IN due course the stories of the various expeditions arrived. Each had done nobly good work, but in the splendour of the achievement of Amundsen and Scott all else paled to insignificance. National sorrow for the death of its glorious representative made England at first almost impatient of listening to the voices of those who remained alive. Dyke, it seemed, had performed valuable services to science—he had cleared up a good deal; although behind the illustrious two, he had crossed their tracks, and he had also struck into the Japanese and the Germans. But who now could care about discoveries of mountain ranges, charting of coast-lines, or correction of surmises as to land and water? The praise he received in the British press was pitifully small; and one American paper was cruel enough to say that “Comic relief had been given to the tragic drama by the antics of elderly Dyke, who had been fooling around all the time like the clown of the Antarctic Circus.”

He was in England during the summer of 1914; a man forgotten, not given a single newspaper interview, not once bidden to a public dinner. The birthday list of honours was announced in advance as including recognition of all who of late years had served the state usefully or ornamentally; yet neither in forecasts of those to be thus honoured nor in the list itself was the name of Dyke mentioned. He did not say a word to indicate that he even noticed this neglect. Emmie, however, thinking she understood what he must necessarily feel, took him away from London into the country, where he could no longer hear the noise and fuss about recognition and national gratitude.

They stayed at a farmhouse on Dartmoor, and they were very happy; but she had wronged him when she supposed that there was now any bitterness of disappointment in his mind. Alone with him between the sky and the heather, she became aware of a subtle inward change. He was never by any chance irritable. He was calmer, more dignified, whether he spoke of the past or the future.

Yes, as she knew, he had irrevocably lost what had been the hope of his life. Dimly she began to guess that it was the very completeness of the loss that, after the first shock, had brought a new tranquillity of spirit. The game with all its excitements was over, and he experienced a sensation of enforced rest. But truly it was something more and better than this. It was perhaps as near to obliteration of self as the most magnanimous men may reach when they see good work accomplished and measure the extent of the good work that still remains to be done.

She did not really understand until she heard him paying tribute to the memory of Captain Scott; and in her admiration and delight there went from her then the last twinges of the pain that had been caused by her own disappointment. This Anthony that she worshipped and reverenced for every word he said was a nobler and a bigger man than the Dyke who might have been—the Dyke who might have come home amid the plaudits of the world, to drop his laurel wreaths at her feet.

He was lying among the heather, his head resting on his elbow, and a hand playing with the tiny crimson bells; while Emmie with her holland parasol made a screen to keep the sun off them both. An injury to the head inflicted by a tumble on shipboard had left a slight deafness, and because of it he sometimes unconsciously spoke louder than was necessary. Now his voice rang out very strong in the light, pure air; but they were quite alone, and indeed Emmie would not have minded if all the world had heard what he said.

“You will see it written—it is being written already—that Scott’s noble gallant heart was broken by his failure to get there first—that it was the sight of the Norwegian flag flying over the tent that really killed him, and not the hardship and fatigues. Emmie, that’s a wicked thing to write. It’s a wicked poor-spirited thing for anyone to believe. Scott was far, far above all that. You remember I wrote to him to say I was going?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I never had an answer to my letter. I’m sure he sent me an answer, only it missed me. I never got it. Amundsen telegraphed to him too.”

“Did Mr. Amundsen telegraph to him?” said Emmie, flushing. “I was not aware of it. I fear I—”

“Scott’s answer would have been the same to both of us. I know it as surely as if I had heard him say it or had read it in his hand. Scott would have said, ‘You or I or the other fellow, what does it matter, so that the thing is done?’ I am so sure that, when I was rather down in the dumps about myself, I took it as a message from the dead, and it steadied me, Emmie—it steadied me at once. As soon as I can, I shall go back there to carry on the work. I consider it a sacred duty that we Englishmen owe to his memory; and while there’s a kick left in me I’ll be true to it. If I can’t get anyone to trust me with the command, I’m ready to serve under anybody else—any Englishman—as second in command, if they think me good enough;—as third mate, or cook, if that’s the best job they think I’m worth.”

