1 Jimmy's two-seater was suffering from one of its usual breakdowns. That red-haired young man, instructing his porter to put his bag into a first-class smoker, had no idea of the coil woven about his destiny. Ronnie he had not seen for some weeks; Julia's letter to his firm requesting that "Mr. Wilberforce, Jr., should, if possible, come down and see me" conveyed an invitation to stay the Friday night, but no hint of Mollie's presence at Daffadillies.
Nevertheless, as he watched Victoria Station slide past the lowered windows, the solicitor's thoughts visualized a girl whose letters from Clyst Fullerford showed all too plainly that she meant to insist, despite her love for him, on Aliette's divorce preceding her own marriage. Jimmy had written that girl only a week since, begging her--"for the absolutely last time of asking"--to be reasonable. But the veiled threat brought only the inevitable reply, "You mustn't ask me that. It wouldn't be fair to Alie."
He had apologized for his veiled threat; but the reply to it still rankled. "Really," thought the junior partner in Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright, "it's getting a bit too thick. I've told her over and over again that I don't care what her sister does. As far as I am concerned, she can go on living with Cavendish till the cows come home. But when it comes to that dear little idiot insisting that I should arrange my prospective sister-in-law's divorce before my own marriage--well, it's enough to try the temper of the lord chief!"
Though temperamentally incapable of a grand passion, the solicitor had long ceased to regard matrimony, in his own particular and individual case, as an unsentimental contract. He wanted the girl; and "Dash it all," he decided, "this thing's got to stop. If necessary, I'll have to run down to Devonshire. I can't wait much longer. She's asking too much of a chap. I can't settle this affair of her sister's. Nobody can settle it except H. B. And H. B.'s as obstinate as a mule. Bit of a cad is H. B. Clever devil, though; I wish I had his income."
Ruminating thus, James Wilberforce made Horsham Junction; changed trains; and arrived, still ruminating, at West Water.
"Here, you," he called to the solitary porter, "is there a conveyance of any sort from Daffadillies?"
"Yes, sir. There's a motor; and two ladies, sir."
For a moment, Jimmy's eyes refused to recognize the two lone figures by the ticket-collector's gate of the little wayside platform: Aliette in a dove-gray coat and skirt, floppy straw shading her eyes; and Mollie, hatless, gloveless, almost too obviously unperturbed at his approach. Then, conquering surprise, he took off his hat; shook hands; and was whisked into the tonneau of a dusty car before he could collect his wits.
"Astonished, Jimmy?" smiled the girl, still outwardly unperturbed, as Aliette, hardly restraining a sly chuckle of amusement, climbed up beside the driver.
"I certainly didn't expect----"
"To find me here." Imperturbability gave place to diffidence. "I didn't know you were coming down till an hour ago. Perhaps, if I had known, I shouldn't have come."
"That's a jolly remark to one's fiancé."
"I'm not your fiancée."
They were within two miles of Daffadillies before Jimmy ventured his next remark. "Then you haven't changed your mind, dear?"
"Certainly not. And, Jimmy--please behave yourself."
The man--his slight caress eluded--fell into a sulky silence. "Devilish awkward position," he decided--thought of his father's baronetcy, and of the social responsibilities entailed on a family solicitor, weighing heavily on his Philistine mind--"women are the devil!" He felt that he had been trapped; first, into foregathering with Aliette, a situation he had done his best to avoid since the scandal; secondly, into a scene with Mollie; and thirdly, into yet another discussion with that very resolute old lady, Julia Cavendish, about her son's matrimonial troubles.
Nevertheless, the drive soothed him; and by the time they made the stone lodge and the eagle-crowned pillars of the great house, the prospect--scene or no scene--of twenty-four hours in Mollie's company outweighed all other considerations. Moreover, it seemed impossible to associate the foursquare magnificence and tree-girt terraces of Daffadillies with any form of scandal!
"And how is Mrs. Cavendish?" he remembered to ask Aliette, as they alighted. "Bucking up, one hears."
"She's ever so much better. She's in the garden to-day."
2
It is one of the tragedies of a long illness that those who live in daily contact with it fail to perceive the changes wrought in their loved one.
James Wilberforce, as he made his way through the long hall and out of the French windows, down the stone steps on to the south lawns, was horrified at the first sight of his client. Only two days since he had read of her, somewhere or other, as "well on her way to recovery." Nearing the shawled figure in the long chair under the cedar-tree, he knew the full inaccuracy of that bulletin. Julia Cavendish had shrunk to a merest vestige of the woman he remembered. The hand she extended to him seemed so frail that he hardly dared clasp it. The gray hair was nearly white; the sunken cheeks hectic; the bloodless lips tremulous. Only in her eyes shone the old dominance.
