The gates were opened and a sledge issued, drawn by two black ponies. In it sat Lady Jim, who was driving, and Dr. Constantine Demetrius.
"What is she up to now?" Lionel asked himself. He was intensely distrustful of Lady Jim, but he did not explain this to Joan.
[ CHAPTER VII]
The sledge occupied by this well-matched couple might have been used by Pompadour, in the days when the finances of France were melting in the furnace of Versailles. The basketwork body of a swan, gilded and painted and elegantly fragile, rested delicately on slim steel runners, and glided over the frozen snow in the rear of two spirited black ponies. These, harnessed in the Russian fashion, with a paucity of trappings and many tiny silver bells, sprang forward, under Lady Jim's skilful guidance, as though they were rioting in a spring meadow. She and her companion were snugly wrapped in an opossum rug, which Leah, rather vulgarly, despised as a cheap article. Her mink cloak, with the snowy ermine scarf drawn through the shoulder cape in the latest fashion, had cost nearly ten times the amount, and Leah wore it with the proud consciousness that she owed no money for it. It was an early-winter present from Lady Frith, and she had accepted it on the generous ground that its cut and rich brown colour became her better than they would have suited the dowdy, insignificant Marchioness. But the little woman never knew that Lady Jim's good-nature had prevailed to this extent. She had thought to give Leah pleasure.
Demetrius, muffled in Muscovite sables, sat contentedly by this Tauric Diana, wondering why he had been graciously invited to drive with the goddess, after a hurried luncheon. The two were tête-à-tête, for the groom had been dispensed with as out of keeping with the novel vehicle. The excuse was artistic. Nevertheless, Demetrius suspected other reasons for the absence of an eavesdropping servant. What these might be he hoped to hear from Lady Jim.
But as yet she showed no disposition to speak frankly, for the Russian, in Jim's picturesque speech, was a gentleman to be handled "with the gloves on." Jim himself had impressed this on Leah, before he sat down to spell out The Woman in White. Needless to say, this unusual effort to improve what Jim was pleased to term his mind bored him extremely. "Not a word about racin'," grumbled Jim, skipping page after page. Still, as Leah pointed out the necessity of poaching on the domain of fiction, Jim sat at his lesson like a good little boy, and his wife drove out with her proposed victim. That the irony of fate might change the victim into a possible tyrant did not occur to Leah at the moment.
All the same, she was careful not to commit herself too hastily, and for two miles talked society-journal paragraphs with an assiduity at once boring and perplexing to Demetrius. Even when the sledge slipped, silent and ghost-like, over an Arctic waste, and they were alone to babble secrets to a frosty sky, Leah showed no disposition to come to the point. She wished Demetrius to question her, and then, by seeing into his mind, she could be guided as to the most selfishly-successful way of making up her own. But the doctor guessed her reason for this diplomatic silence, and knowing what a shameless capacity she had for word-twisting and for slipping out of untenable positions, he gave her no opportunity to overlook his hand. It was certainly, as he reflected, a game of skill, but what the precise style of game might be Demetrius could not guess. However, one thing was certain; this game, like all others, was being played for money. On Lady Jim's part, that is. Demetrius shuffled his cards for the stake of love, and so, having Leah Kaimes for an antagonist, lost at the outset. A game between a man and a woman, on amatory grounds, is always unequal. The one in earnest invariably loses.
"Does this remind you of the steppes?" asked Leah, waving her whip towards a desert of snow and ice. The polite conversation was still much in evidence.
"Somewhat, madame; but I cannot remember sledging across any steppe in such charming company."
"Ah! You have never driven Mademoiselle Aksakoff, then?"