The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
The K.C. strode rapidly, his hands behind his back, his head lowered,
down Middle Temple Lane, through Elm Court, through Fig Tree Court, into
the big graveled square of the Walk, and diagonally across the Walk to
his chambers.
Suddenly his head lifted. There, at the steps of his chambers, waiting
for him, obviously waiting for him, stood Cavendish. For the fraction of
a second Brunton, K.C., hesitated in his stride.
Ronnie, watching, saw that hesitation; saw his man come on again, head
low, eyes on the pavement; and knew instinctively that Brunton would
pretend not to recognize him, would try to push past him up the stone
stairway. Resolutely, he planted himself across the stairway; and in
that one second of time before they met face to face, the vision he had
seen in the darkness of overnight flashed through his mind. Then he had
his enemy in front of him, and was saying quietly:
"I'd like a word with you, Brunton."
The K.C. tried to pass; but Ronnie stood his ground.
"I'm afraid I'm too busy to see you to-day, Cavendish." The voice
sounded courteous enough; but a glance, a glance of insane rage, darted
snake-like from behind the gray pupils. Brunton's great jowl twitched;
the veins on his forehead were steel cords.
"The matter is rather urgent." Ronnie, watching the approach of David
Patterson, lowered his tone. "I sha'n't keep you a minute. Unless, of
course," the tone rose, "you prefer that our discussion should take
place in public."
The fire in his blue eyes beat down the snake in Brunton's gray; and,
without another word, Ronnie accompanied his man up the stairway, along
the corridor into his chambers.
David Patterson made as if to follow, but Brunton barked over one
shoulder, "I sha'n't need you," and the two of them were alone.
"And now," began the K.C., standing foursquare in front of his empty
fireplace, "I shall be glad to know the reason of this unwarrantable
intrusion."
"You know the reason as well as I do." The red mist still hung before
Ronnie's eyes. He had forgotten the "legal position": he wanted to
strike Brunton; to strike him across the sneering face. Only the code,
the public school code of restraint, held him back.
"I haven't the slightest idea why you should force your way into my
chambers. Perhaps you will condescend to explain." Brunton, too, felt
the code on him--heavy, like a net hampering his limbs. He wanted to
free himself from the net; wanted to lash out at the man who had stolen
Aliette, to destroy him.
"I came to ask you," Ronnie's lips hardly moved, "how much longer you
intend to delay."
"Delay what?"
"Your petition."
"What petition?"
"Your petition for divorce."
"That's my business." Brunton laughed--a harsh, bitter laugh, low in the
throat.
"And mine."
"I fail to see the connection."
Ronnie's fists clenched. "Apparently you take me for a fool."
Brunton laughed again. "No. Only for a thief."
With an effort, Ronnie thrust his hands into his pockets. "I didn't come
here to bandy words with you. All I want to know is how soon you intend
filing your petition."
"When I choose." Rage mastered Aliette's husband. "And if I don't
choose--never."
Now Ronnie laughed--contemptuously. "You may be able to browbeat a woman
in the box, but you can't browbeat me. I want an answer to my question.
How soon do you intend to file your petition? This isn't only your
business. It's mine--mine and----"
"Kindly keep my wife out of this discussion," snarled Brunton. "Your
question is a damned insult, and your presence here an infernal outrage.
Neither you nor God Almighty can make me file the petition you refer
to."
For a full minute the pair faced each other, tense, wordless,
self-control fighting against instincts, instincts fighting against
self-control. Then Brunton's nerve snapped.
"I hate the very sight of you," he shouted. "Will you get out? Or have I
got to throw you out?"
"Don't make a fool of yourself," said Ronnie; and his voice was ice. "If
it comes to violence I sha'n't be the one who'll get the worst of it."
He took a step forward, and the K.C. recoiled before him.
"Answer my question, Brunton."
"I'll see you to hell first, Cavendish."
And suddenly the red mist thickened to blood-color before Ronnie's eyes.
He wanted to kill Brunton. Killing would be the easiest way to deal with
Brunton--far the easiest way. His hands clenched in his trouser-pockets;
he itched to take his hands out of his pockets, to dash them in those
cold gray eyes, to seize that heavy jowl, to tear the life out of it.
And then, in a flash, his legal mind saw the consequences of that
killing. The blood-red mist vanished. Swiftly his mood changed. He began
to plead, to plead desperately, not for his own sake, but for Aliette's.
He said:
"We're being selfish. It isn't of ourselves we have to think. Think of
_her_ position if you don't take action."
"She should have thought of my position before she ran away with you,"
retorted the other. "I tell you, I'm not going to be hustled; and I'm
not going to be bullied. I'll take action when I choose; and not a
minute before. Nothing that you, nothing that she, nothing that anybody
else can do will persuade me to say one word further on this subject.
Now, will you go?"
And Ronnie went, realizing himself powerless. As he passed through the
doorway he gave one glance at his adversary. His adversary still stood,
like a bull at bay, against the empty grate; but the look in his
adversary's eyes--a look which Ronnie could not fathom--was not the
brave look of the bull; rather was it compound of fear and obstinacy, of
injured pride and of determination for revenge; the look of the weak man
who knows himself in the wrong, yet means to persist in his wrongdoing.
