RIMINI
"We left our country for our country's good."
GEORGE BARRINGTON: _Prologue_.
We arrived in Rimini at the end of the first week in August--Joyce,
her two nurses, Maybury-Reynardson and I. Elsie joined us as soon as
we were comfortably settled in the villa, and has stayed on week after
week, month after month, tending her poor sister with a devotion that
touched my selfish, hardened old heart. Dick came for a few days
before the beginning of the law term; otherwise we have been a party
of three, as the doctor and nurses returned to England as soon as
Joyce appeared to be out of danger.
Rimini turns cold at the beginning of November, and we have had to
make arrangements for going into winter quarters. Cairo and the
Riviera are a little public for two escaped criminals, but I hear
there is a tolerable hotel at Taormina; and as Joyce has never been in
Sicily before, we might spend at least the beginning of our honeymoon
there. For myself, I do not mind where we go so long as we can escape
from Rimini. I want no unnecessary reminders of the last three months,
the weary waiting, the frequent false dawns of convalescence, the
regular relapses. They have been bad months for Joyce, but I venture
to think they were worse for Elsie and myself. In my own case there
definitely came an early day when my nervous system showed signs of
striking work; it was then that I embarked on my first and last
venture in prose composition.
When she is well enough to be bothered with such vain trivialities, I
shall present my manuscript to Joyce. I hope she will read it, for I
have intended it for her eyes alone; and if she rejects the task, I
shall feel guilty of having wasted an incredible amount of good sermon
paper. And when she has read it, she must light a little fire and burn
every sheet of it; not even Elsie must see it, though she has been
instrumental in giving me information over the last chapters that I
should not otherwise have obtained.
I think my decision is wise and necessary. In part the book is too
intimate an account of Sylvia's character and the Seraph's feelings
for me to be justified in making it public: in part, the pair of us
have already done sufficient injury to Rodens and Rawnsleys without
giving the world our candid opinion of either family: in part, we have
to remember that during the last eight months, wherever we found the
law of England obtruding itself on our gaze, we broke it with a light
heart and untroubled conscience. There is not the least good in taking
the world into our confidence in the matter of these little
transgressions.
In a week's time there will be a quiet wedding at the British
Consulate; it will take place in the presence of a Consul who has
treated me with such uniform kindness that I have sometimes wondered
if he has ever heard of such things as extradition orders. Our
marriage will be the last chapter of one phase in my life. It opened
on a day when I walked up the steps of the Club, and paused for a
moment to gaze at the altered face of Pall Mall and read on a
contents-bill that the old militants had broken every window on the
east side of Bond Street, interrupted a meeting, and burnt down an
Elizabethan house in Hertfordshire. "Shocking," I remember thinking,
"and quite unimpressive." Before I was twelve hours older, Fate had
introduced me to a young woman whose machinations may or may not have
been infinitely more shocking; they were certainly not unimpressive.
The closing scenes of the Militant campaign are soon given. Elsie left
London and joined us here as soon as the Seraph was fit to travel.
That was three days after Nigel's second raid. They must have been
anxious days, as our rising young statesman seems to have been torn
between a quite bloodthirsty lust for revenge and a morbid horror of
another fiasco as humiliating as his search-party. Elsie went round by
Marseilles, saw the Seraph on board a P. and O. mailboat bound for
Bombay and came overland to Rimini. When I met her and heard the
details of her flight, I could tell her that all danger was over,
and--if Justice had not been done--the stolen goods had at least been
restored.
The news reached us as we came out of the Bay. Gartside and I were on
deck, watching the sun strike golden splinters out of the hock-bottle
towers of the royal palace at Cintra. The wireless operator came down
with a tapped message that Mrs. Millington had revealed the
whereabouts of Mavis Rawnsley and young Paul Jefferson. He added that
the police had so far discovered no trace of that hardened
criminal--Miss Joyce Davenant.
