initial commit of ebook 12859HEADmain

8 files changed, 29738 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/12859-0.txt b/12859-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2ef0a08
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12859-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9646 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12859 ***
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER STORIES
+
+By
+
+A. E. W. MASON
+
+Author of "The Courtship of Morrice Buckler," "The Watchers,"
+"Parson Kelly," etc.
+
+1901
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY
+THE MAN OF WHEELS
+MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE
+THE COWARD
+THE DESERTER
+THE CROSSED GLOVES
+THE SHUTTERED HOUSE
+KEEPER OF THE BISHOP
+THE CRUISE OF THE "WILLING MIND"
+HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG
+HATTERAS
+THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE
+A LIBERAL EDUCATION
+THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY
+THE FIFTH PICTURE
+
+
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY.
+
+
+It was eleven o'clock at night when Surgeon Wyley of His Majesty's
+ship _Bonetta_ washed his hands, drew on his coat, and walked from the
+hospital up the narrow cobbled street of Tangier to the Main-Guard by
+the Catherine Port. In the upper room of the Main-Guard he found
+Major Shackleton of the Tangier Foot taking a hand at bassette with
+Lieutenant Scrope of Trelawney's Regiment and young Captain Tessin of
+the King's Battalion. There were three other officers in the room, and
+to them Surgeon Wyley began to talk in a prosy, medical strain. Two of
+his audience listened in an uninterested stolidity for just so long as
+the remnant of manners, which still survived in Tangier, commanded,
+and then strolling through the open window on to the balcony, lit
+their pipes.
+
+Overhead the stars blazed in the rich sky of Morocco; the
+riding-lights of Admiral Herbert's fleet sprinkled the bay; and below
+them rose the hum of an unquiet town. It was the night of May 13th,
+1680, and the life of every Christian in Tangier hung in the balance.
+The Moors had burst through the outposts to the west, and were now
+entrenched beneath the walls. The Henrietta Redoubt had fallen that
+day; to-morrow the little fort at Devil's Drop, built on the edge of
+the sand where the sea rippled up to the palisades, must fall; and
+Charles Fort, to the southwest, was hardly in a better case. However,
+a sortie had been commanded at daybreak as a last effort to relieve
+Charles Fort, and the two officers on the balcony speculated over
+their pipes on the chances of success.
+
+Meanwhile, inside the room Surgeon Wyley lectured to his remaining
+auditor, who, too tired to remonstrate, tilted his chair against the
+wall and dozed.
+
+"A concussion of the brain," Wyley went on, "has this curious effect,
+that after recovery the patient will have lost from his consciousness
+a period of time which immediately preceded the injury. Thus a man may
+walk down a street here in Tangier; four, five, six hours afterwards,
+he mounts his horse, is thrown on to his head. When he wakes again to
+his senses, the last thing he remembers is--what? A sign, perhaps,
+over a shop in the street he walked down, or a leper pestering him for
+alms. The intervening hours are lost to him, and forever. It is no
+question of an abeyance of memory. There is a gap in the continuity of
+his experience, and that gap he will never fill up."
+
+"Except by hearsay?"
+
+The correction came from Lieutenant Scrope at the bassette table. It
+was quite carelessly uttered while the Lieutenant was picking up his
+cards. Surgeon Wyley shifted his chair towards the table, and accepted
+the correction.
+
+"Except, of course, by hearsay."
+
+Wyley was a new-comer to Tangier, having sailed into the bay less than
+a week back; but he had been long enough in the town to find in Scrope
+a subject at once of interest and perplexity. Scrope was in years
+nearer forty than thirty, dark of complexion, aquiline of feature, and
+though a trifle below the middle height he redeemed his stature by the
+litheness of his figure. What interested Wyley was that he seemed a
+man in whom strong passions were always desperately at war with a
+strong will. He wore habitually a mask of reserve; behind it, Wyley
+was aware of sleeping fires. He spoke habitually in a quiet, decided
+voice, like one that has the soundings of his nature; beneath it,
+Wyley detected, continually recurring, continually subdued, a note
+of turbulence. Here, in a word, was a man whose hand was against the
+world but who would not strike at random. What perplexed Wyley, on the
+other hand, was Scrope's subordinate rank of lieutenant in a garrison
+where, from the frequency of death, promotion was of the quickest. He
+sat there at the table, a lieutenant; a boy of twenty-four faced him,
+and the boy was a captain and his superior.
+
+It was to the Lieutenant, however, that Wyley resumed his discourse.
+
+"The length of time lost is proportionate to the severity of the
+concussion. It may be only an hour; I have known it to be a day." He
+leaned back in his chair and smiled. "A strange question that for a
+man to ask himself--What did he do during those hours?--a question to
+appal him."
+
+Scrope chose a card from his hand and played it. Without looking up
+from the table, he asked: "To appal him? Why?"
+
+"Because the question would be not so much what did he do, as what may
+he not have done. A man rides through life insecurely seated on his
+passions. Within a few hours the most honest man may commit a damnable
+crime, a damnable dishonour."
+
+Scrope looked quietly at the Surgeon to read the intention of his
+words. Then: "I suppose so," he said carelessly. "But do you think
+that question would press?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Wyley.
+
+Scrope shrugged his shoulders. "I should need an example before I
+believed you."
+
+The example was at the door. The corporal of the guard at the
+Catherine Port knocked and was admitted. He told his story to Major
+Shackleton, and as he told it the two officers lounged back into the
+room from the balcony, and the other who was dozing against the wall
+brought the legs of his chair with a bang to the floor and woke up.
+
+It appeared that a sentry at the stockade outside the Catherine Port
+had suddenly noticed a flutter of white on the ground a few yards
+from the stockade. He watched this white object, and it moved. He
+challenged it, and was answered by a whispered prayer for admission in
+the English tongue and in an English voice. The sentry demanded the
+password, and received as a reply, "Inchiquin. It is the last password
+I have knowledge of. Let me in! Let me in!"
+
+The sentry called the corporal, the corporal admitted the fugitive and
+brought him to the Main-Guard. He was now in the guard-room below.
+
+"You did well," said the Major. "The man has come from the Moorish
+lines, and may have news which will profit us in the morning. Let
+him up!" and as the corporal retired, "'Inchiquin,'" he repeated
+thoughtfully: "I cannot call to mind that password."
+
+Now Wyley had noticed that when the corporal first mentioned the word,
+Scrope, who was looking over his cards, had dropped one on the table
+as though his hand shook, had raised his head sharply, and with his
+head his eyebrows, and had stared for a second fixedly at the wall in
+front of him. So he said to Scrope:
+
+"You can remember."
+
+"Yes, I remember the password," Scrope replied simply. "I have cause
+to. 'Inchiquin' and 'Teviot'--those were password and countersign on
+the night which ruined me--the night of January 6th two years ago."
+
+There was an awkward pause, an interchange of glances. Then Major
+Shackleton broke the silence, though to no great effect.
+
+"H'm--ah--yes," he said. "Well, well," he added, and laying an arm
+upon Scrope's sleeve. "A good fellow, Scrope."
+
+Scrope made no response whatever, but of a sudden Captain Tessin
+banged his fist upon the table.
+
+"January 6th two years ago. Why," and he leaned forward across the
+table towards Scrope, "Knightley fell in the sortie that morning, and
+his body was never recovered. The corporal said this fugitive was an
+Englishman. What if--"
+
+Major Shackleton shook his head and interrupted.
+
+"Knightley fell by my side. I saw the blow; it must have broken his
+skull."
+
+There was a sound of footsteps in the passage, the door was opened
+and the fugitive appeared in the doorway. All eyes turned to him
+instantly, and turned from him again with looks of disappointment.
+Wyley remarked, however, that Scrope, who had barely glanced at the
+man, rose from his chair. He did not move from the table; only he
+stood where before he had sat.
+
+The new-comer was tall; a beard plastered with mud, as if to disguise
+its colour, straggled over his burned and wasted cheeks, but here and
+there a wisp of yellow hair flecked with grey curled from his hood, a
+pair of blue eyes shone with excitement from hollow sockets, and he
+wore the violet-and-white robes of a Moorish soldier.
+
+It was his dress at which Major Shackleton looked.
+
+"One of our renegade deserters tired of his new friends," he said with
+some contempt.
+
+"Renegades do not wear chains," replied the man in the doorway,
+lifting from beneath his long sleeves his manacled hands. He spoke
+in a weak, hoarse voice, and with a rusty accent; he rested a hand
+against the jamb of the door as though he needed support. Tessin
+sprang up from his chair, and half crossed the room.
+
+The stranger took an uncertain step forward. His legs rattled as he
+moved, and Wyley saw that the links of broken fetters were twisted
+about his ankles.
+
+"Have two years made so vast a difference?" he asked. "Well, they were
+years of the bastinado, and I do not wonder."
+
+Tessin peered into his face. "By God, it is!" he exclaimed.
+"Knightley!"
+
+"Thanks," said Knightley with a smile.
+
+Tessin reached out to take Knightley's hands, then instantly stopped,
+glanced from Knightley to Scrope and drew back.
+
+"Knightley!" cried the Major in a voice of welcome, rising in his
+seat. Then he too glanced expectantly at Scrope and sat down again.
+Scrope made no movement, but stood with his eyes cast down on the
+table like a man lost in thought. It was evident to Wyley that both
+Shackleton and Tessin had obeyed the sporting instinct, and had left
+the floor clear for the two men. It was no less evident that Knightley
+remarked their action and did not understand it. For his eyes
+travelled from face to face, and searched each with a wistful anxiety
+for the reason of their reserve.
+
+"Yes, I am Knightley," he said timidly. Then he drew himself to his
+full height. "Ensign Knightley of the Tangier Foot," he cried.
+
+No one answered. The company waited upon Scrope in a suspense so
+keen that even the ringing challenge of the words passed unheeded.
+Knightley spoke again, but now in a stiff, formal voice, and slowly.
+
+"Gentlemen, I fear very much that two years make a world of
+difference. It seems they change one who had your goodwill into a most
+unwelcome stranger."
+
+His voice broke in a sob; he turned to the door, but staggered as he
+turned and caught at a chair. In a moment Major Shackleton was beside
+him.
+
+"What, lad? Have we been backward? Blame our surprise, not us."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Wyley, "Ensign Knightley's starving."
+
+The Major pressed Knightley into a chair, called for an orderly, and
+bade him bring food. Wyley filled a glass with wine from the bottle on
+the table, and handed it to the Ensign.
+
+"It is vinegar," he said, "but--"
+
+"But Tangier is still Tangier," said Knightley with a laugh. The
+Major's cordiality had strengthened him like a tonic. He raised the
+glass to his lips and drank; but as he tilted his head back his eyes
+over the brim of the glass rested on Scrope, who still stood without
+movement, without expression, a figure of stone, but that his chest
+rose and fell with his deep breathing. Knightley set down his glass
+half-full.
+
+"There is something amiss," he said, "since even Captain Scrope
+retains no memory of his old comrade."
+
+"Captain?" exclaimed Wyley. So Scrope had been more than a lieutenant.
+Here was an answer to the question which had perplexed him. But it
+only led to another question: "Had Scrope been degraded, and why?" He
+did not, however, speculate on the question, for his attention was
+seized the next moment. Scrope made no sort of answer to Knightley's
+appeal, but began to drum very softly with his fingers on the table.
+And the drumming, at first vague and of no significance, gradually
+took on, of itself as it seemed, a definite rhythm. There was a
+variation, too, in the strength of the taps--now they fell light, now
+they struck hard. Scrope was quite unconsciously beating out upon the
+table a particular tune, although, since there was but the one
+note sounded, Wyley could get no more than an elusive hint of its
+character.
+
+Knightley watched Scrope for a little as earnestly as the rest.
+Then--"Harry!" he said, "Harry Scrope!" The name leaped from his lips
+in a pleading cry; he stretched out his hands towards Scrope, and the
+chain which bound them reached down to the table and rattled on the
+wood.
+
+There was a simultaneous movement, almost a simultaneous ejaculation
+of bewilderment amongst those who stood about Knightley. Where they
+had expected a deadly anger, they found in its place a beseeching
+humility. And Scrope ceased from drumming on the table and turned on
+Knightley.
+
+"Don't shake your chains at me," he burst out harshly. "I am deaf to
+any reproach that they can make. Are you the only man that has worn
+chains? I can show as good, and better." He thrust the palm of his
+left hand under Knightley's nose. "Branded, d'ye see? Branded. There's
+more besides." He set his foot on the chair and stripped the silk
+stocking down his leg. Just above the ankle there was a broad indent
+where a fetter had bitten into the flesh. "I have dragged a chain, you
+see; not like you among the Moors, but here in Tangier, on that damned
+Mole, in sight of these my brother officers. By the Lord, Knightley, I
+tell you you have had the better part of it."
+
+"You!" cried Knightley. "You dragged a chain on Tangier Mole? For
+what offence?" And he added, with a genuine tenderness, "There was no
+disgrace in't, I'll warrant."
+
+Major Shackleton half checked an exclamation, and turned it into a
+cough. Scrope leaned right across the table and stared straight into
+Knightley's eyes.
+
+"The offence was a duel," he answered steadily, "fought on the night
+of January 6th two years ago."
+
+Knightley's face clouded for an instant. "The night when I was
+captured," he said timidly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The officers drew closer about the table, and seemed to hold their
+breath, as the strange catechism proceeded.
+
+"With whom did you fight?" asked Knightley.
+
+"With a very good friend of mine," replied Scrope, in a hard, even
+voice.
+
+"On what account?"
+
+"A woman."
+
+Knightley laughed with a man's amused leniency for such escapades when
+he himself is in no way hurt by them.
+
+"I said there would be no disgrace in't, Harry," he said, with a smile
+of triumph.
+
+The heads of the listeners, which had bunched together, were suddenly
+drawn back. A dark flush of anger overspread Scrope's face, and the
+veins ridged up upon his forehead. Some impatient speech was on the
+tip of his tongue, when the Major interposed.
+
+"What's this talk of penalties? Where's the sense of it? Scrope paid
+the price of his fault. He was admitted to the ranks afterwards. He
+won a lieutenancy by sheer bravery in the field. For all we know he
+may be again a captain to-morrow. Anyhow he wears the King's uniform.
+It is a badge of service which levels us all from Ensign to Major in
+an equality of esteem."
+
+Scrope bowed to the Major and drew back from the table. The other
+officers shuffled and moved in a welcome relief from the strain
+of their expectancy, and Knightley's thoughts were diverted by
+Shackleton's words to a quite different subject. For he picked with
+his fingers at the Moorish robe he wore and "I too wore the King's
+uniform," he pleaded wistfully.
+
+"And shall do so again, thank God," responded the Major heartily.
+
+Knightley started up from his chair; his face lightened unaccountably.
+
+"You mean that?" he asked eagerly. "Yes, yes, you mean it! Then let it
+be to-night--now--even before I sup. As long as I wear these chains,
+as long as I wear this dress, I can feel the driver's whip curl
+about my shoulders." He parted the robe as he spoke, and showed that
+underneath he wore only a coarse sack which reached to his knees, with
+a hole cut in it for his head.
+
+"True, you have worn the chains too long," said the Major. "I should
+have had them knocked off before, but--" he paused for a second, "but
+your coming so surprised me that of a truth I forgot," he continued
+lamely. Then he turned to Tessin. "See to it, Tessin! Ensign Barbour
+of the Tangier Foot was killed to-day. He was quartered in the
+Main-Guard. Take Knightley to his quarters and see what you can do.
+By the way, Knightley, there's a question I should have put to you
+before. By what road did you come in?"
+
+"Down Teviot Hill past the Henrietta Fort. The Moors brought me down
+from Mequinez to interpret between them and their prisoners. I escaped
+last night."
+
+"Past the Henrietta Fort?" replied the Major. "Then you can help us,
+for that way we make our sortie."
+
+"To relieve the Charles Fort?" said Knightley. "I guessed the Charles
+Fort was surrounded, for I heard one man on the Tangier wall shouting
+through a speaking trumpet to the Charles Fort garrison. But it will
+not be easy to relieve them. The Moors are entrenched between. There
+are three trenches. I should never have crawled through them, but that
+I stripped a dead Moor of his robe."
+
+"Three trenches," said Tessin, with a shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"Yes, three. The two nearest to Tangier may be carried. But the
+third--it is deep, twelve feet at the least, and wide, at the least
+eight yards. The sides are steep and slippery with the rain."
+
+"A grave, then," said Scrope carelessly; "a grave that will hold
+many before the evening falls. It is well they made it wide and deep
+enough."
+
+The sombre words knocked upon every heart like a blow on a door behind
+which conspirators are plotting. The Major was the first to recover
+his speech.
+
+"Curse your tongue, Scrope!" he said angrily. "Let who will lie in
+your grave when the evening falls. Before that time comes, we'll show
+these Moors so fine a powder-play as shall glut some of them to all
+eternity. _Bon chat, bon rat_; we are not made of jelly. Tessin, see
+to Knightley."
+
+The two men withdrew. Major Shackleton scribbled a note and despatched
+it to Sir Palmes Fairborne, the Lieutenant-Governor. Scrope took a
+turn or two across the room while the Major was writing the news which
+Knightley had brought. Then--"What game is this he's playing?" he
+said, with a jerk of his head to the door by which Knightley had gone
+out. "I have no mind to be played with."
+
+"But is he playing a game at all?" asked Wyley.
+
+Scrope faced him quickly, looked him over for a second, and replied:
+"You are a new-comer to Tangier, or you would not have asked that
+question."
+
+"I should," rejoined Wyley with complete confidence. "I know quite
+enough to be sure of one thing. I know there lies some deep matter of
+dispute between Ensign Knightley and Lieutenant Scrope, and I am sure
+that there is one other person more in the dark than myself, and that
+person is Ensign Knightley. For whereas I know there is a dispute, he
+is unaware of even that."
+
+"Unaware?" cried Scrope. "Why, man, the very good friend I fought
+with was Ensign Knightley. The woman on whose account we fought was
+Knightley's wife." He flung the words at the Surgeon with almost a
+gesture of contempt. "Make the most of that!" And once again he began
+to pace the room.
+
+"I am not in the least surprised," returned Wyley with an easy smile.
+"Though I admit that I am interested. A wife is sauce to any story."
+He looked placidly round the company. He alone held the key to the
+puzzle, and since he was now become the centre of attraction he was
+inclined to play with his less acute brethren. With a wave of the hand
+he stilled the requests for an explanation, and turned to Scrope.
+
+"Will you answer me a question?"
+
+"I think it most unlikely."
+
+The curt reply in no way diminished the Surgeon's suavity.
+
+"I chose my words ill. I should have asked, Will you confirm an
+assertion? The assertion is this: Ensign Knightley had no suspicion
+before he actually discovered the--well, the lamentable truth."
+
+Scrope stopped his walk and came back to the table.
+
+"Why, that is so," he agreed sullenly. "Knightley had no suspicions.
+It angered me that he had not."
+
+Wyley leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Really, really," he said, and laughed a little to himself. "On the
+night of January 6th Ensign Knightley discovers the lamentable truth.
+At what hour?" he asked suddenly.
+
+Scrope looked to the Major. "About midnight," he suggested.
+
+"A little later, I should think," corrected Major Shackleton.
+
+"A little after midnight," repeated Wyley. "Ensign Knightley and
+Lieutenant Scrope, I understand, immediately fight a duel, which seems
+to have been interrupted before any hurt was done."
+
+The Major and Scrope agreed with a nod of their heads.
+
+"In the morning," continued Wyley, "Ensign Knightley takes part in a
+skirmish, and is clubbed on the head so fiercely that Major Shackleton
+thought his skull must be broken in. At what hour was he struck?"
+Again he put the question quickly.
+
+"'Twixt seven and eight of the morning," replied the Major.
+
+"Quite so," said Wyley. "The incidents fit to a nicety. Two years
+afterwards Ensign Knightley comes home. He knows nothing of the duel,
+or any cause for a duel. Lieutenant Scrope is still 'Harry' to him,
+and his best of friends. It is all very clear."
+
+He gazed about him. Perplexity sat on each face except one; that face
+was Scrope's.
+
+"I spoke to you all some half an hour since concerning the effects of
+a concussion. I could not have hoped for so complete an example," said
+Wyley.
+
+Captain Tessin whistled; Major Shackleton bounced on to his feet.
+
+"Then Knightley knows nothing," cried Tessin in a gust of excitement.
+
+"And never will know," cried the Major.
+
+"Except by hearsay," sharply interposed Scrope. "Gentlemen, you go too
+fast, Except by hearsay. That, Mr. Wyley, was the phrase, I think. By
+what spells, Major," he asked with irony, "will you bind Tangier to
+silence when there's scandal to be talked? Let Knightley walk down to
+the water-gate to-morrow; I'll warrant he'll have heard the story a
+hundred times with a hundred new embellishments before he gets there."
+
+Major Shackleton resumed his seat moodily.
+
+"And since that's the truth, why, he had best hear the story nakedly
+from me."
+
+"From you?" exclaimed Tessin. "Another duel, then. Have you counted
+the cost?"
+
+"Why, yes," replied Scrope quietly.
+
+"Two years of the bastinado," said the Major. "That was what he said.
+He comes back to Tangier to find--who knows?--a worse torture here.
+Knightley, Knightley, a good officer marked for promotion until that
+infernal night. Scrope, I could turn moralist and curse you!"
+
+Scrope dropped his head as though the words touched him. But it was
+not long before he raised it again.
+
+"You waste your pity, I think, Major," he said coldly. "I disagree
+with Mr. Wyley's conclusions. Knightley knows the truth of the matter
+very well. For observe, he has made no mention of his wife. He has
+been two years in slavery. He escapes, and he asks for no news of his
+wife. That is unlike any man, but most of all unlike Knightley. He has
+his own ends to serve, no doubt, but he knows."
+
+The argument appeared cogent to Major Shackleton.
+
+"To be sure, to be sure," he said. "I had not thought of that."
+
+Tessin looked across to Wyley.
+
+"What do you say?"
+
+"I am not convinced," replied Wyley. "Indeed, I was surprised that
+Knightley's omission had not been remarked before. When you first
+showed reserve in welcoming Knightley, I noticed that he became all at
+once timid, hesitating. He seemed to be afraid."
+
+Major Shackleton admitted the Surgeon's accuracy. "Well, what then?"
+
+"Well, I go back to what I said before Knightley appeared. A man has
+lost so many hours. The question, what he did during those hours, is
+one that may well appal any one. Lieutenant Scrope doubted whether
+that question would trouble a man, and needed an instance. I believe
+here is the instance. I believe Knightley is afraid to ask any
+questions, and I believe his reason to be fear of how he lived during
+those lost hours."
+
+There was a pause. No one was prepared to deny, however much he might
+doubt, what Wyley said.
+
+Wyley continued:
+
+"At some point of time before this duel Knightley's recollections
+break off. At what precise point we are not aware, nor is it of any
+great importance. The sure thing is he does not know of the dispute
+between Lieutenant Scrope and himself, and it is of more importance
+for us to consider whether he cannot after all be kept from knowing.
+Could he not be sent home to England? Mrs. Knightley, I take it, is no
+longer in Tangier?"
+
+Major Shackleton stood up, took Wyley by the arm and led him out on to
+the balcony. The town beneath them had gone to sleep; the streets were
+quiet; the white roofs of the houses in the star-shine descended to
+the water's edge like flights of marble steps; only here and there did
+a light burn. To one of the lights close by the city wall the Major
+directed Wyley's attention. The house in which it burned lay so nearly
+beneath them that they could command a corner of the square open
+_patio_ in the middle of it; and the light shone in a window set in
+that corner and giving on to the _patio_.
+
+"You see that house?" said the Major.
+
+"Yes," said Wyley. "It is Scrope's. I have seen him enter and come
+out."
+
+"No doubt," said the Major; "but it is Knightley's house."
+
+"Knightley's! Then the light burning in the window is--"
+
+The Major nodded. "She is still in Tangier. And never a care for him
+has troubled her for two years, not so much as would bring a pucker to
+her pretty forehead--all my arrears of pay to a guinea-piece."
+
+Wyley leaned across the rail of the balcony, watching the light, and
+as he watched he was aware that his feelings and his thoughts changed.
+The interest which he had felt in Scrope died clean away, or rather
+was transferred to Knightley; and with this new interest there sprang
+up a new sympathy, a new pity. The change was entirely due to that one
+yellow light burning in the window and the homely suggestions which it
+provoked. It brought before him very clearly the bitter contrast: so
+that light had burned any night these last two years, and Scrope had
+gone in and out at his will, while up in the barbarous inlands of
+Morocco the husband had had his daily portion of the bastinado and
+the whip. It was her fault, too, and she made her profit of it. Wyley
+became sensible of an overwhelming irony in the disposition of the
+world.
+
+"You spoke a true word to-night, Major," he said bitterly. "That light
+down there might turn any man to a moralist, and send him preaching in
+the market-places."
+
+"Well," returned the Major, as though he must make what defence he
+could for Scrope, "the story is not the politest in the world. But,
+then, you know Tangier--it is only a tiny outpost on the edges of the
+world where we starve behind broken walls forgotten of our friends. We
+have the Moors ever swarming at our gates and the wolf ever snarling
+at our heels, and so the niceties of conduct are lost. We have so
+little time wherein to live, and that little time is filled with the
+noise of battle. Passion has its way with us in the end, and honour
+comes to mean no more than bravery and a gallant death."
+
+He remained a few moments silent, and then disconnectedly he told
+Wyley the rest of the story.
+
+"It was only three years ago that Knightley came to Tangier. He should
+never have brought his wife with him. Scrope and Knightley became
+friends. All Tangier knew the truth pretty soon, and laughed at
+Knightley's ignorance.... I remember the night of January 6th very
+well. I was Captain of the Guard that night too. A spy brought in news
+that we might expect a night attack. I sent Knightley with the news to
+Lord Inchiquin. On the way back he stepped into his own house. It was
+late at night. Mrs. Knightley was singing some foolish song to Scrope.
+The two men came down into the street and fought then and there. The
+quarter was aroused, the combatants arrested and brought to me....
+There are two faults which our necessities here compel us to punish
+beyond their proper gravity: duelling, for we cannot afford to lose
+officers that way; and brawling in the streets at night, because the
+Moors lie _perdus_ under our walls; ready to take occasion as it
+comes. Of Scrope's punishment you have heard. Knightley I released for
+that night. He was on guard--I could not spare him. We were attacked
+in the morning, and repulsed the attack. We followed up our success by
+a sortie in which Knightley fell."
+
+Wyley began again to wonder at what particular point in this story
+Knightley's recollection broke off; and, further, what particular fear
+it was that kept him from all questions even concerning his wife.
+
+Knightley's voice was heard behind them, and they turned back into the
+room. The Ensign had shaved his matted beard and combed out his hair,
+which now curled and shone graciously about his head and shoulders;
+his face, too, for all that it was wasted, had taken almost a boyish
+zest, and his figure, revealed in the graceful dress of his regiment,
+showed youth in every movement. He was plainly by some years a younger
+man than Scrope.
+
+He saluted the Major, and Wyley noticed that with his uniform he
+seemed to have drawn on something of a soldierly confidence.
+
+"There's your supper, lad," said Shackleton, pointing to a few poor
+herrings and a crust of bread which an orderly had spread upon the
+table. "It is scanty."
+
+"I like it the better," said Knightley with a laugh; "for so I am
+assured I am at home, in Tangier. There is no beef, I suppose?"
+
+"Not so much as a hoof."
+
+"No butter?"
+
+"Not enough to cover a sixpence."
+
+"There is cheese, however." He lifted up a scrap upon a fork.
+
+"There will be none to-morrow."
+
+"And as for pay?" he asked slyly.
+
+"Two years and a half in arrears."
+
+Knightley laughed again.
+
+"Moreover," added Shackleton, "out of our nothing we may presently
+have to feed the fleet. It is indeed the pleasantest joke imaginable."
+
+"In a week, no doubt," rejoined Knightley, "I shall be less sensible
+of its humour. But to-night--well, I am home in Tangier, and that
+contents me. Nothing has changed." At that he stopped suddenly.
+"Nothing has changed?" This time the phrase was put as a question, and
+with the halting timidity which he had shown before. No one answered
+the question. "No, nothing has changed," he said a third time, and
+again his eyes began to travel wistfully from face to face.
+
+Tessin abruptly turned his back; Shackleton blinked his eyes at the
+ceiling with altogether too profound an unconcern; Scrope reached out
+for the wine, and spilt it as he filled his glass; Wyley busily drew
+diagrams with a wet finger on the table.
+
+All these details Knightley remarked. He laid down his fork, he rested
+his elbow on the table, his forehead upon his hand. Then absently he
+began to hum over to himself a tune. The rhythm of it was somehow
+familiar to the Surgeon's ears. Where had he heard it before? Then
+with a start he remembered. It was this very rhythm, that very tune,
+which Scrope's fingers had beaten out on the table when he first
+saw Knightley. And as he had absently drummed it then, so Knightley
+absently hummed it now.
+
+Surely, then, the tune had some part in the relations of the two
+men--perhaps a part in this story. "A foolish song." The words flashed
+into Wyley's mind.
+
+"She was singing a foolish song." What if the tune was the tune of
+that song? But then--Wyley's argument came to a sudden conclusion. For
+if the tune _was_ the tune of that song, why, then Knightley must know
+the truth, since he remembered that song. Was Scrope right after all?
+Was Knightley playing with him? Wyley glanced at Knightley in the
+keenest excitement. He wanted words fitted to that tune, and in a
+little the words came--first one or two fitted here and there to a
+note, and murmured unconsciously, then an entire phrase which filled
+out a bar, finally this verse in its proper sequence:
+
+  "No, no, fair heretick, it needs must be
+    But an ill love in me,
+    And worse for thee;
+  For were it in my power
+  To love thee now this hour
+    More than I did the last,
+  'Twould then so fall
+  I might not love at all.
+  Love that can flow...."
+
+And then the song broke off, and silence followed. Wyley looked again
+at Knightley, but the latter had not changed his position. He still
+sat with his face shaded by his hand.
+
+The Surgeon was startled by a light touch on the arm. He turned with
+almost a jump, and he saw Scrope bending across the table towards him,
+his eyes ablaze with an excitement no less keen than his own.
+
+"He knows, he knows!" whispered Scrope. "It was that song she was
+singing; at that word 'flow' he pushed open the door of the room."
+
+Knightley raised his head and drew his hand across his forehead,
+as though Scrope's whisper had aroused him. Scrope seated himself
+hurriedly.
+
+"Nothing has changed, eh?" Knightley asked, like a man fresh from his
+sleep. Then he stood, and quietly, slowly, walked round the table
+until he stood directly behind Scrope's chair. Scrope's face hardened;
+he laid the palms of his hands upon the edge of the table ready to
+spring up; he looked across to Wyley with the expectation of death in
+his eyes.
+
+One of the officers shuffled his feet. Tessin said "Hush!" Knightley
+took a step forward and dropped a hand on Scrope's shoulder, very
+lightly; but none the less Scrope started and turned white as though
+he had been stabbed.
+
+"Harry," said the Ensign, "my--my wife is still in Tangier?"
+
+Scrope drew in a breath. "Yes."
+
+"Ah, waiting for me! You have shown her what kindness you could during
+my slavery?"
+
+He spoke in a wavering voice, as if he were not sure of his ground,
+and as he spoke he felt Scrope shiver beneath his hand, and saw upon
+the faces of his companions an unmistakable shrinking. He turned away
+and staggered, rather than walked, to the window, where he stood
+leaning against the sill.
+
+"The day is breaking," he said quietly. Wyley looked up; outside the
+window the colour was fading down the sky. It was purple still towards
+the zenith, but across the Straits its edges rested white upon the
+hills of Spain.
+
+"Love that can flow ..." murmured Knightley, and of a sudden he flung
+back into the room. "Let me have the truth of it," he burst out,
+confronting his brother-officers gathered about the table--"the truth,
+though it knell out my damnation. If you only knew how up there, at
+Fez, at Mequinez, I have pictured your welcome when I should get back!
+I made of my anticipation a very anodyne. The cudgelling, the chains,
+the hunger, the sun, hot as though a burning glass was held above my
+head--it would all make a good story for the guard-room when I got
+back--when I got back. And yet I do get back, and one and all of you
+draw away from me as though I were one of the Tangier lepers we
+jostle in the streets. 'Love that can flow ...'" he broke off. "I ask
+myself"--he hesitated, and with a great cry, "I ask you, did I play
+the coward on that night I was captured two years ago?"
+
+"The coward?" exclaimed Shackleton in bewilderment.
+
+Wyley, for all his sympathy, could not refrain from a triumphant
+glance at Scrope. "Here is the instance you needed," he said.
+
+"Yes, did I play the coward?" Knightley seated himself sideways on the
+edge of the table, and clasping his hands between his knees, went on
+in a quick, lowered voice. "'Love that can flow'--those are the last
+words I remember. You sent me, Major, to the Governor with a message.
+I delivered it; I started back. On my way back I passed my house. I
+went in. I stood in the _patio_. My wife was singing that song. The
+window of the room in which she sang opened on to the _patio_. I stood
+there listening for a second. Then I went upstairs. I turned the
+handle of the door. I remember quite clearly the light upon the room
+wall as I opened the door. Those words 'love that can flow' came
+swelling through the opening; and--and--the next thing I am aware of,
+I was riding chained upon a camel into slavery."
+
+Tessin and Major Shackleton looked suddenly towards Wyley in
+recognition of the accuracy of his guess. Scrope simply wiped the
+perspiration from his forehead and waited.
+
+"But how does that--forgetfulness, shall we say?--persuade you to the
+fear that you played the coward?" asked Wyley.
+
+"Well," replied Knightley, and his voice sank to a whisper, "I played
+the coward afterwards at Mequinez. At the first it used to amuse me to
+wonder what happened after I opened the door and before I was captured
+outside Tangier; later it only puzzled me, and in the end it began to
+frighten me. You see, I could not tell; it was all a blank to me, as
+it is now; and a man overdriven--well, he nurses sickly fancies.
+No need to say what mine were until the day I played the coward in
+Mequinez. They set me to build the walls of the Emperor's new Palace.
+We used the stones of the old Roman town and built them up in
+Mequinez, and in the walls we were bidden to build Christian slaves
+alive to the glory of Allah. I refused. They stripped the flesh off my
+feet with their bastinadoes, starved me of food and drink, and brought
+me back again to the walls. Again I refused." Knightley looked up at
+his audience, and whether or no he mistook their breathless silence
+for disbelief,--"I did," he implored. "Twice I refused, and twice they
+tortured me. The third time--I was so broken, the whistle of a cane
+in the air made me cry out with pain--I was sunk to that pitch of
+cowardice--" He stopped, unable to complete the sentence. He clasped
+and unclasped his hands convulsively, he moistened his dry lips with
+his tongue, and looked about him with a weak, almost despairing laugh.
+Then he began in another way. "The Christian was a Portuguee from
+Marmora. He was set in the wall with his arms outstretched on either
+side--the attitude of a man crucified. I built in his arms--his right
+arm first--and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way.
+I was careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his
+face." Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning,
+and hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung
+almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards
+from his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his
+neck. All this while he had been crying out for pity, babbling
+prayers, and the rest of it. When I reached his neck he ceased his
+clamour. I suppose he was dumb with horror. I did not know. All I knew
+was that now I should have to meet his eyes as I built in his face.
+I thought for a moment of blinding him. I could have done it quite
+easily with a stone. I picked up a stone to do it, and then, well--I
+could not help looking at him. He drew my eyes to his like a steel
+filing to a magnet. And once I had looked, once I had heard his eyes
+speaking, I--I tore down the stones. I freed his body, his legs, his
+feet and one arm. When the guards noticed what I was doing I cannot
+tell. I could not tell you when their sticks began to beat me. But
+they dragged me away when I had freed only one arm. I remember seeing
+him tugging at the other. What happened to me,"--he shivered,--"I
+could not describe to you. But you see I had played the coward finely
+at Mequinez, and when that question recurred to me as to what had
+happened after I had opened the door, I began to wonder whether by any
+chance I had played the coward at Tangier. I dismissed the thought as
+a sickly fancy, but it came again and again; and I came back here, and
+you draw aloof from me with averted faces and forced welcomes on your
+lips. Did I play the coward on that night I was captured? Tell me!
+Tell me!" And so the torrent of his speech came to an end.
+
+The Major rose gravely from his seat, walked round the table and held
+out his hand.
+
+"Put your hand there, lad," he said gravely.
+
+Knightley looked at the outstretched hand, then at the Major's face.
+He took the hand diffidently, and the Major's grasp was of the
+heartiest.
+
+"Neither at Mequinez nor at Tangier did you play the coward," said the
+Major. "You fell by my side in the van of the attack."
+
+And then Knightley began to cry. He blubbered like a child, and with
+his blubbering he mixed apologies. He was weak, he was tired, his
+relief was too great; he was thoroughly ashamed.
+
+"You see," he said, "there was need that I should know. My wife is
+waiting for me. I could not go back to her bearing that stigma.
+Indeed, I hardly dared ask news of her. Now I can go back; and,
+gentlemen, I wish you good-night."
+
+He stood up, made his bow, wiped his eyes, and began to walk to the
+door. Scrope rose instantly.
+
+"Sit down, Lieutenant," said the Major sharply, and Scrope obeyed with
+reluctance.
+
+The Major watched Knightley cross the room. Should he let the Ensign
+go? Should he keep him? He could not decide. That Knightley would seek
+his wife at once might of course have been foreseen; and yet it had
+not been foreseen either by the Major or the others. The present
+facts, as they had succeeded one after another had engrossed their
+minds.
+
+Knightley's hand was on the door, and the Major had not decided. He
+pushed the door open, he set a foot in the passage, and then the roar
+of a gun shook the room.
+
+"Ah!" remarked Wyley, "the signal for your sortie."
+
+Knightley stopped and listened. Major Shackleton stood in a fixed
+attitude with his eyes upon the floor. He had hit upon an issue, it
+seemed to him by inspiration. The noise of the gun was followed by ten
+clear strokes of a bell.
+
+"That's for the King's Battalion," said Knightley with a smile.
+
+"Yes," said Tessin, and picking up his sword from a corner he slung
+the bandolier across his shoulder.
+
+The bell rang out again; this time the number of the strokes was
+twenty.
+
+"That's for my Lord Dunbarton's Regiment," said Knightley.
+
+"Yes," said two of the remaining officers. They took their hats and
+followed Captain Tessin down the stairs.
+
+A third time the bell spoke, and the strokes were thirty.
+
+"Ah!" said Knightley, "that's for the Tangier Foot. Well, good luck to
+you, Major!" and he passed through the door.
+
+"A moment, Knightley. The regiment first. You wear Ensign Barbour's
+uniform. You must do more than wear his uniform. The regiment first."
+
+Major Shackleton spoke in a husky voice and kept his eyes on the
+floor. Scrope looked at him keenly from the table. Knightley hardly
+looked at him at all. He stepped back into the room.
+
+"With all my heart, Major: the regiment first."
+
+"Your station is at Peterborough Tower. You will go there--at once."
+
+"At once," replied Knightley cheerfully. "So she would wish," and he
+went down the stairs into the street. Major Shackleton picked up his
+hat.
+
+"I command this sortie," he said to Wyley; but as he turned he found
+himself confronted by Scrope.
+
+"What do you intend?" asked Scrope.
+
+Major Shackleton looked towards Wyley. Wyley understood the look and
+also what Shackleton intended. He went from the room and left the two
+men together.
+
+The grey light poured through the window; the candles still burnt
+yellow on the table.
+
+"What do you intend?"
+
+The Major looked Scrope straight in the face.
+
+"I have heard a man speak to-night in a man's voice. I mean to do that
+man the best service that I can. These two years at Mequinez cannot
+mate with these two years at Tangier. Knightley knows nothing now; he
+never shall know. He believes his wife a second Penelope; he shall
+keep that belief. There is a trench--you called it very properly a
+grave. In that trench Knightley will not hear though all Tangier
+scream its gossip in his ears. I mean to give him his chance of
+death."
+
+"No, Major," cried Scrope. "Or listen! Give me an equal chance."
+
+"Trelawney's Regiment is not called out. Again, Lieutenant, I fear me
+you will have the harder part of it."
+
+Shackleton repeated Scrope's own words in all sincerity, and hurried
+off to his post.
+
+Scrope was left alone in the guard-room. A vision of the trench,
+twelve feet deep, eight yards wide, yawned before his eyes. He closed
+them, but that made no difference; he still saw the trench. In
+imagination he began to measure its width and depth. Then he shook his
+head to rid himself of the picture, and went out on to the balcony.
+His eyes turned instinctively to a house by the city wall, to a corner
+of the _patio_ the house and the latticed shutter of a window just
+seen from the balcony.
+
+He stepped back into the room with a feeling of nausea, and blowing
+out the candles sat down alone, in the twilight, amongst the empty
+chairs. There were dark corners in the room; the broadening light
+searched into them, and suddenly the air was tinged with warm gold.
+Somewhere the sun had risen. In a little, Scrope heard a dropping
+sound of firing, and a few moments afterwards the rattle of a volley.
+The battle was joined. Scrope saw the trench again yawn up before his
+eyes. The Major was right. This morning, again, Lieutenant Scrope had
+the harder part of it.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF WHEELS.
+
+
+When Sir Charles Fosbrook was told by Mr. Pepys that Tangier had been
+surrendered to the Moors, he asked at once after the fate of his
+gigantic mole; and when he was informed that his mole had been, before
+the evacuation, so utterly blown to pieces that its scattered blocks
+made the harbour impossible for anchorage, he forbade so much as the
+mention in his presence of the name of Africa. But if he had done with
+Tangier, Tangier had not done with him, and five years afterwards
+he became concerned in the most unexpected way with certain tragic
+consequences of that desperate siege.
+
+He received a letter from an acquaintance of whom he had long lost
+sight, a Mr. Mardale of the Quarry House near Leamington, imploring
+him to give his opinion upon some new inventions. The value of the
+inventions could be easily gauged; Mr. Mardale claimed to have
+invented a wheel of perpetual rotation. Sir Charles, however, had his
+impulses of kindness. He knew Mr. Mardale to be an old and gentle
+person, a little touched in the head perhaps, who with money enough
+to surfeit every instinct of pleasure, had preferred to live a shy
+secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities
+or the invention of toy-like futile machines. There was a girl too
+whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird elfin creature with extraordinary
+black eyes and hair and a clear white face. Her one regret in those
+days had been that she was not born a horse, and she had lived in the
+stables, in as horse like a fashion as was possible. Her ankle indeed
+still must bear an unnecessary scar through the application of a
+fierce horse-liniment to a sprain. No doubt, however, she had long
+since changed her ambitions. Sir Charles calculated her age. Resilda
+Mardale must be twenty-five years old and a deuced fine woman into the
+bargain. Sir Charles took a glance at his figure in his cheval-glass.
+He had reached middle-age to be sure, but he had a leg that many a
+spindle-shanked youngster might envy, nor was there any unbecoming
+protuberance at his waist. He wrote a letter accepting the invitation
+and a week later in the dusk of a June evening, drove up the long
+avenue of trees to the terrace of the Quarry House.
+
+The house was a solid square mansion built upon the side of a hill,
+and the ground in front of it fell away very quickly from the terrace
+to what Sir Charles imagined must be a pond, for a light mist hung at
+the bottom. On the other side of the pond the ground rose again in a
+steep hill. But Sir Charles had no opportunity at this moment to get
+any accurate knowledge of the house and its surroundings. For apart
+from the darkness, it was close upon supper-time and Miss Resilda
+Mardale must assuredly not be kept waiting. His valet subsequently
+declared that Sir Charles had seldom been so particular in the choice
+of his coat and small-clothes; and the supper-bell certainly rang out
+before he was satisfied with the set of his cravat.
+
+He could not, however, consider his pains wasted when once he was set
+down opposite to Resilda. She was taller than he had expected her to
+be, but he did not count height a fault so long as there was grace
+to carry it off, and grace she had in plenty. Her face had gained in
+delicacy and lost nothing of its brilliancy, or of its remarkable
+clearness of complexion. Her hair too if it was less rebellious, and
+more neatly coiled, had retained its glory of profusion, and her big
+black eyes, though to be sure they were grown a trifle sedate, no
+doubt could sparkle as of old. Sir Charles set himself to make them
+sparkle. Old Mr. Mardale prattled of his inventions to his heart's
+delight--he described the wheel, and also a flying machine and besides
+the flying machine, an engine by which steam might be used to raise
+water to great altitudes. Sir Charles was ready from time to time with
+a polite, if not always an appropriate comment, and for the rest he
+paid compliments to Resilda. Still the eyes did not sparkle, indeed a
+pucker appeared and deepened on her forehead. Sir Charles accordingly
+redoubled his gallantries, he was slyly humorous about the
+horse-liniment, and thereupon came the remark which so surprised him
+and was the beginning of his strange discoveries. For Resilda suddenly
+leaned towards him and said frankly:
+
+"I would much rather, Sir Charles, you told me something of your great
+mole at Tangier."
+
+Sir Charles had reason for surprise. The world had long since
+forgotten his mole, if ever it had been concerned in it. Yet here was
+a girl whose thoughts might be expected to run on youths and ribands
+talking of it in a little village four miles from Leamington as though
+there were no topic more universal. Sir Charles Fosbrook answered her
+gravely.
+
+"I thought never to speak of Tangier and the mole again. I spent many
+years upon the devising and construction of that great breakwater. It
+could have sheltered every ship of his Majesty's navy. It was wife and
+children to me. My heart lay very close to it. I fancied indeed my
+heart was disrupted with the disruption of the mole, and it has at all
+events, lain ever since as heavy as King Charles' Chest."
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," said Resilda.
+
+Sir Charles had vowed never to speak of the matter again. But he had
+kept his vow for five long years, and besides here was a girl of a
+remarkable beauty expressing sympathy and asking for information. Sir
+Charles broke his vow and talked, and the girl helped him. A suspicion
+that she might have primed herself with knowledge in view of his
+coming, vanished before the flame of her enthusiasm. She knew the
+history of its building almost as well as he did himself, and could
+even set him right in his dates. It was she who knew the exact day on
+which King Charles' Chest, that great block of mortised stones, which
+formed as it were the keystone of the breakwater, had been lowered
+into its place. Sir Charles abandoned all reserve, and talked freely
+of his hopes and fears as the pier ran farther out and out into the
+currents of the Straits, of his bitter disappointment when his labours
+were destroyed. He forgot his gallantries, he showed himself the man
+he was. Neither he nor Resilda noticed a low rumble of thunder or the
+beating of sudden rain upon the windows, so occupied were they with
+the theme of their talk; and at last Sir Charles, leaning back in his
+chair, cried out with astonishment and delight.
+
+"But how is it that my mole is so familiar a thing to you? Explain it
+if you please! Never have I spent so agreeable an evening."
+
+A momentary embarrassment seemed to follow upon his words. Resilda
+looked at her father who chuckled and explained.
+
+"Sir, an old soldier years ago came over the hill in front of the
+house and begged for alms. He found my daughter on the terrace in a
+lucky moment for himself. He had all sorts of wonderful stories of
+Tangier and the great mole which was then a building. Resilda was set
+on fire that day, and though the King and the Parliament might shut
+their eyes to the sore straits of that town and the gallantry of its
+defenders, no one was allowed to forget them in the Quarry House. To
+tell the truth I sometimes envied the obliviousness of Parliament,"
+and he laughed gently. "So from the first my daughter was primed with
+the history of that siege, and lately we have had further means of
+knowledge--" He began to speak warily and with embarrassment--"For two
+years ago Resilda married an officer of The King's Battalion, Major
+Lashley."
+
+"Here are two surprises," cried Sir Charles. "For in the first place,
+Madam, I had no thought you were wed. Blame a bachelor's stupidity!"
+and he glanced at her left hand which lay upon the table-cloth with
+the band of gold gleaming upon a finger. "In the second place I knew
+Major Lashley very well, though it is news to me that he ever troubled
+his head with my mole. A very gallant officer, who defended Charles
+Fort through many nights of great suspense, and cleft his way back
+to Tangier when his ammunition was expended. I shall be very glad to
+shake the Major once more by the hand."
+
+At once Sir Charles was aware that he had uttered the most awkward and
+unsuitable remark. Resilda Lashley, as he must now term her, actually
+flinched away from him and then sat with a vague staring look of pain
+as though she had been shocked clean out of her wits. She recovered
+herself in a moment, but she did not speak, neither had Sir Charles
+any words. He looked at her dress which was white and had not so much
+as a black riband dangling anywhere about it.
+
+But there were other events than death which could make the utterance
+of his wish a _gaucherie_. Sir Charles prided himself upon his tact,
+particularly with a good-looking woman, and he was therefore much
+abashed and confused. The only one who remained undisturbed was Mr.
+Mardale. His mind was never for very long off his wheels, or his
+works of art. It was the turn of his pictures now. He had picked up a
+genuine Rubens in Ghent, he declared. It was standing somewhere in the
+great drawing-room on the carpet against the back of a chair, and Sir
+Charles must look at it in the morning, if only it could be found. He
+had clean forgotten all about his daughter it appeared. She, however,
+had a mind to clear the mystery up, and interrupting her father.
+
+"It is right that you should know," she said simply, "Major Lashley
+disappeared six months ago."
+
+"Disappeared!" exclaimed Sir Charles in spite of himself, and the
+astonishment in his voice woke the old gentleman from his prattle.
+
+"To be sure," said he apologetically, "I should have told you before
+of the sad business. Yes, Sir, Major Lashley disappeared, utterly from
+this very house on the eleventh night of last December, and though the
+country-side was scoured and every ragamuffin for miles round brought
+to question, no trace of him has anywhere been discovered from that
+day to this."
+
+An intuition slipped into Sir Charles Fosbrook's mind, and though he
+would have dismissed it as entirely unwarrantable, persisted there.
+The thought of the steep slope of ground before the house and the mist
+in the hollow between the two hills. The mist was undoubtedly the
+exhalation from a pond. The pond might have reeds which might catch
+and gather a body. But the pond would have been dragged. Still the
+thought of the pond remained while he expressed a vague hope that the
+Major might by God's will yet be restored to them.