* * * * *
Surely as night follows day in the firmament, so surely does reaction
follow action in imaginative man. Ronald Cavendish's mind, as he crossed
King's Bench Walk after his interview with Hector Brunton, was almost a
blank. Reaction wiped out every detail of that interview. He remembered
only Brunton's words, "I'll take action when _I_ choose."
Twice--the mad purpose of killing Brunton mastering him once more--he
tried to turn back. But his feet carried him on, carried him away from
Brunton, across the Walk to his own chambers. There, at least, was
sanctuary--sanctuary from crime against the herd.
For the herd, even his dazed mind knew, would not countenance his
killing Brunton. Brunton was within his herd-rights, within the law;
while they, he and Aliette, having broken the herd-rights, were outlaws.
Still weak from reaction, he visioned the consequences of that outlawry;
visioned Brunton relentless, Aliette without a friend.
Till gradually, thinking of Aliette, his manhood came back to him. Let
Brunton do his damnedest. Let them be outlaws. Even in their outlawry
they would possess one another. Soon, Brunton would be brought to
reason. Meanwhile, even if he were not soon brought to reason, they, the
outlaws, would find people to stand by them; people like his mother. And
at that, abruptly, Ronnie remembered the letter Aliette had written to
her sister, the promise he had made to Jimmy.
Somehow it needed more courage than he had required in facing Aliette's
husband to lift the telephone and make his appointment with Mollie!
6
Over a snack of luncheon--snatched late and hastily at a little
uncomfortable coffee-shop near the Griffin--Ronnie's usual calm
returned. He realized that he had made a fool of himself in going to see
Brunton; that Jimmy, after all, had been right. Confound Brunton!
Brunton's "dog-in-the-manger" attitude would not endure, could not
endure. Even Carrington had given way in the long run. It was only a
question of patience. Still, he would have to break things very gently
to Aliette's sister.
Betty Masterman was out; and Mollie received her sister's lover alone in
the little red-papered sitting-room which seemed so cozy to the
Philistine mind of James Wilberforce.
"It's nice of you to call," she said perfunctorily. The voice might have
been that of Aliette, of the socially poised Aliette as Ronnie first
remembered her: but the girl's violet eyes were stern with suspicion;
her red lips showed unsmiling, uncompromising.
"Won't you sit down?" she went on.
"Thanks. I sha'n't keep you very long." Always impossibly shy with
women, the man did not know how to begin.
"You've got some message for me," the girl prompted "Some message
from----"
"From your sister."
She seated herself, avoiding his eyes.
"Your sister and I," he began bruskly----
And in those four words--even without the halting explanation which
followed--it seemed to Mollie Fullerford that she knew the whole story.
But she was not going to help him out. Why should she? The
story--carefully though he told it--revolted her. She felt hot; hot and
dirty and ashamed. Hurt, too, as though the healed scars of her bodily
wounds were opening afresh. All the suspicions of the past weeks, all
her still-smoldering resentment that Aliette should have let her return
unwarned to Hector's house, all her balked love for James Wilberforce,
harshened Mollie's judgment. She saw Cavendish no longer a "sober-sides"
but a hypocrite; and so seeing, hated him for his imagined hypocrisy.
"You see," he concluded, "it wasn't Aliette's fault. I mean the running
away in a hurry. You mustn't condemn her. I was to blame for that. I was
to blame, from beginning to end."
"Of course," said that Mollie who had once thought "most women rotters."
"It's always the man who's to blame."
Nevertheless her judgment softened. "After all," she thought, "he isn't
beating about the bush. He's being perfectly straight with me." And she
discovered to her great surprise that it was not their having run away
together which had been hurting her, but their omission to take her into
their confidence.
Ronnie, trying to guess the verdict behind those averted eyes, drew
Aliette's letter from his pocket; and handed it over without another
word. Watching her open the envelope, watching her as she read, he saw
her fingers tremble, her violet eyes suffuse.
"And _have_ you seen Hector?" she asked at last.
"Yes. I saw him this morning."
"What did he say?"
Ronnie hesitated to tell the brutal truth; and the girl repeated her
question, adding:
"Of course he's going to divorce her."
"I'm afraid, Miss Fullerford, that it's not going to be quite so easy as
that."
"You don't mean to say that he isn't going to----?"
"He _says_ he hasn't made up his mind----"
"But"--the girl was stammering now--"that's absolutely caddish. Hector's
a gentleman. Alie's been perfectly straight with him. Besides, even if
he had been badly treated, he couldn't, couldn't possibly----"
And suddenly the full possibilities of Hector's persisting in a refusal
to take action grew visible to the girl's mind. She braced herself to
meet those possibilities; the personal consequences of them. She forced
herself to ask:
"Have you seen Mr. Wilberforce?"
"Yes. Last night."
"Did you ask his advice?"
"Yes."
"What was it?"
"To do nothing. To wait."
At that, thought of her own love affair obsessed the girl's mind. She
visualized James, there, in the very chair which Cavendish occupied.
Remembering a thousand unspoken hesitancies of James, she saw only too
clearly the reason of those hesitancies.
"How long has Mr. Wilberforce known about--about you and my sister?"
"Some weeks, I believe."
"You're sure?" The wounds hurt again, hurt desperately. James ought to
have told her. "He never said a word--to me." She could have borne it
better from James than from Cavendish.