1
"I think I'll be going now, if you'll permit me, sir," said Benjamin
Bunce. "And, if I may be allowed to say so, sir, congratulations."
"Thanks, Bunce. Toddle off if you like."
It was past eight o'clock, and the Temple curiously quiet. Ronnie,
kindling himself a pipe and leaning back in his battered armchair, heard
his clerk's boot-soles hurrying through, the colonnade of Pump Court;
and after that, never a footfall.
Despite Spillcroft's invitation and Cartwright's, despite an imploring
wire from Bertram Standon to meet his entire staff at the Savoy, the
barrister had dined early and alone. His work had played him out.
Looking back, he could remember nothing of the case, except that last
frenzied scene outside the court, whence--the police good-temperedly
intervening--he and his client and the armless sailor had escaped in
John Cartwright's car. Trying to recapture the events of the last three
days, and more especially the words of his final speech, it seemed as
though he had been some one other than himself, as though the hand of
fate itself had steered him to victory. Perhaps that was why victory
seemed so valueless!
To sit there in the old chambers where he had dreamed so many dreams; to
watch the pipe-smoke curling round his head, and know Lucy Towers saved;
to imagine Lucy Towers and Bob Fielding happily married; even to realize
Brunton, his enemy Brunton, beaten--afforded no satisfaction. Curious,
he thought, how little his public triumph over Aliette's husband, his
public success, affected him! So often in the last fifteen months he had
thrilled to the vision of himself successful: yet now--now that success
had actually been accomplished--it held no joy.
Glooming, Ronnie's thoughts switched from the public issue to the
personal. What did it avail that he, Ronald Cavendish, should have
rolled the "hanging prosecutor" in the dust; that the press was already
blazing his fame from one end of England to another--so long as Brunton
remained, as Brunton would remain, the legal owner of Aliette? What did
it profit him to have saved the woman in the dock if he could not save
the woman in his own home?
The pipe went out, and his slack fingers could not be bothered to
rekindle it. Depression, the terrible depression of overstrain, settled
like a miasma-cloud on his brain. His triumph became a mockery, his fame
a whited sepulcher. Saving others, he could save neither himself nor the
woman he loved. Aliette was outcast, would remain outcast; and he with
her. All the pleasant things his success might have won for them
both--social position, companionship of friends, political
possibilities--were beyond their reach. To them, success could only
bring money.
Bitterly he fell to reproaching himself--as all the lovers of all the
Aliettes do reproach themselves in those hours when love comes not to
their aid--for ever having persuaded her to run away with him. What was
the use of blaming Brunton, of hating Brunton? He himself and no other
was responsible. He felt the flame of his old hatred against Brunton
blow back, scorching his own head. Truly loving Aliette, he should have
been satisfied--as Robert Fielding had been satisfied--with
renunciation.
"I've been selfish," he thought, "selfish"; and, so thinking, remembered
his mother.
Toward her, too, he had played the complete egoist; forgetful--in his
self-concentration, in the absorption of his work and the battle against
his enemy--of her need for him, of her illness.
And abruptly, luminous through the darkness which had settled on his
mind, Ronnie saw a picture of Daffadillies. The great house stood
foursquare under the moon. Trees spired sable from the gleam of its
lawns. Its roof glittered under a glittering sky. From its gabled
windows glowed the saffron welcome of lamp-light. Behind one of those
gabled windows, his mother, who had loved him all her life, who had
grudged him never a thought, never a sacrifice, lay ill; mortally ill
perhaps.
And suddenly it seemed to Julia's son as though the darkness of his own
mind came between the moon and Daffadillies. Black clouds, ragged and
menacing, drifted down from the glitter of the skies, blurring the
saffron window-gleams. Mists swirled about the spring trees, across the
gleam of the lawns. Watching the menace of those ragged clouds, the cold
swirl of the mists, he knew fear, the old battle-fear of death.
If only the clouds would break, the mists roll away from Daffadillies.
But there came no break in the ragged clouds. Black they banked, and
blacker, round the high moon; till the moon was no more, and only the
ghost of a ghostly house trembled--as smoke seen through smoked
glass--through the swirl of the mist.
