Elsie dropped no hint of the time that must elapse before Joyce was strong again or “frightfully happy.”
“Where shall it be then?” she asked.
The Seraph pressed her fingers to his lips.
“You go there, Elsie. I must travel alone. I shall go to the East. I shan’t come back for some time. If ever.”
The effort of talking and the trend of the conversation had made him restless. Elsie smoothed his pillow, and rose to leave the room.
As he watched her walk to the door, his eyes fell for the first time on the bouquet of roses and lilies.
“Who brought those?” he inquired.
“I found them in the library,” she answered.
“Is there no name?”
For a moment she pretended to look for a card, then shook her head without speaking. As she saw him lying in bed, she wondered if he would ever know the price at which his freedom from arrest had been purchased. Of her own sacrifice she thought little; it was but generous payment of a long outstanding debt. All her imagination was concentrated on Sylvia—her sanguine, happy arrival, the morning’s long agony, her hopeless, agonised departure.
“And no message?” the Seraph persisted with a mixture of eagerness and disappointment.
“No.”
“I wonder who they can be from.”
“One of your numerous admirers, I suppose,” Elsie answered carelessly. Then she opened the door, walked wearily to her own room, and tried—unsuccessfully—to cry.
CHAPTER XVI
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.
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