Not as a child but as a woman had she spoken last night when she said—“Tell me the story of my life and I shall have the right to listen to you.” There could be no rest for me, no thought of man’s love for her until the record proved her not the daughter of General Fordibras, but his victim. I had been conscious of this from the beginning, but the inevitability of it recurred to me now when the great ship had disappeared from my ken, and all my hopes seemed to sink with her. To win Joan’s love I must snatch her secret from a rogue’s keeping, carry it triumphantly to her, and so write it that all the world might read. God alone knew how such a task as this might be accomplished. I wonder not that its very magnitude appalled me.
And so the new day waxed old, and found me still alone, my eyes upon the void; my heart heavy with the burden I must carry. The great sea had spoken and I had heard her voice and bowed to the destiny of her judgments. Let the land now answer me—that land for which my friends yearned as exiles, who have heard a call from home and answered it with tears of gladness because their faces are toward the light.
CHAPTER XXXII.
WE HEAR OF THE JEW AGAIN.
Once More in London.
I am not one of those who touch the posts by Temple Bar with that rare delight which betrays the true-blue Londoner. Foreign scenes are ever a safer tonic to me than any fret and striving of our own cities; and gladly as I turn to London sometimes, it is rarely that I do not quit her shadows with a greater pleasure. Perhaps I am conscious of a subtle change creeping upon her, and destroying much of her charm. To me she seems as the great growing child which has lost its strength in the act. Vast beyond all belief, her energies are perceptibly weakening. She is no longer an example to the provinces; they do not imitate her fashions, and are ready to scoff at her pretensions. The old London of the gloomy theatres, the narrow, dirty streets, the London of Simpson’s and Evans’, and the decent supper rooms, was a thousand times more romantic a city in my eyes than this County Council Babylon, with its raucous prophets and its perpetual cant of moralities. Let the blame be on my head which dares to think such treason. I am lonely in wide streets, and the gospel of modernity depresses me.
Unrepentant, I write these lines, and yet they can conjure up for me a vision of London so desired that all the years will never blot it from my memory. I had been in England two months then. A littered writing table in my private sitting-room at a great Strand hotel bore witness to my activities—an untasted elixir in a wineglass by my side spoke of a woman’s anxieties and of her devotion. Certainly my dear sister Harriet had sufficiently impressed upon these people the necessity of treating all carpets and curtains by an antiseptic process, and the profound wisdom of warming the interiors of those hats which subsequently were to adorn the heads of males. Her debates with a German Prince in command, neither understanding the tongue of the other, were a little protracted, and not always without heat. She was determined that I should not cut my finger-nails with unaired scissors, and convinced that the only way of saving me from the troubles which beset the path of my indifference lay in the frequent administration of advertised tonics, and a just sampling of the whole of them. I suffered her and was happy. Is it not something that there should be one woman in all the world who lives for us a life so wholly unselfish that no thought of her own needs ever enters into it?
To my dear sister, then, be this well-earned tribute paid. Doubly fortunate, I might write down another name and spare no encomiums. Joan Fordibras, my little Joan of Dieppe and the sunshine, was with us in the hotel, and no less a slave of mine than the other. Every day, when I came down to breakfast, it was Joan who had been across to Covent Garden for the flowers I like best to have about me—it was Joan’s clever fingers which delved amidst the mass of littered papers and unfailingly extracted therefrom the erring document; Joan who told me at night what had happened during the day in this dismal world of politics and art—the world in which we amuse ourselves by calling those who differ from us knaves and decrying all merit save that which makes its own appeal to us. Rarely did I find her in that merry mood of girlhood in which I caught her—how long ago it seemed!—at the Fête at Kensington. If her face betrayed the sea’s dower of heightened colour and eyes unspeakably blue, she had become less the child and more the woman, and she lived as one tortured between two rivers of doubt—knowing the past and fearing the future, but unconscious of the present. Between us there stood the impassable barrier of the truce we arrived at upon the deck of my yacht, White Wings. I was never again to tell her what she was and must be to me—never to speak of a man’s love prevailing above all else, more precious to him than all else under God’s fair sky; never to speak of it until I could carry the secret to her and say—“This is your birthright, such were the days of your childhood.” I had pledged my word, and the bond was of honour. Time might redeem it or time might bring the ultimate misfortune upon me—I knew not nor had the courage to prophesy.
So London became the city of my desire, and in London my work began. I saw Joan every day, heard the music of her laughter, and was conscious of her presence about me as man is ever aware of the spirit of happiness which hovers so rarely about a busy life. The littered table in my private room bore witness to my activities, and the animation with which I had pursued them. Many ambitions have I set before me to worship in the years of the old time, but never such a task as this; whose achievement must bring a reward beyond price; whose failure, I was aware, would separate me finally and for ever from the woman I love.
To say that I laboured at it incessantly, indeed, is to do little justice to actuality. The mystery went with me wherever I turned. I wrestled with it through nights of bitter dreaming; it followed me to the streets, to the theatres, to the houses of my friends. It prevailed above every other occupation; it would start up even in the blue eyes which daily asked the unspoken question; it would envelop little Joan herself as a veil which hid her true self from me; it would stand out black and clear upon every page that I wrote—a sentence irrevocable, a very torture of the doubt. The secret, or the years of darkness, said the voice. I hid myself from the light and still I heard its message. It spoke to me above the city’s clamour and the hum of throngs. The secret, or the night! What an alternative was that!
I was to go to Joan and to say to her—You are the daughter of this man or that, but not of General Fordibras. I was to tell her that none of hers had part or lot in the great conspiracy of crime whose fringe I had touched, whose arch-priest I had named. Here was the task in a nutshell, so simple seemingly that any dunce might have entered upon it with confidence or any child sat down to master it. Yet, witness the uncertain steps I had followed, and judge then what kind of a task it was and what the peculiar nature of my difficulties. Judge then if I misrepresent the circumstance or claim for myself that which truth has not justified.
We had made a fair passage home from the Azores and come straight to London. Losing none of the precious hours, I went immediately to Scotland Yard, and from Scotland Yard to a friendly Minister’s room at Whitehall, and there I told this story as it is written in this book, and as time has not changed it. If I met with incredulity, I blame no one. My cables home had warned the police of much that I would tell them, and more that remained mere surmise. Murray himself—my old friend Murray, whose suppositions had sent me upon an errand as strange as any in his calendar—Murray assured me that the police of France, of Germany, of America, and of Portugal were already advised of that which had been done, and of the evidence upon which it was being done. But even he had begun to lose faith.
“We have searched the houses you named in Paris,” he said, “and there are half a dozen men under lock and key. They have