"The gay cavalry major's prudently shipped himself back to India," he said, "and he was a pretty shadowy figure to most people as it was. What the Seraph has to understand is that he'll get all the discredit of being an 'and other' if he ties himself to her strings in this way. I only give you what everybody's saying."
I promised to ponder his advice, and after being reminded that Gladys and I were due at his musical party the following week, and reminding him that he was expected to lunch on my house-boat at Henley, we went our several ways.
Wandering circuitously round the smoking-rooms and library on my way to the hall, I had ample corroboration of what—in Gartside's words—everybody was saying. The Wylton divorce was the one topic of conversation. For the most part, I found Gartside's own tolerance to the woman representative of the general feeling in the club: his strictures on the folly of the Seraph's conduct had a good many echoes, though two men had the detachment to praise his disinterested behaviour. Of the rest, those who did not condemn opined that he was too young to know any better.
The one discordant note was struck when I met Nigel Rawnsley in the hall. Elsie Wylton was shot hellwards in one sentence and the Seraph in another, but the burden of his discourse was reserved for the sacramental nature of wedlock and the damnable heresy of divorce. I was subjected to a lucid exposition of the Anglican doctrine of marriage, initiated into the mysteries of the first three (or three hundred) General Councils of the Church, presented with thumbnail biographies of Arius and S. Athanasius, and impressed with the necessity of unfrocking all priests who celebrated the marriage of divorced persons. It was all very stimulating, and I found that half my most prosaic friends were living in something that Rawnsley damningly described as "a state of sin."
It was tea-time before I arrived at Chester Square. I suppose I had never taken Gartside very seriously: the moment I saw Elsie and the Seraph, my lot was unconditionally thrown in with the publicans and sinners. She greeted me with the smile of a woman who has no care in the world: then as she turned to ring the bell for tea, I caught the expression of one who is passing through Purgatory on her way to Hell. The Seraph's eyes were telegraphing a whole code-book. I walked to the window so that she could not see my face, nor I hers.
"I thought you wouldn't mind my dropping in," I said as carelessly as I could. "It was tea-time for one thing, and for another I wanted to tell you that you've done about the pluckiest thing a woman can do. Good luck to you! If there's anything I can do...."
Then we shook hands again, and I found her death-like placidity a good deal harder to bear than if she had broken down or gone into hysterics. I do not believe the Davenant women know how to cry: Nature left the lachrymal sac out of their composition. Yet on reflection I can see now that she was suffering less than in the days six weeks before when the anticipation of the divorce lowered menacingly over her head and haunted every waking moment. It is curious to see how suspense cards down a woman's spirit while the shock of a catastrophe seems actually to brace her and call forth every reserve of strength. From this time till the day of my departure from England, Elsie was indomitable.
"It's hard work at present," she said with a gentle, tired smile, "but I'm going through with it."
That was what her father used to say when I climbed with him in Trans-Caucasia. He would say it as we crawled and fought and bit our way up a slippery face of rock, sheer as the side of a house. And he was five and twenty years my senior.
"What are you doing to-night?" I asked.