RATHER less than a week after this Dyke came to Prince’s Gate by appointment. All the preliminaries for the interview had been completed by letters and in the most courteous manner on both sides. Greatly as the Verinders hated him, they felt that there was no other way of doing things. Mr. Verinder, then, politely expressing a wish to see Mr. Dyke for the purpose of discussing “certain matters,” Mr. Dyke had replied that he was entirely at Mr. Verinder’s service and begged that place and time should be named. Mr. Verinder named his own house and nine o’clock in the evening; choosing an evening on which Emmeline could be conveniently banished from the premises.
Mrs. Verinder had taken her to dine quietly with Mrs. Bell in Queen’s Gate, and afterwards they and their hostess were going to a concert given by an elderly widower. The widower had hired the Grosvenor Gallery for his concert; it would be a grand and a late affair; thus Mr. Verinder need not apprehend the return of his ladies until long after midnight. The docility with which Emmeline agreed to these arrangements had made him wonder suspiciously if she had received confirmative instructions from the enemy. He trusted, however, that this was not so.
It was now a quarter to nine, and he and Eustace and Mrs. Verinder’s brother, Colonel Gussie Pollard, wereseated at the dinner table finishing their dessert. The presence of their brother-in-law and uncle bothered Mr. Verinder, but there had seemed to be no way of avoiding it; for his own convenience he was staying in the house, he now had learned all about their trouble, and his sister said she thought he would add weight to their side of the discussion.
“I should not scruple myself to tell him it isn’t cricket,” said Colonel Gussie, beginning to peel a second nectarine.
He was one of those very large, radiantly smooth elderly men who take inordinate pains in cleaning, polishing, and decorating their persons. The dress-suit of Colonel Gussie, his white waistcoat, his jewelled buttons, studs, and little chains, suggested that he felt he could never do quite enough for himself; and, as if for this reason, his face was garnished with every small blob of white hair that can be grown on a face—moustache, whisker, imperial, even something under the plump chin, but each sample small and nicely trimmed, and all of it neatly divided. Through the white hair his complexion showed with the silvery pinkness of an uncooked salmon. For the rest, he had a genial yet grand manner, was not disposed to think evil of anybody, and when compelled to censure knew no worse verdict than to say that a thing was not cricket.
If pushed beyond that mark and as it were forced to put on the black cap and pass a final sentence of condemnation, he said the thing was un-English.
Mr. Verinder secretly objected to his insistence on calling himself colonel, since he was not a regular soldier but merely in command of a militia or volunteer battalion attached to one of the city regiments; and hethought it childish of him to like to be addressed as Gussie instead of Augustus.
“Wouldn’t be playing the game,” said Colonel Gussie, as he finished his nectarine with relish.
Then, after saying he knew that Emmeline was not contaminated with anything of this kind, he spoke in disapproval of these modern notions that were tending to upset the feminine half of humanity—“emancipation,” “the new woman,” “equal rights,” and so on. It was one thing to like advanced education and keep yourself “up-to-date”; but this impressionist art, this Yellow Book, and all these “problem plays”—well, they did no good, did they? There was too much of the spirit of revolt in the air.
Eustace smoked his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. Mr. Verinder allowed his brother-in-law to talk, only saying once, as if to himself, “Freedom, yes, so long as it does not degenerate into license.”
Then the butler came in, and informed them that Mr. Dyke was upstairs.
The colonel rose at once, drawing himself to his full height, which was at least six feet three inches, and looking magnificent.
“Come on,” he said; and they all three went upstairs to that room behind the music-room—the room that contained the smiling landscapes by Leader. Mr. Verinder had ordered that Dyke should be shown into this room, because he felt it was large enough and yet not too large for their purposes.
In spite of the hatred, the interview opened with extreme propriety and politeness, but Mr. Verinder was at once oppressed by its incredible fantastic nature. It was as though he had not been really Mr. Verinder,here, among these smiling landscapes, in Prince’s Gate, but a person wrenched out of a land of probabilities and launched on an ocean of the impossible.
Dyke was in evening clothes, and perhaps recently his hair had been cut and his beard pointed; at any rate, that aspect of Tolstoy or the pilgrim had entirely vanished. He was standing on the hearth-rug when they came in, and he did not move; he stood there, a tall commanding figure; handsome too—with his strong nose and high cheek-bones—in a careless, dare-devil, but not swash-bucklering style; not really taller than the others, certainly less tall and very much less round than the colonel, and yet somehow dominating them and the whole room.
Eustace understood that they had made a mistake in procedure. It was a trifle—no consequence, of course—but it vexed him to think how very obviously they should have had him brought into a room where they were sitting, so that he would have seemed like a person summoned before a tribunal, instead of establishing him here by himself and then coming to him, to be received by him as though they were a deputation.
“Will you smoke?” said Eustace curtly, and he opened the silver cigarette box that he had brought up from the dinner table.
With a gravely courteous gesture and smile—the gesture indeed almost Spanish and antiquated in its courtesy—Dyke indicated that he preferred not to smoke.
“My son—Eustace,” said Mr. Verinder. “And my brother-in-law—Colonel Pollard.”
“Miss Verinder’s godfather too,” said the colonel, seating himself.
Dyke ignored the second introduction; not rudely, but as if all that pinkness and whiteness had made no impression on him. He appeared to be quite unaware of them, and throughout this first interview spoke not a single word to their possessor.
“I was admiring that picture,” he said with another gesture, and he smiled again. “Mr. Verinder, I don’t pretend to be a judge of art, but I must say, that picture took my fancy enormously. So cleverly painted—all the autumn tints of the foliage, and the effect of the sunshine on the lake.” He said this as if wishing to put them at their ease and allow them time. “A very charming picture—in my uneducated opinion.”
“It is by Leader, R. A.,” said Mr. Verinder simply. “I have several of them.”
He had sat down at a table on which were blotting pads with tortoise-shell covers, boxes of porcelain, a gold photograph frame, and a massive ivory paper-knife; picking up the knife and toying with it, he conveyed the intimation that he wished Mr. Dyke to sit upon the amber satin sofa which faced the table at about two yards distance.
Dyke, immediately obeying, went to the sofa and sat down.
Eustace had gone to the double doors and he opened one of them, disclosing the music-room as a sombre and empty vault. He closed the door again and turning from it said that, since they were here for a delicate confidential talk, it was just as well to make sure they would not be overheard. This, as he had intended, set the thing going.
Mr. Verinder, balancing the paper-knife, drove at the heart of the matter and spoke of“these attentions and meetings.” He said he felt sure that Dyke would himself see that they must cease.
“Mr. Verinder,” said Dyke, gravely and very gently, “I hope you will allow me to say that I would sooner die than injure your daughter.”
