We had been "inseparables" before his going, and we would be so never again I felt convinced. She had absorbed him: mind, desire, future were packed in the little palm of her hand. Yet I was not vulgarly jealous. I loved Aubrey Yeldham better than I could have loved a brother, but I had seen her and had caught the reflection of his sentiment, though in a tempered degree. I had met her but once, for on the day after our chance encounter—in a verdurous Devon lane where she had lost her bearings and we had come to her assistance—I had been summoned to the bedside of a sick relative in town. Returning to the old haunts, I naturally expected to resume our fishing expeditions in the picturesque valley of the Exe, but I soon discovered Yeldham to have found other pellucid purple depths that interested him superlatively. I had watched the drama from a distance, and administered cautions with the cool pulse of an umpire. But he was past redemption. I suspected the truth when I made an impressionist sketch of her—milky complexion, dead copper chevelure and pulpy eyelids like some Greuze dreamer—and saw his greedy eyes fixed on the canvas, not daring to name a price, too delicate to crave a charitable dole. I learnt more from the attitude of reverence, almost of awe, wherewith he received the gift from my hands and hurriedly carried it to his own sanctum, hid it from me, the maker of it, as though to veil its charms from alien eye. I knew Aubrey Yeldham well, had shared many of his escapades, and winked apprehensively at others. But here I was of no use, and decided we had come to the supreme moment of life—there is always one—when we must let things slide.
Her name was Ruth Lascelles, and she was a widow; that was the sum total of our knowledge of her. She might have been twenty, but we estimated her age at twenty-five, deducing our theory from a certain fatigued languor of voice and expression that accorded ill with the girlish satin of her skin. This was arrived at on the first day of our meeting—we had not discussed her since. I had not been Yeldham's friend, his disciple, a mental sitter at his feet, without learning to walk warily where the fuse of his passions flickered. For some time there was a tacit agreement to ignore the impending danger, to talk of trivialities, wheeling round the central idea without ever settling there. But one morning when he had called at the little farm cottage where she lived and had found her flown without a word or a regret, his despair had been too much for him. The whole story rolled from his lips: his love for her, her seeming reciprocity, their wanderings in the woods, her reliant, trusting attitude—which had taught him to wish himself some knight of the Round Table and not a mere besmirched man of many passions—her flutterings of childish gaiety and sombre philosophy that had tinted her speech garishly as rainbows on thunder-clouds: he gave forth all, and asked, with an expression jejune as Sahara, what the sudden flight could mean.
I was so out of it, as the phrase is, that I could volunteer small elucidation: that she was a coquette of the first order seemed the most feasible solution, and I offered it. He derided the notion—it was apparently so frivolous a venture that it failed to anger him—he never set hands on the cudgels for defence. "She is not shallow," he had merely said, and his poor brain had tackled the enigma so often and to so little purpose that its purport had become an unmeaning and vacuous reiteration. But one day, after we had returned to town and were working well in harness, he with his book, I with my illustrations for it, he burst out afresh.
"She unintentionally let out where she lived: it is a little village on the coast of France. She must have returned."
"Well?" I said, suspending my work and pretending to extract a hair from the fine point of my drawing-pen.
"Well," he burst out, "the world is our oyster, and if we shirk opening it we can't hope to filch pearls!"
"That means?" I hinged expectantly.
"That means, in plain words, that I don't intend to give up the biggest pearl that God ever sent to make a man rich."
"You intend to follow her?" I questioned—needlessly, indeed, for his kindling eye contained a fire of decision and energy that for fourteen days, since the sorry one of her disappearance, had smouldered.
"Yes, follow her, make her love me by every art, divine or devilish—I don't care which, so long as she loves me—and keep her till the same grave closes over us."