CHAPTER XXXIIPaddy Learns Her Mistake.True to her word, Gwen called for Doreen a few days later, and the two drove in a taxi to Shepherd’s Bush and found their way to the surgery, where Paddy, in a large black apron, was busy with her prescriptions. They stayed about ten minutes and then drove away again, leaving Paddy less able than ever to resist Gwen’s overtures. At the same time, she felt no less incensed against Lawrence and anxious to avoid meeting him, which was the cause of her reluctance to accept an invitation to a small dance at Gwen’s beautiful home in Grosvenor Place.“I have no dress good enough,” she told Doreen when they talked it over, “and I can’t afford to get a new one on purpose.”“Nonsense,” asserted Doreen promptly. “I know quite well you have. Why, that pretty dress you had for our coming-out dance is not two years old, and you have scarcely worn it at all. You must just send it to me, and I will get Jean to do it up for you. You simply must come. It will be such a jolly dance. Not a grand one at all, but one of Gwen’s impromptu hops, as she calls them.”In the end Paddy gave in, and on the evening of the dance arrived at Cadogan Place in time to go with Doreen and Lawrence in their brougham. She knew Lawrence would be there, but was prepared for it, and chatted merrily to Doreen without ever including him if she could help it.Lawrence took no notice, merely sitting forward, opposite to them, with his arms across his knees, casually glancing through an evening paper.When Paddy first arrived Doreen had made her take off her cloak and show herself, and he had then, as she well knew, though he said nothing, criticised her keenly. Doreen had been enraptured.“You look splendid!” was her verdict. “I don’t know what it is about you, Paddy, but somehow you always manage to look striking nowadays. Don’t you think so, Lawrence? Here am I, got up at endless expense, mentioned in the fashionable papers as ‘pretty Miss Doreen Blake,’ and yet, when we go into the room together, I’m sure everyone will look at you.”“If they do, it will only be my hair,” laughed Paddy. “It’s so difficult not to stare at carroty hair.”“Stuff!” from Doreen. “But am I not right, Lawrence?”Lawrence was standing a little apart, lighting a cigarette, and he did not answer for a moment.“Paddy has a lot of original ideas,” he said at last, “and they somehow cling about her. The crowd is always struck with anything original.”Paddy was pulling on a long glove. “I guess I’ll have this stocking in half before I’ve done,” she remarked, with studied unconcern, “and then I shall have to pin it to my sleeve to show I possess it, which is, after all, the main thing about it.”When they reached the Hon. Grant-Carew’s, however, and had got rid of their cloaks, Lawrence came up to them while chatting with Gwen and asked Paddy how many dances she would give him.Paddy tried to prevaricate, but both Gwen and Doreen were watching, and Lawrence persisted. He had purposely chosen that moment, knowing she could hardly refuse before the other two.“Give him three,” said Gwen decisively. “I’ll allow that number, as he’s a lovely waltzer, and you’re sure to enjoy them; but the rest of your programme I’m going to superintend myself and see that you don’t get any tiresome partners at all.”Paddy bit her lip and flashed a look at Lawrence that seemed to dare him to take advantage of her position. He, however, only smiled slightly with his usual impassivity, and wrote her name three times upon his programme. He then glanced at Gwen significantly, and she, in an easy, natural fashion, possessed herself of Paddy’s programme and handed it to him.Paddy was inwardly furious, but obliged to take it with a good grace. When they had their first dance, however, she hardly spoke, and afterward insisted upon remaining in the dance-room, so that she could watch the other guests instead of keeping up a conversation. Lawrence pretended not to notice, but chatted pleasantly about the people and pointed out any one of note to her. The same thing happened at each of his dances, and whereas Paddy was brilliant with enjoyment with all her other partners, she immediately became constrained and silent with him. And each time Lawrence chatted in his pleasantest way, and pretended not to notice it.Later, however, he suddenly dropped his pretence, and took the bull by the horns in his most resolute fashion. It had been arranged that Paddy should return home in a hansom straight from Grosvenor Place, and after saying good-by to Doreen she turned and nodded a casual good-by to Lawrence, standing near.