CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Duchess, that evening, watched Brigit with dismayed surprise. What had happened to the girl? Where were her happy expression and youthful spirits?
Théo had not changed; that they had not quarrelled was quite evident, for when she spoke to him there was something of the gentleness of the day before in her manner; but this exception excepted, the girl had reverted to her old air of silent, resentful indifference, and her strange beauty was to the watchful old woman as repellent as she had ever seen it.
Once, when Carron spoke to her, Brigit answered without turning her head, and with her narrowed eyes and slow-moving lips looked almost venomous.
If she had produced a knife and plunged it into him, the Duchess told herself she would not have been surprised.
"An uncommonly unpleasant young person," thought the old lady, "with the temper of a fiend. I wonder where she got it; poor Henry had no temper at all, and her mother is at worst a spitfire."
Yelverton, too, noticed the disquieting change that had come over Lady Brigit, and observed with some amusement that she had noticed his observation and did not care about it, one way or the other.
Théo, seeing his love with the rosiest of spectacles, asked her gently what was the matter, and was told in a quiet voice that she was cross. "I have an abominable temper, poor boy," she said.
And possibly because it was the simple truth, it never occurred to him to believe her, and he set this remark down as an example of her divine humility.
Her mother, glaring at her toward the end of dinner, shrugged her shoulders.
"Cross again," she thought; "what an infernal temper she has. I'm glad I haven't, it makes so many wrinkles."
But Brigit had some reason for looking tragic, for she had made up her mind, while dressing, to break her engagement. Perhaps, after all, Joyselle would prove large-minded enough to continue to see Tommy, and even if he did not, she must end matters.
Regarding herself, the girl had a curious prescience, and the vague foreboding she had felt ever since her realisation of her love for Joyselle had, as she sat before her glass while her maid dressed her hair, suddenly developed into a definite terror. She knew that something dreadful would happen if she continued to see Joyselle, and the fact that he was quite innocent, and unsuspecting of the threatened danger, gave her the sensation of one who sees a child playing with a poisonous snake. He was in danger as well as she, and not only they two, but his son and his wife. Her beauty was so great, and she was so accustomed to see its effect on men, that there was no vanity at all in her suddenly awakened solicitude for him. At any moment he might see her with the eyes of a man, instead of, as he had hitherto done, with those of a father.
"And if he fell in love with me," she told herself as the maid clasped her pearls round her neck, "there would be no hope for any of us."
It is remarkable that the possibility of Joyselle's loving her only added to her misery, for most women in like cases would have clutched at the bare chance of such a contingency in rapturous disregard of all consequences.
She, however, who had been the object of more strong passions than many women ever even hear of, knew although, or possibly because, she had never before cared a jot for any man, that her time had come, and that for her love must be a perilous thing. She had once been called a stormy petrel, and now as, racked with the agony of her resolve, she sat through the interminable dinner, she recalled the name, and smiled bitterly to herself. Yes, she was a stormy petrel, and she had no right to ruin Victor Joyselle and his family. She would break her engagement and go to Italy for the winter. The Lenskys were going, and she would go with them.
Joyselle was in high spirits that evening. He had had a letter from Là-bas, as he always called Normandy, and his mother was better, and greatly looking forward to his visit. "She is old, my mother," he told the party, "eighty years old, but her cheeks are still rosy! They live in Falaise, in a small little house near the parish church, and in her garden she grows vegetables—ah, such vegetables!"
"It is a great age," observed someone, and he laughed aloud. "Yes—for here. Là-bas with us, she is not so old as she would be here. I am an old man here, but there, I am still jeune Joyselle! And my big boy, my betrothed boy, is still le petit du jeune Joyselle."
It was not particularly interesting, but nevertheless everyone at the table listened with delight. The man's vividness, his simple certainty of their sympathy, were irresistible.
"Next September," he went on, draining his champagne glass and wiping his moustache upward, in a martial way, "is their golden wedding, mes vieux! It will be very fine. Very fine indeed, for all the children and grandchildren," he glanced slily at Brigit, who clasped her hands lightly on her lap, "will be there, and we shall eat until we can eat no more, and tell each other old tales, and boast about our successes in life—ah, it will be very pleasant!"
"You will come too, my Brigit," whispered Théo under his breath. "I can show them my wonderful—wife?"
She could not answer, and he took her distress for girlish confusion, and, manlike, rejoiced in it.
After dinner Joyselle came straight to her. "May I talk to you about Tommy?" he began, "I love Tommy very much."
"He—adores you."
"Yes. Let us go into the library, Most Beautiful, where we can talk quietly." Before she could protest he had turned to her mother and announced his intention. "I leave to-morrow, before she will be up," he declared, "and there are things I must say. You allow me, Lady Kingsmead?"
Then he put his arm round the girl's waist and marched her down the hall and up the stairs leading to the library.
"Isn't he quaint?" giggled Lady Kingsmead to the Duchess, and the old woman assented with a laugh. "He is an amazing mixture of the boyish and the paternal. I thoroughly like him."
Meantime Brigit had sat down in a tall-backed carved chair, and, her hands on its arms, waited for Joyselle to speak. He walked about the room for a few moments, looking up at the book-covered walls, opening one of the windows, examining an ivory dragon that grinned on the chimney-piece. Then he burst out, "Eh, bien, my dearest, and when is it to be?"
"When is what to be?"
"The wedding."
A hot blush crept over her, leaving her cold.
"Théo wants his wife, and I want my daughter," he continued, sitting down by her and taking her hand affectionately, "why waste time!"
She looked at him in hopeless dismay. He was so big, so strong, so overpowering, she felt that her strength to resist his will was as nothing.
"You think I ask too soon?" He looked at her, an anxious pucker in his eyelids, "But no. There is never too much time in which to be happy, ma Brigitte——"
For the first time in her recollection she was glad to see Gerald Carron, as he came up the stairs, and approached them slowly.
"Does mother want me?" she asked, rising.
"No. I—just wondered what you were doing."
"I brought Lady Brigit here because I wanted to talk to her," explained Joyselle, mildly. Carron laughed.
"So do I want to talk to her!"
Brigit gave a nervous laugh. "Let's all go downstairs and talk there. My conversation isn't usually so appreciated."
The two men followed her in silence, and to her immense relief were both promptly accosted by someone of the party, and she could escape to her window seat.
What would have happened if Carron had not come, she asked herself with a shudder. Would her strength have come back, and would she have been able to tell Joyselle that he must make no plans for her wedding?
Until she had known his father, Théo had never seemed to her to lack personality; he was young, but his very boyishness was individual. Yet now with Joyselle clamouring for her to fix her wedding-day, Théo seemed to fade into insignificance, and her task to become that of breaking the news of her intended rupture with the son, to the father.
And as she sat there in the background watching the members of the little party as they smoked and chatted to each other, she gave up and resolved on flight. "If I told Théo he would rush to his father," she thought, "and then Joyselle would come to me. And we'd quarrel, and then anything might happen." His utter unconsciousness was at once a safeguard and a menace.
"I'll say nothing until he is safe in Normandy," she decided.