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Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell · English · Gutenberg #48685 · 650,071 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Spinster of This Parish

Author: W. B. Maxwell


        
Release date: April 12, 2015 [eBook #48685]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPINSTER OF THIS PARISH ***

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR


NOVELS

    A LITTLE MORE
    FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE
    GLAMOUR
    THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP
    THE DEVIL’S GARDEN
    GENERAL MALLOCK’S SHADOW
    IN COTTON WOOL
    MRS. THOMPSON
    THE REST CURE
    SEYMOUR CHARLTON
    HILL RISE
    THE GUARDED FLAME
    VIVIEN
    THE RAGGED MESSENGER
    THE COUNTESS OF MAYBURY


SHORT STORIES

    LIFE CAN NEVER BE THE SAME
    ODD LENGTHS
    FABULOUS FANCIES




                             SPINSTER
                          OF THIS PARISH

                                BY
                           W. B. MAXWELL

                          [Illustration]

                             NEW YORK
                      DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
                               1922




                          COPYRIGHT, 1922
                   BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, INC.


           THE PLIMPTON PRESS · NORWOOD · MASSACHUSETTS
              PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




SPINSTER OF THIS PARISH




AUTHOR’S NOTE


  Neither the characters nor the incidents of this story are in any
  way drawn from persons or events of real life; and in passages
  where the names of the living or the dead have been mentioned,
  they thus appear merely because the omission of them seemed
  impossible (in such a context) by reason of the world-wide fame
  of their holders.




SPINSTER OF THIS PARISH




CHAPTER I


It had been an odd impulse that made little Mildred Parker seek
counsel and advice, or at least sympathy, from Miss Verinder in
the first great crisis of her young life. The imperious necessity
of opening her heart to somebody had of course lain behind the
impulse, and Miss Verinder, although really only an acquaintance of
Mildred’s parents, had been unusually kind and friendly to Mildred
herself; but now, sitting in the drawing-room of Miss Verinder’s
flat, listening to Miss Verinder’s pleasant emotionless voice,
watching Miss Verinder with methodic care put away small odds and
ends in an antique bureau, she felt the huge incongruity that there
would be in speaking of love to an old maid of fifty.

“I won’t be a minute,” said Miss Verinder.

“I am not in the least hurry,” said Mildred quite untruthfully.

Waiting and watching, she thought that fifty years of age is
nothing nowadays--if you are not an old maid, and if you decorate
yourself properly. Some women of fifty are still dangerously
attractive--they act leading parts on the stage, they appear in
divorce cases, they marry their third husbands. But when once you
have allowed old maidishness to take possession of you!

“A place for everything and everything in its place,” said Miss
Verinder, closing a drawer and speaking as if to herself rather
than to a visitor. “That is a good motto, isn’t it?” And she began
to flick a silk handkerchief. “These are souvenirs--with only a
sentimental value.”

Mildred glanced round the room. At the far end there were windows,
through which one saw the shredded stem and drooping branches of
a large plane tree, all transparent green and fiery orange now in
the sunlight of a September afternoon; near the window at the other
end there was a cage with a somnolent grey parrot; a singularly
clean white cat lay stretching itself lazily on the seat of a
chintz-covered chair; and everywhere there showed the neatness and
order as well as the prettiness and taste that are only possible
in rooms altogether free from the disturbing presence of clumsy
man. Mildred, feeling more and more enervated, spoke admiringly but
abruptly.

“I do like your flat, Miss Verinder.”

“It is convenient, isn’t it?” said Miss Verinder. “So close to the
Brompton Road, so near everything. Strictly speaking,” she added
with gentle precision, “it is not a flat at all, but what they
call a maisonette. That straight staircase--almost like a ladder,
isn’t it?--has been as it were stolen from the auctioneer’s offices
on the ground floor; and it forms quite a private entrance. I
prefer that. It gives a feeling,”--and she made a graceful vague
gesture. “I think Oratory Gardens is the only place where you
find flats constructed on this principle. I considered myself
lucky in securing the lease--many years ago, you know. I wanted
to be just here, because I have so many associations with this
neighbourhood--the whole neighbourhood--as far as Kensington Gore
and Knightsbridge, but not south or west, you know. I like the
sight of the tree too.”

For a few moments she ceased dusting the small objects on the flap
of the bureau and stood at the window, looking out; a tall thin
dark figure with the sunlight behind her.

“It sometimes makes me feel as if I were miles away from
Kensington”; and she gently nodded her head and half closed her
eyes. “Far in the country. On the other side of the world, even.”

She was really a very charming, well-bred, elegant woman; and once
upon a time, a long while ago, when those eyes of hers were full
of brightness and lustre, when her sensitive lips were redder,
when her pale unwrinkled cheeks had permanent colour instead of
the fitful pinkness that now came and went so delicately, she must
have been quite good-looking. Possibly she might then have been
fascinating also. Her hair was really good, dark and strong, rolled
in bulky waves about her forehead and in a lump at the back of her
neck.

It was the demureness, the air of patience, endurance, and
submissiveness proper to her age and condition, that spoilt her
general effect and made her just a little dowdy, although always
beautifully dressed. Even in the moment of recognising a certain
natural feminine charm one sought for and found the stigmata of
spinsterhood. She had no mannerisms, affectations, or silly tricks;
and nevertheless.--But there is the bother of it. How and why do
we judge people or form any opinion concerning them? As soon as
you think you know what a woman is you begin to think she looks
like what you have decided her to be. Perhaps one merely imagined
and did not really see that outward suggestion of untilled fields,
autumn leaves, and faded flowers, which has come to symbolise a
particular combination of loneliness and neglect.

Essentially, she appeared to be spinsterhood personified. She stood
so very much alone. Although, as was known, she had relatives,
she did not appear to preserve any close intercourse with them.
One never met robust full-blooded nieces putting up at the flat
with “darling Aunt Emmeline” for a night or two; she showed you no
portraits of middle-aged brothers and sisters, or snap-shots of
children in embroidered aprons and sailor hats, the representatives
of a budding generation; there was not even a ne’er-do-well nephew
in the background, emerging into the foreground from time to time
and extracting financial assistance as he passed through London on
the way from Harrow to Sandhurst and from Sandhurst to his regiment.

Thus it seemed that the attitude of uninvolved spectator or
disinterested critic of all that matters in life had been
irrevocably forced upon her, and that, as in all such typical
cases, she had taken up feeble little secondary interests to fill
the vast blank spaces that should have been occupied by prime
ones. She attended concerts, lectures, classes; played bridge for
mild points; drank weak tea and nibbled dry biscuits at afternoon
parties. Sometimes, abruptly going away by herself, she was absent
for long periods; and one imagined her, charmingly and suitably
dressed as usual, say in the solitude of Dartmoor, translating
its purple heather and golden skies into the wishy-washy tints of
her sketch-book; or gathering a sprig of fern near the Castle of
Chillon in order to place it later between the pages of Byron’s
poem--in a word, one imagined her travelling as old maids with
ample means have always done, changing the outward scene but never
the mental atmosphere. Occasionally, too, she shut herself in the
flat, for weeks at a time, refusing to see anybody; and then one
surmised that she was passing through those phases of nervous
distress or semi-hysteria from the experience of which old maids
can scarcely hope to escape altogether.

Naturally she offered a strong contrast to the very modern young
lady of twenty sitting on one of the sofas, playing with her
gauntlet gloves, and brimming over with youthfulness and ardent
irrepressible life.

Mildred looked very pretty in her scant frock, low bodice, and
short sleeves; after the manner of modern girls seeming, perhaps,
a little commonplace or ordinary because so like so many others of
her class and years, at once doll-like and self-possessed, shrewd
and yet innocent. She was, or at least believed herself to be,
entirely modern; although at the moment occupied with elemental
things.

“Now,” said Miss Verinder, “I am all attention,” and she came from
the bureau and drew a chair to the sofa.

“I’m so glad I’ve caught you alone,” said Mildred feebly.

“Well, my dear Mildred,” said Miss Verinder, “I am purposely
alone, because, when I received your little note saying you wished
to see me--I don’t know why--but somehow I had the suspicion that
there was something you wanted to tell me, or to talk about.”

“Oh, Miss Verinder! How kind--how very kind!” said Mildred in a
gush of gratitude.

Indeed this divination seemed to her a most striking proof of
Miss Verinder’s power of sympathy; her own instinct had been
correct; she was glad she had come here. She went on impulsively
and confidently; telling Miss Verinder how she had half mooted the
subject of her troubles to two comfortable matrons, but in each
case she had felt rebuffed and had immediately “curled up,” feeling
certain that neither would give her any help, but rather take the
side of her family against her. Then she had made up her mind to
tell Miss Verinder all about it.

“I knew you’d help me if you could, dear Miss Verinder. You _have_
been so nice to me ever since we first met--and, I know it sounds
conceited, but I felt you did really like me.”

“I do like you very much,” said Miss Verinder simply and
affectionately; and she stretched out her hand and gave a little
squeeze to one of Mildred’s soft warm paws. Then she folded her
hands on her lap again.

“Thank you so much. I think you’re just an angel, Miss Verinder.”

“Why always Miss Verinder? Why don’t you call me Emmeline?”

“Oh, I _couldn’t_,” said Mildred, flattered but overwhelmed by this
surprising invitation. “It would seem such awful cheek.”

“Am I so venerable and forbidding?” asked Miss Verinder, with mild
reproach.

“Of _course_ not,” said Mildred eagerly. “No, I shall be
delighted, if you’ll really let me. I think it’s absolutely sweet
of you--Emmeline. Well now, Emmeline,”--and Mildred repeated
the name firmly, as if feeling great satisfaction in using this
unceremonious form of address;--“The fact is, Emmeline--”

And with a voluble flood she narrated how she had fallen deeply and
perhaps even foolishly in love with a young man; how Mr. and Mrs.
Parker had made a monstrous absurd fuss about it; and how, because
of it, the once comfortable home in Ennismore Gardens was swept
with tempest, wrath, and pain.

“You understand, Emmeline? I mean to say, they really are behaving
like people who have been bitten by a mad dog. In one way, I mean
to say--you know--it’s all too ridiculous for words. The things
they say! The things, don’t you know, they threaten to do. Well, I
mean to say--”

Mildred’s eyes were flashing, she pulled her gloves from hand to
hand, and, prattling on, became so involved with mean-to-says and
don’t-you-knows that she floundered suddenly to silence.

“Emmeline,” and she changed her position on the sofa, “I think I’d
better start at the very beginning.”

“That is always a good place to start at,” said Miss Verinder,
smiling sympathetically.

“Then what I want you to understand is that I’m very much in
earnest. It’s no silliness--or infatuation, as mother says--or any
rot of that sort. It’s the real thing.” As she said this Mildred’s
pretty commonplace little face became all soft and tender, her lips
quivered, and in spite of her modernity she had the aspect of a
quite small child who will burst into tears if you speak harshly to
it. “You must understand,” and she suddenly turned her head away,
“I wasn’t even thinking of love--much less hunting for it. It came
upon me like a thunderclap.”

“Like a thunderclap!” Miss Verinder echoed the words, and drew in
her breath, making the sound of a faint sigh. “Go on, Mildred dear.”

“Well then,” and Mildred looked round again, with a child-like air
of triumph. “I would have you to know also that the man I’ve fallen
in love with is very famous.”

Miss Verinder started and looked at her intently.

“But it’s nothing to do with his fame that has made me love him.”

Again Miss Verinder started, slightly.

“Of course I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t influenced by all
that. You know what I mean? Seeing his photographs in the papers!
Hearing what other girls said about him. And I own that I admired
him before I knew him, but it was for himself and nothing else that
I fell in love with him directly I did get to know him. The fact
that he was celebrated and a favourite of the public was nothing
then.”

And, now fairly started, Mildred opened her heart as she had
never done before. She told Miss Verinder all she felt of the
torturing bliss and exquisite pain that honest straightforward
young girls suffer when this most potent of fevers catches them
without warning, like a thunderclap. The tale of Mildred’s frenzied
longings and cravings and hopes and fears brought faint old-maidish
blushes to the smooth ivory of Miss Verinder’s cheeks. It was as
though Mildred, like a small house on fire, had lit up a faint
reflection in the far distance of a tranquil evening sky.

“There,” said Mildred, ceasing to flash and becoming quite calm.
“Oh, Emmeline, that _has_ done me good--even if you can’t help me.
You know what I mean? Just to get it off one’s chest for once.”
And then she laughed in a deprecating manner. “But I’m afraid I’m
shocking you most frightfully.”

“No, my dear,” said Miss Verinder, “you are not shocking me in the
least.”

“You _are_ so kind. Well then, now you _do_ see I’m in earnest, and
how ridiculous it is for one’s people--”

“Yes. But who is he, Mildred? You haven’t told me yet.”

“Alwyn Beckett,” said Mildred looking confident and triumphant.

But great as was Miss Verinder’s sympathy, she could not make
her face show any signs of intelligent recognition. She reminded
Mildred that she lived very much out of the world. It would
naturally appear ignorant and stupid, but she felt forced again to
ask the question: Who is he?

“The actor,” said Mildred.

“Oh, yes,” said Miss Verinder. “You must not be surprised if I
don’t know him by reputation, because I never go to the play, and
am quite out of touch with theatrical people”; and she paused,
smiling as if involuntarily amused by some secret thought. “The
utmost I do in that direction is occasionally to go to one of these
cinema theatres.”

“Oh, but he is on the films too,” said Mildred proudly.

“In what piece is he acting at the present time?”

“He is understudying the two big parts in _Five Old Men and a Dog_.”

“Ah, yes?”

Then Mildred burst forth about her family. “Of course I know they
can’t keep us apart. Of course they’ve no right to interfere with
me. But it isn’t exactly that. Good gracious, no, this is 1920, not
1820. Of course they can do what they’re doing now--I mean to say,
just making hell for me at home. It’s irritating, but I must put up
with it. Only I simply can’t stand their attitude to Alwyn”; and
Mildred grew warm. “What are they, I’d like to know--to look down
upon the stage!”

Miss Verinder said that the notion of treating the stage with
contempt did certainly sound rather old-fashioned nowadays.

“Old-fashioned! I should think so. Even if they were anybody--which
they aren’t. Do you know what my grandfather was? No. Well, I don’t
myself. Father’s been jolly careful to prevent us knowing; but I
know this--he wasn’t a gentleman. I mean, he hadn’t the smallest
pretensions to being one. It was up in the north, and I believe
he was just a person in a shop; you know, not owning the shop,
but serving behind the counter--and he married grannie for her
money. She wasn’t anything either. The elderly ugly daughter of
some manufacturing people. But by a fluke of luck her share in the
business somehow turned up trumps, so that while father was still
a boy they were rich, and able to send him to Rugby and Cambridge.
Then, when grandfather died, he and mother came to London, and
bought the house in Ennismore Gardens.” Saying this, Mildred
laughed scornfully. “Yes, and amused themselves by pretending that
they’ve lived in it for ten generations.”

