Other people having breakfast in the room glanced from time to time
at the lady with the short hair who was sitting all alone at a
table near the window. Gently stirred by the vapid curiosity that
would seem to be the atmosphere itself in private hotels, they had
already put themselves to the trouble of ascertaining that she was
a Miss Verinder who had arrived last night from foreign parts,
and they wondered if the oddly shortened hair meant that she had
suffered from a fever while abroad. One or two of the old ladies
determined, since she was obviously quite proper and genteel,
to make her acquaintance before luncheon--by rolling a ball of
crochet silk across the floor at her, by inquiring if they had
inadvertently taken her chair, or by some other polite method usual
in such places.
A large proportion of the visitors were old ladies, some of them
very old indeed, and each had a comparatively young lady as
attendant or companion--a granddaughter or great-niece, or merely a
nice girl glad to see London under any conditions--who readjusted
the white woollen shawl, cut bread into convenient slices, and made
herself generally serviceable. There was talk about the inclemency
of the weather, the unusualness of it so late in the year; and
these juvenile aids were sympathetic and thoughtful, saying
“Auntie, you won’t venture out, of course.” At a table larger than
the others there was a family group, father, mother, governess,
and well-grown children, visitors from the northern provinces.
The father stood in the window to eat his porridge, and without
searching for pretexts, spoke genially to the solitary breakfaster;
telling her that his way of eating porridge was the only correct
one, and advising her to adopt the method. “At hoam ’tis always
served to us on the sideboard, never on the table.” Then he jerked
his head towards the windowpanes. “Give it an hour, an’ all that
snow will have turned to fair sloosh. I’ve ben watching those
la’ads shoovel away wi’ it off the steps and the footway.”
It was Sunday morning; and Miss Verinder, automatically resuming
one of her old customs, set forth an hour later to attend divine
services at Brompton parish church. The hotel manageress insisted
upon lending her a pair of indiarubber goloshes, and praised her
for her temerity while the page-boy knelt and put them on her feet.
“Yes, I do call you brave,” said the manageress, “to face the
elements on such a morning as this. _I_ wouldn’t have the courage”;
and she shivered. “No, I wouldn’t. And walking too! Why don’t you
let me send Charles to fetch you a cab?... Oh, shut that door,
Charles. I declare the cold comes in enough to cut you in half.”
Miss Verinder did not feel the cold--she was inured to cold. In
fact, the air out of doors seemed to her only remarkable for its
flatness and heaviness. She observed the snow--if one must honour
with the name of snow that niggardly smoke-stained deposit which
men with tools had scraped from the pavement into mean little
banks and defiled with a crust of mud as they swept it here and
there. Changing already to “sloosh” in the roadway, with wet tracks
made by cart wheels, and pools of primrose-coloured water where
the faint wintry sunlight touched it, any approximate whiteness
that it still retained served only to make the house fronts seem
darker, more offensively drab, more overwhelmingly dismal. Out of
the porches and down the steps came people who seemed to be in some
queer manner parasitic to the houses, rather than their owners or
leaseholders; as if the architect’s incessantly repeated design,
the builder’s profuse stucco, and the plumber’s leaden pipes, had
mysteriously engendered human tenants. Born of the Cromwell Road,
they closely resembled it; they were uniform, drab of complexion,
with a dingy respectability that took the last fading lustre out
of the trodden snow and obliterated every spiritless effort of the
sunlight. All similar, but of both sexes, well wrapped in coats
and furs, with prayer-books in their hands, they moved slowly and
cautiously, begging one another to beware of slipping, to avoid
puddles, and to step back and stand still when a passing carriage
splashed the mud dangerously. They seemed to Miss Verinder strange,
small, pitiful. Moreover the roadway that she used to think so wide
had constricted, the lofty line of the house cornices came crushing
down upon her, a narrowing vista of plate glass and window curtains
seemed to close any chance of escape into freedom and open spaces.
Even the terra-cotta mass of the Natural History Museum shrank
to nothing as she approached it, and offered to her, instead of
the dignity of soaring towers and vaulted vastness, a fantastic
little toy, or that picture of a toy that is pasted on the lid of a
child’s box of bricks.