For some reason or other he was going to North China when the outbreak of war stopped him. The four-years agony had begun. He served first as a sailor, then as a soldier; and it may be said at once that Emmie was never less anxious about him than at this time, for, although the war of course had its risks, they seemed so much smaller than those of his ordinary life.

But she had anxieties of another kind—about money. Fortunately, with exploration at a standstill, she was given a breathing space; in fact, she was in such a mess financially that she could not anyhow have assisted the good cause by secret donations. For some while she had been gambling. There was no other word for it—and her very respectable stockbrokers used the word freely.

“My dear Miss Verinder,” said Mr. Burnett, the stockbroker. “I must really warn you against this sort of thing. It is not investment at all; it is speculation. It is sheer gambling.”

Ignoring his advice, she bought some oil shares and lost her money. She had been impelled to make this venture by a hint concerning the future of oil that had fallen casually from the lips of Anthony. Another philosophic reflection of his led her into copper; and this commodity also played her false.

“What did I tell you?” said Mr. Burnett. “Why will you jeopardise your position in this manner. It isn’t as if you were not well-off.”

Miss Verinder demurely replied that, although originally well-off, her expenses had increased, and for certain reasons she would be pleased to add to her income.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” cried Mr. Burnett, almost writhing in his altruistic despair. “How often have I heard people like you say exactly what you have just said! In this very room, Miss Verinder—clients who really ought to know better”; and he gave her a severe little lecture on her recent speech, which, he said, was absolutely typical in the foolishness of its underlying ideas. Widows and spinsters, living out of the world, knowing nothing of business, with no man to control them, invariably talk in that silly manner before they fall into the most frightful pitfalls.

But this incorrigible spinster went on with her bad practices, buying this and that queer thing, and once, to the astonishment and annoyance of Mr. Burnett, securing a little profit. That made her worse than ever, and she soon went right down all among the pitfalls.

“Now what do you intend?” said the stockbroker, speaking very gravely of the catastrophe. “Are you going on, or are you going to stop?”

“I scarcely know how to answer,” said Emmie, after a silence. “I have dropped so much that it almost seems as if I couldn’t afford to stop.”

Mr. Burnett writhed despairingly. Then nodding his head, and pointed his finger at her, he said, “Miss Verinder, may I tell you a story?”

“Oh, please do,” said Emmie. “I should be so glad if you would.”

“A client of ours was bitten with this mania—for mania it is; although, mind you, there was more excuse for her, because it was in peace-time, and not when the whole world has gone upside down and from day to day one cannot make the wildest guess as to what the value of anything will be to-morrow. She was not only a client but a relative—my own cousin—Adela Burnett—so I knew all her circumstances. She too was an old—Suffice it to say that she was the unmarried daughter of my uncle John, who had left her quite a good little property. Really a jolly little place in Sussex—perhaps three hundred acres, not more—and I don’t know how many feet above the sea—The Mount, they called it—not that the name matters. But there she was—don’t you see?—surrounded with comfort—quite able to play the lady bountiful in a small way—respected by everybody. The first doubtful order she brought to me—the very first, Miss Verinder”—and he shook his finger impressively—“I said, ‘Adela, stop it.’ But did she listen to me? No. It was nothing to her that my firm is one of the oldest in the City of London and that her own cousin is its senior partner. She would sooner act on the advice of the local doctor, or the curate, or the wife of the master of hounds, than listen to anything our firm could tell her. Well, I warned her for the second time. And what do you think she did? What, Miss Verinder, do you think she did?”

“I can’t imagine,” said Miss Verinder, feebly.

“She removed her business to another firm.”

“Oh, what a shame!” said Emmie, with sympathetic indignation. “Oh, I think that was mean of her. I promise never to do anything like that.”

Mr. Burnett writhed again. It seemed that Miss Verinder was missing the whole point of the story. As he hastened to explain, it was not the loss of his commission but the ruin of his cousin that he deplored.