“Just so,” said Mr. Verinder. “I was quite prepared to believe so, but—”
Dyke interrupted him. “No, I would rather kill myself many times than harm a hair of her head.” As he said this, not only his voice but his face softened in the most extraordinary manner; and Mr. Verinder was pleased with the man for saying it. But Dyke went on, with his blue eyes fixed on Mr. Verinder and his voice becoming a mere whisper. “Not one pretty dark hair of her sweet little head.”
The outrageous use of such adjectives made Mr. Verinder tremble from wrath; but, with difficulty controlling himself, he spoke in a firm quiet tone.
“If there is any meaning in what you are saying, Mr. Dyke, you will give me an assurance that no further molestation will occur.”
Dyke remained silent for a little while, and during the pause Gussie was heard to mention the national pastime—“Not cricket, what!” Dyke did not seem to hear him; he was now looking at the parquetry. “Mr. Verinder,” he said, looking up, “this is not plain-sailing, it is complicated. I suppose you know that Emmie—”
Mr. Verinder flapped with the paper-knife and grew hot and red. The use of his daughter’s christian name, the use of a grossly familiar abbreviation of that name! Not a member of the family ever called her anything shorter than Emmeline. But Dyke went on, as if oblivious of his offence.
“Emmie has done me the honour—the very great honour—to become attached to me. Mr. Verinder, you do know that, don’t you? Emmie—God bless her—has become very fond of me.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Verinder wrathfully; and both the colonel and Eustace made movements.
Dyke’s manner changed, and he spoke with a sudden biting hardness. “Unless,” he said, “you admit that, it is useless for us to attempt to discuss the situation.”
Mr. Verinder said he would not admit it; certainly not. But, on consideration, he said he would go as far as possible to meet Dyke’s argument; he would admit as much as this—that, to some extent, Dyke had unfortunately fascinated the imagination of her; against a young inexperienced girl Dyke had employed the advantage given by age, the glamour of romance, and so forth; and he wound up to the effect that two hundred years ago it would have been said that Dyke had thrown a spell over her.
Dyke answered, sadly, that he had thrown no spell. The first evening he had certainly told her a few of his adventures.
“Oh, yes,” said Eustace, sneering. “Othello and Desdemona”; and he quoted a few words of the famous speech. “‘Hair-breadth escapes—antres vast and deserts idle.’ But then Othello wasn’t a married man. Unfortunately you are.”
Dyke had now risen from the sofa. He walked about the room and began to make a noise. To Mr. Verinder, in the midst of his anger and distress, the striding up and down of Dyke was a fresh discomfort, a new surface-sting. If anybody walked about rooms in thathouse, it should be he, the master of the house; it was a habit of his. No one else had the right to take the floor on him.
“Of course I’m married,” said Dyke, loudly, almost shouting. “How can I help that? It’s my misfortune, not my fault. Besides, I told her so. I told her so at once.”
“She doesn’t weigh the consequences,” said the father.
“Shehasweighed them,” Dyke shouted. Then he went on more quietly, but with the incisive hardness that was almost worse than noise. “Besides, she’s over twenty-one; she has independent means—why shouldn’t she do what she likes? She’s her own mistress.”
“Exactly. But we don’t want her to be your mistress,” said the sneering brother. “That’s just what it amounts to.”
From this point onwards the thing was devoid of hope; and they knew it really. Dyke made more and more noise; he rumpled his hair, brandished his arms, broke his shirt front; and the other three felt their helplessness. How could they tackle this hulking ruffian, this savage in dress clothes who disregarded all rules, who cared nothing for civilization? They were three tame men, and utterly impotent against a wild man. He overwhelmed their minds by his unchecked fierceness; but it should be noted that they had not any unworthy physical fear of him, although Eustace, more particularly, felt that at any moment Dyke might strike him. That odd, hideously vulgar expression, A word and a blow, echoed in the troubled thoughts of Eustace. A blow, a struggle, a disgraceful episode, at any moment now.
They appealed to his better feeling, and he seemed to have none. They spoke of law and decency, and he inveighed against the cursed law. A wife that wasn’t a wife, but tied to her irrevocably—a millstone round his neck—“Poor unhappy lady, God forgive me for speaking of her like that.She’snot to blame. No, no, it’s the law’s to blame.”
As he said all this he was banging on the table in front of Mr. Verinder, so forcibly that the porcelain boxes danced and the gold frame fell over.
“It’s fellows like you who make these infernal laws. Why don’t you alter them? Why do you allow people to be tormented and bedevilled because that sort of thing pleased a pack of dirty verminous monks hundreds of years ago? Poor little innocent Emmie too! I feel the cruelty of her situation just as much as you do—and a dashed sight more. It’s monstrous and iniquitous”; and he strode away from the table waving his arms.
In every lull Mr. Verinder said the same sort of thing—that facts were facts, laws laws, proprieties proprieties. “You must see it, Mr. Dyke. On reflection, youmustsee it. I decline to believe that you yourself will wish to continue—”
Dyke swore that he had no choice; he would continue, he could not stop.
“What do you propose to do then?” asked Mr. Verinder.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Dyke.
Mr. Verinder said he wanted Dyke to give her up altogether.
“Never!” Dyke roared at them now.
So the thing went on. Eustace was livid with rage, trembling. The colonel, unnoticed, chattered and fumed. Mr. Verinder felt possessed by that sensation of the dreamlike nature, the sheer fantasticness of it all—this quiet room, with the loud voices in it, servants probably listening on the stairs; yet also the awareness of the framework of society all round them still unbroken; his friends next door enjoying a little music after dinner in one oftheirdrawing-rooms, or playing a rubber of whist for moderate points; a small evening-party at Number Ten; above everything, the Albert Hall such a little distance away, with a ballad concert as usual;—only in here this raging lunatic trying to turn the whole world upside down. But perhaps the colonel’s agitation and horror were even more painful than what his brother-in-law underwent. To him the thing was so appallingly obnoxious, so immeasurably far from the spirit of the game he worshipped. He continued to say it; and close to his lips, contained but certain to be released if the strain lasted, there hovered the crushing black-cap epithet—un-English.
“I shan’t give her up.”
Dyke was blustering fiercely as he moved here and there. Once he threatened Eustace, saying that if there was any attempt to bully Emmie, he would break every bone in his body. Finally he left them, mentally shattered.
He was gone, right out of the house.
Then, quite late, after eleven-thirty, there was a tremendous sustained ringing of the front-door bell. What could it be? The house on fire? Mr. Verinder, half unrobed, hurried down from his dressing-room to the first floor, and looked over the gilt balustrade intothe hall. It was the man come back again—but altered, strange, in a totally different mood. He forced his way past the butler, past Eustace, past Gussie, and shouted upward.
“Verinder, I must talk to you. Verinder—my dear fellow—I can’t sleep to-night, until you and I have settled it.”
And he came up the stairs; with Eustace and the colonel following, both of them really scared now.
“Go in there,” said Eustace, and, while Dyke entered the darkened room, he whispered to his father: “If he is violent I shall send for the police.”
