The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
parents, books, a theater or so.
"What makes you say that?" Aliette, shoulder-deep in bedclothes, looked
up from her pillow.
"Oh, I don't know." The girl blushed; and there fell a moment's awkward
silence, during which it flashed through Aliette's sleepy mind that
perhaps Hector had been confiding their matrimonial differences to his
sister-in-law. But she dismissed the thought: Hector's reticence, even
about small matters, was proverbial in the family. Besides, the reason
for Mollie's question was sufficiently obvious.
"We get on as well as most married people, I expect," protested Hector
Brunton's wife.
"I'm afraid I'm a terrible sentimentalist," went on Mollie. "Sometimes,"
she blushed again, "I think I'm even worse than that. I've never met a
man I liked well enough to marry. Though, of course, I've let two or
three men make love to me. It's rather nice to feel that a man's fond of
you." She hesitated, and broke off--Aliette being hardly the kind of
sister to whom one confided one's love-affairs.
"Most women are awful rotters," said the girl, after a long pause.
Aliette restrained the retort at her lips; and Mollie's naïve
revelations continued. "Most men aren't. They've got a higher sense of
honor than we have. I found that out while I was nursing. Reading the
women's letters to fellows who'd been gas-blinded. There was one, I
remember, who wanted a divorce. She wrote: 'I'm afraid I haven't been
playing the game while you've been away.' And she didn't seem a bit
ashamed of herself."
"Did you read him the letter?" interrupted Aliette.
"No. But I wrote to the woman; and she wrote back, thanking me.
_Thanking me!_" Mollie's voice rose. "She'd decided that 'after all, and
especially as he was so bad, it would be better not to tell him. Would I
burn her silly letter?' I think that's _beastly_." Her violet eyes
kindled. "I'm not a prig. I don't believe divorce is wrong. But I do
consider it dirty, when a woman or a man do--that sort of thing."
Aliette's face, smooth on its pillows between braided coils, gave no
hint of the thoughts in her mind. Vaguely she resented an unmarried
girl, or, in fact, any woman discussing "that sort of thing"; but her
resentment, she knew, would only make the younger generation laugh. The
younger generation of girls, as represented by Mollie, did not believe
in squeamishness. Perhaps--Aliette seemed to remember that Julia
Cavendish had touched on the subject in her last novel--the younger
generation were no less virtuous because they faced facts instead of
hiding their heads, ostrich-like, in the sands of innocence.
"I don't see," Mollie's decided voice closed the conversation, "why
being in love should prevent one from playing the game."
She rose, gathered her dressing-gown round her, asked if she should blow
out the candle, did so, and made for the door.
"By the way," said the figure silhouetted against the glow of the
corridor-lamp, "I suppose there's a service at Key Hatch to-morrow
afternoon. If there is, let's go. It's such a ripping little church; and
I can't bear being preached to by Adrian."
"If you like, dear," replied an unguarded Aliette. But when the door
closed and she lay alone in darkness, her mind reverted to its problem,
to that peculiar omission of Ronald Cavendish's name.
4
Morning broke to gusts of rain. Hector locked himself in the library;
the admiral inspected his greenhouses; Mollie refused to get up; and
Aliette wrote letters.
Somehow, the letters took a long while to write. She found herself, pen
in raised hand, dreaming. In her day-dreams happiness and
dissatisfaction mingled incoherently, as the voices of two people heard
through a wall. She could not catch the words of the voices, only the
tones of them: one low-laughing, the other querulous. For the first time
since girlhood--and even in girlhood she had been deliberate--deliberate
thought abandoned her. She felt content that her mind should drift idly
through an idle day. Only when Mollie--appearing brogued and tweeded for
luncheon--reminded her of the agreed church-going, did her brain resume
its normal function.
"In all probability I shall see Ronald Cavendish"--the thought came
startlingly as Aliette watched Hector at work on the inevitable roast
beef and Yorkshire pudding of the admiral's Sabbath. "I hope I shall see
Ronald Cavendish"--so distinct were the words that they might have been
actually spoken.
"It's clearing up," announced her father-in-law. "You'll have a jolly
walk. Ought to start about half-past three. Better have some tea at the
Bull. Service is at half-past five."
"I don't think I'll go," said Aliette. "I've got rather a headache."
"Do your headache good," rumbled the admiral.
She pulled herself together. Why shouldn't she go to Key Hatch; why
shouldn't she meet Ronald Cavendish? Not, of course, that she really
_wanted_ to meet Ronald Cavendish. . . .
5
"I wonder why on earth I invented that headache," thought Aliette, as
she and Mollie tramped down the drive. Hector had returned to work in
the library; he waved them au revoir from the desk by the window.
A fantasy came to her: "I shall never see Hector again." She said to
herself: "I hope _he_ hasn't gone back to town." She said to herself:
"Aliette, don't be an absolute idiot."
For, after all, could anything be more idiotic than that a woman of
nearly thirty--and that woman Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Hector Brunton, wife of
Hector Brunton, K.C.--should feel like--like a schoolgirl going to meet
her first choir-boy?
And yet, instinctively, Aliette knew herself somehow caught, somehow
entangled. No escape from that knowledge! Ridiculous or not, this
stranger she was going to meet--of course they _would_ meet him; he
couldn't have gone back to town--interested her. Interested her
enormously. She saw him again in the eyes of her mind, his serious face,
his blue eyes, his hair--such curious hair, goldy-gray as though
bleached by the tropics,--all the while she swung, listening to Mollie's
chatter, along the familiar lanes.
