“JOHN MEREDITH.”
There were no signs of haste or discomposure. The letter was neatly written in the somewhat large calligraphy, firm, bold, ornate, which Sir John had insisted on Jack's learning. The stationery bore a club crest. It was an eminently gentlemanly communication. Sir John read it and gravely tore it up, throwing it into the fire, where he watched it burn.
Nothing was farther from his mind than sentiment. He was not much given to sentiment, this hard-hearted old sire of an ancient stock. He never thought of the apocryphal day when he, being laid in his grave, should at last win the gratitude of his son.
“When I am dead and gone you may be sorry for it” were not the words that any man should hear from his lips.
More than once during their lives Lady Cantourne had said:
“You never change your mind, John,” referring to one thing or another. And he had invariably answered:
“No, I am not the sort of man to change.”
He had always known his own mind. When he had been in a position to rule he had done so with a rod of iron. His purpose had ever been inflexible. Jack had been the only person who had ever openly opposed his desire. In this, as in other matters, his indomitable will had carried the day, and in the moment of triumph it is only the weak who repine. Success should have no disappointment for the man who has striven for it if his will be strong.
Sir John rather liked the letter. It could only have been written by a son of his—admitting nothing, not even defeat. But he was disappointed. He had hoped that Jack would come—that some sort of a reconciliation would be patched up. And somehow the disappointment affected him physically. It attacked him in the back, and intensified the pain there. It made him feel weak and unlike himself. He rang the bell.
“Go round,” he said to the butler, “to Dr. Damer, and ask him to call in during the evening if he has time.”
The butler busied himself with the coffee tray, hesitating, desirous of gaining time.
“Anything wrong, sir? I hope you are not feeling ill,” he said nervously.
“Ill, sir,” cried Sir John. “D—n it, no; do I look ill? Just obey my orders if you please.”
My faith is large in Time,And that which shapes it to some perfect end.
“MY DEAR JACK,—At the risk of being considered an interfering old woman, I write to ask you whether you are not soon coming to England again. As you are aware, your father and I knew each other as children. We have known each other ever since—we are now almost the only survivors of our generation. My reason for troubling you with this communication is that during the last six months I have noticed a very painful change in your father. He is getting very old—he has no one but servants about him. You know his manner—it is difficult for any one to approach him, even for me. If you could come home—by accident—I think that you will never regret it in after life. I need not suggest discretion as to this letter. Your affectionate friend,
“CAROLINE CANTOURNE.”
Jack Meredith read this letter in the coffee-room of the Hotel of the Four Seasons at Wiesbaden. It was a lovely morning—the sun shone down through the trees of the Friedrichstrasse upon that spotless pavement, of which the stricken wot; the fresh breeze came bowling down from the Taunus mountains all balsamic and invigorating—it picked up the odours of the Seringa and flowering currant in the Kurgarten, and threw itself in at the open window of the coffee-room of the Hotel of the Four Seasons.
Jack Meredith was restless. Such odours as are borne on the morning breeze are apt to make those men restless who have not all that they want. And is not their name legion? The morning breeze is to the strong the moonlight of the sentimental. That which makes one vaguely yearn incites the other to get up and take.
By the train leaving Wiesbaden for Cologne, “over Mainz,” as the guide-book hath it, Jack Meredith left for England, in which country he had not set foot for fifteen months. Guy Oscard was in Cashmere; the Simiacine was almost forgotten as a nine days' wonder except by those who live by the ills of mankind. Millicent Chyne had degenerated into a restless society “hack.” With great skill she had posed as a martyr. She had allowed it to be understood that she, having remained faithful to Jack Meredith through his time of adversity, had been heartlessly thrown over when fortune smiled upon him and there was a chance of his making a more brilliant match. With a chivalry which was not without a keen shaft of irony, father and son allowed this story to pass uncontradicted. Perhaps a few believed it; perhaps they had foreseen the future. It may have been that they knew that Millicent Chyne, surrounded by the halo of whatever story she might invent, would be treated with a certain careless nonchalance by the older men, with a respectful avoidance by the younger. Truly women have the deepest punishment for their sins here on earth; for sooner or later the time will come—after the brilliancy of the first triumph, after the less pure satisfaction of the skilled siren—the time will come when all that they want is an enduring, honest love. And it is written that an enduring love cannot, with the best will in the world, be bestowed on an unworthy object. If a woman wishes to be loved purely she must have a pure heart, and NO PAST, ready for the reception of that love. This is a sine qua non. The woman with a past has no future.
