They were still over fifty miles from their destination, and the darkness of night had settled, when the spice of adventure increased for Mr. Trimblerigg in a sudden shock. The car had irremediably and unaccountably broken down in a way which its owner announced would take hours to repair. They found themselves upon the outskirts of a village to which the requirements of motorists had added a small hotel; and before Mr. Trimblerigg could make up his own mind what to do, his companion had taken command of the situation and made retreat impossible, by entering in the visitors’ book a Mr. and Mrs. Somebody: names not their own.
She had done this, while leaving him in charge of the car. They were booked, he found, to stay for the night; and the accommodation was as their names indicated.
Mr. Trimblerigg was not prepared to have a scene; but neither was he to be coerced from the ways of virtue. If he ever left them it would be in his own time and in his own way. And so presently, when they had dined together very pleasantly, and when Mr. Trimblerigg, in order to restore his sense of adventure, had experimented by taking wine, he simply stepped out casually into the darkness of the night and did not return.
His suit-case he left as a prey to his lady of the situation now ended; and walking to the nearest station, five miles away, waited there rather miserably for a midnight train which brought him back in the small hours to the virtuous side of his astonished Caroline.
He had a good deal to explain, including the absence of his suit-case; which forced him to say things which were not all of them true. And when next day the suit-case arrived ‘forwarded by request,’ addressed on an hotel label to the name left in the visitors’ book, there was a good deal more to explain; and for the first time Caroline became jealous. But it did not make her more interesting; it took the depressing form of a tearful resignation to the inevitable. She supposed that he had become tired of her, which was true; she added, less truthfully, that it was what she had always foreseen would happen, when as a matter of fact her mind had never been sufficiently awake to foresee anything so undomestic as suspicious circumstances pointing toward divorce.
Being simple, she spent the rest of the day trimming herself a new hat; at 6 p.m. she fortified herself in maternity by giving the three children a hot bath before bed-time; and then, as it was the servant’s evening out, she descended to the kitchen and made pancakes for Mr. Trimblerigg’s supper; and sat to watch him eat them with her hair unbecomingly tied up in a large pink bow.
These mild symptoms of jealousy expending itself in domestic steam, ought to have interested him but did not. He merely recognized and accepted the fact that Caroline’s jealousy was as unimportant as had been her previous lack of it. Perhaps his mind was too preoccupied to give it all the attention it deserved.
He was amazed by the return of the suit-case under a name not of his own choosing; and yet somehow it raised the lady in his respect. For he had in him a touch of the sportsman; and on being struck so shrewd a blow, was quick to recognize that in going out into the night without warning he had left behind him a situation difficult for the lady to explain. He wondered how she had explained it, and was a little fretted because he could not quite make things fit. All he saw clearly was that the open forwarding of the suit-case by rail to name and address, gave to it an air of bona fide which might have served to allay suspicion. But unless it was to avenge herself why had she given the right address? Was it, he wondered, an unusual combination of vindictiveness with plain horse common sense; a straight one in the eye for him, and a bit of smart dodging for herself? If so, she was more interesting than he had thought: that was just the sort of thing that Isabel Sparling would have done. In that direction he was beginning to have definite regrets.
So, after the pancakes, he sat and thought, while his wife, a mellow picture of domesticity, bent under the lamplight darning his socks.
And then the evening post came and a letter, in a handwriting which he knew and had hoped never to see again. It was very brief.