The Gap in the Curtain

had won something which could never be taken away … This man of prose and affairs became a mystic. One side of him went about his daily round, and waited hungrily for telephone calls, but the other was in a quiet country where Pamela's happy spirit moved in eternal vigour and youth. He had no hope in the lesser sense, for that is a mundane thing; but he had won peace, the kind that the world does not give …

Hope, the lesser hope, was to follow. There came a day when the news from South Audley Street improved, and then there was a quick uprush of vitality in the patient. One morning early in May Mollie telephoned to me that Pamela was out of danger. I went straightway to the City and found Charles in his office, busy as if nothing had happened.

I remember that he seemed to me almost indecently composed. But when he spoke he no longer kept his eyes down, but looked me straight in the face, and there was something in those eyes of his which made me want to shout. It was more than peace—it was a radiant serenity. Charles had come out of the Valley of the Shadow to the Delectable Mountains.

Nothing in Heaven or earth could harm him now. I had the conviction that if he had been a poet he could have written something that would have solemnised mankind. As it was, he only squeezed my hand.

7

Chapter

I went down to Wirlesdon for the wedding, which was to be in the village church. Charles had gone for an early morning swim in the lake, and I met him coming up with his hair damp and a towel over his shoulder. I had motored from London and had The Times in my hand, but he never glanced at it. Half an hour later I saw him at breakfast, but he had not raided the pile of newspapers on the side-table.

It was a gorgeous June morning, and presently I found Pamela in the garden, busy among the midsummer flowers—a taller and paler Pamela, with the wonderful pure complexion of one who has been down into the shades.

'It's all there,' she whispered to me, so that her sister Dollie should not hear. 'Exactly as he saw it … We shall have a lot of questions to answer today … I showed it to Charles, but he scarcely glanced at it. It doesn't interest him. I believe he has forgotten all about it.'

'A queer business, wasn't it?' Charles told me in the autumn. 'Oh yes, it was all explained. There was an old boy of my name, a sort of third cousin of my great-grandfather. I had never heard of him. He had been in the Scots Guards, and had retired as a captain about fifty years ago.

Well, he died in a London hotel on June ninth. He was a bachelor, and had no near relations, so his servant sent the notice of his death to The Times. The man's handwriting was not very clear, and the newspaper people read the age as thirty-six instead of eighty-six … Also, the old chap always spoke of his regiment as the Scots Fusilier Guards, and the servant, not being well up in military history, confused it with the Scots Fusiliers … He lived in a villa at Cheltenham, which he had christened Marlcote, after the family place.'