CHAPTER XI
AT LOW KETLEY
IT WAS very dull at Low Ketley, or so Jasmine thought. The people around were quite unexciting, as she knew from experience, and although she loved Aunt Phil, her father's younger sister, the good lady's exemplary Scottish character always bored her after a time. She had a secret suspicion that this quietude was part of the prescription.
Tints of autumn were beginning to show themselves in hedge and woodland, and the garden of Low Ketley reminded Jasmine of her own hair when by force of circumstance or because of sheer laziness she had neglected it: a shampoo seemed to be indicated. Autumn had no joys for Jasmine. Temporarily, at any rate, she was caught in the stream of those who seek an eternal spring. The neighbours were very autumnal, too. Most of them were old, and those who were young wore horn-rimmed spectacles and talked about "Back to Methuselah." Aunt Phil, furthermore, had a genius for engaging silent servants. Low Ketley was a mute house.
The election to which her father had referred left Jasmine extremely cold. Her sympathies were modern, but not so modern as to include the vice of politics. Some of her friends had assured her that this meant a great gap in her life, but nevertheless she was wont to admit that she preferred dancing to speech-making. Yes, it was very boring. She was thrown almost entirely upon her own resources; perhaps a part of the cure. For on reflection—and she had ample time for reflection—her father's idea in rusticating her could only be explained in one of two ways.
He disapproved of some man whom he imagined she favoured, or he disapproved of the general lightness of her life. In either event it meant a cure, and, as a doctor's daughter, she detested cures. She had suffered them before, but never gladly.
Jasmine groped for a box of cigarettes which lay upon the window-seat, keeping her eyes fixed in an unseeing stare upon a group of firs topping the mound which concealed the tennis courts. They showed as silhouettes, for the moon hung over the distant hills investing the heather. Jasmine had learned that the smell of heather by night was different from that which characterized it during the day. Except for faint chirping of bats and the rare jarring note of a night bird in the coppice, all was very still. The smell of the heather to-night was like the smell of Harris tweed, by which mental stepping-stones Jasmine's thoughts came to Douglas Carey.
She always associated Douglas with Harris tweeds. He was not a dressy man, and, although she tried, she could not recall that she had ever seen him wearing a morning coat. He wore blue serge sometimes, but Harris tweeds usually, except at night when he bowed to custom. It was characteristic, of course, and in a small way had helped to mark him out from the others. Yes, he was very different from the others. He had grave blue eyes in which at times she found something pathetic—something that disarmed her. His dogged pertinacity she knew well. It had carried him far. And because he was weak where she was concerned, she experienced no triumph—on the contrary, she wanted to "mother" him.
Yet against this instinct she revolted and wished desperately that he would not look at her in that gentle way. If he would only be more brutal. She had often wondered if he did not care enough, was not so deeply stirred as to trouble to assert himself. That disarming, pathetic expression—she hated it because it so often recurred to her—hated it doubly now, now that doubt had come. It had been deliberate, of course; a trick which he had found effective with others. Jasmine was glad that it had not quite conquered in her case. Probably it had proved very successful with Madame Sabinov.
She found and lighted a cigarette without removing her gaze from the distant trees. How could he have lied to her so deliberately, so childishly; and why, in any event, did she torture her mind in quest of reasons? Many men had lied to her. Probably, with the exception of her father, every man she knew had lied to her. What did it matter? Yet why—why? It was so unnecessary.
As if attracted by the glow of her cigarette, a bat swooped very low and near to the window. Jasmine shrank back instinctively, and the bat, a large one, floated away again.
It was difficult to believe that London was so near. Even in Aunt Phil's obsolete car it would be quite possible to get to the Embassy in time for supper. Perhaps Douglas was there with Madame Sabinov. But no; she rather thought he would be at the Mayfair. Probably this unnatural, white-haired adventuress had a weakness for the newer club.
He was so earnest, and she had thought him so different. He was unobtrusive, yet in any gathering of the men she knew he seemed to dominate. One other there was who had that quality. But in the latter case, it was due at least in some part to deliberate eccentricity: M. de Trepniak.
Trepniak was very fascinating. Everyone found him so. Jasmine determined to give her mind a rest from these perpetual, useless imaginings centring round Douglas Carey and to think awhile of the mysterious, romantic figure of the Russian millionaire. At least, his name was Russian, or so someone had told her. Personally, she did not think he was a Russian, nor had she ever before met with the prefix "de" in connection with a Russian name. Certainly he was not English. If his mode of dress, his car, his servants, were not a mere pose, then he was even more extraordinary than his reputation.