+
+He had barely ended before a louder gust of rain than ordinary smote
+upon the windows and immediately there followed a knocking upon the
+hall-door. The sound was violent, and it came with so opposite a
+rapidity upon the heels of Fosbrook's words that it thrilled and
+startled him. There was something very timely in the circumstances of
+night and storm and that premonitory clapping at the door. Sir Charles
+looked towards the door in a glow of anticipation. He had time to
+notice, however, how deeply Resilda herself was stirred; her left hand
+which had lain loose upon the table-cloth was now tightly clenched,
+and she had a difficulty in breathing. The one strange point in her
+conduct was that although she looked towards the door like Sir Charles
+Fosbrook, there was more of suspense in the look than of the eagerness
+of welcome. The butler, however, had no news of Major Lashley to
+announce. He merely presented the compliments of Mr. Gibson Jerkley
+who had been caught in the storm near the Quarry House and ten miles
+from his home. Mr. Jerkley prayed for supper and a dry suit of
+clothes.
+
+"And a bed too," said Resilda, with a flush of colour in her cheeks,
+and begging Sir Charles' permission she rose from the table. Sir
+Charles was disappointed by the mention of a strange name. Mr.
+Mardale, however, to whom that loud knocking upon the door had been
+void of suggestion, now became alert. He looked with a strange anxiety
+after his daughter, an anxiety which surprised Fosbrook, to whom
+this man of wheels and little toys had seemed lacking in the natural
+affections.
+
+"And a bed too," repeated Mr. Mardale doubtfully, "to be sure! To be
+sure!" And though he went into the hall to welcome his visitor, it was
+not altogether without reluctance.
+
+Mr. Gibson Jerkley was a man of about thirty years. He had a brown
+open personable countenance, a pair of frank blue eyes, and the steady
+restful air of a man who has made his account with himself, and who
+neither speaks to win praise nor is at pains to escape dislike. Sir
+Charles Fosbrook was from the first taken with the man, though he
+spoke little with him for the moment. For being tired with his long
+journey from London, he retired shortly to his room.
+
+But however tired he was, Sir Charles found that it was quite
+impossible for him to sleep. The cracking of the rain upon his
+windows, the groaning trees in the park, and the wail of the wind
+among the chimneys and about the corners of the house were no doubt
+for something in a Londoner's sleeplessness. But the mysterious
+disappearance of Major Lashley was at the bottom of it. He thought
+again of the pond. He imagined a violent kidnapping and his fancies
+went to work at devising motives. Some quarrel long ago in the crowded
+city of Tangier and now brought to a tragical finish amongst the oaks
+and fields of England. Perhaps a Moor had travelled over seas for his
+vengeance and found his way from village to village like that
+Baracen lady of old times. And when he had come to this point of his
+reflections, he heard a light rapping upon his door. He got out of bed
+and opened it. He saw Mr. Gibson Jerkley standing on the threshold
+with a candle in one hand and a finger of the other at his lip.
+
+"I saw alight beneath your door," said Jerkley, and Sir Charles made
+room for him to enter. He closed the door cautiously, and setting his
+candle down upon a chest of drawers, said without any hesitation:
+
+"I have come, Sir, to ask for your advice. I do not wonder at your
+surprise, it is indeed a strange sort of intrusion for a man to make
+upon whom you have never clapped your eyes before this evening. But
+for one thing I fancy Mrs. Lashley wishes me to ask you for the
+favour. She has said nothing definitely, in faith she could not as you
+will understand when you have heard the story. But that I come with
+her approval I am very sure. For another, had she disapproved, I
+should none the less have come of my own accord. Sir, though I know
+you very well by reputation, I have had the honour of few words with
+you, but my life has taught me to trust boldly where my eyes bid me
+trust. And the whole affair is so strange that one more strange act
+like this intrusion of mine is quite of apiece. I ask you therefore to
+listen to me. The listening pledges you to nothing, and at the worst,
+I can promise you, my story will while away a sleepless hour. If when
+you have heard, you can give us your advice, I shall be very glad. For
+we are sunk in such a quandary that a new point of view cannot but
+help us."
+
+Sir Charles pointed to a chair and politely turned away to hide a
+yawn. For the young man's lengthy exordium had made him very drowsy.
+He could very comfortably had fallen asleep at this moment. But Gibson
+Jerkley began to speak, and in a short space of time Sir Charles was
+as wide-awake as any house-breaker.
+
+"Eight years ago," said he, "I came very often to the Quarry House,
+but I always rode homewards discontented in the evening. Resilda at
+that time had a great ambition to be a boy. The sight of any brown
+bare-legged lad gipsying down the hill with a song upon his lips,
+would set her viciously kicking the toes of her satin slippers against
+the parapet of the terrace, and clamouring at her sex. Now I was not
+of the same mind with Resilda."
+
+"That I can well understand," said Sir Charles drily. "But, my young
+friend, I can remember a time when Resilda desired of all things to be
+a horse. There was something hopeful because more human in her wish to
+be a boy, had you only known."
+
+Mr. Jerkley nodded gravely and continued:
+
+"I was young enough to argue the point with her, which did me no good,
+and then to make matters worse, the soldier from Tangier came over the
+hill, with his stories of Major Lashley--Captain he was then."
+
+"Major Lashley," exclaimed Sir Charles. "I did not hear the soldier
+was one of Major Lashley's men!"
+
+"But he was and thenceforward the world went very ill with me. Reports
+of battles, and sorties came home at rare intervals. She was the first
+to read of them. Major Lashley's name was more than once mentioned. We
+country gentlemen who stayed at home and looked after our farms and
+our tenants, having no experience of war, suffered greatly in the
+comparison. So at the last I ordered my affairs for a long voyage, and
+without taking leave of any but my nearest neighbours and friends, I
+slipped off one evening to the wars."
+
+"You did not wish your friends at the Quarry House good-bye?" said
+Fosbrook.
+
+"No. It might have seemed that I was making claims, and, after all,
+one has one's pride. I would never, I think, ask a woman to wait
+for me. But she heard of course after I had gone and--I am speaking
+frankly--I believe the news woke the woman in her. At all events there
+was little talk after of Tangier at the Quarry House."
+
+Mr. Jerkley related his subsequent history. He had sailed at his own
+charges to Africa; he had enlisted as a gentleman volunteer in The
+King's Battalion; he had served under Major Lashley in the Charles
+Fort where he was in charge of the great speaking-trumpet by which
+the force received its orders from the Lieutenant-Governor in Tangier
+Castle; he took part in the desperate attempt to cut a way back
+through the Moorish army into the town. In that fight he was wounded
+and left behind for dead.
+
+"A year later peace was made. Tangier was evacuated, Major Lashley
+returned to England. Now the Major and I despite the difference
+in rank had been friends. I had spoken to him of Miss Mardale's
+admiration, and as chance would have it, he came to Leamington to take
+the waters."
+
+"Chance?" said Sir Charles drily.
+
+"Well it may have been intention," said Jerkley. "There was no reason
+in the world why he should not seek her out. She was not promised to
+me, and very likely I had spoken of her with enthusiasm. For a long
+time she would not consent to listen to him. He was, however, no
+less persistent--he pleaded his suit for three years. I was dead you
+understand, and what man worth a pinch of salt would wish a woman to
+waste her gift of life in so sterile a fidelity.... You follow me?
+At the end of three years Resilda yielded to his pleadings, and the
+persuasions of her friends. For Major Lashley quickly made himself a
+position in the country. They were married, Major Lashley was not a
+rich man, it was decided that they should both live at the Quarry
+House."
+
+"And what had Mr. Mardale to say to it?" asked Fosbrook.
+
+"Oh, Sir," said Gibson Jerkley with a laugh. "Mr. Mardale is a man of
+wheels, and little steel springs. Let him sit at his work-table in
+that crowded drawing-room on the first floor, without interruption,
+and he will be very well content, I can assure you.... Hush!" and he
+suddenly raised his hand. In the silence which followed, they both
+distinctly heard the sound of some one stirring in the house. Mr.
+Jerkley went to the door and opened it. The door gave on to the
+passage which was shut off at its far end by another door from the
+square tulip-wood landing, at the head of the stairs. He came back
+into the bedroom.
+
+"There is a light on the other side of the passage-door," said he.
+"But I have no doubt it is Mr. Mardale going to his bed. He sits late
+at his work-table."
+
+Sir Charles brought him back to his story.
+
+"Meanwhile you were counted for dead, but actually you were taken
+prisoner. There is one thing which I do not understand. When peace was
+concluded the prisoners were freed and an officer was sent up into
+Morocco to secure their release."
+
+"There were many oversights like mine, I have no doubt. The Moors were
+reluctant enough to produce their captives. We who were supposed to be
+dead were not particularly looked for. I have no doubt there is many
+a poor English soldier sweating out his soul in the uplands of that
+country to this day. I escaped two years ago, just about the time, in
+fact, when Miss Resilda Mardale became Mrs. Lashley. I crept down
+over the hillside behind Tangier one dark evening, and lay all night
+beneath a bush of tamarisks dreaming the Moors were still about me.
+But an inexplicable silence reigned and nowhere was the darkness
+spotted by the flame of any camp-fire. In the morning I looked down
+to Tangier. The first thing which I noticed was your broken stump of
+mole, the second that nowhere upon the ring of broken wall could be
+seen the flash of a red coat or the glitter of a musket-barrel. I came
+down into Tangier, I had no money and no friends. I got away in a
+felucca to Spain. From Spain I worked my passage to England. I came
+home nine months ago. And here is the trouble. Three months after I
+returned Major Lashley disappeared. You understand?"
+
+"Oh," cried Sir Charles, and he jumped in his chair. "I understand
+indeed. Suspicion settled upon you," and as it ever will upon the
+least provocation suspicion passed for a moment into Fosbrook's brain.
+He was heartily ashamed of it when he looked into Jerkley's face. It
+would need, assuredly, a criminal of an uncommon astuteness to come at
+this hour with this story. Mr. Jerkley was not that criminal.
+
+"Yes," he answered simply, "I am looked at askance, devil a doubt of
+it. I would not care a snap of the fingers were I alone in the matter;
+but there is Mrs. Lashley ... she is neither wife nor widow ... and,"
+he took a step across the room and said quickly--and were she known
+for a widow, there is still the suspicion upon me like a great iron
+door between us."
+
+"Can you help us, Sir Charles! Can you see light?"
+
+"You must tell me the details of the Major's disappearance," said Sir
+Charles, and the following details were given.
+
+On the eleventh of December and at ten o'clock of the evening Major
+Lashley left the house to visit the stables which were situated in
+the Park and at the distance of a quarter of a mile from the house. A
+favourite mare, which he had hunted the day before, had gone lame,
+and all day Major Lashley had shown some anxiety; so that there was a
+natural reason why he should have gone out at the last moment before
+retiring to bed. Mrs. Lashley went up to her room at the same time,
+indeed with so exact a correspondence of movement that as she reached
+the polished tulip-wood landing at the top of the stairs, she heard
+the front door latch as her husband drew it to behind him. That was
+the last she heard of him.
+
+"She woke up suddenly," said Jerkley, "in the middle of the night, and
+found that her husband was not at her side. She waited for a little
+and then rose from her bed. She drew the window-curtains aside and by
+the glimmering light which came into the room, was able to read the
+dial of her watch. It was seven minutes past three of the morning. She
+immediately lighted her candle and went to rouse her father. Her door
+opened upon the landing, it is the first door upon the left hand side
+as you mount the stairs; the big drawing-room opens on to the landing
+too, but faces the stairs. Mrs. Lashley at once went to that room,
+knowing how late Mr. Mardale is used to sit over his inventions, and
+as she expected, found him there. A search was at once arranged; every
+servant in the house was at once impressed, and in the morning every
+servant on the estate. Major Lashley had left the stable at a quarter
+past ten. He has been seen by no one since."
+
+Sir Charles reflected upon this story.
+
+"There is a pond in front of the house," said he.
+
+"It was dragged in the morning," replied Jerkley.
+
+Sir Charles made various inquiries and received the most
+unsatisfactory answers for his purpose. Major Lashley had been a
+favourite alike at Tangier, and in the country. He had a winning
+trick of a smile, which made friends for him even among his country's
+enemies. Mr. Jerkley could not think of a man who had wished him ill.
+
+"Well, I will think the matter over," said Sir Charles, who had not an
+idea in his head, and he held the door open for Mr. Jerkley. Both men
+stood upon the threshold, looked down the passage and then looked at
+one another.
+
+"It is strange," said Jerkley.
+
+"The light has been a long while burning on the landing," said Sir
+Charles. They walked on tiptoe down the passage to the door beneath
+which one bright bar of light stretched across the floor. Jerkley
+opened the door and looked through; Sir Charles who was the taller man
+looked over Jerkley's head and never were two men more surprised. In
+the embrasure of that door to the left of the staircase, the door
+behind which Resilda Lashley slept, old Mr. Mardale reclined, with his
+back propped against the door-post. He had fallen asleep at his post,
+and a lighted candle half-burnt flamed at his side. The reason of his
+presence then was clear to them both.
+
+"A morbid fancy!" he said in a whisper, but with a considerable anger
+in his voice. "Such a fancy as comes only to a man who has lost his
+judgment through much loneliness. See, he sits like any negro outside
+an Eastern harem! Sir, I am shamed by him."
+
+"You have reason I take the liberty to say," said Sir Charles
+absently, and he went back to his room puzzling over what he had seen,
+and over what he could neither see nor understand. The desire for
+sleep was altogether gone from him. He opened his window and leaned
+out. The rain had ceased, but the branches still dripped and the air
+was of an incomparable sweetness. Blackbirds and thrushes on the
+lawns, and in the thicket-depths were singing as though their lives
+hung upon the full fresh utterance of each note. A clear pure light
+was diffused across the world. Fosbrook went back to his old idea of
+some vengeful pursuit sprung from a wrong done long ago in Tangier.
+The picture of Major Lashley struck with terror as he got news of his
+pursuers, and slinking off into the darkness. Even now, somewhere or
+another, on the uplands or the plains of England, he might be rising
+from beneath a hedge to shake the rain from his besmeared clothes, and
+start off afresh on another day's aimless flight. The notion caught
+his imagination and comforted him to sleep. But in the morning he woke
+to recognise its unreality. The unreality became yet more vivid to
+him at the breakfast-table, when he sat with two pairs of young eyes
+turning again and again trustfully towards him. The very reliance
+which the man and woman so clearly placed in him spurred him. Since
+they looked to him to clear up the mystery, why he must do it, and
+there was an end of the matter.
+
+He was none the less glad, however, when Mr. Jerkley announced his
+intention of returning home. There would at all events be one pair
+of eyes the less. He strolled with Mr. Jerkley on the terrace
+after breakfast with a deep air of cogitation, the better to avoid
+questions. Gibson Jerkley, however, was himself in a ruminative
+mood. He stopped, and gazing across the valley to the riband of road
+descending the hill:
+
+"Down that road the soldier came," said he, "whose stories brought
+about all this misfortune."
+
+"And very likely down that road will come the bearer of news to make
+an end of it," rejoined Fosbrook sententiously. Mr. Jerkley looked at
+him with a sudden upspringing of hope, and Sir Charles nodded with
+ineffable mystery, never guessing how these lightly spoken words were
+to return to his mind with the strength of a fulfilled prophecy.
+
+As he nodded, however, he turned about towards the house, and a
+certain disfigurement struck upon his eyes. Two windows on the first
+floor were entirely bricked up, and as the house was square with level
+tiers of windows, they gave to it an unsightly look. Sir Charles
+inquired of his companion if he could account for them.
+
+"To be sure," said Jerkley, with the inattention of a man diverted
+from serious thought to an unimportant topic. "They are the windows of
+the room in which Mrs. Mardale died a quarter of a century ago. Mr.
+Mardale locked the door as soon as his wife was taken from it to the
+church, and the next day he had the windows blocked. No one but he has
+entered the room during all these years, the key has never left his
+person. It must be the ruin of a room by now. You can imagine it, the
+dust gathering, the curtains rotting, in the darkness and at times the
+old man sitting there with his head running on days long since dead.
+But you know Mr. Mardale, he is not as other men."
+
+Sir Charles swung round alertly to his companion. To him at all events
+the topic was not an indifferent one.
+
+"Yet you say, you believe that he is void of the natural affections.
+Last night we saw a proof, a crazy proof if you will, but none the
+less a proof of his devotion to his daughter. To-day you give me as
+sure a one of his devotion to his dead wife," and almost before he had
+finished, Mr. Mardale was calling to him from the steps of the house.
+
+He spent all that morning in the great drawing-room on the first
+floor. It was a room of rich furniture, grown dingy with dust and
+inattention, and crowded from end to end with tables and chairs and
+sofas, on which were heaped in a confused medley, pictures, statues of
+marble, fans and buckles from Spain, queer barbaric ornaments, ivory
+carvings from the Chinese. Sir Charles could hardly make his way to
+the little cleared space by the window, where Mr. Mardale worked,
+without brushing some irreplaceable treasure to the floor. Once
+there he was fettered for the morning. Mr. Mardale with all the
+undisciplined enthusiasm of an amateur, jumping from this invention to
+that, beaming over his spectacles. Sir Charles listened with here and
+there a word of advice, or of sympathy with the labour of creation.
+But his thoughts were busy elsewhere, he was pondering over his
+discovery of the morning, over the sight which he and Jerkley had seen
+last night, he was accustoming himself to regard the old man in a
+strange new light, as an over-careful father and a sorely-stricken
+husband. Meanwhile he sat over against the window which was in the
+side of the house, and since the house was built upon a slope of hill,
+although the window was on the first floor, a broad terrace of grass
+stretched away from it to a circle of gravel ornamented with statues.
+On this terrace he saw Mrs. Lashley, and reflected uncomfortably that
+he must meet her at dinner and again sustain the inquiry of her eyes.
+
+He avoided actual questions, however, and as soon as dinner was over,
+with a meaning look at the girl to assure her that he was busy with
+her business, he retired to the library. Then he sat himself down to
+think the matter over restfully. But the room, walled with books upon
+its three sides, fronted the Southwest on its fourth, and as the
+afternoon advanced, the hot June sun streamed farther and farther into
+the room. Sir Charles moved his chair back, and again back, and again,
+until at last it was pushed into the one cool dark corner of the room.
+Then Sir Charles closed his wearied eyes the better to think. But he
+had slept little during the last night, and when he opened them again,
+it was with a guilty start. He rubbed his eyes, then he reached a hand
+down quickly at his side, and lifted a book out of the lowest shelf in
+the corner. The book was a volume of sermons. Sir Charles replaced it,
+and again dipped his hand into the lucky-bag. He drew out a tome of
+Mr. Hobbes' philosophy; Sir Charles was not in the mood for Hobbes; he
+tried again. On this third occasion he found something very much more
+to his taste, namely the second Volume of Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs
+of Count Grammont. This he laid upon his knee, and began glancing
+through the pages while he speculated upon the mystery of the Major's
+disappearance. His thoughts, however, lagged in a now well-worn
+circle, they begot nothing new in the way of a suggestion. On the
+other hand the book was quite new to him. He became less and less
+interested in his thoughts, more and more absorbed in the Memoirs.
+There were passages marked with a pencil-line in the margin, and
+marked, thought Sir Charles, by a discriminating judge. He began to
+look only for the marked passages, being sure that thus he would most
+easily come upon the raciest anecdotes. He read the story of the
+Count's pursuit by the brother of the lady he was affianced to. The
+brother caught up the Count when he was nearing Dover to return to
+France. "You have forgotten something," said the brother. "So I have,"
+replied Grammont. "I have forgotten to marry your sister." Sir Charles
+chuckled and turned over the pages. There was an account of how the
+reprobate hero rode seventy miles into the country to keep a tryst
+with an _inamorata_ and waited all night for no purpose in pouring
+rain by the Park gate. Sir Charles laughed aloud. He turned over more
+pages, and to his surprise came across, amongst the marked passages, a
+quite unentertaining anecdote of how Grammont lost a fine new suit of
+clothes, ordered for a masquerade at White Hall. Sir Charles read the
+story again, wondering why on earth this passage had been marked; and
+suddenly he was standing by the window, holding the book to the light
+in a quiver of excitement. Underneath certain letters in the words of
+this marked passage he had noticed dents in the paper, as though by
+the pressure of a pencil point. Now that he stood by the light, he
+made sure of the dents, and he saw also by the roughness of the paper
+about them, that the pencil-marks had been carefully erased. He read
+these underlined letters together--they made a word, two words--a
+sentence, and the sentence was an assignation.
+
+Sir Charles could not remember that the critical moment in any of his
+great engineering undertakings, had ever caused him such a flutter
+of excitement, such a pulsing in his temples, such a catching of his
+breath--no, not even the lowering of Charles' Chest into the Waters
+of Tangier harbour. Everything at once became exaggerated out of its
+proportions, the silence of the house seemed potential and expectant,
+the shadows in the room now that the sun was low had their message, he
+felt a queer chill run down his spine like ice, he shivered. Then he
+hurried to the door, locked it and sat down to a more careful study.
+And as he read, there came out before his eyes a story--a story told
+as it were in telegrams, a story of passion, of secret meetings, of
+gratitude for favours.
+
+Who was the discriminating judge who had marked these passages and
+underlined these letters? The book was newly published, it was in the
+Quarry House, and there were three occupants of the Quarry House. Was
+it Mr. Mardale? The mere question raised a laugh. Resilda? Never.
+Major Lashley then? If not Major Lashley, who else?
+
+It flashed into his mind that here in this book he might hold the
+history of the Major's long courtship of Resilda. But he dismissed the
+notion contemptuously. Gibson Jerkley had told him of that courtship,
+and of the girl's reluctance to respond to it. Besides Resilda was
+never the woman in this story. Perhaps the first volume might augment
+it and give the clue to the woman's identity. Sir Charles hunted
+desperately through the shelves. Nowhere was the first volume to be
+found. He wasted half-an-hour before he understood why. Of course the
+other volume would be in the woman's keeping, and how in the world to
+discover her?
+
+Things moved very quickly with Sir Charles that afternoon. He had shut
+up the volume and laid it on the table, the while he climbed up and
+down the library steps. From the top of the steps he glanced about the
+room in a despairing way, and his eyes lit upon the table. For the
+first time he remarked the binding which was of a brown leather. But
+all the books on the shelves were bound uniformly in marble boards
+with a red backing. He sprang down from the steps with the vigour of a
+boy, and seizing the book looked in the fly leaf for a name. There was
+a name, the name of a bookseller in Leamington, and as he closed the
+book again, some one rapped upon the door. Sir Charles opened it and
+saw Mr. Mardale. He gave the old gentleman no time to speak.
+
+"Mr. Mardale," said he, "I am a man of plethoric habits, and must
+needs take exercise. Can you lend me a horse?"
+
+Mr. Mardale was disappointed as his manner showed. He had perhaps at
+that very moment hit upon a new and most revolutionary invention.
+But his manners hindered him from showing more than a trace of
+the disappointment, and Sir Charles rode out to the bookseller at
+Leamington, with the volume beneath his coat.
+
+"Can you show me the companion to this?" said he, dumping it down upon
+the counter. The bookseller seized upon the volume and fondled it.
+
+"It is not fair," he cried. "In any other affair but books, it would
+be called at once sheer dishonesty. Here have been my subscribers
+clamouring for the Memoirs for six months and more."
+
+"You hire out your books!" cried Sir Charles.
+
+"Give would be the properer word," grumbled the man.
+
+Sir Charles humbly apologised.
+
+"It was the purest oversight," said he, "and I will gladly pay double.
+But I need the first volume."
+
+"The first volume, Sir," replied the bookseller in a mollified voice,
+"is in the like case with the second. There has been an oversight."
+
+"But who has it?"
+
+The bookseller was with difficulty persuaded to search his list. He
+kept his papers in the greatest disorder, so that it was no wonder
+people kept his volumes until they forgot them. But in the end he
+found his list.
+
+"Mrs. Ripley," he read out, "Mrs. Ripley of Burley Wood."
+
+"And where is Burley Wood?" asked Sir Charles.
+
+"It is a village, Sir, six miles from Leamington," replied the
+bookseller, and he gave some rough directions as to the road.
+
+Sir Charles mounted his horse and cantered down the Parade. The sun
+was setting; he would for a something miss his supper; but he meant to
+see Burley Wood that day, and he would have just daylight enough
+for his purpose. As he entered the village, he caught up a labourer
+returning from the fields. Sir Charles drew rein beside him.
+
+"Will you tell me, if you please, where Mrs. Ripley lives?"
+
+The man looked up and grinned.
+
+"In the churchyard," said he.
+
+"Do you mean she is dead?"
+
+"No less."
+
+"When did she die?"
+
+"Well, it may have been a month or two ago, or it may have been more."
+
+"Show me her grave and there's a silver shilling in your pocket."
+
+The labourer led Fosbrook to a corner of the churchyard. Then upon
+a head-stone he read that Mary Ripley aged twenty-nine had died on
+December 7th. December the 7th thought Sir Charles, five days before
+Major Lashley died. Then he turned quickly to the labourer.
+
+"Can you tell me when Mrs. Ripley was buried?"
+
+"I can find out for another shilling."
+
+"You shall have it, man."
+
+The labourer hurried off, discovered the sexton, and came back. But
+instead of the civil gentleman he had left, he found now a man with a
+face of horror, and eyes that had seen appalling things. Sir Charles
+had remained in the churchyard by the grave, he had looked about him
+from one to the other of the mounds of turf, his imagination already
+stimulated had been quickened by what he had seen; he stood with the
+face of a Medusa.
+
+"She was buried when?" he asked.
+
+"On December the 11th," replied the labourer.
+
+Sir Charles showed no surprise. He stood very still for a moment, then
+he gave the man his two shillings, and walked to the gate where his
+horse was tied. Then he inquired the nearest way to the Quarry House,
+and he was pointed out a bridle-path running across fields to a hill.
+As he mounted he asked another question.
+
+"Mr. Ripley is alive?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It must be Mr. Ripley," Sir Charles assured himself, as he rode
+through the dusk of the evening. "It must be ... It must be ..." until
+the words in his mind became a meaningless echo of his horse's hoofs.
+He rode up the hill, left the bridle-path for the road, and suddenly,
+and long before he had expected, he saw beneath him the red square of
+the Quarry House and the smoke from its chimneys. He was on that very
+road up which he and Gibson Jerkley had looked that morning. Down that
+road, he had said, would come the man who knew how Major Lashley
+had disappeared, and within twelve hours down that road the man was
+coming. "But it must be Mr. Ripley," he said to himself.
+
+None the less he took occasion at supper to speak of his ride.
+
+"I rode by Leamington to Burley Wood. I went into the churchyard."
+Then he stopped, but as though the truth was meant to come to light,
+Resilda helped him out.
+
+"I had a dear friend buried there not so long ago," she said. "Father,
+you remember Mrs. Ripley."
+
+"I saw her grave this afternoon," said Fosbrook, with his eyes upon
+Mr. Mardale. It might have been a mere accident, it was in any case a
+trifling thing, the mere shaking of a hand, the spilling of a spoonful
+of salt upon the table, but trifling things have their suggestions.
+He remembered that Resilda, when she had waked up on the night of
+December the 11th to find herself alone, had sought out her father,
+who was still up, and at work in the big drawing-room. He remembered
+too that the window of that room gave on to a terrace of grass. A man
+might go out by that window--aye and return without a soul but himself
+being the wiser.
+
+Of course it was all guess work and inference, and besides, it must be
+Mr. Ripley. Mr. Ripley might as easily have discovered the secret
+of the Memoirs as himself--or anyone else. Mr. Ripley would have
+justification for anger and indeed for more--yes for what men who are
+not affected are used to call a crime ... Sir Charles abruptly stopped
+his reasoning, seeing that it was prompted by a defence of Mr.
+Mardale. He made his escape from his hosts as soon as he decently
+could and retired to his room. He sat down in his room and thought,
+and he thought to some purpose. He blew out his candle, and stole down
+the stairs into the hall. He had met no one. From the hall he went to
+the library-door and opened it--ever so gently. The room was quite
+dark. Sir Charles felt his way across it to his chair in the corner.
+He sat down in the darkness and waited. After a time inconceivably
+long, after every board in the house had cracked a million times, he
+heard distinctly a light shuffling step in the passage, and after that
+the latch of the door release itself from the socket. He heard nothing
+more, for a little, he could only guess that the door was being
+silently opened by some one who carried no candle. Then the shuffling
+footsteps began to move gently across the room, towards him, towards
+the corner where he was sitting. Sir Charles had had no doubt but that
+they would, not a single doubt, but none the less as he sat there
+in the dark, he felt the hair rising on his scalp, and all his body
+thrill. Then a hand groped and touched him. A cry rang out, but it was
+Sir Charles who uttered it. A voice answered quietly:
+
+"You had fallen asleep. I regret to have waked you."
+
+"I was not asleep, Mr. Mardale."
+
+There was a pause and Mr. Mardale continued.
+
+"I cannot sleep to-night, I came for a book."
+
+"I know. For the book I took back to Leamington to-day, before I went
+to visit Mrs. Ripley's grave."
+
+There was a yet longer pause before Mr. Mardale spoke again.
+
+"Stay then!" he said in the same gentle voice. "I will fetch a light."
+He shuffled out of the room, and to Sir Charles it seemed again an
+inconceivably long time before he returned. He came back with a single
+candle, which he placed upon the table, a little star of light,
+showing the faces of the two men shadowy and dim. He closed the door
+carefully, and coming back, said simply:
+
+"You know."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you find out?"
+
+"I saw the grave. I noticed the remarkable height of the mound. I
+guessed."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Mardale, and in a low voice he explained. "I found the
+book here one day, that he left by accident. On December 11th Mrs.
+Ripley was buried, and that night he left the house--for the stables,
+yes, but he did not return from the stables. It seemed quite clear to
+me where he would be that night. People hereabouts take me for a
+man crazed and daft, I know that very well, but I know something of
+passion, Sir Charles. I have had my griefs to bear. Oh, I knew where
+he would be. I followed over the hill down to the churchyard of Burley
+Wood. I had no thought of what I should do. I carried a stick in my
+hand, I had no thought of using it. But I found him lying full-length
+upon the grave with his lips pressed to the earth of it, whispering to
+her who lay beneath him.... I called to him to stand up and he did. I
+bade him, if he dared, repeat the words he had used to my face, to
+me, the father of the girl he had married, and he did--triumphantly,
+recklessly. I struck at him with the knob of my stick, the knob was
+heavy, I struck with all my might, the blow fell upon his forehead.
+The spade was lying on the ground beside the grave. I buried him with
+her. Now what will you do?"
+
+"Nothing," said Sir Charles.
+
+"But Mr. Jerkley asked you to help him."
+
+"I shall tell a lie."
+
+"My friend, there is no need," said the old man with his gentle
+smile. "When I went out for this candle I ..." Sir Charles broke in
+upon him in a whirl of horror.
+
+"No. Don't say it! You did not!"
+
+"I did," replied Mr. Mardale. "The poison is a kindly one. I shall be
+dead before morning. I shall sleep my way to death. I do not mind, for
+I fear that, after all, my inventions are of little worth. I have left
+a confession on my writing-desk. There is no reason--is there?--why he
+and she should be kept apart?"
+
+It was not a question which Sir Charles could discuss. He said
+nothing, and was again left alone in the darkness, listening to the
+shuffling footsteps of Mr. Mardale as, for the last time, he mounted
+the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE.
+
+
+It was in the kitchen of the inn at Framlingham that Mr. Mitchelbourne
+came across the man who was afraid, and during the Christmas week
+of the year 1681. Lewis Mitchelbourne was young in those days, and
+esteemed as a gentleman of refinement and sensibility, with a queer
+taste for escapades, pardonable by reason of his youth. It was his
+pride to bear his part in the graceful tactics of a minuet, while a
+saddled horse waited for him at the door. He delighted to vanish of a
+sudden from the lighted circle of his friends into the byways where
+none knew him, or held him of account, not that it was all vanity with
+Mitchelbourne though no doubt the knowledge that his associates
+in London Town were speculating upon his whereabouts tickled him
+pleasurably through many a solitary day. But he was possessed both of
+courage and resource, qualities for which he found too infrequent an
+exercise in his ordinary life; and so he felt it good to be free for
+awhile, not from the restraints but from the safeguards, with
+which his social circumstances surrounded him. He had his spice of
+philosophy too, and discovered that these sharp contrasts,--luxury and
+hardship, treading hard upon each other and the new strange people
+with whom he fell in, kept fresh his zest of life.
+
+Thus it happened that at a time when families were gathering cheerily
+each about a single fireside, Mr. Mitchelbourne was riding alone
+through the muddy and desolate lanes of Suffolk. The winter was not
+seasonable; men were not tempted out of doors. There was neither
+briskness nor sunlight in the air, and there was no snow upon the
+ground. It was a December of dripping branches, and mists and steady
+pouring rains, with a raw sluggish cold, which crept into one's
+marrow.
+
+The man who was afraid, a large, corpulent man, of a loose and heavy
+build, with a flaccid face and bright little inexpressive eyes like a
+bird's, sat on a bench within the glow of the fire.
+
+"You travel far to-night?" he asked nervously, shuffling his feet.
+
+"To-night!" exclaimed Mitchelbourne as he stood with his legs apart
+taking the comfortable warmth into his bones. "No further than from
+this fire to my bed," and he listened with enjoyment to the rain
+which cracked upon the window like a shower of gravel flung by some
+mischievous urchin. He was not suffered to listen long, for the
+corpulent man began again.
+
+"I am an observer, sir. I pride myself upon it, but I have so much
+humility as to wish to put my observations to the test of fact. Now,
+from your carriage, I should judge you to serve His Majesty."
+
+"A civilian may be straight. There is no law against it," returned
+Mitchelbourne, and he perceived that the ambiguity of his reply threw
+his questioner into a great alarm. He was at once interested. Here,
+it seemed, was one of those encounters which were the spice of his
+journeyings.
+
+"You will pardon me," continued the stranger with a great assumption
+of heartiness, "but I am curious, sir, curious as Socrates, though
+I thank God I am no heathen. Here is Christmas, when a sensible
+gentleman, as upon my word I take you to be, sits to his table and
+drinks more than is good for him in honour of the season. Yet here are
+you upon the roads to Suffolk which have nothing to recommend them. I
+wonder at it, sir."
+
+"You may do that," replied Mitchelbourne, "though to be sure, there
+are two of us in the like case."
+
+"Oh, as for me," said his companion shrugging his shoulders, "I am on
+my way to be married. My name is Lance," and he blurted it out with
+a suddenness as though to catch Mitchelbourne off his guard.
+Mitchelbourne bowed politely.
+
+"And my name is Mitchelbourne, and I travel for my pleasure, though my
+pleasure is mere gipsying, and has nothing to do with marriage. I
+take comfort from thinking that I have no friend from one rim of
+this country to the other, and that my closest intimates have not an
+inkling of my whereabouts."
+
+Mr. Lance received the explanation with undisguised suspicion, and at
+supper, which the two men took together, he would be forever laying
+traps. Now he slipped some outlandish name or oath unexpectedly into
+his talk, and watched with a forward bend of his body to mark whether
+the word struck home; or again he mentioned some person with whom
+Mitchelbourne was quite unfamiliar. At length, however, he seemed
+satisfied, and drawing up his chair to the fire, he showed himself at
+once in his true character, a loud and gusty boaster.
+
+"An exchange of sentiments, Mr. Mitchelbourne, with a chance
+acquaintance over a pipe and a glass--upon my word I think you are in
+the right of it, and there's no pleasanter way of passing an evening.
+I could tell you stories, sir; I served the King in his wars, but I
+scorn a braggart, and all these glories are over. I am now a man of
+peace, and, as I told you, on my way to be married. Am I wise? I do
+not know, but I sometimes think it preposterous that a man who
+has been here and there about the world, and could, if he were so
+meanly-minded, tell a tale or so of success in gallantry, should
+hamper himself with connubial fetters. But a man must settle, to
+be sure, and since the lady is young, and not wanting in looks or
+breeding or station, as I am told--"
+
+"As you are told?" interrupted Mitchelbourne.
+
+"Yes, for I have never seen her. No, not so much as her miniature.
+Nor have I seen her mother either, or any of the family, except the
+father, from whom I carry letters to introduce me. She lives in a
+house called 'The Porch' some miles from here. There is another house
+hard by to it, I understand, which has long stood empty and I have a
+mind to buy it. I bring a fortune, the lady a standing in the county."
+
+"And what has the lady to say to it?" asked Mitchelbourne.
+
+"The lady!" replied Lance with a stare. "Nothing but what is dutiful,
+I'll be bound. The father is under obligations to me." He stopped
+suddenly, and Mitchelbourne, looking up, saw that his mouth had
+fallen. He sat with his eyes starting from his head and a face grey as
+lead, an image of panic pitiful to behold. Mitchelbourne spoke but got
+no answer. It seemed Lance could not answer--he was so arrested by a
+paralysis of terror. He sat staring straight in front of him, and it
+seemed at the mantelpiece which was just on a level with his eyes. The
+mantelpiece, however, had nothing to distinguish it from a score of
+others. Its counterpart might be found to this day in the parlour of
+any inn. A couple of china figures disfigured it, to be sure, but
+Mitchelbourne could not bring himself to believe that even their
+barbaric crudity had power to produce so visible a discomposure. He
+inclined to the notion that his companion was struck by a physical
+disease, perhaps some recrudescence of a malady contracted in those
+foreign lands of which he vaguely spoke.
+
+"Sir, you are ill," said Mitchelbourne. "I will have a doctor, if
+there is one hereabouts to be found, brought to your relief." He
+sprang up as he spoke, and that action of his roused Lance out of his
+paralysis. "Have a care," he cried almost in a shriek, "Do not move!
+For pity, sir, do not move," and he in his turn rose from his chair.
+He rose trembling, and swept the dust off a corner of the mantelpiece
+into the palm of his hand. Then he held his palm to the lamp.
+
+"Have you seen the like of this before?" he asked in a low shaking
+voice.
+
+Mitchelbourne looked over Lance's shoulder. The dust was in reality a
+very fine grain of a greenish tinge.
+
+"Never!" said Mitchelbourne.
+
+"No, nor I," said Lance, with a sudden cunning look at his companion,
+and opening his fingers, as he let the grain run between them. But he
+could not remove as easily from Mitchelbourne's memories that picture
+he had shown him of a shaking and a shaken man. Mitchelbourne went to
+bed divided in his feelings between pity for the lady Lance was to
+marry, and curiosity as to Lance's apprehensions. He lay awake for
+a long time speculating upon that mysterious green seed which could
+produce so extraordinary a panic, and in the morning his curiosity
+predominated. Since, therefore, he had no particular destination he
+was easily persuaded to ride to Saxmundham with Mr. Lance, who, for
+his part, was most earnest for a companion. On the journey Lance gave
+further evidence of his fears. He had a trick of looking backwards
+whenever they came to a corner of the road--an habitual trick, it
+seemed, acquired by a continued condition of fear. When they stopped
+at midday to eat at an ordinary, he inspected the guests through the
+chink at the hinges of the door before he would enter the room; and
+this, too, he did as though it had long been natural to him. He kept
+a bridle in his mouth, however; that little pile of grain upon
+the mantelshelf had somehow warned him into reticence, so that
+Mitchelbourne, had he not been addicted to his tobacco, would
+have learnt no more of the business and would have escaped the
+extraordinary peril which he was subsequently called upon to face.
+
+But he _was_ addicted to his tobacco, and no sooner had he finished
+his supper that night at Saxmundham than he called for a pipe. The
+maidservant fetched a handful from a cupboard and spread them upon the
+table, and amongst them was one plainly of Barbary manufacture. It had
+a straight wooden stem painted with hieroglyphics in red and green
+and a small reddish bowl of baked earth. Nine men out of ten would no
+doubt have overlooked it, but Mitchelbourne was the tenth man. His
+fancies were quick to kindle, and taking up the pipe he said in a
+musing voice:
+
+"Now, how in the world comes a Barbary pipe to travel so far over seas
+and herd in the end with common clays in a little Suffolk village?"
+
+He heard behind him the grating of a chair violently pushed back. The
+pipe seemingly made its appeal to Mr. Lance also.
+
+"Has it been smoked?" he asked in a grave low voice.
+
+"The inside of the bowl is stained," said Mitchelbourne.
+
+Mitchelbourne had been inclined to believe that he had seen last
+evening the extremity of fear expressed in a man's face: he had now to
+admit that he had been wrong. Mr. Lance's terror was a Circe to him
+and sunk him into something grotesque and inhuman; he ran once or
+twice in a little tripping, silly run backwards and forwards like an
+animal trapped and out of its wits; and his face had the look of a
+man suffering from a nausea; so that Mitchelbourne, seeing him, was
+ashamed and hurt for their common nature.
+
+"I must go," said Lance babbling his words. "I cannot stay. I must
+go."
+
+"To-night?" exclaimed Mitchelbourne. "Six yards from the door you will
+be soaked!"
+
+"Then there will be the fewer men abroad. I cannot sleep here! No,
+though it rained pistols and bullets I must go." He went into
+the passage, and calling his host secretly asked for his score.
+Mitchelbourne made a further effort to detain him.
+
+"Make an inquiry of the landlord first. It may be a mere shadow that
+frightens you."
+
+"Not a word, not a question," Lance implored. The mere suggestion
+increased a panic which seemed incapable of increase. "And for the
+shadow, why, that's true. The pipe's the shadow, and the shadow
+frightens me. A shadow! Yes! A shadow is a horrible, threatning thing!
+Show me a shadow cast by nothing and I am with you. But you might as
+easily hold that this Barbary pipe floated hither across the seas of
+its own will. No! 'Ware shadows, I say." And so he continued harping
+on the word, till the landlord fetched in the bill.
+
+The landlord had his dissuasions too, but they availed not a jot more
+than Mr. Mitchelbourne's.
+
+"The road is as black as a pauper's coffin," said he, "and damnable
+with ruts."
+
+"So much the better," said Lance.
+
+"There is no house where you can sleep nearer than Glemham, and no man
+would sleep there could he kennel elsewhere."
+
+"So much the better," said Lance. "Besides, I am expected to-morrow
+evening at 'The Porch' and Glemham is on the way." He paid his bill,
+slipped over to the stables and lent a hand to the saddling of his
+horse. Mitchelbourne, though for once in his life he regretted the
+precipitancy with which he welcomed strangers, was still sufficiently
+provoked to see the business to its end. His imagination was seized by
+the thought of this fat and vulgar person fleeing in terror through
+English lanes from a Barbary Moor. He had now a conjecture in his mind
+as to the nature of that greenish seed. He accordingly rode out with
+Lance toward Glemham.
+
+It was a night of extraordinary blackness; you could not distinguish
+a hedge until the twigs stung across your face; the road was narrow,
+great tree-trunks with bulging roots lined it, at times it was very
+steep--and, besides and beyond every other discomfort, there was the
+rain. It fell pitilessly straight over the face of the country with a
+continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum. Both travellers
+were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one
+of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down
+parody of a tavern at Glemham, was in an extreme exhaustion. It was no
+more than an ague, said Lance, from which he periodically suffered,
+but the two men slept in the same bare room, and towards morning
+Mitchelbourne was awakened from a deep slumber by an unfamiliar voice
+talking at an incredible speed through the darkness in an uncouth
+tongue. He started up upon his elbow; the voice came from Lance's bed.
+He struck a light. Lance was in a high fever, which increased as the
+morning grew.
+
+Now, whether he had the sickness latent within him when he came from
+Barbary, or whether his anxieties and corpulent habit made him an
+easy victim to disease, neither the doctor nor any one else could
+determine. But at twelve o'clock that day Lance was seized with an
+attack of cholera and by three in the afternoon he was dead. The
+suddenness of the catastrophe shocked Mr. Mitchelbourne inexpressibly.
+He stood gazing at the still features of the man whom fear had, during
+these last days, so grievously tormented, and was solemnly aware of
+the vanity of those fears. He could not pretend to any great esteem
+for his companion, but he made many suitable reflections upon the
+shears of the Fates and the tenacity of life, in which melancholy
+occupation he was interrupted by the doctor, who pointed out the
+necessity of immediate burial. Seven o'clock the next morning was the
+hour agreed upon, and Mitchelbourne at once searched in Lance's
+coat pockets for the letters which he carried. There were only two,
+superscribed respectively to Mrs. Ufford at "The Porch" near Glemham,
+and to her daughter Brasilia. At "The Porch" Mitchelbourne remembered
+Lance was expected this very evening, and he thought it right at once
+to ride thither with his gloomy news.
+
+Having, therefore, sprinkled the letters plentifully with vinegar and
+taken such rough precautions as were possible to remove the taint of
+infection from the letters, he started about four o'clock. The evening
+was most melancholy. For, though no rain any longer fell, there was a
+continual pattering of drops from the trees and a ghostly creaking of
+branches in a light and almost imperceptible wind. The day, too, was
+falling, the grey overhang of cloud was changing to black, except for
+one wide space in the west, where a pale spectral light shone without
+radiance; and the last of that was fading when he pulled up at a
+parting of the roads and inquired of a man who chanced to be standing
+there his way to "The Porch." He was directed to ride down the road
+upon his left hand until he came to the second house, which he could
+not mistake, for there was a dyke or moat about the garden wall. He
+passed the first house a mile further on, and perhaps half a mile
+beyond that he came to the dyke and the high garden wall, and saw the
+gables of the second house loom up behind it black against the sky. A
+wooden bridge spanned the dyke and led to a wide gate. Mitchelbourne
+stopped his horse at the bridge. The gate stood open and he looked
+down an avenue of trees into a square of which three sides were made
+by the high garden wall, and the fourth and innermost by the house.
+Thus the whole length of the house fronted him, and it struck him as
+very singular that neither in the lower nor the upper windows was
+there anywhere a spark of light, nor was there any sound but the
+tossing of the branches and the wail of the wind among the chimneys.
+Not even a dog barked or rattled a chain, and from no chimney breathed
+a wisp of smoke. The house in the gloom of that melancholy evening had
+a singular eerie and tenantless look; and oppressive silence reigned
+there; and Mitchelbourne was unaccountably conscious of a growing
+aversion to it, as to something inimical and sinister.
+
+He had crossed the mouth of a lane, he remembered, just at the first
+corner of the wall. The lane ran backwards from the road, parallel
+with the side wall of the garden. Mitchelbourne had a strong desire
+to ride down that lane and inspect the back of the house before he
+crossed the bridge into the garden. He was restrained for a moment by
+the thought that such a proceeding must savour of cowardice. But only
+for a moment. There had been no doubting the genuine nature of Lance's
+fears and those fears were very close to Mr. Mitchelbourne now. They
+were feeling like cold fingers about his heart. He was almost in the
+icy grip of them.
+
+He turned and rode down the lane until he came to the end of the wall.
+A meadow stretched behind the house. Mitchelbourne unfastened the
+catch of a gate with his riding whip and entered it. He found himself
+upon the edge of a pool, which on the opposite side wetted the house
+wall. About the pool some elder trees and elms grew and overhung, and
+their boughs tapped like fingers upon the window-panes. Mitchelbourne
+was assured that the house was inhabited, since from one of the
+windows a strong yellow light blazed, and whenever a sharper gust blew
+the branches aside, swept across the face of the pool like a flaw of
+wind.
+
+The lighted window was in the lowest storey, and Mitchelbourne, from
+the back of his horse, could see into the room. He was mystified
+beyond expression by what he saw. A deal table, three wooden chairs,
+some ragged curtains drawn back from the window, and a single lamp
+made up the furniture. The boards of the floor were bare and unswept;
+the paint peeled in strips from the panels of the walls; the
+discoloured ceiling was hung with cobwebs; the room in a word matched
+the outward aspect of the house in its look of long disuse. Yet it had
+occupants. Three men were seated at the table in the scarlet coats and
+boots of the King's officers. Their faces, though it was winter-time,
+were brown with the sun, and thin and drawn as with long privation and
+anxiety. They had little to say to one another, it seemed. Each man
+sat stiffly in a sort of suspense and expectation, with now and then a
+restless movement or a curt word as curtly answered.
+
+Mitchelbourne rode back again, crossed the bridge, fastened his horse
+to a tree in the garden, and walked down the avenue to the door. As he
+mounted the steps, he perceived with something of a shock, that the
+door was wide open and that the void of the hall yawned black before
+him. It was a fresh surprise, but in this night of surprises, one more
+or less, he assured himself, was of little account. He stepped into
+the hall and walked forwards feeling with his hands in front of him.
+As he advanced, he saw a thin line of yellow upon the floor ahead of
+him. The line of yellow was a line of light, and it came, no doubt,
+from underneath a door, and the door, no doubt, was that behind which
+the three men waited. Mitchelbourne stopped. After all, he reflected,
+the three men were English officers wearing His Majesty's uniform,
+and, moreover, wearing it stained with their country's service. He
+walked forward and tapped upon the door. At once the light within the
+room was extinguished.
+
+It needed just that swift and silent obliteration of the slip of light
+upon the floor to make Mitchelbourne afraid. He had been upon the
+brink of fear ever since he had seen that lonely and disquieting
+house; he was now caught in the full stream. He turned back. Through
+the open doorway, he saw the avenue of leafless trees tossing against
+a leaden sky. He took a step or two and then came suddenly to a halt.
+For all around him in the darkness he seemed to hear voices breathing
+and soft footsteps. He realised that his fear had overstepped his
+reason; he forced himself to remember the contempt he had felt for
+Lance's manifestations of terror; and swinging round again he flung
+open the door and entered the room.
+
+"Good evening, gentlemen," said he airily, and he got no answer
+whatsoever. In front of him was the grey panel of dim twilight where
+the window stood. The rest was black night and an absolute silence. A
+map of the room was quite clear in his recollections. The three men
+were seated he knew at the table on his right hand. The faint light
+from the window did not reach them, and they made no noise. Yet they
+were there. Why had they not answered him, he asked himself. He could
+not even hear them breathing, though he strained his ears. He could
+only hear his heart drumming at his breast, the blood pulsing in his
+temples. Why did they hold their breath? He crossed the room, not
+knowing what he did, bereft of his wits. He had a confused, ridiculous
+picture of himself wearing the flaccid, panic stricken face of Mr.
