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The Love-Story of
Aliette Brunton
By Gilbert Frankau
* * * * *
[Illustration]
* * * * *
F. D. GOODCHILD
TORONTO
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Printed in U. S. A.
TO MY WIFE AND LOYAL ASSOCIATE
AIMÉE DE BURGH FRANKAU
IN ALL LOVE AND A GREAT REVERENCE
THIS STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE
But woman's gamble (there's only one;
And it takes some pluck to play,
When the rules are broke ere the game's begun;
When, lose _or_ win, you must pay!)
Is a double wager on human kind,
A limitless risk--and she goes it blind.
For she stakes, at love, on a single throw,
Pride, Honor, Scruples, and Fears,
And dreams no lover can hope to know,
And the gold of the after-years.
(And all for a man; and there's no man lives
Who is worth the odds that a woman gives.)
--From "The Judgment of Valhalla."
THE LOVE-STORY OF
ALIETTE BRUNTON
The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
PREAMBLE
1
In our heart of hearts--which we in England take almost as much pains to
hide from ourselves as from our fellow-creatures--most of us realize
that life without love is a weariness, a conflict bereft of hope, a
struggle for no victory. Yet Love, the Real Thing--whether it be love of
a god or love of our fellow-creatures, the love of a man for his mate,
of a mother for her son, of a friend for his friend or a girl for her
chosen--is not the law of the majority. Because Love, the Real Thing--as
all real things--demands infinite self-sacrifice: and infinite
self-sacrifice is too divine a code for the average imperfect human
being, who must needs make himself other codes or perish.
This, therefore, Aliette's love-story, deals of necessity with the
self-sacrifices endured not only by Aliette but by many of those who
came within the orbit of her personality.
Rightly to understand the people of this tale and the motives which
swayed them, it is vital that you should comprehend, at the very outset,
how essentially English they all were; how essentially old-fashioned, in
the best sense of that much misused word; and how difficult it was, even
for Aliette, to learn that Love, the Real Thing, had come into their
lives, making blind havoc of every unwritten rule and every written law
to which they owed allegiance.
For all these people, Bruntons, Fullerfords, Wilberforces, and
Cavendishes, were ordinary orderly English folk; trained in that school
of thought which prizes sheer character above mere intellect, which
teaches self-restraint and self-respect and self-reliance, and
believes--as an ultimate issue--in "playing the game."
It is no bad code, this old-fashioned English code of "playing the
game." Humanity owes it much, will owe it even more. But, like all forms
of discipline, it is apt to weigh heavily on individuals; and heaviest
on those who, believing in the code, must needs make choice between
playing the game according to the rules of love or playing the game
according to the rules of average imperfect human beings.
That Aliette Brunton and Ronald Cavendish played their game according to
the dictates of love and their own consciences, remains the sole
excuse--if excuse be needed--for the happiness to which, at long last,
they both won.
2
Of the various English families here concerned, the Fullerfords of Clyst
Fullerford are at once the oldest and the least distinguished--according
to modern standards of "distinction." Yeomen by original birth, yeomen
at heart they have remained; content, in an age of ostentation, to serve
their country quietly, and retire--at the end of service--into the lush
obscurity of the Devon countryside, there maintaining modest state and
modest revenues until such time as a Church of England God is pleased to
summon them elsewhere.
Aliette's father, Andrew, born in the very early sixties, followed the
Fullerford tradition of service, and became puisne judge of an obscure
colonial law-court before retiring. His marriage, at the age of
twenty-four, to Marie Sheldon, caused--owing to Marie's abandonment of
the rigid Sheldon Catholicism for the scarcely less rigid Protestantism
of the Fullerfords--no small sensation.
This marriage, founded on a self-sacrifice of which only Aliette's
mother knew the full burden, yielded two sons, both of whom give their
lives for their country early in 1915, and three daughters: Eva, eldest
of the family, who married Captain Harold Martin of the Devonshire
Regiment in 1910, and became "colonel's lady"--a position she filled
most admirably; Aliette; and Mollie, youngest of the five.
It was not until her second daughter's birth in 1892 that the Sheldons
fully pardoned Marie Fullerford's infidelity to their religion--Aliette,
named after a remote French ancestress, becoming as it were the symbol
of family reunion, and inheriting, on the death of Grandmama Sheldon, a
little block of consolidated stock in further token of forgiveness.
Shortly after which inheritance, in December, 1912, she married--for
reasons which will be apparent in our story--Hector Brunton, barrister
of the Middle Temple, and no small gun in the legal world; while Mollie,
then a long-legged flapper of tomboy proclivities, reluctantly returned
from Wycombe Abbey School to "assist mother in looking after things."
Mollie "looked after things" until the boys were killed. Then she joined
the nursing service. To that service her body still bears witness in the
shape of three white scars--souvenirs of a bombed hospital.
3
Although, socially speaking, there is little if any difference between
the Fullerfords and the Bruntons, the latter family shine considerably
the more effulgent in the public eye. One finds them in newspaper
paragraphs; one sees them at court, at the opera, at the Ritz. In fact,
wheresoever the ostentatious world of the nineteen-twenties foregathers,
the Bruntons forgather with it; not because they themselves are
ostentatious, but because, being of their period, they must needs follow
the tide--as Rear-Admiral Billy, in that bluff manner which fifteen
years' absence from the sea-service has scarcely impaired, is the first
to admit.