Mr. Verinder ran up for a dressing-jacket, came down and sat at the same table, looking queer without his collar. As Eustace switched on the lamps the Leaders sprang into life, smiling at them all again. Dyke threw his slouch hat and an Inverness cape to the floor, stood with his hair absurdly ruffled; then sank upon the amber satin sofa.
“I have been walking about, feeling half mad,” he began in a humble tone, then paused. His face was strangely pale, as though all the blood had gone from it; and they noticed, during the pause, that he seemed suddenly to shiver or gasp for breath. “Look here. I want to apologise to you—Out there, trying to think, I felt that I deserved to be kicked. Anybody would say you’re quite right—from your point of view.” And he looked at them most piteously.“I’m sorry I made a noise. But please make allowances. This—this entanglement—or whatever you like to call it—is so tragically serious for both of us. I mean for her as well as for me.That’s why I beg you to bear with me—to reach an understanding, a solution—to do anything rather than just quarrel about it. If, to begin with, you can only put yourself in my place”; and he seemed to be wringing his hands. “Verinder, I want that girl. I simply can’t live without her.”
He said these last words in a hoarse whisper that was more disturbing to hear than if it had been a loud cry of pain. It jarred upon the ear, it set one’s teeth on edge; and the expression of his haggard face added to the physical commotion he produced, even if one did not think of what he had said. The colonel felt the commotion all through his stout body; Eustace held up an arm, as if calling for invisible cabs.
“Verinder!” He was perceptibly shivering—a tremor that made his limbs jerk. “Verinder—don’t you see? This is tearing me to pieces. Surely you can comprehend? You were young once—under forty, full of life. Perhaps you were unhappy too—as I have been—lonely—Didn’t you ever feel the longing to make a girl your own?”
Mr. Verinder, once more white with anger, shouted in his turn. “Will you remember that I am her father.”
“I know. Forgive me. I express myself badly.” And he sat staring at the carpet, and shivering as though some fever of the jungle again had him in its clutch. They watched him; and when he raised his head they saw it for moment convulsed and twitching. He put his hand to his forehead, and then continued to speak. “You and I must have it out, mustn’t we? We can’t leave it all in doubt. I must settle it before I sail for South America”; and he gave a groan.“I want that girl. I can’t live without her. She has become the whole world to me. She wants me, too. And, remember, other people mayn’t want her like that—I mean, as I do.” As he went on it seemed to them that delirium had set in. He was raving at them now. “We can’t do without each other. Well, that’s love. Love! What is it? I can’t say. But no one’s to blame for it. A chance? A fatality? Some day these things will be scientifically ascertained, and then the accident of love will be avoidable—to be guarded against. But it isn’t now.”
He paused as if for breath, and cast glances round the room before he went on again.
“Verinder, I know you want to do what’s right and proper. You’re a man of high principle—no one could doubt that. Only don’t be hide-bound—or tied down by prejudice. Look the thing in the face. I see the obstacles, plainly, from your point of view—but somehow wemustget over them. You and your friends are people of the world—you have all sorts of social riddles at your fingers’ ends. Can’t you find an answer? Can’t you cut the knot? If we could only tide over—get round the obstacle—then we should come to daylight one day. No,” he cried forcibly. “I mustn’t say that—I mustn’t hint that my unhappy wife may die and cut the knot herself. Besides, it isn’t true. Her physical health is excellent. She’ll probably live to a hundred”; and once more he groaned.“But one thing is certain, Verinder. You can’t say we must be left quite without hope—and remain divided for ever. Oh, no, that would be inhuman. Neither of us could submit. Verinder, my dear fellow, it’s in your power to make it hard for us or easy. Don’t make it hard for us.”
All this last part of his appeal had seemed to them worse than delirium, grotesque and terrible in its nearness to a kind of perverted impossible logic. Now he seemed suddenly to collapse on the sofa in a fit of profound dejection. His back stooped, his hands dangled down between his knees, his head subsided almost upon his chest, and he sighed at brief intervals. They watched him, as if spellbound.
He changed his attitude, and sat now with an elbow on the back of the sofa and his head leaning on his hand; and he sighed, as if sick with emotion.
Then there occurred what was perhaps the most astounding incident of the night. The colonel had launched his last word; now he darted round behind the sofa, bent over Dyke, seized his shoulder, and shook him. What was it? Some deep invincible instinct of remote antiquity—the instinct that compels the tame animal to take all risks and fly at and worry the wild beast when it lies prostrate and in pain? Or was it just frenzy and disgust aroused in the colonel by the sight and the sound of something so devastatingly un-English. But Dyke, plainly supposing that the action was prompted by compassionate sympathy, spoke to the colonel for the first time, and in tones of grateful affection.
“Thanks, old boy,” said Dyke; and then, as the colonel continued to shake his shoulder, “Don’t trouble, dear old chap. I shall be all right directly.”
The colonel dropped his hands and tottered away from the sofa. To him the thing had become like the fourth dimension, or the fifth; beyond the range of intellect, brain-destroying. He thought vaguely that if it went on he should faint.
Mr. Verinder was running his fingers round the open neck of his shirt. He felt that his universe had crumbled. He felt that the only sane thing for him to do would be to speak as if to a child, and say, “Mr. Dyke, stop making these afflicted noises; get up, go home to bed, and don’t be so ridiculous.” He would have said it perhaps, if he could. But strangely, inexplicably, Mr. Dyke wasnotridiculous; he was still awe-inspiring—dreadful. Yes, that was the word. In the language of the locality, the man had made a dreadful exhibition.
He got up presently, without being told to do so.
“It’s not a bit of good my making promises that I can’t keep. I’ve made one promise about it already—to my father—and I’ll keep that. My father’s a clergyman—in Devonshire.”
He shook hands with Mr. Verinder, gave the colonel a wan smile, and went. Eustace let him out, watched by Gussie; the butler standing by, looking very anxious.
When they came upstairs again Mr. Verinder was still sitting at the table.
“Do you think Dyke had been drinking?” he asked, tapping with the paper knife.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Eustace.
“He didn’t smell of alcohol,” said Gussie, “when I stooped over him on the sofa.”
“That makes it all the worse,” said Mr. Verinder, stonily.
“Thank goodness,” said Eustace, “that mother and Emmeline didn’t come back before we had got rid of him.” And he lit a cigarette with fingers that trembled.
After this they had a plain perception of the force they were up against. As Mr. Verinder looked at theimposing façade of the house, he felt that, solid as he had always considered it to be, it afforded a frail protection. He sighed as he drove away from it—his menaced stronghold, his undermined fortress.
He went once again to see Mr. Williams in Spring Gardens, but without any hope that Mr. Williams would be able to help him.
“What can one do?”
Mr. Williams seemed to think that one could do nothing.