The short March day was closing in over London with that murky suggestion of hopelessness affected by metropolitan eventide when Jack Meredith presented himself at the door of his father's house.
In his reception by the servants there was a subtle suggestion of expectation which was not lost on his keen mind. There is no patience like that of expectation in an old heart. Jack Meredith felt vaguely that he had been expected thus, daily for many months past.
He was shown into the library, and the tall form standing there on the hearthrug had not the outline for which he had looked. The battle between old age and a stubborn will is long. But old age wins. It never raises the siege. It starves the garrison out. Sir John Meredith's head seemed to have shrunk. The wig did not fit at the back. His clothes, always bearing the suggestion of emptiness, seemed to hang on ancient-given lines as if the creases were well established. The clothes were old. The fateful doctrine of not-worth-while had set in.
Father and son shook hands, and Sir John walked feebly to the stiff-backed chair, where he sat down in shamefaced silence. He was ashamed of his infirmities. His was the instinct of the dog that goes away into some hidden corner to die.
“I am glad to see you,” he said, using his two hands to push himself further back in his chair.
There was a little pause. The fire was getting low. It fell together with a feeble, crumbling sound.
“Shall I put some coals on?” asked Jack.
A simple question—if you will. But it was asked by the son in such a tone of quiet, filial submission, that a whole volume could not contain all that it said to the old man's proud, unbending heart.
“Yes, my boy, do.”
And the last six years were wiped away like evil writing from a slate.
There was no explanation. These two men were not of those who explain themselves, and in the warmth of explanation say things which they do not fully mean. The opinions that each had held during the years they had left behind had perhaps been modified on both sides, but neither sought details of the modification. They knew each other now, and each respected the indomitable will of the other.
They inquired after each other's health. They spoke of events of a common interest. Trifles of everyday occurrence seemed to contain absorbing details. But it is the everyday occurrence that makes the life. It was the putting on of the coals that reconciled these two men.
“Let me see,” said John, “you gave up your rooms before you left England, did you not?”
“Yes.”
Jack drew forward his chair and put his feet out towards the fire. It was marvellous how thoroughly at home he seemed to be.
“Then,” continued Sir John, “where is your luggage?”
“I left it at the club.”
“Send along for it. Your room is—er, quite ready for you. I shall be glad if you will make use of it as long as you like. You will be free to come and go as if you were in your own house.”
Jack nodded with a strange, twisted little smile, as if he were suffering from cramp in the legs. It was cramp—at the heart.
“Thanks,” he said, “I should like nothing better. Shall I ring?”
“If you please.”
Jack rang, and they waited in the fading daylight without speaking. At times Sir John moved his limbs, his hand on the arm of the chair and his feet on the hearth-rug, with the jerky, half-restless energy of the aged which is not pleasant to see.
When the servant came, it was Jack who gave the orders, and the butler listened to them with a sort of enthusiasm. When he had closed the door behind him he pulled down his waistcoat with a jerk, and as he walked downstairs he muttered “Thank 'eaven!” twice, and wiped away a tear from his bibulous eye.
“What have you been doing with yourself since I saw you?” inquired Sir John conversationally when the door was closed.
“I have been out to India—merely for the voyage. I went with Oscard, who is out there still, after big-game.”
Sir John Meredith nodded.
“I like that man,” he said, “he is tough. I like tough men. He wrote me a letter before he went away. It was the letter of—one gentleman to another. Is he going to spend the rest of his life 'after big-game'?”
Jack laughed.
“It seems rather like it. He is cut out for that sort of life. He is too big for narrow streets and cramped houses.”
“And matrimony?”
“Yes—and matrimony.”
Sir John was leaning forward in his chair, his two withered hands clasped on his knees.
“You know,” he said slowly, blinking at the fire, “he cared for that girl—more than you did, my boy.”
“Yes,” answered Jack softly.
Sir John looked towards him, but he said nothing. His attitude was interrogatory. There were a thousand questions in the turn of his head, questions which one gentleman could not ask another.
Jack met his gaze. They were still wonderfully alike, these two men, though one was in his prime while the other was infirm. On each face there was the stamp of a long-drawn, silent pride; each was a type of those haughty conquerors who stepped, mail-clad, on our shore eight hundred years ago. Form and feature, mind and heart, had been handed down from father to son, as great types are.