"Damn vulgar commercial age, but we can't put the clock back, worse
luck," says Rear-Admiral Billy Brunton to his brother, Sir Simeon
Brunton, K.C.V.O., recently retired with ambassadorial rank from the
diplomatic service. To which Sir Simeon, after three glasses of port,
has been known to retort with a suave: "It hasn't done us so badly."
And this is a fact! For the Bruntons, originally sea-folk, and as poor
as most of the senior service, have developed an uncanny instinct for
marrying money.
Rear-Admiral Billy, head of the clan and now rising seventy-five,
yielded to the instinct before the age of thirty; bringing home as
bride, from his first cruise to Australia, a distinguished daughter of
the Melbourne squatocracy, by whom he had two sons, Hector and Adrian;
and from whom, on her death in 1906, he received sufficient money to
make his declining years perfectly comfortable--though in a very modest
fashion when compared with his younger brother Simeon, whose first wife
was a Sturgis, of Sturgis, Campion & Sturgis, the high-speed steel
manufacturers, and whose second, an Anglo-Indian, still very much alive
at the time our story opens, inherited a largish slice of shares in her
father's main enterprise, "The Raneegunge Jute and Cotton Mills, Ltd."
"Still"--once again employing the language of Rear-Admiral
Billy--"Simeon's feeding a pretty long string of unmated fillies in his
stables; and I've only got a brace of colts who seem tolerably capable
of foraging for themselves in mine."
The "colts," Hector, born in '77, and Adrian two years later, certainly
foraged for themselves with considerable assiduity. Adrian entered the
church; and developed the Brunton instinct to such purpose that he
endowed himself with a bishop's daughter and a Mayfair congregation at
the early age of thirty-five--though it must be put to his credit that
he abandoned his Hill Street surplice for a chaplain's khaki tunic in
the Holy Land, and did not return to his bishop's daughter until early
in 1919, by which time she had manœuvered for him the comfortable
vicarage at High Moor, a prosperous Oxfordshire living, whose exact
center is Admiral Billy's Moor Park.
Meanwhile Aliette's husband--having persuaded himself that he was
indispensable to his country--became a king's counselor, dividing his
days between the common law courts, where emoluments were fat if
advertisement lean, and the criminal courts, wherein, as prosecuting
counsel for the crown, he on occasions glittered exceedingly.
A large and a successful family--they look--these Bruntons, when you
make their massed acquaintance in three pages of "Who's Who." But Julia
Cavendish, _née_Wixton, used to have a page to herself!
4
You will find mention of the "four sisters Wixton," of their "charming"
mother and their "distinguished" father in most mid-Victorian memoirs.
Tennyson wrote a poem to the baby Clementina. Robert Browning is rumored
to have stopped May's perambulator on more than one occasion in
Kensington Gardens. Alice had an affair, very nebulous and of her
period, with one of the less celebrated Preraphaelite painters.
But on the demise of Josiah Wixton (his wife and book-publishing
business survived him a bare three years), all but one of his daughters
disappear from artistic history. May married a tea-broker named
Robinson, and was left a childless but affluent widow in 1908. Alice
vanished with John Edwards of the Indian civil service into the
Punjab--finally returning with a livery husband and one daughter, Lucy,
to settle down among the retired Anglo-Indians of Cheltenham. Clementina
allied herself--no less pompous phrase is adequate--with Sir John
Bentham of the Bank of England.
Remained, therefore, to carry on the literary tradition, only the eldest
of the Wixtons, who married Maurice Cavendish, the Oxford don, presented
him with a son, Ronald, and became "Julia Cavendish, the novelist."
It is a curious commentary on the ingratitude of our educated classes
that the Rutland Cavendishes, who are at least as distinguished
scholastically as the Bruntons in the social world, have to rely for
their public fame almost entirely on Julia.
"Because in Julia Cavendish," as wrote her one-time friend, "Dot"
Fancourt, "we have a really great Victorian. She stands for everything
that is best of that bygone school: for a technique, now, alas!
despised. Her novels are not perfect; they lack, perhaps, that warm
touch of humanity which one finds in Charles Dickens, in William
Makepeace Thackeray. But at least they are the novels of a true educated
Englishwoman, reflections of a fine, faithful spirit. Even apart from
her skill as a story-teller, Julia Cavendish, with her great belief in
the traditional decencies, with her reverence for the teachings of the
Protestant Church, for discipline and the subjugation of self to the
common weal, towers like a rock above the wish-wash flood of cheap sex
and cheaper psychoanalysis which obsess most young writers of this
self-conscious Georgian epoch."
And with that, to our story!
CHAPTER I
1
Miracle, by St. Peter out of Three-to-a-Flush, a thoroughbred chestnut
not quite good enough for steeple-chasing but considerably too good for
that very quiet hunt, the Mid-Oxfordshire, was just out of his box, and
pretty fresh. Looking over the flint wall which separated the well-kept
gardens from the newly-swilled tiling of the stable-courtyard at Moor
Park, the horse's questing eyes could just see, between clipped
yew-trees, the red-brick façade of the modest Georgian house, its
windows glinting in the March sunlight. Miracle knew that a footpath led
straight across the gardens from the front door of the house to the
white gate in the wall of his stable-courtyard; and suddenly, hearing a
footfall on the path, he whinnied.
"All right, you," soothed Miracle's groom, a little lame man with
tattooed forearms and a wry smile. The white gate clicked open,
revealing Aliette.
Hector Brunton's wife had never accustomed herself to riding astride.
