“Yes, but one must be civil,” said Dyke, sufficiently loud to be heard in the other room; “one can’t ignore the claims of courtesy.”
And he followed her through the door and closed it behind him.
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
They were seated at the long table where the innocent laborious engineers used to eat their well-earned food. The man called Martinez, a brutal-looking ruffian, stared at Dyke, but took no notice of his bow or greeting. The other man rose immediately, took off his hat, and sat down again. He was the person of importance, and Dyke concerned himself with him and paid little regard to the uncourteous lieutenant.
As well as a lamp on the dresser, there were two candles stuck in bottles on the table, so that one had him fairly illumined and easy to study. He was tall and thin, so sallow of complexion as to seem like a sick man; every tint of him was vague and unnatural, from the sunken yellowish eyes, the blue mistiness of his shaved cheeks, the umber-coloured lips and blackened teeth, to the undyed shaggy cloth of his coat and the tarnished velvet of his broad belt; for the rest, there was about him the air of something that must necessarily cause fear and shrinking in all that looks at it—as of a pallid ghost in a graveyard, or the body of a hanged murderer brought into a dissecting room and there come to life again—an arrogance of sheer repulsiveness that seemed to defy one to look at it a second time. Dyke observed the mark of a sword cut on his forehead, the saliva at the corners of the brown lips, and the spasmodic flicker of his hairless eyelids. He wore two unusually long knives in a leather belt above the velvet.
“A pleasant calm night,” Dyke said carelessly, as he crossed the room and opened the door of egress. He stood there looking out, taking the air. The two horses were in the same place; all was dark now at the sheds; the landlord had left his lantern on the ground by the corner of the house. Overhead the stars shone brightly from a purple sky.
Dyke strolled back to the door of his own room, and, leaning against its jamb, talked to the pallid man. He spoke politely enough, but with the careless, indefinably contemptuous tone that he might have employed to a stranger at his club, somebody who ought to be a gentleman and yet isn’t.
“You are moving on soon, I hear—before to-morrow.”
“Yes,” said the man, drawling and blinking his eyes, “I do not stay long anywhere. So I may go soon from here. With me it is always uncertain. And you?”
“As soon as I can. I have a boy here with me, and he’s very tired. I want him to get a good night’s rest, and then—”
“Ah, yes.” The man interrupted him. “There is a boy. You are not alone. There is your boy”; and he turned his eyes from Dyke and blinked at the ceiling.
“Moving as I do,” he murmured, after a pause, “now here, now there, not sure myself where next I may be, I do not care to account for myself. In truth—as is generally known—I prefer not to be met with or observed, even involuntarily.”
Then he asked Dyke how it was that he, who appeared to be an Englishman, had so reduced himself in baggage and belongings, when visiting a neighbourhood as unfrequented as this. In the same careless tone as before, Dyke gave him a brief but entirely truthful outline of his trip: describing how he had gone far north in search of an ancient mine, and how his followers had decamped, leaving him and his young servant to get out of the scrape as best they could.
“And you succeeded in getting out of that scrape. It was well done. And the boy, too.” As the man said this, a flutter seemed to pass from his eyelids downward through the flesh of his cheeks till it played about his moist lips as a sickening deadly sort of smile. “Yes, you and your boy!” And, his face rigid again, he showed for a moment the underpart of his tongue obtruding through his opened teeth.
He asked a few more languid questions, but not one in regard to Dyke’s possible possession of any money; and Dyke knew that this apparent lack of curiosity on the point was a bad sign.
While they talked the woman brought in the food—an omelette, some cold chicken, and a flask of wine. She hummed a few notes of a song as she bustled in and out. Acting as waitress, she moved swiftly round and about the table, and every now and then darted at Dyke a glance that seemed to have meaning in it. The man called Martinez ate greedily, but his leader scarcely at all. He sat staring at the wine in his glass, held the glass up to the flame of the nearest candle, and slobbered its edge as he took an occasional sip.
Then abruptly he asked Dyke to leave them alone now, adding that he would join him later.
“By all means,” said Dyke; and he went back into the other room and closed the door.
“Emmie, wake.” He was shaking her by the shoulder, but holding his hand firmly over her mouth lest in waking her she should cry out. “Listen,” he whispered, “and don’t speak. We have got to do a bolt. Not yet, but soon. First, hide this for me. Put it right under you and lie on it.” And he pushed the revolver into her hands. “Now can you keep awake? Emmie, you must. Somehow keep awake and listen to what goes on—but pretend to be asleep. Then, when I call to you, come straight to me and give me the revolver—as quick as possible. Lie still, darling—and for God’s sake keep awake.”
Then he moved hastily to the table and sat on one of the stools. He looked back towards the bed and saw that Emmie was lying motionless, sprawled in an attitudeof deep sleep; then he turned again to the door. Without the slightest sound it had been opened wide, and the pallid man stood on the threshold looking at him.
“We will not keep you waiting long,” he drawled. “Only a few minutes.”
“Don’t apologize,” said Dyke. “My time’s your time.”
“Thank you”; and the man half closed the door and withdrew. He could be heard speaking to Martinez, and for a little while Martinez growled and muttered to him. Then they moved about the outer room, and there was silence. Dyke sat quietly waiting and Emmie did not stir.
Then he heard the woman humming and the chink of crockery as she began to clear the table. Next moment she had slipped through the doorway and was at his side. She touched his forehead with her fingers and spoke cautiously. “They have gone to their horses—and to fetch something. They will come back.”
“Are you a friend?” said Dyke, looking up at her and smiling gravely.
“Yes, I’ll be your friend now.”
“So I guessed. That was what you meant when you made those signs?”
“Yes.” And nodding her head she went on rapidly. “Because you are so brave; and because I am sorry. Very sorry since I told him”; and she pointed to the bed. “I should not if I had thought. You must risk everything to get away.”
“That seems the idea,” said Dyke, still smiling at her.
“See.” She stooped suddenly, pulled up her skirts,and whipped a knife from the clip that held it to her girdle. “I bring you this.”
Dyke shook his head negatively.
“Not? Why? You have a gun?”
“Not, so to speak, about me.”
“Then take this. It is something. Why not?”
“Because directly they come in here they’ll search me. Put it away, please.”