“They could hardly have done that,” said Miss Verinder, smiling;
“because Ennismore Gardens have not been built long enough.”

“No, exactly. But you know what I mean”; and Mildred spoke with
almost tragic force. “Father’s just a snob, and mother’s every bit
as bad.”

Miss Verinder reproved her for speaking disrespectfully of her
parents.

“I know, I know, Emmeline;” and Mildred hastened to assure her that
till now she had always been fond of her parents--“poor dears.” She
had been loyal too, entering into their little foolishnesses, never
giving the show away; and she could feel fond of them again, if
only they would behave decently.

Miss Verinder asked, “Do they really base their objections
to--Forgive me, dear. What is his name again? Mr. Beckett. Yes, of
course. Well, do they only base their objection on the fact that he
is an actor?”

A crimson wave of indignation flowed upward from Mildred’s neck to
her forehead, while she explained how they had the effrontery to
say their real objection was--not so much that he was an actor, as
that he was a bad actor.

“Who are they to judge?” said Mildred hotly; and for a space she
held forth concerning the young man’s brilliant talent.

Miss Verinder asking how matters stood at the moment, Mildred
told her that the outrageous Mr. Parker had simply forbidden them
to meet. “But we _do_ meet of course.” And with a few words she
conjured up a picture of their clandestine meetings late at night
in Ennismore Gardens itself--he driving as fast as taxi-cab would
bring him from the theatre, she slipping out of the house to wait
for him, and the two of them pacing slowly through that columned
entrance by the mews and along the passage by the churchyard,
in the warm darkness beneath the trees; peered at curiously
by soft-footed policemen; encountering, as it seemed, all the
servant-maids of the neighbourhood similarly engaged with _their_
sweethearts. “Isn’t it degrading, Emmeline, to be forced to do such
a thing?”

And again she spoke of love and its invincible claims. She knew,
she said, that her destiny was all in her own hands. If she lost
Alwyn, she would have herself to thank, and it would be no use to
put the blame on anybody else. It was this thought that sometimes
made her feel desperate--and Alwyn too. Her parents could not
of course really come between them. But then there is the money
question. What they _can_ do is just to cut her off without a
penny; and really, seeing them behave like such pigs, one could
believe them capable of doing it. Well, that is not fair. That is
tommy rot. Suppose, after all, darling Alwyn should prove, not a
bad actor, but hardly quite the tremendous one that she hopes he
is; then, in that case, if they had a proper settlement--“the usual
thing,” with parents as well-off as hers--she could take him off
the stage. There were heaps of things she could do with him. Or
if--as is far more probable--he makes a colossal success, money
will be useful to set him up in management. You must look ahead;
although, when you are madly in love, it is difficult to do so.

Miss Verinder, watching her thoughtfully, inquired if all these
ideas had been prompted by Alwyn himself; and Mildred said no,
he was a thousand miles above such considerations. He cared for
nothing but her.

“Emmeline--as I say, you’re so awfully kind, and I do feel that
I need a word of advice from someone older than myself.” At this
point of the interview, it was curious to observe in Mildred that
mixture of shrewdness and innocence which makes the typical modern
girl seem at once so shallow and so baffling. She still playfully
tormented the yellow gauntlet gloves; her eyes shone with childish
candour; but there was something a little hard and business-like
about the red lips that only a moment ago had been pouting
petulantly. “My own inclination is to chuck over everything and do
something desperate--you know, just to run off with him.”

“And marry him without your parents’ consent?”

“Or _not_ marry him,” said Mildred, pulling at her gloves.

“Mildred!” said Miss Verinder, with a little cry. “What _do_ you
mean?”

“Well, what I mean,” said Mildred, “is that if they’re so damned
old-fashioned, I don’t see why they shouldn’t stew in their own
gravy--at least for a bit. Don’t you see? When they find I’m gone,
in _that_ way, if they’re really genuine in their feelings, it will
be the regular Mid-Victorian business. The lost child--our daughter
gone to perdition. Get her married now to the scoundrel that has
lured her away. Make her an honest woman at any price--and, by
Jove,” said Mildred, with a little ripple of innocent laughter,
“I’ll jolly well make them pay the price. You know, no more than is
right--the usual. I don’t mean blackmailing them or anything like
that.”

“Mildred,” said Miss Verinder, with an unexpectedly firm tone of
voice, “you and I must talk very seriously. And you must listen to
me, dear, and not be impatient if what I urge--Ah, yes.”

Interrupted by the opening of the door, she checked herself.

It was the faithful maid Louisa--a grey-haired woman older than
Miss Verinder, neat yet stately in her black dress and black silk
apron; just such an efficient long-tried maid-housekeeper as one
would expect such a mistress to have. Louisa was bringing them tea.
At sight of her the white cat dropped heavily from its easy chair,
stalked forward, and rubbed itself against Miss Verinder’s ankles;
while the grey parrot as promptly awoke, flapped its wings, and
screamed. Tea meant something to these two dependents.

“Look sharp, Louisa,” said the parrot, expressing the wish of both
in a gruff monotone. “Look sharp, Louisa. Louisa. Louisa.”

Louisa, bringing a collapsible table from the wall, smiled sedately.

“He always says that,” Miss Verinder explained. “It was taught to
him a long time ago--and with great difficulty. Only as a joke,”
she added. “For Louisa is always up to time--very much on the spot,
as you young people say.”

Louisa opened the table in front of her mistress, brought the tea
tray with kettle and tea-pot; went out again and returned with
trays carrying cakes, bread and butter, and so forth, which she
placed on smaller tables; finally brought a silver tea-caddy, and
lit the lamp under the kettle.

“It is just on the boil, miss.”

“Thank you, Louisa.”

Then Miss Verinder made the tea. Mildred watched her, fascinated
although preoccupied; it was all so neat and careful and methodic.
“One spoonful for you and one for me.” After warming the tea-pot
with a very little hot water, Miss Verinder was using not a spoon
but a queer little silver shovel to put in the tea. “One for the
pot--and one for luck! Now, dear, you see that bolt beneath the
kettle? Pull it out for me, will you? That’s it.” And for a moment
she was almost invisible as the steam rose. “Louisa never fails me.
She knows the proverb that ‘If the water not boiling be, filling
the tea-pot spoils the tea.’ One lump or two?”

In spite of emotion, or because of it, Mildred was hungry; and she
ate freely of the thin bread and butter and the sugar-covered cake,
till gradually these dainties seemed to turn to dust and ashes in
her mouth while she listened to Miss Verinder’s advice.

Miss Verinder indeed displayed an astoundingly accurate
comprehension of her young friend’s state of mind; but truly every
word she said might have been heard with cordial approval by Mr.
and Mrs. Parker themselves had they been present.

Mildred must not be silly; Mildred must be a sensible girl; Mildred
must summon patience to her aid, consider other people’s feelings
as well as her own, allow time to work on her behalf.

Mildred put down her tea-cup with a nervous jerk; she was bitterly
disappointed; and yet what different sort of advice could she have
expected from the owner of this room, with its caged bird, its
cat of dubious gender, its chintzes, water colour drawings, and
embroidered footstool--this room used only by elderly women, in
which the sound of a real man’s voice had never once been heard?
Clergymen came here no doubt for subscriptions; and faded old
bachelors, like old maids themselves, to gossip amiably--of books,
china, pictures, or anything else without any real life in it.
Completely enervated, Mildred felt again that sense of fantastic
incongruity between the subject of her late discourse and its
auditor. As well might she have gone to the nuns at Roehampton and
told her tale there.

Moreover, while talking, Miss Verinder performed certain little
actions which, as Mildred guessed, had become purely automatic
from long habit--such as pouring out milk and tea in a saucer and
placing it on the floor for the cat, going across the room and
inserting morsels of the sugary cake between the cage bars for the
parrot. Nevertheless, although thus to be interpreted, they added
to the girl’s distress.

Miss Verinder went on talking with earnestness and affection. She
would help, to the best of her ability, she would take the first
chance of a chat with Mrs. Parker. But really and truly it is all
nonsense to speak of kicking over the traces, outraging propriety
or convention, and that sort of thing. Mildred must wait. At any
rate, one must not give way to one’s passions.

Then Mildred blurted it out; clothed her thought in very plain
words. “But, dear Miss Verinder, perhaps you don’t know what the
passions are.”

“Why should you assume that?” said Miss Verinder gently.

Mildred apologised for a stupid phrase or explained it away.
Unconsciously she had ceased to address Miss Verinder by her
Christian name, and she pleaded with great strength for her own
point of view. It was the fiery cry of youth. Whatever else you can
do when you are young--so she said in effect--there is one thing
you cannot do, and that is, _wait_.

“Miss Verinder, I feel that I want us to be bound
together--now--and forever. Suppose we put it off, who can say
what would happen? Accidents--anything--He might grow tired of
waiting--or--or change his mind.”

“Oh, no, dear. If there is any chance of that, it is all the more
reason for not being in a hurry.”

“Miss Verinder, I believe you think I’m horrid about it; but on my
honour I’m not. My love for Alwyn and his for me is a _nice_ love.
Really and truly it is.”

“I’m quite sure yours is.”

“His too.” Suddenly and unexpectedly Mildred began to cry. She did
not gasp or sob; her lips trembled, her eyes filled with tears,
overflowed, and in a moment her whole face was wet, looking like
the face of a child of six who has been caught in an April shower.
She dabbed it with a totally inadequate handkerchief to prevent
the drops from falling on her pretty frock, and continued talking.
She herself looked prettier now than at any time during the visit;
that touch of calculating sagacity, with all other attributes of
modernness, had gone; only the natural innocence and simplicity
remained. “When we have been together for hours and hours--alone
together--up the river--anywhere--sometimes he hasn’t even once
kissed me. And at the time I haven’t even noticed it. I’ve only
thought of it afterwards, you know. We have been just perfectly
happy being together--not wanting anything else on earth. Miss
Verinder, you see what I mean? I only tell you to _make_ you see
what our love is. It’s because of it that I’m sure of myself--yes,
Miss Verinder, I am really.”

And dabbing her eyes with vigour, she emphasised the argument
that in linking yourself to anyone of the other sex you are quite
safe when you find the desired companion as well as the lover.
Companionship with Alwyn was the essential thing for which she
longed. It would be too dreadful to lose it--to risk losing it.
Suppose she let the chance slip, suppose she allowed Fate acting
under the more usual title of Accident to rob her of this felicity,
it was probable that she would never meet anybody else for whom
she could care in the same way, or even so much as “the snuff of
a candle.” She would be spiritually alone forever. Under such
conditions she felt that she simply could not face her life;
and, carried away with emotion and momentarily forgetful of the
personage she addressed, she sketched vividly the situation of a
middle-aged, soon-to-be old spinster--alone, with nothing to hope
for.

“But one always goes on hoping,” said Miss Verinder firmly.

She said the words indeed with such quiet strength that Mildred,
startled and surprised, asked her what she meant.

Miss Verinder did not answer explicitly. She came and sat beside
Mildred on the sofa, put her arm round the girl’s slim waist, and
began to repeat or sum up the counsel that she had already given.

Mildred for a minute was quite unable to listen; she sat looking
at her wondering. One always goes on hoping! What an extraordinary
queer thing to say. Could it be possible that Miss Verinder still
tried to brighten the cold monotony of life with sentimental or
romantic dreams--did she at her age still cherish the idea that a
knight would one day come to smash the prison bars of solitude,
break the chains of habit, and lead her out into freedom and
light--did she, poor dear kind soul, still really hope there was
somewhere on this broad strange earth a man stout enough and bold
enough to save her from dying as an old maid? These questioning
thoughts touched little Mildred’s heart with something far
removed from mirth, rather a pitying pain. They drove away her
self-absorbed emotion; they steadied her.

“Yes, Miss Verinder, I am really giving weight to everything you
say.”

Miss Verinder was gently yet firmly summing up. Mildred must
promise not to act rashly. In time--the young man proving patient
and worthy--her parents may agree to an engagement. In time--they
shewing themselves obdurate and unreasonable--one can begin to
think of marriage without their consent. But this suggestion of an
unsanctified bolt, an irregular union, entered into for whatever
aim or purpose--oh, no, never.

“Believe me, Mildred dear, it is only the very strongest characters
that can brave public opinion--and you must remember, public
opinion is represented by your father and mother. Yes, I am
sure--to go right through with anything of that kind, immense
self-control, really almost an iron nerve is required. That is, if
it is to be done successfully.

“And, Mildred,” said Miss Verinder, with an affectionate pressure
of the surrounding arm, “You mustn’t think I don’t know what I am
talking about. I don’t want you to dismiss me as antiquated and
squeamish.”

“Oh, no, Miss Verinder.”

“As you said, this is 1920; and people are always saying how
tremendously the world has changed; but I often think the changes
are not as big as people pretend--I think they are most of them on
the surface, as it were, and not going deep. Of course, when I was
young, girls had much less freedom. Oh, yes, much less--and people
will tell you that girls now can do what they like, and do do it.”
Saying this, Miss Verinder had a demure little smile. “So to speak,
girls are allowed to govern almost everything--but then they must
never omit to govern themselves. Oh, no, Mildred,” and she shook
her head. “In _that_, public opinion is quite unchanged. I mean for
people of _our_ class, Mildred. For those above us and below us it
may be quite different. I can’t say. But you’re not a barmaid or a
duchess either--are you?”

“No, Miss Verinder,” said Mildred meekly.

“And you have to think of your Alwyn and the effect it might
produce on him. There is the danger that he might fail you in a
way you haven’t considered. No, no--I don’t for a moment mean
play you false. Oh, no. But, perhaps, it is only the very finest
natures that can--accept--ah--this particular kind of surrender or
self-sacrifice from a woman and still hold her quite as high in
their minds as they did before--ah--the surrender occurred.

“There, Mildred dear. I am going to help you for all I am worth,
and you are going to be wise. And don’t--I beg you--forget this. I
have my reasons for all I have said.”

Mildred, nipping through the traffic of the Brompton Road with the
composure and agility of up-to-date girls, and then making her
way thoughtfully past the Oratory and into Ennismore Gardens, was
wondering what were Miss Verinder’s reasons.




