BUT for Olivia’s unquestioning faith in him he would not have pulled through this passport quagmire. At every fresh lie he dreaded lest her credulity should reach the breaking point. For he had to lie once more—and this time with revulsion and despair. He began the abominable campaign the next evening after dinner. He had been absent all day, on the vague plea of business. In reality he had walked through London and wandered about the docks, Ratcliffe Highway, the Isle of Dogs. He had returned physically and spiritually worn out. Her solicitude smote him. It was nothing. A little worry which the sight of her would dispel. They dined and went into the drawing-room. She sat on the arm of his chair.
“And now the worry, poor boy. Anything I can do?”
He stared into the fire. “It’s our trip.”
“Why, what has gone wrong?”
“Everything,” he groaned.
“But, darling!” She gripped his shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid it’s a beautiful dream, my dear. We must call it off.”
She uttered a breathless “Why?”
“It’s far beyond our means.”
She broke into her gay laugh and hugged him and called him a silly fellow. Hadn’t they settled all that side of it long ago? Her fingers were itching to draw cheques. She had scarcely put pen to pink paper since their marriage. Hadn’t he insisted on supporting her?
“And I’ll go on insisting,” said he. “I’m not the man to live on my wife’s money. No, no——” with uplifted hand he checked her generous outburst. “I know what you’re going to say, sweetheart, but it can’t be done. I was willing for you to advance a certain amount. But I would have paid it back—well, I would have accepted it if it gave you pleasure. Anyhow, things are different now. Suddenly different.”
He writhed under the half-truths, the half-sincerities he was speaking. In marrying her his conscience absolved him of fortune seeking. It had been the pride of his Northumbrian blood to maintain his wife as she should be maintained, out of his earnings—this draft on her fortune for the jaunt he had made up a Tyneside mind to repay. Given the passport, the whole thing was as simple as signing a cheque. But no passports to be given, he had to lie. How else, in God’s name, to explain?
“My dear,” said he, in answer to her natural question, “there’s one thing about myself I’ve not told you. It has seemed quite unimportant. In fact, I had practically forgotten it. But this is the story. During my last flight through Russia a friend, one of the old Russian nobility, gave me shelter. He was in hiding, dressed as a peasant. His wife and children had escaped the Revolution and were, he was assured, in England. He entrusted me with a thousand pounds in English bank-notes which he had hidden in a scapulary hanging round his neck, and which I was to give to his family on my arrival. I followed his example and hung the few paper roubles I had left, together with his money, round my neck. As you know, I was torpedoed. I was hauled out of the water in shirt and drawers, and landed penniless. The string of the scapulary had broken, and all the money was at the bottom of the North Sea. I went to every conceivable Russian agency in London to get information about the Vronsky family. There was no trace of them. I came to the conclusion that they had never landed in England, and to-day I found I was right. They hadn’t. They had disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“To-day?” queried Olivia.
“This morning. I had a letter from Vronsky forwarded by the publishers.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” cried Olivia. “I had an idea you weren’t quite yourself.”
“I didn’t want to worry you without due reason,” he explained, “and I was upset. It was like a message from the dead. For, not having heard of him all this time, I concluded he had perished, like so many others, at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Anyhow, there he was alive in a little hotel in Bloomsbury. Of course, I had to go and rout him out.”
“Naturally,” said Olivia.
“Well, I found him. He had managed to escape, with the usual difficulties, and was now about to search Europe for his family.”
“What a terrible quest,” said Olivia, with a shudder.
“Yes. It’s awful, isn’t it?” replied Triona in a voice of deep feeling—already half beginning himself to believe in the genuineness of his story—“I spent a heart-rending day with him. He had expected to find his family in England.”
“But you wrote to him——”
“Of course. But how many letters to Russia reach their destination? Their letters, too, have miscarried or been seized. He hadn’t had news of them since they left Petrograd.”
Carried away by the tragedy of this Wandering Jew hunt for a lost family, Olivia forgot the reason for its recital. She questioned, Triona responded, his picturesque invention in excited working. He etched in details. Vronsky’s declension from the ruddy, plethoric gentleman, with good-humoured Tartar face, to the gaunt, hollow-eyed grey-beard, with skinny fingers on which the nails grew long. The gentle charm of the lost Madame Vronsky and the beauty of her two young daughters, Vera and Sonia. The faithful moujik who had accompanied them on their way and reported that they had sailed on the Olger Danske from Copenhagen for London. He related their visit to Lloyds, where they had learned that no such ship was known. Certainly at the time of the supposed voyage it had put into no British port. Vronsky was half mad. No wonder.
“Why did you leave him? Why didn’t you bring him here?” asked Olivia, her eyes all pity and her lips parted.
“I asked him. He wouldn’t come. He must begin his search at once—take ship for Denmark. . . . Meanwhile, dearest,” he said after a pause, “being practically without resources, he referred to his thousand pounds. That’s where you and I come in. He entrusted me with the money and the accident of losing it could not relieve me of the responsibility—could it?”
