1 "Man--you're glad she's coming?"
"If her coming means that she is on our side; yes."
It was ten o'clock of a great July day. From outside, through the low foliaged casement of Honeysuckle Cottage, sounded the drone of a bee, the whine and splash of the well-bucket, and Caroline Staley's loud-voiced chaffering with a fisherman. Within, the lovers faced each other across the debris of a Gargantuan breakfast.
Seen, white-frocked, in the sun-moted coolth of that low whitewashed room, Aliette looked utterly the girl. Happiness had wiped clean the slate of her desolate years. Her cheeks, her eyes, her whole personality glowed with the sheer joy of matehood. Sunlight and sea-light had goldened--ever so faintly--the luster of her bared arms, the bared nape under her vivid hair.
Ronnie, too, had youthened. Gone, or almost gone from his face, was the semi-monastic seriousness. Constantly, now, smiles played about his full lips; constantly, his light-blue eyes held the semblance of a twinkle. One hardly noticed the gray in his hair for the tawn of it. Lean still, to-day his leanness was that of an athlete in training. Under his browned skin, when they bathed together, the muscles rippled like a panther's. As he rose, flanneled, from the table, it seemed almost as though happiness had added the proverbial cubit to his stature.
He came over to her and kissed the palm of her outstretched hand, her wrist, the curls at her temple.
"This afternoon," he said, "our honeymoon ends."
She laughed--but there was something of sadness in the laughter. "Man, don't be immoral. Honeymoons are legal. This hasn't been legal. It's been----"
"Heaven," he suggested.
"Yes." She took his hand. "All that--and more. But all the same, we're outcasts. We've got to realize that the world, our world, won't forgive us for having been in heaven."
Sotto voce, he consigned the world to perdition. Aloud, he answered, "They'll forgive us all right. As soon as H. B. makes up his mind to do the right thing. I expect that's what's at the bottom of the mater's wire."
"Do you?" Intimacy had made this great difference in their relationship: that they could talk of Hector dispassionately enough. "Do you? I wish I were sure. He's a peculiar man. Very obstinate and rather cruel. He may make--difficulties."
"He'll make no difficulties."
Aliette changed the topic. For a week past, the vague possibility of Hector's abiding by his threat had been frightening her. Once, even, she had precisely perceived the social ostracism such a course might entail. But in the sunshine and sea-shine of Chilworth Cove, social ostracism seemed a very tiny price to pay for happiness so great as theirs.
The first fine madness, the glamor of the grand passion was still on her, still on them both. Julia's telegram, which--cycle-forwarded across eight miles of common-land from Chilton Junction--threw the tiny port into a state of seething curiosity, excited its recipients hardly at all. Selfish with the sublime selfishness of mating-time, they regarded the threatened irruption of a mundane personality into paradise as the merest episode.
Nevertheless, as she watched the innkeeper's pony-cart, Ronnie at its reins, rattle away between the pink-washed cottages, slow to a walk up the white road, and disappear among the heathery ridges at sky-line, Aliette grew conscious of a deep abiding joy that--whatever else of harm she might bring into her lover's life--at least she had not separated him from his mother.
And all morning, all afternoon, busied with Caroline Staley in preparation for their guest, that joy warded every apprehension from her mind.
2
But in the heart of Ronald Cavendish, setting out alone on his eight-mile journey for the station, was no joy. To him, it seemed as though he were definitely abandoning happiness, definitely leaving it behind. Mentally and physically obsessed with Aliette, he could anticipate no pleasure in again seeing his mother. Indeed, he could hardly visualize his mother at all.
Gradually, though, as the brown pony ambled its uneager way along the white and empty track among the heather, the image of Julia's face, the sound of Julia's voice came back to him; and he, too, knew joy at the prospect of reconciliation.
Looking back on their quarrel, it appeared to him that he had been rather brutal. "After all," he thought, "one could hardly have expected her to understand. I'm glad Alie insisted on my writing that letter. I wonder if the mater'll be looking well. I hope she'll like Alie. She's sure to like Alie."
