with the Right Honourable Willoughby Johns, the English Premier, Prince von Fürstenheim, German Ambassador, and Monsieur Vallauris, the newly appointed delegate of his country from the Quai d’Orsay.
“I tell you what it is,” the latter remarked, in an outburst half-cynical, half-humorous. “We ambassadors have cut our own throats. What I mean is this. There is no work to be done—no reason for our small army of secretaries and typists. Diplomacy will become a dead letter. Commerce! Commerce! Commerce! That is all our people, at any rate, think about. My visitors, my correspondents, all have to do with matters which concern our consular department.”
“Capital!” Willoughby Johns commented. “I always thought that the two establishments—diplomatic and commercial—should be joined up.”
“Nowadays,” Von Fürstenheim pronounced, “there is as much diplomacy in dealing with the commerce of our country as was ever required in the settlement of weightier affairs.”
“It is a new era upon which we enter,” the Marchese declared.
“I ask myself and you,” Vallauris propounded, “what is to be the reward which will be offered to this almost unknown person who first of all conceived the idea of the pact and then carried it through?”
“Perhaps I can answer that question,” Willoughby Johns observed, lighting a fresh cigarette. “It has been rather a trouble to all of us. What are you to do with a man who is himself a multimillionaire, who cannot accept a title because he is an American and whose sole desire seems to be to step back into obscurity? However, between us—the Marchese and myself—we have done all that is humanly possible. I, or rather my Cabinet, we have presented him with an island and the Marchese has given him a wife.”
“An island?” Vallauris repeated, a trifle bewildered.
Willoughby Johns nodded assent.
“The island,” he confided, “is the most beautiful one—although of course it is very small—ever owned by the British Government, and the Princess Elida di Rezco di Vasena, the niece of our friend here, is, I think, quite one of the most beautiful of his country-women I have ever seen.”
“An island,” the Frenchman, who like most of his compatriots was of a social turn of mind, repeated incredulously. “Fancy wanting to live on an island!”
The Marchese smiled. There was a strange look in his eyes, for he, too, had known romance.
“You have never met my niece, Monsieur Vallauris,” he observed.
EPILOGUE
Through the driving grey mists of the Channel, battling her way against the mountainous seas of the Bay of Biscay, emerging at last into the rolling waters of the Straits and the sunshine of Gibraltar, the famous yacht Espèrance seemed, in a sense, to be making one of those allegorical voyages of the Middle Ages, dimly revealed in ancient volumes of fable and verse. Something of the same spirit had, perhaps, already descended upon her two passengers—Martin Fawley and Elida—as they passed into the warm tranquillity of the Mediterranean. After the turmoil of the last few months, a sort of dreaming inertia seemed to have gathered them into her bosom. They were never tired of sitting in their favourite corner on deck, searching the changing sea by day and the starlit or cloud-bespattered sky by night, indulging in odd little bursts of spasmodic conversation, sometimes breaking a silence Elida, for her part declared, with the sole purpose of assuring herself that the whole affair was not a dream.
In the long daylight hours a new gaiety seemed to have come to her. She was restless with her happiness. She moved about the ship the very spirit of joy—light-footed, a miracle of grace and fantastic devotion to her very little more sedate lover. With the coming of night, however, her mood changed. She needed reassurance—Martin’s arm and lips, the deep obscurity of their retired resting place. There was excitement in the very throbbing of the engines. There were times when she felt herself shivering with the tremors of repressed passion. Martin surprised himself at the effortless facility with which, at such times, he played the part of lover and husband. With him, too, it seemed, after the hurricane of a stormy life, the opening of the great book of peace and romance…
It was seldom that they spoke of the immediate past. Both seemed equally convinced that it belonged to two utterly different people who would some day slowly awaken into life, rubbing their eyes. Patches of those colourful days, however, would sometimes present themselves. One morning Elida discovered her husband with a powerful telescope, watching the distant land. She paused by his side—a silent questioner.
“Somewhere amongst that nest of mountains,” he pointed out, with a grim smile of reminiscence, “is a French Colonel—a fine little chap and I should think a thorough soldier—the desire of whose life it was to see me with a bandage over my eyes, against his whitewashed barrack walls, facing a squad of his picked rifle shots! Nearly came off, too!”
She shivered and half closed her eyes. He understood that she was shutting out Europe from the field of her vision. He closed the telescope with a little snap.
“We both had our escapes,” he remarked. “Berati was out for your blood once…It is my watch,” he added, listening to the bell. “Come with me on the bridge for an hour.”
She passed her arm through his and they mounted the steps together. The third officer made his report, saluted and withdrew. For several minutes afterwards no words passed. Fawley, leaning a little forward over the canvas-screened rail, scanned the horizon with seaman’s vision. At such times a sort of graven calm came to his features, a new intensity to his keenly searching eyes. The blood of his seafaring ancestors revealed itself. Deliberately, it seemed as though of natural habit, he examined with meticulous care every yard of the grey tossing waters. Only when he felt himself master of the situation did his features relax. He smiled down at Elida, drew her hand through his arm and commenced their nightly promenade.
Silence on the bridge. Sometimes he wondered whether they were not both grateful for that stern commandment of the sea. At ordinary times they were overwhelmed with the happiness which was always seeking to express itself. The silences of night were wonderful. The forced silences of the day were like an aching relief. A few paragraphs in a modern novel which she had passed to him with a smile contained sentences which struck home to them both.
* * * * *
The self-consciousness of the lover has increased enormously since the decay of Victorian sentimentalism. Allegorically speaking, it is only amongst the brainless and the lower orders of to-day that the man walks unashamed with his arm around his sweetheart’s waist, and both scorn to wait till the darkness for the mingling of lips. The affection of Edwin and Angelina of the modern world may be of the same order as that which inspired their great-grandmother and great-grandfather, but they seem to have lost the idea of how to set about it. In town this seems to be a fair idea of what goes on. Edwin and Angelina find themselves by accident alone.
“What about a spot of love-making, old dear?” Edwin suggested apprehensively.
“All right, old bean, but for heaven’s sake don’t let’s moon about alone! We’ll ring up Morris’ Bar and see if any of the crowd are over there.”
Or if the amorous couple happen to be in the country, the reply to the same question is a feverish suggestion that they try if the old bus will do over sixty, or rival bags of golf clubs are produced, or Edwin is invited to search for his gun and come along and see if there’s an odd rabbit sitting outside the woods…
* * * * *
Fawley closed
