"No, my dear, it would take too long. Ah, there is Daisy."
A gentle tap sounded at the door; it was softly opened, and Daisy, seeing the light inside, came in.
"Ah, but how wicked of you, Aunt Jeannie," she said, "when you told me you were going to bed early. Yes, we are early too, but it was stupid and crowded, and so Gladys and I came away. Oh, you darling, it is nice to know you are here! But how tired you look!"
"Yes, dear, I am tired," said Jeannie. "I was just sending Aunt Alice away. And you must go away too. But it was dear of you just to look in to say good-night."
When the two had gone Jeannie sat down again in the window, her head resting on her hands, thinking vividly, intently.
"Thank Heaven she does not love him!" she said at length.
CHAPTER VIII.
The geography of breakfast at Lady Nottingham"s was vague and shifting. Sometimes it all happened in the dining-room, sometimes, and rather oftener, little of it happened there, but took place, instead of on that continent, in the scattered islands of bedrooms. Gladys, however, was generally faithful to the continent, and often, as happened next morning, breakfasted there alone, while trays were carried swiftly upstairs to the bedrooms of the others. She alone of the inmates of the house had slept well that night. But she always slept well, even if she had the toothache.
Daisy had not slept at all well. It would be nearer the mark, indeed, to say that she had not even lain awake at all well, but had tossed and tumbled in a manner unprecedented. There was no wonder that it was unprecedented, since that which caused it had not occurred before to her. She had left the dance quite early, dragging Gladys away, because she had got something to think about which absorbed her. She had never been really absorbed before, though it was a chronic condition with her to be intensely and violently interested in a superficial manner.
But this went deeper; from the springs of her nature now there came forth something both bitter and sweet, and tinged all her thoughts and her consciousness.
In herself, as she lay awake that night hearing the gradual diminuendo of the noises of traffic outside, till, when she thought there would be a hush, the crescendo of the work of the coming day began, she felt no doubt as to what this was which absorbed her and kept sleep so far aloof from her eyelids. It had started from as small a beginning as a fire that devastates a city, reducing it to desolation and blackened ash. A careless pa.s.senger has but thrown away the stump of a cigarette or a match not entirely extinguished near some inflammable material, and it is from no other cause than that that before long the walls of the tallest buildings totter and sway and fall, and the night is turned to a h.e.l.l of burning flame. Not yet to her had come the wholesale burning, there was not yet involved in it all her nature; but something had caught fire at those few words of Lord Lindfield"s; the heat and fever had begun.
Well she knew what it was that ailed her. Hitherto love was a thing that was a stranger to her, though she was no stranger to intense and impulsive affection like that which she felt for Aunt Jeannie. But how mysterious and unaccountable this was. It seemed to her that the phenomenon known as "love at first sight," of which she had read, was a thing far less to be wondered at. There a girl meets some one she has not seen before whom she finds holds for her that potent spell.
That could be easily understood; the new force with which she comes in contact instantly exercises its power on her. But she, Daisy, had come across this man a hundred times, and now suddenly, without apparent cause, she who thought she knew him so well, and could appraise and weigh him and settle in her own mind, as she had done after her talk to Lady Nottingham the afternoon before, whether she would speak a word that for the rest of her life or his would make her fate and destiny, and fashion the manner of her nights and days, found that in a moment some change of vital import had come in turn on her, so that she looked on him with eyes of other vision, and thought of him in ways as yet undreamt of.
This was disquieting, unsettling; it was as if the house in which she dwelt--her own mind and body--which she had thought so well-founded and securely built--was suddenly shaken as by an earthquake shock, and she realized with a touch of panic-fear that outside her, and yet knit into her very soul, were forces unmanifested as yet which might prove to be of dominant potency.
Then, suddenly, her mood changed; their power was frightening no longer, they were wholly benignant and life-giving. It was not an earthquake shock that had frightened her, it was but the first beam of some new-rising sun that had struck on to the darkness of the world in which she had lived till now. She was smitten "by the first beam from the springing East," she who had never known before what morning was, or how fair was the light which it pours on to the world. And this morning beam was for her; it had not struck her fortuitously, shedding its light on her and others without choice. It had come to shine into her window, choosing that above all others. It was she that the first beam sought.
