The Judgment House | Page 3

answered to his perfect
satisfaction. Indeed, there was between Jasmine and himself the
equivalent of a betrothal. He had asked her to marry him, and she had
not said no; but she had bargained for time to "prepare"; that she should
have another year in which to be gay in a gay world and, in her own
words, "walk the primrose path of pleasure untrammelled and alone,
save for my dear friend Mrs. Grundy."

Since that moment he had been quite sure that all was well. And now
the year was nearly up, and she had not changed; had, indeed, grown
more confiding and delicately dependent in manner towards him,
though seeing him but seldom alone.
As Ian Stafford looked at her now, he kept saying to himself, "So
exquisite and so clever, what will she not be at thirty! So well poised,
and yet so sweetly child-like dear dresden-china Jasmine."
That was what she looked like--a lovely thing of the time of Boucher in
dresden china.
At last, as though conscious of what was going on in his mind, she
slowly turned her drooping eyes towards him, and, over her shoulder,
as he quickly leaned forward, she said in a low voice which the others
could not hear:
"I am too young, and not clever enough to understand all the music
means--is that what you are thinking?"
He shook his head in negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded
hers, but still deferentially, as he said: "You know of what I was
thinking. You will be forever young, but yours was always--will always
be--the wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have been as clever at
twenty-two."
"How trying that you should know my age so exactly--it darkens the
future," she rejoined with a soft little laugh; then, suddenly, a cloud
passed over her face. It weighed down her eyelids, and she gazed
before her into space with a strange, perplexed, and timorous anxiety.
What did she see? Nothing that was light and joyous, for her small
sensuous lips drew closer, and the fan she held in her lap slipped from
her fingers to the floor.
This aroused her, and Stafford, as he returned the fan to her, said into a
face again alive to the present: "You look as though you were trying to
summon the sable spirits of a sombre future."

Her fine pink-white shoulders lifted a little and, once more quite
self-possessed, she rejoined, lightly, "I have a chameleon mind; it
chimes with every mood and circumstance."
Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng, and something in the rough
power of the head arrested her attention, and the thought flashed
through her mind: "How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three!
Three millions at thirty-three--and millions beget millions!"
. . . Power--millions meant power; millions made ready the stage for
the display and use of every gift, gave the opportunity for the full
occupation of all personal qualities, made a setting for the jewel of life
and beauty, which reflected, intensified every ray of merit. Power--that
was it. Her own grandfather had had power. He had made his fortune, a
great one too, by patents which exploited the vanity of mankind, and,
as though to prove his cynical contempt for his fellow-creatures, had
then invented a quick-firing gun which nearly every nation in the world
adopted. First, he had got power by a fortune which represented the
shallowness and gullibility of human nature, then had exploited the
serious gift which had always been his, the native genius which had
devised the gun when he was yet a boy. He had died at last with the
smile on his lips which had followed his remark, quoted in every great
newspaper of two continents, that: "The world wants to be fooled, so I
fooled it; it wants to be stunned, so I stunned it. My fooling will last as
long as my gun; and both have paid me well. But they all love being
fooled best."
Old Draygon Grenfel's fortune had been divided among his three sons
and herself, for she had been her grandfather's favourite, and she was
the only grandchild to whom he had left more than a small reminder of
his existence. As a child her intelligence was so keen, her perception so
acute, she realized him so well, that he had said she was the only one of
his blood who had anything of himself in character or personality, and
he predicted--too often in her presence--that she "would give the world
a start or two when she had the chance." His intellectual contempt for
his eldest son, her father, was reproduced in her with no prompting on
his part; and, without her own mother from the age of three, Jasmine

had grown up self-willed and imperious, yet