He glanced a challenge. Her uprightness waved it aside.
“Good heavens, no!”
“Well, I took him to my bank and gave him the thousand pounds in Bank of England notes. So, my dear, we’re all that to the bad on our balance sheet. We’re nearly broke—and we’ll have to put off our trip round the world to more prosperous times.”
Although, womanlike, she tried at first to kick against the pricks, parading the foolish fortune lying idle at the bank, that was the end of the romantic project. Her common sense asserted itself. A thousand pounds, for folks in their position, was a vast sum of money. She resigned herself with laughing grace to the inevitable, and poured on her husband all the consolation for disappointment that her heart could devise. Their pleasant life went on. Deeply interested in Vronsky, she questioned him from time to time. Had he no news of the tragic wanderer? At last, in February, he succumbed to the temptation to finish for ever with these Frankenstein monsters. He came home one afternoon, and after kissing her said with a gay air:
“I found a letter at Decies Street”—the house of his publishers—“from whom do you think? From Vronsky. Just a few lines. He tracked his family to Palermo and they’re all as happy as can be. How he did it he doesn’t say, which is disconcerting, for one would like to know the ins and outs of his journeyings. But there’s the fact, and now we can wipe Vronsky off our slate.”
In March the novel appeared. Reviewers lauded it enthusiastically as a new note in fiction.
The freshness of subject, outlook, and treatment appealed to the vastly superior youth, the disappointed old, and the scholarly and conscientious few, who write literary criticism. The great firm of publishers smiled urbanely. Repeat orders on a gratifying scale poured in every day. Triona took Olivia to Decies Street to hear from publishing lips the splendid story. They went home in a taxi-cab, their arms around each other, intoxicated with the pride of success and the certainty of their love. And the next day Olivia said:
“If we can’t go round the world, at any rate let us have a holiday. Let us go to Paris. We can afford it.”
And Triona, who for months had foreseen such a reasonable proposal, replied:
“I wish we could. I’ve been dreaming of it for a long time. In fact—I didn’t tell you—but I went to the Foreign Office a fortnight ago.”
She wrinkled her brow.
“What’s the Foreign Office got to do with it?”
“They happen to regard me as an exceptional man, my dearest,” said he. “I’m still in the Secret Service. I tried last summer to get out of it—but they overpersuaded me, promising not to worry me unduly. One can’t refuse to serve one’s country at a pinch, can one?”
“No. But why didn’t you tell me?”
She felt hurt at being left out in the cold. She also had a sudden fear of the elusiveness of this husband of hers, hero of so many strange adventures and interests that years would not suffice for their complete revelation. She remembered the dug-up Vronsky romance, in itself one that might supply the ordinary human being with picturesque talk for a lifetime. And now she resented this continued association with the Foreign Office which he thought he had severed on his return from Finland.
“I never imagined they would want me again, after what I told them. But it seems they do. You know the state of things in Russia. Well—they may send me or they may not. At any rate, for the next few months I am not to leave the country.”
“I call that idiotic,” cried Olivia indignantly. “They could get at you in Paris just as easily as they could in London.”
“They’ve got the whip hand, confound them,” replied Triona. “They grant or refuse passports.”
“The Foreign Office is a beast!” said Olivia. “I’d like to tell them what I think of them.”
“Do,” said he with a laugh, “but don’t tell anybody else.”
She believed him. He breathed again. The difficulty was over for the present. Meanwhile he called himself a fool for not having given her this simple explanation months ago. Why had he racked his conscience with the outrageous fiction of the Vronskys?
About this time, too, in her innocence, she raised the question of his technical nationality. It was absurd for him to continue to be a Russian subject. A son of English parents, surely he could easily be naturalized. He groaned inwardly at this fresh complication, and cursed the name of Triona. He put her off with vague intentions. One of these days . . . there was no great hurry. She persisted.
“It’s so unlike you,” she declared, uncomprehending. “You who do things so swiftly and vividly.”
“I must have some sort of papers establishing my identity,” he explained. “My word won’t do. We must wait till there’s a settled government in Russia to which I can apply. I know it’s an unsatisfactory position for both; but it can’t be helped.” He smiled wearily. “You mustn’t reproach me.”
“Reproach you—my dearest——?”
The idea shocked her. She only had grown impatient of the intangible Russian influences that checked his freedom of action. Sometimes she dreaded them, not knowing how deep or how sinister they might be. Secret agents were sometimes mysteriously assassinated. He laughed at her fears. But what else, she asked herself, could he do but laugh? She was not reassured.
The naturalization question settled for an indefinite time, he felt once more in clear water. Easter came and went.
“If I don’t move about a little, I shall die,” he said.
“Let us move about a lot,” said Olivia. “Let us hire a car and race about Great Britain.”