+Lance, like an ass' head, not holding the wand of Titania. He reached
+the window and stood in its embrasure, and there one definite,
+practical thought crept into his mind. He was visible to these men who
+were invisible to him. The thought suggested a precaution, and with
+the trembling haste of a man afraid, he tore at the curtains and
+dragged them till they met across the window so that even the faint
+grey glimmer of the night no longer had entrance. The next moment
+he heard the door behind him latch and a key turn in the lock. He
+crouched beneath the window and did not stand up again until a light
+was struck, and the lamp relit.
+
+The lighting of the lamp restored Mr. Mitchelbourne, if not to the
+full measure of his confidence, at all events to an appreciation that
+the chief warrant for his trepidation was removed. What he had with
+some appearance of reason feared was a sudden attack in the dark. With
+the lamp lit, he could surely stand in no danger of any violence at
+the hands of three King's officers whom he had never come across in
+all his life. He took, therefore, an easy look at them. One, the
+youngest, now leaned against the door, a youth of a frank, honest
+face, unremarkable but for a firm set of the jaws. A youth of no great
+intellect, thought Mitchelbourne, but tenacious, a youth marked out
+for a subordinate command, and never likely for all his sterling
+qualities to kindle a woman to a world-forgetting passion, or to tread
+with her the fiery heights where life throbs at its fullest. Mr.
+Mitchelbourne began to feel quite sorry for this young officer of the
+limited capacities, and he was still in the sympathetic mood when one
+of the two men at the table spoke to him. Mitchelbourne turned at
+once. The officers were sitting with a certain air of the theatre in
+their attitudes, one a little dark man and the other a stiff, light
+complexioned fellow with a bony, barren face, unmistakably a stupid
+man and the oldest of the three. It was he who was speaking, and he
+spoke with a sort of aggravated courtesy like a man of no breeding
+counterfeiting a gentleman upon the stage.
+
+"You will pardon us for receiving you with so little ceremony. But
+while we expected you, you on the other hand were not expecting us,
+and we feared that you might hesitate to come in if the lamp was
+burning when you opened the door."
+
+Mitchelbourne was now entirely at his ease. He perceived that there
+was some mistake and made haste to put it right.
+
+"On the contrary," said he, "for I knew very well you were here.
+Indeed, I knocked at the door to make a necessary inquiry. You did not
+extinguish the lamp so quickly but that I saw the light beneath the
+door, and besides I watched you some five minutes through the window
+from the opposite bank of the pool at the back of the house."
+
+The officers were plainly disconcerted by the affability of Mr.
+Mitchelbourne's reply. They had evidently expected to carry off a
+triumph, not to be taken up in an argument. They had planned a stroke
+of the theatre, final and convincing, and behold the dialogue went on!
+There was a riposte to their thrust.
+
+The spokesman made some gruff noises in his throat. Then his face
+cleared.
+
+"These are dialectics," he said superbly with a wave of the hand.
+
+"Good," said the little dark fellow at his elbow, "very good!"
+
+The youth at the door nodded superciliously towards Mitchelbourne.
+
+"True, these are dialectics," said he with a smack of the lips upon
+the word. It was a good cunning scholarly word, and the man who could
+produce it so aptly worthy of admiration.
+
+"You make a further error, gentlemen," continued Mitchelbourne, "you
+no doubt are expecting some one, but you were most certainly not
+expecting me. For I am here by the purest mistake, having been
+misdirected on the way." Here the three men smiled to each other, and
+their spokesman retorted with a chuckle.
+
+"Misdirected, indeed you were. We took precautions that you should be.
+A servant of mine stationed at the parting of the roads. But we are
+forgetting our manners," he added rising from his chair. "You should
+know our names. The gentleman at the door is Cornet Lashley, this
+is Captain Bassett and I am Major Chantrell. We are all three of
+Trevelyan's regiment."
+
+"And my name," said Mitchelbourne, not to be outdone in politeness,
+"is Lewis Mitchelbourne, a gentleman of the County of Middlesex."
+
+At this each of the officers was seized with a fit of laughter;
+but before Mitchelbourne had time to resent their behavior, Major
+Chantrell said indulgently:
+
+"Well, well, we shall not quarrel about names. At all events we all
+four are lately come from Tangier."
+
+"Oh, from Tangier," cried Mitchelbourne. The riddle was becoming
+clear. That extraordinary siege when a handful of English red-coats
+unpaid and ill-fed fought a breached and broken town against countless
+hordes for the honour of their King during twenty years, had not yet
+become the property of the historian. It was still an actual war
+in 1681. Mitchelbourne understood whence came the sunburn on his
+antagonists' faces, whence the stains and the worn seams of their
+clothes. He advanced to the table and spoke with a greater respect
+than he had used.
+
+"Did one of you," he asked, "leave a Moorish pipe behind you at an inn
+of Saxmundham?"
+
+"Ah," said the Major with a reproachful glance at Captain Bassett. The
+Captain answered with some discomfort:
+
+"Yes. I made that mistake. But what does it matter? You are here none
+the less."
+
+"You have with you some of the Moorish tobacco?" continued
+Mitchelbourne.
+
+Captain Bassett fetched out of his pocket a little canvas bag, and
+handed it to Mitchelbourne, who untied the string about the neck, and
+poured some of the contents into the palm of his hand. The tobacco was
+a fine, greenish seed.
+
+"I thought as much," said Mitchelbourne, "you expected Mr. Lance
+to-night. It is Mr. Lance whom you thought to misdirect to this
+solitary house. Indeed Mr. Lance spoke of such a place in this
+neighbourhood, and had a mind to buy it."
+
+Captain Bassett suddenly raised his hand to his mouth, not so quickly,
+however, but Mitchelbourne saw the grim, amused smile upon his lips.
+"It is Mr. Lance for whom you now mistake me," he said abruptly.
+
+The young man at the door uttered a short, contemptuous laugh, Major
+Chantrell only smiled.
+
+"I am aware," said he, "that we meet for the first time to-night, but
+you presume upon that fact too far. What have you to say to this?" And
+dragging a big and battered pistol from his pocket, he tossed it upon
+the table, and folded his arms in the best transpontine manner.
+
+"And to this?" said Captain Bassett. He laid a worn leather powder
+flask beside the pistol, and tapped upon the table triumphantly.
+
+Mr. Mitchelbourne recognised clearly that villainy was somehow
+checkmated by these proceedings and virtue restored, but how he could
+not for the life of him determine. He took up the pistol.
+
+"It appears to have seen some honourable service," said he. This
+casual remark had a most startling effect upon his auditors. It was
+the spark to the gun-powder of their passions. Their affectations
+vanished in a trice.
+
+"Service, yes, but honourable! Use that lie again, Mr. Lance, and I
+will ram the butt of it down your throat!" cried Major Chantrell. He
+leaned forward over the table in a blaze of fury. Yet his face did no
+more than match the faces of his comrades.
+
+Mitchelbourne began to understand. These simple soldier-men had
+endeavoured to conduct their proceedings with great dignity and a
+judicial calmness; they had mapped out for themselves certain parts
+which they were to play as upon a stage; they were to be three stern
+imposing figures of justice; and so they had become simply absurd and
+ridiculous. Now, however, that passion had the upper hand of them,
+Mitchelbourne saw at once that he stood in deadly peril. These were
+men.
+
+"Understand me, Mr. Lance," and the Major's voice rang out firm, the
+voice of a man accustomed to obedience. "Three years ago I was in
+command of Devil's Drop, a little makeshift fort upon the sands
+outside Tangier. In front the Moors lay about us in a semicircle. Sir,
+the diameter was the line of the sea at our backs. We could not retire
+six yards without wetting our feet, not twenty without drowning. One
+night the Moors pushed their trenches up to our palisades; in the dusk
+of the morning I ordered a sortie. Nine officers went out with me and
+three came back, we three. Of the six we left behind, five fell, by my
+orders, to be sure, for I led them out; but, by the living God, you
+killed them. There's the pistol that shot my best friend down, an
+English pistol. There's the powder flask which charged the pistol, an
+English flask filled with English powder. And who sold the pistol and
+the powder to the Moors, England's enemies? You, an Englishman. But
+you have come to the end of your lane to-night. Turn and turn as you
+will you have come to the end of it."
+
+The truth was out now, and Mitchelbourne was chilled with
+apprehension. Here were three men very desperately set upon what they
+considered a mere act of justice. How was he to dissuade them? By
+argument? They would not listen to it. By proofs? He had none to offer
+them. By excuses? Of all unsupported excuses which can match for
+futility the excuse of mistaken identity? It springs immediate to the
+criminal's lips. Its mere utterance is almost a conviction.
+
+"You persist in error, Major Chantrell," he nevertheless began.
+
+"Show him the proof, Bassett," Chantrell interrupted with a shrug of
+the shoulders, and Captain Bassett drew from his pocket a folded sheet
+of paper.
+
+"Nine officers went out," continued Chantrell, "five were killed,
+three are here. The ninth was taken a prisoner into Barbary. The Moors
+brought him down to their port of Marmora to interpret. At Marmora
+your ship unloaded its stores of powder and guns. God knows how often
+it had unloaded the like cargo during these twenty years--often enough
+it seems, to give you a fancy for figuring as a gentleman in the
+county. But the one occasion of its unloading is enough. Our brother
+officer was your interpreter with the Moors, Mr. Lance. You may very
+likely know that, but this you do not know, Mr. Lance. He escaped, he
+crept into Tangier with this, your bill of lading in his hand," and
+Bassett tossed the sheet of paper towards Mitchelbourne. It fell upon
+the floor before him but he did not trouble to pick it up.
+
+"Is it Lance's death that you require?" he asked.
+
+"Yes! yes! yes!" came from each mouth.
+
+"Then already you have your wish. I do not question one word of your
+charges against Lance. I have reason to believe them true. But I am
+not Lance. Lance lies at this moment dead at Great Glemham. He died
+this afternoon of cholera. Here are his letters," and he laid the
+letters on the table. "I rode in with them at once. You do not believe
+me, but you can put my words to the test. Let one of you ride to Great
+Glemham and satisfy himself. He will be back before morning."
+
+The three officers listened so far with impassive faces, or barely
+listened, for they were as indifferent to the words as to the passion
+with which they were spoken.
+
+"We have had enough of the gentleman's ingenuities, I think," said
+Chantrell, and he made a movement towards his companions.
+
+"One moment," exclaimed Mitchelbourne. "Answer me a question! These
+letters are to the address of Mrs. Ufford at a house called 'The
+Porch.' It is near to here?"
+
+"It is the first house you passed," answered the Major and, as he
+noticed a momentary satisfaction flicker upon his victim's face, he
+added, "But you will not do well to expect help from 'The Porch'--at
+all events in time to be of much service to you. You hardly appreciate
+that we have been at some pains to come up with you. We are not
+likely again to find so many circumstances agreeing to favour us, a
+dismantled house, yourself travelling alone and off your guard in a
+country with which you are unfamiliar and where none know you, and
+just outside the window a convenient pool. Besides--besides," he broke
+out passionately, "There are the little mounds about Tangier, under
+which my friends lie," and he covered his face with his hands. "My
+friends," he cried in a hoarse and broken voice, "my soldier-men!
+Come, let's make an end. Bassett, the rope is in the corner. There's a
+noose to it. The beam across the window will serve;" and Bassett rose
+to obey.
+
+But Mitchelbourne gave them no time. His fears had altogether vanished
+before his indignation at the stupidity of these officers. He was
+boiling with anger at the thought that he must lose his life in this
+futile ignominious way for the crime of another man, who was not even
+his friend, and who besides was already dead. There was just one
+chance to escape, it seemed to him. And even as Bassett stooped to
+lift the coil of rope in the corner he took it.
+
+"So that's the way of it," he cried stepping forward. "I am to be hung
+up to a beam till I kick to death, am I? I am to be buried decently in
+that stagnant pool, am I? And you are to be miles away before sunrise,
+and no one the wiser! No, Major Chantrell, I am not come to the end of
+my lane," and before either of the three could guess what he was at,
+he had snatched up the pistol from the table and dashed the lamp into
+a thousand fragments.
+
+The flame shot up blue and high, and then came darkness.
+
+Mitchelbourne jumped lightly back from his position to the centre of
+the room. The men he had to deal with were men who would follow their
+instincts. They would feel along the walls; of so much he could be
+certain. He heard the coil of rope drop down in a corner to his left;
+so that he knew where Captain Bassett was. He heard a chair upset in
+front of him, and a man staggered against his chest. Mitchelbourne had
+the pistol still in his hand and struck hard, and the man dropped with
+a crash. The fall followed so closely upon the upsetting of the chair
+that it seemed part of the same movement and accident. It seemed so
+clearly part, that a voice spoke on Mitchelbourne's left, just where
+the empty hearth would be.
+
+"Get up! Be quick!"
+
+The voice was Major Chantrell's and Mitchelbourne had a throb of hope.
+For since it was not the Major who had fallen nor Captain Bassett, it
+must be Lashley. And Lashley had been guarding the door, of which the
+key still remained in the lock. If only he could reach the door and
+turn the key! He heard Chantrell moving stealthily along the wall upon
+his left hand and he suffered a moment's agony; for in the darkness he
+could not surely tell which way the Major moved. For if he moved to
+the window, if he had the sense to move to the window and tear aside
+those drawn curtains, the grey twilight would show the shadowy moving
+figures. Mitchelbourne's chance would be gone. And then something
+totally unexpected and unhoped for occurred. The god of the machine
+was in a freakish mood that evening. He had a mind for pranks and
+absurdities. Mitchelbourne was strung to so high a pitch that the
+ridiculous aspect of the occurrence came home to him before all else,
+and he could barely keep himself from laughing aloud. For he heard two
+men grappling and struggling silently together. Captain Bassett and
+Major Chantrell had each other by the throat, and neither of them
+had the wit to speak. They reserved their strength for the struggle.
+Mitchelbourne stepped on tiptoe to the door, felt for the key, grasped
+it without so much as a click, and then suddenly turned it, flung open
+the door and sprang out. He sprang against a fourth man--the servant,
+no doubt, who had misdirected him--and both tumbled on to the floor.
+Mitchelbourne, however, tumbled on top. He was again upon his feet
+while Major Chantrell was explaining matters to Captain Bassett;
+he was flying down the avenue of trees before the explanation was
+finished. He did not stop to untie his horse; he ran, conscious that
+there was only one place of safety for him--the interior of Mrs.
+Ufford's house. He ran along the road till he felt that his heart was
+cracking within him, expecting every moment that a hand would be laid
+upon his shoulder, or that, a pistol shot would ring out upon the
+night. He reached the house, and knocked loudly at the door. He was
+admitted, breathless, by a man, who said to him at once, with the
+smile and familiarity of an old servant:
+
+"You are expected, Mr. Lance."
+
+Mitchelbourne plumped down upon a chair and burst into uncontrollable
+laughter. He gave up all attempt for that night to establish his
+identity. The fates were too heavily against him. Besides he was now
+quite hysterical.
+
+The manservant threw open a door.
+
+"I will tell my mistress you have come, sir," said he.
+
+"No, it would never do," cried Mitchelbourne. "You see I died at three
+o'clock this afternoon. I have merely come to leave my letters of
+presentation. So much I think a proper etiquette may allow. But it
+would never do for me to be paying visits upon ladies so soon after
+an affair of so deplorable a gravity. Besides I have to be buried
+at seven in the morning, and if I chanced not to be back in time, I
+should certainly acquire a reputation for levity, which since I am
+unknown in the county, I am unwilling to incur," and, leaving the
+butler stupefied in the hall, he ran out into the road. He heard no
+sound of pursuit.
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Geoffrey," said General Faversham, "look at the clock!"
+
+The hands of the clock made the acutest of angles. It was close upon
+midnight, and ever since nine the boy had sat at the dinner-table
+listening. He had not spoken a word, indeed had barely once stirred in
+the three hours, but had sat turning a white and fascinated face upon
+speaker after speaker. At his father's warning he waked with a shock
+from his absorption, and reluctantly stood up.
+
+"Must I go, father?" he asked.
+
+The General's three guests intervened in a chorus. The conversation
+was clear gain for the lad, they declared,--a first taste of powder
+which might stand him in good stead at a future time. So Geoffrey was
+allowed furlough from his bed for another half-hour, and with his face
+supported between his hands he continued to listen at the table.
+The flames of the candles were more and more blurred with a haze of
+tobacco smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the
+wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a
+strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened
+eyes seemed preternaturally large.
+
+The stories were all of that terrible winter in the Crimea, now ten
+years past, and a fresh story was always in the telling before its
+predecessor was ended. For each of the four men had borne his share
+of that winter's wounds and privations. It was still a reality rather
+than a memory to them; they could feel, even in this hot summer
+evening and round this dinner-table, the chill of its snows, and the
+pinch of famine. Yet their recollections were not all of hardships.
+The Major told how the subalterns, of whom he had then been one, had
+cheerily played cards in the trenches three hundred yards from the
+Malakoff. One of the party was always told off to watch for shells
+from the fort's guns. If a black speck was seen in the midst of the
+cannon smoke, then the sentinel shouted, and a rush was made for
+safety, for the shell was coming their way. At night the burning fuse
+could be seen like a rocket in the air; so long as it span and flew,
+the card-players were safe, but the moment it became stationary above
+their heads it was time to run, for the shell was falling upon them.
+The guns of the Malakoff were not the rifled guns of a later decade.
+When the Major had finished, the General again looked at the clock,
+and Geoffrey said good-night.
+
+He stood outside the door listening to the muffled talk on the other
+side of the panels, and, with a shiver, lighted his candle, and held it
+aloft in the dark and silent hall. There was not one man's portrait upon
+the walls which did not glow with the colours of a uniform,--and there
+were the portraits of many men. Father and son the Faversham's had been
+soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father and son,--no
+steinkirks and plumed hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged
+coats and no high stocks. They looked down upon the boy as though
+summoning him to the like service. No distinction in uniform could
+obscure their resemblance to each other: that stood out with a
+remarkable clearness. The Favershams were men of one stamp,--lean-faced,
+hard as iron--they lacked the elasticity of steel--, rugged in feature;
+confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow
+at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly
+conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men
+of the first-class, but hardly first-class soldiers. Some of their
+faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity. The boy, however, saw none
+of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible;
+and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely
+for forgiveness. The candle shook in his hand.
+
+These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of
+torturers to Geoffrey Faversham. He sat horribly thralled, so long as
+he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.
+For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the
+Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by
+the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome
+gift of imagination. It was visible in his face, marking him off
+unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the
+hall. He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not
+but exercise that capacity. A hint was enough for the boy. Straightway
+he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men
+at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the
+midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he
+quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean
+nights this had been fraught with the most torments.
+
+His father had told a story with a lowered voice, and in his usual
+jerky way. But the gap was easy to fill up.
+
+"A Captain! Yes, and he bore one of the best names in all England.
+It seemed incredible, and mere camp rumour. But the rumour grew with
+every fight he was engaged in. At the battle of Alma the thing was
+proved. He was acting as galloper to his General. I believe, upon my
+soul, that the General chose him for this duty so that the man might
+set himself right. He was bidden to ride with a message a quarter of a
+mile, and that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept. There were enough
+men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come
+through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to
+his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his
+circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if
+he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back
+bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and
+says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's
+the truth, and shrug your shoulders. Queer, incomprehensible things
+happen. There's one of them."
+
+Geoffrey, however, understood only too well. He was familiar with many
+phases of warfare of which General Faversham took little account, such
+as, for instance, the strain and suspense of the hours between the
+parading of the troops and the first crack of a rifle. He took that
+story with him up the great staircase, past the portraits to his bed.
+He fell asleep only in the grey of the morning, and then only to dream
+of a crisis in some hard-fought battle, when, through his cowardice,
+a necessary movement was delayed, his country worsted, and those dead
+men in the hall brought to irretrievable shame. Geoffrey's power to
+foresee in one flash all the perils to be encountered, the hazards to
+be run, had taught him the hideous possibility of cowardice. He was
+now confronted with the hideous fact. He could not afterwards clear
+his mind of the memory of that evening.
+
+He grew up with it; he looked upon himself as a born coward, and all
+the time he knew that he was destined for the army. He could not have
+avoided his destiny without an explanation, and he could not explain.
+But what he could do, he did. He hunted deliberately, hoping
+that familiarity with danger would overcome the vividness of his
+anticipations. But those imagined hours before the beginnings of
+battles had their exact counterpart in the moments of waiting while
+the covers were drawn. At such times he had a map of the country-side
+before his eyes, with every ditch and fence and pit underlined and
+marked dangerous; and though he rode straight when the hounds were
+off, he rode straight with a fluttering heart. Thus he spent his
+youth. He passed into Woolwich and out of it with high honours;
+he went to India with battery, and returned home on a two years'
+furlough. He had not been home more than a week when his father broke
+one morning into his bedroom in a great excitement--
+
+"Geoff," he cried, "guess the news to-day!"
+
+Geoffrey sat up in his bed:--"Your manner, Sir, tells me the news. War
+is declared."
+
+"Between France and Germany."
+
+Geoffrey said slowly:--
+
+"My mother, Sir, was of Germany."
+
+"So we can wish that country all success."
+
+"Can we do no more?" said Geoffrey. And at breakfast-time he returned
+to the subject. The Favershams held property in Germany; influence
+might be exerted; it was only right that those who held a substantial
+stake in a country should venture something for its cause. The words
+came quite easily from Geoffrey's lips; he had been schooling himself
+to speak them ever since it had become apparent that Germany and
+France were driving to the collision of war. General Faversham laughed
+with content when he heard them.
+
+"That's a Faversham talking," said he. "But there are obstacles, my
+boy. There is the Foreign Enlistment Act, for instance. You are half
+German, to be sure, but you are an English subject, and, by the Lord!
+you are all Faversham. No, I cannot give you permission to seek
+service in Germany. You understand. I cannot give you permission," he
+repeated the words, so that the limit as well as the extent of their
+meaning might be fully understood; and as he repeated them, he
+solemnly winked. "Of course, you can go to Germany; you can follow
+the army as closely as you are allowed. In fact, I will give you some
+introductions with that end in view. You will gain experience, of
+course; but seek service,--no! To do that, as I have said, I cannot
+give you permission."
+
+The General went off chuckling to write his letters; and with them
+safely tucked away in his pocket, Geoffrey drove later in the day to
+the station.
+
+General Faversham did not encourage demonstrations. He shook his son
+cordially by the hand--
+
+"There's no way I would rather you spent your furlough. But come back,
+Geoff," said he. He was not an observant man except in the matter of
+military detail; and of Geoffrey's object he had never the slightest
+suspicion. Had it been told him, however, he would only have
+considered it one of those queer, inexplicable vagaries, like the
+history of his coward in the Crimea.
+
+Geoffrey's action, however, was of a piece with the rest of his life:
+it was due to no sudden, desperate resolve. He went out to the war as
+deliberately as he had ridden out to the hunting-field. The realities
+of battle might prove his anticipations mere unnecessary torments of
+the mind.
+
+"If only I can serve,--as a volunteer, as a private, in any capacity,"
+he thought, "I shall at all events know. And if I fail, I fail not in
+the company of my fellows. I disgrace only myself, not my name. But if
+I do not fail--" He drew a great breath, he saw himself waking up one
+morning without oppression, without the haunting dread that he
+was destined one day to slink in forgotten corners of the world a
+forgotten pariah, destitute even of the courage to end his misery. He
+went out to the war because he was afraid of fear.
+
+
+II.
+
+On the evening of the capitulation of Paris, two subalterns of
+German Artillery were seated before a camp fire on a slope of hill
+overlooking the town. To both of them the cessation of alarm was as
+yet strange and almost incomprehensible, and the sudden silence
+after so many months lived amongst the booming of cannon had even a
+disquieting effect. Both were particularly alert on this night when
+vigilance was never less needed. If a gust of wind caught the fire and
+drove the red flare of the flame like a ripple across the grass, one
+would be sure to look quickly over his shoulder, the other perhaps
+would lift a warning finger and listen to the shivering of the trees
+behind them. Then with a relaxation of his attitude he would say "All
+right" and light his pipe again at the fire. But after one such gust,
+he retained his position.
+
+"What is it, Faversham?" asked his companion.
+
+"Listen, Max," said Geoffrey; and they heard a faint jingle. The
+jingle became more distinct, another sound was added to it, the sound
+of a horse galloping over hard ground. Both officers turned their
+faces away from the yellow entrenchment with its brown streak of gun,
+below them and looked towards a roofless white-walled farmhouse on the
+left, of which the rafters rose black against the sky like a gigantic
+gallows. From behind that farmhouse an aide-de-camp galloped up to the
+fire.
+
+"I want the officer in command of this battery," he cried out and
+Geoffrey stood up.
+
+"I am in command."
+
+The aide-de-camp looked at the subaltern in an extreme surprise.
+
+"You!" he exclaimed. "Since when?"
+
+"Since yesterday," answered Faversham.
+
+"I doubt if the General knows you have been hit so hard," the
+aide-de-camp continued. "But my orders are explicit. The officer in
+command is to take sixty men and march to-morrow morning into St.
+Denis. He is to take possession of that quarter, he is to make a
+search for mines and bombs, and wait there until the German troops
+march in." There was to be no repetition, he explained, of a certain
+unfortunate affair when the Germans after occupying a surrendered fort
+had been blown to the four winds. He concluded with the comforting
+information that there were 10,000 French soldiers under arms in St.
+Denis and that discretion was therefore a quality to be much exercised
+by Faversham during his day of search. Thereupon he galloped back.
+
+Faversham remained standing a few paces from the fire looking down
+towards Paris. His companion petulantly tossed a branch upon the fire.
+
+"Luck comes your way, my friend," said he enviously.
+
+Geoffrey looked up to the stars and down again to Paris which with
+its lights had the look of a reflected starlit firmament. Individual
+lights were the separate stars and here and there a gash of fire,
+where a wide thoroughfare cleaved, made a sort of milky way.
+
+"I wonder," he answered slowly.
+
+Max started up on his elbow and looked at his friend in perplexity.
+
+"Why, you have sixty men and St. Denis to command. To-morrow may bring
+you your opportunity;" and again with the same slowness, Geoffrey
+answered, "I wonder."
+
+"You joined us after Gravelotte," continued Max, "Why?"
+
+"My mother was German," said Faversham, and turning suddenly back to
+the fire he dropped on the ground beside his companion.
+
+"Tell me," he said in a rare burst of confidence, "Do you think a
+battle is the real test of courage? Here and there men run away to be
+sure. But how many fight and fight no worse than the rest by reason of
+a sort of cowardice? Fear of their companions in arms might dominate
+fear of the enemy."
+
+"No doubt," said Max. "And you infer?"
+
+"That the only touchstone is a solitary peril. When danger comes upon
+a man and there is no one to see whether he shirks--when he has no
+friends to share his risks--that I should think would be the time when
+fear would twist a man's bowels."
+
+"I do not know," said Max. "All I am sure of is that luck comes your
+way and not mine. To-morrow you march into St. Denis."
+
+Geoffrey Faversham marched down at daybreak and formally occupied the
+quarter. The aide-de-camp's calculations were confirmed. There were at
+the least 10,000 French soldiers crowded in the district. Geoffrey's
+discretion warned against any foolish effort to disarm them; he
+simply ignored their chassepôts and bulging pouches, and searched the
+barracks, which the Germans were to occupy, from floor to ceiling.
+Late in the afternoon he was able to assure himself that his duty was
+ended. He billeted his men, and inquired whether there was a hotel
+where he could sleep the night. A French sergeant led him through the
+streets to an Inn which matched in every detail of its appearance that
+dingy quarter of the town. The plaster was peeling from its walls, the
+window panes were broken, and in the upper storey and the roof there
+were yawning jagged holes where the Prussian shells had struck. In the
+dusk the building had a strangely mean and sordid look. It recalled
+to Faversham's mind the inns in the novels of the elder Dumas and
+acquired thus something of their sinister suggestions. In the eager
+and arduous search of the day he had forgotten these apprehensions to
+which he had given voice by the camp fire. They now returned to him
+with the relaxation of his vigilance. He looked up at the forbidding
+house. "I wonder," he said to himself.
+
+He was met in the hall by a little obsequious man who was full of
+apologies for the disorder of his hostelry. He opened a door into a
+large and dusty room.
+
+"I will do my best, Monsieur," said he, "but food is not yet plentiful
+in Paris."
+
+In the centre of the room was a large mahogany table surrounded by
+chairs. The landlord began to polish the table with his napkin.
+
+"We had an ordinary, Sir, every day before the war broke out. But most
+cheerful, every chair had its regular occupant. There were certain
+jokes, too, which every day were repeated. Ah, but it was like home.
+However, all is changed as you see. It has not been safe to sit in
+this room for many a long month."
+
+Faversham unstrapped his sword and revolver from his belt and laid
+them on the table.
+
+"I saw that your house had unfortunately suffered."
+
+"Suffered!" said the garrulous little man. "It is ruined, sir, and its
+master with it. Ah, war! It is a fine thing no doubt for you young
+gentlemen, but for me? I have lived in a cellar, Sir, under the ground
+ever since your guns first woke us from our sleep. Look, I will show
+you."
+
+He went out from the dining-room into the hall and from the hall into
+the street; Faversham followed him. There was a wooden trap in the
+pavement close by the wall with an iron ring. The landlord pulled
+at the ring and raised the trap disclosing a narrow flight of stone
+steps. Faversham bent forward and peered down into a dark cellar.
+
+"Yes it is there that I have lived. Come down, Sir, and see for
+yourself;" and the landlord moved down a couple of steps. Faversham
+drew back. At once the landlord turned to him.
+
+"But there is nothing to fear, Sir," he said with a deprecatory smile.
+Faversham coloured to the roots of his hair.
+
+"Of course there is nothing," said he and he followed the landlord.
+The cellar was only lighted by the trap-door and at first Faversham
+coming out of the daylight could distinguish nothing at all. He stood,
+however, with his back to the light and in a little he began to see. A
+little truckle-bed with a patchwork counterpane stood at the end, the
+floor was merely hard earth, the furniture consisted of a stove, a
+stool and a small deal table. And as Faversham took in the poverty of
+this underground habitation, he suddenly found himself in darkness
+again. The explanation came to him at once, the entrance to the cellar
+had been blocked from the light. Yet he had heard no sound except the
+footsteps of people in the street above his head. He turned and faced
+the stair steps. As he did so, the light streamed down again; the
+obstruction had been removed, and that obstruction had not been the
+trap-door as Faversham had suspected, but merely the body of some
+inquisitive passer-by. He recognised this with relief and immediately
+heard voices speaking together, and as it seemed to him in lowered
+tones.
+
+A sword rattled on the pavement, the entrance was again darkened, but
+Faversham had just time to see that the man who stooped down wore
+the buttons of a uniform and a soldier's kepi. He kept quite still,
+holding his breath while the man peered down into the cellar. He
+remembered with a throb of hope that he had himself been unable to
+distinguish a thing in the gloom. And then the landlord knocked
+against the table and spoke aloud. At once the man at the head of
+the steps stood up. Faversham heard him cry out in French, "They are
+here," and he detected a note of exultation in the cry. At the same
+moment a picture flashed before his eyes, the picture of that dusty
+desolate dining-room up the steps, and of a long table surrounded
+by chairs, upon which lay a sword and a revolver,--his sword, his
+revolver. He had dismissed his sixty soldiers, he was alone.
+
+"This is a trap," he blurted out.
+
+"But, Sir, I do not understand," began the landlord, but Faversham cut
+him short with a whispered command for silence.
+
+The cellar darkened again, and the sound of boots rang upon the stone
+steps. A rifle besides clanged as it struck against the wall. The
+French soldiers were descending. Faversham counted them by the light
+which escaped past their legs; there were three. The landlord kept
+the silence which had been enjoined upon him but he fancied in the
+darkness that he heard some one's teeth chattering.
+
+The Frenchmen descended into the cellar and stood barring the steps.
+Their leader spoke.
+
+"I have the honour to address the Prussian officer in command of St.
+Denis."
+
+The Frenchman got no reply whatever to his words but he seemed to hear
+some one sharply draw in a breath. He spoke again into the darkness;
+for it was now impossible for any one of the five men in the cellar to
+see a hand's breadth beyond his face.
+
+"I am the Captain Plessy of Mon Vandon's Division. I have the honour
+to address the Prussian officer."
+
+This time he received an answer, quietly spoken yet with an
+inexplicable note of resignation.
+
+"I am Lieutenant Faversham in command of St. Denis."
+
+Captain Plessy stepped immediately forward, and bowed. Now as he
+dipped his shoulders in the bow a gleam of light struck over his head
+into the cellar, and--he could not be sure--but it seemed to him that
+he saw a man suddenly raise his arm as if to ward off a blow. Captain
+Plessy continued.
+
+"I ask Lieutenant Faversham for permission for myself and my two
+officers to sleep to-night at this hotel;" and now he very distinctly
+heard a long, irrepressible sigh of relief. Lieutenant Faversham gave
+him the permission he desired in a cordial, polite way. Moreover he
+added an invitation. "Your name, Captain Plessy, is well known to me
+as to all on both sides who have served in this campaign and to many
+more who have not. I beg that you and your officers will favour me
+with your company at dinner."
+
+Captain Plessy accepted the invitation and was pleased to deprecate
+the Lieutenant's high opinion of his merits. But his achievement none
+the less had been of a redoubtable character. He had broken through
+the lines about Metz and had ridden across France into Paris without
+a single companion. In the sorties from that beleaguered town he had
+successively distinguished himself by his fearless audacity. His name
+and reputation had travelled far as Lieutenant Faversham was that
+evening to learn. But Captain Plessy, for the moment, was all for
+making little of his renown.
+
+"Such small exploits should be expected from a soldier. One brave man
+may say that to another,--is it not so?--and still not be thought
+to be angling for praise," and Captain Plessy went up the steps,
+wondering who it was that had drawn the long sharp breath of suspense,
+and uttered the long sigh of immense relief. The landlord or
+Lieutenant Faversham? Captain Plessy had not been in the cellar at
+the time when the landlord had seemed to hear the chatter of a man's
+teeth.
+
+The dinner was not a pronounced success, in spite of Faversham's
+avoidance of any awkward topic. They sat at the long table in the big,
+desolate and shabby room, lighted only by a couple of tallow candles
+set up in their candlesticks upon the cloth. And the two junior
+officers maintained an air of chilly reserve and seldom spoke except
+when politeness compelled them. Faversham himself was absorbed, the
+burden of entertainment fell upon Captain Plessy. He strove nobly, he
+told stories, he drank a health to the "Camaraderie of arms," he drew
+one after the other of his companions into an interchange of words, if
+not of sympathies. But the strain told on him visibly towards the end
+of the dinner. His champagne glass had been constantly refilled, his
+face was now a trifle overflushed, his eyes beyond nature bright, and
+he loosened the belt about his waist and at a moment when Faversham
+was not looking the throat buttons of his tunic. Moreover while up
+till now he had deprecated any allusions to his reputation he now
+began to talk of it himself; and in a particularly odious way.
+
+"A reputation, Lieutenant, it has its advantages," and he blew a kiss
+with his fingers into the air to designate the sort of advantages to
+which he referred. Then he leaned on one side to avoid the candle
+between Faversham and himself.
+
+"You are English, my Commandant?" he asked.
+
+"My mother was German," replied Faversham.
+
+"But you are English yourself. Now have you ever met in England a
+certain Miss Marian Beveridge," and his leer was the most disagreeable
+thing that Faversham ever remembered to have set eyes upon.
+
+"No," he answered shortly.
+
+"And you have not heard of her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Captain Plessy leaned back in his chair and filled his glass.
+Lieutenant Faversham's tone was not that of a man inviting confidence.
+But the Captain's brains were more than a little fuddled, he repeated
+the name over to himself once or twice with the chuckle which asks for
+questions, and since the questions did not come, he must needs proceed
+of his own accord.
+
+"But I must cross to England myself. I must see this Miss Marian
+Beveridge. Ah, but your English girls are strange, name of Heaven,
+they are very strange."
+
+Lieutenant Faversham made a movement. The Captain was his guest, he
+was bound to save him if he could from a breach of manners and saw no
+way but this of breaking up the party. Captain Plessy, however, was
+too quick for him, he lifted his hand to his breast.
+
+"You wish for something to smoke. It is true, we have forgotten to
+smoke, but I have my cigarettes and I beg you to try them, the tobacco
+I think is good and you will be saved the trouble of moving."
+
+He opened the case and reached it over to Faversham. But as Faversham
+with a word of thanks took a cigarette, the Captain upset the case
+as though by inadvertence. There fell out upon the table under
+Faversham's eyes not merely the cigarettes, but some of the Captain's
+visiting-cards and a letter. The letter was addressed to Captain
+Plessy in a firm character but it was plainly the writing of a woman.
+Faversham picked it up and at once handed it back to Plessy.
+
+"Ah," said Plessy with a start of surprise, "Was the letter indeed in
+the case?" and he fondled it in his hands and finally kissed it with
+the upturned eyes of a cheap opera singer. "A pigeon, Sir, flew with
+it into Paris. Happy pigeon that could be the bearer of such sweet
+messages."
+
+He took out the letter from the envelope and read a line or two with a
+sigh, and another line or two with a laugh.
+
+"But your English girls are strange!" he said again. "Here is an
+instance, an example, fallen by accident from my cigarette-case. M. le
+Commandant, I will read it to you, that you may see how strange they
+are."
+
+One of Plessy's subalterns extended his hand and laid it on his
+sleeve. Plessy turned upon him angrily, and the subaltern withdrew his
+hand.
+
+"I will read it to you," he said again to Faversham. Faversham did
+not protest nor did he now make any effort to move. But his face grew
+pale, he shivered once or twice, his eyes seemed to be taking the
+measure of Plessy's strength, his brain to be calculating upon his
+prowess; the sweat began to gather upon his forehead.
+
+Of these signs, however, Plessy took no note. He had reached however
+inartistically the point at which he had been aiming.
+
+He was no longer to be baulked of reading his letter. He read it
+through to the end, and Faversham listened to the end. It told its own
+story. It was the letter of a girl who wrote in a frank impulse of
+admiration to a man whom she did not know. There was nowhere a trace
+of coquetry, nowhere the expression of a single sentimentality. Its
+tone was pure friendliness, it was the work of a quite innocent girl
+who because she knew the man to whom she wrote to be brave, therefore
+believed him to be honourable. She expressed her trust in the very
+last words. "You will not of course show this letter to any one in the
+world. But I wrong you even by mentioning such an impossibility."
+
+"But you have shown it," said Faversham.
+
+His face was now grown of an extraordinary pallor, his lips twitched
+as he spoke and his fingers worked in a nervous uneasy manner upon the
+table-cloth. Captain Plessy was in far too complacent a mood to notice
+such trifles. His vanity was satisfied, the world was a rosy mist
+with a sparkle of champagne, and he answered lightly as he unfastened
+another button of his tunic.
+
+"No, my friend, I have not shown it. I keep the lady's wish."
+
+"You have read it aloud. It is the same thing."
+
+"Pardon me. Had I shown the letter I should have shown the name. And
+that would have been a dishonour of which a gallant man is incapable,
+is it not so? I read it and I did not read the name."
+
+"But you took pains, Captain Plessy, that we should know the name
+before you read the letter."
+
+"I? Did I mention a name?" exclaimed Plessy with an air of concern and
+a smile upon his mouth which gave the lie to the concern. "Ah, yes,
+a long while ago. But did I say it was the name of the lady who had
+written the letter? Indeed, no. You make a slight mistake, my friend.
+I bear no malice for it--believe me, upon my heart, no! After a dinner
+and a little bottle of champagne, there is nothing more pardonable.
+But I will tell you why I read the letter."
+
+"If you please," said Faversham, and the gravity of his tone struck
+upon his companion suddenly as something unexpected and noteworthy.
+Plessy drew himself together and for the first time took stock of his
+host as of a possible adversary. He remarked the agitation of his
+face, the beads of perspiration upon his forehead, the restless
+fingers, and beyond all these a certain hunted look in the eyes with
+which his experience had made him familiar. He nodded his head once or
+twice slowly as though he were coming to a definite conclusion about
+Faversham. Then he sat bolt upright.
+
+"Ah," said he with a laugh. "I can answer a question which puzzled me
+a little this afternoon," and he sank back again in his chair with an
+easy confidence and puffed the smoke of his cigarette from his mouth.
+Faversham was not sufficiently composed to consider the meaning of
+Plessy's remark. He put it aside from his thoughts as an evasion.
+
+"You were to tell me, I think, why you read the letter."
+
+"Certainly," answered Plessy. He twirled his moustache, his voice had
+lost its suavity and had taken on an accent of almost contemptuous
+raillery. He even winked at his two brother officers, he was beginning
+to play with Faversham. "I read the letter to illustrate how strange,
+how very strange, are your English girls. Here is one of them who
+writes to me. I am grateful--oh, beyond words, but I think to myself
+what a different thing the letter would be if it had been written by
+a Frenchwoman. There would have been some hints, nothing definite you
+understand, but a suggestion, a delicate, provoking suggestion of
+herself, like a perfume to sting one into a desire for a nearer
+acquaintance. She would delicately and without any appearance of
+intention have permitted me to know her colour, perhaps her height,
+perhaps even to catch an elusive glimpse of her face. Very likely a
+silk thread of hair would have been left inadvertently clinging to
+a sheet of the paper. She would sketch perhaps her home and speak
+remorsefully of her boldness in writing. Oh, but I can imagine the
+letter, full of pretty subtleties, alluring from its omissions, a
+vexation and a delight from end to end. But this, my friend!" He
+tossed the letter carelessly upon the table-cloth. "I am grateful from
+the bottom of my heart, but it has no art."
+
+At once Geoffrey Faversham's hand reached out and closed upon the
+letter.
+
+"You have told me why you have read it aloud."
+
+"Yes," said Plessy, a little disconcerted by the quickness of
+Faversham's movement.
+
+"Now I will tell you why I allowed you to read it to the end. I was of
+the same mind as that English girl whose name we both know. I could
+not believe that a man, brave as I knew you to be, could outside his
+bravery be so contemptible."
+
+The words were brought out with a distinct effort. None the less they
+were distinctly spoken.
+
+A startled exclamation broke from the two subalterns. Plessy commenced
+to bluster.
+
+"Sir, do I understand you?" and he saw Faversham standing above him,
+in a quiver of excitement.
+
+"You will hold your tongue, Captain Plessy, until I have finished. I
+allowed you to read the letter, never thinking but that some pang of
+forgotten honour would paralyse your tongue. You read it to the
+end. You complain there is no art in it, that it has no delicate
+provocations, such as your own countrywomen would not fail to use. It
+should be the more sacred on that account, and I am glad to believe
+that you misjudge your country women. Captain Plessy, I acknowledge
+that as you read out that letter with its simple, friendly expression
+of gratitude for the spectacle of a brave man, I envied you heartily,
+I would have been very proud to have received it. I would have much
+liked to know that some deed which I had done had made the world for
+a moment brighter to some one a long way off with whom I was not
+acquainted. Captain Plessy, I shall not allow you to keep this letter.
+You shall not read it aloud again."
+
+Faversham thrust the letter into the flame of the candle which stood
+between Plessy and himself. Plessy sprang up and blew the candle out;
+but little colourless flames were already licking along the envelope.
+Faversham held the letter downwards by a corner and the colourless
+flame flickered up into a tongue of yellow, the paper charred and
+curled in the track of the flames, the flames leapt to Faversham's
+fingers; he dropped the burning letter on the floor and crushed it
+with his foot. Then he looked at Plessy and waited. He was as white as
+the table-cloth, his dark eyes seemed to have sunk into his head
+and burned unnaturally bright, every nerve in his body seemed to be
+twitching; he looked very like the young boy who used to sit at the
+dinner-table on Crimean nights and listen in a quiver to the appalling
+stories of his father's guests. As he had been silent then, so he was
+silent now. He waited for Captain Plessy to speak. Captain Plessy,
+however, was in no hurry to begin. He had completely lost his air of
+contemptuous raillery, he was measuring Faversham warily with the eyes
+of a connoisseur.
+
+"You have insulted me," he said abruptly, and he heard again that
+indrawing of the breath which he had remarked that afternoon in the
+cellar. He also heard Faversham speak immediately after he had drawn
+the breath.
+
+"There are reparations for insults," said Faversham.
+
+Captain Plessy bowed. He was now almost as sober as when he had sat
+down to his dinner.
+
+"We will choose a time and place," said he.
+
+"There can be no better time than now," suddenly cried Faversham, "no
+better place than this. You have two friends of whom with your leave I
+will borrow one. We have a large room and a candle apiece to fight
+by. To-morrow my duties begin again. We will fight to-night, Captain
+Plessy, to-night," and he leaned forward almost feverishly, his words
+had almost the accent of a prayer. The two subalterns rose from their
+chairs, but Plessy motioned them to keep still. Then he seized the
+candle which he had himself blown out, lighted it from the candle at
+the far end of the table and held it up above his head so that
+the light fell clearly upon Faversham's face. He stood looking at
+Faversham for an appreciable time. Then he said quietly,
+
+"I will not fight you to-night."
+
+One of the subalterns started up, the other merely turned his head
+towards Plessy, but both stared at their Captain with an unfeigned
+astonishment and an unfeigned disappointment. Faversham continued to
+plead.
+
+"But you must to-night, for to-morrow you cannot. To-night I am alone
+here, to-night I give orders, to-morrow I receive them. You have your
+sword at your side to-night. Will you be wearing it to-morrow? I pray
+you gentlemen to help me," he said turning to the subalterns, and he
+began to push the heavy table from the centre of the room.
+
+"I will not fight you to-night, Lieutenant," Captain Plessy replied.
+
+"And why?" asked Faversham ceasing from his work. He made a gesture
+which had more of despair than of impatience.
+
+Captain Plessy gave his reason. It rang false to every man in the
+room and indeed he made no attempt to give to it any appearance of
+sincerity. It was a deliberate excuse and not his reason.
+
+"Because you are the Prussian officer in command and the Prussian
+troops march into St. Denis to-morrow. Suppose that I kill you, what
+sort of penalty should I suffer at their hands?"
+
+"None," exclaimed Faversham. "We can draw up an account of the
+quarrel, here now. Look here is paper and ink and as luck will have it
+a pen that will write. I will write an account with my own hand, and
+the four of us can sign it. Besides if you kill me, you can escape
+into Paris."
+
+"I will not fight you to-night," said Captain Plessy and he set down
+the candle upon the table. Then with an elaborate correctness he drew
+his sword from its scabbard and offered the handle of it to Faversham.
+
+"Lieutenant, you are in command of St. Denis. I am your prisoner of
+war."
+
+Faversham stood for a moment or two with his hands clenched. The light
+had gone out of his face.
+
+"I have no authority to make prisoners," he said. He took up one of
+the candles, gazed at his guest in perplexity.
+
+"You have not given me your real reason, Captain Plessy," he said.
+Captain Plessy did not answer a word.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," said Faversham and Captain Plessy bowed
+deeply as Faversham left the room.
+
+A silence of some duration followed upon the closing of the door. The
+two subalterns were as perplexed as Faversham to account for their
+hero's conduct. They sat dumb and displeased. Plessy stood for a
+moment thoughtfully, then he made a gesture with his hands as though
+to brush the whole incident from his mind and taking a cigarette from
+his case proceeded to light it at the candle. As he stooped to the
+flame he noticed the glum countenances of his brother-officers, and
+laughed carelessly.
+
+"You are not pleased with me, my friends," said he as he threw himself
+on to a couch which stood against the wall opposite to his companions.
+"You think I did not speak the truth when I gave the reason of my
+refusal? Well you are right. I will give you the real reason why I
+would not fight. It is very simple. I do not wish to be killed. I know
+these white-faced, trembling men--there are no men more terrible. They
+may run away but if they do not, if they string themselves to
+the point of action--take the word of a soldier older than
+yourselves--then is the time to climb trees. To-morrow I would very
+likely kill our young friend, he would have had time to think, to
+picture to himself the little point of steel glittering towards his
+heart--but to-night he would assuredly have killed me. But as I say I
+do not wish to be killed. You are satisfied?"
+
+It appeared that they were not. They sat with all the appearances
+of discontent. They had no words for Captain Plessy. Captain Plessy
+accordingly rose lightly from his seat.
+
+"Ah," said he, "my good friend the Lieutenant has after all left me my
+sword. The table too is already pushed sufficiently on one side.
+There is only one candle to be sure, but it will serve. You are not
+satisfied, gentlemen? Then--" But both subalterns now hastened to
+assure Captain Plessy that they considered his conduct had been
+entirely justified.
+
+
+
+
+THE DESERTER.
+
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier of the 69th regiment, which belonged to the first
+brigade of the first division of the army of the Rhine, was summoned
+to the Belletonge farm just as it was getting dusk. The Lieutenant
+hurried thither, for the Belletonge farm opposite the woods of
+Colombey was the headquarters of the General of his division.
+
+"I have been instructed," said General Montaudon, "to select an
+officer for a special duty. I have selected you."
+
+Now for days Lieutenant Fevrier's duties had begun and ended with him
+driving the soldiers of his company from eating unripe fruit; and
+here, unexpectedly, he was chosen from all the officers of his
+division for a particular exploit. The Lieutenant trembled with
+emotion.
+
+"My General!" he cried.
+
+The General himself was moved.
+
+"What your task will be," he continued, "I do not known. You will go
+at once to the Mareschal's headquarters when the chief of the staff,
+General Jarras, will inform you."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier went immediately up to Metz. His division was
+entrenched on the right bank of the Mosel and beyond the forts, so
+that it was dark before he passed through the gates. He had never once
+been in Metz before; he had grown used to the monotony of camps; he
+had expected shuttered windows and deserted roads, and so the aspect
+of the town amazed him beyond measure. Instead of a town besieged, it
+seemed a town during a fairing. There were railway carriages, it is
+true, in the Place Royale doing duty as hospitals; the provision
+shops, too, were bare, and there were no horses visible.
