The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
his last card,--"I won't go back on my words. I'll admit the justice of
everything you've said. You shall have your freedom." Her eyes lit; and
his suspicion became certainty. "I'll arrange everything. There need be
very little scandal; only the usual fake--a suit for restitution of your
conjugal rights. You'll get an order of the court, an order for me to
return to you. You needn't worry, I sha'n't comply with it. After
that----"
He broke off, watching her. Her face had softened, renewed its coloring.
Yet she was nervous. She fidgeted ever so slightly, first on one
white-shod foot, than on the other.
"But before I consent, there's one condition I must make; one question I
must ask you." His voice grew stern, became the voice of the K.C.
"Before I take any steps in this matter, I must have your assurance,
your definite assurance, that you are not asking for your freedom with a
view--with a view"--he hesitated--"to marrying any one else."
The blood ebbed from Aliette's cheeks: it seemed to her that her heart
had stopped beating. This was the test! One downright lie--and she might
win to freedom. That issue she saw clearly. But she saw another
issue--the issue between herself and Ronnie. Even though Ronnie himself
had suggested that she should divorce Hector, his suggestion--she
knew--had implied telling Hector the truth. Surely Ronnie would be the
first to reject freedom won at such a price.
And, "I've got to play the game," cried the soul of Aliette; "otherwise,
even my love for Ronnie becomes a degradation." Yet, still, instinct
cried in her for freedom.
The decisive seconds lengthened; lengthened; stretched, taut as
piano-wire, into the eternities. The scene imprinted itself, sharper
than sharpest snapshot, on unfading memory. Always, burnt into memory,
would remain Hector, his sandy hair awry, his thin lips parted under the
bulbous nose, his jowl set; would remain herself, torture-pale on the
rack of indetermination; would remain the light white room, blazing with
electrics, the stripes of its wall-paper upright as prison bars. No
freedom from that prison--save at the price of truth!
But at last, truth spoke.
"I cannot give you that assurance, Hector," said Hector's wife.
About her, the snapshotted scene trembled, shivered and broke to
whirling fragments. She was conscious of Hector's hands, itching to take
her by the throat, of Hector's feet, of the red fury in Hector's eyes.
His hands itched to strike her. If he struck, she would strike
back--madly, through those whirling fragments.
But Brunton could not strike; he could not even speak. The insanity of
balked desire dumbed his mouth as it numbed his limbs. Nature, fighting
like a wild beast, wrenched at the cage of his self-control. He could
hear nature wrenching ape-like at his ribs, howling to him: "Kill! Kill
both! Kill both the man and the woman!" The blood-lust and the sex-lust
were knives in his loins.
"You!" he stammered. "You, you----" Then his hands ceased their itching,
and the red in his eyes flickered out, smoldering to gray.
* * * * *
She heard his great feet go creaking across the room, creaking through
the doorway, creaking up the staircase. She heard the slam of an
upstairs door. She heard herself whisper to the wide-eyed distraught
woman who peered out from the mirror over the mantelpiece: "That leaves
only one way--only one way to freedom."
CHAPTER X
1
The "grand passion" (it is unfortunate that no single word in the
English language exactly pictures that emotional process) was a little
beyond Caroline Staley's philosophy.
Yet within twelve hours of Aliette's interview with Hector, even
Caroline Staley realized that "Miss Aliette was about through with that
husband of hers." Lennard and the rest of the staff--though Caroline
refused to gossip--were also aware, basement-wise, of the connubial
position. In fact, at Lancaster Gate, only Mollie remained in ignorance.
For, at the moment, Mollie Fullerford was far too absorbed to bother
herself overlong about either sister or brother-in-law; a sublime
selfishness held her aloof from both.
The girl's mind was concentrated on Jimmy. It had become a point of
honor with her not to think of anybody except Jimmy. Jimmy--for his own
sake--must be neither "fascinated" nor "put off." He must be given his
exact measure of attraction as of repulsion, his exact chance of finding
out her faults as well as her virtues. Then, when he had definitely
fallen in or out of love with the real her--_she_ would decide exactly
how much she could love the real him. "Marriage," the girl said to
herself, "is a pretty serious business. Jimmy and I mustn't make any
mistake about it."
Mollie Fullerford, you see, was of the modern young, who are trying,
vainly, to avoid the troubles of their romantic and unreasoning
elders--such troubles, for instance, as Hector's.
Hector, reticent always, confided his troubles to nobody. He spent the
first twelve hours after the quarrel in kicking himself for a fool and a
savage who had nearly thrashed his wife; the next twelve in cursing
himself for a fool and a softy who ought to have thrashed his wife--and
the rest of the week fighting against the impulse to apologize.
Meanwhile he was a stranger in his own house; excluded, as surely as
though he had been a servant under notice, from domestic conversation.
His wife had taken to breakfasting in bed (the rattle of the tray
infuriated him every morning), and refused to get up till he had left
the house: he, retorting in the only way open to him, dined at his
clubs. On the one occasion when they did meet, her manners were beyond
criticism--and her unattainable beauty a positive bar to any plans for
sex-consolation.