A low sun, emerging from between gold-edged clouds, shone on them
walking. The hedges dripped cool sparkles. Cow-parsley pushed its
feathery green through the tangled grass of the ditches. They topped the
rise by Moor Farm, and saw Key Hatch below them. It lay in a cup of the
valley, gray and brown and slate-blue through leafless branches against
the concave jade of pasture-land. Half a mile on, midway between them
and the village, two figures strolled up-hill.
Social sense, banishing idiotic fantasies, reasserted itself in Hector
Brunton's wife; and, five minutes later, the four figures met.
"How do you do, Mrs. Brunton?"
"How do you do, Mr. Cavendish?"
Ronnie introduced his friend; Aliette introduced them both to Mollie.
The friend, James Wilberforce, carried his five feet eleven well. He had
broad shoulders and a rather clever face, aquiline of nose, brown-eyed,
high cheek-boned, full-lipped under a "toothbrushed" mustache. His
mustache and his hair only just escaped being carroty. His voice carried
a faint suggestion of superciliousness.
"An overworked solicitor," he told them with a humorous twinkle of his
brown eyes, "taking a day off in the country." He was "charmed" to meet
Mrs. Brunton. He had had the pleasure of knowing her husband for some
years. "A great man."
Mollie liked the way he spoke. She thought him much more agreeable than
Mr. Cavendish, who appeared to her rather a sobersides--almost ill at
ease, in fact.
"We were just having a stroll before tea," announced Wilberforce, after
about five minutes of uninspired conversation.
"And we are going to have tea at the Bull before church," retorted the
girl. "So we'd better all have tea together." She marched Wilberforce
off down the hill.
Her sister and Cavendish followed slowly. Now that they had actually
met, Aliette felt thoroughly ashamed of the mental fuss she had made
about him. He was a perfectly ordinary man, who happened to have given
her a lead over Parson's Brook. Rather a nice man, of course. She liked
the way he wore his clothes, his assumption that she did not require him
to chatter. He walked--she noticed in the gathering twilight--almost as
well as he rode, easily from the hips.
"You've let your pipe out," she told him.
He stopped to rekindle it; and she saw that his hand trembled ever so
slightly in the glow of the match. "Nervy," she thought. She did not
divine that the long scholarly fingers trembled because the man had
scarcely slept for overmuch thinking of the woman at his side; that he
had been saying to himself, ever since he espied her on the brow of the
hill, "Don't be a fool. Don't be a _damn_ fool. She's Hector Brunton's
wife."
That afternoon her sheer physical beauty thrilled him like fine poetry.
He had no idea how she was dressed. Her clothes seemed part of her--deep
wallflower brown, the color of her eyes. He wanted to acknowledge her
beauty, to say: "You're wonderful; too wonderful for any man's sight."
Actually, he opined that they had had a jolly run, and hoped he'd get
another day with the Mid-Oxfordshire some time or other.
On horseback he could thrust with the best of them, this long,
loose-limbed young man with the serious face above the Wixton chin; but
he was no thruster after women. Too much the poet for that--one of those
many dumb poets who have no desire to flaunt their emotions in cold
print.
The four came down the hill, Mollie and Wilberforce still leading, round
a whitewashed farmhouse, along a strip of wet road whereon a few
bowler-hatted chawbacons strolled arm-in-arm with their red-cheeked,
silent Dollies, under leafless elm branches, into the main--and
only--street of Key Hatch.
England's Sabbath brooded obviously over stone cottages, picturesquely
inefficient, flower-pots blocking their tiny windows, doors closed.
Already, here and there behind the flower-pots, an extravagant light
twinkled. Half-way down the street, its bow-windows inhospitably
blinded, stood the Bull, relic of posting-days, whose rusty signboard
had so far failed to attract the motorist. At street-end, dark against
the cold cloud-banks of declining day, loomed the square tower of Key
Hatch Church.
Mollie and Wilberforce waited at the side door of the inn till the
others joined them.
"You won't mind having tea in my sitting-room. I'm afraid there isn't a
fire anywhere else," said Cavendish; and led his three guests down a
narrow corridor--rigid fish in glass cases and an iron hatstand its only
decorations--into a parlor where firelight danced invitingly.
Wilberforce lit the lamp, revealing a five-legged tea-table set for two,
a hard sofa, three antimacassared chairs, a stuffed barn-owl between
Britannia-ware candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the usual litter of
photographs in sea-shell frames without which no English inn considers
itself furnished.
Cavendish jerked the bell-tassel; Mrs. Wiggins, a pleasant-featured
young woman already attired for church-going, bustled in with the brown
teapot; nearly courtesied to Aliette; bustled out again, and reappeared
with the extra utensils.
"You'll pour out for us, won't you, Mrs. Brunton?" asked the host.
"If you like." Aliette spoke in her usual deliberate way. But now, for
the first time, she felt self-conscious. Was her hat on straight? Had
she remembered to powder her nose before starting?
Pouring tea, handing cups, busied with the most ordinary social duties,
there swept over her mind the most extraordinary fantasies. And quite
suddenly she wanted to take off her hat!
"But this is ridiculous," she said to herself. "I _can't_ take off my