“One may have the right feeling and bestow it by mistake on the wrong person,” said Jack.
Sir John's fingers were at his lips.
“Yes,” he said rather indistinctly, “while the right person is waiting for it.”
Jack looked up sharply, as if he either had not heard or did not understand.
“While the right person is waiting for it,” repeated Sir John deliberately.
“The right person—?”
“Jocelyn Gordon,” exclaimed Sir John, “is the right person.”
Jack shrugged his shoulders and leant back so that the firelight did not shine upon his face. “So I found out eighteen months ago,” he said, “when it was too late.”
“There is no such thing as too late for that,” said Sir John in his great wisdom. “Even if you were both quite old it would not be too late. I have known it for longer than you. I found it out two years ago.”
Jack looked across the room into the keen, worldly-wise old face.
“How?” he inquired.
“From her. I found it out the moment she mentioned your name. I conducted the conversation in such a manner that she had frequently to say it, and whenever your name crossed her lips she—gave herself away.”
Jack shook his head with an incredulous smile.
“Moreover,” continued Sir John, “I maintain that it is not too late.”
There followed a silence; both men seemed to be wrapped in thought, the same thoughts with a difference of forty years of life in the method of thinking them.
“I could not go to her with a lame story like that,” said Jack. “I told her all about Millicent.”
“It is just a lame story like that that women understand,” answered Sir John. “When I was younger I thought as you do. I thought that a man must needs bring a clean slate to the woman he asks to be his wife. It is only his hands that must be clean. Women see deeper into these mistakes of ours than we do; they see the good of them where we only see the wound to our vanity. Sometimes one would almost be inclined to think that they prefer a few mistakes in the past because it makes the present surer. Their romance is a different thing from ours—it is a better thing, deeper and less selfish. They can wipe the slate clean and never look at it again. And the best of them—rather like the task.”
Jack made no reply. Sir John Meredith's chin was resting on his vast necktie. He was looking with failing eyes into the fire. He spoke like one who was sure of himself—confident in his slowly accumulated store of that knowledge which is not written in books.
“Will you oblige me?” he asked.
Jack moved in his chair, but he made no answer. Sir John did not indeed expect it. He knew his son too well.
“Will you,” he continued, “go out to Africa and take your lame story to Jocelyn just as it is?”
There was a long silence. The old worn-out clock on the mantelpiece wheezed and struck six.
“Yes,” answered Jack at length, “I will go.”
Sir John nodded his head with a sigh of relief. All, indeed, comes to him who waits.
“I have seen a good deal of life,” he said suddenly, arousing himself and sitting upright in the stiff-backed chair, “here and there in the world; and I have found that the happiest people are those who began by thinking that it was too late. The romance of youth is only fit to write about in books. It is too delicate a fabric for everyday use. It soon wears out or gets torn.”
Jack did not seem to be listening.
“But,” continued Sir John, “you must not waste time. If I may suggest it, you will do well to go at once.”
“Yes,” answered Jack, “I will go in a month or so. I should like to see you in a better state of health before I leave you.”
Sir John pulled himself together. He threw back his shoulders and stiffened his neck.
“My health is excellent,” he replied sturdily. “Of course I am beginning to feel my years a little, but one must expect to do that after—eh—er—sixty. C'est la vie.”
He made a little movement of the hands.
“No,” he went on, “the sooner you go the better.”
“I do not like leaving you,” persisted Jack.
Sir John laughed rather testily.
“That is rather absurd,” he said; “I am accustomed to being left. I have always lived alone. You will do me a favour if you will go now and take your passage out to Africa.”
“Now—this evening?”
“Yes—at once. These offices close about half-past six, I believe. You will just have time to do it before dinner.”
Jack rose and went towards the door. He went slowly, almost reluctantly.
“Do not trouble about me,” said Sir John, “I am accustomed to being left.”
He repeated it when the door had closed behind his son.
The fire was low again. It was almost dying. The daylight was fading every moment. The cinders fell together with a crumbling sound, and a greyness crept into their glowing depths. The old man sitting there made no attempt to add fresh fuel.
“I am accustomed,” he said, with a half-cynical smile, “to being left.”
How could it end in any other way?You called me, and I came home to your heart.
“They tell me, sir, that Missis Marie—that is, Missis Durnovo—has gone back to her people at Sierra Leone.”