CHAPTER II


Miss Verinder’s reasons were as follows: In the year 1895, when
Queen Victoria still reigned upon the throne, when people still
talked of the London season and described it as being good or bad,
a brilliant season or a dull season, Emmeline Verinder was living
very comfortably with her parents in one of the largest houses of
Prince’s Gate. Then, unexpectedly and for the first time, she and
love bowed, touched hands, and made acquaintance. The thing came
upon her like a thunder-clap.

It began on a June evening just before midnight; and Mr. Verinder,
her father, thinking afterwards of that summer night, used to feel
a kind of warm prickly irritation, as though one of Destiny’s
invisible imps was teasing the back of his stout neck with stinging
nettles. It might have happened anyhow, but he could not banish
the annoying recollection that he himself had assisted in getting
it started. When his wife placidly asked whether the effort was
worth while, it was he who had decided that, having accepted the
invitation, they must certainly go to Mrs. Clutton’s musical party.

And he had said so not truly because he desired to go, but because
of vague, almost organic sensations which told him that if you are
a well-preserved man of sixty who is also a personage of a certain
importance, who lives in Prince’s Gate, with plenty of money,
horses, carriages, an ample ornate wife, one charming beautifully
dressed single daughter, and another daughter, married, but now
staying on a visit under your roof--when you find yourself so
situated and so surrounded, there is something inadequate and
unimpressive if you go to bed at eleven o’clock in the height of
the London season.

They went, then, the four of them; he, Mrs. Verinder, Emmeline, and
Margaret Pratt, her married sister--down the newly-named Exhibition
Road, round the corner to one of the largest houses in the Cromwell
Road. There would have been space in the closed landau for Eustace,
the son and brother; he could have sat between Emmeline and
Margaret; but he was attending a banquet as the guest of a city
company.

There had been a dinner-party at Mrs. Clutton’s and the Verinders
with many others were asked for the music. The concluding strains
of Tosti’s _Good-Bye_ floated down the staircase to meet them
as they entered the inner hall, through which Mr. Verinder’s
ladies swept onward to some library or boudoir at the back of the
building, now organised as a place for depositing velvet coats and
feathered wraps. Mr. Verinder, having been relieved of his coat and
opera hat, stood waiting for them--large, grey-headed, dignified,
and yet urbane, exchanging suave civilities with other prosperous
ladies and gentlemen, who had arrived just before him. It was a
typical evening party of the period--awning, drugget, and linkmen
outside; inside, a full pressure on the electric light; large
palms, together with masses of flowers brought in for the occasion;
extraneous help also in the dining-room, now set as a brilliant
supper scene; the servants of the house obliterated, or, at least,
standing back behind the numerous grave hirelings in white
waistcoats, who, but for their solemnity, might so easily have been
mistaken for some of Mrs. Clutton’s visitors.

It should be noted that at this period the neighbourhood still
had a distinct society of its own; not, of course, because the
antiquated country custom of calling on one another merely as
neighbours was practised by its residents, but because this
modern spacious end of the town, with no traditions earlier than
the Prince Consort, seemed to have been planned and constructed
for a particular class of which the members were likely to
foregather--fairly rich prosperous people, eminently respectable
if somewhat colourless people; merchants, bankers, judges of the
High Court, Queen’s counsel of the Parliamentary bar, heads of
departments in the civil service; here and there a doctor who had
been made a baronet, a successful recently knighted architect,
a chartered accountant doing government work, and so on. These
and their families meddled not at all, in the year 1895, with
fashion and aristocracy; punctual in the regulation attendance at
drawing-rooms and levées, but bringing no influence to bear in
order to secure command for state concerts and balls; prompt with
bouquet or curtsey when a princess opened one of their bazaars, but
never fawning on the lady-in-waiting with hints that it would be
a pleasure as well as an honour if her Royal Highness would come
to luncheon one day, at number so-and-so Prince’s Gardens; they
felt and were sufficient for themselves. Untempted by the lure of
a vanishing Bohemia, they did not traffic either with artistic
circles; they bought pictures and read books without desiring to
know the creators of such amenities; they enjoyed the play, but
thought a row of footlights a very sensible, useful barrier between
comedians of both sexes and the rest of the world.

Thus Mr. Verinder found himself immediately among his friends,
and soon learned of something a little unusual about to-night’s
assembly. Anthony Dyke, the famous explorer, was here. He had dined
here, and was now upstairs listening to the music.

“Oh, _that_ fellow,” said Mr. Verinder. “What a fuss they’re making
about him. You see his name everywhere. By the way, I rather
thought he was booked to dine with the Salmon-Curers’ Company this
evening. My son went there, quite expecting to have a peep at him.”

But old Sir Timothy Smith, given a knighthood last Christmas for
designing the market-hall of a northern city, assured Mr. Verinder
that the great man had dined with Mrs. Clutton and no one else.

“Refresh my memory about him,” said Mr. Verinder. “I remember the
Antarctic voyages. But what’s his latest?”

“Well, nothing since that astounding performance in the Andes.”

“Some of that has been questioned, hasn’t it? Travellers’ tales,
what!” said Mr. Verinder, with a large tolerant smile. “Ah, there
you are, my dear.”

Mrs. Verinder, sailing forth splendidly from the cloak-room, was at
his elbow.

“Dyke, the explorer, is here,” she said.

“Yes, so Sir Timothy was telling me. Lead on, my dear.”

And Mrs. Verinder led on, broad but splendid still in the
back-view, carrying her train with a stout round forearm, followed
by the grand young married lady and the slim demurely graceful
girl, and lastly by Mr. Verinder. As they went upstairs, the
music took a classical turn--a turn for the worse, Mr. Verinder
considered.

After an ill-timed stentorian announcement, they were received in
the midst of a few hushes, with silent cordiality by Mrs. Clutton.
She was amiable and friendly as ever, leading Mrs. Verinder to a
seat when the music stopped, but a little nervous or self-conscious
by reason of the presence of the lion of the season.

“Yes, the big man leaning against the wall.”

It would have been impossible to make any mistake. You could not
see him without recognising him--since his portrait had become so
familiar in the illustrated newspapers, as well as on the cover of
that remarkable book of his. And seeing him you could scarcely help
struggling hard to form a clear conception of what the man really
might be.

In size he was very big, but looking still bigger than the true
iron frame of him because of his loose garments--and one thought
at once that of course he hated all confinements and restrictions,
even those entailed by well-cut neatly-fitting clothes; with
dark hair, blue eyes, a reddish beard, and shoulders that seemed
too heavy; of enormous energy, the fire or lust for effort that
seems incomprehensibly to renew itself in the grossest excesses
of gratification; explosive and uncontrollable, as men like him
must always be, but with that curious streak of softness, even of
sentimentality, which goes sometimes with such characters. Just as
he looked bigger than his size, he looked older than his years; but
this impression may have been derived less from the marks and tints
left upon him by tempest and strife than from the known record of
his achievements. It was difficult to believe that he had done so
much and yet was only thirty-seven. Above all else, unavoidably
confusing judgment and driving one back to intuitions, there was a
glamour cast about him by the deeply proved quality of courage--a
glamour, it should be remembered, very much more rare and therefore
very much more potent and alluring then than now.

“Did you hear him laugh?”

Everybody was whispering about him, thinking of him, ostentatiously
taking no notice of him--except the privileged few who from time to
time were being presented to him.

After twenty minutes or so Mrs. Clutton introduced Mr. Verinder to
him, and they seemed to get on well together. Mr. Verinder, pleased
to show that he knew a good deal of geography, asked intelligent
questions, and felt flattered by the adventurer’s eager expansive
manner of giving full details in reply. Though he made you feel
small physically, he did not make you feel small mentally. He said
it was pleasant to be back in the old country, and agreed with
Mr. Verinder that--all said and done--there was no place like
London. Asked how long he intended to honour the metropolis with
his presence, he laughed, and said it depended on circumstances,
but he certainly should not stay more than a month or two. He was
“taking the hat round,” as he explained with a laugh, trying to
raise funds towards another Antarctic expedition. “The fact is, Mr.
Verinder”--and Mr. Verinder was not ill-pleased to observe that his
name had been picked up so quickly and correctly--“in my trade,
capital is very necessary. The most successful ventures are those
that are best fitted out. The more money you have behind you, the
further you go.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mr. Verinder, laughing in his turn, “that that
may be said of all other trades, Mr. Dyke, as well as yours; but I
quite understand what you mean. Equipment. Equipment. And no doubt
many risks could be minimized by foresight and wise outlay.”

Dyke became quite exuberant at finding Mr. Verinder so intelligent
and sympathetic; his loud open-air voice could be heard throughout
the length of Mrs. Clutton’s double drawing-room. He was giving
Mr. Verinder more and more details, with a child-like enthusiasm,
and he would not stop when the music began again. No one dared
say hush to him, but the decorum of Mr. Verinder’s manner
gradually restrained him. In regard to such interruptions, he
pleased Mr. Verinder most of all by declaring that this music was
incomprehensible to him--over his head; and at once concurring in
Mr. Verinder’s opinion that a ballad concert at the Albert Hall was
the real stuff, and laughing most heartily when Mr. Verinder said
that a just finished arrangement of Bach for the violin and piano
might, in the popular phrase, have been the tune the old cow died
of. Then, their relations having reached this very cordial stage,
Anthony Dyke said abruptly--“I’m a fish out of water here. I wonder
if by chance you could tell me the name of that girl over there.”

“Which one?” asked Mr. Verinder.

“That one,” said Dyke, not of course pointing with his hand in an
uncouth manner, but only making slight yet significant signs with
his dark eyebrows and blue eyes. “Now--the one using her fan. I’d
like to get somebody to introduce me to her.”

“I can supply the information, and gratify your wish,” said
Mr. Verinder, in a tone so urbane that it was robbed of any
pompousness. “She is my daughter.”

“Oh, really!” said Dyke, suddenly staring at him as if he didn’t
believe it. Then he laughed once more, but not loudly, shyly. “I
hope it didn’t sound odd my saying that. From living alone so much,
I bang out whatever comes into my mind. You must look on me as the
untutored savage and make excuses for me.”

“None are necessary,” said Mr. Verinder.

Emmeline, on the other side of the room, was engaged in
conversation with their friend Mrs. Bell, whose house was one of
the biggest in Queen’s Gate. Her father beckoned her; and as she
did not observe the signal, went across to fetch her, bringing her
back with him and feeling proud of her as something that belonged
to him and did him credit. Indeed, the circumstance that in a room
full of other well-dressed women she had drawn the attention of
this simple middle-aged wanderer, seemed a compliment to the whole
family.

He thought that she looked very nice as she stood there smiling,
after Mr. Dyke shook hands; so modest and quiet, so essentially
_ladylike_, so completely everything he would have wished; her eyes
shining, and a little colour in her usually rather pale cheeks,
brought there from the excitement caused by meeting a really
celebrated person; but with no shyness or awkwardness perceptible
in voice or manner--just a raising of the arched eyebrows above
the straight well-cut nose and that frank smile about the sweetly
gentle mouth in order to show courteous interest in everything
that was being said. The cream satin dress, too, with the silver
and pearl ornamentation straight across the bodice, the shoulder
puffs, the long white gloves, and the enormous fan, were all
exactly the right thing, all very becoming. Mr. Verinder liked
also, now that he considered the matter, this method of arranging
the dark hair--quite low on the forehead and ascending beneath
bands of gold ribbon to a high crest, brushed up from the back of
her neck, as you saw when she turned round, and secured by a broad
jewelled comb. This, the very latest mode, suited Emmeline. She
had plenty of hair. Her father felt well satisfied with Emmeline’s
appearance.

They all three remained talking together, and Dyke would not
relinquish the father and daughter when his hostess came and made
further introductions. He drew the new people into the talk or let
them slide altogether, but he hung on to the other two, moving with
them if they moved. Mr. Verinder had a good-humoured gratified
feeling that the lion had taken to him, and natural fierceness
had disappeared in impulsive affection; it was, so to speak, a
tame lion following him about, ready to eat out of his hand. But
lionising, like everything else in a well-regulated world, must
have its limits; you cannot neglect your duties at an evening party
to gratify a stranger’s hunger for your society, however famous
that stranger may be. Mr. Verinder wished to rejoin his wife, and,
using tact, he extricated himself. Yet his tact was not sufficient
to extricate Emmeline as well.

One saw them standing together on the staircase, and later they
were sitting together in a remote corner of the supper-room; he
still telling her wonderful things, so that one heard the boom of
his eager tones and the sound of her pretty girlish voice chiming
in--a flute helping, not interrupting the ’cello or the bigger
reeds. “Oh, but how exciting that must have been! Did you really,
Mr. Dyke? What presence of mind.”

When Mrs. Verinder with Margaret broke up the chat and said it was
time to go, Emmeline gave a little start and looked at her as if
for the moment she did not recognize her; then, as if remembering,
she made the traveller known to her.

In the carriage, going up Exhibition Road, Mr. Verinder praised
him. He said that he was a breezy, open hearted, engaging creature,
and he would like to ask him to dinner. Get a few friends to meet
him, what?

Mrs. Verinder said, “He has asked Margaret and Emmeline to tea
to-morrow at Hurlingham. They could give him a message.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Verinder, “has he asked you two girls out for a
little treat? Well, that’s very kind and friendly of him.”

At this date the dinner-party was still an unshaken British
institution, a stately serious affair in any circumstances, like
matrimony, not to be entered into lightly, and when conducted on
the grand scale habitual to Prince’s Gate, all preliminaries needed
thoughtful care. For the minute of time before the horses pulled
up, Mr. and Mrs. Verinder were both turning things over in their
minds.

To all of them, as they entered the hall, there came that vague
and usually unanalysed sensation which most people experience on
returning home from a party; it is a faint shock of surprise caused
by the silence and tranquillity after the noise and commotion; as
if, because you have been hearing music, chattering, drinking wine,
getting warm in a crowd, you expect your house to show that it has
also passed through slight agitation and excitement. For a moment
you are consciously or unconsciously displeased that it should have
been quite unconcerned in anything that concerned you so much; then
the solidness of the fact seems to steady your nerves and bring you
comfort. Home again!

In the wisely restricted lamp-light turned on for them by the
butler, one saw pallid marble nymphs and gods with black caves of
shadow behind them, the squat richly carved legs of heavy tables
whose further ends were lost in gloom, the gilt balustrade of the
staircase glittering, and the stairs themselves rising sharply and
as sharply turning till they grew dim and faded out on a level with
the first floor. Above that all was dark, and one had an impression
of the house stretching upward in the darkness to a fantastic
height. The butler moving ahead gave them of a sudden a doorway of
yellow flames, so dazzling did it seem as he switched and switched,
flooding a large inner room with vivid light. They went in after
him.

