OLIVIA struggled for a fortnight against Circumstance, when Circumstance got the upper hand. But it had been a valiant fight from the moment Myra, on her return to the flat, had delivered Triona’s scribbled note, and had given her account of the brief parting interview.
“It’s just as well,” she said. “It’s the only way out.”
She made a brave show of dining, while Myra waited stoically. At last, impelled to speech, she said:
“Well, what do you think of it?”
“How can I think of what I know nothing about?” said Myra.
“Would you like to know?”
“My liking has nothing to do with it,” said Myra brushing the crumbs off the table. “If you tell me, you tell me because it may help you. But—I know it’s not a Christian thing to say—I’m not likely to forgive the man that has done you an injury.”
“He has done me no injury,” said Olivia. “That’s what I want you to know. No injury in the ordinary sense of the word.”
She looked up at Myra’s impassive face, and met the dull blue eyes, and found it very difficult to tell her, in spite of lifelong intimacy. Yet it was right that Myra should have no false notions.
“I’ve discovered that my husband’s name is not Alexis Triona. It is John Briggs.”
“John Briggs,” echoed Myra.
“His father was a labourer in Newcastle. He was a chauffeur in Russia. All that he had said about himself and written in his book is untrue. When he left us last summer to go to Finland, he really went to Newcastle to his mother’s death-bed. Everything he has told me has been a lie from beginning to end. He—oh, God, Myra——”
She broke down and clutched her face, while her throat was choking with dry sobbing. Myra came swiftly round the table and put her arm about her, and drew the beloved head near to her thin body.
“There, there, my dear. You can tell me more another time.”
Olivia let herself be soothed for a while. Then she pulled herself together and rose.
“No, I’ll tell you everything now. Then we’ll never need talk of it again. I’m not going to make a fool of myself.”
She stiffened herself against feminine weakness. At the end of the story, Myra asked her:
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to carry on as if nothing had happened. At any rate for the present.”
Myra nodded slowly. “You’re not the only one who has had to carry on as if nothing had happened.”
“What do you mean?” Olivia asked quickly.
“Nothing but what I said,” replied Myra. “It takes some doing. But you’ve got to believe in God and believe in yourself.”
“Where did you get your wisdom from, Myra?” asked Olivia wonderingly.
“From life, my dear,” replied Myra with unwonted softness. And picking up the last tray of removed dinner things, she left the room.
The next afternoon, she said to Myra, “Major Olifant has telephoned me that Mr. Triona is arriving at Paddington by a six-fifteen train. I should like you to come with me.”
“Very well,” said Myra.
It was characteristic of their relations that they spoke not a word of Triona during their drive to the station or during their wait on the platform. When the train came in, and they had assured themselves that he had not arrived—for they had taken the precaution to separate and each to scan a half-section—they re-entered their waiting taxi-cab and drove home.
“I hope I shall never see him again,” said Olivia, humiliated by this new deception. “He told Major Olifant he was coming straight to town by the train. The truth isn’t in him. You mustn’t suppose,” she turned rather fiercely to Myra, “that I came to meet him with any idea of reconciliation. That’s why I brought you with me. But people don’t part for ever in this hysterical way. There are decencies of life. There are the commonplace arrangements of a separation.”
She burned with a new sense of wrong. Once more he had eluded her. Now, what she told Myra was true. She wished never to see him again.
Blaise Olifant came up to town, anxious to be of service, and found her in this defiant mood.
“It’s impossible for it all to end like this,” he said. “You are wounded to the quick. He’s in a state of crazy remorse. Time will soften things. He’ll come to his senses and return and ask your forgiveness, and you will give it.”
She replied, “My dear Blaise, you don’t understand. The man I loved and married doesn’t exist.”
“The man of genius exists. Listen,” said he. “After he left me, I’ve done scarcely anything but think of the two of you. He could have put forward a case—a very strong case—but he didn’t.”
“And what was his strong case?” she asked bitterly.
Olifant put before her his reasoned apologia for the life of Triona. Given the first deception practised under the obsession of the little black book acting on a peculiarly sensitive temperament, the rest followed remorselessly.
“He was being blackmailed by one lie.”
“My intelligence grasps what you say,” Olivia answered, “but my heart doesn’t. You’re standing away and can see things in the round. I’m in the middle of them, and I can’t.”
If she, although his wife, had stood away; if she had been dissociated from his deceptions; if nothing more had occurred than the exposure of the Triona myth, she might have forgiven him. But the deceptions had been interwoven with the sacred threads of her love; she could not forgive that intimate entanglement. To a woman the little things are as children, as the little ones whose offenders Christ cursed with the millstone and the sea. She had lain awake, his forgotten wrist-watch on her arm, picturing him tossed by the waves of the North Sea in the execution of her country’s errand. She had proudly told a hundred people of the Bolshevist gyve-marks around his ankle. She had been moved to her depths by the tragical romance of the fictitious Vronsky. In her heart there had been hot rebellion against a Foreign Office keeping strangle-hold on a heroic servant and restricting his freedom of action. These little sufferings he had caused her she could not forgive. While inflicting them, he knew that she suffered.