Then even the ghost of Daffadillies vanished; and, sightless, he peered
at the void.
Till, out of the void, sound issued--the sound of a woman's voice--of
his mother's voice: "Ronnie! Ronnie! I am afraid. Come to me."
2
With a start, Ronald Cavendish awoke.
The green-shaded lamp still burned at his head, showing up every stain
on the leather desk-top, every ink-spot on the pewter inkstand. There
were his quill pens; his thumb-soiled brief. There, on the shelves, were
his law-books. At his feet, its ashes spilled from cracked bowl to worn
carpet, lay the pipe he had been smoking. "I must have been dreaming,"
he thought.
But the dream and the fear of the dream still haunted his mind. Vainly,
rubbing his eyes, he strove for courage. Always, his imagination saw the
darkness gathering about Daffadillies; always, out of the gathering
darkness, he heard his mother's voice--calling--calling. Till,
fear-haunted, he sprang to his feet.
His feet moved under him. They moved very slowly, as the feet of a
sleep-walker. He said to his feet, "This is foolishness, foolishness."
He said to his feet, "Be still."
He found himself in the corridor. He found himself at the telephone. He
said to himself, "I might just make certain that she's all right."
Then, startlingly, the telephone-bell rang; and, startled, he picked the
receiver from the clip. Ages seemed to pass before he heard the
operator's: "City double-four two eight? Don't go away. I want you."
Followed, very distinct at that hour of the night, "Horsham, you're
through"; and after a pause, "Is that Mr. Cavendish? Mr. Ronald
Cavendish? This is Mrs. Sanderson speaking. I rang up Embankment House,
but the porter said you weren't back yet." Already Ronnie's ears, acute,
apprehensive, knew the worst. "Can you get through to Dr. Baynet? Can
you bring him down at once? Your mother has had another hemorrhage."
"A bad one?" Ronnie tried to smooth the fear from his voice.
"I'm afraid so. Your wife's upstairs with Dr. Thompson. Would you like
to speak to her?"
"No. Tell her that I'll get on to Sir Heron at once. Tell her, please,"
the words snapped decision, "that I'll bring him down to Daffadillies
to-night. Do you understand? To-night! Tell the lodge-keeper to wait up
for us, to have the gates open. Is that quite clear?"
"Quite clear." The automaton's answer sounded irritatingly calm. "Quite
clear, thank you."
"Then good night." With a click of decision, Ronnie replaced the
receiver. Danger, ousting fear, galvanized him to action. He looked at
the clock. The hands pointed to 9:15. The last train for West Water left
at nine! He snatched up the telephone-book; found the doctor's number;
called it.
A man-servant answered. "Sir Heron's engaged. Can I take any message?"
"No. I want to speak to him personally."
"Sir Heron is giving a dinner-party, sir."
"Tell him the matter is urgent ... Yes ... Cavendish ... Ronald
Cavendish."
The man left the instrument. Waiting, Ronnie grew apprehensive. Suppose
Sir Heron refused to come.... Then he heard, "Is that you, Cavendish? No
bad news, I hope?"
"Very bad, I'm afraid. I've just spoken to Daffadillies on the
telephone. My mother's had another hemorrhage. Can you come down
to-night?"
"To-night?"
"Yes. With me. The last train's gone. I'm going down by taxi."
Silence ... and again Ronnie grew apprehensive. Sir Heron was a
specialist--a great man. Absurd to ask such a favor of him!
Interrupted Sir Heron's decisive, "Very well. No need for a taxi. You
can come down in my car. Where are you telephoning from?"
"The Temple."
"Then be here in twenty minutes."
3
Snatching his hat and his coat, clicking off the light, and slamming his
oak behind him, Ronnie darted downstairs into Pump Court, through Pump
Court and up Middle Temple Lane toward the barred gate which gives on to
Fleet Street. In seconds he was at the side door of the gate--through
it--and into a taxi. In seconds he was whirling away from the deserted
law courts, past the gleaming front of the Gaiety Theater, down the
Strand.
