"I wish you'd come in more quietly, Kate," said Julia irritably.
"I'm sorry, madam. Shall I bring your tea?"
"No, not yet."
Julia resumed her reverie. Was there no way by which the man whose obstinacy stood between her son and his happiness might be brought to bay? Apparently none. Sir Peter Wilberforce could only suggest that "the lady might pledge her husband's credit to such an extent that he had to take action"--and that Aliette refused to do.
Dot Fancourt, whom she had also consulted, finding him incredibly stupid, incredibly weak, was all for "letting sleeping dogs lie." He seemed to have no spirit; and she would have been grateful to him for spirit. She felt old; terribly old and weak; prescient, every now and then, of death.
This occasional prescience frightened her. The formal religion to which she had so long clung provided only a personal and a selfish consolation for death. She wanted an impersonal, an unselfish consolation; realizing that she would never be happy to leave this world unless she could leave Ronnie happy in it. Materially, of course, she had already provided for him: all her fortune would be his. But that did not suffice. Before death claimed her she must find some sword to sever his Gordian knot.
So Julia, alone in her quiet house; Julia, the literature all gone out of her, her mind busied with the actual happenings of life; while Brunton, lost in the holiday mists of the long vacation, gave never a sign; and rumor, spider-like, wove its intangible filaments to close and closer mesh.
2
That very afternoon--October 11 it was, the day before the autumn session of the law courts began--Aliette and her lover walked in Kensington Gardens. Even as Julia's, much of their attitude toward life had altered in the past months. The first grandly onrushing wave of the grand passion, the wave which swept them both from safe moorings into outlawry, had spent itself. They were still lovers; but now, with love, comradeship mingled. A comradeship of mutual suffering--knit closer as the days went by.
For, in love's despite, since training and inherited traditions alike unfitted them for the rôle they played, both suffered.