“Let’s go before we make a public brawl. It’s true I hate Joyce. I remember a scene over a telephone one night when she threatened to betray my man. But I hate her now because she’s betraying you, in heart if not in body.”
Bertram took his sister back without a word, to the apartment house in the rue de la Pompe. There he left her with a gruff “Good night!” She had wounded him horribly with a poisoned shaft. Her words tortured him. He thought of her as a female Iago who had slandered another Desdemona. And he was Othello, refusing to believe, yet with foul suspicion gnawing at him, and making a madness in his brain.
Joyce and Kenneth! No, a million times no. And yet, deep down in his subconsciousness had been that very toad of evil thought. Ever since Joyce had written to him, telling him she saw a good deal of Kenneth in Paris, he had tried to kill this base and frightful thought which now Susan had stated as a well known belief. “Every one thinks so in Paris.”
At nine o’clock next morning he took the train to Amiens and, at the Hotel du Rhin, hired a motor-car and drove to the Château de Plumoison where Joyce was staying.
XLIV
He remembered this old château of Picardy. It lay to the right of the cottage where he had been billeted for a few weeks in 1917. He had hardly thought of it since, because that memory had been effaced by more exciting and deadly adventure. But now, as he passed up the dirty village where cocks and hens clustered across the roadway and peasant women stared at him from doorways where once British soldiers had lounged during Divisional rests between long spells in the line, he remembered the way past the pump, and then a sharp turn to the right by the estaminet of “La Véritable Coucou”—that comical name came back to him now with intimate remembrance—and so to the long avenue of poplars leading straight through the park to the old white house with its pointed roofs.
The Vicomte de Plumoison had given the run of the place to any British officers in the neighbourhood, and Yvonne, his daughter, had invited them to “five o’clock,” as she called her tea-parties. She was not very beautiful, though an elegant little lady, but it was paradise enough to sit with any lady in any drawing-room, after long terms of servitude in the lousy trenches, in exile from all beauty. . . .
He turned through the iron gates and walked slowly up the avenue. Somewhere in that white house was Joyce. His heart beat at the thought, with sickening kind of thuds. He was passionate to see her, to take her hand, to draw her close to him, and be assured of her love after all this foolishness of separation and estrangement. A word from her, a straight look out of her eyes, would be enough to kill that toad of evil still alive in the slime of suspicion, in those base and primitive instincts of the male beast which lurk as a heritage of cave-man ancestry in all human brains.
Janet Welford had spoken a true thing when she said, “Joyce is the Beatrice of your Divina Commedia.” In the time of his greatest bitterness against her, when he felt most injured by her ill-temper with him, she had been his vision, and in his heart, inescapable. His loyalty had been strained, but was stronger than all his weakness, and now, as he went towards her, the thought of this girl who had given him her beauty so generously in time of war, so recklessly, perhaps, fevered him.
He quickened his pace, and instead of going straight up the avenue, took a winding path which led to the back of the château by the trout stream. Perhaps it was some mental “wave-length” which impelled him to do that instinctively, and without conscious purpose, because, as he made his way through a little glade, he saw Joyce a few yards away from him.