharply on edge.
"Dear Alice," she said, "that is not very clever of you. I thought you would see. However, I am quite glad you don't, for if you don't I am sure Daisy doesn't. I am getting a respite from Daisy's--well, Daisy's loathing of me and my methods. She, like you, probably thinks I have given him back to her."
Jeannie was prowling up and down the room rather in the manner of some restless caged thing. In spite of her tiredness and her disquietude, it seemed to Lady Nottingham that she had never seen her look so beautiful. She looked neither kind nor genial nor sympathetic, but for sheer beauty, though rather formidable, there were no two words to it.
"Sit down, Jeannie," said Alice quietly. "You are only exciting yourself. And tell me about it all. I understand nothing, it seems."
Jeannie paused a moment in her walk, and then fell to pacing the room again.
"No, I'm not exciting myself," she said, "but it is exciting me. I don't stir myself up by walking; I am merely attempting, not very successfully, to walk my excitement off. Oh, Alice, what wild beasts we are at bottom! Prey! Prey! Prey! It is one of the instincts that we--you and I, nice women--are rarely conscious of; but I doubt whether it is ever quite dormant. Yes, that comes later; I will explain from the beginning.
"The beginning of it all was easy," she said. "It is perfectly easy for any woman to capture the attention of a man like that, even when he is seriously thinking of getting married to a girl. There was no difficulty in making him take me to the concert, in making him neglect Daisy those first two days. He liked me immensely, and, oh! Alice, here was the first extra difficulty, I liked him. We became friends. We mentioned the word friend openly as applied to us. And I felt like--like a man who gets a wild bird to sit on his hand and eat out of it, in order to grab it, and if not to wring its neck, to put it into a cage. I meant to put him into a cage, shut the door, and go away. And then yesterday afternoon in the punt, just after we had made our discovery that we were friends, he confided in me. He told me he was going to settle down and marry! Judge of my rage, my disappointment! I saw that all my efforts up till then had been quite useless. He was still meaning to marry, and, as was right, poor dear, he told the news to his friend. Daisy's name did not come in. Something made us break off--a flash of lightning, I think, and the beginning of the storm. I should have found something to divert the conversation otherwise. It was much better, in view of what I have to do, that I should not officially know to whom he hoped to be married."
Already the calming effect of telling a trouble to a friend was being felt by Jeannie, and she sat down on the sofa near the window, clasping her hands behind her head, and looking not at Alice, but into the dark soft night. A little rain was falling, hissing among the bushes.
"I saw then," she said, "that I had made a stupid mistake. I had thought that by mere friendliness and sympathy and making myself agreeable, and making him admire me (which he did and does), I could get him away from Daisy. I see now how impossible that was. If it is I who am going to take him away, he must feel more than that. He will not leave the girl he intended to marry unless he falls in love in his own manner with some one else. Alice, I believe he is doing so."
Jeannie paused a moment.
"I hate it all," she said, "but I can't help being immensely interested. Now for the part you don't understand, the part that made you think that I had given it all up. It was a bold game, and, I believe, a correct one. I dropped him--d-r-o-p, drop. Why? Simply in order that he might miss me. Of course, I risked failure. He might have shrugged his shoulders, and wondered why I had taken so much trouble to flirt with him, and gone straight away and resumed operations with Daisy. He did go straight back to Daisy, but do you think they are getting on very nicely? I don't. The more he sees of her now, the more he thinks about me. I don't say he has kind thoughts of me; he is puzzled,
but he doesn't dismiss me. He is angry instead, and hurt. That shows he wants me. He will never propose to Daisy while he feels like that."
There was a short silence. Then Lady Nottingham said,--
"Do you mean you want to make him propose to you?"
"Yes."
The monosyllable came very dryly and unimportantly, as if to a perfectly commonplace inquiry. Then Lady Nottingham, in her turn, got up. Jeannie's restlessness and disquiet seemed to have transferred themselves to her.
"But it is an intolerable role," she said. "You cannot play with love like that. It is playing heads and tails with a man's life, or worse. You are playing with his very soul."
"And a month afterwards it will be he who will be playing with another woman's soul," said Jeannie quietly. "You cannot call it love with that sort of man. How many times has he been in love, and what has happened to it all? I am only making myself the chance woman with whom he happens to think himself in love at the time when he proposes to settle down and marry. He shall propose marriage, therefore, to me."
Lady Nottingham's air of comfort had quite left her. Her plump, contented face was puckered into unusual wrinkles.
"No, no, no," she said. "I can't imagine you act like that, Jeannie. It isn't you."
Jeannie's eyes grew suddenly sombre.
"Oh, my dear, it is me," she said, "though I am glad it is a me which is a stranger to you. I hope, as a rule, I don't play pitch-and-toss with other men's souls; but there are circumstances--and those have now arisen--in which I see no other way. At all costs to him I will fulfil my promise to Diana. I will do my best that Daisy shall never know. I do not care what it costs him. And yet that is not quite true. I do care, because I like him. But I cannot measure his possible suffering against Daisy's. It is through him that the need of doing this has come. He has got to suffer for it; and I assure you it isn't he alone who pays, it is I also."