Why had she returned to this particular neighbourhood--like the
wounded animal creeping back to the place it used to haunt before,
largely straying, it received its wounds? As though exhausted by
rebellious originality she seemed meekly to have surrendered to
the force of habit. Or perhaps when the cab-driver asked where
he should take her she had said Kensington as the only name of a
locality belonging to this hemisphere that she could remember in
her great weariness. Because the effort required for thinking hard
was just now impossible, because nothing that concerned herself
personally was any longer of the least consequence; because one
place was the same to her as another, since more than half of the
world had become quite empty and she was condemned to live alone in
it?
She mingled with the small stream of worshippers passing beneath
the drip of the trees by the blank wall of the Oratory, threaded
her way past two or three broughams regretfully brought there by
devout masters or mistresses who could not walk but hated troubling
their stable on the day of rest, and then just outside the church
door she came almost face to face with her parents.
Sweeping into the sacred edifice, they both cut her--Mr. Verinder
in the manner known as dead; Mrs. Verinder with a vacillation of
gait, a fluttering of furs and feathers, the first rough sketch of
a gesture, and a look. It was in its essence a look that Emmie had
often seen at home; the look that came when servants had committed
an accident with valuable glass or rare porcelain, angry but not
really inexorable, seeming to say: “I _cannot_ ignore it. You have
broken our hearts, and we are very much annoyed.”
In spite of the disastrous turn of events that occurred last
August, Mr. and Mrs. Verinder throughout the month and during half
of September were still sustained by a modified form of hope, and
still making strenuous efforts to conceal the disgrace that had
befallen them. They felt that they were engaged in a contest with
time. If they could “hush things up” until their enemy went back to
the wilds no one need know of this truly _fin-de-siècle_ escapade,
and Emmeline need not be given that horrible up-to-date label of
“The woman who did.” Dyke was leaving England about the middle of
September--really going--no doubt of it. Not only the newspapers
said so, but Mr. Verinder--without the aid of detectives--had
assured himself of the truth. When once Dyke was gone all would
be over; Emmeline would come to her senses, rub her eyes as one
awakening from an ugly delirium, and be very grateful to find her
reputation still intact. They could then do anything they liked
with her--for instance, marry her to that old widower who hired the
Grosvenor Gallery for his concert, and thus, as Mr. Verinder put
it, “save her from her temperament.”
Straining therefore towards these ends, they for the moment gave
their daughter what she had already taken, absolute freedom; they
frustrated the desire of Eustace to get Dyke out on the sands of
Boulogne; and they officially intimated to their servants, through
the housekeeper and butler, that a very slight tiff recently
existing between Mr. Verinder and Miss Verinder had now been
completely smoothed away, leaving father and daughter the very
best of friends as in the past. The faithful servants were glad to
hear this; they knew they had a good master, and never meaning to
quarrel with him themselves, they could not understand why anybody
else should fall foul of him. They thought that the girl Louisa
Hodson had acted like a rare fool in forfeiting her situation--for
it should be mentioned that Louisa had been despatched with a
month’s board wages as well as salary, in lieu of notice. She was
dismissed not because her complicity had been established, but
because Mrs. Verinder could no longer bear the sight of her.
Then came the middle, the end of September, and the total
vanishment of Louisa’s late charge. The enemy had gone and his
victim with him. Nothing more could now be done by her tormented
father. In the whole circle of the family acquaintance the dreadful
affair became more or less known. Within those limits it was a
very solid scandal--a scandal that could only have been allayed by
the production of Emmeline herself, and Mr. Verinder was unable to
produce her. He abandoned fictional enterprise, clothed himself
in a garment of silence, and suffered. Conscious that the local
society was talking about him, he had the illusion that it was
talking of nothing else; when old friends like Sir Timothy shook
hands with him he seemed to feel an added pressure on his fingers
and winced beneath this contact with sorrowful sympathy; if people
spoke of such matters as public morality or licentious domestic
habits and then broke off the conversation, he believed they had
all at once remembered his misfortune. Doubtless, he thought, they
condemned him for failing to bring up a family in the way it should
go, for being unable to govern his own household, for letting
things drift until they came to a pretty pass indeed. If now it had
been necessary to issue debentures of those paper mills, he felt
that the terms would be less favourable than in the past and the
response not so large, because confidence was withdrawn from one of
the principal directors of the company. If a man can’t look after
his own daughter, you don’t trust him to look after anything.
