1 By that strange perversity which is peculiar to loving womanhood, Aliette's first thoughts--as the taxi rattled her away from Jermyn Street--were for her husband.
For the second time in three years her mood relented. "Poor Hector!" she thought. "He'll be home when I get back. It isn't much of a home for him--ours."
Yet, even relenting, she knew that she could never forgive. The physical Hector was dead, killed by her knowledge of his infidelities--as dead to her as the physical Ronnie was alive.
Then she forgot Hector, remembered only Ronnie. Her memory thrilled to his caresses. She began to yearn for him with a bodily yearning so acute that--had he been beside her in the taxi--she would have thrown her arms round his neck.
Her mind whirled. This way. That way. She, Aliette Brunton, who had always thought "that sort of thing" the prerogative of shop-girls and chorus-ladies, was yearning, physically, for a man. It was all wrong. She should never have gone to his rooms. They must part. She would never be parted from him. He ought never to have made love to her. She would have died if he had not made love to her!
She tried to blame herself for her weakness; she tried to think: "I made no struggle. I yielded everything. I virtually threw myself at his head. I should have been strong. I should have denied him my hands, my lips." But her heart refused to be blamed; her heart said: "He loves you. You love him. Nothing else matters."
The taxi swung into Bayswater Road; and instinctively Aliette opened her vanity-bag. Glancing at her face in the mirrored lid, she remembered Hector again. Hector mustn't see her as Ronnie had seen her. Hector mustn't find out!
Once more, she felt abased. Once more her fastidiousness revolted--this time from concealment. The commonplace impulse--to confess--appeared, disappeared. What was there to confess? Nothing!
Nevertheless, paying her driver, mounting the pillared door-step, ringing as she let herself into the square tessellated hall, Aliette felt guilty. In thought, if not in act, she was little better than the husband whom Lennard, appearing from his lower regions, announced to be in the library.
Caroline Staley joined Lennard in the hall. Aliette handed her gloves, her bag and parasol to the maid; asked Lennard the time; heard it was a quarter past seven; hesitated the fraction of a second; and pushed open the library door.
Hector sat in his big leather armchair by the bow-window--the "Evening Standard" on his knees, and a glass of whisky and water at his elbow. His gray eyes lit pleasurably at sight of her. As he came across the room with a smiled "My dear, how well you're looking," Aliette realized with the shock of a sudden revelation the cruelty latent in those thin lips.
(She was looking well, thought Hector; her very best. This evening, that subtle incomprehensible process, process alike mental and physical, which he had divined at work in her for so long, seemed to have attained its completion. Her very complexion showed it.)
"Am I?" she answered.
He gave her the cheek-kiss of connubial compromise; and she schooled herself not to shudder. "This is the price I must pay," she thought, "for those other kisses."
The front-door bell rang; and, a minute afterwards, Mollie rustled in.
"Hello, Hector," said Mollie. "So you've got back."
The girl's eyes were all luminous, subtly afire with happiness. Kissing Aliette, she whispered, "I must talk to you."
To Brunton, watching the sisters go arm in arm through the door, came a sharp pang of sex-consciousness. As Aliette, so Mollie: from each there radiated that same incomprehensible aura of physical and mental completion. The aura excited Brunton, stimulated him, roused his imagination almost to mania. All the way home in the car--and usually the car distracted him--he had been thinking of his wife, goading his mind with the mirage of the past. Now the prongs of the goad penetrated through the mind to the very flesh.
He poured himself another drink, and stood for a long while in contemplation of a photograph on his desk; a photograph of Aliette, taken just before they became engaged. He remembered how then, as always, her fastidiousness had lured him; how then, as now, he had ached to conquer her fastidiousness, to make her desires one with his own. And always, from the very outset to this very day, he had failed. Against the refinement in her, even when she yielded, his will to sex-mastery beat in vain; till finally there came the break.
The break, as Hector saw it, had been of her making. The things he most desired of her, the unfastidious intimacies, she either could not or would not endure. Those intimacies she had driven him elsewhere to seek. And he had sought them for three years; sought them, he now realized, without assuaging his desire.
Dressing for dinner, he heard--from the room she had barred against him--his wife's voice. His wife and her sister were talking, talking. The incomprehensible talk maddened Hector, even as the incomprehensible physical aura of them had maddened him. Surely--surely it was high time to put an end to this--this nonsensical chastity.
2
Her sister's dressing-hour confidences seemed to Aliette the final complication. Mollie had met James Wilberforce, by accident, in Bond Street. Although too late for tea, he had insisted on her eating an ice at Rumpelmayer's. At Rumpelmayer's they ran into the admiral and Hermione. The admiral had spoken of his meeting with Alie.
"Where did you have tea?" asked the girl.
"Never mind about my tea," retorted her sister. "Tell me your news."
Whereupon Mollie, not in the least hesitantly, told it. Jimmy had asked her to marry him! That is to say, he had spoken about marriage in such a way as to leave no doubt about his intention to propose. That was one of the admirable things about Jimmy. He never beat around the bush. She, of course, had "choked him off." Jimmy must be taught that these things couldn't be fixed up over an ice in a tea-shop.
"Still," concluded the modern young, "I'm very fond of James. The chances are that I shall marry him in the autumn."
"And James Wilberforce," thought Aliette, as she went down to dinner, "is just the person whose wife's family must be sans reproche!"