+
+But on the other hand, everywhere was a blaze of light and a bustle of
+people coming and going upon the footpaths. The cafés glittered and
+rang with noise. Here one little fat burgher was shouting that the
+town-guard was worth all the red-legs in the trenches; another as
+loudly was criticising the tactics of Bazaine and comparing him for
+his invisibility to a pasha in his seraglio; while a third sprang upon
+a table and announced fresh victories. An army was already on the way
+from Paris to relieve Metz. Only yesterday MacMahon had defeated the
+Prussians, any moment he might be expected from the Ardennes. Nor were
+they only civilians who shouted and complained. Lieutenant Fevrier saw
+captains, majors, and even generals who had left their entrenchments
+to fight the siege their own way with dominoes upon the marble tables
+of the cabarets.
+
+"My poor France," he said to himself, and a passer-by overhearing him
+answered:
+
+"True, monsieur. Ah, but if we had a man at Metz!"
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier turned his back upon the speaker and walked on.
+He at all events would not join in the criticisms. It was just, he
+reflected, because he had avoided the cafés of Metz that he was
+singled out for special distinction, and he fell to wondering what
+work it was he had to do that night. Was it to surprise a field-watch?
+Or to spike a battery? Or to capture a convoy? Lieutenant Fevrier
+raised his head. For any exploit in the world he was ready.
+
+General Jarras was writing at a table when Fevrier was admitted to his
+office. The Chief of the Staff inclined his lamp-shade so that the
+light fell full upon Fevrier's face, and the action caused the
+lieutenant to rejoice. So much care in the choice of the officer meant
+so much more important a duty.
+
+"The General Montaudon tells me," said Jarras, "that you are an
+obedient soldier."
+
+"Obedience, my General, is the soldier's first lesson."
+
+"That explains to me why it is first forgotten," answered Jarras,
+drily. Then his voice became sharp and curt. "You will choose fifty
+men. You will pick them carefully."
+
+"They shall be the best soldiers in the regiment," said Fevrier.
+
+"No, the worst."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier was puzzled. When dangers were to be encountered,
+when audacity was needed, one requires the best soldiers. That was
+obvious, unless the mission meant annihilation. That thought came to
+Fevrier, and remembering the cafés and the officers dishonouring their
+uniforms, he drew himself up proudly and saluted. Already he saw his
+dead body recovered from the enemy, and borne to the grave beneath a
+tricolour. He heard the lamentations of his friends, and the firing
+of the platoon. He saw General Montaudon in tears. He was shaken with
+emotion. But Jarras's next words fell upon him like cold water.
+
+"You will parade your fifty men unarmed. You will march out of the
+lines, and to-morrow morning as soon as it is light enough for the
+Prussians to see you come unarmed you will desert to them. There are
+too many mouths to feed in Metz[A]."
+
+[Footnote A: See the Daily News War Correspondence, 1870.]
+
+The Lieutenant had it on his lips to shout, "Then why not lead us out
+to die?" But he kept silence. He could have flung his kepi in the
+General's face; but he saluted. He went out again into the streets
+and among the lighted cafés and reeled like a drunken man, thinking
+confusedly of many things; that he had a mother in Paris who might
+hear of his desertion before she heard of its explanation; that it was
+right to claim obedience but _lâche_ to exact dishonour--but chiefly
+and above all that if he had been wise, and had made light of his
+duty, and had come up to Metz to re-arrange the campaign with dominoes
+on the marble-tables, he would not have been specially selected for
+ignominy. It was true, it needed an obedient officer to desert! And
+so laughing aloud he reeled blindly down to the gates of Metz. And
+it happened that just by the gates a civilian looked after him, and
+shrugging his shoulders, remarked, "Ah! But if we had a _Man_ at
+Metz!"
+
+From Metz Lieutenant Fevrier ran. The night air struck cool upon him.
+And he ran and stumbled and fell and picked himself up and ran again
+until he reached the Belletonge farm.
+
+"The General," he cried, and so to the General a mud-plastered figure
+with a white, tormented face was admitted.
+
+"What is it?" asked Montaudon. "What will this say?"
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier stood with the palms of his hands extended,
+speechless like an animal in pain. Then he suddenly burst into tears
+and wept, and told of the fine plan to diminish the demands upon the
+commissariat.
+
+"Courage, my old one!" said the General. "I had a fear of this. You
+are not alone--other officers in other divisions have the same hard
+duty," and there was no inflection in the voice to tell Fevrier what
+his General thought of the duty. But a hand was laid soothingly upon
+his shoulder, and that told him. He took heart to whisper that he had
+a mother in Paris.
+
+"I will write to her," said Montaudon. "She will be proud when she
+receives the letter."
+
+Then Lieutenant Fevrier, being French, took the General's hand and
+kissed it, and the General, being French, felt his throat fill with
+tears.
+
+Fevrier left the headquarters, paraded his men, laid his sword and
+revolver on the ground, and ordered his fifty to pile their arms. Then
+he made them a speech--a very short speech, but it cost him much to
+make it in an even voice.
+
+"My braves," said he, "my fellow-soldiers, it is easy to fight for
+one's country, it is not difficult to die for it. But the supreme test
+of patriotism is willingly to suffer shame for it. That test your
+country now claims of you. Attention! March!"
+
+For the last time he exchanged a password with a French sentinel, and
+tramped out into the belt of ground between the French outposts and
+the Prussian field-watch. Now in this belt there stood a little
+village which Fevrier had held with skill and honour all the two
+days of the battle of Noisseville. Doubtless that recollection had
+something to do with his choice of the village. For in his martyrdom
+of shame he had fallen to wonder whether after all he had not deserved
+it, and any reassurance such as the gaping house-walls of Vaudère
+would bring to him, was eagerly welcomed. There was another reason,
+however, in the position of the village.
+
+It stood in an abrupt valley at the foot of a steep vine-hill on the
+summit, and which was the Prussian forepost. The Prussian field-watch
+would be even nearer to Vaudère and dispersed amongst the vines. So
+he could get his ignominious work over quickly in the morning. The
+village would provide, too, safe quarters for the night, since it
+was well within range of the heavy guns in Fort St. Julien, and the
+Prussians on that account were unable to hold it.
+
+He led his fifty soldiers then northwestward from his camp, skirted
+the Bois de Grimont, and marched into the village. The night was dark,
+and the sky so overhung with clouds that not a star was visible. The
+one street of Vaudère was absolutely silent. The glimmering white
+cottages showed their black rents on either side, but never the light
+of a candle behind any shutter. Lieutenant Fevrier left his men at the
+western or Frenchward end of the street, and went forward alone.
+
+The doors of the houses stood open. The path was encumbered with the
+wreckage of their contents, and every now and then he smelt a whiff of
+paraffin, as though lamps had been broken or cans overset. Vaudère had
+been looted, but there were no Prussians now in the village.
+
+He made sure of this by walking as far as the large house at the head
+of the village. Then he went back to his men and led them forward
+until he reached the general shop which every village has.
+
+"It is not likely," he said, "that we shall find even the makeshift of
+a supper. But courage, my friends, let us try!"
+
+He could not have eaten a crust himself, but it had become an instinct
+with him to anticipate the needs of his privates, and he acted from
+habit. They crowded into the shop; one man shut the door, Fevrier
+lighted a match and disclosed by its light staved-in barrels, empty
+cannisters, broken boxes, fragments of lemonade bottles, but of food
+not so much as a stale biscuit.
+
+"Go upstairs and search."
+
+They went and returned empty-handed.
+
+"We have found nothing, monsieur," said they.
+
+"But I have," replied Fevrier, and striking another match he held up
+what he had found, dirty and crumpled, in a corner of the shop. It
+was a little tricolour flag of painted linen upon a bamboo stick, a
+child's cheap and gaudy toy. But Fevrier held it up solemnly, and of
+the fifty deserters no one laughed.
+
+"The flag of the Patrie," said Fevrier, and with one accord the
+deserters uncovered.
+
+The match burned down to Fevrier's fingers, he dropped it and trod
+upon it and there was a moment's absolute stillness. Then in the
+darkness a ringing voice leapt out.
+
+"Vive la France!"
+
+It was not the lieutenant's voice, but the voice of a peasant from the
+south of the Loire, one of the deserters.
+
+"Ah, but that is fine, that cry," said Fevrier.
+
+He could have embraced that private on both cheeks. There was love in
+that cry, pain as well--it could not be otherwise--but above all a
+very passion of confidence.
+
+"Again!" said Fevrier; and this time all his men took it up, shouting
+it out, exultantly. The little ruined shop, in itself a contradiction
+of the cry, rang out and clattered with the noise until it seemed to
+Fevrier that it must surely pierce across the country into Metz and
+pluck the Mareschal in his headquarters from his diffidence. But they
+were only fifty deserters in a deserted village, lost in the darkness,
+and more likely to be overheard by the Prussian sentries than by any
+of their own blood.
+
+It was Fevrier who first saw the danger of their ebullition. He cut it
+short by ordering them to seek quarters where they could sleep until
+daybreak. For himself, he thrust the little toy flag in his breast and
+walked forward to the larger house at the end of the village beneath
+the vine-hill; and as he walked, again the smell of paraffin was
+forced upon his nostrils.
+
+He walked more slowly. That odour of paraffin began to seem
+remarkable. The looting of the village had not occurred to-day, for
+there had been thick dust about the general shop. But the paraffin had
+surely been freshly spilt, or the odour would have evaporated.
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier walked on thinking this over. He found the broken
+door of his house, and still thinking it over, mounted the stairs.
+There was a door fronting the stairs. He felt for the handle and
+opened it, and from a corner of the room a voice challenged him in
+German.
+
+Fevrier was fairly startled. There were Germans in the village after
+all. He explained to himself now the smell of paraffin. Meanwhile he
+did not answer; neither did he move; neither did he hear any movement.
+He had forgotten for the moment that he was a deserter, and he stood
+holding his breath and listening. There was a tiny window opposite to
+the door, but it only declared itself a window, it gave no light. And
+illusions came to Lieutenant Fevrier, such as will come to the bravest
+man so long as he listens hard enough in the dark--illusions of
+stealthy footsteps on the floor, of hands scraping and feeling along
+the walls, of a man's breathing upon his neck, of many infinitesimal
+noises and movements close by.
+
+The challenge was repeated and Fevrier remembered his orders.
+
+"I am Lieutenant Fevrier of Montaudon's division."
+
+"You are alone."
+
+Fevrier now distinguished that the voice came from the right-hand
+corner of the room, and that it was faint.
+
+"I have fifty men with me. We are deserters," he blurted out, "and
+unarmed."
+
+There followed silence, and a long silence. Then the voice spoke
+again, but in French, and the French of a native.
+
+"My friend, your voice is not the voice of a deserter. There is too
+much humiliation in it. Come to my bedside here. I spoke in German,
+expecting Germans. But I am the curé of Vaudère. Why are you
+deserters?"
+
+Fevrier had expected a scornful order to marshal his men as prisoners.
+The extraordinary gentleness of the curé's voice almost overcame him.
+He walked across to the bedside and told his story. The curé basely
+heard him out.
+
+"It is right to obey," said he, "but here you can obey and disobey.
+You can relieve Metz of your appetites, my friend, but you need not
+desert." The curé reached up, and drawing Fevrier down, laid a hand
+upon his head. "I consecrate you to the service of your country. Do
+you understand?"
+
+Fevrier leaned his mouth towards the curé's ear.
+
+"The Prussians are coming to-night to burn the village."
+
+"Yes, they came at dusk."
+
+Just at the moment, in fact, when Fevrier had been summoned to Metz,
+the Prussians had crept down into Vaudère and had been scared back to
+their répli by a false alarm.
+
+"But they will come back you may be sure," said the curé, and raising
+himself upon his elbow he said in a voice of suspense "Listen!"
+
+Fevrier went to the window and opened it. It faced the hill-side, but
+no sounds came through it beyond the natural murmurs of the night. The
+curé sank back.
+
+"After the fight here, there were dead soldiers in the streets--French
+soldiers and so French chassepôts. Ah, my friend, the Prussians have
+found out which is the better rifle--the chassepôt or the needle gun.
+After your retreat they came down the hill for those chassepôts. They
+could not find one. They searched every house, they came here and
+questioned me. Finally they caught one of the villagers hiding in a
+field, and he was afraid and he told where the rifles had been buried.
+The Prussians dug for them and the hole was empty. They believe they
+are still hidden somewhere in the village; they fancy, too, that there
+are secret stores of food; so they mean to burn the houses to the
+ground. They did not know that I was here this afternoon. I would have
+come into the French lines had it been possible, but I am tied here to
+my bed. No doubt God had sent you to me--you and your fifty men. You
+need not desert. You can make your last stand here for France."
+
+"And perish," cried Fevrier, caught up from the depths of his
+humiliation, "as Frenchmen should, arms in hand." Then his voice
+dropped again. "But we have no arms."
+
+The curé shook the lieutenant's arm gently.
+
+"Did I not tell you the chassepôts were not found? And why? Because
+too many knew where they were hidden. Because out of that many I
+feared there might be one to betray. There is always a Judas. So I got
+one man whom I knew, and he dug them up and hid them afresh."
+
+"Where, father?"
+
+The question was put with a feverish eagerness--it seemed to the curé
+with an eagerness too feverish. He drew his hand, his whole body away.
+
+"You have matches? Light one!" he said, in a startled voice.
+
+"But the window--!"
+
+"Light one!"
+
+Every moment of time was now of value. Fevrier took the risk and lit
+the match, shading it from the window so far as he could with his
+hand.
+
+"That will do."
+
+Fevrier blew out the light. The curé had seen him, his uniform and his
+features. He, too, had seen the curé, had noticed his thin emaciated
+face, and the eyes staring out of it feverishly bright and
+preternaturally large.
+
+"Shall I tell you your malady, father?" he said gently. "It is
+starvation."
+
+"What will you, my son? I am alone. There is not a crust from one end
+of Vaudère to the other. You cannot help me. Help France! Go to the
+church, stand with your back to the door, turn left, and advance
+straight to the churchyard wall. You will find a new grave there, the
+rifles in the grave. Quick! There is a spade in the tower. Quick! The
+rifles are wrapped from the damp, the cartridges too. Quick! Quick!"
+
+Fevrier hurried downstairs, roused three of his soldiers, bade one of
+them go from house to house and bring the soldiers in silence to the
+churchyard, and with the others he went thither himself. In groups of
+two and three the men crept through the street, and gathered about
+the grave. It was already open. The spade was driven hard and quick,
+deeper and deeper, and at last rang upon metal. There were seventy
+chassepôts, complete with bayonets and ammunition. Fifty-one were
+handed out, the remaining nineteen were hastily covered in again.
+Fevrier was immeasurably cheered to notice his men clutch at their
+weapons and fondle them, hold them to their shoulders taking aim, and
+work the breech-blocks.
+
+"It is like meeting old friends, is it not, my children, or rather
+new sweethearts?" said he. "Come! The Prussians may advance from
+the Brasserie at Lanvallier, from Servigny, from Montay, or from
+Noisseville, straight down the hill. The last direction is the most
+likely, but we must make no mistake. Ten men will watch on the
+Lanvallier road, ten on the Servigny, ten on the Montay, twenty will
+follow me. March!"
+
+An hour ago Lieutenant Fevrier was in command of fifty men who
+slouched along with their hands in their pockets, robbed even of
+self-respect. Now he had fifty armed and disciplined soldiers, men
+alert and inspired. So much difference a chassepôt apiece had made.
+Lieutenant Fevrier was moved to the conception of another plan; and to
+prepare the way for its execution, he left his twenty men in a house
+at the Prussian end of Vaudère, and himself crept in among the vines
+and up the hill.
+
+Somewhere near to him would be the sentries of the field-watch. He
+went down upon his hands and knees and crawled, parting the vine
+leaves, that the swish of them might not betray him. In a little knoll
+high above his head he heard the cracking of wood, the sound of men
+stumbling. The Prussians were coming down to Vaudère. He lay flat
+upon the ground waiting and waiting; and the sounds grew louder and
+approached. At last he heard that for which he waited--the challenge
+of the field-watch, the answer of the burning-party. It came down to
+him quite clearly through the windless air. "Sadowa."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier turned about chuckling. It seemed that in some
+respects the world after all was not going so ill with him that night.
+He crawled downwards as quickly as he could. But it was now more than
+even inspiration that he should not be detected. He dared not stand
+up and run; he must still keep upon his hands and knees. His arms so
+ached that he was forced now and then to stop and lie prone to give
+them ease; he was soaked through and through with perspiration; his
+blood hammered at his temples; he felt his spine weaken as though the
+marrow had melted into water; and his heart throbbed until the effort
+to breathe was a pain. But he reached the bottom of the hill, he got
+refuge amongst his men, he even had time to give his orders before the
+tread of the first Prussian was heard in the street.
+
+"They will make for the other end of Vaudère. They will give the
+village first as near to the French lines as it reaches and light the
+rest as they retreat. Let them go forward! We will cut them off. And
+remember, the bayonet! A shot will bring the Prussians down in force.
+It will bring the French too, so there is just the chance we may find
+the enemy as silent as ourselves."
+
+But the plan was to undergo alteration. For as Lieutenant Fevrier
+ended, the Prussians marched in single file into the street and
+halted. Fevrier from the corner within his doorway counted them; there
+were twenty-three in all. Well, he had twenty besides himself, and the
+advantage of the surprise; and thirty more upon the other roads, for
+whom, however, he had other work in mind. The officer in command of
+the Prussians carried a dark lantern, and he now turned the slide, so
+that the light shone out.
+
+His men fell out of their rank, some to make a cursory search, others
+to sprinkle yet more paraffin. One man came close to Fevrier's
+doorway, and even looked in, but he saw nothing, though Fevrier was
+within six feet of him, holding his breath. Then the officer closed
+his lantern, the men re-formed and marched on. But they left behind
+with Lieutenant Fevrier--an idea.
+
+He thought it quickly over. It pleased him, it was feasible, and there
+was comedy in it. Lieutenant Fevrier laughed again, his spirits were
+rising, and the world was not after all going so ill with him.
+
+He had noticed by the lantern light that the Prussians had not
+re-formed in the same order. They were in single file again, but the
+man who marched last before the halt, did not march last after it.
+Each soldier, as he came up, fell in in the rear of the file. Now
+Fevrier had in the darkness experienced some difficulty in counting
+the number of Prussians, although he had strained his eyes to that
+end.
+
+He whispered accordingly some brief instructions to his men; he sent
+a message to the ten on the Servigny road, and when the Prussians
+marched on after their second halt, Lieutenant Fevrier and two
+Frenchmen fell in behind them. The same procedure was followed at the
+next halt and at the next; so that when the Prussians reached the
+Frenchward end of Vaudère there were twenty-three Prussians and ten
+Frenchmen in the file. To Fevrier's thinking it was sufficiently
+comic. There was something artistic about it too.
+
+Fevrier was pleased, but he had not counted on the quick Prussian
+step to which his soldiers were unaccustomed. At the fourth halt, the
+officer moved unsuspiciously first on one side of the street, then on
+the other, but gave no order to his men to fall out. It seemed that
+he had forgotten, until he came suddenly running down the file and
+flashed his lantern into Fevrier's face. He had been secretly counting
+his men.
+
+"The French," he cried. "Load!"
+
+The one word quite compensated Fevrier for the detection. The Germans
+had come down into Vaudère with their rifles unloaded, lest an
+accidental discharge should betray their neighbourhood to the French.
+
+"Load!" cried the German. And slipping back he tugged at the revolver
+in his belt. But before he could draw it out, Fevrier dashed his
+bayonet through the lantern and hung it on the officer's heart. He
+whistled, and his other ten men came running down the street.
+
+"Vorwarts," shouted Fevrier, derisively. "Immer Vorwarts."
+
+The Prussians surprised, and ignorant how many they had to face, fell
+back in disorder against a house-wall. The French soldiers dashed at
+them in the darkness, engaging them so that not a man had the chance
+to load.
+
+That little fight in the dark street between the white-ruined cottages
+made Fevrier's blood dance.
+
+"Courage!" he cried. "The paraffin!"
+
+The combatants were well matched, and it was hand-to-hand and
+bayonet-to-bayonet. Fevrier loved his enemies at that moment. It even
+occurred to him that it was worth while to have deserted. After the
+sense of disgrace, the prospect of imprisonment and dishonour, it
+was all wonderful to him--the feel of the thick coat yielding to the
+bayonet point, the fatigue of the beaten opponent, the vigour of the
+new one, the feeling of injury and unfairness when a Prussian he had
+wounded dropped in falling the butt of a rifle upon his toes.
+
+Once he cried, "_Voila pour la patrie_!" but for the rest he fought in
+silence, as did the others, having other uses for their breath. All
+that could be heard was a loud and laborious panting, as of wrestlers
+in a match, the clang of rifle crossing rifle, the rattle of bayonet
+guarding bayonet, and now and then a groan and a heavy fall. One
+Prussian escaped and ran; but the ten who had been stationed on the
+Servigny road were now guarding the entrance from Noisseville. Fevrier
+had no fears of him. He pressed upon a new man, drove him against the
+wall, and the man shouted in despair:
+
+"_A moi_!"
+
+"You, Philippe?" exclaimed Fevrier.
+
+"That was a timely cry," and he sprang back. There were six men
+standing, and the six saluted Fevrier; they were all Frenchmen.
+Fevrier mopped his forehead.
+
+"But that was fine," said he, "though what's to come will be still
+better. Oh, but we will make this night memorable to our friends. They
+shall talk of us by their firesides when they are grown old and France
+has had many years of peace--we shall not hear, but they will talk of
+us, the deserters from Metz."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier in a word was exalted, and had lost his sense of
+proportion. He did not, however, relax his activity. He sent off the
+six to gather the rest of his contingent. He made an examination of
+the Prussians, and found that sixteen had been killed outright, and
+eight were lying wounded. He removed their rifles and ammunition out
+of reach, and from dead and wounded alike took the coats and caps.
+To the wounded he gave instead French uniforms; and then, bidding
+twenty-three of his soldiers don the Prussian caps and coats, he
+snatched a moment wherein to run to the curé.
+
+"It is over," said he. "The Prussians will not burn Vaudère to-night."
+And he jumped down the stairs again without waiting for any response.
+In the street he put on the cap and coat of the Prussian officer,
+buckled the sword about his waist, and thrust the revolver into
+his belt. He had now twenty-three men who at night might pass for
+Prussians, and thirteen others.
+
+To these thirteen he gave general instructions. They were to spread
+out on the right and left, and make their way singly up through
+the vines, and past the field-watch if they could without risk of
+detection. They were to join him high up on the slope, and opposite to
+the bonfire which would be burning at the répli. His twenty-three he
+led boldly, following as nearly as possible the track by which the
+Prussians had descended. The party trampled down the vine-poles,
+brushed through the leaves, and in a little while were challenged.
+
+"Sadowa," said Fevrier, in his best imitation of the German accent.
+
+"Pass Sadowa," returned the sentry.
+
+Fevrier and his men filed upwards. He halted some two hundred yards
+farther on, and went down upon his knees. The soldiers behind him
+copied his example. They crept slowly and cautiously forward until the
+flames of the bonfire were visible through the screen of leaves, until
+the faces of the officers about the bonfire could be read.
+
+Then Fevrier stopped and whispered to the soldier next to him. That
+soldier passed the whisper on, and from a file the Frenchmen crept
+into line. Fevrier had now nothing to do but to wait; and he waited
+without trepidation or excitement. The night from first to last had
+gone very well with him. He could even think of Mareschal Bazaine
+without anger.
+
+He waited for perhaps an hour, watching the faces round the fire
+increase in number and grow troubled with anxiety. The German officers
+talked in low tones staring through their night-glasses down the hill,
+to catch the first leaping flame from the roofs of Vaudère, pushing
+forward their heads to listen for any alarm. Fevrier watched them with
+the amusement of a spectator in a play house. He was fully aware that
+he was shortly to step upon the stage himself. He was aware too that
+the play was to have a tragic ending. Meanwhile, however, here
+was very good comedy! He had a Frenchman's appreciation of the
+picturesque. The dark night, the glowing fire on the one broad level
+of grass, the French soldiers hidden in the vines, within a stone's
+throw of the Germans, the Germans looking unconsciously on over
+their heads for the return of those comrades who never would
+return.--Lieutenant Fevrier was the dramatist who had created this
+striking and artistic situation. Lieutenant Fevrier could not but be
+pleased. Moreover there were better effects to follow. One occurred to
+him at this very moment, an admirable one. He fumbled in his breast
+and took out the flag. A minute later he saw the Colonel of the
+forepost join the group, hack nervously with his naked sword at
+a burning log, and dispatch a subaltern down the hill to the
+field-watch.
+
+The subaltern came crashing back through the vines. Fevrier did not
+need to hear his words in order to guess at his report. It could only
+be that the Prussian party had given the password and come safely back
+an hour since. Besides, the Colonel's act was significant.
+
+He sent four men at once in different directions, and the rest of his
+soldiers he withdrew into the darkness behind the bonfire. He did not
+follow them himself until he had picked up and tossed a fusee into the
+fire. The fusee flared and spat and spurted, and immediately it
+seemed to Fevrier--so short an interval of time was there--that the
+country-side was alive with the hum of a stirring camp, and the rattle
+of harness-chains, as horses were yoked to guns.
+
+For a third time that evening Fevrier laughed softly. The deserters
+had roused the Prussian army round Metz to the expectation of an
+attack in force. He touched his neighbour on the shoulder.
+
+"One volley when I give the word. Then charge. Pass the order on!" and
+the word went along the line like a ripple across a pond.
+
+He had hardly given it, the fusee had barely ceased to sputter, before
+a company doubled out on the open space behind the bonfire. That
+company had barely formed up, before another arrived to support it.
+
+"Load!"
+
+As the Prussian command was uttered, Fevrier was aware of a movement
+at his side. The soldier next to him was taking aim. Fevrier reached
+out his hand and stopped the man. Fevrier was going to die in five
+minutes, and meant to die chivalrously like a gentleman. He waited
+until the German companies had loaded, until they were ordered to
+advance, and then he shouted,
+
+"Fire!"
+
+The little flames shot out and crackled among the vines. He saw
+gaps in the Prussian ranks, he saw the men waver, surprised at the
+proximity of the attack.
+
+"Charge," he shouted, and crashing through the few yards of shelter,
+they burst out upon the répli, and across the open space to the
+Prussian bayonets. But not one of the number reached the bayonets.
+
+"Fire!" shouted the Prussian officer, in his turn.
+
+The volley flashed out, the smoke cleared away, and showed a little
+heap of men silent between the bonfire and the Prussian ranks.
+
+The Prussians loaded again and stood ready, waiting for the main
+attack. The morning was just breaking. They stood silent and
+motionless till the sky was flooded with light and the hills one after
+another came into view, and the files of poplars were seen marching
+on the plains. Then the Colonel approached the little heap. A rifle
+caught his eye, and he picked it up.
+
+"They are all mad," said he. Forced to the point of the bayonet was a
+gaudy little linen tri-colour flag.
+
+
+
+
+THE CROSSED GLOVES.
+
+
+"Although you have not been near Ronda for five years," said the
+Spanish Commandant severely to Dennis Shere, "the face of the country
+has not changed. You are certainly the most suitable officer I
+can select, since I am told you are well acquainted with the
+neighbourhood. You will ride therefore to-day to Olvera and deliver
+this sealed letter to the officer commanding the temporary garrison
+there. But it is not necessary that it should reach him before eleven
+at night, so that you will still have an hour or two before you start
+in which you can renew your acquaintanceships, as I can very well
+understand you are anxious to do."
+
+Dennis Shere's reluctance, however, was now changed into alacrity. For
+the road to Olvera ran past the gates of that white-walled, straggling
+residencía where he had planned to spend this first evening that he
+was stationed at Ronda. On his way back from his colonel's quarters
+he even avoided those squares and streets where he would be likely to
+meet with old acquaintances, foreseeing their questions as to why he
+was now a Spanish subject and wore the uniform of a captain of Spanish
+cavalry and by seven o'clock he was already riding through the Plaza
+de Toros upon his mission. There, however, a familiar voice hailed
+him, and turning about in his saddle he saw an old padre who had once
+gained a small prize for logic at the University of Barcelona, and who
+had since made his inferences and deductions an excuse for a great
+deal of inquisitiveness. Shere had no option but to stop. He broke in,
+however, at once on the inevitable questions as to his uniform with
+the statement that he must be at Olvera by eleven.
+
+"Fifteen miles," said the padre. "Does it need four hours and a fresh
+horse to journey fifteen miles?"
+
+"But I have friends to visit on the way," and to give convincing
+details to an excuse which was plainly disbelieved, Shere added, "Just
+this side of Setenil I have friends."
+
+The padre was still dissatisfied. "There is only one house just this
+side of Setenil, and Esteban Silvela I saw with my own eyes to-day in
+Ronda."
+
+"He may well be home by now, and it is not Esteban whom I go to see."
+
+"Not Esteban," exclaimed the padre. "Then it will be--"
+
+"His sister, the Señora Christina," said Shere with a laugh at his
+companion's persistency. "Since the brother and sister live alone, and
+it is not the brother, why it will be the sister. You argue still very
+closely, padre."
+
+The padre stood back a little from Shere and stared. Then he said
+slyly, and with the air of one who quotes:
+
+"All women are born tricksters."
+
+"Those were rank words," said Shere composedly.
+
+"Yet they were often spoken when you grew vines in the Ronda Valley."
+
+"Then a crowd of men must know me for a fool. A young man may make a
+mistake, padre, and exaggerate a disappointment. Besides, I had not
+then seen the señora. Esteban I knew, but she was a child, and known
+to me only by name." And then, warmed by the pleasure in his old
+friend's face, he said, "I will tell you about it."
+
+They walked on slowly side by side, while Shere, who now that he had
+begun to confide was quite swept away, bent over his saddle and told
+how after inheriting a modest fortune, after wandering for three years
+from city to city, he had at last come to Paris, and there, at a
+Carlist conversazione, had heard the familiar name called from a
+doorway, and had seen the unfamiliar face appear. Shere described
+Christina. She walked with the grace of a deer, as though the floor
+beneath her foot had the spring of turf. The blood was bright in her
+face; her brown hair shone; she was sweet with youth; the suppleness
+of her body showed it and the steadiness of her great clear eyes.
+
+"She passed me," he went on, "and the arrogance of what I used to
+think and say came sharp home to me like a pain. I suppose that
+I stared--it was an accident, of course--perhaps my face showed
+something of my trouble; but just as she was opposite me her fan
+slipped through her fingers and clattered on the floor."
+
+The padre was at a loss to understand Shere's embarrassment in
+relating so small a matter.
+
+"Well," said he, "you picked up the fan and so--"
+
+"No," interrupted Shere. His embarrassment increased, and he stammered
+out awkwardly, "Just for the moment, you see, I began to wonder
+whether after all I had not been right before; whether after all
+any woman would or could baulk herself of a fraction of any man's
+admiration, supposing that it would only cost a trick to extort it.
+And while I was wondering she herself stooped, picked up the fan, and
+good-humouredly dropped me a curtsey for my lack of manners. Esteban
+presented me to her that evening. There followed two magical months in
+Paris and a June in London."
+
+"But, Esteban?" said the padre, doubtfully. "I do not understand. I
+know something of Esteban Silvela. A lean man of plots and devices. My
+friend, do you know that Esteban has not a groat? The Silvela fortunes
+and estate came from the mother and went to the daughter. Esteban
+is the Señora Christina's steward, and her marriage would alter his
+position at the least. Did he not spoil the magic of the months in
+Paris?"
+
+Shere laughed aloud in assured confidence.
+
+"No, indeed," said he. "I did not know Esteban was dependent on his
+sister, but what difference would her marriage make? Esteban is my
+best friend. For instance, you questioned me about my uniform. It is
+by Esteban's advice and help that I wear it."
+
+"Indeed!" said the padre, quickly. "Tell me."
+
+"That June, in London, two years ago--it was by the way the last time
+I saw the señora--we three dined at the same house. As the ladies rose
+from the table I said to Christina quietly, 'I want to speak to you
+to-night,' and she answered very simply and quietly, 'With all my
+heart.' She was not so quiet, however, but that Esteban overheard her.
+He hitched his chair up to mine; I asked him what my chances were, and
+whether he would second them? He was most cordial, but he thought with
+his Spaniard's pride that I ought--I use my words, not his--in some
+way to repair my insufficiency in station and the rest; and he pointed
+out this way of the uniform. I could not resist his argument; I did
+not speak that night. I took out my papers and became a Spaniard; with
+Esteban's help I secured a commission. That was two years ago. I have
+not seen her since, nor have I written, but I ride to her to-night
+with my two years' silence and my two years' service to prove the
+truth of what I say. So you see I have reason to thank Esteban." And
+since they were now come to the edge of the town they parted company.
+Shere rode smartly down the slope of the hill, the padre stood and
+watched him with a feeling of melancholy.
+
+It was not merely that he distrusted Esteban, but he knew Shere, the
+cadet of an impoverished family, who had come out from England to a
+small estate in the Ronda valley, which had belonged to his house
+since the days of the Duke of Wellington in Spain. He knew him for a
+man of tempests and extremes, and as he thought of his ardent words
+and tones, of his ready acceptance of Esteban's good faith, of his
+description of Christina, he fell to wondering whether so sudden and
+violent a conversion from passionate cynic to passionate believer
+would not lack permanence. There was that little instructive accident
+of the dropped fan. Even in the moment of conversion so small a thing
+had almost sufficed to dissuade Shere.
+
+Shere, however, was quite untroubled--so untroubled, indeed, that he
+even rode slowly that he might not waste the luxury of anticipating
+the welcome which his unexpected appearance would surely provoke. He
+rode into the groves of almond and walnut trees and out again into a
+wild and stony country. It was just growing dusk when he saw ahead
+of him the square white walls of the enclosure, and the cluster of
+buildings within, glimmering at the foot of a rugged hill. The lights
+began to move in the windows as he approached, and then a man suddenly
+appeared at his side on the roadway and whistled twice loudly as
+though he were calling his dog. Shere rode past the man and through
+the open gates into the courtyard. There were three men lounging
+there, and they came forward almost as if they had expected Shere. He
+gave his horse into their charge and impetuously mounted the flight of
+stone steps to the house. A servant in readiness came forward at once
+and preceded Shere along a gallery towards a door. Shere's impetuosity
+led him to outstep the servant, he opened the door, and so entered the
+room unannounced.
+
+It was a long, low room with a wainscot of dark walnut, and a single
+lamp upon the table gave it shadows rather than light. He had just
+time to notice that a girl and a man were bending over the table in
+the lamplight, to recognise with a throb of the heart the play of
+the light upon the girl's brown hair, to understand that she was
+explaining something which she held in her hands, and then Esteban
+came quickly to him with a certain air of perplexity and a glance of
+inquiry towards the servant. Then he said:--
+
+"Of course, of course, you stopped and came in of your own accord."
+
+"Of my own accord, indeed," said Shere, who was looking at Christina
+instead of heeding Esteban's words. His unexpected coming had
+certainly not missed its effect, although it was not the effect which
+Shere had desired. There was, to be sure, a great deal of astonishment
+in her looks, but there was also consternation; and when she spoke it
+was in a numbed and absent way.
+
+"You are well? We have not seen you this long while. Two years is it?
+More than two years."
+
+"There have been changes," said Esteban. "We have had war and, alas,
+defeats."
+
+"Yes, I was in Cuba," said Shere, and the conversation dragged
+on impersonal and dull. Esteban talked continually with a forced
+heartiness, Christina barely spoke at all, and then absently. Shere
+noticed that she had but lately come in, for she still wore her hat,
+and her gloves lay crossed on the table in the light of the lamp; she
+moved restlessly about the room, stopping now and then to give an ear
+to any chance noise in the courtyard, and to glance alertly at the
+door; so that Shere understood that she was expecting another visitor,
+and that he himself was in the way. An inopportune intrusion, it
+seemed, was the sole outcome of the two years' anticipations, and
+utterly discouraged he rose from his chair. On the instant, however,
+Esteban signed to Shere to remain, and with a friendly smile himself
+made an excuse and left the room.
+
+Christina was now walking up and down one particular seam in the floor
+with as much care as if the seam was a tight-rope, and this exercise
+she continued. Shere moved over to the table and quite absently played
+with the gloves which lay there, disarranging their position, so that
+they no longer made a cross.
+
+"You remember that night in London," said he, and Christina stopped
+for a second to say simply and without any suggestion that she was
+offended, "You should have spoken that night," and then resumed her
+walk.
+
+"Yes," returned Shere. "But I was always aware that I could not offer
+you your match, and I found, I thought, quite suddenly that evening a
+way to make my insufficiency less insufficient."
+
+"Less insufficient by a strip of brass upon your shoulder," she
+exclaimed passionately. She came and stood opposite to him. "Well,
+that strip of brass stops us both. It stops my ears, it must stop your
+lips too. Where did we meet first?"
+
+"In Paris."
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"At a Carlist--" and Shere broke off and took a step towards her.
+"Oh!" he exclaimed, "I never thought of it. I imagined you went there
+to laugh as I did."
+
+"Does one laugh at one's creed?" she cried violently; and Shere with a
+helpless gesture of the hands sat down in a chair. Esteban had fooled
+him, and why, the padre had shown Shere that afternoon, Esteban had
+fooled him irreparably; it did not need a glance at Christina, as she
+stood facing him, to convince him of that. There was no anger against
+him, he noticed, in her face, but on the contrary a great friendliness
+and pity. But he knew her at that moment. Her looks might soften, but
+not her resolve. She was heart-whole a Carlist. Carlism was her creed,
+and her creed would be more than a creed, it would be a passion too.
+So it was not to persuade her but rather in acknowledgment that he
+said:
+
+"And one does not change one's creed?"
+
+"No," she answered, and suggested, but in a doubtful voice, "but one
+can put off one's uniform."
+
+Shere stood up. "Neither can one do that," he said simply. "It is
+quite true that I sought my commission upon your account. I would just
+as readily have become a Carlist had I known. I had no inclination one
+way or the other, only a great hope and longing for you. But I have
+made the mistake, and I cannot retrieve it. The strip of brass obliges
+me to good faith. Already you will understand the uniform has had its
+inconvenience. It sent me to Cuba, and set me armed against men almost
+of my own blood. There was no escape then; there is no escape now."
+
+Christina moved closer to him. The reticence with which Shere spoke,
+and the fact that he made no claim upon her made her voice very
+gentle.
+
+"No," she agreed. "I thought that you would make that answer. And in
+my heart I do not think that I should like to have heard from you any
+other."
+
+"Thank you," said Shere. He drew out his watch. "I have still some
+way to go. I have to reach Olvera by eleven;" and he was aware that
+Christina at his side became at once very still, so that even her
+breathing was arrested. For her sigh of emotion at the abrupt mention
+of parting he was thankful, but it made him keep his eyes turned from
+her lest a sight of any distress of hers might lead him to falter from
+his purpose.
+
+"You are riding to Olvera?" she asked, after a pause, and in a queer
+muffled voice.
+
+"Yes. So I must say good-bye," and now he turned to her. But she was
+too quick for him to catch a glimpse of her face. She had already
+turned from him and was walking towards the door.
+
+"You must also say good-bye to Esteban," said she, as though to gain
+time. With her fingers on the door-handle she stopped. "Tell me," she
+exclaimed. "It was Esteban who advised the army, who helped you to
+your commission? You need not deny it! It was Esteban," she stood
+silent, turning over this revelation in her mind. Then she added, "Did
+you see Esteban in Ronda this afternoon?"
+
+"No, but I heard that he was there. I must go."
+
+He took up his hat, and turning again towards the door saw that
+Christina stood with her back against the panels and her arms
+outstretched across them like a barrier.
+
+"You need not fear," he said to reassure her. "I shall not quarrel
+with Esteban. He is your brother, and the harm is done. Besides, I do
+not know that it is all harm when I look back in the years before I
+wore the uniform. In those times it was all one's own dissatisfactions
+and trivial dislikes and trivial ambitions. Now I find a repose in
+losing them, in becoming a little necessary part of a big machine,
+even though it is not the best machine of its kind and works creakily.
+I find a dignity in it too."
+
+It was the man of extremes who spoke, and he spoke quite sincerely.
+Christina, however, neither answered him nor heard. Her eyes were
+fixed with a strange intentness upon him; her breath came and went as
+if she had run a race, and in the silence seemed unnaturally audible.
+
+"You carry orders to Olvera?" she said at length. Shere fetched the
+sealed letter out of his pocket.
+
+"So I must go, or fail in my duty," said he.
+
+"Give me the letter," said Christina.
+
+Shere stared at her in amazement. The amazement changed to suspicion.
+His whole face seemed to narrow and sharpen out of his own likeness
+into something foxy and mean.
+
+"I will not," he said, and slowly replaced the letter. "There was a
+man in the road," he continued slowly, "who whistled as I passed--a
+signal, no doubt. You are Carlist. This is a trap."
+
+"A trap not laid for you," said Christina. "Be sure of that! Until you
+spoke of Olvera I did not know."
+
+"No," admitted Shere, "not laid for me to your knowledge, but to
+Esteban's. You were surprised at my coming--Esteban only at the manner
+of my coming. He asked if I had ridden into the gates of my own accord
+I remember. He was in Ronda this afternoon. Very likely it was he who
+told my colonel of my knowledge of the neighbourhood. It would suit
+his purposes well to present me to you suddenly, not merely as an
+enemy, but an active enemy. Yes, I understand that. But," and his
+voice hardened again, "even to your knowledge the trap was laid for
+the man who carries the letter. You have your share in the trick." He
+repeated the word with a sharp laugh, savouring it, dwelling upon it
+as upon something long forgotten, and now suddenly remembered. "A
+murderous trick, too, it seems! I wonder what would have happened if
+I had not turned in at the gates of my own accord. How much farther
+should I have ridden towards Olvera, and by what gentle means should I
+have been stopped?"
+
+"By nothing more dangerous than a hand upon your bridle and an excuse
+that you might do me some small service at Olvera."
+
+"An excuse, a falsity! To be sure," said Shere bitterly. "Yet you
+still stand before the door though you know the letter will not be
+yours. Is the trick after all so harmless? Is there no one--Esteban,
+for instance--in the dark passage outside the door or on the dark road
+outside the gates?"
+
+"I will prove to you you are wrong."
+
+Christina dropped her arms to her side, moved altogether from the
+door, and rang a bell. "Esteban shall come here; he will see you
+outside the gates; he will set you safely on your road to Olvera." She
+spoke now quite quietly; all the panic and agitation had gone in
+a moment from her face, her manner, and her words. But the very
+suddenness of the change in her increased Shere's suspicions. A moment
+ago Christina was standing before the door with every nerve astrain,
+her face white, and her eyes bewildered with horror. Now she stood
+easily by the table with the lighted lamp, speaking easily, playing
+easily with the gloves upon the table. Shere watched for the secret of
+this sudden change.
+
+A servant answered the bell and was bidden to find Esteban. No look of
+significance passed between them; by no gesture was any signal given.
+"No harm was intended to any man," Christina continued as soon as
+the door again was closed; "I insisted--I mean there was no need to
+insist; for I promised to get the letter from the bearer once he had
+come into this room."
+
+"How?" Shere asked with a blunt contempt. "By tricks?"
+
+Christina raised her head quickly, stung to a moment's anger; but she
+did not answer him, and again her head drooped.
+
+"At all events," she said quietly, "I have not tried to trick you,"
+and Shere noticed that she arranged with an absent carelessness the
+gloves in the form of a cross beneath the lamp; and at once he felt
+that her action contradicted her words. It was merely an instinct at
+first. Then he began to reason. Those gloves had been so arranged when
+first he entered the room. Christina and Esteban were bending over the
+table. Christina was explaining something. Was she explaining that
+arrangement of the gloves? Was that arrangement the reason of her
+ready acceptance of his refusal to part with his orders? Was it, in a
+word, a signal for Esteban--a signal which should tell him whether
+or not she had secured the letter? Shere saw a way to answer that
+question. He was now filled with distrust of Christina as half an hour
+back he had been filled with faith in her; so that he paid no heed
+to her apology, or to the passionate and pleading voice in which she
+spoke it.
+
+"So much was at stake for us," she said. "It seemed a necessity that
+we must have that letter, that no sudden orders must reach Olvera
+to-night. For there is some one at Olvera--I must trust you, you see,
+though you are our pledged enemy--some one of great consequence to us,
+some one we love, some one to whom we look to revive this Spain of
+ours. No, it is not our King, but his son--his young and gallant son.
+He will be gone to-morrow, but he is at Olvera to-night. And so when
+Esteban found out to-day that orders were to be sent to the commandant
+there it seemed we had no choice. It seemed those orders must not
+reach him, and it seemed therefore--just so that no hurt might be
+done, which otherwise would surely have been done, whatever I might
+order or forbid--that I must use a woman's way and secure the letter."
+
+"And the bearer?" asked Shere, advancing to the table. "What of him?
+He, I suppose, might creep back to Ronda, broken in honour and with a
+lie to tell? The best lie he could invent. Or would you have helped
+him to the lie?"
+
+Christina shrank away from the table as though she had been struck.
+
+"You had not thought of his plight," continued Shere. "He rides out
+from Ronda an honest soldier and returns--what? No more a soldier than
+this glove of yours is your hand," and taking up one of the gloves he
+held it for a moment, and then tossed it down at a distance from its
+fellow. He deliberately turned his back to the table as Christina
+replied:
+
+"The bearer would be just our pledged enemy--pledged to outwit us, as
+we to outwit him. But when you came there was no effort made to outwit
+you. Own that at all events? You carry your orders safely, with your
+honour safe, though the consequence may be disaster for us, and
+disgrace for that we did not prevent you. Own that! You and I, I
+suppose, will meet no more. So you might own this that I have used no
+tricks with you?"
+
+The appeal coming as an answer to his insult and contempt, and coming
+from one whose pride he knew to be a real and dominant quality,
+touched Shere against his expectation. He faced Christina on an
+impulse to give her the assurance she claimed, but he changed his
+mind.
+
+"Are you sure of that?" he asked slowly, for he saw that the gloves
+while his back was turned had again been crossed. He at all events
+was now sure. He was sure that those crossed gloves were a signal for
+Esteban, a signal that the letter had not changed hands. "You have
+used no tricks with me?" he repeated. "Are you sure of that?"
+
+The handle of the door rattled; Christina quickly crossed towards it.
+Shere followed her, but stopped for the fraction of a second at the
+table and deliberately and unmistakably placed the gloves in parallel
+lines. As the door opened, he was standing between Christina and the
+table, blocking it from her view.
+
+It was not she, however, who looked to the table, but Esteban. She
+kept her eyes upon her brother, and when he in his turn looked to her
+Shere noticed a glance of comprehension swiftly interchanged. So Shere
+was confident that he had spoiled this trick of the gloves, and when
+he took a polite leave of Christina and followed Esteban from the room
+it was not without an air of triumph.
+
+Christina stood without changing her attitude, except that perhaps she
+pushed her head a little forward that she might the better hear the
+last of her lover's receding steps. When they ceased to sound she ran
+quickly to the window, opened it, and leaned out that she might the
+better hear his horse's hoofs on the flagged courtyard. She heard
+besides Esteban's voice speaking amiably and Shere's making amiable
+replies. The sharp hard clatter upon the stones softened into the
+duller thud upon the road; the voices became fainter and lost their
+character. Then one clear "good-night" rang out loudly, and was
+followed by the quick beats of a horse trotting. Christina slowly
+closed the window and turned her eyes upon the room. She saw the lamp
+upon the table and the gloves in parallel lines beneath it.
+
+Now Shere was so far right in that the gloves were intended as a
+signal for Esteban; only owing to that complete revulsion of which the
+padre had seen the possibility, Shere had mistaken the signal. The
+passionate believer had again become the passionate cynic. He saw the
+trick, and setting no trust in the girl who played it, heeding neither
+her looks nor words nor the sincerity of her voice, had no doubt that
+it was aimed against him; whereas it was aimed to protect him. Shere
+had no doubt that the gloves crossed meant that he still had the
+sealed letter in his keeping, and therefore he disarranged them. But
+in truth the gloves crossed meant that Christina had it, and that the
+messenger might go unhindered upon his way.
+
+Christina uttered no cry. She simply did not believe what her eyes
+saw. She needed to touch the gloves before she was convinced, and when
+she had done that she was at once not sure but that she herself in
+touching them had ranged them in these lines. In the end, however,
+she understood, not the how or why, but the mere fact. She ran to the
+door, along the gallery, down the steps into the courtyard. She met no
+one. The house might have been a deserted ruin from its silence.
+She crossed the courtyard to the glimmering white walls, and passed
+through the gates on to the road. The night was clear; and ahead of
+her far away in the middle of the road a lantern shone very red.
+Christina ran towards it, and as she approached she saw faces like
+miniatures grouped above it. They did not heed her until she was close
+upon them, until she had noticed one man holding a riderless horse
+apart from the group and another coiling up a stout rope. Then
+Esteban, who was holding the lantern, raised his hand to keep her
+back.
+
+"There has been an accident," said he. "He fell, and fell awkwardly,
+the horse with him."
+
+"An accident," said Christina, and she pointed to the coil of rope. It
+was no use for her now to say that she had forbidden violence. Indeed,
+at no time, as she told Shere, would it have been of any use. She
+pushed through the group to where Dennis Shere lay on the ground, his
+face white and shiny and tortured with pain. She knelt down on the
+ground and took his head in her hands as though she would raise it on
+to her lap, but one man stopped her, saying, "It is his back, señora."
+Shere opened his eyes and saw who it was that bent over him, and
+Christina, reading their look, was appalled. It was surely impossible
+that human eyes could carry so much hate. His lips moved, and she
+leaned her ear close to his mouth to catch the words. But it was only
+one word he spoke and repeated:--
+
+"Tricks! Tricks!"
+
+There was no time to disprove or explain. Christina had but one
+argument. She kissed him on the lips.
+
+"This is no trick," she cried, and Esteban, laying a hand upon her
+shoulder, said, "He does not hear, nor can his lips answer;" and
+Esteban spoke the truth. Shere had not heard, and never would hear, as
+Christina knew.
