The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton

Various belated riders, the wily parson, the panting colonel, and the chagrined politician among them, came up and began congratulating. Sandwich-boxes were produced, flasks, cigarettes. Sir Siegfried looked at his watch; and started in to consider what degree of exaggeration might be warranted in subsequent reports of their day. It was nearly half-past two o'clock--call it three. They had begun to draw Parson's Wood at about one--make it half-past twelve. It is to be feared that the hour's run, by the time it was reported to Sir Siegfried's connubial fireside, had suffered considerable extension. But neither Aliette nor Ronnie, as they walked their horses side by side into Key Hatch village (Gorse Hill is twelve miles from kennels, and the colonel, well satisfied with his kill, had ordered the pack home), spoke of the run. Indeed, they hardly spoke at all. And when she said good-by to him at the open posting-doorways of the Bull, neither remembered to ask the other where or whether they should meet again. Which forgetfulness, thought Aliette as she turned Miracle's head for home, was the strangest part of a strangely joyous day. But Ronald Cavendish, watching her mounted figure disappear down the village street, thought only of their ride together. CHAPTER II 1 "You can't possibly want to brush it any more, Caroline." Aliette's maid, a square-hipped, square-shouldered, square-faced woman who had been in service with the Fullerford family ever since Judge Fullerford came back from Trinidad, laid the ivory-backed hair-brushes on the dressing-table, and began to twine the vivid coils round the small head. There is neither gas nor electric light at Moor Park. In the slanted oval of the old-fashioned mirror, Aliette could only see, either side of her rather serious face, two primrose points of candle-flame. The long low bedroom behind her--furnished in mid-Victorian mahogany, Morris-papered with tiny roses on an exiguous trellis--was almost in darkness, darkness against which the primrose candle-glow showed Aliette's full beauty. You saw her now--bathed after hunting, peacock-blue kimono round her dimpled shoulders--as a creature of supreme health. Her arms were smooth, lustrous; her wrists rounded; her hands small, a little broad in the palm--resolute strong hands for all their smallness. Her neck was smooth, full, lustrous as her arms; her bosoms low and firm; her feet fine; her legs, under their black silk stockings, slim-ankled and smooth-muscled--almost classic in their perfection. Caroline Staley's mistress hardly moved while Caroline Staley completed the simple hair-dressing. Her deliberate mind was busy with the past day. She relived it--moment by moment,--loving it. The primeval instinct which had momentarily and subconsciously troubled her was asleep again, lulled to civilized quiescence by the air and the exercise. She remembered her pursuer in the field only as a pleasant companionable figure against the background of March sunlight and English countryside. Nevertheless, she found herself wishing, vaguely, that he were coming to dinner that night. It would be a dullish dinner. Her husband had arrived by the afternoon train, bringing the usual bagful of legal papers to assimilate over the week-end, and her sister Mollie. Mollie and Hector always got on well with each other. She had found them taking tea together when she arrived home; and left them alone after a brief greeting. The Rev. Adrian was to be there, with his bishop's daughter. "Billy" would want to know all about the day's run. "Dear Billy!" Hector Brunton's wife inspected her maid's handiwork, and rose to be frocked. Mollie came in without knocking; lit another candle or so, and helped with a hook or two. "Nice frock," decided Mollie Fullerford, surveying Aliette's black lace and silver tissue. Her voice resembled Aliette's; but there resemblance ended. The girl stood half a head taller than the woman. She had violet eyes, a broadish brow, and dark, almost black hair, bobbed during convalescence. Her coloring was white in comparison with Aliette's cream; but two patches of natural bloom glowed in her cheeks. She wore a panniered dress of blue and mauve shot taffeta, wide over the hips, tight round the ankles, short-sleeved, neck cut high to conceal one of her wound-scars. Her arms, hands, and feet, well-shaped as her sister's, looked more powerful. Altogether rather a hefty, healthy, happy young creature--the sort of creature a decent hefty young man would single out at a dance. "No nicer than yours," retorted Aliette, slipping her rings on her fingers, and adjusting the short single string of pearls round her throat. A knuckle rapped the door-panels; a loudish voice asked: "May I come in, dear?" "Yes. I'm just ready." Hector entered--a big, over-big man, the glazed shirt-front already bulging out of his black waistcoat. The K.C., shorn of legal wig and trappings, did not look very dignified; nevertheless, he gave an impression of force. The sandy hair was scant on his wide mottled forehead; his eyes were a cold gray; his nose tended to the bulbous. The clean-shaven lips appeared thin and a trifle cruel; his jowl was heavy--almost the jowl of a mastiff. He had the hands of a gentleman, the feet of a clodhopper. "Is it time for dinner?" asked the wife. The husband drew from his waistcoat pocket a heavy gold watch; consulted the hands of it; and admitted the accuracy of her suggestion. "Then we'd better be going down," decided Aliette. 