She did so, talking fast. “I will help you. I will watch. And you will take your chance—you are very brave. If you could once get out. There are the horses.”
“Exactly. It had occurred to me. If I could get the horses.”
“I’ll try my best. I’ll watch. Hush.”
Swift as a lizard she glided into the outer room, and begun to hum merrily as she picked up the plates.
They had come back. Dyke heard them lock the outer door and drop a cross-bar into its socket. Then, obedient to an order, the woman entered the inner room carrying the two candles in the bottles. The pale captain of the revels followed her, pointed with his hand, and she set the candles on the table. Martinez had come in too. He dropped some sacking and a coil of rope upon the floor-boards near the door, and stood there. The woman went out, glancing back at Dyke. The captain called after, telling her to get wine ready.
“Now we will talk,” he said, “and perhaps drink. But first of all—if you permit—”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Dyke. “I have no weapon about me of any sort or kind.”
“If you will be good enough to prove that, we can talk comfortably.”
Dyke, with a contemptuous smile, stood up, opened his garments, slapped his large breeches pockets, showed them the tops of his boots, and satisfied them that he was without means of defence.
“That is quite satisfactory.”
“But I notice,” said Dyke, “that you don’t return the compliment.”
“Ah, no. With us it is different,” said the captain, and he picked up one of the candles, and sauntered towards the bed.
Dyke was there before him and stood in his way.
“What do you want?”
“Only another peep at the boy—the wonderful boy. No, I will not wake him—not yet. I will attend to him later. But soon.” Mistily and vaguely, the man moved his disengaged hand as though sketching in the air the shape of the recumbent form. Then he went back to the table and invited Dyke to sit down again. He himself sat down, drew one of his long knives from its sheath, and laid it across his knees.
“Martinez, the wine. Get some wine ready”; and he sat looking at Dyke over the table until, after a minute or two, Martinez returned with a small tray, three glasses, and two flasks of wine. “No, not on the table. Put it on that stool.”
“Well,” said Dyke, “I am at your service. What do you want with me?”
“With you not much”; and once more there was the muscular flicker about the brown lips. “But for myself I would like, if possible, to have a little fun.”
“Oh, damn your fun, Ruy Chaves,” said Dyke forcibly.“You are Chaves himself, aren’t you? But of course you are. There couldn’t be two such jokers knocking about at the same time.”
“Martinez.”
Martinez was growling. He picked up the coil of rope; but at a sign from the chieftain dropped it again.
“Well then, Chaves, I’m tired of your fun,” Dyke went on quietly. “Get to business. What’s the game?”
“So you don’t like fun. But your boy? Is not all this funny? Oh, that boy!” And for the first time he laughed. It was a rasping, whistling snigger. “Suppose now I ask you to spare me your boy.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Oh, ho. You speak resolutely. Suppose then the fancy comes to take him without your permission.”
“I should be sorry for you to try to do that, Chaves.”
“If it amused me! To keep him with me in the mountains. Ho, ho. You flush. Be calm. I said, to keep him in the mountains, make of him my pet and my toy, as you seem to have done.”
“Ruy Chaves.”
“Yes, perhaps to put him in girl’s frocks—and when I have played with him so—dressing and undressing him—then hand him on to my men for their doll.”
“Chaves,” said Dyke, raising his voice, “that’s enough. I am asking myself if it can possibly be true—what people say—that you were once a soldier—consorting with other soldiers—fighting fair, as they fight. When did they find you out? When were you first flogged, or branded—or whatever they did to you, to show what they thought of you?” He went on speaking, grimly and defiantly, scarcely knowing and not really caring what he said. From the bed he hadheard the sound of Emmie’s breathing, quickened and sharpened by fear; and he wanted to drown the sound.
“I think,” said Chaves, “you had better have a drink now.”
“No, thank you, I am not thirsty.”
“Martinez, pour out wine for him. From his own bottle. Let him have a bottle to himself. There. Toss it off.”
“Thanks, no.”
“Then I think you had better go to sleep.”
“I am not sleepy.”
“Drink. Then you may feel ready to sleep. Sleep is so good, so comfortable. And remember, I have yet to attend to the boy. When one sleeps one sees nothing, one knows nothing. Whereas to a wakeful man, bound fast with cords, and compelled to watch, while—”
Once more Dyke talked loud. Again he had heard the terrified breathing from the bed. But he chose his words now, such word as might possibly relieve the strain of the listener.
“Chaves, drop all this rubbish and rot. Stop chattering. Talk sense. There’s nothing in what you’re saying to frighten anybody. It’s ridiculous.”
“Be it so. Then drink. We’ll drink together; and happily you may sleep. Take your glass.”
Behind the bulky frowning Martinez, the innkeeper’s wife showed for a moment in the doorway, and Dyke saw her sign to him not to drink. The warning was of course unnecessary. Indeed, the bandit had himself plainly indicated that he was offering a drugged beverage.
“I am obliged to you—but no.”
“Take the glass.”
Dyke took it then, and, looking steadily at Chaves, he poured the wine on the floor and replaced the glass on the table.
“Martinez.”
Martinez displayed a cutlass, and taking a step forward from the wall, felt the blade with his nail.
“Keep where you are, but be ready,” said Chaves; and he refilled the glass. “Drink. I have told you to drink—and I don’t like to be refused. Drink this to the dregs.”
For the second time Dyke took the glass. He held it high in the candlelight, sniffed at it, and again held it poised.
“Drink. It is good stuff for you. It will save you pain. Drink and forget.”
“Emmie!” Dyke called the name loudly, as he drove the rim of the glass against the bandit’s sunken eyes and flooded them full.
Chaves gave a yell of pain, and, blinded, spluttering, sprang up with his knife. But already Dyke had the wooden stool high in the air; he crashed it down, broke it on Chaves’s head, and sent him senseless to the floor. Turning, he tried to ward off Martinez with the fragments of the stool; but his foot slipped on the wet boards. Martinez cut at him, closed with him, and both went down together, Dyke underneath.
It was all in a moment, this sudden tumult and struggle. Emmie had leaped to the signal, and, half mad with terror, she screamed aloud as Dyke fell. Twice she screamed, in her agony of dread, as the two men fought at her feet. Then some one fired. One after another, three shots were fired, filling the roomwith smoke, seeming to split the walls with the force of the explosions. And then in the cloud of smoke Dyke was up, gripping her hand, dragging her through the doorway.