He wanted speed--speed. Not till they were out of the Strand and through
Trafalgar Square did thought oust action from his mind. And then thought
was fearful--terrifying. Again, as on that night when he and Aliette had
taxied from Embankment House to Bruton Street, he saw his mother dying.
But now he saw himself guilty of her death.
Harley Street reached, a long blue car purred past his taxi and pulled
up a hundred yards ahead. Reaching the car, the taxi stopped. Ronnie
leaped out; flung a couple of half-crowns to his driver; leaped up the
steps of the Georgian house; and rang. The door opened instantaneously;
revealing--behind the portly form of the butler--a long tessellated
hall. Down the staircase into the hall--his dinner-party abandoned--came
the punctual specialist.
"That you, Cavendish? I sha'n't be a moment." Sir Heron, already in his
fur coat, his slouch hat pulled on anyhow, disappeared round the newel
post of the staircase toward his consulting room; and reëmerged, with a
battered black medicine-case in his hand. "Come along. We can talk in
the car. In you go----"
The butler closed the door of the limousine behind them; and the
doctor's chauffeur, obviously preinstructed as to their destination,
turned the long Rolls-Royce bonnet south.
"Another hemorrhage, you say?" Sir Heron lit himself a cigarette; and in
the red spurt of the match, Ronnie could see that his face was troubled.
"I'm glad you telephoned."
"It's very good of you to come down at such short notice, Sir Heron.''
"Only my duty."
The great car swept down Portland Place, down Regent Street. At the
Circus, Heron Baynet picked up the speaking-tube, and called, "Take the
Bromley road, please."
"Wonderful woman, your mother," he said suddenly. "I wish I could have
done more for her."
"There's no chance, then?"
"None now, I'm afraid." The car purred on out of London, and after a
long time the specialist said: "Not that there ever was more than the
ghost of a chance."
"There was a chance then--once?" Ronnie's face, seen in the intermittent
light of the passing street-lamps, showed white with misery. Again he
was remembering that other night--the night when he had waited with
Smithers outside Julia's door.
"Meaning?" prevaricated the specialist.
"This." Bonnie's teeth clenched on the Bullet. "Suppose that my mother
had gone away to Switzerland or the south of France a year ago, she
might have been saved?"
"I doubt it."
"But you advised Switzerland, didn't you?"
"Admitted." Sir Heron looked shrewdly at his cross-examiner. "Blaming
yourself?" he asked bruskly.
"Yes."
"You needn't. Even if she had done what I told her, we couldn't have
cured the diabetes." He plunged into medical details.
"Nobody's to blame then?" The voice of Julia Cavendish's son embodied a
whole army of questions.
"No, nobody. Not even herself. If you blame any one, blame nature." And
Sir Heron, who knew more of Ronnie's story than Ronnie guessed, added
quietly: "Your wife has been a wonderful nurse, Cavendish."
"Thank you, Sir Heron." The men's thoughts, meeting, understood one
another. "You've taken rather a weight off my mind. Tell me one thing
more. This work she's been doing: has it been harmful?"
"Not as harmful as trying to prevent her from doing it."
"I see." Consoled, Ronnie fell silent.
But the consolation was short-lived. All said and done, what did it
matter at whose hand--his own or nature's--his mother lay stricken?
Remained always the bitter unescapable knowledge that the surest
consultant in England spoke of her as one already doomed. In a little
while there would be no Julia. Even now--impossible as it seemed,
driving thus down the living breathing streets into the living breathing
country--she might be already dead.
4
"We've done it in well under two hours." Sir Heron, who had been dozing,
opened his eyes as the car-lights climbed West Water Hill and began to
thread their illuminated path through the woods which surround
Daffadillies.
The Rolls-Royce made the lodge-gates; found them swung back from their
stone pillars; swept through; and, rounding the drive, pulled up
noiselessly at the open door of the great house. In the glow of the
doorway stood Aliette. Ronnie hardly saw, as she came down the steps to
meet him, how lined and drawn was her face, how wide with anxiety her
brown eyes.