“I am coming with you,” he said calmly.“Oh, no, certainly not,” and Paddy looked very resolute. “There is not the least necessity to drag you all that way. Besides, you must see Doreen home.”“Doreen will go home in the brougham. I am coming with you.”For one moment there was a dangerous look in Paddy’s eyes; then Doreen chimed in with:“Don’t be silly, Paddy. Of course Lawrie will take you home. As if he were likely to do otherwise.”Paddy saw there was no help for it, and tripped down the steps and into the hansom without giving him a chance to offer his hand. Lawrence gave the address and stepped in after her.“Do you mind my cigarette?” he asked, to which Paddy replied coldly, “Not in the least,” and drew further back into her corner.“You seem more angry with me than ever to-night,” he began presently.By this time Paddy had just about exhausted her none too large supply of cold hauteur, so, feeling she must vent her anger somehow, she turned upon him suddenly, which secretly pleased Lawrence because it was so much more natural to her.“Of course I am angry with you,” she exclaimed. “I think you have behaved abominably. You have simply laid traps for me, first over the dances and then over this drive. You know perfectly well I would have refused both if Doreen and Miss Carew had not been with us.”“That was strategy. They say all is fair in love and war.”“I don’t care what they say; you are a paltry enemy, because you take a mean advantage.”“And supposing I weren’t an enemy at all?”“But you are; you can’t help being. You only did it purely and simply to annoy me. You knew I did not want to dance with you, so you thought you would make me, just for an amusement for yourself—because it’s a new experience to have an unwilling partner, or something equally silly. It was only on a par with most of your actions.”Lawrence slowly knocked some ash off his cigarette.“I can’t understand Miss Carew helping you,” Paddy ran on. “If she is going to marry you, it is no reason why she should encourage you in annoying other people.”Lawrence raised his eyebrows slightly.“What makes you think Miss Carew is going to marry me?” he asked.“Well, when people are engaged to each other, don’t they usually marry!”There was a faint gleam of amusement in his eyes, but he managed to hide it by studying the end of his cigarette.“And what makes you think Miss Carew and I are engaged to each other?”Paddy shook herself with an irritable movement.“Because you are, of course! I have known it a long time.”“Longer than we have, I suspect,” with provoking calmness.Paddy puckered her forehead into a frown, and condescended to look at him.“Of course, I don’t know whether it is announced or not yet, and I’m sure I don’t care, but I heard from a mutual friend of yours and hers that it was settled when you were in India over a year ago.”“Might I ask you the mutual friend’s name?”“It was Captain O’Connor. He met you both in Calcutta. But really, except that I like Miss Carew very much, this is a most uninteresting topic.”“On the contrary, considering we have never been engaged at all, and it is very unlikely that we ever shall be, I find it extremely interesting.”“Never been engaged at all!” gasped Paddy.“Never to my knowledge,” with the same provoking calmness.“Impossible! Captain O’Connor told me he had congratulated you both, and that he heard it from Miss Carew herself.”A sudden light broke on Lawrence. “Did he tell you it happened a year last Christmas?” he asked.“About then. He was passing through Calcutta on his way home.”“Ah!” significantly.“Then you were engaged,” scathingly, “and with your customary changeableness have broken it off again?”“Yes, that’s about it. But this was a record in quick changes.”“Why?—how?” irritably, feeling there was something she did not understand.“Merely that it only lasted one evening.”“One evening!” incredulously.“Yes. But, of course, you do not care to hear about it. I quite understand that my affairs in any shape or form are not of the slightest interest to you,” which was quite a long sentence for Lawrence.For a few minutes Paddy felt squashed; then her curiosity got the better of her.“Did Miss Carew do it?” she asked.