Within the Tides: Tales

CHAPTER I

In the private editorial office of the principal newspaper in a great

colonial city two men were talking. They were both young. The stouter

of the two, fair, and with more of an urban look about him, was the

editor and part-owner of the important newspaper.

The other’s name was Renouard. That he was exercised in his mind about

something was evident on his fine bronzed face. He was a lean, lounging,

active man. The journalist continued the conversation.

“And so you were dining yesterday at old Dunster’s.”

He used the word old not in the endearing sense in which it is sometimes

applied to intimates, but as a matter of sober fact. The Dunster in

question was old. He had been an eminent colonial statesman, but had now

retired from active politics after a tour in Europe and a lengthy stay in

England, during which he had had a very good press indeed. The colony

was proud of him.

“Yes. I dined there,” said Renouard. “Young Dunster asked me just as I

was going out of his office. It seemed to be like a sudden thought. And

yet I can’t help suspecting some purpose behind it. He was very

pressing. He swore that his uncle would be very pleased to see me. Said

his uncle had mentioned lately that the granting to me of the Malata

concession was the last act of his official life.”

“Very touching. The old boy sentimentalises over the past now and then.”

“I really don’t know why I accepted,” continued the other. “Sentiment

does not move me very easily. Old Dunster was civil to me of course, but

he did not even inquire how I was getting on with my silk plants. Forgot

there was such a thing probably. I must say there were more people there

than I expected to meet. Quite a big party.”

“I was asked,” remarked the newspaper man. “Only I couldn’t go. But

when did you arrive from Malata?”

“I arrived yesterday at daylight. I am anchored out there in the bay—off

Garden Point. I was in Dunster’s office before he had finished reading

his letters. Have you ever seen young Dunster reading his letters? I

had a glimpse of him through the open door. He holds the paper in both

hands, hunches his shoulders up to his ugly ears, and brings his long

nose and his thick lips on to it like a sucking apparatus. A commercial

monster.”

“Here we don’t consider him a monster,” said the newspaper man looking at

his visitor thoughtfully.

“Probably not. You are used to see his face and to see other faces. I

don’t know how it is that, when I come to town, the appearance of the

people in the street strike me with such force. They seem so awfully

expressive.”

“And not charming.”

“Well—no. Not as a rule. The effect is forcible without being clear. . . .

I know that you think it’s because of my solitary manner of life away

there.”

“Yes. I do think so. It is demoralising. You don’t see any one for

months at a stretch. You’re leading an unhealthy life.”

The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it

was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.

“You see,” insisted the other. “Solitude works like a sort of poison.

And then you perceive suggestions in faces—mysterious and forcible, that

no sound man would be bothered with. Of course you do.”

Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the suggestions

of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as much as the

others. He detected a degrading quality in the touches of age which

every day adds to a human countenance. They moved and disturbed him,

like the signs of a horrible inward travail which was frightfully

apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his isolation in Malata,

where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and

exploration.

“It’s a fact,” he said, “that when I am at home in Malata I see no one

consciously. I take the plantation boys for granted.”

“Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted. And

that’s sanity.”

The visitor said nothing to this for fear of engaging a discussion. What

he had come to seek in the editorial office was not controversy, but

information. Yet somehow he hesitated to approach the subject. Solitary

life makes a man reticent in respect of anything in the nature of gossip,

which those to whom chatting about their kind is an everyday exercise

regard as the commonest use of speech.

“You very busy?” he asked.

The Editor making red marks on a long slip of printed paper threw the

pencil down.

“No. I am done. Social paragraphs. This office is the place where

everything is known about everybody—including even a great deal of

nobodies. Queer fellows drift in and out of this room. Waifs and strays

from home, from up-country, from the Pacific. And, by the way, last time

you were here you picked up one of that sort for your assistant—didn’t

you?”

“I engaged an assistant only to stop your preaching about the evils of

solitude,” said Renouard hastily; and the pressman laughed at the

half-resentful tone. His laugh was not very loud, but his plump person

shook all over. He was aware that his younger friend’s deference to his

advice was based only on an imperfect belief in his wisdom—or his

sagacity. But it was he who had first helped Renouard in his plans of

exploration: the five-years’ programme of scientific adventure, of work,

of danger and endurance, carried out with such distinction and rewarded

modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial

government. And this reward, too, had been due to the journalist’s

advocacy with word and pen—for he was an influential man in the

community. Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was

himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he

could not quite make out. He only felt it obscurely to be his real

personality—the true—and, perhaps, the absurd. As, for instance, in that

case of the assistant. Renouard had given way to the arguments of his

friend and backer—the argument against the unwholesome effect of

solitude, the argument for the safety of companionship even if

quarrelsome. Very well. In this docility he was sensible and even

likeable. But what did he do next? Instead of taking counsel as to the

choice with his old backer and friend, and a man, besides, knowing

everybody employed and unemployed on the pavements of the town, this

extraordinary Renouard suddenly and almost surreptitiously picked up a

fellow—God knows who—and sailed away with him back to Malata in a hurry;

a proceeding obviously rash and at the same time not quite straight.

That was the sort of thing. The secretly unforgiving journalist laughed

a little longer and then ceased to shake all over.

“Oh, yes. About that assistant of yours. . . .”

“What about him,” said Renouard, after waiting a while, with a shadow of

uneasiness on his face.

“Have you nothing to tell me of him?”

“Nothing except. . . .” Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard’s

aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously

before he changed his mind. “No. Nothing whatever.”

“You haven’t brought him along with you by chance—for a change.”

The Planter of Malata stared, then shook his head, and finally murmured

carelessly: “I think he’s very well where he is. But I wish you could

tell me why young Dunster insisted so much on my dining with his uncle

last night. Everybody knows I am not a society man.”

The Editor exclaimed at so much modesty. Didn’t his friend know that he

was their one and only explorer—that he was the man experimenting with

the silk plant. . . .

“Still, that doesn’t tell me why I was invited yesterday. For young

Dunster never thought of this civility before. . . .”

“Our Willie,” said the popular journalist, “never does anything without a

purpose, that’s a fact.”

“And to his uncle’s house too!”

“He lives there.”

“Yes. But he might have given me a feed somewhere else. The

extraordinary part is that the old man did not seem to have anything

special to say. He smiled kindly on me once or twice, and that was all.

It was quite a party, sixteen people.”

The Editor then, after expressing his regret that he had not been able to

come, wanted to know if the party had been entertaining.

Renouard regretted that his friend had not been there. Being a man whose

business or at least whose profession was to know everything that went on

in this part of the globe, he could probably have told him something of

some people lately arrived from home, who were amongst the guests. Young

Dunster (Willie), with his large shirt-front and streaks of white skin

shining unpleasantly through the thin black hair plastered over the top

of his head, bore down on him and introduced him to that party, as if he

had been a trained dog or a child phenomenon. Decidedly, he said, he

disliked Willie—one of these large oppressive men. . . .

A silence fell, and it was as if Renouard were not going to say anything

more when, suddenly, he came out with the real object of his visit to the

editorial room.

“They looked to me like people under a spell.”

The Editor gazed at him appreciatively, thinking that, whether the effect

of solitude or not, this was a proof of a sensitive perception of the

expression of faces.

“You omitted to tell me their name, but I can make a guess. You mean

Professor Moorsom, his daughter and sister—don’t you?”

Renouard assented. Yes, a white-haired lady. But from his silence, with

his eyes fixed, yet avoiding his friend, it was easy to guess that it was

not in the white-haired lady that he was interested.

“Upon my word,” he said, recovering his usual bearing. “It looks to me

as if I had been asked there only for the daughter to talk to me.”

He did not conceal that he had been greatly struck by her appearance.

Nobody could have helped being impressed. She was different from

everybody else in that house, and it was not only the effect of her

London clothes. He did not take her down to dinner. Willie did that.

It was afterwards, on the terrace. . . .

The evening was delightfully calm. He was sitting apart and alone, and

wishing himself somewhere else—on board the schooner for choice, with the

dinner-harness off. He hadn’t exchanged forty words altogether during

the evening with the other guests. He saw her suddenly all by herself

coming towards him along the dimly lighted terrace, quite from a

distance.

She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head of a

character which to him appeared peculiar, something—well—pagan, crowned

with a great wealth of hair. He had been about to rise, but her decided

approach caused him to remain on the seat. He had not looked much at her

that evening. He had not that freedom of gaze acquired by the habit of

society and the frequent meetings with strangers. It was not shyness,

but the reserve of a man not used to the world and to the practice of

covert staring, with careless curiosity. All he had captured by his

first, keen, instantly lowered, glance was the impression that her hair

was magnificently red and her eyes very black. It was a troubling

effect, but it had been evanescent; he had forgotten it almost till very

unexpectedly he saw her coming down the terrace slow and eager, as if she

were restraining herself, and with a rhythmic upward undulation of her

whole figure. The light from an open window fell across her path, and

suddenly all that mass of arranged hair appeared incandescent, chiselled

and fluid, with the daring suggestion of a helmet of burnished copper and

the flowing lines of molten metal. It kindled in him an astonished

admiration. But he said nothing of it to his friend the Editor. Neither

did he tell him that her approach woke up in his brain the image of

love’s infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives

in beauty. No! What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but

mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words.

“That young lady came and sat down by me. She said: ‘Are you French, Mr.

Renouard?’”

He had breathed a whiff of perfume of which he said nothing either—of

some perfume he did not know. Her voice was low and distinct. Her

shoulders and her bare arms gleamed with an extraordinary splendour, and

when she advanced her head into the light he saw the admirable contour of

the face, the straight fine nose with delicate nostrils, the exquisite

crimson brushstroke of the lips on this oval without colour. The

expression of the eyes was lost in a shadowy mysterious play of jet and

silver, stirring under the red coppery gold of the hair as though she had

been a being made of ivory and precious metals changed into living

tissue.

“. . . I told her my people were living in Canada, but that I was brought

up in England before coming out here. I can’t imagine what interest she

could have in my history.”

“And you complain of her interest?”

The accent of the all-knowing journalist seemed to jar on the Planter of

Malata.

“No!” he said, in a deadened voice that was almost sullen. But after a

short silence he went on. “Very extraordinary. I told her I came out to

wander at large in the world when I was nineteen, almost directly after I

left school. It seems that her late brother was in the same school a

couple of years before me. She wanted me to tell her what I did at first

when I came out here; what other men found to do when they came out—where

they went, what was likely to happen to them—as if I could guess and

foretell from my experience the fates of men who come out here with a

hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons—for no

reason but restlessness—who come, and go, and disappear! Preposterous.

She seemed to want to hear their histories. I told her that most of them

were not worth telling.”

The distinguished journalist leaning on his elbow, his head resting

against the knuckles of his left hand, listened with great attention, but

gave no sign of that surprise which Renouard, pausing, seemed to expect.

“You know something,” the latter said brusquely. The all-knowing man

moved his head slightly and said, “Yes. But go on.”

“It’s just this. There is no more to it. I found myself talking to her

of my adventures, of my early days. It couldn’t possibly have interested

her. Really,” he cried, “this is most extraordinary. Those people have

something on their minds. We sat in the light of the window, and her

father prowled about the terrace, with his hands behind his back and his

head drooping. The white-haired lady came to the dining-room window

twice—to look at us I am certain. The other guests began to go away—and

still we sat there. Apparently these people are staying with the

Dunsters. It was old Mrs. Dunster who put an end to the thing. The

father and the aunt circled about as if they were afraid of interfering

with the girl. Then she got up all at once, gave me her hand, and said

she hoped she would see me again.”

While he was speaking Renouard saw again the sway of her figure in a

movement of grace and strength—felt the pressure of her hand—heard the

last accents of the deep murmur that came from her throat so white in the

light of the window, and remembered the black rays of her steady eyes

passing off his face when she turned away. He remembered all this

visually, and it was not exactly pleasurable. It was rather startling

like the discovery of a new faculty in himself. There are faculties one

would rather do without—such, for instance, as seeing through a stone

wall or remembering a person with this uncanny vividness. And what about

those two people belonging to her with their air of expectant solicitude!

Really, those figures from home got in front of one. In fact, their

persistence in getting between him and the solid forms of the everyday

material world had driven Renouard to call on his friend at the office.

He hoped that a little common, gossipy information would lay the ghost of

that unexpected dinner-party. Of course the proper person to go to would

have been young Dunster, but, he couldn’t stand Willie Dunster—not at any

price.

In the pause the Editor had changed his attitude, faced his desk, and

smiled a faint knowing smile.

“Striking girl—eh?” he said.

The incongruity of the word was enough to make one jump out of the chair.

Striking! That girl striking! Stri . . .! But Renouard restrained his

feelings. His friend was not a person to give oneself away to. And,

after all, this sort of speech was what he had come there to hear. As,

however, he had made a movement he re-settled himself comfortably and

said, with very creditable indifference, that yes—she was, rather.

Especially amongst a lot of over-dressed frumps. There wasn’t one woman

under forty there.

“Is that the way to speak of the cream of our society; the ‘top of the

basket,’ as the French say,” the Editor remonstrated with mock

indignation. “You aren’t moderate in your expressions—you know.”

“I express myself very little,” interjected Renouard seriously.

“I will tell you what you are. You are a fellow that doesn’t count the

cost. Of course you are safe with me, but will you never learn. . . .”

“What struck me most,” interrupted the other, “is that she should pick me

out for such a long conversation.”

“That’s perhaps because you were the most remarkable of the men there.”

Renouard shook his head.

“This shot doesn’t seem to me to hit the mark,” he said calmly. “Try

again.”

“Don’t you believe me? Oh, you modest creature. Well, let me assure you

that under ordinary circumstances it would have been a good shot. You

are sufficiently remarkable. But you seem a pretty acute customer too.

The circumstances are extraordinary. By Jove they are!”

He mused. After a time the Planter of Malata dropped a negligent—

“And you know them.”

“And I know them,” assented the all-knowing Editor, soberly, as though

the occasion were too special for a display of professional vanity; a

vanity so well known to Renouard that its absence augmented his wonder

and almost made him uneasy as if portending bad news of some sort.

“You have met those people?” he asked.

“No. I was to have met them last night, but I had to send an apology to

Willie in the morning. It was then that he had the bright idea to invite

you to fill the place, from a muddled notion that you could be of use.

Willie is stupid sometimes. For it is clear that you are the last man

able to help.”

“How on earth do I come to be mixed up in this—whatever it is?”

Renouard’s voice was slightly altered by nervous irritation. “I only

arrived here yesterday morning.”

CHAPTER II

His friend the Editor turned to him squarely. “Willie took me into

consultation, and since he seems to have let you in I may just as well

tell you what is up. I shall try to be as short as I can. But in

confidence—mind!”

He waited. Renouard, his uneasiness growing on him unreasonably,

assented by a nod, and the other lost no time in beginning. Professor

Moorsom—physicist and philosopher—fine head of white hair, to judge from

the photographs—plenty of brains in the head too—all these famous

books—surely even Renouard would know. . . .

Renouard muttered moodily that it wasn’t his sort of reading, and his

friend hastened to assure him earnestly that neither was it his

sort—except as a matter of business and duty, for the literary page of

that newspaper which was his property (and the pride of his life). The

only literary newspaper in the Antipodes could not ignore the fashionable

philosopher of the age. Not that anybody read Moorsom at the Antipodes,

but everybody had heard of him—women, children, dock labourers, cabmen.

The only person (besides himself) who had read Moorsom, as far as he

knew, was old Dunster, who used to call himself a Moorsomian (or was it

Moorsomite) years and years ago, long before Moorsom had worked himself

up into the great swell he was now, in every way. . . Socially too.

Quite the fashion in the highest world.

Renouard listened with profoundly concealed attention. “A charlatan,” he

muttered languidly.

“Well—no. I should say not. I shouldn’t wonder though if most of his

writing had been done with his tongue in his cheek. Of course. That’s

to be expected. I tell you what: the only really honest writing is to be

found in newspapers and nowhere else—and don’t you forget it.”

The Editor paused with a basilisk stare till Renouard had conceded a

casual: “I dare say,” and only then went on to explain that old Dunster,

during his European tour, had been made rather a lion of in London, where

he stayed with the Moorsoms—he meant the father and the girl. The

professor had been a widower for a long time.

“She doesn’t look just a girl,” muttered Renouard. The other agreed.

Very likely not. Had been playing the London hostess to tip-top people

ever since she put her hair up, probably.

“I don’t expect to see any girlish bloom on her when I do have the

privilege,” he continued. “Those people are staying with the Dunster’s

_incog._, in a manner, you understand—something like royalties. They

don’t deceive anybody, but they want to be left to themselves. We have

even kept them out of the paper—to oblige old Dunster. But we shall put

your arrival in—our local celebrity.”

“Heavens!”

“Yes. Mr. G. Renouard, the explorer, whose indomitable energy, etc., and

who is now working for the prosperity of our country in another way on

his Malata plantation . . . And, by the by, how’s the silk

plant—flourishing?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring any fibre?”

“Schooner-full.”

“I see. To be transhipped to Liverpool for experimental manufacture, eh?

Eminent capitalists at home very much interested, aren’t they?”

“They are.”

A silence fell. Then the Editor uttered slowly—“You will be a rich man

some day.”

Renouard’s face did not betray his opinion of that confident prophecy.

He didn’t say anything till his friend suggested in the same meditative

voice—

“You ought to interest Moorsom in the affair too—since Willie has let you

in.”

“A philosopher!”

“I suppose he isn’t above making a bit of money. And he may be clever at

it for all you know. I have a notion that he’s a fairly practical old

cove. . . . Anyhow,” and here the tone of the speaker took on a tinge of

respect, “he has made philosophy pay.”

Renouard raised his eyes, repressed an impulse to jump up, and got out of

the arm-chair slowly. “It isn’t perhaps a bad idea,” he said. “I’ll

have to call there in any case.”

He wondered whether he had managed to keep his voice steady, its tone

unconcerned enough; for his emotion was strong though it had nothing to

do with the business aspect of this suggestion. He moved in the room in

vague preparation for departure, when he heard a soft laugh. He spun

about quickly with a frown, but the Editor was not laughing at him. He

was chuckling across the big desk at the wall: a preliminary of some

speech for which Renouard, recalled to himself, waited silent and

mistrustful.

“No! You would never guess! No one would ever guess what these people

are after. Willie’s eyes bulged out when he came to me with the tale.”

“They always do,” remarked Renouard with disgust. “He’s stupid.”

“He was startled. And so was I after he told me. It’s a search party.

They are out looking for a man. Willie’s soft heart’s enlisted in the

cause.”

Renouard repeated: “Looking for a man.”

He sat down suddenly as if on purpose to stare. “Did Willie come to you

to borrow the lantern,” he asked sarcastically, and got up again for no

apparent reason.

“What lantern?” snapped the puzzled Editor, and his face darkened with

suspicion. “You, Renouard, are always alluding to things that aren’t

clear to me. If you were in politics, I, as a party journalist, wouldn’t

trust you further than I could see you. Not an inch further. You are

such a sophisticated beggar. Listen: the man is the man Miss Moorsom was

engaged to for a year. He couldn’t have been a nobody, anyhow. But he

doesn’t seem to have been very wise. Hard luck for the young lady.”

He spoke with feeling. It was clear that what he had to tell appealed to

his sentiment. Yet, as an experienced man of the world, he marked his

amused wonder. Young man of good family and connections, going

everywhere, yet not merely a man about town, but with a foot in the two

big F’s.

Renouard lounging aimlessly in the room turned round: “And what the

devil’s that?” he asked faintly.

“Why Fashion and Finance,” explained the Editor. “That’s how I call it.

There are the three R’s at the bottom of the social edifice and the two

F’s on the top. See?”

“Ha! Ha! Excellent! Ha! Ha!” Renouard laughed with stony eyes.

“And you proceed from one set to the other in this democratic age,” the

Editor went on with unperturbed complacency. “That is if you are clever

enough. The only danger is in being too clever. And I think something

of the sort happened here. That swell I am speaking of got himself into

a mess. Apparently a very ugly mess of a financial character. You will

understand that Willie did not go into details with me. They were not

imparted to him with very great abundance either. But a bad

mess—something of the criminal order. Of course he was innocent. But he

had to quit all the same.”

“Ha! Ha!” Renouard laughed again abruptly, staring as before. “So

there’s one more big F in the tale.”

“What do you mean?” inquired the Editor quickly, with an air as if his

patent were being infringed.

“I mean—Fool.”

“No. I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well—let him be a scoundrel then. What the devil do I care.”

“But hold on! You haven’t heard the end of the story.”

Renouard, his hat on his head already, sat down with the disdainful smile

of a man who had discounted the moral of the story. Still he sat down

and the Editor swung his revolving chair right round. He was full of

unction.

“Imprudent, I should say. In many ways money is as dangerous to handle

as gunpowder. You can’t be too careful either as to who you are working

with. Anyhow there was a mighty flashy burst up, a sensation, and—his

familiar haunts knew him no more. But before he vanished he went to see

Miss Moorsom. That very fact argues for his innocence—don’t it? What

was said between them no man knows—unless the professor had the

confidence from his daughter. There couldn’t have been much to say.

There was nothing for it but to let him go—was there?—for the affair had

got into the papers. And perhaps the kindest thing would have been to

forget him. Anyway the easiest. Forgiveness would have been more

difficult, I fancy, for a young lady of spirit and position drawn into an

ugly affair like that. Any ordinary young lady, I mean. Well, the

fellow asked nothing better than to be forgotten, only he didn’t find it

easy to do so himself, because he would write home now and then. Not to

any of his friends though. He had no near relations. The professor had

been his guardian. No, the poor devil wrote now and then to an old

retired butler of his late father, somewhere in the country, forbidding

him at the same time to let any one know of his whereabouts. So that

worthy old ass would go up and dodge about the Moorsom’s town house,

perhaps waylay Miss Moorsom’s maid, and then would write to ‘Master

Arthur’ that the young lady looked well and happy, or some such cheerful

intelligence. I dare say he wanted to be forgotten, but I shouldn’t

think he was much cheered by the news. What would you say?”

Renouard, his legs stretched out and his chin on his breast, said

nothing. A sensation which was not curiosity, but rather a vague nervous

anxiety, distinctly unpleasant, like a mysterious symptom of some malady,

prevented him from getting up and going away.

“Mixed feelings,” the Editor opined. “Many fellows out here receive news

from home with mixed feelings. But what will his feelings be when he

hears what I am going to tell you now? For we know he has not heard yet.

Six months ago a city clerk, just a common drudge of finance, gets

himself convicted of a common embezzlement or something of that kind.

Then seeing he’s in for a long sentence he thinks of making his

conscience comfortable, and makes a clean breast of an old story of

tampered with, or else suppressed, documents, a story which clears

altogether the honesty of our ruined gentleman. That embezzling fellow

was in a position to know, having been employed by the firm before the

smash. There was no doubt about the character being cleared—but where

the cleared man was nobody could tell. Another sensation in society.

And then Miss Moorsom says: ‘He will come back to claim me, and I’ll

marry him.’ But he didn’t come back. Between you and me I don’t think

he was much wanted—except by Miss Moorsom. I imagine she’s used to have

her own way. She grew impatient, and declared that if she knew where the

man was she would go to him. But all that could be got out of the old

butler was that the last envelope bore the postmark of our beautiful

city; and that this was the only address of ‘Master Arthur’ that he ever

had. That and no more. In fact the fellow was at his last gasp—with a

bad heart. Miss Moorsom wasn’t allowed to see him. She had gone herself

into the country to learn what she could, but she had to stay downstairs

while the old chap’s wife went up to the invalid. She brought down the

scrap of intelligence I’ve told you of. He was already too far gone to

be cross-examined on it, and that very night he died. He didn’t leave

behind him much to go by, did he? Our Willie hinted to me that there had

been pretty stormy days in the professor’s house, but—here they are. I

have a notion she isn’t the kind of everyday young lady who may be

permitted to gallop about the world all by herself—eh? Well, I think it

rather fine of her, but I quite understand that the professor needed all

his philosophy under the circumstances. She is his only child now—and

brilliant—what? Willie positively spluttered trying to describe her to

me; and I could see directly you came in that you had an uncommon

experience.”

Renouard, with an irritated gesture, tilted his hat more forward on his

eyes, as though he were bored. The Editor went on with the remark that

to be sure neither he (Renouard) nor yet Willie were much used to meet

girls of that remarkable superiority. Willie when learning business with

a firm in London, years before, had seen none but boarding-house society,

he guessed. As to himself in the good old days, when he trod the

glorious flags of Fleet Street, he neither had access to, nor yet would

have cared for the swells. Nothing interested him then but parliamentary

politics and the oratory of the House of Commons.

He paid to this not very distant past the tribute of a tender,

reminiscent smile, and returned to his first idea that for a society girl

her action was rather fine. All the same the professor could not be very

pleased. The fellow if he was as pure as a lily now was just about as

devoid of the goods of the earth. And there were misfortunes, however

undeserved, which damaged a man’s standing permanently. On the other

hand, it was difficult to oppose cynically a noble impulse—not to speak

of the great love at the root of it. Ah! Love! And then the lady was

quite capable of going off by herself. She was of age, she had money of

her own, plenty of pluck too. Moorsom must have concluded that it was

more truly paternal, more prudent too, and generally safer all round to

let himself be dragged into this chase. The aunt came along for the same

reasons. It was given out at home as a trip round the world of the usual

kind.

Renouard had risen and remained standing with his heart beating, and

strangely affected by this tale, robbed as it was of all glamour by the

prosaic personality of the narrator. The Editor added: “I’ve been asked

to help in the search—you know.”

Renouard muttered something about an appointment and went out into the

street. His inborn sanity could not defend him from a misty creeping

jealousy. He thought that obviously no man of that sort could be worthy

of such a woman’s devoted fidelity. Renouard, however, had lived long

enough to reflect that a man’s activities, his views, and even his ideas

may be very inferior to his character; and moved by a delicate

consideration for that splendid girl he tried to think out for the man a

character of inward excellence and outward gifts—some extraordinary

seduction. But in vain. Fresh from months of solitude and from days at

sea, her splendour presented itself to him absolutely unconquerable in

its perfection, unless by her own folly. It was easier to suspect her of

this than to imagine in the man qualities which would be worthy of her.

Easier and less degrading. Because folly may be generous—could be

nothing else but generosity in her; whereas to imagine her subjugated by

something common was intolerable.

Because of the force of the physical impression he had received from her

personality (and such impressions are the real origins of the deepest

movements of our soul) this conception of her was even inconceivable.

But no Prince Charming has ever lived out of a fairy tale. He doesn’t

walk the worlds of Fashion and Finance—and with a stumbling gait at that.

Generosity. Yes. It was her generosity. But this generosity was

altogether regal in its splendour, almost absurd in its lavishness—or,

perhaps, divine.

In the evening, on board his schooner, sitting on the rail, his arms

folded on his breast and his eyes fixed on the deck, he let the darkness

catch him unawares in the midst of a meditation on the mechanism of

sentiment and the springs of passion. And all the time he had an abiding

consciousness of her bodily presence. The effect on his senses had been

so penetrating that in the middle of the night, rousing up suddenly,

wide-eyed in the darkness of his cabin, he did not create a faint mental

vision of her person for himself, but, more intimately affected, he

scented distinctly the faint perfume she used, and could almost have

sworn that he had been awakened by the soft rustle of her dress. He even

sat up listening in the dark for a time, then sighed and lay down again,

not agitated but, on the contrary, oppressed by the sensation of

something that had happened to him and could not be undone.

CHAPTER III

In the afternoon he lounged into the editorial office, carrying with

affected nonchalance that weight of the irremediable he had felt laid on

him suddenly in the small hours of the night—that consciousness of

something that could no longer be helped. His patronising friend

informed him at once that he had made the acquaintance of the Moorsom

party last night. At the Dunsters, of course. Dinner.

“Very quiet. Nobody there. It was much better for the business. I say

. . .”

Renouard, his hand grasping the back of a chair, stared down at him

dumbly.

“Phew! That’s a stunning girl. . . Why do you want to sit on that chair?

It’s uncomfortable!”

“I wasn’t going to sit on it.” Renouard walked slowly to the window,

glad to find in himself enough self-control to let go the chair instead

of raising it on high and bringing it down on the Editor’s head.

“Willie kept on gazing at her with tears in his boiled eyes. You should

have seen him bending sentimentally over her at dinner.”

“Don’t,” said Renouard in such an anguished tone that the Editor turned

right round to look at his back.

“You push your dislike of young Dunster too far. It’s positively

morbid,” he disapproved mildly. “We can’t be all beautiful after thirty.

. . . I talked a little, about you mostly, to the professor. He appeared

to be interested in the silk plant—if only as a change from the great

subject. Miss Moorsom didn’t seem to mind when I confessed to her that I

had taken you into the confidence of the thing. Our Willie approved too.

Old Dunster with his white beard seemed to give me his blessing. All

those people have a great opinion of you, simply because I told them that

you’ve led every sort of life one can think of before you got struck on

exploration. They want you to make suggestions. What do you think

‘Master Arthur’ is likely to have taken to?”

“Something easy,” muttered Renouard without unclenching his teeth.

“Hunting man. Athlete. Don’t be hard on the chap. He may be riding

boundaries, or droving cattle, or humping his swag about the back-blocks

away to the devil—somewhere. He may be even prospecting at the back of

beyond—this very moment.”

“Or lying dead drunk in a roadside pub. It’s late enough in the day for

that.”

The Editor looked up instinctively. The clock was pointing at a quarter

to five. “Yes, it is,” he admitted. “But it needn’t be. And he may

have lit out into the Western Pacific all of a sudden—say in a trading

schooner. Though I really don’t see in what capacity. Still . . . ”

“Or he may be passing at this very moment under this very window.”

“Not he . . . and I wish you would get away from it to where one can see

your face. I hate talking to a man’s back. You stand there like a

hermit on a sea-shore growling to yourself. I tell you what it is,

Geoffrey, you don’t like mankind.”

“I don’t make my living by talking about mankind’s affairs,” Renouard

defended himself. But he came away obediently and sat down in the

arm-chair. “How can you be so certain that your man isn’t down there in

the street?” he asked. “It’s neither more nor less probable than every

single one of your other suppositions.”

Placated by Renouard’s docility the Editor gazed at him for a while.

“Aha! I’ll tell you how. Learn then that we have begun the campaign.

We have telegraphed his description to the police of every township up

and down the land. And what’s more we’ve ascertained definitely that he

hasn’t been in this town for the last three months at least. How much

longer he’s been away we can’t tell.”

“That’s very curious.”

“It’s very simple. Miss Moorsom wrote to him, to the post office here

directly she returned to London after her excursion into the country to

see the old butler. Well—her letter is still lying there. It has not

been called for. Ergo, this town is not his usual abode. Personally, I

never thought it was. But he cannot fail to turn up some time or other.

Our main hope lies just in the certitude that he must come to town sooner

or later. Remember he doesn’t know that the butler is dead, and he will

want to inquire for a letter. Well, he’ll find a note from Miss

Moorsom.”

Renouard, silent, thought that it was likely enough. His profound

distaste for this conversation was betrayed by an air of weariness

darkening his energetic sun-tanned features, and by the augmented

dreaminess of his eyes. The Editor noted it as a further proof of that

immoral detachment from mankind, of that callousness of sentiment

fostered by the unhealthy conditions of solitude—according to his own

favourite theory. Aloud he observed that as long as a man had not given

up correspondence he could not be looked upon as lost. Fugitive

criminals had been tracked in that way by justice, he reminded his

friend; then suddenly changed the bearing of the subject somewhat by

asking if Renouard had heard from his people lately, and if every member

of his large tribe was well and happy.

“Yes, thanks.”

The tone was curt, as if repelling a liberty. Renouard did not like

being asked about his people, for whom he had a profound and remorseful

affection. He had not seen a single human being to whom he was related,

for many years, and he was extremely different from them all.

On the very morning of his arrival from his island he had gone to a set

of pigeon-holes in Willie Dunster’s outer office and had taken out from a

compartment labelled “Malata” a very small accumulation of envelopes, a

few addressed to himself, and one addressed to his assistant, all to the

care of the firm, W. Dunster and Co. As opportunity offered, the firm

used to send them on to Malata either by a man-of-war schooner going on a

cruise, or by some trading craft proceeding that way. But for the last

four months there had been no opportunity.

“You going to stay here some time?” asked the Editor, after a longish

silence.

Renouard, perfunctorily, did see no reason why he should make a long

stay.

“For health, for your mental health, my boy,” rejoined the newspaper man.

“To get used to human faces so that they don’t hit you in the eye so hard

when you walk about the streets. To get friendly with your kind. I

suppose that assistant of yours can be trusted to look after things?”

“There’s the half-caste too. The Portuguese. He knows what’s to be

done.”

“Aha!” The Editor looked sharply at his friend. “What’s his name?”

“Who’s name?”

“The assistant’s you picked up on the sly behind my back.”

Renouard made a slight movement of impatience.

“I met him unexpectedly one evening. I thought he would do as well as

another. He had come from up country and didn’t seem happy in a town.

He told me his name was Walter. I did not ask him for proofs, you know.”

“I don’t think you get on very well with him.”

“Why? What makes you think so.”

“I don’t know. Something reluctant in your manner when he’s in

question.”

“Really. My manner! I don’t think he’s a great subject for

conversation, perhaps. Why not drop him?”

“Of course! You wouldn’t confess to a mistake. Not you. Nevertheless I

have my suspicions about it.”

Renouard got up to go, but hesitated, looking down at the seated Editor.

“How funny,” he said at last with the utmost seriousness, and was making

for the door, when the voice of his friend stopped him.

“You know what has been said of you? That you couldn’t get on with

anybody you couldn’t kick. Now, confess—is there any truth in the soft

impeachment?”

“No,” said Renouard. “Did you print that in your paper.”

“No. I didn’t quite believe it. But I will tell you what I believe. I

believe that when your heart is set on some object you are a man that

doesn’t count the cost to yourself or others. And this shall get printed

some day.”

“Obituary notice?” Renouard dropped negligently.

“Certain—some day.”

“Do you then regard yourself as immortal?”

“No, my boy. I am not immortal. But the voice of the press goes on for

ever. . . . And it will say that this was the secret of your great

success in a task where better men than you—meaning no offence—did fail

repeatedly.”

“Success,” muttered Renouard, pulling-to the office door after him with

considerable energy. And the letters of the word PRIVATE like a row of

white eyes seemed to stare after his back sinking down the staircase of

that temple of publicity.