Thus spoke Joseph to his master one afternoon in March, not so many years ago. They were on board the steamer Bogamayo, which good vessel was pounding down the West Coast of Africa at her best speed. The captain reckoned that he would be anchored at Loango by half-past seven or eight o'clock that evening. There were only seven passengers on board, and dinner had been ordered an hour earlier for the convenience of all concerned. Joseph was packing his master's clothes in the spacious cabin allotted to him. The owners of the steamer had thought it worth their while to make the finder of the Simiacine as comfortable as circumstances allowed. The noise of that great drug had directed towards the West Coast of Africa that floating scum of ne'er-do-welldom which is ever on the alert for some new land of promise.
“Who told you that?” asked Jack, drying his hands on a towel.
“One of the stewards, sir—a man that was laid up at Sierra Leone in the hospital.”
Jack Meredith paused for a moment before going on deck. He looked out through the open porthole towards the blue shadow on the horizon which was Africa—a country that he had never seen three years before, and which had all along been destined to influence his whole life.
“It was the best thing she could do,” he said. “It is to be hoped that she will be happy.”
“Yes, sir, it is. She deserves it, if that goes for anything in the heavenly reckonin'. She's a fine woman—a good woman that, sir.”
“Yes.”
Joseph was folding a shirt very carefully.
“A bit dusky,” he said, smoothing out the linen folds reflectively, “but I shouldn't have minded that if I had been a marryin' man, but—but I'm not.”
He laid the shirt in the portmanteau and looked up. Jack Meredith had gone on deck.
While Maurice and Jocelyn Gordon were still at dinner that same evening, a messenger came announcing the arrival of the Bogamayo in the roads. This news had the effect of curtailing the meal. Maurice Gordon was liable to be called away at any moment thus by the arrival of a steamer. It was not long before he rose from the table and lighted a cigar preparatory to going down to his office, where the captain of the steamer was by this time probably awaiting him. It was a full moon, and the glorious golden light of the equatorial night shone through the high trees like a new dawn. Hardly a star was visible; even those of the southern hemisphere pale beside the southern moon.
Maurice Gordon crossed the open space of cultivated garden and plunged into the black shadow of the forest. His footsteps were inaudible. Suddenly he ran almost into the arms of a man.
“Who the devil is that?” he cried.
“Meredith,” answered a voice.
“Meredith—Jack Meredith, is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I'm blowed!” exclaimed Maurice Gordon, shaking hands—“likewise glad. What brought you out here again?”
“Oh, pleasure!” replied Jack, with his face in the shade.
“Pleasure! you've come to the wrong place for that. However, I'll let you find out that for yourself. Go on to the bungalow; I'll be back in less than an hour. You'll find Jocelyn in the verandah.”
When Maurice left her, Jocelyn went out into the verandah. It was the beginning of the hot season. At midday the sun on his journey northward no longer cast a shadow. Jocelyn could not go out in the daytime at this period of the year. For fresh air she had to rely upon a long, dreamy evening in the verandah.
She sat down in her usual chair, while the moonlight, red and glowing, made a pattern on the floor and on her white dress with the shadows of the creepers. The sea was very loud that night, rising and falling like the breath of some huge sleeping creature.
Jocelyn Gordon fell into a reverie. Life was very dull at Loango. There was too much time for thought and too little to think about. This girl only had the past, and her past was all comprised in a few months—the few months still known at Loango as the Simiacine year. She had lapsed into a bad habit of thinking that her life was over, that the daylight of it had waned, and that there was nothing left now but the grey remainder of the evening. She was wondering now why it had all come—why there had been any daylight at all. Above these thoughts she wondered why the feeling was still in her heart that Jack Meredith had not gone out of her life for ever. There was no reason why she should ever meet him again. He was, so far as she knew, married to Millicent Chyne more than a year ago, although she had never seen the announcement of the wedding. He had drifted into Loango and into her life by the merest accident, and now that the Simiacine Plateau had been finally abandoned there was no reason why any of the original finders should come to Loango again.
And the creepers were pushed aside by one who knew the method of their growth. A silver glory of moonlight fell on the verandah floor, and the man of whom she was thinking stood before her.
“You!” she exclaimed.
“Yes.”
She rose, and they shook hands. They stood looking at each other for a few moments, and a thousand things that had never been said seemed to be understood between them.
“Why have you come?” she asked abruptly.
“To tell you a story.”
She looked up with a sort of half smile, as if she suspected some pleasantry of which she had not yet detected the drift.