It came to gild and glorify her house, her body and mind, the place where her soul dwelt.
How blind she had been! There was no difference in him; the difference had been in her alone. She had sat with sealed eyes at her window, or, at the most, with eyes that could but see the shadows and not the sun.
Now they saw the sun only; there were no shadows, for the shadows had been but her own blindness.
Dawn was in the sky outside; here in the quiet, white-curtained room another dawn had come, not quiet, but with gleam of sun alternating with cloud and tempest, making the beholder wonder what the day would bring forth.
Aunt Jeannie, too, had lain long awake, but when sleep came it came deeply and dreamlessly, demanding the repair of two nights in the train and the agitation of her talk. She had given orders that she was not to be called till she rang, and when she woke the sun was already high, and the square outside lively with pa.s.sengers and traffic. But it was with a sense of coming trial and trouble, if not quite of disaster, that she woke.
It was disaster she had to avert; she had to think and scheme. But had she known of Daisy"s sleepless night, and the cause of that, she would have felt that the anchor which prevented the situation drifting into disaster had been torn up. For the anchor was the belief, as Lady Nottingham had told her, that Daisy was not in love with Tom Lindfield, and by one of fate"s little ironies, at the very moment when she was comforting herself last night with that thought it was true no longer.
Her sleep had quite restored her, giving vigour to her body and the power of cool reflection to her brain, and when Victor came, according to promise, to see her during the morning there was no hint of trouble in her welcome of him, nor did he guess that any disquieting news had reached her. And his conclusion, though not actually true, was justly drawn, for the peace and the sense of security which she felt in his presence was of a kind that nothing else, except danger and disaster to it itself, could disturb.
It was a very tender, a very real part of her nature that was troubled, but the trouble did not reach down into these depths. Nor did she mean to speak of this trouble to him at all; a promise had been made by her to keep it as secret as could be. Hitherto the secret had been completely kept; it had pa.s.sed the lips of none of the few who knew. But to-day she would be obliged to speak of it to Alice, for her plan to avert disaster was already half formed, but she dared not embark on it alone without counsel from another. For an utterly unlooked-for stroke of fate, supreme in its irony, that Daisy should be meditating marriage with the one man in the world whom it was utterly impossible that she should marry, had fallen, and at all costs the event must be averted.
CHAPTER IX.
The two girls, as had been already arranged, set off during the morning for the river-side house at Bray, where they would be joined next day by Lady Nottingham and the rest of her party; and Aunt Jeannie, returning home shortly before lunch, found that Daisy and Gladys had already gone, and that the hour for her consultation with her friend was come. For the situation admitted of no delay: in a sky that till yesterday had been of dazzling clearness and incomparable serenity there had suddenly formed this thunder-cloud, so to speak, hard, imminent, menacing. It was necessary, and immediately necessary (such was the image under which the situation presented itself to her mind), to put up a lightning-conductor over Daisy"s room. It was the nature of the thunder-cloud that she had now to make known to Lady Nottingham: that done, between them they had to devise the lightning-conductor, or approve and erect that one which she had already designed in her mind during the sleepless hours of the night before. It was of strange design: she hardly knew if she had the skill to forge it. For the forging had to be done by her.
They lunched together, and immediately afterwards went to Lady Nottingham"s sitting-room, where they would be undisturbed, for she had given orders that neither the most urgent of telephones nor the most intimate of callers were to be admitted. They drank their coffee in silence, and then Jeannie got up.
"I have got to tell you, Alice," she said, "about that which only yesterday I said I hoped I should never be obliged to speak of to anybody. I suppose the envious Fates heard me; certainly the words were scarcely out of my mouth before the necessity arose. What I have got to tell you about is that which all last autumn was harder for me to get over, I think, than all that I had been through myself. Only yesterday I believed it to be all dead; I believed it to be at most a memory from which time had already taken the bitterness. But I was completely and signally wrong. It is dead no longer; it is terribly alive, for it has had a resurrection which would convert a Sadducee. It is connected with the reason why Daisy can never marry Tom Lindfield. It is more than connected with it; it is the reason itself."
