1
Ponto the Dane, a piebald hummock of utter contentment, slapped his vast
stern on the sands; woke; and rose to his haunches.
At gaze into the sun-dazzle, Ponto's slitty eyes could just discern the
twin rock buttresses of Chilworth Cove, the sea-water eddying
translucent between them, and, forging through the sea-water, a man's
head. White birds, which Ponto after one or two dignified experiments
had decided uncatchable, strutted the beach or circled lazily round the
buttresses. His mistress slept, sun-bonneted in her long deck-chair, a
smile on her lips.
"This," mused the great dog, "is a very pleasant place."
"This," dreamed the great dog's mistress, "is paradise."
Chilworth Cove lies far from the track of motor char-à-bancs in the
unspoiled West Country. Inshore from its tongue of hot gold sands, the
wild flowers riot; and back along the fritillary-haunted pathway through
the wild flowers, Chilworth Ghyll leads to Chilworth Port--a handful of
thatch-roofed, pink-washed cottages whereon the clematis spreads its
purple stars and the honeysuckle droops coral clusters for the
loudly-questing bee.
Once the sea filled the Ghyll; once, from the ancient well-head midway
of the streetless "port," men drew water for their ships; once seafarers
in hose and doublet with strange oaths and stranger tales on their lips
would sit drinking in the parlor of the ancient alehouse. But to-day
never a ship and hardly a "foreigner" comes where Chill Down upswells
warm-breasted as a woman to the blue and Chill Common sweeps wave on
wave of heathered ridges to a houseless horizon.
This summer, indeed, only three "foreigners"--the man forging overarm to
seaward, the drowsy dog, and the dreaming lady--had visited the port:
for the square-faced, square-hipped Devonian woman, busied at the moment
with the setting-out of curdled cream and other homely fare in their
pink-washed cottage, was no "foreigner"--but a port woman by birth, as
the alehouse well knew.
And if the alehouse sometimes speculated why "Martha Staley's daughter,
her who had the good place in Lunnon, should have brought her 'folk' to
the port"--who cared? Not Ronnie! Not Aliette! For them, London with all
its harassing memories had faded into that remote past before they
possessed one another, before flaming June and flaming love alike
combined to teach them a delight so exquisite that it seemed to both as
though paradise itself could hold no rarer in its offering.
They had been in paradise a full month; and never for a moment had
either of them regretted their hurried flight, their abandoned schemes.
The past was dead, the future still unborn; they lived only for the
all-sufficing present, two human beings fulfilling one another in
isolation from their kind.
"Ronnie is happy," dreamed Aliette. "Happy as I am."
Yet even dreaming, she knew her own happiness the greater. She, risking
most, gained the most from her risking; she--once that first inevitable
fear of revulsion which is the portion of every woman who, disappointed
in one man, seeks consolation with another, proved phantom--had been
content to surrender herself, body, brain, and soul, to the call of
matehood; to pour out all that was best hers, of beauty, of
selflessness, of tender thought and reckless caring, at Ronnie's feet;
knowing each gift a thousand times recompensed by the slightest touch of
his hand on her hair, the lightest brushing of his lips against her
cheeks--knowing herself no longer a woman, but very womanhood, eternal
essence distilled eternally from the fruit of Eden-tree for manhood's
completion.
And, "Poor Ronnie," she dreamed, "he can never be happy as I am. He
thinks I am the same Aliette--he does not realize the miracle."
For, of a surety, if ever love wrought a miracle, it was on this woman.
She who, in her mateless fastidiousness, had schooled herself to the
poise of a virgin Artemis, became, mated, the very Venus Anadyomene,
Venus of foam and of sun-glints, rose-flushed for adoration between the
roses and the sea. And in the hush of moon-pale midnights, when the
clematis-blossoms showed as black butterflies against their diamonded
window-panes, when the ripples beyond the Ghyll murmured like tired
children asleep, she--to whom, mateless, the nights had been emptier
even than the days--became night's own goddess-girl, subduing man's
passion to merest instrument of her love.
The dreaming lady stirred, murmuring through dreams; and the smile faded
from her lips.
