As Lady Aspenick drew nearer to Octon, one of the grooms whistled. Octon gave way--a little. Apparently the groom--whether Lady Aspenick spoke to him or not I could not see--thought that there was not yet room enough, for he whistled again, waving his hand impatiently. Octon edged a little more to the side of the road and then stood still, apparently waiting for them to pa.s.s. He was by no means at the side of the road--neither was he now in the middle; perhaps he was a third of the way across; and, so far as I could judge, there was room for them to pa.s.s--and a sufficient margin, at any rate for a steady team. Now the groom shouted--a loud "Hi!" or some such word--in a peremptory way. I heard Octon's reply plainly. "There's plenty of room, I tell you." Lady Aspenick had her whip in her hand--ready, no doubt, to give her restless leader a flick to make him mind his manners as they went by. While this happened, I had begun to walk on again slowly, meaning to speak to Octon when the lady had pa.s.sed. I was about fifteen yards away--and the tandem was just approaching where Octon stood. Just as she came up to him, Lady Aspenick loosed the long lash of her whip; it flew out and I looked to see a jump from the leader, who was dancing and capering in a very restive way. But unless she took great care--or Octon moved a bit----

The next instant, while the idea was still incomplete in my mind, the end of the lash caught him full on the face. He jumped back with a shout of rage. The leader gave a wild plunge toward the other side of the road; the cart swayed and rocked. The grooms leaped down and ran as hard as they could to the leader's head. Octon sprang forward, caught hold of the whip, wrenched it from Lady Aspenick's hand, almost pulling her out of her seat, broke it in the middle across his knee, and flung the fragments down on the road. I ran up hastily.

"You did that on purpose," he said, his voice shaking with rage. There was a red streak across his face from the cheek bone to the chin.

She was pale, but she looked at him calmly through her eyegla.s.ses.

"Nonsense," she answered, "but if I had, it would have been only your deserts. Why didn't you give me room?"

"There was plenty of room if you knew how to drive; and, if you wanted more, you could have asked for it civilly."

"You must have seen I had a young horse." She turned to me. "Give me my whip, please, Mr. Austin. You saw what happened? I'll ask my husband to come and see you about it." Then she ordered her men to take out the refractory leader, and lead him home; she would drive back with the wheeler. She took no more notice of Octon, nor he of her (unless to watch her grooms' proceedings with a sullen stare), but as she started off, holding the broken b.u.t.t of the whip in her hand, she called to me, "Tell Miss Driver we're looking forward to dinner to-night."

The grooms had looked dangerously at Octon, and were now saying something to one another; but it needed at least one to hold the horse, and Octon would be far more than a match for either of them singly. His angry eyes seemed only to hope that they would give him some excuse for violence.

"Follow your mistress," I said to them. "It's no affair of yours."

I think that they were glad to get my sanction for their retreat. Off they went, and I was left alone with Octon.

"If it had been a man, I wouldn't have left a whole bone in his body.

She struck me deliberately--on purpose."

"It wasn't a man. Why didn't you give her more room?"

"There was plenty of room?" he persisted. "The whole road isn't hers, is it?" With that he turned on his heel and sauntered off toward the south gate, in the direction of his own house.

There was the incident--and I had the grave misfortune of being the only independent witness of it. There was the incident--and there was the dinner-party in the evening, to which both the Aspenicks and Leonard Octon were bidden. Clearly the matter could not stand where it was; it was, alas! no less clear that I should have to give my evidence. Of course the meeting at dinner must not take place; whatever else might or might not follow from the affair, that much was certain. I went back to the house and asked to see Jenny.

I told her the story plainly and fully--all that I had seen and all that had been said; she did not interrupt me once.

"There it is," I ended. "His case is that he gave her plenty of room and that she purposely lashed him over the face. Hers is that he gave her too little room, deliberately annoying her, that her leader was restive and she had to use her whip, and that, if she hit him, it was his own fault for standing where he did."

"His s.n.a.t.c.hing away the whip and breaking it--isn't that bad?" she asked. "Or if he thought she meant to hit him?"

"Then it's still bad, I suppose, since she's a woman; but it's perhaps understandable--above all in him."

"Well, what's your own opinion about it?"

"That's just what I don't want to give," I objected.

"But you must. I have to come to some decision about this."

"Well, then--I think he did leave her room--enough and a little more than enough; but I also think that he meant to annoy her. I'm sure he didn't mean to put her in danger of an upset, but I do think that, with such a horse as she was driving, an upset might have been the result, and he ought to have thought of that--only he doesn't know much about horses. On the other hand I don't think she deliberately made up her mind to hit him--but I do think she meant to go as near to it as she could without actually doing it; I think she meant to make him jump.

That's about my idea of the truth of the matter."

"Yes, I daresay," she said thoughtfully. "When Sir John comes to you, bring him straight up here. They mustn't meet to-night, of course, but I should like to see Sir John first--if he comes this morning or soon after lunch."

"It's all very tiresome," said I lugubriously.

She suddenly put her hands in mine--in one of her moments of impulse.

"Oh, yes, yes, dear friend!" she murmured with an acute note of distress in her voice. Tiresome as the affair was, it hardly seemed to call for that; but I had not yet realized her position in its full difficulty; I did not know what every new proof of Octon's "impossibility" meant to her.

