“You did?” Morley looked at his sister, and his thin, rather haggard face softened. “No one can say you don’t take your fences well, Leslie.”
She wondered if she should say that Reid had urged her to take this particular fence. But it would involve too much explaining of what was best left alone, and would lead into the very debatable subject of her own exact motives in asking Oliver and his new
fiancée
to Cranley Magna. She contented herself with patting Morley’s shoulder, smiling and saying,
“I’m not the most courageous member of this family. But I hope I’m not a bad loser.”
. He looked at her with anxious curiosity,
“Was it a bad shock, Leslie?”
“Say rather a nasty jar,” she retorted almost lightly.
And she went back into the garden, marvelling to herself that she could conceal her inmost feelings from her brother, and yet reveal them to a comparative stranger.
“It’s settled,” she told Reid in a matter-of-fact voice. “And don’t pick any more peas, please. We have enough for a siege as it is.”
He laughed.
“Sorry. I thought I’d better finish your job while you busied yourself about my affairs.”
She looked at him reflectively.
“Would you say that telephone call was a question your affairs or mine?”
He grinned.
“It’s all in the way you look at it, I guess. What do you say?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did,” Leslie said, and took her peas away into the kitchen.
Outwardly she might appear extremely calm and matter-of-fact, but inwardly she felt frightened and agitated. Not only was there the direct ordeal of meeting Oliver’s
fiancée
, and somehow making herself calmly accept the display of affection which he would presumably show for another girl, there was also the dreadful uncertainty in her own mind of what she meant to do.
Did she intend to stand by and watch Reid try to take Caroline away from Oliver? Or, rather—since there was nothing, it seemed, that she could do to influence Reid one way or the other—did she intend to keep a close watch on the situation and profit by it if she could?
Mentally she rejected the word “profit” as sounding too unscrupulous, and substituted the word “benefit.” But she still felt uneasily that she was adopting the role of schemer, rather than good loser. Only, if Caroline did turn to her first love, what sense would there be in Leslie not trying to console Oliver?
“It’s all in the way one looks at it,” she assured herself, unconsciously using Reid’s own words. “Suppose I had been a good friend of Reid’s and had never seen Oliver, I should feel quite differently. If I knew Reid had lost his girl through no fault of his own, I should be only too eager for him to win her back. And even if, in the intervening months, she had got herself entangled with someone else, I should still hope that Reid would regain her. I should be sorry for the other man, but I don’t think I should rate his claim as high as Reid’s.”
It sounded wonderful, put that way. If only she had had no stake in the game herself!
“Am I being quite objective?” she asked herself anxiously. “And if I am, and if I really think Reid has the better claim to Caroline, am I prepared even to help him get her back?”
But it was useless to pretend that she was still being objective when she reached that point in her reflections.
“I’m not being honest now!” she told herself ruthlessly. “But I have agreed to set the stage as Reid wants it this evening. Was that quite honest?”
Her common sense argued then that she had done nothing but arrange a perfectly harmless and ordinary family gathering. But her conscience would not let her—entirely alone, and by the time the evening came she was sure that her conduct had not been entirely disinterested.
“It’s funny we’ve never seen this Caroline Frenton before,” remarked Alma. “You’d think Oliver would want to marry someone he knew, not a stranger.”
“He probably feels he knows this girl now,” Morley pointed out patiently.
“Oh, now—yes,” Alma agreed. “But I mean you’d expect him to have married someone he’d known for ages, like Leslie or Kate.”
“Much obliged.” Katherine said. “I’m fond of Oliver, in a general, family way, but his Caroline may have him, for me.”
Leslie smiled faintly, and even a little indulgently. But by no effort of will could she bring
herself
to second Katherine’s sentiments.
“Oliver is our best friend, you know,” Alma was busily explaining to Reid. “He lived quite near, and we’ve always known him. He’s going to be a doctor, but he’s living in Pencaster now, and I suppose that’s where he met this Caroline.”
“She is not, as you might suppose from my young sister’s remarks, a camp-follower,” Morley added. “She is apparently the niece of a perfectly reputable doctor in our nearest town.”