When Elsie joined us and told me the story of the Rawnsley raid, I
could not help thinking once again, "_Plus ça change, plus c'est la
même chose_." The gallant fight she had made for freedom and
reputation ended in disaster, and she left England branded with the
stigma that the Divorce Court had striven to impose and we had fought
tooth and nail to remove. Joyce's struggle for the suffrage ended, as
she now knows, in putting the suffrage further from the forefront of
practical politics than it has been for a generation. When the
recording angel allots to each one of us our share of responsibility
in moulding the face of history, what effective change will be
credited to the united or separate efforts of Rawnsleys and Rodens,
Seraphs, Davenants and Merivales?
Two results stand out. The first is a marriage that will be celebrated
at the Consulate in a week's time, the second is a listless letter
penned in exile, signed by the Seraph and dated from Yokohama. Joyce
knows I am tolerably fond of her, and will acquit me of speaking
rhetorically if I say that I would wipe the last eight months--and all
they mean to us both--from the pages of Time, if I could spare the
Seraph what he has been through since I dined with him that first
evening at the Ritz. Here is the letter, and no one will be surprised
to learn that I spent a melancholy day after reading it.
"I send you the last chapters of Volume III. As you've waded through
the earlier stuff, you may care to see the record brought up to date.
I call it 'The End' because there's nothing more to write, and if
there were, I shouldn't write it. Some day I suppose I may have to
write again, when my present money (Roden's money) is exhausted. Not
till then.
"India was one disappointment, and Japan another, though the fault, I
imagine, lay in my lack of appreciation. The South Seas will be a
third. '_Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_.' I don't
want to move on, but I can't stand Yokohama any longer.
"When I get to San Francisco I shall probably cross the States,
arriving in New York at the end of December. Then I suppose one has to
see this Panama Canal. After that, God knows.
"Before I left England I was looking for the MS. of the earlier
chapters of Vol. III. I couldn't find them. Did you by any chance get
them mixed up in your luggage? If so, please destroy them at once,
with the new chapters, as soon as you have read them. Don't let
anybody see them, even Joyce. In this I depend on your friendship and
honour.
"I hope Joyce is all right again now. Give my love to her and Elsie,
and take my best wishes for yourself. You--I suppose--are a fixture at
Rimini, or at any rate out of England. I can't answer for myself, but
I don't expect we shall meet again. You must have found me a
depressing host in London. I'm sorry. Good-bye."
He said that even Joyce was not to see the third volume--put me on my
honour, in fact--and see it she shall not. There is another reason. I
read those last chapters and then went through the whole volume from
beginning to end. Without exaggeration the effect was overwhelming--his
style is so artless, his pathos so unpremeditated. I felt as if I had
been re-reading Hardy's most poignant novels--"Tess" and "Jude" and "A
Pair of Blue Eyes." It was horrible. I went up to my room, lit the fire
and prepared for the holocaust.
Then I was tempted. Yes, he puts me on my honour, depends on my
friendship, all that sort of thing.... But I did not burn a sheet. It
was a chilly evening, I lit a cigar, and waited for the pyre to burst
into destructive flame. As I watched and meditated, Sylvia's little
face seemed to look at me out of the fire, the black coals crowning
her forehead as I used to see it crowned with her own lustrous hair. I
thought of our last meeting when she struggled with her devils of
pride and unbelief; and of her meeting with Elsie when she came in
hope and left in humiliation. I confess I love Sylvia very
dearly--love her as all men love her--for her beauty, her queenliness
and clean, passionate pride; love her because I know something of her
loneliness, her passion for service, and the repeated rejections of
her sacrifices. And I love her a little more on my own account,
because she talked to me as if I had been her own sister, and I
perhaps know--better than any one--what she must have been through
during those sad, mad months in England.
Well, I broke faith with the Seraph and wrote her a line of overture.
I was perhaps a fool to do it, as I had already had evidence in plenty
of my incompetence to play the _rôle_ of Providence. "I am sending you
the MS. of a book," I told her. "It is the third volume of Gordon
Tremayne's 'Child of Misery'. I know you have read the first two
volumes, for we have discussed and admired them together a dozen
times. Did you ever suspect who the author was?
"In telling you it was the Seraph, I am breaking my word to him and
running the risk of being branded and disowned. I must tell you,
though, to explain the existence of the third volume. I watched it
being written, day by day. That evening on the Cher, when he
anticipated some words you were going to say, the words had already
been written down as part of the current chapter. I saw him brought up
short when you were spirited away and the connection was broken. Most
wonderful of all, I was present when the connection was re-established
and he jumped up like one possessed, exclaiming, 'Sylvia wants me!'