Sometimes, even to paradise--as black ships seen through a golden haze
to seaward--came dark visions of the past. Of Julia Cavendish, her son's
unanswered letter crumpled in unrelenting fingers; of Mollie and her
James; of the mullioned house at Clyst Fullerford; of the stiff
bow-fronted library at Lancaster Gate; and of the man in that library,
the man whose thin lips muttered: "So it was that briefless fool
Cavendish you would have married, had I given you your freedom. Very
good! Go to him now, if you dare. You're not my property. I can't force
you to stop here. But if you leave this house, remember that you're
still Mrs. Hector Brunton, not Mrs. Ronald Cavendish. Remember that
you're taking a risk, a biggish risk."
That risk, all in a sweet madness, the dreaming lady and the man forging
back to her through the translucent water, had taken within twelve
hours; hurriedly; almost planlessly; instinctively as Ponto, who, let
loose by a mischievous boy from his kennel in Westbourne Street, nosed
his way to the door of Brunton's house just as Aliette and Caroline
Staley stepped into the loaded taxi, and, spying the portmanteau, set up
such a howl that in sheer self-defense they let him clamber in between
them.
"And that," thought Aliette, waking from dreams to find a huge wet nose
nuzzling her hand, "was the maddest thing I did in all that one mad
day."
Then she, too, sat at gaze into the sun-dazzle; till her lover's head
rounded the translucent pool below the buttresses; till he came up the
hot sands toward her--the sea-light in his hair, his browned shoulders
dripping from the sea.
2
Meanwhile, five hours away along the shining track beyond Chill Common,
seven million exiles from paradise plied their harassed harassing
earth-days in London City.
Of all those seven millions only three people knew exactly what had
happened; and only two--Julia Cavendish and Benjamin Bunce--the
fugitives' address. Even Mollie, who had been overnighting with friends
at Richmond during those few hours when her sister decided on flight,
had been told--officially--nothing.
But Mollie, from the first moment when she glanced at the incoherent
scrawl Lennard handed her on her return, had suspected the worst. With
her, Hector's reassurances, given over the telephone from his chambers,
that "Alie had suddenly made up her mind to take a holiday," went for
nothing.
"Rather unexpected, wasn't it?" she said; and then, remembering the
scene in the drawing-room: "On the whole, Hector, I think I'd better
take a holiday, too."
Hector, with a terse, "Of course, you must do what you think best," rang
off; and the girl, now thoroughly perturbed, telephoned to Betty
Masterman, her oldest school-friend, demanding hospitality.
"Nothing wrong, I hope?" said Betty.
"No, dear. Nothing. Only Alie's had to go away, and I can't very well
stop here without a chaperon."
Betty Masterman was a comforting creature who neither asked nor demanded
confidences; but the interview with James Wilberforce hurt. It took
Mollie three days to summon up enough courage to notify him of her new
address; and when, throwing up his afternoon's work in Norfolk Street,
he came to call at the little conventionally-furnished flat, it seemed
to the girl as though they could never again be frank with one another;
as though her very greeting, "Hello, James! Rotten of Alie to take a
holiday, right in the middle of the season, isn't it?" were a deliberate
lie.
And his answer, "Oh, well, it's rather stuffy in town, these days," made
any discussion of the topic nearest her heart impossible. "For, of
course," thought the girl, "Jimmy knows that Aliette's run away from
Hector."
As a matter of fact, Jimmy had not previously suspected any connection
between Aliette Brunton's sudden departure from Lancaster Gate and the
news, previously imparted to him by Benjamin Bunce, that "Mr. Cavendish
had been called out of town and might not be back for some days." It
was, Jimmy said to himself, rather weird of old Ronnie to buzz off in
the middle of the sessions; but then old Ronnie always had been rather
weird, a peculiar kind of chap, pretty reticent about his private
affairs.
But subconsciously, the moment Mollie spoke of her sister, the
solicitor's mind connected the two disappearances. At first blush, the
connection seemed incredible. "Old Ronnie" was "as straight as they make
'em"; and "H. B.'s wife a regular Puritan."
All the same, James Wilberforce--just to reassure himself--would have
liked to ask a question or two, to take Mollie's summary of evidence. He
wanted, for instance, to ask her if she knew her sister's address.
Something restrained him from asking the question; but while he was
taking tea his brain suddenly remembered a little twist of Ronnie's
mouth when Julia Cavendish had mentioned Aliette's name during his lunch
at Bruton Street. Scarcely noticed at the time, that remembered twist of
the clean-shaven lips called up other memories; Ronald and Aliette at
Key Hatch, playing patters at Queen's, shaking hands in Hyde Park.