Her small figure, in its short black habit and loose-fitting coat,
looked modern enough. She wore the conventional bowler hat, white stock,
and patent-leather riding-boots. Yet there was something old-fashioned
about her, despite the fashionable get-up; something, to use an
old-fashioned word, distinguished.
She closed the gate, and came slowly across the courtyard. Her
yellow-gloved hands carried a thonged hunting-crop and a leather
sandwich-case.
"You might fasten this on for me, Jenkins," said Aliette. The voice, low
yet with each tone perfectly clear, held a hint of diffident shyness,
alluring in so poised a creature.
While Jenkins busied himself with the sandwich-case and girthed up,
Aliette held Miracle's head, gentling his nose with deft fingers, and
explaining--half to herself and half to the horse--why she had brought
no sugar for him.
"No sugar for gee-gees these days, Miracle. Not at the admiral's.
Billy's mean about his sugar. Pity you don't drink port, Miracle dear.
There's plenty of port."
She laughed at that; and it was as though you saw a woman transformed.
Her face, smooth in repose, almost colorless save for the scarlet lips
and the big wallflower-brown eyes under the dark lashes, broke into a
hundred dimples. There were dimples at the corners of her mouth, in the
cream of her oval cheeks, on the crinkled upper-lip under the small fine
nose; even--if you looked carefully enough--behind the close-set ears.
Miracle began fidgeting; and laughter went out of the face, leaving it
smooth, purposeful.
"Those girths are too tight, Jenkins."
"I don't think so, mum."
"Loosen them one hole, please. They can be tightened at the meet." Now
Aliette spoke with the quiet certainty of one who understands both
serving-men and horses; and with that same certainty--her orders
obeyed--bent down to insert a finger between clipped skin and taut
webbing. As the head under the hat-rim stooped to its task, her coiled
hair showed vividest brown, almost the color of flames in sunlight,
against the cream of her neck.
Miracle stood quietly enough while his mistress gathered up the reins;
put her unspurred left into Jenkins's hand; mounted; arranged her apron;
and thrust foot home into the stirrup. Then, for the sheer love of
hunting that was in him, he tossed at the snaffle, hogged his back, and
whisked round toward the big arched gateway which gave on to the
highroad.
"Steady, old chap," soothed Aliette. She looked too light a rider for
that raking horse; but her little hands settled him down easily enough.
"I'm in plenty of time, aren't I, Jenkins?"
"Yes, mum." The groom pulled a silver watch from his moleskin waistcoat.
"It hasn't gone nine yet, mum."
As she rode quietly on to the highroad Aliette saw, either side of her
under the archway, Rear-Admiral Billy's stables--empty save for the
admiral's black cob, a luggage pony, and a huge charger-like animal
which, on rare occasions, carried her husband. Horses are even more
expensive to keep than children nowadays!
2
The little woman and the big thoroughbred danced left-handed down the
highroad; passed Admiral Billy's unpretentious lodge, half-hidden by
yew-hedges, clipped with nautical precision to turrets of dark-green
velvet; skirted Moor Pond; and took the bridle-path for Upper Moorsby.
It was a great morning of earliest March. The ground under hoof still
sparkled here and there with surface frost; but there was no "bone" in
it. Warmth softened the tang of the air. Above the bare tops of the
trees between which they trotted, Aliette saw a thin cloudless sky. In
the clearings, crisscrossed with uncarted larch-poles, primroses
sparkled softly. Almost it seemed as though a purple bloom already
showed on the young birches.
She pulled to a walk, thinking as she rode. Her thoughts came slowly,
precisely: Aliette was not the type of woman who liked rushing her
fences, either mentally or on horseback.
"Spring," she mused; "another spring! And hunting nearly over. Then
there'll be nothing but tennis till next winter. Except 'the season.'
How I dislike 'the season'! It wouldn't be so bad if one had children.
One could watch them riding in the park."
A little ripple of dissatisfaction submerged her mind. She leaned
forward and patted Miracle's arched neck. The clipped skin quivered in
response.
"What's the use of making one's self unhappy?" thought Aliette. "All
that's done with. Best forget."
She trotted on, rising squarely from the Mayhew saddle, hands like
velvet on Miracle's bridle-reins. The path rose through fragrant
woodlands; met the roadway. Now, at walk between leafless chestnuts,
thought troubled her once more.
This must be the third springtime since her discovery of Hector's
infidelity. She re-lived the scene: he, big and blustering, in the
paneled dining-room at Lancaster Gate: herself quiet, controlled, but
furious to the core. She heard herself saying to him: "You misunderstand
me, Hector. It isn't a question of jealousy. It's a question of loyalty,
and--cleanliness." That last word hurt the man. She had meant it to
hurt.
Three years! It seemed a long time. Since then--despite occasional
entreaty--she had withdrawn herself. She was too fastidious, perhaps.
Suddenly, she wished herself less fastidious. Her childlessness cried
out in her, "Condone!" But she knew she could never condone. The time
for that had gone by. Other infidelities, she knew, had followed the
first. Hector was not the man to restrain his natural impulses. His very
entreaties proved him more libertine than husband.
And Aliette rode on, through Upper Moorsby, red-cottaged behind
tumble-down palings, disused cycle-shop at one end, shut church at the
other; past Moorsby Place, ring-fenced and inhospitable; across the
common toward High Moor.