“What did you say her name was?” Reid asked, so casually that Leslie could hardly suppress a smile of admiration.
“Caroline Frenton.”
“Oh, then I know her already.”
“You do?” Alma registered inordinate astonishment. “But what an extraordinary thing! Do you hear that, everyone? Reid knows this girl Oliver’s going to marry.”
There was a chorus of mild surprise, in which Leslie contrived to join convincingly. And Katherine added curiously,
“What is she like?”
“Dark, desirable, graceful, and with lots of oomph,” replied Reid, with unexpected comprehensiveness.
There was a funny little silence, while they all registered this curiously vivid portrait of Caroline Frenton. Then Morley said reflectively,
“She doesn’t sound Oliver’s cup of tea, somehow.”
“She may not be,” Reid remarked amiably.
“But he’s going to marry her,” Alma protested in a shocked tone. And Leslie found herself saying severely,
“He sounded devoted to her when he told me about her.”
But Reid merely smiled lazily and said, “Maybe, maybe.”
And before Alma could voice any of the half-dozen questions which were obviously trembling on her lips, there were sounds of arrival in the hall, and a moment later Oliver came into the room in company with a girl whom they all recognized immediately under Reid’s description of “dark, desirable, graceful and with lots of oomph.”
In the first flurry of introductions, Leslie found, to her. unutterable relief, that she was able to display complete self-control and a nice, impersonal pleasantness. But after a few moments, she found that her desire to sink into the background had been gratified beyond anything she had intended. In some curious way, she was overwhelmed by the personality of Caroline Frenton, and she had the peculiar, and most unwelcome, impression that her own colouring faded to something neutral and subdued beside the vivid drama of the other girl’s looks.
Caroline was one of those people who naturally, and without either insistence or conceit, took the centre of the stage. No wonder Oliver had fallen for her! No wonder Reid hoped to win her back!
Leslie, in a fascinated, helpless way, found herself irresistibly assuming the identity of the sisterly, rather uninteresting friend who wished Oliver well without being of any particular importance in the scheme of things. She struggled against it. In that moment, she would have been gay and fast and a little outrageous, if she had known how to be. But Caroline held everyone’s attention. And not until she fetched up before Reid, with a startled exclamation, did the spell of her enchanting invulnerability seem, momentarily, broken.
“Why, Reid? Where did you spring from?”
“France, darling. On a visit to my charming relations.”
Immediately there was an outburst of explanations, in which Alma firmly took a leading part. Caroline contented herself with giving Reid a slow, pulse-disturbing smile, while she said to Oliver,
“He is one of my old flames, darling. But there’s no need to call for pistols for two.”
“I don’t intend to.” Oliver gave her an answering smile, which Katherine afterwards described as “besotted,” and then turned on Reid an absent, indulgent glance of compassion which said as plainly as words that he was sorry for the poor fellow who was a back-number, but had no intention of losing any sleep over him.
Oliver was talking energetically to Morley. But Caroline, who seemed able, in spite of her slightly lazy manner, to keep track of most that was going on around her, smilingly terminated her conversation with her host and drifted over to a seat nearer Leslie.
“Oliver has told me so much about you,” she said, in a perfectly friendly tone. “I feel I know you better than the others, somehow.”
“She’s the easiest one to know. Aren’t you, my sweet?” Reid said. And Leslie knew from his tone that he was looking down at her with an air which must be bordering on affectionate.
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.” Leslie’s voice was beautifully controlled, but her pulses leapt excitedly, for into the other girl’s lazy, smiling eyes had come an entirely different expression. She was looking above Leslie’s head at Reid now, and there was deliberate challenge in her face.
“And how do you spend your time, in this rural retreat?” she asked him, in an easy, mocking tone employed only between people who know each other very, very well.
“In the pleasantest way possible. Getting to know my cousins better,” Reid assured her. “Especially this one.” And to Leslie’s amazement, amusement—and a little bit to her indignation too—she felt him drop a light, but unmistakable kiss on the top of her head.
For the life of her, she could not keep herself from glancing at the other girl, to see the effect on her, and she was a good deal startled to see Caroline’s fine nostrils flare with some sudden emotion, and the line of her white teeth show for an instant on her lower lip.
