1
Even average people, when obsessed by the grand passion--which is a far
rarer passion among Anglo-Saxons than Anglo-Saxon novelists would have
us believe--cannot be judged by average standards. Such are as surely
bound to the wheels of terror as to the wheels of courage. In such,
strength and weakness, misery and ecstasy, love's heaven and love's
hell, mingle as wax and honey in the comb. For the grand passion is the
sublime exaggerator of human emotion, the indefinable complex of the
soul.
So, to Aliette, returning from her interview with Julia, it seemed as
though London's self had altered its countenance, as though every face
encountered on her homeward way spoke of her own newly-regained
happiness. Her momentary change of feeling toward Ronnie had been
trivial; an undercurrent of misunderstanding rather than an overt
quarrel. Yet the relief of knowing it over was tremendous.
She found him huddled in the armchair before the gas-fire; Ponto,
surreptitiously introduced into Powolney Mansions, couched at his feet.
He rose as she entered; and the great dog, wagging a delighted stern,
rose with him. In a flash of new insight, she saw how alike they were:
the big man and the big dog--devoted both, both asking only kindness.
And whimsically she thought: "I've been unkind to both of them. I ought
to have gone to see Ponto when he was ill. I ought never to have let
myself drift away, even in thought, from Ronnie."
As always, Ponto nuzzled his great head against her knee; Ronnie, as
always, kissed her. But that night, as never since Chilworth nights,
Aliette answered Ronnie's kisses, giving him all her confidence, all her
tenderness.
"No more quarrels, man. No more secrets," she whispered drowsily,
falling to sleep in his arms.
"Quarrels, darling?" he whispered back. "We couldn't really quarrel--you
and I."
And after that, for many a day, their rose-bubble of enchantment--the
frail yet impermeable magic of the grand passion--reblew itself about
those twain, isolating them from their fellows, making even Powolney
Mansions a paradise.
For many a day neither spiritual nor material troubles clouded the
bright mirror of their joint happiness. Scarcely conscious of the
discomforts in which they lived; utterly unconscious of the nascent
hostility--a hostility based on some rumor which had arisen none knew
whence and was tending none knew whither--among their fellow-boarders;
careless alike of financial difficulties, of outlawry, and of ostracism,
they went their way among their uncaring kind.
The high courts were closed; and so far, despite the promises of John
Cartwright, neither county nor police courts afforded Ronnie a single
brief. Wherefore he and Aliette made holiday together, with London for
their playground. Wandering, Ponto at heel, her streets and her parks,
her squares and her terraces, they knew the keen radium of London's
morning, her smoke-gray half-lights, the red-gold radiance of her dimmed
sunsets, the first out-twinkle of her street-lamps, faintly green
against a faintly violet sky, her high evening arcs, and the long lit
saffron parallels of her mysterious nights.
And one day, wandering casually beside London's river, wandering, to be
exact, through Fulham and over Putney Bridge, they knew that, by
sheerest accident, they had found them a home.
To a Lady Hermione or a Lady Cynthia, Embankment House, a great red
building-block which overlooks the Thames, would have been the last word
in discomfort. Except for the automatic lift (into which Ronnie,
Aliette, Ponto, and the uniformed porter who showed them over, squeezed
only as asparagus into a tin), and the gas-cooker left in the tiny
top-floor kitchen by an absconding tenant, no luxuries whatsoever
ameliorated the bareness of Flat 27, Block B. It was, in fact, hardly
more than the model working-man's tenement of its original builder's
dream. But since it possessed five tolerable rooms, the possibility of
installing a geyser bath, and, above all things, its own front door,
they decided instantaneously on its acquirement, seeking out the
secretary of the house and paying the requisite deposit of a quarter's
rent that very afternoon.
So excited were both at the prospect of domestic privacy, so engrossed
with their plans for expending Julia's Christmas present to best
advantage, that two incidents which--at any other time--would have been
of immense importance, passed almost unnoticed. The first of these
incidents was Rear-Admiral Billy's written confession of failure, and
the second--"the scandal of Powolney Mansions." For the rumor which had
arisen none knew whence, the rumor that "Mrs. Cavendish wasn't really
Mrs. Cavendish at all, but the wife of a well-known society man who
refused to divorce her," at last blew so strongly that _Monsieur_ (who
before the war would have called himself _Herr_) Mayer, proprietor of
the Mansions, felt himself finally obliged to take notice of it.
"Of course, I ask you no questions, Mr. Cavendish," said Monsieur Mayer,
seated undistinguished at the dusty desk in his private office. "Of
course I ask you and your wife no questions. Your private affairs are
your private affairs. But in a boarding-house it is not always possible
to keep one's private affairs private; and there has been talk, much
talk. That Miss Greenwell, she who have No. 26, and pay less than any
one in the house, she gossip all the time. She gossip about you and Mrs.
Cavendish. For my part," he waved a deprecatory hand, "I know it is only
gossip. I make no suggestion. To me, so long as you pay your bill at the
end of the week, it is all right."
To which Ronnie, in his most cautious legal manner, retorted:
"If Miss Greenwell or any of your other guests wish to make imputations
against myself or my wife, I shall be glad if they will make them to me
personally"--and promptly gave a fortnight's notice.
"Dash the fellow's impertinence." he laughed to Aliette, when he
reported the interview. "There's no law in England to stop you from
calling yourself Mrs. Cavendish." But Aliette, looking up from the
wall-paper pattern-book she was studying, did not laugh; because
intuitively she knew the power behind Miss Greenwell's throne.