"Sir Heron"--her voice sounded calm, controlled; the hand on her lover's
arm did not tremble--"you'll go to her at once, won't you? I made the
local doctor give her morphia. That was right, wasn't it?"
"Quite right."
Kate, appearing through the baize door at the end of the hall, led the
doctor upstairs.
"I did what I could, dear," said Aliette hurriedly. "Nurse has been
splendid. Dr. Thompson came at once. But I'm afraid it isn't much good.
It was all so terribly sudden. She'd gone to bed quite comfortably.
Neither nurse nor I had the least idea. She only just managed to ring
her bell in time. Smithers said it was just the same that first time at
Bruton Street. She asked for you--twice."
"Is she in any pain?"
"No, darling, not now."
"You're sure?"
"Quite sure."
"But--that's all we can do for her?"
"I--I'm afraid so. Unless Sir Heron----" They spoke in whispers, like
people already in the presence of death. Kate, running downstairs,
disturbed them. Kate's eyes were swollen. Tears choked her voice.
"The doctor says, will you please come up, Mr. Ronnie."
Swiftly Ronnie passed up that gloomy balustered staircase. He couldn't
think. He couldn't feel. Pain numbed his limbs, numbed his brain. Just
outside his mother's room stood Smithers. She, too--he could see--had
been crying. He wanted to console her--but his lips found no word.
His mother's door was ajar. Pushing it open, he knew fear. In that room
waited Death--an impalpable figure--a figure of mist--icy-cold.
Entering the room, he was just aware of the local doctor's tweeded
figure stooped over his mother's bed, and of Sir Heron--hand on his
arm--whispering, "It's the end, I'm afraid, Cavendish."
Dr. Thompson made way; and, still incapable of thought, Ronnie moved
toward the bed. A light burned by the bed. In the ring of the light he
saw a face. The face, he knew, had been in pain, in terror. But now both
the terror and the pain were gone from it. Morphia--eons ago some one
must have told him about the morphia--had driven the terror and the pain
away.
Could this gray countenance--this mask of shrunken cheek-bones, of
closed eyes, and open mouth--be Julia's? If Julia, surely Julia was
already dead. Surely the last breath had already left that wasted body,
motionless under its bedclothes.
He became aware that his mother was not yet dead. Every now and then,
breath gurgled in her throat. The gurgle of her breath terrified him.
She was still in pain--in pain.
But she could not be in pain. No agony twitched that wasted body. The
fingers of that hand which lay, white and shrunken on the eiderdown, did
not move.
Surely he had been standing by his mother's bedside since the dawn of
time. Fatigue rocked his limbs. His eyelids smarted with unshed tears.
He wanted to kneel down, to press his lips in homage on those shrunken
fingers.
Surely, the fingers moved. Surely, even at the gates of death, his
mother was aware of him. Her eyes opened. The gurgling of her breath
ceased. And suddenly, desperately, he wanted to hear her voice, to hear
one last word from those bluing lips.
Then, in fear, Ronnie knew that the soul was passing. Then, in fear, he
saw the flutter of it at his mother's mouth; saw the hover of it--palest
tenuous flame--above her head. Despairingly, his soul called to hers:
"Mater! Mater!"
But the soul might not speak with him. The tenuous flame fled upwards;
and he knew that the body which had born his body was dead.
5
Both doctors were gone. Already nurse busied herself in the
death-chamber.
But to Ronnie and Aliette, sitting side by side in the empty
drawing-room, it seemed as though Julia's spirit still haunted the
house, as though at any moment they might hear her fine courageous voice
and see her come in to them. Outside--weeping for her--rain fell. The
drip of it among the shrubberies, heard through closed curtains, was
like the patter of little unhappy feet. If only, like the voice of the
rain, their voices could weep for her! If only, like the feet of the
rain, their feet could busy themselves about some task in her service!
A faint diffident knocking startled them. Mrs. Sanderson came in.
The automaton's cheeks were swollen. The eyes under her tortoise-shell
spectacles showed red and heavy-lidded. "I'm sorry to disturb you," said
Mrs. Sanderson, "but it was her wish." She moved toward them across the
carpet; and Ronnie saw that she carried under her arm a thick wad of
papers.
