1 Ponto the Dane, a piebald hummock of utter contentment, slapped his vast stern on the sands; woke; and rose to his haunches.
At gaze into the sun-dazzle, Ponto's slitty eyes could just discern the twin rock buttresses of Chilworth Cove, the sea-water eddying translucent between them, and, forging through the sea-water, a man's head. White birds, which Ponto after one or two dignified experiments had decided uncatchable, strutted the beach or circled lazily round the buttresses. His mistress slept, sun-bonneted in her long deck-chair, a smile on her lips.
"This," mused the great dog, "is a very pleasant place."
"This," dreamed the great dog's mistress, "is paradise."
Chilworth Cove lies far from the track of motor char-à-bancs in the unspoiled West Country. Inshore from its tongue of hot gold sands, the wild flowers riot; and back along the fritillary-haunted pathway through the wild flowers, Chilworth Ghyll leads to Chilworth Port--a handful of thatch-roofed, pink-washed cottages whereon the clematis spreads its purple stars and the honeysuckle droops coral clusters for the loudly-questing bee.
Once the sea filled the Ghyll; once, from the ancient well-head midway of the streetless "port," men drew water for their ships; once seafarers in hose and doublet with strange oaths and stranger tales on their lips would sit drinking in the parlor of the ancient alehouse. But to-day never a ship and hardly a "foreigner" comes where Chill Down upswells warm-breasted as a woman to the blue and Chill Common sweeps wave on wave of heathered ridges to a houseless horizon.
This summer, indeed, only three "foreigners"--the man forging overarm to seaward, the drowsy dog, and the dreaming lady--had visited the port: for the square-faced, square-hipped Devonian woman, busied at the moment with the setting-out of curdled cream and other homely fare in their pink-washed cottage, was no "foreigner"--but a port woman by birth, as the alehouse well knew.
And if the alehouse sometimes speculated why "Martha Staley's daughter, her who had the good place in Lunnon, should have brought her 'folk' to the port"--who cared? Not Ronnie! Not Aliette! For them, London with all its harassing memories had faded into that remote past before they possessed one another, before flaming June and flaming love alike combined to teach them a delight so exquisite that it seemed to both as though paradise itself could hold no rarer in its offering.
They had been in paradise a full month; and never for a moment had either of them regretted their hurried flight, their abandoned schemes. The past was dead, the future still unborn; they lived only for the all-sufficing present, two human beings fulfilling one another in isolation from their kind.
"Ronnie is happy," dreamed Aliette. "Happy as I am."
Yet even dreaming, she knew her own happiness the greater. She, risking most, gained the most from her risking; she--once that first inevitable fear of revulsion which is the portion of every woman who, disappointed in one man, seeks consolation with another, proved phantom--had been content to surrender herself, body, brain, and soul, to the call of matehood; to pour out all that was best hers, of beauty, of selflessness, of tender thought and reckless caring, at Ronnie's feet; knowing each gift a thousand times recompensed by the slightest touch of his hand on her hair, the lightest brushing of his lips against her cheeks--knowing herself no longer a woman, but very womanhood, eternal essence distilled eternally from the fruit of Eden-tree for manhood's completion.
And, "Poor Ronnie," she dreamed, "he can never be happy as I am. He thinks I am the same Aliette--he does not realize the miracle."
For, of a surety, if ever love wrought a miracle, it was on this woman. She who, in her mateless fastidiousness, had schooled herself to the poise of a virgin Artemis, became, mated, the very Venus Anadyomene, Venus of foam and of sun-glints, rose-flushed for adoration between the roses and the sea. And in the hush of moon-pale midnights, when the clematis-blossoms showed as black butterflies against their diamonded window-panes, when the ripples beyond the Ghyll murmured like tired children asleep, she--to whom, mateless, the nights had been emptier even than the days--became night's own goddess-girl, subduing man's passion to merest instrument of her love.
The dreaming lady stirred, murmuring through dreams; and the smile faded from her lips.
