The Turnstile.
by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason.
CHAPTER I
THE SWINGING OF A CHANDELIER
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:
"We have not only made our friends, Robert. We have made them here. If we go, we lose them."
"Yes," he answered. "But it wouldn"t be as if we had to start quite fresh again. I have old ties with Warwickshire. Thirty years won"t have broken them all."
Joan Daventry answered slowly:
"Thirty years. That"s a long time, Robert."
"And yet," said Robert Daventry with a wistfulness in his voice which almost weakened her into a consent against which her judgment no less than her inclinations fought. "And yet there"s a house on the London road which I might have pa.s.sed yesterday--it"s so vivid to me now. A white house set back from the highway behind a great wall of old red brick. Above the coping of the wall you can see the rows of level windows and the roof of a wing a story lower than the rest of the house. And if the gates are open you catch a glimpse of great cedar trees on a wide lawn--a lawn of fine gra.s.s like emeralds."
His eyes turned back upon his boyhood, and the thought of his county set his heart aching. Long white roads, rising and dipping between high elms, with a yard or two of turf on either side for a horse to canter on; cottages, real cottages, not shapeless buildings of corrugated iron standing gauntly up against the sky-line at the edge of a round of burnt, bare plain, but cottages rich with phlox and deep in trees--the pictures were flung before his eyes by the lantern of his memories as if upon a white sheet. But, above all, it was the thought of the greenery of Warwickshire which caught at his throat; the woods flecked with sunlight, the lawns like emeralds.
He glanced at a thermometer which hung against the wall. Here, even at eleven o"clock of the night, it marked this January ninety-seven degrees of heat. The mosquitoes trumpeted and drummed against the gauze curtains which covered the open windows; and outside the windows the night was black and hot like velvet.
Robert Daventry drew his handkerchief across his forehead and with his elbow on the table leaned his face upon his hand. His wife looked at him quickly and with solicitude.
"You are tired to-night, Robert," she said gently. "That"s why you want to give the estancia up."
Robert Daventry shook his head and corrected her.
"No, Joan. But I am more tired to-night and very likely that"s the explanation." Then he laughed at a recollection. "Do you remember when the squadron came to Montevideo two years ago? There was a dinner at the legation at Buenos Ayres. I sat next to the commodore, and he asked me how old I was. When I told him that I was just fifty, he replied: "Ah, now you will begin to find life very interesting. For you will notice every year that you are able to do a little less than you did the year before." Well, I am beginning, my dear, to find life interesting from the commodore"s point of view."
Joan did not answer him at once, and the couple sat for awhile in silence, with their thoughts estranged.
For Joan Daventry shrank, with all her soul, from that coveted white house on the London road. Old ties could be resumed, was Robert"s thought. He was forgetful that the ties were his, and his alone. She had no share in them and she had come to a time of life when the making of new friends is a weariness and a labor. With infinite toil and self-denial they had carved out their niche here in the Argentine Republic. They spent the winter in their house in Buenos Ayres, the summer upon the Daventry estancia. Their life was an ordered, comfortable progression of the months. For both of them, to her thinking, the time for new adventures had long gone by. They had had their full proportion of them in their youth. And so while Robert Daventry dreamed of a green future Joan was busily remembering.
"When we first came here to settle," she said slowly, as she counted up all that had been done in these twenty-seven years, "we drove for two days. If the house on the London road is vivid to you, that drive is as clear to me. Our heaviest luggage was our hopes;" and Robert Daventry smiled across the table.
"I have not forgotten that either," he said; and there was a whole world of love in his voice.
"When we reached here we found a tin house with three rooms and nothing else, not a tree, hardly a track. Now there"s an avenue half a mile long, there are plantations, there"s a real brick house for the plantations to shelter. There are wells, there"s a garden, there"s a village at the end of the avenue, there"s even a railway station to-day. These things are our doing, Robert;" and her voice was lifted up with pride.
"I know," replied her husband. "But I ask myself whether the time has not come to hand them on."
Once more the look of solicitude shone in his wife"s eyes.
"I could leave the estancia," she said doubtfully, "though it would almost break my heart to do it. But suppose we did. What would become of you in England? I have a fear," and she leaned forward across the table.
"Why a fear?" he asked.
"Because I think that people who have lived hard, like you and me, run a great risk if they retire just when they feel that they are beginning to grow old. A real risk of life, I mean. I think such as you and I would be killed off by inactivity rather than by any disease."
She did not deny that something was wrong in their present situation.
But she had a different conception of what that something was; and she had a different remedy.
"We should find life too dull?" he exclaimed. "Too lonely, Joan?" and he struck the table with his hand; "I find it lonely here;" and at that she uttered a low cry:
"Oh, my dear, and what of me?" and the wistfulness of her voice struck him to silence, a remorseful silence. After all, his days were full.
"There"s our other plan," she suggested gently.
"Yes. To be sure! There"s our other plan," he said. He leaned back in his chair, his face upturned toward the ceiling, and a thoughtful look in his eyes.
"We have talked it over, haven"t we? But we have played with it all the time. It would be so big an experiment."
He ended the sentence abruptly. The look of thought pa.s.sed from his face. It became curious, perplexed. Then he cried with a start of dismay:
"You see, Joan, even my eyes are beginning to play tricks with me. I could swear that the chandelier is swinging to and fro above our heads."
Joan looked anxiously at her husband, and then up toward the ceiling.
At once surprise drove the anxiety from her face and thoughts.
"But it _is_ swinging," she exclaimed. Both of them stared at the chandelier. There was not a doubt about the phenomenon possible. Not a breath of wind stirred in the garden, not a sound was audible overhead. Yet very gently the chandelier, with its lighted globes, oscillated above their heads. Robert Daventry rose to his feet and touched it.
"Yes, it is swinging," he said. He stopped it, and held it quite still. Then he resumed his seat.
"Very well, Joan," he said with a new briskness in his voice, "we will make the experiment. Come! When we go to Buenos Ayres in the winter!
We will try the other plan. Even if it fails it will be worth making."
Joan"s face lighted up.
"If it fails, then we"ll go home," she said.
No doubt the relief which Robert Daventry felt in the proof that his eyes were not failing him led him thus briskly to fall in with the scheme which both approached with timidity; and so the swinging of the chandelier had its share in bringing them to their decision. But the chandelier had not done with them. For hardly had Robert Daventry ceased to speak when it began again to swing backward and forward before their eyes. So it swung for exactly five minutes and then of its own accord it stopped.
"That"s very strange," said Robert Daventry. He looked at the clock upon the mantel-shelf. It was five minutes past eleven.
"It"s unaccountable," he continued. But he was able to account for it the next day. For a local paper brought to them the news that at ten minutes to eleven o"clock on the evening before, seven hundred miles away on the other side of the great barrier of the Andes, an earthquake had set the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific heaving like a sea, and Valparaiso, that city of earthquakes, had tumbled into ruins.