"When you have read these pages, you will not be in a position to
doubt any longer. He loves you as no woman was ever loved before, and
in him you have found the half that completes and interprets your
'_âme incomprise_.' Get him back, Sylvia. I don't know how it's to be
done, but you must use your woman's wit to find a way. I'm asking for
his sake and yours, not for mine--though I would give much to see 'The
Child of Misery' growing to happier manhood.
"I am afraid you will say I am hardly the man to ask anything of you
or yours. The Rodens and Merivales have hardly made a success of their
recent relationship. But I should like to be forgiven. What is my
crime? That I helped to keep justice from touching a woman who had
done you and your family a great wrong. Well, Sylvia, you'd have done
the same thing and told the same lies, had you been in my place and
had you wanted Joyce as badly as I wanted her. So will you forgive me
and be friends? And if you forgive me, will you forgive the woman
who's going to be my wife in a few days' time? I must reconcile myself
to the idea of being estranged from the rest of your family, but
(between ourselves) I'll let 'em all go if you'll write and say Joyce
and I are not quite such monsters of iniquity as you may have thought
us.
"One thing more. When you've read the third volume, you will no longer
doubt that Mrs. Wylton's presence in Adelphi Terrace was due to
charitable impulse towards Joyce and the Seraph. And you ought to
think well of any one who played the Good Samaritan to the Seraph.
Don't try to rehabilitate her character in public; it can only be done
at a risk to the Seraph's personal safety. And in any case you won't
convince a man like Nigel or the men he's already told the story to.
"Return me the MS. when you've read it, will you? I was entrusted with
its destruction, and put on honour not to let another soul read it.
You see how I keep my trust. The worst thing you can say of me is what
I've already said of myself--that most damning of all judgments--that
I meant well."
I sent that letter to Sylvia nine days ago, and received her reply
this morning. She returned me the MS., and I burnt it--with the
knowledge that I was destroying one of the greatest literary treasures
of this generation.... Well, they had to do the same with some of
Ruskin's letters.
"I wish you had not told me to send you back the book," she began. "I
should have liked to keep it. Or rather--I don't know--I half wish you
hadn't sent it at all. The time that has passed since the beginning of
August has been rather hard to bear, and the book has only turned
misgiving into certainty.
"Of course I forgive you! As if there were anything to forgive! And
Miss Davenant too. I hope she is better now. Will you ask her to
accept my love and best wishes for the future? And of course I include
you. We were good friends, weren't we? As I said we should be the
first time we met. Only I said then that you would find me worth
having as a friend, and I'm afraid I did everything I could to
disprove it. You stood me awfully well. I think you knew most of the
dark corners in my mean little soul--and if you did, perhaps you see
that I didn't do much beyond showing my true nature.
"This isn't a pose--I'm really--well, I was going to say 'broken'--but
I hope I'm a little more tolerant. You'd hardly recognise me if you
saw me, there's little enough of the 'Queen Elizabeth' about me now.
It's a horrid, flat world, and I wish I could find something in it to
interest me. May I ask for just one good mark? You wrote to me when
you left England, telling me to swallow my pride and go to see the
Seraph. Well, it was a struggle, but I did go--as you know. When I got
there, I seemed to find more than I could bear, and so of course
everything went wrong. But I did try, and you will give me my one
little good mark, won't you? I want it.
"Mother says I'm run down and in need of a change, so Phil's taking me
over to the United States at the beginning of December. There's a sort
of Parliamentary Polytechnic Tour to Panama, every one who can get
away is going to see the Canal. I don't in the least want to go, but I
suppose the States can hardly be duller than England, and as long as
mother thinks I must have a change, change I must have. If it isn't
Panama it will be somewhere worse.
"We shall spend Christmas in New York. Will you send me a letter of
good wishes to the Fifth Avenue Hotel? And tell me where you are going
to settle permanently and whether you will let me come and see you. If
your wife will not mind, I should like to see you both again--well and
happy, I hope. Somebody must be happy in this world, or it wouldn't go
on. I don't want to lose you as a friend; I'm feeling lonely enough as
it is.