In this winter of 1895-96, he suffered, feeling as he walked to
the house and away from it that invisible eyes were looking at him
from all the neighbours’ windows and that he was not holding up
his head as he used to do. Only in the spacious tranquillity, the
well-warmed atmosphere of egoism, the nicely arranged comfortable
total indifference to all things except oneself, that permeates
and makes up the charm of a really good London club--only there
could he shake off his depression and feel sure that nobody was
sympathising with him, pitying him, or blaming him; that if members
laughed at the story of his fugitive child, they immediately forgot
what had set them laughing; that if, going into the coffee-room,
they connected the names of Anthony Dyke and Emmeline, they
disconnected them again, and probably for ever, in the moment of
asking for red currant jelly with the hot mutton or mixed pickles
with the cold beef.
At Kensington these names had been fatally connected. Kensington
knew that Dyke, the famous Anthony Dyke, was at the bottom of
everything, at the side of it too, and all round it. The most
faithful servants will chatter, even at the risk of losing the
best of places. If people are quick at putting two and two
together to make four, they are quicker still at putting one and
one together to make two. Perhaps Miss Marchant, emissary to Mrs.
Pryce-Jones, not really hoodwinked by Mrs. Verinder’s explanation,
had continued to keep a watchful eye. Perhaps as well as Miss
Marchant, the mournful angels on top of the Albert Memorial had
seen the infatuated couple walking side by side, and had told the
summer wind while begging it not to carry the news any further.
Such things always leaked out somehow--more or less. Thus rumour,
busy with both names, had enlivened drawing-rooms, by swift
amplification; and in the protracted absence of Miss Verinder there
had been reports that somebody or other had met her and Mr. Dyke at
Monte Carlo, had lodged next door to them at Folkestone, had bumped
into them at Tunbridge Wells.
* * * * *
During the church service she meditated, without emotion, upon
her new social status. Glancing at one or two familiar faces she
thought she could observe a rigidity of feature, a marble restraint
of expression, that was something more than should be produced
by absorbed interest in a religious exercise. They could not of
course, at such a time and in such a place, even faintly nod or
smile at an old friend; but their devotion was not surely quite so
profound in past days; this statuesque aspect of the praying saint
was surely new and significant. She felt a numb grief at having
caused pain to her parents; but she cared nothing for the mental
perturbation of these other people.
Except perhaps Mrs. Bell! She felt a sting of regret, a sudden
realisation of forlornness, as she noticed that, far from assuming
that air of sculptured oblivion, Mrs. Bell from time to time looked
at her in a most distressful manner. Mrs. Bell had always shown
strong regard for her. Emmie was fond of Mrs. Bell.
As has been mentioned, Mrs. Bell owned one of the largest houses
in Queen’s Gate, and it may now be added that her heart was as
large as her house. She was a childless widow of forty-two who had
earned a widowhood in which she frankly delighted by assiduous care
of an elderly invalid husband; loquacious but devoid of malice,
indeed exuberantly good-natured, she loved to clothe her pleasant
expansive figure with grand garments; fair of complexion, gracious,
smiling, when dressed at her grandest she looked blondly opulent
like the queen of diamonds in the very best and most expensive
packs of cards. She was waiting on the porch steps, when Emmie,
after allowing the congregation to depart, herself left the church.
“Now, my dear girl--my dearest Emmeline--you are coming home to
lunch with me. _That_ goes without saying.”
She would take no refusal. Her brougham, the last of the carriages
remaining on the wet gravel, stood with its door open; she pushed
Miss Verinder into it and the footman smothered them with a fur
rug. As they drove away Miss Verinder’s eyes for a moment filled
with not easily repressible tears. She was touched by the warmth of
her friend’s greeting.
“Now I want to tell you,” said Mrs. Bell, with affectionate
impressiveness, when she and Emmie had crossed the hospitable
threshold and were alone together, “I want to tell you at once that
nothing that has happened makes the least difference to _me_.”
“Thank you, dear Mrs. Bell,” said Emmie gratefully.
“I am not even going to ask you what _has_ happened.”
Miss Verinder thanked her again.
