1 In the heart of Julia Cavendish--those earliest days--was neither hatred nor cruelty; only a terrible numbness as from a blow.
Ronnie, her own son, had struck her! At first she could not bring herself to believe the happening real. His letter, read and reread, conveyed nothing.
But soon the letter grew real enough--so real that Julia's imagination, peering between the lines, could actually see him with the woman who had inspired it; with the woman who had ruined her boy's career.
Her first impulse was to go to them, to go swiftly; to say to the woman, "It's not too late--even now. Return to your husband--give my son back to me."
Yet every traditional instinct in Julia fought against that solution. All her life she had schooled herself to the belief that adultery--in a woman--was the unforgivable sin. Men, of course, were never guilty of "adultery," only of "lapses." Modern society, so pitifully lax, so given over to the sentimental impulse, might forgive both parties. Julia Cavendish could not. She, in her eugenic wisdom, knew that individual sin--in a woman--must earn individual punishment. Mrs. Brunton, therefore, could not return to her husband. But if Mrs. Brunton did not return, how could Mrs. Brunton give back Ronnie?
Mrs. Brunton probably took the ordinary tolerant view about divorce; the view that she, Julia, had spent a lifetime in combating. Not that her own public position on the divorce question counted! At any moment since Ronnie's birth she would have sacrificed more than public position for him. But this, this was a question of beliefs. Love might urge forgiveness but how could love countenance sin--a deadly sin?
For a week that stubborn old doctrine of deadly sin, which Julia had imbibed with a bookish Christianity--the same bookish "Christianity" which still tolerates the ghastly word "heretic," continued to harden her heart as it blinded her intellect; for a week she held on, with a tenacity almost Hebraic, to the fixed idea of the woman taken in adultery.
Then, as the numbness of the blow warmed into pain, her heart softened, and her intellect--momentarily freed by sorrow from the blindness of all formal faiths--saw a ray of light.
Admit, just for argument's sake, that a husband was entitled to put away his guilty wife; and suppose that the guilty man were willing to marry her. What then? Could one doom the guilty parties to a perpetual living in sin?
But the ray of light petered out, leaving her in even blacker darkness, because--by the beam of it--she had seen herself already drifted so far away from her old beliefs as to countenance not only divorce but the remarriage of divorced parties.
All the same, mother-love still urged her to forgive: so that, for a full week, she went about her house (a lonely house, it seemed now; all the charm of the years gone out of it) in a positive stupor of intellectual and religious bewilderment. She asked herself: "Does anything matter except my boy's happiness, my boy's career? Does anything really count except love? Isn't love--and love alone--the true teaching of Christianity!" But she found no answer to her questions. Honesty said: "It's a matter of principle; judge the case as though it were a stranger's, not the case of your own son."
Nevertheless the argument of the individual case persisted. Memory recalled her son's statement about Aliette's relationship to her husband. If those two--the woman to whom she had taken such an instinctive liking and the man she had deemed, at first sight, capable of cruelty--were husband and wife only in name, didn't the case alter? "No!" said formal religion. "Yes!" said the mother in Julia Cavendish.
She remembered a phrase of Aliette's: "I have no children, worse luck." That was hardly the phrase of a loose woman, of a harpy. Suppose this woman really loved Ronnie?
But that brought back the old jealousy. How could Aliette really love Ronnie? She, his mother, would have held her right hand in the flames rather than jeopardize her son's career--as Aliette had jeopardized it.
Whereupon the novelist's imagination in Julia started to activity. She pictured--knowing little of the law--a crowd of clients besieging Ronnie's chambers, only to be told that "the eminent Mr. Cavendish" could not take their cases; and--thoroughly frightened at the heroic version of Benjamin Bunce and those few dusty briefs which Ronald had abandoned--sent for her secretary, the blank-faced Mrs. Sanderson, whom she told to ring up Sir Peter Wilberforce.
But Sir Peter was in Paris; and James deputized in his stead.
"Do you know what she wants to see him about?" asked James's secretary on the telephone.
"It's about her will, I think," answered Julia's.
2
Jimmy Wilberforce, who had not seen Mollie since his talk with Bunce and spent four sleepless nights in consequence, set out for that interview with the uncomfortable foreboding that the "old lady's will" was only a pretext for discussing the old lady's son. And the foreboding justified itself before he had been with her ten minutes.
"I suppose," said Julia, eying him across the Empire desk of her work-room, "that you, as Ronnie's best friend, are very much in his confidence?"
"How do you mean?" prevaricated the big red lawyer. "About his financial affairs?" He laughed, tapping the document between them. "Ronald isn't the sort of chap who'd borrow on his--er--expectations."