Renouard had no doubt that all the means of publicity would be put at the

service of love and used for the discovery of the loved man. He did not

wish him dead. He did not wish him any harm. We are all equipped with a

fund of humanity which is not exhausted without many and repeated

provocations—and this man had done him no evil. But before Renouard had

left old Dunster’s house, at the conclusion of the call he made there

that very afternoon, he had discovered in himself the desire that the

search might last long. He never really flattered himself that it might

fail. It seemed to him that there was no other course in this world for

himself, for all mankind, but resignation. And he could not help

thinking that Professor Moorsom had arrived at the same conclusion too.

Professor Moorsom, slight frame of middle height, a thoughtful keen head

under the thick wavy hair, veiled dark eyes under straight eyebrows, and

with an inward gaze which when disengaged and arriving at one seemed to

issue from an obscure dream of books, from the limbo of meditation,

showed himself extremely gracious to him. Renouard guessed in him a man

whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and

indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to

the events of existence. Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace

of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly.

They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view

of the town and the harbour.

The splendid immobility of the bay resting under his gaze, with its grey

spurs and shining indentations, helped Renouard to regain his

self-possession, which he had felt shaken, in coming out on the terrace,

into the setting of the most powerful emotion of his life, when he had

sat within a foot of Miss Moorsom with fire in his breast, a humming in

his ears, and in a complete disorder of his mind. There was the very

garden seat on which he had been enveloped in the radiant spell. And

presently he was sitting on it again with the professor talking of her.

Near by the patriarchal Dunster leaned forward in a wicker arm-chair,

benign and a little deaf, his big hand to his ear with the innocent

eagerness of his advanced age remembering the fires of life.

It was with a sort of apprehension that Renouard looked forward to seeing

Miss Moorsom. And strangely enough it resembled the state of mind of a

man who fears disenchantment more than sortilege. But he need not have

been afraid. Directly he saw her in a distance at the other end of the

terrace he shuddered to the roots of his hair. With her approach the

power of speech left him for a time. Mrs. Dunster and her aunt were

accompanying her. All these people sat down; it was an intimate circle

into which Renouard felt himself cordially admitted; and the talk was of

the great search which occupied all their minds. Discretion was expected

by these people, but of reticence as to the object of the journey there

could be no question. Nothing but ways and means and arrangements could

be talked about.

By fixing his eyes obstinately on the ground, which gave him an air of

reflective sadness, Renouard managed to recover his self-possession. He

used it to keep his voice in a low key and to measure his words on the

great subject. And he took care with a great inward effort to make them

reasonable without giving them a discouraging complexion. For he did not

want the quest to be given up, since it would mean her going away with

her two attendant grey-heads to the other side of the world.

He was asked to come again, to come often and take part in the counsels

of all these people captivated by the sentimental enterprise of a

declared love. On taking Miss Moorsom’s hand he looked up, would have

liked to say something, but found himself voiceless, with his lips

suddenly sealed. She returned the pressure of his fingers, and he left

her with her eyes vaguely staring beyond him, an air of listening for an

expected sound, and the faintest possible smile on her lips. A smile not

for him, evidently, but the reflection of some deep and inscrutable

thought.

CHAPTER IV

He went on board his schooner. She lay white, and as if suspended, in

the crepuscular atmosphere of sunset mingling with the ashy gleam of the

vast anchorage. He tried to keep his thoughts as sober, as reasonable,

as measured as his words had been, lest they should get away from him and

cause some sort of moral disaster. What he was afraid of in the coming

night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task.

It had to be faced however. He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in

the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre

lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and

unfurnished palace. In this startling image of himself he recognised

somebody he had to follow—the frightened guide of his dream. He

traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors.

He lost himself utterly—he found his way again. Room succeeded room. At

last the lamp went out, and he stumbled against some object which, when

he stooped for it, he found to be very cold and heavy to lift. The

sickly white light of dawn showed him the head of a statue. Its marble

hair was done in the bold lines of a helmet, on its lips the chisel had

left a faint smile, and it resembled Miss Moorsom. While he was staring

at it fixedly, the head began to grow light in his fingers, to diminish

and crumble to pieces, and at last turned into a handful of dust, which

was blown away by a puff of wind so chilly that he woke up with a

desperate shiver and leaped headlong out of his bed-place. The day had

really come. He sat down by the cabin table, and taking his head between

his hands, did not stir for a very long time.

Very quiet, he set himself to review this dream. The lamp, of course, he

connected with the search for a man. But on closer examination he

perceived that the reflection of himself in the mirror was not really the

true Renouard, but somebody else whose face he could not remember. In

the deserted palace he recognised a sinister adaptation by his brain of

the long corridors with many doors, in the great building in which his

friend’s newspaper was lodged on the first floor. The marble head with

Miss Moorsom’s face! Well! What other face could he have dreamed of?

And her complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of

angels. The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the

open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to

the chilly gust.

Yes! And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only

more mysterious and weird. There was something daemonic in that dream.

It was one of those experiences which throw a man out of conformity with

the established order of his kind and make him a creature of obscure

suggestions.

Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon to the

house where she lived. He went there as passively as if in a dream. He

could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the

Dunster mansion above the bay—whether on the ground of personal merit or

as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry. It must have been the

last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream,

hearing old Dunster once telling him that his next public task would be a

careful survey of the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for

the cultivation of the silk plant. The old man wagged his beard at him

sagely. It was indeed as absurd as a dream.

Willie of course would be there in the evening. But he was more of a

figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in his

dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat. “Do away

with the beastly cocoons all over the world,” he buzzed in his blurred,

water-logged voice. He affected a great horror of insects of all kinds.

One evening he appeared with a red flower in his button-hole. Nothing

could have been more disgustingly fantastic. And he would also say to

Renouard: “You may yet change the history of our country. For economic

conditions do shape the history of nations. Eh? What?” And he would

turn to Miss Moorsom for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous

nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which

grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin. For this

large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to

tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.

In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming

earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing too much

the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived. He had given up

trying to deceive himself. His resignation was without bounds. He

accepted the immense misfortune of being in love with a woman who was in

search of another man only to throw herself into his arms. With such

desperate precision he defined in his thoughts the situation, the

consciousness of which traversed like a sharp arrow the sudden silences

of general conversation. The only thought before which he quailed was

the thought that this could not last; that it must come to an end. He

feared it instinctively as a sick man may fear death. For it seemed to

him that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless, bottomless

pit. But his resignation was not spared the torments of jealousy: the

cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy, when it seems that a

woman betrays us simply by this that she exists, that she breathes—and

when the deep movements of her nerves or her soul become a matter of

distracting suspicion, of killing doubt, of mortal anxiety.

In the peculiar condition of their sojourn Miss Moorsom went out very

little. She accepted this seclusion at the Dunsters’ mansion as in a

hermitage, and lived there, watched over by a group of old people, with

the lofty endurance of a condescending and strong-headed goddess. It was

impossible to say if she suffered from anything in the world, and whether

this was the insensibility of a great passion concentrated on itself, or

a perfect restraint of manner, or the indifference of superiority so

complete as to be sufficient to itself. But it was visible to Renouard

that she took some pleasure in talking to him at times. Was it because

he was the only person near her age? Was this, then, the secret of his

admission to the circle?

He admired her voice as well poised as her movements, as her attitudes.

He himself had always been a man of tranquil tones. But the power of

fascination had torn him out of his very nature so completely that to

preserve his habitual calmness from going to pieces had become a terrible

effort.

He used to go from her on board the schooner exhausted, broken, shaken

up, as though he had been put to the most exquisite torture. When he saw

her approaching he always had a moment of hallucination. She was a misty

and fair creature, fitted for invisible music, for the shadows of love,

for the murmurs of waters. After a time (he could not be always staring

at the ground) he would summon up all his resolution and look at her.

There was a sparkle in the clear obscurity of her eyes; and when she

turned them on him they seemed to give a new meaning to life. He would

say to himself that another man would have found long before the happy

release of madness, his wits burnt to cinders in that radiance. But no

such luck for him. His wits had come unscathed through the furnaces of

hot suns, of blazing deserts, of flaming angers against the weaknesses of

men and the obstinate cruelties of hostile nature.

Being sane he had to be constantly on his guard against falling into

adoring silences or breaking out into wild speeches. He had to keep

watch on his eyes, his limbs, on the muscles of his face. Their

conversations were such as they could be between these two people: she a

young lady fresh from the thick twilight of four million people and the

artificiality of several London seasons; he the man of definite

conquering tasks, the familiar of wide horizons, and in his very repose

holding aloof from these agglomerations of units in which one loses one’s

importance even to oneself. They had no common conversational small

change. They had to use the great pieces of general ideas, but they

exchanged them trivially. It was no serious commerce. Perhaps she had

not much of that coin. Nothing significant came from her. It could not

be said that she had received from the contacts of the external world

impressions of a personal kind, different from other women. What was

ravishing in her was her quietness and, in her grave attitudes, the

unfailing brilliance of her femininity. He did not know what there was

under that ivory forehead so splendidly shaped, so gloriously crowned.

He could not tell what were her thoughts, her feelings. Her replies were

reflective, always preceded by a short silence, while he hung on her lips

anxiously. He felt himself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom

spoke an unknown voice, like the voice of oracles, bringing everlasting

unrest to the heart.

He was thankful enough to sit in silence with secretly clenched teeth,

devoured by jealousy—and nobody could have guessed that his quiet

deferential bearing to all these grey-heads was the supreme effort of

stoicism, that the man was engaged in keeping a sinister watch on his

tortures lest his strength should fail him. As before, when grappling

with other forces of nature, he could find in himself all sorts of

courage except the courage to run away.

It was perhaps from the lack of subjects they could have in common that

Miss Moorsom made him so often speak of his own life. He did not shrink

from talking about himself, for he was free from that exacerbated, timid

vanity which seals so many vain-glorious lips. He talked to her in his

restrained voice, gazing at the tip of her shoe, and thinking that the

time was bound to come soon when her very inattention would get weary of

him. And indeed on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and

perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping

head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from

the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious,

and potent immensity of mankind.

CHAPTER V

One afternoon Renouard stepping out on the terrace found nobody there.

It was for him, at the same time, a melancholy disappointment and a

poignant relief.

The heat was great, the air was still, all the long windows of the house

stood wide open. At the further end, grouped round a lady’s work-table,

several chairs disposed sociably suggested invisible occupants, a company

of conversing shades. Renouard looked towards them with a sort of dread.

A most elusive, faint sound of ghostly talk issuing from one of the rooms

added to the illusion and stopped his already hesitating footsteps. He

leaned over the balustrade of stone near a squat vase holding a tropical

plant of a bizarre shape. Professor Moorsom coming up from the garden

with a book under his arm and a white parasol held over his bare head,

found him there and, closing the parasol, leaned over by his side with a

remark on the increasing heat of the season. Renouard assented and

changed his position a little; the other, after a short silence,

administered unexpectedly a question which, like the blow of a club on

the head, deprived Renouard of the power of speech and even thought, but,

more cruel, left him quivering with apprehension, not of death but of

everlasting torment. Yet the words were extremely simple.

“Something will have to be done soon. We can’t remain in a state of

suspended expectation for ever. Tell me what do you think of our

chances?”

Renouard, speechless, produced a faint smile. The professor confessed in

a jocular tone his impatience to complete the circuit of the globe and be

done with it. It was impossible to remain quartered on the dear

excellent Dunsters for an indefinite time. And then there were the

lectures he had arranged to deliver in Paris. A serious matter.

That lectures by Professor Moorsom were a European event and that

brilliant audiences would gather to hear them Renouard did not know. All

he was aware of was the shock of this hint of departure. The menace of

separation fell on his head like a thunderbolt. And he saw the absurdity

of his emotion, for hadn’t he lived all these days under the very cloud?

The professor, his elbows spread out, looked down into the garden and

went on unburdening his mind. Yes. The department of sentiment was

directed by his daughter, and she had plenty of volunteered moral

support; but he had to look after the practical side of life without

assistance.

“I have the less hesitation in speaking to you about my anxiety, because

I feel you are friendly to us and at the same time you are detached from

all these sublimities—confound them.”

“What do you mean?” murmured Renouard.

“I mean that you are capable of calm judgment. Here the atmosphere is

simply detestable. Everybody has knuckled under to sentiment. Perhaps

your deliberate opinion could influence . . .”

“You want Miss Moorsom to give it up?” The professor turned to the young

man dismally.

“Heaven only knows what I want.”

Renouard leaning his back against the balustrade folded his arms on his

breast, appeared to meditate profoundly. His face, shaded softly by the

broad brim of a planter’s Panama hat, with the straight line of the nose

level with the forehead, the eyes lost in the depth of the setting, and

the chin well forward, had such a profile as may be seen amongst the

bronzes of classical museums, pure under a crested helmet—recalled

vaguely a Minerva’s head.

“This is the most troublesome time I ever had in my life,” exclaimed the

professor testily.

“Surely the man must be worth it,” muttered Renouard with a pang of

jealousy traversing his breast like a self-inflicted stab.

Whether enervated by the heat or giving way to pent up irritation the

professor surrendered himself to the mood of sincerity.

“He began by being a pleasantly dull boy. He developed into a

pointlessly clever young man, without, I suspect, ever trying to

understand anything. My daughter knew him from childhood. I am a busy

man, and I confess that their engagement was a complete surprise to me.

I wish their reasons for that step had been more naïve. But simplicity

was out of fashion in their set. From a worldly point of view he seems

to have been a mere baby. Of course, now, I am assured that he is the

victim of his noble confidence in the rectitude of his kind. But that’s

mere idealising of a sad reality. For my part I will tell you that from

the very beginning I had the gravest doubts of his dishonesty.

Unfortunately my clever daughter hadn’t. And now we behold the reaction.

No. To be earnestly dishonest one must be really poor. This was only a

manifestation of his extremely refined cleverness. The complicated

simpleton. He had an awful awakening though.”

In such words did Professor Moorsom give his “young friend” to understand

the state of his feelings toward the lost man. It was evident that the

father of Miss Moorsom wished him to remain lost. Perhaps the

unprecedented heat of the season made him long for the cool spaces of the

Pacific, the sweep of the ocean’s free wind along the promenade decks,

cumbered with long chairs, of a ship steaming towards the Californian

coast. To Renouard the philosopher appeared simply the most treacherous

of fathers. He was amazed. But he was not at the end of his

discoveries.

“He may be dead,” the professor murmured.

“Why? People don’t die here sooner than in Europe. If he had gone to

hide in Italy, for instance, you wouldn’t think of saying that.”

“Well! And suppose he has become morally disintegrated. You know he was

not a strong personality,” the professor suggested moodily. “My

daughter’s future is in question here.”

Renouard thought that the love of such a woman was enough to pull any

broken man together—to drag a man out of his grave. And he thought this

with inward despair, which kept him silent as much almost as his

astonishment. At last he managed to stammer out a generous—

“Oh! Don’t let us even suppose. . .”

The professor struck in with a sadder accent than before—

“It’s good to be young. And then you have been a man of action, and

necessarily a believer in success. But I have been looking too long at

life not to distrust its surprises. Age! Age! Here I stand before you

a man full of doubts and hesitation—_spe lentus_, _timidus futuri_.”

He made a sign to Renouard not to interrupt, and in a lowered voice, as

if afraid of being overheard, even there, in the solitude of the terrace—

“And the worst is that I am not even sure how far this sentimental

pilgrimage is genuine. Yes. I doubt my own child. It’s true that she’s

a woman. . . . ”

Renouard detected with horror a tone of resentment, as if the professor

had never forgiven his daughter for not dying instead of his son. The

latter noticed the young man’s stony stare.

“Ah! you don’t understand. Yes, she’s clever, open-minded, popular,

and—well, charming. But you don’t know what it is to have moved,

breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of

life—the brilliant froth. There thoughts, sentiments, opinions,

feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space—to amuse

life—a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning

nothing, leading nowhere. She is the creature of that circle. And I ask

myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its

satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving

her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic images. And

everything is possible—except sincerity, such as only stark, struggling

humanity can know. No woman can stand that mode of life in which women

rule, and remain a perfectly genuine, simple human being. Ah! There’s

some people coming out.”

He moved off a pace, then turning his head: “Upon my word! I would be

infinitely obliged to you if you could throw a little cold water. . . ”

and at a vaguely dismayed gesture of Renouard, he added: “Don’t be

afraid. You wouldn’t be putting out a sacred fire.”

Renouard could hardly find words for a protest: “I assure you that I

never talk with Miss Moorsom—on—on—that. And if you, her father . . . ”

“I envy you your innocence,” sighed the professor. “A father is only an

everyday person. Flat. Stale. Moreover, my child would naturally

mistrust me. We belong to the same set. Whereas you carry with you the

prestige of the unknown. You have proved yourself to be a force.”

Thereupon the professor followed by Renouard joined the circle of all the

inmates of the house assembled at the other end of the terrace about a

tea-table; three white heads and that resplendent vision of woman’s

glory, the sight of which had the power to flutter his heart like a

reminder of the mortality of his frame.

He avoided the seat by the side of Miss Moorsom. The others were talking

together languidly. Unnoticed he looked at that woman so marvellous that

centuries seemed to lie between them. He was oppressed and overcome at

the thought of what she could give to some man who really would be a

force! What a glorious struggle with this amazon. What noble burden for

the victorious strength.

Dear old Mrs. Dunster was dispensing tea, looking from time to time with

interest towards Miss Moorsom. The aged statesman having eaten a raw

tomato and drunk a glass of milk (a habit of his early farming days, long

before politics, when, pioneer of wheat-growing, he demonstrated the

possibility of raising crops on ground looking barren enough to

discourage a magician), smoothed his white beard, and struck lightly

Renouard’s knee with his big wrinkled hand.

“You had better come back to-night and dine with us quietly.”

He liked this young man, a pioneer, too, in more than one direction.

Mrs. Dunster added: “Do. It will be very quiet. I don’t even know if

Willie will be home for dinner.” Renouard murmured his thanks, and left

the terrace to go on board the schooner. While lingering in the

drawing-room doorway he heard the resonant voice of old Dunster uttering

oracularly—

“. . . the leading man here some day. . . . Like me.”

Renouard let the thin summer portière of the doorway fall behind him.

The voice of Professor Moorsom said—

“I am told that he has made an enemy of almost every man who had to work

with him.”

“That’s nothing. He did his work. . . . Like me.”

“He never counted the cost they say. Not even of lives.”

Renouard understood that they were talking of him. Before he could move

away, Mrs. Dunster struck in placidly—

“Don’t let yourself be shocked by the tales you may hear of him, my dear.

Most of it is envy.”

Then he heard Miss Moorsom’s voice replying to the old lady—

“Oh! I am not easily deceived. I think I may say I have an instinct for

truth.”

He hastened away from that house with his heart full of dread.

CHAPTER VI

On board the schooner, lying on the settee on his back with the knuckles

of his hands pressed over his eyes, he made up his mind that he would not

return to that house for dinner—that he would never go back there any

more. He made up his mind some twenty times. The knowledge that he had

only to go up on the quarter deck, utter quietly the words: “Man the

windlass,” and that the schooner springing into life would run a hundred

miles out to sea before sunrise, deceived his struggling will. Nothing

easier! Yet, in the end, this young man, almost ill-famed for his

ruthless daring, the inflexible leader of two tragically successful

expeditions, shrank from that act of savage energy, and began, instead,

to hunt for excuses.

No! It was not for him to run away like an incurable who cuts his

throat. He finished dressing and looked at his own impassive face in the

saloon mirror scornfully. While being pulled on shore in the gig, he

remembered suddenly the wild beauty of a waterfall seen when hardly more

than a boy, years ago, in Menado. There was a legend of a

governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, on official tour, committing

suicide on that spot by leaping into the chasm. It was supposed that a

painful disease had made him weary of life. But was there ever a

visitation like his own, at the same time binding one to life and so

cruelly mortal!

The dinner was indeed quiet. Willie, given half an hour’s grace, failed

to turn up, and his chair remained vacant by the side of Miss Moorsom.

Renouard had the professor’s sister on his left, dressed in an expensive

gown becoming her age. That maiden lady in her wonderful preservation

reminded Renouard somehow of a wax flower under glass. There were no

traces of the dust of life’s battles on her anywhere. She did not like

him very much in the afternoons, in his white drill suit and planter’s

hat, which seemed to her an unduly Bohemian costume for calling in a

house where there were ladies. But in the evening, lithe and elegant in

his dress clothes and with his pleasant, slightly veiled voice, he always

made her conquest afresh. He might have been anybody distinguished—the

son of a duke. Falling under that charm probably (and also because her

brother had given her a hint), she attempted to open her heart to

Renouard, who was watching with all the power of his soul her niece

across the table. She spoke to him as frankly as though that miserable

mortal envelope, emptied of everything but hopeless passion, were indeed

the son of a duke.

Inattentive, he heard her only in snatches, till the final confidential

burst: “. . . glad if you would express an opinion. Look at her, so

charming, such a great favourite, so generally admired! It would be too

sad. We all hoped she would make a brilliant marriage with somebody very

rich and of high position, have a house in London and in the country, and

entertain us all splendidly. She’s so eminently fitted for it. She has

such hosts of distinguished friends! And then—this instead! . . . My

heart really aches.”

Her well-bred if anxious whisper was covered by the voice of professor

Moorsom discoursing subtly down the short length of the dinner table on

the Impermanency of the Measurable to his venerable disciple. It might

have been a chapter in a new and popular book of Moorsomian philosophy.

Patriarchal and delighted, old Dunster leaned forward a little, his eyes

shining youthfully, two spots of colour at the roots of his white beard;

and Renouard, glancing at the senile excitement, recalled the words heard

on those subtle lips, adopted their scorn for his own, saw their truth

before this man ready to be amused by the side of the grave. Yes!

Intellectual debauchery in the froth of existence! Froth and fraud!

On the same side of the table Miss Moorsom never once looked towards her

father, all her grace as if frozen, her red lips compressed, the faintest

rosiness under her dazzling complexion, her black eyes burning

motionless, and the very coppery gleams of light lying still on the waves

and undulation of her hair. Renouard fancied himself overturning the

table, smashing crystal and china, treading fruit and flowers under foot,

seizing her in his arms, carrying her off in a tumult of shrieks from all

these people, a silent frightened mortal, into some profound retreat as

in the age of Cavern men. Suddenly everybody got up, and he hastened to

rise too, finding himself out of breath and quite unsteady on his feet.

On the terrace the philosopher, after lighting a cigar, slipped his hand

condescendingly under his “dear young friend’s” arm. Renouard regarded

him now with the profoundest mistrust. But the great man seemed really

to have a liking for his young friend—one of those mysterious sympathies,

disregarding the differences of age and position, which in this case

might have been explained by the failure of philosophy to meet a very

real worry of a practical kind.

After a turn or two and some casual talk the professor said suddenly: “My

late son was in your school—do you know? I can imagine that had he lived

and you had ever met you would have understood each other. He too was

inclined to action.”

He sighed, then, shaking off the mournful thought and with a nod at the

dusky part of the terrace where the dress of his daughter made a luminous

stain: “I really wish you would drop in that quarter a few sensible,

discouraging words.”

Renouard disengaged himself from that most perfidious of men under the

pretence of astonishment, and stepping back a pace—

“Surely you are making fun of me, Professor Moorsom,” he said with a low

laugh, which was really a sound of rage.

“My dear young friend! It’s no subject for jokes, to me. . . You don’t

seem to have any notion of your prestige,” he added, walking away towards

the chairs.

“Humbug!” thought Renouard, standing still and looking after him. “And

yet! And yet! What if it were true?”

He advanced then towards Miss Moorsom. Posed on the seat on which they

had first spoken to each other, it was her turn to watch him coming on.

But many of the windows were not lighted that evening. It was dark over

there. She appeared to him luminous in her clear dress, a figure without

shape, a face without features, awaiting his approach, till he got quite

near to her, sat down, and they had exchanged a few insignificant words.

Gradually she came out like a magic painting of charm, fascination, and

desire, glowing mysteriously on the dark background. Something

imperceptible in the lines of her attitude, in the modulations of her

voice, seemed to soften that suggestion of calm unconscious pride which

enveloped her always like a mantle. He, sensitive like a bond slave to

the moods of the master, was moved by the subtle relenting of her grace

to an infinite tenderness. He fought down the impulse to seize her by

the hand, lead her down into the garden away under the big trees, and

throw himself at her feet uttering words of love. His emotion was so

strong that he had to cough slightly, and not knowing what to talk to her

about he began to tell her of his mother and sisters. All the family

were coming to London to live there, for some little time at least.

“I hope you will go and tell them something of me. Something seen,” he

said pressingly.

By this miserable subterfuge, like a man about to part with his life, he

hoped to make her remember him a little longer.

“Certainly,” she said. “I’ll be glad to call when I get back. But that

‘when’ may be a long time.”

He heard a light sigh. A cruel jealous curiosity made him ask—

“Are you growing weary, Miss Moorsom?”

A silence fell on his low spoken question.

“Do you mean heart-weary?” sounded Miss Moorsom’s voice. “You don’t know

me, I see.”

“Ah! Never despair,” he muttered.

“This, Mr. Renouard, is a work of reparation. I stand for truth here. I

can’t think of myself.”

He could have taken her by the throat for every word seemed an insult to

his passion; but he only said—

“I never doubted the—the—nobility of your purpose.”

“And to hear the word weariness pronounced in this connection surprises

me. And from a man too who, I understand, has never counted the cost.”

“You are pleased to tease me,” he said, directly he had recovered his

voice and had mastered his anger. It was as if Professor Moorsom had

dropped poison in his ear which was spreading now and tainting his

passion, his very jealousy. He mistrusted every word that came from

those lips on which his life hung. “How can you know anything of men who

do not count the cost?” he asked in his gentlest tones.

“From hearsay—a little.”

“Well, I assure you they are like the others, subject to suffering,

victims of spells. . . .”

“One of them, at least, speaks very strangely.”

She dismissed the subject after a short silence. “Mr. Renouard, I had a

disappointment this morning. This mail brought me a letter from the

widow of the old butler—you know. I expected to learn that she had heard

from—from here. But no. No letter arrived home since we left.”

Her voice was calm. His jealousy couldn’t stand much more of this sort

of talk; but he was glad that nothing had turned up to help the search;

glad blindly, unreasonably—only because it would keep her longer in his

sight—since she wouldn’t give up.

“I am too near her,” he thought, moving a little further on the seat. He

was afraid in the revulsion of feeling of flinging himself on her hands,

which were lying on her lap, and covering them with kisses. He was

afraid. Nothing, nothing could shake that spell—not if she were ever so

false, stupid, or degraded. She was fate itself. The extent of his

misfortune plunged him in such a stupor that he failed at first to hear

the sound of voices and footsteps inside the drawing-room. Willie had

come home—and the Editor was with him.

They burst out on the terrace babbling noisily, and then pulling

themselves together stood still, surprising—and as if themselves

surprised.

CHAPTER VII

They had been feasting a poet from the bush, the latest discovery of the

Editor. Such discoveries were the business, the vocation, the pride and

delight of the only apostle of letters in the hemisphere, the solitary

patron of culture, the Slave of the Lamp—as he subscribed himself at the

bottom of the weekly literary page of his paper. He had had no

difficulty in persuading the virtuous Willie (who had festive instincts)

to help in the good work, and now they had left the poet lying asleep on

the hearthrug of the editorial room and had rushed to the Dunster mansion

wildly. The Editor had another discovery to announce. Swaying a little

where he stood he opened his mouth very wide to shout the one word

“Found!” Behind him Willie flung both his hands above his head and let

them fall dramatically. Renouard saw the four white-headed people at the

end of the terrace rise all together from their chairs with an effect of

sudden panic.

“I tell you—he—is—found,” the patron of letters shouted emphatically.

“What is this!” exclaimed Renouard in a choked voice. Miss Moorsom

seized his wrist suddenly, and at that contact fire ran through all his

veins, a hot stillness descended upon him in which he heard the blood—or

the fire—beating in his ears. He made a movement as if to rise, but was

restrained by the convulsive pressure on his wrist.

“No, no.” Miss Moorsom’s eyes stared black as night, searching the space

before her. Far away the Editor strutted forward, Willie following with

his ostentatious manner of carrying his bulky and oppressive carcass

which, however, did not remain exactly perpendicular for two seconds

together.

“The innocent Arthur . . . Yes. We’ve got him,” the Editor became very

business-like. “Yes, this letter has done it.”

He plunged into an inside pocket for it, slapped the scrap of paper with

his open palm. “From that old woman. William had it in his pocket since

this morning when Miss Moorsom gave it to him to show me. Forgot all

about it till an hour ago. Thought it was of no importance. Well, no!

Not till it was properly read.”

Renouard and Miss Moorsom emerged from the shadows side by side, a

well-matched couple, animated yet statuesque in their calmness and in

their pallor. She had let go his wrist. On catching sight of Renouard

the Editor exclaimed:

“What—you here!” in a quite shrill voice.

There came a dead pause. All the faces had in them something dismayed

and cruel.

“He’s the very man we want,” continued the Editor. “Excuse my

excitement. You are the very man, Renouard. Didn’t you tell me that

your assistant called himself Walter? Yes? Thought so. But here’s that

old woman—the butler’s wife—listen to this. She writes: All I can tell

you, Miss, is that my poor husband directed his letters to the name of H.

Walter.”

Renouard’s violent but repressed exclamation was lost in a general murmur

and shuffle of feet. The Editor made a step forward, bowed with

creditable steadiness.

“Miss Moorsom, allow me to congratulate you from the bottom of my heart

on the happy—er—issue. . . ”

“Wait,” muttered Renouard irresolutely.

The Editor jumped on him in the manner of their old friendship. “Ah,

you! You are a fine fellow too. With your solitary ways of life you

will end by having no more discrimination than a savage. Fancy living

with a gentleman for months and never guessing. A man, I am certain,

accomplished, remarkable, out of the common, since he had been

distinguished” (he bowed again) “by Miss Moorsom, whom we all admire.”

She turned her back on him.

“I hope to goodness you haven’t been leading him a dog’s life, Geoffrey,”

the Editor addressed his friend in a whispered aside.

Renouard seized a chair violently, sat down, and propping his elbow on

his knee leaned his head on his hand. Behind him the sister of the

professor looked up to heaven and wrung her hands stealthily. Mrs.

Dunster’s hands were clasped forcibly under her chin, but she, dear soul,

was looking sorrowfully at Willie. The model nephew! In this strange

state! So very much flushed! The careful disposition of the thin hairs

across Willie’s bald spot was deplorably disarranged, and the spot itself

was red and, as it were, steaming.

“What’s the matter, Geoffrey?” The Editor seemed disconcerted by the

silent attitudes round him, as though he had expected all these people to

shout and dance. “You have him on the island—haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes: I have him there,” said Renouard, without looking up.

“Well, then!” The Editor looked helplessly around as if begging for

response of some sort. But the only response that came was very

unexpected. Annoyed at being left in the background, and also because

very little drink made him nasty, the emotional Willie turned malignant

all at once, and in a bibulous tone surprising in a man able to keep his

balance so well—

“Aha! But you haven’t got him here—not yet!” he sneered. “No! You

haven’t got him yet.”

This outrageous exhibition was to the Editor like the lash to a jaded

horse. He positively jumped.

“What of that? What do you mean? We—haven’t—got—him—here. Of course he

isn’t here! But Geoffrey’s schooner is here. She can be sent at once to

fetch him here. No! Stay! There’s a better plan. Why shouldn’t you

all sail over to Malata, professor? Save time! I am sure Miss Moorsom

would prefer. . .”

With a gallant flourish of his arm he looked for Miss Moorsom. She had

disappeared. He was taken aback somewhat.

“Ah! H’m. Yes. . . . Why not. A pleasure cruise, delightful ship,

delightful season, delightful errand, del . . . No! There are no

objections. Geoffrey, I understand, has indulged in a bungalow three

sizes too large for him. He can put you all up. It will be a pleasure

for him. It will be the greatest privilege. Any man would be proud of

being an agent of this happy reunion. I am proud of the little part I’ve

played. He will consider it the greatest honour. Geoff, my boy, you had

better be stirring to-morrow bright and early about the preparations for

the trip. It would be criminal to lose a single day.”

He was as flushed as Willie, the excitement keeping up the effect of the

festive dinner. For a time Renouard, silent, as if he had not heard a

word of all that babble, did not stir. But when he got up it was to

advance towards the Editor and give him such a hearty slap on the back

that the plump little man reeled in his tracks and looked quite

frightened for a moment.

“You are a heaven-born discoverer and a first-rate manager. . . He’s

right. It’s the only way. You can’t resist the claim of sentiment, and

you must even risk the voyage to Malata. . . ” Renouard’s voice sank. “A

lonely spot,” he added, and fell into thought under all these eyes

converging on him in the sudden silence. His slow glance passed over all

the faces in succession, remaining arrested on Professor Moorsom, stony

eyed, a smouldering cigar in his fingers, and with his sister standing by

his side.

“I shall be infinitely gratified if you consent to come. But, of course,

you will. We shall sail to-morrow evening then. And now let me leave

you to your happiness.”

He bowed, very grave, pointed suddenly his finger at Willie who was

swaying about with a sleepy frown. . . . “Look at him. He’s overcome

with happiness. You had better put him to bed . . . ” and disappeared

while every head on the terrace was turned to Willie with varied

expressions.

Renouard ran through the house. Avoiding the carriage road he fled down

the steep short cut to the shore, where his gig was waiting. At his loud

shout the sleeping Kanakas jumped up. He leaped in. “Shove off. Give

way!” and the gig darted through the water. “Give way! Give way!” She

flew past the wool-clippers sleeping at their anchors each with the open

unwinking eye of the lamp in the rigging; she flew past the flagship of

the Pacific squadron, a great mass all dark and silent, heavy with the

slumbers of five hundred men, and where the invisible sentries heard his

urgent “Give way! Give way!” in the night. The Kanakas, panting, rose

off the thwarts at every stroke. Nothing could be fast enough for him!

And he ran up the side of his schooner shaking the ladder noisily with

his rush.

On deck he stumbled and stood still.

Wherefore this haste? To what end, since he knew well before he started

that he had a pursuer from whom there was no escape.

As his foot touched the deck his will, his purpose he had been hurrying

to save, died out within. It had been nothing less than getting the

schooner under-way, letting her vanish silently in the night from amongst

these sleeping ships. And now he was certain he could not do it. It was

impossible! And he reflected that whether he lived or died such an act

would lay him under a dark suspicion from which he shrank. No, there was

nothing to be done.

