"Surely that "Besides" is superfluous, anyhow?"
"I don"t know--I don"t quite trust you. But shall I tell you your mistake? You"re too ready to think that I have a reason for everything I do. You"re wrong. Where reason comes in with me is about the things I don"t do. If you reason about things, most of them look either dull or dangerous. So you let them alone. But if you don"t reason, you chance it--either the dullness or the danger, as the case may be."
"A juggle with words! You reason all the same."
"Not always. Sometimes you"re--driven."
On her face was a look almost as if she were being driven. I fancied that I might have said too much about deliberate exercises of power in my conversation with the Rector.
"I suppose you"d explain that, if you wished to," I remarked after a pause. "You appear to be as free from being driven as most people.
You"re pretty independent!"
"I should explain it if I wished--perhaps even if I could. But do you always find it easy to explain yourself--even to yourself, to say nothing of other people?"
"It seems to me that you"ve only got yourself to please."
"And it also seems to you that that would be very easy?"
"Now you"re in one of your fencing moods--there"s no plain English to be got out of you."
"Fencing is useful to parry thrusts, Austin."
"Heavens, have I been making thrusts at you? You mean about that miserable Powers?"
She sat there looking at me, with the mystery smile on her lips; but her brow was knit. "Yes, about Powers," she said--after a pause, but without hesitation. The manner of her answer said plainly "Call it about Powers--it is about something else." So I think she meant me to read it.
She told me that there was some trouble lest, suspecting but not knowing, I should make wild thrusts and wound her blindly.
"No one but you would put up with such an impertinent retainer," I said.
"You always stop when I want you to. And I rather like--sometimes--to try over my feelings and ideas in talk. One gets a kind of outside look at them in that way." She broke into a little laugh. "And I must keep you in a good temper, because I"ve a favor to ask. Are we going to be terribly busy in the immediate future?"
"I should think so--with your Inst.i.tute!"
"No time for riding?" she suggested insinuatingly.
"Oh, well, one must consider one"s health."
"I don"t want to give up my morning ride; but I want you to come with me--well, as often as you can. Make it the regular thing to come, barring most pressing business."
"I see what I get out of this, Lady Jenny. Now what do you?"
"I knew you"d ask that. Of course I"m never disinterested!"
"I won"t ask. I"ll take the gift Heaven sends!"
"I daren"t leave it like that. You"re too conscientious; you"d stay at home and work. I"m afraid I must give you the reason."
Her thoughts had pa.s.sed away, it seemed, from the difficulty which had made her now irritable, now melancholy, while we talked about reasoning and being "driven." She was gay and chaffed me with enjoyment. If there were any perplexity in the case here, evidently it struck her as a comedy, complicated by no threat of a tragic catastrophe. Her lips twitched with merriment.
"Yes, you must have it--and really plain English this time--no fencing--the downright blunt truth!"
"I wait for it."
"Lord Lacey comes home on leave to-morrow."
The explanation here was certainly plain. In fact it was both plain and pregnant. While it confessed to a flirtation in the past, it also admitted a project for the future.
"I must ride as often as possible," I said gravely. "Does he stay long?"
"I should think that might depend," answered Jenny. She laughed again as she added, "Not even you can ask "On what?""
CHAPTER X
A FRIENDLY GLa.s.s
I hope that my company on the morning rides was agreeable to Jenny, but I cannot be persuaded that it was necessary; she showed such perfect ability to handle a situation which, if not precisely difficult, might easily have become so under less skillful management. There had, of course, never been any serious love-making between her and Lacey; whatever he may have been inclined to feel, or to tell himself that he felt, she had always kept him to his position as "a boy." Yet young women in the twenties do not always scorn the attentions of boys, and Jenny had certainly not despised Lacey"s. In fact, they had flirted, and flirted pretty hard--and, as has been seen, Jenny was at no trouble to deny it. But now the thing had to stop--or rather the flirtation had to be transformed, the friendship established on a new basis. Into this task Jenny put some of her best work. Her finest weapon was a frank cordiality--such as could not but delight a friend, but was really hopeless for a lover. To every advance it opposed a shield of shining friendliness, of a hearty, almost masculine, comradeship. It left no room for the attacks and defenses, the challenges and evasions, the pursuit, the flight, and the collusive capture. It was all such immensely plain sailing, all so pre-eminently above-board, in its unmitigated cunning. But it was charming also, and Lacey, though naturally a little puzzled at first, soon felt the charm. He was wax in those clever hands; she seemed to be able not only to make him do what she wanted, but even to make him feel toward her as she wished--to impart to his emotions the color which she desired them to take.
