AFTER this, Olivia took up her life, as she thought, in firm hands. She
had made her reparation to her old friends. She joined the family party
of the Trivetts at dinner, and mixed with the “homely folk” that
assembled around old John Freke’s tea table. She lived in a glow of
contrition for past snobberies. The vague story of her separation from
Triona which she had told to the two old men not sufficing Medlow
curiosity, she told what she believed to be the truth.
“My husband has gone to Poland to fight against the Russian Reds.”
And thereby she gave the impression that the cause of the break up of
her married life was the incurable adventurous spirit of her husband.
The suggestion fitted in with the town’s idea of the romance of her
marriage and the legendary character of Alexis Triona, which had
originally been inspired by the local bookseller eager to sell copies of
Triona’s books. She herself, therefore, became invested in a gossamer
garment of mystery, which she wore with becoming grace. Her homecoming
was a triumph.
As the days passed and brought no news of Alexis, she grew convinced of
the honesty of his last letter. His real achievements in the past
confirmed her conviction. He was the born adventurer. It was like him to
have sought the only field of mad action open at that hour of
frantically guarded peace. He had gone to Poland. In her heart she
rejoiced. She saw him striving to burn a past record and rise,
Phœnix-like, from its ashes.
“If he came back a Polish General, all over stars and glory,” said Myra,
during one of their increasingly intimate conversations, “would you take
up with him again?”
Olivia reddened. “I should be glad for his sake.”
“I don’t see that you’re answering my question,” said Myra.
“I’ve told you once and for all,” flashed Olivia, “that I’ll have
nothing more to do with him as long as I live.”
She meant it with all that she knew of her soul. His fraud was
unforgivable; his perfect recognition of it constituted his only merit.
In Poland, doing wild things, he was a picturesque and tolerable
personage. In her immediate neighbourhood, he became once again a
repellent figure. As far as she could, she blotted him out of her
thoughts.
The threat of exposure at the hands of Onslow and Wedderburn still hung
over her head. The disgrace of it would react on her innocent self. The
laughter of the Lydian galley rang in her ears. She guessed the cynical
gossip of the newer London world. That was hateful enough. She need
never return to either. But it would follow her to Medlow. She would be
pitied by the Trivetts and the Frekes, and the parents of the present
generation of Landsdowne House. They would wonder why, in the face of
the revelations, she still called herself “Mrs. Triona.” To spring her
plain Mrs. Briggs-dom on Medlow she had not the courage.
She took counsel with Blaise Olifant. In his soldier-scholar protecting
way he seemed a rock of refuge. He said:
“Write to them through Rowington and ask them to hold their hands until
you can put them into communication with your husband, which you give
your word of honour to do as soon as you learn his address.”
She did so. The bargain was accepted. When she received Rowington’s
letter, she danced into Olifant’s study, and, sitting on the corner of
his table, flourished it in his face.
“Oh, the relief of it! I feel ten years younger. I was on the verge of
becoming an old woman. Now it will never come out.”
Olifant leaned back in his chair and looked at her wistfully. A faint
flush coloured her cheeks, and her eyes were lit with the gladness of
hundreds of days ago. Her lips were parted, showing the white, girlish
teeth. Sitting there, vividly alive, in the intimate attitude, smiling
on him, she was infinitely desirable.
“No,” said he. “It will never come out.”
A cloud passed over her face. “Still, one never knows——”
“I have faith in Alexis,” said he. “He’s a man of his word.”
“I think you’re the loyalest creature that ever lived.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “I would I were,” said he.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked pleasantly.
“If I were,” said he, his nose seeming to lengthen over the wry smile of
his lips, “if I were, I would go out into the world and not rest till I
brought him back to you.”
She slid to her feet. “With a barber’s basin for a helmet, and the rest
of the equipment. If you did such an idiot thing, I should hate you.
Don’t you understand that he has gone out of my life altogether?”
“Life is a long, long time to look forward to, for a woman so young as
yourself.”
“You mean, I might fall in love with somebody else, and there would be
horrid complications?” She laughed in the cocksureness of youth. “Oh,
no, my dear Blaise. Once bitten, twice shy. Three times, four times, all
the multiplication table times shy.”
Though impelled by primitive instinct, he could not press her further.
He found himself in a position of poignant absurdity, compensated by the
sweetness of their daily companionship. Sometimes he wondered how it
could be that an awakened woman like Olivia could remain in calm
ignorance of his love. Yet she gave never a sign of knowledge. She
accepted friendship with full hands and gave it with full heart. Beyond
that—nothing. From his sensitive point of view, it was all for the
best. If, like a lean spider, he sat down beside her and talked of love,
he would indubitably frighten Miss Muffet away from Medlow. Further, she
would hold him in detestation for intentions which, in the queer
circumstances, had no chance of being what the world calls honourable.