This room had never been properly named; it was spoken of
indifferently as the boudoir, the morning-room, and mother’s
room--although Mrs. Verinder herself did not put forward any claim
to proprietorial rights. Probably her title to it merely rested
upon the circumstance that the portrait of her by Millais had been
hung above its marble chimney-piece. Like every other room in the
house, it displayed evidences of moderate wealth, painstaking care,
and a docile adhesion to the prevailing standards of good taste.
The walls were cream-coloured, with panels of red satin--two
large patches of the satin being hidden by the Millais picture and
another picture of similar size but strangely different subject by
Leighton. There were more of those massive heavily carved tables,
some big chairs with golden legs and tapestry backs, and here
and there on the parquetry floor had been placed firmly secured
mounds of velvet and brocade cushions, forming the easy backless
seats then known as “poufs.” These poufs had been chosen by Mrs.
Verinder, and, sinking voluminously upon one of them, she gave a
sign of fatigue, and stared at Millais’ notion of her as she was
once. A smaller pouf would have fitted her in that first year of
her married life.

Margaret, fairer, shorter, plumper, altogether more bustling than
her sister, went to one of the tables, where a silver tray with
cut-glass bottles and tumblers waited for them, and poured out
soda-water. Mr. Verinder at another table busied himself with the
bed-rock detail of his dinner-party, consulting a gold-framed
calendar and jotting down names on an ivory tablet. “The Cluttons,”
he murmured, “and old Sir Timothy--and the Everard-Browns.”

“Don’t forget some young men for Emmeline,” said Mrs. Pratt gaily.

“I never do,” said Mr. Verinder. And that was true. Before his time
in that respect, he liked to see a few fresh young faces even at
his most ceremonious feasts; moreover, as the father of daughters,
he knew that one must not think only of oneself. It was at a big
dinner that Lionel Pratt first betrayed his inclination towards
Margaret. “I am thinking now more of the day than the company,” he
continued; and he ran his pencil down the calendar. “Seventeen
days will bring us to the twelfth, and that’s a Thursday. At this
time of year you can’t expect people to be free unless you give
them adequate notice.”

“Emmeline,” said Mrs. Verinder, yawning, “would you like young
What’s-his-name--that friend of Mrs. Pryce-Jones--Gerald
Something--to be asked?”

Emmeline did not answer. She was standing at the corner of the
chimney-piece, one arm stretched along the marble, her cloak thrown
open. Her eyes seemed queerly large and black, her cheeks white,
her breathing wearily rapid; so that she had the aspect worn by her
when, in the maternal phrase, she had been “overdoing it”--playing
too many sets at lawn tennis, riding too long in the Row, going to
too many theatres in the same week.

“There’s no occasion for you to stay up,” said Mrs. Verinder,
observing this look on her daughter’s face. “You go to bed, dear”;
and she added the farewell words that she had first begun to utter
when Emmeline was a child of fourteen. “Don’t read in bed.”

“No, I don’t want to read to-night,” said Emmeline, going out of
the room.

No, she did not want to read: she wanted to think.




CHAPTER III


On the morning after the day on which the two girls watched the
polo and drank tea with Mr. Dyke, Margaret went back to her kind
husband and two sweet little children at Hindhead, where they
lived in a red-brick catastrophe of the largest size that Pratt
had brought about among the beeches and pines only a few years
previously. On the afternoon of that day Mr. Dyke called in
Prince’s Gate for the purpose of offering thanks by word of mouth
for the invitation which he had already accepted with pen and ink.
Mrs. Verinder said that he was amiable but untidy, and a sticker.
She thought he would never go.

At dinner a night later--when only Eustace had been claimed by
society and the other three remained at home--Mr. Verinder talked
again of Anthony Dyke.

It appeared, said Mr. Verinder, that Dyke began his career as a
hunter of big game in Africa, where, together with his companion,
the eccentric Duke of Ravenna, he had been badly mauled by lions.

“The other night, while we were talking, I noticed some disfiguring
marks on both cheekbones, and I should not be surprised if they
were the signs of the clawing to which I allude. Whatever they
were, he will carry them to his grave.” And Mr. Verinder went on to
say that Dyke’s next scene of operations was Australia, where he
had penetrated the unknown desert country in all directions.

Then he told them some more. He did not, of course, know that one
of his hearers could have told it to him, had she been willing to
display her knowledge.

The fact was that Mr. Verinder, desirous of being well posted
by the twelfth of next month, when the man would be here as his
guest for dinner, had searched tables and shelves at the Reform
Club in order to put things together. That most useful of all
volumes, Who’s Who, did not as yet exist, but a sort of popular
dictionary of biography gave Mr. Verinder all that he wanted,
and very much in the modern style. In this compendium he gleaned
such essential details as: “Emerged at Shark Bay on the northern
coast, sole survivor of the party; Thanked by the Government of
Queensland, 1885; Thanked by Governments of South Australia and New
South Wales, gold medal of Royal Geographical Society, 1886; First
Antarctic cruise, resulting in discovery of the island since named
Anthony Dyke Land, and charting of coast-line for five hundred
miles, 1888; Establishing Furthest South record”--and so on.

Also Mr. Verinder had been to Mudie’s Library and borrowed that
book, _A Walk in the Andes_. He read it after dinner.

They sat upstairs in what they called the music-room--the room that
comprised the full width of the house, the largest and best room,
with the pictures by Long, Poynter, and Alma Tadema. The Leaders
were in the room behind; you reached it through those folding
doors, now of course closed. Naturally all the light was not turned
on, but there was full and sufficient radiance throughout the
little camp that the diminished family formed on the stretching
desert of parquetry.

Mrs. Verinder, wearing mauve brocade, occupied a sofa and dozed
over the newspaper; Mr. Verinder had taken the very easiest chair
and settled himself in it with many changes of position, as if
determined to perform the impossible task of making it still
easier; Emmeline sat upon a lowish stool, her pretty hair darkly
lustrous in the soft orange glow of the lamps as she bent her head
over a piece of embroidery and made minute stitches slowly and very
neatly. From time to time she raised her eyes to glance at the book
in her father’s hands, noticing how old and shabby it looked with
the edge of the cloth binding broken and the librarian’s ugly label
loose at one corner. She had a lovely clean new copy upstairs in
her room--with the portrait-cover intact, and her own name and the
author’s compliments written in a slap-dash hand on the title page.

“They told me at the club,” said Mr. Verinder, half closing his
book, “that there’s a strong touch of Baron Munchausen about this.”

“Did you speak?” said Mrs. Verinder, raising herself and stooping
to pick up the newspaper.

Mr. Verinder repeated his words.

“Munchausen,” murmured Mrs. Verinder drowsily.

He went on reading and Emmeline watched him while he read.

As she knew or had learned involuntarily, it was not great
literature, a modest affair compared with the works of Thackeray,
Carlyle, or Ruskin--but why bother about style when you have such
a tale to tell? The matter not the manner grips. Was it gripping
father? He had assumed a dogged, almost aggressive air, he frowned;
but this did not really indicate that he was quarrelling with the
book, it only meant that as he was very little used to book-reading
as a pastime, he felt that a superior concentration of the
intellect was necessary.

Watching him, she had again that odd sense of strangeness; as
though he had not been really her father, but somebody that she
scarcely knew and did not in the least care for. How strange!
Certainly she had never seen him or understood him as now,
suddenly, unexpectedly.

She observed his bushy yet straggling grey eyebrows, his inch
of close-cropt whisker, his bald head with long strands of hair
idiotically plastered across it from the fat neck, his leathery
complexion, the creases and furrows of his chin and cheeks. He
was well dressed, in a suitable manner--but suitable to what? The
well-starched shirt, the black satin tie, the glossy dinner jacket
gave him no true dignity, concealed not one of his defects. He
was a ruin, a man run to seed; large without being strong, too
stout about the middle, too slack about the knees, no steel and
whipcord anywhere about this sprawling unimpressive bulk. No force
of any sort behind that stupid frown! But he was kindly by nature,
well-intentioned, thoroughly good according to his lights; only
stupid--stupid, stupid as the Albert Hall is round, as Exhibition
Road is wide, as Queen’s Gate straight and Kensington Gore flat.

Then she thought how cruel it was that she should thus judge him
instead of pitying him--she, with this immense gladness in her
heart.

She glanced at her mother, from whose relaxed grasp the newspaper
was again slipping, and a yearning compassion for both parents came
in response to the call. Poor dears.

The book had gripped father; he read on resolutely, but as yet of
course he was only at the beginning, still in Patagonia. Stitching
very slowly she thought about it. It was so simple, yet so
wonderful, so very wonderful.

He had been “messing about” among the gold-diggings of Cape Horn.
“The Gold-diggings of Cape Horn”--inaudibly she re-articulated the
words to herself, just to feel them again on her vocal cords. Like
all other words that concerned him, they had magic in them. For
instance, Tierra del Fuego--the Land of Fire--Tierra del Fuego.
And beyond all else, the Andes. The Andes--it seemed to her that
the very first time she heard that word when she was a child, she
should have thrilled through and through. The word should have
taken possession of her by reason of its mystery and might.

Well then, he was moving northward among those islands, trying his
luck at the gold-digging, and doing no good. “I don’t think I am
a lucky man, Miss Verinder. No, I have never been very lucky. How
I go on warning you against myself, don’t I? But, just as I have
been frank to you about important matters, I won’t deceive you
about small ones. Never mind. Hang it, the luck turns. I shall get
my luck one day.” Well then--while her father read the book she
talked to herself about it: Since he was at a loose end, no big
thing on hand, the idea had come to him to land on the mainland,
and go along the gigantic spine of the Andes in its entire length
from south to north, say four thousand miles. And he had achieved
his purpose, alone and on foot--seeing marvellous things, doing
marvellous things all the way.

She thought of the lure that danger exercises over the bravest
hearts. It is the same to-day as it was hundreds of years ago. It
was that--the lure--which drew the brave hearts over the bars of
Devon rivers in Elizabeth’s time; out, out to the Spanish main.
Not the glitter of the gold, but the danger behind the flash and
glow--the danger. She quite understood.

The newspaper had fallen with a gentle rustle upon the parquetry.
Mrs. Verinder leaned further back, opened her mouth, and, after
it had been open for a little while, made the faint sound of a
snore. The snoring of Mrs. Verinder was like a terrible family
secret, never to be spoken of or even hinted at in any manner to
anybody--least of all, to Mrs. Verinder herself. This evening,
however, it did not distressfully afflict either her husband or her
daughter.

Emmeline ceased to stitch, folded her hands on her lap with a
gesture that had become habitual to her even at this distant
date, and her eyes grew soft and dreamy. Large as the room was,
it was too small for her; with a few dreamlike thoughts she broke
the westward wall of it, swept it clean away--the five windows,
the rich curtains, the gilded, moulded panels, and all the rest
of it--and passed out through the gap, merely leaving behind the
graceful external shape of herself to keep her parents company and
answer questions, if necessary, during her absence. She went a long
way; westward, half across the world. Then she came back again, and
was once more in the neighbourhood, although not yet in the house
itself. She was walking under the trees, not far from sunlit water,
listening to a voice.

The entrance of butler and footmen with the silver tray and the cut
glass brought her right home, and she resumed her stitching.

Quite late the book wrung a chuckle and an expostulation from Mr.
Verinder. “Oh, I say. Really--upon my word;” and he stood up. “If
Dyke actually means what I think! And I don’t see what else he can
mean. Listen to this. I want to read it to you.”

Mrs. Verinder, in the absurd sprightly tone of a person whom
sleep has intoxicated, begged him to give them the passage; and
Mr. Verinder, standing close to a tall standard lamp, with all
available light on the page, read it, after first explaining the
context.

Dyke, he said, had accepted a night’s hospitality from three
savages, who at first appeared friendly, but soon aroused his
suspicion. Acting a naïve admiration of the weapon, they had
withdrawn his rifle before he lay down to sleep; and now the three
of them sat at the fire with their heads close together, planning
mischief, as he surmised. At their feet was a great stone axe, and
not far from him a horse-hair lasso. “Dyke says that while still
pretending to sleep, he moved inch by inch towards the lasso, till
he got it and opened the noose. Ah, here we are. Now listen.” And
Mr. Verinder read slowly, amazedly, fearfully. “‘By good fortune
I noosed them all three, so that their greased and painted faces
crashed together with a nasty bang. Borrowing the stone axe, I used
it freely. Then I lay down and slept comfortably, feeling confident
that my late hosts would never plot against a visitor again.’ He
means--doesn’t he?--that he killed them. He says his _late_ hosts.
What! He can’t mean anything else?”

“No,” said Mrs. Verinder, successfully shaking off the dregs of
torpor; “that’s what he means, of course.”

Mr. Verinder chuckled feebly. “But, upon my word If you think of
it, wasn’t it--”

“It was in self-defence,” said Mrs. Verinder tolerantly.

“Yes, I suppose it was. But doesn’t it show--”

Of a truth he scarcely knew what it showed. Unless the obvious
fact that there are wide expanses of land and water on this
big planet where life does not run as smoothly as it does in
Prince’s Gate; that when once you go outside the boundaries
of civilization, when once you begin to disregard the rules
that bind society together--He stood there in the strong
lamp-light, with the reluctant confused facial expression of a
comfort-loving, peaceable, sheltered person who is confronted
with ferocity--legitimate ferocity, perhaps; as when, standing in
an hotel balcony during a riot, one sees limbs broken by a baton
charge of mounted police. However much one dislikes it, one cannot
hinder or interfere. One can do nothing--except to make light of
the incident afterwards, and, so to speak, laugh it off.

Mr. Verinder laughed and closed the book. “That’s enough for
to-night,” he said, putting the book down, and feeling the back of
his neck.

After this the name of Anthony Dyke faded out of the family
conversation, and for a few days at least was mentioned no more.
Then Miss Marchant came and made a communication to Mrs. Verinder,
saying that she had been sent to do it by Mrs. Pryce-Jones.

Mrs. Jones lived in the large stone house at the western end of
Kensington Gore, and Miss Marchant lived with her as a kind of lady
companion, assisting her with household management.

Mrs. Jones thought that Mrs. Verinder ought to be told that Miss
Marchant, happening to be in Kensington Gardens not long before
dinner time, had seen Miss Verinder walking alone with a man there.
They were quite alone, without the shadow of a chaperon. Just
together--like that. They never saw Miss Marchant, who had observed
them until obliged herself to leave the gardens. As Mrs. Verinder
knew, they dined rather early at the stone house. As Mrs. Verinder
knew also, Mrs. Jones was very fond of Miss Emmeline, and she felt
it only right to send Miss Marchant; bearing in mind that the very
nicest girls do need a little looking after.

