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Updated: June 11, 2025
I say! what do you think of this! She wouldn't let Beattie come down to the drawing-room yesterday, because she cried for a sweet! Wasn't that devilish!" He brought his hand down fiercely on his thigh. "A Gorgon!" said Mrs. Fairmile, raising her eyebrows. "Any other qualifications? French? German?" "Not a word. Not she! Her people live somewhere near here, I believe."
The grace of Chloe Fairmile haunted her memory, and the perfection, the corrupt perfection of her appeal to men, men like Roger. She must wring from him she must and would a much fuller history of his engagement. And of those conversations in the garden, too. It stung her to recollect that, after all, he had given her no account of them. She had been sure they had not been ordinary conversations!
The scent of the beech-leaves under foot; the buffeting of a westerly wind; the pleasant yielding of her light frame to the movement of the horse; the glimpses of plain that every here and there showed themselves through the trees that girdled the high ground or edge along which she rode; the white steam-wreath of a train passing, far away, through strata of blue or pearly mist; an old windmill black in the middle distance; villages, sheltering among their hedges and uplands: a sky, of shadow below widely brooding over earth, and of a radiant blue flecked with white cloud above: all the English familiar scene, awoke in Chloe Fairmile a familiar sensuous joy.
"What, indeed, can be the matter?" repeated Chloe lightly, as she handed back the letter. "Angela Warton never knows anything. But there's not much need for you to ask, my dear," said the Duchess quietly. Mrs. Fairmile turned an astonished face. "Me?" The Duchess, more bulky, shapeless and swathed than usual, subsided on a chair, and just raised her small but sharp eyes on Mrs. Fairmile.
The Duchess had clearly pulled her up, and Chloe was not a person who took it well. If Roger's American wife was by now wildly jealous of his old fiancée, whose fault was it? Had not Mrs. Barnes herself thrown them perpetually together? Dinners at Upcott! invitations to Heston! a resolute frequenting of the same festal gatherings with Mrs. Fairmile.
He meant honestly and sincerely to keep straight; to do his duty by Daphne and the child. But he was no plaster saint, and he could not afford to give Chloe Fairmile too many opportunities. To break at once, to carry off Daphne and leave Heston, at least for a time that was the obviously prudent and reasonable course.
He would have been a pauper but for her; but now that he had her money safe, without a word to her of his previous engagement, he and Mrs. Fairmile might do as they pleased. The heat and corrosion of this idea spread through her being, and the will made no fight against it. "You're off to the meet?" "I am. Look at the day!"
Fairmile, smiling. He frowned involuntarily. "Oh, I suppose we shall be straight some day;" the tone, however, belied the words. "When once the British workman gets in, it's the deuce to get him out." "The old house had such a charm!" said Chloe softly. Roger made no reply. He rode stiffly beside her, looking straight before him.
The Fairmile marriage, it was generally rumoured, had broken down hopelessly. "Faults on both sides, of course. Fairmile is and always was an unscrupulous beggar! He left Eton just as you came, but I remember him well."
"By George, no! not with a wagon-load of Leliuses!" Then, with a sudden veer and a flush: "I say, French, do you know what sort of state the Fairmile marriage is in by now? I think that lady might have spared her call don't you?" French kept his eyes on the path. It was the first time, as far as he was concerned, that Roger had referred to the incident.
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