Sir John arrived, hot-haste, before lunch. Happily Fillingford was with him. I say happily, for I gathered that the angry husband's first intention had been to go straight to Hatcham Ford and undertake the horse-whipping of Leonard Octon--which enterprise must have ended in broken bones for Sir John, and probably the police court for both combatants. Fillingford happened to be with him when Lady Aspenick arrived at home and told her story; with difficulty he dissuaded Aspenick from violent measures; above all, nothing must get into the papers; all the same, it was a case for decisive private action.

According to my orders I took Sir John up to Jenny, and Fillingford came with us.

There--before her--we had the whole story over again. Sir John told his wife's version, I put Octon's forward against it--if only for fair play's sake. Sir John naturally would have none of Octon's, nor would Fillingford. Then I repeated my own impression of the affair. Any points in it which made for Octon Sir John violently rejected; Fillingford's att.i.tude was wiser, the position he took up less open to the charge of prejudice; he disliked Octon intensely, but he would not rest his case on the weak foundation of an angry temper.

"I'm quite content to accept Mr. Austin's view of the facts, which he has given us so clearly and so impartially. Where does his view lead?

Why to this--Not only was Mr. Octon inexcusably violent at the end, but he was the original aggressor. He did not, Mr. Austin is convinced, mean to cause danger to Lady Aspenick, but he did mean to cause her vexation--in fact to offer her an affront. In my opinion anything on her part that followed is imputable to his own fault, and he had no t.i.tle to resent it. I base my decision not on Lady Aspenick's account, but on Mr.

Austin's independent testimony; and I say that Mr. Octon behaved as no gentleman and as no good neighbor should."

Jenny had listened to all the stories in silence, and in silence also she heard Fillingford's summing-up. Now she looked at him and asked briefly, "What follows?"

"It follows that he must be cut," interposed Aspenick in dogged anger.

"We have a right to protect ourselves--above all the ladies of our families--from the chance of such occurrences. They mustn't be exposed to them if we can help it; they certainly need not and must not be exposed to the unpleasantness of meeting the man who causes them. We have a right to act on that line--and I, for one, feel bound to act on it, Miss Driver."

"Not a man in the place will do anything else," declared Aspenick.

But I was wondering what Jenny would do. Almost without disguise they were presenting to her an ultimatum. They were saying, "If you want him, you can't have us. We can't come where he comes. Is he to go on coming to Breysgate? Is he to go on using your park?" She did not like dictation--nor did she like sending her friends away. To send them away on dictation--would she do that? Or would she fall into one of her rages, bid them all go hang, and throw in her lot with boycotted Octon?

She turned to me.

"Do you agree with what these gentlemen say?" she asked.

In the end I liked Octon or, at any rate, found him very interesting, and I was therefore ready, for myself, to put up with his tempers and his tantrums. People who did not like him nor find him interesting could not be asked to do that. And he stood condemned on my own evidence.

"They are quite within their rights," I had to answer.

She was not in a rage; she was anxious and distressed. Nor was the anxiety all hers. Aspenick indeed had at the moment no thought but of anger on his wife's account, but Fillingford must have had other things in his mind. To put it at the lowest, he valued his acquaintance with the mistress of Breysgate Priory; there were good grounds for guessing that he valued it very much. If he had learned anything at all about her, he must have known that he was risking it now. But he showed no hesitation; he awaited her answer with a grave deference which declared the importance he attached to it but gave no reason to hope that his own course of action could be affected, whatever the answer might be.

Neither did she give the impression of hesitating--it was not exactly that. Whether in her heart she hesitated I cannot tell; if she did, she would not let them see it. Her demeanor betrayed nothing more than a pained reluctance to condemn utterly, to recognize that one who had been received as a friend and as a gentleman had by his own fault forfeited his claim to those t.i.tles. Her delay in giving her decision--for the real question now was whether she would join in Octon's ostracism--did not impugn their judgment nor seem to weigh their merits against the culprit's. It did not declare a doubt of their being right; it said only with what pain she would recognize that they were right.

"Yes--it's the only thing," she said at last.

"I was sure you would agree with us--painful as such a course is,"

Fillingford said.

"It's only cutting a cad," Aspenick grumbled, half under his breath.

Jenny did not or would not hear him.

The bargain was struck, and fully understood without more words. Jenny's friends must not be exposed to meeting Octon at Breysgate or in Breysgate park. They would be strangers to Octon; if Jenny would be their friend, she must be a stranger to him. Dropping Octon was the condition of holding her place in their society. She understood the condition and accepted it. There was no more to be said.

They took leave and she did not ask them to stay to lunch. Her farewell to Aspenick was cold, though she made a civil reference to seeing him again at dinner--nothing was said about Octon in that connection! But toward Fillingford she showed a marked, if subdued, graciousness.

Clearly she meant to convey to him that, distressed as she was by the incident and its necessary consequences, she attached no blame to him for the part he had taken--nay, was grateful to him for his counsel and guidance.

"I never had any doubt of your coming to a right decision," he told her, holding her hand for a moment longer than he need. She looked into his eyes, but said nothing; she gave the air of being heartily content to surrender her judgment to his.

I saw them off and came back to her. She was still standing in the same place, looking very thoughtful and frowning slightly; it was by no means the trustful expression with which her eyes had dwelt on Fillingford's.