“She did. She asked me to be her tool for one evening, having got into a scrape with a hot-headed Irishman and a woolly-lamb Englishman. Since, almost as long as I can remember, I have been at Gwendoline’s beck and call, I was perfectly willing. I presume the hot-headed Irishman was your friend Captain O’Connor.”For some minutes Paddy was struck dumb. It had never entered her head to question the engagement, and she had not mentioned it to Doreen because it was such a sore subject. Hastily reviewing the past year, however, she could not but see that, on the whole, the news, though incorrect, had been most beneficial to Eileen. Undoubtedly, from the time she learnt of Lawrence’s supposed engagement, she had been better able to pull herself together and set steadily about forgetting him. Only this could not, to a girl like Paddy, in any measure abate what had gone. For every tear Lawrence’s heartlessness had made her sister shed, she felt she had an undying grudge against him, and she would not forget. Presently, to break the silence, she remarked:“I don’t know how you can help falling in love with Miss Carew. Why aren’t you engaged to her?”“Well, one very good reason, perhaps, is the fact that she is practically engaged to someone else.”“Is she?” with ill-concealed eagerness. “Who is he!”“Unfortunately he happens to be a younger son, which is a heinous and not easily-overcome offence in her mother’s eyes, and hence the delay.”“What a pity! Is he nice?”“One of the nicest chaps I ever met.”“Oh, I do hope it will come out right in the end.”“There is not much doubt. Gwen has her father on her side, and I think it is chiefly a question of time with the mother. But, for the matter of that, Gwen always gets her own way in the end. Her mother arranged for her to be a countess eighteen months ago, but at the last moment she advised the earl not to propose to her, and sent him flying.”“How splendid of her!” cried Paddy, forgetting her anger for a moment. “And she is going to marry a plain Mr Somebody now?”“Well, he holds a captain’s commission in the Guards, and considerably distinguished himself in South Africa. I’m not sure it wasn’t his V.C. that took Gwen’s fancy first.”“How nice! I do like her so much. I hope she’ll be able to marry him soon and be awfully happy. Do you think I might mention it to her?”“I’m surprised she hasn’t already told you herself. She is not in the least reserved about it, and she is awfully in love with him. She is as good at loving as you are at hating, Paddy,” and suddenly he was looking into her eyes, with an expression she had never seen on his face before, and which stirred her pulses unaccountably. She fidgeted with her hands, compressed her lips, and stared straight before her, feeling in every corner of her being that he was still looking at her with those calm, compelling eyes.“Well!” he asked at last, and his voice was full of that winning quality which had gained him such easy conquests in the past. But it only made Paddy hotly distrustful, and she gripped the front of the hansom and called up every fighting instinct she possessed.“Miss Carew would hate in my place.” She drew a long breath, as if gathering herself together for a special thrust. “Since she loves as strongly as I hate, I am glad it is some one else, and not you, to whom she has given her love.” She was unconsciously sitting rigidly upright, and from his corner, with his compelling eyes still watching her face, that gleam that might have been either love or war again passed through them.“You hit hard,” he said at last; and then, with the slightest inflection of a taunt in his voice, added: “Why don’t you look at me—are you afraid?”Paddy bit her teeth together hard, and her breath came a little fitfully. She was not afraid—that was quite certain; but, on the other hand, she had not quite the calm assurance she usually felt. She would greatly have preferred not to look at him.“Well?” he said again.Paddy took her courage in both hands.“No, I am not afraid,” and she turned her head a moment and looked full and deep into his eyes.Suddenly he gave a low, harsh laugh.“My God!” he muttered. “Patricia the Great!” And then he flung his half-smoked cigarette away and stared into the night.Neither spoke again, and a few minutes later the cab drew up at her uncle’s door. He sprang out first and offered her his aid, but she gathered up her dress with both hands and ignored him. At the door she fitted the latchkey into the lock herself. While she fumbled a little in the dim light, she felt his eyes again fixed on her, and before she managed to get the door open he said, in low, distinct tones, “The new interest you have given me is growing apace, Patricia. I see it is going to be war to the knife, but, if I’m worth my name, I’ll win yet.”“Good-night,” she said jauntily, as the door at last opened, then slammed it in his face.