Jeannie had begun to speak standing by the fireplace and facing the full light of the window, but here she moved, and wheeling a chair with its back to the light, sat down in it. She wanted to be a voice and no more--a mere chronicle of a few hard, dry, irrevocable facts, things that had happened, and could not be altered or softened. There was no comment, no interpretation to be made. She had just to utter them; Alice Nottingham had just to hear them.
"You may have to give me time, my dear," she said, "for it will be as much as I can do, I am afraid, just to get through with the telling of it. Yes, I am already frightening you, I know. I do that on purpose, because I want to prepare you for a story that must shock and disturb you very much. I wondered last night whether I could manage without telling you, whether I could spare your hearing it all, but I find I can"t. I can"t act alone in this, on my own responsibility. Perhaps you may be able to think of some plan which will make mine unnecessary, and I would give a great deal for that to happen. But some plan must be made and carried out. Something has to be done."
She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then took them away, and spoke, slowly and carefully, so that there might be no need for further explanation of what she said.
"Of course you remember Diana, Daisy"s sister," she said, "though you would remember her more as a name than as a person, for I think you never knew her at all well. She married very early, you know; she married that nice Frenchman, Monsieur Dupre. After that she lived abroad till the time of her death. The fact of that you will certainly remember, though it is now some years since it happened.
Where are we? Yes, 1908. Then Diana died in 1903, five years ago. So at least we were told at the time. It was in 1903 that we, all of us, you, Daisy, and I, believed that Diana died."
Jeannie gave a long sigh.
"My story of why Daisy cannot marry Tom Lindfield has begun, dear Alice," she said, "for Diana did not die then. She lived for four years after that, and died last autumn only, in my arms, thank G.o.d! I thank G.o.d, my dear, that she died, and I thank G.o.d that I was with her. There was no one else, not her husband even."
Alice Nottingham turned on her a face that was puzzled, and was beginning to get frightened.
"But what does it all mean?" she said. "It is very disquieting, very strange, but what does it lead to? Daisy--Tom Lindfield."
"I am telling you as shortly as I can," said Jeannie. "Do not interrupt me, dear. It was last autumn she died, not five years ago as we had supposed. Five years ago she was--was found out, if you understand--she was found to have been living with another man not her husband. He learned that, and he forgave her, for he adored her with a tender, unwavering devotion that is very rare. She was to him like a child who has been naughty and must be forgiven. Then in a few weeks only after that she fell again. Even then he did not divorce her, or make her bear the shame and publicity of what she had done; he simply let her go."
Jeannie was still speaking slowly and quietly, as if reading out some report which had to be mastered by her friend. But on the words "let her go" her voice trembled a little. But then she again recaptured the completeness of her self-control.
"Whether that was wise or not," she said, "whether it might not have been better if he had let Diana bear the punishment that human law has ordained for those poor things who behave as she behaved, we need not inquire. Nor need I tell you the details of how it was all managed, which I learned from Diana so few weeks before she died last year. It is sufficient for me to say that they left their home near Amiens together, ostensibly for a long foreign travel. After some weeks he sent home the news of her sudden death; he sent the news also to us in England. You were told, I and Daisy were told. And Diana, poor, poor Diana, went and lived in Paris."
Again the bravely-suppressed emotion made Jeannie"s voice to quiver.
"That is what I mean when I said that M. Dupre let her go," she said.
"Often I think it was a barbarous kindness. He could not live with her any more--the fact that he loved her so much made that impossible--and he had either to divorce her or--or let her vanish into the glittering crowd of those who--who are made like that. He chose the latter: he accounted for her disappearance by the news, sent to Amiens and sent to us in England, that she had died.
"So five years ago Diana went to Paris, and for a time lived, not with the man who had taken her from her husband, but with another. During her married life she had lived in that beautiful country-house of his near Amiens, seldom going to Paris, and no one apparently ever found out who she really was. Then----"
Again Jeannie paused--paused a long time; and before she spoke she put her hands over her eyes, as if to shut out some dreadful vision.
"Then she left that man," she said, "and lived with another. You know him; I know him; Daisy also."
It was as if Lady Nottingham had caught sight of that which made Jeannie cover her eyes, for she winced and drew back.
"Don"t--don"t!" she said; "I can"t bear that, please, Jeannie!"
At the sound of the beseeching voice Jeannie recovered all her self-control. She was wanted; Alice wanted her for comfort.