hands to her. If I had your position, I'd"—one of his great hands rose suddenly into the air—"crunch up this neighborhood. With her resources she could get all the power." His hand fell again, and he removed his body from two of the three chairs, shifting himself with easy indolent strength. "Then you'd have it all in your own control."
"She'd have it in her own control, you must mean," said I.
"Come, you're a man!" he mocked me. But he was looking at me closely, too—and rather inquisitively, I thought.
"Since you've met her often, I thought you might understand better than that." To answer him in his own coin, I infused into my tone a contempt which I hoped would annoy him.
He was not annoyed; he was amused. In the insolence of his strength he mocked at me—at Jenny through me—at me through Jenny. Yet, pervading it all, there was revealed an interest—a curiosity—about her that agreed ill with his assumed contemptuousness.
"She's given you her idea of herself—and you've absorbed it. She thinks she's another Nick Driver—and you're sure of it! It's all flim-flam, Austin."
"Have it your own way," said I meekly. "It's no affair of mine what you choose to think."
"Well, that's a more liberal sentiment than one generally hears in this neighborhood."
He rose and stretched himself, clenching his big fists in the air over his head. "At any rate she's told me I may take my walks about here as usual. I'll drop in and have a pipe with you some day."
Another guest proposed himself! I hoped that the company might always prove harmonious.
"As for Chat," he went on, "I don't want to boast of my conquests—but she's mine."
"My congratulations are untouched by envy."
"You may live to change your mind about that. Anyhow I hold her in my hand."
The truth about him was that, as he loved his strength, so, and no less, he loved the display of it. A common, doubtless not the highest, characteristic of the strong! Display is apt to pass into boast. He was not at all loath to hint to me—to force me to guess—that his encounters in Paris had set him thinking. (If they had set him feeling, he said nothing about that.) Hence—as I reasoned it—he went on, with a trifle more than his usual impudence, "Your goose will be cooked when she marries, though!"
After all, his impudence was good-humored. I retorted in kind. "Perhaps the husband won't let you walk in the park either!"
"If Fillingford were half a man—Lord, what a chance!"
"You gossip as badly as the women themselves. Why not say young Lacey at once?"
"The boy? I'd lay him over my knee—at the first word of it."
"He'd stab you under the fifth rib as you did it."
The big man laughed. "Then my one would be worse than his sound dozen! And what you say isn't at all impossible. He's a fine boy, that! After all, though, he's inherited his courage. The father's no coward, either."
We had become engrossed in our interchange of shots—hostile, friendly, or random. One speaks sometimes just for the repartee, especially when no more than feeling after the interpretation of a man.
Moreover Loft's approach was always noiseless. On Octon's last words, he was by my side.
"I beg pardon, sir, but Miss Driver has telephoned from London to say that she'll be down to-morrow and glad to see you at lunch. And I was to say, sir, would you be so kind as to send word to Mr. Octon that she would be very pleased if he would come, too, if his engagements permitted."
"Oh—yes—very good, Loft. This is Mr. Octon."
"Yes, sir," said Loft. The tone was noncommittal. He knew Octon—but declared no opinion.
I was taken aback, for I had received no word of her coming; I had been led not to expect her for four or five weeks. Octon's eye caught mine.
"Changed her mind and come back sooner? Well, I did just the same myself."
By themselves the words were nothing. In connection with our little duel—backed by the man's broad smile and the forceful assertion of his personality—they amounted to a yet plainer boast—"I've come—and I thought she would." That is too plain for speech—even for Octon's ill-restrained tongue—but not too plain for his bearing. But then I doubted whether his bearing were toward facts or merely toward me—were proof of force or effort after effect.
"Clearly Miss Chatters can't keep away from you!" I said.
"Clearly we're going to have a more amusing time than we'd been hoping," he answered and, with a casual and abrupt "Good-by," turned on his heel, taking out another great cigar as he went.
Perhaps we were—if amusing should prove to be the right word about it. So ran my instinct—with no express reason to be given for it. Why should not Jenny come home? Why should Octon's coming have anything to do with it? In truth I was affected, I was half dominated for the moment, by his confidence and his force. I had taken the impression he wanted to give—just as he accused me of taking the impression that Jenny sought to give. So I told myself consolingly. But I could not help remembering that in those countries which he frequented, where he got his insects and very probably his ideas, men were said as often to win or lose—to live or die—by the impression they imparted to friends, foes, and rivals as by the actual deeds they did. I could not judge how far that was true—but that or something like it was surely what they called prestige? If a man created prestige, you did not even try to oppose him. Nay, you hastened to range yourself on his side—and your real little power went to swell his asserted big power—his power big in assertion but in fact, as against the present foe, still unproved. Had the prestige been brought to bear on Chat—so that she was wholly his? Was it being brandished before my eyes, to gain me also—for what I was worth?
After all, it was flattering of him to think that I mattered. I mattered so very little. If he were minded to impress, if he were ready to fight, his display and his battle must be against another foe—or—if the evidence of that talk at the Flower Show went for anything—against several. If an attack on Breysgate Priory were really in his mind, he would find no ally—outside its walls.
CHAPTER V
RAPIER AND CLUB
Any account of Jenny Driver's doings is in danger of seeming to progress by jumps and jerks, and thereby of contradicting the truth about its subject. Cartmell, her principal man of business, scoffed at the idea that Jenny was impulsive at all; after six months' experience of her he said that he had never met a cooler, saner, more cautious judgment. That this was true of her in business matters I have no reason to doubt, but (I have noted this distinction already) if the remark is to be extended to her personal affairs it needs qualification—yet without admitting of contradiction. There she was undoubtedly impetuous and impulsive on occasion; a certain course would appeal to her fancy, and she made for it headlong, regardless, or seeming regardless, of its risks. But even here, though the impulses prevailed on her suddenly in the end, they were long in coming to a head, long in achieving mastery, and preceded by protracted periods either of inaction or of action so wary and tentative as not to commit her in any serious degree. She would advance toward the object, then retreat from it, then stand still and look at it, then walk round and regard it from another point of view. Next she was apt to turn her back on it and become, for a time, engrossingly interested in something else; it seemed essential to her ease of mind that there should be an alternative possible and a line of retreat open. All this circumspection and deliberation—or, if you like, this dawdling and shilly-shallying (for opinions of Jenny have