Mrs. Verinder did not at all relish this turn of phrase, and she
allowed Miss Marchant to perceive her distaste for it; but Miss
Marchant, continuing the narrative after an apology, threw Mrs.
Verinder into a state of flabby perturbation which she could ill
conceal, by saying that the impression made by Miss Emmeline’s
male companion had been so very unfavourable. He had seemed
altogether a most undesirable person--objectionable even. One did
read such dreadful things in the newspapers nowadays--about slight
indiscretions of young ladies leading to painful entanglements.
Indeed, as she confessed, she had been haunted by the idea of
blackmailers--the sort of ruffians who possess themselves of a
perhaps quite innocent secret, then distort it and make you pay
them to hide it. In these circumstances Mrs. Pryce-Jones and Miss
Marchant had both felt that it would be really wicked not to speak
about it to Mrs. Verinder.

“Do you imply,” asked Mrs. Verinder breathlessly, “that it was a
common ragged sort of person?”

Oh, no. The person was adequately, if queerly dressed; a great big
tall man, wearing a grey suit and a slouch hat. It was rather his
commanding air, the way he brandished his arms, and so on, that had
displeased and frightened Miss Marchant.

Then--what was exceedingly rare with her--Mrs. Verinder had an
inspiration, or an intuition.

“A bearded man?”

“Yes.”

“A man with a red beard, and rather high cheekbones--a great big
man?”

“Yes, yes.”

It was that Dyke--the explorer. Although no worse, Mrs. Verinder
was, of course, very much upset by it; but she displayed a
satisfaction that she was very far from feeling.

“Oh, really!” she said, tittering effectively. “You may be quite
at ease, Miss Marchant. It is quite all right, thank you. He is a
valued friend of the family. No more a friend of Emmeline’s than
the rest of us. But I don’t think I shall tell you his name,” she
added, acting playful reproachfulness. “I don’t think you deserve
it--No, I am not in the least offended. I’ll at least tell you
this--” and for a moment hesitating whether to cloak herself
with cold dignity or put on a mask of cordialness, she chose
the smiles--“he is dining with us on the twelfth, and although
unfortunately, our table is made up, so that I cannot ask you to
meet him at dinner, I shall be very glad indeed if you and Mrs.
Jones will look in afterwards. That is, if you have nothing better
to do.”

Miss Marchant withdrew, puzzled and crestfallen.

Immediately Mrs. Verinder despatched a message upstairs requesting
Miss Emmeline to come down to the morning-room. She had determined
to talk to her daughter without delay, but quite lightly, with a
simulation of unconcern. It is always wisest with young people not
to show them that you have been fluttered by any act of theirs.

Afternoon tea was done, and trays of cut flowers, the contents of
a hamper sent by Margaret from Hindhead, had been brought into the
room for Mrs. Verinder to arrange in glass vases and dishes. It
was a little task that she liked to do herself--perhaps because
she did it with so extraordinary a clumsiness and ineptitude. She
seized upon these flowers now--lovely long-stalked roses, pink and
red--feeling that they would aid her and keep her in countenance;
and as she moved about, dabbing the delicious blooms into obviously
improper receptacles, breaking a stalk here or there, and slopping
a little water on the choice furniture, she looked like a large
over-blown actress playing a part in a highly artificial comedy.

“Ah, Emmeline, is that you?” she cried, with a tone so jarringly
spurious that Emmeline stopped short on the threshold and
understood at once that the trouble was beginning.

“Shut the door, dear. What was I going to say?” And Mrs. Verinder
caused a slop-over and a shower of petals with the same brisk
movement of her dimpled hand. “Oh, yes. I could not tell you why,
but our friend Mr. Anthony Dyke came into my mind just now; and
thinking about him, I thought I’d give you a little hint.”

“Yes, mother?”

“To begin with, we scarcely know him.”

“We have not known him very long,” said Emmeline, gently.

“I say, we don’t really know him at all”; and Mrs. Verinder gave
a harshly nervous laugh as she mutilated some maidenhair fern.
“I mean, nothing _about_ him--who he is, or what he is, himself,
outside his notoriety. Then the point is this. Because--I don’t say
so, but I thought it might be--because he may have interested you
as rather striking, a _bizarre_ figure, and so forth--” Watching
Emmeline’s face, she rapidly abandoned a difficult rôle and became
more like herself. “I don’t want you to indulge in any silliness
about him.”

“What do you mean by silliness?” said Emmeline quietly.

“Well, I don’t want you to fall in love with him.”

“I’m afraid I’ve done that already,” said Emmeline, still more
quietly.

Her mother flung down a bunch of wet La Frances on the satin seat
of the nearest chair, and became entirely natural.

“Oh, what nonsense--what utter nonsense! Emmeline, how can you talk
such rubbish? Really--upon my word. A total stranger--and a man old
enough to be your father.”

“Oh, no. He is considerably under forty.”

“Then he doesn’t _look_ it. And such an untidy creature.” Ruffled,
bothered, angry, Mrs. Verinder was speaking without plan, uttering
scattered thoughts as they presented themselves, and she continued
volubly to do so. “I never saw such an untidy man. That night at
Mrs. Clutton’s. His crumpled shirt--and he kept running his hands
through his hair till it was all anywhere.” Emmeline was gently
shaking her head, as though to imply that she did not mind, that
she rather liked the untidy appearance. “You of all people,
too--you who’ve always had such a sense of fitness and niceness.
How can you for a moment harbour such silliness? Besides, the
_time_! There’s been no _time_ for it. What night was it, that
night at Mrs. Clutton’s? Surely not a week ago!” And Mrs. Verinder
steadied herself, speaking slower and with weight. “Emmeline, tell
me the truth. How many times have you actually seen him?”

“Let me think,” said Emmeline, with dreamy introspective eyes,
deeply interested by the question and vibrating with anxious care
as she answered it. How many times, how few times? Of course, it
was so immeasurably more wonderful to her than it could be to her
mother. “At Mrs. Clutton’s,” she said gravely. “At Hurlingham next
day. Next morning at Waterloo.”

“At Waterloo?” ejaculated Mrs. Verinder loudly. “What’s that?
Waterloo!”

“When Margaret was going home. He came to see her off.”

“See her off! How did he know her train?”

“She told him--or I did. I don’t remember.”

“More fools, the pair of you.”

Emmeline made a deprecating gesture, as of one who pleads not to be
interrupted in a difficult mental effort, and for a moment or so
looked about her vaguely.

“Then of course he came here that same afternoon,” she said, with a
brightening face. “And the next afternoon he came again.”

“Not two afternoons!” cried Mrs. Verinder. “Not again, behind my
back, without my seeing him. Oh, but, Emmeline, that is shameful;
that is underhand.”

“He is not underhand. How could you see him? You were out.”

“Then he oughtn’t to have come in. Besides, why didn’t he leave his
cards? There were no cards on the table. I looked.”

“He left cards the day before.”

“He should have left them again,” said Mrs. Verinder, not really
meaning it, only feeling muddled and angry.

Emmeline made another gesture.

“That brings us to Thursday. And the three times in Kensington
Gardens. I have met him there, mother, by appointment. That’s seven
times, isn’t it? No, eight--eight!” Her voice faded away as she
said the number, as though she was lost in the wonder of it. Could
it be possible? Only eight times--all told!

“Well. _Well_,” said Mrs. Verinder, pulling herself together. In
the midst of her irritation she could not avoid a feeling of pride
because of the silly child’s absolute truthfulness and candour. “Of
course you understand that there must be no more of such meetings.”

Emmeline let that remark go, as if it had been a ball at tennis
that was not worth moving to--so obviously out of court.

“And your father must be told about it.”

“Yes, I suppose he had better know,” said Emmeline dreamily.

Left alone, Mrs. Verinder polished off the flowers in a very
rough and ready fashion, thinking the while. If Emmeline insisted
on making an imprudent marriage, it was doubtful if one could
prevent her. No, why not be honest about it? One _couldn’t_
prevent her. The only way you can keep grown-up girls in check is
by holding their purse-strings--and Emmeline had her own money.
And she thought that, nice as it is to belong to the third or
even fourth generation of families enriched by the highest form
of trade, it is perhaps a pity that grandfathers should leave
money to female grandchildren--absolutely, on their attaining the
age of twenty-one. Wiser and better to leave it in the control of
parents--or make the age thirty--or forty. Margaret had gone off so
easily and pleasantly with Lionel Pratt. A nice well-dressed rich
young fellow, able to build quite a palace for his wife, and send
flowers to his mother-in-law.

Leaving out maternal feeling altogether, she could not bear this
idea of a quite attractive if rather reserved girl marrying an
uncouth stranger--a man who had come from the ends of the earth
and would probably want to go back there. Of course if it must be,
it must be. “But, oh,” she said to herself with a sigh, “it is all
too weird; for _I_ don’t understand what she has seen in him to
captivate her.”

She determined that she would talk to her husband about it directly
after dinner, not before dinner. It was now half-past six o’clock;
and, while giving her very last dabs to the flowers, she fancied
that she heard the front door open and shut. Going out to the hall
presently and seeing one of the footmen, she inquired if it had
been Mr. Verinder coming in.

“No, ma’am, it was Miss Verinder going out.”

“Oh, yes, quite so.”

Mrs. Verinder went slowly up the stairs, feeling seriously
perturbed. In spite of all that had been said just now, had
Emmeline gone out to meet that man? But Mrs. Verinder held to her
determination of postponing her chat with Mr. Verinder till after
dinner. If you cannot avoid worry, it is better to take it on a
full stomach.

Emmeline gave one glance back at the house, noticed that it too had
changed, and hurried on.

Open carriages with a footman as well as a coachman on each
box seat were streaming up the road. Quite young ladies in the
carriages wore bonnets with strings tied under their chins,
daintily small bonnets of delicate colours, primrose, heliotrope,
and peach; those that wore hats had them perched in the queerest
manner, on the back of the head, sideways, at angles; all of them
held up flounced or laced parasols of rich dark tints, and their
great sleeves ballooned so widely as almost to conceal gentlemen
who were accompanying them--elderly gentlemen, these, like father,
in top hats and open frock coats; or comparatively youthful
gentlemen, like our brother Eustace, in top hats and buttoned
frock coats. A horn sounded joyously, and round the corner from
Prince’s Gardens there came a four-in-hand--four beautiful grey
horses prancing, the whole coach shining in the sunlight, a bevy
of ladies, a flower-bed of female elegance, on top; and the two
grooms, one standing up to blow the horn and the other sitting
down with folded arms. There was another, a plain-clothes groom,
concealed within the shuttered doors, but ready to pop out should
the gentleman driving meet any difficulties. “So-ho, there. Steady.”

The top hat of the gentleman driving shone prodigiously; he wore a
button-hole of gardenias and had a light holland cloth round his
middle dividing the frock coat from the shepherd’s plaid trousers;
although his face was red and anxious, he looked very grand. The
whole prosperous essentially respectable neighbourhood was rolling
through the slanted sunbeams to enjoy its drive of ceremony in Hyde
Park.

At Alexandra Gate a mounted policeman held up his white hand
and stopped the traffic of the main road, in order to allow
all these equipages to roll flashing past unimpeded. The stout
plebeian horses of two omnibuses had to be pulled up short with
a jerk, the ponies in several tradesmen’s carts skidded a little
on the macadam; a small squad of lads riding on those new safety
bicycles--not the ugly high ones--jumped from the pedals and held
their machines sloping to the pavement. Within the rails of the
semi-private sanctuary of Hyde Park, Mayfair and Belgravia on
wheels at once mingled with and absorbed Kensington on wheels. It
was a gay and enchantingly polite spectacle.

But Emmeline turned her back on it and walked swiftly into the
cool shadow cast by Albert Hall Mansions--the only edifice in the
locality of which Mr. Verinder did not approve. Then, before she
reached the Albert Hall, her heart leaped. A tall, excitable man
was coming towards her, waving a slouch hat. They should have met
on the Broad Walk; she had told him to wait there; but he was not
able to wait.

How had he captivated her? She did not know. Was it only because
he was the incarnate antithesis of Kensington; because he was
individual, unlike the things on each side of him, not arranged
on any pattern, not dull, monotonous, or flat; a thing alive in a
place where all else was sleeping or dead? Neither then nor at any
future time did she attempt mentally to differentiate between the
impression he had made upon her as himself all complete, with the
dark hair, the penetrating but impenetrable eyes, the record, the
fame, and the impression she might have received if any of these
attributes had been taken away from him. Say, if he had been
an unknown Mr. Tomkins instead of a known Mr. Dyke. Absurd. The
man and the name were one. So very much so indeed that yesterday
morning when, at the museum, she had asked for a new map of the
Antarctic, and was poring over it in order to feast herself with a
sight of those magic words Anthony Dyke Land, it was not only that
the little black letters of which the names was composed shone like
rubies and burned like fire, she felt distinctly the man’s hand
on her shoulder and heard his voice at her ear, although at this
moment he was miles away. He was Anthony Dyke. He was her lord, her
prince, her lover.

Yet hitherto she had not been a romantic girl. She had felt nothing
irksome in her surroundings, had been content with these broad
streets and platitudinous façades; her pulses had not stirred at
contact with masculinity; life with the family had seemed pleasant,
and the prospect of ultimate union with some good-natured nonentity
like Pratt, a well-managed nursery, some humdrum babies, had not
appeared repellent. She was not irregular either in thought or
conduct. Indeed, she had inherited a fair portion of her father’s
love of order; showing this characteristic in many ways, keeping
her room very neat and tidy, liking, even when she was quite
small, to have boxes and convenient places in which to keep her
belongings, not leaving books on sofas or dropping her handkerchief
on the stairs. Beyond the sensation of possessing latent powers and
capabilities upon which there had been no call, there had not come
to her herself the slightest indication of the likelihood of what
was happening now. It was unexpected, miraculous. As though that
Virginia creeper which was so neatly bound upon its wires from the
wide area to the top of the ground floor windows of their house
had been metamorphosed into an overwhelming growth, with tendrils
strong enough to bind a man’s limbs, huge pulp-laden leaves, and
blazing red tropical passion flowers.

They entered the Gardens by the small gate, and he plunged across
the grass with her just at a point where a notice board was
imploring people to keep on the paths. They walked away together
under the trees, towards the water. It lay all aglow in the mellow
sunlight.

When she came home a little more than an hour later she glanced at
the outside of the house again. Home. It was not so much that it
had changed, it had lost significance.

