Then it was as if a bright light burst before her eyes, and she shook as if an explosion had set the room and the whole house rocking. She had understood at last the audacity and magnitude of Dyke’s aim.
He had never intended to retrace his steps. He meant to go straight on past the Pole, through the unknown, unguessed-at regions on that other side, straight on, right across the circle.
Presently she was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying, and talking aloud. “O Tony, this is too bad of you. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. You have broken the spirit of our agreement, if not the letter. You knew very well that I would not have allowed it, if I had been consulted. And you said I should be consulted—you said my word was law—at the time I gave you the money.” She went on talking, half hysterically, just as a mother talks when news reaches her from a distance of a wild son’s reckless and inexcusable behaviour; saying the things that even she, his mother, would have been forced to say to him, had he been here within sound of her voice. “No, Tony, I can’t, I can’t forgive you for this. You could not have done it if you had thought of me.”
She went almost at once to Devonshire, in order to be with his father during this dreadful time.
Following on that cablegram from Lieutenant Twining to the unhappy patron and mock chieftain of the expedition, there came all sorts of messages from press correspondents in Tasmania. But evidently Twining had told them very little. They did not know what Emmie knew. Soon however the name of Dyke once more became prominent in English newspapers.
Silent and oblivious all this time, they now took him up again in the interesting uncertainty as to his fate. The famous explorer lost, became worth space again. Anthony Dyke missing, gone from human ken, long over-due, was naturally more valuable than Anthony Dyke alive and well, ready to answer our representative’s questions at the end of a telephone wire. He took rank as a sensation that appealed to all readers, and was featured only less conspicuously than some Miss Jenkins, a pretty golden-haired flapper of seventeen, who started from home to go to a cinema palace three weeks ago and has not been seen or heard of since. A strange disappearance! His old photographs were brought out. His whole career was narrated—briefly, and without any intimate details that might discount his obituary notices. These were all ready, waiting.
As the weeks passed and the view of the newspapers grew more gloomy, their writers became more and more complimentary. They spoke of him as “the great Englishman.” They said that even after a war which had shown us by hundreds of instances how the fire of patriotism can overcome the disability of age, one must yet feel dumb with admiration as one thought of such an enterprise as this being undertaken by a man of sixty-two. They wished they could entertain any real hope that he would ultimately work his way back to safety, but they must point to the adverse opinion of an expert (in another column) who reminded one that the factors of time and food allowed no possibility of delay. Neither seals nor birds would be met with. And to eat the sledge dogs, when it became necessary, meant destroying the means of rapid movement. They feared that, at this date, there could be little doubt that the tragedy of ten years ago had been re-enacted. Dyke and his two companions had perished on their way back to the base. And venerable admirals, writing in confirmation of this verdict, paid eloquent tributes and called it a national loss.
It was a part of Emmie’s task at Endells to keep all these horrible newspapers out of reach of the poor old man. She said it merely lacerated one’s feelings to read them, and, as they were without information that he and she possessed, their opinion was quite valueless.