“I shall not ask a single question; and I want you to know that you
will be welcomed in this house precisely as before--at all times
and seasons, do you understand? If any of my friends object, then,”
said Mrs. Bell firmly and grandly, “they can stay outside. Yes,
they shall soon find I will not stand anything of _that_ sort. You
see, I am perfectly frank with you, Emmeline. I should be less than
a friend if I attempted to conceal the truth from you. You have the
whole world against you. So far as worldly opinion is concerned,
your only chance is to live it down--just _to live it down_. And,
as I say, by _me_ you will be asked _no_ questions of any kind.
But, oh, my dear child, what on earth have you done with your hair?”
“I had it cut,” said Miss Verinder meekly.
“But _why_?”
“I mean to let it grow again,” said Miss Verinder, evading an
answer.
“I hope so indeed. Now we will go into the other room and have
lunch.” But before opening the door good Mrs. Bell put her hands
on the visitor’s shoulders and administered a warmly affectionate
kiss. Then she looked at Miss Verinder doubtfully, distressfully,
and with a slight piteousness of appeal. “As I have promised you, I
shall not ask questions--unless, my dearest Emmeline, you yourself
would like to tell me every single little thing. If you feel it
would be a relief to you for me to know exactly where you have been
and exactly what you have been doing since you left England--but,
no, I see you would rather not. Then come along.”
And with that tremendous adventure for ever locked in her heart,
Miss Verinder sat down to luncheon.
She remained in the neighbourhood. Cut by her friends and cast off
by her family, she calmly settled in the flat at the corner of
Oratory Gardens and went about just as if she had been anybody else
instead of the disgraced Miss Verinder. The arrangement of the flat
pleased her; she liked the narrow steep staircase with its private
street-door beside the auctioneer’s office; when she closed that
door behind her she felt safe, and when she passed through the door
at the top of the stairs she felt that she was in an impenetrable
stronghold. She furnished the flat charmingly, with antique things
that as yet were not valued by everyone. Mrs. Bell said she had
made it “too pretty and comfy for words.” Louisa Hodson, discovered
without much trouble, came to the flat as factotum, and added to
Miss Verinder’s sensation of being finally established in a shelter
and retreat that was quite unassailable. No one on earth could
interfere with her here. Even when the street door stood wide and
an invader mounted the stairs, there was Louisa at the top of them
to bar further progress and send him down again. In these days
visitors were of the kind that wish to sell tea or dispose of
tickets for a benevolent concert; but neither then nor at a later
period could anyone get past Louisa when her mistress desired brief
or lengthy seclusion; no one--not even Mrs. Bell of Queen’s Gate.
At once Miss Verinder began to occupy herself in the pursuit of
knowledge, as though attempting a sort of higher or secondary
education. She read scientific treatises and learned to draw maps.
She studied such impossible things as logic, rhetoric, and English
composition. She joined a literary society, attended lectures
and classes; wrote essays on subjects chosen by a severe young
professor, and humbly carried them back to him for sharp censure or
faint praise. She was in many ways busy.
Almost at once too there fell upon her that air of self-reliance
which, whether proudly deprecating or gently defiant, is observable
in all women who are for any length of time compelled to manage
without assistance both their outward and their inward lives. All
people knowing her story must see in her appearance as well as her
manner a confirmation of their own way of interpreting it. Even her
cheerful resignation was suspicious; they looked for the sadness in
her face when she thought herself unnoticed. To such critics she
was in every detail precisely what might be expected in one who
has forfeited all chances of respectful attention, who is left to
herself because she deserves to be left to herself. To those who
knew nothing about her she was merely old-maidish. Her hair grew
again, long and thick, but the brightness of youth had irrevocably
gone from her. Her complexion slowly faded, the tints of the frail
blush rose giving place to the waxen permanence of the lily. At
twenty-eight she looked at least thirty-five.
And the long years began to glide away. Colourless, without salient
features, swift in their cold monotony, the years were like ghosts
of years flitting across a half-lit room into the endless dark
passages that leads to the eternal. Mrs. Bell had said that she
must live down the past, but it seemed that her real task was to
live down the future.
At least thus it all appeared to external observers. Events of one
sort or another were truly happening in the flat all the while.
For instance--as observed by Mrs. Bell--after a time a parrot
arrived, to be petted and fed and cared for. Then Louisa, the
maid-housekeeper, asked permission to keep a cat. Louisa did not
intend to marry; she had established herself in the flat as firmly
as her mistress; she and Miss Verinder understood each other--they
played with the cat in its kitten stage, they made much of the
solemn and probably very aged parrot. Seemingly they were just two
old maids together.
