Description
At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But we live in a very small island, and its inhabitants have for so long been wanderers upon the face of the earth that one can hardly search amongst them for the beginnings of either people or events without slipping unexpectedly over the edge of England. So it is in this instance. For, although it was in England that Captain Rames, Mr. Benoliel, Cynthia, the little naturalized Frenchman, and the rest of them met and struggled more or less inefficiently to express themselves; although, too, Ludsey, the old city, was during a period the pivot of their lives; for the beginnings of their relationship one with another, it is necessary to go further afield, and back by some few years. One must turn toward a lonely estancia in the south-west of Argentina, where, on a hot, still night of summer, a heavy chandelier touched by no human hand swung gently to and fro. This queer thing happened in the dining-room of the house, and between half-past ten and eleven o'clock. It was half-way through January, and Mr. and Mrs. Daventry were still seated at the table over a late supper. For Robert Daventry had on that day begun the harvesting of his eight leagues of wheat, and there had been little rest for any one upon the estancia since daybreak. He sat now taking his ease opposite his wife, with a cup of black coffee in front of him and a cigar between his lips, a big, broad, sunburnt man with a beard growing gray and a thick crop of brown hair upon his head; loose-limbed still, and still getting, when he stood up, the value of every inch of his six feet two. As he lounged at the table he debated with his wife in a curious gentle voice a question which, played with once, had begun of late years to insist upon an answer. "We are both over fifty, Joan," he said. "And we have made our money." "We have also made our friends, Robert," replied his wife. She was a short, stoutish woman, quick with her hands, practical in her speech. Capacity was written broad upon her like a label, and, for all her husband's bulk, she was the better man of the two, even at the first casual glance. There was a noticeable suggestion of softness and amiability in Robert Daventry. It was hardly, perhaps, to be localized in any feature. Rather he diffused it about him like an atmosphere. One would have wondered how it came about that in a country so stern as Argentina he had prospered so exceedingly had his wife not been present to explain his prosperity. It was so evident that she drove the cart and that he ran between the shafts--evident, that is, to others than Robert Daventry. She had been clever enough and fond enough to conceal from him their exact relationship. So now it was with an air of pleading that she replied to him:
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