“You mean to say,” said Mr. Verinder, frowning, “that if I know this man intends to abduct my daughter—”
“Oh, you can hardly call it that, I think,” said Mr. Williams; and he moved towards his book-shelves, as if with the intention of taking out the letter A and looking up the article entitled Abduction. But then he was mechanically checked by something already in his mind. “By the way, Miss Verinder herself has been here.”
“She has, has she? What for?”
“To ask about her securities. She wants all papers sent to her bank. She said she would discontinue our arrangements, you know, and henceforth manage her affairs herself. She brought her maid with her, and they took some papers I gave her then and there straight on to the bank, I believe.”
Mr. Verinder thought that this was very significant. He said it suggested premeditated defiance and rebellion.
The solicitor said, smiling mildly, that she had not the air of “a rebel.” No, she had seemed“very quiet and sensible,” and he somehow implied that he would like to venture to add “very good-looking, too.”
In conclusion, Mr. Verinder asked, “Would you advise me to have her watched by detectives?”
“Oh, surely not? What could be gained by that?”
“It is her mother’s suggestion. At least we should then know her movements—and perhaps some of his. He alleges that he means soon to sail for South America. Of course, if one knew for certain that he was out of the country! If we did do it, could you arrange it for us?”
Mr. Williams said yes, if really necessary; but he must own that this class of thing was not in his line, or in the line of the firm.
“Then I will not trouble you further,” said Mr. Verinder stiffly.
“Emmeline,” he said that afternoon, or on an afternoon very near to it, “come in here, please, I want to speak to you.”
Mrs. Verinder had given him a warning; he was flushed, angry, uncomfortable, as he stood at the dining-room door and waited for his daughter. He spoke sternly now, as she appeared at the bottom of the staircase.
“Father, I am going out.”
“Going out as late as this? Why, it’s nearly seven o’clock. And where’s your maid? Where’s that girl—where’s Louisa?”
“I don’t require her. I’m not going far.”
“No, so I think.” He made her come into the dining-room, and he closed the door behind her.
She was wearing a queer little fashionable hat madeof chip straw, with rosebud ornaments, and a white spotted veil neatly drawn under her chin; her dark simple dress was of the kind then known as “tailor-made,” fitting close to the waist, but enormously wide at the shoulders; as she stood looking at her father and quivering in anxiety, she had that gentle inoffensive charm of feminine prettiness which du Maurier was at the moment drawing so cleverly.
“Father, I beg you not to detain me. I have an appointment.”
“You won’t keep it. Do you understand? Sit down. I won’t allow you to leave this room.”
“Do you mean you’ll use force to prevent me?”
“If necessary. Sit down—over there.”
She sat down then, meekly, despairingly; but almost immediately she got up again.
“Father, let me go, please. To-morrow he is leaving London for a day or two. I want to see him before that.”
Although she had not moved from her chair, he stepped between it and the door; and he angrily told her to be seated. Once or twice more she rose and implored him to let her go. Then she sat still, in agony. She thought of this lost hour, this hour of mellow sunlight beyond the trees, by the water of Kensington Gardens; and of her lover waiting for her.
It was a cruel little scene, and Mr. Verinder felt the cruelty of it. He knew that he was inflicting anguish; worse, much worse than if he had really employed force. Throughout the dragging hour he might have beaten her, thrown her down upon the floor, knelt on her chest, and he would have hurt her less. He walked about the room torturing and tortured; his thoughts on fire, and yet his heart coldly aching.
Once she said words that sounded like an echo of another voice, but in her pathetically pleading tones they stabbed Mr. Verinder with a stiletto thrust.
“I’m not very happy, as it is, father. Please don’t make things harder.”
“My dear girl,” Mr. Verinder groaned, “do you think I’m happy either? Have I been unkind till now? Have I reproached you, even now? How else can I act? I see you drifting”—and he clung to this word—“drifting quite unconsciously to perils that you cannot measure.”
She said no more, and she never changed her attitude in her chair until Mr. Verinder, ostentatiously consulting his watch, said it was time to dress for dinner. As he glanced at her it seemed to him that her nose had grown sharp and thin beneath the veil; her eyes were dry and hard, so that the face, instead of being like a young girl’s, made him think of a haggard woman who has “knocked about” and “been through a lot.”
She herself had thought all the while of the man who was waiting for her, thinking, “He will give me another five minutes; now he won’t wait any longer; now he has really abandoned hope.”
She had lost the hour with him. It was gone for ever; nothing could bring it back. Out of her life they had taken it; this hour of love they had stolen from her—the hour that should have had love in it; and life is so pitifully short, holding, if you count them, so few hours of any sort.
That morning, quite early, Miss Verinder walked out of the house by herself; and she did not return for three days.
During her absence Mr. and Mrs. Verinder took what seemed perhaps an odd course, and yet it would have been difficult in the circumstances to propose a better one. They wished to maintain “appearances” as far as might be possible, to avoid premature scandal, to keep the talk within the four walls of home; and also they were in this predicament, that they did not really know if Miss Verinder would come back next minute or never. They therefore entered into a conspiracy with their servants, giving orders rather than explanations, and instructing them to tell inquirers that Miss Verinder was ill in bed upstairs—nothing serious, merely indisposition, but bed advisable.
Mrs. Bell, of Queen’s Gate, worried them badly by her good-natured solicitude. She was fond of Emmeline; and learning of the indisposition, she came often, brought hot-house grapes, and begged that if reading aloud was out of the question, she might at least be permitted to sit by the bedside and hold the invalid’s hand. Except by Mrs. Bell few inquiries were made.
It was just before dinner when Emmeline reappeared. Her mother and father received her alone in the boudoir; directly she came in, her father seized her by the wrist, and Mrs. Verinder sat down on a “pouf” in the middle of the room. Mr. Verinder released his daughter, almost casting her from him, and began walking to and fro; while Mrs. Verinder, sitting in a huddled fashion, following him with her eyes, so that her head moved from side to side exactly as heads move when people are watching the flight of the ball at a lawn-tennis match. Her hands were shaking, her watchful face expressed great distress as well as fear and wonder. Emmeline seemed calm and fearless.
“What’s the meaning of this?” said Mr. Verinder tragically, in spite of the commonplace character of the question.
“I am sorry, father, for any trouble and anxiety I have caused—but I couldn’t help it.”
“Couldn’t help it?”
“I mean, you were keeping me a prisoner. Well, I had to break my prison.”
“Where have you been?”
Emmeline remained silent.
“Emmeline, why don’t you answer?” said her mother. “Can’t you see what I’m suffering?”
“Leave her to me,” said Mr. Verinder. “You have been with that man?”
“Yes—if by that man you mean Mr. Dyke”; and Emmeline squared her shoulders and looked her father full in the face.
“For—for these three days you have been living with him as if you were his wife?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Verinder uttered a suffocated cry, and it seemed for an instant as if Mr. Verinder was about to hurl himself upon Emmeline and fling her down at his feet; but then he turned his back on her, walked to a window and opened the curtains as if in need of more air.
