The Uttermost Farthing | Page 4

wordless atmosphere of devotion
which had become to her as vital, as necessary, as is that of domestic
peace and happiness to the average woman. But for Laurence
Vanderlyn and his "friendship," Mrs. Pargeter's existence would have
been lacking in all human savour, and that from ironic circumstance
rather than from any fault of her own.
* * * * *
Vanderlyn had spent the day in a fever of emotion and suspense, and he
had arrived at the Gare de Lyon a good hour before the time the train
for Orange was due to leave.
At first he had wandered about the great railway-station aimlessly,
avoiding the platform whence he knew he and his companion were to
start. Then, with relief, he had hailed the moment for securing coming
privacy in the unreserved railway carriage; this had not been quite an
easy matter to compass, for he desired to avoid above all any
appearance of secrecy.
But he need not have felt any anxiety, for whereas in an English
railway-station his large "tip" to the guard, carrying with it significant
promise of final largesse, would have spelt but one thing, and that thing
love, the French railway employé accepted without question the

information that the lady the foreign gentleman was expecting was his
sister. Such a statement to the English mind would have suggested the
hero of an innocent elopement, but as regards family relations the
French are curiously Eastern, and then it may be said again that the
American's stern, pre-occupied face and cold manner were not those
which to a Parisian could suggest a happy lover.
As he walked up and down with long, even strides, his arms laden with
papers and novels, it would have been difficult for anyone seeing him
there to suppose that Vanderlyn was starting on anything but a solitary
journey. Indeed, for the moment he felt horribly alone. He began to
experience the need of human companionship. She had said she would
be there at seven; it was now a quarter-past the hour. In ten minutes the
train would be gone----
Then came to him a thought which made him unconsciously clench his
hands. Was it not possible, nay, even likely, that Margaret Pargeter,
like many another woman before her, had found her courage fail her at
the last moment--that Heaven, stooping to her feeble virtue, had come
to save her in spite of herself?
Vanderlyn's steps unconsciously quickened. They bore him on and on,
to the extreme end of the platform. He stood there a moment staring out
into the red-starred darkness: how could he have ever thought that
Margaret Pargeter--his timid, scrupulous little Peggy--would embark on
so high and dangerous an adventure?
There had been a moment, during that springtime of passion which
returns no more, when Vanderlyn had for a wild instant hoped that he
would be able to take her away from the life in which he had felt her to
be playing the terrible rôle of an innocent and yet degraded victim.
Even to an old-fashioned American the word divorce does not carry
with it the odious significance it bears to the most careless
Englishwoman. He had envisaged a short scandal, and then his and
Peggy's marriage. But he had been compelled, almost at once, to
recognise that with her any such solution was impossible.

As to another alternative? True, there are women--he and Margaret
Pargeter had known many such--who regard what they call love as a
legitimate distraction; to them the ignoble, often sordid, shifts involved
in the pursuit of a secret intrigue are as the salt of life; but this solution
of their tragic problem would have been--or so Vanderlyn would have
sworn till four days ago--impossible to the woman he loved, and this
had added one more stone to the pedestal on which she had been placed
by him from the day they had first met.
And yet? Yet so inconsequent and so illogical is our poor human nature,
that she, the virtuous woman, had completely lacked the courage to
break with the man who loved her, even in those, the early friable days
of their passion. Nay more, whatever Peggy might believe, Vanderlyn
was well aware that the good, knowing all, would have called them
wicked, even if the wicked, equally well-informed, would have sneered
at them as absurdly good.
* * * * *
Vanderlyn wheeled abruptly round. He looked at the huge station clock,
and began walking quickly back, down the now peopled platform to the
ticket barrier. As he did so his eyes and mind, trained to note all that
was happening round him, together with an unconscious longing to
escape from the one absorbing thought, made him focus those of his
fellow-travellers who stood about him. They consisted for the most