CHAPTER XVI[ToC]
RIMINI
"We left our country for our country's good."
George Barrington: Prologue.
We arrived in Rimini at the end of the first week in August—Joyce, her two nurses, Maybury-Reynardson and I. Elsie joined us as soon as we were comfortably settled in the villa, and has stayed on week after week, month after month, tending her poor sister with a devotion that touched my selfish, hardened old heart. Dick came for a few days before the beginning of the law term; otherwise we have been a party of three, as the doctor and nurses returned to England as soon as Joyce appeared to be out of danger.
Rimini turns cold at the beginning of November, and we have had to make arrangements for going into winter quarters. Cairo and the Riviera are a little public for two escaped criminals, but I hear there is a tolerable hotel at Taormina; and as Joyce has never been in Sicily before, we might spend at least the beginning of our honeymoon there. For myself, I do not mind where we go so long as we can escape from Rimini. I want no unnecessary reminders of the last three months, the weary waiting, the frequent false dawns of convalescence, the regular relapses. They have been bad months for Joyce, but I venture to think they were worse for Elsie and myself. In my own case there definitely came an early day when my nervous system showed signs of striking work; it was then that I embarked on my first and last venture in prose composition.
When she is well enough to be bothered with such vain trivialities, I shall present my manuscript to Joyce. I hope she will read it, for I have intended it for her eyes alone; and if she rejects the task, I shall feel guilty of having wasted an incredible amount of good sermon paper. And when she has read it, she must light a little fire and burn every sheet of it; not even Elsie must see it, though she has been instrumental in giving me information over the last chapters that I should not otherwise have obtained.
I think my decision is wise and necessary. In part the book is too intimate an account of Sylvia's character and the Seraph's feelings for me to be justified in making it public: in part, the pair of us have already done sufficient injury to Rodens and Rawnsleys without giving the world our candid opinion of either family: in part, we have to remember that during the last eight months, wherever we found the law of England obtruding itself on our gaze, we broke it with a light heart and untroubled conscience. There is not the least good in taking the world into our confidence in the matter of these little transgressions.