He went down into the cabin and, before even unbuttoning his overcoat,

took out of the drawer the letter addressed to his assistant; that letter

which he had found in the pigeon-hole labelled “Malata” in young

Dunster’s outer office, where it had been waiting for three months some

occasion for being forwarded. From the moment of dropping it in the

drawer he had utterly forgotten its existence—till now, when the man’s

name had come out so clamorously. He glanced at the common envelope,

noted the shaky and laborious handwriting: H. Walter, Esqre. Undoubtedly

the very last letter the old butler had posted before his illness, and in

answer clearly to one from “Master Arthur” instructing him to address in

the future: “Care of Messrs. W. Dunster and Co.” Renouard made as if to

open the envelope, but paused, and, instead, tore the letter deliberately

in two, in four, in eight. With his hand full of pieces of paper he

returned on deck and scattered them overboard on the dark water, in which

they vanished instantly.

He did it slowly, without hesitation or remorse. H. Walter, Esqre, in

Malata. The innocent Arthur—What was his name? The man sought for by

that woman who as she went by seemed to draw all the passion of the earth

to her, without effort, not deigning to notice, naturally, as other women

breathed the air. But Renouard was no longer jealous of her very

existence. Whatever its meaning it was not for that man he had picked up

casually on obscure impulse, to get rid of the tiresome expostulations of

a so-called friend; a man of whom he really knew nothing—and now a dead

man. In Malata. Oh, yes! He was there secure enough, untroubled in his

grave. In Malata. To bury him was the last service Renouard had

rendered to his assistant before leaving the island on this trip to town.

Like many men ready enough for arduous enterprises Renouard was inclined

to evade the small complications of existence. This trait of his

character was composed of a little indolence, some disdain, and a

shrinking from contests with certain forms of vulgarity—like a man who

would face a lion and go out of his way to avoid a toad. His intercourse

with the meddlesome journalist was that merely outward intimacy without

sympathy some young men get drawn into easily. It had amused him rather

to keep that “friend” in the dark about the fate of his assistant.

Renouard had never needed other company than his own, for there was in

him something of the sensitiveness of a dreamer who is easily jarred. He

had said to himself that the all-knowing one would only preach again

about the evils of solitude and worry his head off in favour of some

forlornly useless protégé of his. Also the inquisitiveness of the Editor

had irritated him and had closed his lips in sheer disgust.

And now he contemplated the noose of consequences drawing tight around

him.

It was the memory of that diplomatic reticence which on the terrace had

stiffled his first cry which would have told them all that the man sought

for was not to be met on earth any more. He shrank from the absurdity of

hearing the all-knowing one, and not very sober at that, turning on him

with righteous reproaches—

“You never told me. You gave me to understand that your assistant was

alive, and now you say he’s dead. Which is it? Were you lying then or

are you lying now?” No! the thought of such a scene was not to be borne.

He had sat down appalled, thinking: “What shall I do now?”

His courage had oozed out of him. Speaking the truth meant the Moorsoms

going away at once—while it seemed to him that he would give the last

shred of his rectitude to secure a day more of her company. He sat

on—silent. Slowly, from confused sensations, from his talk with the

professor, the manner of the girl herself, the intoxicating familiarity

of her sudden hand-clasp, there had come to him a half glimmer of hope.

The other man was dead. Then! . . . Madness, of course—but he could not

give it up. He had listened to that confounded busybody arranging

everything—while all these people stood around assenting, under the spell

of that dead romance. He had listened scornful and silent. The glimmers

of hope, of opportunity, passed before his eyes. He had only to sit

still and say nothing. That and no more. And what was truth to him in

the face of that great passion which had flung him prostrate in spirit at

her adored feet!

And now it was done! Fatality had willed it! With the eyes of a mortal

struck by the maddening thunderbolt of the gods, Renouard looked up to

the sky, an immense black pall dusted over with gold, on which great

shudders seemed to pass from the breath of life affirming its sway.

CHAPTER VIII

At last, one morning, in a clear spot of a glassy horizon charged with

heraldic masses of black vapours, the island grew out from the sea,

showing here and there its naked members of basaltic rock through the

rents of heavy foliage. Later, in the great spilling of all the riches

of sunset, Malata stood out green and rosy before turning into a violet

shadow in the autumnal light of the expiring day. Then came the night.

In the faint airs the schooner crept on past a sturdy squat headland, and

it was pitch dark when her headsails ran down, she turned short on her

heel, and her anchor bit into the sandy bottom on the edge of the outer

reef; for it was too dangerous then to attempt entering the little bay

full of shoals. After the last solemn flutter of the mainsail the

murmuring voices of the Moorsom party lingered, very frail, in the black

stillness.

They were sitting aft, on chairs, and nobody made a move. Early in the

day, when it had become evident that the wind was failing, Renouard,

basing his advice on the shortcomings of his bachelor establishment, had

urged on the ladies the advisability of not going ashore in the middle of

the night. Now he approached them in a constrained manner (it was

astonishing the constraint that had reigned between him and his guests

all through the passage) and renewed his arguments. No one ashore would

dream of his bringing any visitors with him. Nobody would even think of

coming off. There was only one old canoe on the plantation. And landing

in the schooner’s boats would be awkward in the dark. There was the risk

of getting aground on some shallow patches. It would be best to spend

the rest of the night on board.

There was really no opposition. The professor smoking a pipe, and very

comfortable in an ulster buttoned over his tropical clothes, was the

first to speak from his long chair.

“Most excellent advice.”

Next to him Miss Moorsom assented by a long silence. Then in a voice as

of one coming out of a dream—

“And so this is Malata,” she said. “I have often wondered . . .”

A shiver passed through Renouard. She had wondered! What about? Malata

was himself. He and Malata were one. And she had wondered! She had . . .

The professor’s sister leaned over towards Renouard. Through all these

days at sea the man’s—the found man’s—existence had not been alluded to

on board the schooner. That reticence was part of the general constraint

lying upon them all. She, herself, certainly had not been exactly elated

by this finding—poor Arthur, without money, without prospects. But she

felt moved by the sentiment and romance of the situation.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” she whispered out of her white wrap, “to think of

poor Arthur sleeping there, so near to our dear lovely Felicia, and not

knowing the immense joy in store for him to-morrow.”

There was such artificiality in the wax-flower lady that nothing in this

speech touched Renouard. It was but the simple anxiety of his heart that

he was voicing when he muttered gloomily—

“No one in the world knows what to-morrow may hold in store.”

The mature lady had a recoil as though he had said something impolite.

What a harsh thing to say—instead of finding something nice and

appropriate. On board, where she never saw him in evening clothes,

Renouard’s resemblance to a duke’s son was not so apparent to her.

Nothing but his—ah—bohemianism remained. She rose with a sort of

ostentation.

“It’s late—and since we are going to sleep on board to-night . . .” she

said. “But it does seem so cruel.”

The professor started up eagerly, knocking the ashes out of his pipe.

“Infinitely more sensible, my dear Emma.”

Renouard waited behind Miss Moorsom’s chair.

She got up slowly, moved one step forward, and paused looking at the

shore. The blackness of the island blotted out the stars with its vague

mass like a low thundercloud brooding over the waters and ready to burst

into flame and crashes.

“And so—this is Malata,” she repeated dreamily, moving towards the cabin

door. The clear cloak hanging from her shoulders, the ivory face—for the

night had put out nothing of her but the gleams of her hair—made her

resemble a shining dream-woman uttering words of wistful inquiry. She

disappeared without a sign, leaving Renouard penetrated to the very

marrow by the sounds that came from her body like a mysterious resonance

of an exquisite instrument.

He stood stock still. What was this accidental touch which had evoked

the strange accent of her voice? He dared not answer that question. But

he had to answer the question of what was to be done now. Had the moment

of confession come? The thought was enough to make one’s blood run cold.

It was as if those people had a premonition of something. In the

taciturn days of the passage he had noticed their reserve even amongst

themselves. The professor smoked his pipe moodily in retired spots.

Renouard had caught Miss Moorsom’s eyes resting on himself more than

once, with a peculiar and grave expression. He fancied that she avoided

all opportunities of conversation. The maiden lady seemed to nurse a

grievance. And now what had he to do?

The lights on the deck had gone out one after the other. The schooner

slept.

About an hour after Miss Moorsom had gone below without a sign or a word

for him, Renouard got out of his hammock slung in the waist under the

midship awning—for he had given up all the accommodation below to his

guests. He got out with a sudden swift movement, flung off his sleeping

jacket, rolled his pyjamas up his thighs, and stole forward, unseen by

the one Kanaka of the anchor-watch. His white torso, naked like a

stripped athlete’s, glimmered, ghostly, in the deep shadows of the deck.

Unnoticed he got out of the ship over the knight-heads, ran along the

back rope, and seizing the dolphin-striker firmly with both hands,

lowered himself into the sea without a splash.

He swam away, noiseless like a fish, and then struck boldly for the land,

sustained, embraced, by the tepid water. The gentle, voluptuous heave of

its breast swung him up and down slightly; sometimes a wavelet murmured

in his ears; from time to time, lowering his feet, he felt for the bottom

on a shallow patch to rest and correct his direction. He landed at the

lower end of the bungalow garden, into the dead stillness of the island.

There were no lights. The plantation seemed to sleep, as profoundly as

the schooner. On the path a small shell cracked under his naked heel.

The faithful half-caste foreman going his rounds cocked his ears at the

sharp sound. He gave one enormous start of fear at the sight of the

swift white figure flying at him out of the night. He crouched in

terror, and then sprang up and clicked his tongue in amazed recognition.

“Tse! Tse! The master!”

“Be quiet, Luiz, and listen to what I say.”

Yes, it was the master, the strong master who was never known to raise

his voice, the man blindly obeyed and never questioned. He talked low

and rapidly in the quiet night, as if every minute were precious. On

learning that three guests were coming to stay Luiz clicked his tongue

rapidly. These clicks were the uniform, stenographic symbols of his

emotions, and he could give them an infinite variety of meaning. He

listened to the rest in a deep silence hardly affected by the low, “Yes,

master,” whenever Renouard paused.

“You understand?” the latter insisted. “No preparations are to be made

till we land in the morning. And you are to say that Mr. Walter has gone

off in a trading schooner on a round of the islands.”

“Yes, master.”

“No mistakes—mind!”

“No, master.”

Renouard walked back towards the sea. Luiz, following him, proposed to

call out half a dozen boys and man the canoe.

“Imbecile!”

“Tse! Tse! Tse!”

“Don’t you understand that you haven’t seen me?”

“Yes, master. But what a long swim. Suppose you drown.”

“Then you can say of me and of Mr. Walter what you like. The dead don’t

mind.”

Renouard entered the sea and heard a faint “Tse! Tse! Tse!” of concern

from the half-caste, who had already lost sight of the master’s dark head

on the overshadowed water.

Renouard set his direction by a big star that, dipping on the horizon,

seemed to look curiously into his face. On this swim back he felt the

mournful fatigue of all that length of the traversed road, which brought

him no nearer to his desire. It was as if his love had sapped the

invisible supports of his strength. There came a moment when it seemed

to him that he must have swum beyond the confines of life. He had a

sensation of eternity close at hand, demanding no effort—offering its

peace. It was easy to swim like this beyond the confines of life looking

at a star. But the thought: “They will think I dared not face them and

committed suicide,” caused a revolt of his mind which carried him on. He

returned on board, as he had left, unheard and unseen. He lay in his

hammock utterly exhausted and with a confused feeling that he had been

beyond the confines of life, somewhere near a star, and that it was very

quiet there.

CHAPTER IX

Sheltered by the squat headland from the first morning sparkle of the sea

the little bay breathed a delicious freshness. The party from the

schooner landed at the bottom of the garden. They exchanged

insignificant words in studiously casual tones. The professor’s sister

put up a long-handled eye-glass as if to scan the novel surroundings, but

in reality searching for poor Arthur anxiously. Having never seen him

otherwise than in his town clothes she had no idea what he would look

like. It had been left to the professor to help his ladies out of the

boat because Renouard, as if intent on giving directions, had stepped

forward at once to meet the half-caste Luiz hurrying down the path. In

the distance, in front of the dazzlingly sunlit bungalow, a row of

dark-faced house-boys unequal in stature and varied in complexion

preserved the immobility of a guard of honour.

Luiz had taken off his soft felt hat before coming within earshot.

Renouard bent his head to his rapid talk of domestic arrangements he

meant to make for the visitors; another bed in the master’s room for the

ladies and a cot for the gentleman to be hung in the room opposite

where—where Mr. Walter—here he gave a scared look all round—Mr.

Walter—had died.

“Very good,” assented Renouard in an even undertone. “And remember what

you have to say of him.”

“Yes, master. Only”—he wriggled slightly and put one bare foot on the

other for a moment in apologetic embarrassment—“only I—I—don’t like to

say it.”

Renouard looked at him without anger, without any sort of expression.

“Frightened of the dead? Eh? Well—all right. I will say it myself—I

suppose once for all. . . .” Immediately he raised his voice very much.

“Send the boys down to bring up the luggage.”

“Yes, master.”

Renouard turned to his distinguished guests who, like a personally

conducted party of tourists, had stopped and were looking about them.

“I am sorry,” he began with an impassive face. “My man has just told me

that Mr. Walter . . .” he managed to smile, but didn’t correct himself .

. . “has gone in a trading schooner on a short tour of the islands, to

the westward.”

This communication was received in profound silence.

Renouard forgot himself in the thought: “It’s done!” But the sight of

the string of boys marching up to the house with suit-cases and

dressing-bags rescued him from that appalling abstraction.

“All I can do is to beg you to make yourselves at home . . . with what

patience you may.”

This was so obviously the only thing to do that everybody moved on at

once. The professor walked alongside Renouard, behind the two ladies.

“Rather unexpected—this absence.”

“Not exactly,” muttered Renouard. “A trip has to be made every year to

engage labour.”

“I see . . . And he . . . How vexingly elusive the poor fellow has

become! I’ll begin to think that some wicked fairy is favouring this

love tale with unpleasant attentions.”

Renouard noticed that the party did not seem weighed down by this new

disappointment. On the contrary they moved with a freer step. The

professor’s sister dropped her eye-glass to the end of its chain. Miss

Moorsom took the lead. The professor, his lips unsealed, lingered in the

open: but Renouard did not listen to that man’s talk. He looked after

that man’s daughter—if indeed that creature of irresistible seductions

were a daughter of mortals. The very intensity of his desire, as if his

soul were streaming after her through his eyes, defeated his object of

keeping hold of her as long as possible with, at least, one of his

senses. Her moving outlines dissolved into a misty coloured shimmer of a

woman made of flame and shadows, crossing the threshold of his house.

The days which followed were not exactly such as Renouard had feared—yet

they were not better than his fears. They were accursed in all the moods

they brought him. But the general aspect of things was quiet. The

professor smoked innumerable pipes with the air of a worker on his

holiday, always in movement and looking at things with that mysteriously

sagacious aspect of men who are admittedly wiser than the rest of the

world. His white head of hair—whiter than anything within the horizon

except the broken water on the reefs—was glimpsed in every part of the

plantation always on the move under the white parasol. And once he

climbed the headland and appeared suddenly to those below, a white speck

elevated in the blue, with a diminutive but statuesque effect.

Felicia Moorsom remained near the house. Sometimes she could be seen

with a despairing expression scribbling rapidly in her lock-up dairy.

But only for a moment. At the sound of Renouard’s footsteps she would

turn towards him her beautiful face, adorable in that calm which was like

a wilful, like a cruel ignoring of her tremendous power. Whenever she

sat on the verandah, on a chair more specially reserved for her use,

Renouard would stroll up and sit on the steps near her, mostly silent,

and often not trusting himself to turn his glance on her. She, very

still with her eyes half-closed, looked down on his head—so that to a

beholder (such as Professor Moorsom, for instance) she would appear to be

turning over in her mind profound thoughts about that man sitting at her

feet, his shoulders bowed a little, his hands listless—as if vanquished.

And, indeed, the moral poison of falsehood has such a decomposing power

that Renouard felt his old personality turn to dead dust. Often, in the

evening, when they sat outside conversing languidly in the dark, he felt

that he must rest his forehead on her feet and burst into tears.

The professor’s sister suffered from some little strain caused by the

unstability of her own feelings toward Renouard. She could not tell

whether she really did dislike him or not. At times he appeared to her

most fascinating; and, though he generally ended by saying something

shockingly crude, she could not resist her inclination to talk with

him—at least not always. One day when her niece had left them alone on

the verandah she leaned forward in her chair—speckless, resplendent, and,

in her way, almost as striking a personality as her niece, who did not

resemble her in the least. “Dear Felicia has inherited her hair and the

greatest part of her appearance from her mother,” the maiden lady used to

tell people.

She leaned forward then, confidentially.

“Oh! Mr. Renouard! Haven’t you something comforting to say?”

He looked up, as surprised as if a voice from heaven had spoken with this

perfect society intonation, and by the puzzled profundity of his blue

eyes fluttered the wax-flower of refined womanhood. She continued.

“For—I can speak to you openly on this tiresome subject—only think what a

terrible strain this hope deferred must be for Felicia’s heart—for her

nerves.”

“Why speak to me about it,” he muttered feeling half choked suddenly.

“Why! As a friend—a well-wisher—the kindest of hosts. I am afraid we

are really eating you out of house and home.” She laughed a little.

“Ah! When, when will this suspense be relieved! That poor lost Arthur!

I confess that I am almost afraid of the great moment. It will be like

seeing a ghost.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” asked Renouard, in a dull voice.

She shifted her hands a little. Her pose was perfect in its ease and

middle-aged grace.

“Not actually. Only in a photograph. But we have many friends who had

the experience of apparitions.”

“Ah! They see ghosts in London,” mumbled Renouard, not looking at her.

“Frequently—in a certain very interesting set. But all sorts of people

do. We have a friend, a very famous author—his ghost is a girl. One of

my brother’s intimates is a very great man of science. He is friendly

with a ghost . . . Of a girl too,” she added in a voice as if struck for

the first time by the coincidence. “It is the photograph of that

apparition which I have seen. Very sweet. Most interesting. A little

cloudy naturally. . . . Mr. Renouard! I hope you are not a sceptic.

It’s so consoling to think. . .”

“Those plantation boys of mine see ghosts too,” said Renouard grimly.

The sister of the philosopher sat up stiffly. What crudeness! It was

always so with this strange young man.

“Mr. Renouard! How can you compare the superstitious fancies of your

horrible savages with the manifestations . . . ”

Words failed her. She broke off with a very faint primly angry smile.

She was perhaps the more offended with him because of that flutter at the

beginning of the conversation. And in a moment with perfect tact and

dignity she got up from her chair and left him alone.

Renouard didn’t even look up. It was not the displeasure of the lady

which deprived him of his sleep that night. He was beginning to forget

what simple, honest sleep was like. His hammock from the ship had been

hung for him on a side verandah, and he spent his nights in it on his

back, his hands folded on his chest, in a sort of half conscious,

oppressed stupor. In the morning he watched with unseeing eyes the

headland come out a shapeless inkblot against the thin light of the false

dawn, pass through all the stages of daybreak to the deep purple of its

outlined mass nimbed gloriously with the gold of the rising sun. He

listened to the vague sounds of waking within the house: and suddenly he

became aware of Luiz standing by the hammock—obviously troubled.

“What’s the matter?”

“Tse! Tse! Tse!”

“Well, what now? Trouble with the boys?”

“No, master. The gentleman when I take him his bath water he speak to

me. He ask me—he ask—when, when, I think Mr. Walter, he come back.”

The half-caste’s teeth chattered slightly. Renouard got out of the

hammock.

“And he is here all the time—eh?”

Luiz nodded a scared affirmative, but at once protested, “I no see him.

I never. Not I! The ignorant wild boys say they see . . . Something!

Ough!”

He clapped his teeth on another short rattle, and stood there, shrunk,

blighted, like a man in a freezing blast.

“And what did you say to the gentleman?”

“I say I don’t know—and I clear out. I—I don’t like to speak of him.”

“All right. We shall try to lay that poor ghost,” said Renouard

gloomily, going off to a small hut near by to dress. He was saying to

himself: “This fellow will end by giving me away. The last thing that I

. . . No! That mustn’t be.” And feeling his hand being forced he

discovered the whole extent of his cowardice.

CHAPTER X

That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened soul

than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol bobbing up here

and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green plants. The crop

promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable philosopher of the age

took other than a merely scientific interest in the experiment. His

investments were judicious, but he had always some little money lying by,

for experiments.

After lunch, being left alone with Renouard, he talked a little of

cultivation and such matters. Then suddenly:

“By the way, is it true what my sister tells me, that your plantation

boys have been disturbed by a ghost?”

Renouard, who since the ladies had left the table was not keeping such a

strict watch on himself, came out of his abstraction with a start and a

stiff smile.

“My foreman had some trouble with them during my absence. They funk

working in a certain field on the slope of the hill.”

“A ghost here!” exclaimed the amused professor. “Then our whole

conception of the psychology of ghosts must be revised. This island has

been uninhabited probably since the dawn of ages. How did a ghost come

here. By air or water? And why did it leave its native haunts. Was it

from misanthropy? Was he expelled from some community of spirits?”

Renouard essayed to respond in the same tone. The words died on his

lips. Was it a man or a woman ghost, the professor inquired.

“I don’t know.” Renouard made an effort to appear at ease. He had, he

said, a couple of Tahitian amongst his boys—a ghost-ridden race. They

had started the scare. They had probably brought their ghost with them.

“Let us investigate the matter, Renouard,” proposed the professor half in

earnest. “We may make some interesting discoveries as to the state of

primitive minds, at any rate.”

This was too much. Renouard jumped up and leaving the room went out and

walked about in front of the house. He would allow no one to force his

hand. Presently the professor joined him outside. He carried his

parasol, but had neither his book nor his pipe with him. Amiably serious

he laid his hand on his “dear young friend’s” arm.

“We are all of us a little strung up,” he said. “For my part I have been

like sister Anne in the story. But I cannot see anything coming.

Anything that would be the least good for anybody—I mean.”

Renouard had recovered sufficiently to murmur coldly his regret of this

waste of time. For that was what, he supposed, the professor had in his

mind.

“Time,” mused Professor Moorsom. “I don’t know that time can be wasted.

But I will tell you, my dear friend, what this is: it is an awful waste

of life. I mean for all of us. Even for my sister, who has got a

headache and is gone to lie down.”

He shook gently Renouard’s arm. “Yes, for all of us! One may meditate

on life endlessly, one may even have a poor opinion of it—but the fact

remains that we have only one life to live. And it is short. Think of

that, my young friend.”

He released Renouard’s arm and stepped out of the shade opening his

parasol. It was clear that there was something more in his mind than

mere anxiety about the date of his lectures for fashionable audiences.

What did the man mean by his confounded platitudes? To Renouard, scared

by Luiz in the morning (for he felt that nothing could be more fatal than

to have his deception unveiled otherwise than by personal confession),

this talk sounded like encouragement or a warning from that man who

seemed to him to be very brazen and very subtle. It was like being

bullied by the dead and cajoled by the living into a throw of dice for a

supreme stake.

Renouard went away to some distance from the house and threw himself down

in the shade of a tree. He lay there perfectly still with his forehead

resting on his folded arms, light-headed and thinking. It seemed to him

that he must be on fire, then that he had fallen into a cool whirlpool, a

smooth funnel of water swirling about with nauseating rapidity. And then

(it must have been a reminiscence of his boyhood) he was walking on the

dangerous thin ice of a river, unable to turn back. . . . Suddenly it

parted from shore to shore with a loud crack like the report of a gun.

With one leap he found himself on his feet. All was peace, stillness,

sunshine. He walked away from there slowly. Had he been a gambler he

would have perhaps been supported in a measure by the mere excitement.

But he was not a gambler. He had always disdained that artificial manner

of challenging the fates. The bungalow came into view, bright and

pretty, and all about everything was peace, stillness, sunshine. . . .

While he was plodding towards it he had a disagreeable sense of the dead

man’s company at his elbow. The ghost! He seemed to be everywhere but

in his grave. Could one ever shake him off? he wondered. At that moment

Miss Moorsom came out on the verandah; and at once, as if by a mystery of

radiating waves, she roused a great tumult in his heart, shook earth and

sky together—but he plodded on. Then like a grave song-note in the storm

her voice came to him ominously.

“Ah! Mr. Renouard. . . ” He came up and smiled, but she was very

serious. “I can’t keep still any longer. Is there time to walk up this

headland and back before dark?”

The shadows were lying lengthened on the ground; all was stillness and

peace. “No,” said Renouard, feeling suddenly as steady as a rock. “But

I can show you a view from the central hill which your father has not

seen. A view of reefs and of broken water without end, and of great

wheeling clouds of sea-birds.”

She came down the verandah steps at once and they moved off. “You go

first,” he proposed, “and I’ll direct you. To the left.”

She was wearing a short nankin skirt, a muslin blouse; he could see

through the thin stuff the skin of her shoulders, of her arms. The noble

delicacy of her neck caused him a sort of transport. “The path begins

where these three palms are. The only palms on the island.”

“I see.”

She never turned her head. After a while she observed: “This path looks

as if it had been made recently.”

“Quite recently,” he assented very low.

They went on climbing steadily without exchanging another word; and when

they stood on the top she gazed a long time before her. The low evening

mist veiled the further limit of the reefs. Above the enormous and

melancholy confusion, as of a fleet of wrecked islands, the restless

myriads of sea-birds rolled and unrolled dark ribbons on the sky,

gathered in clouds, soared and stooped like a play of shadows, for they

were too far for them to hear their cries.

Renouard broke the silence in low tones.

“They’ll be settling for the night presently.” She made no sound. Round

them all was peace and declining sunshine. Near by, the topmost pinnacle

of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock,

weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the

Pacific. Renouard leaned his shoulders against it. Felicia Moorsom

faced him suddenly, her splendid black eyes full on his face as though

she had made up her mind at last to destroy his wits once and for all.

Dazzled, he lowered his eyelids slowly.

“Mr. Renouard! There is something strange in all this. Tell me where he

is?”

He answered deliberately.

“On the other side of this rock. I buried him there myself.”

She pressed her hands to her breast, struggled for her breath for a

moment, then: “Ohhh! . . . You buried him! . . . What sort of man are

you? . . . You dared not tell! . . . He is another of your victims? . . .

You dared not confess that evening. . . . You must have killed him. What

could he have done to you? . . . You fastened on him some atrocious

quarrel and . . .”

Her vengeful aspect, her poignant cries left him as unmoved as the weary

rock against which he leaned. He only raised his eyelids to look at her

and lowered them slowly. Nothing more. It silenced her. And as if

ashamed she made a gesture with her hand, putting away from her that

thought. He spoke, quietly ironic at first.

“Ha! the legendary Renouard of sensitive idiots—the ruthless

adventurer—the ogre with a future. That was a parrot cry, Miss Moorsom.

I don’t think that the greatest fool of them all ever dared hint such a

stupid thing of me that I killed men for nothing. No, I had noticed this

man in a hotel. He had come from up country I was told, and was doing

nothing. I saw him sitting there lonely in a corner like a sick crow,

and I went over one evening to talk to him. Just on impulse. He wasn’t

impressive. He was pitiful. My worst enemy could have told you he

wasn’t good enough to be one of Renouard’s victims. It didn’t take me

long to judge that he was drugging himself. Not drinking. Drugs.”

“Ah! It’s now that you are trying to murder him,” she cried.

“Really. Always the Renouard of shopkeepers’ legend. Listen! I would

never have been jealous of him. And yet I am jealous of the air you

breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees you—moving

free—not mine. But never mind. I rather liked him. For a certain

reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant here. He said he

believed this would save him. It did not save him from death. It came

to him as it were from nothing—just a fall. A mere slip and tumble of

ten feet into a ravine. But it seems he had been hurt before

up-country—by a horse. He ailed and ailed. No, he was not a

steel-tipped man. And his poor soul seemed to have been damaged too. It

gave way very soon.”

“This is tragic!” Felicia Moorsom whispered with feeling. Renouard’s

lips twitched, but his level voice continued mercilessly.

“That’s the story. He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to

tell me something. I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in

me. I told him that he was mistaken. That there was a good deal of a

plebeian in me, that he couldn’t know. He seemed disappointed. He

muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a

curse on some woman, then turned to the wall and—just grew cold.”

“On a woman,” cried Miss Moorsom indignantly. “What woman?”

“I wonder!” said Renouard, raising his eyes and noting the crimson of her

ear-lobes against the live whiteness of her complexion, the sombre, as if

secret, night-splendour of her eyes under the writhing flames of her

hair. “Some woman who wouldn’t believe in that poor innocence of his. .

. Yes. You probably. And now you will not believe in me—not even in me

who must in truth be what I am—even to death. No! You won’t. And yet,

Felicia, a woman like you and a man like me do not often come together on

this earth.”

The flame of her glorious head scorched his face. He flung his hat far

away, and his suddenly lowered eyelids brought out startlingly his

resemblance to antique bronze, the profile of Pallas, still, austere,

bowed a little in the shadow of the rock. “Oh! If you could only

understand the truth that is in me!” he added.

She waited, as if too astounded to speak, till he looked up again, and

then with unnatural force as if defending herself from some unspoken

aspersion, “It’s I who stand for truth here! Believe in you! In you,

who by a heartless falsehood—and nothing else, nothing else, do you

hear?—have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable

farce!” She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the

pose of simple grief—mourning for herself.

“It only wanted this. Why! Oh! Why is it that ugliness, ridicule, and

baseness must fall across my path.”

On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if the

earth had fallen away from under their feet.

“Are you grieving for your dignity? He was a mediocre soul and could

have given you but an unworthy existence.”

She did not even smile at those words, but, superb, as if lifting a

corner of the veil, she turned on him slowly.

“And do you imagine I would have devoted myself to him for such a

purpose! Don’t you know that reparation was due to him from me? A

sacred debt—a fine duty. To redeem him would not have been in my power—I

know it. But he was blameless, and it was for me to come forward. Don’t

you see that in the eyes of the world nothing could have rehabilitated

him so completely as his marriage with me? No word of evil could be

whispered of him after I had given him my hand. As to giving myself up

to anything less than the shaping of a man’s destiny—if I thought I could

do it I would abhor myself. . . .” She spoke with authority in her deep

fascinating, unemotional voice. Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over

some sinister riddle of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road of his

life.

“Yes. Your father was right. You are one of these aristocrats . . .”

She drew herself up haughtily.

“What do you say? My father! . . . I an aristocrat.”

“Oh! I don’t mean that you are like the men and women of the time of

armours, castles, and great deeds. Oh, no! They stood on the naked

soil, had traditions to be faithful to, had their feet on this earth of

passions and death which is not a hothouse. They would have been too

plebeian for you since they had to lead, to suffer with, to understand

the commonest humanity. No, you are merely of the topmost layer,

disdainful and superior, the mere pure froth and bubble on the

inscrutable depths which some day will toss you out of existence. But

you are you! You are you! You are the eternal love itself—only, O

Divinity, it isn’t your body, it is your soul that is made of foam.”

She listened as if in a dream. He had succeeded so well in his effort to

drive back the flood of his passion that his life itself seemed to run

with it out of his body. At that moment he felt as one dead speaking.

But the headlong wave returning with tenfold force flung him on her

suddenly, with open arms and blazing eyes. She found herself like a

feather in his grasp, helpless, unable to struggle, with her feet off the

ground. But this contact with her, maddening like too much felicity,

destroyed its own end. Fire ran through his veins, turned his passion to

ashes, burnt him out and left him empty, without force—almost without

desire. He let her go before she could cry out. And she was so used to

the forms of repression enveloping, softening the crude impulses of old

humanity that she no longer believed in their existence as if it were an

exploded legend. She did not recognise what had happened to her. She

came safe out of his arms, without a struggle, not even having felt

afraid.

“What’s the meaning of this?” she said, outraged but calm in a scornful

way.

He got down on his knees in silence, bent low to her very feet, while she

looked down at him, a little surprised, without animosity, as if merely

curious to see what he would do. Then, while he remained bowed to the

ground pressing the hem of her skirt to his lips, she made a slight

movement. He got up.

“No,” he said. “Were you ever so much mine what could I do with you

without your consent? No. You don’t conquer a wraith, cold mist, stuff

of dreams, illusion. It must come to you and cling to your breast. And

then! Oh! And then!”

All ecstasy, all expression went out of his face.

“Mr. Renouard,” she said, “though you can have no claim on my

consideration after having decoyed me here for the vile purpose,

apparently, of gloating over me as your possible prey, I will tell you

that I am not perhaps the extraordinary being you think I am. You may

believe me. Here I stand for truth itself.”

“What’s that to me what you are?” he answered. “At a sign from you I

would climb up to the seventh heaven to bring you down to earth for my

own—and if I saw you steeped to the lips in vice, in crime, in mud, I

would go after you, take you to my arms—wear you for an incomparable

jewel on my breast. And that’s love—true love—the gift and the curse of

the gods. There is no other.”

The truth vibrating in his voice made her recoil slightly, for she was

not fit to hear it—not even a little—not even one single time in her

life. It was revolting to her; and in her trouble, perhaps prompted by

the suggestion of his name or to soften the harshness of expression, for

she was obscurely moved, she spoke to him in French.

“_Assez_! _J’ai horreur de tout cela_,” she said.

He was white to his very lips, but he was trembling no more. The dice

had been cast, and not even violence could alter the throw. She passed

by him unbendingly, and he followed her down the path. After a time she

heard him saying:

“And your dream is to influence a human destiny?”

“Yes!” she answered curtly, unabashed, with a woman’s complete assurance.

“Then you may rest content. You have done it.”

She shrugged her shoulders slightly. But just before reaching the end of

the path she relented, stopped, and went back to him.

“I don’t suppose you are very anxious for people to know how near you

came to absolute turpitude. You may rest easy on that point. I shall

speak to my father, of course, and we will agree to say that he has

died—nothing more.”

“Yes,” said Renouard in a lifeless voice. “He is dead. His very ghost

shall be done with presently.”

She went on, but he remained standing stock still in the dusk. She had

already reached the three palms when she heard behind her a loud peal of

laughter, cynical and joyless, such as is heard in smoking-rooms at the

end of a scandalous story. It made her feel positively faint for a

moment.

CHAPTER XI

Slowly a complete darkness enveloped Geoffrey Renouard. His resolution

had failed him. Instead of following Felicia into the house, he had

stopped under the three palms, and leaning against a smooth trunk had

abandoned himself to a sense of an immense deception and the feeling of

extreme fatigue. This walk up the hill and down again was like the

supreme effort of an explorer trying to penetrate the interior of an

unknown country, the secret of which is too well defended by its cruel

and barren nature. Decoyed by a mirage, he had gone too far—so far that

there was no going back. His strength was at an end. For the first time

in his life he had to give up, and with a sort of despairing

self-possession he tried to understand the cause of the defeat. He did

not ascribe it to that absurd dead man.

The hesitating shadow of Luiz approached him unnoticed till it spoke

timidly. Renouard started.