Jeannie rose.
"And I do not yet know if I shall succeed," she said. "He may look with a scornful wonder on my--my somewhat mature charms. He may--though I do not really expect it--still intend to settle down and marry--Daisy. She will accept him, if he does--I have seen enough to know that--and we shall then have to tell her. But I hope that may not happen."
She took up her candle.
"I must go to bed," she said, "for I am dog-tired. But I don't feel so fretted now I have told you. I wish I did not like him. I should not care if I did not. Good-night, dear Alice."
* * * * *
All next day until evening Jeannie continued these tactics. Genial, eager, sympathetic with others, she treated Lord Lindfield, whenever it was necessary to speak to him at all, with the unsmiling civility which a well-bred woman accords to a man she scarcely knows, and does not wish to know better. And all day she saw the growing effect of her policy, for all day he grew more perplexed and more preoccupied with her. She gave him no opportunity of speaking with her alone, for she had planned her day and occupations so that she was all the time in the company of others, and hour by hour his trouble increased. Nor did the trouble spare Daisy. Nothing could be clearer to her eye, with such absolute naturalness did Jeannie manage the situation, than that she now, at any rate, was standing quite aloof from Lord Lindfield.
A few days ago Daisy had told herself that she was glad her aunt liked him, but it should be added that to-day she was equally glad that Jeannie apparently did not. Yet the trouble did not spare Daisy, for if Aunt Jeannie was utterly changed to Lindfield, he seemed to be utterly changed too. He was grave, anxious, preoccupied, and the meaning of it escaped the girl, even as it had escaped Lady Nottingham.
The party had been gradually gathering in the verandah before it was time to dress for dinner that night, and Jeannie,
a propos of the dressing-bell, had just announced that a quarter of an hour was enough for any nimble woman, with a competent maid.
"She throws things at me, and I catch them and put them on," she said. "If I don't like them I drop them, and the floor of the room looks rather like Carnival-time until she clears up."
But the sense of the meeting was against Jeannie; nobody else could "manage," it appeared, under twenty minutes, and Jim Crowfoot stuck out for half an hour.
"You've got soft things to put on," he said; "but imagine a stiff shirt-cuff hitting you in the eye when your maid threw it. The floor of my room would look not so much like Carnival-time as a shambles."
Lord Lindfield, indeed, alone supported Jeannie.
"I want ten minutes," he said; "neither more nor less. Jim, it's time for you to go, else you will keep us waiting for dinner. I see that Mrs. Halton and I will be left alone at ten minutes past eight, and I at a quarter past."
Jeannie heard this perfectly, but she turned quickly to Lady Nottingham.
"Alice, is it true that you have a post out after dinner?" she said. "Yes? I must go and write a letter, then, before dressing; I particularly want it to get to town to-morrow."
She rose and went in. And at that Lindfield deliberately got up too and followed her. She walked straight through the drawing-room, he a pace or two behind, and out into the hall. And then he spoke to her by name.
She turned round at that. There was no way to avoid giving a reply, and, indeed, she did not wish to, for she believed that the policy of the last two days had ripened.
"Yes, Lord Lindfield?" she said.
"Am I ever going to have a word with you again?" he asked.
Jeannie leant over the banisters; she had already gone up some six stairs.
"But by all means," she said. "I--I too have missed our talks. Things have gone wrong a little? Let us try after dinner to put them straight. We shall find an opportunity."
"Thanks," he said; and it was not only the word that thanked her.
Jeannie's maid must have been a first-rate hand at throwing, if by that simple process she produced in a quarter of an hour that exquisite and finished piece of apparelling which appeared at half-past eight. True, it was Jeannie who wore the jewels and the dress, and her hair it was that rose in those black billows above her shapely head; and the dress, it may be said, was worthy of the wearer. Still, if this was to be arrived at by throwing things, the maid, it was generally felt, must be a competent hurler.
It so happened that everybody was extremely punctual that night, and Jeannie, though quite sufficiently so, the last to appear. Lady Nottingham was even just beginning to allude to the necessary quarter of an hour when she came in.
Lord Lindfield saw her first; he was talking to Daisy. But he turned from her in the middle of a sentence, and said,--
"By Gad!"
It might have been by Gad, but it was by Worth. Four shades of grey, and pearls. Mrs. Beaumont distinctly thought that this was not the sort of dress to dash into the faces of a quiet country party. It was like letting off rockets at a five o'clock tea. Only a woman could dissect the enormity of it; men just stared.
"I know I am not more than one minute late," she said. "Lord Lindfield, Alice has told me to lead you to your doom, which is to take me in.--Alice, they have told us, haven't they?" _