2 The dining-room at Moor Park possesses, or is possessed by, the largest suite of mid-Victorian mahogany ever fashioned. The sideboard, gleaming always with massive silver, occupies the entire east end of the apartment, barely leaving room for a white-paneled Adams door. Either side of the marble mantelpiece stand two colossal serving-tables. Gigantic horsehair-seated armchairs, ranged between the long red-curtained windows, spill a brood of slightly less gigantic offspring round the mastodontic board. The mulligatawny and the cod with oyster-sauce had already been served by the two cap-and-aproned wenches, whom the rear-admiral declared to be "a damned sight better than any heavy-handed son of a gun who smoked a fellow's cigars, drank his port, and did as little work as the old bumboat-woman of Portsmouth." Rear-Admiral Billy was enjoying himself. His jovial eyes, a little red-rimmed with age under the heavy brown thatch of his hair, kept glancing round at "his two colts and their fillies" (one is, alas! forced to modify a good many of the admiral's pet expressions) and at that "jolly little piece in the No. 5 rig," Aliette's sister. His trim beard, grayed only at the extremities, kept wagging accompaniment to Aliette's account of the run; the course of which his hairy-backed hands were trying to trace, in bread and salt, on the table-cloth. "'Spose you funked as usual, Adrian," rumbled the old man across the enormous table. "God knows what I've ever done to deserve a son in the church." The Rev. Adrian, in clerical evening dress, only laughed at his father's criticism; but the Rev. Adrian's Margery fired up in defense of her spouse. "Adrian's seen more active service than most men of his cloth," began the little aquiline, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and darkly determined woman, who dressed (when natural circumstances permitted her--as they did not at the moment) with the severe precision of unadorned royalty. Aliette continued her low-voiced description of the day's run; Hector tried explaining to an attentive Mollie the exact difference between a disbarred barrister and a solicitor who has been struck off the rolls; the cap-and-aproned wenches set an enormous joint of mutton before the host, who always insisted on carving with his own hands; and dinner proceeded. To Hector Brunton's wife the dullish meal was less unpleasant than her anticipation of it. She liked her father-in-law--though his occasional coarseness always jarred her sensitive mind. She appreciated her sister's week-end visit; and anticipated with some pleasure the family talk which would precede their going to bed. But above all, she liked being away from the constraining intimacy of her home with Hector. Recently Hector had been growing more and more difficult to deny. She caught him looking at her now, sideways across the vast white of the table-cloth. Vaguely she felt sorry for him. His cold eyes almost held an appeal. "Look round," they seemed to be saying, "it isn't so bad; really it isn't so bad, this little family party. Can't we make it up, you and I?" "Poor Hector!" she thought. "He's a very simple person. He doesn't understand"; and checked thought, not abruptly, but with the same quiet firmness she had applied to Miracle that morning. For Aliette never posed, even to herself. She was the very antithesis of the usual misunderstood married woman; so far, the mere thought of a compensating lover had never entered her head. All that happened afterward--and sometimes, looking back, it seems to her as though it all began from that chance remark of Adrian's--happened of its own volition. At the moment Adrian spoke she was just an ordinary woman, who had married an ordinary man in the expectation of a home and children, found him out in various infidelities, and decided--after due thought--that she could no longer pay his physical price for the dwindling possibility of motherhood. "We had young Cavendish out with us to-day," said the parson. "Julia Cavendish's son. You know him, I suppose, Hector?" "Yes. Clever fellow. No orator, but very sound on his law. He's doing junior to me in the Ellerson case. Rather an interesting case----" "He and Aliette gave us all a lead." "Rides well, does he?" "Rather. A fine horseman. Handsome looking chap, too." The parson glanced at his sister-in-law, not maliciously, yet with a certain puzzlement. Listening with half an ear to her description of the run, he had wondered why she made no mention of the stranger. "Didn't you think so, Aliette?" he went on. "I can't say I noticed his looks. He certainly rides well." The wallflower-brown eyes betrayed no startle, the pale, cream-tinged cheeks did not blush. Nevertheless, deep down in the inmost recesses of her nature, Aliette felt herself startle, not guiltily, but in wonderment at her inexplicable omission. What possible reason could there be for not mentioning the man? Adrian continued to discuss Ronnie, and Ronnie's mother, and Maurice Cavendish, whom he had encountered years since at Oxford. "His son's rather like him; but of course he's got the Wixton chin," said Adrian. All the time Adrian talked, Aliette was asking herself questions. Why hadn't she even mentioned the man's name? Why? Why? Why? Harking back to her conversation, she seemed to have made the omission deliberately. She tried to laugh herself out of the absurd mood; to join in the conversation. Deliberate? Ridiculous! She just hadn't thought about him. And yet, subconsciously, the man's face rose up before her, serious and strangely vivid against the glow of the table-candles. She could almost hear his voice, "I'll give you a lead over, Mrs. Brunton." 3 "Do you know, Alie, I've sometimes thought that you and Hector don't get on very well together." Mollie, in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, sat on the edge of her sister's bed. Margery Brunton, inclining to the aggressive about her forthcoming infant, departed early; and the two Fullerfords had been talking for nearly an hour, quite unsentimentally, about frocks,