“Be quick now. Not that way. Here.” The woman was there. She took Dyke by the arm, led him through the middle room, through her kitchen-bedroom, and out into the cold clean air. Dyke looked round the corner of the house. The horses were no longer there. There were shoutings in the sheds, the men all stirring, roused by the noise.
“Come quick,” said the woman, hurrying them away, chattering as she went. “My husband has the horses ready. My husband is good too. He was set to guard the other door, but he opened it for me.”
They came to the man meekly holding the horses. But pursuit was too close at hand. Some one—Chaves possibly, certainly not Martinez—had recovered sufficiently to unbolt the main door and yell frenzied orders to the gang. One could hear the mules coming out of the sheds. Then the men began to fire their rifles, blindly, down the path towards the high road. It seemed to Dyke that it was too dangerous to use the horses as he had intended. Emmie was in no state to mount and run the gauntlet in the dark. Yet the horses might be useful in another way.
He took them from the man, set their heads towards the road, loosed them. Then he kicked the stomach of each in turn, and they galloped away. As he guessed, they knew the road and would surely make for it.
As he and Emmie ran off in the opposite direction, he heard the men firing. Then evidently they mounted their mules and started on a stern chase of the galloping hoofs.
Presently he dived with her down a sharp slope until they lodged themselves in a horizontal ravine. They waited there for sunrise, and then worked their way back along the hillside, far below the now silent camp, and onward till they came to the high road. Trudging down the road, they met almost immediately a Chilian officer with a couple of gendarmes. Their troubles were over.
The officer, courteously turning, took them to a place that was at once post-house and barracks, and there provided them with a two-horse wheeled conveyance which he grandiloquently called a carriage. He told Dyke that two troops of cavalry had gone up to the hills, and spoke hopefully of those pests, those disgraces to civilization, being sooner or later cornered and caught. He said that they had been too long permitted. He promised that within a few hours the innkeeper and his wife should be rescued from their precarious situation, that they should suffer no reproaches for any indiscreetness of which they might have been guilty as compelled accomplices of the gang, and that he would hold as a sacred charge the money that Dyke gave him for their future use.
The travellers drove away then, after breakfast, in their carriage—jolting, bumping, making the dust and the stones fly, as they whirled downward side by side; downward, with feathery tree-tops rising to enchant their eyes, green meadows, sparkling streams, brilliant many-coloured flowers—downward into the kindly smiling paradise that nature has spread out between the foot-hills and the sea.
“Oh, for a bath, Emmie! And what price a bed with sheets? That’s what I always tell people. If you want to enjoy—But, by Jove, I’ve forgotten something. The revolver! I must make quite sure.” Andhe opened the breech of the weapon and emptied the six chambers. “Yes,” he said, “just as I thought.” Three of the cartridges were intact, the other three had been fired. “You saved my life! You killed Martinez.”
And suddenly he burst into tears. The tears ran down in rivulets, melting the dirt, whitening his cheekbones, bringing out the red here and there on his dusty beard. “You killed him,” he sobbed, “dead as mutton. How the devil you missed me in doing it, I don’t know. All—all the more to your credit. Oh, Emmie—my little fragile, delicate girl—the, the bravest creature that ever lived, as well as the most divinely precious. Oh, Emmie, Emmie.”
Miss Verinder, herself affected by emotion with her arm round his neck soothed and quieted him.
“Don’t, Tony, don’t.”
She said that she did not really know what happened in that horrible room, except that she was crazy with fear. She never wanted to think of the place again, and it would be unkind of him if he did not help her to forget the agony she felt during the moment when he was rolling about the floor and she was trying to get the revolver into his hand. She knew that, despairing, she had pulled the trigger once. But surely not more than once? It had seemed to her then that all the people in the room and in the house were firing together—not merely revolvers but large cannon. It was hot, too, as if the house was on fire. She remembered no other sensations of any kind whatever, until the choking smoke lifted and she felt cold air upon herface and Dyke’s hand dragging her along.
They left the carriage at the nearest railway town, and went on by train to Santiago. Here, in perhaps the most beautiful city of the world, they stayed three days, washing themselves, sleeping, eating. Here too they bought clothes, and became once more Mrs. Fleming the journalist and Mr. Dyke her guide.
At Santiago he learned, in telegraphic communication with his agent at Buenos Ayres, that Australia was clamouring for him as much overdue. Important work awaited him; and he was at once in a fever to be off, willing to forgo or indefinitely postpone bone-breaking vengeance on muleteers, thinking only of the new adventure. He flushed with delight when he found that a steamer was on the point of sailing from Valparaiso for Brisbane. Since Emmie showed a strong disinclination to recross the mountains by herself and go home the shortest way via Buenos Ayres, he said she must travel in one steamer to Panama, in another to San Francisco; and thence in a train to New York, where she would have a choice of Atlantic liners.
They parted at Valparaiso; and six weeks later she was sitting at breakfast in the coffee-room of a private hotel in the Cromwell Road, Kensington.
OTHER people having breakfast in the room glanced from time to time at the lady with the short hair who was sitting all alone at a table near the window. Gently stirred by the vapid curiosity that would seem to be the atmosphere itself in private hotels, they had already put themselves to the trouble of ascertaining that she was a Miss Verinder who had arrived last night from foreign parts, and they wondered if the oddly shortened hair meant that she had suffered from a fever while abroad. One or two of the old ladies determined, since she was obviously quite proper and genteel, to make her acquaintance before luncheon—by rolling a ball of crochet silk across the floor at her, by inquiring if they had inadvertently taken her chair, or by some other polite method usual in such places.
A large proportion of the visitors were old ladies, some of them very old indeed, and each had a comparatively young lady as attendant or companion—a granddaughter or great-niece, or merely a nice girl glad to see London under any conditions—who readjusted the white woollen shawl, cut bread into convenient slices, and made herself generally serviceable. There was talk about the inclemency of the weather, the unusualness of it so late in the year; and these juvenile aids were sympathetic and thoughtful, saying “Auntie, you won’t venture out, of course.” At atable larger than the others there was a family group, father, mother, governess, and well-grown children, visitors from the northern provinces. The father stood in the window to eat his porridge, and without searching for pretexts, spoke genially to the solitary breakfaster; telling her that his way of eating porridge was the only correct one, and advising her to adopt the method. “At hoam ’tis always served to us on the sideboard, never on the table.” Then he jerked his head towards the windowpanes. “Give it an hour, an’ all that snow will have turned to fair sloosh. I’ve ben watching those la’ads shoovel away wi’ it off the steps and the footway.”
