She had spoken all this quietly, in a matter-of-fact way, but now she began to cry again, with her hands up to her face.
Bertram had sat very still, with his head bent during her monologue. A greyness crept into his face, giving him a dead look. He was dead for a little while. Joyce had killed the spirit in him by those words of hers. He had nothing to say to himself. Not even anger stirred in him, nor self-pity. All that came into his mind was a kind of numbness, and one name reiterated. Kenneth! Kenneth! Kenneth Murless!
Joyce took her hands down from her face, and wiped her tears away with a handkerchief. Then she spoke again in the same quiet tone.
“Kenneth and I want to play the game. He’s fearfully sorry about you. He likes you immensely and thinks I’ve given you a rough deal. That’s true. I’ve been beastly to you, but I didn’t know all the time that it was Kenneth I wanted. You’ve been jolly good to me, Bertram. I see that now. But it’s impossible to live together after what I’ve told you. What are we going to do about it? For the moment I’ve cut and run. It was Kenneth who asked me to do that. ‘You’d better cut and run,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to play the game.’ So here I am waiting until you think things out. I haven’t told Mother yet.”
Bertram was still silent, still rather dead in his heart and brain. But one phrase used by Joyce startled him a little. “I’ve cut and run,” she said. Where had he heard that before? It was something that had happened to himself. Some time or other, from some one or other, he too had “cut and run.” It was old Christy, who had advised it. “If you’re tempted by disloyalty,” he said, “you’d better cut and run.” Queer, that Joyce should have been given the same advice. Rather funny! Damnably funny!
He laughed at the comedy of it. He stood up from the stone seat and laughed loudly and harshly, frightening the birds again, a jay in the boughs near by, which flew out with a kind of echo of his laugh and a quick beat of wings.
“Good God in Heaven!” he said. “So you haven’t told your Mother yet? I wonder what the Countess of Ottery will think of it. Her sense of propriety will be a little shocked. She too will want to play the game according to the rules. I don’t know this kind of game. Perhaps it’s up to me. I guess the rules will oblige me to give you an excuse for divorce. I rather fancy that’s the way it’s done in your set. I commit a technical sin. I indulge in a perfectly painless act of cruelty. You institute proceedings for restitution of conjugal rights. Isn’t that one of the rules? I refuse on a post-card. Then you divorce me. The newspapers print your photograph—the beautiful Lady Joyce Pollard obtains her decree. I seem to remember that sort of thing. . . . Joyce! Oh, my dear wife! Joyce, my beloved!”
It was quite suddenly, at the end of his monstrous irony, that he broke down and wept, and pleaded with her weakly, in a stricken way.
Several times Joyce said, “I’m sorry, Bertram! I’m frightfully sorry!”
She too was weeping now, and her slim body shook with sobs. Under the trees there in the little glade of a French château, this man and wife, so English, so young, so good to see, if love had been between them, made a pitiful picture.