“Eh? What? Dinner waiting? You must say I beg to be excused. I can’t

come. But I shall see them to-morrow morning, at the landing place.

Take your orders from the professor as to the sailing of the schooner.

Go now.”

Luiz, dumbfounded, retreated into the darkness. Renouard did not move,

but hours afterwards, like the bitter fruit of his immobility, the words:

“I had nothing to offer to her vanity,” came from his lips in the silence

of the island. And it was then only that he stirred, only to wear the

night out in restless tramping up and down the various paths of the

plantation. Luiz, whose sleep was made light by the consciousness of

some impending change, heard footsteps passing by his hut, the firm tread

of the master; and turning on his mats emitted a faint Tse! Tse! Tse! of

deep concern.

Lights had been burning in the bungalow almost all through the night; and

with the first sign of day began the bustle of departure. House boys

walked processionally carrying suit-cases and dressing-bags down to the

schooner’s boat, which came to the landing place at the bottom of the

garden. Just as the rising sun threw its golden nimbus around the purple

shape of the headland, the Planter of Malata was perceived pacing

bare-headed the curve of the little bay. He exchanged a few words with

the sailing-master of the schooner, then remained by the boat, standing

very upright, his eyes on the ground, waiting.

He had not long to wait. Into the cool, overshadowed garden the

professor descended first, and came jauntily down the path in a lively

cracking of small shells. With his closed parasol hooked on his forearm,

and a book in his hand, he resembled a banal tourist more than was

permissible to a man of his unique distinction. He waved the disengaged

arm from a distance, but at close quarters, arrested before Renouard’s

immobility, he made no offer to shake hands. He seemed to appraise the

aspect of the man with a sharp glance, and made up his mind.

“We are going back by Suez,” he began almost boisterously. “I have been

looking up the sailing lists. If the zephirs of your Pacific are only

moderately propitious I think we are sure to catch the mail boat due in

Marseilles on the 18th of March. This will suit me excellently. . . .”

He lowered his tone. “My dear young friend, I’m deeply grateful to you.”

Renouard’s set lips moved.

“Why are you grateful to me?”

“Ah! Why? In the first place you might have made us miss the next boat,

mightn’t you? . . . I don’t thank you for your hospitality. You can’t be

angry with me for saying that I am truly thankful to escape from it. But

I am grateful to you for what you have done, and—for being what you are.”

It was difficult to define the flavour of that speech, but Renouard

received it with an austerely equivocal smile. The professor stepping

into the boat opened his parasol and sat down in the stern-sheets waiting

for the ladies. No sound of human voice broke the fresh silence of the

morning while they walked the broad path, Miss Moorsom a little in

advance of her aunt.

When she came abreast of him Renouard raised his head.

“Good-bye, Mr. Renouard,” she said in a low voice, meaning to pass on;

but there was such a look of entreaty in the blue gleam of his sunken

eyes that after an imperceptible hesitation she laid her hand, which was

ungloved, in his extended palm.

“Will you condescend to remember me?” he asked, while an emotion with

which she was angry made her pale cheeks flush and her black eyes

sparkle.

“This is a strange request for you to make,” she said, exaggerating the

coldness of her tone.

“Is it? Impudent perhaps. Yet I am not so guilty as you think; and bear

in mind that to me you can never make reparation.”

“Reparation? To you! It is you who can offer me no reparation for the

offence against my feelings—and my person; for what reparation can be

adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its

implication, so humiliating to my pride. No! I don’t want to remember

you.”

Unexpectedly, with a tightening grip, he pulled her nearer to him, and

looking into her eyes with fearless despair—

“You’ll have to. I shall haunt you,” he said firmly.

Her hand was wrenched out of his grasp before he had time to release it.

Felicia Moorsom stepped into the boat, sat down by the side of her

father, and breathed tenderly on her crushed fingers.

The professor gave her a sidelong look—nothing more. But the professor’s

sister, yet on shore, had put up her long-handle double eye-glass to look

at the scene. She dropped it with a faint rattle.

“I’ve never in my life heard anything so crude said to a lady,” she

murmured, passing before Renouard with a perfectly erect head. When, a

moment afterwards, softening suddenly, she turned to throw a good-bye to

that young man, she saw only his back in the distance moving towards the

bungalow. She watched him go in—amazed—before she too left the soil of

Malata.

Nobody disturbed Renouard in that room where he had shut himself in to

breathe the evanescent perfume of her who for him was no more, till late

in the afternoon when the half-caste was heard on the other side of the

door.

He wanted the master to know that the trader _Janet_ was just entering

the cove.

Renouard’s strong voice on his side of the door gave him most unexpected

instructions. He was to pay off the boys with the cash in the office and

arrange with the captain of the _Janet_ to take every worker away from

Malata, returning them to their respective homes. An order on the

Dunster firm would be given to him in payment.

And again the silence of the bungalow remained unbroken till, next

morning, the half-caste came to report that everything was done. The

plantation boys were embarking now.

Through a crack in the door a hand thrust at him a piece of paper, and

the door slammed to so sharply that Luiz stepped back. Then approaching

cringingly the keyhole, in a propitiatory tone he asked:

“Do I go too, master?”

“Yes. You too. Everybody.”

“Master stop here alone?”

Silence. And the half-caste’s eyes grew wide with wonder. But he also,

like those “ignorant savages,” the plantation boys, was only too glad to

leave an island haunted by the ghost of a white man. He backed away

noiselessly from the mysterious silence in the closed room, and only in

the very doorway of the bungalow allowed himself to give vent to his

feelings by a deprecatory and pained—

“Tse! Tse! Tse!”

CHAPTER XII

The Moorsoms did manage to catch the homeward mail boat all right, but

had only twenty-four hours in town. Thus the sentimental Willie could

not see very much of them. This did not prevent him afterwards from

relating at great length, with manly tears in his eyes, how poor Miss

Moorsom—the fashionable and clever beauty—found her betrothed in Malata

only to see him die in her arms. Most people were deeply touched by the

sad story. It was the talk of a good many days.

But the all-knowing Editor, Renouard’s only friend and crony, wanted to

know more than the rest of the world. From professional incontinence,

perhaps, he thirsted for a full cup of harrowing detail. And when he

noticed Renouard’s schooner lying in port day after day he sought the

sailing master to learn the reason. The man told him that such were his

instructions. He had been ordered to lie there a month before returning

to Malata. And the month was nearly up. “I will ask you to give me a

passage,” said the Editor.

He landed in the morning at the bottom of the garden and found peace,

stillness, sunshine reigning everywhere, the doors and windows of the

bungalow standing wide open, no sight of a human being anywhere, the

plants growing rank and tall on the deserted fields. For hours the

Editor and the schooner’s crew, excited by the mystery, roamed over the

island shouting Renouard’s name; and at last set themselves in grim

silence to explore systematically the uncleared bush and the deeper

ravines in search of his corpse. What had happened? Had he been

murdered by the boys? Or had he simply, capricious and secretive,

abandoned his plantation taking the people with him. It was impossible

to tell what had happened. At last, towards the decline of the day, the

Editor and the sailing master discovered a track of sandals crossing a

strip of sandy beach on the north shore of the bay. Following this track

fearfully, they passed round the spur of the headland, and there on a

large stone found the sandals, Renouard’s white jacket, and the Malay

sarong of chequered pattern which the planter of Malata was well known to

wear when going to bathe. These things made a little heap, and the

sailor remarked, after gazing at it in silence—

“Birds have been hovering over this for many a day.”

“He’s gone bathing and got drowned,” cried the Editor in dismay.

“I doubt it, sir. If he had been drowned anywhere within a mile from the

shore the body would have been washed out on the reefs. And our boats

have found nothing so far.”

Nothing was ever found—and Renouard’s disappearance remained in the main

inexplicable. For to whom could it have occurred that a man would set

out calmly to swim beyond the confines of life—with a steady stroke—his

eyes fixed on a star!

Next evening, from the receding schooner, the Editor looked back for the

last time at the deserted island. A black cloud hung listlessly over the

high rock on the middle hill; and under the mysterious silence of that

shadow Malata lay mournful, with an air of anguish in the wild sunset, as

if remembering the heart that was broken there.

* * * * *

_Dec._ 1913.

THE PARTNER

“And that be hanged for a silly yarn. The boatmen here in Westport have

been telling this lie to the summer visitors for years. The sort that

gets taken out for a row at a shilling a head—and asks foolish

questions—must be told something to pass the time away. D’ye know

anything more silly than being pulled in a boat along a beach? . . . It’s

like drinking weak lemonade when you aren’t thirsty. I don’t know why

they do it! They don’t even get sick.”

A forgotten glass of beer stood at his elbow; the locality was a small

respectable smoking-room of a small respectable hotel, and a taste for

forming chance acquaintances accounts for my sitting up late with him.

His great, flat, furrowed cheeks were shaven; a thick, square wisp of

white hairs hung from his chin; its waggling gave additional point to his

deep utterance; and his general contempt for mankind with its activities

and moralities was expressed in the rakish set of his big soft hat of

black felt with a large rim, which he kept always on his head.

His appearance was that of an old adventurer, retired after many unholy

experiences in the darkest parts of the earth; but I had every reason to

believe that he had never been outside England. From a casual remark

somebody dropped I gathered that in his early days he must have been

somehow connected with shipping—with ships in docks. Of individuality he

had plenty. And it was this which attracted my attention at first. But

he was not easy to classify, and before the end of the week I gave him up

with the vague definition, “an imposing old ruffian.”

One rainy afternoon, oppressed by infinite boredom, I went into the

smoking-room. He was sitting there in absolute immobility, which was

really fakir-like and impressive. I began to wonder what could be the

associations of that sort of man, his “milieu,” his private connections,

his views, his morality, his friends, and even his wife—when to my

surprise he opened a conversation in a deep, muttering voice.

I must say that since he had learned from somebody that I was a writer of

stories he had been acknowledging my existence by means of some vague

growls in the morning.

He was essentially a taciturn man. There was an effect of rudeness in

his fragmentary sentences. It was some time before I discovered that

what he would be at was the process by which stories—stories for

periodicals—were produced.

What could one say to a fellow like that? But I was bored to death; the

weather continued impossible; and I resolved to be amiable.

“And so you make these tales up on your own. How do they ever come into

your head?” he rumbled.

I explained that one generally got a hint for a tale.

“What sort of hint?”

“Well, for instance,” I said, “I got myself rowed out to the rocks the

other day. My boatman told me of the wreck on these rocks nearly twenty

years ago. That could be used as a hint for a mainly descriptive bit of

story with some such title as ‘In the Channel,’ for instance.”

It was then that he flew out at the boatmen and the summer visitors who

listen to their tales. Without moving a muscle of his face he emitted a

powerful “Rot,” from somewhere out of the depths of his chest, and went

on in his hoarse, fragmentary mumble. “Stare at the silly rocks—nod

their silly heads [the visitors, I presume]. What do they think a man

is—blown-out paper bag or what?—go off pop like that when he’s hit—Damn

silly yarn—Hint indeed! . . . A lie?”

You must imagine this statuesque ruffian enhaloed in the black rim of his

hat, letting all this out as an old dog growls sometimes, with his head

up and staring-away eyes.

“Indeed!” I exclaimed. “Well, but even if untrue it _is_ a hint,

enabling me to see these rocks, this gale they speak of, the heavy seas,

etc., etc., in relation to mankind. The struggle against natural forces

and the effect of the issue on at least one, say, exalted—”

He interrupted me by an aggressive—

“Would truth be any good to you?”

“I shouldn’t like to say,” I answered, cautiously. “It’s said that truth

is stranger than fiction.”

“Who says that?” he mouthed.

“Oh! Nobody in particular.”

I turned to the window; for the contemptuous beggar was oppressive to

look at, with his immovable arm on the table. I suppose my unceremonious

manner provoked him to a comparatively long speech.

“Did you ever see such a silly lot of rocks? Like plums in a slice of

cold pudding.”

I was looking at them—an acre or more of black dots scattered on the

steel-grey shades of the level sea, under the uniform gossamer grey mist

with a formless brighter patch in one place—the veiled whiteness of the

cliff coming through, like a diffused, mysterious radiance. It was a

delicate and wonderful picture, something expressive, suggestive, and

desolate, a symphony in grey and black—a Whistler. But the next thing

said by the voice behind me made me turn round. It growled out contempt

for all associated notions of roaring seas with concise energy, then went

on—

“I—no such foolishness—looking at the rocks out there—more likely call to

mind an office—I used to look in sometimes at one time—office in

London—one of them small streets behind Cannon Street Station. . . ”

He was very deliberate; not jerky, only fragmentary; at times profane.

“That’s a rather remote connection,” I observed, approaching him.

“Connection? To Hades with your connections. It was an accident.”

“Still,” I said, “an accident has its backward and forward connections,

which, if they could be set forth—”

Without moving he seemed to lend an attentive ear.

“Aye! Set forth. That’s perhaps what you could do. Couldn’t you now?

There’s no sea life in this connection. But you can put it in out of

your head—if you like.”

“Yes. I could, if necessary,” I said. “Sometimes it pays to put in a

lot out of one’s head, and sometimes it doesn’t. I mean that the story

isn’t worth it. Everything’s in that.”

It amused me to talk to him like this. He reflected audibly that he

guessed story-writers were out after money like the rest of the world

which had to live by its wits: and that it was extraordinary how far

people who were out after money would go. . . Some of them.

Then he made a sally against sea life. Silly sort of life, he called it.

No opportunities, no experience, no variety, nothing. Some fine men came

out of it—he admitted—but no more chance in the world if put to it than

fly. Kids. So Captain Harry Dunbar. Good sailor. Great name as a

skipper. Big man; short side-whiskers going grey, fine face, loud voice.

A good fellow, but no more up to people’s tricks than a baby.

“That’s the captain of the _Sagamore_ you’re talking about,” I said,

confidently.

After a low, scornful “Of course” he seemed now to hold on the wall with

his fixed stare the vision of that city office, “at the back of Cannon

Street Station,” while he growled and mouthed a fragmentary description,

jerking his chin up now and then, as if angry.

It was, according to his account, a modest place of business, not shady

in any sense, but out of the way, in a small street now rebuilt from end

to end. “Seven doors from the Cheshire Cat public house under the

railway bridge. I used to take my lunch there when my business called me

to the city. Cloete would come in to have his chop and make the girl

laugh. No need to talk much, either, for that. Nothing but the way he

would twinkle his spectacles on you and give a twitch of his thick mouth

was enough to start you off before he began one of his little tales.

Funny fellow, Cloete. C-l-o-e-t-e—Cloete.”

“What was he—a Dutchman?” I asked, not seeing in the least what all this

had to do with the Westport boatmen and the Westport summer visitors and

this extraordinary old fellow’s irritable view of them as liars and

fools. “Devil knows,” he grunted, his eyes on the wall as if not to miss

a single movement of a cinematograph picture. “Spoke nothing but

English, anyway. First I saw him—comes off a ship in dock from the

States—passenger. Asks me for a small hotel near by. Wanted to be quiet

and have a look round for a few days. I took him to a place—friend of

mine. . . Next time—in the City—Hallo! You’re very obliging—have a

drink. Talks plenty about himself. Been years in the States. All sorts

of business all over the place. With some patent medicine people, too.

Travels. Writes advertisements and all that. Tells me funny stories.

Tall, loose-limbed fellow. Black hair up on end, like a brush; long

face, long legs, long arms, twinkle in his specs, jocular way of

speaking—in a low voice. . . See that?”

I nodded, but he was not looking at me.

“Never laughed so much in my life. The beggar—would make you laugh

telling you how he skinned his own father. He was up to that, too. A

man who’s been in the patent-medicine trade will be up to anything from

pitch-and-toss to wilful murder. And that’s a bit of hard truth for you.

Don’t mind what they do—think they can carry off anything and talk

themselves out of anything—all the world’s a fool to them. Business man,

too, Cloete. Came over with a few hundred pounds. Looking for something

to do—in a quiet way. Nothing like the old country, after all, says he. . .

And so we part—I with more drinks in me than I was used to. After a

time, perhaps six months or so, I run up against him again in Mr. George

Dunbar’s office. Yes, _that_ office. It wasn’t often that I . . .

However, there was a bit of his cargo in a ship in dock that I wanted to

ask Mr. George about. In comes Cloete out of the room at the back with

some papers in his hand. Partner. You understand?”

“Aha!” I said. “The few hundred pounds.”

“And that tongue of his,” he growled. “Don’t forget that tongue. Some

of his tales must have opened George Dunbar’s eyes a bit as to what

business means.”

“A plausible fellow,” I suggested.

“H’m! You must have it in your own way—of course. Well. Partner.

George Dunbar puts his top-hat on and tells me to wait a moment. . .

George always looked as though he were making a few thousands a year—a

city swell. . . Come along, old man! And he and Captain Harry go out

together—some business with a solicitor round the corner. Captain Harry,

when he was in England, used to turn up in his brother’s office regularly

about twelve. Sat in a corner like a good boy, reading the paper and

smoking his pipe. So they go out. . . Model brothers, says Cloete—two

love-birds—I am looking after the tinned-fruit side of this cozy little

show. . . Gives me that sort of talk. Then by-and-by: What sort of old

thing is that _Sagamore_? Finest ship out—eh? I dare say all ships are

fine to you. You live by them. I tell you what; I would just as soon

put my money into an old stocking. Sooner!”

* * * * *

He drew a breath, and I noticed his hand, lying loosely on the table,

close slowly into a fist. In that immovable man it was startling,

ominous, like the famed nod of the Commander.

“So, already at that time—note—already,” he growled.

“But hold on,” I interrupted. “The _Sagamore_ belonged to Mundy and

Rogers, I’ve been told.”

He snorted contemptuously. “Damn boatmen—know no better. Flew the

firm’s _house-flag_. That’s another thing. Favour. It was like this:

When old man Dunbar died, Captain Harry was already in command with the

firm. George chucked the bank he was clerking in—to go on his own with

what there was to share after the old chap. George was a smart man.

Started warehousing; then two or three things at a time: wood-pulp,

preserved-fruit trade, and so on. And Captain Harry let him have his

share to work with. . . I am provided for in my ship, he says. . . But

by-and-by Mundy and Rogers begin to sell out to foreigners all their

ships—go into steam right away. Captain Harry gets very upset—lose

command, part with the ship he was fond of—very wretched. Just then, so

it happened, the brothers came in for some money—an old woman died or

something. Quite a tidy bit. Then young George says: There’s enough

between us two to buy the _Sagamore_ with. . . But you’ll need more money

for your business, cries Captain Harry—and the other laughs at him: My

business is going on all right. Why, I can go out and make a handful of

sovereigns while you are trying to get your pipe to draw, old man. . .

Mundy and Rogers very friendly about it: Certainly, Captain. And we will

manage her for you, if you like, as if she were still our own. . . Why,

with a connection like that it was good investment to buy that ship.

Good! Aye, at the time.”

The turning of his head slightly toward me at this point was like a sign

of strong feeling in any other man.

“You’ll mind that this was long before Cloete came into it at all,” he

muttered, warningly.

“Yes. I will mind,” I said. “We generally say: some years passed.

That’s soon done.”

He eyed me for a while silently in an unseeing way, as if engrossed in

the thought of the years so easily dealt with; his own years, too, they

were, the years before and the years (not so many) after Cloete came upon

the scene. When he began to speak again, I discerned his intention to

point out to me, in his obscure and graphic manner, the influence on

George Dunbar of long association with Cloete’s easy moral standards,

unscrupulously persuasive gift of humour (funny fellow), and

adventurously reckless disposition. He desired me anxiously to elaborate

this view, and I assured him it was quite within my powers. He wished me

also to understand that George’s business had its ups and downs (the

other brother was meantime sailing to and fro serenely); that he got into

low water at times, which worried him rather, because he had married a

young wife with expensive tastes. He was having a pretty anxious time of

it generally; and just then Cloete ran up in the city somewhere against a

man working a patent medicine (the fellow’s old trade) with some success,

but which, with capital, capital to the tune of thousands to be spent

with both hands on advertising, could be turned into a great

thing—infinitely better-paying than a gold-mine. Cloete became excited

at the possibilities of that sort of business, in which he was an expert.

I understood that George’s partner was all on fire from the contact with

this unique opportunity.

“So he goes in every day into George’s room about eleven, and sings that

tune till George gnashes his teeth with rage. Do shut up. What’s the

good? No money. Hardly any to go on with, let alone pouring thousands

into advertising. Never dare propose to his brother Harry to sell the

ship. Couldn’t think of it. Worry him to death. It would be like the

end of the world coming. And certainly not for a business of that kind!

. . . Do you think it would be a swindle? asks Cloete, twitching his

mouth. . . George owns up: No—would be no better than a squeamish ass if

he thought that, after all these years in business.

“Cloete looks at him hard—Never thought of _selling_ the ship. Expected

the blamed old thing wouldn’t fetch half her insured value by this time.

Then George flies out at him. What’s the meaning, then, of these silly

jeers at ship-owning for the last three weeks? Had enough of them,

anyhow.

“Angry at having his mouth made to water, see. Cloete don’t get excited. . .

I am no squeamish ass, either, says he, very slowly. ’Tisn’t selling

your old _Sagamore_ wants. The blamed thing wants tomahawking (seems the

name _Sagamore_ means an Indian chief or something. The figure-head was

a half-naked savage with a feather over one ear and a hatchet in his

belt). Tomahawking, says he.

“What do you mean? asks George. . . Wrecking—it could be managed with

perfect safety, goes on Cloete—your brother would then put in his share

of insurance money. Needn’t tell him exactly what for. He thinks you’re

the smartest business man that ever lived. Make his fortune, too. . .

George grips the desk with both hands in his rage. . . You think my

brother’s a man to cast away his ship on purpose. I wouldn’t even dare

think of such a thing in the same room with him—the finest fellow that

ever lived. . . Don’t make such noise; they’ll hear you outside, says

Cloete; and he tells him that his brother is the salted pattern of all

virtues, but all that’s necessary is to induce him to stay ashore for a

voyage—for a holiday—take a rest—why not? . . . In fact, I have in view

somebody up to that sort of game—Cloete whispers.

“George nearly chokes. . . So you think I am of that sort—you think _me_

capable—What do you take me for? . . . He almost loses his head, while

Cloete keeps cool, only gets white about the gills. . . I take you for a

man who will be most cursedly hard up before long. . . He goes to the

door and sends away the clerks—there were only two—to take their lunch

hour. Comes back . . . What are you indignant about? Do I want you to

rob the widow and orphan? Why, man! Lloyd’s a corporation, it hasn’t

got a body to starve. There’s forty or more of them perhaps who

underwrote the lines on that silly ship of yours. Not one human being

would go hungry or cold for it. They take every risk into consideration.

Everything I tell you. . . That sort of talk. H’m! George too upset to

speak—only gurgles and waves his arms; so sudden, you see. The other,

warming his back at the fire, goes on. Wood-pulp business next door to a

failure. Tinned-fruit trade nearly played out. . . You’re frightened, he

says; but the law is only meant to frighten fools away. . . And he shows

how safe casting away that ship would be. Premiums paid for so many,

many years. No shadow of suspicion could arise. And, dash it all! a

ship must meet her end some day. . .

“I am not frightened. I am indignant,” says George Dunbar.

“Cloete boiling with rage inside. Chance of a lifetime—his chance! And

he says kindly: Your wife’ll be much more indignant when you ask her to

get out of that pretty house of yours and pile in into a two-pair

back—with kids perhaps, too. . .

“George had no children. Married a couple of years; looked forward to a

kid or two very much. Feels more upset than ever. Talks about an honest

man for father, and so on. Cloete grins: You be quick before they come,

and they’ll have a rich man for father, and no one the worse for it.

That’s the beauty of the thing.

“George nearly cries. I believe he did cry at odd times. This went on

for weeks. He couldn’t quarrel with Cloete. Couldn’t pay off his few

hundreds; and besides, he was used to have him about. Weak fellow,

George. Cloete generous, too. . . Don’t think of my little pile, says

he. Of course it’s gone when we have to shut up. But I don’t care, he

says. . . And then there was George’s new wife. When Cloete dines there,

the beggar puts on a dress suit; little woman liked it; . . . Mr. Cloete,

my husband’s partner; such a clever man, man of the world, so amusing! . . .

When he dines there and they are alone: Oh, Mr. Cloete, I wish George

would do something to improve our prospects. Our position is really so

mediocre. . . And Cloete smiles, but isn’t surprised, because he had put

all these notions himself into her empty head. . . What your husband

wants is enterprise, a little audacity. You can encourage him best, Mrs.

Dunbar. . . She was a silly, extravagant little fool. Had made George

take a house in Norwood. Live up to a lot of people better off than

themselves. I saw her once; silk dress, pretty boots, all feathers and

scent, pink face. More like the Promenade at the Alhambra than a decent

home, it looked to me. But some women do get a devil of a hold on a

man.”

“Yes, some do,” I assented. “Even when the man is the husband.”

“My missis,” he addressed me unexpectedly, in a solemn, surprisingly

hollow tone, “could wind me round her little finger. I didn’t find it

out till she was gone. Aye. But she was a woman of sense, while that

piece of goods ought to have been walking the streets, and that’s all I

can say. . . You must make her up out of your head. You will know the

sort.”

“Leave all that to me,” I said.

“H’m!” he grunted, doubtfully, then going back to his scornful tone: “A

month or so afterwards the _Sagamore_ arrives home. All very jolly at

first. . . Hallo, George boy! Hallo, Harry, old man! . . . But by and by

Captain Harry thinks his clever brother is not looking very well. And

George begins to look worse. He can’t get rid of Cloete’s notion. It

has stuck in his head. . . There’s nothing wrong—quite well. . . Captain

Harry still anxious. Business going all right, eh? Quite right. Lots

of business. Good business. . . Of course Captain Harry believes that

easily. Starts chaffing his brother in his jolly way about rolling in

money. George’s shirt sticks to his back with perspiration, and he feels

quite angry with the captain. . . The fool, he says to himself. Rolling

in money, indeed! And then he thinks suddenly: Why not? . . . Because

Cloete’s notion has got hold of his mind.

“But next day he weakens and says to Cloete . . . Perhaps it would be

best to sell. Couldn’t you talk to my brother? and Cloete explains to

him over again for the twentieth time why selling wouldn’t do, anyhow.

No! The _Sagamore_ must be tomahawked—as he would call it; to spare

George’s feelings, maybe. But every time he says the word, George

shudders. . . I’ve got a man at hand competent for the job who will do

the trick for five hundred, and only too pleased at the chance, says

Cloete. . . George shuts his eyes tight at that sort of talk—but at the

same time he thinks: Humbug! There can be no such man. And yet if there

was such a man it would be safe enough—perhaps.

“And Cloete always funny about it. He couldn’t talk about anything

without it seeming there was a great joke in it somewhere. . . Now, says

he, I know you are a moral citizen, George. Morality is mostly funk, and

I think you’re the funkiest man I ever came across in my travels. Why,

you are afraid to speak to your brother. Afraid to open your mouth to

him with a fortune for us all in sight. . . George flares up at this: no,

he ain’t afraid; he will speak; bangs fist on the desk. And Cloete pats

him on the back. . . We’ll be made men presently, he says.

“But the first time George attempts to speak to Captain Harry his heart

slides down into his boots. Captain Harry only laughs at the notion of

staying ashore. He wants no holiday, not he. But Jane thinks of

remaining in England this trip. Go about a bit and see some of her

people. Jane was the Captain’s wife; round-faced, pleasant lady. George

gives up that time; but Cloete won’t let him rest. So he tries again;

and the Captain frowns. He frowns because he’s puzzled. He can’t make

it out. He has no notion of living away from his _Sagamore_. . .

“Ah!” I cried. “Now I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” he growled, his black, contemptuous stare turning on me

crushingly.

“I beg your pardon,” I murmured.

“H’m! Very well, then. Captain Harry looks very stern, and George

crumples all up inside. . . He sees through me, he thinks. . . Of course

it could not be; but George, by that time, was scared at his own shadow.

He is shirking it with Cloete, too. Gives his partner to understand that

his brother has half a mind to try a spell on shore, and so on. Cloete

waits, gnawing his fingers; so anxious. Cloete really had found a man

for the job. Believe it or not, he had found him inside the very

boarding-house he lodged in—somewhere about Tottenham Court Road. He had

noticed down-stairs a fellow—a boarder and not a boarder—hanging about

the dark—part of the passage mostly; sort of ‘man of the house,’ a

slinking chap. Black eyes. White face. The woman of the house—a widow

lady, she called herself—very full of Mr. Stafford; Mr. Stafford this and

Mr. Stafford that. . . Anyhow, Cloete one evening takes him out to have a

drink. Cloete mostly passed away his evenings in saloon bars. No

drunkard, though, Cloete; for company; liked to talk to all sorts there;

just habit; American fashion.

“So Cloete takes that chap out more than once. Not very good company,

though. Little to say for himself. Sits quiet and drinks what’s given

to him, eyes always half closed, speaks sort of demure. . . I’ve had

misfortunes, he says. The truth was they had kicked him out of a big

steam-ship company for disgraceful conduct; nothing to affect his

certificate, you understand; and he had gone down quite easily. Liked

it, I expect. Anything’s better than work. Lived on the widow lady who

kept that boarding-house.”

“That’s almost incredible,” I ventured to interrupt. “A man with a

master’s certificate, do you mean?”

“I do; I’ve known them ’bus cads,” he growled, contemptuously. “Yes.

Swing on the tail-board by the strap and yell, ‘tuppence all the way.’

Through drink. But this Stafford was of another kind. Hell’s full of

such Staffords; Cloete would make fun of him, and then there would be a

nasty gleam in the fellow’s half-shut eye. But Cloete was generally kind

to him. Cloete was a fellow that would be kind to a mangy dog. Anyhow,

he used to stand drinks to that object, and now and then gave him half a

crown—because the widow lady kept Mr. Stafford short of pocket-money.

They had rows almost every day down in the basement. . .

“It was the fellow being a sailor that put into Cloete’s mind the first

notion of doing away with the _Sagamore_. He studies him a bit, thinks

there’s enough devil in him yet to be tempted, and one evening he says to

him . . . I suppose you wouldn’t mind going to sea again, for a spell? . . .

The other never raises his eyes; says it’s scarcely worth one’s while

for the miserable salary one gets. . . Well, but what do you say to

captain’s wages for a time, and a couple of hundred extra if you are

compelled to come home without the ship. Accidents will happen, says

Cloete. . . Oh! sure to, says that Stafford; and goes on taking sips of

his drink as if he had no interest in the matter.

“Cloete presses him a bit; but the other observes, impudent and languid

like: You see, there’s no future in a thing like that—is there? . . Oh!

no, says Cloete. Certainly not. I don’t mean this to have any future—as

far as you are concerned. It’s a ‘once for all’ transaction. Well, what

do you estimate your future at? he asks. . . The fellow more listless

than ever—nearly asleep.—I believe the skunk was really too lazy to care.

Small cheating at cards, wheedling or bullying his living out of some

woman or other, was more his style. Cloete swears at him in whispers

something awful. All this in the saloon bar of the Horse Shoe, Tottenham

Court Road. Finally they agree, over the second sixpennyworth of Scotch

hot, on five hundred pounds as the price of tomahawking the _Sagamore_.

And Cloete waits to see what George can do.

“A week or two goes by. The other fellow loafs about the house as if

there had been nothing, and Cloete begins to doubt whether he really

means ever to tackle that job. But one day he stops Cloete at the door,

with his downcast eyes: What about that employment you wished to give me?

he asks. . . You see, he had played some more than usual dirty trick on

the woman and expected awful ructions presently; and to be fired out for

sure. Cloete very pleased. George had been prevaricating to him such a

lot that he really thought the thing was as well as settled. And he

says: Yes. It’s time I introduced you to my friend. Just get your hat

and we will go now. . .

“The two come into the office, and George at his desk sits up in a sudden

panic—staring. Sees a tallish fellow, sort of nasty-handsome face, heavy

eyes, half shut; short drab overcoat, shabby bowler hat, very

careful—like in his movements. And he thinks to himself, Is that how

such a man looks! No, the thing’s impossible. . . Cloete does the

introduction, and the fellow turns round to look behind him at the chair

before he sits down. . . A thoroughly competent man, Cloete goes on . . .

The man says nothing, sits perfectly quiet. And George can’t speak,

throat too dry. Then he makes an effort: H’m! H’m! Oh

yes—unfortunately—sorry to disappoint—my brother—made other

arrangements—going himself.

“The fellow gets up, never raising his eyes off the ground, like a modest

girl, and goes out softly, right out of the office without a sound.

Cloete sticks his chin in his hand and bites all his fingers at once.

George’s heart slows down and he speaks to Cloete. . . This can’t be

done. How can it be? Directly the ship is lost Harry would see through

it. You know he is a man to go to the underwriters himself with his

suspicions. And he would break his heart over me. How can I play that

on him? There’s only two of us in the world belonging to each other. . .

“Cloete lets out a horrid cuss-word, jumps up, bolts away into his room,

and George hears him there banging things around. After a while he goes

to the door and says in a trembling voice: You ask me for an

impossibility. . . Cloete inside ready to fly out like a tiger and rend

him; but he opens the door a little way and says softly: Talking of

hearts, yours is no bigger than a mouse’s, let me tell you. . . But

George doesn’t care—load off the heart, anyhow. And just then Captain

Harry comes in. . . Hallo, George boy. I am little late. What about a

chop at the Cheshire, now? . . . Right you are, old man. . . And off they

go to lunch together. Cloete has nothing to eat that day.

“George feels a new man for a time; but all of a sudden that fellow

Stafford begins to hang about the street, in sight of the house door.

The first time George sees him he thinks he made a mistake. But no; next

time he has to go out, there is the very fellow skulking on the other

side of the road. It makes George nervous; but he must go out on

business, and when the fellow cuts across the road-way he dodges him. He

dodges him once, twice, three times; but at last he gets nabbed in his

very doorway. . . What do you want? he says, trying to look fierce.

“It seems that ructions had come in the basement of that boarding-house,

and the widow lady had turned on him (being jealous mad), to the extent

of talking of the police. _That_ Mr. Stafford couldn’t stand; so he

cleared out like a scared stag, and there he was, chucked into the

streets, so to speak. Cloete looked so savage as he went to and fro that

he hadn’t the spunk to tackle him; but George seemed a softer kind to his

eye. He would have been glad of half a quid, anything. . . I’ve had

misfortunes, he says softly, in his demure way, which frightens George

more than a row would have done. . . Consider the severity of my

disappointment, he says. . .

