For a long time, hands in his pockets, the ashplant dangling by its crook from his forearm, Aliette Cavendish's husband stood ruminant under the sloped porch. For a long time his memory, apprehension-prompted, conjured up the past months.
He recollected how, by the sheerest luck, Windmill House had fallen tenantless just when they most needed a refuge from London; how, at first sight of the place, Alie, a white-cheeked pathetic Alie, nerve-wracked and listless, had brightened to interest; and how, as autumn deepened to winter, she had made the Tudor house a veritable home. He recollected himself, Friday after Friday, driving his new car down from London; finding her, week after week, braver, healthier, better and better equipped for the ordeal to be faced. He recollected their joyous Christmas together--and the black days which had followed Christmas--the days when "the case" loomed near and nearer, frightening her anew with the dread of "those awful newspapers."
Luckily, he had been able to keep most of "those awful newspapers" from her; so that she had seen only three reports of "The Hanging Prosecutor's Divorce-Suit."
Ronnie remembered, standing there motionless in the gabled doorway, how--each helping each through the difficult days--they had made light of that trouble, telling one another that it was "like having a tooth out; soon over!" Nevertheless, the memory still ached at times--as a broken bone aches to the cold long after the cure of the actual fracture.
And, "I wonder," thought Ronald Cavendish, lover, "whether the people who make their livings by it, the writing-folk, know how much the written word can hurt? I wonder if Julia knew, when she wrote 'Man's Law.'"
He began to think of Julia, tenderly, as the imaginative think of the dead. Julia would be glad to know that the purpose of her book had been accomplished before its publication; that, published, it would contain no hurt. Julia, chivalrous, would not wish to injure a man who--at the pinch of things--had behaved chivalrously.
For that in the end Hector Brunton had behaved well, even his enemy admitted. Had it not been for Brunton, Brunton with his tremendous influence, the six months between the granting of the divorce-decree and the making of that decree absolute would never have been shortened to three. Had it not been for Brunton, not even Sir Peter Wilberforce could have succeeded in setting Aliette free to marry her lover before her lover's child was born to her.
And on that, vividly, Ronnie's memory conjured up the scene of three days ago: he and she, Roberts the chauffeur for witness, being legally married in the dingy registrar's office of the near-by townlet. Driving back to Windmill House, they had laughed together--a little cynically--at the formality. Yet underneath their laughter had been tears, tears of gratitude to the kindly Fates.
"Man," Aliette had smiled, "it feels so--so funny not to be an outcast any more."