Aliette Brunton

“ Aliette kissed her sister good night. During the last two hours her relenting mood had almost evaporated under the fire of Hector's covert glances. Her mind no longer whirled. She knew now--definitely--that contest between them was unavoidable; and, though she still dreaded it, her courage refused to postpone the ordeal.
The door closed behind Mollie; and, after a moment's hesitancy, Hector leaned forward from his chair. Aliette saw that there were pearls of sweat on his forehead. His hands gripped the blue grapes of the cretonne chair-cover as though he would squeeze them dry. ”

“ There is neither gas nor electric light at Moor Park. In the slanted oval of the old-fashioned mirror, Aliette could only see, either side of her rather serious face, two primrose points of candle-flame. The long low bedroom behind her--furnished in mid-Victorian mahogany, Morris-papered with tiny roses on an exiguous trellis--was almost in darkness, darkness against which the primrose candle-glow showed Aliette's full beauty. ”

“ She could see clearly only one face, the serious blue-eyed face of her man.
"How do you do?" said the voice of Julia Cavendish. And a moment afterwards, as she and Ronnie shook hands, reality and social sense alike came back to the mind of Aliette Brunton.
She found herself sitting pleasantly in the park, surrounded by pleasant people. She knew a great many of these people: but best of all she knew the man beside her. "Poor Ronnie!" she thought. "He doesn't know what to say for himself. He feels awkward. ”

“ In its stead was a spiritual Presence, all-pervading, all-comprehending, all-pardoning: an Individual of Individuals, to whom, freed from the slave-allegiance of the formal churches, each unhampered soul must fight its own unhampered way: a Soul of Souls who--despising no man-made creed--yet demanded more than any creed made of man, even the courage to look on life and death and Himself alike fearlessly.
But to that Godhead the soul of Aliette Brunton had not yet come. Her second honeymoon-time was over; Daffadillies no longer "Joyous Gard"; Ronnie no more the single-minded lover of July. ”

“ Then she forgot Hector, remembered only Ronnie. Her memory thrilled to his caresses. She began to yearn for him with a bodily yearning so acute that--had he been beside her in the taxi--she would have thrown her arms round his neck.
Her mind whirled. This way. That way. She, Aliette Brunton, who had always thought "that sort of thing" the prerogative of shop-girls and chorus-ladies, was yearning, physically, for a man. It was all wrong. She should never have gone to his rooms. They must part. She would never be parted from him. He ought never to have made love to her. ”

“ Ever since Caroline had cleared away dinner, they had been discussing the problem of Brunton's inactivity. To Aliette, pride-bound, feeling herself--despite the new alliance with Julia Cavendish--still guilty, still the interloper, it seemed best that they should wait. Silently resenting, yet chiding herself all the while for her resentment, the whole discussion, she had held herself, whenever possible, aloof from it.
But now she could hold aloof no longer. No coward in her own love; willing, for herself, to take any and all risks; the suggested meeting filled her with apprehension for Ronnie. ”

“ If only Hector Brunton were dead! If only for Aliette's sake, for Lucy's sake, he, Ronald Cavendish, could kill Brunton as William Towers had been killed! Surely that killing would be not murder, but justice. For more than a year Brunton, moved only by blind vanity, had been striving to compass the ruin of a woman against whom his only grudge was that she had denied herself to him. Now, moved by the same blind motive, he was striving to compass the ruin and the death of Lucy Towers. Between those two women and the tyrant who oppressed them stood but one man. ”

“ The love of a man for a woman, and of a woman for her mate are very blind, very selfish, when compared with the love of a mother for her son. Every week, as June flamed into July, as her fears for Julia subsided, as the fret of London dwindled into memory and the country wove its soothing spells more and more surely about her consciousness; every week-end when she drove to welcome her lover at the little wayside station which served Daffadillies, Aliette grew more and more radiant, more and more akin to the woman of a year ago, the woman whose kisses had made paradise of Chilworth Cove. ”

“ Caroline Staley joined Lennard in the hall. Aliette handed her gloves, her bag and parasol to the maid; asked Lennard the time; heard it was a quarter past seven; hesitated the fraction of a second; and pushed open the library door.
Hector sat in his big leather armchair by the bow-window--the "Evening Standard" on his knees, and a glass of whisky and water at his elbow. His gray eyes lit pleasurably at sight of her. As he came across the room with a smiled "My dear, how well you're looking," Aliette realized with the shock of a sudden revelation the cruelty latent in those thin lips. ”

“ Aliette was not the type of woman who liked rushing her fences, either mentally or on horseback.
"Spring," she mused; "another spring! And hunting nearly over. Then there'll be nothing but tennis till next winter. Except 'the season.' How I dislike 'the season'! It wouldn't be so bad if one had children. One could watch them riding in the park."
A little ripple of dissatisfaction submerged her mind. She leaned forward and patted Miracle's arched neck. The clipped skin quivered in response.
"What's the use of making one's self unhappy?" thought Aliette. ”

“ But so grandly did the story draw him on, that only gradually--gradually as a man sees dawn dissolving night---did Ronnie realize the personal application of it; realize that here, in words of sheer genius, an advocate not tonguetied--where he himself would always have been tonguetied, in Aliette's defense--pleaded not so much the cause of all the Aliettes in the world as, in sentences now so reasoned that they convinced the very intellect, now so passionate that they wrung the very heart, the cause of his own individual Aliette, the cause of Hector Brunton's wife against her legal owner. ”