“George, instead of telling him to go to the devil, loses his head. . . I

don’t know you. What do you want? he cries, and bolts up-stairs to

Cloete. . . . Look what’s come of it, he gasps; now we are at the mercy

of that horrid fellow. . . Cloete tries to show him that the fellow can

do nothing; but George thinks that some sort of scandal may be forced on,

anyhow. Says that he can’t live with that horror haunting him. Cloete

would laugh if he weren’t too weary of it all. Then a thought strikes

him and he changes his tune. . . Well, perhaps! I will go down-stairs

and send him away to begin with. . . He comes back. . . He’s gone. But

perhaps you are right. The fellow’s hard up, and that’s what makes

people desperate. The best thing would be to get him out of the country

for a time. Look here, the poor devil is really in want of employment.

I won’t ask you much this time: only to hold your tongue; and I shall try

to get your brother to take him as chief officer. At this George lays

his arms and his head on his desk, so that Cloete feels sorry for him.

But altogether Cloete feels more cheerful because he has shaken the ghost

a bit into that Stafford. That very afternoon he buys him a suit of blue

clothes, and tells him that he will have to turn to and work for his

living now. Go to sea as mate of the _Sagamore_. The skunk wasn’t very

willing, but what with having nothing to eat and no place to sleep in,

and the woman having frightened him with the talk of some prosecution or

other, he had no choice, properly speaking. Cloete takes care of him for

a couple of days. . . Our arrangement still stands, says he. Here’s the

ship bound for Port Elizabeth; not a safe anchorage at all. Should she

by chance part from her anchors in a north-east gale and get lost on the

beach, as many of them do, why, it’s five hundred in your pocket—and a

quick return home. You are up to the job, ain’t you?

“Our Mr. Stafford takes it all in with downcast eyes. . . I am a

competent seaman, he says, with his sly, modest air. A ship’s chief mate

has no doubt many opportunities to manipulate the chains and anchors to

some purpose. . . At this Cloete thumps him on the back: You’ll do, my

noble sailor. Go in and win. . .

“Next thing George knows, his brother tells him that he had occasion to

oblige his partner. And glad of it, too. Likes the partner no end.

Took a friend of his as mate. Man had his troubles, been ashore a year

nursing a dying wife, it seems. Down on his luck. . . George protests

earnestly that he knows nothing of the person. Saw him once. Not very

attractive to look at. . . And Captain Harry says in his hearty way,

That’s so, but must give the poor devil a chance. . .

“So Mr. Stafford joins in dock. And it seems that he did manage to

monkey with one of the cables—keeping his mind on Port Elizabeth. The

riggers had all the cable ranged on deck to clean lockers. The new mate

watches them go ashore—dinner hour—and sends the ship-keeper out of the

ship to fetch him a bottle of beer. Then he goes to work whittling away

the forelock of the forty-five-fathom shackle-pin, gives it a tap or two

with a hammer just to make it loose, and of course that cable wasn’t safe

any more. Riggers come back—you know what riggers are: come day, go day,

and God send Sunday. Down goes the chain into the locker without their

foreman looking at the shackles at all. What does he care? He ain’t

going in the ship. And two days later the ship goes to sea. . . ”

* * * * *

At this point I was incautious enough to breathe out another “I see,”

which gave offence again, and brought on me a rude “No, you don’t”—as

before. But in the pause he remembered the glass of beer at his elbow.

He drank half of it, wiped his mustaches, and remarked grimly—

“Don’t you think that there will be any sea life in this, because there

ain’t. If you’re going to put in any out of your own head, now’s your

chance. I suppose you know what ten days of bad weather in the Channel

are like? I don’t. Anyway, ten whole days go by. One Monday Cloete

comes to the office a little late—hears a woman’s voice in George’s room

and looks in. Newspapers on the desk, on the floor; Captain Harry’s wife

sitting with red eyes and a bag on the chair near her. . . Look at this,

says George, in great excitement, showing him a paper. Cloete’s heart

gives a jump. Ha! Wreck in Westport Bay. The _Sagamore_ gone ashore

early hours of Sunday, and so the newspaper men had time to put in some

of their work. Columns of it. Lifeboat out twice. Captain and crew

remain by the ship. Tugs summoned to assist. If the weather improves,

this well-known fine ship may yet be saved. . . You know the way these

chaps put it. . . Mrs. Harry there on her way to catch a train from

Cannon Street. Got an hour to wait.

“Cloete takes George aside and whispers: Ship saved yet! Oh, damn! That

must never be; you hear? But George looks at him dazed, and Mrs. Harry

keeps on sobbing quietly: . . . I ought to have been with him. But I am

going to him. . . We are all going together, cries Cloete, all of a

sudden. He rushes out, sends the woman a cup of hot bovril from the shop

across the road, buys a rug for her, thinks of everything; and in the

train tucks her in and keeps on talking, thirteen to the dozen, all the

way, to keep her spirits up, as it were; but really because he can’t hold

his peace for very joy. Here’s the thing done all at once, and nothing

to pay. Done. Actually done. His head swims now and again when he

thinks of it. What enormous luck! It almost frightens him. He would

like to yell and sing. Meantime George Dunbar sits in his corner,

looking so deadly miserable that at last poor Mrs. Harry tries to comfort

him, and so cheers herself up at the same time by talking about how her

Harry is a prudent man; not likely to risk his crew’s life or his own

unnecessarily—and so on.

“First thing they hear at Westport station is that the life-boat has been

out to the ship again, and has brought off the second officer, who had

hurt himself, and a few sailors. Captain and the rest of the crew, about

fifteen in all, are still on board. Tugs expected to arrive every

moment.

“They take Mrs. Harry to the inn, nearly opposite the rocks; she bolts

straight up-stairs to look out of the window, and she lets out a great

cry when she sees the wreck. She won’t rest till she gets on board to

her Harry. Cloete soothes her all he can. . . All right; you try to eat

a mouthful, and we will go to make inquiries.

“He draws George out of the room: Look here, she can’t go on board, but I

shall. I’ll see to it that he doesn’t stop in the ship too long. Let’s

go and find the coxswain of the life-boat. . . George follows him,

shivering from time to time. The waves are washing over the old pier;

not much wind, a wild, gloomy sky over the bay. In the whole world only

one tug away off, heading to the seas, tossed in and out of sight every

minute as regular as clockwork.

“They meet the coxswain and he tells them: Yes! He’s going out again.

No, they ain’t in danger on board—not yet. But the ship’s chance is very

poor. Still, if the wind doesn’t pipe up again and the sea goes down

something might be tried. After some talk he agrees to take Cloete on

board; supposed to be with an urgent message from the owners to the

captain.

“Whenever Cloete looks at the sky he feels comforted; it looks so

threatening. George Dunbar follows him about with a white face and

saying nothing. Cloete takes him to have a drink or two, and by and by

he begins to pick up. . . That’s better, says Cloete; dash me if it

wasn’t like walking about with a dead man before. You ought to be

throwing up your cap, man. I feel as if I wanted to stand in the street

and cheer. Your brother is safe, the ship is lost, and we are made men.

“Are you certain she’s lost? asks George. It would be an awful blow

after all the agonies I have gone through in my mind, since you first

spoke to me, if she were to be got off—and—and—all this temptation to

begin over again. . . For we had nothing to do with this; had we?

“Of course not, says Cloete. Wasn’t your brother himself in charge?

It’s providential. . . Oh! cries George, shocked. . . Well, say it’s the

devil, says Cloete, cheerfully. I don’t mind! You had nothing to do

with it any more than a baby unborn, you great softy, you. . . Cloete has

got so that he almost loved George Dunbar. Well. Yes. That was so. I

don’t mean he respected him. He was just fond of his partner.

“They go back, you may say fairly skipping, to the hotel, and find the

wife of the captain at the open window, with her eyes on the ship as if

she wanted to fly across the bay over there. . . Now then, Mrs. Dunbar,

cries Cloete, you can’t go, but I am going. Any messages? Don’t be shy.

I’ll deliver every word faithfully. And if you would like to give me a

kiss for him, I’ll deliver that too, dash me if I don’t.

“He makes Mrs. Harry laugh with his patter. . . Oh, dear Mr. Cloete, you

are a calm, reasonable man. Make him behave sensibly. He’s a bit

obstinate, you know, and he’s so fond of the ship, too. Tell him I am

here—looking on. . . Trust me, Mrs. Dunbar. Only shut that window,

that’s a good girl. You will be sure to catch cold if you don’t, and the

Captain won’t be pleased coming off the wreck to find you coughing and

sneezing so that you can’t tell him how happy you are. And now if you

can get me a bit of tape to fasten my glasses on good to my ears, I will

be going. . .

“How he gets on board I don’t know. All wet and shaken and excited and

out of breath, he does get on board. Ship lying over, smothered in

sprays, but not moving very much; just enough to jag one’s nerve a bit.

He finds them all crowded on the deck-house forward, in their shiny

oilskins, with faces like sick men. Captain Harry can’t believe his

eyes. What! Mr. Cloete! What are you doing here, in God’s name? . . .

Your wife’s ashore there, looking on, gasps out Cloete; and after they

had talked a bit, Captain Harry thinks it’s uncommonly plucky and kind of

his brother’s partner to come off to him like this. Man glad to have

somebody to talk to. . . It’s a bad business, Mr. Cloete, he says. And

Cloete rejoices to hear that. Captain Harry thinks he had done his best,

but the cable had parted when he tried to anchor her. It was a great

trial to lose the ship. Well, he would have to face it. He fetches a

deep sigh now and then. Cloete almost sorry he had come on board,

because to be on that wreck keeps his chest in a tight band all the time.

They crouch out of the wind under the port boat, a little apart from the

men. The life-boat had gone away after putting Cloete on board, but was

coming back next high water to take off the crew if no attempt at getting

the ship afloat could be made. Dusk was falling; winter’s day; black

sky; wind rising. Captain Harry felt melancholy. God’s will be done.

If she must be left on the rocks—why, she must. A man should take what

God sends him standing up. . . Suddenly his voice breaks, and he squeezes

Cloete’s arm: It seems as if I couldn’t leave her, he whispers. Cloete

looks round at the men like a lot of huddled sheep and thinks to himself:

They won’t stay. . . Suddenly the ship lifts a little and sets down with

a thump. Tide rising. Everybody beginning to look out for the

life-boat. Some of the men made her out far away and also two more tugs.

But the gale has come on again, and everybody knows that no tug will ever

dare come near the ship.

“That’s the end, Captain Harry says, very low. . . . Cloete thinks he

never felt so cold in all his life. . . And I feel as if I didn’t care to

live on just now, mutters Captain Harry . . . Your wife’s ashore, looking

on, says Cloete . . . Yes. Yes. It must be awful for her to look at the

poor old ship lying here done for. Why, that’s our home.

“Cloete thinks that as long as the _Sagamore’s_ done for he doesn’t care,

and only wishes himself somewhere else. The slightest movement of the

ship cuts his breath like a blow. And he feels excited by the danger,

too. The captain takes him aside. . . The life-boat can’t come near us

for more than an hour. Look here, Cloete, since you are here, and such a

plucky one—do something for me. . . He tells him then that down in his

cabin aft in a certain drawer there is a bundle of important papers and

some sixty sovereigns in a small canvas bag. Asks Cloete to go and get

these things out. He hasn’t been below since the ship struck, and it

seems to him that if he were to take his eyes off her she would fall to

pieces. And then the men—a scared lot by this time—if he were to leave

them by themselves they would attempt to launch one of the ship’s boats

in a panic at some heavier thump—and then some of them bound to get

drowned. . . There are two or three boxes of matches about my shelves in

my cabin if you want a light, says Captain Harry. Only wipe your wet

hands before you begin to feel for them. . .

“Cloete doesn’t like the job, but doesn’t like to show funk, either—and

he goes. Lots of water on the main-deck, and he splashes along; it was

getting dark, too. All at once, by the mainmast, somebody catches him by

the arm. Stafford. He wasn’t thinking of Stafford at all. Captain

Harry had said something as to the mate not being quite satisfactory, but

it wasn’t much. Cloete doesn’t recognise him in his oilskins at first.

He sees a white face with big eyes peering at him. . . Are you pleased,

Mr. Cloete . . . ?

“Cloete is moved to laugh at the whine, and shakes him off. But the

fellow scrambles on after him on the poop and follows him down into the

cabin of that wrecked ship. And there they are, the two of them; can

hardly see each other. . . You don’t mean to make me believe you have had

anything to do with this, says Cloete. . .

“They both shiver, nearly out of their wits with the excitement of being

on board that ship. She thumps and lurches, and they stagger together,

feeling sick. Cloete again bursts out laughing at that wretched creature

Stafford pretending to have been up to something so desperate. . . Is

that how you think you can treat me now? yells the other man all of a

sudden. . .

“A sea strikes the stern, the ship trembles and groans all round them,

there’s the noise of the seas about and overhead, confusing Cloete, and

he hears the other screaming as if crazy. . . Ah, you don’t believe me!

Go and look at the port chain. Parted? Eh? Go and see if it’s parted.

Go and find the broken link. You can’t. There’s no broken link. That

means a thousand pounds for me. No less. A thousand the day after we

get ashore—prompt. I won’t wait till she breaks up, Mr. Cloete. To the

underwriters I go if I’ve to walk to London on my bare feet. Port cable!

Look at her port cable, I will say to them. I doctored it—for the

owners—tempted by a low rascal called Cloete.

“Cloete does not understand what it means exactly. All he sees is that

the fellow means to make mischief. He sees trouble ahead. . . Do you

think you can scare me? he asks,—you poor miserable skunk. . . And

Stafford faces him out—both holding on to the cabin table: No, damn you,

you are only a dirty vagabond; but I can scare the other, the chap in the

black coat. . .

“Meaning George Dunbar. Cloete’s brain reels at the thought. He doesn’t

imagine the fellow can do any real harm, but he knows what George is;

give the show away; upset the whole business he had set his heart on. He

says nothing; he hears the other, what with the funk and strain and

excitement, panting like a dog—and then a snarl. . . A thousand down,

twenty-four hours after we get ashore; day after to-morrow. That’s my

last word, Mr. Cloete. . . A thousand pounds, day after to-morrow, says

Cloete. Oh yes. And to-day take this, you dirty cur. . . He hits

straight from the shoulder in sheer rage, nothing else. Stafford goes

away spinning along the bulk-head. Seeing this, Cloete steps out and

lands him another one somewhere about the jaw. The fellow staggers

backward right into the captain’s cabin through the open door. Cloete,

following him up, hears him fall down heavily and roll to leeward, then

slams the door to and turns the key. . . There! says he to himself, that

will stop you from making trouble.”

“By Jove!” I murmured.

The old fellow departed from his impressive immobility to turn his

rakishly hatted head and look at me with his old, black, lack-lustre

eyes.

“He did leave him there,” he uttered, weightily, returning to the

contemplation of the wall. “Cloete didn’t mean to allow anybody, let

alone a thing like Stafford, to stand in the way of his great notion of

making George and himself, and Captain Harry, too, for that matter, rich

men. And he didn’t think much of consequences. These patent-medicine

chaps don’t care what they say or what they do. They think the world’s

bound to swallow any story they like to tell. . . He stands listening for

a bit. And it gives him quite a turn to hear a thump at the door and a

sort of muffled raving screech inside the captain’s room. He thinks he

hears his own name, too, through the awful crash as the old _Sagamore_

rises and falls to a sea. That noise and that awful shock make him clear

out of the cabin. He collects his senses on the poop. But his heart

sinks a little at the black wildness of the night. Chances that he will

get drowned himself before long. Puts his head down the companion.

Through the wind and breaking seas he can hear the noise of Stafford’s

beating against the door and cursing. He listens and says to himself:

No. Can’t trust him now. . .

“When he gets back to the top of the deck-house he says to Captain Harry,

who asks him if he got the things, that he is very sorry. There was

something wrong with the door. Couldn’t open it. And to tell you the

truth, says he, I didn’t like to stop any longer in that cabin. There

are noises there as if the ship were going to pieces. . . Captain Harry

thinks: Nervous; can’t be anything wrong with the door. But he says:

Thanks—never mind, never mind. . . All hands looking out now for the

life-boat. Everybody thinking of himself rather. Cloete asks himself,

will they miss him? But the fact is that Mr. Stafford had made such poor

show at sea that after the ship struck nobody ever paid any attention to

him. Nobody cared what he did or where he was. Pitch dark, too—no

counting of heads. The light of the tug with the lifeboat in tow is seen

making for the ship, and Captain Harry asks: Are we all there? . . .

Somebody answers: All here, sir. . . Stand by to leave the ship, then,

says Captain Harry; and two of you help the gentleman over first. . .

Aye, aye, sir. . . Cloete was moved to ask Captain Harry to let him stay

till last, but the life-boat drops on a grapnel abreast the fore-rigging,

two chaps lay hold of him, watch their chance, and drop him into her, all

safe.

“He’s nearly exhausted; not used to that sort of thing, you see. He sits

in the stern-sheets with his eyes shut. Don’t want to look at the white

water boiling all around. The men drop into the boat one after another.

Then he hears Captain Harry’s voice shouting in the wind to the coxswain,

to hold on a moment, and some other words he can’t catch, and the

coxswain yelling back: Don’t be long, sir. . . What is it? Cloete asks

feeling faint. . . Something about the ship’s papers, says the coxswain,

very anxious. It’s no time to be fooling about alongside, you

understand. They haul the boat off a little and wait. The water flies

over her in sheets. Cloete’s senses almost leave him. He thinks of

nothing. He’s numb all over, till there’s a shout: Here he is! . . .

They see a figure in the fore-rigging waiting—they slack away on the

grapnel-line and get him in the boat quite easy. There is a little

shouting—it’s all mixed up with the noise of the sea. Cloete fancies

that Stafford’s voice is talking away quite close to his ear. There’s a

lull in the wind, and Stafford’s voice seems to be speaking very fast to

the coxswain; he tells him that of course he was near his skipper, was

all the time near him, till the old man said at the last moment that he

must go and get the ship’s papers from aft; would insist on going

himself; told him, Stafford, to get into the life-boat. . . He had meant

to wait for his skipper, only there came this smooth of the seas, and he

thought he would take his chance at once.

“Cloete opens his eyes. Yes. There’s Stafford sitting close by him in

that crowded life-boat. The coxswain stoops over Cloete and cries: Did

you hear what the mate said, sir? . . . Cloete’s face feels as if it were

set in plaster, lips and all. Yes, I did, he forces himself to answer.

The coxswain waits a moment, then says: I don’t like it. . . And he turns

to the mate, telling him it was a pity he did not try to run along the

deck and hurry up the captain when the lull came. Stafford answers at

once that he did think of it, only he was afraid of missing him on the

deck in the dark. For, says he, the captain might have got over at once,

thinking I was already in the life-boat, and you would have hauled off

perhaps, leaving me behind. . . True enough, says the coxswain. A minute

or so passes. This won’t do, mutters the coxswain. Suddenly Stafford

speaks up in a sort of hollow voice: I was by when he told Mr. Cloete

here that he didn’t know how he would ever have the courage to leave the

old ship; didn’t he, now? . . . And Cloete feels his arm being gripped

quietly in the dark. . . Didn’t he now? We were standing together just

before you went over, Mr. Cloete? . . .

“Just then the coxswain cries out: I’m going on board to see. . . Cloete

tears his arm away: I am going with you. . .

“When they get aboard, the coxswain tells Cloete to go aft along one side

of the ship and he would go along the other so as not to miss the

captain. . . And feel about with your hands, too, says he; he might have

fallen and be lying insensible somewhere on the deck. . . When Cloete

gets at last to the cabin companion on the poop the coxswain is already

there, peering down and sniffing. I detect a smell of smoke down there,

says he. And he yells: Are you there, sir? . . . This is not a case for

shouting, says Cloete, feeling his heart go stony, as it were. . . Down

they go. Pitch dark; the inclination so sharp that the coxswain, groping

his way into the captain’s room, slips and goes tumbling down. Cloete

hears him cry out as though he had hurt himself, and asks what’s the

matter. And the coxswain answers quietly that he had fallen on the

captain, lying there insensible. Cloete without a word begins to grope

all over the shelves for a box of matches, finds one, and strikes a

light. He sees the coxswain in his cork jacket kneeling over Captain

Harry. . . Blood, says the coxswain, looking up, and the match goes out.

. .

“Wait a bit, says Cloete; I’ll make paper spills. . . He had felt the

back of books on the shelves. And so he stands lighting one spill from

another while the coxswain turns poor Captain Harry over. Dead, he says.

Shot through the heart. Here’s the revolver. . . He hands it up to

Cloete, who looks at it before putting it in his pocket, and sees a plate

on the butt with _H. Dunbar_ on it. . . His own, he mutters. . . Whose

else revolver did you expect to find? snaps the coxswain. And look, he

took off his long oilskin in the cabin before he went in. But what’s

this lot of burnt paper? What could he want to burn the ship’s papers

for? . . .

Cloete sees all, the little drawers drawn out, and asks the coxswain to

look well into them. . . There’s nothing, says the man. Cleaned out.

Seems to have pulled out all he could lay his hands on and set fire to

the lot. Mad—that’s what it is—went mad. And now he’s dead. You’ll

have to break it to his wife. . .

“I feel as if I were going mad myself, says Cloete, suddenly, and the

coxswain begs him for God’s sake to pull himself together, and drags him

away from the cabin. They had to leave the body, and as it was they were

just in time before a furious squall came on. Cloete is dragged into the

life-boat and the coxswain tumbles in. Haul away on the grapnel, he

shouts; the captain has shot himself. . .

“Cloete was like a dead man—didn’t care for anything. He let that

Stafford pinch his arm twice without making a sign. Most of Westport was

on the old pier to see the men out of the life-boat, and at first there

was a sort of confused cheery uproar when she came alongside; but after

the coxswain has shouted something the voices die out, and everybody is

very quiet. As soon as Cloete has set foot on something firm he becomes

himself again. The coxswain shakes hands with him: Poor woman, poor

woman, I’d rather you had the job than I. . .

“Where’s the mate?” asks Cloete. He’s the last man who spoke to the

master. . . Somebody ran along—the crew were being taken to the Mission

Hall, where there was a fire and shake-downs ready for them—somebody ran

along the pier and caught up with Stafford. . . Here! The owner’s agent

wants you. . . Cloete tucks the fellow’s arm under his own and walks away

with him to the left, where the fishing-harbour is. . . I suppose I

haven’t misunderstood you. You wish me to look after you a bit, says he.

The other hangs on him rather limp, but gives a nasty little laugh: You

had better, he mumbles; but mind, no tricks; no tricks, Mr. Cloete; we

are on land now.

“There’s a police office within fifty yards from here, says Cloete. He

turns into a little public house, pushes Stafford along the passage. The

landlord runs out of the bar. . . This is the mate of the ship on the

rocks, Cloete explains; I wish you would take care of him a bit to-night. . .

What’s the matter with him? asks the man. Stafford leans against the

wall in the passage, looking ghastly. And Cloete says it’s nothing—done

up, of course. . . I will be responsible for the expense; I am the

owner’s agent. I’ll be round in an hour or two to see him.

And Cloete gets back to the hotel. The news had travelled there already,

and the first thing he sees is George outside the door as white as a

sheet waiting for him. Cloete just gives him a nod and they go in. Mrs.

Harry stands at the head of the stairs, and, when she sees only these two

coming up, flings her arms above her head and runs into her room. Nobody

had dared tell her, but not seeing her husband was enough. Cloete hears

an awful shriek. . . Go to her, he says to George.

“While he’s alone in the private parlour Cloete drinks a glass of brandy

and thinks it all out. Then George comes in. . . The landlady’s with

her, he says. And he begins to walk up and down the room, flinging his

arms about and talking, disconnected like, his face set hard as Cloete

has never seen it before. . . What must be, must be. Dead—only brother.

Well, dead—his troubles over. But we are living, he says to Cloete; and

I suppose, says he, glaring at him with hot, dry eyes, that you won’t

forget to wire in the morning to your friend that we are coming in for

certain. . .

“Meaning the patent-medicine fellow. . . Death is death and business is

business, George goes on; and look—my hands are clean, he says, showing

them to Cloete. Cloete thinks: He’s going crazy. He catches hold of him

by the shoulders and begins to shake him: Damn you—if you had had the

sense to know what to say to your brother, if you had had the spunk to

speak to him at all, you moral creature you, he would be alive now, he

shouts.

“At this George stares, then bursts out weeping with a great bellow. He

throws himself on the couch, buries his face in a cushion, and howls like

a kid. . . That’s better, thinks Cloete, and he leaves him, telling the

landlord that he must go out, as he has some little business to attend to

that night. The landlord’s wife, weeping herself, catches him on the

stairs: Oh, sir, that poor lady will go out of her mind. . .

“Cloete shakes her off, thinking to himself: Oh no! She won’t. She will

get over it. Nobody will go mad about this affair unless I do. It isn’t

sorrow that makes people go mad, but worry.

“There Cloete was wrong. What affected Mrs. Harry was that her husband

should take his own life, with her, as it were, looking on. She brooded

over it so that in less than a year they had to put her into a Home. She

was very, very quiet; just gentle melancholy. She lived for quite a long

time.

“Well, Cloete splashes along in the wind and rain. Nobody in the

streets—all the excitement over. The publican runs out to meet him in

the passage and says to him: Not this way. He isn’t in his room. We

couldn’t get him to go to bed nohow. He’s in the little parlour there.

We’ve lighted him a fire. . . You have been giving him drinks too, says

Cloete; I never said I would be responsible for drinks. How many? . . .

Two, says the other. It’s all right. I don’t mind doing that much for a

shipwrecked sailor. . . Cloete smiles his funny smile: Eh? Come. He

paid for them. . . The publican just blinks. . . Gave you gold, didn’t

he? Speak up! . . . What of that! cries the man. What are you after,

anyway? He had the right change for his sovereign.

“Just so, says Cloete. He walks into the parlour, and there he sees our

Stafford; hair all up on end, landlord’s shirt and pants on, bare feet in

slippers, sitting by the fire. When he sees Cloete he casts his eyes

down.

“You didn’t mean us ever to meet again, Mr. Cloete, Stafford says,

demurely. . . That fellow, when he had the drink he wanted—he wasn’t a

drunkard—would put on this sort of sly, modest air. . . But since the

captain committed suicide, he says, I have been sitting here thinking it

out. All sorts of things happen. Conspiracy to lose the ship—attempted

murder—and this suicide. For if it was not suicide, Mr. Cloete, then I

know of a victim of the most cruel, cold-blooded attempt at murder;

somebody who has suffered a thousand deaths. And that makes the thousand

pounds of which we spoke once a quite insignificant sum. Look how very

convenient this suicide is. . .

“He looks up at Cloete then, who smiles at him and comes quite close to

the table.

“You killed Harry Dunbar, he whispers. . . The fellow glares at him and

shows his teeth: Of course I did! I had been in that cabin for an hour

and a half like a rat in a trap. . . Shut up and left to drown in that

wreck. Let flesh and blood judge. Of course I shot him! I thought it

was you, you murdering scoundrel, come back to settle me. He opens the

door flying and tumbles right down upon me; I had a revolver in my hand,

and I shot him. I was crazy. Men have gone crazy for less.

“Cloete looks at him without flinching. Aha! That’s your story, is it?

. . . And he shakes the table a little in his passion as he speaks. . .

Now listen to mine. What’s this conspiracy? Who’s going to prove it?

You were there to rob. You were rifling his cabin; he came upon you

unawares with your hands in the drawer; and you shot him with his own

revolver. You killed to steal—to steal! His brother and the clerks in

the office know that he took sixty pounds with him to sea. Sixty pounds

in gold in a canvas bag. He told me where they were. The coxswain of

the life-boat can swear to it that the drawers were all empty. And you

are such a fool that before you’re half an hour ashore you change a

sovereign to pay for a drink. Listen to me. If you don’t turn up day

after to-morrow at George Dunbar’s solicitors, to make the proper

deposition as to the loss of the ship, I shall set the police on your

track. Day after to-morrow. . .

“And then what do you think? That Stafford begins to tear his hair.

Just so. Tugs at it with both hands without saying anything. Cloete

gives a push to the table which nearly sends the fellow off his chair,

tumbling inside the fender; so that he has got to catch hold of it to

save himself. . .

“You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely. I’ve got to a

point that I don’t care what happens to me. I would shoot you now for

tuppence.

“At this the cur dodges under the table. Then Cloete goes out, and as he

turns in the street—you know, little fishermen’s cottages, all dark;

raining in torrents, too—the other opens the window of the parlour and

speaks in a sort of crying voice—

“You low Yankee fiend—I’ll pay you off some day.

“Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that the

fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it.”

* * * * *

My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black,

sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.

“I don’t quite understand this,” I said. “In what way?”

He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain

Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and

her trustees of course bought consols with it. Enough to keep her

comfortable. George Dunbar’s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did

not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men

stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly

shorn of everything.

“I am curious,” I said, “to learn what the motive force of this tragic

affair was—I mean the patent medicine. Do you know?”

He named it, and I whistled respectfully. Nothing less than Parker’s

Lively Lumbago Pills. Enormous property! You know it; all the world

knows it. Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried

it.

“Why!” I cried, “they missed an immense fortune.”

“Yes,” he mumbled, “by the price of a revolver-shot.”

He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, passenger

in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock. The night before he sailed he met him

wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink. “Funny chap,

Cloete. We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go

on board.”

It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this story,

with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine man stranger

to all moral standards. Cloete concluded by remarking that he, had “had

enough of the old country.” George Dunbar had turned on him, too, in the

end. Cloete was clearly somewhat disillusioned.

As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End hospital or

other, and on his last day clamoured “for a parson,” because his

conscience worried him for killing an innocent man. “Wanted somebody to

tell him it was all right,” growled my old ruffian, contemptuously. “He

told the parson that I knew this Cloete who had tried to murder him, and

so the parson (he worked among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about

it. That skunk of a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . .

Promised to be good and so on. . . Then he went crazy . . . screamed and

threw himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can

guess all that—eh? . . . till he was exhausted. Gave up. Threw himself

down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray. So he says. Tried to think of

some prayer for a quick death—he was that terrified. Thought that if he

had a knife or something he would cut his throat, and be done with it.

Then he thinks: No! Would try to cut away the wood about the lock. . .

He had no knife in his pocket. . . he was weeping and calling on God to

send him a tool of some kind when suddenly he thinks: Axe! In most ships

there is a spare emergency axe kept in the master’s room in some locker

or other. . . Up he jumps. . . Pitch dark. Pulls at the drawers to find

matches and, groping for them, the first thing he comes upon—Captain

Harry’s revolver. Loaded too. He goes perfectly quiet all over. Can

shoot the lock to pieces. See? Saved! God’s providence! There are

boxes of matches too. Thinks he: I may just as well see what I am about.

“Strikes a light and sees the little canvas bag tucked away at the back

of the drawer. Knew at once what that was. Rams it into his pocket

quick. Aha! says he to himself: this requires more light. So he pitches

a lot of paper on the floor, set fire to it, and starts in a hurry

rummaging for more valuables. Did you ever? He told that East-End

parson that the devil tempted him. First God’s mercy—then devil’s work.

Turn and turn about. . .

“Any squirming skunk can talk like that. He was so busy with the drawers

that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens. He looks up

and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in the lock) and

Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce in the light of the

burning papers. His eyes were starting out of his head. Thieving, he

thunders at him. A sailor! An officer! No! A wretch like you deserves

no better than to be left here to drown.

“This Stafford—on his death-bed—told the parson that when he heard these

words he went crazy again. He snatched his hand with the revolver in it

out of the drawer, and fired without aiming. Captain Harry fell right in

with a crash like a stone on top of the burning papers, putting the blaze

out. All dark. Not a sound. He listened for a bit then dropped the

revolver and scrambled out on deck like mad.”

The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.

“What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people the

captain committed suicide. Pah! Captain Harry was a man that could face

his Maker any time up there, and here below, too. He wasn’t the sort to

slink out of life. Not he! He was a good man down to the ground. He

gave me my first job as stevedore only three days after I got married.”

As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide seemed to

be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively for his material.

And then it was not worth many thanks in any case.

For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in our

respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious

continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo. This story to be

acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South Seas.

But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the consumption of

magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak—just as it was told to

me—but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the

most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of

master stevedore in the port of London.

* * * * *

_Oct._ 1910.

THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES

A FIND

This tale, episode, experience—call it how you will—was related in the

fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was

sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age—unless in

perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with

mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then;

and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a

fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable

attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic

view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar

potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live

with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but—so to speak—naked,

stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the

immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing,

under the gathering shadows.

I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man to

relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder of his

posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because the experience

was simply that of an abominable fright—terror he calls it. You would

have guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines was in

writing.

This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title. The title

itself is my own contrivance, (can’t call it invention), and has the

merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here. As to the

witches that’s merely a conventional expression, and we must take our

man’s word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which

no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last stage of

decay. As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and

on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I

disbursed. It might have been some premonition of that fact which made

me say: “But I must have the box too.” The decayed bookseller assented

by the careless, tragic gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but

faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was not attractive at

first sight. But in one place the statement that in A.D. 1813 the writer

was twenty-two years old caught my eye. Two and twenty is an interesting

age in which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of

reflection being weak and the power of imagination strong.

In another place the phrase: “At night we stood in again,” arrested my

languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. “Let’s see what it is

all about,” I thought, without excitement.

Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other line in

their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone of a monotonous

voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think

of) could have been given a more lively appearance. “In A.D. 1813, I was

twenty-two years old,” he begins earnestly and goes on with every

appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don’t imagine, however, that

there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention

though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the

telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this

world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our

bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to

turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred young men of

twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

If this isn’t progress! . . . Why immense! We have moved on, and so you

must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance and

simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch. And of course no

motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere, now. This one,

the one of the title, was situated in Spain. That much I discovered only

from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that relation were

missing—perhaps not a great misfortune after all. The writer seemed to

have entered into a most elaborate detail of the why and wherefore of his

presence on that coast—presumably the north coast of Spain. His

experience has nothing to do with the sea, though. As far as I can make

it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war. There’s nothing

strange in that. At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of

our men-of-war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of

Spain—as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to

perform. A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be

expected from our man, only, as I’ve said, some of his pages (good tough

paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the

fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it is to be seen clearly

that communication with the shore and even the sending of messengers

inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to

transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret

juntas of the province. Something of the sort. All this can be only

inferred from the preserved scraps of his conscientious writing.

Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a member of the

ship’s company, having the rating of the captain’s coxswain. He was

known on board as Cuba Tom; not because he was Cuban however; he was

indeed the best type of a genuine British tar of that time, and a

man-of-war’s man for years. He came by the name on account of some

wonderful adventures he had in that island in his young days, adventures

which were the favourite subject of the yarns he was in the habit of

spinning to his shipmates of an evening on the forecastle head. He was

intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally we are

told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for

thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared

for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad

back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy of

some.