It was Sunday morning; and Miss Verinder, automatically resuming one of her old customs, set forth an hour later to attend divine services at Brompton parish church. The hotel manageress insisted upon lending her a pair of indiarubber goloshes, and praised her for her temerity while the page-boy knelt and put them on her feet. “Yes, I do call you brave,” said the manageress, “to face the elements on such a morning as this.Iwouldn’t have the courage”; and she shivered. “No, I wouldn’t. And walking too! Why don’t you let me send Charles to fetch you a cab?... Oh, shut that door, Charles. I declare the cold comes in enough to cut you in half.”
Miss Verinder did not feel the cold—she was inured to cold. In fact, the air out of doors seemed to her only remarkable for its flatness and heaviness. She observed the snow—if one must honour with the name of snow that niggardly smoke-stained deposit which men with tools had scraped from the pavement into mean little banks and defiled with a crust of mud as theyswept it here and there. Changing already to “sloosh” in the roadway, with wet tracks made by cart wheels, and pools of primrose-coloured water where the faint wintry sunlight touched it, any approximate whiteness that it still retained served only to make the house fronts seem darker, more offensively drab, more overwhelmingly dismal. Out of the porches and down the steps came people who seemed to be in some queer manner parasitic to the houses, rather than their owners or leaseholders; as if the architect’s incessantly repeated design, the builder’s profuse stucco, and the plumber’s leaden pipes, had mysteriously engendered human tenants. Born of the Cromwell Road, they closely resembled it; they were uniform, drab of complexion, with a dingy respectability that took the last fading lustre out of the trodden snow and obliterated every spiritless effort of the sunlight. All similar, but of both sexes, well wrapped in coats and furs, with prayer-books in their hands, they moved slowly and cautiously, begging one another to beware of slipping, to avoid puddles, and to step back and stand still when a passing carriage splashed the mud dangerously. They seemed to Miss Verinder strange, small, pitiful. Moreoverthe roadway that she used to think so wide had constricted, the lofty line of the house cornices came crushing down upon her, a narrowing vista of plate glass and window curtains seemed to close any chance of escape into freedom and open spaces. Even the terra-cotta mass of the Natural History Museum shrank to nothing as she approached it, and offered to her, instead of the dignity of soaring towers and vaulted vastness, a fantastic little toy, or that picture of a toy that is pasted on the lid of a child’s box of bricks.
Why had she returned to this particular neighbourhood—like the wounded animal creeping back to the place it used to haunt before, largely straying, it received its wounds? As though exhausted by rebellious originality she seemed meekly to have surrendered to the force of habit. Or perhaps when the cab-driver asked where he should take her she had said Kensington as the only name of a locality belonging to this hemisphere that she could remember in her great weariness. Because the effort required for thinking hard was just now impossible, because nothing that concerned herself personally was any longer of the least consequence; because one place was the same to her as another, since more than half of the world had become quite empty and she was condemned to live alone in it?
She mingled with the small stream of worshippers passing beneath the drip of the trees by the blank wall of the Oratory, threaded her way past two or three broughams regretfully brought there by devout masters or mistresses who could not walk but hated troubling their stable on the day of rest, and then just outside the church door she came almost face to face with her parents.
Sweeping into the sacred edifice, they both cut her—Mr. Verinder in the manner known as dead; Mrs. Verinder with a vacillation of gait, a fluttering of furs and feathers, the first rough sketch of a gesture, and a look. It was in its essence a look that Emmie had often seen at home; the look that came when servants had committed an accident with valuable glass or rare porcelain, angry but not really inexorable, seeming to say:“Icannotignore it. You have broken our hearts, and we are very much annoyed.”
In spite of the disastrous turn of events that occurred last August, Mr. and Mrs. Verinder throughout the month and during half of September were still sustained by a modified form of hope, and still making strenuous efforts to conceal the disgrace that had befallen them. They felt that they were engaged in a contest with time. If they could “hush things up” until their enemy went back to the wilds no one need know of this trulyfin-de-siècleescapade, and Emmeline need not be given that horrible up-to-date label of “The woman who did.” Dyke was leaving England about the middle of September—really going—no doubt of it. Not only the newspapers said so, but Mr. Verinder—without the aid of detectives—had assured himself of the truth. When once Dyke was gone all would be over; Emmeline would come to her senses, rub her eyes as one awakening from an ugly delirium, and be very grateful to find her reputation still intact. They could then do anything they liked with her—for instance, marry her to that old widower who hired the Grosvenor Gallery for his concert, and thus, as Mr. Verinder put it, “save her from her temperament.”
Straining therefore towards these ends, they for the moment gave their daughter what she had already taken, absolute freedom; they frustrated the desire of Eustace to get Dyke out on the sands of Boulogne; and they officially intimated to their servants, through the housekeeper and butler, that a very slight tiff recently existing between Mr. Verinder and Miss Verinder had now been completely smoothed away, leaving father and daughter the very best of friends as in the past. The faithful servants were glad to hear this; they knew they had a good master, and nevermeaning to quarrel with him themselves, they could not understand why anybody else should fall foul of him. They thought that the girl Louisa Hodson had acted like a rare fool in forfeiting her situation—for it should be mentioned that Louisa had been despatched with a month’s board wages as well as salary, in lieu of notice. She was dismissed not because her complicity had been established, but because Mrs. Verinder could no longer bear the sight of her.
