AS he had expected, the Foreign Office beamed on him. It was immensely gratified that a man of his statesmanlike qualities should have differentiated so acutely between the values of the two spheres of his suggested activities. In bureaucratic satisfaction it rubbed its hands at a departmental score. Mr. Baltazar had only to name his terms and conditions. With the Foreign Office it was all plain sailing. Nay, more. If it could have prevailed with an ultra-conservative Admiralty, it would have sent him out to China in the newest, fastest and most mysterious battle-cruiser. But in Government circles outside the Foreign Office there was the devil to pay. Consternation also reigned in the office of The New Universe. For two or three weeks Baltazar had a grim time. The first announcement in an evening newspaper of his retirement from the projected Ministry smote the eyes of an incredulous and bewildered Marcelle. She caught him on the telephone.
“Is it true?”
“Yes. Quite true.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“I’ll come round this evening and explain.”
“No. I’ll come to you. I shan’t be alone here.”
“Come to dinner.”
“Miss Graham and I are just sitting down to ours. I’ll run round after.”
“All right. I’m free all the evening.”
Baltazar dined alone with Quong Ho, and talked cheerfully of matters far remote from the war. No reference was made to his retirement from English politics, about which Quong Ho knew everything, or to the Chinese Mission, of which Quong Ho as yet had no official knowledge. Apart from the expressed desire of the Foreign Office to keep the appointment from the press, it was characteristic of Baltazar to maintain silence, even to those dear to him, as to his especially meteoric doings. Besides, of the two, Marcelle must have the privilege of being the first to learn from his own lips.
She arrived about half-past eight, and he received her in the drawing-room. She wore a simple, semi-evening old black dress into which she had changed before her quiet dinner with her friend, a long pre-war confection, a favourite of Godfrey’s, moulding her, as he said, in soldierly daring, like Juno. Her thick brown hair crowned her gloriously. Rest had restored her to health, and in spite of the anxiety in her eyes, she appeared to Baltazar in the ripe fullness of her beauty. He strode to meet her, with his usual gesture of outstretched hands, strong, confident, admiring, smiling. Yet never did she appear more desirable, or more remote from his desires.
“What is the meaning of it—your resignation? I thought it was the one thing in life you were working for.”
“I find,” said he, “I can serve my country better in other ways.”
She put a hand to a puzzled forehead.
“How?”
He looked steadily into her eyes. What was the use of beating the air with idle words? She would have to know the truth sooner or later.
“By going to China.”
She stared at him open-mouthed.
“China?”
“Why not?”
He stood, his hands deep in his dinner-jacket pockets, balancing himself alternately on toes and heels, with the air of a conqueror.
“I know more about inner China, I suppose, than any man living. I go out with a free hand to pull two or three million people together and establish a wise government and exterminate the German. Hundreds of men can do my job in England. But those who can do it in China may be counted on the fingers of a mutilated hand.”
“It’s all so sudden.”
“I’m a sudden sort of fellow, as you ought to know,” he laughed.
“But you always said you hated the place—would rather die than go back.”
“In these days you’ve got to do things you hate—for the good of your country.”
She sat down, feeling stupefied by his news. She asked:
“How long will you be away?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Possibly years. Who knows?”
“And when do you start?”
“As soon as I can wind up here. Say in a fortnight’s time.” She shook her head and looked at the floor, making little hopeless gestures with her fingers. “You see, my dear,” said he, “except my own personal ambitions, which I have scrapped for the time, there’s nothing very much to keep me here. I’ve done my duty by Quong Ho. He’s on the road to fame at Cambridge. Godfrey’s settled in France till the end of the war. And you—well, my dear,” he smiled, “we won’t lose touch with each other for another twenty years.”
“No, of course not,” she said in a queer voice. “We’ll—we’ll write to each other.” She raised her eyes to his timidly. “Won’t you be rather lonely out there, without us?”
He turned swiftly aside so that she should not see his face. “Naturally I’ll miss you. Miss the three of you. I’m human. But, on the other hand, I’m used to being alone. I’m a solitary by temperament.” Then he flashed round on her. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ll have my hands too full to be lonely. I’ll have a real man’s job to get through.”