“And you haven’t yet told us where,” said Mrs. Verinder, making strange throat sounds as well as speaking.
“Liverpool,” said Emmeline quietly.
“Liverpool!” Mrs. Verinder repeated the word, and moaned.“You went that distance—to Liverpool—without even a dressing-bag! No things—not even a brush and comb!”
“I got things there.”
“Then where are they? You have come back without anything.”
“I left them.”
Mrs. Verinder uttered another cry. “So that you could return to him!”
Then there came a tapping on the outer panels of the door.
“Come in,” shouted Mr. Verinder furiously.
It was the butler; and Mr. Verinder swore at him roundly. For the first time in his life he swore at a servant, and with ladies present.
“Damn you, you fool, what do you mean by knocking at the door. Why did you do it?”
The butler said he thought they were talking business, and was loth to disturb them. But he wished to know about the dinner.
To Mr. Verinder that tap had been symbolic; it seemed to imply the end of keeping up pretences. It was this thought that made him swear.
“Dinner! Yes, at once”; and he looked at his watch. “Eight-fifteen!”
They sat down to dinner and Emmeline joined them. Sherry was poured out for Mr. Verinder to drink with his soup; he could smell, before it came in, the shrimp sauce that was to go with the turbot; there was general conversation—about the weather and politics, just as usual.
What had happened had happened; yet there they were. In appearance at least, the world was going round at the same pace. The Albert Hall still stood on the old site.
During the course of the evening Emmeline told themthat it would be wiser for them to let her go away altogether; and she was unshaken by the storm that both parents launched. She said she was very sorry; she knew they must hate her now; it would be better for everybody if they parted. What amazed them most was her courage. It was as though she drew all this new strength and character from the man. In their distress and confusion they told her so.
“I don’t recognize you”; “You are changed”; “I simply do not recognize you”; and so on.
THROUGHOUT the month of August, while drawn blinds in all the handsome windows of Prince’s Gate announced that Kensington was at the seaside or on the continent, Miss Verinder enjoyed the absolute freedom of a sitting-room and a bedroom at the Langham Hotel. Mr. Dyke did not lodge in Portland Place, and the hotel porters scarcely knew him by sight. He and his Emmie were never seen together at the west-end of the town. If he appeared anywhere in public he was alone. Although Emmie might not be very far off, she never disclosed herself. She retired into the modest ill-lit background—as on the occasion of his lecture at the hall in Wigmore Street, where she sat in her dim corner shooting arrows of love from misty eyes as she watched him step upon the platform, and trembling with pride and joy as she listened to what the noble chairman said about him. He belonged to her, “this wonderful explorer, this man of resource as limitless as his courage, this man who, alone and unaided, has gone into the dark places of the world, tearing the veil from nature’s face and making foot-paths through the unknown,”—he belonged to her, but fate had ordained that she must possess her property in secret and not openly claim it as her very own. He too understood that the wide public need not be told everything, and he showed a delicate reserve in spite of his passion. As was saidby one of the very few people who knew anything about them: on the whole they were decent in their indecency.
To use a phrase much favoured and commonly used at this epoch, life had become a fairy tale to Miss Verinder. It seemed to her that the first sight of Anthony Dyke had awakened her from a sleep of death; that then he had breathed fire into her, and that now he was filling her with purpose and power. He was moreover the key to all enigmas and the magical expounder of the commonplace. Nothing tired her, nothing bored her; everything, however drab and cold till now, had light and warmth and colour in it. Also nearly everything was new. She rode with him in hansom cabs, was hugged by him in delightful smoky compartments of the underground railway, spent whole days with him on the eastern side of the Mansion House; seeing in flashes the Monument, the Tower and the new Bridge, the Commercial Road, the docks—the places she had heard about but never seen before. These, with glimpses of the river, the rattle of the city traffic, the roar of trains rolling through iron bridges above crowded streets, made a new forceful world for her after the dignified repose of her old universe.
All this while he was making preparations for his departure, which could not be delayed after the middle of September, and his business in the city and beyond the city concerned the ship that was to take him to South America and the cargo it would carry. She felt elation, pride, and overwhelming interest as she trotted by his side, or a little behind him; dodging through the thronged streets, dashing down dark little courts, and in and out of such queer offices, where among dust and gloom one seemed to smell sea breezesand have visions of distance and adventure. He walked so fast that she was always out of breath, but even this discomfort was pleasant since it came from him; she felt that romance and poetry were making her breathless, and not merely muscular effort. He left her sitting in outer rooms, and if the truth must be told, he sometimes forgot her, so absorbed did he become in the negotiations he was conducting. Once, after waiting for an incredible time, she looked down through a dirt-stained window into a narrow street near Tower Hill and saw him going away engrossed and gesticulating with two other men; and her heart almost ceased to beat as she thought it would be like this when he went from her for ever. He came back exultant, apologetic, her lover again now that the business had been completed, and swept her away with him for a belated three o’clock luncheon, a ravenously hungry meal in a strange tavern—the first of those queer repasts in queer places of which destiny decreed she was to eat so many. He drank her health, he touched her hand beneath the table, he looked sudden death at inoffensive strangers that he suspected of glancing at her with an admiration too patent to be respectful; he praised and thanked her for granting him her companionship and counsel, for giving him—as he said without the slightest intention of flippancy—her “moral support.”
His praise was music to her, sweet as the singing of birds, grand and voluminous as a cathedral organ; but she reproved him for the murder glare at those always well-meaning and now terrified young men.
“Because you like me,” she said, smiling at him,“you mustn’t fall into the mistake of supposing that other people see me with your eyes. Except you, no one has ever thought me worth looking at—or in any way out of the ordinary.”
“Emmie, why do you say that?” He stared at her in surprise, and his face grew troubled. “It’s not like you—not worthy. You should be above all that. You must know quite well”—and he said this softly but very firmly, with a kind of grateful solemn reverence—“that you are the most beautiful thing God ever created.”
“Oh, no,” she said, with one of her swift blushes, and in a voice of frightened confusion. “That’s utterly absurd—even foryouto think. But, dear Tony, I am quite content if, as I say, in your eyes—”
“Inalleyes,” he said loudly and almost angrily, administering a sharp slap to the table with his open hand. “Why pretend—why try to spoil my rapture? Emmie, my dearest, don’t do it. My lovely priceless girl, it—it hurts me”; and there was real pain in his tone.
She vowed both to herself and to him that she would not do it again. His illusion was ecstasy to her. Why should she try to shatter it in the name of dull stupid truth? Rather pray to heaven that he might continue thus divinely deluded.
Miss Verinder, then, was happy as well as entranced. She averted her gaze from the cloud represented bythat ominous date of September Fifteen. She refused to look at it in her diary at the hotel or to notice its advancing shadow out of doors. Four more weeks, three more weeks—and then the end. She would not think of it, she could not think of it. Does the busy little gnat as it moves with a whir of tiny wings in the sunlight brood on the ephemeral nature of its joy orfeel premonitions of the darkness and the frost which will close its brief day?