Our young officer dwells on the manly qualities of Cuba Tom with

something like affection. This sort of relation between officer and man

was not then very rare. A youngster on joining the service was put under

the charge of a trustworthy seaman, who slung his first hammock for him

and often later on became a sort of humble friend to the junior officer.

The narrator on joining the sloop had found this man on board after some

years of separation. There is something touching in the warm pleasure he

remembers and records at this meeting with the professional mentor of his

boyhood.

We discover then that, no Spaniard being forthcoming for the service,

this worthy seaman with the unique pigtail and a very high character for

courage and steadiness had been selected as messenger for one of these

missions inland which have been mentioned. His preparations were not

elaborate. One gloomy autumn morning the sloop ran close to a shallow

cove where a landing could be made on that iron-bound shore. A boat was

lowered, and pulled in with Tom Corbin (Cuba Tom) perched in the bow, and

our young man (Mr. Edgar Byrne was his name on this earth which knows him

no more) sitting in the stern sheets.

A few inhabitants of a hamlet, whose grey stone houses could be seen a

hundred yards or so up a deep ravine, had come down to the shore and

watched the approach of the boat. The two Englishmen leaped ashore.

Either from dullness or astonishment the peasants gave no greeting, and

only fell back in silence.

Mr. Byrne had made up his mind to see Tom Corbin started fairly on his

way. He looked round at the heavy surprised faces.

“There isn’t much to get out of them,” he said. “Let us walk up to the

village. There will be a wine shop for sure where we may find somebody

more promising to talk to and get some information from.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom falling into step behind his officer. “A bit

of palaver as to courses and distances can do no harm; I crossed the

broadest part of Cuba by the help of my tongue tho’ knowing far less

Spanish than I do now. As they say themselves it was ‘four words and no

more’ with me, that time when I got left behind on shore by the

_Blanche_, frigate.”

He made light of what was before him, which was but a day’s journey into

the mountains. It is true that there was a full day’s journey before

striking the mountain path, but that was nothing for a man who had

crossed the island of Cuba on his two legs, and with no more than four

words of the language to begin with.

The officer and the man were walking now on a thick sodden bed of dead

leaves, which the peasants thereabouts accumulate in the streets of their

villages to rot during the winter for field manure. Turning his head Mr.

Byrne perceived that the whole male population of the hamlet was

following them on the noiseless springy carpet. Women stared from the

doors of the houses and the children had apparently gone into hiding.

The village knew the ship by sight, afar off, but no stranger had landed

on that spot perhaps for a hundred years or more. The cocked hat of Mr.

Byrne, the bushy whiskers and the enormous pigtail of the sailor, filled

them with mute wonder. They pressed behind the two Englishmen staring

like those islanders discovered by Captain Cook in the South Seas.

It was then that Byrne had his first glimpse of the little cloaked man in

a yellow hat. Faded and dingy as it was, this covering for his head made

him noticeable.

The entrance to the wine shop was like a rough hole in a wall of flints.

The owner was the only person who was not in the street, for he came out

from the darkness at the back where the inflated forms of wine skins hung

on nails could be vaguely distinguished. He was a tall, one-eyed

Asturian with scrubby, hollow cheeks; a grave expression of countenance

contrasted enigmatically with the roaming restlessness of his solitary

eye. On learning that the matter in hand was the sending on his way of

that English mariner toward a certain Gonzales in the mountains, he

closed his good eye for a moment as if in meditation. Then opened it,

very lively again.

“Possibly, possibly. It could be done.”

A friendly murmur arose in the group in the doorway at the name of

Gonzales, the local leader against the French. Inquiring as to the

safety of the road Byrne was glad to learn that no troops of that nation

had been seen in the neighbourhood for months. Not the smallest little

detachment of these impious _polizones_. While giving these answers the

owner of the wine-shop busied himself in drawing into an earthenware jug

some wine which he set before the heretic English, pocketing with grave

abstraction the small piece of money the officer threw upon the table in

recognition of the unwritten law that none may enter a wine-shop without

buying drink. His eye was in constant motion as if it were trying to do

the work of the two; but when Byrne made inquiries as to the possibility

of hiring a mule, it became immovably fixed in the direction of the door

which was closely besieged by the curious. In front of them, just within

the threshold, the little man in the large cloak and yellow hat had taken

his stand. He was a diminutive person, a mere homunculus, Byrne

describes him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet assertive attitude, a

corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over his left shoulder, muffling

his chin and mouth; while the broad-brimmed yellow hat hung on a corner

of his square little head. He stood there taking snuff, repeatedly.

“A mule,” repeated the wine-seller, his eyes fixed on that quaint and

snuffy figure. . . “No, señor officer! Decidedly no mule is to be got in

this poor place.”

The coxswain, who stood by with the true sailor’s air of unconcern in

strange surroundings, struck in quietly—

“If your honour will believe me Shank’s pony’s the best for this job. I

would have to leave the beast somewhere, anyhow, since the captain has

told me that half my way will be along paths fit only for goats.”

The diminutive man made a step forward, and speaking through the folds of

the cloak which seemed to muffle a sarcastic intention—

“Si, señor. They are too honest in this village to have a single mule

amongst them for your worship’s service. To that I can bear testimony.

In these times it’s only rogues or very clever men who can manage to have

mules or any other four-footed beasts and the wherewithal to keep them.

But what this valiant mariner wants is a guide; and here, señor, behold

my brother-in-law, Bernardino, wine-seller, and alcade of this most

Christian and hospitable village, who will find you one.”

This, Mr. Byrne says in his relation, was the only thing to do. A youth

in a ragged coat and goat-skin breeches was produced after some more

talk. The English officer stood treat to the whole village, and while

the peasants drank he and Cuba Tom took their departure accompanied by

the guide. The diminutive man in the cloak had disappeared.

Byrne went along with the coxswain out of the village. He wanted to see

him fairly on his way; and he would have gone a greater distance, if the

seaman had not suggested respectfully the advisability of return so as

not to keep the ship a moment longer than necessary so close in with the

shore on such an unpromising looking morning. A wild gloomy sky hung

over their heads when they took leave of each other, and their

surroundings of rank bushes and stony fields were dreary.

“In four days’ time,” were Byrne’s last words, “the ship will stand in

and send a boat on shore if the weather permits. If not you’ll have to

make it out on shore the best you can till we come along to take you

off.”

“Right you are, sir,” answered Tom, and strode on. Byrne watched him

step out on a narrow path. In a thick pea-jacket with a pair of pistols

in his belt, a cutlass by his side, and a stout cudgel in his hand, he

looked a sturdy figure and well able to take care of himself. He turned

round for a moment to wave his hand, giving to Byrne one more view of his

honest bronzed face with bushy whiskers. The lad in goatskin breeches

looking, Byrne says, like a faun or a young satyr leaping ahead, stopped

to wait for him, and then went off at a bound. Both disappeared.

Byrne turned back. The hamlet was hidden in a fold of the ground, and

the spot seemed the most lonely corner of the earth and as if accursed in

its uninhabited desolate barrenness. Before he had walked many yards,

there appeared very suddenly from behind a bush the muffled up diminutive

Spaniard. Naturally Byrne stopped short.

The other made a mysterious gesture with a tiny hand peeping from under

his cloak. His hat hung very much at the side of his head. “Señor,” he

said without any preliminaries. “Caution! It is a positive fact that

one-eyed Bernardino, my brother-in-law, has at this moment a mule in his

stable. And why he who is not clever has a mule there? Because he is a

rogue; a man without conscience. Because I had to give up the _macho_ to

him to secure for myself a roof to sleep under and a mouthful of _olla_

to keep my soul in this insignificant body of mine. Yet, señor, it

contains a heart many times bigger than the mean thing which beats in the

breast of that brute connection of mine of which I am ashamed, though I

opposed that marriage with all my power. Well, the misguided woman

suffered enough. She had her purgatory on this earth—God rest her soul.”

Byrne says he was so astonished by the sudden appearance of that

sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of the speech, that he

was unable to disentangle the significant fact from what seemed but a

piece of family history fired out at him without rhyme or reason. Not at

first. He was confounded and at the same time he was impressed by the

rapid forcible delivery, quite different from the frothy excited

loquacity of an Italian. So he stared while the homunculus letting his

cloak fall about him, aspired an immense quantity of snuff out of the

hollow of his palm.

“A mule,” exclaimed Byrne seizing at last the real aspect of the

discourse. “You say he has got a mule? That’s queer! Why did he refuse

to let me have it?”

The diminutive Spaniard muffled himself up again with great dignity.

“_Quien sabe_,” he said coldly, with a shrug of his draped shoulders.

“He is a great _politico_ in everything he does. But one thing your

worship may be certain of—that his intentions are always rascally. This

husband of my _defunta_ sister ought to have been married a long time ago

to the widow with the wooden legs.” {188}

“I see. But remember that, whatever your motives, your worship

countenanced him in this lie.”

The bright unhappy eyes on each side of a predatory nose confronted Byrne

without wincing, while with that testiness which lurks so often at the

bottom of Spanish dignity—

“No doubt the señor officer would not lose an ounce of blood if I were

stuck under the fifth rib,” he retorted. “But what of this poor sinner

here?” Then changing his tone. “Señor, by the necessities of the times

I live here in exile, a Castilian and an old Christian, existing

miserably in the midst of these brute Asturians, and dependent on the

worst of them all, who has less conscience and scruples than a wolf. And

being a man of intelligence I govern myself accordingly. Yet I can

hardly contain my scorn. You have heard the way I spoke. A caballero of

parts like your worship might have guessed that there was a cat in

there.”

“What cat?” said Byrne uneasily. “Oh, I see. Something suspicious. No,

señor. I guessed nothing. My nation are not good guessers at that sort

of thing; and, therefore, I ask you plainly whether that wine-seller has

spoken the truth in other particulars?”

“There are certainly no Frenchmen anywhere about,” said the little man

with a return to his indifferent manner.

“Or robbers—_ladrones_?”

“_Ladrones en grande_—no! Assuredly not,” was the answer in a cold

philosophical tone. “What is there left for them to do after the French?

And nobody travels in these times. But who can say! Opportunity makes

the robber. Still that mariner of yours has a fierce aspect, and with

the son of a cat rats will have no play. But there is a saying, too,

that where honey is there will soon be flies.”

This oracular discourse exasperated Byrne. “In the name of God,” he

cried, “tell me plainly if you think my man is reasonably safe on his

journey.”

The homunculus, undergoing one of his rapid changes, seized the officer’s

arm. The grip of his little hand was astonishing.

“Señor! Bernardino had taken notice of him. What more do you want? And

listen—men have disappeared on this road—on a certain portion of this

road, when Bernardino kept a _meson_, an inn, and I, his brother-in-law,

had coaches and mules for hire. Now there are no travellers, no coaches.

The French have ruined me. Bernardino has retired here for reasons of

his own after my sister died. They were three to torment the life out of

her, he and Erminia and Lucilla, two aunts of his—all affiliated to the

devil. And now he has robbed me of my last mule. You are an armed man.

Demand the _macho_ from him, with a pistol to his head, señor—it is not

his, I tell you—and ride after your man who is so precious to you. And

then you shall both be safe, for no two travellers have been ever known

to disappear together in these days. As to the beast, I, its owner, I

confide it to your honour.”

They were staring hard at each other, and Byrne nearly burst into a laugh

at the ingenuity and transparency of the little man’s plot to regain

possession of his mule. But he had no difficulty to keep a straight face

because he felt deep within himself a strange inclination to do that very

extraordinary thing. He did not laugh, but his lip quivered; at which

the diminutive Spaniard, detaching his black glittering eyes from Byrne’s

face, turned his back on him brusquely with a gesture and a fling of the

cloak which somehow expressed contempt, bitterness, and discouragement

all at once. He turned away and stood still, his hat aslant, muffled up

to the ears. But he was not offended to the point of refusing the silver

_duro_ which Byrne offered him with a non-committal speech as if nothing

extraordinary had passed between them.

“I must make haste on board now,” said Byrne, then.

“_Vaya usted con Dios_,” muttered the gnome. And this interview ended

with a sarcastic low sweep of the hat which was replaced at the same

perilous angle as before.

Directly the boat had been hoisted the ship’s sails were filled on the

off-shore tack, and Byrne imparted the whole story to his captain, who

was but a very few years older than himself. There was some amused

indignation at it—but while they laughed they looked gravely at each

other. A Spanish dwarf trying to beguile an officer of his majesty’s

navy into stealing a mule for him—that was too funny, too ridiculous, too

incredible. Those were the exclamations of the captain. He couldn’t get

over the grotesqueness of it.

“Incredible. That’s just it,” murmured Byrne at last in a significant

tone.

They exchanged a long stare. “It’s as clear as daylight,” affirmed the

captain impatiently, because in his heart he was not certain. And Tom

the best seaman in the ship for one, the good-humouredly deferential

friend of his boyhood for the other, was becoming endowed with a

compelling fascination, like a symbolic figure of loyalty appealing to

their feelings and their conscience, so that they could not detach their

thoughts from his safety. Several times they went up on deck, only to

look at the coast, as if it could tell them something of his fate. It

stretched away, lengthening in the distance, mute, naked, and savage,

veiled now and then by the slanting cold shafts of rain. The westerly

swell rolled its interminable angry lines of foam and big dark clouds

flew over the ship in a sinister procession.

“I wish to goodness you had done what your little friend in the yellow

hat wanted you to do,” said the commander of the sloop late in the

afternoon with visible exasperation.

“Do you, sir?” answered Byrne, bitter with positive anguish. “I wonder

what you would have said afterwards? Why! I might have been kicked out

of the service for looting a mule from a nation in alliance with His

Majesty. Or I might have been battered to a pulp with flails and

pitch-forks—a pretty tale to get abroad about one of your officers—while

trying to steal a mule. Or chased ignominiously to the boat—for you

would not have expected me to shoot down unoffending people for the sake

of a mangy mule. . . And yet,” he added in a low voice, “I almost wish

myself I had done it.”

Before dark those two young men had worked themselves up into a highly

complex psychological state of scornful scepticism and alarmed credulity.

It tormented them exceedingly; and the thought that it would have to last

for six days at least, and possibly be prolonged further for an

indefinite time, was not to be borne. The ship was therefore put on the

inshore tack at dark. All through the gusty dark night she went towards

the land to look for her man, at times lying over in the heavy puffs, at

others rolling idle in the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a

mind of her own to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm impulse.

Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on tossed by the

seas towards the shallow cove where, with considerable difficulty, an

officer in a thick coat and a round hat managed to land on a strip of

shingle.

“It was my wish,” writes Mr. Byrne, “a wish of which my captain approved,

to land secretly if possible. I did not want to be seen either by my

aggrieved friend in the yellow hat, whose motives were not clear, or by

the one-eyed wine-seller, who may or may not have been affiliated to the

devil, or indeed by any other dweller in that primitive village. But

unfortunately the cove was the only possible landing place for miles; and

from the steepness of the ravine I couldn’t make a circuit to avoid the

houses.”

“Fortunately,” he goes on, “all the people were yet in their beds. It

was barely daylight when I found myself walking on the thick layer of

sodden leaves filling the only street. No soul was stirring abroad, no

dog barked. The silence was profound, and I had concluded with some

wonder that apparently no dogs were kept in the hamlet, when I heard a

low snarl, and from a noisome alley between two hovels emerged a vile cur

with its tail between its legs. He slunk off silently showing me his

teeth as he ran before me, and he disappeared so suddenly that he might

have been the unclean incarnation of the Evil One. There was, too,

something so weird in the manner of its coming and vanishing, that my

spirits, already by no means very high, became further depressed by the

revolting sight of this creature as if by an unlucky presage.”

He got away from the coast unobserved, as far as he knew, then struggled

manfully to the west against wind and rain, on a barren dark upland,

under a sky of ashes. Far away the harsh and desolate mountains raising

their scarped and denuded ridges seemed to wait for him menacingly. The

evening found him fairly near to them, but, in sailor language, uncertain

of his position, hungry, wet, and tired out by a day of steady tramping

over broken ground during which he had seen very few people, and had been

unable to obtain the slightest intelligence of Tom Corbin’s passage.

“On! on! I must push on,” he had been saying to himself through the hours

of solitary effort, spurred more by incertitude than by any definite fear

or definite hope.

The lowering daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced by a broken

bridge. He descended into the ravine, forded a narrow stream by the last

gleam of rapid water, and clambering out on the other side was met by the

night which fell like a bandage over his eyes. The wind sweeping in the

darkness the broadside of the sierra worried his ears by a continuous

roaring noise as of a maddened sea. He suspected that he had lost the

road. Even in daylight, with its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of

outcropping stone, it was difficult to distinguish from the dreary waste

of the moor interspersed with boulders and clumps of naked bushes. But,

as he says, “he steered his course by the feel of the wind,” his hat

rammed low on his brow, his head down, stopping now and again from mere

weariness of mind rather than of body—as if not his strength but his

resolution were being overtaxed by the strain of endeavour half suspected

to be vain, and by the unrest of his feelings.

In one of these pauses borne in the wind faintly as if from very far away

he heard a sound of knocking, just knocking on wood. He noticed that the

wind had lulled suddenly.

His heart started beating tumultuously because in himself he carried the

impression of the desert solitudes he had been traversing for the last

six hours—the oppressive sense of an uninhabited world. When he raised

his head a gleam of light, illusory as it often happens in dense

darkness, swam before his eyes. While he peered, the sound of feeble

knocking was repeated—and suddenly he felt rather than saw the existence

of a massive obstacle in his path. What was it? The spur of a hill? Or

was it a house! Yes. It was a house right close, as though it had risen

from the ground or had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid; from

some dark recess of the night. It towered loftily. He had come up under

its lee; another three steps and he could have touched the wall with his

hand. It was no doubt a _posada_ and some other traveller was trying for

admittance. He heard again the sound of cautious knocking.

Next moment a broad band of light fell into the night through the opened

door. Byrne stepped eagerly into it, whereupon the person outside leaped

with a stifled cry away into the night. An exclamation of surprise was

heard too, from within. Byrne, flinging himself against the half closed

door, forced his way in against some considerable resistance.

A miserable candle, a mere rushlight, burned at the end of a long deal

table. And in its light Byrne saw, staggering yet, the girl he had

driven from the door. She had a short black skirt, an orange shawl, a

dark complexion—and the escaped single hairs from the mass, sombre and

thick like a forest and held up by a comb, made a black mist about her

low forehead. A shrill lamentable howl of: “Misericordia!” came in two

voices from the further end of the long room, where the fire-light of an

open hearth played between heavy shadows. The girl recovering herself

drew a hissing breath through her set teeth.

It is unnecessary to report the long process of questions and answers by

which he soothed the fears of two old women who sat on each side of the

fire, on which stood a large earthenware pot. Byrne thought at once of

two witches watching the brewing of some deadly potion. But all the

same, when one of them raising forward painfully her broken form lifted

the cover of the pot, the escaping steam had an appetising smell. The

other did not budge, but sat hunched up, her head trembling all the time.

They were horrible. There was something grotesque in their decrepitude.

Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active

one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose

head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful

physical degradation had not been appalling to one’s eyes, had not

gripped one’s heart with poignant amazement at the unspeakable misery of

age, at the awful persistency of life becoming at last an object of

disgust and dread.

To get over it Byrne began to talk, saying that he was an Englishman, and

that he was in search of a countryman who ought to have passed this way.

Directly he had spoken the recollection of his parting with Tom came up

in his mind with amazing vividness: the silent villagers, the angry

gnome, the one-eyed wine-seller, Bernardino. Why! These two unspeakable

frights must be that man’s aunts—affiliated to the devil.

Whatever they had been once it was impossible to imagine what use such

feeble creatures could be to the devil, now, in the world of the living.

Which was Lucilla and which was Erminia? They were now things without a

name. A moment of suspended animation followed Byrne’s words. The

sorceress with the spoon ceased stirring the mess in the iron pot, the

very trembling of the other’s head stopped for the space of breath. In

this infinitesimal fraction of a second Byrne had the sense of being

really on his quest, of having reached the turn of the path, almost

within hail of Tom.

“They have seen him,” he thought with conviction. Here was at last

somebody who had seen him. He made sure they would deny all knowledge of

the Ingles; but on the contrary they were eager to tell him that he had

eaten and slept the night in the house. They both started talking

together, describing his appearance and behaviour. An excitement quite

fierce in its feebleness possessed them. The doubled-up sorceress

flourished aloft her wooden spoon, the puffy monster got off her stool

and screeched, stepping from one foot to the other, while the trembling

of her head was accelerated to positive vibration. Byrne was quite

disconcerted by their excited behaviour. . . Yes! The big, fierce Ingles

went away in the morning, after eating a piece of bread and drinking some

wine. And if the caballero wished to follow the same path nothing could

be easier—in the morning.

“You will give me somebody to show me the way?” said Byrne.

“Si, señor. A proper youth. The man the caballero saw going out.”

“But he was knocking at the door,” protested Byrne. “He only bolted when

he saw me. He was coming in.”

“No! No!” the two horrid witches screamed out together. “Going out.

Going out!”

After all it may have been true. The sound of knocking had been faint,

elusive, reflected Byrne. Perhaps only the effect of his fancy. He

asked—

“Who is that man?”

“Her _novio_.” They screamed pointing to the girl. “He is gone home to

a village far away from here. But he will return in the morning. Her

_novio_! And she is an orphan—the child of poor Christian people. She

lives with us for the love of God, for the love of God.”

The orphan crouching on the corner of the hearth had been looking at

Byrne. He thought that she was more like a child of Satan kept there by

these two weird harridans for the love of the Devil. Her eyes were a

little oblique, her mouth rather thick, but admirably formed; her dark

face had a wild beauty, voluptuous and untamed. As to the character of

her steadfast gaze attached upon him with a sensuously savage attention,

“to know what it was like,” says Mr. Byrne, “you have only to observe a

hungry cat watching a bird in a cage or a mouse inside a trap.”

It was she who served him the food, of which he was glad; though with

those big slanting black eyes examining him at close range, as if he had

something curious written on his face, she gave him an uncomfortable

sensation. But anything was better than being approached by these

blear-eyed nightmarish witches. His apprehensions somehow had been

soothed; perhaps by the sensation of warmth after severe exposure and the

ease of resting after the exertion of fighting the gale inch by inch all

the way. He had no doubt of Tom’s safety. He was now sleeping in the

mountain camp having been met by Gonzales’ men.

Byrne rose, filled a tin goblet with wine out of a skin hanging on the

wall, and sat down again. The witch with the mummy face began to talk to

him, ramblingly of old times; she boasted of the inn’s fame in those

better days. Great people in their own coaches stopped there. An

archbishop slept once in the _casa_, a long, long time ago.

The witch with the puffy face seemed to be listening from her stool,

motionless, except for the trembling of her head. The girl (Byrne was

certain she was a casual gipsy admitted there for some reason or other)

sat on the hearth stone in the glow of the embers. She hummed a tune to

herself, rattling a pair of castanets slightly now and then. At the

mention of the archbishop she chuckled impiously and turned her head to

look at Byrne, so that the red glow of the fire flashed in her black eyes

and on her white teeth under the dark cowl of the enormous overmantel.

And he smiled at her.

He rested now in the ease of security. His advent not having been

expected there could be no plot against him in existence. Drowsiness

stole upon his senses. He enjoyed it, but keeping a hold, so he thought

at least, on his wits; but he must have been gone further than he thought

because he was startled beyond measure by a fiendish uproar. He had

never heard anything so pitilessly strident in his life. The witches had

started a fierce quarrel about something or other. Whatever its origin

they were now only abusing each other violently, without arguments; their

senile screams expressed nothing but wicked anger and ferocious dismay.

The gipsy girl’s black eyes flew from one to the other. Never before had

Byrne felt himself so removed from fellowship with human beings. Before

he had really time to understand the subject of the quarrel, the girl

jumped up rattling her castanets loudly. A silence fell. She came up to

the table and bending over, her eyes in his—

“Señor,” she said with decision, “You shall sleep in the archbishop’s

room.”

Neither of the witches objected. The dried-up one bent double was

propped on a stick. The puffy faced one had now a crutch.

Byrne got up, walked to the door, and turning the key in the enormous

lock put it coolly in his pocket. This was clearly the only entrance,

and he did not mean to be taken unawares by whatever danger there might

have been lurking outside.

When he turned from the door he saw the two witches “affiliated to the

Devil” and the Satanic girl looking at him in silence. He wondered if

Tom Corbin took the same precaution last night. And thinking of him he

had again that queer impression of his nearness. The world was perfectly

dumb. And in this stillness he heard the blood beating in his ears with

a confused rushing noise, in which there seemed to be a voice uttering

the words: “Mr. Byrne, look out, sir.” Tom’s voice. He shuddered; for

the delusions of the senses of hearing are the most vivid of all, and

from their nature have a compelling character.

It seemed impossible that Tom should not be there. Again a slight chill

as of stealthy draught penetrated through his very clothes and passed

over all his body. He shook off the impression with an effort.

It was the girl who preceded him upstairs carrying an iron lamp from the

naked flame of which ascended a thin thread of smoke. Her soiled white

stockings were full of holes.

With the same quiet resolution with which he had locked the door below,

Byrne threw open one after another the doors in the corridor. All the

rooms were empty except for some nondescript lumber in one or two. And

the girl seeing what he would be at stopped every time, raising the smoky

light in each doorway patiently. Meantime she observed him with

sustained attention. The last door of all she threw open herself.

“You sleep here, señor,” she murmured in a voice light like a child’s

breath, offering him the lamp.

“_Buenos noches_, _senorita_,” he said politely, taking it from her.

She didn’t return the wish audibly, though her lips did move a little,

while her gaze black like a starless night never for a moment wavered

before him. He stepped in, and as he turned to close the door she was

still there motionless and disturbing, with her voluptuous mouth and

slanting eyes, with the expression of expectant sensual ferocity of a

baffled cat. He hesitated for a moment, and in the dumb house he heard

again the blood pulsating ponderously in his ears, while once more the

illusion of Tom’s voice speaking earnestly somewhere near by was

specially terrifying, because this time he could not make out the words.

He slammed the door in the girl’s face at last, leaving her in the dark;

and he opened it again almost on the instant. Nobody. She had vanished

without the slightest sound. He closed the door quickly and bolted it

with two heavy bolts.

A profound mistrust possessed him suddenly. Why did the witches quarrel

about letting him sleep here? And what meant that stare of the girl as

if she wanted to impress his features for ever in her mind? His own

nervousness alarmed him. He seemed to himself to be removed very far

from mankind.

He examined his room. It was not very high, just high enough to take the

bed which stood under an enormous baldaquin-like canopy from which fell

heavy curtains at foot and head; a bed certainly worthy of an archbishop.

There was a heavy table carved all round the edges, some arm-chairs of

enormous weight like the spoils of a grandee’s palace; a tall shallow

wardrobe placed against the wall and with double doors. He tried them.

Locked. A suspicion came into his mind, and he snatched the lamp to make

a closer examination. No, it was not a disguised entrance. That heavy,

tall piece of furniture stood clear of the wall by quite an inch. He

glanced at the bolts of his room door. No! No one could get at him

treacherously while he slept. But would he be able to sleep? he asked

himself anxiously. If only he had Tom there—the trusty seaman who had

fought at his right hand in a cutting out affair or two, and had always

preached to him the necessity to take care of himself. “For it’s no

great trick,” he used to say, “to get yourself killed in a hot fight.

Any fool can do that. The proper pastime is to fight the Frenchies and

then live to fight another day.”

Byrne found it a hard matter not to fall into listening to the silence.

Somehow he had the conviction that nothing would break it unless he heard

again the haunting sound of Tom’s voice. He had heard it twice before.

Odd! And yet no wonder, he argued with himself reasonably, since he had

been thinking of the man for over thirty hours continuously and, what’s

more, inconclusively. For his anxiety for Tom had never taken a definite

shape. “Disappear,” was the only word connected with the idea of Tom’s

danger. It was very vague and awful. “Disappear!” What did that mean?

Byrne shuddered, and then said to himself that he must be a little

feverish. But Tom had not disappeared. Byrne had just heard of him.

And again the young man felt the blood beating in his ears. He sat still

expecting every moment to hear through the pulsating strokes the sound of

Tom’s voice. He waited straining his ears, but nothing came. Suddenly

the thought occurred to him: “He has not disappeared, but he cannot make

himself heard.”

He jumped up from the arm-chair. How absurd! Laying his pistol and his

hanger on the table he took off his boots and, feeling suddenly too tired

to stand, flung himself on the bed which he found soft and comfortable

beyond his hopes.

He had felt very wakeful, but he must have dozed off after all, because

the next thing he knew he was sitting up in bed and trying to recollect

what it was that Tom’s voice had said. Oh! He remembered it now. It

had said: “Mr. Byrne! Look out, sir!” A warning this. But against

what?

He landed with one leap in the middle of the floor, gasped once, then

looked all round the room. The window was shuttered and barred with an

iron bar. Again he ran his eyes slowly all round the bare walls, and

even looked up at the ceiling, which was rather high. Afterwards he went

to the door to examine the fastenings. They consisted of two enormous

iron bolts sliding into holes made in the wall; and as the corridor

outside was too narrow to admit of any battering arrangement or even to

permit an axe to be swung, nothing could burst the door open—unless

gunpowder. But while he was still making sure that the lower bolt was

pushed well home, he received the impression of somebody’s presence in

the room. It was so strong that he spun round quicker than lightning.

There was no one. Who could there be? And yet . . .

It was then that he lost the decorum and restraint a man keeps up for his

own sake. He got down on his hands and knees, with the lamp on the

floor, to look under the bed, like a silly girl. He saw a lot of dust

and nothing else. He got up, his cheeks burning, and walked about

discontented with his own behaviour and unreasonably angry with Tom for

not leaving him alone. The words: “Mr. Byrne! Look out, sir,” kept on

repeating themselves in his head in a tone of warning.

“Hadn’t I better just throw myself on the bed and try to go to sleep,” he

asked himself. But his eyes fell on the tall wardrobe, and he went

towards it feeling irritated with himself and yet unable to desist. How

he could explain to-morrow the burglarious misdeed to the two odious

witches he had no idea. Nevertheless he inserted the point of his hanger

between the two halves of the door and tried to prize them open. They

resisted. He swore, sticking now hotly to his purpose. His mutter: “I

hope you will be satisfied, confound you,” was addressed to the absent

Tom. Just then the doors gave way and flew open.

He was there.

He—the trusty, sagacious, and courageous Tom was there, drawn up shadowy

and stiff, in a prudent silence, which his wide-open eyes by their fixed

gleam seemed to command Byrne to respect. But Byrne was too startled to

make a sound. Amazed, he stepped back a little—and on the instant the

seaman flung himself forward headlong as if to clasp his officer round

the neck. Instinctively Byrne put out his faltering arms; he felt the

horrible rigidity of the body and then the coldness of death as their

heads knocked together and their faces came into contact. They reeled,

Byrne hugging Tom close to his breast in order not to let him fall with a

crash. He had just strength enough to lower the awful burden gently to

the floor—then his head swam, his legs gave way, and he sank on his

knees, leaning over the body with his hands resting on the breast of that

man once full of generous life, and now as insensible as a stone.

“Dead! my poor Tom, dead,” he repeated mentally. The light of the lamp

standing near the edge of the table fell from above straight on the stony

empty stare of these eyes which naturally had a mobile and merry

expression.

Byrne turned his own away from them. Tom’s black silk neckerchief was

not knotted on his breast. It was gone. The murderers had also taken

off his shoes and stockings. And noticing this spoliation, the exposed

throat, the bare up-turned feet, Byrne felt his eyes run full of tears.

In other respects the seaman was fully dressed; neither was his clothing

disarranged as it must have been in a violent struggle. Only his checked

shirt had been pulled a little out the waistband in one place, just

enough to ascertain whether he had a money belt fastened round his body.

Byrne began to sob into his handkerchief.

It was a nervous outburst which passed off quickly. Remaining on his

knees he contemplated sadly the athletic body of as fine a seaman as ever

had drawn a cutlass, laid a gun, or passed the weather earring in a gale,

lying stiff and cold, his cheery, fearless spirit departed—perhaps

turning to him, his boy chum, to his ship out there rolling on the grey

seas off an iron-bound coast, at the very moment of its flight.

He perceived that the six brass buttons of Tom’s jacket had been cut off.

He shuddered at the notion of the two miserable and repulsive witches

busying themselves ghoulishly about the defenceless body of his friend.

Cut off. Perhaps with the same knife which . . . The head of one

trembled; the other was bent double, and their eyes were red and bleared,

their infamous claws unsteady. . . It must have been in this very room

too, for Tom could not have been killed in the open and brought in here

afterwards. Of that Byrne was certain. Yet those devilish crones could

not have killed him themselves even by taking him unawares—and Tom would

be always on his guard of course. Tom was a very wide awake wary man

when engaged on any service. . . And in fact how did they murder him?

Who did? In what way?

Byrne jumped up, snatched the lamp off the table, and stooped swiftly

over the body. The light revealed on the clothing no stain, no trace, no

spot of blood anywhere. Byrne’s hands began to shake so that he had to

set the lamp on the floor and turn away his head in order to recover from

this agitation.

Then he began to explore that cold, still, and rigid body for a stab, a

gunshot wound, for the trace of some killing blow. He felt all over the

skull anxiously. It was whole. He slipped his hand under the neck. It

was unbroken. With terrified eyes he peered close under the chin and saw

no marks of strangulation on the throat.

There were no signs anywhere. He was just dead.

Impulsively Byrne got away from the body as if the mystery of an

incomprehensible death had changed his pity into suspicion and dread.

The lamp on the floor near the set, still face of the seaman showed it

staring at the ceiling as if despairingly. In the circle of light Byrne

saw by the undisturbed patches of thick dust on the floor that there had

been no struggle in that room. “He has died outside,” he thought. Yes,

outside in that narrow corridor, where there was hardly room to turn, the

mysterious death had come to his poor dear Tom. The impulse of snatching

up his pistols and rushing out of the room abandoned Byrne suddenly. For

Tom, too, had been armed—with just such powerless weapons as he himself

possessed—pistols, a cutlass! And Tom had died a nameless death, by

incomprehensible means.

A new thought came to Byrne. That stranger knocking at the door and

fleeing so swiftly at his appearance had come there to remove the body.

Aha! That was the guide the withered witch had promised would show the

English officer the shortest way of rejoining his man. A promise, he saw

it now, of dreadful import. He who had knocked would have two bodies to

deal with. Man and officer would go forth from the house together. For

Byrne was certain now that he would have to die before the morning—and in

the same mysterious manner, leaving behind him an unmarked body.

