“I don’t recognize you”; “You are changed”; “I simply do not recognize you”; and so on.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGHOUT the month of August, while drawn blinds in all the handsome windows of Prince’s Gate announced that Kensington was at the seaside or on the continent, Miss Verinder enjoyed the absolute freedom of a sitting-room and a bedroom at the Langham Hotel. Mr. Dyke did not lodge in Portland Place, and the hotel porters scarcely knew him by sight. He and his Emmie were never seen together at the west-end of the town. If he appeared anywhere in public he was alone. Although Emmie might not be very far off, she never disclosed herself. She retired into the modest ill-lit background—as on the occasion of his lecture at the hall in Wigmore Street, where she sat in her dim corner shooting arrows of love from misty eyes as she watched him step upon the platform, and trembling with pride and joy as she listened to what the noble chairman said about him. He belonged to her, “this wonderful explorer, this man of resource as limitless as his courage, this man who, alone and unaided, has gone into the dark places of the world, tearing the veil from nature’s face and making foot-paths through the unknown,”—he belonged to her, but fate had ordained that she must possess her property in secret and not openly claim it as her very own. He too understood that the wide public need not be told everything, and he showed a delicate reserve in spite of his passion. As was said by one of the very few people who knew anything about them: on the whole they were decent in their indecency.
To use a phrase much favoured and commonly used at this epoch, life had become a fairy tale to Miss Verinder. It seemed to her that the first sight of Anthony Dyke had awakened her from a sleep of death; that then he had breathed fire into her, and that now he was filling her with purpose and power. He was moreover the key to all enigmas and the magical expounder of the commonplace. Nothing tired her, nothing bored her; everything, however drab and cold till now, had light and warmth and colour in it. Also nearly everything was new. She rode with him in hansom cabs, was hugged by him in delightful smoky compartments of the underground railway, spent whole days with him on the eastern side of the Mansion House; seeing in flashes the Monument, the Tower and the new Bridge, the Commercial Road, the docks—the places she had heard about but never seen before. These, with glimpses of the river, the rattle of the city traffic, the roar of trains rolling through iron bridges above crowded streets, made a new forceful world for her after the dignified repose of her old universe.
All this while he was making preparations for his departure, which could not be delayed after the middle of September, and his business in the city and beyond the city concerned the ship that was to take him to South America and the cargo it would carry. She felt elation, pride, and overwhelming interest as she trotted by his side, or a little behind him; dodging through the thronged streets, dashing down dark little courts, and in and out of such queer offices, where among dust and gloom one seemed to smell sea breezes and have visions of distance and adventure. He walked so fast that she was always out of breath, but even this discomfort was pleasant since it came from him; she felt that romance and poetry were making her breathless, and not merely muscular effort. He left her sitting in outer rooms, and if the truth must be told, he sometimes forgot her, so absorbed did he become in the negotiations he was conducting. Once, after waiting for an incredible time, she looked down through a dirt-stained window into a narrow street near Tower Hill and saw him going away engrossed and gesticulating with two other men; and her heart almost ceased to beat as she thought it would be like this when he went from her for ever. He came back exultant, apologetic, her lover again now that the business had been completed, and swept her away with him for a belated three o’clock luncheon, a ravenously hungry meal in a strange tavern—the first of those queer repasts in queer places of which destiny decreed she was to eat so many. He drank her health, he touched her hand beneath the table, he looked sudden death at inoffensive strangers that he suspected of glancing at her with an admiration too patent to be respectful; he praised and thanked her for granting him her companionship and counsel, for giving him—as he said without the slightest intention of flippancy—her “moral support.”
His praise was music to her, sweet as the singing of birds, grand and voluminous as a cathedral organ; but she reproved him for the murder glare at those always well-meaning and now terrified young men.
“Because you like me,” she said, smiling at him, “you mustn’t fall into the mistake of supposing that other people see me with your eyes. Except you, no one has ever thought me worth looking at—or in any way out of the ordinary.”
“Emmie, why do you say that?” He stared at her in surprise, and his face grew troubled. “It’s not like you—not worthy. You should be above all that. You must know quite well”—and he said this softly but very firmly, with a kind of grateful solemn reverence—“that you are the most beautiful thing God ever created.”