"But it's absurd," thought the big red solicitor, "absurd! I'd lay
twenty to one against it. A hundred to one!" And, looking at Mollie
across the tea-table, he forgot her sister.
That afternoon the girl seemed more than ever desirable, just the sort
of wife he was looking for. He liked the way she bobbed her dark hair,
the cotton frock she was wearing, her strong white hands and arms; he
liked being alone with her in this little room with its fumed oak
furniture, its red wall-paper, its general air of coziness. He would
have liked, very much, to kiss that full red mouth. But more than
anything else, he liked this new shyness, this very hopeful shyness,
which had replaced her old self-confidence.
"What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mollie?" he chaffed her.
"Got the hump about anything?"
"No. I'm a bit tired; that's all."
"Nothing worrying you?"
"Nothing much."
And again--vaguely--the solicitor in Wilberforce grew nervous.
"Damn it all," he thought, "supposing my suspicions _are_ right. Suppose
those two have gone off together. It's fifty to one against, but
still----"
The instinct to gamble on that fifty-to-one chance (it had been a
hundred to one half an hour since), to propose and have done with it,
came to him. But his caution subdued the instinct. The world, his world,
was a pretty censorious place; and if one's father were almost a cert.
for his baronetcy, if one were junior partner in a firm so entirely
_sans reproche_ with the king's proctor as Wilberforce, Wilberforce &
Cartwright--well, one just couldn't afford to take even thousand-to-one
gambles on one's future wife's social position.
The entrance of Betty, a thin golden-haired grass-widow, very much _à la
mode_ from her trim feet to her modulated voice, tided over the awkward
interview.
That night, however, Mollie Fullerford--least sentimental of the modern
young--cried herself to sleep.
3
Tears are not fashionable in Pump Court; but that melancholy individual,
Benjamin Bunce, very nearly followed Mollie Fullerford's example, when
"young Mr. Wilberforce"--anxious only to allay his suspicions--called at
Ronnie's chambers next morning.
"I'm sure _I_ don't know what to do, sir," wailed Benjamin. "Here's a
couple of good briefs come in; and my instructions is not to send
anything on to him. No, sir, I'm afraid I can't give you his address.
I'm not allowed to give any one his address--except Mr. David Patterson.
And that only if Mr. David Patterson asks me for it."
"David Patterson!" exclaimed the solicitor.
"Yes, sir. Mr. Brunton's--Mr. Hector Brunton's--clerk."
"Good God!" said a young man whose ruddy complexion had gone suddenly
white. "Good God!" And he walked out of the door, as Benjamin
subsequently described it, "as though he'd been lifting the elbow ever
since breakfast."
4
James Wilberforce did not gossip; nevertheless, within a week of the
flight for paradise, rumor--the amazing omniscient rumor of
London--began to weave, spider-like, her intangible filaments. As yet,
rumor was unconfirmed: only a vague web of talk, spun from boudoir to
drawing-room, from drawing-room to club, from club to Fleet Street, from
Fleet Street to the Griffin.
And in the center of the web, watching it a-weave, sat Aliette's
husband.
More than once, friends, those maddeningly tactful friends of the
successful, touched on rumor; but none of them, not even Hector's
father, succeeded in extracting a syllable. "My wife," said Hector
Brunton, K.C, to his friends, "has not been feeling very well lately.
I've sent her out of town for a bit of a holiday."
At first the mere mention of Aliette's name enraged him; aroused in him
a cruelty so melodramatic, so virulent that, for a full three days, he
went in fear of becoming a murderer. He knew that he could find "the
guilty pair" easily enough: Cavendish's clerk--Aliette's brief note told
him--would give his solicitors their address. But even without
Cavendish's clerk it would be simple to trace them. You couldn't lug a
twelve-stone dog round the London railway termini without attracting the
attention of at least half a hundred involuntary private detectives!