There was love of the countryside in her heart as she rode, love of
horse and love of hound, love for the quick scurry of hoofs on turf, for
the white scuttle of rabbits to bramble. But there was no love for any
man. That love she had never known. Marriage--as she still imagined
marriage--meant affection: mutual regard, mutual interests, children.
Especially children! If only she could have had children!
Putting thought away from her, Aliette let Miracle have his head, and
cantered on between the gorse and the brambles.
Cantering, her heart sang to her. "Fox-hunting! Fox-hunting!
Fox-hunting!" Padded Miracle's hoofs. She watched their shadow lolloping
the brambles; watched the track ahead. And suddenly, at the bend of the
track, she grew aware of a horse coming fast behind her. Miracle
gathered himself for a gallop. Checking him, she heard a man's voice:
"I say, I'm most awfully sorry; but can you tell me if I'm right for the
kennels?"
Man and beast, a great raw-boned, rat-tailed gray with a huge fiddle
head and enormous withers, which she knew belonged to Ross Titterton,
the horse-breaker at Key Hatch, hove fighting alongside. As though by
mutual consent, they eased to a bumpy walk.
"Yes. This is quite right," said Aliette.
Examining the man, she saw a serious, clean-shaven face, eyes of pale
clear blue, a broad forehead, a lean jowl, full lips, the nose prominent
and almost pure Greek in shape, the chin determined, and the hair a
curious goldy-gray as though bleached by the tropics.
"Thanks so much."
She judged him just over six feet and just under forty. He looked a
horseman in his high black boots, dark cord breeches, pepper-and-salt
cutaway coat, and buckskin gloves.
"I hope I didn't startle your horse. This brute of Ross's pulls like a
steam-engine," he apologized with an almost imperceptible drawl.
"I know." Aliette smiled. "Mr. Titterton tried to sell him to us last
year."
"Oh, I can't afford to keep horses," confessed the man. "This is only a
loan. Ross was sergeant-major of our yeomanry crowd in Palestine. He
offered me a ride once--and I've taken him at his word. You don't mind
my jogging along with you like this, do you?"
"Of course not. We turn off to the right here."
They rode down, chatting with the easy camaraderie of fox-hunting folk,
into sight of a village. It lay just below them, on a spur of the
common--pointed church-spire, gray vicarage crouching at foot, among a
blob of slate-roofed smoke-plumed cottages. Beyond it, the ground
unrolled to a brown and green checker-board of square hedged fields,
lozenged here and there with pale woodlands.
"That's High Moor Church," announced Aliette, pointing her whip at the
spire.
"High Moor!" The man cogitated. "Isn't a fellow named Brunton the
rector?"
"Yes. You speak as if you knew him."
"Only slightly. I see a good deal of his brother. The K.C., you know.
I'm at the bar."
"Oh!" Aliette hesitated a moment. "I'm his wife."
"Whose! The parson's?"
"No. The K.C.'s."
Both laughed, feeling the conventional ice broken.
"My name's Cavendish, Mrs. Brunton. Ronald Cavendish. You probably know
my mother--most people do."
"Julia Cavendish, the novelist. Of course I know of her; but we've never
met. What a wonderful woman she must be!"
"She is." Ronnie's serious face lit. Usually shy with women, he felt
quaintly at ease with this one. She seemed so sure of herself. And how
she rode! That horse must take some steering. He wanted, suddenly, to
see her across country; to send his gray pelting after her chestnut. Of
her peculiar beauty, except as a horsewoman, he was not yet conscious.
But Aliette, even in those first moments of their meeting, knew herself
stirred, ever so subtly, to interest. Julia Cavendish's son! Didn't she
remember something, something rather decent about Julia Cavendish's son?
It flashed into her memory just as they made the lich-gate of High Moor
Church. "Conspicuous gallantry . . . rallied his squadron under fire
. . . great personal risk."
3
The sight of the Rev. Adrian disturbed further musing. He tittuped out
of the rectory drive as they came by--a little clean-shaven creature,
jovially wrinkled, his short legs in their canvas gaiters gripping the
flanks of a cock-throppled bay mare with a bobbed tail and a roving eye.
The Rev. Adrian on Thumbs Up contrived, somehow, to look far more like a
keeper than the proverbial hunting parson.
"Morning, Aliette," he greeted. Then, before she could introduce Ronnie,
"I say, didn't you and I meet at Jaffa?"
"We did." Ronnie laughed. "Delightful spot."
Explanations over, they rode three abreast past the slate-roofed
cottages, the Rev. Adrian acknowledging with perfunctory bridle-hand the
salutes of his parishioners; and veered left along a metaled road
between high telegraph-poles.
"Are you stopping at Titterton's?" asked the parson, eying Ronnie's
gray.
"No. He couldn't manage me a room. I'm putting up at the pub in Key
Hatch just for the week-end."
"Do they do you well at the Bull?"
"Not badly."
They jogged on, Adrian and Ronnie chatting. Aliette rather silent. An
open car, whose occupant waved greeting, purred past. Miracle shied,
bumping the gray.
"Dash that fellow Moss! Why can't he ride to the meet like a Christian?"
muttered the parson.
Ahead of them, on the straight white of the road, they could see various
other horsemen and horsewomen, a slow-moving dogcart, and two or three
figures a-wheel. They overhauled and passed a flaxen-haired young
farmer, very red of face and waistcoat, on an unclipped four-year-old;
they added to their cavalcade a surly-eyed woman with weatherbeaten
features who straddled a ewe-necked black, and answered to the
inappropriate name of "Lady Helen." They came upon the dogcart, and
Aliette reined alongside for a chat. The parson and Lady Helen jogged
on.