He waxed instantly enthusiastic. She was splendid. Always the audacious one. A car—a little high-powered two-seater. Just they two together. Free of the high road! If they could find no lodgings at inns they could sleep beneath the hedges. They would drive anywhere, losing their way, hitting on towns with delicious unexpectancy. The maddest motor tour that was ever unplanned.
In the excitement of the new idea, the disappointment over the prohibited foreign travel vanished from their hearts. Once more they contemplated their vagabondage, with the single-mindedness of children.
“We’ll start to-morrow,” he declared.
“To-morrow evening is the Rowingtons’ dinner-party,” Olivia reminded him.
He confounded Rowington and his dinner-party. Why not send a telegram saying he was down with smallpox? He hated literary dinner-parties. Why should he make an ass of himself in a lion’s skin—just to gratify the vanity of a publisher? Olivia administered the required corrective.
“Isn’t it rather a case of the lion putting on an ass’s skin, my dear? Of course we must go.”
He laughed. “I suppose we must. Anyway, we’ll start the day after. I’ll see about the car in the morning.”
He went out immediately after breakfast, and in a couple of hours returned radiant. He was in luck, having found the high-powered two-seater of his dreams. He overwhelmed her with enthusiastic technicalities.
“You beloved infant,” said Olivia.
But before they could set out in this chariot of force and speed, something happened. It happened at the dinner-party given by Rowington, the active partner in the great publishing house, in honour of their twice-proved successful author.
The Rowingtons lived in a mansion at the southern end of Portland Place. It had belonged to his father and grandfather before him and the house was filled with inherited and acquired treasures. On entering, Triona had the same sense of luxurious comfort as on that far-off day of the first interview in Decies Street, when his advancing foot stepped so softly on the thick Turkey carpet. A manservant relieved him of his coat and hat, a maid took Olivia for an instant into a side-room whence she reappeared bare-necked, bare-armed, garbed, as her husband whispered, in cobweb swept from Heaven’s rafters. A manservant at the top of the stairs announced them. Mrs. Rowington, thin, angular, pince-nez’d, and Rowington, middle-aged, regarding the world benevolently through gold spectacles, received them and made the necessary introduction to those already present. There was a judge of the High Court, a well-known novelist, a beautiful and gracious woman whom Olivia, with a little catch of the heart, recognized as the Lady Aintree who had addressed a passing word of apology to her in the outgoing theatre crush in the first week of her emancipation. She envied Alexis who stood in talk with her. She herself was trying to correlate the young and modern bishop, in plum-coloured evening dress, with the billow of lawn semi-humanized by a gaunt staring head and a pair of waxen hands which had gone through the dimly comprehended ritual of her confirmation.
He explained his presence in this brilliant assembly on the ground that once he had written an obscure book of travels in Asia Minor. St. Paul’s steps retraced. He had fought with beasts at Ephesus—but not of the kind to which the apostle was presumed to refer; disgusting little beasts! He also swore “By Jove!” which she was sure her confirming bishop would never have done.
A while later, as the room was filling up, she found herself talking to a Colonel Onslow, an authority on Kurdistan, said her hostess, who was anxious to meet her husband. She glanced around, her instinctive habit, to place Alexis. He had been torn from Lady Aintree and was standing just behind her by the chimney-piece in conversation with a couple of men. His eyes caught the message of love in hers and telegraphed back again.
He no longer confounded Rowington. The central figure of this distinguished gathering, he glowed with the divine fire of success. He was talking to two elderly men on Russian folk literature. On that he was an authority. He knew the inner poignancy of every song, the bitter humour of every tale. Speaking sober truth about Russia he forgot that he had ever lied.
Suddenly into the little open space about the hearth emerged from the throng, a brisk, wiry man with a keen, clean-shaven, weather-beaten face, who, on catching sight of Triona, paused for a startled second and then darted up to him with outstretched hand; and Triona, taken off his guard, made an eager step to meet him.
If, for two days, you have faced death alone with a man who has given every proof of indomitable courage and cheerfulness, your heart has an abominable way of leaping when suddenly, years afterwards, you are brought with him face to face.
“You are Briggs! I knew I was right. Fancy running up against you here!”
Triona’s cheeks burned hot. The buried name seemed to be shrieked to the listening universe. At any rate, Olivia heard; and instinctively she drifted from the side of Colonel Onslow towards Alexis.
“It’s a far cry from Russia,” he said.
“Yes, and a far cry from the lower deck of an armoured car,” laughed the other. “Well, I am glad to see you. God knows what has happened to the rest of us. I’ve been one of the lucky ones. Got a ship soon afterwards. Retired now. Farming. Living on three pigs and a bee. And you”—he clapped him on the shoulder—“you look flourishing. I used to have an idea there was something behind you.”
It was then that Triona became conscious of Olivia at his elbow. He put on a bold face and laughed in his careless way.
“I have my wife behind me. My dear—this is Captain Wedderburn. We met in Russia.”
“We d............