Faintly embarrassed, Leslie looked quickly away again, and as she did so she encountered Oliver’s astonished and angry gaze.
She gave a slight, audible gasp as, with a sort of breathless, icy exhilaration, she recognized something of the feelings which had prompted that expression.
For the first time for days, Oliver had emerged from his happy bewilderment. And the shock which had accomplished that miracle was the disagreeable discovery that someone else apparently considered he had a right to be affectionately possessive towards a girl he had taken happily for granted all his life.
CHAPTER FIVE
LIKE all family parties where most of the people know each other well, this one kept on forming into little groups, disintegrating and regrouping, in a very informal way. And it was not long before Oliver detached himself quite naturally from his conversation with Morley and drifted casually into the group comprising Caroline, Leslie and Reid.
At first, Leslie thought he was seeking to rejoin his beloved, from whom he doubtless felt he had been separated long enough. But, after, a minute or two, it dawned upon her that it was to her he wished to talk.
Caroline and Reid were getting on splendidly, in an exchange of gay and rapid cross-talk which kept things balanced on that curious knife-edge between intimacy and remoteness, only to be maintained when the protagonists are both amusing and quick-witted.
“Come and tell me how your parents are reacting to the new position, now they are getting used to it,” Oliver said to Leslie, and, skilfully extricating her from the position of conversational buffer-state in which she had found herself, he drew her over to one of the deep window-seats, and sat down there with her.
As soon as they were established, however, in a reasonable degree of privacy, he seemed to forget his kind interest in her parents’ welfare, because, without pressing the enquiry further, he looked across the room at Reid and said,
“So that’s the fellow who has cut you all out with Great-Aunt Tabitha.”
“Oh, that isn’t quite how we feel about him, you know,” Leslie protested, forgetting that this was exactly how they had felt about him twenty-four hours ago. “He is really very nice, and seems anxious to act in a most generous way.”
Oliver was unimpressed.
“And what form does h
is generosity take?” he enquired, with a slight note of irony in his voice.
“He thinks Father should regard himself as morally entitled to some of the money at any rate, and he appears ready to go to a great deal of trouble to convince him of the fact.”
“All of which entails his staying on at Cranley Magna for some time, I suppose.”
“Naturally.”
There was a rather pregnant silence. Then, without any finesse at all, Oliver said,
“I can’t say I like his manner towards you.”
“Why, Oliver” Leslie was divided between amusement and a certain tenderness for him in his new found concern on her behalf. “He is very nice to me, I assure you.”
Oliver frowned.
“Leslie, you mustn’t take it amiss if I say that you girls are almost too sweet and naive to keep certain types in their place. I mean, it’s all very well for Morley and me to treat you with brotherly intimacy and
well, affection. But, hang it! that bounder’s only known you since yesterday. What did he think he was doing, kissing your hair?”
Leslie bit her lip very hard. Mostly to keep herself from saying exactly what Reid had thought he was doing, kissing her hair. And a very successful manoeuvre it appeared to have been too.
“He doesn’t mean anything serious, Oliver. He’s very free and easy in his manner, I know, because—”
“Much too free and easy.”
“He regards himself as more or less of a relation.”
“Nonsense.” Oliver seemed more annoyed than soothed by this view. “Does he regard himself as more or less of a relation of Caroline’s too?”
A little startled by the change of attack, Leslie glanced quickly across to where Caroline and Reid were still sparring enjoyably.
“Well—” she began, seeking for words to reassure Oliver, without actually descending to an untruth.
But she had no need to worry, for he went on immediately,
“Not that Caroline isn’t well able to look after herself.” He smiled reminiscently, and something of his good-humour returned. “I don’t worry about her. She can take the measure of anyone, and she has handled him well before.”
“Yes,” murmured Leslie, overwhelmed with astonishment that Caroline should awake no protective feel in Oliver, while she herself, for the first time in joint existence, seemed to strike him as someone in need of support and advice.
“It’s you I’m worried about,” Oliver went on, with a degree of earnestness which might, perhaps, have been called brotherly but certainly transcended anything Morley would have presumed to display on her behalf.