True to her word, Gwen called for Doreen a few days later, and the two drove in a taxi to Shepherd’s Bush and found their way to the surgery, where Paddy, in a large black apron, was busy with her prescriptions. They stayed about ten minutes and then drove away again, leaving Paddy less able than ever to resist Gwen’s overtures. At the same time, she felt no less incensed against Lawrence and anxious to avoid meeting him, which was the cause of her reluctance to accept an invitation to a small dance at Gwen’s beautiful home in Grosvenor Place.
“I have no dress good enough,” she told Doreen when they talked it over, “and I can’t afford to get a new one on purpose.”
“Nonsense,” asserted Doreen promptly. “I know quite well you have. Why, that pretty dress you had for our coming-out dance is not two years old, and you have scarcely worn it at all. You must just send it to me, and I will get Jean to do it up for you. You simply must come. It will be such a jolly dance. Not a grand one at all, but one of Gwen’s impromptu hops, as she calls them.”
In the end Paddy gave in, and on the evening of the dance arrived at Cadogan Place in time to go with Doreen and Lawrence in their brougham. She knew Lawrence would be there, but was prepared for it, and chatted merrily to Doreen without ever including him if she could help it.
Lawrence took no notice, merely sitting forward, opposite to them, with his arms across his knees, casually glancing through an evening paper.
When Paddy first arrived Doreen had made her take off her cloak and show herself, and he had then, as she well knew, though he said nothing, criticised her keenly. Doreen had been enraptured.
“You look splendid!” was her verdict. “I don’t know what it is about you, Paddy, but somehow you always manage to look striking nowadays. Don’t you think so, Lawrence? Here am I, got up at endless expense, mentioned in the fashionable papers as ‘pretty Miss Doreen Blake,’ and yet, when we go into the room together, I’m sure everyone will look at you.”
“If they do, it will only be my hair,” laughed Paddy. “It’s so difficult not to stare at carroty hair.”
“Stuff!” from Doreen. “But am I not right, Lawrence?”
Lawrence was standing a little apart, lighting a cigarette, and he did not answer for a moment.
“Paddy has a lot of original ideas,” he said at last, “and they somehow cling about her. The crowd is always struck with anything original.”
Paddy was pulling on a long glove. “I guess I’ll have this stocking in half before I’ve done,” she remarked, with studied unconcern, “and then I shall have to pin it to my sleeve to show I possess it, which is, after all, the main thing about it.”
When they reached the Hon. Grant-Carew’s, however, and had got rid of their cloaks, Lawrence came up to them while chatting with Gwen and asked Paddy how many dances she would give him.
Paddy tried to prevaricate, but both Gwen and Doreen were watching, and Lawrence persisted. He had purposely chosen that moment, knowing she could hardly refuse before the other two.
“Give him three,” said Gwen decisively. “I’ll allow that number, as he’s a lovely waltzer, and you’re sure to enjoy them; but the rest of your programme I’m going to superintend myself and see that you don’t get any tiresome partners at all.”
Paddy bit her lip and flashed a look at Lawrence that seemed to dare him to take advantage of her position. He, however, only smiled slightly with his usual impassivity, and wrote her name three times upon his programme. He then glanced at Gwen significantly, and she, in an easy, natural fashion, possessed herself of Paddy’s programme and handed it to him.
Paddy was inwardly furious, but obliged to take it with a good grace. When they had their first dance, however, she hardly spoke, and afterward insisted upon remaining in the dance-room, so that she could watch the other guests instead of keeping up a conversation. Lawrence pretended not to notice, but chatted pleasantly about the people and pointed out any one of note to her. The same thing happened at each of his dances, and whereas Paddy was brilliant with enjoyment with all her other partners, she immediately became constrained and silent with him. And each time Lawrence chatted in his pleasantest way, and pretended not to notice it.
Later, however, he suddenly dropped his pretence, and took the bull by the horns in his most resolute fashion. It had been arranged that Paddy should return home in a hansom straight from Grosvenor Place, and after saying good-by to Doreen she turned and nodded a casual good-by to Lawrence, standing near.