"Mr. Cavendish--Mrs. O'Riordan," introduced Aliette.
The lady in the dogcart appeared to fill it, dwarfing the man at her
side. She was a vast, voluptuous blond, full-nosed and full-lipped,
slightly too well tweeded for the country. Her blue eyes, as they
surveyed Aliette and Ronnie, held that peculiar twinkle common to all
over-sexed women; they seemed to be pondering the problem, "Has Aliette
at last found a lover?"
Mrs. O'Riordan herself, after a hectic but--with one
exception--camouflaged career, had recently settled down to her second
(and, she believed, final) adventure in matrimony. The "exception," a
semi-literary, semi-theatrical Irish land-owner who drove the dogcart,
had caused her considerable trouble to capture; trouble which involved
an elopement, a year of uncertainty, a brace of arranged divorces,
various columns of undesirable publicity in the Sunday papers, and the
loss of several influential acquaintances. During these troubles
Aliette, an old school-friend, had championed Mary O'Riordan's cause;
and earned, by so doing, if not gratitude at least a very tolerable
counterfeit thereof.
Ronnie's horse, bucking violently at a passing cyclist, interrupted
conversation. The riders trotted on.
"Nice man," commented Mary O'Riordan.
"Good-looking woman, Aliette," remarked her husband.
Mary O'Riordan eyed her new male possession jealously. He was very
attractive to the sex, this dark-haired, lantern-jowled Irishman she had
captured from his first wife. It displeased her to hear him admire other
women--especially women like Aliette, whose poised slimness set her own
hoydenish bulk at such disadvantage.
4
It is a fifty-year-old custom of the Mid-Oxfordshire Hunt--the pack,
started by old Squire Petersfield of Great Petersfield just before
Waterloo, has changed hands many times but never failed its subscribers
of their two days a week, with one "bye" monthly--that the first meet in
March should be at the Kennels, an unpretentious building of sandstone
and concrete which shelters under the black slope of Petersfield Woods.
Already, half a mile away, Ronnie could see two blobs of pink, and
hounds--a runnel of moving white--pouring out of the gate their
kennelman held open. Hounds and pink disappeared from view as Aliette
led off the road up a sandy track between high blackthorns, and kicked
Miracle into a canter.
Following, Ronnie's pulses tingled. He hunted so rarely; but always,
hunting, this zest got into his blood. Only to-day, somehow, the zest
seemed heightened. It was as though the cantering figure ahead typified
the game. He felt drawn to her, drawn after her round the bends of the
track, drawn instinctively, drawn irresistibly.
All the last four miles of highroad they had been meeting people. Now,
just for a moment, they seemed utterly alone. And he knew, abruptly,
that he wanted to be alone with this woman; that he desired her
companionship.
They came to a locked gate. He dismounted, put his back against it, and
lifted it off the hinges for her. She smiled down at him, "Thank you,
Mr. Cavendish." He noticed, for the first time, how laughter dimpled the
cream of her cheeks. They could hear other people coming up the track.
The gray waltzed to Ronnie's remounting. Aliette watched him swing to
saddle, appraising--as she imagined--only his horsemanship. But now, in
her too, zest stirred, a strange new zest not entirely attributable to
the chase.
Three other riders trotted through the gateway, dispelling illusion.
"This way," said the wife of Hector Brunton, K.C.
They ambled, side by side, diagonally across rabbit-bitten pasture;
ambled, single-file, through a gap in the hedge-rows; struck an uphill
bridle-path; and arrived, almost last, at the meet.
On the flat strip of grass behind the kennels--the direct road to them
zigzags steeply down through Petersfield Woods--Will Oakley, the
huntsman, his crab-apple face a trifle less saturnine than usual under
its cap-peak, was just getting ready to throw off. Fifteen couple of
fairly level hounds desisted from their rolling and watched him eagerly.
Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., a heavy old-fashioned soldier,
white-mustached, in a heavy old-fashioned hunting-kit (his special
low-crowned bell-toppers were the despair of a certain aristocratic
hatter in St. James's Street) had just finished his inevitable pow-wow
with the kennelman. Ross Titterton (the whippety ex-sergeant-major came
early, bent on a little profitable horse-copery) stood, bridle over arm,
by Sir Siegfried Moss, an immaculate scarlet-coated, black-mustached
young politician who rode, by horse-show standards, magnificently.
The Rev. Adrian, no thruster, was finishing an early cigar to be
followed by an early nip from his silver flask. Lady Helen had engaged
the whipper-in in a reluctant monosyllabic conversation--Jock Herbert
was a shy, moon-faced young man from the North--on the eternal question
of scent. The remainder of the field, about sixty in all, stood in
equine groups of threes and fours a little away from hounds.
Mrs. O'Riordan's dogcart, Sir Siegfried's car and second horseman ("Must
hunt in one's own constituency occasionally, even if it is a provincial
pack," pronounced that very astute young politician), three flappers and
a brace of young men on push-bikes, Mrs. Colonel Sanders and a trio of
hard-bitten daughters afoot, a farm hand or two, and the socialist
doctor of Key Hatch (who was on a walking-tour with his knapsacked wife
and had come quite by accident on this "parasitic sport-crazy gathering
of the capitalist class") completes the picture.
