The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
Ronnie, too, had youthened. Gone, or almost gone from his face, was the
semi-monastic seriousness. Constantly, now, smiles played about his full
lips; constantly, his light-blue eyes held the semblance of a twinkle.
One hardly noticed the gray in his hair for the tawn of it. Lean still,
to-day his leanness was that of an athlete in training. Under his
browned skin, when they bathed together, the muscles rippled like a
panther's. As he rose, flanneled, from the table, it seemed almost as
though happiness had added the proverbial cubit to his stature.
He came over to her and kissed the palm of her outstretched hand, her
wrist, the curls at her temple.
"This afternoon," he said, "our honeymoon ends."
She laughed--but there was something of sadness in the laughter. "Man,
don't be immoral. Honeymoons are legal. This hasn't been legal. It's
been----"
"Heaven," he suggested.
"Yes." She took his hand. "All that--and more. But all the same, we're
outcasts. We've got to realize that the world, our world, won't forgive
us for having been in heaven."
Sotto voce, he consigned the world to perdition. Aloud, he answered,
"They'll forgive us all right. As soon as H. B. makes up his mind to do
the right thing. I expect that's what's at the bottom of the mater's
wire."
"Do you?" Intimacy had made this great difference in their relationship:
that they could talk of Hector dispassionately enough. "Do you? I wish I
were sure. He's a peculiar man. Very obstinate and rather cruel. He may
make--difficulties."
"He'll make no difficulties."
Aliette changed the topic. For a week past, the vague possibility of
Hector's abiding by his threat had been frightening her. Once, even, she
had precisely perceived the social ostracism such a course might entail.
But in the sunshine and sea-shine of Chilworth Cove, social ostracism
seemed a very tiny price to pay for happiness so great as theirs.
The first fine madness, the glamor of the grand passion was still on
her, still on them both. Julia's telegram, which--cycle-forwarded across
eight miles of common-land from Chilton Junction--threw the tiny port
into a state of seething curiosity, excited its recipients hardly at
all. Selfish with the sublime selfishness of mating-time, they regarded
the threatened irruption of a mundane personality into paradise as the
merest episode.
Nevertheless, as she watched the innkeeper's pony-cart, Ronnie at its
reins, rattle away between the pink-washed cottages, slow to a walk up
the white road, and disappear among the heathery ridges at sky-line,
Aliette grew conscious of a deep abiding joy that--whatever else of harm
she might bring into her lover's life--at least she had not separated
him from his mother.
And all morning, all afternoon, busied with Caroline Staley in
preparation for their guest, that joy warded every apprehension from her
mind.
2
But in the heart of Ronald Cavendish, setting out alone on his
eight-mile journey for the station, was no joy. To him, it seemed as
though he were definitely abandoning happiness, definitely leaving it
behind. Mentally and physically obsessed with Aliette, he could
anticipate no pleasure in again seeing his mother. Indeed, he could
hardly visualize his mother at all.
Gradually, though, as the brown pony ambled its uneager way along the
white and empty track among the heather, the image of Julia's face, the
sound of Julia's voice came back to him; and he, too, knew joy at the
prospect of reconciliation.
Looking back on their quarrel, it appeared to him that he had been
rather brutal. "After all," he thought, "one could hardly have expected
her to understand. I'm glad Alie insisted on my writing that letter. I
wonder if the mater'll be looking well. I hope she'll like Alie. She's
sure to like Alie."
Then, from thinking of his mother and the woman he loved, he glided into
thought of the world in which they must all three live till Brunton's
decree had been obtained and made absolute. It would be--he mused--a bit
difficult, rather a rough time.
Aliette's "funny idea" that Brunton might try "the dog-in-the-manger
trick," Aliette's lover dismissed--much in the way that Jimmy
Wilberforce had dismissed it--as "not on the cards." All the same, the
lawyer in him did begin to find it curious that Brunton's solicitors
should have dilly-dallied so long in communicating through Benjamin
Bunce that the citations were ready for service.
"The mater's sure to have some news," he thought; and by the time his
pony topped the ridge from which one sees, three miles away at the foot
of the slope, the red roofs and shining rails of Chilton Junction, he
felt quite excited about her arrival.
Always strong in the every-day relationship of man to man, but
never--until now--decisive in his dealings with woman, Ronnie knew
himself rather anxious for Julia's advice. Socially, the period between
divorce and remarriage must have many drawbacks. "The mater's" guidance,
at such a time, might be most useful.
Of the heart-searchings, of the contest between her love and her
beliefs, which even now (as the slow train jolted her, maidless,
uncomfortable, in her crowded first-class compartment, out of Andover)
still nagged at the intellect of Julia Cavendish, her son had never an
inkling. From his point of view, their quarrel--for his share in which
he had already apologized by letter--appeared infinitely more important
than "the mater's silly prejudice about divorce." Most important, of
course, would be "how the mater would hit it off with Aliette."
Ronnie drove on till he made the Chilton Arms; and there, stabling his
pony, ordered himself an early luncheon.