“I am coming with you,” he said calmly.
“Oh, no, certainly not,” and Paddy looked very resolute. “There is not the least necessity to drag you all that way. Besides, you must see Doreen home.”
“Doreen will go home in the brougham. I am coming with you.”
For one moment there was a dangerous look in Paddy’s eyes; then Doreen chimed in with:
“Don’t be silly, Paddy. Of course Lawrie will take you home. As if he were likely to do otherwise.”
Paddy saw there was no help for it, and tripped down the steps and into the hansom without giving him a chance to offer his hand. Lawrence gave the address and stepped in after her.
“Do you mind my cigarette?” he asked, to which Paddy replied coldly, “Not in the least,” and drew further back into her corner.
“You seem more angry with me than ever to-night,” he began presently.
By this time Paddy had just about exhausted her none too large supply of cold hauteur, so, feeling she must vent her anger somehow, she turned upon him suddenly, which secretly pleased Lawrence because it was so much more natural to her.
“Of course I am angry with you,” she exclaimed. “I think you have behaved abominably. You have simply laid traps for me, first over the dances and then over this drive. You know perfectly well I would have refused both if Doreen and Miss Carew had not been with us.”
“That was strategy. They say all is fair in love and war.”
“I don’t care what they say; you are a paltry enemy, because you take a mean advantage.”
“And supposing I weren’t an enemy at all?”
“But you are; you can’t help being. You only did it purely and simply to annoy me. You knew I did not want to dance with you, so you thought you would make me, just for an amusement for yourself—because it’s a new experience to have an unwilling partner, or something equally silly. It was only on a par with most of your actions.”
Lawrence slowly knocked some ash off his cigarette.
“I can’t understand Miss Carew helping you,” Paddy ran on. “If she is going to marry you, it is no reason why she should encourage you in annoying other people.”
Lawrence raised his eyebrows slightly.
“What makes you think Miss Carew is going to marry me?” he asked.
“Well, when people are engaged to each other, don’t they usually marry!”
There was a faint gleam of amusement in his eyes, but he managed to hide it by studying the end of his cigarette.
“And what makes you think Miss Carew and I are engaged to each other?”
Paddy shook herself with an irritable movement.
“Because you are, of course! I have known it a long time.”
“Longer than we have, I suspect,” with provoking calmness.
Paddy puckered her forehead into a frown, and condescended to look at him.
“Of course, I don’t know whether it is announced or not yet, and I’m sure I don’t care, but I heard from a mutual friend of yours and hers that it was settled when you were in India over a year ago.”
“Might I ask you the mutual friend’s name?”
“It was Captain O’Connor. He met you both in Calcutta. But really, except that I like Miss Carew very much, this is a most uninteresting topic.”
“On the contrary, considering we have never been engaged at all, and it is very unlikely that we ever shall be, I find it extremely interesting.”
“Never been engaged at all!” gasped Paddy.
“Never to my knowledge,” with the same provoking calmness.
“Impossible! Captain O’Connor told me he had congratulated you both, and that he heard it from Miss Carew herself.”
A sudden light broke on Lawrence. “Did he tell you it happened a year last Christmas?” he asked.
“About then. He was passing through Calcutta on his way home.”
“Ah!” significantly.
“Then you were engaged,” scathingly, “and with your customary changeableness have broken it off again?”
“Yes, that’s about it. But this was a record in quick changes.”
“Why?—how?” irritably, feeling there was something she did not understand.
“Merely that it only lasted one evening.”
“One evening!” incredulously.
“Yes. But, of course, you do not care to hear about it. I quite understand that my affairs in any shape or form are not of the slightest interest to you,” which was quite a long sentence for Lawrence.
For a few minutes Paddy felt squashed; then her curiosity got the better of her.
“Did Miss Carew do it?” she asked.
“She did. She asked me to be her tool for one evening, having got into a scrape with a hot-headed Irishman and a woolly-lamb Englishman. Since, almost as long as I can remember, I have been at Gwendoline’s beck and call, I was perfectly willing. I presume the hot-headed Irishman was your friend Captain O’Connor.”