Then came the middle, the end of September, and the total vanishment of Louisa’s late charge. The enemy had gone and his victim with him. Nothing more could now be done by her tormented father. In the whole circle of the family acquaintance the dreadful affair became more or less known. Within those limits it was a very solid scandal—a scandal that could only have been allayed by the production of Emmeline herself, and Mr. Verinder was unable to produce her. He abandoned fictional enterprise, clothed himself in a garment of silence, and suffered. Conscious that the local society was talking about him, he had the illusion that it was talking of nothing else; when old friends like Sir Timothy shook hands with him he seemed to feel an added pressure on his fingers and winced beneath this contact with sorrowful sympathy; if people spoke of such matters as public morality or licentious domestic habits and then broke off the conversation, he believed they had all at once remembered his misfortune. Doubtless, he thought, they condemned him for failing to bring up a family in the way it should go, for being unable to govern his own household, for letting things drift until they came to a pretty pass indeed. If now it had been necessary toissue debentures of those paper mills, he felt that the terms would be less favourable than in the past and the response not so large, because confidence was withdrawn from one of the principal directors of the company. If a man can’t look after his own daughter, you don’t trust him to look after anything.
In this winter of 1895-96, he suffered, feeling as he walked to the house and away from it that invisible eyes were looking at him from all the neighbours’ windows and that he was not holding up his head as he used to do. Only in the spacious tranquillity, the well-warmed atmosphere of egoism, the nicely arranged comfortable total indifference to all things except oneself, that permeates and makes up the charm of a really good London club—only there could he shake off his depression and feel sure that nobody was sympathising with him, pitying him, or blaming him; that if members laughed at the story of his fugitive child, they immediately forgot what had set them laughing; that if, going into the coffee-room, they connected the names of Anthony Dyke and Emmeline, they disconnected them again, and probably for ever, in the moment of asking for red currant jelly with the hot mutton or mixed pickles with the cold beef.
At Kensington these names had been fatally connected. Kensington knew that Dyke, the famous Anthony Dyke, was at the bottom of everything, at the side of it too, and all round it. The most faithful servants will chatter, even at the risk of losing the best of places. If people are quick at putting two and two together to make four, they are quicker still at putting one and one together to make two. Perhaps Miss Marchant, emissary to Mrs. Pryce-Jones, not reallyhoodwinked by Mrs. Verinder’s explanation, had continued to keep a watchful eye. Perhaps as well as Miss Marchant, the mournful angels on top of the Albert Memorial had seen the infatuated couple walking side by side, and had told the summer wind while begging it not to carry the news any further. Such things always leaked out somehow—more or less. Thus rumour, busy with both names, had enlivened drawing-rooms, by swift amplification; and in the protracted absence of Miss Verinder there had been reports that somebody or other had met her and Mr. Dyke at Monte Carlo, had lodged next door to them at Folkestone, had bumped into them at Tunbridge Wells.
During the church service she meditated, without emotion, upon her new social status. Glancing at one or two familiar faces she thought she could observe a rigidity of feature, a marble restraint of expression, that was something more than should be produced by absorbed interest in a religious exercise. They could not of course, at such a time and in such a place, even faintly nod or smile at an old friend; but their devotion was not surely quite so profound in past days; this statuesque aspect of the praying saint was surely new and significant. She felt a numb grief at having caused pain to her parents; but she cared nothing for the mental perturbation of these other people.
Except perhaps Mrs. Bell! She felt a sting of regret, a sudden realisation of forlornness, as she noticed that, far from assuming that air of sculptured oblivion, Mrs. Bell from time to time looked at her in a most distressful manner. Mrs. Bell had always shown strong regard for her. Emmie was fond of Mrs. Bell.
As has been mentioned, Mrs. Bell owned one of the largest houses in Queen’s Gate, and it may now be added that her heart was as large as her house. She was a childless widow of forty-two who had earned a widowhood in which she frankly delighted by assiduous care of an elderly invalid husband; loquacious but devoid of malice, indeed exuberantly good-natured, she loved to clothe her pleasant expansive figure with grand garments; fair of complexion, gracious, smiling, when dressed at her grandest she looked blondly opulent like the queen of diamonds in the very best and most expensive packs of cards. She was waiting on the porch steps, when Emmie, after allowing the congregation to depart, herself left the church.
“Now, my dear girl—my dearest Emmeline—you are coming home to lunch with me.Thatgoes without saying.”
She would take no refusal. Her brougham, the last of the carriages remaining on the wet gravel, stood with its door open; she pushed Miss Verinder into it and the footman smothered them with a fur rug. As they drove away Miss Verinder’s eyes for a moment filled with not easily repressible tears. She was touched by the warmth of her friend’s greeting.
“Now I want to tell you,” said Mrs. Bell, with affectionate impressiveness, when she and Emmie had crossed the hospitable threshold and were alone together, “I want to tell you at once that nothing that has happened makes the least difference tome.”
“Thank you, dear Mrs. Bell,” said Emmie gratefully.
“I am not even going to ask you whathashappened.”
Miss Verinder thanked her again.
“I shall not ask a single question; and I want you to know that you will be welcomed in this house precisely as before—at all times and seasons, do you understand? If any of my friends object, then,” said Mrs. Bell firmly and grandly, “they can stay outside. Yes, they shall soon find I will not stand anything ofthatsort. You see, I am perfectly frank with you, Emmeline. I should be less than a friend if I attempted to conceal the truth from you. You have the whole world against you. So far as worldly opinion is concerned, your only chance is to live it down—justto live it down. And, as I say, bymeyou will be askednoquestions of any kind. But, oh, my dear child, what on earth have you done with your hair?”
“I had it cut,” said Miss Verinder meekly.
“Butwhy?”
“I mean to let it grow again,” said Miss Verinder, evading an answer.
“I hope so indeed. Now we will go into the other room and have lunch.” But before opening the door good Mrs. Bell put her hands on the visitor’s shoulders and administered a warmly affectionate kiss. Then she looked at Miss Verinder doubtfully, distressfully, and with a slight piteousness of appeal. “As I have promised you, I shall not ask questions—unless, my dearest Emmeline, you yourself would like to tell me every single little thing. If you feel it would be a relief to you for me to know exactly where you have been and exactly what you have been doing since you left England—but, no, I see you would rather not. Then come along.”
And with that tremendous adventure for ever locked in her heart, Miss Verinder sat down to luncheon.