The luncheon--solitary cold beef and lukewarm beer--made him realize
that it was more than six weeks since he had mealed alone; and from that
realization thought traveled--almost automatically--to his rooms in
Jermyn Street, to Pump Court, to the past which had been London and the
future which must still be London. Smoking, he began to consider the
various problems of return.
Where, how, and on what were he and Aliette to live?
Of Aliette's finances, beyond one confided fact that "she had never
taken an allowance from "H.," her lover knew nothing whatever. She
might, for all he cared, possess five hundred a year or ten thousand.
But his own professional income, excluding the four hundred a year from
his mother, barely touched the former figure; and since he was by no
means the kind of creature who could consent to live on a woman's money,
however desperately he might be in love with her, the housing problem
alone--Moses Moffatt, officially, sheltered only bachelors--would need
more than a little solving.
Consideration of this, and other mundane factors in their somewhat
bizarre situation, fretted Ronnie's mind. He could not help feeling, as
he drove slowly to the station, how much wiser it would have been if he
and Alie had talked these things over before he started. His mother, who
liked practical women, might not understand that Alie and he had been
too madly happy to bother about every-day affairs. "But by Jove!" he
said to himself; "by Jove, we _have_ been happy."
He hitched the brown pony to the railings and strode through the
waiting-room. That afternoon Chilton Junction seemed less of a junction
than ever. A few rustics, a few milk-cans, two porters, and the
miniature of a bookstall occupied its "down" platform; its "up" showed
as a stretch of deserted gravel, from either end of which the hot rails
ran straight into pasture.
Looking Londonward along those narrowing rails, remembering how, six
weeks since, they had carried him into paradise, Ronald Cavendish
understood--for the merest fraction of a second--his mother's sacrifice.
"Damn decent of the old lady to come down," he thought, seeing, still
far away across the pastures, the leisured smoke-plume of her train.
3
Julia Cavendish--having ascertained from her latest vis-à-vis, a burly
cattle-dealer in brown leggings and a black bowler hat, that her journey
at last neared its destination--closed the novel she had been pretending
to read, straightened her hat, and prepared to meet both culprits with
stern Victorian condescension.
That Aliette would not accompany Ronnie to the station did not cross his
mother's mind. All the way down from Waterloo she had been apprehensive,
doubtful of her own rectitude, conscious of a growing antagonism toward
"that woman." "That woman," of course, would be furious at the
interruption of her amour.
Even the prospect of seeing Ronnie once more could not lighten the cloud
of jealousy and self-distrust which Julia felt hovering--like evil
birds--about her head. Viewed in retrospect, the five hours of
journeying were a nightmare. Viewed prospectively, arrival would be the
ugliest of awakenings. She felt ill; ill and old and out-of-date.
But the first glimpse of her son sent all Julia's evil birds flying. As
the train steamed in, she saw him craning his eyes at its windows; saw
that he was alone, that he was sun-bronzed, flanneled like a schoolboy.
Her heart thumped--painfully, joyfully--at the knowledge that he had
espied her, that he was loping along after her carriage, just as she
remembered him loping along the platform at Winchester, in his
cricket-flannels, twenty years ago. Then the train stopped; and he swung
the carriage door open, handed her out.
"My luggage----" began Julia; but got no further with the sentence;
because Ronnie, her Ronnie, who had never, even as a boy, caressed his
mother in public, just put an arm round her shoulders and, kissing her,
whispered: "By jingo, mater, it is ripping to see you."
A porter got her trunk and her handbag out of the train. Another porter
put them into the pony-cart. Julia, for once in her life, forgot to
thank them. Tears, tears she dared not shed, twitched her wrinkled
eyelids; her mouth had dried up; her thin knees tottered. She could only
cling, cling with all the strength of one weak arm, to Ronnie. He was
her son, her only son--and she, in her stupid pride, had thought to let
prejudice come between them. Her jealousy of "that woman" disappeared.
The happiness, the health, the rejuvenation of Ronnie were sufficient
justification, in her eyes, for Aliette. No worthless woman could have
put those sunny words into her boy's mouth, that sun-bronze on his
cheeks!
Ronnie, too, was moved almost to tears. The first sight of his mother,
reacting on the emotions of the past weeks, struck him to consciousness
of his love for her. She needed his protection more than ever before.
She looked so frail, so suffering. She had suffered--because of him,
because of Aliette. His heart went out to both women--in pity, in
self-condemnation.
He helped her into the trap (it no longer surprised her to find they
were alone) and said: "I'm afraid it's not very comfortable. That
cushion's for your back. We'll have some tea at the Arms before we
start."
She managed to answer: "Yes, dear. I think I would like some tea." To
herself she said: "I wonder which of them thought about giving me tea,
about bringing this cushion."
Ronnie clambered up; took the reins; and tipped the porters. In silence,
they drove to the inn.
There the hot tea and the hot buttered toast, which he coaxed her to
eat, brought back a little of Julia's courage; but the waitress,
popping--eager-faced at sight of strangers--in and out of the
coffee-room, made free speech impossible. Perforce they confined
conversation to generalities. He, she said, "looked extraordinarily
well." She, he said, "looked the least bit tired." The lunch on the
train, she told him, had been "execrable." The drive to the Cove, he