       *       *       *       *       *

After dinner she went upstairs to the music-room, while her father
was drawn by Mrs. Verinder into the room that they sometimes called
her own. In there Mrs. Verinder told him, with a mere expression of
regret and no preamble, that Emmeline had fallen in love with Dyke,
the explorer.

“But, good heavens,” cried Mr. Verinder, “he’s a married man.”

Mrs. Verinder sat down. As a very broad generalisation, it might
be said that there are two classes of people: those who spring to
their feet when suddenly confronted with a grave crisis and those
who sit down. Mrs. Verinder was of the sitting-down sort.

“Married man!” she echoed, after seating herself. “How do you
know?”

“Mrs. Clutton told me so. I asked if his wife was there, and she
said no, the wife is never seen.”

“Then you ought to have told me.”

“I did.”

“Never.”

“I certainly intended to--although I never thought it could be of
the slightest consequence to us. But I meant to warn you for the
twelfth--to say nothing to him in conversation about married life
or divorce. Oh, but this is ridiculous.” Mr. Verinder walked about
the room, frowning. “Emmeline! No, no. Whatever fancy--It must be
stopped at once. Emmeline must be told the facts of the case, and
she must dismiss all thought about him. It can be nothing, so far.”

“I fear,” said Mrs. Verinder, “that she has been going about with
him.”

“What makes you think that?”

Mrs. Verinder explained.

“It is very wrong of him,” said Mr. Verinder indignantly. “It is
very wrong of him in the circumstances.” He felt alarm now as
well as indignation, and he came to the front of Mrs. Verinder
and spoke with frowning emphasis. “That sort of man might be very
dangerous--unscrupulous--reckless of consequences. I don’t like
this at all.”

Then he walked about the room again, reflecting upon the manner in
which he should break the unpalatable news to Emmeline. He felt
that it was a delicate business and one demanding tact; for no
sensitive self-respecting young lady can fail to suffer from the
sting of wounded pride when she learns that a man with no right to
pay specially marked attentions to anybody has been paying them to
her. On the other hand, if the attentions have not been special or
marked, then in responding by any relaxment of reserve she has made
a fool of herself--and she won’t like that either. However, he was
soon ready for his task, and both of them went upstairs to Emmeline
in the music-room.

There, in the music-room, occurred what Mrs. Verinder called “a
scene.” It was the first real scene that had ever broken the
tranquil atmosphere of the house since the family had occupied
it; but as many other scenes were soon to follow, one may perhaps
indicate the developments of this one by synopsis.

Miss Verinder, coming from the piano where she had been playing,
was informed by her father of the fact--Mr. Dyke not in a position
to marry, for the simple reason that Mr. Dyke is already married.
In these circumstances an obvious necessity to open her eyes; and
an equally obvious necessity for her and the rest of the family to
drop Mr. Dyke like a hot potato.

All this he had conveyed with delicacy enough; but, observing that
Miss Verinder, after her eyes had been opened, showed density,
slowness of intelligence, or lack of sufficient recoil, he felt
the initial touch of that cumulative irritation with which fate
was about to torture him, and he amplified the argument in a
heavier and less tactful style. Very, very wrong of Dyke to play
the fool with her, and hold this knowledge up his sleeve. Can
have so behaved for none other than a caddish motive. Very, very
humiliating for her, to find out how worthless he is; but nothing
to do except take the thing in proper ladylike style, wash him out,
and look pleasant about it--that is, pleasant before company.

Then came the shock.

Miss Verinder, to the horror and amazement of her parents, said she
had known it from the beginning. Nothing underhand or caddish about
the man; best man in the world; at any rate, the only man in the
world for her. As to being talked about, peril to reputation, and
so on--it did not, as she implied, matter twopence-half-penny to
Miss Verinder. To such questions as, Where had her pride gone? she
returned evasive or unsatisfactory replies.

Mr. Verinder, talking now very freely, felt after a little while
that he was making too much noise and no real progress. He broke
off the interview, saying he would take Mrs. Verinder downstairs
with him and go on talking to her alone in the boudoir. Emmeline
offered to withdraw from the music-room, leaving them alone there;
but Mr. Verinder said he needed pens, ink, and paper, and he would
find them on the ground floor. He would return soon to make some
final pronouncement to Emmeline; she was therefore to remain where
she was.

Downstairs, he used such words as stupid hero-worship, temporary
infatuation, passing fancy induced by the plausible cajolements
of a man so much older than herself. Of Dyke he said he could
not speak with adequate censure--and he added at once that most
certainly Dyke’s invitation to dinner on the twelfth must be
cancelled. But of course there should be no cancellation of
the dinner itself. He would write to Dyke to-morrow; he knew
exactly what to say to Dyke. That letter, however, could wait
till to-morrow. The pressing thing was to decide what to do with
Emmeline.

“If,” said Mr. Verinder, “she will give me her solemn promise never
to see him again, then--”

“She won’t,” said Mrs. Verinder. “I could detect that, in the
expression of her face just now.”

Then soon an idea occurred to one or other of them and was
immediately adopted by both. They would send Emmeline on a visit
to Hindhead, and thus keep her out of the way and give her time to
forget this silliness. She would be very happy down there, she was
devoted to Margaret’s two children, she liked all the sylvan glades
that had been left standing after Pratt built his mansion.

It was not too late to despatch a telegram, although it might not
be delivered to-night, and they could not expect an answer till the
morning. They sent this off, looked in the railway guide to find
an early train to Hindhead, gave the necessary instructions about
the carriage which would convey Miss Verinder to the station. Then
Mr. Verinder stood thinking and frowning, till he asked a question
about the maid who would accompany his daughter.

“That girl who looks after her--Louisa Hodson! Can Louisa be
trusted?”

“Oh, I hope so,” said Mrs. Verinder, already feeling that nobody
was to be trusted, that everybody had bothering secrets which one
would find out sooner or later. “Oh, yes, I think Louisa is quite
trustworthy. She _has_ been--so far.”

Then they went upstairs once more.

“It is arranged,” he said, “that you shall go to Margaret for a few
weeks.”

Miss Verinder said that she would not go. Her face was white, and
she spoke in a quiet but rather breathless manner.

“Oh, yes, it is all settled,” said Mr. Verinder curbing himself.
Then, as he saw her shake her head negatively, he burst out. “You
will do what you are told.”

“Oh, no, I assure you, father, I can’t be treated like this, as if
I was a child.”

“It will do you good,” said Mrs. Verinder feebly. “You look pale
and fagged. The change of air--”

“If I wanted change of air I’d sooner go to the seaside by myself.
Yes, I could do that.”

“No, you couldn’t,” shouted Mr. Verinder; and he told her that if
she compelled him, he would give orders that would result in total
restriction of her movements. Then the servants would all know that
there was something wrong in the house; they would talk, and the
echo of their talk would be heard outside the house. Nevertheless,
facing these risks, he would give his orders. “Understand, I am
serious.”

“So am I,” said Miss Verinder, very quietly.

“The carriage will be at the door at ten minutes to ten, to take
you to Waterloo,” he said, shouting. “You’ll have your things
packed, and you’ll start--No, don’t leave the room.” She was going
towards the door; but she stopped, and sat down by the piano. “Do
you hear? You’ll have everything packed to-night, before you go to
bed.”

“Except her dressing-case,” said Mrs. Verinder. “That must be kept
open till the morning--to put in her small odds and ends--brush and
comb--what she wants for her personal comfort.”

Nothing further of a contentious character was said. And presently
Mr. Verinder tried to do a little acting in his turn; he essayed a
representation of relief of mind, restored confidence, general good
humour. He said he had interrupted Emmeline earlier in the evening
when she was playing the piano. Would she play something to him now?

She obeyed, playing a selection from the new musical piece at the
Savoy Theatre.

Mr. Verinder acted the soothing effect produced by tuneful melody,
satisfaction that peace now reigned, and so forth; but, leaning
back in the easy chair, he felt unexpectedly tired and shaky.

“Thank you, dear. That is very pretty.”

“And didn’t she play it prettily?” said Mrs. Verinder.

“Yes. Thank you, dear,” said Mr. Verinder again, indicating by
his tone that in view of the task which lay before her upstairs
he would not ask for an encore. That packing! He tried to express
trunks and boxes by his firm but kindly manner; he did not wish to
repeat the words themselves.

Emmeline, seeming to accept the hint, rose from the piano and bade
them good-night.

“Out of the way for a month at least. That gives one time,” said
Mr. Verinder, when the door had closed; and he gave his wife an
oral sketch of the letter she was to write to Margaret explaining
the state of affairs, putting Margaret on her guard, and telling
her what precautions should be taken. He thought it ought, if
possible, to be in the post-box before one A.M.

Poor Mrs. Verinder sat up late to write it.

Early next morning they received Margaret’s reply telegram--just
the one word “Delighted.” Miss Emmeline had breakfast in her room,
and this arrangement appeared to Mr. Verinder both natural and
proper. At ten minutes to ten the single brougham with the luggage
tray on top stood waiting at the door, and the footman who was
to accompany it was in the hall waiting for the odd man to come
through the baize doors with the luggage.

“Are Miss Verinder’s things down?” asked Mr. Verinder of somebody.

“No, sir,” said the butler, “I don’t think they are.”

“Where’s Hodson?”

Louisa Hodson leaned over the gilt balustrade on the first floor.

“Is Miss Verinder packed?”

“No, sir,” said Louisa; coming half-way down the stairs to meet
him as he came up them, and speaking confidentially when they met.
“Miss Verinder told me not to pack, sir. I think she has changed
her mind and doesn’t intend to go.”

It was open rebellion.




CHAPTER IV


Mr. Verinder gave his orders now--foolish ones, as such orders
always are. Miss Verinder was not to leave the house except when
accompanied by her maid, or her mother. In the case of her issuing
forth with Louisa Hodson, she was to account for the time spent
while away. Louisa must also account for it. Miss Verinder was to
go about with her mother as much as possible; to fulfil all social
engagements that had already been made; to do the afternoon drives
in Hyde Park, together with both her parents, and so on.

During the course of the morning he called upon his solicitors in
Spring Gardens, and saw the head of the firm, Mr. Williams. He
desired Mr. Williams to find out all about Anthony Dyke. “Find out
everything you can for me. I want the fullest information I can
get.” Mr. Williams, promising to do so, noticed that his client and
old friend looked gloomy and depressed; and the brief interview
terminated at once, without passing into the pleasant general chat
that was customary when Mr. Verinder came to Spring Gardens.

It has been said that Mr. Verinder had a love of law and order.
Truly, he adored them. We are all of us what our antecedent
history makes us; and Mr. Verinder, looking backward far beyond
his own birth, behind his grandfather’s birth even, could see such
beneficent factors as open markets, stable rates of exchange,
organised means of transport, together with banking and credit
systems that are really based on the confidence inspired by a firm
government--he could see all this not only as the solid foundation
on which the British Empire had been raised, but as the prime cause
of the success of those paper mills in the midlands from which he
and his family derived their wealth. The mills had long ceased to
give any trouble, they just went on; and he merely drew dividends
or travelled by train occasionally to attend board meetings. But,
of course, except for law and order, the mills could not have
maintained their initial impetus so comfortably.

He was proud to think that the mills made paper used by government
offices, and that his son Eustace--now aged thirty-three--was
actually a government official. Eustace, after taking honours
at the venerable long-established institution known as Oxford
University, had entered the Board of Trade--not to stay there for
ever, but as a step in his career; whereby he would lay up such
a store of useful knowledge with regard to the wider aspects of
national commerce as should enable him later on, when he went into
Parliament, handsomely to assist the government of the day instead
of hampering them with unenlightened criticism.

Except in relation to classical music, Mr. Verinder himself was
never critical. He was content to bow to acknowledged authority
in every form; respecting heads of professions and submitting to
expert opinions; believing in the wisdom of judges on the bench,
the art of Royal Academicians, the inspired logical faculty of
bishops in conclave. Although a stout Anglican, he could not in any
circumstances have brought himself to speak disparagingly of the
Pope.

Simply but completely he loved his house, taking daily pleasure in
its largeness, its unostentatious splendour, its immense comfort.
As he lay in bed at night he liked to think of the number of
people sleeping under his roof; also their dependence on him the
chieftain, who took care of their food and their well-being, who
had provided two bath-rooms solely for the servants’ use--one under
the tiles for the women, one down in the basement for the men. It
was a grand, well-managed house. It was his castle, his stronghold.
He looked at it with satisfaction every time that he walked or
drove up to it.

There was no taint of meanness in this feeling. He remembered with
unselfish gladness that several of his friends were almost if not
quite as fortunate. Mrs. Bell had one of the largest houses in
Queen’s Gate, and throughout the whole Cromwell Road there was
nothing bigger than Mrs. Clutton’s mansion. When speaking of these
ladies he rarely omitted to mention the fact.

He loved his neighbourhood too. In imagination he could see it
as finally completed, with the College of Music, the Colonial
Institute, and all the other fine edifices grouping together--much
as it is to-day. The Albert Hall was especially dear to him. He
owned a box in it; some of his money went annually towards its
maintenance. The vast and noble arena had no traditions earlier
than the Prince Consort, but, oh, what glorious traditions since!
It would be not too much to say that he derived a subtle kind of
intellectual support from the adjacency of the Albert Hall. It
stood there so close, unshakable, giving him a sensation directly
due to its height above the eye and its stretch to either hand;
solid and calm in its triumphant common-sense. For, if you want a
building to hold the greatest possible number of people, then make
it circular and avoid corners. Add a dome to render it sightly, but
do not sacrifice use to ornamentation.

Nor, for the life of him, could he understand why certain folk
tried to belittle the merit of the Albert Memorial. To him it
seemed a very beautiful monument. He rejoiced even in its accessory
groups of sculpture, admiring the taste and judgment that had led
the artist to select a camel as symbolic of Africa and an elephant
for Asia; often, when alone, he would mount the broad steps and
study the reliefs about the square base; with the assistance of the
chiselled names, he distinguished certain English Worthies, pausing
here and there to gaze reverently at the genial attitude of Barry
or the contemplative brow of Wren. English Worthies--the very title
was pleasant to him; so honest and unpretentious. English Worthies!
He was almost one himself--of course on a small scale, in a humble
way.