He therefore put up with what he could get. The proclamation of her
eternal man-shyness sounded like her final word on her future existence.
So he came back to Rowington.
“I’m glad that’s all settled,” said he. “Now you can take up the threads
of life again.”
“What do you think I can make of them?” she asked.
“I can’t sit here idle all my life—not here, at ‘The Towers,’” she
laughed, “for I’m not going to inflict myself on you for a lifetime—but
here, in the world.”
He had no practical suggestion to make; but he spoke from the sincerity
of his tradition.
“A woman like you fulfils her destiny by being her best self.”
“But being good is scarcely an occupation.”
He smiled. “I give it up, my dear. If you like, I can teach you
geology——”
She laughed. Geology had to do with dead things. She cared not a hang
for the past. She wanted to forget it. The epoch of the dynosaurus and
the period of the past year were, save for a few hundreds of centuries,
contemporaneous. No past, thank you. The present and the future for her.
The present was mere lotus-eating; delightful, but demoralising. It was
the future that mattered.
“If only you were an astrologer, and could bind me apprentice,” she
said. “No,” she added after a pause. “There’s nothing for it. I must do
something. I think I’ll go in for Infant Welfare and breed bull-dogs.”
She watched him as he laboriously stuffed his pipe with his one hand by
means of a little winch fixed to the refectory table and lit it by a
match struck on a heavy mat stand; refraining from helping him, although
all the woman in her longed to do so, for she knew his foibles. The very
first time he had entered the house, he had refused her offer of help
with his Burberry. He needed a woman to look after him; not a sister;
not a landlady-lodger friend; a wife, in fact, whose arm and hand he
would accept unquestionably, in lieu of his own. A great pity sprung in
her heart. Why had no woman claimed him—a man stainless in honour,
exquisite in thought, loyal of heart, and—not the least qualification
for the perfect gentle knight in a woman’s eyes—soldier-like in
bearing? There was something missing. That was all the answer she could
give herself. Something intangible. Something magnetic, possessed by the
liar and scamp who had been her husband. She could live with Blaise
Olifant for a hundred years in perfect amity, in perfect sympathy . . .
but with never a thrill.
She knew well enough the basis of sentiment underlying his friendship.
If she were free to marry, he would declare himself in his restrained
and dignified way. But with the barrier of the living Alexis between
them, she laughed at the possibility of such a declaration. And yet, her
inward laughter was tinged with bitterness. What kind of a man was it,
who, loving a woman, did not catch her round the waist and swing her on
his horse and ride away with her? Of course, she herself would have
something to say in the matter. She would fight tooth and nail. She
would fling the ravisher to Kingdom Come. But still her sex would have
the gratification of being madly desired.
In some such confused way, she thought; the horror of Mavenna, and the
romantic mastery of Alexis arising in comparison and contrast. To say
nothing of Bobby Quinton. . . .
“I wonder how you can put up with me,” she said when he had set his pipe
comfortably going.
“Put up with you? What do you mean?”
“You and I are so different.”
He had some glimmer of the things working behind her dark eyes.
“Do you still want adventures? Medlow is too dull for you?”
She felt guilty, and cried impulsively: “Oh, no, no. This is peace. This
is Heaven. This is all I want.”
And for a time she persuaded herself that it was so.
Then there came a day when the lilac and the laburnum were out in the
garden behind the house, and the row of beeches screening it from the
east wind were all a riot of tender green, and Olivia was sitting with a
book in the noon sunshine; and the book lay unread on her lap, for her
thoughts went back to a magical day of greenery in Richmond Park; an
imperishable memory. Her eyes filled with tears. For a few moments, she
had recaptured the lost Alexis in that remembered hour of blue mist and
mystery. And now, he was in Poland. Doing what?
The French window of Olifant’s study opened, and he came down the
gravelled path towards her, a letter in his hand. His face was serious.
She rose to meet him.
“I don’t know whether I ought to show you this—but, perhaps later you
might blame me if I didn’t.”
She uttered a little cry which stuck in her throat.
“Alexis?”
“Yes.”
The eagerness with which she grasped the letter brought a touch of pain
into his eyes. Surely she loved the man still.
“I’m afraid it gives less than news of him,” said he.
But, already reading the letter, she gave no heed to his words.
The letter was from Warsaw, and it ran:
“Sir, “I was commissioned by my friend, Mr. John Briggs, to
communicate with you should anything befall him. Now something
must have befallen him, because he has failed to keep with me
very definite engagements into which he had entered with the
utmost good faith and enthusiasm. He was to start on his journey
hither, to join the Polish service, on a certain day. He was
furnished with railway tickets and passports; also, on the night
before his departure, with a letter to friends in Prague where
he was to await my coming, and with a letter to friends in
Warsaw, in case political exigencies should delay my arrival in
Prague. The Prague letter has not been delivered, nor has Mr.