During this period the illustrious name that had been whispered
in Kensington drawing-rooms sounded at intervals loud and clear
on the public tongue. As hitherto in the career of Dyke, he was
alternately lost to view for long stretches of time and lit up by a
blaze of publicity for brief spaces. Throughout the year 1897 those
deserts of Australia hid him completely. Then early in 1898 he was
very much before the world again. His book _Sunshine and Sand_
gave the history of his most recent vicissitudes and successes,
and appearing at a moment when the ultimate confederation of the
Australian Colonies was being widely discussed, the book, as
critics said, was not only more entrancing than any novel, it took
its place as an indispensable volume of reference for all students
of imperial history. Also at some time early in this year 1898
he was in London, being interviewed by newspapers and delivering
a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society. Then the dark
curtain promptly descended upon him once more. He had been sent
to examine the interior of British New Guinea and to explore any
unvisited islands to the east of it; and the newspapers had not
much to say about him for two or three years, except that he was
alive in spite of the insatiable craving of the cannibals with whom
he now consorted. Then came the publication of _Among the Papuans_
in two bulky volumes, which the press welcomed with compliments
similar to those showered upon his previous work. Critics said
that since there could be little doubt that the Crown would cede
its interests in New Guinea to the Commonwealth of Australia as
soon as that federation should be finally constituted, these two
illuminating and compendious volumes of Mr. Dyke’s appeared at a
most opportune hour. Then soon one heard that Mr. Dyke was in the
United States lecturing, and trying to collect money for another
Antarctic voyage, which should start, as he hoped, in 1902, or
at latest in 1903. The lecture tour closed stormily in a pitched
battle with American critics who had thrown doubt on his records of
the Patagonian pigmies and the Andine temples. The noise of this
contest echoed loudly even on our side of the Atlantic.
Thus Miss Verinder was not allowed any true chance to forget the
man who had been so much to her. For her, one must suppose, even
the occasional mention of his name, a mere newspaper reference
to him, should prove stirring to the memory, if not absolutely
upsetting to her peace of mind. And above all, those books of
his--always running into a new edition or being advertised by the
publisher as about to appear in a cheaper form! The earlier ones,
too, got themselves reissued--_First Antarctic Cruise_ (1888); _The
Second Cruise_ (1890); “At all booksellers, uniform with _A Walk in
the Andes_”; and so forth! Perhaps she was reading one or other of
these works and suffering in consequence, when she lay indisposed
behind her shut doors, or suddenly and abruptly disappeared from
the flat altogether on one of her strange lonely excursions.
Louisa, growing older and sterner every year, merely reported
that Miss Verinder was unwell and could see no one; or that Miss
Verinder had left London and it was quite uncertain when she would
return.
Moreover, had Miss Verinder been in any danger of forgetting the
man himself and his more intimate characteristics, she received at
least one sharp reminder.
On a certain winter afternoon his father came to call upon her, by
appointment.
“I was so glad to get your note giving me permission,” said the
elder Mr. Dyke. “It is very kind of you.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Emmie; using, as so often happens when we
feel that an occasion is momentous, the tritest and most simple
form of words. “Do please sit down”; and she indicated that
she wished him to choose the sofa as his seat. Her nerves were
fluttered and her thoughts in some disorder during these first
civilities.
“It is a great pleasure, Miss Verinder, to make your acquaintance.”
“And I,” said Emmie earnestly, “have wanted to know you, Mr. Dyke.
I have wanted it so much--so very much.”
“Thank you. It is good indeed of you to say that. I should have
wished to come long ago--but, well, somehow I did not venture”;
and he had a smile that seemed to shoot like an arrow into Emmie’s
gentle breast and set it throbbing with exquisite pain. Almost, for
that instant, Anthony might have been there smiling at her. “No,
I wished to do so--but one is always afraid of seeming intrusive.
Only when he wrote to me--”
Mr. Dyke sat then upon the sofa, and they began to talk about his
son.