The M.F.H. greeted Mrs. Brunton, whom he secretly thought an adjectival
nice little woman, adjectivally too pretty for that dimmed husband of
hers, and gave orders to throw off.
Low ripple of black, white, and tan between high bobs of black and
scarlet, pack, whip, and huntsman circled the dark of Petersfield Woods
and headed down-hill in the March sunlight. Bay, black, and brown
against green turf, followed the field. Very last, fighting-mad for a
gallop, boring sideways along the slope, came the fiddle-headed gray.
And "Confound the brute!" muttered Ronald Cavendish, seeing, over one
shoulder, a slim black figure on a big chestnut; a slim black figure
which seemed suddenly more important than the business of the chase.
But Aliette, watching hounds ahead, had utterly forgotten that one
strange flash of premonition.
5
"Not much luck so far, Mrs. Brunton."
They had been at it nearly two blank hours; trotting from covert to
tenantless covert; waiting vainly at covert-side for the "welcome
whimper" of hound to scent, for the full music which follows the
whimper, for the twang of the huntsman's horn and the "view-halloo" of
fox's departure.
"We ought to find here," said Aliette.
Ronnie's gray, at last mastered to good manners, stood quietly beside
her chestnut at the west corner of Parson's Copse. To the left of them a
ditch and an elder-hedge screened the wood. All along the ditch and the
elder-hedge other horsemen and horsewomen were waiting. Through the
hedge they caught glimpses of browned bracken, of dun tree-boles, of a
green ride here and a clump of dead bramble there. In front, the
mole-heaved turf crested in shadow to a clouding sky. To the right and
below them Parson's Hill sloped to an open valley country: first a strip
of ill-fenced waste-land, a white road; then hedged grass-fields, young
wheat, brown plows, a gleam of water; beyond, a church-tower, squat
among poplars; further still, rising turf and twin hills dark with
gorse.
Now, from the other side of the wood, they heard Will Oakley's voice:
"Leu in, Ranger! Leu in." A whip cracked. They caught the soft twang of
a horn.
Life stirred in the wood: a wary pigeon rose blue through branches;
bracken rustled as a bunny sprinted to hole; a blackbird popped out of
the hedge, popped in again. They were wise to hounds moving in covert;
saw white sterns waving through brown bracken; heard a whimper, another
whimper, the horn again. Dubiously, a hound gave tongue; then a second
hound. The horses under them twitched excitement. Something red and
furtive whisked across the ride. They heard Oakley's echoing voice:
"Yooi push him up, push him up"; heard a touch of his horn; caught the
flicker of his scarlet among tree-boles.
And suddenly, the pack crashed to deep-toned melody. The copse rang to
it. The horses under them began to dance. The whole copse was a crash of
hound-music, now drawing away, now nearing them.
"Fox all right this time," said Ronald Cavendish; and even as he spoke,
Aliette, watching the rise in front, saw a low shadow streak across the
shadows and disappear.
Then, simultaneously, Jock Herbert bellowed from the south corner of the
wood: "Tally-ho! Gone away, gone away, gone away"; a hound or two in
full cry leaped down out of covert fifty yards ahead; the colonel's
voice roared, "Keep back, gentlemen, keep back," behind them; fourteen
couple of crazy hounds streamed down after one; and Will Oakley's roan
came thundering up the ride, crashed through the hedge, over the ditch,
and up the crest after a pack you could have covered under the
"pocket-handkerchief," without which no reporter considers his account
of a run complete.
The rest was a mad scurry of eight hoofs to skyline, glimpse of a low
fence, flown without thought, of the hounds pouring down-hill, of Will
Oakley, horn still in hand, tally-hoing them on.
* * * * *
"Now where, in the name of all that's holy," mused the Rev. Adrian,
"will that fox make for?" Most of the field were already away: he could
see them galloping alongside the wood, topping the fence at crest-line.
To the Rev. Adrian's eyes it looked as though they were leaping into
eternity.
Himself and a few wise ones, Ross Titterton included, had waited; and so
waiting, they saw that the fox must have circled for the valley.
Hounds, going far faster than the parson approved, crossed the white
road below him. He put his cock-throppled nag to a cautious canter, and
bumped downwards across the wasteland. Ross Titterton passed him at a
furious gallop; Lady Helen gave him a lead through a gap in the
dilapidated fencing. He could see hounds beyond the road: the master and
Will Oakley were well up; close behind him rode his brother's wife, Jock
Herbert, and that "young Cavendish" whom he remembered at Jaffa.
* * * * *
So far, Aliette and Ronnie had scarcely spoken. The dog-fox had gone
away too suddenly, the ground beyond that first flown fence had been too
full of rabbit-holes, for anything except concentration on the immediate
job. But even in that first moment they had been aware of comradeship.
Their thoughts, if either could have uttered them, would have been: "I'm
glad we were together--just in that place, just at that moment."
Now, as they swept side by side across the twenty-acre grass--gray
pulling like mad; chestnut scarcely extended; wind of their going in
their faces; field behind and hounds in full cry ahead--the man spoke:
"We got away well."
"Rather." Aliette, drawing in front, smiled at him over her left
shoulder. He let the gray have his head. Hounds topped their hedge,
flashed on. They saw Will Oakley's roan fly over; saw the master's
scarlet back and bell-topper lift disappear; and cleared the
stake-and-bound side by side.
More grass. They grew aware of other riders behind them: Sir Siegfried,
very pleased with himself; Ross Titterton, riding jealous to be up; Lady
Helen.
