Long before this time Mr. Burnett, the stockbroker, had ceased to talk to her about his cousin Adela, or to lecture her in general terms on the foolishness of lonely widows and spinsters. He understood now that in a world which has gone upside down wise saws and ancient instances are out of place. He hung upon her words, he treated her with the deference due to an important client; as his clerks would have said, “he wished he had half her complaint.”
She herself was frightened by her success. In the inevitable reaction after so much nervous strain and excitement, she felt an almost superstitious fear of the flood of new capital that was rolling in upon her. She had dreaded poverty, and now it was as if some instinct warned her that she might have a greater cause to dread the consequences of wealth. She told no one anything about it—no, not even Tony. She guarded all knowledge of it as though it had been a guilty secret. She flushed and felt ashamed when affluent Mrs. Bell emitted groans under the war taxation, or when people spoke with scathing contempt of war profiteers. She longed for peace.
But the war went on. “Will it ever stop?” wrote Mr. Dyke from Endells. “It is very cruel to us old people.”
Yes, it was cruel to old people. It shook them, it weakened them, it killed them. Emmie thought of this—when old Mr. Dyke fell ill again; and when her mother died. Mrs. Verinder, shrunk to half her past size, for many years had been an old lady in a Bath chair gliding slowly along the sea-shore at Brighton with her head a little on one side; sometimes speaking of Mr. Verinder as though he was still alive; rather doubtful about the identity of Emmeline when she visited her, and always prone to confound Margaret Pratt with Margaret’s eldest daughter. Now she subsided in the chair, and vanished. Then one day Emmie’s clever solicitor wrote to inform her that her pensioner, old Mrs. Kent, was no more.
Still the war went on. It had reached that point when one felt and said that civilization was doomed, that this planet was lapsing into irremediable chaos, and that the whole universe might crash to fire and dust. When Emmie read the obituary advertisements in The Times, she felt now that, young or middle-aged or old, the war spared none. As many people were dying of it here in England as out there at the front. Only that unfortunate life-sentence prisoner in the prison called Upperslade Park remained quite undisturbed by the war, and, as her guardians told Emmie, enjoyed excellent health.
It was unending. Dyke had served in the Mediterranean, in East Africa, in Mesopotamia; and all the while he had been getting more and more angry, first because the Germans took such a lot of beating, and, secondly, because, although they knew themselves beaten, they wouldn’t own it. “Do you realize,” he wrote now, “that I am fifty-eight? If it goes on much longer I shall be fit for nothing but to settle down with my old governor in Devonshire, and hoe potatoes and carry the muck pail to the pigs. Well, perhaps it might be the best thing that could happen to me. I should be happy there if my Emmie was with me.”
Oh, if only that could come true! His Emmie sat dreaming with the letter in her hand, giving herself to the mental vision that his words had evoked—the tranquil perfect life down there in the house that she loved, the unbroken companionship; Anthony satisfied, with his roving spirit finally at rest; he and she as the squire and the squire’s lady, being kind to everybody, doing a little good with her money.
Then she remembered the real Mrs. Anthony Dyke. Even if he consented to remain in England, that peaceful dual life would be as impossible as it had always been. And thinking again of all this money of hers and of the power that money brings, she grew cold and sad. It was as if already she knew that the money would draw her irresistibly to a supreme sacrifice.