Sometimes, even to paradise--as black ships seen through a golden haze to seaward--came dark visions of the past. Of Julia Cavendish, her son's unanswered letter crumpled in unrelenting fingers; of Mollie and her James; of the mullioned house at Clyst Fullerford; of the stiff bow-fronted library at Lancaster Gate; and of the man in that library, the man whose thin lips muttered: "So it was that briefless fool Cavendish you would have married, had I given you your freedom. Very good! Go to him now, if you dare. You're not my property. I can't force you to stop here. But if you leave this house, remember that you're still Mrs. Hector Brunton, not Mrs. Ronald Cavendish. Remember that you're taking a risk, a biggish risk."
That risk, all in a sweet madness, the dreaming lady and the man forging back to her through the translucent water, had taken within twelve hours; hurriedly; almost planlessly; instinctively as Ponto, who, let loose by a mischievous boy from his kennel in Westbourne Street, nosed his way to the door of Brunton's house just as Aliette and Caroline Staley stepped into the loaded taxi, and, spying the portmanteau, set up such a howl that in sheer self-defense they let him clamber in between them.
"And that," thought Aliette, waking from dreams to find a huge wet nose nuzzling her hand, "was the maddest thing I did in all that one mad day."
Then she, too, sat at gaze into the sun-dazzle; till her lover's head rounded the translucent pool below the buttresses; till he came up the hot sands toward her--the sea-light in his hair, his browned shoulders dripping from the sea.
2
Meanwhile, five hours away along the shining track beyond Chill Common, seven million exiles from paradise plied their harassed harassing earth-days in London City.
Of all those seven millions only three people knew exactly what had happened; and only two--Julia Cavendish and Benjamin Bunce--the fugitives' address. Even Mollie, who had been overnighting with friends at Richmond during those few hours when her sister decided on flight, had been told--officially--nothing.
But Mollie, from the first moment when she glanced at the incoherent scrawl Lennard handed her on her return, had suspected the worst. With her, Hector's reassurances, given over the telephone from his chambers, that "Alie had suddenly made up her mind to take a holiday," went for nothing.
"Rather unexpected, wasn't it?" she said; and then, remembering the scene in the drawing-room: "On the whole, Hector, I think I'd better take a holiday, too."
Hector, with a terse, "Of course, you must do what you think best," rang off; and the girl, now thoroughly perturbed, telephoned to Betty Masterman, her oldest school-friend, demanding hospitality.
"Nothing wrong, I hope?" said Betty.
"No, dear. Nothing. Only Alie's had to go away, and I can't very well stop here without a chaperon."
Betty Masterman was a comforting creature who neither asked nor demanded confidences; but the interview with James Wilberforce hurt. It took Mollie three days to summon up enough courage to notify him of her new address; and when, throwing up his afternoon's work in Norfolk Street, he came to call at the little conventionally-furnished flat, it seemed to the girl as though they could never again be frank with one another; as though her very greeting, "Hello, James! Rotten of Alie to take a holiday, right in the middle of the season, isn't it?" were a deliberate lie.
And his answer, "Oh, well, it's rather stuffy in town, these days," made any discussion of the topic nearest her heart impossible. "For, of course," thought the girl, "Jimmy knows that Aliette's run away from Hector."
As a matter of fact, Jimmy had not previously suspected any connection between Aliette Brunton's sudden departure from Lancaster Gate and the news, previously imparted to him by Benjamin Bunce, that "Mr. Cavendish had been called out of town and might not be back for some days." It was, Jimmy said to himself, rather weird of old Ronnie to buzz off in the middle of the sessions; but then old Ronnie always had been rather weird, a peculiar kind of chap, pretty reticent about his private affairs.
But subconsciously, the moment Mollie spoke of her sister, the solicitor's mind connected the two disappearances. At first blush, the connection seemed incredible. "Old Ronnie" was "as straight as they make 'em"; and "H. B.'s wife a regular Puritan."
All the same, James Wilberforce--just to reassure himself--would have liked to ask a question or two, to take Mollie's summary of evidence. He wanted, for instance, to ask her if she knew her sister's address.
Something restrained him from asking the question; but while he was taking tea his brain suddenly remembered a little twist of Ronnie's mouth when Julia Cavendish had mentioned Aliette's name d............