“Yes, she ruined herself. And where is she now? Where, Miss Verinder, is she now?”

“Where is she, Mr. Burnett?”

“Living in one room—in a wretched road not far from Clapham Common. Pigging it in one single room—subsisting as best she may on a voluntary allowance made to her by—her blood relations”; and for a moment Mr. Burnett looked modest, as though imploring that no compliments should be paid with regard to the generosity of Adela’s family. Then he became more impressive than ever. “To this she has reduced herself by Stock Exchange gambling. Think of it. Here you have a delicately nurtured lady, no longer young, accustomed to be waited on by a highly-trained domestic staff, now cooking her own meals in a bed-sitting-room. One room, Miss Verinder. Just think of it.”

Miss Verinder thought of it. The accommodation would be hopelessly inadequate in her case. Three rooms was the very least she could do with—one for herself, one for Louisa, and a spare one for Tony.

Should she go on or stop? With the cost of life leaping upward, with a humble invalid pensioner called Aunt Janet still on her hands, with further obligations to an unhappy prisoner in the midlands whose expenses had again risen, with an income tax threatening to absorb half her diminished dividends, she looked at the future in trepidation and saw it full of difficulties and dangers. She shook with dread as she thought that the time might come when she would not be able to maintain this beloved flat just as it had always been. Oh, for a coup, for a stroke of luck that would bring security! During long hours of feverish wakeful nights she asked herself that question. Should she go on or stop?

She went on. Perhaps it is impossible to consort for a number of years with an adventurer and yet not catch the adventurous spirit; or to force oneself to think boldly in regard to a few matters without acquiring the habit of bold thinking in regard to all matters. And her pulses had been stirred by what seemed to be another hint from her oracle. Although the submarine menace was as yet nothing more than a menace, Dyke foretold the ultimate scarcity of shipping; and writing to her from a mine-sweeper in the Mediterranean, he said he believed that anybody now could make a certain fortune by getting hold of ships, no matter how old they were, and selling them again later. “No doubt,” he added, “a lot of artful dodgers are doing it already.”

A fortnight after receiving this letter, Miss Verinder was established at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool. She had with her as travelling companion Mr. Cairns, late captain of the Mercedaria; and he and she, passing here and there unnoticed among the war crowd at the big hotel, were exceedingly busy—so busy, in fact, that she had no spare moments for reviving sentimental memories of her only previous visit to this great maritime city.

Cairns, although so much older now than then, still gave one the same impression of solidity and trustworthiness. He still loved his joke, but the years had made him a little asthmatic and his laughter was apt to end in a fit of coughing. Emmie, taking tender care of him, made him give another turn of the muffler round his neck as they rowed up the river one morning and met the sharp winter’s breeze on their faces. In the rowboat with them were two shabby-looking elderly men that Cairns had produced after searching among his seafaring and commercial acquaintance. These queer associates were Mr. Gann, a tall, mournful man, and Mr. Rice, who was stout and jovial; and by Cairns’s arrangement they and Emmie had entered into a little partnership for the purpose of buying an iron steamer named the Marian II., this vessel being one of three that a panic-stricken owner desired to shuffle off his hands. To-day they were going over her for a last look round, before taking the plunge.

“I don’t like being mixed up in business with a woman,” Mr. Gann had said sadly, after his first introduction to Emmie’s pale face, charming graceful manner, and fashionable London costume. “Always lands you in more than you bargained for.”

“My experience too,” said Rice.

But Cairns had reassured them, and, as it were, thrown them into Emmie’s arms.

“My lads,” said Cairns, “don’t you worry about her being a woman. Take it from me, she has more grit than half a dozen ordinary men.”

Now they were beginning to think that Cairns was right.

