He had no more gone to Helsingfors in the last year’s autumn than he had gone there now. What should John Briggs, obscure and demobilized able seaman, have to do in Helsingfors? Why the elaborate falsehood? He shrugged his shoulders and made a helpless gesture with his elbows. The obsession again. The quietude of Medlow had got on his nerves. He had to break away, to seek fresh environment. He had invented Helsingfors; it was dramatic, in his romantic past; it kept up, in the direct mind of Blaise Olifant, the mystery of Alexis Triona; and it gave him freedom. He had spoken truth as to his vagabond humour. He loved the eternal change of the broad highway. The Salvation Yeo inspiration had persisted ever since he had run away from home to the El Dorado beyond the seas. Had he been set down in a torpid household, no matter how princely, sooner or later he would have revolted and have fled, smitten with the wander madness. But the Prince, the nomadic Tartar atavism asserting itself, suffered too much from this unrest; and in their mighty journeyings through Russia, up and down, north and south, east and west, and in the manifold adventures and excitements by the way, the young chief mechanic found the needful satisfaction of his cravings. On leaving Medlow he had started on a tramp, knapsack on back, to the north of Scotland, stopping at his mother’s house, en route, and had reached the John o’ Groats whither, on an eventful day, Olivia had professed herself ready to accompany him. She had little guessed how well he knew that long, long road. . . . Yet, when he met Blaise Olifant again, and was forced to vague allusion to his mythical travels, he almost persuaded himself that he had just arrived from Finland.
But now had come an irreparable shifting of psychological values. He could not return to Olivia, eating her heart out for news of him, and persuade himself that he had been to Helsingfors. The lie had been facile enough. How else to account for his absence? His attendance at his mother’s death-bed had been imperative: to disregard the summons had never entered his mind. Yet simple avowal would have been pulling down the keystone of the elaborate structure which, to her, represented Alexis Triona. The parting lie had been easy: but the lie on his return—the inevitable fabrication of imaginary travel—that would be hatefully difficult. For the first time since he had loved her he was smitten with remorse for his deception and with terror of her discovery.
He could not sleep of nights aching for her, shivering with dread at the possibility of loss of her, picturing her alone in the sweet, wind-swept house, utterly trustful and counting the long hours till he should come again. Still, thank God, this was the last time they would be parted. His mother had been the only link to his John Briggs past.
There were no testamentary complications, which he had somewhat feared. His mother had only a life interest in the tiny estate which went, under his father’s will, to his sister Ellen. And Ellen did not count. Absorbed in her family cares, she would pass out of his life for ever without thought of regret. It would be the final falsehood.
At breakfast, on the morning of the funeral, Ellen said suddenly, in her dour way:
“I’ve been reading your book. It’s a pack of lies.”
“It would have been if I had signed it John Briggs,” he answered. “But everything in it is true about Alexis Triona.”
“Your ways don’t seem to be our ways, John,” she remarked coldly.
He felt the words like a slap in the face. He flushed with anger.
“How dare you?”