He thought of Dyke as a subversive agency--an enemy to peace;
something unamenable, uncontrollable, that suddenly threatened him,
his family, and the whole neighbourhood. He began to hate Dyke, as
the best of men begin to hate the thing they dread. It appeared
to him now that he had seen through Dyke from the first moment,
but that he had refused to be guided or warned by the clear light
of his own intuitive intelligence. “I’d like to know that girl
over there. Who is she?” when Dyke said something of that sort, he
should have resented it as an impertinence and not accepted it as a
compliment. Then Dyke had laughed, blatantly--offensively, if you
came to think of it. “Pardon me for being a untutored savage.”
But, no, one cannot pardon savagery--except in savage lands, at
a remote distance, beyond the pale. One has to protect oneself
against its effects. He wished that somehow he could get the
whip-hand of Dyke. And yet even now, so kindly and trustful was he
by nature, that at the very moment of dreading and hating Dyke, he
could not believe the man really meant mischief.

Within his narrow limits he was always generous-minded. Markedly so
with regard to money matters--and perhaps there is still no surer
test of a person’s magnanimity than that which can be obtained by
a record of his consistent attitude towards hard cash. Unlike many
men who have all the money that they require, he did not crave for
more. No petty gains or economies ever lured him. For instance,
although Emmeline had come into the enjoyment of her income, he
had never suggested or dreamed of suggesting that she should make
any contribution to household expenses. She was freely welcome to
bed and board, the attendance of Louisa, the use of the carriages.
He had advised her to draw only such a portion of her income as
she needed, leaving Mr. Williams of Spring Gardens to reinvest all
surplus; and it made him happy to feel that she was doing this, and
increasing her modest capital quarter by quarter.

Now, not unnaturally, he thought--as Mrs. Verinder had already
thought--that, so far as a whip-hand over Emmeline was concerned,
the soundness of her financial position robbed him of much
desirable power.

This was Mr. Verinder. Unless one knew him and did him justice,
one could not understand his state of mind. He was not in any
respects the conventional old-fashioned father that lingered in the
comic literature of the period. About him there was nothing either
grotesque or preposterous.

After all, it was only 1895; say twenty-seven years ago--yesterday.
There are large numbers of people to-day who think as he did then.
There are men at his club and at other clubs saying in essence
just what he used to say--when, not thinking of Emmeline, but
merely generalising, he spoke of fin-de-siècle girls who mistake
license for freedom, of regrettable up-to-date ideas, of the danger
of abusing the word progress and pulling down before you have
learnt to build up;--men who have passed through the devastating
experience of the world-war and are less shaken by its rivers of
blood, its fiery chaos, its starving millions, than by the social
readjustments it has occasioned--“the passing of the old order,” as
they call it--and the fact that half the members of the club won’t
even trouble to put on a white shirt and a black tie for dinner.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week passed, and, to Mr. Verinder’s supreme satisfaction,
Emmeline showed herself altogether docile and amenable. She
attended parties, she drove in the park, she spent afternoons and
evenings with their friend Mrs. Bell, at Queen’s Gate, and was
punctually brought home from these visits by Louisa. Mr. Verinder
highly approved of them. Mrs. Bell was devoted to Emmeline,
had always admired and made much of the child. Here would be a
good influence. But not a hint had been given to Mrs. Bell of
any trouble in the air. The only people who knew of the cause
of anxiety were Margaret--and presumably Pratt--and, of course,
Eustace.

Another week passed. The twelfth of July with its dinner party lay
behind them. That feast, although shorn of its guest of honour,
had not proved too dismal, all things considered. And in those
two weeks not a sign from the enemy. Lulled into a sense of false
security, Mr. Verinder began to feel easy in his mind.

Then he discovered that Dyke had been out of London for a
fortnight. Dyke was in Scotland, giving lectures at the great
Scottish cities. “Taking the hat round,” as he had himself
described it. A banquet had been given in his honour at Edinburgh,
with many notabilities present; the speechifying was recorded by
the public press.

After another week or ten days Dyke returned to London. His
return was chronicled in all the newspapers. They again began to
make a fuss about him. And Mr. Verinder, at his club, had the
mortification of hearing his praises sung by certain members of it.
He had dined here, at Mr. Verinder’s club, last night--a little
dinner in his honour, given by Duff-Steele, a personal friend of
Mr. Verinder’s--with So-and-so, and So-and-so--and a few more. Dyke
had kept them there yarning until two or three in the morning.
They said, in effect, that he was entirely fascinating; a great
irresponsible child, full of the most infectious gaiety. A real
tip-topper, madcap, dare-devil--whatever you like--but evidently
behind it all, a heart of gold. How he had talked! How he had
laughed!

When Mr. Verinder reached home that afternoon Mrs. Verinder at once
reported that Emmeline had become restless--very restless indeed.
She felt that it would be necessary to watch her closely.

They did it for the next week or so, but Mr. Verinder had the
uncomfortable sensation, shared by his wife, that no matter how
carefully you watched, more was going on than met the eye. An
atmosphere of suspicion permeated all the reception rooms of the
house; Mr. Verinder’s discomfort and annoyance increased day by day.

Although Mr. Williams of Spring Gardens had long ago written to say
he was prepared to communicate the result of his investigations,
Mr. Verinder had not yet gone to receive them. He went now, after
luncheon one day, and took Eustace from the Board of Trade with him.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is a candour and unpretentiousness about the very best sort
of solicitors that is sometimes almost startling to their clients.
If you speak of investments, a really good solicitor will say at
once that he is not a business man; if you speak of an attack on
your character or a possible career for your children, he will say
he is not a man of the world; if you are involved in a wrangle and
fancy you have publicly libelled your adversary, he will say that
he is not a lawyer. He doesn’t in the least mean that he will not
carry through to a triumphant conclusion the affair, whatever it
is, that you are bringing to him; he only means that he lays no
claim to keeping a mass of encyclopædic knowledge on the tip of
his tongue, to giving oracular decisions at a moment’s notice, or
seeing through a brick wall without the aid of a periscope. He will
take a little time going into the matter thoroughly, obtaining
counsel’s opinion, doing everything necessary. Meanwhile and at
once, in your presence, he often consults his books of reference;
and it must be confessed that this reliance on books and the
guileless manner of speaking about them does often disconcert,
if it does not shake a client. “You doubt if your bargain is
clinched?” says the really eminent solicitor; and he rings the bell
for his clerk. “Bring me that book on Contracts, latest edition.
And see if we have a directory of county court judges downstairs. I
want to ascertain if there is any county court south of the Thames.
And, look here, go upstairs and give my compliments to Mr. Cyril
and ask him if he knows whether the Stock Exchange is open on Bank
Holidays.”

Mr. Williams, of Spring Gardens, or his firm, had long conducted
the affairs of the Verinder family in a most efficient style. He
himself relied greatly on his books, which he kept in handsome
book-cases in his own room. This solid old-world room was lighted
by narrow windows with reflecting mirrors above them, and had
no encumbrances of deed boxes and that sort of thing; a large
beautifully neat table for Mr. Williams, a fine comfortable
leather-seated chair for visitors, the picture of a marine battle
over the chimneypiece, and one or two marble busts on top of the
book-cases--that was all; and with these simple surroundings the
owner of the room worked in it very happily and contentedly;
looking up with a friendly smile as you came in at the door, and
showing himself as a shortish, stoutish, fresh-complexioned person
of sixty-five or a little more. As his intimates knew, he had only
one sorrow in life--the certainty that sooner or later this room,
the whole Queen Anne house, and the rest of Spring Gardens, would
be swept away by London’s unbridled rage for street improvements.
But he hoped they would last his time.

He begged Mr. Verinder and Mr. Eustace Verinder to sit down, and
with an air of innocent triumph said that he had found out a great
deal about Anthony Dyke.

“I may say that directly you mentioned the name, it seemed familiar
to me.”

“It is familiar to everyone,” said old Mr. Verinder rather
irritably, and his son sneered. Eustace had a trick of sneering and
saying pointed things, in a polite Oxford manner on which he had
superimposed a slight veneer of officialness.

“To begin with,” said Mr. Williams, “he is a married man.”

“Yes, I knew that,” said Mr. Verinder.

“Oh, you did? But he is not living with his wife.”

“So I understood.”

“They have been separated for years--and there is a reason.” And
Mr. Williams explained how he had found it all in his book. “I have
it all here under my hand”; and he laid his hand on the useful
volume, lying there on the table. “As soon as you told me the
name it aroused associations in my memory--apart from his public
performances, you know. There was a law suit--years ago--quite an
important case. Mrs. Dyke proved to be out of her mind--immediately
after the wedding--and Dyke tried to get the marriage annulled, on
the grounds that her people had deceived him. He failed of course.”

Mr. Verinder had not known about the madness, and he sat frowning
and brooding over it. Then presently he asked what Mr. Williams had
discovered about the man himself.

“Yes,” said Mr. Williams, “I have his whole record here.” And he
began to read from a paper of notes, saying that Anthony Dyke left
Africa for Australia in such and such a year; was thanked by the
government of Queensland for explorations in the interior of the
continent in the year 1885; and in 1887 made his first Antarctic
cruise, which resulted in the discovery of the island now known
as Anthony Dyke Land. It was of course all in the books, and Mr.
Verinder, who already knew it by heart, interrupted very irritably.

“Yes, yes, yes. No more than that? Very good.” Then, after
exchanging a glance with Eustace, he said, “Williams, the fact
is--Frankly, our trouble is this. He is paying undesirable
attentions to my daughter.”

“Oh, really?” Mr. Williams showed suitable distress as well as
surprise, and he looked across at the bookcases. “Which of your
daughters?”

“My unmarried daughter.”

“Oh, really? Miss Emmeline!”

“Yes. What would you advise me to do?”

“Ah, that’s somewhat difficult to say. Off-hand, I should scarcely
like--”

And another look given by Mr. Williams to the book-shelves was that
of a timid swimmer who feels deep water under him and sees the
solid shore fast receding. “From what you have let fall--well, so
little to go on, from what you _have_ let fall.”

Mr. Verinder let everything fall, and pressed for counsel.

And then Mr. Williams, bracing himself to the effort and striking
out boldly, advised that in his opinion Dyke should be at once
tackled.

“Tackled?” said Mr. Verinder. “What do you mean by tackled?”

Mr. Williams meant brought to book, called to account, and so
forth; and he said something that Mr. Verinder grasped at because
it echoed a hope that he was still glad not to abandon altogether.
Mr. Williams considered that, although there had been impropriety
in Dyke’s attitude, they might be very wrong in assuming that he
really entertained bad motives.

“Why jump to the conclusion that he intends harm? Tackle him, and
he himself may express regret and discontinue the annoyance. Would
you wish me to write him a letter?”

“No,” said Mr. Verinder. “But perhaps an interview here, in your
presence?”

Mr. Williams, not taking to this idea, suggested that it would be
better to get hold of Dyke informally; and after further talk it
was decided that Eustace Verinder should go to him not for the real
tackling, but for a preliminary skirmish in which an interview with
the young lady’s father should be arranged.

“You know him personally?” asked Mr. Williams.

“No,” said Eustace, sneering slightly. “As yet I have not had the
privilege of setting eyes on this gentleman.”

“One moment,” said Mr. Williams, picking up the notes. “I have his
address here. It is care of his bankers--a bank in Fleet Street.”

But the Verinders were better informed. Dyke’s visiting cards told
them that he belonged to a club in Pall Mall--one of the oldest and
best clubs in the street.

“When will you go there?” asked Mr. Williams.

“Now,” said Eustace resolutely.

He parted with his father in Cockspur Street, and strolled on to
Pall Mall by himself.

It was now what journalists of those days called the apotheosis of
the London season; what was then considered a flood of traffic came
pouring down Waterloo Place; large open carriages with a mother
and one daughter on the back seat, and a red book and another
daughter on the front seat, swept across to and from Carlton House
Terrace, while splendid padded veterans at the corner outside the
Senior and sedate members of the Government outside the Athenæum
took off their silk hats or even kissed the tips of their gloved
fingers. The pavements of Pall Mall were full of gentlemen in
black coats and top hats, with here and there a white waistcoat
and a button-hole to light up the throng; the sentry in scarlet
and bearskin outside the War Office stood presenting arms to
the passage of a field officer; and one had a sensation of the
further glories at the end of the street--Marlborough House, with
the Prince and Princess of Wales perhaps just emerging from the
gates, the old palace where a brilliant levée had taken place that
morning, the drive shaded by close-standing elms along which people
drove to daylight drawing-rooms--an impression of the leisurely
pomp, the well-ordered stately calm of the whole realm.

It was 1895, essentially yesterday, and yet, if judged by external
aspect alone, another world--the world in which people behaved
with dignity, looked pleasant, and never did objectionable things.
Eustace Verinder, tall, dark, already bald under his silk hat,
looking like the cabinet-minister that he intended later on to be,
formed a small but harmonious part of this world; and his blood
boiled tepidly at the thought that any intruder should dare at
once to violate the governing code of good manners and menace his
sister’s fair name.

As he approached Dyke’s club an amazingly incongruous figure came
down its steps. It was a tall big man in a sombrero hat, with a
canvas wallet slung over his back and a long staff in his hand;
he looked like a pilgrim, like a youthful Tolstoy, like anything
strange and odd and absurdly out of place. Eustace noticed the
outlandish dun colour of his flannel suit, the huge collar of
his flannel shirt flapping over his jacket and all open at the
hairy throat, and, feeling shocked at such a moving outrage to
convention, stared after him as he stalked across the roadway and
disappeared into St. James Square.

The hall porter told Eustace that Mr. Dyke had just left the club.
“Just this minute, sir. Shall I send the boy to see if he can catch
him?”

Eustace said no, it did not matter. He felt that he ought to have
guessed, after all his father had told him. But it was so far worse
than one could imagine. He went away feeling profoundly disgusted.
To dress like that, in London, at half past three P.M., with the
season at its apotheosis!

Anthony Dyke had, in fact, dressed like that only because he
was going for a walk. He felt that, yielding to civilization’s
enticements, he had been for some time sitting too much, eating
too much, above all else sleeping too much, and he needed a walk.
He had therefore slipped on what seemed to him very suitable
attire for the purpose, gone to the club coffee-room to fill his
wallet with some fruit and a few rolls of bread--and now was off.
Naturally, with the hero of the Andes, a walk meant a walk. He
would go straight ahead, over Hampstead Heath into Hertfordshire,
round that county and any other counties adjacent; he would walk
all night, and probably all day to-morrow; then he would come back,
have a bath, and feel thoroughly refreshed--the limbs loosened by
gentle exercise, civilization’s rust rubbed out of his joints and
the mind clarified by avoidance of slumber.




CHAPTER V


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, were seated 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 he thought 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
that house, 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.

“She _has_ weighed 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’s_ not 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, you _must_ see 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 of _their_ drawing-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 into the 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
we _must_ get 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 was
_not_ ridiculous; 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 the imposing 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 made of 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 them that 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.




