"I hope you have enjoyed yourself, dear," said Lady Richardson, arranging Billy's tie and kissing Billy's nose, but addressing Leah; "I'm sure you ought to have. This darling has won you pots."
Lady Jim nodded, rather wearily. The cackle of the hen over her chick worried her, and she retreated to the most distant corner, bored by maternal fussiness. This visit had taken her a step farther, but it was most annoying that success should make her feel uncomfortable. Aksakoff, misapprehending her reasons as he did, would certainly assist her materially. But Katinka,--bur-r-r-r! Why couldn't conscience quit worrying?
[ CHAPTER XVII]
Even the skilful find it no easy matter to drive a kicking, squealing team. The off-horse must be flicked into decorum, the near leader soothed, the wheelers, bearing the heat and burden of the day, encouraged into pulling with a will. Then, a deft hand on tugging reins, a quick eye for the deviations of the road, some knowledge of mouths, tender and hard, and manifestations of that will which makes of vehicle and quadrupeds a coherent whole--these things must be attributes of the god in the car. Likewise of the "Dea ex machina," although Lady Jim was in and not out of the vehicle. Enthroned with whip and ribbons, she drove a team of five. And in the odd number lay the difficulty of bringing the car of Destiny to the selected stables.
For by this time, rejecting an overruling Providence other than the fetish, who was a domestic god and biased, Leah looked upon herself as her own omnipotent and triumphing Destiny. She would, so she decided, expunge Jim, utilise Askew and Katinka, obliterate Demetrius, and assist Muscovite politics through Aksakoff. This team, in harness, and rendered obedient by blinkers, she controlled with considerable judgment, and made, single-hearted, for her goal. That the actual Destiny, whose rôle she affected to play, might upset her smoothly-running chariot by a judiciously placed and unlooked-for stone, she never paused to consider. So far as she could see, the course was clear to the prize--a money-bag, which she would seize as a victorious widow of the wrong sort.
Askew was the odd animal of the team, the fifth wheel on her chariot, though he was less like a horse than a troublesome and over-faithful dog. Notwithstanding her prohibition, he invaded San Remo, played a most exasperating Patience on a monument along the promenade, and dodged her angry eyes round convenient street-corners. She could not go abroad but what he turned up in unexpected quarters, nor could she remain at home without his appearing, to excuse, on frivolous pretexts, a wholly unnecessary visit. Luckily, the Hengists approved of his frank looks and modest manners, else she might have been compromised. Even in easy-going Italy such cicisbeism was annoying.
Later, Lady Jim returned to London, for that season invented by man, and left him to kick his heels in cross isolation. But, even before the Curzon Street house could be warmed, he rang the bell, and presented himself in the character of a martyr. For the sake of the future Leah kept him in the team, but she gave him more of the whip than he liked, and also--ironically--a marked almanack, limiting his visits. But that she had some liking for him, and much use, she would have bundled him into the arms of the fixture, with strict orders to give those same arms a legal right to embrace him for ever. But Askew himself put an end to that chance of being safely bestowed.
"What will Marjory say if you make my house your hotel?" she asked, when he appeared on the fifth day of the week for the eighth time, and at afternoon tea, too, when she, with a hard day's pleasure behind her, was recruiting for the night's fatigue.
"Nothing," he asserted, sulkily and guiltily; "she has no right to control my actions."
"That depends upon your feelings towards your future wife."