The next fence was blackthorn, thick as night, not a gap in it. The
hounds, spreading out, scrambled through. Will Oakley's horse balanced
himself like a good hunter; jumped; and took it clean. Jock Herbert
followed him over. The colonel, hat crammed to pate, galloped at it;
blundered through somehow.
Sir Siegfried, on his bay, shot past Ronnie. Aliette, easing Miracle for
his leap, saw the self-satisfied smile wiped from the politician's face
as he took off; felt Miracle rise under her; landed safe on plow; turned
her head to glimpse a big gray horse in mid-air; and, turning, heard the
thud of a fall as Sir Siegfried's four-hundred-guinea bay pecked, slid,
and rolled over sideways, wrenched to disaster by clumsy hands.
"Good toss, that," laughed Ronald Cavendish as they cantered slow over
the heavy plow. "Who is he?"
"The member for Mid-Oxfordshire." Aliette, too, laughed: it had been a
great little burst from covert, and the heart in her--the heart that
loved hounds and horses--still beat to it.
"Good fox," said Ronnie.
"Isn't he!" said Aliette.
He was! By now four good fields separated its brushed quarry from the
loud pack that labored--sterns and heads level--across sliced loam.
"Devil take the stuff!" muttered Colonel Sanders, watching hounds draw
away from him. And "Thank God for a gate!" muttered Colonel Sanders as
he made for it.
Huntsman and whip, too, were making for that gate. Aliette and Ronnie
followed their lead, the gray plunging across the holding furrows like a
ship in a storm. Looking back, they saw the pink politician struggling
with his horse, half a dozen black-coats safely landed, Lady Helen
barging in their wake.
A bumpkin in corduroys at the open gate shouted the master to "mind they
wheatfields." The colonel damned his impertinence, and rode on after
Will Oakley. Aliette and Ronnie shot single file down the trodden path
between pricking corn, and flew the stile at end of it.
The pack, overrunning scent, had thrown up half-way across the next
wheatfield. Casting themselves to pick up the line, hounds--noses to
ground, sterns high--hunted on their own. Huntsman, whip and master,
motionless on their horses, glad of the breather, sat watching. Suddenly
Ranger feathered with eager stem, whimpered, and gave tongue. They were
off again--Ranger in front, Audacious at Ranger's flank, a quiet smile
on Will Oakley's face as he cantered after them.
"Pretty work," said Ronald Cavendish. He and Aliette still led the
field; but the moment's check had given Ross Titterton and half a dozen
others their chance. They came now, full split after gray and chestnut,
across the young wheat. Among them, though the wheat was his own,
galloped the red-faced, red-waistcoated farmer--and the Rev. Adrian,
whose eye for country had compensated for his dislike of jumping.
Something inside Aliette, some curious instinct, vague and
incomprehensible, seemed to resent those crowding horsemen. She was
aware, dimly, that she would rather be alone, alone with the man who
rode at her side. She wanted hounds to mend their pace, to run mute on a
breast-high scent, clean away from the field. She wanted to feel Miracle
extended under her, to hear the gray thudding after.
But now the hounds hunted slowly, puzzling out their line across a
sheep-fouled pasture. As Miracle sailed a low fence, Aliette saw Key
Hatch Church, squatting among poplars a mile to their right; a plowman,
hat off by halted team, pointing the line; some foot-followers in a lane
on the left; and in front, six fields away, the sudden gleam of water.
Then the pace mended. The pack raced in full cry to Parson's Brook;
plunged in, plunged through; and checked dead on the far side. Will
Oakley, putting spurs to his horse, got over. Jock Herbert just managed
it. Pulling up this side the brook, Aliette and the rest of the first
flighters watched the huntsman as he cast hounds forward.
"There's a ford half a mile down," spluttered the Rev. Adrian; and made
for it, followed by Lady Helen, Sir Siegfried, his hat dented, his pink
plow-plastered, who had at last managed to catch up, the red-waistcoated
farmer, and half a dozen others.
Ronnie glanced at Aliette. He had no idea if his horse would face water
or not. The brook, broadish under rotting banks, looked formidable; and
it was almost like taking it in cold blood--this waiting for hounds to
pick up the scent again. All the same, he knew that if Miracle went over
he would get the gray across if he had to swim for it.
"Better make for the ford, Mrs. Brunton," called the colonel. He and
Ross Titterton galloped off.
They were alone again: two ordinary orderly English people, a little
dumb in each other's presence, both moved by very extraordinary
thoughts, thoughts to which they were quite incapable of giving exact
expression.
Aliette's red lips had pursed to stubborn determination. "I hate funking
things," thought Aliette. To her, subconsciously, it was as though the
water typified something more than a mere obstacle encountered in the
day's hunting. She knew Miracle could jump it. Neither she nor Miracle
would "funk things." Then why the thought? "Because," some voice in her
gave clear answer, "_he_ might."
"It isn't as bad as it looks," said the voice of the man at her side.
"I'll give you a lead over."
And at that the voice in her began laughing. She felt unaccountably
comforted. "Why should I mind?" she thought.
Beyond the brook, at the big bullfinch on the far side of the meadow, a
hound feathered. "Yoi-doit, then. Yoi-doit," came Will Oakley's voice.
The hound gave tongue, owning to the line; Aliette saw Ronnie take his
gray short by the head, ram his spurs home, and ride straight at the
water.