She knew that his plans were finally settled—cut-and-dried, as he said himself—and that nothing would change them. He was going to the Argentine Republic with a cargo in which, as she soon learned, he owned the largest share; he hoped that this venture might prove exceedingly profitable; and, immediately on its completion, he intended to make some mysterious kind of excursion to his old friends, the Andes—“a picnic,” as he described it; “a little trip on spec”; “just a lark.” Then, after this, he would be off to Australia and its deserts again. One of those governments wanted him. Then, when he had finished the governmental job, he would turn once more to big work—the noble work that, as he had hinted to Mr. Verinder, requires solid cash behind it.
Speaking of the preliminary commercial venture, he touched on this point.
“Emmie, my grave little judge, you mustn’t think me sordid and grasping when I chatter about pots and pans, and gas about fleecing the honest Argentinos. If I’m keen—and I am desperately keen—to get money, it isn’t for myself—it’s for what I feel my life-work”; and he laughed gaily. “Look here, old lady, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. I’d stick at nothing to put myself in funds. The end justifies the means.” And he laughed again.“Don’t look frightened, you innocent angel. All I wish to imply is this: If Dyke is desired to find the South Pole on one of these long evenings—as Dyke intends to do, mark you, Emmeline of the dusky locks—well, he must have a bob or two in the bank.”
Immediately Miss Verinder offered him her own money, all of it, or as much of it as he felt he could make use of; but he told her that acceptance was quite impossible. He could never take a penny of her. Besides, as he explained, it was a duty of the public to support him, and he proposed to make them fulfil their duty. “If our little gamble turns up trumps, it may keep me going for two or three years. But the public must put up the stuff for the big thing. Emmie dear, I confess it’s a matter of pride with me. Dyke has done enough already to establish his title to public support. Why shouldn’t they back Dyke—as well as the other fellows? Ah, here we are. I shan’t keep you ten minutes here.”
They had been hurrying down a lane not far from Liverpool Street Station. Taking her by the elbow, he guided her through the doorway of a warehouse and up a narrow flight of stairs. The warehouse belonged to a Birmingham firm of gunmakers; and soon she was following Dyke and his business friends down more and more stairs, till she found herself in a cellar deep below the level of the roadway, where a shooting-gallery, perhaps twenty-five yards long, had been contrived for testing fire-arms. Dyke, very gay and jovial, chaffing black-coated managers or partners and slapping on the back a stout workman in an apron, selected from hundreds of rifles about a dozen, and took up position at the opening of the gallery. An assistant with black hands and oil-stained face began to load the weapons, and the man in the apron handed them one after another to Dyke. The whole cellar was well lit with electric light, which its whitewashed walls reflected harshly. One saw the vaulted entrance in front of Dyke, and a white target against a brown bank at the far-end.
“How much earth have you got there behind the disc?”
“Three feet—quite three feet.”
“All right”; and Dyke loosed off.
The noise was appalling. In that confined space each discharge made a crash and roar as of a thunder-storm; the walls seemed to be shaking as well as echoing; one felt that the building overhead must fall and one would be buried alive. They were repeating rifles—clumsy and poor machines if compared with the magazine rifle of to-day; but Dyke fired them so rapidly that he might have been working a mitrailleuse. Miss Verinder felt that the top of her head had gone, that the drums of her ears had split, that she was suffocating by the sulphurous fumes of the exploded powder; but all the while she was proudly watching, proudly admiring him.
He was a younger Anthony now, the shooter of big game, out in Africa; bringing his gun to his shoulder in one motion so swift that it was there before you saw it begin to come up; standing firmly planted on his legs, with his hat on the back of his head, his eye intent, blazing away under conditions where a miss means death.
“There. Thank you”; and handing back his smoking rifle, he began very carefully to examine each one that he had fired.
“Well,” said the stout assistant, with a complaisant grin, “I never see anything like it. You don’t fiddle about—you don’t shilly-shally, sir. No, my word, you don’t.”
Dyke gave him another slap on the back, laughed, and spoke in the frank exulting tone of a schoolboy who brags so simply that what he says does not soundvain-glorious. “I was taught to be nippy, old chap, by shooting at elephants on the charge. I never had any lessons at the rifle-butts—with a marker and a flag. But I was hurrying now because I have another appointment”; and he turned to one of the gentlemen in black coats. “Yes, they’re all right. Yes, I pass that lot. Two hundred and fifty, aren’t they? Come along.”
“That was a very noisy performance,” said Emmeline, when they were out in the street again.
“Was it?” he said carelessly. “I suppose it was. I say, I’m behind time. We must leg it, darling.”
He did not apologize for having nearly deafened her; it never occurred to him that anybody could be upset by the pleasantly familiar racket of fire-arms. Nor did he ever notice that he walked much too fast for her—although he bowed like a Spanish hidalgo as he stood aside for her to pass through chop-house doors, handed her into hansom cabs as if she were a princess, and often looked at her across soiled tablecloths with the eyes of a mediæval knight kneeling before the shrine of his patron saint. And perhaps Miss Verinder’s most exquisite bliss lay in her recognition of the fact that, beyond thinking her the loveliest of created things, beyond thinking her his counsellor and moral supporter, he instinctively regarded her as a comrade and a pal. Merely for dashing about the city, there was not a man in the world—and, scattered about the earth, there were, as she knew, many men for whom he had a great tenderness—there was not one that he would have preferred as companion to his staunchly trotting breathless little Emmie.
One day she met the captain of the ship on whichDyke was to sail, and the three of them had a delightful intimate luncheon in a remarkable eating-house with low beamed ceilings, panelled walls, and partitions surrounding each of the tables—a place, it was said, exactly the same as it had been in the time of Mr. Pickwick and little changed since the time of Dr. Johnson. It was hot, full of loud voices and oppressive kitchen smells; but Miss Verinder ate with appetite, being astonished to discover the charm afforded by grilled steak, tomatoes, and Worcestershire sauce, when you happen to be very hungry as well as very much in love. She liked Captain Cairns, a short but enormously strong man of fifty, with grizzled beard, and face and hands the colour of the woodwork that perhaps had seen Dr. Johnson and faithful Boswell. Captain Cairns inspired confidence; her Anthony would be safe with him. She was pleased, moreover, to observe his profound regard and admiration, when he spoke of Dyke’s famous deeds.
“One of my oldest and loyalest friends,” Dyke himself had said of him.
“Oh, Miss Verinder,” said the captain, “it does make me that angry when folks cast doubt on his discoveries. Pack o’ silly stay-at-home fools. I saw a bit in the newspaper the other day actually sneering at what he’d seen with his own eyes—those pigmies at Patagonia, Tony—you know—and the remnants of them temples in the Andes. Has he ever said what isn’t true? Oh, it makes me fair mad, when they go on like that—in print, too”; and Captain Cairns grew warm in his genuine disgust and indignation. “Not fit to clean his boots, they aren’t.”
