In a week's time there will be a quiet wedding at the British Consulate; it will take place in the presence of a Consul who has treated me with such uniform kindness that I have sometimes wondered if he has ever heard of such things as extradition orders. Our marriage will be the last chapter of one phase in my life. It opened on a day when I walked up the steps of the Club, and paused for a moment to gaze at the altered face of Pall Mall and read on a contents-bill that the old militants had broken every window on the east side of Bond Street, interrupted a meeting, and burnt down an Elizabethan house in Hertfordshire. "Shocking," I remember thinking, "and quite unimpressive." Before I was twelve hours older, Fate had introduced me to a young woman whose machinations may or may not have been infinitely more shocking; they were certainly not unimpressive.
The closing scenes of the Militant campaign are soon given. Elsie left London and joined us here as soon as the Seraph was fit to travel. That was three days after Nigel's second raid. They must have been anxious days, as our rising young statesman seems to have been torn between a quite bloodthirsty lust for revenge and a morbid horror of another fiasco as humiliating as his search-party. Elsie went round by Marseilles, saw the Seraph on board a P. and O. mailboat bound for Bombay and came overland to Rimini. When I met her and heard the details of her flight, I could tell her that all danger was over, and—if Justice had not been done—the stolen goods had at least been restored.
The news reached us as we came out of the Bay. Gartside and I were on deck, watching the sun strike golden splinters out of the hock-bottle towers of the royal palace at Cintra. The wireless operator came down with a tapped message that Mrs. Millington had revealed the whereabouts of Mavis Rawnsley and young Paul Jefferson. He added that the police had so far discovered no trace of that hardened criminal—Miss Joyce Davenant.
When Elsie joined us and told me the story of the Rawnsley raid, I could not help thinking once again, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." The gallant fight she had made for freedom and reputation ended in disaster, and she left England branded with the stigma that the Divorce Court had striven to impose and we had fought tooth and nail to remove. Joyce's struggle for the suffrage ended, as she now knows, in putting the suffrage further from the forefront of practical politics than it has been for a generation. When the recording angel allots to each one of us our share of responsibility in moulding the face of history, what effective change will be credited to the united or separate efforts of Rawnsleys and Rodens, Seraphs, Davenants and Merivales?
Two results stand out. The first is a marriage that will be celebrated at the Consulate in a week's time, the second is a listless letter penned in exile, signed by the Seraph and dated from Yokohama. Joyce knows I am tolerably fond of her, and will acquit me of speaking rhetorically if I say that I would wipe the last eight months—and all they mean to us both—from the pages of Time, if I could spare the Seraph what he has been through since I dined with him that first evening at the Ritz. Here is the letter, and no one will be surprised to learn that I spent a melancholy day after reading it.
"I send you the last chapters of Volume III. As you've waded through the earlier stuff, you may care to see the record brought up to date. I call it 'The End' because there's nothing more to write, and if there were, I shouldn't write it. Some day I suppose I may have to write again, when my present money (Roden's money) is exhausted. Not till then.
"India was one disappointment, and Japan another, though the fault, I imagine, lay in my lack of appreciation. The South Seas will be a third. 'Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.' I don't want to move on, but I can't stand Yokohama any longer.
"When I get to San Francisco I shall probably cross the States, arriving in New York at the end of December. Then I suppose one has to see this Panama Canal. After that, God knows.
"Before I left England I was looking for the MS. of the earlier chapters of Vol. III. I couldn't find them. Did you by any chance get them mixed up in your luggage? If so, please destroy them at once, with the new chapters, as soon as you have read them. Don't let anybody see them, even Joyce. In this I depend on your friendship and honour.
"I hope Joyce is all right again now. Give my love to her and Elsie, and take my best wishes for yourself. You—I suppose—are a fixture at Rimini, or at any rate out of England. I can't answer for myself, but I don't expect we shall meet again. You must have found me a depressing host in London. I'm sorry. Good-bye."