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.