The sight of a smashed head, of a throat cut, of a gaping gunshot wound,

would have been an inexpressible relief. It would have soothed all his

fears. His soul cried within him to that dead man whom he had never

found wanting in danger. “Why don’t you tell me what I am to look for,

Tom? Why don’t you?” But in rigid immobility, extended on his back, he

seemed to preserve an austere silence, as if disdaining in the finality

of his awful knowledge to hold converse with the living.

Suddenly Byrne flung himself on his knees by the side of the body, and

dry-eyed, fierce, opened the shirt wide on the breast, as if to tear the

secret forcibly from that cold heart which had been so loyal to him in

life! Nothing! Nothing! He raised the lamp, and all the sign

vouchsafed to him by that face which used to be so kindly in expression

was a small bruise on the forehead—the least thing, a mere mark. The

skin even was not broken. He stared at it a long time as if lost in a

dreadful dream. Then he observed that Tom’s hands were clenched as

though he had fallen facing somebody in a fight with fists. His

knuckles, on closer view, appeared somewhat abraded. Both hands.

The discovery of these slight signs was more appalling to Byrne than the

absolute absence of every mark would have been. So Tom had died striking

against something which could be hit, and yet could kill one without

leaving a wound—by a breath.

Terror, hot terror, began to play about Byrne’s heart like a tongue of

flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes. He

backed away from the body as far as he could, then came forward

stealthily casting fearful glances to steal another look at the bruised

forehead. There would perhaps be such a faint bruise on his own

forehead—before the morning.

“I can’t bear it,” he whispered to himself. Tom was for him now an

object of horror, a sight at once tempting and revolting to his fear. He

couldn’t bear to look at him.

At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing horror, he

stepped forward from the wall against which he had been leaning, seized

the corpse under the armpits, and began to lug it over to the bed. The

bare heels of the seaman trailed on the floor noiselessly. He was heavy

with the dead weight of inanimate objects. With a last effort Byrne

landed him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him over,

snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet with which he

covered it over. Then he spread the curtains at head and foot so that

joining together as he shook their folds they hid the bed altogether from

his sight.

He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it. The perspiration poured

from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to carry for a

while a thin stream of half, frozen blood. Complete terror had

possession of him now, a nameless terror which had turned his heart to

ashes.

He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning at his

feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the end of the

table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets round the walls,

over the ceiling, over the floor, in the expectation of a mysterious and

appalling vision. The thing which could deal death in a breath was

outside that bolted door. But Byrne believed neither in walls nor bolts

now. Unreasoning terror turning everything to account, his old time

boyish admiration of the athletic Tom, the undaunted Tom (he had seemed

to him invincible), helped to paralyse his faculties, added to his

despair.

He was no longer Edgar Byrne. He was a tortured soul suffering more

anguish than any sinner’s body had ever suffered from rack or boot. The

depth of his torment may be measured when I say that this young man, as

brave at least as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol

and firing into his own head. But a deadly, chilly, langour was

spreading over his limbs. It was as if his flesh had been wet plaster

stiffening slowly about his ribs. Presently, he thought, the two witches

will be coming in, with crutch and stick—horrible, grotesque,

monstrous—affiliated to the devil—to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny

little bruise of death. And he wouldn’t be able to do anything. Tom had

struck out at something, but he was not like Tom. His limbs were dead

already. He sat still, dying the death over and over again; and the only

part of him which moved were his eyes, turning round and round in their

sockets, running over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, again and again

till suddenly they became motionless and stony—starting out of his head

fixed in the direction of the bed.

He had seen the heavy curtains stir and shake as if the dead body they

concealed had turned over and sat up. Byrne, who thought the world could

hold no more terrors in store, felt his hair stir at the roots. He

gripped the arms of the chair, his jaw fell, and the sweat broke out on

his brow while his dry tongue clove suddenly to the roof of his mouth.

Again the curtains stirred, but did not open. “Don’t, Tom!” Byrne made

effort to shout, but all he heard was a slight moan such as an uneasy

sleeper may make. He felt that his brain was going, for, now, it seemed

to him that the ceiling over the bed had moved, had slanted, and came

level again—and once more the closed curtains swayed gently as if about

to part.

Byrne closed his eyes not to see the awful apparition of the seaman’s

corpse coming out animated by an evil spirit. In the profound silence of

the room he endured a moment of frightful agony, then opened his eyes

again. And he saw at once that the curtains remained closed still, but

that the ceiling over the bed had risen quite a foot. With the last

gleam of reason left to him he understood that it was the enormous

baldaquin over the bed which was coming down, while the curtains attached

to it swayed softly, sinking gradually to the floor. His drooping jaw

snapped to—and half rising in his chair he watched mutely the noiseless

descent of the monstrous canopy. It came down in short smooth rushes

till lowered half way or more, when it took a run and settled swiftly its

turtle-back shape with the deep border piece fitting exactly the edge of

the bedstead. A slight crack or two of wood were heard, and the

overpowering stillness of the room resumed its sway.

Byrne stood up, gasped for breath, and let out a cry of rage and dismay,

the first sound which he is perfectly certain did make its way past his

lips on this night of terrors. This then was the death he had escaped!

This was the devilish artifice of murder poor Tom’s soul had perhaps

tried from beyond the border to warn him of. For this was how he had

died. Byrne was certain he had heard the voice of the seaman, faintly

distinct in his familiar phrase, “Mr. Byrne! Look out, sir!” and again

uttering words he could not make out. But then the distance separating

the living from the dead is so great! Poor Tom had tried. Byrne ran to

the bed and attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering

the body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a

tombstone. The rage of vengeance made him desist; his head buzzed with

chaotic thoughts of extermination, he turned round the room as if he

could find neither his weapons nor the way out; and all the time he

stammered awful menaces. . .

A violent battering at the door of the inn recalled him to his soberer

senses. He flew to the window pulled the shutters open, and looked out.

In the faint dawn he saw below him a mob of men. Ha! He would go and

face at once this murderous lot collected no doubt for his undoing.

After his struggle with nameless terrors he yearned for an open fray with

armed enemies. But he must have remained yet bereft of his reason,

because forgetting his weapons he rushed downstairs with a wild cry,

unbarred the door while blows were raining on it outside, and flinging it

open flew with his bare hands at the throat of the first man he saw

before him. They rolled over together. Byrne’s hazy intention was to

break through, to fly up the mountain path, and come back presently with

Gonzales’ men to exact an exemplary vengeance. He fought furiously till

a tree, a house, a mountain, seemed to crash down upon his head—and he

knew no more.

* * * * *

Here Mr. Byrne describes in detail the skilful manner in which he found

his broken head bandaged, informs us that he had lost a great deal of

blood, and ascribes the preservation of his sanity to that circumstance.

He sets down Gonzales’ profuse apologies in full too. For it was

Gonzales who, tired of waiting for news from the English, had come down

to the inn with half his band, on his way to the sea. “His excellency,”

he explained, “rushed out with fierce impetuosity, and, moreover, was not

known to us for a friend, and so we . . . etc., etc. When asked what had

become of the witches, he only pointed his finger silently to the ground,

then voiced calmly a moral reflection: “The passion for gold is pitiless

in the very old, señor,” he said. “No doubt in former days they have put

many a solitary traveller to sleep in the archbishop’s bed.”

“There was also a gipsy girl there,” said Byrne feebly from the

improvised litter on which he was being carried to the coast by a squad

of guerilleros.

“It was she who winched up that infernal machine, and it was she too who

lowered it that night,” was the answer.

“But why? Why?” exclaimed Byrne. “Why should she wish for my death?”

“No doubt for the sake of your excellency’s coat buttons,” said politely

the saturnine Gonzales. “We found those of the dead mariner concealed on

her person. But your excellency may rest assured that everything that is

fitting has been done on this occasion.”

Byrne asked no more questions. There was still another death which was

considered by Gonzales as “fitting to the occasion.” The one-eyed

Bernardino stuck against the wall of his wine-shop received the charge of

six escopettas into his breast. As the shots rang out the rough bier

with Tom’s body on it went past carried by a bandit-like gang of Spanish

patriots down the ravine to the shore, where two boats from the ship were

waiting for what was left on earth of her best seaman.

Mr. Byrne, very pale and weak, stepped into the boat which carried the

body of his humble friend. For it was decided that Tom Corbin should

rest far out in the bay of Biscay. The officer took the tiller and,

turning his head for the last look at the shore, saw on the grey hillside

something moving, which he made out to be a little man in a yellow hat

mounted on a mule—that mule without which the fate of Tom Corbin would

have remained mysterious for ever.

* * * * *

_June_, 1913.

BECAUSE OF THE DOLLARS

CHAPTER I

While we were hanging about near the water’s edge, as sailors idling

ashore will do (it was in the open space before the Harbour Office of a

great Eastern port), a man came towards us from the “front” of business

houses, aiming obliquely at the landing steps. He attracted my attention

because in the movement of figures in white drill suits on the pavement

from which he stepped, his costume, the usual tunic and trousers, being

made of light grey flannel, made him noticeable.

I had time to observe him. He was stout, but he was not grotesque. His

face was round and smooth, his complexion very fair. On his nearer

approach I saw a little moustache made all the fairer by a good many

white hairs. And he had, for a stout man, quite a good chin. In passing

us he exchanged nods with the friend I was with and smiled.

My friend was Hollis, the fellow who had so many adventures and had known

so many queer people in that part of the (more or less) gorgeous East in

the days of his youth. He said: “That’s a good man. I don’t mean good

in the sense of smart or skilful in his trade. I mean a really _good_

man.”

I turned round at once to look at the phenomenon. The “really _good_

man” had a very broad back. I saw him signal a sampan to come alongside,

get into it, and go off in the direction of a cluster of local steamers

anchored close inshore.

I said: “He’s a seaman, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Commands that biggish dark-green steamer: ‘_Sissie_—Glasgow.’ He

has never commanded anything else but the ‘_Sissie_—Glasgow,’ only it

wasn’t always the same _Sissie_. The first he had was about half the

length of this one, and we used to tell poor Davidson that she was a size

too small for him. Even at that time Davidson had bulk. We warned him

he would get callosities on his shoulders and elbows because of the tight

fit of his command. And Davidson could well afford the smiles he gave us

for our chaff. He made lots of money in her. She belonged to a portly

Chinaman resembling a mandarin in a picture-book, with goggles and thin

drooping moustaches, and as dignified as only a Celestial knows how to

be.

“The best of Chinamen as employers is that they have such gentlemanly

instincts. Once they become convinced that you are a straight man, they

give you their unbounded confidence. You simply can’t do wrong, then.

And they are pretty quick judges of character, too. Davidson’s Chinaman

was the first to find out his worth, on some theoretical principle. One

day in his counting-house, before several white men he was heard to

declare: ‘Captain Davidson is a good man.’ And that settled it. After

that you couldn’t tell if it was Davidson who belonged to the Chinaman or

the Chinaman who belonged to Davidson. It was he who, shortly before he

died, ordered in Glasgow the new _Sissie_ for Davidson to command.”

We walked into the shade of the Harbour Office and leaned our elbows on

the parapet of the quay.

“She was really meant to comfort poor Davidson,” continued Hollis. “Can

you fancy anything more naïvely touching than this old mandarin spending

several thousand pounds to console his white man? Well, there she is.

The old mandarin’s sons have inherited her, and Davidson with her; and he

commands her; and what with his salary and trading privileges he makes a

lot of money; and everything is as before; and Davidson even smiles—you

have seen it? Well, the smile’s the only thing which isn’t as before.”

“Tell me, Hollis,” I asked, “what do you mean by good in this

connection?”

“Well, there are men who are born good just as others are born witty.

What I mean is his nature. No simpler, more scrupulously delicate soul

had ever lived in such a—a—comfortable envelope. How we used to laugh at

Davidson’s fine scruples! In short, he’s thoroughly humane, and I don’t

imagine there can be much of any other sort of goodness that counts on

this earth. And as he’s that with a shade of particular refinement, I

may well call him a ‘_really_ good man.’”

I knew from old that Hollis was a firm believer in the final value of

shades. And I said: “I see”—because I really did see Hollis’s Davidson

in the sympathetic stout man who had passed us a little while before.

But I remembered that at the very moment he smiled his placid face

appeared veiled in melancholy—a sort of spiritual shadow. I went on.

“Who on earth has paid him off for being so fine by spoiling his smile?”

“That’s quite a story, and I will tell it to you if you like. Confound

it! It’s quite a surprising one, too. Surprising in every way, but

mostly in the way it knocked over poor Davidson—and apparently only

because he is such a good sort. He was telling me all about it only a

few days ago. He said that when he saw these four fellows with their

heads in a bunch over the table, he at once didn’t like it. He didn’t

like it at all. You mustn’t suppose that Davidson is a soft fool. These

men—

“But I had better begin at the beginning. We must go back to the first

time the old dollars had been called in by our Government in exchange for

a new issue. Just about the time when I left these parts to go home for

a long stay. Every trader in the islands was thinking of getting his old

dollars sent up here in time, and the demand for empty French wine

cases—you know the dozen of vermouth or claret size—was something

unprecedented. The custom was to pack the dollars in little bags of a

hundred each. I don’t know how many bags each case would hold. A good

lot. Pretty tidy sums must have been moving afloat just then. But let

us get away from here. Won’t do to stay in the sun. Where could we—? I

know! let us go to those tiffin-rooms over there.”

We moved over accordingly. Our appearance in the long empty room at that

early hour caused visible consternation amongst the China boys. But

Hollis led the way to one of the tables between the windows screened by

rattan blinds. A brilliant half-light trembled on the ceiling, on the

whitewashed walls, bathed the multitude of vacant chairs and tables in a

peculiar, stealthy glow.

“All right. We will get something to eat when it’s ready,” he said,

waving the anxious Chinaman waiter aside. He took his temples touched

with grey between his hands, leaning over the table to bring his face,

his dark, keen eyes, closer to mine.

“Davidson then was commanding the steamer _Sissie_—the little one which

we used to chaff him about. He ran her alone, with only the Malay serang

for a deck officer. The nearest approach to another white man on board

of her was the engineer, a Portuguese half-caste, as thin as a lath and

quite a youngster at that. For all practical purposes Davidson was

managing that command of his single-handed; and of course this was known

in the port. I am telling you of it because the fact had its influence

on the developments you shall hear of presently.

“His steamer, being so small, could go up tiny creeks and into shallow

bays and through reefs and over sand-banks, collecting produce, where no

other vessel but a native craft would think of venturing. It is a paying

game, often. Davidson was known to visit in her places that no one else

could find and that hardly anybody had ever heard of.

“The old dollars being called in, Davidson’s Chinaman thought that the

_Sissie_ would be just the thing to collect them from small traders in

the less frequented parts of the Archipelago. It’s a good business.

Such cases of dollars are dumped aft in the ship’s lazarette, and you get

good freight for very little trouble and space.

“Davidson, too, thought it was a good idea; and together they made up a

list of his calls on his next trip. Then Davidson (he had naturally the

chart of his voyages in his head) remarked that on his way back he might

look in at a certain settlement up a mere creek, where a poor sort of

white man lived in a native village. Davidson pointed out to his

Chinaman that the fellow was certain to have some rattans to ship.

“‘Probably enough to fill her forward,’ said Davidson. ‘And that’ll be

better than bringing her back with empty holds. A day more or less

doesn’t matter.’

“This was sound talk, and the Chinaman owner could not but agree. But if

it hadn’t been sound it would have been just the same. Davidson did what

he liked. He was a man that could do no wrong. However, this suggestion

of his was not merely a business matter. There was in it a touch of

Davidsonian kindness. For you must know that the man could not have

continued to live quietly up that creek if it had not been for Davidson’s

willingness to call there from time to time. And Davidson’s Chinaman

knew this perfectly well, too. So he only smiled his dignified, bland

smile, and said: ‘All right, Captain. You do what you like.’

“I will explain presently how this connection between Davidson and that

fellow came about. Now I want to tell you about the part of this affair

which happened here—the preliminaries of it.

“You know as well as I do that these tiffin-rooms where we are sitting

now have been in existence for many years. Well, next day about twelve

o’clock, Davidson dropped in here to get something to eat.

“And here comes the only moment in this story where accident—mere

accident—plays a part. If Davidson had gone home that day for tiffin,

there would be now, after twelve years or more, nothing changed in his

kindly, placid smile.

“But he came in here; and perhaps it was sitting at this very table that

he remarked to a friend of mine that his next trip was to be a

dollar-collecting trip. He added, laughing, that his wife was making

rather a fuss about it. She had begged him to stay ashore and get

somebody else to take his place for a voyage. She thought there was some

danger on account of the dollars. He told her, he said, that there were

no Java-sea pirates nowadays except in boys’ books. He had laughed at

her fears, but he was very sorry, too; for when she took any notion in

her head it was impossible to argue her out of it. She would be worrying

herself all the time he was away. Well, he couldn’t help it. There was

no one ashore fit to take his place for the trip.

“This friend of mine and I went home together in the same mail-boat, and

he mentioned that conversation one evening in the Red Sea while we were

talking over the things and people we had just left, with more or less

regret.

“I can’t say that Davidson occupied a very prominent place. Moral

excellence seldom does. He was quietly appreciated by those who knew him

well; but his more obvious distinction consisted in this, that he was

married. Ours, as you remember, was a bachelor crowd; in spirit anyhow,

if not absolutely in fact. There might have been a few wives in

existence, but if so they were invisible, distant, never alluded to. For

what would have been the good? Davidson alone was visibly married.

“Being married suited him exactly. It fitted him so well that the

wildest of us did not resent the fact when it was disclosed. Directly he

had felt his feet out here, Davidson sent for his wife. She came out

(from West Australia) in the _Somerset_, under the care of Captain

Ritchie—you know, Monkey-face Ritchie—who couldn’t praise enough her

sweetness, her gentleness, and her charm. She seemed to be the

heaven-born mate for Davidson. She found on arrival a very pretty

bungalow on the hill, ready for her and the little girl they had. Very

soon he got for her a two-wheeled trap and a Burmah pony, and she used to

drive down of an evening to pick up Davidson, on the quay. When

Davidson, beaming, got into the trap, it would become very full all at

once.

“We used to admire Mrs. Davidson from a distance. It was a girlish head

out of a keepsake. From a distance. We had not many opportunities for a

closer view, because she did not care to give them to us. We would have

been glad to drop in at the Davidson bungalow, but we were made to feel

somehow that we were not very welcome there. Not that she ever said

anything ungracious. She never had much to say for herself. I was

perhaps the one who saw most of the Davidsons at home. What I noticed

under the superficial aspect of vapid sweetness was her convex, obstinate

forehead, and her small, red, pretty, ungenerous mouth. But then I am an

observer with strong prejudices. Most of us were fetched by her white,

swan-like neck, by that drooping, innocent profile. There was a lot of

latent devotion to Davidson’s wife hereabouts, at that time, I can tell

you. But my idea was that she repaid it by a profound suspicion of the

sort of men we were; a mistrust which extended—I fancied—to her very

husband at times. And I thought then she was jealous of him in a way;

though there were no women that she could be jealous about. She had no

women’s society. It’s difficult for a shipmaster’s wife unless there are

other shipmasters’ wives about, and there were none here then. I know

that the dock manager’s wife called on her; but that was all. The

fellows here formed the opinion that Mrs. Davidson was a meek, shy little

thing. She looked it, I must say. And this opinion was so universal

that the friend I have been telling you of remembered his conversation

with Davidson simply because of the statement about Davidson’s wife. He

even wondered to me: ‘Fancy Mrs. Davidson making a fuss to that extent.

She didn’t seem to me the sort of woman that would know how to make a

fuss about anything.’

“I wondered, too—but not so much. That bumpy forehead—eh? I had always

suspected her of being silly. And I observed that Davidson must have

been vexed by this display of wifely anxiety.

“My friend said: ‘No. He seemed rather touched and distressed. There

really was no one he could ask to relieve him; mainly because he intended

to make a call in some God-forsaken creek, to look up a fellow of the

name of Bamtz who apparently had settled there.’

“And again my friend wondered. ‘Tell me,’ he cried, ‘what connection can

there be between Davidson and such a creature as Bamtz?’

“I don’t remember now what answer I made. A sufficient one could have

been given in two words: ‘Davidson’s goodness.’ _That_ never boggled at

unworthiness if there was the slightest reason for compassion. I don’t

want you to think that Davidson had no discrimination at all. Bamtz

could not have imposed on him. Moreover, everybody knew what Bamtz was.

He was a loafer with a beard. When I think of Bamtz, the first thing I

see is that long black beard and a lot of propitiatory wrinkles at the

corners of two little eyes. There was no such beard from here to

Polynesia, where a beard is a valuable property in itself. Bamtz’s beard

was valuable to him in another way. You know how impressed Orientals are

by a fine beard. Years and years ago, I remember, the grave Abdullah,

the great trader of Sambir, unable to repress signs of astonishment and

admiration at the first sight of that imposing beard. And it’s very well

known that Bamtz lived on Abdullah off and on for several years. It was

a unique beard, and so was the bearer of the same. A unique loafer. He

made a fine art of it, or rather a sort of craft and mystery. One can

understand a fellow living by cadging and small swindles in towns, in

large communities of people; but Bamtz managed to do that trick in the

wilderness, to loaf on the outskirts of the virgin forest.

“He understood how to ingratiate himself with the natives. He would

arrive in some settlement up a river, make a present of a cheap carbine

or a pair of shoddy binoculars, or something of that sort, to the Rajah,

or the head-man, or the principal trader; and on the strength of that

gift, ask for a house, posing mysteriously as a very special trader. He

would spin them no end of yarns, live on the fat of the land, for a

while, and then do some mean swindle or other—or else they would get

tired of him and ask him to quit. And he would go off meekly with an air

of injured innocence. Funny life. Yet, he never got hurt somehow. I’ve

heard of the Rajah of Dongala giving him fifty dollars’ worth of trade

goods and paying his passage in a prau only to get rid of him. Fact.

And observe that nothing prevented the old fellow having Bamtz’s throat

cut and the carcase thrown into deep water outside the reefs; for who on

earth would have inquired after Bamtz?

“He had been known to loaf up and down the wilderness as far north as the

Gulf of Tonkin. Neither did he disdain a spell of civilisation from time

to time. And it was while loafing and cadging in Saigon, bearded and

dignified (he gave himself out there as a bookkeeper), that he came

across Laughing Anne.

“The less said of her early history the better, but something must be

said. We may safely suppose there was very little heart left in her

famous laugh when Bamtz spoke first to her in some low café. She was

stranded in Saigon with precious little money and in great trouble about

a kid she had, a boy of five or six.

“A fellow I just remember, whom they called Pearler Harry, brought her

out first into these parts—from Australia, I believe. He brought her out

and then dropped her, and she remained knocking about here and there,

known to most of us by sight, at any rate. Everybody in the Archipelago

had heard of Laughing Anne. She had really a pleasant silvery laugh

always at her disposal, so to speak, but it wasn’t enough apparently to

make her fortune. The poor creature was ready to stick to any

half-decent man if he would only let her, but she always got dropped, as

it might have been expected.

“She had been left in Saigon by the skipper of a German ship with whom

she had been going up and down the China coast as far as Vladivostok for

near upon two years. The German said to her: ‘This is all over, _mein

Taubchen_. I am going home now to get married to the girl I got engaged

to before coming out here.’ And Anne said: ‘All right, I’m ready to go.

We part friends, don’t we?’

“She was always anxious to part friends. The German told her that of

course they were parting friends. He looked rather glum at the moment of

parting. She laughed and went ashore.

“But it was no laughing matter for her. She had some notion that this

would be her last chance. What frightened her most was the future of her

child. She had left her boy in Saigon before going off with the German,

in the care of an elderly French couple. The husband was a doorkeeper in

some Government office, but his time was up, and they were returning to

France. She had to take the boy back from them; and after she had got

him back, she did not like to part with him any more.

“That was the situation when she and Bamtz got acquainted casually. She

could not have had any illusions about that fellow. To pick up with

Bamtz was coming down pretty low in the world, even from a material point

of view. She had always been decent, in her way; whereas Bamtz was, not

to mince words, an abject sort of creature. On the other hand, that

bearded loafer, who looked much more like a pirate than a bookkeeper, was

not a brute. He was gentle—rather—even in his cups. And then, despair,

like misfortune, makes us acquainted with strange bed-fellows. For she

may well have despaired. She was no longer young—you know.

“On the man’s side this conjunction is more difficult to explain,

perhaps. One thing, however, must be said of Bamtz; he had always kept

clear of native women. As one can’t suspect him of moral delicacy, I

surmise that it must have been from prudence. And he, too, was no longer

young. There were many white hairs in his valuable black beard by then.

He may have simply longed for some kind of companionship in his queer,

degraded existence. Whatever their motives, they vanished from Saigon

together. And of course nobody cared what had become of them.

“Six months later Davidson came into the Mirrah Settlement. It was the

very first time he had been up that creek, where no European vessel had

ever been seen before. A Javanese passenger he had on board offered him

fifty dollars to call in there—it must have been some very particular

business—and Davidson consented to try. Fifty dollars, he told me, were

neither here nor there; but he was curious to see the place, and the

little _Sissie_ could go anywhere where there was water enough to float a

soup-plate.

“Davidson landed his Javanese plutocrat, and, as he had to wait a couple

of hours for the tide, he went ashore himself to stretch his legs.

“It was a small settlement. Some sixty houses, most of them built on

piles over the river, the rest scattered in the long grass; the usual

pathway at the back; the forest hemming in the clearing and smothering

what there might have been of air into a dead, hot stagnation.

“All the population was on the river-bank staring silently, as Malays

will do, at the _Sissie_ anchored in the stream. She was almost as

wonderful to them as an angel’s visit. Many of the old people had only

heard vaguely of fire-ships, and not many of the younger generation had

seen one. On the back path Davidson strolled in perfect solitude. But

he became aware of a bad smell and concluded he would go no farther.

“While he stood wiping his forehead, he heard from somewhere the

exclamation: ‘My God! It’s Davy!’

“Davidson’s lower jaw, as he expressed it, came unhooked at the crying of

this excited voice. Davy was the name used by the associates of his

young days; he hadn’t heard it for many years. He stared about with his

mouth open and saw a white woman issue from the long grass in which a

small hut stood buried nearly up to the roof.

“Try to imagine the shock: in that wild place that you couldn’t find on a

map, and more squalid than the most poverty-stricken Malay settlement had

a right to be, this European woman coming swishing out of the long grass

in a fanciful tea-gown thing, dingy pink satin, with a long train and

frayed lace trimmings; her eyes like black coals in a pasty-white face.

Davidson thought that he was asleep, that he was delirious. From the

offensive village mudhole (it was what Davidson had sniffed just before)

a couple of filthy buffaloes uprose with loud snorts and lumbered off

crashing through the bushes, panic-struck by this apparition.

“The woman came forward, her arms extended, and laid her hands on

Davidson’s shoulders, exclaiming: ‘Why! You have hardly changed at all.

The same good Davy.’ And she laughed a little wildly.

“This sound was to Davidson like a galvanic shock to a corpse. He

started in every muscle. ‘Laughing Anne,’ he said in an awe-struck

voice.

“‘All that’s left of her, Davy. All that’s left of her.’

“Davidson looked up at the sky; but there was to be seen no balloon from

which she could have fallen on that spot. When he brought his distracted

gaze down, it rested on a child holding on with a brown little paw to the

pink satin gown. He had run out of the grass after her. Had Davidson

seen a real hobgoblin his eyes could not have bulged more than at this

small boy in a dirty white blouse and ragged knickers. He had a round

head of tight chestnut curls, very sunburnt legs, a freckled face, and

merry eyes. Admonished by his mother to greet the gentleman, he finished

off Davidson by addressing him in French.

“‘_Bonjour_.’

“Davidson, overcome, looked up at the woman in silence. She sent the

child back to the hut, and when he had disappeared in the grass, she

turned to Davidson, tried to speak, but after getting out the words,

‘That’s my Tony,’ burst into a long fit of crying. She had to lean on

Davidson’s shoulder. He, distressed in the goodness of his heart, stood

rooted to the spot where she had come upon him.

“What a meeting—eh? Bamtz had sent her out to see what white man it was

who had landed. And she had recognised him from that time when Davidson,

who had been pearling himself in his youth, had been associating with

Harry the Pearler and others, the quietest of a rather rowdy set.

“Before Davidson retraced his steps to go on board the steamer, he had

heard much of Laughing Anne’s story, and had even had an interview, on

the path, with Bamtz himself. She ran back to the hut to fetch him, and

he came out lounging, with his hands in his pockets, with the detached,

casual manner under which he concealed his propensity to cringe.

Ya-a-as-as. He thought he would settle here permanently—with her. This

with a nod at Laughing Anne, who stood by, a haggard, tragically anxious

figure, her black hair hanging over her shoulders.

“‘No more paint and dyes for me, Davy,’ she struck in, ‘if only you will

do what he wants you to do. You know that I was always ready to stand by

my men—if they had only let me.’

“Davidson had no doubt of her earnestness. It was of Bamtz’s good faith

that he was not at all sure. Bamtz wanted Davidson to promise to call at

Mirrah more or less regularly. He thought he saw an opening to do

business with rattans there, if only he could depend on some craft to

bring out trading goods and take away his produce.

“‘I have a few dollars to make a start on. The people are all right.’

“He had come there, where he was not known, in a native prau, and had

managed, with his sedate manner and the exactly right kind of yarn he

knew how to tell to the natives, to ingratiate himself with the chief

man.

“‘The Orang Kaya has given me that empty house there to live in as long

as I will stay,’ added Bamtz.

“‘Do it, Davy,’ cried the woman suddenly. ‘Think of that poor kid.’

“‘Seen him? ’Cute little customer,’ said the reformed loafer in such a

tone of interest as to surprise Davidson into a kindly glance.

“‘I certainly can do it,’ he declared. He thought of at first making

some stipulation as to Bamtz behaving decently to the woman, but his

exaggerated delicacy and also the conviction that such a fellow’s

promises were worth nothing restrained him. Anne went a little distance

down the path with him talking anxiously.

“‘It’s for the kid. How could I have kept him with me if I had to knock

about in towns? Here he will never know that his mother was a painted

woman. And this Bamtz likes him. He’s real fond of him. I suppose I

ought to thank God for that.’

“Davidson shuddered at any human creature being brought so low as to have

to thank God for the favours or affection of a Bamtz.

“‘And do you think that you can make out to live here?’ he asked gently.

“‘Can’t I? You know I have always stuck to men through thick and thin

till they had enough of me. And now look at me! But inside I am as I

always was. I have acted on the square to them all one after another.

Only they do get tired somehow. Oh, Davy! Harry ought not to have cast

me off. It was he that led me astray.’

“Davidson mentioned to her that Harry the Pearler had been dead now for

some years. Perhaps she had heard?

“She made a sign that she had heard; and walked by the side of Davidson

in silence nearly to the bank. Then she told him that her meeting with

him had brought back the old times to her mind. She had not cried for

years. She was not a crying woman either. It was hearing herself called

Laughing Anne that had started her sobbing like a fool. Harry was the

only man she had loved. The others—

“She shrugged her shoulders. But she prided herself on her loyalty to

the successive partners of her dismal adventures. She had never played

any tricks in her life. She was a pal worth having. But men did get

tired. They did not understand women. She supposed it had to be.

“Davidson was attempting a veiled warning as to Bamtz, but she

interrupted him. She knew what men were. She knew what this man was

like. But he had taken wonderfully to the kid. And Davidson desisted

willingly, saying to himself that surely poor Laughing Anne could have no

illusions by this time. She wrung his hand hard at parting.

“‘It’s for the kid, Davy—it’s for the kid. Isn’t he a bright little

chap?’

CHAPTER II

“All this happened about two years before the day when Davidson, sitting

in this very room, talked to my friend. You will see presently how this

room can get full. Every seat’ll be occupied, and as you notice, the

tables are set close, so that the backs of the chairs are almost

touching. There is also a good deal of noisy talk here about one

o’clock.

“I don’t suppose Davidson was talking very loudly; but very likely he had

to raise his voice across the table to my friend. And here accident,

mere accident, put in its work by providing a pair of fine ears close

behind Davidson’s chair. It was ten to one against, the owner of the

same having enough change in his pockets to get his tiffin here. But he

had. Most likely had rooked somebody of a few dollars at cards

overnight. He was a bright creature of the name of Fector, a spare,

short, jumpy fellow with a red face and muddy eyes. He described himself

as a journalist, as certain kind of women give themselves out as

actresses in the dock of a police-court.

“He used to introduce himself to strangers as a man with a mission to

track out abuses and fight them whenever found. He would also hint that

he was a martyr. And it’s a fact that he had been kicked, horsewhipped,

imprisoned, and hounded with ignominy out of pretty well every place

between Ceylon and Shanghai, for a professional blackmailer.

“I suppose, in that trade, you’ve got to have active wits and sharp ears.

It’s not likely that he overheard every word Davidson said about his

dollar collecting trip, but he heard enough to set his wits at work.

“He let Davidson go out, and then hastened away down to the native slums

to a sort of lodging-house kept in partnership by the usual sort of

Portuguese and a very disreputable Chinaman. Macao Hotel, it was called,

but it was mostly a gambling den that one used to warn fellows against.

Perhaps you remember?

“There, the evening before, Fector had met a precious couple, a

partnership even more queer than the Portuguese and the Chinaman. One of

the two was Niclaus—you know. Why! the fellow with a Tartar moustache

and a yellow complexion, like a Mongolian, only that his eyes were set

straight and his face was not so flat. One couldn’t tell what breed he

was. A nondescript beggar. From a certain angle you would think a very

bilious white man. And I daresay he was. He owned a Malay prau and

called himself The Nakhoda, as one would say: The Captain. Aha! Now you

remember. He couldn’t, apparently, speak any other European language

than English, but he flew the Dutch flag on his prau.

“The other was the Frenchman without hands. Yes. The very same we used

to know in ’79 in Sydney, keeping a little tobacco shop at the lower end

of George Street. You remember the huge carcase hunched up behind the

counter, the big white face and the long black hair brushed back off a

high forehead like a bard’s. He was always trying to roll cigarettes on

his knee with his stumps, telling endless yarns of Polynesia and whining

and cursing in turn about ‘_mon malheur_.’ His hands had been blown away

by a dynamite cartridge while fishing in some lagoon. This accident, I

believe, had made him more wicked than before, which is saying a good

deal.

“He was always talking about ‘resuming his activities’ some day, whatever

they were, if he could only get an intelligent companion. It was evident

that the little shop was no field for his activities, and the sickly

woman with her face tied up, who used to look in sometimes through the

back door, was no companion for him.

