“I simply pulled them apart. Sent Lady Edna home, and despatched Godfrey to France a day before his time. That’s all over.”
“But you met Mr. Donnithorpe. Quong Ho——”
“Oh yes, I met Donnithorpe. That’s what saved the situation. He expected to find Godfrey. Found me instead.” He grinned in the most disarming manner. “A comedy situation. And off he went defeated.” He took her hand, apparently in the gayest of moods. “It’s only a woman,” said he, “that could throw a bridge between Waterloo station and the interior of China.”
She let the question drop; but the suspicion remained, and every minute that passed, until the ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantelpiece gave her the signal for conventional retirement, converted it into certainty.
He walked with her as usual to the door of her block of flats. On parting she found tremulous utterance for the sense of utter forlornness which she had been trying all the evening to formulate:
“What’s to become of me when you’re gone?”
She fled upstairs, not waiting for the lift, and went straight to her room, with the words echoing in her ears. No. They did not at all convey her heart’s meaning. They sounded heartless, selfish. Yet they were true. What would become of her? For a year she had been enwrapped soul and mind and thought in the dynamic man. Dynamic, yet so tender, so chivalrous, so childlike. Without him existence was a blank full of shuddering fears. And then a coldness as of death fell upon her. Never once, on this night of the parting of the ways, had he hinted at his love for her. Had she, by her selfish folly, her now incomprehensible sex shrinkings, killed at last the love that once was hers for the taking? Slowly she undressed and crept into bed; but sleep mocked her. Agonizingly awake, she stared at her life. . . . And she stared too, almost in rhythmic alternation, at the life of John Baltazar. Nothing but some supreme emotional crisis could have caused this characteristic revolution, this sudden surrender of the prize of his ambition, this gorgeous acceptance of exile. For all his contemptuous dismissal of the suggestion, she knew, with a woman’s unerring logic, that Baltazar had bought Godfrey’s release from entanglement at the price of his own career. And never a hint of regret, never a murmur against fate. Never the faintest appeal to pity. . . . And she arraigned her own narrow nurse’s self, and condemned it mercilessly. And the lower she sank in her own esteem, the higher rose Baltazar until he loomed gigantic as a god above her puny mortality.
Her throat was dry. She got out of bed and drank a glass of water. On her way back across the room her glance fell on the little brass Yale latchkey, lying on her dressing-table, which he, in his big, careless way, had insisted on her having, so that she could gain entrance, as of right, to the house, whenever she chose. She took it up, gazing at it stupidly. The key to his home, the key to his heart, the key to his soul—all in her keeping. And she had despised it. Now she had lost it. The home would pass into alien hands. His heart was barred. For the first time, for a whole year, they had met without his uttering one little word, playful or wistful or tyrannic, to prove that his nature was open hungrily for her. To-night she had been but his dear friend. He had accepted her gift of friendship. She remembered the old French adage: L’amitié, c’est le tombeau de l’amour. She sat on the edge of the bed and mourned hopelessly the death of his love.
And the brass Yale latchkey lay mockingly within her range of vision.