In vain did Olifant, unversed in the psychology of woman, plead the cause of the erratic creature that was her husband. In vain did he set out his honourable and uncontested record; that of a man whose response to the call of duty was unquestioned; of whose courage and endurance she had received personal testimony; who had cheerfully suffered wounds, the hardships of flight through Revolutionary Russia, the existence on a mine-sweeper on perilous seas ending in the daily dreaded catastrophe; the record of a man who, apart from his fraud, had justified himself as a queer, imaginative genius, writing of life in a new way, in a new, vibrating style that had compelled the attention of the English-speaking world. In vain did he adduce the boyish charm of the man. Olivia sighed.
“I don’t know him as you see him,” she said.
“Then what can I do?” he asked.
She shook a despairing head. “Nothing, my dear Blaise.” She rubbed the palm of one hand on the back of the other, and turned her great dark eyes on him. “You can’t do anything, but you’ve done something. You’ve shown me how loyal a man can be.”
He protested vaguely. “My dear Olivia . . .”
“It’s true,” she said. “And I’ll always remember it. And now, don’t let us ever talk about this again.”
“As you will,” said he. “But what are you going to do?”
She replied as she had done to Myra. She would carry on.
“Until when?”
She shrugged her shoulders. She would carry on indefinitely. To act otherwise would open the door to gossip. She was not going to be done to death by slanderous tongues. She rose and stood before him in slim, rigid dignity.
“If I can’t out-brave the world, I’m a poor thing.”
“You stay here, then?” he asked.
“Why not? Where else should I go?”
“I came with a little note from my sister,” said Olifant, drawing a letter from his pocket and handing it to her.
Olivia read it through. Then she said, in a softened voice:
“You’re a dear, kind friend.”
“It’s my sister,” he smiled; but he could not keep an appeal out of his eyes. “Why shouldn’t you?” he asked suddenly. “It will be hateful for you here, for all your courage. And you’ll be fighting what? Just shadows, and you’ll expend all your strength in it. What good will it do you or anybody? You want rest, real rest, of body and soul.”
She met his eyes.
“Do I look so woebegone?”
“The sight of you now is enough to break the heart of any one who cares for you, Olivia,” he said soberly.
“It’s merely a question of sleeplessness. That’ll pass off.”
“It will pass off quicker in the country,” he urged. “It will be a break. The house will be yours. Mary and I, the discreetest shadows. You don’t know the self-effacing dear that Mary is. Besides, she is one of those women who is a living balm for the wounded. To look at her is to draw love and comforting from her.” He ventured the tips of his fingers on her slender shoulders. “Do come. Your old room shall be yours, just as you left it. Or the room I have always kept sacred.”
She stood by the fireplace, her arm on the mantelshelf, looking away from him.
“Or, if you like,” he went on, “we’ll clear out—we only want a few days—and give you back your old home all to yourself.”
She stretched out a groping hand; he took it.
“I know you would,” she said. “It’s—it’s beautiful of you. I’m not surprised, because—” she swayed head and shoulders a bit, seeking for words, her eyes away from him, “—because, after that first day at Medlow, I have never thought of you as doing otherwise than what was beautiful and noble. It sounds silly. But I mean it.”
She withdrew her hand and walked away into the room, her back towards him. He strode after her.
“That’s foolishness. I’m only an ordinary, decent sort of man. In the circumstances, good Lord! I couldn’t do less.”
She faced him in the middle of the room.
“And I as an ordinary, decent woman, couldn’t do less than what I’ve said.”
“Well?” said he.
They stood for a few seconds eye to eye. A faint colour came into her cheeks, and she smiled.
“Don’t suppose I’m not tempted. I am. But if I came, you’d spoil me. I’ve got to fight.”
This valiant attitude he could not induce her to abandon. At last, with a pathetic air of disappointment, he said:
“If I can help you in any other way, and you won’t let me, I shall be hurt.”
“Oh, I’ll let you,” she cried impulsively. “You may be sure. Who else is there?”
He went away comforted. Yet he did not return to Medlow. These early days, he argued, were critical. Anything might happen, and it would be well for him to remain within call.
Of what the future held for her she did not think. Her mind was concentrated on the struggle through the present. She received a woman caller and chattered over tea as though nothing had happened. The effort braced her, and she felt triumphant over self. She went about on her trivial shopping. She remembered a fitting for a coat and skirt which she had resolved to postpone till after the projected motor jaunt. If she was to live in the world, she must have clothes to cover her. One morning, therefore, she journeyed to the dressmaker’s in Hanover Street, and, the fitting over, wandered through the square, down Conduit Street into Bond Street. At the corner, she ran into Lydia, expensively dressed, creamy, serene.
“My dear, you’re looking like a ghost. What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Jogging on as usual,” said Olivia.
Their acquaintance had not been entirely broken. A few calls had been exchanged. Once Lydia had lunched with Olivia alone in the Buckingham Palace Road. But they had not met since the early part of the year. They strolled slowly down Bond Street. Lydia was full of news. Bobby Quinton had married Mrs. Bellingham—a rich woman twice his age.
“The way of the transgressor is soft,” said Olivia.
Mauregard was transferred to Rome. His idol, the Russian dancer, had run off with Danimède, the fitter at Luquin’s. Hadn’t Olivia heard?
“Where have you been living, my dear child? In a tomb? It has been the talk of London for the past six weeks. They’re in Paris now, and ............