Miss Verinder said that the incredulity of Mr. Dyke’s critics had made her very angry also.
“What does it matter?” said Dyke grandly. “Wasn’t Columbus doubted? We’re prepared for that sort of thing. It all comes right—we get our due at long last. Calumny and suspicion, perhaps, as long as we’re alive, but a piece of sculpture and a brass plate, a tomb in St. Paul’s or the Abbey, when the last cruise is done.”
“Oh, don’t speak like that”; and Miss Verinder shivered.
The industrious city clerks did not linger over their meal; the room grew nearly empty; but Dyke and the captain sat smoking cigars and talking of the cargo. She listened with unabated interest and puffed at a cigarette—one of the queer Spanish cigarettes given to her by Dyke. To smoke was a new accomplishment, and she was not yet very good at it, coughing occasionally, and blowing out when she meant to suck in. But she gloried in it, because it seemed to bring her closer still to him.
Captain Cairns, it appeared, had himself a share in the cargo; and it appeared further that a small portion of the cargo was for Uruguay and not for the Argentine. This consisted of bicycles and bicycle parts.
Miss Verinder, deeply interested, asked if the fashionable craze for bicycling had really reached that distant land. She said she was amused by the thought of a fashion spreading so swiftly.
“Captain Cairns was amused too.” He laughed until he rolled about on his bench.
“Yes, miss,” he spluttered, “no mistake about it. Them Uruguayans want bicycles—mad for ’em—ready to give any money for ’em.”
“Then what a splendid idea—how clever to have thought of bicycles.”
“Yes, yes,” said the captain, still laughing immoderately. “Hisidea. It was you, Tony, as thought of it first. Yes—bicycles. Why, bless me, Miss Verinder, the Uruguayans will be bang in the fashion—like so many monkeys on wheels.” Then he slowly recovered composure. “You set me off, miss. Forgive me. I’m one who will have his joke.”
It was a little difficult to understand of what this particular joke consisted and she saw that her sweetheart, although he had smiled to begin with, now seemed troubled if not annoyed by the captain’s sense of humour. For a moment he looked contritely at his Emmie, as though about to apologize for something or explain something. But then he seemed to change his mind, and he soon broke up the little party and took her away.
They walked westward along Cheapside and Newgate Street, and on to Holborn Viaduct; and, as always, their progress was enlivened by occurrences, incidents, excitements, emotions. Whether starting from Cape Horn or the Bank of England, he could not take a walk without things happening. At the corner of a side street a young woman selling flowers offered him roses. He bought a bunch for his companion, gave the woman half-a-crown, and told her to keep the change. The woman, overwhelmed by this largesse, huskily asked heaven to bless him, and then burst into tears saying she had been there since seven in the morning and those were the very first flowers she had sold. Dyke, almost weeping himself, implored her to be calm, made her tell more of her circumstances, gave her a couple of sovereigns with some loose silver, and took off his hat in the most respectfully courteous of farewells.
As he walked on—very slowly for him—he spoke with sadness of the cruelly hard fate of many women at great centres of civilization, like this enormous labyrinth of London—women, who ought to be cared for and loved in the shelter of happy homes, out in the open street, snatching a doubtful livelihood from the caprices of the crowd. He said it broke his heart when he thought about it.
Soon ceasing to think about it, he talked of those detractors of his—the people who, like Mr. Verinder and fellow members at the club, spoke of “travellers’ tales,” “Baron Munchausen,” and so on.
“It’s all true, Emmie dear; every word that I have ever uttered or put down on paper. What dolts! Because they read at school that Patagonians are a large race of men, if you tell them of an older smaller race not quite extinct—And those temples, too! Huge masses of masonry welded to the cliffs and rocks”; and he waved his hand above his head, as if to indicate the vastness and grandeur of these sacred remains. “Well, I couldn’t bring them away with me, could I? I couldn’t prove their existence by carting them home to the Geographical Society in Saville Row. No, believe me, the Andes still holds marvellous secrets. Yes,” he added triumphantly. “One little secret I have here, in my pocket,” and he tapped his chest. Then he stopped suddenly. “By the way, we’ve done our work. Why shouldn’t I go there now?” And he smiled at her fondly while he brought out a notebook. “I spoke of the labyrinth of London. But you, as a born Londoner, ought to know your way about. Where’s Hatton Garden?”
Miss Verinder had to confess that she did not know.
“There’s a merchant there I want to see.” After consulting his notebook, he hailed a hansom cab, with the usual ceremony handed her into it, and followed her.
“Hatton Garden,” he called to the driver, and gave the number of the house he wished to visit.
“Hatton Garden! Did you say Hatton Garden?” asked the driver, in surprised tones, through the roof trap.
“Yes. Drive on,” said Dyke authoritatively.
The man drove on for perhaps fifty yards, and then pulled up his horse.
“Drive on,” said Dyke, again, opening the trap-door. “What have you stopped for?”
“You’ve arrived,” said the man.
“Is this Hatton Garden?” shouted Dyke, as he sprang out of the cab.
The man said yes, and Dyke exploded with terrible force.
“Then, you infernal scoundrel, what do you mean by luring me into your cab and defrauding me of a fare when I was in Hatton Garden already and I had only a few steps to walk?”
“Youwasn’tin Hatton Garden,” said the man. “You was facing it. I did ask you and you yelled I was to get on. I thought you knew.”
“No, you didn’t. You thought I was a stranger—you thought, because I didn’t know all the twists and turns of your senseless town you’d fleece me and make a fool of me—” And continuing the explosion, increasing it even, he said he would not pay the fare, not one penny of it, and he had a great mind to pull the driver off his seat and break every bone in his body.
Miss Verinder begged that the man might be paid.Gasping bystanders distressed her, the wrath of Dyke had thrown her into a flutter. “For my sake, Tony, pay him and be done with it.”
“For your sake? But the principle of the thing, Emmie. Oh, very well”; and he spoke now calmly and grandly to the cab-driver. “Because this lady wishes it, because this lady has interceded for you, you shall have your shilling. You shall have your—” He was feeling in his trousers pockets. But there was nothing there. He had given all his money to the flower-seller.
Miss Verinder opened her purse, and paid the cab-driver—a little more than his exact fare, in order to remove a perhaps unfavourable impression. Of course the cabdriver could not be expected to understand Anthony’s noble but explosive nature as she did.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, linking her arm in that of her hero and giving it an affectionate pressure. “Please dismiss all that from your mind—for my sake.”
Thus, arm in arm, they crossed the threshold of “Cunlip and Company, dealers in precious stones.”
Dyke in a moment was smiling, like a child who in the midst of fearful tantrums is soothed by a magic word from the lips of governess or nursemaid.
“Now this will be fun,” he said, beaming at her. “You listen to everything that he says. Where’s Mr. Cunlip? I want to see him at once, if he can make it convenient.”
