There was no Other Woman, even she was quite sure of that; there wasn’t even the shadow of another man. He rather wished there were, with a good solid six-foot personality to project it. He was so confoundedly tired of conjugal life.
He had an old historic title, a large estate unencumbered by the prodigalities of ancestors, unhampered by his own. She had inherited from an American mother a large fortune and some of the biggest jewels Tiffany had ever set. Their tastes were similar, their constitutions robust, their tempers strong and healthy, their temperaments ardent and enthusiastic, their moral and mental temperatures since the last decisive meeting between the trustees of her property and his family lawyers had been slowly descending to normal. Never, oh, never would either of them put their heads again, they were determined, into the noose of marriage! even if a decree nisi should ever make it possible. Because naturally, as time went on, she would meet somebody she liked, he thought.... Because men were so constituted, reflected she, that if a woman only told one of them often enough that he was in love with her, he would begin to believe it.
They had used up all their capability for passion, devotion, and so on, during their romantic wooing, their short but divine engagement, and the incandescent eight weeks’ honeymoon that had followed the wedding. They wanted to forget the world then, and be alone together; and they got what they wanted, one April, one May, in that great old granite-built pepper-box turreted Scotch mansion on the banks of the silver Tweed.
It was heavenly, or at the very least Paradisaical. They wanted it to be quite an old-fashioned honeymoon, so they did not go down by motor, but by the Euston express. Ten hours of traveling, and then they got out at a little gray station of a little Scots town with a dreadful tweed-factory in it whose dye and grease terribly defiled the silvery river reaches, and does so to this day—and drove through lovely woods of larch and birch and hawthorn, just breaking into green leaf, to Maryhouse, the cradle of the race from which she sprang, the unhappy lovely Queen—whose great wrought gates of rusted iron, with the Stuart shield of arms in faded gold and crimson and blue, would never be unlocked again until a Stuart should reign once more upon the throne of England.
The great avenue had been turned into park, and you reached the house by the lesser way. It had a square courtyard, closed by another pair of great wrought gates, and bears with ragged staves were on the pillars, and even held up the antique scraper at the low-browed door, and the knocker was the tiniest bear of all. There were no rooms to some of the four hundred casements that winked out of the lichened walls. You pulled the bear-handle of the house-bell, and it clanged up high out of sight somewhere among the twisted chimneys and the great slants of stone-tiled roof studded with pinky house-leek and gay with yellow moss.
Then the low, square, iron-studded door had opened, and two people had gone in, to commence, among the tragic relics of vanished, forgotten existences, their own new life together. Perhaps some sorrowful shadow of failure and disillusion had fallen upon them from those old gray walls. A week before they went there a piece of paneling had fallen from the wall in the great hall, revealing in a niche behind it a skull, and what else Time had left of the man who had suffered such a tragic ending.
As I have said, the Deed of Separation had been formally signed by both parties, their trustees and lawyers. She was beautifully free. She sang a little song as her motor-victoria ran her homeward to the house which he had no right to enter now, and she ordered the touring limousine to be at the door very early in the morning before she ran upstairs.
She was as gay as possible. She told her maid, as she hummed the “Dream Waltz,� to have a cabin trunk and a bag packed. Only these, because she would be back in a week. She was only going to visit some old great, quiet people in an old great, quiet house up North, who had been very fond of society in their time, but now never even dressed for dinner. She meant the fair murdered Scots’ Queen and the Kings who had dwelt at Maryhouse, of course.
“Fancy that, my lady!� said the maid, thanking her own stars that she was not to accompany her mistress. Many silken calves and much company above and below stairs constituted the waiting-woman’s ideal of Life.
Well, the itinerary of the Great North road—that would take too long. Behind the glass screen she sat, swathed in her sables, while the taciturn, clean-shaven chauffeur made England spin by. She chose her own road, the collieries were left behind in their smoke, the ruins of St. Oswald’s Chapel of Ease were passed, standing gray and battered on their battle-site. Serving-shields, where under the enchanted hall sleep Arthur and his Knights, she saw before she lost the vision. She slept at Carlisle, and went on next morning to Peebles, where Needpath elevates its single fang above the salmon pool.