Miracle raced after the gray, catching up with every stride. Side by
side, they galloped the fifty yards to the brook, rose at it, glimpsed
it deep under them, flew it, landed.
Landing, she knew him safely over. Racing on, she heard the thud of his
horse-hoofs behind. Her heart thrilled to the horse-hoofs; it seemed,
suddenly, as though some string had snapped in her heart. The pack in
front was utterly mad: she heard a burst of hound-music from beyond the
bullfinch, knew that they were running a breast-high scent, running
clean away from her. She gave Miracle his head, shielded her eyes with
her crop-arm, crashed through the hedge, heard the gray crash through
behind her.
Now she saw the hounds again, a close ripple of black, white, and tan,
eight hundred yards away across post-and-railed common land. Miracle
went after them, drawing up stride by stride, steeplechasing his fences.
But the man on the gray would not be denied. A rail smashed behind her.
He was following, following. He mustn't catch up with her--must never
catch up with her.
The ground rose. Not very far ahead she saw a dark-red dot making for
the gorse-clad hills. She heard Will Oakley's "Halloo! Halloo!" as he
capped hounds on. They ran nearly mute now, sterns straight, hackles up.
The fox vanished from view as they raced up-hill; reappeared again.
But Aliette was no longer aware of the chase. She could barely realize
that hounds were running into their fox, that the two pink coats twenty
yards ahead of her were whip and huntsman. All her conscious mind was at
her left shoulder, listening, listening to the horse-hoofs behind. Could
it be that she herself was the quarry of those thudding hoofs, quarry of
the man who drove those thudding hoof-beats onward? He mustn't catch up
with her! He must never catch up with her! And yet could it be that some
instinct in her, some instinct earth-old and primeval, wanted to be
caught?
That same instinct had been at work in the man on the fiddle-headed
horse, the man who rode with his hands low and his teeth clenched,
sitting down to his job as though he would go through Oxfordshire and
out the other side in pursuit of Aliette. He had been aware of it,
dimly, as they waited by the brook; aware of it, furiously, as he
jumped. But now, instinct was blurred by the actual chase. He had come
out for a "good gallop"; he was having his gallop. His feet were jammed
home to the hunting-heel, his hat rammed to his head. His eye took in
and loved the whole scene: the sky clouding blue-gray above them, the
shadows skimming green turf below, the speeding pink of the hunt-coats
behind the speeding black, white, and tan of the pack, the flame of
gorse on the crest-line ahead.
Yet always, as he galloped, the man knew an urge stronger than the mere
urge of the chase; knew that there was some dim reason why he had waited
at Parson's Brook on a strange horse instead of going full split for the
ford; why he must ride on--on and on--ride as he had never ridden
before--ride the gray's shoes off, rather than lose touch with that
black-habited figure in front. God! How well she went! How magnificently
she went!
Will Oakley was not worrying about either of them. For once in their
lives the Mid-Oxfordshire hounds were going like the Belvoir or the
Cottesmore. Their fox was sinking before them. Will Oakley knew, as his
roan topped the green bank which runs like an earthwork round the foot
of Gorse Hill, that he would view "the varmint" close; viewed him.
No need, now, to lift hounds from scent: they, too, saw that draggled
down-brushed shape, making its last effort; and crashed to fiercest
music. Will Oakley hallooed them on, and Jock Herbert. "Yooi to him,
Ranger," they hallooed, "Yooi to him, Audacious." Reynard swerved
snarling from Ranger's teeth; Audacious snapped, missed; Victory rolled
him over; massed pack were on him, mad for blood, as Will Oakley flung
himself to ground.
Aliette, pulling up by instinct, saw the huntsman's scarlet ringed with
leaping hounds; heard his joyful "Tear him and eat him, tear him and eat
him"; and came back to sanity as the gray galloped up, halted, and stood
with steaming flanks and steaming nostrils while his rider slid from
saddle.
6
"By Jove, Mrs. Brunton, that was perfectly great!"
"Thanks to your lead over Parson's Brook."
They stood by their sweating horses, two perfectly normal people, rather
pleased with their prowess, quite childishly delighted with the brush
which Will Oakley held out to her.
"'T isn't often we gives you a run like that, ma'm," said the huntsman;
and his saturnine face might have been a boy's, as he produced a piece
of whipcord from his breeches pocket and began fastening the brush to
Aliette's saddle-ring.
Various belated riders, the wily parson, the panting colonel, and the
chagrined politician among them, came up and began congratulating.
Sandwich-boxes were produced, flasks, cigarettes. Sir Siegfried looked
at his watch; and started in to consider what degree of exaggeration
might be warranted in subsequent reports of their day. It was nearly
half-past two o'clock--call it three. They had begun to draw Parson's
Wood at about one--make it half-past twelve. It is to be feared that the
hour's run, by the time it was reported to Sir Siegfried's connubial
fireside, had suffered considerable extension.
But neither Aliette nor Ronnie, as they walked their horses side by side
into Key Hatch village (Gorse Hill is twelve miles from kennels, and the
colonel, well satisfied with his kill, had ordered the pack home), spoke
of the run.
Indeed, they hardly spoke at all. And when she said good-by to him at
the open posting-doorways of the Bull, neither remembered to ask the
other where or whether they should meet again. Which forgetfulness,
thought Aliette as she turned Miracle's head for home, was the strangest
part of a strangely joyous day.
But Ronald Cavendish, watching her mounted figure disappear down the
village street, thought only of their ride together.