Mr. Cunlip, a small, dark, old man, received them in a dingy office behind his show-rooms on the ground floor. He seemed a little taken aback by Dyke’s breezy self-introduction and cordial greetings.
“Well, here I am at last—Dyke—Anthony Dyke, you know. That doesn’t impress you, eh?” And Mr. Dyke laughed good-humouredly. “Well, I’ll give you a name that will mean something to you. Pedro del Sarto! Ever heard of Pedro del Sarto? Of Buenos Ayres, you know.”
But, to Dyke’s slight discomfiture, the name aroused no immediate memories in Mr. Cunlip. It became necessary to give further details—such as that old Pedro was a tip-topper, a white man, one of Dyke’s best friends, that he had been over here in 1880 and had done business with Mr. Cunlip.
Then the dealer in precious stones at last remembered. “Oh, yes, to be sure. But I see so many gentlemen from Argentina. A Spanish gentleman, wasn’t he? Headquarters at Buenos Ayres, but connected with those gold mines at Cape Horn? Yes, I’ve placed him now. I hadn’t much business with him. I passed him on to the assay people over the road.”
“That’sthe man,” said Dyke, beaming. “Well, you’ll recollect now that he wrote to you two years ago to say I’d call on you at the first opportunity.”
“Two years ago! First opportunity, what!”
“Thisisthe first opportunity. I have been occupied in other parts of the world,” said Dyke, with a very modest air.
Mr. Cunlip then wished to know how he could avail himself of the opportunity, now that it had come, by being of service to Mr. Dyke.
“Something to show you,” said Dyke modestly.
He had brought from his waistcoat pocket a small envelope; he opened this, extracted a tiny packet of tissue paper, and after unfolding the paper, rolled out upon the top of a glass case what looked like five or sixgreenish pebbles, each about the size of a pea. Then he spoke in a tone that had changed from extreme modesty to almost aggressive triumph.
“What do you call those?”
Mr. Cunlip put a magnifying glass in his eye, and examined a stone carefully before he answered.
“I call this one an emerald. What doyoucall it?”
“I call it the same,” said Dyke jovially. “And the others too. Emeralds, my dear Cunlip—and beauties, eh? The real article.”
“Do you want me to weigh ’em up and name a price?” asked Mr. Cunlip.
“No. That’ll come later. What I want now is just your opinion—expert advice. Suppose—I say suppose, later on, I began to dribble them across to you! How many could you do with like that?”
“Why, as many as you could send. May I ask where they come from?”
“No, you mustn’t ask that—not just at present. I know where I got them, and Pedro del Sarto knows—and we’re the only two men alive who do know. But we think there’s more there in the same place—and I’m soon going to have a look.”
Then Mr. Cunlip spoke rather disparagingly of the specimens before him; he had his doubts as to colour; they were not very big either; he said that to judge actual merits before cutting was almost impossible, even to the greatest expert in the trade—and he delicately implied that between that gifted person and himself there was little if any difference. But, urged to do so, he gave a rough estimate of the value of a particular stone, if after cutting it proved as good as it looked now.
“Splendid! As much as that? Then I may take it that emeralds are keeping up their price, and it isn’t likely to drop?”
“Their pricecan’tdrop—so far as I can see.”
“They’re as fashionable as ever?”
“They’re just as fashionable as they were in the time of the Incas.”
“Ah. Glorious?” Dyke gave an exultant laugh. “The Incas!Rem acu tetigisti.”
“I beg your pardon—what’s that?”
“Nothing,” said Dyke gaily. “I liked your way of putting it. The Incas! They covered themselves with emeralds, didn’t they? Very apt—your historical allusion. Emmie, did you hear what Mr. Cunlip said?”
While he spoke he was packing up his specimens in their tissue paper. He put the envelope in his waistcoat pocket, and, with compliments to Mr. Cunlip, he hurried away.
“Let’s walk, Emmie. No more cabs. Besides, all this has excited me. The days of the Incas! Ha, ha.”
And as they walked on, through Holborn and New Oxford Street, he told her the story of how he had found those emeralds quite by chance, high up in the mountains. As he sat resting in the fierce sunshine, he had seen one of them on the edge of a small basin of sand among black rocks, and had scratched for the others with his hands. He described the place—oh, yes, he could find his way back all right; he had mapped it very carefully, and given the corrected map to his partner, Pedro del Sarto. But he himself needed no maps; he could take you there blindfolded—a valley narrowing to and shut in by a perpendicular cliff a thousand feet high, down the face of which the meltedsnow had made deep channels—a valley where no white man had ever stood, where perhaps no man of any colour had even been since the Spanish Conquest four hundred years ago, till he, Dyke, came to tear the secret out of its lonely heart and profit by the discovery.
As she listened, she fancied that she could see it all in imagination. People on the crowded pavements jostled them, they passed close to the noses of van horses in crossing the Tottenham Court Road, and they noticed nothing of these surrounding sights, sounds, or pressures. They were both of them thousands of miles away.
The time of the Incas! Yes, he honestly believed that he had stumbled upon the trace of workings of emerald mines that were in use before the advent of the Spaniard. He might prove wrong, of course. He had been in a hurry, with no time for close investigations. Perhaps what he fancied had been wrought by human beings labouring was really made by nature using such of her tools as lay handy—storm, frost, sunshine, and the upheaving forces that had built the whole mountain backbone of the continent. In any case, the real point was—How many emeralds had man or nature left there?
At any rate, Dyke would go now and see for himself. It would be a lark. Let us leave it at that.
“Not a word to anybody, Emmie. You and I and old Pedro. No one else—till the day when I give my queen a tiara of green stones all as big as filberts, with a few Brazilian diamonds to flash among the greenness.Then when you go to the Opera—on one of the grand nights—you lovely Emmie, like a high priestess of the sun—then—But I say, let’s have tea.That is, if you don’t mind paying for it”; and, laughing, he grasped her elbow and led her into a crowded tea-shop.
They sat there, on a seat against the wall, at the end of a table that was occupied by other people; and Dyke while waiting for their tea and while eating two crumbly currant scones, continued to talk to her, but in a voice so low that no one else could hear. His eyes flashed sometimes, he raised his head and shook his hair; he was talking enthusiastically, with a freedom that he could only use to her, and in the midst of it quite automatically he pushed his cup across the marble tablefor more tea and picked up and began to eat another cake.
“You don’t know me yet. Above all, you don’t understand the impetus—the added drive—that your love has given to me. Listen. I can’t say it too often. You have lifted me up—you have placed me on high—you havesavedme. For your sake—oh, how I worship you when you say those words—for your sake, Emmie, I must and I shall keep on the summits of endeavour—and never yield to the powers of darkness or the cowardice of shameful compromises. I’m all out now—to the last ounce—for my good angel’s sake. Yes, two lumps, please. These buns are stale.”