He was a much smaller man than Anthony, very thin and spare, and
yet obviously possessing something of Anthony’s iron strength;
so that, although sixty-four or sixty-five years of age, he gave
one an impression of a person who will go on living for a great
while without ever growing really old. He too had blue eyes and
a straight nose, but one could not imagine this face becoming
hawklike or fierce. He was quite dignified, yet devoid of all
commanding or majestic attributes. His manner, reminding her
of Anthony’s now and then in its deferential courtliness, more
particularly as expressed by bowing the head, was quite that of a
man of the world. And Emmie noticed that his sacred calling was not
indicated by the slightest sign in the clothes he wore. Then as
her nerves steadied themselves, while he went on talking and she
listening, she thought of nothing beyond the one fact that he was
Anthony’s father.
He was telling her about Anthony’s birthplace, their home in
Devonshire, and the time of Anthony’s boyhood. “Endells--that is
the name of our house, you know--quite a small place, but in a way
very charming--to _us_, at least--we all love it. Close to the sea,
you know. Endells--so many places in our part of the world have
a plural name. Abertors--that’s the big place, the show-place.
An old house, ours, you know--and the most delightful old church
close by, on our own ground. I am, you know, what they used to
call ‘a squarson,’” and he smiled again. She could bear it now;
and it was not really Anthony’s smile. It was full of goodness
and kindness, but it had not that warm flood of light as of the
sunshine bursting through splendid dark clouds and making the
whole world happy. “At the time I speak of, I was still doing my
clerical duties. I hadn’t then turned lazy and handed everything
over to a curate. And will you believe it, Miss Verinder? I then
thought that Anthony, when he grew up, would be ordained and
follow in my footsteps. His mother thought so. Poor dear”; and
he sighed. “We lost her before he was fourteen. As a boy he was
religious--unusually religious. But now, I fear--well, you know his
inmost thoughts a great deal better than I do. We won’t speak of
that.”
Then, continuing, he said he felt it would interest her to hear
that as a boy Anthony showed no sign of the adventurous spirit.
“Isn’t it strange, Miss Verinder? But so it is.” He was a dreamy
boy, loving mystical books, with a hankering after magic,
astrology, and spiritualism. He had never been seen to read tales
of travel. Nor was he fond of athletic sports. He did not care for
riding. “You know, there are hounds of course within reach of us.
And sometimes he would follow them on foot, but never on horseback.
Always a prodigious walker.” Then Mr. Dyke laughed gently. “He
would not come in to meals. It worried his poor mother, and our
housekeeper--who had been his nurse--used to say nature never put
a clock or dinner bell inside Master Anthony’s stomach as it does
with other children. He would climb along the cliffs and lie on his
back on some ledge or other, looking at the sky or watching the
seagulls, and dreaming--dreaming hour after hour; the whole day
often, in summer. All one can imagine is that during these long
reveries great purposes were slowly shaping--unknown to himself
perhaps. At any rate not one single word about it did he utter to
me--and we were _friends_, Miss Verinder--a very real affection,
thank God, remained always between us two--I fancy, something more
than is common with fathers and sons.” And Mr. Dyke paused to blow
his nose. “Not one word until he was approaching his nineteenth
birthday. Then he said to me--I was never more astonished in
my life--he said, ‘Father, I can’t stand this any longer. I am
starting for Africa to-morrow.’ Just like that. And he went, you
know.
“The rest--if a father may say so--is history. It is, isn’t it,
Miss Verinder? Now I musn’t tire you by too long a visitation. But
I felt that these little early details would interest you. They are
so little and yet so much. And they should certainly come into his
life when it is written. I think it is a mistake in biographies to
omit all the slight and seemingly trivial details and give one only
the big events. Nothing is trivial in the lives of really great
men.”
Miss Verinder assured him that she had been enthrallingly
interested; and, taking leave, he detained her hand in his for
a moment while he asked if he might call again in a few days’
time before he returned to Devonshire. She was conscious during
these moments of a constraint or uneasiness that he had seemed
to feel even when he was talking to her so gently and kindly. It
had been as if the talk was merely superficial, and that beneath
it there was a communication that he desired to make but could
not. Now it seemed that this had risen close to the surface, and
with her hand in his, she braced herself to meet it. Perhaps that
mental preparation on her side, detected and misunderstood,
was sufficient to check him again; for, without saying anything
further, he went away.