In his vehement way he sketched the kind of work that lay before him, went off into picturesque reminiscence, unfolded some of the plans he had already made for the conquest of those in power in disaffected districts. Anyone but Marcelle he would have convinced of the whole-hearted and enthusiastic anticipation of his mission. But a woman whom a man loves is apt to know him even better than the woman who loves him. A suspicion, vague but insistent, began to haunt her. Presently she gave words to it.
“Have Godfrey’s affairs anything to do with this sudden decision of yours?”
He assumed a puzzled look. “Godfrey’s affairs?”
“Yes. The Donnithorpe business.”
He laughed. “My dear, we’re dealing in high international politics. What on earth can a boy’s calf love have to do with it?”
“You’ve never told me what happened at Waterloo. Nor did Godfrey.”
“I simply pulled them apart. Sent Lady Edna home, and despatched Godfrey to France a day before his time. That’s all over.”
“But you met Mr. Donnithorpe. Quong Ho——”
“Oh yes, I met Donnithorpe. That’s what saved the situation. He expected to find Godfrey. Found me instead.” He grinned in the most disarming manner. “A comedy situation. And off he went defeated.” He took her hand, apparently in the gayest of moods. “It’s only a woman,” said he, “that could throw a bridge between Waterloo station and the interior of China.”
She let the question drop; but the suspicion remained, and every minute that passed, until the ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantelpiece gave her the signal for conventional retirement, converted it into certainty.
He walked with her as usual to the door of her block of flats. On parting she found tremulous utterance for the sense of utter forlornness which she had been trying all the evening to formulate:
“What’s to become of me when you’re gone?”
She fled upstairs, not waiting for the lift, and went straight to her room, with the words echoing in her ears. No. They did not at all convey her heart’s meaning. They sounded heartless, selfish. Yet they were true. What would become of her? For a year she had been enwrapped soul and mind and thought in the dynamic man. Dynamic, yet so tender, so chivalrous, so childlike. Without him existence was a blank full of shuddering fears. And then a coldness as of death fell upon her. Never once, on this night of the parting of the ways, had he hinted at his love for her. Had she, by her selfish folly, her now incomprehensible sex shrinkings, killed at last the love that once was hers for the taking? Slowly she undressed and crept into bed; but sleep mocked her. Agonizingly awake, she stared at her life. . . . And she stared too, almost in rhythmic alternation, at the life of John Baltazar. Nothing but some supreme emotional crisis could have caused this characteristic revolution, this sudden surrender of the prize of his ambition, this gorgeous acceptance of exile. For all his contemptuous dismissal of the suggestion, she knew, with a woman’s unerring logic, that Baltazar had bought Godfrey’s release from entanglement at the price of his own career. And never a hint of regret, never a murmur against fate. Never the faintest appeal to pity. . . . And she arraigned her own narrow nurse’s self, and condemned it mercilessly. And the lower she sank in her own esteem, the higher rose Baltazar until he loomed gigantic as a god above her puny mortality.
Her throat was dry. She got out of bed and drank a glass of water. On her way back across the room her glance fell on the little brass Yale latchkey, lying on her dressing-table, which he, in his big, careless way, had insisted on her having, so that she could gain entrance, as of right, to the house, whenever she chose. She took it up, gazing at it stupidly. The key to his home, the key to his heart, the key to his soul—all in her keeping. And she had despised it. Now she had lost it. The home would pass into alien hands. His heart was barred. For the first time, for a whole year, they had met without his uttering one little word, playful or wistful or tyrannic, to prove that his nature was open hungrily for her. To-night she had been but his dear friend. He had accepted her gift of friendship. She remembered the old French adage: L’amitié, c’est le tombeau de l’amour. She sat on the edge of the bed and mourned hopelessly the death of his love.
And the brass Yale latchkey lay mockingly within her range of vision.
Baltazar walked home, her last words echoing in his ears. His absence in China would naturally make a difference to her. She had become part of his household. Godfrey, to whom she had given a mother’s heart, was indefinitely in France and alienated from her ............