“That woman!” she cried. “He’s not come back.”
I assured her that the Radolins were gone back home. She stared at me and began to cry. She cried and cried, and I did not try to stop her. She was not only desolate and miserable, but bitter and angry. ‘So long as she can be angry,’ I thought, ‘she’ll get over it. One is not angry under a death-blow.’
At last she had cried her misery out, but not her anger or dismay. What was she to do? I tried to persuade her that Frank would turn up in time for them to start to-morrow evening. He was probably trying to work the thing out of his system; she must look on it as a fever, a kind of illness. She laughed wildly, scornfully, and went out.
Weymouth did not turn up, but the morning brought me a letter, enclosing a cheque for three hundred pounds, a note to his wife, and a sealed envelope addressed to the headmaster of his Public School.
The letter to me ran as follows:
“Old Man,
“I admit that I am behaving like a cad; but it’s either this or the sweet waters of oblivion; and there’s less scandal this way. I have made up some story for my chief; please post it. The cheque is for all my substance except some fifty pounds. Take care of it for my wife; she’ll get another five hundred, about, out of the turnover of our house. She will go to her father, no doubt, and forget me, I hope. Do, please, like a good fellow, see her safely on board. It’s not likely that I shall ever come back to England. The future is quite dark, but where she is, there I must be. Poste restante Constantinople will find me, so far as I know at present. Good-bye!
“Your affectionate
“F. W.”
I did see Jessie Weymouth on board her ship, and a precious business it was.
A week later I, too, started for Constantinople, partly because I had promised Mrs. Weymouth, partly because I could not reconcile myself to the vision of my friend in the grip of his passion, without a job, almost without money.
The Radolins inhabited an old house on the far shore almost opposite the Rumeli Hissar. I called on them without warning, and found Hélène Radolin alone. In a room all Turkish stuffs and shadowy lights, she looked very different from her desert self. She had regained her pale languor, but her face had a definite spirit, lacking when I first saw her. She spoke quite freely.
“I love him; but it is madness. I have tried to send him away; he will not go. You see, I am a Catholic; my religion means much to me. I must not go away with him. Take him back to England with you; I cannot bear to see him ruin his life like this for me.”