The weird willingness of Henry Hamilton to treat himself to the spectacle of his brunette wife assailed by her own brother was not the fruit of the sudden impulse that it seemed, although the courage to be so brutally frank an instigator of the incestuous outrage was born tonight of the opportunity and of the potency of the drinks he had absorbed at dinner and later.
Almost ever since the return of the young globe trotter, he had cherished the notion, that it would give him great pleasure to bring to bed together this sister and this brother. Somewhat blase to the normal and hackneyed pleasures of life-though an avid fornicator when the occasion arose-the notion of encouraging and fostering this unnatural indulgence had tormented his jaded nerves for days.
He could not have told clearly just how it had arisen. The whole atmosphere of this summer colony, with its promiscuities, with its frivolous jollities which tended to become warmly and languorously sensual, had no doubt played its part in making him yearn for episodes beyond the pale of even the most daring indecencies. Like many a debauche, he was keen for the peep-show type of entertainment, and it whipped his senses tremendously to conceive of staging for his own pleasure the spectacle of this perverse indulgence, one which would have rocked the social world had it become known. That he himself and his marital honor were deeply involved merely served to heighten the lust which goaded him on.
There were other considerations, too, which had nursed his desire for this unspeakable episode. In the prolonged absence of her only brother, Edith was almost constantly revealing the extreme fondness which she had nourished since childhood for Herbert. The physical side of this fraternal obsession, born of incidents already described, she thought that she had managed wholly to hide from her husband. Yet the quick-witted Henry had had his moments of insight.
It had not escaped him that the topic of Herbert was likely to creep out at very intimate moments of their conjugal life. Lying naked with her spouse, perhaps caressed with Henry’s fingers or otherwise in ways reminiscent of incidents that had preceded her marriage, Edith was likely to express a murmuring wonder as to where Herbert was at that moment and just what he was doing. And she pouted but listened eagerly when Henry repeated and enlarged upon the tale which had come out of Zurich, which was to the effect that while Herbert was there briefly on his way to the eastern wilds he had been seen much with the fair bride of an impecunious English nobleman and the latter’s attractive older sister, and that when the Chicago Croesus went on his way towards the jungles and steppes these two girls disappeared also.
Scandal had been rather effectively hushed, and the nobleman had managed to give some rather unconvincing explanation of the vanishing of the two girls. But he had also given evidence of unaccustomed prosperity. An accepted but whispered theory had been that the young wife and the maiden had been practically sold to Herbert, probably when it was found impossible to detain them from accompanying their new friend, and that they formed this seraglio amid wild landscapes and adventures such as would have seemed ill-fitted to persons of their previous sheltered lives.
“We must ask him-he’ll just have to tell us” Edith had insisted with a flushed and impassioned fervor. “I don’t believe he’d do such a thing. And yet, really, Henry I suppose he’d just have to have at least one woman with him for health’s sake, wouldn’t he?”
“Many a chieftain and princeling wherever he travels would be quite willing to slip wife or daughter into Herbert’s bed. He wouldn’t lack for tail,” explained Henry. “No, he probably wanted these girls and took them. They’ve never reappeared, I understand, this Lady Kinsolving and her sister, Betty. Herbie may have stuck them into the harem of some emir or even have given them to a chieftain. Don’t think he wouldn’t do it if the caprice struck him or if he caught them cheating on him. I know this brother of yours, the son of a gun!”
“He is not a son of a gun,” protested Edith warmly. “He is very quiet and considerate and courteous, except, well, that is to say…”
Her voice trailed off in a certain confusion which made her husband give her a keen glance.
Other little incidents of the kind, each trivial in itself but all pointing to some hidden significance, had finally roused Henry Hamilton’s curiosity regarding the actual relations of his lovely brunette wife and her only brother. And this, instead of causing any resentment to mingle with his curiosity over the possible physical familiarities which might have occurred between this fine pair in their earlier family life, only stimulated a distinctly perverse brooding in his mind.
He had gone so far once as to accuse Edith of being in love with Herbert.