"I am hardly likely to see the Seraph again, but if you meet him, I
should like you to give him a message. Say it is from a woman who did
him a great wrong: say she now knows the wrong she did him and has
been punished for it. Tell him you know how much she hates ever
apologising or admitting she was wrong, but that she wants him to know
of her apology before she finally passes out of his memory. Will you
tell him that? It won't do any good, but it will make me more
comfortable in my mind."
At the bottom of the page six words had been scratched out. I did not
mean to read them, but the obliteration was incomplete, and the
firelight shining up through the paper enabled me to decipher: "Oh, my
God, I am miserable." Then followed the signature: "Affectionately
yours (may I sign myself 'affectionately'?) Sylvia."
After reading her letter I concentrated my thoughts on the question
how to blot out time, annihilate space, bridge two continents, and
bring two proud, sore, sensitive spirits into communion. My method of
attaining concentration of mind is to think of something different and
wait for inspiration to solve my original problem. Joyce may remember
the day when I stumped into her room and talked at large of honeymoons
and winter resorts. That was the time when my mind was concentrated on
the problem of Sylvia and the Seraph. She will further recollect
assenting to my suggestion of a villa at Taormina.
On leaving her room I strolled round to the bank to see if they had
agents in Sicily or could give me any information on the subject of a
suitable villa. They were kind but helpless, and eventually I thought
it the safer course to write for rooms at an hotel and look for a
villa at our leisure. Ambling out of the bank, I wandered in the
direction of the telegraph office.
Inspiration came in the interval between wiring for rooms and engaging
berths on the Wagon-Lits--I knew it would. As soon as our places were
booked I walked back to the telegraph office and cabled to the Seraph
at Yokohama. "Letter and enclosures received with thanks," I wired.
"All nonsense about not meeting again. Will you lunch Christmas Day,
one-thirty? Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York.--TOBY."
Then I came back to the Villa Monreale.
Joyce's first words were to tell me I had been away a very long time.
Flattering as this was, I had to justify myself and account for every
moment of my absence. She wanted to know what I had wired to the
Seraph, and as husbands and wives _in posse_ should have no secrets
from each other, I showed her the draft of my cable. Her face was a
study.
"My dear!" she exclaimed, "we can't go all the way to New York even to
see the Seraph. You suggested Taormina when you left here...."
"Quite so," I assented.
"Did you order rooms?"
"Yes."
"Then we can't go to New York."
"I never proposed to."
"Why did you invite the Seraph to lunch with us there?"
"I didn't."
"Toby!"
She was not satisfied till I spelt out the draft of the cable word by
word; and then she rather resented my remarks about the incurable
sloppiness of the female mind. As a matter of fact, I cannot claim
originality for the phrase; I believe a Liberal Prime Minister coined
it as a terse description of his opponents' mental shortcomings. I
only borrowed it for the nonce.
"Will--you--lunch--Christmas Day----" I pointed out. "It doesn't say
we shall be there to receive him."
"I don't understand it," she said rather wearily. I have since
honourably resolved not to be guilty of facetiousness when we are
married, but at the moment I was rather pleased with my little
stratagem.
"I'm arranging for some one to be there to meet him," I said.
"Who?" she asked.
"A young woman named Sylvia Roden," I answered.
And even then her appreciation of my diplomacy was grudging.
EPILOGUE
TRISTRAM.
"Raise the light, my page! that I may see her--
Thou art come at last, then, haughty Queen?
Long I've waited, long I've fought my fever;
Late thou comest, cruel hast thou been."
ISEULT.
"Blame me not, poor sufferer! that I tarried;
Bound I was, I could not break the band.
Chide not with the past, but feel the present!
I am here--we meet--I hold thy hand."
MATTHEW ARNOLD: "Tristram and Iseult."
I had intended to write no more, but as we left the Consulate to-day
after our wedding, a cable was handed me by my smiling Italian valet.
"Paddy Culling for a bob!" I said, as I opened it and prepared for
some whimsical message of congratulation.
I was wrong. The cable was my reply from Yokohama.
"No offence intended," it ran. "Delighted lunch as
suggested.--SERAPH."
THE END
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
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