CHAPTER VI


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 said by 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
breezes and 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 for _you_ to
think. But, dear Tony, I am quite content if, as I say, in your
eyes--”

“In _all_ eyes,” 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 by that 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 or feel 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 sound vain-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 which Dyke 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. “_His_
idea. 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?”

“You _wasn’t_ in 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’s_ the 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!”

“This _is_ the 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 six greenish 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 do _you_ call 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 price _can’t_ drop--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 melted snow 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 table for 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 have _saved_ me. 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.”

He went on, in his vibrating heart-stirring whisper, to speak of
the South Pole. She had divined--as it seemed, long ago--that this
was his ultimate goal, the glorious hope of his life’s work. Dyke
meant, had always meant, to capture the South Pole, and all other
tasks were but a filling or wasting of time. He had marked it
down as his own. He spoke of it as if it had been some dangerous
yet timid animal of the chase, round which he had made narrowing
circles till it crouched fascinated, unable any more to flee from
its pursuer; it knew that it could not escape and that when Dyke
ceased to circle and dashed in, it must fall into his hands.

“Remember, Emmie, I’m not all talk; I’m do as well. Yes, Dyke will
do things”; and his blue eyes flashed at her, and the colour came
to those high cheek-bones as if the tea was beginning not only to
cheer but to intoxicate. “If they won’t support me--if they won’t
fit me out in the style I ask for--if they won’t give me the ship I
want--Then in a sieve I’ll thither sail, and like a rat without a
tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do. No, you don’t know me yet, Emmie.
You don’t know me yet.”

But already how well she knew him! Better perhaps than he knew
himself. She knew that behind all the courage which for so long
had made him hold his life at a pin’s fee; behind the insatiable
curiosity, the love of adventure, the fiery challenge to the
universe that form the very substance of a true explorer’s mental
constitution;--behind all that there was the unslumbering desire
for personal fame. If only by his little individual trick of
speaking of himself in the third person--“That’s not good enough
for Dyke”; “Anthony Dyke has other plans”; and so on--she would
have known so much as this. Habitually, during all those enforced
silences that had made up his active career, he had listened to
the imagined voices of the world thinking about him; and now he
could not think of himself in relation to fame without, as it were,
standing for a moment outside himself. Dyke wanted the South Pole;
but Dyke wanted the undying fame of getting it. Why not? The
labourer is worthy of his hire. She felt that she need not class
his ambition--the last infirmity of noble minds--as even one slight
defect of his innumerable glorious qualities.

Nevertheless, she thought sagely that it was the thing she must
always reckon with--the factor never to be omitted from her
calculations when making plans for his assistance, moral or immoral.

She knew him--he need not fear her lack of knowledge. She knew that
he was noble to the core; simple only as everything fine and great
will always be; at his own trade as resourceful as Pizarro, in all
other things as grand a gentleman as Cortes; gentle with women,
splendid with men--familiar, as people who live their whole lives
in Kensington cannot be, calling sea-captains old boy, slapping
underlings on the back, and yet being a leader and a chieftain all
the while. Yes--even when exploding under a misapprehension with
cab-drivers.

Before paying the bill for tea, she picked up the bunch of roses
that he had bought from the beggar. She attached exactly the same
value to it as if it had been that tiara of emeralds. It had been
given to her by him. And with deep penetrating joy she remembered
how he had called her his queen, wishing for an instant perhaps
that she was really and truly some splendid historical queen or
empress. But, no, even then she would have been just as unworthy of
such a lover.




CHAPTER VII


The last days had come. They were staying at Liverpool at the North
Western Hotel: and Dyke, although as sweet to her as ever, was
preoccupied with final business. He hurried to and fro about this
new strange city unaccompanied by her now, talked in her presence
of such abstruse matters as the charter-party, bills of lading,
the ship’s clearance papers, and had no time to teach her what
it all meant. In some mysterious manner the agent of the owners
of the ship had “got upon his nerves,” as he said; but he was
long-suffering and indulgent towards this gentleman, permitting
himself no explosions; even asking him to dine at the hotel with
Captain Cairns, the first mate, and other men. They had a round
table in a corner of the big room, drank a great deal of champagne,
and talked rather too loudly for the comfort of their neighbours.

Miss Verinder’s table was at a distance, right on the other side of
the room, where she sat quite alone and ate her dinner with little
appetite. Dyke came over to her once, bowed to her, and stood by
the table; outwardly just a friend or an hotel acquaintance, a
person upon whom she had no claims of any kind. But he looked down
at her with eloquent eyes, and whisperingly told her how terrible
it was to be separated from her for one of their last three
evenings.

She understood. He was constant and loyal as ever; the only change
in him was what every woman must fatally see in the man she loves
when he begins to take up again a man’s job. She understood--only
it made her heart ache; and while telling the waiter that she did
not require any more of the dinner but would like a cup of coffee,
she thought of the essential force of those two hackneyed and
inexact words. A heartache! Of course her heart was not really
aching, and yet it _felt_ like that; the pain was mental, yet it
seemed physical--this dull oppressive discomfort that had taken the
taste away from the food, the colour from surrounding objects, the
brilliancy from the electric light, suggested something primitive
and instinctive that might be shared by dumb animals quite low down
the scale; say the young sheep driven into a different gate from
that through which its companion passed as they both approached the
shambles; or, at highest, the sensations of a dog when it loses its
master.

Separation. Anthony’s own word echoed itself as she sipped her
coffee and glanced across the room to the corner where he was being
jolly with an unexplained purpose to that agent of the shipowners.
She was losing him by inches; every moment those men, that ship,
the breezes of the wide estuary, the trackless ocean, and the call
of plains and hills that she had never seen were taking him bit
by bit even while he was still here. It was not like the end of a
dance; or the falling of a curtain at the end of a play, or the
blowing out of candles when the feast is over; it was like night
slowly creeping into a lampless room, where you have to sit and
wait, watching the walls fade and the window frames grow fainter,
until it is quite dark. Her world would be such a room to her when
the slow separation had been completed and she was finally alone.

Her brain and not her heart ached now, as for a few moments she
allowed herself to think of what separation would really mean to
her. Her eyes smarted, her throat grew hot, her head was full
of the dully throbbing anguish. She could scarcely breathe.
Then she drove thought away again, beating it from her with the
verbal weapons she had prepared against this emergency; saying to
herself, “It is wrong of me. I must not be selfish. I must look at
everything from his point of view. I know very well that if it were
in my power to keep him, I would urge him to go.”

And beneath the words and the thoughts and the pain, she had
now the sense of unreality or impossibility. They could not be
separated in this manner. Some chance would intervene; by no
action of her own but by some eleventh hour leniency of fate, the
consummation of the catastrophe would be prevented or at least
retarded; nature itself would recoil from adding this one more to
its tale of endless cruelties. It was with Miss Verinder, finishing
her coffee, as with children when they think of death, believing
that death is something that will certainly happen, and yet, owing
to some failure of the thought-machine at their disposal, being
unable to believe in its possibility.

It could not be that if on the fourth night from now she entered
this great dining-hall, she would find apparently the same crowd
of travellers, the swing-doors opening and shutting, the waiters
going round asking people whether they wanted any liqueur with
their coffee--and yet no Anthony Dyke to be seen or heard anywhere.
It could not be that she should creep back to London, a broken
useless thing wanted by nobody, and that her lover would have gone
from her for years if not for ever. It _must_ be impossible that
so strong, so overwhelmingly real a thing as he, should fade out
of her life and take his place among such weak impalpable things
as ghosts or dreams or haunting memories; that he for whom she had
forsaken and renounced her home, her parents, her friends, every
precept of education, every habit of the mind, should become again
scarcely more to her than he had been three months ago--a name in a
newspaper.

She went out of the room, and a party of travellers at the
nearest table to hers thought her a good-looking but hard sort
of young woman--too proud and defiantly British for their
taste--and, considering her youthfulness, too self-possessed and
self-satisfied. Did you hear how she spoke to the waiter? “No, no
liqueur, thank you.” Just like that--so off-hand.

Miss Verinder had the same air of hardness and resolution, together
with a new and metallic form of gaiety, next morning when Dyke took
her with him to visit the ship. The _Mercedaria_--a steamer of
about three thousand tons--had come out into the river now, and she
lay moored in the bright but soft sunlight towards the Birkenhead
shore. With her one tall funnel and two raking masts, she looked,
not only small, but a battered and rather disreputable kind of
tramp, when compared with the lofty shining mass of a big liner a
little higher up the river. But she loomed up high and solid, as
their boat passed under her stern.

Dyke took the honoured visitor here and there about the vessel,
showing her first the saloon, and what they pompously called the
state rooms. This accommodation, although originally planned for
a few passengers as well as the ship’s officers, seemed to Miss
Verinder’s untutored eye appallingly inadequate and restricted
for so long a voyage. The state rooms were but dark and stuffy
cupboards, with a bunk in each. A rough partition of woodwork,
left plain and unvarnished, had been erected athwartship at the
back of the saloon, which itself was a dull malodorous den, with
a table surrounded by seven permanently fixed swivel chairs. A
large oil lamp hung beneath a skylight above the table, and really,
this was all of furniture or decoration. It was a relief to emerge
on the upper deck, and feel again the air and warmth. Here Dyke
showed her the chart-room--quite a comfortable retreat--immediately
below the bridge, with leather cushions to its benches and printed
certificates in frames against the wall.

An unshaved but smiling steward or cook followed them up, to say
that by the orders of Captain Cairns he had put out a bottle of
champagne and some biscuits down below, for the lady. Captain
Cairns himself, immensely improved in appearance now that he was
wearing uniform, welcomed her very courteously, and said he only
wished that she was going with them across the sea. He was busy,
Captain Cairns, making these kindly civilities brief and to the
point, and then at once resuming his task. There were lighters
alongside, and the last of the cargo was being hoisted on board by
the noisy rattling steam winches.

On this pleasant sunny morning the very air seemed full of bustling
activity; the whole stream was alive with traffic; crowded steam
ferry-boats shot diagonally across it, and made their practised
curves, as they glided to the huge landing-stages. Tugs whistling
insistently went up and down, together with strings of barges;
and farther off, one saw the long forest of masts that told of
unceasing trade. It was as though everybody was hurrying to get
away, and the great city itself, seen from here with diminished
eminence and towers and domes brought together by the distance,
seemed to be sitting on the waters, calmly meditating in the midst
of a foolish tumult.

Miss Verinder stood near a boat that hung inboard on its davits,
with her gloved hand on the rail and her gauze scarf gently
stirring in the friendly breeze, while she talked and smiled,
gaily and cheerfully. This is the woman’s portion. One must not
say anything, or do anything, to bother one’s man or to lower his
spirits when he is taking up his own burden of care and anxiety.

She watched, with intelligent interest, the toil of the sailors and
the winches, as the wooden cases one after another came up from
the hidden barge, swung round, and disappeared in their proper
hold. This part of the cargo, as Dyke explained, was coming in
last because it would go out first. The sailors, he assured her,
although they certainly looked a shabby untrimmed gang, apparently
of all nationalities too, were a real good lot. Oh, yes, one could
trust old Cairns for that, and everything else.

With her heart aching rather worse than last night, Miss Verinder
laughed and showed most intelligent interest.

Some of the big cases had on them, marked roughly in black paint,
the words, “Bicycles” and “Bicycle accessories.” Oh, yes, of
course, this was that consignment of which Dyke had spoken. The
bicycles for the people of Uruguay, all bitten with the fashionable
craze--the bicycles, of which the mere notion had caused Mr.
Cairns to laugh so uproariously. Making conversation, she reminded
Dyke of the Captain’s humour.

But Dyke looked at her doubtfully. Indeed his whole face clouded
and he answered with a strange glumness. Then abruptly he took
her by the arm, drawing her across the deck to the corresponding
boat on the other side. There he told her firmly that he could not
allow the continuance of a deception, however trifling. He could
not leave her in the dark about anything in any way concerning him.
Between him and her there must not be a secret, even though the
secret was devoid of all importance. Well then, he had to confess,
or rather to inform her, that all these bicycles--and he looked
round to be sure that they were not overheard--those bicycles,
don’t you know, were not really bicycles. No, they were, in fact,
rifles, and so forth, technically known as small arms.

“But, Anthony,” said Miss Verinder, looking at him timidly but
intently, “isn’t that what you call gun-running?”

“Oh, no, I don’t call it that. I shouldn’t think of calling
it that, Emmie,” and he laughed. With a very uncharacteristic
confusion, even sheepishness, he answered her further questions. He
had released her arm, and he stood there really like a naughty boy
answering a governess. He could only try to laugh it off. He had no
excuses.

“But, Anthony, isn’t it dangerous?”

His eyes gave a flash, and sheepishness vanished.

“Oh, I know _that_ wouldn’t deter you, Tony. But, I mean, isn’t it
against the law?”

“Well, there’s no revolution in Uruguay--not at this minute,
anyhow. I don’t pretend to any blind respect for the law; but I
don’t see why the law should object. No,” and he laughed now with
unembarrassed cheerfulness. “If they don’t stop us here, they won’t
stop us out there. So don’t you worry, darling. If we get safe out
of the Mersey, I promise we’ll get safe into Rio Grande.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It was their last day. After a misty morning there had been a
little rain, then the dark sky fought the sunlight, and now a
settled gloom lay on the town and the river, with presages of more
rain. Smoke was rolling languidly from the _Mercedaria’s_ ugly
yellow funnel. She was to sail before night. She was to sail in
five hours.

Miss Verinder wandered about her disconsolately, and talked to
Dyke from time to time. He was very busy. Down below Reynolds, the
steward or cook, was busy too; in his shirt sleeves, packing away
all kinds of light consumable stores in the narrow compartment
that was his whole realm. She gave money to Reynolds, begged him
to take care of Mr. Dyke as well as he could. Reynolds promised.
She sat for a long while alone on the bunk in Dyke’s cabin, staring
at trunks that were like old friends to her, trunks that had
been in his room at the hotel such a little while ago; and she
fingered many parcels all thrown down there on the bunk, the things
she had bought for him yesterday and the day before--comforts,
contrivances, and books. That small square parcel contained the
poems of Tennyson. He loved them--especially the _Idylls of the
King_. Both head and heart were aching so intolerably that she had
to clench her hands sometimes; and her breathing was affected. She
felt that she might suffocate if she did not have more air, and
yet she did not like to go up to the deck where Dyke and Cairns
were busy with some one in the chart-room. Down here, in this small
buried cabin, she had a feeling that the ship was enormous, a
monster of the deep now gathering energy, angrily shivering, like
the men on the upper deck panting to get to 

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