As a matter of psychological fact, both husband and wife were in a
momentary state of complete sex-revulsion. Hector, thwarted of his one
desire, seeing Aliette unobtainable as the only woman in the world; and
Aliette--love's dream obscured by thought of love's material
consequences--regarding herself, for the nonce, as the mere quarry of
two males, a quarry anxious only to escape both pursuers.
Twice, at least, Aliette's thoughts renounced womanhood completely. The
physical Hector, the Hector of the writhing lips, she hated; but when
her yearning for the physical Ronnie grew so desperately acute that she
had to rush out of the library lest she should telephone to him; when
every post which brought no letter seemed the last bodily hurt she could
endure: then, looking back on her lost virginity of temperament, she
could be amazingly sorry for, amazingly grateful to the abstemious
Hector of the last three years.
Yet all the time, she knew subconsciously that she loved Ronnie; that,
without him, life was one mazed loneliness.
Aliette, like Hector, kept her own counsel. Mary O'Riordan, to whom--as
in duty bound--she confided a hint of her distress, pumped her for full
confession, but pumped in vain. Only Ponto, the huge harlequin Dane with
the magpie coat and the princely manners, shared her mazed loneliness.
She used to fetch the dog, every after-lunch-time, from the garage in
Westbourne Street where he had his abode; and wander with him by the
hour together through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Ponto, unlike
her other pursuers, desired nothing but an occasional caress. He would
pad and pad after her, close to heel, disdainful of all distractions,
his eyes on the hem of her skirt, his stern slapping only the mildest
disapproval of an occasional fly. And when she sat her down to meditate,
the beast--as though conscious of the fret in his mistress--would
content affection with the rare up-thrust of an enormous consolatory
paw.
Vaguely during that week Ponto's mistress conceived the scheme of
sending to Moor Park for Miracle, of condescending to ride in the Row.
Dumb animals, of a sudden, seemed so much wiser, so much kinder than
men. But to ride in the Row would make one conspicuous, and instinct
warned her that the less conspicuous she made herself during the season,
the easier things might be--in the event of a social crash.
2
One other woman in London--during the days which followed Aliette's
definite break with Hector--was meditating the probabilities of a social
crash.
"Julia," said Dot Fancourt, dropping in to lunch on Friday, "you're not
looking so well. You ought to see Baynet again. You've nothing on your
mind, have you?"
"My dear Dot," retorted the novelist, smiling, "I'm quite well, and I
have nothing on what you are pleased to call my mind--except the
vulgarity of your methods in booming my divorce article."
But after Dot had gone back to his office, Julia Cavendish's face lost
its smile.
Surveyed in cool retrospect, her momentary thought-panic in Hyde Park
appeared a mere firework of the literary imagination. Nevertheless, ever
since Sunday, when she had tried, over dinner, to let him inkle her
knowledge, to warn him, she had been reproaching herself about Ronnie.
Other mothers--her own sister Clementina among them--did not apparently
find it at all difficult to discuss sex matters with their sons. Yet
she, the celebrated psychologist, had found it impossible.
"If only I could have been open with him," she thought, "if only I could
have said: 'I'm afraid that you've fallen in love with that charming
Mrs. Brunton. You won't let it go too far--will you? Women's heads are
so easily turned.'"
She would not, of course, have said more than that. Ronnie was so
sensible, so straight and clean, that he would have needed no further
warning. Ronnie--her Ronnie--did not in the least resemble the heroes of
her novels, the passionate men with cleft chins who occasionally counted
the world well lost for love. Ronnie was the very spit of his father,
the Oxford don.
Still even dons were human. And Ronnie, unwarned, might have lost his
head.
As for the woman--women, according to Julia Cavendish, could always fall
prey to the sentimental impulse. If only a man were sufficiently ardent
the entire sex yielded to him. Why should this Mrs. Brunton be the
exception? Ronnie--her Ronnie--must be terribly attractive.
Therefore----
And quite suddenly, Julia panicked again. Her literary imagination saw
the worst; Aliette in Ronnie's arms, Ronnie in the divorce court. Her
heart went cold at the imaginary prospect. The mother, the religious
woman, and the Victorian in her were alike appalled.
Jealousy spread a yellow jaundice film over her intellect. Seen through
that film, the "charming Mrs. Brunton" became a harpy, an over-dressed,
over-scented, over-manicured harpy, her unguented claws sharp for an
innocent boy.
Whereupon Julia Cavendish--turning, as most literary people in a crisis,
to her pen--began the composition of a letter which should convey,
tactfully, of course, the picture of the harpy to the mind of the boy.
But the letter, completed, read so much more like a piece of fiction
than a statement of fact, that she tore it up; and contented herself
with the usual note ordering him to dinner on Saturday.
3
The note itself contained nothing to alarm Ronnie; and yet, dressing to
obey its commands in his severe mannish bedroom, he felt nervous about
the coming interview. For five days now he had been on edge; sleepless,
unable to concentrate thought.
Every night he had expected that Aliette would telephone; every morning,
every evening, he had expected a letter from her. It never dawned on his
mind that she should be equally on edge, equally expectant. Since she
had admitted her love, asking only that he should not hurry her,