From the doctor Sylvia, for a faint flash, gained the impression that Valentine enjoyed rather poor health. But it had been only an impression arising from the fact that the doctor saw her every day—and it was rather discounted by the other fact that the doctor said that his daily visits were for Mark, who might be expected to pop off at any moment. So he needed careful watching. A little excitement and he was done for. … Otherwise Valentine seemed to have a sharp eye for old furniture, as the doctor knew to his cost, for in a small way, he collected himself. And he said that at small cottage sales and for small objects Valentine could drive a bargain that Tietjens himself never achieved.
Otherwise, from both the doctor and the parson, she had an impression of Tietjens’s as a queer household—queer because it was so humdrum and united. She really herself had expected something more exciting! Really. It did not seem possible that Christopher should settle down into tranquil devotion to brother and mistress after the years of emotion she had given him. It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying-pan into—a duckpond.
So, as she looked at the red flush on Fittleworth’s face, an almost mad moment of impatience had overcome her. This fellow was about the only man who had ever had the guts to stand up to her. … A foxhunting squire: an extinct animal!
The trouble was, you could not tell quite how extinct he was. He might be able to bite as hard as a fox. Otherwise she would be running down, right now, running down that zigzag orange path to that forbidden land.
That she had hitherto never dared. From a social point of view it would have been outrageous, but she was prepared to chance that. She was sure enough of her place in Society, and if people will excuse a man’s leaving his wife, they will excuse the wife’s making at least one or two demonstrations that are a bit thick. But she had simply not dared to meet Christopher: he might cut her.
Perhaps he would not. He was a gentleman and gentlemen do not actually cut women with whom they have slept. … But he might. … She might go down there, and in a dim, low room be making some sort of stipulation—God knew what, the first that came into her head—to Valentine. You can always make up some sort of reason for approaching the woman who has supplanted you. But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy—oh, adorable—face of stone.
That was what you would not dare to face. That would be death. She could imagine him going out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Leaving the whole establishment indifferently to her, closing only himself in invisible bonds—denied to her by the angel with the flaming sword! … That was what he would do. And that before the other woman. He had come once very near it, and she had hardly recovered from it. That pretended illness had not been so much pretended as all that! She had smiled angelically, under the great crucifix, in the convent that had been her nursing home—angelically, amongst lilies, upon the general, the sisters, the many callers that gradually came to her teas. But she had had to think that Christopher was probably in the arms of his girl and he had let her go when she had, certainly physically, needed his help.
But that had not been a calm occasion, in that dark empty house. … And he had not, at that date, enjoyed the favours, the domesticity, of that young woman. He hadn’t had a chance of comparison, so the turning down had not counted. He had treated her barbarously—as social counters go it had been helpful to her—but only at the strong urge of a young woman driven to fury: that could be palliated. It hardly indeed affected her now as a reverse. Looked at reasonably: if a man comes home intending to go to bed with a young woman who has bewitched him for a number of years and finds another woman who tells him that she has cancer, and then does a very creditable faint from the top of the stairs and thus—in spite of practice and of being as hard as nails—puts her ankle out of joint, he has got to choose between the one and the other. And the other in this case had been vigorous, determined on her man, even vituperative. Obviously Christopher was not the sort of man who would like seducing a young woman whilst his wife was dying of internal cancer, let alone a sprained ankle. But the young woman had arrived at a stage when she did not care for any delicacies or their dictates.
No. That she had been able to live down. But if now the same thing happened, in dim, quiet daylight, in a tranquil old room … that she would not be able to face. It is one thing to acknowledge that your man has gone—there is no irrevocability about going. He may come back when the other woman is insignificant, a bluestocking, entirely un-chic. … But if he took the step—the responsibility—of cutting you, that would be to put between you a barrier that no amount of weariness with your rival could overstep.
Impatience grew upon her. The fellow was away in an aeroplane. Gone North. It was the only time she had ever known of him as having gone away. It was her only chance of running down those orange zigzags. And now—it was all Lombard Street to a China apple that Fittleworth intended to disapprove of her running down. And you could not ignore Fittleworth.
II
No, you could not ignore Fittleworth. As a foxhunting squire he might be an extinct monster—though, then again, he