Positively I think he began to forget the flirtation in the friendship, or to charge his memory with twisting or misinterpreting the facts. All the time, though, he would have been ready to resume the old footing at the smallest encouragement, the lightest touch of coquetry or allurement. But Jenny"s masterpiece of honest friendship was without any such flaw; if she was great at flirtation, she was no less a mistress of the art of baffling it. With such ability and such self-confidence what need had she of my presence? She was wiser than I was when I put that question to myself. I thought only of what would happen; she remembered what people might say--that the neighbors had tongues, and that Fillingford had ears to his head like other folks. While the buckler of cordiality fronted Lacey, I was her shield against a flank attack.
Had she really made up her mind then? It looked like it. If she rode in my company with Lacey in the morning, she received his father without my company in the afternoon. There could be no doubt what he came for; middle-aged men of many occupations do not pay calls two or three afternoons a week without a purpose. What pa.s.sed at these interviews remained, of course, a secret; I confess to a suspicion that Jenny found them dull. Fillingford"s wariness of exposing himself to rebuff or ridicule, his habitual secretiveness as to his emotions, cannot have made him either an ardent or an entertaining suitor. In truth I do not believe that he seriously pretended to be in love. He liked her very much; he thought that she would fill well the place he had to offer, and that she, in her turn, would like to fill it, and might find him agreeable enough to accept with it. That would content him. With that I thought she, too, would be content--considering the other advantages thrown in. She would not have cared for his love, but she could endure his company. That carried with it only a limited liability--and good dividends in the form of rank, position, and influence. In dealing with the Drivers one had a tendency to fall into commercial metaphors; caught from old Nicholas, the trick extended itself to Jenny.
But if he were resolved and she ready, why did the thing hang fire? It did--and surely by Jenny"s will? She was reasoning; the affair could not look dangerous; then it looked dull? But it would look no less dull the longer she looked at it. Her feelings were not engaged; unless caught up by strong emotions, she shunned the irrevocable, liked open alternatives, hated to close the line of retreat; he who still parleys is still free, he who still bargains is still master. That att.i.tude of her mind--re-enforced by her father"s warning--was always strong with her and had always to be remembered. Was it enough to account for her continuing to keep Fillingford at bay? The answer might well be yes--for these natural predispositions will knock the bottom out of much speciously logical reasoning about people. But there was another factor in the case--a thing which could not be overlooked. Why was Leonard Octon keeping quiet? Or if quiet perforce, why did he seem placid, content, and, contrary to all expectation of him, amiably trustful?
One evening I availed myself of his invitation--Jenny did not always bid me to dinner, and sometimes I was lonely even as he was--and walked down to Hatcham Ford. Pa.s.sing Ivydene, I was interested to observe lights in the window, though it was nine o"clock at night. Presumably friend Nelson Powers did not merely use the place as his office (Cartmell"s protest had, of course, not produced the smallest effect on Jenny--my own having failed, I should have been annoyed if it had), but was established there with his family. Certainly Jenny did not always procrastinate--she seemed to delay least when the transaction was most doubtful! But I had come to accept Powers"s position as one of her freaks and, save for a rather sour amus.e.m.e.nt, thought at the moment little more about him.
That night--it seems strange to say it, but it expresses my inmost feelings--I made friends with Leonard Octon; before I had been merely interested, amused, and exasperated in turn. He chose to remove from me the ban which he laid on and maintained over most of his fellow-creatures--from no merit of my own, as I believe, but because I stood near to Jenny; or, if I can claim any part in the matter, because of a certain openness of mind which, as he was good enough to declare, existed in me. This was to say no more than that, to a certain and limited extent, I agreed with some of his prejudices--his own openness of mind consisting mainly in a hatred of the views and opinions of most other people. I was a very pale copy of him. Things toward which my meditations and my temper bred in me a degree of indifference he frankly and cordially hated. Respectability may be chosen as the word to sum them up; if I questioned its merits, he hated and d.a.m.ned it utterly.
This was one of the things which interested and amused--and, when it issued in rudeness to Lady Aspenick, also exasperated. It was not for this that I made friends with him.
"When I saw that woman owning that road--coming along in her twopenny glory, with her flunkeys to whistle me out of the way--she looked at me herself, too, mind you, and without a gleam of recognition--I got angry.
Not even the public road, mind you! She was a guest as I was."
"But you weren"t driving a tandem with a restive leader."
"And oughtn"t she to apologize for driving restive horses? Must I dodge for my life--or for hers--without even a civil word or look--just an order from a flunkey?"
"For some reason or another," I observed, "people who are angry always call grooms and footmen flunkeys."
He burst into a guffaw of laughter. "Lord, yes, a.s.ses all of us, to be sure! And what, after all, does a flick in the face come to, Mr.
Philosopher? Nothing at all! It hardly even hurts. But a man calls it a deadly insult--when he"s angry; between man and man there must be blood for it when they"re angry."
"There"s the police court," I suggested mildly.
"As you say, for sheep there"s the police court. I came as near behaving right as one can with a woman when I broke her whip."
"You really think that?"