Then, from thinking of his mother and the woman he loved, he glided into thought of the world in which they must all three live till Brunton's decree had been obtained and made absolute. It would be--he mused--a bit difficult, rather a rough time.
Aliette's "funny idea" that Brunton might try "the dog-in-the-manger trick," Aliette's lover dismissed--much in the way that Jimmy Wilberforce had dismissed it--as "not on the cards." All the same, the lawyer in him did begin to find it curious that Brunton's solicitors should have dilly-dallied so long in communicating through Benjamin Bunce that the citations were ready for service.
"The mater's sure to have some news," he thought; and by the time his pony topped the ridge from which one sees, three miles away at the foot of the slope, the red roofs and shining rails of Chilton Junction, he felt quite excited about her arrival.
Always strong in the every-day relationship of man to man, but never--until now--decisive in his dealings with woman, Ronnie knew himself rather anxious for Julia's advice. Socially, the period between divorce and remarriage must have many drawbacks. "The mater's" guidance, at such a time, might be most useful.
Of the heart-searchings, of the contest between her love and her beliefs, which even now (as the slow train jolted her, maidless, uncomfortable, in her crowded first-class compartment, out of Andover) still nagged at the intellect of Julia Cavendish, her son had never an inkling. From his point of view, their quarrel--for his share in which he had already apologized by letter--appeared infinitely more important than "the mater's silly prejudice about divorce." Most important, of course, would be "how the mater would hit it off with Aliette."
Ronnie drove on till he made the Chilton Arms; and there, stabling his pony, ordered himself an early luncheon.
The luncheon--solitary cold beef and lukewarm beer--made him realize that it was more than six weeks since he had mealed alone; and from that realization thought traveled--almost automatically--to his rooms in Jermyn Street, to Pump Court, to the past which had been London and the future which must still be London. Smoking, he began to consider the various problems of return.
Where, how, and on what were he and Aliette to live?
Of Aliette's finances, beyond one confided fact that "she had never taken an allowance from "H.," her lover knew nothing whatever. She might, for all he cared, possess five hundred a year or ten thousand. But his own professional income, excluding the four hundred a year from his mother, barely touched the former figure; and since he was by no means the kind of creature who could consent to live on a woman's money, however desperately he might be in love with her, the housing problem alone--Moses Moffatt, officially, sheltered only bachelors--would need more than a little solving.
Consideration of this, and other mundane factors in their somewhat bizarre situation, fretted Ronnie's mind. He could not help feeling, as he drove slowly to the station, how much wiser it would have been if he and Alie had talked these things over before he started. His mother, who liked practical women, might not understand that Alie and he had been too madly happy to bother about every-day affairs. "But by Jove!" he said to himself; "by Jove, we have been happy."
He hitched the brown pony to the railings and strode through the waiting-room. That afternoon Chilton Junction seemed less of a junction than ever. A few rustics, a few milk-cans, two porters, and the miniature of a bookstall occupied its "down" platform; its "up" showed as a stretch of deserted gravel, from either end of which the hot rails ran straight into pasture.
Looking Londonward along those narrowing rails, remembering how, six weeks since, they had carried him into paradise, Ronald Cavendish understood--for the merest fraction of a second--his mother's sacrifice.
"Damn decent of the old lady to come down," he thought, seeing, still far away across the pastures, the leisured smoke-plume of her train.
3
Julia Cavendish--having ascertained from her latest vis-à-vis, a burly cattle-dealer in brown leggings and a black bowler hat, that her journey at last neared its destination--closed the novel she had been pretending to read, straightened her hat, and prepared to meet both culprits with stern Victorian condescension.
That Aliette would not accompany Ronnie to the station did not cross his mother's mind. All the way down from Waterloo she had been apprehensive, doubtful of her own rectitude, conscious of a growing antagonism toward "that woman." "That woman," of course, would be furious at the interruption of her amour.
Even the prospect of seeing Ronnie once more could not lighten the cloud of jealousy and self-distrust which Julia felt hovering--like evil birds--about her head. Viewed in retrospect, the five hours of journeying were a nightmare. Viewed prospectively, arrival would be the ugliest of awakenings. She felt ill; ill and old and out-of-date.