“You really don’t need to worry, Oliver!” Leslie was beginning to grow restive in her role of foolish, unprotected innocent. “Believe me, I am perfectly capable of managing Reid Carthay—or anyone else, come to that.”
As she said the words, she knew they were strictly not true. Managing Reid Carthay—though in a sense other than that in Oliver’s mind—had proved beyond her once or twice already.
“Well, my dear, of course I don’t want to interfere,” said Oliver, who quite obviously did. “But, as you know, I’ve a good deal of brotherly—” He stopped, as though suddenly discovering something which surprised him. “Well, no, ‘brotherly’ isn’t quite the word, I suppose. But, anyway, I’ve always regarded you girls as very much my concern, and particularly you, Leslie. You must forgive me if I was taking a bit too much on myself. But what I wanted to say was that you’d better keep this so-called cousin at a distance, and if you have any sort of trouble with him, just let me know.”
“Thank you, Oliver. I will,” Leslie promised rather meekly. “But I really don’t expect any trouble.”
“Then don’t encourage him,” Oliver retorted, with an unusual spurt of irritation. And he seemed a good deal surprised when Leslie laughed.
Oliver and she stayed for about an hour. And when they had taken their leave, the Greeves, in the manner of families, immediately embarked on a delightful, though not unkindly, inquest on the newcomer.
Aware as she was of Reid’s particular place in things, Leslie felt rather uncomfortable for the first few minutes. But she very soon realized that she was worrying herself unduly. It would have taken much more than a gaggle of Greeves to disconcert Reid Carthay.
“She’s very good-looking,” remarked Alma, always quickest off the mark when it came to personalities.
“She’s exactly as Reid described her,” replied Morley. “You must have known her very well, Reid.”
Katherine glanced at him in idle curiosity.
“Reasonably well,” Reid agreed, but seemed otherwise disinclined to join in the discussion.
“I mean, it was clever of you to describe her right away so accurately and in so few words.”
“A very beautiful and attractive girl,” remarked Richard Greeve at that moment, in a tone which silenced all other comment. “I am just a little surprised that she took anyone so ordinary as our good Oliver.”
And, with this final and rather depressing dictum on Oliver, Richard Greeve made his exit.
Leslie looked after him with a vexed laugh. But Morley said,
“For once, I’m rather in agreement with Papa, I think. I also am a little surprised that she took Oliver. And as I said before, I don’t think she sounds—and I don’t think she is—Oliver’s cup of tea either.”
“Then perhaps this will be one of those cases when there is a slip between cup and lip,” Reid suggested lightly. “Coming into the garden for a breath of air, Leslie?”
Part of her—the responsible, conscientious part of her—very much wanted to refuse. But although she despised herself for wanting to talk things over with him, Leslie could not, for anything, have resisted the urge to hear what Reid had to say when none of the others were by.
She nodded in a casual, friendly way, and they went out together into the warm dusk.
For the first few minutes they strolled in silence, each perhaps intending that the other should start the conversation. Then he said reflectively, almost softly, “I’d forgotten how beautiful she is.”
“Forgotten!”
“Oh, only in the final, sharpest sense. I had a clear picture of her in my mind, of course. But no mental recollection ever really supplies that final glow of colour or clarity of outline. It’s like having a beautiful lamp, without the light inside.”
“Yes. I know what you mean. You’re still very much in love with her, aren’t you, Reid?”
“Lord, yes! Sometimes I wish I weren’t. But there’ll never be any other girl for me.”
“Even if you don’t get her?”
“I shall get her, Leslie.”
She held her breath for a moment and tried to steady the beating of her heart.
“Was it something that happened this evening which makes you so sure of that, Reid?”
He didn’t answer her at first, but seemed to follow his own thoughts on some rather dark path. Then his attention came back to her with a start and he said,
“What did you say? Yes, of course. Everything that happened this evening. She isn’t for him, my sweet.”
He was in his characteristic, half-mocking mood of self-confidence again. “And she knows it as well as I do. It won’t take so very much to make her think again.”
“And what about Oliver?” Leslie enquired rather flatly.
