“I’ve told you we intend to play the game as far as possible. Kenneth has played up like a gentleman. I hope you won’t behave like a savage.”
“I am a savage,” he said, “when it comes to this sort of thing. It is the primitive right of man to make sure of his mate. D’you think I’m going to connive at your sin? To play the “mari complaisant?” Not in your life!”
“Don’t mediævalise,” said Joyce. “We’re in the Twentieth Century.”
“Human nature doesn’t change,” he answered. “You’re my wife, and I’ll hold you, if I have to fight for you.”
“You can’t hold me,” she said. “I’ve escaped. You can hold my dead body, but not my living heart. Kenneth has that. From the beginning of things, as I see now, he and I were meant for each other. You were an accident that intervened. It was my mistake, and yours. And I’ve paid for it already, pretty badly.”
An accident that intervened! That was how she spoke of his love. That was his position between Joyce Pollard and Kenneth Murless! The phrase slashed his soul, and stung him into a mad rage. The man who had come into this glade with love in his heart for this girl with gold hair and slim white body, strode towards her now with clenched fists and a fury in his eyes. He meant to do her bodily harm, and she saw that in his eyes. But she stood very straight and still, and did not flinch as he came close to her, but smiled with a strange disdain.
“As you like,” she said.
It was a kind of invitation to hit her, even to kill her, if he thought well of that, as for a moment he did. But, as once before when he had raised his hand against her, he was disarmed by her prettiness, and the fury passed from him.
Down the avenue came the sound of voices, speaking French, and through the trees Bertram saw Yvonne de Plumoison and her father, as he had seen them walking arm-in-arm in time of war. On the other side of the old man was Lady Ottery with her hand on the arm of Yvonne’s brother.
Bertram took hold of Joyce, and kissed her twice on the lips, with passionate brutality, and then released her, flinging her away from him so that she fell on the grass. He hadn’t meant, then, to be as rough as that. He made his way through the glade, and turned a moment to look back. Joyce was standing again with her face towards him. He raised his hand with a tragic gesture of farewell, to which she made no answer. Then he walked back to the great iron gates through which he passed, and so towards the village, and so towards life without the hope of Joyce, in loneliness and desolation of soul, worse than he had known.