“And, true enough, he vanished from Sydney before long, after some

trouble with the Excise fellows about his stock. Goods stolen out of a

warehouse or something similar. He left the woman behind, but he must

have secured some sort of companion—he could not have shifted for

himself; but whom he went away with, and where, and what other companions

he might have picked up afterwards, it is impossible to make the remotest

guess about.

“Why exactly he came this way I can’t tell. Towards the end of my time

here we began to hear talk of a maimed Frenchman who had been seen here

and there. But no one knew then that he had foregathered with Niclaus

and lived in his prau. I daresay he put Niclaus up to a thing or two.

Anyhow, it was a partnership. Niclaus was somewhat afraid of the

Frenchman on account of his tempers, which were awful. He looked then

like a devil; but a man without hands, unable to load or handle a weapon,

can at best go for one only with his teeth. From that danger Niclaus

felt certain he could always defend himself.

“The couple were alone together loafing in the common-room of that

infamous hotel when Fector turned up. After some beating about the bush,

for he was doubtful how far he could trust these two, he repeated what he

had overheard in the tiffin-rooms.

“His tale did not have much success till he came to mention the creek and

Bamtz’s name. Niclaus, sailing about like a native in a prau, was, in

his own words, ‘familiar with the locality.’ The huge Frenchman, walking

up and down the room with his stumps in the pockets of his jacket,

stopped short in surprise. ‘_Comment_? _Bamtz_! _Bamtz_!’

“He had run across him several times in his life. He exclaimed:

‘_Bamtz_! _Mais je ne connais que ca_!’ And he applied such a

contemptuously indecent epithet to Bamtz that when, later, he alluded to

him as ‘_une chiffe_’ (a mere rag) it sounded quite complimentary. ‘We

can do with him what we like,’ he asserted confidently. ‘Oh, yes.

Certainly we must hasten to pay a visit to that—’ (another awful

descriptive epithet quite unfit for repetition). ‘Devil take me if we

don’t pull off a coup that will set us all up for a long time.’

“He saw all that lot of dollars melted into bars and disposed of

somewhere on the China coast. Of the escape after the _coup_ he never

doubted. There was Niclaus’s prau to manage that in.

“In his enthusiasm he pulled his stumps out of his pockets and waved them

about. Then, catching sight of them, as it were, he held them in front

of his eyes, cursing and blaspheming and bewailing his misfortune and his

helplessness, till Niclaus quieted him down.

“But it was his mind that planned out the affair and it was his spirit

which carried the other two on. Neither of them was of the bold

buccaneer type; and Fector, especially, had never in his adventurous life

used other weapons than slander and lies.

“That very evening they departed on a visit to Bamtz in Niclaus’s prau,

which had been lying, emptied of her cargo of cocoanuts, for a day or two

under the canal bridge. They must have crossed the bows of the anchored

_Sissie_, and no doubt looked at her with interest as the scene of their

future exploit, the great haul, _le grand coup_!

“Davidson’s wife, to his great surprise, sulked with him for several days

before he left. I don’t know whether it occurred to him that, for all

her angelic profile, she was a very stupidly obstinate girl. She didn’t

like the tropics. He had brought her out there, where she had no

friends, and now, she said, he was becoming inconsiderate. She had a

presentiment of some misfortune, and notwithstanding Davidson’s

painstaking explanations, she could not see why her presentiments were to

be disregarded. On the very last evening before Davidson went away she

asked him in a suspicious manner:

“‘Why is it that you are so anxious to go this time?’

“‘I am not anxious,’ protested the good Davidson. ‘I simply can’t help

myself. There’s no one else to go in my place.’

“‘Oh! There’s no one,’ she said, turning away slowly.

“She was so distant with him that evening that Davidson from a sense of

delicacy made up his mind to say good-bye to her at once and go and sleep

on board. He felt very miserable and, strangely enough, more on his own

account than on account of his wife. She seemed to him much more

offended than grieved.

“Three weeks later, having collected a good many cases of old dollars

(they were stowed aft in the lazarette with an iron bar and a padlock

securing the hatch under his cabin-table), yes, with a bigger lot than he

had expected to collect, he found himself homeward bound and off the

entrance of the creek where Bamtz lived and even, in a sense, flourished.

“It was so late in the day that Davidson actually hesitated whether he

should not pass by this time. He had no regard for Bamtz, who was a

degraded but not a really unhappy man. His pity for Laughing Anne was no

more than her case deserved. But his goodness was of a particularly

delicate sort. He realised how these people were dependent on him, and

how they would feel their dependence (if he failed to turn up) through a

long month of anxious waiting. Prompted by his sensitive humanity,

Davidson, in the gathering dusk, turned the _Sissie’s_ head towards the

hardly discernible coast, and navigated her safety through a maze of

shallow patches. But by the time he got to the mouth of the creek the

night had come.

“The narrow waterway lay like a black cutting through the forest. And as

there were always grounded snaggs in the channel which it would be

impossible to make out, Davidson very prudently turned the _Sissie_

round, and with only enough steam on the boilers to give her a touch

ahead if necessary, let her drift up stern first with the tide, silent

and invisible in the impenetrable darkness and in the dumb stillness.

“It was a long job, and when at the end of two hours Davidson thought he

must be up to the clearing, the settlement slept already, the whole land

of forests and rivers was asleep.

“Davidson, seeing a solitary light in the massed darkness of the shore,

knew that it was burning in Bamtz’s house. This was unexpected at this

time of the night, but convenient as a guide. By a turn of the screw and

a touch of the helm he sheered the _Sissie_ alongside Bamtz’s wharf—a

miserable structure of a dozen piles and a few planks, of which the

ex-vagabond was very proud. A couple of Kalashes jumped down on it, took

a turn with the ropes thrown to them round the posts, and the _Sissie_

came to rest without a single loud word or the slightest noise. And just

in time too, for the tide turned even before she was properly moored.

“Davidson had something to eat, and then, coming on deck for a last look

round, noticed that the light was still burning in the house.

“This was very unusual, but since they were awake so late, Davidson

thought that he would go up to say that he was in a hurry to be off and

to ask that what rattans there were in store should be sent on board with

the first sign of dawn.

“He stepped carefully over the shaky planks, not being anxious to get a

sprained ankle, and picked his way across the waste ground to the foot of

the house ladder. The house was but a glorified hut on piles, unfenced

and lonely.

“Like many a stout man, Davidson is very lightfooted. He climbed the

seven steps or so, stepped across the bamboo platform quietly, but what

he saw through the doorway stopped him short.

“Four men were sitting by the light of a solitary candle. There was a

bottle, a jug and glasses on the table, but they were not engaged in

drinking. Two packs of cards were lying there too, but they were not

preparing to play. They were talking together in whispers, and remained

quite unaware of him. He himself was too astonished to make a sound for

some time. The world was still, except for the sibilation of the

whispering heads bunched together over the table.

“And Davidson, as I have quoted him to you before, didn’t like it. He

didn’t like it at all.

“The situation ended with a scream proceeding from the dark, interior

part of the room. ‘O Davy! you’ve given me a turn.’

“Davidson made out beyond the table Anne’s very pale face. She laughed a

little hysterically, out of the deep shadows between the gloomy mat

walls. ‘Ha! ha! ha!’

“The four heads sprang apart at the first sound, and four pairs of eyes

became fixed stonily on Davidson. The woman came forward, having little

more on her than a loose chintz wrapper and straw slippers on her bare

feet. Her head was tied up Malay fashion in a red handkerchief, with a

mass of loose hair hanging under it behind. Her professional, gay,

European feathers had literally dropped off her in the course of these

two years, but a long necklace of amber beads hung round her uncovered

neck. It was the only ornament she had left; Bamtz had sold all her

poor-enough trinkets during the flight from Saigon—when their association

began.

“She came forward, past the table, into the light, with her usual groping

gesture of extended arms, as though her soul, poor thing! had gone blind

long ago, her white cheeks hollow, her eyes darkly wild, distracted, as

Davidson thought. She came on swiftly, grabbed him by the arm, dragged

him in. ‘It’s heaven itself that sends you to-night. My Tony’s so

bad—come and see him. Come along—do!’

“Davidson submitted. The only one of the men to move was Bamtz, who made

as if to get up but dropped back in his chair again. Davidson in passing

heard him mutter confusedly something that sounded like ‘poor little

beggar.’

“The child, lying very flushed in a miserable cot knocked up out of

gin-cases, stared at Davidson with wide, drowsy eyes. It was a bad bout

of fever clearly. But while Davidson was promising to go on board and

fetch some medicines, and generally trying to say reassuring things, he

could not help being struck by the extraordinary manner of the woman

standing by his side. Gazing with despairing expression down at the cot,

she would suddenly throw a quick, startled glance at Davidson and then

towards the other room.

“‘Yes, my poor girl,’ he whispered, interpreting her distraction in his

own way, though he had nothing precise in his mind. ‘I’m afraid this

bodes no good to you. How is it they are here?’

“She seized his forearm and breathed out forcibly: ‘No good to me! Oh,

no! But what about you! They are after the dollars you have on board.’

“Davidson let out an astonished ‘How do they know there are any dollars?’

“She clapped her hands lightly, in distress. ‘So it’s true! You have

them on board? Then look out for yourself.’

“They stood gazing down at the boy in the cot, aware that they might be

observed from the other room.

“‘We must get him to perspire as soon as possible,’ said Davidson in his

ordinary voice. ‘You’ll have to give him hot drink of some kind. I will

go on board and bring you a spirit-kettle amongst other things.’ And he

added under his breath: ‘Do they actually mean murder?’

“She made no sign, she had returned to her desolate contemplation of the

boy. Davidson thought she had not heard him even, when with an unchanged

expression she spoke under her breath.

“‘The Frenchman would, in a minute. The others shirk it—unless you

resist. He’s a devil. He keeps them going. Without him they would have

done nothing but talk. I’ve got chummy with him. What can you do when

you are with a man like the fellow I am with now. Bamtz is terrified of

them, and they know it. He’s in it from funk. Oh, Davy! take your ship

away—quick!’

“‘Too late,’ said Davidson. ‘She’s on the mud already.’

“If the kid hadn’t been in this state I would have run off with him—to

you—into the woods—anywhere. Oh, Davy! will he die?’ she cried aloud

suddenly.

“Davidson met three men in the doorway. They made way for him without

actually daring to face his glance. But Bamtz was the only one who

looked down with an air of guilt. The big Frenchman had remained lolling

in his chair; he kept his stumps in his pockets and addressed Davidson.

“‘Isn’t it unfortunate about that child! The distress of that woman

there upsets me, but I am of no use in the world. I couldn’t smooth the

sick pillow of my dearest friend. I have no hands. Would you mind

sticking one of those cigarettes there into the mouth of a poor, harmless

cripple? My nerves want soothing—upon my honour, they do.’

“Davidson complied with his naturally kind smile. As his outward

placidity becomes only more pronounced, if possible, the more reason

there is for excitement; and as Davidson’s eyes, when his wits are hard

at work, get very still and as if sleepy, the huge Frenchman might have

been justified in concluding that the man there was a mere sheep—a sheep

ready for slaughter. With a ‘_merci bien_’ he uplifted his huge carcase

to reach the light of the candle with his cigarette, and Davidson left

the house.

“Going down to the ship and returning, he had time to consider his

position. At first he was inclined to believe that these men

(Niclaus—the white Nakhoda—was the only one he knew by sight before,

besides Bamtz) were not of the stamp to proceed to extremities. This was

partly the reason why he never attempted to take any measures on board.

His pacific Kalashes were not to be thought of as against white men. His

wretched engineer would have had a fit from fright at the mere idea of

any sort of combat. Davidson knew that he would have to depend on

himself in this affair if it ever came off.

“Davidson underestimated naturally the driving power of the Frenchman’s

character and the force of the actuating motive. To that man so

hopelessly crippled these dollars were an enormous opportunity. With his

share of the robbery he would open another shop in Vladivostok, Haïphong,

Manila—somewhere far away.

“Neither did it occur to Davidson, who is a man of courage, if ever there

was one, that his psychology was not known to the world at large, and

that to this particular lot of ruffians, who judged him by his

appearance, he appeared an unsuspicious, inoffensive, soft creature, as

he passed again through the room, his hands full of various objects and

parcels destined for the sick boy.

“All the four were sitting again round the table. Bamtz not having the

pluck to open his mouth, it was Niclaus who, as a collective voice,

called out to him thickly to come out soon and join in a drink.

“‘I think I’ll have to stay some little time in there, to help her look

after the boy,’ Davidson answered without stopping.

“This was a good thing to say to allay a possible suspicion. And, as it

was, Davidson felt he must not stay very long.

“He sat down on an old empty nail-keg near the improvised cot and looked

at the child; while Laughing Anne, moving to and fro, preparing the hot

drink, giving it to the boy in spoonfuls, or stopping to gaze motionless

at the flushed face, whispered disjointed bits of information. She had

succeeded in making friends with that French devil. Davy would

understand that she knew how to make herself pleasant to a man.

“And Davidson nodded without looking at her.

“The big beast had got to be quite confidential with her. She held his

cards for him when they were having a game. Bamtz! Oh! Bamtz in his

funk was only too glad to see the Frenchman humoured. And the Frenchman

had come to believe that she was a woman who didn’t care what she did.

That’s how it came about they got to talk before her openly. For a long

time she could not make out what game they were up to. The new arrivals,

not expecting to find a woman with Bamtz, had been very startled and

annoyed at first, she explained.

“She busied herself in attending to the boy; and nobody looking into that

room would have seen anything suspicious in those two people exchanging

murmurs by the sick-bedside.

“‘But now they think I am a better man than Bamtz ever was,’ she said

with a faint laugh.

“The child moaned. She went down on her knees, and, bending low,

contemplated him mournfully. Then raising her head, she asked Davidson

whether he thought the child would get better. Davidson was sure of it.

She murmured sadly: ‘Poor kid. There’s nothing in life for such as he.

Not a dog’s chance. But I couldn’t let him go, Davy! I couldn’t.’

“Davidson felt a profound pity for the child. She laid her hand on his

knee and whispered an earnest warning against the Frenchman. Davy must

never let him come to close quarters. Naturally Davidson wanted to know

the reason, for a man without hands did not strike him as very formidable

under any circumstances.

“‘Mind you don’t let him—that’s all,’ she insisted anxiously, hesitated,

and then confessed that the Frenchman had got her away from the others

that afternoon and had ordered her to tie a seven-pound iron weight (out

of the set of weights Bamtz used in business) to his right stump. She

had to do it for him. She had been afraid of his savage temper. Bamtz

was such a craven, and neither of the other men would have cared what

happened to her. The Frenchman, however, with many awful threats had

warned her not to let the others know what she had done for him.

Afterwards he had been trying to cajole her. He had promised her that if

she stood by him faithfully in this business he would take her with him

to Haïphong or some other place. A poor cripple needed somebody to take

care of him—always.

“Davidson asked her again if they really meant mischief. It was, he told

me, the hardest thing to believe he had run up against, as yet, in his

life. Anne nodded. The Frenchman’s heart was set on this robbery. Davy

might expect them, about midnight, creeping on board his ship, to steal

anyhow—to murder, perhaps. Her voice sounded weary, and her eyes

remained fastened on her child.

“And still Davidson could not accept it somehow; his contempt for these

men was too great.

“‘Look here, Davy,’ she said. ‘I’ll go outside with them when they

start, and it will be hard luck if I don’t find something to laugh at.

They are used to that from me. Laugh or cry—what’s the odds. You will

be able to hear me on board on this quiet night. Dark it is too. Oh!

it’s dark, Davy!—it’s dark!’

“‘Don’t you run any risks,’ said Davidson. Presently he called her

attention to the boy, who, less flushed now, had dropped into a sound

sleep. ‘Look. He’ll be all right.’

“She made as if to snatch the child up to her breast, but restrained

herself. Davidson prepared to go. She whispered hurriedly:

“‘Mind, Davy! I’ve told them that you generally sleep aft in the hammock

under the awning over the cabin. They have been asking me about your

ways and about your ship, too. I told them all I knew. I had to keep in

with them. And Bamtz would have told them if I hadn’t—you understand?’

“He made a friendly sign and went out. The men about the table (except

Bamtz) looked at him. This time it was Fector who spoke. ‘Won’t you

join us in a quiet game, Captain?’

“Davidson said that now the child was better he thought he would go on

board and turn in. Fector was the only one of the four whom he had, so

to speak, never seen, for he had had a good look at the Frenchman

already. He observed Fector’s muddy eyes, his mean, bitter mouth.

Davidson’s contempt for those men rose in his gorge, while his placid

smile, his gentle tones and general air of innocence put heart into them.

They exchanged meaning glances.

“‘We shall be sitting late over the cards,’ Fector said in his harsh, low

voice.

“‘Don’t make more noise than you can help.’

“‘Oh! we are a quiet lot. And if the invalid shouldn’t be so well, she

will be sure to send one of us down to call you, so that you may play the

doctor again. So don’t shoot at sight.’

“‘He isn’t a shooting man,’ struck in Niclaus.

“‘I never shoot before making sure there’s a reason for it—at any rate,’

said Davidson.

“Bamtz let out a sickly snigger. The Frenchman alone got up to make a

bow to Davidson’s careless nod. His stumps were stuck immovably in his

pockets. Davidson understood now the reason.

“He went down to the ship. His wits were working actively, and he was

thoroughly angry. He smiled, he says (it must have been the first grim

smile of his life), at the thought of the seven-pound weight lashed to

the end of the Frenchman’s stump. The ruffian had taken that precaution

in case of a quarrel that might arise over the division of the spoil. A

man with an unsuspected power to deal killing blows could take his own

part in a sudden scrimmage round a heap of money, even against

adversaries armed with revolvers, especially if he himself started the

row.

“‘He’s ready to face any of his friends with that thing. But he will

have no use for it. There will be no occasion to quarrel about these

dollars here,’ thought Davidson, getting on board quietly. He never

paused to look if there was anybody about the decks. As a matter of

fact, most of his crew were on shore, and the rest slept, stowed away in

dark corners.

“He had his plan, and he went to work methodically.

“He fetched a lot of clothing from below and disposed it in his hammock

in such a way as to distend it to the shape of a human body; then he

threw over all the light cotton sheet he used to draw over himself when

sleeping on deck. Having done this, he loaded his two revolvers and

clambered into one of the boats the _Sissie_ carried right aft, swung out

on their davits. Then he waited.

“And again the doubt of such a thing happening to him crept into his

mind. He was almost ashamed of this ridiculous vigil in a boat. He

became bored. And then he became drowsy. The stillness of the black

universe wearied him. There was not even the lapping of the water to

keep him company, for the tide was out and the _Sissie_ was lying on soft

mud. Suddenly in the breathless, soundless, hot night an argus pheasant

screamed in the woods across the stream. Davidson started violently, all

his senses on the alert at once.

“The candle was still burning in the house. Everything was quiet again,

but Davidson felt drowsy no longer. An uneasy premonition of evil

oppressed him.

“‘Surely I am not afraid,’ he argued with himself.

“The silence was like a seal on his ears, and his nervous inward

impatience grew intolerable. He commanded himself to keep still. But

all the same he was just going to jump out of the boat when a faint

ripple on the immensity of silence, a mere tremor in the air, the ghost

of a silvery laugh, reached his ears.

“Illusion!

“He kept very still. He had no difficulty now in emulating the stillness

of the mouse—a grimly determined mouse. But he could not shake off that

premonition of evil unrelated to the mere danger of the situation.

Nothing happened. It had been an illusion!

“A curiosity came to him to learn how they would go to work. He wondered

and wondered, till the whole thing seemed more absurd than ever.

“He had left the hanging lamp in the cabin burning as usual. It was part

of his plan that everything should be as usual. Suddenly in the dim glow

of the skylight panes a bulky shadow came up the ladder without a sound,

made two steps towards the hammock (it hung right over the skylight), and

stood motionless. The Frenchman!

“The minutes began to slip away. Davidson guessed that the Frenchman’s

part (the poor cripple) was to watch his (Davidson’s) slumbers while the

others were no doubt in the cabin busy forcing off the lazarette hatch.

“What was the course they meant to pursue once they got hold of the

silver (there were ten cases, and each could be carried easily by two

men) nobody can tell now. But so far, Davidson was right. They were in

the cabin. He expected to hear the sounds of breaking-in every moment.

But the fact was that one of them (perhaps Fector, who had stolen papers

out of desks in his time) knew how to pick a lock, and apparently was

provided with the tools. Thus while Davidson expected every moment to

hear them begin down there, they had the bar off already and two cases

actually up in the cabin out of the lazarette.

“In the diffused faint glow of the skylight the Frenchman moved no more

than a statue. Davidson could have shot him with the greatest ease—but

he was not homicidally inclined. Moreover, he wanted to make sure before

opening fire that the others had gone to work. Not hearing the sounds he

expected to hear, he felt uncertain whether they all were on board yet.

“While he listened, the Frenchman, whose immobility might have but

cloaked an internal struggle; moved forward a pace, then another.

Davidson, entranced, watched him advance one leg, withdraw his right

stump, the armed one, out of his pocket, and swinging his body to put

greater force into the blow, bring the seven-pound weight down on the

hammock where the head of the sleeper ought to have been.

“Davidson admitted to me that his hair stirred at the roots then. But

for Anne, his unsuspecting head would have been there. The Frenchman’s

surprise must have been simply overwhelming. He staggered away from the

lightly swinging hammock, and before Davidson could make a movement he

had vanished, bounding down the ladder to warn and alarm the other

fellows.

“Davidson sprang instantly out of the boat, threw up the skylight flap,

and had a glimpse of the men down there crouching round the hatch. They

looked up scared, and at that moment the Frenchman outside the door

bellowed out ‘_Trahison_—_trahison_!’ They bolted out of the cabin,

falling over each other and swearing awfully. The shot Davidson let off

down the skylight had hit no one; but he ran to the edge of the cabin-top

and at once opened fire at the dark shapes rushing about the deck. These

shots were returned, and a rapid fusillade burst out, reports and

flashes, Davidson dodging behind a ventilator and pulling the trigger

till his revolver clicked, and then throwing it down to take the other in

his right hand.

“He had been hearing in the din the Frenchman’s infuriated yells

‘_Tuez-le_! _tuez-le_!’ above the fierce cursing of the others. But

though they fired at him they were only thinking of clearing out. In the

flashes of the last shots Davidson saw them scrambling over the rail.

That he had hit more than one he was certain. Two different voices had

cried out in pain. But apparently none of them were disabled.

“Davidson leaned against the bulwark reloading his revolver without

haste. He had not the slightest apprehension of their coming back. On

the other hand, he had no intention of pursuing them on shore in the

dark. What they were doing he had no idea. Looking to their hurts

probably. Not very far from the bank the invisible Frenchman was

blaspheming and cursing his associates, his luck, and all the world. He

ceased; then with a sudden, vengeful yell, ‘It’s that woman!—it’s that

woman that has sold us,’ was heard running off in the night.

“Davidson caught his breath in a sudden pang of remorse. He perceived

with dismay that the stratagem of his defence had given Anne away. He

did not hesitate a moment. It was for him to save her now. He leaped

ashore. But even as he landed on the wharf he heard a shrill shriek

which pierced his very soul.

“The light was still burning in the house. Davidson, revolver in hand,

was making for it when another shriek, away to his left, made him change

his direction.

“He changed his direction—but very soon he stopped. It was then that he

hesitated in cruel perplexity. He guessed what had happened. The woman

had managed to escape from the house in some way, and now was being

chased in the open by the infuriated Frenchman. He trusted she would try

to run on board for protection.

“All was still around Davidson. Whether she had run on board or not,

this silence meant that the Frenchman had lost her in the dark.

“Davidson, relieved, but still very anxious, turned towards the

river-side. He had not made two steps in that direction when another

shriek burst out behind him, again close to the house.

“He thinks that the Frenchman had lost sight of the poor woman right

enough. Then came that period of silence. But the horrible ruffian had

not given up his murderous purpose. He reasoned that she would try to

steal back to her child, and went to lie in wait for her near the house.

“It must have been something like that. As she entered the light falling

about the house-ladder, he had rushed at her too soon, impatient for

vengeance. She had let out that second scream of mortal fear when she

caught sight of him, and turned to run for life again.

“This time she was making for the river, but not in a straight line. Her

shrieks circled about Davidson. He turned on his heels, following the

horrible trail of sound in the darkness. He wanted to shout ‘This way,

Anne! I am here!’ but he couldn’t. At the horror of this chase, more

ghastly in his imagination than if he could have seen it, the

perspiration broke out on his forehead, while his throat was as dry as

tinder. A last supreme scream was cut short suddenly.

“The silence which ensued was even more dreadful. Davidson felt sick.

He tore his feet from the spot and walked straight before him, gripping

the revolver and peering into the obscurity fearfully. Suddenly a bulky

shape sprang from the ground within a few yards of him and bounded away.

Instinctively he fired at it, started to run in pursuit, and stumbled

against something soft which threw him down headlong.

“Even as he pitched forward on his head he knew it could be nothing else

but Laughing Anne’s body. He picked himself up and, remaining on his

knees, tried to lift her in his arms. He felt her so limp that he gave

it up. She was lying on her face, her long hair scattered on the ground.

Some of it was wet. Davidson, feeling about her head, came to a place

where the crushed bone gave way under his fingers. But even before that

discovery he knew that she was dead. The pursuing Frenchman had flung

her down with a kick from behind, and, squatting on her back, was

battering in her skull with the weight she herself had fastened to his

stump, when the totally unexpected Davidson loomed up in the night and

scared him away.

“Davidson, kneeling by the side of that woman done so miserably to death,

was overcome by remorse. She had died for him. His manhood was as if

stunned. For the first time he felt afraid. He might have been pounced

upon in the dark at any moment by the murderer of Laughing Anne. He

confesses to the impulse of creeping away from that pitiful corpse on his

hands and knees to the refuge of the ship. He even says that he actually

began to do so. . .

“One can hardly picture to oneself Davidson crawling away on all fours

from the murdered woman—Davidson unmanned and crushed by the idea that

she had died for him in a sense. But he could not have gone very far.

What stopped him was the thought of the boy, Laughing Anne’s child, that

(Davidson remembered her very words) would not have a dog’s chance.

“This life the woman had left behind her appeared to Davidson’s

conscience in the light of a sacred trust. He assumed an erect attitude

and, quaking inwardly still, turned about and walked towards the house.

“For all his tremors he was very determined; but that smashed skull had

affected his imagination, and he felt very defenceless in the darkness,

in which he seemed to hear faintly now here, now there, the prowling

footsteps of the murderer without hands. But he never faltered in his

purpose. He got away with the boy safely after all. The house he found

empty. A profound silence encompassed him all the time, except once,

just as he got down the ladder with Tony in his arms, when a faint groan

reached his ears. It seemed to come from the pitch-black space between

the posts on which the house was built, but he did not stop to

investigate.

“It’s no use telling you in detail how Davidson got on board with the

burden Anne’s miserably cruel fate had thrust into his arms; how next

morning his scared crew, after observing from a distance the state of

affairs on board, rejoined with alacrity; how Davidson went ashore and,

aided by his engineer (still half dead with fright), rolled up Laughing

Anne’s body in a cotton sheet and brought it on board for burial at sea

later. While busy with this pious task, Davidson, glancing about,

perceived a huge heap of white clothes huddled up against the corner-post

of the house. That it was the Frenchman lying there he could not doubt.

Taking it in connection with the dismal groan he had heard in the night,

Davidson is pretty sure that his random shot gave a mortal hurt to the

murderer of poor Anne.

“As to the others, Davidson never set eyes on a single one of them.

Whether they had concealed themselves in the scared settlement, or bolted

into the forest, or were hiding on board Niclaus’s prau, which could be

seen lying on the mud a hundred yards or so higher up the creek, the fact

is that they vanished; and Davidson did not trouble his head about them.

He lost no time in getting out of the creek directly the _Sissie_

floated. After steaming some twenty miles clear of the coast, he (in his

own words) ‘committed the body to the deep.’ He did everything himself.

He weighted her down with a few fire-bars, he read the service, he lifted

the plank, he was the only mourner. And while he was rendering these

last services to the dead, the desolation of that life and the atrocious

wretchedness of its end cried aloud to his compassion, whispered to him

in tones of self-reproach.

“He ought to have handled the warning she had given him in another way.

He was convinced now that a simple display of watchfulness would have

been enough to restrain that vile and cowardly crew. But the fact was

that he had not quite believed that anything would be attempted.

“The body of Laughing Anne having been ‘committed to the deep’ some

twenty miles S.S.W. from Cape Selatan, the task before Davidson was to

commit Laughing Anne’s child to the care of his wife. And there poor,

good Davidson made a fatal move. He didn’t want to tell her the whole

awful story, since it involved the knowledge of the danger from which he,

Davidson, had escaped. And this, too, after he had been laughing at her

unreasonable fears only a short time before.

“‘I thought that if I told her everything,’ Davidson explained to me,

‘she would never have a moment’s peace while I was away on my trips.’

“He simply stated that the boy was an orphan, the child of some people to

whom he, Davidson, was under the greatest obligation, and that he felt

morally bound to look after him. Some day he would tell her more, he

said, and meantime he trusted in the goodness and warmth of her heart, in

her woman’s natural compassion.

“He did not know that her heart was about the size of a parched pea, and

had the proportional amount of warmth; and that her faculty of compassion

was mainly directed to herself. He was only startled and disappointed at

the air of cold surprise and the suspicious look with which she received

his imperfect tale. But she did not say much. She never had much to

say. She was a fool of the silent, hopeless kind.

“What story Davidson’s crew thought fit to set afloat in Malay town is

neither here nor there. Davidson himself took some of his friends into

his confidence, besides giving the full story officially to the Harbour

Master.

“The Harbour Master was considerably astonished. He didn’t think,

however, that a formal complaint should be made to the Dutch Government.

They would probably do nothing in the end, after a lot of trouble and

correspondence. The robbery had not come off, after all. Those

vagabonds could be trusted to go to the devil in their own way. No

amount of fuss would bring the poor woman to life again, and the actual

murderer had been done justice to by a chance shot from Davidson. Better

let the matter drop.

“This was good common sense. But he was impressed.

“‘Sounds a terrible affair, Captain Davidson.’

“‘Aye, terrible enough,’ agreed the remorseful Davidson. But the most

terrible thing for him, though he didn’t know it yet then, was that his

wife’s silly brain was slowly coming to the conclusion that Tony was

Davidson’s child, and that he had invented that lame story to introduce

him into her pure home in defiance of decency, of virtue—of her most

sacred feelings.

“Davidson was aware of some constraint in his domestic relations. But at

the best of times she was not demonstrative; and perhaps that very

coldness was part of her charm in the placid Davidson’s eyes. Women are

loved for all sorts of reasons and even for characteristics which one

would think repellent. She was watching him and nursing her suspicions.

“Then, one day, Monkey-faced Ritchie called on that sweet, shy Mrs.

Davidson. She had come out under his care, and he considered himself a

privileged person—her oldest friend in the tropics. He posed for a great

admirer of hers. He was always a great chatterer. He had got hold of

the story rather vaguely, and he started chattering on that subject,

thinking she knew all about it. And in due course he let out something

about Laughing Anne.

“‘Laughing Anne,’ says Mrs. Davidson with a start. ‘What’s that?’

“Ritchie plunged into circumlocution at once, but she very soon stopped

him. ‘Is that creature dead?’ she asks.

“‘I believe so,’ stammered Ritchie. ‘Your husband says so.’

“‘But you don’t know for certain?’

“‘No! How could I, Mrs. Davidson!’

“‘That’s all wanted to know,’ says she, and goes out of the room.

“When Davidson came home she was ready to go for him, not with common

voluble indignation, but as if trickling a stream of cold clear water

down his back. She talked of his base intrigue with a vile woman, of

being made a fool of, of the insult to her dignity.

“Davidson begged her to listen to him and told her all the story,

thinking that it would move a heart of stone. He tried to make her

understand his remorse. She heard him to the end, said ‘Indeed!’ and

turned her back on him.

“‘Don’t you believe me?’ he asked, appalled.

“She didn’t say yes or no. All she said was, ‘Send that brat away at

once.’

“‘I can’t throw him out into the street,’ cried Davidson. ‘You don’t

mean it.’

“‘I don’t care. There are charitable institutions for such children, I

suppose.’

“‘That I will never do,’ said Davidson.

“‘Very well. That’s enough for me.’

“Davidson’s home after this was like a silent, frozen hell for him. A

stupid woman with a sense of grievance is worse than an unchained devil.

He sent the boy to the White Fathers in Malacca. This was not a very

expensive sort of education, but she could not forgive him for not

casting the offensive child away utterly. She worked up her sense of her

wifely wrongs and of her injured purity to such a pitch that one day,

when poor Davidson was pleading with her to be reasonable and not to make

an impossible existence for them both, she turned on him in a chill

passion and told him that his very sight was odious to her.

“Davidson, with his scrupulous delicacy of feeling, was not the man to

assert his rights over a woman who could not bear the sight of him. He

bowed his head; and shortly afterwards arranged for her to go back to her

parents. That was exactly what she wanted in her outraged dignity. And

then she had always disliked the tropics and had detested secretly the

people she had to live amongst as Davidson’s wife. She took her pure,

sensitive, mean little soul away to Fremantle or somewhere in that

direction. And of course the little girl went away with her too. What

could poor Davidson have done with a little girl on his hands, even if

she had consented to leave her with him—which is unthinkable.

“This is the story that has spoiled Davidson’s smile for him—which

perhaps it wouldn’t have done so thoroughly had he been less of a good

fellow.”

Hollis ceased. But before we rose from the table I asked him if he knew

what had become of Laughing Anne’s boy.

He counted carefully the change handed him by the Chinaman waiter, and

raised his head.

“Oh! that’s the finishing touch. He was a bright, taking little chap, as

you know, and the Fathers took very special pains in his bringing up.

Davidson expected in his heart to have some comfort out of him. In his

placid way he’s a man who needs affection. Well, Tony has grown into a

fine youth—but there you are! He wants to be a priest; his one dream is

to be a missionary. The Fathers assure Davidson that it is a serious

vocation. They tell him he has a special disposition for mission work,

too. So Laughing Anne’s boy will lead a saintly life in China somewhere;

he may even become a martyr; but poor Davidson is left out in the cold.

He will have to go downhill without a single human affection near him

because of these old dollars.”

* * * * *

_Jan._ 1914

[Picture: Decorative graphic]

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS LIMITED, LONDON AND NORWICH, ENGLAND

Footnotes

{188} The gallows, supposed to be widowed of the last executed criminal

and waiting for another.