Thinking about this afterwards, Emmie felt that it had spoilt
everything. It was not difficult to find interpretations of a
reticence or shrinking that would check Mr. Dyke’s flow of words
and make him hesitate each time that he approached a fuller
confidence; yet if such thoughts, however natural they might
be, were really in his mind, she did not wish ever to see him
again. If they were not there, then she wished, without doubts or
self-questionings, to enjoy the immense comfort and support that
the sight of his face and the sound of his voice gave to her. She
determined at once to lay the doubt at rest, and when, fulfilling
his promise, he reappeared at the flat, she asked him a very simple
question.
“Mr. Dyke, do you blame me for what I have done?”
“_Blame_ you? Oh, how _could_ I? How can I? Oh, my goodness, no,”
said Mr. Dyke, in visible agitation, and he sprang up from the
sofa and stood looking down at Emmie, who was seated on one of her
lowest chairs. “But I see what you mean. A clergyman? I feared you
might think--That is why I have been so anxious to see you. That is
what I wanted to say--but it was so difficult.” He was stooping,
and he took her hand and raised it to his lips. “To tell you my
gratitude to you for your love of my son. And that I, just as much
as he, can measure the extent of your sacrifice--its nobility and
its completeness.”
The barrier between them falling thus, she was free to take such
comfort from him as he could convey. They sat on the sofa together
now, and patting her hand and calling her his dear Emmeline, he
talked again of Anthony.
That afternoon he told her among other things the story of Dyke’s
miserable, fatal marriage. Although the mother of Dyke’s wife and
her other relations were dreadfully common people, the girl herself
was decently educated and showed a certain refinement inherited
from her father, who had been both a gentleman and a scholar.
Unhappily, she inherited from him also the strain of madness that
in his case had led to violent mania and suicide. Before Dyke ever
saw her, incipient insanity at least had declared itself in the
daughter, and, as was discovered afterwards, her wretched relatives
had been warned by doctors that it would be a monstrous wickedness
to allow her to marry anybody at all. But when the ardent,
impetuous Anthony fell into their hands they made remorselessly
short work of him. He was then only twenty-one, just back from
his first visit to Africa, full of chivalry and altogether devoid
of caution; and to such people as these he would naturally seem a
grand prize. The girl--Mr. Dyke believed--practised no deception,
and indeed was wholeheartedly in love with her splendid wooer.
Three weeks after the wedding she entered an asylum in the
Midlands, and she had remained there ever since. She was incurably
insane--with a sort of dull religious melancholia that flickered
up into mildly homicidal tendencies at intervals. Dyke from the
beginning had taken every possible measure for her comfort and
security. It was a good asylum, and the annual charges were not
light. In order to insure the payment of these, Dyke had invested
money left to him by his mother; so that, whatever happened to him,
the asylum would continue to receive the half-yearly amounts. For
a considerable number of years he had not been allowed to see his
wife--or rather, she had not been allowed to see him; for the sight
of him threw her into a dangerous kind of excitement. But Dyke was
never in England without paying a visit to the asylum. He went down
there, to make certain that she was being properly treated; after
an interview with the doctors, one of the attendants guided him to
some part of the grounds where he could stand unobserved and watch
her as she passed by in charge of her nurse. In this manner he had
seen her many times.
Her mother and the other relations had more or less blackmailed him
as long as they lived, and he had been generous to them in spite of
the wrong they had done him. Now they were all of them dead, except
an aunt--a horrible old woman who from time to time wrote abusive
letters to Anthony and his father.
“A sad case, my dear Emmeline. And I must say I find it difficult
not to condemn the cruelty of a law that refuses to annul such
marriages. I should tell you that my boy tried to obtain release by
appealing to the law courts. Yes, he brought a case--but without
success.”
* * * * *
One after another the years glided past. In 1904 Anthony Dyke, the
explorer, was about to do his third Antarctic cruise in command
of an expedition that had been organized for purely scientific
purposes, and with no intention of pushing far south. But
newspapers said that it would be strange if Dyke did not make some
sort of dash and attempt to lower the record that he himself still
held.
Long before this year of 1904 the number of people who condescended
to be aware of Miss Verinder’s existence had largely increased.
After the tea-sellers there had come in due course clergymen or
church lay-helpers; for, however much you may disapprove of a
lady’s former way of life, you cannot be so uncharitable as to
preclude her from herself exercising the virtue of charity; and,
moreover, the acceptance of a donation or subscription commits you
to no real friendliness. Then came a chance acquaintance who had
been warned against her but could not bother about the warning, or
thought that in regard to scandal there ought to be a statute of
limitations; and, adopting this broad-minded view, they even asked
her to dine with them quietly and at short notice--more especially
when they were at their wit’s ends to find a fourth for bridge.