She remained in the neighbourhood. Cut by her friends and cast off by her family, she calmly settled in the flat at the corner of Oratory Gardens and went about just as if she had been anybody else instead of the disgraced Miss Verinder. The arrangement of the flat pleased her; she liked the narrow steep staircase with its private street-door beside the auctioneer’s office; when she closed that door behind her she felt safe, and when she passed through the door at the top of the stairs she felt that she was in an impenetrable stronghold. She furnished the flat charmingly, with antique things that as yet were not valued by everyone. Mrs. Bell said she had made it “too pretty and comfy for words.” Louisa Hodson, discovered without much trouble, came to the flat as factotum, and added to Miss Verinder’s sensation of being finally established in a shelter and retreat that was quite unassailable. No one on earth could interfere with her here. Even when the street door stood wide and an invader mounted the stairs, there was Louisa at the top of them to bar further progress and send him down again. In these days visitors were of the kind that wish to sell tea or dispose of tickets for a benevolent concert; but neither then nor at a later period could anyone get past Louisa when her mistress desired brief or lengthy seclusion; no one—not even Mrs. Bell of Queen’s Gate.
At once Miss Verinder began to occupy herself in the pursuit of knowledge, as though attempting a sort of higher or secondary education. She read scientific treatises and learned to draw maps. She studied such impossible things as logic, rhetoric, and English composition. She joined a literary society, attended lecturesand classes; wrote essays on subjects chosen by a severe young professor, and humbly carried them back to him for sharp censure or faint praise. She was in many ways busy.
Almost at once too there fell upon her that air of self-reliance which, whether proudly deprecating or gently defiant, is observable in all women who are for any length of time compelled to manage without assistance both their outward and their inward lives. All people knowing her story must see in her appearance as well as her manner a confirmation of their own way of interpreting it. Even her cheerful resignation was suspicious; they looked for the sadness in her face when she thought herself unnoticed. To such critics she was in every detail precisely what might be expected in one who has forfeited all chances of respectful attention, who is left to herself because she deserves to be left to herself. To those who knew nothing about her she was merely old-maidish. Her hair grew again, long and thick, but the brightness of youth had irrevocably gone from her. Her complexion slowly faded, the tints of the frail blush rose giving place to the waxen permanence of the lily. At twenty-eight she looked at least thirty-five.
And the long years began to glide away. Colourless, without salient features, swift in their cold monotony, the years were like ghosts of years flitting across a half-lit room into the endless dark passages that leads to the eternal. Mrs. Bell had said that she must live down the past, but it seemed that her real task was to live down the future.
At least thus it all appeared to external observers. Events of one sort or another were truly happening inthe flat all the while. For instance—as observed by Mrs. Bell—after a time a parrot arrived, to be petted and fed and cared for. Then Louisa, the maid-housekeeper, asked permission to keep a cat. Louisa did not intend to marry; she had established herself in the flat as firmly as her mistress; she and Miss Verinder understood each other—they played with the cat in its kitten stage, they made much of the solemn and probably very aged parrot. Seemingly they were just two old maids together.
During this period the illustrious name that had been whispered in Kensington drawing-rooms sounded at intervals loud and clear on the public tongue. As hitherto in the career of Dyke, he was alternately lost to view for long stretches of time and lit up by a blaze of publicity for brief spaces. Throughout the year 1897 those deserts of Australia hid him completely. Then early in 1898 he was very much before the world again. His bookSunshine and Sandgave the history of his most recent vicissitudes and successes, and appearing at a moment when the ultimate confederation of the Australian Colonies was being widely discussed, the book, as critics said, was not only more entrancing than any novel, it took its place as an indispensable volume of reference for all students of imperial history. Also at some time early in this year 1898 he was in London, being interviewed by newspapers and delivering a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society. Then the dark curtain promptly descended upon him once more. He had been sent to examine the interior of British New Guinea and to explore any unvisited islands to the east of it; and the newspapers had not much to say about him for two or three years, except that hewas alive in spite of the insatiable craving of the cannibals with whom he now consorted. Then came the publication ofAmong the Papuansin two bulky volumes, which the press welcomed with compliments similar to those showered upon his previous work. Critics said that since there could be little doubt that the Crown would cede its interests in New Guinea to the Commonwealth of Australia as soon as that federation should be finally constituted, these two illuminating and compendious volumes of Mr. Dyke’s appeared at a most opportune hour. Then soon one heard that Mr. Dyke was in the United States lecturing, and trying to collect money for another Antarctic voyage, which should start, as he hoped, in 1902, or at latest in 1903. The lecture tour closed stormily in a pitched battle with American critics who had thrown doubt on his records of the Patagonian pigmies and the Andine temples. The noise of this contest echoed loudly even on our side of the Atlantic.
Thus Miss Verinder was not allowed any true chance to forget the man who had been so much to her. For her, one must suppose, even the occasional mention of his name, a mere newspaper reference to him, should prove stirring to the memory, if not absolutely upsetting to her peace of mind. And above all, those books of his—always running into a new edition or being advertised by the publisher as about to appear in a cheaper form! The earlier ones, too, got themselves reissued—First Antarctic Cruise(1888);The Second Cruise(1890); “At all booksellers, uniform withA Walk in the Andes”; and so forth! Perhaps she was reading one or other of these works and suffering in consequence, when she lay indisposed behind her shut doors, or suddenly and abruptly disappeared from theflat altogether on one of her strange lonely excursions. Louisa, growing older and sterner every year, merely reported that Miss Verinder was unwell and could see no one; or that Miss Verinder had left London and it was quite uncertain when she would return.
Moreover, had Miss Verinder been in any danger of forgetting the man himself and his more intimate characteristics, she received at least one sharp reminder.
On a certain winter afternoon his father came to call upon her, by appointment.
“I was so glad to get your note giving me permission,” said the elder Mr. Dyke. “It is very kind of you.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Emmie; using, as so often happens when we feel that an occasion is momentous, the tritest and most simple form of words. “Do please sit down”; and she indicated that she wished him to choose the sofa as his seat. Her nerves were fluttered and her thoughts in some disorder during these first civilities.
“It is a great pleasure, Miss Verinder, to make your acquaintance.”
“And I,” said Emmie earnestly, “have wanted to know you, Mr. Dyke. I have wanted it so much—so very much.”
“Thank you. It is good indeed of you to say that. I should have wished to come long ago—but, well, somehow I did not venture”; and he had a smile that seemed to shoot like an arrow into Emmie’s gentle breast and set it throbbing with exquisite pain. Almost, for that instant, Anthony might have been there smiling at her.“No, I wished to do so—but one is always afraid of seeming intrusive. Only when he wrote to me—”
Mr. Dyke sat then upon the sofa, and they began to talk about his son.