Truly she was wonderful, ducking under a wet hawser that caught one of her partners as the boat approached the wharf alongside which lay Marian II., climbing slippery steps, and crossing a rickety gangway to get on board. Yet it would have been impossible to imagine anybody who appeared more incongruous to the business and the scene. In the bright cold sunshine the ship seemed a melancholy ruin, full of rust and grime, with the air of forlorn abandonment proper to a thing created for men’s use but deserted by all mankind; and Emmie, dressed in her fur coat, with her veil neatly tied under her narrow chin and her chamois leather gloves being blackened by each bit of wood or metal that they touched, was like a lady going over a house that she thinks of taking for a term of years. As she walked about with Cairns and the caretaker, now on the rusting decks, now in the gloomy depths, she asked a multitude of questions, all charmingly unprofessional and yet all full of common-sense.

“Can the machinery be put in working order? Are there no leaks? Is she sound, Captain Cairns? I think nothing of appearances—no one cares now;—but is she really watertight and seaworthy?”

“Yes, miss,” said Captain Cairns. “The three ships are all right. You may take my word for it.”

“But this is the best of the three, isn’t she?”

“Yes, I think she is. She’s the best-looking, anyhow.”

Nothing tired Miss Verinder, and she took nothing for granted. Although they were only concerned with the Marian II., she insisted on being rowed up the river a little further, to see the other two steamers that belonged to the same owner. One of these, the Osprey, was out in the stream, black and forbidding, with the water racing past the faded paint beneath her load-line. The third one, the Anemone, was literally on the mud.

“Is her back broken?” asked Emmie.

“Good Lord, no,” said Cairns. “She’s right enough. Get her reconditioned, and no one would recognize her.”

Mr. Gann and Mr. Rice were both suffering from the cold, and both weary of the excursion. At their request the boat was turned and the party made its way back to Liverpool.

Miss Verinder was more wonderful still at the final meeting with the timorous owner and his agent. They all sat round a carved oak table in a luxurious private sitting-room at the hotel; but, as the manager had not been able to allow them a fire, Miss Verinder retained her fur wraps and the gentlemen their overcoats. She took no part in a lengthy struggle with regard to the price they were to pay. Cairns and the agent grew heated in a contest of praise and disparagement. Mr. Gann became sadder and more sad. Mr. Rice at last told Mr. Jones, the owner, that to ask twelve thousand pounds for a rotten old tub like the Marian II. was high-seas piracy; and Mr. Jones said that unless this word was immediately withdrawn he would break off the negotiation. To show that he was in earnest, he pushed back his chair and put on his hat.

“Ladies present, kindly remember,” said Cairns.

“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Miss Verinder, sweetly. Then she went and rang an electric bell while the others continued to wrangle.

A waiter brought, not inopportunely, a tray with sandwiches, biscuits, whisky, soda water; and, at Miss Verinder’s request, the gentlemen consented to take light refreshment.

Then she sat at the table again, and smiled deprecatingly at Mr. Jones.

“Will you allow me to speak quite frankly, Mr. Jones?”

Mr. Jones, with his mouth full of biscuit, signified assent; and Emmie startled him and her allies by a quiet but entirely damaging attack upon the Marian II. She said that if Mr. Jones was fond of Marian II. and wanted to keep her, there was no more to be said. But if he really wished to sell the ship, she must confess that the price he was asking struck her as quite ridiculous. She admitted that Marian II. was the best of the bunch. “Oh, yes, certainly. As to the other two—” and she gave a little shiver, as if upset by the mere recollection of their state. One of them, she went on demurely, was to her mind little better than a derelict, and the other one gave her an impression of being about to sink at its moorings.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Jones.

“Well, that was my impression,” said Emmie. “I don’t profess to be an expert. But I can assure you, Mr. Jones, we are here to do business. We want to do business. Can’t we make a deal of it, anyhow?”

“Not on your terms. I’d sooner go to government. You forget there’s government always ready to buy.”

“Oh, Mr. Jones!” said Emmie, as if shocked by this pretence. “I understand that the government officials have inspected your ships at least a dozen times.”

“They may change their minds.”

