1 England has not yet quite forgotten the "Bournemouth Tragedy" during which Hector Brunton, who led for the Crown, first became known to the public as the "hanging prosecutor."
The charge against Mrs. Cairns was murder; and for days no newspaper dared to omit a single comma from its reports of the case. For days Hector's bewigged photograph blazed on the back page of the "Daily Mail" and the front page of the "Sunday Pictorial"; for days England abandoned itself to the raptest scrutiny of Dr. Spilsbury's and other experts' evidence anent the poisonous properties of a certain arsenical face lotion with which--the "hanging prosecutor" alleged--Mrs. Cairns had doctored her dead husband's whisky; and to speculations, ruminations, discussions, and wagers as to the probable fate of Mrs. Cairns.
During those days, that epitome of England, Powolney Mansions, oblivious alike of reconstruction, strikes, German indemnities, the Irish question, and the "scandal of Mr. and Mrs. Cavendish," demanded only to know whether Mrs. Cairns would dare to face Hector Brunton's cross-examination; whether, cross-examination concluded, Hector Brunton would succeed in securing a verdict of "guilty" against Mrs. Cairns; and whether Mrs. Cairns, having been found guilty, would be hanged by the neck until she was dead or incarcerated for the period of her natural life--which period, Miss Greenwell informed Monsieur Mayer, was limited to twenty years with the remission of one quarter the sentence for good conduct.
"She'll be out in fifteen years," said Miss Greenwell, when, some ten days after the conclusion of the trial, the home secretary's remission of the death penalty was duly announced, "and she'll still be a young woman."
"I," retorted Monsieur Mayer, "do not believe that she was guilty at all. If it had not been for 'Ector Brunton----"
"And that reminds me," began Miss Greenwell--but by then the lovers were already away.
2
Consciously and subconsciously, the success and the réclame of the "hanging prosecutor" infuriated Ronnie. Always he hated the man, but now, every time he saw H. B.'s face staring at him from the newspapers, a new thought, the thought of his own meagerly employed talents, talents of which he had begun to feel more and more surely confident, rankled. Even in the "ridiculous flat" (he and Aliette christened it the "ridiculous flat" in the same way that Orientals always refer to their most cherished possessions as things of no account) he felt himself a failure.
Yet the flat's self was an indubitable success--a home of their own--very symbol of mated unity.
Julia Cavendish herself, too weak, with a curious lethargy of which Heron Baynet alone knew the exact cause, to pay more than one visit to Flat 27, Block B, Embankment House, admitted it "passable." At her suggestion Aliette had decided on using a beige wall-paper, almost identical with the one at Jermyn Street, throughout; on Ronnie's Chippendale and Ronnie's eighteenth century engravings (removed almost by force from Moses Moffatt's) for the tiny flame-curtained dining-room. Ronnie's ascetic bedroom furniture she relegated to Caroline Staley, providing him in its stead with hanging-cupboards craftily and cheaply contrived in the wall-spaces either side his dressing-room fireplace.
For the sitting-room (christened by Aliette the "parlor"), the tiniest box of French simplicity combined with English comfort; and for their communal chamber, with its tester bed and its short purple curtains, Julia's Christmas check provided the adornment. But it was only by adding some of her own income that Aliette, faced with and realizing for the first time the petty troubles of home-making with one servant, could install the electric kitchenette, the Canadian "cook's table," the gas-fires and the tiled hearths, the Califont hot-water system which functioned automatically as soon as one turned the taps, the Hoover vacuum-sweeper, and all those other labor-saving devices which people who really need them can never afford.
Despite all of which, the "ridiculous flat" had its discomforts, not least of them being the impossibility of sleeping Ponto on the exiguous premises.
"Man," asked Aliette dubiously, as they finally drove away, luggage on taxi, from a curiously incurious Powolney Mansions, "what are we going to do with him?"
"The Lord knows, my dear," laughed Ronnie. "People who elope have no right to take Great Danes with them."
"I suppose we ought to get rid of him. He's very expensive."
However, neither of them had the heart to part with the beast; and eventually they found quarters for him in a little side-street off the Hammersmith Road.