"I was not referring to his financial affairs," retorted Julia stiffly. "If you, as my son's best friend, and as the son of my own legal adviser, do not understand the matter to which I allude, the conversation need go no further."
Jimmy looked at his client, and noticed--for the first time since entering the little box of a room--how she had aged, how ill, how ill at ease, how unhappy she appeared. Jimmy, the man rather than the solicitor, was feeling very far from happy himself; and unhappiness, being a completely new experience, keyed him to unusual sympathy.
"We're in the same boat," he thought. "Poor old lady! I wonder how much she knows. Ronnie had no right to run away with H. B.'s wife. The harm it's done already! His mother looks quite broken up about it. And I--I can't marry Mollie."
"Mrs. Cavendish," he said, "I don't pretend to be as fond of your son as you are. I'm rather a selfish chap, I'm afraid. But if there's anything, any affair in which I can be of assistance to you--you've only to ask me."
She asked him, pointblank: "Do you know my son's where-abouts?"
He answered, "No. I didn't even know that he'd gone away, till his clerk told me."
Julia hesitated. "I'm speaking to you in absolute confidence?"
"Of course."
"Then please tell me: Have you heard any--any rumors?"
Jimmy chewed the cud for ten full seconds before replying: "You mean--about a certain lady?"
"I mean precisely that."
"So far, none." Now it was Jimmy's turn to hesitate. "But, speaking entirely in confidence, there are bound to be rumors--if he stays away much longer."
"You know nothing for certain then?"
"Officially--nothing." The solicitor inspected his finger nails. "But I'm afraid that, unofficially, I know a good deal."
"Including the name of the lady?"
"Including the name of the lady!"
Julia's heart sank. Wilberforce could not be alone in his knowledge of the truth. And that meant--publicity! "Tell me, Mr. Wilberforce," she went on, "before we go any further: Is a barrister who has been co-respondent in a divorce case disbarred from further practice?"
"So she knows everything," thought Jimmy, and discarded finesse. "On that point I can reassure you. Even if the petitioner were himself a barrister, it would make no difference."
"You made inquiries then?"
"Yes."
"May I ask why?" Julia's manner stiffened again. The conversation was unutterably distasteful: but she had been alone with her thoughts so long that even the most distasteful of conversations seemed preferable to further silence.
"Because"--the man, moved by a similar impulse, laid all his cards, faced, on the table--"because the sister of the certain lady is a--a very great friend of mine."
"And if"--remembering the meeting in Hyde Park, the novelist's mind jumped instanter to its conclusion--"if the divorce we mentioned were to take place, it would make a difference to the outcome of that friendship?"
"I"--Jimmy stammered--"I'm afraid so."
Remembering Ronnie's letter, Julia Cavendish felt aware of a new pride in her son. Ronnie might have been guilty of a "lapse": but at least he had not been weak. For it was weak, pitifully weak, almost caddishly weak of a man even to contemplate ending his friendship with a girl because of a scandal in her family.
"I'm sorry to tell you then," she said, "officially, that your unofficial knowledge is perfectly correct. I have incontrovertible proof--a letter from him--that my son has run away with Hector Brunton's wife, and that they are now waiting for him to serve them with divorce-papers."
Jimmy Wilberforce's brown eyes darkened with pain. It had been bad enough to know the truth himself; but to hear it from some one else seemed for the moment unbearable.
"That," went on his client, "is why I wanted to see your father. Perhaps I'd better wait till he returns from Paris. You, obviously, will be a little--shall we say prejudiced?"
There are certain instants in a man's life when he comprehends his own character with revolting clarity. Such an instant those last words brought to the solicitor. In the light of them he saw himself as poor friend, as worse lover. He felt he could never again look Ronald or Mollie in the face.
"I hope your father will be back soon." continued Julia. "Naturally I'm rather anxious for his advice."
"Mrs. Cavendish"--Jimmy, contrary to her expectation, made no effort to go--"if I gave you the impression of prejudice by what I said just now, I'm sorry. My father will be away for at least another week. Meanwhile, I beg you to forget my own--er--personal interest in this matter; and to look upon me as--as a friend. You and Ronnie are in trouble; let me help you both to the best of my ability. Do you, by any chance, know Ronnie's address? If so, won't you, in strict confidence, let me have it?"
"I don't think I ought to do that without his permission," said Julia. "But I shall be very grateful for your advice. Tell me--I'm afraid I'm rather ignorant, wilfully ignorant perhaps, about these matters--how are divorces"--she stumbled over the word--"arranged?"
And James Wilberforce told ............