The Uttermost Farthing

Uttermost Farthing, by Marie
Belloc Lowndes

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Title: The Uttermost Farthing
Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes
Release Date: July 28, 2006 [EBook #18927]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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UTTERMOST FARTHING ***

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THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
BY MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES

1910

COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS COPYRIGHT EDITION
VOL. 4174. LEIPZIG: BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ. PARIS:
LIBRAIRIE H. GAULON & CIE, 39, RUE MADAME. PARIS: THE
GALIGNANI LIBRARY, 224, RUE DE RIVOLI, AND AT NICE, 8,
AVENUE MASSÉNA.

"Thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the
uttermost farthing."

I.
Laurence Vanderlyn, unpaid attaché at the American Embassy in Paris,
strode down the long grey platform marked No. 5, of the Gare de Lyon.
It was seven o'clock, the hour at which Paris is dining or is about to
dine, and the huge station was almost deserted.
The train de luxe had gone more than an hour ago, the Riviera rapide
would not start till ten, but one of those trains bound for the South,
curiously named demi-rapides, was timed to leave in twenty minutes.
Foreigners, especially Englishmen and Americans, avoid these trains,
and this was why Laurence Vanderlyn had chosen it as the starting
point of what was to be a great adventure, an adventure which must for
ever be concealed, obliterated as much as may be from his own
memory--do not men babble in delirium?--once life had again become
the rather grey thing he had found it to be.
In the domain of the emotions it is the unexpected which generally
happens, and now it was not only the unexpected but the incredible
which had happened to this American diplomatist. He and Margaret
Pargeter, the Englishwoman whom he had loved with an absorbing,
unsatisfied passion, and an ever-increasing concentration and selfless

devotion, for seven years, were about to do that which each had sworn,
together and separately, should never come to pass,--that is, they were
about to snatch from Fate a few days of such free happiness and
communion as during their long years of intimacy they had never
enjoyed. In order to secure these fleeting moments of joy, she, the
woman in the case, was about to run the greatest risk which can in these
days be incurred by civilised woman.
Margaret Pargeter was not free as Vanderlyn was free; she was a
wife,--not a happy wife, but one on whose reputation no shadow had
ever rested,--and further, she was the mother of a child, a son, whom
she loved with an anxious tenderness.... It was these two facts which
made what she was going to do a matter of such moment not only to
herself, but to the man to whom she was now about to commit her
honour.
Striding up and down the platform to which he had bought early access
by one of those large fees for which the travelling American of a
certain type is famed, Vanderlyn, with his long lean figure, and stern
pre-occupied face, did not suggest, to the French eyes idly watching
him, a lover,--still less the happy third in one of those conjugal
comedies which play so much greater a part in French literature and in
French drama than they do in French life. He had thrust far back into
his heart the leaping knowledge of what was about to befall him, and he
was bending the whole strength of his mind to avert any possible
danger of ignoble catastrophe to the woman whom he was awaiting,
and whose sudden surrender was becoming more, instead of less,
amazing as the long minutes dragged by.
Vanderlyn's mind went back to the moment, four short days ago, when
this journey had been suddenly arranged. Mrs. Pargeter had just come
back from England, where she had gone to pay some family visits and
to see her little son, who was at a preparatory school; and the American
diplomatist, as was so often his wont, had come to escort her to one of
those picture club shows in which Parisian society delights.
Then, after a quarter of an hour spent by them at the exhibition, the two
friends had slipped away, and had done a thing which was perhaps

imprudent. But each longed, with an unspoken eager craving, to be
alone with the other; the beauty of Paris in springtime tempted them,
and it was the woman