+
+"He still has the letter," said Esteban. Christina thrust him back
+with her hand and crouched over the dead man, protecting him. In a
+little she said, "True, there is the letter." She unbuttoned Shere's
+jacket and gently took the letter from his breast. Then she knelt back
+and looked at the superscription without speaking. Esteban opened the
+door of the lantern and held the flame towards her. "No," said she.
+"It had better go to Olvera."
+
+She rode to Olvera that night. They let her go, deceived by her
+composure and thinking that she meant to carry it to "the man of great
+consequence."
+
+But Christina's composure meant nothing more than that her mind and
+her feelings were numbed. She was conscious of only one conviction,
+that Shere must not fail in his duty, since he had staked his honour
+upon its fulfilment. And so she rode straight to the commandant's
+quarters at Olvera, and telling of an accident to the bearer, handed
+him the letter. The commandant read it, and was most politely
+distressed that Christina should have put herself to so much trouble,
+for the orders merely recalled his contingent to Ronda in the morning.
+It was about this time that Christina began to understand precisely
+what had happened.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHUTTERED HOUSE.
+
+
+If ever a man's pleasures jumped with his duties mine did in the year
+1744, when, as a clerk in the service of the Royal African Company
+of Adventurers, I was despatched to the remote islands of Scilly in
+search of certain information which, it was believed, Mr. Robert
+Lovyes alone could impart. For even a clerk that sits all day conning
+his ledgers may now and again chance upon a record or name which
+will tickle his dull fancies with the suggestion of a story. Such a
+suggestion I had derived from the circumstances of Mr. Lovyes. He had
+passed an adventurous youth, during which he had for eight years
+been held to slavery by a negro tribe on the Gambia river; he had
+afterwards amassed a considerable fortune, and embarked it in the
+ventures of the Company; he had thereupon withdrawn himself to Tresco,
+where he had lived for twenty years: so much any man might know
+without provocation to his curiosity. The strange feature of Mr.
+Lovyes' conduct was revealed to me by the ledgers. For during all
+those years he had drawn neither upon his capital nor his interest, so
+that his stake in the Company grew larger and larger, with no profit
+to himself that any one could discover. It seemed to me, in fact,
+clean against nature that a man so rich should so disregard his
+wealth; and I busied myself upon the journey with discovering strange
+reasons for his seclusion, of which none, I may say, came near the
+mark, by so much did the truth exceed them all.
+
+I landed at the harbour of New Grimsey, on Tresco, in the grey
+twilight of a September evening; and asking for Mr. Lovyes, was
+directed across a little ridge of heather to Dolphin Town, which lies
+on the eastward side of Tresco, and looks across Old Grimsey Sound to
+the island of St. Helen's. Dolphin Town, you should know, for all its
+grand name, boasts but a poor half-score of houses dotted about the
+ferns and bracken, with no semblance of order. One of the houses,
+however, attracted my notice--first, because it was built in two
+storeys, and was, therefore, by a storey taller than the rest; and,
+secondly, because all its windows were closely shuttered, and it wore
+in that falling light a drooping, melancholy aspect, like a derelict
+ship upon the seas. It stood in the middle of this scanty village, and
+had a little unkempt garden about it inclosed within a wooden paling.
+There was a wicket-gate in the paling, and a rough path from the gate
+to the house door, and a few steps to the right of this path a well
+was sunk and rigged with a winch and bucket. I was both tired and
+thirsty, so I turned into the garden and drew up some water in the
+bucket. A narrow track was beaten in the grass between the well and
+the house, and I saw with surprise that the stones about the mouth of
+the well were splashed and still wet. The house, then, had an inmate.
+I looked at it again, but the shutters kept their secret: there was no
+glimmer of light visible through any chink. I approached the house,
+and from that nearer vantage discovered that the shutters were common
+planks fitted into the windows and nailed fast to the woodwork from
+without. Growing yet more curious, I marched to the door and knocked,
+with an inquiry upon my tongue as to where Mr. Lovyes lived. But the
+excuse was not needed; the sound of my blows echoed through the house
+in a desolate, solitary fashion, and no step answered them. I knocked
+again, and louder. Then I leaned my ear to the panel, and I distinctly
+heard the rustling of a woman's dress. I held my breath to hear the
+more surely. The sound was repeated, but more faintly, and it was
+followed by a noise like the closing of a door. I drew back from the
+house, keeping an eye upon the upper storey, for I thought it possible
+the woman might reconnoitre me thence. But the windows stared at me
+blind, unresponsive. To the right and left lights twinkled in the
+scattered dwellings, and I found something very ghostly in the thought
+of this woman entombed as it were in the midst of them and moving
+alone in the shuttered gloom. The twilight deepened, and suddenly the
+gate behind me whined on its hinges. At once I dropped to my full
+length on the grass--the gloom was now so thick there was little
+fear I should be discovered--and a man went past me to the house.
+He walked, so far as I could judge, with a heavy stoop, but was yet
+uncommon tall, and he carried a basket upon his arm. He laid the
+basket upon the doorstep, and, to my utter disappointment, turned
+at once, and so down the path and out at the gate. I heard the gate
+rattle once, twice, and then a click as its latch caught. I was
+sufficiently curious to desire a nearer view of the basket, and
+discovered that it contained food. Then, remembering me that all this
+while my own business waited, I continued on my way to Mr. Lovyes'
+house. It was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant's
+Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour. Mr. Lovyes
+was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his
+dining-room--a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took
+to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline.
+I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got far before he
+interrupted me.
+
+"There is a mistake," he said. "It is doubtless my brother Robert you
+are in search of. I am John Lovyes, and was, it is true, captured
+with my brother in Africa, but I escaped six years before he did, and
+traded no more in those parts. We fled together from the negroes, but
+we were pursued. My brother was pierced by an arrow, and I left him,
+believing him to be dead."
+
+I had, indeed, heard something of a brother, though I little expected
+to find him in Tresco too. He pressed upon me the hospitality of his
+house, but my business was with Mr. Robert, and I asked him to direct
+me on my path, which he did with some hesitation and reluctance. I had
+once more to pass through Dolphin Town, and an impulse prompted me to
+take another look at the shuttered house. I found that the basket of
+food had been removed, and an empty bucket stood in its place. But
+there was still no light visible, and I went on to the dwelling of
+Mr. Robert Lovyes. When I came to it, I comprehended his brother's
+hesitation. It was a rough, mean little cottage standing on the edge
+of the bracken close to the sea--a dwelling fit for the poorest
+fisherman, but for no one above that station, and a large open boat
+was drawn up on the hard beside it as though the tenant fished for
+his bread. I knocked at the door, and a man with a candle in his hand
+opened it.
+
+"Mr. Robert Lovyes?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I am he." And he led the way into a kitchen, poor and mean as
+the outside warranted, but scrupulously clean and bright with a fire.
+He led the way, as I say, and I was still more mystified to observe
+from his gait, his height, and the stoop of his shoulders that he was
+the man whom I had seen carrying the basket through the garden. I had
+now an opportunity of noticing his face, wherein I could detect no
+resemblance to his brother's. For it was broader and more vigorous,
+with a great, white beard valancing it; and whereas Mr. John's hair
+was neatly powdered and tied with a ribbon, as a gentleman's should
+be, Mr. Robert's, which was of a black colour with a little sprinkling
+of grey, hung about his head in a tangled mane. There was but a
+two-years difference between the ages of the brothers, but there might
+have been a decade. I explained my business, and we sat down to a
+supper of fish, freshly caught, which he served himself. And during
+supper he gave me the information I was come after. But I lent only
+an inattentive ear to his talk. For my knowledge of his wealth, the
+picture of him as he sat in his great sea-boots and coarse seaman's
+vest, as though it was the most natural garb in the world, and his
+easy discourse about those far African rivers, made a veritable jumble
+of my mind. To add to it all, there was the mystery of the shuttered
+house. More than once I was inclined to question him upon this last
+account, but his manner did not promise confidences, and I said
+nothing. At last he perceived my inattention.
+
+"I will repeat all this to-morrow," he said grimly. "You are, no
+doubt, tired. I cannot, I am afraid, house you, for, as you see, I
+have no room; but I have a young friend who happens by good luck to
+stay this night on Tresco, and no doubt he will oblige me." Thereupon
+he led me to a cottage on the outskirts of Dolphin Town, and of all in
+that village nearest to the sea.
+
+"My friend," said he, "is named Ginver Wyeth, and, though he comes
+from these parts, he does not live here, being a school-master on the
+mainland. His mother has died lately, and he is come on that account."
+
+Mr. Wyeth received me hospitably, but with a certain pedantry of
+speech which somewhat surprised me, seeing that his parents were
+common fisherfolk. He readily explained the matter, however, over a
+pipe, when Mr. Lovyes had left us. "I owe everything to Mrs. Lovyes,"
+he said. "She took me when a boy, taught me something herself, and
+sent me thereafter, at her own charges, to a school in Falmouth."
+
+"Mrs. Lovyes!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," he continued, and, bending forward, lowered his voice. "You
+went up to Merchant's Point, you say? Then you passed Crudge's
+Folly--a house of two storeys with a well in the garden."
+
+"Yes, yes!" I said.
+
+"She lives there," said he.
+
+"Behind those shutters!" I cried.
+
+"For twenty years she has lived in the midst of us, and no one has
+seen her during all that time. Not even Robert Lovyes. Aye, she has
+lived behind the shutters."
+
+There he stopped. I waited, thinking that in a little he would take up
+his tale, but he did not, and I had to break the silence.
+
+"I had not heard that Mr. Robert was ever married," I said as
+carelessly as I might.
+
+"Nor was he," replied Mr. Wyeth. "Mrs. Lovyes is the wife of John.
+The house at Merchant's Point is hers, and there twenty years ago she
+lived."
+
+His words caught my breath away, so little did I expect them.
+
+"The wife of John Lovyes!" I stammered, "but--" And I told him how I
+had seen Robert Lovyes carry his basket up the path.
+
+"Yes," said Wyeth. "Twice a day Robert draws water for her at the
+well, and once a day he brings her food. It is in his house, too, that
+she lives--Crudge's Folly, that was his name for it, and the name
+clings. But, none the less, she is the wife of John;" and with little
+more persuasion Mr. Wyeth told me the story.
+
+"It is the story of a sacrifice," he began, "mad or great, as you
+please; but, mark you, it achieved its end. As a boy, I witnessed it
+from its beginnings. For it was at this very door that Robert Lovyes
+rapped when he first landed on Tresco on the night of the seventh of
+May twenty-two years ago, and I was here on my holidays at the time. I
+had been out that day in my father's lugger to the Poul, which is
+the best fishing-ground anywhere near Scilly, and the fog took us, I
+remember, at three of the afternoon. So what with that and the wind
+failing, it was late when we cast anchor in Grimsey Sound. The night
+had fallen in a brown mirk, and so still that the sound of our feet
+brushing through the ferns was loud, like the sweep of scythes. We sat
+down to supper in this kitchen about nine, my mother, my father, two
+men from the boat, and myself, and after supper we gathered about the
+fire here and talked. The talk in these parts, however it may begin,
+slides insensibly to that one element of which the noise is ever in
+our ears; and so in a little here were we chattering of wrecks and
+wrecks and wrecks and the bodies of dead men drowned. And then, in the
+thick of the talk, came the knock on the door--a light rapping of the
+knuckles, such as one hears twenty times a day; but our minds were
+so primed with old wives' tales that it fairly shook us all. No one
+stirred, and the knocking was repeated.
+
+"Then the latch was lifted, and Robert Lovyes stepped in. His beard
+was black then--coal black, like his hair--and his face looked out
+from it pale as a ghost and shining wet from the sea. The water
+dripped from his clothes and made a puddle about his feet.
+
+"'How often did I knock?' he asked pleasantly. 'Twice, I think. Yes,
+twice.'
+
+"Then he sat down on the settle, very deliberately pulled off his
+great sea-boots, and emptied the water out of them.
+
+"'What island is this?' he asked.
+
+"'Tresco.'
+
+"'Tresco!' he exclaimed, in a quick, agitated whisper, as though he
+dreaded yet expected to hear the name. 'We were wrecked, then, on the
+Golden Ball.'
+
+"'Wrecked?' cried my father; but the man went on pursuing his own
+thoughts.
+
+"'I swam to an islet.'
+
+"'It would be Norwithel,' said my father.
+
+"'Yes,' said he, 'it would be Norwithel.' And my mother asked
+curiously--
+
+"'You know these islands?' For his speech was leisurely and delicate,
+such as we heard neither from Scillonians nor from the sailors who
+visit St. Mary's.
+
+"'Yes,' he answered, his face breaking into a smile of unexpected
+softness, 'I know these islands. From Rosevean to Ganilly, from
+Peninnis Head to Maiden Bower: I know them well.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point Mr. Wyeth broke off his story, and crossing to the
+window, opened it. "Listen!" he said. I heard as it were the sound of
+innumerable voices chattering and murmuring and whispering in some
+mysterious language, and at times the voices blended and the murmurs
+became a single moan.
+
+"It is the tide making on the Golden Ball," said Mr. Wyeth. "The reef
+stretches seawards from St. Helen's island and half way across the
+Sound. You may see it at low tide, a ledge level as a paved causeway,
+and God help the ship that strikes on it!"
+
+Even while he spoke, from these undertones of sound there swelled
+suddenly a great booming like a battery of cannon.
+
+"It is the ledge cracking," said Mr. Wyeth, "and it cracks in the
+calmest weather." With that, he closed the window, and, lighting his
+pipe, resumed his story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It was on that reef that Mr. Robert Lovyes was wrecked. The ship, he
+told us, was the schooner _Waking Dawn_, bound from Cardiff to Africa,
+and she had run into the fog about half-past three, when they were a
+mile short of the Seven Stones. She bumped twice on the reef, and sank
+immediately, with, so far as he knew, all her crew.
+
+"'So now,' Robert continued, tapping his belt, 'since I have the means
+to pay, I will make bold to ask for a lodging, and for this night I
+will hang up here my dripping garments to Neptune.'
+
+    "'Me tabula sacer
+  Votiva paries--'
+
+"I began in the pride of my schooling, for I had learned that verse of
+Horace but a week before.
+
+"'This, no doubt, is the Cornish tongue,' he interrupted gravely, 'and
+will you please to carry my boots outside?'
+
+"What followed seemed to me then the strangest part of all this
+business, though, indeed, our sea-fogs come and go as often as not
+with a like abruptness. But the time of this fog's dispersion shocked
+the mind as something pitiless and arbitrary. For had the air cleared
+an hour before, the _Waking Dawn_ would not have struck. I opened the
+door, and it was as though a panel of brilliant white was of a sudden
+painted on the floor. Robert Lovyes sprang up from the settle, ran
+past me into the open, and stood on the bracken in his stockinged
+feet. A little patch of fog still smoked on the shining beach of Tean;
+a scarf of it was twisted about the granite bosses of St. Helen's; and
+for the rest the moonlight sparkled upon the headlands and was spilled
+across miles of placid sea. There was a froth of water upon the Golden
+Ball, but no sign of the schooner sunk among its weeds.
+
+"My father, however, and the two boatmen hurried down to the shore,
+while I was despatched with the news to Merchant's Point. My mother
+asked Mr. Lovyes his name, that I might carry it with me. But he spoke
+in a dreamy voice, as though he had not heard her.
+
+"'There were eight of the crew. Four were below, and I doubt if the
+four on deck could swim.'
+
+"I ran off on my errand, and, coming back a little later with a bottle
+of cordial waters, found Mr. Lovyes still standing in the moonlight.
+He seemed not to have moved a finger. I gave him the bottle, with a
+message that any who were rescued should be carried to Merchant's
+Point forthwith, and that he himself should go down there in the
+morning.
+
+"'Who taught you Latin?' he asked suddenly.
+
+"'Mrs. Lovyes taught me the rudiments,' I began; and with that he led
+me on to talk of her, but with some cunning. For now he would divert
+me to another topic and again bring me back to her, so that it all
+seemed the vagrancies of a boy's inconsequent chatter.
+
+"Mrs. Lovyes, who was remotely akin to the Lord Proprietor, had come
+to Tresco three years before, immediately after her marriage, and, it
+was understood, at her husband's wish. I talked of her readily, for,
+apart from what I owed to her bounty, she was a woman most sure to
+engage the affections of any boy. For one thing she was past her
+youth, being thirty years of age, tall, with eyes of the kindliest
+grey, and she bore herself in everything with a tender toleration,
+like a woman that has suffered much.
+
+"Of the other topics of this conversation there was one which later I
+had good reason to remember. We had caught a shark twelve feet long at
+the Poul that day, and the shark fairly divided my thoughts with Mrs.
+Lovyes.
+
+"'You bleed a fish first into the sea,' I explained. 'Then you bait
+with a chad's head, and let your line down a couple of fathoms. You
+can see your bait quite clearly, and you wait.'
+
+"'No doubt,' said Robert; 'you wait.'
+
+"'In a while,' said I, 'a dim lilac shadow floats through the clear
+water, and after a little you catch a glimpse of a forked tail and
+waving fins and an evil devil's head. The fish smells at the bait and
+sinks again to a lilac shadow--perhaps out of sight; and again it
+rises. The shadow becomes a fish, the fish goes circling round your
+boat, and it may be a long while before he turns on his back and
+rushes at the bait.'
+
+"'And as like as not, he carries the bait and line away."
+
+"'That depends upon how quick you are with the gaff,' said I.' Here
+comes my father.'
+
+"My father returned empty-handed. Not one of the crew had been saved.
+
+"'You asked my name,' said Robert Lovyes, turning to my mother. 'It is
+Crudge--Jarvis Crudge.' With that he went to his bed, but all night
+long I heard him pacing his room.
+
+"The next morning he complained of his long immersion in the sea, and
+certainly when he told his story to Mr. and Mrs. Lovyes as they sat
+over their breakfast in the parlour at Merchant's Point, he spoke with
+such huskiness as I never heard the like of. Mr. Lovyes took little
+heed to us, but went on eating his breakfast with only a sour comment
+here and there. I noticed, however, that Mrs. Lovyes, who sat over
+against us, bent her head forward and once or twice shook it as though
+she would unseat some ridiculous conviction. And after the story was
+told, she sat with no word of kindness for Mr. Crudge, and, what was
+yet more unlike her, no word of pity for the sailors who were lost.
+Then she rose and stood, steadying herself with the tips of her
+fingers upon the table. Finally she came swiftly across the room and
+peered into Mr. Crudge's face.
+
+"'If you need help,' she said, 'I will gladly furnish it. No doubt you
+will be anxious to go from Tresco at the earliest. No doubt, no doubt
+you will,' she repeated anxiously.
+
+"'Madame,' he said, 'I need no help, being by God's leave a man'--and
+he laid some stress upon the 'man,' but not boastfully--rather as
+though all _women_ did, or might need help, by the mere circumstance
+of their sex--'and as for going hence, why yesterday I was bound for
+Africa. I sailed unexpectedly into a fog off Scilly. I was wrecked in
+a calm sea on the Golden Ball--I was thrown up on Tresco--no one
+on that ship escaped but myself. No sooner was I safe than the fog
+lifted---'
+
+"'You will stay?' Mrs. Lovyes interrupted. 'No?'
+
+"'Yes,' said he, 'Jarvis Grudge will stay.'
+
+"And she turned thoughtfully away. But I caught a glimpse of her face
+as we went out, and it wore the saddest smile a man could see.
+
+"Mr. Grudge and I walked for a while in silence.
+
+"'And what sort of a name has Mr. John Lovyes in these parts?' he
+asked.
+
+"'An honest sort,' said I emphatically--'the name of a man who loves
+his wife.'
+
+"'Or her money,' he sneered. 'Bah! a surly ill-conditioned dog, I'll
+warrant, the curmudgeon!"
+
+"'You are marvellously recovered of your cold,' said I.
+
+"He stopped, and looked across the Sound. Then he said in a soft,
+musing voice: 'I once knew just such another clever boy. He was so
+clever that men beat him with sticks and put on great sea-boots to
+kick him with, so that he lived a miserable life, and was subsequently
+hanged in great agony at Tyburn.'
+
+"Mr. Grudge, as he styled himself, stayed with us for a week, during
+which time he sailed much with me about these islands; and I made a
+discovery. Though he knew these islands so well, he had never visited
+them before, and his knowledge was all hearsay. I did not mention my
+discovery to him, lest I should meet with another rebuff. But I was
+none the less sure of its truth, for he mistook Hanjague for Nornor,
+and Priglis Bay for Beady Pool, and made a number of suchlike
+mistakes. After a week he hired the cottage in which he now lives,
+bought his boat, leased from the steward the patch of ground in
+Dolphin Town, and set about building his house. He undertook the work,
+I am sure, for pure employment and distraction. He picked up the
+granite stones, fitted them together, panelled them, made the floors
+from the deck of a brigantine which came ashore on Annet, pegged down
+the thatch roof--in a word, he built the house from first to last with
+his own hands and he took fifteen months over the business, during
+which time he did not exchange a single word with Mrs. Lovyes, nor
+anything more than a short 'Good-day' with Mr. John. He worked,
+however, with no great regularity. For while now he laboured in a
+feverish haste, now he would sit a whole day idle on the headlands;
+or, again, he would of a sudden throw down his tools as though the
+work overtaxed him, and, leaping into his boat, set all sail and
+run with the wind. All that night you might see him sailing in the
+moonlight, and he would come home in the flush of the dawn.
+
+"After he had built the house, he furnished it, crossing for that
+purpose backwards and forwards between Tresco and St. Mary's. I
+remember that one day he brought back with him a large chest, and I
+offered to lend him a hand in carrying it. But he hoisted it on his
+back and took it no farther than the cottage in which he lived, where
+it remained locked with a padlock.
+
+"Towards Christmas-time, then, the house was ready, but to our
+surprise he did not move into it. He seemed, indeed, of a sudden, to
+have lost all liking for it, and whether it was that he had no longer
+any work upon his hands, he took to following Mrs. Lovyes about, but
+in a way that was unnoticeable unless you had other reasons to suspect
+that his thoughts were following her.
+
+"His conduct in this respect was particularly brought home to me on
+Christmas Day. The afternoon was warm and sunny, and I walked over the
+hill at Merchant's Point, meaning to bathe in the little sequestered
+bay beyond. From the top of the hill I saw Mrs. Lovyes walking along
+the strip of beach alone, and as I descended the hill-side, which
+is very deep in fern and heather, I came plump upon Jarvis Grudge,
+stretched full-length on the ground. He was watching Mrs. Lovyes with
+so greedy a concentration of his senses that he did not remark my
+approach. I asked him when he meant to enter his new house.
+
+"'I do not know that I ever shall,' he replied.
+
+"'Then why did you build it?' I asked.
+
+"'Because I was a fool!' and then he burst out in a passionate
+whisper. 'But a fool I was to stay here, and a fool's trick it was
+to build that house!' He shook his fist in its direction. 'Call it
+Grudge's Folly, and there's the name for it!' and with that he turned
+him again to spying upon Mrs. Lovyes.
+
+"After a while he spoke again, but slowly and with his eyes fixed upon
+the figure moving upon the beach.
+
+"'Do you remember the night I came ashore? You had caught a shark that
+day, and you told me of it. The great lilac shadow which rises from
+the depths and circles about the bait, and sinks again and rises again
+and takes--how long?--two years maybe before he snaps it.'
+
+"'But he does not carry it away,' said I, taking his meaning.
+
+"'Sometimes--sometimes," he snarled.
+
+"'That depends on how quick we are with the gaff."
+
+"'You!' he laughed, and taking me by the elbows, he shook me till I
+was giddy.
+
+"'I owe Mrs. Lovyes everything,' I said. At that he let me go. The
+ferocity of his manner, however, confirmed me in my fears, and, with a
+boy's extravagance, I carried from that day a big knife in my belt.
+
+"'The gaff, I suppose,' said Mr. Grudge with a polite smile when
+first he remarked it. During the next week, however, he showed more
+contentment with his lot, and once I caught him rubbing his hands and
+chuckling, like a man well pleased; so that by New Year's Eve I was
+wellnigh relieved of my anxiety on Mrs. Lovyes' account.
+
+"On that night, however, I went down to Grudge's cottage, and peeping
+through the window on my way to the door, I saw a strange man in the
+room. His face was clean-shaven, his hair tied back and powdered; he
+was in his shirt-sleeves, with a satin waistcoat, a sword at his side,
+and shining buckles to his shoes. Then I saw that the big chest stood
+open. I opened the door and entered.
+
+"'Come in!' said the man, and from his voice I knew him to be Mr.
+Crudge. He took a candle in his hand and held it above his head.
+
+"'Tell me my name,' he said. His face, shaved of its beard and no
+longer hidden by his hair, stood out distinct, unmistakable.
+
+"'Lovyes,' I answered.
+
+"'Good boy,' said he. 'Robert Lovyes, brother to John.'
+
+"'Yet he did not know you,' said I, though, indeed, I could not
+wonder.
+
+"'But she did,' he cried, with a savage exultation. 'At the first
+glance, at the first word, she knew me.' Then, quietly, 'My coat is on
+the chair beside you.'
+
+"I took it up. 'What do you mean to do?' I asked.
+
+"'It is New Year's Eve,' he said grimly. 'The season of good wishes.
+It is only meet that I should wish my brother, who stole my wife, much
+happiness for the next twelve months.'
+
+"He took the coat from my hands.
+
+"'You admire the coat? Ah! true, the colour is lilac.' He held it out
+at arm's length. Doubtless I had been staring at the coat, but I had
+not even given it a thought. 'The lilac shadow!' he went on, with a
+sneer. 'Believe me, it is the purest coincidence.' And as he prepared
+to slip his arm into the sleeve I flashed the knife out of my belt. He
+was too quick for me, however. He flung the coat over my head. I felt
+the knife twisted out of my hand; he stumbled over the chair; we both
+fell to the ground, and the next thing I know I was running over the
+bracken towards Merchant's Point with Robert Lovyes hot upon my heels.
+He was of a heavy build, and forty years of age. I had the double
+advantage, and I ran till my chest cracked and the stars danced above
+me. I clanged at the bell and stumbled into the hall.
+
+"'Mrs. Lovyes!' I choked the name out as she stepped from the parlour.
+
+"'Well?' she asked. 'What is it?'
+
+"'He is following--Robert Lovyes!'
+
+"She sprang rigid, as though I had whipped her across the face. Then,
+'I knew it would come to this at the last,' she said; and even as she
+spoke Robert Lovyes crossed the threshold.
+
+"'Molly,' he said, and looked at her curiously. She stood singularly
+passive, twisting her fingers. 'I hardly know you,' he continued. 'In
+the old days you were the wilfullest girl I ever clapped eyes on.'
+
+"'That was thirteen years ago,' she said, with a queer little laugh at
+the recollection.
+
+"He took her by the hand and led her into the parlour. I followed.
+Neither Mrs. Lovyes nor Robert remarked my presence, and as for John
+Lovyes, he rose from his chair as the pair approached him, stretched
+out a trembling hand, drew it in, stretched it out again, all without
+a word, and his face purple and ridged with the veins.
+
+"'Brother,' said Robert, taking between his fingers half a gold coin,
+which was threaded on a chain about Mrs. Lovyes' wrist, 'where is the
+fellow to this? I gave it to you on the Gambia river, bidding you
+carry it to Molly as a sign that I would return.'
+
+"I saw John's face harden and set at the sound of his brother's voice.
+He looked at his wife, and, since she now knew the truth, he took the
+bold course.
+
+"'I gave it to her,' said he, 'as a token of your death; and, by God!
+she was worth the lie!'
+
+"The two men faced one another--Robert smoothing his chin, John with
+his arms folded, and each as white and ugly with passion as the other.
+Robert turned to Mrs. Lovyes, who stood like a stone.
+
+"'You promised to wait,' he said in a constrained voice. 'I escaped
+six years after my noble brother.'
+
+"'Six years?' she asked. 'Had you come back then you would have found
+me waiting.'
+
+"'I could not,' he said. 'A fortune equal to your own--that was what I
+promised to myself before I returned to marry you.'
+
+"'And much good it has done you,' said John, and I think that he meant
+by the provocation to bring the matter to an immediate issue. 'Pride,
+pride!' and he wagged his head. 'Sinful pride!'
+
+"Robert sprang forward with an oath, and then, as though the movement
+had awakened her, Mrs. Lovyes stepped in between the two men, with an
+arm outstretched on either side to keep them apart.
+
+"'Wait!' she said. 'For what is it that you fight? Not, indeed, for
+me. To you, my husband, I will no more belong; to you, my lover, I
+cannot. My woman's pride, my woman's honour--those two things are mine
+to keep.'
+
+"So she stood casting about for an issue, while the brothers glowered
+at one another across her. It was evident that if she left them alone
+they would fight, and fight to the death. She turned to Robert.
+
+"'You meant to live on Tresco here at my gates, unknown to me; but you
+could not.'
+
+"'I could not,' he answered. 'In the old days you had spoken so much
+of Scilly--every island reminded me--and I saw you every day.'
+
+"I could read the thought passing through her mind. It would not serve
+for her to live beside them, visible to them each day. Sooner or later
+they would come to grips. And then her face flushed as the notion of
+her great sacrifice came to her.
+
+"'I see but the one way,' she said. 'I will go into the house that
+you, Robert, have built. Neither you nor John shall see me, but none
+the less, I shall live between you, holding you apart, as my hands do
+now. I give my life to you so truly that from this night no one shall
+see my face. You, John, shall live on here at Merchant's Point.
+Robert, you at your cottage, and every day you will bring me food and
+water and leave it at my door.'
+
+"The two men fell back shamefaced. They protested they would part and
+put the world between them; but she would not trust them. I think,
+too, the notion of her sacrifice grew on her as she thought of it. For
+women are tenacious of sacrifice even as men are of revenge. And in
+the end she had her way. That night Robert Lovyes nailed the boards
+across the windows, and brought the door-key back to her; and that
+night, twenty years ago, she crossed the threshold. No man has seen
+her since. But, none the less, for twenty years she has lived between
+the brothers, keeping them apart."
+
+This was the story which Mr. Wyeth told me as we sat over our
+pipes, and the next day I set off on my journey back to London. The
+conclusion of the affair I witnessed myself. For a year later we
+received a letter from Mr. Robert, asking that a large sum of money
+should be forwarded to him. Being curious to learn the reason for his
+demand, I carried the sum to Tresco myself. Mr. John Lovyes had died a
+month before, and I reached the island on Mr. Robert's wedding-day.
+I was present at the ceremony. He was now dressed in a manner which
+befitted his station--an old man bent and bowed, but still handsome,
+and he bore upon his arm a tall woman, grey-haired and very pale, yet
+with the traces of great beauty. As the parson laid her hand in her
+husband's, I heard her whisper to him, "Dust to Dust."
+
+
+
+
+KEEPER OF THE BISHOP.
+
+
+For a fortnight out of every six weeks the little white faced man
+walked the garrison on St. Mary's Island in a broadcloth frock-coat,
+a low waistcoat and a black riband of a tie fastened in a bow; and it
+gave him great pleasure to be mistaken for a commercial traveller. But
+during the other four weeks he was head-keeper of the lighthouse on
+the Bishop's Rock, with thirty years of exemplary service to his
+credit. By what circumstances he had been brought to enlist under the
+Trinity flag I never knew. But now, at the age of forty-eight he was
+entirely occupied with a great horror of the sea and its hunger for
+the bodies of men; the frock-coat which he wore during his spells on
+shore was a protest against the sea; and he hated not only the sea but
+all things that were in the sea, especially rock lighthouses, and of
+all rock lighthouses especially the Bishop.
+
+"The Atlantic's as smooth as a ballroom floor," said he. It was a
+clear, still day and we were sitting among the gorse on the top of the
+garrison, looking down the sea towards the west. Five miles from the
+Scillies, the thin column of the Bishop showed like a cord strung
+tight in the sky. "But out there all round the lighthouse there are
+eddies twisting and twisting, without any noise, and extraordinary
+quick, and every other second, now here, now there, you'll notice the
+sea dimple, and you'll hear a sound like a man hiccoughing, and all at
+once, there's a wicked black whirlpool. The tide runs seven miles an
+hour past the Bishop. But in another year I have done with her." To
+her Garstin nodded across from St. Mary's to that grey finger post of
+the Atlantic. "One more winter, well, very likely during this one more
+winter the Bishop will go--on some night when a storm blows from west
+or west-nor'west and the Irish coast takes none of its strength."
+
+He was only uttering the current belief of the islands. The first
+Bishop lighthouse had been swept away before its building was
+finished, and though the second stood, a fog bell weighing no less
+than a ton, and fixed ninety feet above the water, had been lifted
+from its fittings by a single wave, and tossed like a tennis-ball into
+the sea. I asked Garstin whether he had been stationed on the rock at
+the time.
+
+"People talk of lightships plunging and tugging at their cables," he
+returned. "Well, I've tried lightships, and what I say is, ships are
+built to plunge and tug at their cables. That's their business. But it
+isn't the business of one hundred and twenty upright feet of granite
+to quiver and tremble like a steel spring. No, I wasn't on the Bishop
+when the bell went. But I was there when a wave climbed up from the
+base of the rock and smashed in the glass wall of the lantern, and put
+the light out. That was last spring at four o'clock in the morning.
+The day was breaking very cold and wild, and one could just see the
+waves below, a lashing tumble of grey and white water as far as the
+eye could reach. I was in the lantern reading 'It's never too late to
+mend.' I had come to where the chaplain knocks down the warder, and I
+was thinking how I'd like to have a go at that warder myself, when all
+the guns in the world went off together in my ears. And there I was
+dripping wet, and fairly sliced with splinters of glass, and the wind
+blowing wet in my face, and the lamp out, and a bitter grey light of
+morning, as though there never, never had been any sun, and all the
+dead men in the sea shouting out for me one hundred feet below," and
+Garstin shivered, and rose to his feet. "Well, I have only one more
+winter of it."
+
+"And then?" I asked.
+
+"Then I get the North Foreland, and the trippers come out from
+Margate, and I live on shore with my wife and--By the way, I wanted to
+speak to you about my boy. He's getting up in years. What shall I make
+of him? A linen-draper, eh? In the Midlands, what? or something in a
+Free Library, handing out Charles Reade's books? He's at home now.
+Come and see him!"
+
+In Garstin's quarters, within the coastguard enclosure, I was
+introduced to his wife and the lad, Leopold. "What shall we call him?"
+Mrs. Garstin had asked, some fifteen years before. "I don't know any
+seafaring man by the name of Leopold," Garstin had replied, after a
+moment of reflection. So Leopold he was named.
+
+Mrs. Garstin was a buxom, unimaginative woman, but she shared to the
+full her husband's horror of the sea. She told me of nights when she
+lay alone listening to the moan of the wind overhead, and seeing the
+column of the Bishop rock upon its base, and of mornings when she
+climbed from the sheltered barracks up the gorse, with her heart
+tugging in her breast, certain, certain that this morning, at least,
+there would be no Bishop lighthouse visible from the top of the
+garrison.
+
+"It seems a sort of insult to the works of God," said she, in a hushed
+voice. "It seems as if it stood up there in God's face and cried, 'You
+can't hurt me!'"
+
+"Yes, most presumptuous and provoking," said Garstin; and so they fell
+to talking of the boy, who, at all events, should fulfil his
+destiny very far inland from the sea. Mrs. Garstin leaned to the
+linen-drapery; Garstin inclined to the free library.
+
+"Well, I will come down to the North Foreland," said I, "and you shall
+tell me which way it is."
+
+"Yes, if--" said Garstin, and stopped.
+
+"Yes, if--" repeated his wife, with a nod of the head.
+
+"Oh! it won't go this winter," said I.
+
+And it didn't. But, on the other hand, Garstin did not go to the North
+Foreland, nor for two years did I hear any more of him. But two years
+later I returned to St. Mary's and walked across the beach of the
+island to the little graveyard by the sea. A new tablet upon the outer
+wall of the church caught and held my eye. I read the inscription and
+remained incredulous. For the Bishop still stood. But the letters were
+there engraved upon the plate, and as I read them again, the futility
+of Garstin's fears was enforced upon me with a singular pathos.
+
+For the Bishop still stood and Garstin had died on the Christmas Eve
+of that last year which he was to spend upon rock lighthouses. Of how
+he died the tablet gave a hint, but no more than a hint. There were
+four words inscribed underneath his name:
+
+  "And he was not."
+
+I walked back to Hugh Town, wondering at the tragedy which those four
+words half hid and half revealed, and remembering that the tide runs
+seven miles an hour past the Bishop, with many eddies and whirlpools.
+Almost unconsciously I went up the hill above Hugh Town and came to
+the signal station on the top of the garrison. And so occupied was I
+with my recollections of Garstin that it did not strike me as strange
+that I should find Mrs. Garstin standing now where he had stood and
+looking out to the Bishop as he was used to look.
+
+"I had not heard," I said to her.
+
+"No?" she returned simply, and again turned her eyes seawards. It was
+late on a midsummer afternoon. The sun hung a foot or so above the
+water, a huge ball of dull red fire, and from St. Mary's out to the
+horizon's rim the sea stretched a rippling lagoon of the colour of
+claret. Over the whole expanse there was but one boat visible, a
+lugger, between Sennen and St. Agnes, beating homewards against a
+light wind.
+
+"It was a storm, I suppose," said I. "A storm out of the west?"
+
+"No. There was no wind, but--there was a haze, and it was growing
+dark." Mrs. Garstin spoke in a peculiar tone of resignation, with a
+yearning glance towards the Bishop as I thought, towards the lugger as
+I know. But even then I was sure that those last words: "There was a
+haze and it was growing dark," concealed the heart of her distress.
+She explained the inscription upon the tablet, while the lugger tacked
+towards St. Mary's, and while I gradually began to wonder what still
+kept her on the island.
+
+At four o'clock on the afternoon of that Christmas Eve, the lighthouse
+on St. Agnes' Island showed its lamps; five minutes later the red
+beams struck out from Round Island to the north; but to the west on
+the Bishop all was dark. The haze thickened, and night came on; still
+there was no flash from the Bishop, and the islands wondered. Half an
+hour passed; there was still darkness in the west, and the islands
+became alarmed. The Trinity Brethren subsidise a St. Agnes' lugger to
+serve the Bishop, and this boat was got ready. At a quarter to five
+suddenly the Bishop light shot through the gloom, but immediately
+after a shutter was interposed quickly some half-a-dozen times. It was
+the signal of distress, and the lugger worked out to the Bishop with
+the tide. Of the three keepers there were now only two.
+
+It appeared from their account that Garstin took the middle day watch,
+that they themselves were asleep, and that Garstin should have roused
+them to light the lamps at a quarter to four. They woke of their own
+accord in the dark, and at once believed they had slept into the
+night. The clock showed them it was half-past four. They mounted to
+the lantern room, and nowhere was there any sign of Garstin. They lit
+the lamps. The first thing they saw was the log. It was open and the
+last entry was written in Garstin's hand and was timed 3.40 P.M. It
+mentioned a ketch reaching northwards. The two men descended the
+winding-stairs, and the cold air breathed upon their faces. The brass
+door at the foot of the stairs stood open. From that door thirty feet
+of gun-metal rungs let in to the outside of the lighthouse lead down
+to the set-off, which is a granite rim less than a yard wide, and
+unprotected by any rail. They shouted downwards from the doorway,
+and received no answer. They descended to the set-off, and again no
+Garstin, not even his cap. He was not.
+
+Garstin had entered up the log, had climbed down to the set-off for
+five minutes of fresh air, and somehow had slipped, though the wind
+was light and the sea whispering. But the whispering sea ran seven
+miles an hour past the Bishop.
+
+This was Mrs. Garstin's story and it left me still wondering why she
+lived on at St. Mary's. I asked after her son.
+
+"How is Leopold? What is he--a linen-draper?" She shaded her eyes with
+her hand and said:
+
+"That's the St. Agnes' lugger from the Bishop, and if we go down to
+the pier now we shall meet it."
+
+We walked down to the pier. The first person to step on shore was
+Leopold, with the Trinity House buttons on his pilot coat.
+
+"He's the third hand on the Bishop now," said Mrs. Garstin. "You are
+surprised?" She sent Leopold into Hugh Town upon an errand, and as we
+walked back up the hill she said: "Did you notice a grave underneath
+John's tablet?"
+
+"No," said I.
+
+"I told you there was a mention in the log of a ketch."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The ketch went ashore on the Crebinachs at half-past four on that
+Christmas Eve. One man jumped for the rocks when the ketch struck, and
+was drowned. The rest were brought off by the lugger. But one man was
+drowned."
+
+"He drowned because he jumped," said I.
+
+"He drowned because my man hadn't lit the Bishop light," said she,
+brushing my sophistry aside. "So I gave my boy in his place."
+
+And now I knew why those words--"There was a haze and it was growing
+dark"--held the heart of her distress.
+
+"And if the Bishop goes next winter," she continued, "why, it will
+just be a life for a life;" and she choked down a sob as a young voice
+hailed us from behind.
+
+But the Bishop still stands in the Atlantic, and Leopold, now the
+second hand, explains to the Margate trippers the wonders of the North
+Foreland lights.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRUISE OF THE "WILLING MIND."
+
+
+The cruise happened before the steam-trawler ousted the smack from the
+North Sea. A few newspapers recorded it in half-a-dozen lines of
+small print which nobody read. But it became and--though nowadays the
+_Willing Mind_ rots from month to month by the quay--remains staple
+talk at Gorleston ale-houses on winter nights.
+
+The crew consisted of Weeks, three fairly competent hands, and a
+baker's assistant, when the _Willing Mind_ slipped out of Yarmouth.
+Alexander Duncan, the photographer from Derby, joined the smack
+afterwards under peculiar circumstances. Duncan was a timid person,
+but aware of his timidity. He was quite clear that his paramount
+business was to be a man; and he was equally clear that he was not
+successful in his paramount business. Meanwhile he pretended to be,
+hoping that on some miraculous day a sudden test would prove the straw
+man he was to have become real flesh and blood. A visit to a surgeon
+and the flick of a knife quite shattered that illusion. He went
+down to Yarmouth afterwards, fairly disheartened. The test had been
+applied, and he had failed.
+
+Now, Weeks was a particular friend of Duncan's. They had chummed
+together on Gorleston Quay some years before, perhaps because they
+were so dissimilar. Weeks had taught Duncan to sail a boat, and had
+once or twice taken him for a short trip on his smack; so that the
+first thing that Duncan did on his arrival at Yarmouth was to take the
+tram to Gorleston and to make inquiries.
+
+A fisherman lounging against a winch replied to them---
+
+"If Weeks is a friend o' yours I should get used to missin' 'im, as I
+tell his wife."
+
+There was at that time an ingenious system by which the skipper might
+buy his smack from the owner on the instalment plan--as people buy
+their furniture--only with a difference: for people sometimes get
+their furniture. The instalments had to be completed within a certain
+period. The skipper could do it--he could just do it; but he couldn't
+do it without running up one little bill here for stores, and another
+little bill there for sail-mending. The owner worked in with the
+sail-maker, and just as the skipper was putting out to earn his last
+instalment, he would find the bailiffs on board, his cruise would be
+delayed, he would be, consequently, behindhand with his instalment and
+back would go the smack to the owner with a present of four-fifths of
+its price. Weeks had to pay two hundred pounds, and had eight weeks to
+earn it in. But he got the straight tip that his sail-maker would stop
+him; and getting together any sort of crew he could, he slipped out at
+night with half his stores.
+
+"Now the No'th Sea," concluded the fisherman, "in November and
+December ain't a bobby's job."
+
+Duncan walked forward to the pier-head. He looked out at a grey
+tumbled sky shutting down on a grey tumbled sea. There were flecks of
+white cloud in the sky, flecks of white breakers on the sea, and it
+was all most dreary. He stood at the end of the jetty, and his great
+possibility came out of the grey to him. Weeks was shorthanded.
+Cribbed within a few feet of the smack's deck, there would be no
+chance for any man to shirk. Duncan acted on the impulse. He bought a
+fisherman's outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage
+the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went
+throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green
+globes of the Mouse. The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him
+good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o'clock the next night
+far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on
+the Dogger.
+
+The _Willing Mind's_ boat came aboard the next morning and Captain
+Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had
+learnt that the smack was shorthanded.
+
+"I can't put you ashore in Denmark," said Weeks knowingly. "There'll
+be seven weeks, it's true, for things to blow over; but I'll have to
+take you back to Yarmouth. And I can't afford a passenger. If you
+come, you come as a hand. I mean to own my smack at the end of this
+voyage."
+
+Duncan climbed after him into the boat. The _Willing Mind_ had now
+six for her crew, Weeks; his son Willie, a lad of sixteen; Upton,
+the first hand; Deakin, the decky; Rall, the baker's assistant, and
+Alexander Duncan. And of these six four were almost competent. Deakin,
+it is true, was making his second voyage; but Willie Weeks, though
+young, had begun early; and Upton, a man of forty, knew the banks and
+currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks.
+
+"It's all right," said the skipper, "if the weather holds." And for
+a month the weather did hold, and the catches were good, and Duncan
+learned a great deal. He learnt how to keep a night-watch from
+midnight till eight in the morning, and then stay on deck till noon;
+how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel, and how
+to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to
+lee; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it; to gauge the
+leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in
+the compass; above all, he learnt to love the boat like a live thing,
+as a man loves his horse, and to want every scanty inch of brass on
+her to shine.
+
+But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea. He gazed out
+at night across the rippling starlit water, and the smacks nestling
+upon it, and asked of his God: "Is this all?" And his God answered
+him.
+
+The beginning of it was the sudden looming of ships upon the horizon,
+very clear, till they looked like carved toys. The skipper got out his
+accounts and totted up his catches, and the prices they had fetched
+in Billingsgate Market. Then he went on deck and watched the sun set.
+There were no cloud-banks in the west, and he shook his head.
+
+"It'll blow a bit from the east before morning," said he, and he
+tapped on the barometer. Then he returned to his accounts and added
+them up again. After a little he looked up, and saw the first hand
+watching him with comprehension.
+
+"Two or three really good hauls would do the trick," suggested Weeks.
+
+The first hand nodded. "If it was my boat I should chance it to-morrow
+before the weather blows up."
+
+Weeks drummed his fists on the table and agreed.
+
+On the morrow the Admiral headed north for the Great Fisher Bank, and
+the fleet followed, with the exception of the _Willing Mind_. The
+_Willing Mind_ lagged along in the rear without her topsails till
+about half-past two in the afternoon, when Captain Weeks became
+suddenly alert. He bore away till he was right before the wind,
+hoisted every scrap of sail he could carry, rigged out a spinnaker
+with his balloon fore-sail, and made a clean run for the coast of
+Denmark. Deakin explained the manoeuvre to Duncan. "The old man's
+goin' poachin'. He's after soles."
+
+"Keep a look-out, lads!" cried Weeks. "It's not the Danish gun-boat
+I'm afraid of; it's the fatherly English cruiser a-turning of us
+back."
+
+Darkness, however, found them unmolested. They crossed the three-mile
+limit at eight o'clock, and crept close in under the Danish headlands
+without a glimmer of light showing.
+
+"I want all hands all night," said Weeks; "and there's a couple of
+pounds for him as first see the bogey-man."
+
+"Meaning the Danish gun-boat," explained Deakin.
+
+The trawl was down before nine. The skipper stood by his lead. Upton
+took the wheel, and all night they trawled in the shallows, bumping on
+the grounds, with a sharp eye for the Danish gun-boat. They hauled in
+at twelve and again at three and again at six, and they had just got
+their last catch on deck when Duncan saw by the first grey of the
+morning a dun-coloured trail of smoke hanging over a projecting knoll.
+
+"There she is!" he cried.
+
+"Yes, that's the gun-boat," answered Weeks. "We can laugh at her with
+this wind."
+
+He put his smack about, and before the gun-boat puffed round the
+headland, three miles away, was reaching northwards with his sails
+free. He rejoined the fleet that afternoon. "Fifty-two boxes of
+soles!" said Weeks. "And every one of them worth two-pound-ten in
+Billingsgate Market. This smack's mine!" and he stamped on the deck in
+all the pride of ownership. "We'll take a reef in," he added. "There's
+a no'th-easterly gale blowin' up and I don't know anything worse in
+the No'th Sea. The sea piles in upon you from Newfoundland, piles in
+till it strikes the banks. Then it breaks. You were right, Upton;
+we'll be lying hove-to in the morning."
+
+They were lying hove-to before the morning. Duncan, tossing about
+in his canvas cot, heard the skipper stamping overhead, and in an
+interval of the wind caught a snatch of song bawled out in a high
+voice. The song was not reassuring, for the two lines which Duncan
+caught ran as follows--
+
+  You never can tell when your death-bells are ringing,
+  Your never can know when you're going to die.
+
+Duncan tumbled on to the floor, fell about the cabin as he pulled
+on his sea-boots and climbed up the companion. He clung to the
+mizzen-runners in a night of extraordinary blackness. To port and to
+starboard the lights of the smacks rose on the crests and sank in the
+troughs, with such violence they had the air of being tossed up into
+the sky and then extinguished in the water; while all round him there
+flashed little points of white which suddenly lengthened out into
+a horizontal line. There was one quite close to the quarter of the
+_Willing Mind_. It stretched about the height of the gaff in a line of
+white. The line suddenly descended towards him and became a sheet; and
+then a voice bawled, "Water! Jump! Down the companion! Jump!"
+
+There was a scamper of heavy boots, and a roar of water plunging over
+the bulwarks, as though so many loads of wood had been dropped on the
+deck. Duncan jumped for the cabin. Weeks and the mate jumped the next
+second and the water sluiced down after them, put out the fire, and
+washed them, choking and wrestling, about on the cabin floor. Weeks
+was the first to disentangle himself, and he turned fiercely on
+Duncan.
+
+"What were you doing on deck? Upton and I keep the watch to-night. You
+stay below, and, by God, I'll see you do it! I have fifty-two boxes of
+soles to put aboard the fish-cutter in the morning, and I'm not going
+to lose lives before I do that! This smack's mine!"
+
+Captain Weeks was transformed into a savage animal fighting for his
+own. All night he and the mate stood on the deck and plunged down the
+open companion with a torrent of water to hurry them. All night Duncan
+lay in his bunk listening to the bellowing of the wind, the great
+thuds of solid green wave on the deck, the horrid rush and roaring of
+the seas as they broke loose to leeward from under the smack's keel.