But the first glimpse of her son sent all Julia's evil birds flying. As the train steamed in, she saw him craning his eyes at its windows; saw that he was alone, that he was sun-bronzed, flanneled like a schoolboy. Her heart thumped--painfully, joyfully--at the knowledge that he had espied her, that he was loping along after her carriage, just as she remembered him loping along the platform at Winchester, in his cricket-flannels, twenty years ago. Then the train stopped; and he swung the carriage door open, handed her out.
"My luggage----" began Julia; but got no further with the sentence; because Ronnie, her Ronnie, who had never, even as a boy, caressed his mother in public, just put an arm round her shoulders and, kissing her, whispered: "By jingo, mater, it is ripping to see you."
A porter got her trunk and her handbag out of the train. Another porter put them into the pony-cart. Julia, for once in her life, forgot to thank them. Tears, tears she dared not shed, twitched her wrinkled eyelids; her mouth had dried up; her thin knees tottered. She could only cling, cling with all the strength of one weak arm, to Ronnie. He was her son, her only son--and she, in her stupid pride, had thought to let prejudice come between them. Her jealousy of "that woman" disappeared. The happiness, the health, the rejuvenation of Ronnie were sufficient justification, in her eyes, for Aliette. No worthless woman could have put those sunny words into her boy's mouth, that sun-bronze on his cheeks!
Ronnie, too, was moved almost to tears. The first sight of his mother, reacting on the emotions of the past weeks, struck him to consciousness of his love for her. She needed his protection more than ever before. She looked so frail, so suffering. She had suffered--because of him, because of Aliette. His heart went out to both women--in pity, in self-condemnation.
He helped her into the trap (it no longer surprised her to find they were alone) and said: "I'm afraid it's not very comfortable. That cushion's for your back. We'll have some tea at the Arms before we start."
She managed to answer: "Yes, dear. I think I would like some tea." To herself she said: "I wonder which of them thought about giving me tea, about bringing this cushion."
Ronnie clambered up; took the reins; and tipped the porters. In silence, they drove to the inn.
There the hot tea and the hot buttered toast, which he coaxed her to eat, brought back a little of Julia's courage; but the waitress, popping--eager-faced at sight of strangers--in and out of the coffee-room, made free speech impossible. Perforce they confined conversation to generalities. He, she said, "looked extraordinarily well." She, he said, "looked the least bit tired." The lunch on the train, she told him, had been "execrable." The drive to the Cove, he told her, was a "good eight miles" and they would have to "take things easy" because of the luggage. Ought they, he asked, to have ordered her a car? Oh, no--she smiled, she preferred the trap: it would give them more time to talk.
"I rather expected you'd bring Smithers," mentioned Ronnie.
"I didn't think a maid--advisable," declared Julia.
He paid for her tea, and they set off again--each silently uncertain of the other, each silently and socially constrained. But at last, as they drew clear of the town, Julia conquered constraint.
"And how is Aliette?" she asked quietly.
All the way down in the train she had intended to speak both to and of "that woman" as "Mrs. Brunton"; but since seeing Ronnie she knew that she could never even think in terms of "Mrs. Brunton" or of "that woman" again. Sinner in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the mother whose boy she had made so happy, Hector Brunton's guilty wife was already a saint.
"Quite well." His quietness matched her own.
"I'm glad."
And suddenly, impetuously, he burst out:
"Mater, she's so wonderful."
Now mother and son were alone in a world of sky and heather; and the brown pony, as though aware of impending confidences, slowed to a walk. She put a tremulous hand on his driving arm.
"Tell me--the whole story," said Julia.
His fingers loosed the reins; and that afternoon, as the brown pony ambled toward the sea, he told her the full tale of his love for Aliette, of his love for both of them: till, listening, it seemed to Julia Cavendish as though never before had she understood the heart of her son.
And that afternoon, for the first time in all her sixty years, she--whose lifelong struggle had been to cramp life in the bonds of formal religion--saw that formal religion at its very highest could only be a code for slaves, for the weak and the ignorant. For the soul of a free individual, for the strong and the wise of the earth, no formalities--whether of religion, of law, or o............