“Never. If the government had wanted them they would have taken them long ago.”

“That’s so,” said Cairns, firmly.

“Nevertheless, Mr. Jones,” said Emmie, resuming a gentle argumentative tone, “suppose we were to make you a sporting bid for the three vessels?”

“No, no,” said her partners, astounded; and Mr. Cairns touched her arm and began to cough. But Miss Verinder quietly went on with it.

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Every day your ships are deteriorating in value. Now a firm offer, Mr. Jones. Cash! Twenty-seven thousand for the three!”

“No, no.”

Mr. Gann and Mr. Rice both turned upon her; Captain Cairns, choking, took her by the arm and led her to the recess of the furthest window. There her partners expostulated with her, declaring that they could not plunge in this manner. One ship was all they were good for.

“Very well,” she immediately replied; “then I’ll do the other two ships on my own.”

“And let us stand or fall on number one?”

“Yes, unless you think better of it. Don’t, please, suppose I’m trying to squeeze you out. At equal stakes we were to have a third share, weren’t we? Now divide it into twenty-sevenths. You see how simple it is, don’t you, Captain Cairns? Instead of one-third each of these gentlemen will have four and a half twenty-sevenths—or whatever the correct fraction is. That can easily be settled at leisure. But, please, let me get back to Mr. Jones now. I want to strike while the iron’s hot.”

Then she returned to the table, and with a slightly ostentatious flourish produced a cheque book.

“Now, Mr. Jones, I’m ready to write you a cheque for a ten per cent. deposit. Is the deal going through?”

The deal went through. Perhaps because of his naturally timid nature, perhaps because of the obvious reluctance shown by the lady’s partners, Mr. Jones said “Done.”

“And done,” Emmie echoed brightly.

She seemed mildly excited and no more. As she bowed to the company and withdrew, she still had that air of a well-preserved middle-aged lady conducting some little affair of ordinary well-to-do life—such as taking a furnished house or buying a motor-car.

“Well, I’m blowed,” said Mr. Rice, when the vendor and his agent had in turn gone away. “She is a card, and no mistake. But confound her arithmetic. Here, give me a drop more whisky. I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels.”

“That’s always the outcome, with a woman,” said Mr. Gann sadly.

“Look here,” said old Cairns enthusiastically. “You stick it through with her. For, take it from me—although I was staggered a moment—she’s done a big thing, and she’s right. It’ll turn up trumps.” And Mr. Cairns began to laugh and cough at the same time. “What gets me,” he spluttered, “is the comic side of it. All our faces, when she said—firm offer! Didn’t I tell you she had grit? Listen half a minute. As an example—in strict confidence—a thing she did when she was quite a girl!” And, splutteringly, he narrated how once when Miss Verinder was travelling with a friend in foreign parts, they were captured and set upon by bravos; “and just as it seemed they were going to be down and out, she whips in with a revolver and—”

At this moment Miss Verinder herself interrupted the narration by reappearing at the door.

“Captain Cairns, can I have one word with you?”

Outside in the corridor she spoke to him tremulously. She was very pale, and she betrayed a nervousness and agitation strangely out of character with the melodramatic heroine of the Captain’s interrupted tale.

“Oh, Captain Cairns, do you think”—and after hesitating she used a phrase that on several occasions he had used himself—“do you think I have bitten off more than I can chew?”

“No,” said Mr. Cairns stoutly. “You’ve done a good morning’s work, and I, well, I’m proud of you.”

The venture turned up trumps. After three months of painful hope and fear they sold Marian II. and got back all their money. Then four months later they sold the last ship and wound up the modest syndicate with a profit of fifty thousand pounds. Meanwhile, operating alone, Miss Verinder had bought and sold two larger vessels and thereby gained nearly seventy thousand pounds. Then she bought ordinary shares in shipping companies, received fabulous dividends, and got out again. Then, as a last flutter, returning to an old fancy, she did something really big in oil. And then, literally and metaphorically, she folded her hands.

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.