He was a much smaller man than Anthony, very thin and spare, and yet obviously possessing something of Anthony’s iron strength; so that, although sixty-four or sixty-five years of age, he gave one an impression of a person who will go on living for a great while without ever growing really old. He too had blue eyes and a straight nose, but one could not imagine this face becoming hawklike or fierce. He was quite dignified, yet devoid of all commanding or majestic attributes. His manner, reminding her of Anthony’s now and then in its deferential courtliness, more particularly as expressed by bowing the head, was quite that of a man of the world. And Emmie noticed that his sacred calling was not indicated by the slightest sign in the clothes he wore. Then as her nerves steadied themselves, while he went on talking and she listening, she thought of nothing beyond the one fact that he was Anthony’s father.
He was telling her about Anthony’s birthplace, their home in Devonshire, and the time of Anthony’s boyhood. “Endells—that is the name of our house, you know—quite a small place, but in a way very charming—tous, at least—we all love it. Close to the sea, you know. Endells—so many places in our part of the world have a plural name. Abertors—that’s the big place, the show-place. An old house, ours, you know—and the most delightful old church close by, on our own ground. I am, you know, what they used to call ‘a squarson,’” and he smiled again. She could bear it now; and it was not really Anthony’s smile. It was full of goodness and kindness, but it had not that warmflood of light as of the sunshine bursting through splendid dark clouds and making the whole world happy. “At the time I speak of, I was still doing my clerical duties. I hadn’t then turned lazy and handed everything over to a curate. And will you believe it, Miss Verinder? I then thought that Anthony, when he grew up, would be ordained and follow in my footsteps. His mother thought so. Poor dear”; and he sighed. “We lost her before he was fourteen. As a boy he was religious—unusually religious. But now, I fear—well, you know his inmost thoughts a great deal better than I do. We won’t speak of that.”
Then, continuing, he said he felt it would interest her to hear that as a boy Anthony showed no sign of the adventurous spirit. “Isn’t it strange, Miss Verinder? But so it is.” He was a dreamy boy, loving mystical books, with a hankering after magic, astrology, and spiritualism. He had never been seen to read tales of travel. Nor was he fond of athletic sports. He did not care for riding. “You know, there are hounds of course within reach of us. And sometimes he would follow them on foot, but never on horseback. Always a prodigious walker.” Then Mr. Dyke laughed gently.“He would not come in to meals. It worried his poor mother, and our housekeeper—who had been his nurse—used to say nature never put a clock or dinner bell inside Master Anthony’s stomach as it does with other children. He would climb along the cliffs and lie on his back on some ledge or other, looking at the sky or watching the seagulls, and dreaming—dreaming hour after hour; the whole day often, in summer. All one can imagine is that during these long reveries great purposes were slowly shaping—unknown to himself perhaps. At any rate not one single word about it did he utter to me—and we werefriends, Miss Verinder—a very real affection, thank God, remained always between us two—I fancy, something more than is common with fathers and sons.” And Mr. Dyke paused to blow his nose. “Not one word until he was approaching his nineteenth birthday. Then he said to me—I was never more astonished in my life—he said, ‘Father, I can’t stand this any longer. I am starting for Africa to-morrow.’ Just like that. And he went, you know.
“The rest—if a father may say so—is history. It is, isn’t it, Miss Verinder? Now I musn’t tire you by too long a visitation. But I felt that these little early details would interest you. They are so little and yet so much. And they should certainly come into his life when it is written. I think it is a mistake in biographies to omit all the slight and seemingly trivial details and give one only the big events. Nothing is trivial in the lives of really great men.”
Miss Verinder assured him that she had been enthrallingly interested; and, taking leave, he detained her hand in his for a moment while he asked if he might call again in a few days’ time before he returned to Devonshire. She was conscious during these moments of a constraint or uneasiness that he had seemed to feel even when he was talking to her so gently and kindly. It had been as if the talk was merely superficial, and that beneath it there was a communication that he desired to make but could not. Now it seemed that this had risen close to the surface, and with her hand in his, she braced herself to meet it. Perhaps that mental preparation on her side, detected and misunderstood,was sufficient to check him again; for, without saying anything further, he went away.
Thinking about this afterwards, Emmie felt that it had spoilt everything. It was not difficult to find interpretations of a reticence or shrinking that would check Mr. Dyke’s flow of words and make him hesitate each time that he approached a fuller confidence; yet if such thoughts, however natural they might be, were really in his mind, she did not wish ever to see him again. If they were not there, then she wished, without doubts or self-questionings,to enjoy the immense comfort and support that the sight of his face and the sound of his voice gave to her. She determined at once to lay the doubt at rest, and when, fulfilling his promise, he reappeared at the flat, she asked him a very simple question.
“Mr. Dyke, do you blame me for what I have done?”
“Blameyou? Oh, howcouldI? How can I? Oh, my goodness, no,” said Mr. Dyke, in visible agitation, and he sprang up from the sofa and stood looking down at Emmie, who was seated on one of her lowest chairs. “But I see what you mean. A clergyman? I feared you might think—That is why I have been so anxious to see you. That is what I wanted to say—but it was so difficult.” He was stooping, and he took her hand and raised it to his lips. “To tell you my gratitude to you for your love of my son. And that I, just as much as he, can measure the extent of your sacrifice—its nobility and its completeness.”
The barrier between them falling thus, she was free to take such comfort from him as he could convey. They sat on the sofa together now, and patting her hand and calling her his dear Emmeline, he talked again of Anthony.
That afternoon he told her among other things the story of Dyke’s miserable, fatal marriage. Although the mother of Dyke’s wife and her other relations were dreadfully common people, the girl herself was decently educated and showed a certain refinement inherited from her father, who had been both a gentleman and a scholar. Unhappily, she inherited from him also the strain of madness that in his case had led to violent mania and suicide. Before Dyke ever saw her, incipient insanity at least had declared itself in the daughter, and, as was discovered afterwards, her wretched relatives had been warned by doctors that it would be a monstrous wickedness to allow her to marry anybody at all. But when the ardent, impetuous Anthony fell into their hands they made remorselessly short work of him. He was then only twenty-one, just back from his first visit to Africa, full of chivalry and altogether devoid of caution; and to such people as these he would naturally seem a grand prize. The girl—Mr. Dyke believed—practised no deception, and indeed was wholeheartedly in love with her splendid wooer.