"Ronnie's coming down by the evening train," said the semblance of his old client. "We're wondering if you'll stay the week-end." A servant whom Jimmy remembered to have seen at Bruton Street brought silver tea-things, a table, a cake-stand, and a hot-water-bottle for the invalid's feet. "My daughter-in-law coddles me," she told him, as Aliette arranged the hot-water-bottle on the foot-rest of the chair and retucked an eiderdown round the thin knees. "But I don't grumble. It's so splendid to feel one's getting well again."
The pathos of that last remark brought tears very close to Jimmy's eyes.
But once Julia had been carried into the house by nurse and Smithers, the young man in the town clothes forgot all about her. He wanted to be alone with Mollie--and the "Brunton woman," confound her, refused to leave them alone.
That tea-time, James Wilberforce learned yet another lesson, to wit, the exact meaning of our ancient saw, "one man's meat is another man's poison." To him Aliette, the exquisite Aliette, was a bore, a nuisance, an interloper. He had never pretended to like Mollie's sister. Now positively he loathed her. Had it not been for the old lady's "daughter-in-law"--Daughter-in-law, forsooth. Why, damn it all, the position was a public disgrace!
Irritably surveying both sisters, Jimmy speculated why on earth Ronald Cavendish should have jeopardized his career for any one so utterly insipid as Aliette. She was insipid, compared with Mollie. Except for her hair. And that, in the sunlight, was red. A rotten red! (Jimmy, like most red-haired people, could not bear the color in others.) As for the pale complexion and the carefully modulated, rather shy voice, he, personally, found them tiresome.
"If only she'd go," he thought; and, at last, making the excuse that it was time for her to meet Ronnie's train, the "Brunton woman," still chuckling, went.
"Isn't Alie a dear?" said Alie's sister, following her with her eyes across the lawn. "Isn't Hector a beast?" And again James Wilberforce was troublesomely aware of his own selfishness.
"What did you think of Mrs. Cavendish?" went on the girl after a pause. "I've only met her once before. She seems rather--rather thin, don't you think?"
"She is rather thin," prevaricated Jimmy.
"But you do think she's going to get well, don't you?"
"Let's hope so."
For both the new-comers had seen, though neither of them could speak it, the truth about Julia; and in the light of that truth, their own troubles seemed petty. They didn't want even to speak of themselves. With their eyes, they said to one another: "Not now. Not here. Not just under her windows." With their lips, till Ronnie and Aliette arrived, they made pretense. "She'll get well," they said, sheering away, by mutual consent, from every personal topic.
And this game of make-believe--which only good breeding enabled them to play--endured all through the dinner of which those four partook (Mrs. Sanderson and the hospital-nurse mealed alone) in the paneled room whose heavy gold-framed pictures looked down across vast spaces on the pale oval pool of the candle-lit dining table.
But Ronnie, even taking part in the game, seemed distrait, self-absorbed. Dinner finished and the sisters gone, he poured himself a second glass of port; and, extracting a piece of carefully-clipped newsprint from his waistcoat-pocket, handed it across the table.
"Tell me," he said, "of whom does this remind you?"
James Wilberforce took the proffered paper and scrutinized it carefully before replying: "Well--it's a little like----"
"Like Aliette." Ronnie's self-absorption passed in a flash. "My dear chap, it's the very image of her. Look at those eyes, that mouth. I tell you I got the shock of my life when I opened the 'Evening News' on my way down to-night."
"Really--and who is the lady? Lucy Towers, eh! Screen-star, I suppose."
"Screen-star, you blithering idiot; she's just been arrested for murder."
"By Jove!" Jimmy, whose wits had been wool-gathering, skimmed through the paragraph underneath the photo, and handed it back without further comment. His friend's excitement over the vague resemblance to Aliette--for that Ronnie was excited, quite uncontrollably excited, even the love-lorn solicitor could now see--appeared, to say the least of it, peculiar.
"Jimmy," went on the barrister, his eyes shining, "I'll swear that woman's no murderess."
"You'd better offer to defend her then."
"Wouldn't I like the chance! Look here,"--another newspaper-cutting emerged from Ronnie's pocket,--"that's the chap she's alleged to have murdered. Her husband, apparently. A nice-looking blackguard, too. As far as I can make out, there's another person under arrest for complicity. A man----"
"Crime passionel, eh?"
"Possibly." Ronnie folded up both the cuttings and put them carefully back into his pocket. "And from the look of the late Mr. Towers, I can't say they're either of them much to blame." He relapsed into silence; and James Wilberforce realized, in a rare flash of psychological illumination, whither the chance remark had led his excited imagination.
"Talking of murder," he said suddenly. &............