Jasmine hated his manner of dressing. It was effeminate, yet, curiously, the man himself was brutally masculine, dominating, virile. There was something pagan about him. He seemed to belong to another age—a coarser age. She associated him with a younger world—a world which had not known the softening touch of Christianity. Some of her friends frankly courted him. To be with Trepniak was to be conspicuous, and, strangely enough, to be envied. Jasmine alone, so far as she could gather, had felt—not revulsion, for this he had never inspired—but fear, a sense of strangeness, of danger, in the company of the man whom everyone seemed to know, yet whom no one knew.
In this respect, alone, he was unusual. A mysterious stranger, given sufficient capital, may sometimes storm New York society. The feat is more difficult in London. In Paris, it is next to impossible. Trepniak had succeeded in London and in Paris. Jasmine did not know if he had ever been in America.
The bat, or another, flew down, this time sweeping a little way into the open window. She shrank back chilled as the creature flew out again and disappeared in the direction of the coppice.
Jasmine was angry with herself for being afraid of bats. Her feminine distaste for mice she had conquered many years before, but bats and spiders defied her. She had never fainted—modern woman does not faint; but she had a horrible conviction that if ever a bat touched her, settled in her hair, as she had read of such creatures doing, she should swoon. The thought of a spider touching her bare flesh was equally revolting, yet she despised these weaknesses.
And now, with a suppressed exclamation of annoyance, she set her foot upon the cigarette which she had dropped when shrinking back from the approach of the little winged animal. The night was curiously and oppressively hot. There was simply not a shadow of excuse for closing her window. She reached down again to the box upon the seat beside her—an exquisite thing without which she never travelled, a gift of Douglas Carey's.
It was of ivory and mother-o'-pearl, ebony lined. Upon the centre of the lid was a panel in relief worked in semi-precious stones and representing flowers and leaves, reproduced with that faithful detail peculiar to the little almond-eyed craftsmen of Japan. As well as cigarettes, the box contained some rings which she rarely wore, charms, and other trinkets. They sparkled attractively in the reflected moonlight.
Jasmine's mood changed. She was far too wide-awake for sleep. She suddenly determined to put on a pair of warm stockings and thick-soled shoes, her fur-lined motor coat over her dressing gown, and to take a stroll in the garden. She could get out through the kitchen without waking a soul. Whereupon, lighting another cigarette, she proceeded to put the plan into execution.
As she came out into the paved yard and found herself in the shadow of the garage which housed her aunt's car, irreverently christened by Jasmine "The Caravan," she experienced a joyous sense of truancy. It was part of her creed that to be different is to be happy, and because she believed that she was different she did not realize that nearly every member of her set was different in just the same way.
She was anxious to reach the tennis courts, to feel herself bathed in the cold light of the moon. But coming to the end of the path which led in that direction she hesitated. The garden of Low Ketley possessed a novel feature. Southeast of the house, and dividing it from the heath, was a curious, tree-topped mound—the same which she could see from her bedroom window. The tennis courts were beyond this mound, and some fanciful designer before her aunt's time had elected to build a rock garden upon the slope facing the house and to open in its centre a tunnel which led through to the courts beyond. It was very short, twenty or thirty paces, quaintly paved, and lined and roofed with moss-grown terra-cotta slabs.
Jasmine had never regarded this passage as being in the least degree mysterious, but then, she had never had occasion to enter it at night. In it were boxes containing croquet sets, damaged tennis racquets, and other odds and ends. It was perfectly dark now, however, because of the bend halfway along, and she tried to tell herself that she would be sure to bark her shins upon something if she attempted to walk through.
In her heart of hearts she knew that this minor danger was not the real deterrent; and because of the Scottish element in her character, to recognize this was to issue a challenge to herself—a challenge which she dared not refuse. She stepped quickly into the passage, her right hand resting upon the tiled wall, for she knew that the croquet boxes and other lumber were stacked against that on the left. So, she came to the bend, turned it, and could see the moon-bathed lawn beyond.
Three paces from the entrance a man was standing looking in her direction as if he expected her! In the pallid light his face was colourless as parchment. Jasmine's heart seemed to turn cold, and she clutched at the wall for support.
It was Trepniak.