For some minutes Paddy was struck dumb. It had never entered her head to question the engagement, and she had not mentioned it to Doreen because it was such a sore subject. Hastily reviewing the past year, however, she could not but see that, on the whole, the news, though incorrect, had been most beneficial to Eileen. Undoubtedly, from the time she learnt of Lawrence’s supposed engagement, she had been better able to pull herself together and set steadily about forgetting him. Only this could not, to a girl like Paddy, in any measure abate what had gone. For every tear Lawrence’s heartlessness had made her sister shed, she felt she had an undying grudge against him, and she would not forget. Presently, to break the silence, she remarked:
“I don’t know how you can help falling in love with Miss Carew. Why aren’t you engaged to her?”
“Well, one very good reason, perhaps, is the fact that she is practically engaged to someone else.”
“Is she?” with ill-concealed eagerness. “Who is he!”
“Unfortunately he happens to be a younger son, which is a heinous and not easily-overcome offence in her mother’s eyes, and hence the delay.”
“What a pity! Is he nice?”
“One of the nicest chaps I ever met.”
“Oh, I do hope it will come out right in the end.”
“There is not much doubt. Gwen has her father on her side, and I think it is chiefly a question of time with the mother. But, for the matter of that, Gwen always gets her own way in the end. Her mother arranged for her to be a countess eighteen months ago, but at the last moment she advised the earl not to propose to her, and sent him flying.”
“How splendid of her!” cried Paddy, forgetting her anger for a moment. “And she is going to marry a plain Mr Somebody now?”
“Well, he holds a captain’s commission in the Guards, and considerably distinguished himself in South Africa. I’m not sure it wasn’t his V.C. that took Gwen’s fancy first.”
“How nice! I do like her so much. I hope she’ll be able to marry him soon and be awfully happy. Do you think I might mention it to her?”
“I’m surprised she hasn’t already told you herself. She is not in the least reserved about it, and she is awfully in love with him. She is as good at loving as you are at hating, Paddy,” and suddenly he was looking into her eyes, with an expression she had never seen on his face before, and which stirred her pulses unaccountably. She fidgeted with her hands, compressed her lips, and stared straight before her, feeling in every corner of her being that he was still looking at her with those calm, compelling eyes.
“Well!” he asked at last, and his voice was full of that winning quality which had gained him such easy conquests in the past. But it only made Paddy hotly distrustful, and she gripped the front of the hansom and called up every fighting instinct she possessed.
“Miss Carew would hate in my place.” She drew a long breath, as if gathering herself together for a special thrust. “Since she loves as strongly as I hate, I am glad it is some one else, and not you, to whom she has given her love.” She was unconsciously sitting rigidly upright, and from his corner, with his compelling eyes still watching her face, that gleam that might have been either love or war again passed through them.
“You hit hard,” he said at last; and then, with the slightest inflection of a taunt in his voice, added: “Why don’t you look at me—are you afraid?”
Paddy bit her teeth together hard, and her breath came a little fitfully. She was not afraid—that was quite certain; but, on the other hand, she had not quite the calm assurance she usually felt. She would greatly have preferred not to look at him.
“Well?” he said again.
Paddy took her courage in both hands.
“No, I am not afraid,” and she turned her head a moment and looked full and deep into his eyes.
Suddenly he gave a low, harsh laugh.
“My God!” he muttered. “Patricia the Great!” And then he flung his half-smoked cigarette away and stared into the night.
Neither spoke again, and a few minutes later the cab drew up at her uncle’s door. He sprang out first and offered her his aid, but she gathered up her dress with both hands and ignored him. At the door she fitted the latchkey into the lock herself. While she fumbled a little in the dim light, she felt his eyes again fixed on her, and before she managed to get the door open he said, in low, distinct tones, “The new interest you have given me is growing apace, Patricia. I see it is going to be war to the knife, but, if I’m worth my name, I’ll win yet.”
“Good-night,” she said jauntily, as the door at last opened, then slammed it in his face.