Time: January, 1925.
Eyewitness Description:
Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947) was as challenging and forward-looking in her fiction as her American contemporary Edith Wharton. The daughter of a radical mother and French barrister father, and sister of Hilaire Belloc, she grew up in a free-speaking household and had her first story published when she was just 16. An early champion of feminism and women’s rights, she became famous in 1913 with
1
Laura Delacourt, after a long and gallant defence of what those who formed the old-fashioned world to which she belonged would have called her virtue, had capitulated to the entreaties of Julian Treville. They had been friends – from tomorrow they would be lovers.
As she lay enfolded in his arms, her head resting on his breast, while now and again their lips met in a trembling, clinging kiss, the strangest and, in some ways, the most incongruous thoughts flitted shadow-wise through her mind, mingled with terror at the possible, though not the probable, consequences of her surrender.
Her husband, Roger Delacourt, was thirty years older than herself. Though still a vigorous man, he had come to a time of life when even a vigorous man longs instinctively for warmth; so he had left London the day after Christmas Day to join a friend’s yacht for a month’s cruise in the Mediterranean. And now, just a week later, the wife whom he considered a negligible quantity in his self-indulgent, still agreeable existence, had consented to embark on what she knew must be a perilous adventure in a one-storied stone house, well named The Folly, built by Julian Treville’s great-grandfather.
Long, low, fantastic – it stood at the narrow end of a wide lake on the confines of his property; and a French dancer, known in the Paris of her day as
Though Laura in her lover’s arms felt strangely at peace, her homing joy was threaded with terror. Constantly her thoughts reverted to her child, David, who, till the man who now held her so closely to him had come into her life, had been the only thing that made that then mournful life worth living.
The boy was spending the New Year with his mother’s one close woman friend and her houseful of happy children, so Laura hoped her little son did not miss her. At any other time the thought that this might be so would have stabbed her with unreasonable pain, but what now filled her heart with shrinking fear was the dread thought of David’s father, and of the punishment he would exact if he found her out.
Like so many men of his type and generation Roger Delacourt had a poor opinion of women. He believed that the woman tempted always falls. But, again true to type, he made, in this one matter, an exception as to his own wife. That Laura might be tempted was a possibility which never entered his shrewd and cynical mind; and had he been compelled to admit the temptation, he would have felt confident as to her power of resistance. So it was that she faced the awful certainty that were she ever “found out”, immediate separation from her son, followed by a divorce, would be her punishment.
She had been a child of seventeen when her mother had elected to sell her into the slavery of marriage with the voluptuary to whom she had now been married ten years. For three years she had been her husband’s plaything, and then, suddenly, when their boy was about two years old, he had tired of her. Even so, they lived, both in London and in the country, under the same roof, and many of the people about them thought the Delacourts got on better than do most modern couples. They were, however, often apart for weeks at a time, for Roger Delacourt still hunted, still shot, still fished, with unabated zest, and his wife did none of these things.
As time went on, Laura’s joyless life was at once illumined and shadowed by her passionate love for her child, for all great love brings with it fear. A year ago, by his father’s decree, David had been sent to a noted preparatory school, leaving his young mother forlornly lonely. It was then that she had met Julian Treville.
By one of those odd accidents of which human life is full, he and she had been the only two guests of an aged brother and sister, distant connections of Laura’s own, in a Yorkshire country house. Cousin John and Cousin Mary had watched the sudden friendship with approval. “Dear Laura Delacourt is just the friend for Julian Treville,” said old Mary to old John. She had added, pensively, “It is so very nice for a nice young man to have a nice married woman as a nice friend.”
That had been eight months ago, and since then Treville had altered the whole of his life for Laura’s sake, she, till to-day, taking everything and giving nothing, as is so often the way with a woman who believes herself to be good . . .
During their long drive the lovers scarcely spoke; to be alone together, as they were now, was sufficient bliss.
Treville had met her at a distant railway junction where a motor had been hired in the name of “Mrs Darcy.” This was part of the plan which was to make the few who must perforce know of her presence at The Folly believe her there as the guest of Treville’s stepmother, who was now abroad.
Darcy had been Laura’s maiden name, and it was the only name she felt she had the right to call herself. She and her lover were both amateurs in the most dangerous and most exciting drama for which a man and woman can be cast.
The hireling motor had brought them across wide stretches of solitary downland, but now they were speeding through one of the long avenues of Treville Place, their journey nearly at an end.
His neighbours would have told you that Julian Treville was a reserved, queer kind of chap. Laura Delacourt was the first woman he had ever loved; and even now, in this hour of unexpected, craved-for joy, he was asking himself if even his great love gave him the right to make her run what seemed an exceedingly slight risk of detection and consequent disgrace.
Each felt a sense of foreboding, though Laura’s reason told her that her terrors were vain, and that it was conscience alone that made her feel afraid. Every possible danger had been countered by her companion. Her pride, her delicacy, her sense of shame – was it false shame? – had been studied by him with a selfless devotion which had deeply moved her. Thus he was leaving her to spend a lonely evening, tended by the old Frenchwoman, who, together with her husband, waited on The Folly’s infrequent occupants.
The now aged couple in their hot youth had been on the losing side in the Paris Commune of 1871. They had been saved from imprisonment, possibly worse, by Julian Treville’s grandmother, a lawless, high-minded Scotchwoman who called herself a Liberal. She had brought them to England, and for fifty odd years they had lived in a cottage a quarter of a mile from The Folly. There was small reason, as Treville could have argued with perfect truth, to be afraid of this old pair. But Laura did feel afraid, and so it had been arranged between the lovers that only to-morrow, after she had spent at The Folly a solitary night and day, would he, at the close of a day’s hunting, share “Mrs Darcy’s” simple dinner . . .
The motor stopped, and the man and woman, who had been clasped in each other’s arms, drew quickly apart.
“We have to get out here,” muttered Treville, “for there is no carriage-way down to The Folly. I’ll carry your bag.”
Keeping up the sorry comedy she paid off and dismissed the chauffeur.
In the now fading daylight Laura saw that to her left the ground sloped steeply down to the shores of a lake