Then she began to be “taken up again,” as they termed it, by a
few of her old friends--the few still remaining in the locality.
Staggered by the countenance given to her by Mrs. Bell, or moved to
pity by their own reflections on her lonely blameless life, they
essayed a smile and nod when they passed her in the street, and,
encouraged by her unresentful courtesy, a little later attacked
Louisa with a packet of their visiting cards.
So the legend of Miss Verinder’s wickedness slowly tended, if
not yet to fade and die, at least to lose its strength and high
colour. Young people yawned and refused to learn when elderly
people narrated the legend for their benefit. “Hot stuff,” was
she, when she was young? But all that must have been a mighty
long time ago. It was as if the house walls absorbed whispers
concerning her past, instead of echoing them as they used to do.
It was as if the varnished front doors and plate glass windows of
the straight, correct roads, conspiring with iron rails and neat
rectangles of grass and gravel in the gardens of the squares,
had now determined, if they could, slowly to obliterate all vivid
recollection of a glaring irregularity. It was as if the whole
monotonously respectable neighbourhood had said to its parasitic
inhabitants, “We never experienced anything of the sort till then.
Let us now try to forget that it ever happened.”
At last her family forgave her, and for form’s sake insisted that
there should be some slight intercourse, although Miss Verinder
herself declined or evaded any resumption of real intimacy. To her
relatives it had become so very awkward to go on cutting her, and
with all the children growing up, to have an aunt that mustn’t be
mentioned. It was far more convenient to know her and name her
again. Margaret Pratt was now the mother of five and putting on
flesh rapidly. But, because of her shortness, she could never hope
to be as big round as Mrs. Verinder. Eustace had married with the
utmost propriety, and his wife in an equally becoming manner had
given him first a female and then a male infant. It was Eustace who
advised a reconciliation with his erring sister, and Mr. Verinder
at once agreed.
Mr. Verinder had been badly shaken by the South African War--a
rebellion, a defiance of authority, that should not have been
called a war at all; during the early reverses he could not sleep
at night, although he doggedly declared at the breakfast table that
he was not anxious and that everything would could right in the
end. He sincerely mourned the death of Queen Victoria, that august
lady who had been as fond of the Albert Hall as he was himself. He
described this great loss as “the breaking of a link.”
Already, in Mr. Verinder’s opinion, his beloved neighbourhood was
changing. He could not disguise from himself that it was not all
that it used to be. That old closely-bound society was breaking
up. The war had shaken things as well as people. New ideas were
creeping in, with a new monarch on the throne; that grand old
British institution, the dinner-party, was threatened by the new
fashion of entertaining at restaurants.
Then soon he began to suffer in health, and submitting to the most
terrific of all possible upheavals, he consented to sell his house
and go to live with Mrs. Verinder at Brighton. Mrs. Verinder had
fallen in love with Brighton, having there found a row of houses
almost exactly like Prince’s Gate--same colour, same porches,
cornice, everything; only smaller, and therefore requiring a less
ample and more easily managed style of household.
From Brighton Mr. Verinder wrote to Emmeline inviting her to
spend Easter with them, saying that Eustace, Margaret, and the
little people would be there, and _all_ of them glad to see her.
He underlined that word _all_; but Emmeline could not accept the
invitation.
It was a comfort to the kindly feeble old man to be able to write
to Emmeline now and then, or to talk about her once in a way
at dinner; and it was an immensely greater comfort, a comfort
always with him, to know that the ancient dreadful affair was so
completely over and done with. To his mind, Emmeline had finally
lived it down. He knew that Dyke had been in England during these
years at least twice, and--again without the aid of detectives--he
had ascertained that Emmeline had not renewed relations with the
man; indeed, had not even attempted to see him. All the time Dyke
was in London the last time, Emmeline had been away somewhere in
the country. She did not return to that little flat of hers until
the man had gone once more. All this Mr. Verinder had learned from
Mrs. Bell, who vouched for the truth; and he admired his daughter’s
fortitude and strength of mind in thus running away to avoid any
possibility of temptation.
A closed chapter. Yes, thank goodness, over and done with.