“What a perfectly foul joke!” she had gasped, turning scarlet. “Why, he’s my brother and being ‘in love’ implies a willingness or a desire to do all sorts of things together! You ought to know by this time whether I really care for any man except you, and you’re being horrid!”
“Well,” he expostulated, “don’t take it so cursed seriously, Edith. Every girl with a nice brother is more or less in love with him and I don’t see any harm in it if they are inspired to lollygag with each other a little. Blanche and Bernice never used to cut up if I happened to see them without their nighties.”
He did not add that his older sisters had never even been aware of his boyish, sensual curiosities regarding their bodies nor of his sometimes successful attempts to see them unclad.
Edith gave him a sidelong, quick glance.
“Well, of course-“ she murmured.
“Of course?” he queried eagerly as she paused.
“Nothing-I meant that if it just happened-and if it was all in fun-it might conceivably be excusable.”
“Certainly it would be ‘excusable.’ It would be more than excusable if it gave them any pleasure,” he affirmed. “Do you mean to maintain, for instance, that it would be any more blameworthy for Herbert to massage your naked titties-your own brother, whom you’d known always-than it was for Jack Birdsall to do that same thing the very first night you met him?”
“Well, good heavens, that was just a forfeit that I had to pay at a rather wild party!” argued Edith. “He just put his hands inside my corset-if you can call that wisp of thing a corset. There was no way I could stop him, was there, without being a spoil-sport? And it wasn’t ten minutes later that you had both your hands on Polly Jackson’s bare behind and then had to bring it out and kiss it before the whole crew when you failed to guess whose bottom it was!”
“I know, Good Lord-you’ve never heard me kick at any of our robust fun with our friends!” said Henry. “But what I was asking was whether it would not have been fully as allowable for Herbert to play with your body as for a man who was not relation to you?”
“Yes, it would,” Edith replied with some agitation. “It would be even preferable. But when you make a licentious thing of it…”
Satisfied with her confession, Henry abandoned the topic for the time. But his mind dwelt now on the party to which they had referred. He chuckled.
“That was a red-hot one, that party, wasn’t it, girlie?” he commented. “And I think about the best fun of all was when we found out that Violet Britt and Pembroke Houghton had gone and got themselves engaged to be married that day, and we got them both well soused and then said we couldn’t consent to their marriage unless they showed each other everything they had. They were so pickled that she at last took it all quite seriously, thinking that they really had omitted a necessary formality.
“He’s a devil, though, that Pembroke! I don’t think he was as soused as he tried to appear. Remember how the girls brought Violet in at last, without a stitch on her little body, and how gravely Pembroke entered then from the opposite door, stark naked? And we shoved them together in the center of the room. They were only supposed to look each other all over in the presence of the whole crowd. But she was weeping maudlinly and he commenced to hug her and console her. And damned if they didn’t both get so hot that they rolled on the rug together! And Violet would have gotten hers right then and there if we hadn’t intervened. That was certainly a warm number!”
“That was going pretty far!” smiled Edith, shaking her head. “We were all pretty soused, as far as that goes. That’s the only excuse there was for such a rank gambol as that.”
“I think it’s devilish good sport to be as pagan as possible,” averred Henry stoutly. “It adds to the gaiety of life. And there’s no permanent harm from any of it.”
His wife shook her head again.
“That was going too fearfully far,” she maintained. “An engaged pair-and she only eighteen and a virgin!”
“Well, damn it, her young aunt was there-and laughing harder than anybody else!” remarked Henry. “And she’s supposed to be responsible for Violet. Though, if you ask me, this newly engaged girl wouldn’t have cried at all if she’d been sober. She’s a torrid young sketch. Didn’t I see her running her bare toes deliberately into Stan Cochrane’s crotch when they were playfully wrestling on the beach?”
“The blamed thing was sticking up,” observed Edith reminiscently. “I saw it too and it seems to me that it tries to burst out of his bathing suit the minute he sees the least thing. I suppose it intrigued Vi. And since she couldn’t very well thrust a hand at it, she just felt it with her foot.”