“A long story,” he explained, “which has not even the merit of being amusing. Please sit down again.”
She obeyed him.
The curtain of hanging leaves and flowers had fallen into place again; the shadowed tracery was on her dress and on the floor once more.
He stood in front of her and told her his story, as Sir John had suggested. He threw no romance into it—attempted no extenuation—but related the plain, simple facts of the last few years with the semi-cynical suggestion of humour that was sometimes his. And the cloak of pride that had fallen upon his shoulders made him hide much that was good, while he dragged forward his own shortcomings. She listened in silence. At times there hovered round her lips a smile. It usually came when he represented himself in a bad light, and there was a suggestion of superior wisdom in it, as if she knew something of which he was ignorant.
He was never humble. It was not a confession. It was not even an explanation, but only a story—a very lame story indeed—which gained nothing by the telling. And he was not the hero of it.
And all came about as wise old Sir John Meredith had predicted. It is not our business to record what Jocelyn said. Women—the best of them—have some things in their hearts which can only be said once to one person. Men cannot write them down; printers cannot print them.
The lame story was told to the end, and at the end it was accepted. When Sir John's name was mentioned—when the interview in the library of the great London house was briefly touched upon—Jack saw the flutter of a small lace pocket-handkerchief, and at no other time. The slate was wiped clean, and it almost seemed that Jocelyn preferred it thus with the scratches upon it where the writing had been.
Maurice Gordon did not come back in an hour. It was nearly ten o'clock before they heard his footstep on the gravel. By that time Jocelyn had heard the whole story. She had asked one or two questions which somehow cast a different light upon the narrative, and she had listened to the answers with a grave, judicial little smile—the smile of a judge whose verdict was pre-ordained, whose knowledge had nothing to gain from evidence.
Because she loved him she took his story and twisted it and turned it to a shape of her own liking. Those items which he had considered important she passed over as trifles; the trifles she magnified into the corner-stones upon which the edifice was built. She set the lame story upon its legs and it stood upright. She believed what he had never told; and much that he related she chose to discredit—because she loved him. She perceived motives where he assured her there were none; she recognised the force of circumstances where he took the blame to himself—because she loved him. She maintained that the past was good, that he could not have acted differently, that she would not have had it otherwise—because she loved him.
And who shall say that she was wrong?
Jack went out to meet Maurice Gordon when they heard his footsteps, and as they walked back to the house he told him. Gordon was quite honest about it.
“I hoped,” he said, “when I ran against you in the wood, that that was why you had come back. Nothing could have given me greater happiness. Hang it, I AM glad, old chap!”
They sat far into the night arranging their lives. Jack was nervously anxious to get back to England. He could not rid his mind of the picture he had seen as he left his father's presence to go and take his passage to Africa—the picture of an old man sitting in a stiff-backed chair before a dying fire. Moreover, he was afraid of Africa; the Irritability of Africa had laid its hand upon him almost as soon as he had set his foot upon its shore. He was afraid of the climate for Jocelyn; he was afraid of it for himself. The happiness that comes late must be firmly held to; nothing must be forgotten to secure it, or else it may slip between the fingers at the last moment.
Those who have snatched happiness late in life can tell of a thousand details carefully attended to—a whole existence laid out in preparation for it, of health fostered, small pleasures relinquished, days carefully spent.
Jack Meredith was nervously apprehensive that his happiness might even now slip through his fingers. Truly, climatic influence is a strange and wonderful thing. It was Africa that had done this, and he was conscious of it. He remembered Victor Durnovo's strange outburst on their first meeting a few miles below Msala on the Ogowe river, and the remembrance only made him the more anxious that Jocelyn and he should turn their backs upon the accursed West Coast for ever.
Before they went to bed that night it was all arranged. Jack Meredith had carried his point. Maurice and Jocelyn were to sail with him to England by the first boat. Jocelyn and he compiled a telegram to be sent off first thing by a native boat to St. Paul de Loanda. It was addressed to Sir John Meredith, London, and signed “Meredith, Loango.” The text of it was:
“I bring Jocelyn home by first boat.”
. . .
And the last words, like the first, must be of an old man in London. We found him in the midst of a brilliant assembly; we leave him alone. We leave him lying stiffly on his solemn fourpost bed, with his keen, proud face turned fearlessly towards his Maker. His lips are still; they wear a smile which even in death is slightly cynical. On the table at his bedside lies a submarine telegram from Africa. It is unopened.