Part 15 (1/2)

”Ah!” The dealer was on his feet in a moment, saluting, excusing himself. Daphne heard him with graciousness. She was now the centre of the situation: she had a.s.serted herself, and her money. Marcus outdid himself in homage. Lelius in the background looked on, a sarcastic smile hidden by his fair moustache. Mrs. Fairmile, too, smiled; Roger had grown rather hot; and the d.u.c.h.ess was frankly annoyed.

”I surrender it to _force majeure_,” she said, as Daphne took it from her. ”Why are we not all Americans?”

And then, leaning back in her chair, she would talk no more. The pleasure of the visit, so far as it had ever existed, was at an end.

But before the Barnes motor departed homewards, Mrs. Fairmile had again found means to carry Roger Barnes out of sight and hearing into the garden. Roger had not been able to avoid it; and Daphne, hugging the leather case, had, all the same, to look on.

When they were once more alone together, speeding through the bright sunset air, each found the other on edge.

”You were rather rough on the d.u.c.h.ess, Daphne!” Roger protested. ”It wasn't quite nice, was it, outbidding her like that in her own house?”

Daphne flared up at once, declaring that she wanted no lessons in deportment from him or anyone else, and then demanding fiercely what was the meaning of his two disappearances with Mrs. Fairmile. Whereupon Roger lost his temper still more decidedly, refusing to give any account of himself, and the drive pa.s.sed in a continuous quarrel, which only just stopped short, on Daphne's side, of those outrageous and insulting things which were burning at the back of her tongue, while she could not as yet bring herself to say them.

An unsatisfactory peace was patched up during the evening. But in the dead of night Daphne sat up in bed, looking at the face and head of her husband beside her on the pillow. He lay peacefully sleeping, the n.o.ble outline of brow and features still n.o.bler in the dim light which effaced all the weaker, emptier touches. Daphne felt rising within her that mingled pa.s.sion of the jealous woman, which is half love, half hate, of which she had felt the first stirrings in her early jealousy of Elsie Maddison. It was the clutch of something racial and inherited--a something which the Northerner hardly knows. She had felt it before on one or two occasions, but not with this intensity. The grace of Chloe Fairmile haunted her memory, and the perfection, the corrupt perfection of her appeal to men, men like Roger.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”In the dead of night Daphne sat up in bed, looking at the face and head of her husband beside her on the pillow.”]

She must wring from him--she must and would--a much fuller history of his engagement. And of those conversations in the garden, too. It stung her to recollect that, after all, he had given her no account of them.

She had been sure they had not been ordinary conversations!--Mrs.

Fairmile was not the person to waste her time in chit-chat.

A gust of violence swept through her. She had given Roger everything--money, ease, amus.e.m.e.nt. Where would he have been without her? And his mother, too?--tiresome, obstructive woman! For the first time that veil of the unspoken, that mist of loving illusion which preserves all human relations, broke down between Daphne and her marriage. Her thoughts dwelt, in a vulgar detail, on the money she had settled upon Roger--on his tendencies to extravagance--his happy-go-lucky self-confident ways. He would have been a pauper but for her; but now that he had her money safe, without a word to her of his previous engagement, he and Mrs. Fairmile might do as they pleased. The heat and corrosion of this idea spread through her being, and the will made no fight against it.

CHAPTER VII

”You're off to the meet?”

”I am. Look at the day!”

Chloe Fairmile, who was standing in her riding-habit at the window of the d.u.c.h.ess's morning-room, turned to greet her hostess.

A mild November sun shone on the garden and the woods, and Chloe's face--the more exquisite as a rule for its slight, strange withering--had caught a freshness from the morning.

The d.u.c.h.ess was embraced, and bore it; she herself never kissed anybody.

”You always look well, my dear, in a habit, and you know it. Tell me what I shall do with this invitation.”

”From Lady Warton? May I look?”

Chloe took a much blotted and crossed letter from the d.u.c.h.ess's hand.

”What were her governesses about?” said the d.u.c.h.ess, pointing to it.

”_Really_--the education of our cla.s.s! Read it!”

... ”Can I persuade you to come--and bring Mrs. Fairmile--next Tuesday to dinner, to meet Roger Barnes and his wife? I groan at the thought, for I think she is quite one of the most disagreeable little creatures I ever saw. But Warton says I must--a Lord-Lieutenant can't pick and choose!--and people as rich as they are have to be considered. I can't imagine why it is she makes herself so odious. All the Americans I ever knew I have liked particularly. It is, of course, annoying that they have so much money--but Warton says it isn't their fault--it's Protection, or something of the kind. But Mrs. Barnes seems really to wish to trample on us. She told Warton the other day that his tapestries--you know, those we're so proud of--that they were bad Flemish copies of something or other--a set belonging to a horrid friend of hers, I think. Warton was furious. And she's made the people at Brendon love her for ever by insisting that they have now ruined all their pictures without exception, by the way they've had them restored--et cetera, et cetera. She really makes us feel her millions--and her brains--too much. We're paupers, but we're not worms. Then there's the Archdeacon--why should she fall foul of him? He tells Warton that her principles are really shocking. She told him she saw no reason why people should stick to their husbands or wives longer than it pleased them--and that in America n.o.body did! He doesn't wish Mrs. Mountford to see much of her;--though, really, my dear, I don't think Mrs. M. is likely to give him trouble--do you? And I hear, of course, that she thinks us all dull and stuck-up, and as ignorant as savages. It's so odd she shouldn't even want to be liked!--a young woman in a strange neighbourhood. But she evidently doesn't, a bit. Warton declares she's already tired of Roger--and she's certainly not nice to him.