Daisy's Aunt Part 22

But she had not reckoned on the strength of the pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.s," 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 antic.i.p.ated; 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 to-morrow, 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 to-morrow, 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 to-morrow, 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 to-morrow. 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sage 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 Jeannie, 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?"