He began writing letters to Connie, accusing her, tenderly and regretfully, of faithlessness. He wrote in French, as that language enabled him to use the endearing “tu” that Connie, he knew of old, found irresistible. As she had made no promises concerning letters, she felt free to exchange them with him as frequently as she desired.
“I am now,” he wrote her one day, “a free man. My wife has seen fit to divorce me, and I do not regret it. Like most American and English women (to this rule, you, my beautiful Connie, are a notable exception) she must have her husband tied to her apron string. He must have no existence of his own. I—I with my talents, my work that is my life, I, if you please, must remain in America at her side! She could not share me with the world. It is not enough for her that she is the wife of Illiodor Petrovitch. He must be a tame bear to perform tricks for her. Ah, Connie, you understood! You, and only you, are a fit companion for a man like myself, a man who cannot, who must not, even when he would, be put in chains. Yet even you chained me once, but only with your love. And I worshiped those chains. I would have bound them round me the more closely, but my work was a cruel master and bade me leave you, and though my heart broke, I obeyed. Yet, knowing this, knowing that all my life I have regretted those sweet chains and longed for them again, knowing this, you keep aloof. You refuse to see me. You permit me to suffer at your hands. Why? Tell me why, my beautiful Connie? You are not indifferent to me. You were moved that first day. I saw all that. Well then, why?”
He wrote many such letters, and she answered them, and told him of promises made to her relations, of obligations. She never mentioned Noel. She said that life was very cruel, and that she did not want to hurt him. He would never know, she said, what it cost her to refuse to see him.
When she wrote him of Chiozzi’s sudden end, he at once saw the finger of fate. They were both free. Here was the advertising he needed. In these days of vulgar competition such means were not to be despised. He would marry Connie. That old affair of theirs would be resurrected. So much the better. A romance if you like. Connie was now a Countess, and that also was to the good. The papers would seize upon it with joy. The news would travel before him to America and pave the way for his next concert tour there. His late wife would be chagrined at this speedy remarriage. Everything was for the best.
He wrote Connie an impassioned letter. He said that he lived but to make her his wife. That he longed to make up to her for any injustice his duty might have forced him to do her in the past. The way was clear now. It was written. He laid his name, his fame, the devotion of a lifetime, at her feet.
Connie was not of the stuff that could resist such an appeal. She was dazzled. Like many women who have once dispensed with the formality of marriage, she had an almost superstitious respect for it. It would reinstate her in the eyes of the world. It would prove that old affair to have been indeed a great love. Illiodor would never leave her again. They would grow old together. Not even Noel could raise the faintest objection to anything so peculiarly respectable.
Judy and Noel returned from Cornwall on the night train, and on Wednesday morning—they had been gone since Monday—Noel, fearing the worst, went straight to Connie and found that events had shaped themselves exactly as he had anticipated.
“Connie,” he told Judy later, “looked like a cat who has eaten the canary.”
When Noel was very angry he was very concise, and he was now in a very fine anger indeed.
“It is quite true,” he said, “that you made no promises about letters. What you promised me was to have nothing further to do with him. When you gave me your word to give him up, it meant just that. You did not give him up. You corresponded with him secretly. I thought you still had a spark of loyalty in you. I counted on that. It was my mistake. If you want to go to the devil, you may.”