+And he listened to something more--the whimpering of the baker's
+assistant in the next bunk. "Three inches of deck! What's the use
+of it! Lord ha' mercy on me, what's the use of it? No more than an
+eggshell! We'll be broken in afore morning, broken in like a man's
+skull under a bludgeon.... I'm no sailor, I'm not; I'm a baker. It
+isn't right I should die at sea!"
+
+Duncan stopped his ears, and thought of the journey some one would
+have to make to the fish-cutter in the morning. There were fifty-two
+boxes of soles to be put aboard.
+
+He remembered the waves and the swirl of foam upon their crests and
+the wind. Two men would be needed to row the boat, and the boat must
+make three trips. The skipper and the first hand had been on deck all
+night. There remained four, or rather three, for the baker's assistant
+had ceased to count--Willie Weeks, Deakin, and himself, not a great
+number to choose from. He felt that he was within an ace of a panic,
+and not so far, after all, from that whimperer his neighbour. Two men
+to row the boat--two men! His hands clutched at the iron bar of his
+hammock; he closed his eyes tight; but the words were thundered out at
+him overhead, in the whistle of the wind, and slashed at him by the
+water against the planks at his side. He found that his lips were
+framing excuses.
+
+Duncan was on deck when the morning broke. It broke extraordinarily
+slowly, a niggardly filtering of grey, sad light from the under edge
+of the sea. The bare topmasts of the smacks showed one after the
+other. Duncan watched each boat as it came into view with a keen
+suspense. This was a ketch, and that, and that other, for there was
+the peak of its reefed mainsail just visible, like a bird's wing, and
+at last he saw it--the fish-cutter--lurching and rolling in the very
+middle of the fleet, whither she had crept up in the night. He stared
+at it; his belly was pinched with fear as a starveling's with
+hunger; and yet he was conscious that, in a way, he would have been
+disappointed if it had not been there.
+
+"No other smack is shipping its fish," quavered a voice at his elbow.
+It was the voice of the baker's assistant.
+
+"But this smack is," replied Weeks, and he set his mouth hard. "And,
+what's more, my Willie is taking it aboard. Now, who'll go with
+Willie?"
+
+"I will."
+
+Weeks swung round on Duncan and stared at him. Then he stared out to
+sea. Then he stared again at Duncan.
+
+"You?"
+
+"When I shipped as a hand on the _Willing Mind_, I took all a hand's
+risks."
+
+"And brought the willing mind," said Weeks with a smile, "Go, then!
+Some one must go. Get the boat tackle ready, forward. Here, Willie,
+put your life-belt on. You, too, Duncan, though God knows life-belts
+won't be of no manner of use; but they'll save your insurance. Steady
+with the punt there! If it slips inboard off the rail there will be a
+broken back! And, Willie, don't get under the cutter's counter. She'll
+come atop of you and smash you like an egg. I'll drop you as close as
+I can to windward, and pick you up as close as I can to leeward."
+
+The boat was dropped into the water and loaded up with fish-boxes.
+Duncan and Willie Weeks took their places, and the boat slid away into
+a furrow. Duncan sat in the boat and rowed. Willie Weeks stood in the
+stern, facing him, and rowed and steered.
+
+"Water!" said Willie every now and then, and a wave curled over the
+bows and hit Duncan a stunning blow on the back.
+
+"Row," said Willie, and Duncan rowed and rowed. His hands were ice, he
+sat in water ice-cold, and his body perspired beneath his oil-skins,
+but he rowed. Once, on the crest of a wave, Duncan looked out and saw
+below them the deck of a smack, and the crew looking upwards at them
+as though they were a horserace. "Row!" said Willie Weeks. Once, too,
+at the bottom of a slope down which they had bumped dizzily, Duncan
+again looked out, and saw the spar of a mainmast tossing just over the
+edge of a grey roller. "Row," said Weeks, and a moment later, "Ship
+your oar!" and a rope caught him across the chest.
+
+They were alongside the cutter.
+
+Duncan made fast the rope.
+
+"Push her off!" suddenly cried Willie, and grasped an oar. But he was
+too late. The cutter's bulwarks swung down towards him, disappeared
+under water, caught the punt fairly beneath the keel and scooped it
+clean on to the deck, cargo and crew.
+
+"And this is only the first trip!" said Willie.
+
+The two following trips, however, were made without accident.
+
+"Fifty-two boxes at two-pound-ten," said Weeks, as the boat was swung
+inboard. "That's a hundred and four, and ten two's are twenty, and
+carry two, and ten fives are fifty, and two carried, and twenties into
+that makes twenty-six. One hundred and thirty pounds--this smack's
+mine, every rope on her. I tell you what, Duncan: you've done me a
+good turn to-day, and I'll do you another. I'll land you at Helsund,
+in Denmark, and you can get clear away. All we can do now is to lie
+out this gale."
+
+Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray
+blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog. The heavy bows of
+the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss--the thud of a
+steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves
+raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away
+in a spume of foam from the ship's keel to lee; and the thrumming and
+screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had
+ever imagined. He clung to the stays appalled. This storm was surely
+the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury. There
+seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to
+wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the
+steady volume of the wind.
+
+Captain Weeks, too, had lost all of a sudden all his exhilaration. He
+stood moodily by Duncan's side, his mind evidently labouring like
+his ship. He told Duncan stories which Duncan would rather not have
+listened to, the story of the man who slipped as he stepped from the
+deck into the punt, and weighted by his boots, had sunk down and down
+and down through the clearest, calmest water without a struggle; the
+story of the punt which got its painter under its keel and drowned
+three men; the story of the full-rigged ship which got driven across
+the seven-fathom part of the Dogger--the part that looks like a man's
+leg in the chart--and which was turned upside-down through the bank
+breaking. The skipper and the mate got outside and clung to her
+bottom, and a steam-cutter tried to get them off, but smashed them
+both with her iron counter instead.
+
+"Look!" said Weeks, gloomily pointing his finger. "I don't know why
+that breaker didn't hit us. I don't know what we should have done if
+it had. I can't think why it didn't hit us! Are you saved?"
+
+Duncan was taken aback, and answered vaguely--"I hope so."
+
+"But you must know," said Weeks, perplexed. The wind made a
+theological discussion difficult. Weeks curved his hand into a
+trumpet, and bawled into Duncan's ear: "You are either saved or not
+saved! It's a thing one knows. You must know if you are saved, if
+you've felt the glow and illumination of it." He suddenly broke off
+into a shout of triumph: "But I got my fish on board the cutter. The
+_Willing Mind's_ the on'y boat that did." Then he relapsed again into
+melancholy: "But I'm troubled about the poachin'. The temptation was
+great, but it wasn't right; and I'm not sure but what this storm ain't
+a judgment."
+
+He was silent for a little, and then cheered up. "I tell you what.
+Since we're hove-to, we'll have a prayer-meeting in the cabin to-night
+and smooth things over."
+
+The meeting was held after tea, by the light of a smoking
+paraffin-lamp with a broken chimney. The crew sat round and smoked,
+the companion was open, so that the swish of the water and the man on
+deck alike joined in the hymns. Rail, the baker's assistant, who had
+once been a steady attendant at Revivalist meetings, led off with a
+Moody and Sankey hymn, and the crew followed, bawling at the top pitch
+of their lungs, with now and then some suggestion of a tune. The
+little stuffy cabin rang with the noise. It burst upwards through the
+companion-way, loud and earnest and plaintive, and the winds caught
+it and carried it over the water, a thin and appealing cry. After the
+hymn Weeks prayed aloud, and extempore and most seriously. He
+prayed for each member of the crew by name, one by one, taking the
+opportunity to mention in detail each fault which he had had to
+complain of, and begging that the offender's chastisement might be
+light. Of Duncan he spoke in ambiguous terms.
+
+"O Lord!" he prayed, "a strange gentleman, Mr. Duncan, has come
+amongst us. O Lord! we do not know as much about Mr. Duncan as You do,
+but still bless him, O Lord!" and so he came to himself.
+
+"O Lord! this smack's mine, this little smack labouring in the North
+Sea is mine. Through my poachin' and your lovin' kindness it's mine;
+and, O Lord, see that it don't cost me dear!" And the crew solemnly
+and fervently said "Amen!"
+
+But the smack was to cost him dear. For in the morning Duncan woke to
+find himself alone in the cabin. He thrust his head up the companion,
+and saw Weeks with a very grey face standing by the lashed wheel.
+
+"Halloa!" said Duncan. "Where's the binnacle?"
+
+"Overboard," said Weeks.
+
+Duncan looked round the deck.
+
+"Where's Willie and the crew?"
+
+"Overboard," said Weeks. "All except Rail! He's below deck forward and
+clean daft. Listen and you'll hear 'im. He's singing hymns for those
+in peril on the sea."
+
+Duncan stared in disbelief. The skipper's face drove the disbelief out
+of him.
+
+"Why didn't you wake me?" he asked.
+
+"What's the use? You want all the sleep you can get, because you an'
+me have got to sail my smack into Yarmouth. But I was minded to call
+you, lad," he said, with a sort of cry leaping from his throat. "The
+wave struck us at about twelve, and it's been mighty lonesome on deck
+since with Willie callin' out of the sea. All night he's been callin'
+out of the welter of the sea. Funny that I haven't heard Upton or
+Deakin, but on'y Willie! All night until daybreak he called, first on
+one side of the smack and then on t'other, I don't think I'll tell his
+mother that. An' I don't see how I'm to put you on shore in Denmark,
+after all."
+
+What had happened Duncan put together from the curt utterances of
+Captain Weeks and the crazy lamentations of Rail. Weeks had roused all
+hands except Duncan to take the last reef in. They were forward by the
+mainmast at the time the wave struck them. Weeks himself was on the
+boom, threading the reefing-rope through the eye of the sail. He
+shouted "Water!" and the water came on board, carrying the three men
+aft. Upton was washed over the taffrail. Weeks threw one end of the
+rope down, and Rail and Willie caught it and were swept overboard,
+dragging Weeks from the boom on to the deck and jamming him against
+the bulwarks.
+
+The captain held on to the rope, setting his feet against the side.
+The smack lifted and dropped and tossed, and each movement wrenched
+his arms. He could not reach a cleat. Had he moved he would have been
+jerked overboard.
+
+"I can't hold you both!" he cried, and then, setting his teeth and
+hardening his heart, he addressed his words to his son: "Willie! I
+can't hold you both!" and immediately the weight upon the rope was
+less. With each drop of the stern the rope slackened, and Weeks
+gathered the slack in. He could now afford to move. He made the rope
+fast and hauled the one survivor on deck. He looked at him for a
+moment. "Thank God, it's not my son!" he had the courage to say.
+
+"And my heart's broke!" had gasped Rail. "Fair broke." And he had gone
+forward and sung hymns.
+
+They saw little more of Rall. He came aft and fetched his meals away;
+but he was crazed and made a sort of kennel for himself forward, and
+the two men left on the smack had enough upon their hands to hinder
+them from waiting on him. The gale showed no sign of abatement; the
+fleet was scattered; no glimpse of the sun was visible at any time;
+and the compass was somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
+
+"We may be making a bit of headway no'th, or a bit of leeway west,"
+said Weeks, "or we may be doing a sternboard. All that I'm sure of
+is that you and me are one day going to open Gorleston Harbour. This
+smack's cost me too dear for me to lose her now. Lucky there's the
+tell-tale compass in the cabin to show us the wind hasn't shifted."
+
+All the energy of the man was concentrated upon this wrestle with the
+gale for the ownership of the _Willing Mind_; and he imparted his
+energy to his companion. They lived upon deck, wet and starved and
+perishing with the cold--the cold of December in the North Sea, when
+the spray cuts the face like a whip-cord. They ate by snatches when
+they could, which was seldom; and they slept by snatches when they
+could, which was even less often. And at the end of the fourth day
+there came a blinding fall of snow and sleet, which drifted down
+the companion, sheeted the ropes with ice, and hung the yards with
+icicles, and which made every inch of brass a searing-iron and every
+yard of the deck a danger to the foot.
+
+It was when this storm began to fall that Weeks grasped Duncan
+fiercely by the shoulder.
+
+"What is it you did on land?" he cried. "Confess it, man! There may be
+some chance for us if you go down on your knees and confess it."
+
+Duncan turned as fiercely upon Weeks. Both men were overstrained with
+want of food and sleep.
+
+"I'm not your Jonah--don't fancy it! I did nothing on land!"
+
+"Then what did you come out for?"
+
+"What did you? To fight and wrestle for your ship, eh? Well, I came
+out to fight and wrestle for my immortal soul, and let it go at that!"
+
+Weeks turned away, and as he turned, slipped on the frozen deck. A
+lurch of the smack sent him sliding into the rudder-chains, where he
+lay. Once he tried to rise, and fell back. Duncan hauled himself along
+the bulwarks to him.
+
+"Hurt?"
+
+"Leg broke. Get me down into the cabin. Lucky there's the tell-tale.
+We'll get the _Willing Mind_ berthed by the quay, see if we don't."
+That was still his one thought, his one belief.
+
+Duncan hitched a rope round Weeks, underneath his arms, and lowered
+him as gently as he could down the companion.
+
+"Lift me on to the table so that my head's just beneath the compass!
+Right! Now take a turn with the rope underneath the table, or I'll
+roll off. Push an oily under my head, and then go for'ard and see if
+you can find a fish-box. Take a look that the wheel's fast."
+
+It seemed to Duncan that the last chance was gone. There was just one
+inexperienced amateur to change the sails and steer a seventy-ton
+ketch across the North Sea into Yarmouth Roads. He said nothing,
+however, of his despair to the indomitable man upon the table, and
+went forward in search of a fish-box. He split up the sides into rough
+splints and came aft with them.
+
+"Thank 'ee, lad," said Weeks. "Just cut my boot away, and fix it up
+best you can."
+
+The tossing of the smack made the operation difficult and long. Weeks,
+however, never uttered a groan. Only Duncan once looked up, and
+said--"Halloa! You've hurt your face too. There's blood on your chin!"
+
+"That's all right!" said Weeks, with an effort. "I reckon I've just
+bit through my lip."
+
+Duncan stopped his work.
+
+"You've got a medicine-chest, skipper, with some laudanum in it--?"
+
+"Daren't!" replied Weeks. "There's on'y you and me to work the ship.
+Fix up the job quick as you can, and I'll have a drink of Friar's
+Balsam afterwards. Seems to me the gale's blowing itself out, and if
+on'y the wind holds in the same quarter--" And thereupon he fainted.
+
+Duncan bandaged up the leg, got Weeks round, gave him a drink of
+Friar's Balsam, set the teapot within his reach, and went on deck. The
+wind was going down; the air was clearer of foam. He tallowed the lead
+and heaved it, and brought it down to Weeks. Weeks looked at the sand
+stuck on the tallow and tasted it, and seemed pleased.
+
+"This gives me my longitude," said he, "but not my latitude, worse
+luck. Still, we'll manage it. You'd better get our dinner now; any odd
+thing in the way of biscuits or a bit of cold fish will do, and then I
+think we'll be able to run."
+
+After dinner Duncan said: "I'll put her about now."
+
+"No; wear her and let her jibe," said Weeks, "then you'll on'y have to
+ease your sheets."
+
+Duncan stood at the wheel, while Weeks, with the compass swinging
+above his head, shouted directions through the companion. They sailed
+the boat all that night with the wind on her quarter, and at daybreak
+Duncan brought her to and heaved his lead again. There was rough sand
+with blackish specks upon the tallow, and Weeks, when he saw it,
+forgot his broken leg.
+
+"My word," he cried, "we've hit the Fisher Bank! You'd best lash the
+wheel, get our breakfast, and take a spell of sleep on deck. Tie a
+string to your finger and pass it down to me, so that I can wake you
+up."
+
+Weeks waked him up at ten o'clock, and they ran southwest with a
+steady wind till six, when Weeks shouted--
+
+"Take another cast with your lead."
+
+The sand upon the tallow was white like salt.
+
+"Yes," said Weeks; "I thought we was hereabouts. We're on the edge of
+the Dogger, and we'll be in Yarmouth by the morning." And all through
+the night the orders came thick and fast from the cabin. Weeks was on
+his own ground; he had no longer any need of the lead; he seemed no
+longer to need his eyes; he felt his way across the currents from the
+Dogger to the English coast; and at daybreak he shouted--
+
+"Can you see land?"
+
+"There's a mist."
+
+"Lie to, then, till the sun's up."
+
+Duncan lay the boat to for a couple of hours, till the mist was tinged
+with gold and the ball of the sun showed red on his starboard quarter.
+The mist sank, the brown sails of a smack thrust upwards through it;
+coastwards it shifted and thinned and thickened, as though cunningly
+to excite expectation as to what it hid. Again Weeks called out--
+
+"See anything?"
+
+"Yes," said Duncan, in a perplexed voice. "I see something. Looks like
+a sort of mediaeval castle on a rock."
+
+A shout of laughter answered him.
+
+"That's the Gorleston Hotel. The harbour-mouth's just beneath. We've
+hit it fine," and while he spoke the mist swept clear, and the long,
+treeless esplanade of Yarmouth lay there a couple of miles from
+Duncan's eyes, glistening and gilded in the sun like a row of dolls'
+houses.
+
+"Haul in your sheets a bit," said Weeks. "Keep no'th of the hotel, for
+the tide'll set you up and we'll sail her in without dawdlin' behind
+a tug. Get your mainsail down as best you can before you make the
+entrance."
+
+Half an hour afterwards the smack sailed between the pier-heads.
+
+"Who are you?" cried the harbour-master.
+
+"The _Willing Mind_."
+
+"The _Willing Mind's_ reported lost with all hands."
+
+"Well, here's the _Willing Mind_," said Duncan, "and here's one of the
+hands."
+
+The irrepressible voice bawled up the companion to complete the
+sentence--
+
+"And the owner's reposin' in his cabin." But in a lower key he added
+words for his own ears. "There's the old woman to meet. Lord! but the
+_Willing Mind_ has cost me dear."
+
+
+
+
+HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG.
+
+
+Norris wanted a holiday. He stood in the marketplace looking
+southwards to the chimney-stacks, and dilating upon the subject to
+three of his friends. He was sick of the Stock Exchange, the men, the
+women, the drinks, the dances--everything. He was as indifferent to
+the price of shares as to the rise and fall of the quicksilver in his
+barometer; he neither desired to go in on the ground floor nor to come
+out in the attics. He simply wanted to get clean away. Besides he
+foresaw a slump, and he would be actually saving money on the veld. At
+this point Teddy Isaacs strolled up and interrupted the oration.
+
+"Where are you off to, then?"
+
+"Manicaland," answered Norris.
+
+"Oh! You had better bring Barrington back."
+
+Teddy Isaacs was a fresh comer to the Rand, and knew no better.
+Barrington meant to him nothing more than the name of a man who had
+been lost twelve months before on the eastern borders of Mashonaland.
+But he saw three pairs of eyebrows lift simultaneously, and heard
+three simultaneous outbursts on the latest Uitlander grievance.
+However, Norris answered him quietly enough.
+
+"Yes, if I come across Barrington, I'll bring him back." He nodded his
+head once or twice and smiled. "You may make sure of that," he added,
+and turned away from the group.
+
+Isaacs gathered that there had been trouble between Barrington
+and Morris, and applied to his companions for information. The
+commencement of the trouble, he was told, dated back to the time when
+the two men were ostrich-farming side by side, close to Port Elizabeth
+in the Cape Colony. Norris owned a wife; Barrington did not. The story
+was sufficiently ugly as Johannesburg was accustomed to relate it, but
+upon this occasion Teddy Isaacs was allowed to infer the details. He
+was merely put in possession of the more immediate facts. Barrington
+had left the Cape Colony in a hurry, and coming north to the Transvaal
+when Johannesburg was as yet in its brief infancy, had prospered
+exceedingly. Meanwhile, Norris, as the ostrich industry declined, had
+gone from worse to worse, and finally he too drifted to Johannesburg
+with the rest of the flotsam of South Africa. He came to the town
+alone, and met Barrington one morning eye to eye on the Stock
+Exchange. A certain amount of natural disappointment was expressed
+when the pair were seen to separate without hostilities; but it was
+subsequently remarked that they were fighting out their duel, though
+not in the conventional way. They fought with shares, and Barrington
+won. He had the clearer head, and besides, Norris didn't need much
+ruining; Barrington could see to that in his spare time. It was, in
+fact, as though Norris stood up with a derringer to face a machine
+gun. His turn, however, had come after Barrington's disappearance, and
+he was now able to contemplate an expedition into Manicaland without
+reckoning up his pass-book.
+
+He bought a buck-wagon with a tent covering over the hinder part,
+provisions sufficient for six months, a span of oxen, a couple of
+horses salted for the thickhead sickness, hired a Griqua lad as
+wagon-driver, and half a dozen Matabele boys who were waiting for a
+chance to return, and started northeastward.
+
+From Johannesburg he travelled to Makoni's town, near the Zimbabwe
+ruins, and with half a dozen brass rings and an empty cartridge case
+hired a Ma-ongwi boy, who had been up to the Mashonaland plateau
+before. The lad guided him to the head waters of the Inyazuri, and
+there Norris fenced in his camp, in a grass country fairly wooded, and
+studded with gigantic blocks of granite.
+
+The Ma-ongwi boy chose the site, fifty yards west of an ant-heap, and
+about a quarter of a mile from a forest of machabel. He had camped on
+the spot before, he said.
+
+"When?" asked Norris.
+
+"Twice," replied the boy. "Three years ago and last year."
+
+"Last year?" Norris looked up with a start of surprise. "You were up
+here last year?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+For a moment or two Norris puffed at his pipe, then he asked slowly--
+
+"Who with?"
+
+"Mr. Barrington," the boy told him, and added, "It is his wagon-track
+which we have been following."
+
+Norris rose from the ground, and walked straight ahead for the
+distance of a hundred yards until he reached a jasmine bush, which
+stood in a bee-line with the opening of his camp fence. Thence he
+moved round in a semicircle until he came upon a wagon-track in the
+rear of the camp, and, after pausing there, he went forward again, and
+completed the circle. He returned to his wagon chuckling. Barrington,
+he remembered, had been lost while travelling northwards to the
+Zambesie; but the track stopped here. There was not a trace of it to
+the north or the east or the west. It was evident that the boy had
+chosen Barrington's last camping-ground as the site for his own, and
+he discovered a comforting irony in the fact. He felt that he was
+standing in Barrington's shoes.
+
+That night, as he was smoking by the fire, he called out to the
+Ma-ongwi boy. The lad came forward from his hut behind the wagon.
+
+"Tell me how you lost him," said Norris.
+
+"He rode that way alone after a sable antelope." The boy pointed an
+arm to the southwest. "The beast was wounded, and we followed its
+blood-spoor. We found Mr. Barrington's horse gored by the antelope's
+horns. He himself had gone forward on foot. We tracked him to a little
+stream, but the opposite bank was trampled, and we lost all sign of
+him." This is what the boy said though his language is translated.
+
+Norris remained upon this encampment for a fortnight. Blue
+wildebeests, koodoos, elands, and gems-bok were plentiful, and once he
+got a shot at a wart-hog boar. At the end of the fortnight he walked
+round the ant-heap early one morning, and of a sudden plumped down
+full length in the grass. Straight in front of him he saw a herd of
+buffaloes moving in his direction down a glade of the forest a quarter
+of a mile away. Norris cast a glance backwards; the camp was hidden
+from the herd by the intervening ant-heap. He looked again towards the
+forest; the buffaloes advanced slowly, pasturing as they moved. Norris
+crawled behind the ant-heap on his hands and knees, ran thence into
+the camp, buckled on a belt of cartridges, snatched up a 450-bore
+Metford rifle, and got back to his position just as the first of the
+herd stepped into the open. It turned to the right along the edge of
+the wood, and the others followed in file. Norris wriggled forward
+through the grass, and selecting a fat bull in the centre of the line,
+aimed behind its shoulder and fired. The herd stampeded into the
+forest, the bull fell in its tracks.
+
+Norris sprang forward with a shout; but he had not run more than
+thirty yards before the bull began to kick. It kneeled upon its
+forelegs, rose thence on to its hind legs, and finally stood up.
+Norris guessed what had happened. He had hit the bull in the neck
+instead of behind the shoulders, and had broken no bones. He fired
+his second barrel as the brute streamed away in an oblique line
+southeastwards from the wood, and missed. Then he ran back to camp,
+slapped a bridle on to his swiftest horse, and without waiting to
+saddle it, sprang on its back and galloped in pursuit. He rode as it
+were along the base of a triangle, whereas the bull galloped from the
+apex, and since his breakfast was getting hot behind him, he wished
+to make that triangle an isosceles. So he jammed his heels into his
+horse's ribs, and was fast drawing within easy range, when the buffalo
+got his wind and swerved on the instant into a diagonal course due
+southwest.
+
+The manoeuvre left Norris directly behind his quarry, and with a long,
+stern chase in prospect. However, his blood was up, and he held on to
+wear the beast down. He forgot his breakfast; he took no more than a
+casual notice of the direction he was following; he simply braced his
+knees in a closer grip, while the distorted shadows of himself and the
+horse lengthened and thinned along the ground as the sun rose over his
+right shoulder.
+
+Suddenly the buffalo disappeared in a dip of the veld, and a few
+moments later came again into view a good hundred yards further to the
+south. Norris pulled his left rein, and made for the exact spot at
+which the bull had reappeared. He found himself on the edge of a tiny
+cliff which dropped twenty feet in a sheer fall to a little stream,
+and he was compelled to ride along the bank until he reached the
+incline which the buffalo had descended. He forded the stream,
+galloped under the opposite bank across a patch of ground which had
+been trampled into mud by the hoofs of beasts coming here to water,
+and mounted again to the open. The bull had gained a quarter of a
+mile's grace from his mistake, and was heading straight for a huge
+cone of granite.
+
+Norris recognised the cone. It towered up from the veld, its cliffs
+seamed into gullies by the rain-wash of ages, and he had used it more
+than once as a landmark during the last fortnight, for it rose due
+southwest of his camp.
+
+He watched the bull approach the cone and vanish into one of the
+gullies. It did not reappear, and he rode forward, keeping a close eye
+upon the gully. As he came opposite to it, however, he saw through the
+opening a vista of green trees flashing in the sunlight. He turned his
+horse through the passage, and reined up in a granite amphitheatre.
+The floor seemed about half a mile in diameter; it was broken into
+hillocks, and strewn with patches of a dense undergrowth, while here
+and there a big tree grew. The walls, which converged slightly towards
+an open top, were robed from summit to base with wild flowers, so that
+the whole circumference of the cone was one blaze of colour.
+
+Norris hitched forward and reloaded the rifle. Then he advanced slowly
+between the bushes on the alert for a charge from the wounded bull;
+but nothing stirred. No sound came to his ears except the soft padding
+noise of his horse's hoofs upon the turf. There was not a crackle
+of the brushwood, and the trees seemed carved out of metal. He rode
+through absolute silence in a suspension of all movement. Once his
+horse trod upon a bough, and the snapping of the twigs sounded like so
+many cracks of a pistol. At first the silence struck Norris as merely
+curious, a little later as very lonesome. Once or twice he stopped his
+horse with a sudden jerk of the reins, and sat crouched forwards with
+his neck outstretched, listening. Once or twice he cast a quick,
+furtive glance over his shoulder to make certain that no one stood
+between himself and the entrance to the hollow. He forgot the buffalo;
+he caught himself labouring his breath, and found it necessary to
+elaborately explain the circumstance in his thoughts on the ground of
+heat.
+
+The next moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse
+for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat
+was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun
+poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in
+blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow,
+every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs
+seemed a mouth breathing heat. He became possessed with a parching
+thirst, and he felt his tongue heavy and fibrous like a dried fig.
+There was, however, one obstacle which prevented him from acting upon
+his impulse, and that obstacle was his sense of shame. It was not so
+much that he thought it cowardly to give up the chase and quietly
+return, but he knew that the second after he had given way, he would
+be galloping madly towards the entrance in no child's panic of terror.
+He finally compromised matters by dropping the reins upon his horse's
+neck in the unformulated hope that the animal would turn of its own
+accord; but the horse kept straight on.
+
+As Norris drew towards the innermost wall of granite, there was a
+quick rustle all across its face as though the screen of shrubs and
+flowers had been fluttered by a draught of wind. Norris drew himself
+erect with a distinct appearance of relief, loosened the clench of his
+fingers upon his rifle, and began once more to search the bushes for
+the buffalo.
+
+For a moment his attention was arrested by a queer object lying upon
+the ground to his left. It was in shape something like a melon, but
+bigger, and it seemed to be plastered over with a black mould. Norris
+rode by it, turned a corner, and then with a gasp reined back his
+horse upon its haunches. Straight in front of him a broken rifle lay
+across the path.
+
+Norris stood still, and stared at it stupidly. Some vague recollection
+floated elusively through his brain. He tried to grasp and fix it
+clearly in his mind. It was a recollection of something which had
+happened a long while ago, in England, when he was at school.
+Suddenly, he remembered. It was not something which had happened, but
+something he had read under the great elm trees in the close. It was
+that passage in _Robinson Crusoe_ which tells of the naked footprint
+in the sand.
+
+Norris dismounted, and stooped to lift the rifle; but all at once he
+straightened himself, and swung round with his arms guarding his head.
+There was no one, however, behind him, and he gave a little quavering
+laugh, and picked up the rifle. It was a heavy lo-bore Holland, a
+Holland with a single barrel, and that barrel was twisted like a
+corkscrew. The lock had been wrenched off, and there were marks upon
+the stock--marks of teeth, and other queer, unintelligible marks as
+well.
+
+Norris held the rifle in his hands, gazing vacantly straight ahead. He
+was thinking of the direction in which he had come, southwest, and of
+the stream which he had crossed, and of the patch of trampled mud,
+where track obliterated track. He dropped the rifle. It rang upon a
+stone, and again the screen of foliage shivered and rustled. Norris,
+however, paid no attention to the movement, but ran back to that
+object which he had passed, and took it in his hands.
+
+It was oval in shape, being slightly broader at one end than the
+other. Norris drew his knife and cleaned the mould from one side
+of it. To the touch of the blade it seemed softer than stone, and
+smoother than wood. "More like bone," he said to himself. In the side
+which he had cleaned, there was a little round hole filled up with
+mould. Norris dug his knife in and scraped round the hole as one
+cleans a caked pipe. He drew out a little cube of mud. There was a
+second corresponding hole on the other side. He turned the narrower
+end of the thing upwards. It was hollow, he saw, but packed full of
+mould, and more deliberately packed, for there were finger-marks in
+the mould. "What an aimless trick!" he muttered vaguely.
+
+He carried the thing back to the rifle, and, comparing them,
+understood those queer marks upon the stock. They were the mark of
+fingers, of human fingers, impressed faintly upon the wood with
+superhuman strength. He was holding the rifle in his hands and looking
+down at it; but he saw below the rifle, and he saw that his knees were
+shaking in a palsy.
+
+On an instant he tossed the rifle away, and laughed to reassure
+himself--laughed out boldly, once, twice; and then he stopped with his
+eyes riveted upon the granite wall. At each laugh that he gave the
+shrubs and flowers rippled, and shook the sunlight from their leaves.
+For the first time he remarked the coincidence as something strange.
+He lifted up his face, but not a breath of air fanned it; he looked
+across the hollow, the trees and bushes stood immobile. He laughed a
+third time, louder than before, and all at once his laughter got hold
+of him; he sent it pealing out hysterically, burst after burst, until
+the hollow seemed brimming with the din of it. His body began to
+twist; he beat time to his laughter with his feet, and then he danced.
+He danced there alone in the African sunlight faster and faster, with
+a mad tossing of his limbs, and with his laughter grown to a yell. And
+as though to keep pace with him, each moment the shiver of the foliage
+increased. Up and down, crosswise and breadthwise, the flowers were
+tossed and flung, while their petals rained down the cliff's face in
+a purple storm. It appeared, indeed, to Norris that the very granite
+walls were moving.
+
+In the midst of his dance he kicked something and stumbled. He
+stopped dead when he saw what that something was. It was the queer,
+mud-plastered object which he had compared with the broken rifle, and
+the sight of it recalled him to his wits. He tucked it hastily beneath
+his jacket, and looked about him for his horse. The horse was standing
+behind him some distance away, and nearer to the cliff. Norris
+snatched up his own rifle, and ran towards it. His hand was on the
+horse's mane, when just above its head he noticed a clean patch of
+granite, and across that space he saw a huge grey baboon leap, and
+then another, and another. He turned about, and looked across to the
+opposite wall, straining his eyes, and a second later to the wall on
+his right. Then he understood; the twisted rifle, the finger marks,
+this thing which he held under his coat, he understood them all. The
+walls of the hollow were alive with baboons, and the baboons were
+making along the cliffs for the entrance.
+
+Norris sprang on to his horse, and kicked and beat it into a gallop.
+He had only to traverse the length of a diameter, he told himself, the
+baboons the circumference of a circle. He had covered three-quarters
+of the distance when he heard a grunt, and from a bush fifty yards
+ahead the buffalo sprang out and came charging down at him.
+
+Norris gave one scream of terror, and with that his nerves steadied
+themselves. He knew that it was no use firing at the front of a
+buffalo's head when the beast was charging. He pulled a rein and
+swerved to the left; the bull made a corresponding turn. A moment
+afterwards Norris swerved back into his former course, and shot just
+past the bull's flanks. He made no attempt to shoot them; he held his
+rifle ready in his hands, and looked forwards. When he was fifty yards
+from the passage he saw the first baboon perched upon a shoulder of
+rock above the entrance. He lifted his rifle, and fired at a venture.
+He saw the brute's arms wave in the air, and heard a dull thud on the
+ground behind him as he drove through the gully and out on to the open
+veld.
+
+The next morning Norris broke up his camp, and started homewards for
+Johannesburg. He went down to the Stock Exchange on the day of his
+arrival, and chanced upon Teddy Isaacs.
+
+"What's that?" asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.
+
+"That?" replied Norris, unfastening the buttons. "I told you I would
+bring back Barrington if I found him," and he trundled a scoured and
+polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.
+
+
+
+
+HATTERAS.
+
+
+The story was told to us by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton
+cutter one night when we lay anchored in Helford river. It was towards
+the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly
+with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a
+dreary look. There was no other boat in the wooded creek and the swish
+of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All the
+circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story but most of
+all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the
+story of a man's loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness
+misled him. However, let the story speak for itself.
+
+Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never schoolmates.
+Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely
+sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance.
+The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be
+visited upon the children, overbore the prophecy. Hatteras, the
+father, disorganised his son's future by dropping unexpectedly through
+one of the trap ways of speculation into the bankruptcy court beneath
+just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to
+Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world
+with a stock in trade which consisted of a school boy's command of the
+classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James
+Walker. The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker,
+whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African
+merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a
+branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
+
+Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone and
+met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident
+did not come to Walker's ears until some time afterwards, nor when he
+heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon
+Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point,
+and so may as well be immediately told.
+
+There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself
+on the swamps of the Forcados river with the mangrove forest closing
+in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put
+Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach.
+Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him,
+but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak
+no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was
+not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his
+traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the
+factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and
+laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation.
+Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they
+wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail
+of a word they said and at last he retired from the din of their
+chatter through the windows of a room which gave on the verandah, and
+sat down to wait for his superior, the agent. It was early in the
+morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In
+the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown
+a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an
+intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came
+in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not
+thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the
+house, so he contemplated the mud-banks and the mud-river and the
+mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet.
+There are few things in the world quieter than a West African forest
+in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not
+let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the
+quietude began to jar on Hatteras' nerves. He was besides very hungry.
+To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.
+
+He walked along the side of the house towards the back, and as he
+neared the back he head a humming sound. The further he went the
+louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so
+metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.
+
+Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this--a shuttered
+window and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming
+outside the window; they streamed in through the lattices of the
+shutters in a busy practical way; they came in columns from the forest
+and converged upon the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the
+room.
+
+Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy just for the sake of company, but,
+at that moment there was not one to be seen. He felt the cold strike
+at his spine, he went back to the room in which he had been sitting.
+He sat again, but he sat shivering. The agent had left no work for
+him.... The Kru boys had been anxious to explain something. The
+humming of the flies about that shuttered window seemed to Hatteras
+to have more explicit language than the Kru boys' chatterings. He
+penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned up the doors.
+He opened one of them ever so slightly, and the buzzing came through
+like the hum of a wheel in a factory, revolving in the collar of
+a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold. The
+atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold upon
+his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved
+himself to enter.
+
+At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a moment, however, he
+made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the
+bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with
+a black, furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in
+defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had
+been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over
+it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so
+vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black, furry rug suddenly lifted
+itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras' face, and dissolved into
+flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor
+half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the
+fever. The agent had died of it three days before.
+
+Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It
+left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense
+of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he
+stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save
+went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he
+served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.
+
+Now the second item in the stock in trade was a gift of tongues and
+about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was
+posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect and with the dialect
+inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the
+west coast, and at the end of six years, Hatteras could speak as many
+of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood;
+because he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service
+under the Niger Protectorate, so that when two years later, Walker
+came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the
+Bonny river, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.
+
+Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny river town to meet the steamer
+which brought his friend.
+
+"I say, Dick, you look bad," said Walker.
+
+"People aren't, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts."
+
+"I know that; but your the weariest bag of bones I've ever seen."
+
+"Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,"
+said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.
+
+"Your factory's next to the Residency," said Hatteras. "There's a
+compound to each running down to the river, and there's a palisade
+between the compounds. I've cut a little gate in the palisade as it
+will shorten the way from one house to the other."
+
+The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few
+months--indeed, more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only
+aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through
+it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. Then he would sit
+for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights in
+Piccadilly-circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a
+comic-opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big
+atlas, and one of Hatteras' chief diversions was to trace with his
+finger a bee-line across the African continent and the Bay of Biscay
+until he reached London.
+
+More rarely Walker would stroll over to the Residency, but he soon
+came to notice that Hatteras had a distinct preference for the factory
+and for the factory verandah. The reason for the preference puzzled
+Walker considerably. He drew a quite erroneous conclusion that
+Hatteras was hiding at the Residency--well, some one whom it was
+prudent, especially in an official, to conceal. He abandoned the
+conclusion, however, when he discovered that his friend was in the
+habit of making solitary expeditions. At times Hatteras would be
+absent for a couple of days, at times for a week, and, so far as
+Walker could ascertain, he never so much as took a servant with him
+to keep him company. He would simply announce at night his intended
+departure, and in the morning he would be gone. Nor on his return
+did he ever offer to Walker any explanation of his journeys. On one
+occasion, however, Walker broached the subject. Hatteras had come back
+the night before, and he sat crouched up in a deck chair, looking
+intently into the darkness of the forest.
+
+"I say," asked Walker, "isn't it rather dangerous to go slumming about
+West Africa alone?"
+
+Hatteras did not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the
+suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant
+question.
+
+"Have you ever seen the Horse Guards' Parade on a dark, rainy night?"
+he asked; but he never moved his head, he never took his eyes from
+the forest. "The wet level of ground looks just like a lagoon and the
+arches a Venice palace above it."
+
+"But look here, Dick!" said Walker, keeping to his subject. "You never
+leave word when you are coming back. One never knows that you have
+come back until you show yourself the morning after."
+
+"I think," said Hatteras slowly, "that the finest sight in the world
+is to be seen from the bridge in St. James's Park when there's a State
+ball on at Buckingham Palace and the light from the windows reddens
+the lake and the carriages glance about the Mall like fireflies."
+
+"Even your servants don't know when you come back," said Walker.
+
+"Oh," said Hatteras quietly, "so you have been asking questions of my
+servants?"
+
+"I had a good reason," replied Walker, "your safety," and with that
+the conversation dropped.
+
+Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African
+mangrove forest at night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that
+ever a man's ears harkened to. And the sounds come not so much from
+the birds, or the soughing of the branches; they seem to come from the
+swamp life underneath the branches, at the roots of trees. There's
+a ceaseless stir as of a myriad of reptiles creeping in the slime.
+Listen long enough and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush
+of innumerable crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again
+a more distinctive sound emerges from the rest--the croaking of a
+bull-frog, the whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras
+would start up in his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room
+that hears another dog barking in the street.
+
+"Doesn't it sound damned wicked?" he said, with a queer smile of
+enjoyment.
+
+Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them
+struck obliquely upon Hatteras' face and slanted off from it in a
+narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves
+of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which ran in Hatteras'
+voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he
+gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth.
+In some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he
+appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus,
+had Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon
+his face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his
+friend. He wondered whether all these months his judgment had been
+wrong. And out of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
+
+"Dick," he said, "this house of mine stands between your house and
+the forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the
+swamp. Is that why you always prefer it to your own?"
+
+Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost
+suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a
+little he said:--
+
+"It's not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you,
+it's the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these
+miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can't get the
+forest and the undergrowth out of my mind. I dream of them at nights.
+I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen,"
+and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forwards. "Doesn't
+it sound wicked?"
+
+"But all this talk about London?" cried Walker.
+
+"Oh, don't you understand?" interrupted Hatteras roughly. Then he
+changed his tone and gave his reason. "One has to struggle against a
+fascination of that sort. It's devil's work. So for all I am worth I
+talk about London."
+
+"Look here, Dick," said Walker. "You had better get leave and go back
+to the old country for a spell."
+
+"A very solid piece of advice," said Hatteras, and he went home to the
+Residency.
+
+
+II.
+
+The next morning he had again disappeared. But Walker discovered upon
+his table a couple of new volumes. He glanced at the titles. They were
+Burton's account of his pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Mecca.
+
+Five nights afterwards Walker was smoking a pipe on the verandah when
+he fancied that he heard a rubbing, scuffling sound as if some one
+very cautiously was climbing over the fence of his compound. The moon
+was low in the sky and dipping down toward the forest; indeed the rim
+of it touched the tree-tops so that while a full half of the enclosure
+was bare to the yellow light that half which bordered on the forest
+was inky black in shadow; and it was from the furthest corner of this
+second half that the sound came. Walker bent forward listening. He
+heard the sound again, and a moment after another sound, which left
+him in no doubt. For in that dark corner he knew that a number of
+palisades for repairing the fence were piled and the second sound
+which he heard was a rattle as some one stumbled against them. Walker
+went inside and fetched a rifle.
+
+When he came back he saw a negro creeping across the bright open space
+towards the Residency. Walker hailed to him to stop. Instead the negro
+ran. He ran towards the wicket gate in the palisades. Walker shouted
+again; the figure only ran the faster. He had covered half the
+distance before Walker fired. He clutched his right forearm with his
+left hand, but he did not stop. Walker fired again, this time at his
+legs, and the man dropped to the ground. Walker heard his servants
+stirring as he ran down the steps. He crossed quickly to the negro
+and the negro spoke to him, but in English, and with the voice of
+Hatteras.
+
+"For God's sake keep your servants off!"
+
+Walker ran to the house, met his servants at the foot of the steps,
+and ordered them back. He had shot at a monkey he said. Then he
+returned to Hatteras.
+
+"Dicky, are you hurt?" he whispered.
+
+"You hit me each time you fired, but not very badly I think."
+
+He bandaged Hatteras' arm and thigh with strips of his shirt and
+waited by his side until the house was quiet. Then he lifted him and
+carried him across the enclosure to the steps and up the steps into
+his bedroom. It was a long and fatiguing process. For one thing Walker
+dared make no noise and must needs tread lightly with his load; for
+another, the steps were steep and ricketty, with a narrow balustrade
+on each side waist high. It seemed to Walker that the day would dawn
+before he reached the top. Once or twice Hatteras stirred in his arms,
+and he feared the man would die then and there. For all the time his
+blood dripped and pattered like heavy raindrops on the wooden steps.
+
+Walker laid Hatteras on his bed and examined his wounds. One bullet
+had passed through the fleshy part of the forearm, the other through
+the fleshy part of his right thigh. But no bones were broken and no
+arteries cut. Walker lit a fire, baked some plaintain leaves, and
+applied them as a poultice. Then he went out with a pail of water and
+scrubbed down the steps.
+
+Again he dared not make any noise, and it was close on daybreak before
+he had done. His night's work, however, was not ended. He had still to
+cleanse the black stain from Hatteras' skin, and the sun was up before
+he stretched a rug upon the ground and went to sleep with his back
+against the door.
+
+"Walker," Hatteras called out in a low voice, an hour or so later.
+
+Walker woke up and crossed over to the bed.
+
+"Dicky, I'm frightfully sorry. I couldn't know it was you."
+
+"That's all right, Jim. Don't you worry about that. What I wanted to
+say was that nobody had better know. It wouldn't do, would it, if it
+got about?"
+
+"Oh, I am not so sure. People would think it rather a creditable
+proceeding."
+
+Hatteras shot a puzzled look at his friend. Walker, however, did not
+notice it, and continued, "I saw Burton's account of his pilgrimage in
+your room; I might have known that journeys of the kind were just the
+sort of thing to appeal to you."
+
+"Oh, yes, that's it," said Hatteras, lifting himself up in bed. He
+spoke eagerly--perhaps a thought too eagerly. "Yes, that's it. I have
+always been keen on understanding the native thoroughly. It's after
+all no less than one's duty if one has to rule them, and since I could
+speak their lingo--" he broke off and returned to the subject which
+had prompted him to rouse Walker. "But, all the same, it wouldn't do
+if the natives got to know."
+
+"There's no difficulty about that," said Walker. "I'll give out
+that you have come back with the fever and that I am nursing you.
+Fortunately there's no doctor handy to come making inconvenient
+examinations."
+
+Hatteras knew something of surgery, and under his directions Walker
+poulticed and bandaged him until he recovered. The bandaging, however,
+was amateurish, and, as a result, the muscles contracted in Hatteras'
+thigh and he limped--ever so slightly, still he limped--he limped
+to his dying day. He did not, however, on that account abandon his
+explorations, and more than once Walker, when his lights were out and
+he was smoking a pipe on the verandah, would see a black figure with
+a trailing walk cross his compound and pass stealthily through the
+wicket in the fence. Walker took occasion to expostulate with his
+friend.
+
+"It's too dangerous a game for a man to play for any length of time.
+It is doubly dangerous now that you limp. You ought to give it up."
+
+Hatteras made a strange reply.
+
+"I'll try to," he said.
+
+Walker pondered over the words for some time. He set them side by side
+in his thoughts with that confession which Hatteras had made to
+him one evening. He asked himself whether, after all, Hatteras'
+explanation of his conduct was sincere, whether it was really a
+desire to know the native thoroughly which prompted these mysterious
+expeditions; and then he remembered that he himself had first
+suggested the explanation to Hatteras. Walker began to feel
+uneasy--more than uneasy, actually afraid on his friend's account.
+Hatteras had acknowledged that the country fascinated him, and
+fascinated him through its hideous side. Was this masquerading as a
+black man a further proof of the fascination? Was it, as it were, a
+step downwards towards a closer association? Walker sought to laugh
+the notion from his mind, but it returned and returned, and here and
+there an incident occurred to give it strength and colour.
+
+For instance, on one occasion after Hatteras had been three weeks
+absent, Walker sauntered over to the Residency towards four o'clock
+in the afternoon. Hatteras was trying cases in the court-house, which
+formed the ground floor of the Residency. Walker stepped into the
+room. It was packed with a naked throng of blacks, and the heat was
+overpowering. At the end of the hall sat Hatteras. His worn face shone
+out amongst the black heads about him white and waxy like a gardenia
+in a bouquet of black flowers. Walker invented his simile and realised
+its appositeness at one and the same moment. Bouquet was not an
+inappropriate word since there is a penetrating aroma about the native
+of the Niger delta when he begins to perspire.
+
+Walker, however, thinking that the Court would rise, determined to
+wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to
+answer to a charge of participation in Fetish rites. The case seemed
+sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its
+conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual
+details--human sacrifice, mutilations and the like, but Hatteras
+pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, and then had candles
+brought into the Court-house. He seemed indeed not so much to be
+investigating the negro's guilt as to be adding to his own knowledge
+of Fetish ceremonials. And Walker could not but perceive that he
+took more than a merely scientific pleasure in the increase of his
+knowledge. His face appeared to smooth out, his eyes became quick,
+interested, almost excited; and Walker again had the queer impression
+that Hatteras was in spirit participating in the loathsome ceremonies,
+and participating with an intense enjoyment. In the end the negro was
+convicted and the Court rose. But he might have been convicted a good
+three hours before. Walker went home shaking his head. He seemed to
+be watching a man deliberately divesting himself of his humanity. It
+seemed as though the white man were ambitious to decline into the
+black. Hatteras was growing into an uncanny creature. His friend began
+to foresee a time when he should hold him in loathing and horror. And
+the next morning helped to confirm him in that forecast.
+
+For Walker had to make an early start down river for Bonny town, and
+as he stood on the landing-stage Hatteras came down to him from the
+Residency.
+
+"You heard that negro tried yesterday?" he asked with an assumption of
+carelessness.
+
+"Yes, and condemned. What of him?"
+
+"He escaped last night. It's a bad business, isn't it?"
+
+Walker nodded in reply and his boat pushed off. But it stuck in his
+mind for the greater part of that day that the prison adjoined the
+Court-house and so formed part of the ground floor of the Residency.
+Had Hatteras connived at his escape? Had the judge secretly set free
+the prisoner whom he had publicly condemned? The question troubled
+Walker considerably during his month of absence, and stood in the way
+of his business. He learned for the first time how much he loved his
+friend and how eagerly he watched for the friend's advancement.
+Each day added to his load of anxiety. He dreamed continually of a
+black-painted man slipping among the tree-boles nearer and nearer
+towards the red glow of a fire in some open space secure amongst the
+swamps, where hideous mysteries had their celebration. He cut short
+his business and hurried back from Bonny. He crossed at once to the
+Residency and found his friend in a great turmoil of affairs. Walker
+came back from Bonny a month later and hurried across to his friend.
+
+"Jim," said Hatteras, starting up, "I've got a year's leave; I am
+going home."
+
+"Dicky!" cried Walker, and he nearly wrung Hatteras' hand from his
+arm. "That's grand news."
+
+"Yes, old man, I thought you would be glad; I sail in a fortnight."