“Oliver?” Reid laughed suddenly and rather shamelessly. “Oh, he’s restive and possessive about you already. Did you see the way he looked when I kissed you?”
“Yes. I did. And you ought to have been ashamed of yourself, Reid. It was taking things too far.”
“Nonsense! Did he say so?”
“He did, as a matter of fact.”
Reid gave a shout of laughter. Triumphant laughter.
“What did I tell you? Fate unkindly mixed up the characters in this little drama, and all we have to do is unmix them. Oliver is already wishing irritably that he had the right to protect you from my attentions.”
“Reid!” She was half vexed, half amused. “That doesn’t alter the fact that he is, at this moment, very much in love with Caroline.”
“Every man is in love with Caroline when he first knows her,” Reid declared carelessly. “Even your father felt romantic stirrings when she smiled at him.”
Leslie’s reluctant laugh admitted the probable truth of that. But aloud she only said,
“That would make her rather an uncomfortable person to be married to, I should have thought.”
“Divine discomfort,” Reid countered easily. “But, allow me to say, a discomfort which I could tackle very much better than your Oliver.”
“I suppose you are right.” She glanced at Reid in the faint evening light and, seeing the brilliant, wicked smile which he gave, she thought she could well imagine that he could manage even Caroline.
“Reid,” she said almost timidly. “How—I mean, what—”
“You mean what is the next move?” he prompted her airily. “Though you are rather too nice a girl to choose your wording to sound as though you’re scheming.”
She pressed her lips together.
“Well,” she said at last, “let’s be honest before everything. What is the next move?” And she paused to pick a withered flower-head from one of the rose bushes.
“I think,” he said, pausing beside her, “that the next move is for you to become engaged to me.”
She straightened up and looked at him.
“What did you say?”
“Just exactly what you thought I said, sweetheart. And don’t tell me that you don’t know what on earth I am talking about, because of course you do.”
She was completely silent, all her protests and indignant denials dying on her lips.
“You mean,” she said slowly at last, “that the shock of seeing you apparently belonging to someone else is all that is needed to make her realize it’s you she wants?”
“I was thinking a little of Oliver too,” he replied modestly. “How do you think he will take the news of your engagement to me?”
“Oh!” For a moment she saw again Oliver’s disturbed, dissatisfied face as he warned her against allowing Reid too many liberties. “He’ll—I mean, he would just hate it.”
“A healthy bit of hate,” remarked Reid in an amused tone.
“Reid, sometimes you terrify me, with your ruthlessness about what you want and your confidence that you’re right!”
“And you,” he said, laughing a little and putting his arm round her, “are much too timid for this job. Don’t endow other people with your own delicacies and scruples. You’re sweet, and I wouldn’t change you for the world. But can’t you see that Caroline and I are much more violent, ruthless, earthy creatures than you are?”
“I wasn’t thinking of you and Caroline so much,” she said rather faintly. “I was thinking of Oliver.”
“Well, then, Oliver, I suppose, is much more your own kind. Don’t you think you ought to rescue him from Caroline?” And he laughed softly and kissed the tip of her ear.
She was completely still. So still that he drew her back lightly against him without any resistance on her part. For a few moments they were silent. Then he realized suddenly that she was crying. Not stormily, as she had wept the previous day, but quietly, with the tears slipping rather helplessly down her cheeks.
“Leslie, don’t!” He was surprised, and a good deal dismayed, and on a sudden impulse he gathered her in his arms as though she were a child. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? I didn’t mean to tease you as far as that. What’s wrong?”
She hid her face against his shoulder for a moment, and was understood to say that she hated herself.
“Yourself? Oh, no!” he exclaimed in amused protest. “Really, that’s terribly illogical of you. You can hate me, if you like, or Caroline, or even Oliver. But not yourself. You’re much the nicest person in this set-up.”
“Oh, I’m not!” She dried her eyes on the handkerchief he offered her, and gave a faint smile of protest. “I hardly know myself, ever since I learned that Oliver didn’t love me after all. I don’t seem to have any dignity or decency or proper standards at all. I couldn’t have believed that I’d even entertain the idea of faking an engagement with one man, to make myself more desirable to another. And yet, when you talk to me about it—”