"_She_ told me"--they hardly recognized the woman's voice--"to give you
this as soon as she died. She told me to telephone Mr. Wilberforce, Mr.
James Wilberforce. There's a letter for him, you know. I'm going to
telephone Mr. Wilberforce in the morning. But this--this is for you, Mr.
Ronnie. She said I was to give it to you as soon as I possibly could.
She said I was to tell you that you were not to show it to anybody else
until you had spoken to Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. James Wilberforce."
"Man," Aliette had risen; "what can it be?"
"It's a book." Ronnie spoke in a whisper. "The manuscript of a book. I
wonder if she finished it."
"Yes. She finished it." The automaton handed her burden, to Ronnie, and
disappeared.
"She"--Aliette moved away from the sofa where they had been
sitting--"she said you weren't to show it to any one else."
"But that couldn't have included you."
"I'd rather not see--not yet." She was at the door now; and Ronnie,
looking up at her--the parcel still in his hands--saw that she had gone
very pale.
"Darling," he asked, "you're not ill, are you?"
"Ill?" She laughed--unsteadily--her fingers on the door-handle. "Ill?
No, I'm not ill--only ... only----"
"But you are ill." He put the parcel down on the sofa and came across
the room toward her. "Why, you're shaking all over."
She laughed again, hysterically. "I'm not. I'm not. I'm only tired. Worn
out. I'm going to bed. Don't come up, Ronnie. Don't come up." And,
kissing him, she ran from the room.
"Poor Alie," thought the man, "it's been too much for her."
6
Alone in the drawing-room, Ronnie sat staring at the thick wad of
papers, and at the envelope which topped them. "To my son," read the
writing on the envelope; the well-known handwriting with the little
loops at the top of the "o's" and the upright triangles of the "m's" and
"n's."
He took up and opened the envelope. Inside of it, folded, lay a single
sheet of note-paper: "Don't be unhappy, Ronnie. Don't blame yourself.
This book is my last effort for you and Aliette. I feel it is your way
to freedom. Use it as you and James Wilberforce think best. I have just
had news of your great success. It makes me very proud. YOUR MOTHER."
Ronnie's eyes blurred, as Julia's eyes had blurred when her weak hands
penciled the uneven lines. Puzzled and miserable--his heart choking in
his mouth--he turned from the letter to the papers. The papers were in
typescript; six pads, each holed and taped.
"'Man's Law,'" read the topmost paper of all; "'The Story of a Wrong,'
By Julia Cavendish: and by her dedicated to all those of her own sex who
have suffered and are suffering injustice."
Julia's son picked the top pad from the manuscript, turned over the
title-page, and began to read his mother's preface.
For a few lines he read aimlessly, as folk obsessed by grief read, their
thoughts wandering from the written word. Then, with one paragraph, the
words gripped him, so that he forgot even his grief.
"All my life," read the paragraph, "I have believed in the sanctity of
the Christian marriage tie. Believing that the oath taken by a man and a
woman before their God--'so long as ye both shall live'--might only be
set aside by death, I made the safeguarding of that oath a fetish and a
shibboleth. The purpose of this book is to undo, so far as in me lies,
the teachings of my former works on the marriage question; and I embrace
this purpose the more firmly because it has been brought home to me by
personal experience that there are and must always be many cases in
which the application of a rigid doctrine leads to misery. Therefore I
have felt it my duty--a duty not undertaken lightly--to combat that
rigid doctrine; and to plead, in substitution for a code which I now
believe un-Christian, the doctrine of 'The Right to Married Happiness.'"
Interested, Ronnie read on. Outside, rain fell and fell. Within was no
sound save the rustle of turned paper. The first chapter of "Man's
Law"--the second--the third raced through his brain, enthralling him,
holding him spellbound. The words became symbols of speech--speech
itself. It seemed to him as though Julia Cavendish were actually in the
room, as though actually he heard her voice. And the voice told him a
story similar to his own. The story of a Ronald Cavendish and an Aliette
Brunton!