+And he did.
+
+For the first month Walker was glad. A year's leave would make a new
+man of Dick Hatteras, he thought, or, at all events, restore the old
+man, sane and sound, as he had been before he came to the West African
+coast. During the second month Walker began to feel lonely. In the
+third he bought a banjo and learnt it during the fourth and fifth.
+During the sixth he began to say to himself, "What a time poor Dick
+must have had all those six years with those cursed forests about him.
+I don't wonder--I don't wonder." He turned disconsolately to his banjo
+and played for the rest of the year; all through the wet season while
+the rain came down in a steady roar and only the curlews cried--until
+Hatteras returned. He returned at the top of his spirits and health.
+Of course he was hall-marked West African, but no man gets rid of that
+stamp. Moreover there was more than health in his expression. There
+was a new look of pride in his eyes and when he spoke of a bachelor it
+was in terms of sympathetic pity.
+
+"Jim," said he, after five minutes of restraint, "I am engaged to be
+married."
+
+Jim danced round him in delight. "What an ass I have been," he
+thought, "why didn't I think of that cure myself?" and he asked, "When
+is it to be?"
+
+"In eight months. You'll come home and see me through."
+
+Walker agreed and for eight months listened to praises of the lady.
+There were no more solitary expeditions. In fact, Hatteras seemed
+absorbed in the diurnal discovery of new perfections in his future
+wife.
+
+"Yes, she seems a nice girl," Walker commented. He found her upon his
+arrival in England more human than Hatteras' conversation had led him
+to expect, and she proved to him that she was a nice girl. For she
+listened for hours to him lecturing her on the proper way to treat
+Dick without the slightest irritation and with only a faintly visible
+amusement. Besides she insisted on returning with her husband to Bonny
+river, which was a sufficiently courageous thing to undertake.
+
+For a year in spite of the climate the couple were commonplace and
+happy. For a year Walker clucked about them like a hen after its
+chickens and slept the sleep of the untroubled. Then he returned to
+England and from that time made only occasional journeys to West
+Africa. Thus for awhile he almost lost sight of Hatteras and
+consequently still slept the sleep of the untroubled. One morning,
+however, he arrived unexpectedly at the settlement and at once called
+on Hatteras. He did not wait to be announced, but ran up the steps
+outside the house and into the dining-room. He found Mrs. Hatteras
+crying. She dried her eyes, welcomed Walker, and said that she was
+sorry, but her husband was away.
+
+Walker started, looked at her eyes, and asked hesitatingly whether he
+could help. Mrs. Hatteras replied with an ill-assumed surprise that
+she did not understand. Walker suggested that there was trouble. Mrs.
+Hatteras denied the truth of the suggestion. Walker pressed the point
+and Mrs. Hatteras yielded so far as to assert that there was no
+trouble in which Hatteras was concerned. Walker hardly thought it the
+occasion for a parade of manners, and insisted on pointing out
+that his knowledge of her husband was intimate and dated from his
+schooldays. Thereupon Mrs. Hatteras gave way.
+
+"Dick goes away alone," she said. "He stains his skin and goes away at
+night. He tells me that he must, that it's the only way by which he
+can know the natives, and that so it's a sort of duty. He says the
+black tells nothing of himself to the white man--ever. You must go
+amongst them if you are to know them. So he goes, and I never know
+when he will come back. I never know whether he will come back."
+
+"But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has
+always come back," replied Walker.
+
+"Yes, but one day he will not." Walker comforted her as well as he
+could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot
+against him, spoke of risks that every one must run who serve the
+Empire. "Never a lotus closes, you know," he said, and went back to
+the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.
+
+It was no sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that he was
+certain, and he waited--he waited from darkness to daybreak in his
+compound for three successive nights. On the fourth he heard the
+scuffling sound at the corner of the fence. The night was black as the
+inside of a coffin. Half a regiment of men might steal past him and he
+not have seen them. Accordingly he walked cautiously to the palisade
+which separated the enclosure of the Residency from his own, felt
+along it until he reached the little gate and stationed himself
+in front of it. In a few moments he thought that he heard a man
+breathing, but whether to the right or the left he could not tell;
+and then a groping hand lightly touched his face and drew away again.
+Walker said nothing, but held his breath and did not move. The hand
+was stretched out again. This time it touched his breast and moved
+across it until it felt a button of Walker's coat. Then it was
+snatched away and Walker heard a gasping in-draw of the breath and
+afterwards a sound as of a man turning in a flurry. Walker sprang
+forward and caught a naked shoulder with one hand, a naked arm with
+the other.
+
+"Wait a bit, Dick Hatteras," he said.
+
+There was a low cry, and then a husky voice addressed him respectfully
+as "Daddy" in trade-English.
+
+"That won't do, Dick," said Walker.
+
+The voice babbled more trade-English.
+
+"If you're not Dick Hatteras," continued Walker, tightening his grasp,
+"You've no manner of right here. I'll give you till I count ten and
+then I shall shoot."
+
+Walker counted up to nine aloud and then--
+
+"Jim," said Hatteras in his natural voice.
+
+"That's better," said Walker. "Let's go in and talk."
+
+
+III.
+
+He went up the step and lighted the lamp. Hatteras followed him and
+the two men faced one another. For a little while neither of them
+spoke. Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black
+skin, naked except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his
+head was a white man married to a white wife who was sleeping--Nay,
+more likely crying--not thirty yards away.
+
+Hatteras began to mumble out his usual explanation of duty and the
+rest of it.
+
+"That won't wash," interrupted Walker. "What is it? A woman?"
+
+"Good Heaven, no!" cried Hatteras suddenly. It was plain that that
+explanation was at all events untrue. "Jim, I've a good mind to tell
+you all about it."
+
+"You have got to," said Walker. He stood between Hatteras and the
+steps.
+
+"I told you how this country fascinated me in spite of myself," he
+began.
+
+"But I thought," interrupted Walker, "that you had got over that
+since. Why, man, you are married," and he came across to Hatteras and
+shook him by the shoulder. "Don't you understand? You have a wife!"
+
+"I know," said Hatteras. "But there are things deeper at the heart
+of me than the love of woman, and one of those things is the love of
+horror. I tell you it bites as nothing else does in this world. It's
+like absinthe that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can't
+do without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first
+landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now--"
+He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. His voice dropped
+to a passionate whisper, he locked and unlocked his fingers with
+feverish movements, and his eyes shifted and glittered in an unnatural
+excitement.
+
+"It's like going down to Hell and coming up again and wanting to go
+down again. Oh, you'd want to go down again. You'd find the whole
+earth pale. You'd count the days until you went down again. Do you
+remember Orpheus? I think he looked back not to see if Eurydice was
+coming after him but because he knew it was the last glimpse he would
+get of Hell." At that he broke off and began to chant in a crazy
+voice, wagging his head and swaying his body to the rhythm of the
+lines:--
+
+  "Quum subita in cantum dementia cepit amantem
+  Ignoscenda quidem scirent si ignoscere manes;
+  Restilit Eurydicengue suam jam luce sub ipsa
+  Immemor heu victusque animi respexit."
+
+"Oh, stop that!" cried Walker, and Hatteras laughed. "For God's sake,
+stop it!"
+
+For the words brought back to him in a flash the vision of a
+class-room with its chipped desks ranged against the varnished walls,
+the droning sound of the form-master's voice, and the swish of lilac
+bushes against the lower window panes on summer afternoons. "Go on,"
+he said. "Oh, go on, and let's have done with it."
+
+Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man
+breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it.
+He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had
+witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the
+last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a growing
+enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their
+loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. "Stop," he
+said, again, "Stop! That's enough."
+
+Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker's
+presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a
+child will, and here and there he laughed and the mere sound of his
+laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold
+out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.
+
+"Well?" he asked. "Well?"
+
+Walker still offered him the revolver.
+
+"There are cases, I think, which neither God's law nor man's law seems
+to have provided for. There's your wife you see to be considered. If
+you don't take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I
+shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old
+country."
+
+Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered
+it for a little.
+
+"My wife must never know," he said.
+
+"There's the pistol. Outside's the swamp. The swamp will tell no
+tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know."
+
+Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.
+
+"Good-bye, Jim," he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook
+his head, and Hatteras went out on to the verandah and down the steps.
+
+Walker heard him climb over the fence; and then followed as far as the
+verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth
+came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes
+afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol shot broke the silence like
+the tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales.
+Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband's disappearance
+that she knew and returned brokenhearted to England. There was some
+loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy, which makes the English a
+dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.
+
+But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowé river in Congo
+Français. He travelled as far as Woermann's factory in Njole Island
+and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the
+hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for
+a hundred and fifty miles in a little stern-wheel steamer. At that
+point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his
+banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty
+miles. There he ran the boat's nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan
+village and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.
+
+There was a slip of forest between the village and the river bank, and
+while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it
+he heard a noise of lamentation. The noise came from the village and
+was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a
+chorus of discordant howls, low in note and long-drawn out--wordless,
+something like the howls of an animal in pain and yet human by reason
+of their infinite melancholy.
+
+Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock, fronting the palisade
+which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed
+down into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For
+from every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in
+their filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their
+heads shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker
+knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the
+coming of the witch doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural
+death, and, since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the
+Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the
+witch doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village
+was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, since the end of
+those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however,
+politely invited Walker to inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut,
+packed with the corpse's relations, who were shouting to it at the top
+of their voices on the on-chance that its spirit might think better of
+its conduct and return to the body. They explained to Walker that they
+had tried all the usual varieties of persuasion. They had put red
+pepper into the chief's eyes while he was dying. They had propped open
+his mouth with a stick; they had burned fibres of the oil nut under
+his nose. In fact, they had made his death as uncomfortable as
+possible, but none the less he had died.
+
+The witch doctor arrived on the heels of the explanation, and Walker,
+since he was powerless to interfere, thought it wise to retire for
+the time being. He went back to the hillock on the edge of the trees.
+Thence he looked across and over the palisade and had the whole length
+of the street within his view.
+
+The witch doctor entered it from the opposite end, to the beating
+of many drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a
+square-skirted eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded
+knee breeches on his bare legs; the second was that he limped--ever
+so slightly. Still he limped and--with the right leg. Walker felt a
+strong desire to see the man's face, and his heart thumped within him
+as he came nearer and nearer down the street. But his hair was so
+matted about his cheeks that Walker could not distinguish a feature.
+"If I was only near enough to see his eyes," he thought. But he was
+not near enough, nor would it have been prudent for him to have gone
+nearer.
+
+The witch doctor commenced the proceedings by ringing a handbell in
+front of every hut. But that method of detection failed to work.
+The bell rang successively at every door. Walker watched the
+man's progress, watched his trailing limb, and began to discover
+familiarities in his manner. "Pure fancy," he argued with himself. "If
+he had not limped I should have noticed nothing."
+
+Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid.
+The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after
+the other and at each name he lifted the lid. But that plan appeared
+to be no improvement, for the lid never stuck. It came off readily at
+each name. Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have
+to cover who walked across country from Bonny river to the Ogowé, and
+he reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand
+to one that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would
+be eaten on the way.
+
+The witch doctor turned up the big square cuffs of his sleeves, as a
+conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however,
+at each name, he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was
+seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine
+the man's right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him.
+The witch doctor went steadily through the list. Walker rose to his
+feet and took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at
+one particular name, the doctor's hands flew apart and waved wildly
+about him. A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group
+of Fans. The group fell back and left one man standing alone. He made
+no defence, no resistance. Two men came forward and bound his hands
+and his feet and his body with tie-tie. Then they carried him within a
+hut.
+
+"That's sheer murder," thought Walker. He could not rescue the victim,
+he knew. But--he could get a nearer view of that witch doctor. Already
+the man was packing up his paraphernalia. Walker stepped back among
+the trees and, running with all his speed, made the circuit of the
+village. He reached the further end of the street just as the witch
+doctor walked out into the open.
+
+Walker ran forward a yard or so until he too stood plain to see on the
+level ground. The witch doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped
+only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker's direction. Then he
+went on again towards his own hut in the forest.
+
+Walker made no attempt to follow him. "He has seen me," he thought.
+"If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night."
+Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards
+down stream. He himself remained alone in his canoe.
+
+The night fell moonless and black, and the enclosing forest made it
+yet blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head
+like gold spangles on a strip of black velvet. Those stars and the
+glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the
+only lights which Walker had. It was as dark as the night when Walker
+waited for Hatteras at the wicket-gate.
+
+He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted
+lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo and again he
+waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of
+twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on
+his banjo and played a hymn tune. He played "Abide with me," thinking
+that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England's summer
+time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano might flash
+into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank and draw him as with
+cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one
+spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune and
+played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly circus. He had not
+played more than a dozen bars before he heard a sob from the bank and
+then the sound of some one sliding down the clay. The next instant a
+figure shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight
+of a foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.
+
+"Well, what is it?" asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt
+for a match in his pocket.
+
+It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he
+had made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and
+sprang up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of
+his ankle.
+
+"No, you don't," said he, "you must have meant to visit me. This isn't
+Heally," and he jerked the man back into the bottom of the boat.
+
+The man explained that he had paid a visit out of the purest
+friendliness.
+
+"You're the witch doctor, I suppose," said Walker. The other replied
+that he was and proceeded to state that he was willing to give
+information about much that made white men curious. He would explain
+why it was of singular advantage to possess a white man's eyeball, and
+how very advisable it was to kill any one you caught making Itung. The
+danger of passing near a cotton-tree which had red earth at the roots
+provided a subject which no prudent man should disregard; and Tando,
+with his driver ants, was worth conciliating. The witch doctor was
+prepared to explain to Walker how to conciliate Tando. Walker replied
+that it was very kind of the witch doctor but Tando didn't really
+worry him. He was, in fact, very much more worried by an inability to
+understand how a native so high up the Ogowé River had learned how to
+speak trade-English.
+
+The witch doctor waved the question aside and remarked that Walker
+must have enemies. "Pussim bad too much," he called them. "Pussim
+woh-woh. Berrah well! Ah send grand Krau-Krau and dem pussim die one
+time." Walker could not recollect for the moment any "pussim" whom
+he wished to die one time, whether from grand Krau-Krau or any
+other disease. "Wait a bit," he continued, "there is one man--Dick
+Hatteras!" and he struck the match suddenly. The witch doctor started
+forward as though to put it out. Walker, however, had the door of the
+lantern open. He set the match to the wick of the candle and closed
+the door fast. The witch doctor drew back. Walker lifted the lantern
+and threw the light on his face. The witch doctor buried his face in
+his hands and supported his elbows on his knees. Immediately Walker
+darted forward a hand, seized the loose sleeve of the witch doctor's
+coat and slipped it back along his arm to the elbow. It was the sleeve
+of the right arm and there on the fleshy part of the forearm was the
+scar of a bullet.
+
+"Yes," said Walker. "By God, it is Dick Hatteras!"
+
+"Well?" cried Hatteras, taking his hands from his face. "What the
+devil made you turn-turn 'Tommy Atkins' on the banjo? Damn you!"
+
+"Dick, I saw you this afternoon."
+
+"I know, I know. Why on earth didn't you kill me that night in your
+compound?"
+
+"I mean to make up for that mistake to-night!"
+
+Walker took his rifle on to his knees. Hatteras saw the movement,
+leaned forward quickly, snatched up the rifle, snatched up the
+cartridges, thrust a couple of cartridges into the breech, and handed
+the loaded rifle back to his old friend.
+
+"That's right," he said. "I remember. There are some cases neither
+God's law nor man's law has quite made provision for." And then he
+stopped, with his finger on his lip. "Listen!" he said.
+
+From the depths of the forest there came faintly, very sweetly the
+sound of church-bells ringing--a peal of bells ringing at midnight in
+the heart of West Africa. Walker was startled. The sound seemed fairy
+work, so faint, so sweet was it.
+
+"It's no fancy, Jim," said Hatteras, "I hear them every night and at
+matins and at vespers. There was a Jesuit monastery here two hundred
+years ago. The bells remain and some of the clothes." He touched his
+coat as he spoke. "The Fans still ring the bells from habit. Just
+think of it! Every morning, every evening, every midnight, I hear
+those bells. They talk to me of little churches perched on hillsides
+in the old country, of hawthorn lanes, and women--English women,
+English girls, thousands of miles away--going along them to church.
+God help me! Jim, have you got an English pipe?"
+
+"Yes; an English briarwood and some bird's-eye."
+
+Walker handed Hatteras his briarwood and his pouch of tobacco.
+Hatteras filled the pipe, lit it at the lantern, and sucked at it
+avidly for a moment. Then he gave a sigh and drew in the tobacco more
+slowly, and yet more slowly.
+
+"My wife?" he asked at last, in a low voice.
+
+"She is in England. She thinks you dead."
+
+Hatteras nodded.
+
+"There's a jar of Scotch whiskey in the locker behind you," said
+Walker. Hatteras turned round, lifted out the jar and a couple of tin
+cups. He poured whiskey into each and handed one to Walker.
+
+"No thanks," said Walker. "I don't think I will."
+
+Hatteras looked at his companion for an instant. Then he emptied
+deliberately both cups over the side of the boat. Next he took the
+pipe from his lips. The tobacco was not half consumed. He poised the
+pipe for a little in his hand. Then he blew into the bowl and watched
+the dull red glow kindle into sparks of flame as he blew. Very slowly
+he tapped the bowl against the thwart of the boat until the burning
+tobacco fell with a hiss into the water. He laid the pipe gently down
+and stood up.
+
+"So long, old man," he said, and sprang out on to the clay. Walker
+turned the lantern until the light made a disc upon the bank.
+
+"Good bye, Jim," said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he
+stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to
+his shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras
+and he had been at school together.
+
+"Good bye, Dicky," he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the
+boat-side. The blacks down-river were roused by the shot. Walker
+shouted to them to stay where they were, and as soon as their camp was
+quiet he stepped on shore. He filled up the whiskey jar with water,
+tied it to Hatteras' feet, shook his hand, and pushed the body into
+the river. The next morning he started back to Fernan Vaz.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE.
+
+
+The truth concerning the downfall of the Princess Joceliande has never
+as yet been honestly inscribed. Doubtless there be few alive except
+myself that know it; for from the beginning many strange and insidious
+rumours were set about to account for her mishap, whereby great damage
+was done to the memory of the Sieur Rudel le Malaise and Solita his
+wife; and afterwards these rumours were so embroidered and painted by
+rhymesters that the truth has become, as you might say, doubly lost.
+For minstrels take more thought of tickling the fancies of those to
+whom they sing with joyous and gallant histories than of their high
+craft and office, and hence it is that though many and various
+accounts are told to this day throughout the country-side by
+grandsires at their winter hearths, not one of them has so much as a
+grain of verity. They are but rude and homely versions of the chaunts
+of Troubadours.
+
+And yet the truth is sweet and pitiful enough to furnish forth a song,
+were our bards so minded. Howbeit, I will set it down here in simple
+prose; for so my duty to the Sieur Rudel bids me, and, moreover, 'twas
+from this event his wanderings began wherein for twenty years I bare
+him company.
+
+And let none gainsay my story, for that I was not my master's servant
+at the time, and saw not the truth with mine own eyes. I had it from
+the Sieur Rudel's lips, and more than once when he was vexed at the
+aspersions thrown upon his name. But he was ever proud, as befitted so
+knightly a gentleman, and deigned not to argue or plead his honour
+to the world, but only with his sword. Thus, then, it falls to me to
+right him as skilfully as I may. Though, alas! I fear my skill is
+little worth, and calumnies are ever fresh to the palate, while truth
+needs the sauce of a bright fancy to command it.
+
+These columnies have assuredly gained some credit, because with ladies
+my lord was ever blithe and _débonnaire_. That he loved many I do not
+deny; but while he loved, he loved right loyally, and, indeed, it is
+no small honour to be loved by a man of so much worship, even for
+a little--the which many women thought also, and those amongst the
+fairest. And I doubt not that as long as she lived, he loved his wife
+Solita no less ardently than those with whom he fell in after she had
+most unfortunately died.
+
+The Sieur Rudel was born within the castle of Princess Joceliande,
+and there grew to childhood and from childhood to youth, being ever
+entreated with great amity and love for his own no less than for his
+father's sake. Though of a slight and delicate figure, he excelled in
+all manly exercises and sports and in venery and hawking. There was
+not one about the court that could equal him. Books too he read, and
+in many languages, labouring at philosophies and logics, so that had
+you but heard him speak, and not marked the hardihood of his limbs
+and his open face, you might have believed you were listening to some
+doxical monk.
+
+In the tenth year of his age came Solita to the castle, whence no man
+knew, nor could they ever learn more than this, that she sailed out of
+the grey mists of a November morning to our bleak Brittany coast in a
+white-painted boat. A fisherman drew the boat to land, perceiving
+it when he was casting his nets, and found a woman-child therein,
+cushioned upon white satin; and marvelling much at the richness of her
+purveyance, for even the sail of the boat was of white silk, he bore
+her straightway to the castle. And the abbot took her and baptised her
+and gave her Sola for a name. "For," said he, "she hath come alone and
+none knoweth her parentage or place." In time she grew to exceeding
+beauty, with fair hair clustering like finest silk above her temples
+and curling waywardly about her throat; wondrous fair she was and
+white, shaming the snowdrops, so that all men stopped and gazed at her
+as she passed.
+
+And the Princess Joceliande, perceiving her, joined her to the company
+of her hand-maidens and took great delight in her for her modesty and
+beauty, so that at last she changed her name. "Sola have you been
+called till now," she said, "but henceforth shall your name be Solita,
+as who shall say 'you have become my wont.'"
+
+Meanwhile the Sieur Rudel was advanced from honour to honour, until
+he stood ever at the right hand of the Princess, and ruled over her
+kingdom as her chancellor and vicegerent. Her enemies he conquered and
+added their lands and sovereignties to hers, until of all the kings
+in those parts, none had such power and dominions as the Princess
+Joceliande. Many ladies, you may believe, cast fond eyes on him, and
+dropped their gauntlet that he might bend to them upon his knee and
+pick it up, but his heart they could not bend, strive how they might,
+and to each and all he showed the same courtesy and gentleness. For
+he had seen the maiden Solita, and of an evening when the Court was
+feasting in the hall and the music of harps rippled sweetly in
+the ears, he would slip from the table as one that was busied in
+statecraft, and in company with Solita pace the terrace in the dark,
+beneath the lighted windows. Yet neither spoke of love, though loving
+was their intercourse. Solita for that her modesty withheld her, and
+she feared even to hope that so great a lord should give his heart to
+her keeping; Rudel because he had not achieved enough to merit she
+should love him. "In a little," he would mutter, "in a little! One
+more thing must I do, and then will I claim my guerdon of the Princess
+Joceliande."
+
+Now this one more thing was the highest and most dangerous emprise of
+all that he had undertaken. Beyond the confines of the kingdom there
+dwelt a great horde of men that had come to Brittany from the East
+in many deep ships and had settled upon the coast, whence they
+would embark and, travelling hard by the land, burn and ravage the
+sea-borders for many days.
+
+Against these did the Sieur Rudel make war, and gathering the nobles
+and yeomen he mustered them in boats and prepared to sail forth to
+what he believed was the last of his adventures, knowing not that it
+was indeed but the beginning. And to the princess he said: "Lady, I
+have served you faithfully, as a gentleman should serve his queen.
+From nothing have I drawn back that could establish or increase you.
+Therefore when I get me home again, one boon will I ask of you, and I
+pray you of your mercy grant it me."
+
+"I will well," replied the princess. "For such loyal service hath no
+queen known before--nay, not even Dame Helen among the Trojans."
+
+So right gladly did the Sieur Rudel depart from her, and down he
+walked among the sandhills, where he found Solita standing in a hollow
+in the midst of a cloud of sand which the sharp wind whirled about
+her. Nothing she said to him, but she stood with downcast head and
+eyes that stung with tears.
+
+"Solita," said he, "the Princess hath granted me such boon as I may
+ask on my return. What say you?"
+
+And she answered in a low voice. "Who am I, my lord, that I should
+oppose the will of the princess? A nameless maiden, meet only to yoke
+with a nameless yeoman!"
+
+At that the Sieur Rudel laughed and said, "Look you into a mirror,
+sweet! and your face will gainsay your words."
+
+She lifted her eyes to his and the light came into them again, so that
+they danced behind the tears, and Rudel clipped her about the waist
+for all that he had not as yet merited her, and kissed her upon the
+lips and the forehead and upon her white hands and wrists.
+
+But she, gazing past his head, saw the blowing sands beyond and the
+armed men in the boats upon the sea, and "O, Rudel, my sweet lord!"
+she cried, "never till this moment did I know how barren and lonely
+was the coast. Come back, and that soon--for of a truth I dread to be
+left alone!"
+
+"In God's good time and if so He will, I will come back, and from the
+moment of my coming I will never again depart from you."
+
+"Promise me that!" she said, clinging to him with her arms twined
+about his neck, and he promised her, and so, comforting her a little
+more, he got him into his boat and sailed away upon his errand.
+
+But of all this, the Princess Joceliande knew nothing. From her
+balcony in the castle she saw the Sieur Rudel sail forth. He stood
+upon the poop, the wind blowing the hair back from his face, and as
+she watched his straight figure, she said, "A boon he shall ask, but
+a greater will I grant. Surely no man ever did such loyal service but
+for love, and for love's sake, he shall share my throne with me." With
+that she wept a little for fear he might be slain or ever he should
+return; but she remembered from how many noble exploits he had come
+scatheless, and so taking heart once more she fell to thinking of his
+black locks and clear olive face and darkly shining eyes. For, in
+truth, these outward qualities did more enthral and delight her than
+his most loyal services.
+
+But for the maiden Solita, she got her back to her chamber and,
+remembering her lord's advice, spied about for a mirror. No mirror,
+however, did she possess, having never used aught else but a basin of
+clear water, and till now found it all-sufficient, so little curious
+had she been concerning the whiteness of her beauty. Thereupon she
+thought for a little, and unbinding her hair so that it fell to her
+feet in a golden cloud, hied her to Joceliande, who bade her take a
+book of chivalry and read aloud. But Solita so bent her head that her
+hair fell ever across the pages and hindered her from reading, and
+each time she put it roughly back from her forehead with some small
+word of anger as though she was vexed.
+
+"What ails you, child?" asked the princess.
+
+"It is my hair," replied Solita. But the princess paid no heed. She
+heard little, indeed, even of what was read, but sat by the window
+gazing out across the grey hungry sea, and bethinking her of the Sieur
+Rudel and his gallant men. And again Solita let her hair fall upon the
+scroll, and again she tossed it back, saying, "Fie! Fie!"
+
+"What ails you, child?" the princess asked.
+
+"It is my hair," she replied, and Joceliande, smiling heedlessly, bade
+her read on. So she read until Joceliande bade her stop and called to
+her, and Solita came over to the window and knelt by the side of the
+princess, so that her hair fell across the wrist of Joceliande and
+fettered it. "It _is_ ever in the way," said Solita, and she loosed
+it from the wrist of the princess. But the princess caught the silky
+coils within her hand and smoothed them tenderly. "That were easily
+remedied," she replied with a smile, and she sought for the scissors
+which hung at her girdle.
+
+But Solita bethought her that many men had praised the colour and
+softness of her hair--why, she could not tell, for dark locks alone
+were beautiful in her eyes. Howbeit men praised hers, and for Sieur
+Rudel's sake she would fain be as praiseworthy as might be. Therefore
+she stayed Joceliande's hand and cried aloud in fear, "Nay, nay, sweet
+lady, 'tis all the gold I have, and I pray you leave it me who am so
+poor."
+
+And the Princess Joceliande laughed, and replaced the scissors in her
+girdle. "I did but make pretence, to try you," she said, "for, in
+truth, I had begun to think you were some holy angel and no woman, so
+little share had you in a woman's vanities. But 'tis all unbound, and
+I wonder not that it hinders you. Let me bind it up!"
+
+And while the princess bound the hair cunningly in a coronal upon her
+head, Solita spake again hesitatingly, seeking to conceal her craft.
+
+"Madame, it is easy for you to bind my hair, but for myself, I have no
+mirror and so dress it awkwardly."
+
+Joceliande laughed again merrily at the words. "Dear heart!" she
+cried. "What man is it? Hast discovered thou art a woman after all?
+First thou fearest for thy hair, and now thou askest a mirror. But in
+truth I like thee the better for thy discovery." And she kissed Solita
+very heartily, who blushed that her secret was so readily found out,
+and felt no small shame at her lack of subtlety. For many ladies, she
+knew, had secrets--ay, even from their bosom lords and masters---and
+kept them without effort in the subterfuge, whereas she, poor fool,
+betrayed hers at the first word.
+
+"And what man is it?" laughed the princess. "For there is not one
+that deserves thee, as thou shalt judge for thyself." Whereupon she
+summoned one of her servants and bade him place a mirror in the
+bed-chamber of Solita, wherein she might see herself from top to toe.
+
+"Art content?" she asked. "Thus shalt thou see thyself, without
+blemish or fault even for this crown of hair to the heel of thy foot.
+But I fear me the sight will change all thy thoughts and incline thee
+to scorn of thy suitor."
+
+Then she stood for a little watching the sunlight play upon the golden
+head and pry into the soft shadows of the curls, and her face saddened
+and her voice faltered.
+
+"But what of me, Solita?" she said. "All men give me reverence, not
+one knows me for a woman. I crave the bread of love, all day long I
+hunger for it, but they offer me the polished stones of courtesy and
+respect, and so I starve slowly to my death. What of me, Solita? What
+of me?"
+
+But Solita made reply, soothing her:
+
+"Madame," she said, "all your servants love you, but it beseems them
+not to flaunt it before your face, so high are you placed above them.
+You order their fortunes and their lives, and surely 'tis nobler work
+than meddling with this idle love-prattle."
+
+"Nay," replied the princess, laughing in despite of her heaviness,
+for she noted how the blush on Solita's cheek belied the scorn of her
+tongue. "There spoke the saint, and I will hear no more from her now
+that I have found the woman. Tell me, did he kiss you?"
+
+And Solita blushed yet more deeply, so that even her neck down to her
+shoulders grew rosy, and once or twice she nodded her head, for her
+lips would not speak the word.
+
+Then Joceliande sighed to herself and said--
+
+    "And yet, perchance, he would not die for you, whereas men die for
+    me daily, and from mere obedience. How is he called?"
+
+    "Madame," she replied, "I may not tell you, for all my pride in
+    him. 'Twill be for my lord to answer you in his good time. But
+    that he would die for me, if need there were, I have no doubt. For
+    I have looked into his eyes and read his soul."
+
+So she spake with much spirit, upholding Sieur Rudel; but Joceliande
+was sorely grieved for that Solita would not trust her with her
+lover's name, and answered bitterly:
+
+    "And his soul which you did see was doubtless your own image. And
+    thus it will be with the next maiden who looks into his eyes. Her
+    own image will she see, and she will go away calling it his soul,
+    and not knowing, poor fool, that it has already faded from his
+    eyes."
+
+At this Solita kept silence, deeming it unnecessary to make reply. It
+might be as the princess said with other men and other women, but the
+Sieur Rudel had no likeness to other men, and in possessing the Sieur
+Rudel's love she was far removed from other women. Therefore did she
+keep silence, but Joceliande fancied that she was troubled by the
+words which she had spoken, and straightway repented her of them.
+
+"Nay, child," she said, and she laid her hand again upon Solita's
+head. "Take not the speech to heart. 'Tis but the plaint of a woman
+whose hair is withered from its brightness and who grows peevish in
+her loneliness. But open your mind to me, for you have twined about my
+heart even as your curls did but now twine and coil about my wrist,
+and the more for this pretty vanity of yours. Therefore tell me his
+name, that I may advance him."
+
+But once more Solita did fob her off, and the princess would no longer
+question her, but turned her wearily to the window.
+
+"All day long," she said, "I listen to soft speeches and honeyed
+tongues, and all night long I listen to the breakers booming upon the
+sands, and in truth I wot not which sound is the more hollow."
+
+Such was the melancholy and sadness of her voice that the tears
+sprang into Solita's eyes and ran down her cheeks for very pity of
+Joceliande.
+
+"Think not I fail in love to you, sweet princess," she cried. "But I
+may not tell you, though I would be blithe and proud to name him. But
+'tis for him to claim me of you, and I must needs wait his time."
+
+But Joceliande would not be comforted, and chiding her roughly, sent
+her to her chamber. So Solita departed out of her sight, her heart
+heavy with a great pity, though little she understood of Joceliande's
+distress. For this she could not know: that at the sight of her white
+beauty the Princess Joceliande was ashamed.
+
+And coming into her chamber, Solita beheld the mirror ranged against
+the wall, and long she stood before it, being much comforted by the
+image which she saw. From that day ever she watched the ladies of the
+court, noting jealously if any might be more fair than she whom Sieur
+Rudel had chosen; and often of a night when she was troubled by the
+aspect of some fair and delicate new-comer, she would rise from her
+couch and light a taper, and so gaze at herself until the fear of her
+unworthiness diminished. For there were none that could compare with
+her in daintiness and fair looks ever came to the castle of the
+Princess Joceliande.
+
+But of the Sieur Rudel, though oft she thought, she never spake,
+biding his good time, and the princess questioned her in vain. For
+she, whose heart hitherto had lain plain to see, like a pebble in a
+clear brook of water, had now learnt all the sweet cunning of love's
+duplicity.
+
+Thus the time drew on towards the Sieur Rudel's home-coming, and ever
+the twain looked out across the sea for the black boats to round the
+bluff and take the beach--Joceliande from her balcony, Solita from the
+window of her little chamber in the tower; and each night the princess
+gave orders to light a beacon on the highest headland that the
+wayfarers might steer safely down that red path across the tumbling
+waters.
+
+So it fell that one night both ladies beheld two ships swim to the
+shore, and each made dolorous moan, seeing how few of the goodly
+company that sailed forth had got them home again, and wondering in
+sore distress whether Rudel had returned with them or no.
+
+But in a little there came a servant to the princess and told of one
+Sir Broyance de Mille-Faits, a messenger from the neighbouring kingdom
+of Broye, that implored instant speech with her. And being admitted
+before all the Court assembled in the great hall, he fell upon his
+knees at the foot of the princess, and, making his obeisance, said--
+
+    "Fair Lady Joceliande, I crave a boon, and I pray you of your
+    gentleness to grant it me."
+
+    "But what boon, good Sir Broyance?" replied the princess. "I know
+    you for a true and loyal gentleman who has ever been welcome at my
+    castle. Speak, then, your need, and if so be I may, you shall find
+    me complaisant to your request."
+
+Thereupon, Sir Broyance took heart and said:
+
+    "Since our king died, God rest his soul, there has been no peace
+    or quiet in our kingdom of Broye. 'Tis rent with strife and
+    factions, so that no man may dwell in it but he must fight from
+    morn to night, and withal win no rest for the morrow. The king's
+    three sons contend for the throne, and meanwhile is the country
+    eaten up. Therefore am I sent by many, and those our chiefest
+    gentlemen, to ask you to send us Sieur Rudel, that he may quell
+    these conflicts and rule over us as our king."
+
+So Sir Broyance spake and was silent, and a great murmur and
+acclamation rose about the hall for that the Sieur Rudel was held
+in such honour and worship even beyond his own country. But for the
+Princess Joceliande, she sat with downcast head, and for a while
+vouchsafed no reply. For her heart was sore at the thought that Sieur
+Rudel should go from her.
+
+"There is much danger in the adventure," she said at length,
+doubtfully.
+
+"Were there no danger, madame," he replied, "we should not ask Sieur
+Rudel of you to be our leader, and great though the danger be, greater
+far is the honour. For we offer him a kingdom."
+
+Then the princess spake again to Sir Broyance:
+
+"It may not be," she said. "Whatever else you crave, that shall you
+have, and gladly will I grant it you. But the Sieur Rudel is the
+flower of our Court, he stands ever at my right hand, and woe is me if
+I let him go, for I am only a woman."
+
+"But, madame, for his knighthood's sake, I pray you assent to our
+prayer," said Sir Broyance. "Few enemies have you, but many friends,
+whereas we are sore pressed on every side."
+
+But the princess repeated: "I am only a woman," and for a long while
+he made his prayer in vain.
+
+At last, however, the princess said:
+
+"For his knighthood's sake thus far will I yield to you: Bide here
+within my castle until Sieur Rudel gets him home, and then shall you
+make your prayer to him, and by his answer will I be bound."
+
+"That I will well," replied Sir Broyance, bethinking him of the Sieur
+Rudel's valour, and how that he had a kingdom to proffer to him.
+
+But the Princess Joceliande said to herself:
+
+"I, too, will offer him a kingdom. My throne shall he share with me;"
+and so she entertained Sir Broyance right pleasantly until the Sieur
+Rudel should get him back from the foray. Meanwhile she would say
+to Solita, "He shall not go to Broye, for in truth I need him;" and
+Solita would laugh happily, replying, "It is truth: he will not go to
+Broye," and thinking thereto silently, "but it is not the princess who
+will keep him, but even I, her poor handmaiden. For I have his promise
+never to depart from me." So much confidence had her mirror taught
+her, as it ever is with women.
+
+But despite them both did the Sieur Rudel voyage to Broye and rule
+over the kingdom as its king, and how that came about ye shall hear.
+
+Now on the fourth day after the coming of Sir Broyance, the Princess
+Joceliande was leaning over the baluster of her balcony and gazing
+seawards as was her wont. The hours had drawn towards evening, and the
+sun stood like a glowing wheel upon the farthest edge of the sea's
+grey floor, when she beheld a black speck crawl across its globe, and
+then another and another, to the number of thirty. Thereupon, she
+knew that the Sieur Rudel had returned, and joyfully she summoned her
+tirewomen and bade them coif and robe her as befitted a princess.
+A coronet of gold and rubies they set upon her head, and a robe of
+purple they hung about her shoulders. With pearls they laced her neck
+and her arms, and with pearls they shod her feet, and when she saw the
+ships riding at their anchorage, and the Sieur Rudel step forth amid
+the shouts of the sailors, then she hied her to the council-chamber
+and prepared to give him instant audience. Yet for all her jewels and
+rich attire, she trembled like a common wench at the approach of her
+lover, and feared that the loud beating of her heart would drown the
+sound of his footsteps in the passage.
+
+But the Sieur Rudel came not, and she sent a messenger to inquire why
+he tarried, and the messenger brought word and said:
+
+"He is with the maiden Solita in the tower."
+
+Then the princess stumbled as though she were about to fall, and her
+women came about her. But she waved them back with her hand, and so
+stood shivering for a little. "The night blows cold," she said; "I
+would the lamps were lit." And when her servants had lighted the
+council-chamber, she sent yet another messenger to Sieur Rudel,
+bidding him instantly come to her, and waited in great bitterness of
+spirit. For she remembered how that she had promised to grant him the
+boon that he should ask, and much she feared that she knew what that
+boon was.
+
+Now leave we the Princess Joceliande, and hie before her messenger to
+the chamber of Solita. No pearls or purple robes had she to clad her
+beauty in, but a simple gown of white wool fastened with a silver
+girdle about the waist, and her hair she loosed so that it rippled
+down her shoulders and nestled round her ears and face.
+
+Thither the Sieur Rudel came straight from the sea, and--
+
+"Love," he said, kissing her, "it has been a weary waste of days and
+nights, and yet more weary for thee than for me. For stern work was
+there ever to my hand--ay, and well-nigh more than I could do; but for
+thee nought but to wait."
+
+"Yet, my dear lord," she replied, "the princess did give me this
+mirror, wherein I could see myself from top to toe, and a great
+comfort has it been to me."
+
+So she spake, and the messenger from the princess brake in upon them,
+bidding the Sieur Rudel hasten to the council-chamber, for that the
+Princess Joceliande waited this long while for his coming.
+
+"Now will I ask for the fulfilment of her promise," said Rudel to
+Solita, "and to-night, sweet, I will claim thee before the whole
+Court." With that he got him from the chamber and, following the
+messenger, came to where the princess awaited him.
+
+"Madame," he said, "good tidings! By God's grace we have won the
+victory over your enemies. Never again will they buzz like wasps about
+your coasts, but from this day forth they will pay you yearly truage."
+
+"Sir," she replied, rebuking him shrewdly, "indeed you bring me good
+tidings, but you bring them over-late. For here have I tarried for you
+this long while, and it beseems neither you nor me."
+
+"Madame," he answered, "I pray you acquit me of the fault and lay the
+blame on Love. For when sweet Cupid thrones a second queen in one's
+heart beside the first, what wonder that a man forgets his duty? And
+now I would that of your gentleness you would grant me your maiden
+Solita for wife."
+
+"That I may not," returned Joceliande, stricken to the soul at that
+image of a second queen. "A nameless child, and my handmaiden! Sieur
+Rudel, it befits a man to look above him for a wife."
+
+"And that, madame," he answered, "in very truth I do. Moreover, though
+no man knows Solita's parentage and place, yet must she be of gentle
+nurture, else had there been no silk sail to float her hitherwards;
+and so much it liketh you to grant my boon, for God's love, I pray
+you, hold your promise."
+
+Thereupon was the princess sore distressed for that she had given her
+promise. Howbeit she said: "Since it is so, and since my maiden Solita
+is the boon you crave, I give her to you;" and so dismissed the Sieur
+Rudel from her presence, and getting her back to her chamber, made
+moan out of all measure.
+
+"Lord Jesu," she cried, "of all my kingdom and barony, but one thing
+did I hunger for and covet, and that one thing this child, whom of my
+kindness I loved and fostered, hath traitorously robbed me of! Why did
+I take her from the sea?"
+
+So she wept for a great while, until she bethought her of a remedy.
+Then she wiped her tears and gave order that Sir Broyance should come
+to her. To him she said: "To-night at the high feast you shall make
+your prayer to the Lord Rudel, and I myself will join with you, so
+that he shall become your leader and rule over you as king."
+
+So she spake, thinking that when the Sieur Rudel had departed, she
+would privily put Solita to death--openly she dared not do it, for the
+great love the nobles bore towards Rudel--and when Solita was dead,
+then would she send again for Rudel and share her siege with him. Sir
+Broyance, as ye may believe, was right glad at her words, and made him
+ready for the feast. Hither, when the company was assembled, came the
+Sieur Rudel, clad in a green tunic edged with fur of a white fox, and
+a chain set with stones of great virtue about his neck. His hose were
+green and of the finest silk, and on his feet he wore shoes of white
+doeskin, and the latchets were of gold. So he came into the hall, and
+seeing him thus gaily attired with all his harness off, much did all
+marvel at his knightly prowess. For in truth he looked more like some
+tender minstrel than a gallant warrior. Then up rose Sir Broyance and
+said;
+
+"From the kingdom of Broye the nobles send greeting to the Sieur
+Rudel, and a message."
+
+And with that he set forth his errand and request; but the Sieur Rudel
+laughed and answered:
+
+"Sir Broyance, great honour you do me, and so, I pray, tell your
+countrymen of Broye. But never more will I draw sword or feuter spear,
+for this day hath the Princess Joceliande granted me her maiden Solita
+for wife, and by her side I will bide till death."
+
+Thereupon rose a great murmur of astonishment within the hall, the men
+lamenting that the Sieur Rudel would lead them no more to battle, and
+the women marvelling to each other that he should choose so mean a
+thing as Solita for wife. But Sir Broyance said never a word, but got
+him from the table and out of the hall, so that the company marvelled
+yet more for that he had not sought to persuade the Sieur Rudel. Then
+said the Princess Joceliande, and greatly was she angered both against
+Solita and Rudel:
+
+"Fie, my lord! shame on you; you forget your knighthood!"
+
+And he replied, "My knighthood, your highness, had but one use, and
+that to win my sweet Solita."
+
+Wherefore was Joceliande's heart yet hotter against the twain, and she
+cried aloud:
+
+"Nay, but it is on us that the shame of your cowardice will fall. Even
+now Sir Broyance left our hall in anger and scorn. It may not be that
+our chiefest noble shall so disgrace us."
+
+But Sieur Rudel laughed lightly, and answered her:
+
+"Madame, full oft have I jeopardised my life in your good cause, and I
+fear no charge of cowardice more than I fear thistle-down."
+
+His words did but increase the fury of the princess, and she brake out
+in most bitter speech:
+
+"Nay, but it is a kitchen knave we have been honouring unawares, and
+bidding sit with us at table!"
+
+And straightway she called to her servants and bade them fetch the
+warden of the castle with the fetters. But the Sieur Rudel laughed
+again, and said:
+
+"Thus it will be impossible that I leave my dear Solita and voyage
+perilously to Broye."
+
+Nor any effort or resistance did he make, but lightly suffered them
+to fetter him, the while the princess most foully mis-said him. With
+fetters they prisoned his feet, and manacles they straitly fastened
+about his wrists, and they bound him to a pillar in the hall by a
+chain about his middle.
+
+"There shall you bide," she said, "in shameful bonds until you make
+promise to voyage forth to Broye. For surely there is nothing so vile
+in all this world as a craven gentleman."
+
+With that she turned her again to the feast, though little heart she
+had thereto. But the Sieur Rudel was well content; for not for all
+the honour in Christendom would he break his word to his dear Solita.
+Howbeit, the nobles were ever urgent that the princess should set him
+free, pleading the worshipful deeds he had accomplished in her cause.
+But to none of them would she hearken, and the fair gentle ladies of
+the Court greatly applauded her for her persistence--and especially
+those who had erstwhile dropped their gauntlets that Rudel might bend
+and pick them up. And many pleasant jests they passed upon the Sieur
+Rudel, bidding him dance with them, since he was loth to fight. But
+he paid no heed to them, nor could they provoke him by any number of
+taunts. Whereupon, being angered at his silence, they were fain to
+send to Solita and make their sport with her.
+
+But that Joceliande would not suffer, and, rising, she went to
+Solita's chamber and entreated her most kindly, telling her that for
+love of her the Sieur Rudel would not adventure himself at Broye. Not
+a word did she say of how she had mistreated him, and Solita answered
+her jocundly for that her lord had held his pledge with her. But when
+the castle was still, the princess took Solita by the hand and led her
+down the steps to where Rudel stood against the pillar in the dark
+hall.
+
+"For thy sake, sweet Solita," she said, "is he bound. For thy sake!"
+and she made her feel the manacles upon his hands. And when Solita had
+so felt his bonds, she wept, and made the greatest sorrow that ever
+man heard.
+
+"Alas!" she cried, "that my dear lord should suffer in such straits.
+In God's mercy, madame, I pray you let him go! Loyal service hath he
+done for you, such as no other in the kingdom."
+
+"Loyal service, I trow," replied the princess. "He hath brought such
+shame upon my Court that for ever am I dishonoured. It may not be that
+I let him go, without you give him back his word and bid him forth to
+Broye."
+
+"And that will I never do," replied Solita, "for all your cruelty."
+
+So the princess turned her away and gat her from the hall, but Solita
+remained with her lord, making moan and easing his fetters with her
+hands as best she might. Hence it fell out that she who should have
+comforted must needs be comforted herself, and that the Sieur Rudel
+did right willingly.
+
+The like, he would say to me, hath often happened to him since, and
+when he was harassed with sore distress he must needs turn him about
+to stop a woman's tears; for which he thanked God most heartily, and
+prayed that so it might ever be, since thus he clean forgot his own
+sad plight. Whence, meseems, may men understand how noble a gentleman
+was my good lord the Sieur Rudel.
+
+Now when the night was well spent and drawing on to dawn, Solita, for
+very weariness, fell asleep at the pillar's foot, and Rudel began to
+take counsel with himself if, by any manner of means, he might outwit
+the Princess Joceliande. For this he saw, that she would not have him
+wed her handmaiden, and for that cause, and for no cowardice of his,
+had so cruelly entreated him. And when he had pondered a little with
+himself, he bent and touched Solita with his hands, and called to her
+in a low voice.
+
+"Solita," he said, "it is in Joceliande's heart to keep us twain
+each from other. Rise, therefore, and get thee to the good abbot who
+baptised thee. Ever hath he stood my friend, and for friendship's sake
+this thing he will do. Bring him hither into the hall, that he may
+marry us even this night, and when the morning comes I will tell the
+princess of our marriage; and so will she know that her cruelty is of
+small avail, and release me unto thee."
+
+Thereupon Solita rose right joyously.
+
+"Surely, my dear lord," said she, "no man can match thee, neither in
+craft nor prowess," and she hurried through the dark passages towards
+the lodging of the abbot. Hard by this lodging was the chapel of the
+castle, and when she came thereto the windows were ablaze with light,
+and Solita clapped her ear to the door. But no sound did she hear, no,
+not so much as the stirring of a mouse, and bethinking her that the
+good abbot might be holding silent vigil, she gently pressed upon the
+door, so that it opened for the space of an inch; and when she looked
+into the chapel, she beheld the Princess Joceliande stretched upon
+the steps before the altar. Her coronet had fallen from her head and
+rolled across the stones, and she lay like one that had fallen asleep
+in the counting of her beads. Greatly did Solita marvel at the sight,
+but no word she said lest she should wake the princess; and in a
+little, becoming afeard of the silence and of the shadows which the
+flickering candles set racing on the wall, she shut the door quickly
+and stole on tiptoe to the abbot. Long she entreated him or ever she
+prevailed, for the holy man was timorous, and feared the wrath of the
+princess. But at the last, for the Sieur Rudel's sake, he consented,
+and married them privily in the hall as the grey dawn was breaking
+across the sea.
+
+Now, in the morning, the princess bid Solita be brought to her, and
+when they were alone, gently and cunningly she spake:
+
+"Child," she said, "I doubt not thy heart is hot against me for that I
+will not enlarge the Sieur Rudel. Alas! fain were I to do this thing,
+but for the honour of my Court I may not. Bound are we not by our
+wills but by our necessities--and thus it is with all women. Men may
+ride forth and shape their lives with their good swords; but for us,
+we must needs bide where we were born, and order such things as fall
+to us, as best we can. Therefore, child, take my word to heart: the
+Sieur Rudel loves thee, and thou wouldst keep his love. Let my age
+point to thee the way! What if I release him? No longer can he stay
+with us, holding high honour and dignity, since he hath turned him
+from his knightlihood and avoided this great adventure, but forth
+with you must he fare. And all day long will he sit with you in your
+chamber, idle as a woman, and ever his thoughts will go back to the
+times of his nobility. The clash of steel will grow louder in
+his ears; he will list again to the praises of minstrels in the
+banquet-hall, and when men speak to him of great achievements wrought
+by other hands, then thou wilt see the life die out of his eyes, and
+his heart will become cold as stone, and thou wilt lose his love. A
+great thing will it be for thee if he come not to hate thee in the
+end. But if, of thy own free will, thou send him from thee, then shalt
+thou ever keep his love. Thy image will ride before his eyes in the
+van of battles; for very lack of thee he will move from endeavour to
+endeavour; and so thy life will be enshrined in his most noble deeds."