Somehow (comedy and tragedy blend strangely in the heart of a man!) the
idea of Ponto's accompanying his wife's elopement seemed in Brunton's
eyes the culminating insult, a last intolerable outrage on the domestic
decencies. He, Hector, had given Aliette that dog; and, though he hated
the beast himself, he grudged it to Cavendish. To his enraged mind, the
dog turned symbol of his betrayal. He had been betrayed by a dishonest
woman. If Aliette had possessed any sense of honesty, she would have
left Ponto behind: as she had left all his other gifts--the pearl
necklace, the jeweled wrist-watch, the gray ostrich-feather fan.
Then, hot on the heels of rage, came remorse--remorse, not for his
cruelty, not for his infidelities, but only for the crass stupidity with
which he believed himself to have handled the situation. He might have
known the woman better than to attempt bluff. He ought to have pleaded
with her. Or locked her in her bedroom. On no account ought he to have
gone down to the courts next morning. Why hadn't he telephoned Mollie to
return that very night? Why hadn't he wired to Clyst Fullerford for
Aliette's mother?
Self-pity succeeded. He pictured himself the injured husband; and, his
heart softening towards Aliette, vowed "that seducer Cavendish should
suffer."
But Cavendish's sufferings did not suffice his imagination. Why should
Cavendish alone suffer? Why should either the woman or the man get off
scotfree? Why shouldn't both of them be made to suffer--damnably--as
damnably as he himself was suffering?
For, surely as love made paradise of Chilworth Cove, so surely did lust
fashion hell at Lancaster Gate.
From this hell in which--as Brunton imagined--the loss of a woman, and
not the loss of his own self-esteem furnished the flame, Brunton's only
escape was work; and into work he flung himself, as a scalded child into
cold water, only to find the agony redoubled on emergence. For though
his work--eight, ten, and sometimes sixteen hours a day of the tensest
mental concentration--did momentarily banish introspection; always, his
work concluded, came the Furies.
In the night, they came--like evil old women--lashing him, sleepless,
from room to room of that huge silent house, mocking him, mocking him.
"Only wait," mocked the Furies. "She'll come back. Perhaps she's on her
way home at this very moment. She'll soon tire of Cavendish--of
Cavendish."
Brunton tried to scream back at them (he knew, even before they showed
him his face in the mirror of his dressing-room, that the scream could
not pass his lips), "I wouldn't have her back. I wouldn't, I tell you--I
wouldn't. She's a loose woman. An adulteress."
"Oh, yes, you would," answered the Furies. "Oh, yes, you would. If she
came into this house now--if she rang the front door-bell--listen!
listen hard! didn't you hear a bell, Brunton?--if she offered herself to
you, you'd take her. It's three years, Brunton. Three years since you
went into that room. Think of her, Brunton. Think of her--her hair
unbound--her arms open to receive--Cavendish!"
And by day, when the evil old women slept, men mocked at
him--voicelessly. All men--so it seemed to him--knew his shame. All men!
Lennard and the chauffeur, so smooth-faced, so efficient, grinning
behind smug hands: the acquaintances at his clubs: his co-barristers,
lunching either side of him at Middle Temple Hall: his subservient
clerk: his respectful clients--all these knew him for the deserted bull,
for the male incapable of authority, for the public cuckold. Even the
impassive pseudo-friendly judges who gave him his verdicts were wise to
his cuckoldry.
Curiously enough, in all that month of June, Brunton never lost a case.
Possible defeats, probable compromises, doubtful prosecution, or still
more doubtful defense--every legal battle he fought ended in sweeping
victory. Treasury briefs, consultations, and demands for his "opinion"
avalanched on his chambers in King's Bench Walk. Fleet Street echoed and
reëchoed his name; till it appeared as though the herd, the damned
hypocritical herd who fawned openly on his public success so that they
might gloat the more on his secret failure, twitted him in very malice
with the prospects of a knighthood, of a judgeship, of a safe seat at
the next election.
More and more, as the days went by, he saw himself as the deserted bull;
and, so seeing, swore that he would teach the whole herd a lesson. The
herd had its rules, its shibboleths; but he was above all rules, above
all shibboleths. Let the herd murmur if it dared. His wife and her lover
could rot in the mire they had pashed for themselves. The lone bull
would not even deign to horn their flanks.
So, arrogance and cruelty in his secret heart; lash-marks of the Furies
red across his secret loins; feigning himself unhurt, uncaring; feigning
himself ignorant; feigning even solicitude for the health of his absent
wife, Hector Brunton went his conquering conquered way.