CHAPTER IX
THE DECISION
As soon as Antony left the office, he walked down into the Strand, where he took an omnibus as far as Pimlico. There he dismounted, and made his way to the embankment, intending to walk back to his rooms in Chelsea. He had spent the previous evening hunting for rooms solely on Josephus’s account. Dogs, and more especially puppies, are not welcomed at hotels; also, Antony considered the terms demanded for this special puppy’s housing and maintenance entirely disproportionate to Josephus’s size and requirements.
As he walked along the embankment he reviewed the situation and conditions recently placed before him. At first sight they appeared almost amusing and absurd. The whole thing presented itself to the mind in the light of some huge joke; and yet, behind the joke, lay a curious sense of inexorableness. At first he did not in the least realize what caused this sense, he was merely oddly aware of its existence. He walked with his eyes on the river, watching a couple of slowly moving barges.
It was a still, sunny day. The trees on the embankment were in full leaf. Scarlet and yellow tulips bedecked the window-boxes in the houses on his right. An occasional group of somewhat grubby children, generally accompanied by an elder sister and a baby in a perambulator, now and again occupied a seat. A threadbare and melancholy-looking man flung pieces of bread to a horde of sea-gulls. Antony watched them screaming and whirling as they snatched at the food. They brought the Fort Salisbury to his mind. And then, in a sudden flash of illumination, he saw precisely wherein that sense of inexorableness lay. With the realization his heart stood still; and, with it, for the same brief second, his feet. The next instant he had quickened his steps, fighting out the new idea which had come to him.
It was not till he had reached his rooms, and partaken of a lunch of cold meat and salad, that he had reduced it to an entirely business-like statement. Then, in the depths of an armchair, and fortified by a pipe, he marshalled it in its somewhat crude form before his brain. Briefly, it reduced itself to the following:—
Should he refuse the conditions attached to the will, he remained in exactly the same position in which he had found himself some four or five weeks previously; namely, in the position of owner of a small farm on the African veldt, which farm brought him in an income of some two hundred a year. In that position the dream, which had dawned within his heart on the Fort Salisbury, would be impossible of fulfilment. His life and that of the Duchessa di Donatello must lie miles apart, separated both by lack of money and the ocean. If, on the other hand, he accepted the conditions, a year must elapse before he made that dream known to her; and—and here lay the meaning of that sense of inexorableness he had experienced—he could give her no explanation of the extraordinary situation in which he would find himself, a situation truly calculated to create any amount of misunderstanding. To all appearances the adventure on which he had started out had brought him to an impasse, a blind alley, from which there was no favourable issue of any kind.
“The whole thing is a deuced muddle,” he announced gloomily, addressing himself to Josephus.
Josephus put his paws on Antony’s knees, and licked the hand which was not holding the pipe.
“To refuse the conditions,” went on Antony aloud, and still gloomily, and stroking Josephus’s head, “is to bring matters to an absolute deadlock, one from which I can never by the remotest atom of chance extricate myself. To accept them—well, I don’t see much better chance there. How on earth am I to explain the situation to her? How on earth will she understand the fact that I remain in England, and make no attempt to see her for a year? I can’t even hint at the situation. Oh, it’s preposterous! But to accept gives me the only possible faintest hope.”