Briggs appeared in Warsaw. Nor have I received from him any
explanatory communication. That he should have changed his mind
at the last moment is incredible, as his more than zealous
intentions cannot be questioned.
This letter, therefore, has a double object; first to acquaint
you with these facts: and secondly to beg you of your courtesy
to give me any information you may possess as to the fate of one
whom I learned to hold in affectionate esteem.
Yours faithfully,
“Paul Boronowski.”
Olivia grew very pale. Her hand shook as she gave the letter back to
Olifant.
“Something must have happened to him,” he said.
“What has always happened to him,” she replied bitterly. “He says one
thing and does another. One more senseless extravagant lie.”
“He was obviously going to Poland,” said Olifant.
“But he never started!”
Olifant persisted: “How do you know?”
“What can one ever know about him except that truth has no meaning for
him? If you suggest that he has perished by the way on a railway journey
between here and Prague—” she laughed scornfully. “Really, my dear
Blaise, you’re too good for this world. If you caught a man with his
hand in your waistcoat pocket, and he told you he only wanted to see the
time by your watch, you’d believe him! Haven’t I been through this
before? All this elaborate preparation for missions abroad which never
came off? Didn’t he leave you here to go off to Helsingfors, and John o’
Groats was the nearest to it he got?”
“Then where do you think he is now?”
“Anywhere, except in Poland. It was the last place he had any intention
of going to.”
“He might have written you a false account of his movements,” Olifant
argued, “but why should he have deceived this good Polish gentleman?”
“It’s his way,” she replied wearily. “Oh, don’t you see? He’s always
acting to himself. He can’t help leading a fictitious life. I can guess
the whole thing. He goes to this Mr. Boronowski—one of his stray
Russo-Polish acquaintances—with the idea in his head of putting me off
his scent. Poland still is romantic and a terribly long way off. He
can’t do a thing simply. He must do it fantastically. It’s not enough
that I should think he was going to Poland. Mr. Boronowski must think
so, too. He throws his arms about, persuading himself and everybody else
that he is a Paladin going to fight for the sacred cause of an oppressed
nationality. When the thing’s done, and the letter to me written, the
curtain comes down on the comedy, and Alexis takes off his war paint and
starts off for Pernambuco—or Haverstock Hill.”
“I think you’re unjust, Olivia,” said Olifant.
“And I think you’re too good to be true,” she retorted angrily, and she
left him and went down the garden path into the house.
In her room, her mother’s room, with the old rose curtains and
Chippendale and water colours, she rang the bell. Myra appeared.
“You know so much already, Myra,” she said in her defiant way, “that I
think you ought to know everything. I’ve just heard that Mr. Triona
never went to Poland.”
“Indeed?” said Myra impassively. “Do you know where he is?”
“No. And I don’t want to.”
“I can’t quite understand,” said Myra.
“I wish you would take some interest in the matter.”
“My interest is your interest. If you never want to see him again, what
does it matter where he is? Perhaps you’re afraid he’ll come back to
you?”
At the elder woman’s suggestion, the fear gripped her with dreadful
suddenness. There had not yet been time for thought of such a
possibility. If he had lied about fighting for Polish freedom, what
truth was there in his perfervid declaration of the severance of his
life from hers? She had been right in her analysis of his character. The
curtain down on whatever comedy he might be now enacting, he would
present himself unexpectedly before her with specious explanations of
the past, and another glittering scenario of illusion. And with his
reappearance would come exposure. She had pledged her word to Rowington.
She seized Myra by the wrist. “Do you think he will?”
“You are afraid,” said Myra.
“Yes. Dreadfully afraid.”
“I don’t think you need be,” said Myra.
Olivia flung away. “You take his part, just like Major Olifant. Neither
of you seem to understand.” She turned. “Don’t you see the horror of
it?”
“I’ve seen lots of horrors in my time,” replied Myra placidly. “But I
shan’t see this one. He’s gone for good, dearie. You may be sure of
that.”
“I wish I could think so,” said Olivia.
It was nearly lunch time. Myra went out and returned with a can of hot
water.
“You’ll not see him so long as I’m about to look after you,” she
remarked.
And Olivia laughed at the dragon of her childhood.
Some mornings afterwards, Myra came to her mistress.
“If it’s convenient to you, I should like a few days’ leave. I’ve had a
letter.”
“Nothing serious, I hope?” asked Olivia, whose thoughts flew to the
madman in the County Asylum.
“I don’t know,” said Myra. “Can I go?”
“Of course,” said Olivia.
So Myra packed her worn valise and left Medlow by the first available
train. But the Asylum was not her destination. The next day saw her
seeking admittance to University College Hospital, London.