But so grandly did the story draw him on, that only gradually--gradually
as a man sees dawn dissolving night---did Ronnie realize the personal
application of it; realize that here, in words of sheer genius, an
advocate not tonguetied--where he himself would always have been
tonguetied, in Aliette's defense--pleaded not so much the cause of all
the Aliettes in the world as, in sentences now so reasoned that they
convinced the very intellect, now so passionate that they wrung the very
heart, the cause of his own individual Aliette, the cause of Hector
Brunton's wife against her legal owner.
And at that, a little, the lawyer in Ronnie's mind ousted, the lover.
* * * * *
Half-way through the book, he put it down for a moment.
Sentences--certain sentences so venomous that he marveled his mother
could have written them--comments, certain comments all leveled against
one particular character, stuck like needles in his legal mind. His
legal mind said to him: "Slander. Those sentences, those comments, are
actionable."
Then he picked up the manuscript again, and read on--on and
on,--unconscious of the clock-tick from the mantelpiece, of the rain
ceasing without, of the day dawning wan across the Sussex Downs.
* * * * *
Till violently, with the ending of the tale, remembering his mother's
letter, he saw her purpose plain.
"Man's Law" represented Julia's "flaunting policy" carried to its
uttermost extreme! It wasn't fiction at all--it was his own story--his
story, and Aliette's and Hector's--scarcely disguised! He recollected
her interest in the Carrington case--recollected telling her how
Belfield had broken Carrington, at long last, by the aid of the press.
Julia, obviously, had planned to break Aliette's husband in much the
same way. This book once published, Hector Brunton would be compelled
(Julia's photographic memory had etched the husband of her tale so
accurately that no reader could mistake him for other than the "hanging
prosecutor") to bring an action for divorce. Brunton, even as
Carrington, could not permit the knowledge that his wife lived openly
with another man to become the public property of Julia Cavendish's
million readers.
"Yes!"--for a moment hope kindled in Ronnie's dazed mind--"'Man's Law'
would bring Aliette's husband to his senses! Publish the book; and
Brunton _must_ file his petition! Unless--unless he brought suit for
libel. But if he did that, surely he would have to admit that his wife
was living unsued in open adultery. Could a man make that admission--and
still wear silk?"
Ronnie's hope expired; violently reaction set in. His heart quaked. He
saw, in a flash, the thousand consequences which the publication of
"Man's Law"--if, indeed, any publisher would set his imprint on so
libelous a story--must entail. This, his mother's last effort to set
Aliette free, was a two-edged weapon. However wielded, it would have to
be wielded publicly. And publicity--even if it injured his enemy--could
help neither him nor Aliette.
Publish the book--and the whole world would know their story! Yes, but
who, in all the world, knowing their story, would sympathize with them?
Even sympathizing, who would take their side? It took more than a book
to turn public opinion. As far as decent people were concerned, the very
asking for sympathy would alienate it. Suppose Brunton risked the
scandal--sued for libel but not for divorce? Brunton couldn't very well
do that. Still----
Fearfully, clutching the letter and the manuscript, Ronnie stumbled up
the fast-lightening staircase. "Man's Law" seemed like a ton-weight of
social dynamite--of social dynamite he dared not use--in his arms.
7
A night-light still burned on the landing. Still clutching "Man's Law,"
Ronnie stole toward the door of his mother's room. If only he could
speak with her, kneel by her bedside, ask her for counsel! But the door
was locked and he might not go in. Julia Cavendish on whom, lifelong, he
had relied for counsel, could counsel him no more. And fearfully,
doubtfully, dreading lest the weapon she had forged for him should
shiver in pieces if he dared draw it from its scabbard, Julia's son
crept to his dressing-room, and locked the weapon away.
"I'll ask Alie," he thought, "I'll ask Alie what she thinks about it."
But Aliette, when he went in to her, was fast asleep. She lay averted
from the window, her head on her right arm, the tumble of her hair vivid
among the pillows. Every now and then a little tormented moan came from
between her lips.
Listening to that moan, believing--in his ignorance--that Hector Brunton
was the sole cause of it, Ronald Cavendish made oath with himself,
whatever the personal consequences, to use the weapon of his mother's
forging.