3
From their very first meal together, faultlessly cooked and faultlessly served by Caroline Staley--as glad as she to be free from boarding-housedom; all through February and well into March, Aliette's home-life was one long ecstasy, marred only by her growing anxiety about Julia's health and a vague suspicion that Ronnie "worried." Looking back from the safe coziness of the "ridiculous flat" on the long months they had wasted in Powolney Mansions, it seemed impossible that they should ever have been "boarding-house people," ever have tolerated the uncleanliness, the unhomeliness, the gossip, and the monotony of Monsieur Mayer's establishment.
And by the end of March even Ronnie's "worries" seemed to have disappeared. For John Cartwright's promises had more than materialized; and though the briefs were rarely marked higher than "Two guineas," the work they entailed kept Ronnie from brooding.
Despite his whimsical grumblings at being forced to leave her alone all day, Aliette knew that her man, growing hourly more ambitious for success, saw prospects of it in this strange employment. Coming back of a late afternoon, he would lounge into the parlor, kiss her, accept the tea Caroline Staley never failed to bring him, light his pipe, and talk at length about his petty triumphs at the Old Bailey or Brixton.
Once, even, he showed her his name in a press-report, with a smiled "I'm getting quite a reputation among the criminal classes. Soon there won't be a pickpocket within the metropolitan radius who doesn't regard me as his only hope of salvation. They call me 'Cut Cavendish,' I believe. Hope you haven't had too dull a day, darling."
But Aliette's days were never dull. The hours when Ronnie was away from her "defending his pickpockets" passed all too swiftly for accomplishment of the manifold trivialities which ministered to his comfort. Literally "she never had a moment to sit down."
So soon as he had left for his chambers (he hated seeing her do housework, and so she used to maintain the pretense of idleness until she heard the front door close, and the gate of the automatic lift clink to behind him), Caroline Staley--grown, as all servants, somewhat dictatorial in her old age--would demand help in the making of the bed, demand that her mistress sally forth to wrangle with the milkman or impress upon the butcher the alien origin of the previous day's joint.
These wrangles provided Aliette, hitherto immune from the petty worries of the average woman and now almost completely isolated from her kind, with a certain amusement. Returned from them, she helped lay her own table for luncheon; and, luncheon over, busied herself with the darning of stockings, with the cleaning of special pieces of silver, or with some other of the thousand and one tasks which your really class-conscious domestic, whose master is waited on hand and foot, always manages to leave to her master's wife. So that if, as at least once a week, Aliette felt it her duty to visit Julia Cavendish, it meant a rush for tube or omnibus, and a second rush homewards in time to dress for dinner--"dressing for dinner" being a shibboleth on which both lovers insisted as their "last relic of respectability."
And even if her days had been dull, the evenings would have made their dullness worth while. Those evenings! Their one servant abed. She and her man alone together, isolated high above London--solitary--safe--not even the telephone to connect them with their kind: Ronnie, pipe between his lips, his face tired yet happy in the glow of the fire, his long limbs outstretched, his lips moving rarely to speech; Aliette, some unread novel on her lap, the light of the reading-lamp a-shimmer on her dimpled shoulders, on the vivid of her hair and the vivid of her eyes; Aliette, pleasantly wearied of body, pleasantly vacuous of thought, speaking rarely as her mate, utterly happy in his silent company, so happy that all the terrors of her past life with Hector seemed like a nightmare dreamed long since in girlhood and remembered in maturity only as foolishness.
Nevertheless, as London March blew chilly toward London April, Aliette again grew fearful. Try as she would to elude them, moments came when she craved so desperately for maternity that Ronnie's very passion seemed a reproach. And in those moments her imagination fashioned itself children--a boy-child and a girl-child--Dennis and Etta--dream-babies who would bind her man to her forever and forever.
Ronnie, too, had his moments of fear, of hope, of dreamery. But for the most part they were a silent couple; and only once did either give voice to their secret thoughts. Then it was Ronnie, who said with one of his whimsical smiles:
"You've no idea, Alie, what an orator I'm getting to be. If only I could get one really big case. A murder trial, for instance. But one needs luck for that!"
So the equable days went by.
4
April came; and, to Aliette, ............