“ Can't we make it up, you and I?"
"Poor Hector!" she thought. "He's a very simple person. He doesn't understand"; and checked thought, not abruptly, but with the same quiet firmness she had applied to Miracle that morning.
For Aliette never posed, even to herself. She was the very antithesis of the usual misunderstood married woman; so far, the mere thought of a compensating lover had never entered her head. All that happened afterward--and sometimes, looking back, it seems to her as though it all began from that chance remark of Adrian's--happened of its own volition. ”

“ But Ronnie had other frets--money-frets--on that October afternoon when they strolled under the browning trees.
They strolled lover-like, arm in arm; and Ponto the Dane, incongruous appanage of their elopement, followed leisurely. Aliette was all in furs, soft furs that cloaked her from the cream of her chin to the slimness of her ankles. Above the furs her face showed happy, glowing with a new youth, a new softness.
"Man," she said suddenly, "do you realize that we are two thoroughly unpractical people?"
"Are we?" He pressed her arm. "Does it matter very much?" ”

“ Ronnie, every fiber in him furious, played up to her. But Aliette could not speak. In her, social instincts were at war with conscience. Feeling herself definitely in the wrong toward society, yet definitely in the right toward her own soul, feeling terribly afraid, yet terribly courageous, striving desperately to wrench out the iron of resentment from her mind, striving piteously to forget the hurt of the wound which Mary O'Riordan had dealt her, she played her game in dumb show. And furtively, fearfully, as the music for the second act began, she watched for Hector's return. ”

“ His hands parted Aliette's fingers; he kissed her on the closed eyelids, on the wet cheeks. She clung to him, tearful still. Her lips murmured:
"Life is so difficult--so terribly difficult."
He said to her: "We mustn't make it more difficult. We love each other. We must be true to love. Nothing else matters. As long as you are mine----"
"I am yours. Only yours. You don't doubt me?"
At that the last of Ronnie's scruples vanished. Fiercely, crudely, he strained her to him. "Aliette, Aliette, my own darling, don't ask me to give you up. I can't give you up! I couldn't endure life without you. ”

“ The sight of her beauty, so virginal in its white simplicity of attire, so alone with him in that emptiness of green, struck Ronnie speechless. He stood enthralled--the magic of her harping sheer music against the hush in his brain.
"I--I think I ought to be going home," said Aliette.
She, too, heard that sheer music which is love. Once more, tempest-wise, emotion swept her through and through: sweeping away inhibition; sweeping away all false fastidiousness; cleansing her soul of all instincts save the instinct for loving, for being loved. ”

“ Julia Cavendish looked at the little shy woman, so gorgeous in her mating beauty, so socially correct in her shyness; and the "Mrs. Brunton, this is a very serious position" with which--ten hours since--she had firmly made up her mind to open their conversation, vanished into the limbo of unuttered sentences.
"I'm afraid," said Julia Cavendish, "that this visit is rather--an intrusion."
"It is I who am the intruder," answered Aliette simply; and then, seeing that Julia, who had seated herself on the side of the bed, was fumbling at the unaccustomed task of removing her own hat: "Can't I help?" ”

“ To sit there in the old chambers where he had dreamed so many dreams; to watch the pipe-smoke curling round his head, and know Lucy Towers saved; to imagine Lucy Towers and Bob Fielding happily married; even to realize Brunton, his enemy Brunton, beaten--afforded no satisfaction. Curious, he thought, how little his public triumph over Aliette's husband, his public success, affected him! So often in the last fifteen months he had thrilled to the vision of himself successful: yet now--now that success had actually been accomplished--it held no joy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But Ronnie, in that moment of fear, had forgotten everything except Aliette. The lane saved a mile and a half, and the lane was all soft turf--good going--the first five furlongs of it straight as a race-course.
Down those first five furlongs Miracle went like a steed possessed. The turf thudded under his hoofs. The hawthorn-hedges streaked past him like snowbanks alongside a train. "Hope to God we don't meet any one at the bend," thought Ronnie, his silk-socked ankles thrust home in the irons, his trousered knees gripping the saddle-flaps, his hands low and his body a little forward. ”

“ Let Brunton do his damnedest. Let them be outlaws. Even in their outlawry they would possess one another. Soon, Brunton would be brought to reason. Meanwhile, even if he were not soon brought to reason, they, the outlaws, would find people to stand by them; people like his mother. And at that, abruptly, Ronnie remembered the letter Aliette had written to her sister, the promise he had made to Jimmy.
Somehow it needed more courage than he had required in facing Aliette's husband to lift the telephone and make his appointment with Mollie! ”

“ Better to kill one's self, better to smash the sacred vessel in pieces, than allow it to be profaned--as profaned it must be--by any man's touch save Ronnie's.
"And surely," said some dim voice in that soul which was Aliette, "surely this is nature's verity: To each one of us, unhindered, our mate- and mother-hood! Surely, in nature's eyes, our parents are but dry and empty vessels, milkless gourds rattling on a dead tree." ”

“ Saving others, he could save neither himself nor the woman he loved. Aliette was outcast, would remain outcast; and he with her. All the pleasant things his success might have won for them both--social position, companionship of friends, political possibilities--were beyond their reach. To them, success could only bring money.
Bitterly he fell to reproaching himself--as all the lovers of all the Aliettes do reproach themselves in those hours when love comes not to their aid--for ever having persuaded her to run away with him. What was the use of blaming Brunton, of hating Brunton? ”

“ And suddenly, subconsciously, Aliette knew that all her life hitherto she had been lying to her own soul, running away from truth. Life, woman's life at its highest, meant mating. Without matehood, motherhood's self must be a failure. And she, she was neither mate nor mother. Remaining with Hector, her very bodily beauty would wither--wither unmated, sterile. For, to Hector--even if she yielded to Hector--and how, loving Ronnie, could she yield herself to Hector?--she would never be more than legal concubine. ”