"Hector's doing," she thought. "Somehow or other he must have put the
tale about." And in that moment, for the first time, she began to
despise her legal owner.
There was neither fear nor hate in her despising; only disdain and a
crystallization of courage. That Hector should try to hurt her man
financially seemed unsporting enough; but this latest secret effort to
drive them shelterless into the streets of London put him, in her eyes,
definitely beyond the pale.
All the same, for the last fortnight of their stay, "Mr. and Mrs.
Cavendish" more than ever eschewed the public apartments and "congenial
society" of Powolney Mansions.
2
Meanwhile, for the only character in our story who was not directly
concerned with the feud of the Bruntons and the Cavendishes--to wit,
Betty Masterman--the average metropolitan life went on. Betty Masterman,
however, treating her self-invited guest with that lavish hospitality
which provides bed and board without asking even companionship in
exchange, lunching out, dining out, dancing and theatering, visiting and
being visited by a horde of acquaintances, knew a good deal more about
the progress of the feud than she confided to Mollie, and vastly more
than Mollie confided to her.
Betty knew, for instance, that Hector Brunton, had it not been for the
now full-blown scandal of his wife's desertion, would have been offered
his knighthood; that Julia Cavendish, for the identical reason, had not
been made a dame of the British Empire; that Dot Fancourt who, it was
rumored, had been captured in betrothal by a middle-aged spinster of
markedly reactionary views, never tired of lamenting "dear Julia's
mistaken devotion to her son"; and that Sir Peter Wilberforce, whose
baronetcy had been duly announced in the New Year's honors, was more
than anxious that _his_ son should get married.
To the grass-widow, it must be confessed, the feud itself seemed as
petty as its ramifications ludicrous. Her own affair--the affair of the
known husband who wrote every month from Toowoomba, Queensland, and the
unknown lover who wrote almost every day from Queen's Gate, London--had
always been one of those semi-public secrets which leave no speck upon
the escutcheon. Aliette's method, therefor, appeared in her estimation
foolish--though not quite so unnecessarily foolish as the scruples which
prevented Mollie Fullerford from accepting the obvious heart and equally
obvious hand of her Jimmy.
"Sorry, dear," Betty used to say, "but I can't see it. Either you're in
love with the man or you're not. If you _are_ in love with him, why on
earth don't you marry him? He's got plenty of money; you've got a little
money; and until you're tired of one another it ought to be ideal."
"You needn't be so beastly cynical," Mollie, ignorant of Queen's Gate,
used to protest. "Just because your own marriage wasn't a success,
there's no reason why mine shouldn't be. But I'm not going to marry
Jimmy until he's arranged things between Alie and her husband."
"Suppose he can't arrange them, my dear?"
"Of course he can arrange them if he really wants to. He's a lawyer."
"You absolutely refuse to marry him until he does?"
"Absolutely."
Despite which repeated assurance, Mollie Fullerford knew that her
decision weakened daily. It was all very well to pretend to Jimmy when
he called, as he constantly did call, that there could be no hope for
him until her wishes had been carried out; all very well, for the
moment, to be reluctant in hand-clasps, grudging with kisses. But "that
sort of thing" couldn't go on. It wasn't--Aliette's phrase--"dignified."
And besides--she felt herself growing far too fond of Jimmy for
half-love. She wanted Jimmy; wanted him very badly; wanted him worse
than she had ever wanted anything in her life. In point of fact--it had
come to that now--she couldn't "jolly well live without Jimmy"; and
would undoubtedly have yielded to Jimmy's persistence before the spring,
had it not been for Eva Martin's interference.
That resolute lady of the cold blue eyes, the fading gold hair, and the
hard unpleasant hands came to London early in January with the avowed
intention of "putting matters straight once and for all." With Aliette,
invited to luncheon at the Ladies' Army and Navy Club (irreverently
known as "Arms and Necks" to junior subalterns), she failed completely,
Ronnie's "wife" refusing, tight-lipped, even to discuss the situation.
But with Mollie the sisterly machinations attained, in some slight
degree, their trouble-making objective.
"You see, my dear," said the colonel's lady, "you're such a child that
one really oughtn't to take you into one's confidence at all. But
unfortunately this sort of thing can't be glossed over. In a way, I need
hardly tell you, I'm very sorry for poor Alie. When I compare my own
Harold with her Hector, I realize Hector's inferiority. All the
same,"--this last with both elbows firmly on the tea-table--"the only
course to be pursued, believe me, is for Aliette to return to her
husband."
"But that would be perfectly beastly," retorted Mollie, the mild
antagonism she had always felt for Eva turning to intensest dislike.
"Beastly or not," decided the colonel's lady, with some asperity, "it's
the only thing to be done." And she added, with that bitter-sweetness
which made Colonel Harold Martin look back upon the western front during
the great war as the only peaceful place he had ever known: "Let me
remind you, dear child, that there isn't only Alie to be considered.
There are your own chances. You'll want to be getting married one of
these days, and naturally, no man in a good position----"
The sentence trailed off into a silence as suggestive as the atmosphere
Eva left behind her when she trailed out of Betty Masterman's flat; so
strengthening the girl's weakened decision that Jimmy Wilberforce, who
dropped in half an hour later to plead his own and his baronet father's
cause, found himself confronted with a white face, a pair of haggard
eyes, and the tense ultimatum, "Jimmy, I'll marry you the day Hector
sets Alie free, but not a day before."