Three weeks after the wedding she entered an asylum in the Midlands, and she had remained there ever since. She was incurably insane—with a sort of dull religious melancholia that flickered up into mildly homicidal tendencies at intervals. Dyke from the beginning had taken every possible measure for her comfort and security. It was a good asylum, and the annual charges were not light. In order to insure the payment of these, Dyke had invested money left to him by his mother; so that, whatever happened to him, the asylum would continue to receive the half-yearly amounts. For a considerable number of years he had not been allowed tosee his wife—or rather, she had not been allowed to see him; for the sight of him threw her into a dangerous kind of excitement. But Dyke was never in England without paying a visit to the asylum. He went down there, to make certain that she was being properly treated; after an interview with the doctors, one of the attendants guided him to some part of the grounds where he could stand unobserved and watch her as she passed by in charge of her nurse. In this manner he had seen her many times.
Her mother and the other relations had more or less blackmailed him as long as they lived, and he had been generous to them in spite of the wrong they had done him. Now they were all of them dead, except an aunt—a horrible old woman who from time to time wrote abusive letters to Anthony and his father.
“A sad case, my dear Emmeline. And I must say I find it difficult not to condemn the cruelty of a law that refuses to annul such marriages. I should tell you that my boy tried to obtain release by appealing to the law courts. Yes, he brought a case—but without success.”
One after another the years glided past. In 1904 Anthony Dyke, the explorer, was about to do his third Antarctic cruise in command of an expedition that had been organized for purely scientific purposes, and with no intention of pushing far south. But newspapers said that it would be strange if Dyke did not make some sort of dash and attempt to lower the record that he himself still held.
Long before this year of 1904 the number of people who condescended to be aware of Miss Verinder’s existencehad largely increased. After the tea-sellers there had come in due course clergymen or church lay-helpers; for, however much you may disapprove of a lady’s former way of life, you cannot be so uncharitable as to preclude her from herself exercising the virtue of charity; and, moreover, the acceptance of a donation or subscription commits you to no real friendliness. Then came a chance acquaintance who had been warned against her but could not bother about the warning, or thought that in regard to scandal there ought to be a statute of limitations; and, adopting this broad-minded view, they even asked her to dine with them quietly and at short notice—more especially when they were at their wit’s ends to find a fourth for bridge. Then she began to be “taken up again,” as they termed it, by a few of her old friends—the few still remaining in the locality. Staggered by the countenance given to her by Mrs. Bell, or moved to pity by their own reflections on her lonely blameless life, they essayed a smile and nod when they passed her in the street, and, encouraged by her unresentful courtesy, a little later attacked Louisa with a packet of their visiting cards.
So the legend of Miss Verinder’s wickedness slowly tended, if not yet to fade and die, at least to lose its strength and high colour. Young people yawned and refused to learn when elderly people narrated the legend for their benefit. “Hot stuff,” was she, when she was young? But all that must have been a mighty long time ago. It was as if the house walls absorbed whispers concerning her past, instead of echoing them as they used to do. It was as if the varnished front doors and plate glass windows of the straight, correct roads, conspiring with iron rails and neat rectangles of grass andgravel in the gardens of the squares, had now determined, if they could, slowly to obliterate all vivid recollection of a glaring irregularity. It was as if the whole monotonously respectable neighbourhood had said to its parasitic inhabitants, “We never experienced anything of the sort till then. Let us now try to forget that it ever happened.”
At last her family forgave her, and for form’s sake insisted that there should be some slight intercourse, although Miss Verinder herself declined or evaded any resumption of real intimacy. To her relatives it had become so very awkward to go on cutting her, and with all the children growing up, to have an aunt that mustn’t be mentioned. It was far more convenient to know her and name her again. Margaret Pratt was now the mother of five and putting on flesh rapidly. But, because of her shortness, she could never hope to be as big round as Mrs. Verinder. Eustace had married with the utmost propriety, and his wife in an equally becoming manner had given him first a female and then a male infant. It was Eustace who advised a reconciliation with his erring sister, and Mr. Verinder at once agreed.
Mr. Verinder had been badly shaken by the South African War—a rebellion, a defiance of authority, that should not have been called a war at all; during the early reverses he could not sleep at night, although he doggedly declared at the breakfast table that he was not anxious and that everything would could right in the end. He sincerely mourned the death of Queen Victoria, that august lady who had been as fond of the Albert Hall as he was himself. He described this great loss as“the breaking of a link.”
Already, in Mr. Verinder’s opinion, his beloved neighbourhood was changing. He could not disguise from himself that it was not all that it used to be. That old closely-bound society was breaking up. The war had shaken things as well as people. New ideas were creeping in, with a new monarch on the throne; that grand old British institution, the dinner-party, was threatened by the new fashion of entertaining at restaurants.
Then soon he began to suffer in health, and submitting to the most terrific of all possible upheavals, he consented to sell his house and go to live with Mrs. Verinder at Brighton. Mrs. Verinder had fallen in love with Brighton, having there found a row of houses almost exactly like Prince’s Gate—same colour, same porches, cornice, everything; only smaller, and therefore requiring a less ample and more easily managed style of household.
From Brighton Mr. Verinder wrote to Emmeline inviting her to spend Easter with them, saying that Eustace, Margaret, and the little people would be there, andallof them glad to see her. He underlined that wordall; but Emmeline could not accept the invitation.
It was a comfort to the kindly feeble old man to be able to write to Emmeline now and then, or to talk about her once in a way at dinner; and it was an immensely greater comfort, a comfort always with him, to know that the ancient dreadful affair was so completely over and done with. To his mind, Emmeline had finally lived it down. He knew that Dyke had been in England during these years at least twice, and—again without the aid of detectives—he had ascertained that Emmeline had not renewed relations withthe man; indeed, had not even attempted to see him. All the time Dyke was in London the last time, Emmeline had been away somewhere in the country. She did not return to that little flat of hers until the man had gone once more. All this Mr. Verinder had learned from Mrs. Bell, who vouched for the truth; and he admired his daughter’s fortitude and strength of mind in thus running away to avoid any possibility of temptation.
A closed chapter. Yes, thank goodness, over and done with.