Dinner completed her mental bouleversement. Hector--she divined even before they sat down--was in a difficult mood. Hector insisted on champagne, insisted on their sharing it. He grew boisterous on the first glass. "They would have a cheery evening," said Hector. "They would get the car round after dinner, and drive to Roehampton." But on Aliette's suggesting that he and Mollie should go alone, he dropped both the scheme and his pose of boisterousness. Catching the look in his eyes, she began to be frightened.
Only twice before--once after her first discovery of his infidelities, and once a year later--had Aliette seen that particular look in Hector's eyes. It betokened contest. Not the casual entreaties of recent months, but contest--contest almost physical! Formerly, though resenting the indignity of such a contest, she had never dreaded it. But to-night--to-night was different.
When Lennard brought in the port, Hector refused to be left alone. They stayed with him while he drank two glasses; and again, watching him, Aliette's mood relented. The look in his eyes had grown soft, almost pleading. "Poor old Hector," she thought; "so many women could have given him all that he requires from a wife. Only I--I can't. I'm Ronnie's--Ronnie's."
Once more her mind whirled. This way. That way. Guilt, fear, love, uncertainty drove the wheels of her mind.
Yet both mind and body possessed one certainty: that the physical Hector had died three years since.
3
It was late, nearly midnight; but Mollie still sat strumming on the piano in the big balconied drawing-room.
Ever since dinner began the girl had been conscious of domestic tension. She could see, over the shining instrument, that neither husband nor wife listened to the music. They sat, either side the fireplace, avoiding speech, avoiding each other's eyes.
Occasionally, when he thought himself unobserved, Hector would glance at Alie. Mollie knew, of course, that Alie didn't get on very well with Hector. On more than one of her visits to them there had been such periods of tension. But this--to the girl's intuition--seemed far more serious, far nearer definite crisis than anything before. Somehow the situation frightened her; somehow she felt averse to leaving Alie alone with Hector. All the same, one couldn't go on playing ragtimes till dawn.
Mollie fired a final rafale on the bass keys, and closed the piano.
"I'm going to bed," she announced. "You too, Alie?"
"Not just yet." Aliette kissed her sister good night. During the last two hours her relenting mood had almost evaporated under the fire of Hector's covert glances. Her mind no longer whirled. She knew now--definitely--that contest between them was unavoidable; and, though she still dreaded it, her courage refused to postpone the ordeal.
The door closed behind Mollie; and, after a moment's hesitancy, Hector leaned forward from his chair. Aliette saw that there were pearls of sweat on his forehead. His hands gripped the blue grapes of the cretonne chair-cover as though he would squeeze them dry.
"I'm glad she's gone to bed," he said hoarsely.
"Are you? Why?"
"Because it's time that you and I had things out with one another."
"What things?" Her voice sounded a little shy, but she no longer averted her eyes. They met his--brown cold and resolute, against gray kindling to passion.
"Everything. Aliette," he began to plead with her, "we can't go on like this for ever."
"Why not?"
"Because the whole position's intolerable. Either you're my wife, or you're not. I--I can't stand this sort of life."
"What sort of life?"
"You know perfectly well what I mean. Aliette," he pleaded again, "can't we make a fresh start--to-night?"
She felt her whole heart turning icy to him as she answered: "We threshed that matter out a very long time ago. I can see no use in referring to it again."
"Possibly you can't." Hector rose. Her very aloofness urged him, despite better judgment, to immediate mastery. "But you're not the only one to be considered. As your husband, I have certain rights."
"If you have, I shouldn't advise you to try and enforce them."
The words sounded calm enough; but there was no calm in Aliette's heart. Suddenly she grew conscious that the sense of rectitude which had sustained her for three years sustained her no longer. In thought she had descended to her husband's level. Her cheeks flushed.
"Why shouldn't I enforce them?" The flush did not escape his eye. Perhaps, after all, she was no different from other women, from the women who liked one to be forceful. He made a movement towards her. "Why shouldn't I enforce them?" he repeated.
"Because you have no rights." Even his blurred judgment knew better than to touch her. "Because you forfeited them--three years ago."
"That old affair," he muttered sullenly; and drew away from where she sat. Then, excusing himself, "Renée's in Australia. She's been in Australia two years. I paid her passage----"
Proudly, coldly, Aliette answered him back: "I hope you do not discuss your wife with your mistresses in the same way that you discuss your mistresses with your wife."
The cold pride weakened him. "You're very harsh. I made a mistake--three years ago. I admitted it at the time. I admit it once more. I've made--other mistakes. But that's all over. You're a woman, a well-bred woman. You can't understand these things."
Three days since she would not have understood; now, understanding a little, she relented again.
"Hector--I'm very sorry. But it's--it's impossible."
He came toward her again; bent down, and tried to take her hand. She drew it away from him. The overwhelming physical hunger of his eyes worried her. His feet, on the white rug, showed suddenly enormous, grotesque--grotesque as his affection.
"Why is it impossible?"
She thought how often she had asked herself that same question; knew that--in Ronnie's arms--she had at last found the answer; knew that she must lie. And she hated lying. Yet more than lying she hated the knowledge that her body, which had lain in Ronnie's arms, should be cause of that overwhelming hunger in Hector's eyes.
She said quietly, "Must we go over all this old ground again?" And since he did not answer: "It does no good. I don't want to hurt you more than I can help. Won't you just leave things as they are? Won't you............