+
+At these words, with such cunning gentleness were they spoken, Solita
+was sore troubled.
+
+"I cannot send him from me," she cried, "for never did woman so love
+her lord--no, not ever in the world!"
+
+"Then prove thy love," said Joceliande again. "A kingdom is given into
+his hand, and he will not take it because of thee. It is a hard thing,
+I trow right well. But the cross becomes a crown when a woman lifts
+it. Think! A kingdom! And never yet was kingdom established but the
+stones of its walls were mortised with the blood of women's hearts."
+
+So she pleaded, hiding her own thoughts, until Solita answered her,
+and said:
+
+"God help me, but he shall go to Broye!"
+
+Much ado had the Princess Joceliande to hide her joy for the success
+of her device; but Solita, poor lass! had neither eyes nor thoughts
+for her. Forthwith she rose to her feet, and quickly gat her to the
+hall, lest her courage should fail, before that she had accomplished
+her resolve. But when she came near to the Sieur Rudel, blithely he
+smiled at her and called "Solita, my wife." It seemed to her that
+words so sweet had never as yet been spoken since the world began, and
+all her strength ebbed from her, and she stood like one that is dumb,
+gazing piteously at her husband. Again Rudel called to her, but no
+answer could she make, and she turned and fled sobbing to the chamber
+of the princess.
+
+"I could not speak," she said; "my lips were locked, and Rudel holds
+the key."
+
+But the princess spoke gently and craftily, bidding her take heart,
+for that she herself would go with her and second her words; and
+taking Solita by the hand, she led her again to the hall.
+
+This time Solita made haste to speak first. "Rudel," she said, "no
+honour can I bring to you, but only foul disgrace, and that is no fit
+gift from one who loves you. Therefore, from this hour I hold you quit
+of your promise and pray you to undertake this mission and set forth
+for Broye."
+
+But the Sieur Rudel would hearken to nothing of what she said.
+
+"No foul disgrace can come to me," he cried, "but only if I prove
+false to you and lose your love. My promise I will keep, and all the
+more for that I see the Princess Joceliande hath set you on to this."
+
+But Solita protested that it was not so, and that of her own will and
+desire she released him, for the longing to sacrifice herself for her
+dear lord's sake grew upon her as she thought upon it. Yet he would
+not consent.
+
+"My word I passed to you when you were a maid, and shall I not keep it
+now that you are a wife?" he cried.
+
+"Wife?" cried the princess, "you are his wife?" And she roughly
+gripped Solita's wrist so that the girl could not withhold a cry.
+
+"In truth, madame," replied the Sieur Rudel, "even last night, in this
+hall, Solita and I were married by the good abbot, and therefore I
+will not leave her while she lives."
+
+Still Joceliande would not believe it, bethinking her that the Sieur
+Rudel had hit upon the pretence as a device for his enlargement; but
+Solita showed to her the ring which the abbot had taken from the
+finger of her lord and placed upon hers, and then the princess knew
+that of a surety they were married, and her hatred for Solita burned
+in her blood like fire.
+
+But no sign she gave of what she felt, but rather spoke with greater
+softness to them both, bidding them look forward beyond the first
+delights of love, and behold how all their years to come were the
+price they needs must pay.
+
+Now, while they were yet debating each with other, came Sir Broyance
+into the hall, and straightway the princess called to him and begged
+him to add his prayers to Solita's. But he answered:
+
+"That, madame, I will not do, for, indeed, the esteem I have for the
+Sieur Rudel is much increased, and I hold it no cowardice that he
+should refuse a kingdom for his wife's sake, but the sweetest bravery.
+And therefore it was that I broke off my plea last night and sought
+not to persuade him."
+
+At that Rudel was greatly rejoiced, and said:
+
+"Dost hear him, Solita? Even he who most has need of me acquits me of
+disgrace. Truly I will never leave thee while I live."
+
+But the princess turned sharply to Sir Broyance. "Sir, have you
+changed your tune?" she said; "for never was a man so urgent as you
+with me for the Sieur Rudel's help."
+
+"Alas! madame," he replied, "I knew not then that he was plighted to
+the maiden Solita, or never would I have borne this message. For
+this I surely know, that all my days are waste and barren because I
+suffered my mistress to send me from her after a will-of-the-wisp
+honour, even as Solita would send her lord."
+
+Thereupon Solita brake in upon him:
+
+"But, my lord, you have won great renown, and far and wide is your
+prowess known and sung."
+
+"That avails me nothing," he replied, "my life rings hollow like an
+empty cup, and so are two lives wasted."
+
+"Nay, my lord, neither life is wasted. For much have you done for
+others, though maybe little for yourself, while for her you loved the
+noise of your achievements must have been enough."
+
+"Of that I cannot tell," he answered. "But this I know: she drags a
+pale life out behind convent walls. Often have I passed the gate with
+my warriors, but never could I hold speech with her."
+
+"She will have seen your banners glancing in the sun," said Solita,
+"and so will she know her sacrifice was good." Thereupon she turned
+her again to her husband. "For my sake, dear Rudel, I pray you go to
+Broye."
+
+But still he persisted, saying he would not depart from her till
+death, until at last she ceased from her importunities, and went sadly
+to her chamber. Then she unbound her hair and stood gazing at her
+likeness in the mirror.
+
+"O cursed beauty," she cried, "wherein I took vain pride for my sweet
+lord's sake--truly art thou my ruin and snare!" And while she thus
+made moan, the princess came softly into her chamber.
+
+"He will not leave me, madame," she sobbed. Joceliande came over to
+her and gently laid her hand upon her head and whispered in her ear,
+"Not while you live!"
+
+For awhile Solita sat silent.
+
+"Ay, madame," she said at length, "even as I came alone to these
+coasts, so will I go from them;" and slowly she drew from its sheath a
+little knife which she carried at her girdle. She tried the point upon
+her finger, so that the blood sprang from the prick and dropped on her
+white gown. At the sight she gave a cry and dropped the knife, and "I
+cannot do it" she said, "I have not the courage. But you, madame! Ever
+have you been kind to me, and therefore show me this last kindness."
+
+"I will well," said the princess; and she made Solita to sit upon a
+couch, and with two bands of her golden hair she tied her hands fast
+behind her, and so laid her upon her back on the couch. And when she
+had so laid her she said:
+
+"But for all that you die, he shall not go to Broye, but here shall he
+bide, and share my throne with me."
+
+Thereupon did Solita perceive all the treachery of Princess
+Joceliande, and vainly she struggled to free her hands and to cry out
+for help. But Joceliande clapped her palm upon Solita's mouth, and
+drawing a gold pin from her own hair, she drove it straight into her
+heart, until nothing but the little knob could be seen. So Solita
+died, and quickly the princess wiped the blood from her breast, and
+unbound her hands and arranged her limbs as though she slept. Then she
+returned to the hall, and, summoning the warden, bade him loose the
+Sieur Rudel.
+
+"It shall be even as you wish," she said to him. Wise and prudent had
+she been, had she ended with that; but her malice was not yet sated,
+and so she suffered it to lead her to her ruin. For she stretched out
+her hand to him and said, "I myself will take you to your wife." And
+greatly marvelling, the Sieur Rudel took her hand and followed.
+
+Now when they were come to Solita's chamber, the princess entered
+first, and turned her again to my Lord Rudel and laid her finger to
+her lips, saying, "Hush!" Therefore he came in after her on tiptoe and
+stood a little way from the foot of the couch, fearing lest he might
+wake his wife.
+
+"Is she not still?" asked Joceliande in a whisper. "Is she not still
+and white?"
+
+"Still and white as a folded lily," he replied, "and like a folded
+lily, too, in her white flesh there sleeps a heart of gold." Therewith
+he crept softly to the couch and bent above her, and in an instant he
+perceived that her bosom did not rise and fall. He gazed swiftly at
+the princess; she was watching him, and their glances met. He dropped
+upon his knees by the couch and felt about Solita's heart that he
+might know whether it beat or not, and his fingers touched the knob of
+Joceliande's bodkin. Gently he drew the gown from Solita's bosom, and
+beheld how that she had been slain. Then did he weep, believing that
+in truth she had killed herself, but the princess must needs touch him
+upon the shoulder.
+
+"My lord," she said, "why weep for the handmaid when the princess
+lives?"
+
+Then the Sieur Rudel rose straightway to his feet and said:
+
+"This is thy doing!" For a little Joceliande denied it, saying that of
+her own will and desire Solita had perished. But Rudel looked her ever
+sternly in the face, and again he said, "This is thy doing!" and at
+that Joceliande could gainsay him no more. But she dropped upon the
+floor, and kissed his feet, and cried:
+
+"It was for love of thee, Rudel. Look, my kingdom is large and of much
+wealth, yet of no worth is it to me, but only if it bring thee service
+and great honour. A princess am I, yet no joy do I have of my degree,
+but only if thou share my siege with me."
+
+Then Rudel broke out upon her, thrusting her from him with his hand
+and spurning her with his foot as she crouched upon the floor.
+
+"No princess art thou, but a changeling. For surely princess never did
+such foul wrong and crime;" and even as he spake, many of the nobles
+burst into the chamber, for they had heard the outcry below and
+marvelled what it might mean. And when Rudel beheld them crowding
+the doorway, "Come in, my lords," said he, "so that ye may know what
+manner of woman ye serve and worship. There lies my dear wife, Solita,
+murdered by this vile princess, and for love of me she saith, for love
+of me!" And again he turned him to Joceliande. "Now all the reverence
+I held thee in is turned to hatred, God be thanked; such is the
+guerdon of thy love for me."
+
+Joceliande, when she heard his injuries, knew indeed that her love was
+unavailing, and that by no means might she win him to share her siege
+with her. Therefore her love changed to a bitter fury, and standing
+up forthwith she bade the nobles take their swords and smite off the
+Sieur Rudel's head. But no one so much as moved a hand towards his
+hilt. Then spake Rudel again:
+
+"O vile and treacherous," he cried, "who will obey thee?" and his eyes
+fell upon Solita where she lay in her white beauty upon the golden
+pillow of her hair. Thereupon he dropped again upon his knees by the
+couch, and took her within his arms, kissing her lips and her eyes,
+and bidding her wake; this with many tears. But seeing she would not,
+but was dead in very truth, he got him to his feet and turned to where
+the princess stood like stone in the middle of the chamber. "Now for
+thy sin," he cried, "a shameful death shalt thou die and a painful,
+and may the devil have thy soul!"
+
+He bade the nobles depart from the chamber, and following them the
+last, firmly barred the door upon the outside. Thus was the Princess
+Joceliande left alone with dead Solita, and ever she heard the closing
+and barring of doors and the sound of feet growing fainter and
+fainter. But no one came to her, loud though she cried, and sorely was
+she afeard, gazing now at the dead body, now wondering what manner of
+death the Sieur Rudel planned for her. Then she walked to the window
+if by any chance she might win help that way, and saw the ships riding
+at their anchorage with sails loose, and heard the songs of the
+sailors as they made ready to cast free; and between the coast and
+the castle were many men hurrying backwards and forwards with all the
+purveyance of a voyage. Then did she think that she was to be left
+alone in the tower, to starve to death in company of the girl she had
+murdered, and great moan she made; but other device was in the mind
+of my ingenious master Lord Rudel. For all about the castle he piled
+stacks of wood and drenched them with oil, bethinking him that
+Solita his wife, if little joy she had had of her life, should have
+undeniable honour in her obsequies. And so having set fire to the
+stacks, he got him into the ships with all the company that had
+dwelled within the castle, and drew out a little way from shore. Then
+the ships lay to and watched the flames mounting the castle walls. The
+tower wherein the Princess Joceliande was prisoned was the topmost
+turret of the building, so that many a roof crashed in, and many a
+rampart bowed out and crumbled to the ground, or ever the fire touched
+it. But just as night was drawing on, lo! a great tongue of flame
+burst through the window from within, and the Sieur Rudel beheld in
+the midst of it as it were the figure of a woman dancing.
+
+Thereupon he signed to his sailors to hoist the sail again, and the
+other ships obeying his example, he led the way gallantly to Broye.
+
+
+
+
+A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
+
+
+"So you couldn't wait!"
+
+Mrs. Branscome turned full on the speaker as she answered
+deliberately: "You have evidently not been long in London, Mr. Hilton,
+or you would not ask that question."
+
+"I arrived yesterday evening."
+
+"Quite so. Then will you forgive me one tiny word of advice? You will
+learn the truth of it soon by yourself; but I want to convince you at
+once of the uselessness--to use no harder word--of trying to revive a
+flirtation--let me see! yes, quite two years old. You might as well
+galvanise a mummy and expect it to walk about. Besides," she added
+inconsistently, "I had to marry and--and--you never came."
+
+"Then you sent the locket!"
+
+The word sent a shiver through Mrs. Branscome with a remembrance of
+the desecration of a gift which she had cherished as a holy thing. She
+clung to flippancy as her defence.
+
+"Oh, no! I never sent it. I lost it somewhere, I think. Must you go?"
+she continued, as Hilton moved silently to the door. "I expect my
+husband in just now. Won't you wait and meet him?"
+
+"How dare you?" Hilton burst out. "Is there nothing of your true self
+left?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+David Hilton's education was as yet in its infancy. This was not only
+his first visit to England, but, indeed, to any spot further afield
+than Interlaken. All of his six-and-twenty years that he could
+recollect had been passed in a _châlet_ on the Scheidegg above
+Grindelwald, his only companion an elderly recluse who had
+deliberately cut himself off from communion with his fellows. The
+trouble which had driven Mr. Strange, an author at one time of some
+mark, into this seclusion, was now as completely forgotten as his
+name. Even David knew nothing of its cause. That Strange was his uncle
+and had adopted him when left an orphan at the age of six, was the
+sum of his information. For although the pair had lived together for
+twenty years, there had been little intercourse of thought between
+them, and none of sentiment. Strange had, indeed, throughout shut his
+nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at
+first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards
+manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his
+embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the
+savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he
+had originally chosen as a solace for his loneliness, became in the
+end the victim of a heartless experiment. Strange's plan was based
+upon a method of training. In the first place, he thoroughly isolated
+David from any actual experience of persons beyond the simple
+shepherd folk who attended to their needs and a few Alpine guides who
+accompanied him on mountain expeditions. He kept incessant guard over
+his own past life, letting no incidents or deductions escape, and fed
+the youth's mind solely upon the ideal polities of the ancients,
+his object being to launch him suddenly upon the world with little
+knowledge of it beyond what had filtered through his books, and
+possessed of an intuitive hostility to existing modes. What kind of a
+career would ensue? Strange anticipated the solution of the problem
+with an approach to excitement. Two events, however, prevented the
+complete realisation of his scheme. One was a lingering illness which
+struck him down when David was twenty-four and about to enter on his
+ordeal. The second, occurring simultaneously, was the advent of Mrs.
+Branscome--then Kate Alden--to Grindelwald.
+
+They met by chance on the snow slopes of the Wetterhorn early one
+August morning. Miss Alden was trying to disentangle some meaning
+from the _pâtois_ of her guides, and gratefully accepted Hilton's
+assistance. Half-an-hour after she had continued the ascent, David
+noticed a small gold locket glistening in her steps. It recalled him
+to himself, and he picked it up and went home with a strange trouble
+clutching at his heart. The next morning he carried the locket down
+into the valley, found its owner and--forgot to restore it. It became
+an excuse for further descents. Meanwhile, the theories were wooed
+with a certain coldness. In front of them stood perpetually the one
+real thing which had surged up through the quiet of his life, and,
+lover-like, he justified its presence to himself, by seeing in Kate
+Alden's frank face the incarnation of the ideal patterns of his books.
+The visits to Grindelwald grew more frequent and more prolonged. The
+climax, however, came unexpectedly to both. David had commissioned a
+jeweller at Berne to fashion a fac-simile of the locket for his own
+wearing, and, meaning to restore the original, handed Kate Alden the
+copy the evening before she left. An explanation of the mistake led to
+mutual avowals and a betrothal. Hilton returned to nurse his adoptive
+father, and was to seek England as soon as he could obtain his
+release. Meanwhile, Kate pledged herself to wait for him. She kept the
+new locket, empty except for a sprig of edelweiss he had placed in
+it, and agreed that if she needed her lover's presence, she should
+despatch it as an imperative summons.
+
+During the next two years Strange's life ebbed sullenly away. The
+approach of death brought no closer intimacy between uncle and nephew,
+since indeed the former held it almost as a grievance against
+David that he should die before he could witness the issue of his
+experiment. Consequently the younger man kept his secret to himself,
+and embraced it the more closely for his secrecy, fostering it through
+the dreary night watches, until the image of Kate Alden became a
+Star-in-the-East to him, beckoning towards London. When the end came,
+David found himself the possessor of a moderate fortune; and with the
+humiliating knowledge that this legacy awoke his first feeling of
+gratitude towards his uncle, he locked the door of the _châlet_, and
+so landed at Charing Cross one wet November evening. Meanwhile the
+locket had never come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Hilton had left, Mrs. Branscome's forced indifference gave way.
+As she crouched beside the fire, numbed by pain beyond the power of
+thought, she could conjure up but one memory--the morning of their
+first meeting. She recollected that the sun had just risen over the
+shoulder of the Shreckhorn, and how it had seemed to her young fancy
+that David had come to her straight from the heart of it. The sound of
+her husband's step in the hall brought her with a shock to facts. "He
+must go back," she muttered, "he must go back."
+
+David, however, harboured no such design. One phrase of hers had
+struck root in his thoughts. "I had to marry," she had said, and
+certain failings in her voice warned him that this, whatever it
+meant, was in her eyes the truth. It had given the lie direct to the
+flippancy which she had assumed, and David determined to remain until
+he had fathomed its innermost meaning. A fear, indeed, lest the one
+single faith he felt as real should crumble to ashes made his resolve
+almost an instinct of self-preservation. The idea of accepting the
+situation never occurred to him, his training having effectually
+prevented any growth of respect for the _status quo_ as such. Nor did
+he realise at this time that his determination might perhaps prove
+unfair to Mrs. Branscome. A certain habit of abstraction, nurtured in
+him by the spirit of inquiry which he had imbibed from his books, had
+become so intuitive as to penetrate even into his passion. From the
+first he had been accustomed to watch his increasing intimacy with
+Kate Alden from the standpoint of a third person, analysing her
+actions and feelings no less than his own. And now this tendency gave
+the crowning impetus to a resolve which sprang originally from his
+necessity to find sure foothold somewhere amid the wreckage of his
+hopes.
+
+From this period might be dated the real commencement of Hilton's
+education. He returned to the Branscomes' house, sedulously schooled
+his looks and his words, save when betrayed into an occasional
+denunciation of the marriage laws, and succeeded at last in overcoming
+a distaste which Mr. Branscome unaccountably evinced for him. To a
+certain extent, also, he was taken up by social entertainers. There
+was an element of romance in the life he had led which appealed
+favourably to the seekers after novelty--"a second St. Simeon
+Skylights" he had been rashly termed by one good lady, whose wealth
+outweighed her learning. At first his gathering crowd of acquaintances
+only served to fence him more closely within himself; but as he began
+to realise that this was only the unit of another crowd, a crowd of
+designs and intentions working darkly, even he, sustained by the
+strength of a single aim, felt himself whirling at times. Thus he
+slowly grew to some knowledge of the difficulties and complications
+which must beset any young girl like Kate Alden, whose nearest
+relation and chaperon had been a feather-headed cousin not so
+many years her elder. At last, in a dim way, he began to see the
+possibility of replacing his bitterness with pity. For Mrs. Branscome
+did not love her husband; he plainly perceived that, if only from the
+formal precision with which she performed her duties. She appeared to
+him, indeed, to be paying off an obligation rather than working out
+the intention of her life.
+
+The actual solution of his perplexities came by an accident. Amongst
+the visitors who fell under Hilton's observation at the Branscomes'
+was a certain Mr. Marston, a complacent widower of some
+five-and-thirty years, and Branscome's fellow servant at the
+Admiralty. Hilton's attention was attracted to this man by the air
+of embarrassment with which Mrs. Branscome received his approaches.
+Resolute to neglect no clue, however slight, David sought Marston's
+companionship, and, as a reward, discovered one afternoon in a Crown
+Derby teacup on the mantel-shelf of the latter's room his own present
+of two years back. The exclamation which this discovery extorted
+aroused Marston.
+
+"What's up?"
+
+"Where did you get this?"
+
+"Why? Have you seen it before?"
+
+The question pointed out to David the need of wariness.
+
+"No!" he answered. "Its shape rather struck me, that's all. The emblem
+of a conquest, I suppose?"
+
+The invitation stumbled awkwardly from unaccustomed lips, but
+Marston noticed no more than the words. He was chewing the cud of a
+disappointment and answered with a short laugh:
+
+"No! Rather of a rebuff. The lady tore her hand away in a hurry--the
+link on the bracelet was thin, I suppose. Anyway, that was left in my
+hand."
+
+"You were proposing to her?"
+
+"Well, hardly. I was married at the time."
+
+There was a silence for some moments, during which Hilton slowly
+gathered into his mind a consciousness of the humiliation which Kate
+must have endured, and read in that the explanation of her words "I
+had to marry." Marston took up the tale, babbling resentfully of
+a nursery prudishness, but his remarks fell on deaf ears until he
+mentioned a withered flower, which he had found inside the locket.
+Then David's self control partially gave way. In imagination he saw
+Marston carelessly tossing the sprig aside and the touch of his
+fingers seemed to sully the love of which it was the token. The locket
+burned into his hand. Without a word he dropped it on to the floor,
+and ground it to pieces with his heel. A new light broke in upon
+Marston.
+
+"So this accounts for all your railing against the marriage laws," he
+laughed. "By Jove, you have kept things quiet. I wouldn't have given
+you credit for it."
+
+His eyes travelled from the carpet to David's face, and he stopped
+abruptly.
+
+"You had better hold your tongue," David said quietly. "Pick up the
+pieces."
+
+"Do you think I would touch them now?"
+
+Marston rose from his lounge; David stepped in front of the door.
+There was a litheness in his movements which denoted obedient muscles.
+Marston perceived this now with considerable discomfort, and thought
+it best to comply: he knelt down and picked up the fragments of the
+locket.
+
+"Now throw them into the grate!"
+
+That done, David took his leave. Once outside the house, however, his
+emotion fairly mastered him. The episode of which he had just heard
+was so mean and petty in itself, and yet so far-reaching in its
+consequences that it set his senses aflame in an increased revolt
+against the order of the world. Marriage was practically a necessity
+to a girl as unprotected as Kate Alden; he now acquiesced in that. But
+that it should have been forced upon her by the vanity of a trivial
+person like Marston, engaged in the pursuit of his desires, sent a
+fever of repulsion through his veins. He turned back to the door
+deluded by the notion that it was his duty to render the occurrence
+impossible of repetition. He was checked, however, by the thought of
+Mrs. Branscome. The shame he felt hinted the full force of degradation
+of which she must have been conscious, and begot in him a strange
+feeling of loyalty. Up till now the true meaning of chivalry had
+been unknown to him. In consequence of his bringing up he had been
+incapable of regarding faith in persons as a working motive in one's
+life. Even the first dawn of his passion had failed to teach him that;
+all the confidence and trust which he gained thereby being a mere
+reflection, from what he saw in Kate Alden, of truth to him. It was
+necessary that he should feel her trouble first and his poignant sense
+of that now revealed to him, not merely the wantonness of the perils
+women are compelled to run, but their consequent sufferings and their
+endurance in suppressing them.
+
+A feverish impulse towards self-sacrifice sprang up within him. He
+would bury the incident of that afternoon as a dead thing--nay, more,
+for Mrs. Branscome's sake he would leave England and return to his
+retreat among the mountains. If she had suffered, why should he claim
+an exemption? The idea had just sufficient strength to impel him to
+catch the night-mail from Charing Cross. That it was already weakening
+was evidenced by a half-feeling of regret that he had not missed the
+train.
+
+The regret swelled during his journey to the coast. The scene he had
+just come through became, from much pondering on it, almost unreal,
+and, with the blurring of the impression it had caused, there rose a
+doubt as to the accuracy of his vision of Mrs. Branscome's distress,
+which he had conjured out of it. His chivalry, in a word, had grown
+too quickly to take firm root. It was an exotic planted in soil not
+yet fully prepared. David began to think himself a fool, and at last,
+as the train neared Dover, a question which had been vaguely throbbing
+in his brain suddenly took shape. Why had she not sent for him? True,
+the locket was lost, but she might have written. The formulation of
+the question shattered almost all the work of the last few hours. He
+cursed his recent thoughts as a child's fairy dreams. Why should he
+leave England after all? If he was to sacrifice himself it should be
+for some one who cared sufficiently for him to justify the act.
+
+There might, of course, have been some hidden obstacle in the way,
+which Mrs. Branscome could not surmount. The revelation of Marston's
+unimagined story warned him of the possibility of that. But the
+chances were against it. Anyway, he quibbled to himself, he had a
+clear right to pursue the matter until he unearthed the truth. Acting
+upon this decision, David returned to town, though not without a
+lurking sense of shame.
+
+A few evenings after, he sought out Mrs. Branscome at a dance. The
+blood rushed to her face when she caught his figure, and as quickly
+ebbed away.
+
+"So you have not gone, after all?" There was something pitiful in her
+tone of reproach.
+
+"No. What made you think I had?"
+
+"Mr. Marston told me!"
+
+"Did he tell you why?"
+
+"I guessed that, and I thanked you in my heart."
+
+David was disconcerted; the woman he saw corresponded so ill with what
+he was schooling himself to believe her. He sought to conceal his
+confusion, as she had once done, and played a part. Like her, he
+overplayed it.
+
+"Well! I came to see London life, you know. It makes a pretty comedy."
+
+"Comedies end in tears at times."
+
+"Even then common politeness makes us sit them out. Can you spare me a
+dance?"
+
+Mrs. Branscome pleaded fatigue, and barely suppressed a sigh of relief
+as she noted her husband's approach. David followed her glance, and
+bent over her, speaking hurriedly:--
+
+"You said you knew why I went away; I want to tell you why I came
+back."
+
+"No! no!" she exclaimed. "It could be of no use--of no help to either
+of us."
+
+"I came back," he went on, ignoring her interruption, "merely to ask
+you one question. Will you hear it and answer it? I can wait," he
+added, as she kept silence.
+
+"Then, to-morrow, as soon as possible," Mrs. Branscome replied, beaten
+by his persistency. "Come at seven; we dine at eight, so I can give
+you half-an-hour. But you are ungenerous."
+
+That night began what may be termed the crisis of Hilton's education.
+This was the second time he had caught Mrs. Branscome unawares. On the
+first occasion--that of his unexpected arrival in England--he did not
+possess the experience to measure accurately looks and movements,
+or to comprehend them as the connotation of words. It is doubtful,
+besides, whether, had he owned the skill, he would have had the power
+to exercise it, so engrossed was he in his own distress. By the
+process, however, of continually repressing the visible signs of his
+own emotions, he had now learnt to appreciate them in others. And
+in Mrs. Branscome's sudden change of colour, in little convulsive
+movements of her hands, and in a certain droop of eyelids veiling eyes
+which met the gaze frankly as a rule, he read this evening sure proofs
+of the constancy of her heart. This fresh knowledge affected him in
+two ways. On the one hand it gave breath to the selfish passion which
+now dominated his ideas. At the same time, however it assured him
+that when he asked his question: "Why did you not send for me?" an
+unassailable answer would be forthcoming; and, moreover, by convincing
+him of this, it destroyed the sole excuse he had pleaded to himself
+for claiming the right to ask it. In self-defence Hilton had recourse
+to his old outcry against the marriage laws and, finding this barren,
+came in the end to frankly devising schemes for their circumvention.
+Such inward personal conflicts were, of necessity, strange to a man
+dry-nursed on abstractions, and, after a night of tension, they tossed
+him up on the shores of the morning broken in mind and irresolute for
+good or ill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Branscome received him impassively at the appointed time. David
+saw that he was expected to speak to the point, and a growing scorn
+for his own insistence urged him to the same course. He plunged
+abruptly into his subject and his manner showed him in the rough, more
+particularly to himself.
+
+"What I came back to ask you is just this. You know--you must
+know--that I would have come, whatever the consequence. Why did you
+not send for me after, after--?"
+
+"Why did I not send for you?" Mrs. Branscome took him up, repeating
+his words mechanically, as though their meaning had not reached her.
+"You don't mean that you never received my letter. Oh, don't say that!
+It can't have miscarried, I registered it."
+
+"Then you did write?"
+
+This confirmation of her fear drove a breach through her composure.
+
+"Of course, of course, I wrote," she cried. "You doubt that? What can
+you think of me? Yes, I wrote, and when no answer came, I fancied
+you had forgotten me--that you had never really cared, and so I--I
+married."
+
+Her voice dried in her throat. The thought of this ruin of two lives,
+made inevitable by a mistake in which neither shared, brought a sense
+of futility which paralysed her.
+
+The same idea was working in Hilton's mind, but to a different end. It
+fixed the true nature of this woman for the first time clearly within
+his recognition, and the new light blinded him. Before, his imagined
+grievance had always coloured the picture; now, he began to realise
+not only that she was no more responsible for the catastrophe than
+himself, but that he must have stood in the same light to her as she
+had done to him. The events of the past few months passed before his
+mind as on a clear mirror. He compared the gentle distinction of her
+bearing with his own flaunting resentment.
+
+"I am sorry," he said, "I have wronged you in thought and word and
+action. The fact is, I never saw you plainly before; myself stood in
+the way."
+
+Mrs. Branscome barely heeded his words. The feelings her watchfulness
+had hitherto restrained having once broken their barriers swept her
+away on a full flow. She recalled the very terms of her letter. She
+had written it in the room in which they were standing. Mr. Branscome
+had called just as she addressed the envelope--she had questioned him
+about its registration to Switzerland, and, yes, he had promised to
+look after it and had taken it away. "Yes!" she repeated to herself
+aloud, directing her eyes instinctively towards her husband's study
+door. "He promised to post it."
+
+The sound of the words and a sudden movement from Hilton woke her to
+alarm. David had turned to the window, and she felt that he had heard
+and understood. The silence pressed on her like a dead weight. For
+Hilton, this was the crucial moment of his ordeal. He had understood
+only too clearly, and this second proof of the harm a petty sin could
+radiate struck through him the same fiery repulsion which had stung
+him to revolt when he quitted Marston's rooms. He flung up the window
+and faced the sunset. Strips of black cloud barred it across, and he
+noticed, with a minute attention of which he was hardly conscious,
+that their lower edges took a colour like the afterglow on a Swiss
+rock mountain. The perception sent a riot of associations through his
+brain which strengthened his wavering purpose. Must he lose her after
+all, he thought; now that he had risen to a true estimation of her
+worth? His fancy throned Kate queen of his mountain home, and he
+turned towards her, but a light of fear in her eyes stopped the words
+on his lips.
+
+"I trust you," she said, simply.
+
+The storm of his passions quieted down. That one sentence just
+expressed to him the debt he owed to her. In return--well, he could do
+no less than leave her her illusion.
+
+"Good-bye," he said. "All the good that comes to us, somehow, seems to
+spring from women like yourself, while we give you nothing but trouble
+in return. Even this last misery, which my selfishness has brought to
+you, lifts me to breathe a cleaner air."
+
+"He must have forgotten to post it," Mrs. Branscome pleaded.
+
+"Yes; we must believe that. Good-bye!"
+
+For a moment he stayed to watch her white figure, outlined against the
+dusk of the room, and then gently closed the door on her. The next
+morning David left England, not, however, for Grindelwald. He dreaded
+the morbid selfishness which grows from isolation, and sought a
+finishing school in the companionship of practical men.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.
+
+
+The surgeon has a weakness for men who make their living on the sea.
+From the skipper of a Dogger Bank fishing-smack to the stoker of a
+Cardiff tramp, from Margate 'longshoreman to a crabber of the Stilly
+Isles, he embraces them all in a lusty affection. And this not merely
+out of his own love of salt water but because his diagnosis reveals
+the gentleman in them more surely than in the general run of his
+wealthier patients. "A primitive gentleman, if you like," Lincott will
+say, "not above tearing his meat with his fingers or wearing the
+same shirt night and day for a couple of months on end, but still a
+gentleman." As one of the innumerable instances which had built up his
+conviction, Lincott will offer you the twenty-kroner story.
+
+As he was walking through the wards of his hospital he stopped for
+a moment by the bed of a brewer's drayman who was suffering from an
+access of _delirium tremens_. The drayman's language was violent and
+voluble. But he sank into a coma with the usual suddenness common to
+such cases, and in the pause which followed Lincott heard a gentle
+voice a few beds away earnestly apologising to a nurse for the trouble
+she was put to. "Why," she replied with a laugh, "I am here to be
+troubled." Apologies of the kind are not so frequently heard in the
+wards of an East End hospital. This one, besides, was spoken with an
+accent not very pronounced, it is true, but unfamiliar. Lincott moved
+down to the bed. It was occupied by a man apparently tall, with a pair
+of remorseful blue eyes set in an open face, and a thatch of yellow
+hair dusted with grey.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Lincott, and the patient explained. He was
+a Norseman from Finland, fifty-three years old, and he had worked all
+his life on English ships. He had risen from "decky" to mate. Then he
+had injured himself, and since he could work no more he had come into
+the hospital to be cured. Lincott examined him, found that a slight
+operation was all the man needed, and performed it himself. In six
+weeks time Helling, as the sailor was named, was discharged. He made a
+simple and dignified little speech of thanks to the nurses for their
+attention, and another to the surgeon for saving his life.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Lincott, as he held out his hand. "Any medical
+student could have performed that operation."
+
+"Then I have another reason to thank you," answered Helling. "The
+nurses have told me about you, sir, and I'm grateful you spared the
+time to perform it yourself."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Lincott.
+
+"Find a ship, sir," answered Helling. Then he hesitated, and slowly
+slipped his finger and thumb along the waist-band of his trousers. But
+he only repeated, "I must find a ship," and so left the hospital.
+
+Three weeks later Helling called at Lincott's house in Harley Street.
+Now, when hospital patients take the trouble, after they have been
+discharged, to find out the doctor's private address and call, it
+generally means they have come to beg. Lincott, remembering how
+Helling's simple courtesies had impressed him, experienced an actual
+disappointment. He felt his theories about the seafaring man begin to
+totter. However, Helling was shown into the consulting-room, and at
+the sight of him Lincott's disappointment vanished. He did not start
+up, since manifestations of surprise are amongst those things with
+which doctors find it advisable to dispense, but he hooked a chair
+forward with his foot.
+
+"Now then, sit down! Chuck yourself about! Sit down," said Lincott
+genially. "You look bad."
+
+Helling, in fact, was gaunt with famine; his eyes were sunk and dull;
+he was so thin that he seemed to have grown in height.
+
+"I had some trouble in finding a ship," he said; and sitting down on
+the edge of the chair, twirled his hat in some embarrassment.
+
+"It is three weeks since you left the hospital?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You should have come here before," the surgeon was moved to say.
+
+"No," answered Helling. "I couldn't come before, sir. You see, I had
+no ship. But I found one this morning, and I start to-morrow."
+
+"But for these three weeks? You have been starving." Lincott slipped
+his hand into his pocket. It seemed to him afterwards simply
+providential that he did not fumble his money, that no clink of coins
+was heard. For Helling answered,
+
+"Yes, sir, I've been starving." He drew back his shoulders and
+laughed. "I'm proud to know that I've been starving."
+
+He laid his hat on the ground, drew out and unclasped his knife, felt
+along the waist-band of his breeches, cut a few stitches, and finally
+produced a little gold coin. This coin he held between his forefinger
+and thumb.
+
+"Forty years ago," he said, "when I was a nipper and starting on
+my first voyage, my mother gave me this. She sewed it up in the
+waist-band of my breeches with her own hands and told me never to part
+with it until I'd been starving. I've been near to starvation often
+and often enough. But I never have starved before. This coin has
+always stood between that and me. Now, however, I have actually been
+starving and I can part with it."
+
+He got up from his chair and timidly laid the piece of gold on the
+table by Lincott's elbow. Then he picked up his hat. The surgeon
+said nothing, and he did not touch the coin. Neither did he look at
+Helling, but sat with his forehead propped in his hand as though he
+were reading the letters on his desk. Helling, afraid to speak lest
+his coin should be refused, walked noiselessly to the door and
+noiselessly unlatched it.
+
+"Wait a bit!" said Lincott. Helling stopped anxiously in the doorway.
+
+"Where have you slept"--Lincott paused to steady his voice--"for the
+last three weeks?" he continued.
+
+"Under arches by the river, sir," replied Helling. "On benches along
+the Embankment, once or twice in the parks. But that's all over now,"
+he said earnestly. "I'm all right. I've got my ship. I couldn't part
+with that before, because it was the only thing I had to hang on to
+the world with. But I'm all right now."
+
+Lincott took up the coin and turned it over in the palm of his hand.
+
+"Twenty kroners," he said. "Do you know what that's worth in England?"
+
+"Yes, I do," answered Helling with some trepidation.
+
+"Fifteen shillings," said Lincott. "Think of it, fifteen shillings,
+perhaps sixteen."
+
+"I know," interrupted Helling quickly, mistaking the surgeon's
+meaning. "But please, please, you mustn't think I value what you have
+done for me at that. It's only fifteen shillings, but it has meant a
+fortune to me all the last three weeks. Each time that I've drawn my
+belt tighter I have felt that coin underneath it burn against my skin.
+When I passed a coffee-stall in the early morning and saw the steam
+and the cake I knew I could have bought up the whole stall if I chose.
+I could have had meals, and meals, and meals. I could have slept in
+beds under roofs. It's only fifteen shillings; nothing at all to
+you," and he looked round the consulting-room, with its pictures and
+electric lights, "but I want you to take it at what it has been worth
+to me ever since I came out of the hospital."
+
+Lincott took Helling into his dining-room. On a pedestal stood a great
+silver vase, blazing its magnificence across the room.
+
+"You see that?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Helling.
+
+"It was given to me by a patient. It must have cost at the least
+£500."
+
+Helling tapped the vase with his knuckles.
+
+"Yes, sir, that's a present," he said enviously. "That _is_ a
+present."
+
+Lincott laughed and threw up the window.
+
+"You can pitch it out into the street if you like. By the side of your
+coin it's muck."
+
+Lincott keeps the coin. He points out that Helling was fifty-three at
+the time that he gave him this present, and that the operation was one
+which any practitioner could have performed.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTH PICTURE.
+
+
+Lady Tamworth felt unutterably bored. The sensation of lassitude, even
+in its less acute degrees, was rare with her; for she possessed a
+nature of so fresh a buoyancy that she was able, as a rule, to extract
+diversion from any environment. Her mind took impressions with the
+vivid clearness of a mirror, and also, it should be owned, with a
+mirror's transient objectivity. To-day, however, the mirror was
+clouded. She looked out of the window; a level row of grey houses
+frowned at her across the street. She looked upwards; a grey pall of
+cloud swung over the rooftops. The interior of the room appeared to
+her even less inviting than the street. It was the afternoon of the
+first drawing-room, and a _debutante_ was exhibiting herself to her
+friends. She stood in the centre, a figure from a Twelfth-Night cake,
+amidst a babble of congratulations, and was plainly occupied in a
+perpetual struggle to conceal her moments of enthusiasm beneath a
+crust of deprecatory languor.
+
+The spectacle would have afforded choice entertainment to Lady
+Tamworth, had she viewed it in the company of a sympathetic companion.
+Solitary appreciation of the humorous, however, only induced in her
+a yet more despondent mood. The tea seemed tepid; the conversation
+matched the tea. Epigrams without point, sallies void of wit, and
+cynicisms innocent of the sting of an apt application floated about
+her on a ripple of unintelligent laughter. A phrase of Mr. Dale's
+recurred to her mind, "Hock and seltzer with the sparkle out of it;"
+so he had stigmatised the style and she sadly thanked him for the
+metaphor.
+
+There was, moreover, a particular reason for her discontent. Nobody
+realised the presence of Lady Tamworth, and this unaccustomed neglect
+shot a barbed question at her breast. "After all why should they?" She
+was useless, she reflected; she did nothing, exercised no influence.
+The thought, however, was too painful for lengthened endurance; the
+very humiliation of it produced the antidote. She remembered that she
+had at last persuaded her lazy Sir John to stand for Parliament. Only
+wait until he was elected! She would exercise an influence then. The
+vision of a _salon_ was miraged before her, with herself in the middle
+deftly manipulating the destinies of a nation.
+
+"Lady Tamworth!" a voice sounded at her elbow.
+
+"Mr. Dale!" She turned with a sudden sprightliness. "My guardian angel
+sent you."
+
+"So bad as that?"
+
+"I have an intuition." She paused impressively upon the word.
+
+"Never mind!" said he soothingly. "It will go away."
+
+Lady Tamworth glared, that is, as well as she could; nature had not
+really adapted her for glaring. "I have an intuition," she resumed,
+"that this is what the suburbs mean." And she waved her hand
+comprehensively.
+
+"They are perhaps a trifle excessive," he returned. "But then you
+needn't have come."
+
+"Oh, yes! Clients of Sir John." Lady Tamworth sighed and sank with a
+weary elegance into a chair. Mr. Dale interpreted the sigh. "Ah! A
+wife's duties," he began.
+
+"No man can know," she interrupted, and she spread out her hands in
+pathetic forgiveness of an over-exacting world. Her companion laughed
+brutally. "You _are_ rude!" she said and laughed too. And then, "Tell
+me something new!"
+
+"I met an admirer of yours to-day."
+
+"But that's nothing new." She looked up at him with a plaintive
+reproach.
+
+"I will begin again," he replied submissively. "I walked down the
+Mile-End road this morning to Sir John's jute-factory."
+
+"You fail to interest me," she said with some emphasis.
+
+"I am so sorry. Good-bye!"
+
+"Mr. Dale!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"You may, if you like, go on with the first story."
+
+"There is only one. It was in the Mile-End road I met the
+admirer--Julian Fairholm."
+
+"Oh!" Lady Tamworth sat up and blushed. However, Lady Tamworth blushed
+very readily.
+
+"It was a queer incident," Mr. Dale continued. "I caught sight of a
+necktie in a little dusty shop-window near the Pavilion Theatre. I
+had never seen anything like it in my life; it fairly fascinated me,
+seemed to dare me to buy it."
+
+The lady's foot began to tap upon the carpet. Mr. Dale stopped and
+leaned critically forward.
+
+"Well! Why don't you go on?" she asked impatiently.
+
+"It's pretty," he reflected aloud.
+
+The foot disappeared demurely into the seclusion of petticoats. "You
+exasperate me," she remarked. But her face hardly guaranteed her
+words. "We were speaking of ties."
+
+"Ah, the tie wasn't pretty. It was of satin, bright yellow with blue
+spots. And an idea struck me; yes, an idea! Sir John's election
+colours are yellow, his opponent's blue. So I thought the tie would
+make a tactful present, symbolical (do you see?) of the state of the
+parties in the constituency."
+
+He paused a second time.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I went in and bought it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Julian Fairholm sold it to me."
+
+Lady Tamworth stared at the speaker in pure perplexity. Then all at
+once she understood and the blood eddied into her cheeks. "I don't
+believe it!" she exclaimed.
+
+"His face would be difficult to mistake," Mr. Dale objected. "Besides
+I had time to assure myself, for I had to wait my turn. When I entered
+the shop, he was serving a woman with baby-linen. Oh yes! Julian
+Fairholm sold me the tie."
+
+Lady Tamworth kept her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up. She
+struck the arm of her chair with her closed fist and cried in a quick
+petulance, "How dare he?"
+
+"Exactly what I thought," answered her companion smoothly. "The
+colours were crude by themselves, the combination was detestable. And
+he an artist too!" Mr. Dale laughed pleasantly.
+
+"Did he speak to you?"
+
+"He asked me whether I would take a packet of pins instead of a
+farthing."
+
+"Ah, don't," she entreated, and rose from her chair. It might have
+been her own degradation of which Mr. Dale was speaking.
+
+"By the way," he added, "I was so taken aback that I forgot to present
+the tie. Would you?"
+
+"No! No!" she said decisively and turned away. But a sudden notion
+checked her. "On second thoughts I will; but I can't promise to make
+him wear it."
+
+The smile which sped the words flickered strangely upon quivering lips
+and her eyes shone with anger. However the tie changed hands, and Lady
+Tamworth tripped down stairs and stepped into her brougham. The packet
+lay upon her lap and she unfolded it. A round ticket was enclosed, and
+the bill. On the ticket was printed, _A Present from Zedediah Moss_.
+With a convulsion of disgust she swept the parcel on to the floor.
+"How dare he?" she cried again, and her thoughts flew back to the
+brief period of their engagement. She had been just Kitty Arlton in
+those days, the daughter of a poor sea-captain but dowered with
+the compensating grace of personal attractions. Providence had
+indisputably designed her for the establishment of the family
+fortunes; such at all events was the family creed, and the girl
+herself felt no inclination to doubt a faith which was backed by the
+evidence of her looking-glass. Julian Fairholm at that time shared a
+studio with her brother, and the acquaintance thus begun ripened into
+an attachment and ended in a betrothal. For Julian, in the common
+prediction, possessed that vague blessing, a future. It is true the
+common prediction was always protected by a saving clause: "If he
+could struggle free from his mysticism." But none the less his
+pictures were beginning to sell, and the family displayed a moderate
+content. The discomposing appearance of Sir John Tamworth, however,
+gave a different complexion to the matter. Sir John was rich, and had
+besides the confident pertinacity of success. In a word, Kitty Arlton
+married Sir John.
+
+Lady Tamworth's recollections of the episode were characteristically
+vague; they came back to her in pieces like disconnected sections of
+a wooden puzzle. She remembered that she had written an exquisitely
+pathetic letter to Fairholm "when the end came," as she expressed it;
+and she recalled queer scraps of the artist's talk about the danger
+of forming ties. "New ties," he would say, "mean new duties, and they
+hamper and clog the will." Ah yes, the will; he was always holding
+forth about that and here was the lecture finally exemplified! He
+was selling baby-linen in the Mile-End road. She had borne her
+disappointment, she reflected, without any talk about will. The
+thought of her self-sacrifice even now brought the tears to her eyes;
+she saw herself wearing her orange-blossoms in the spirit of an
+Iphigeneia.
+
+Sections of the puzzle, however, were missing to Lady Tamworth's
+perceptions. For, in fact, her sense of sacrifice had been mainly
+artificial, and fostered by a vanity which made the possession of a
+broken romance seem to pose her on a notable pedestal of duty. What
+had really attracted her to Julian was the evidence of her power shown
+in the subjugation of a being intellectually higher than his compeers.
+It was not so much the man she had cared for, as the sight of herself
+in a superior setting; a sure proof whereof might have been found in a
+certain wilful pleasure which she had drawn from constantly impelling
+him to acts and admissions which she knew to be alien to his nature.
+
+It was some revival of this idea which explained her exclamation, "How
+dare he?" For his conduct appeared more in the light of an outrage and
+insult to her than of a degradation of himself. He must be rescued
+from his position, she determined.
+
+She stooped to pick up the bill from the floor as the brougham swung
+sharply round a corner. She looked out of the window; the coachman had
+turned into Berkeley Square; in another hundred yards she would reach
+home. She hastily pulled the check-string, and the footman came to the
+door. "Drive down the Mile-End road," she said; "I will fetch Sir John
+home." Lady Tamworth read the address on the bill. "Near the Pavilion
+Theatre," Mr. Dale had explained. She would just see the place this
+evening, she determined, and then reflect on the practical course to
+be pursued.
+
+The decision relieved her of her sense of humiliation, and she nestled
+back among her furs with a sigh of content. There was a pleasurable
+excitement about her present impulse which contrasted very brightly
+with her recent _ennui_. She felt that her wish to do something,
+to exert an influence, had been providentially answered. The task,
+besides, seemed to her to have a flavour of antique chivalry; it
+smacked of the princess undoing enchantments, and reminded her vaguely
+of Camelot. She determined to stop at the house and begin the work
+at once; so she summoned the footman a second time and gave him the
+address. So great indeed was the charm which her conception exercised
+over her, that her very indignation against Julian changed to pity.
+He had to be fitted to the chivalric pattern, and consequently
+refashioned. Her harlequin fancy straightway transformed him into the
+romantic lover who, having lost his mistress, had lost the world and
+therefore, naturally, held the sale of baby-linen on a par with the
+painting of pictures. "Poor Julian!" she thought.
+
+The carriage stopped suddenly in front of a shuttered window. A
+neighbouring gas-lamp lit up the letters on the board above it, _Z.
+Moss_. This unexpected check in the full flight of ardour dropped her
+to earth like a plummet. And as if to accentuate her disappointment
+the surrounding shops were aglare with light; customers pressed
+busily in and out of them, and even on the roadway naphtha-jets waved
+flauntingly over barrows of sweet-stuff and fruit. Only this sordid
+little house was dark. "They can't afford to close at this hour," she
+murmured reproachfully.
+
+The footman came to the carriage door, disdain perceptibly struggling
+through his mask of impassivity.
+
+"Why is the shop closed?" Lady Tamworth asked.
+
+"The name, perhaps, my lady," he suggested. "It is Friday."
+
+Lady Tamworth had forgotten the day. "Very well," she said sullenly.
+"Home at once!" However, she corrected herself adroitly: "I mean, of
+course, fetch Sir John first."
+
+Sir John was duly fetched and carried home jubilant at so rare an
+attention. The tie was presented to him on the way, and he bellowed
+his merriment at its shape and colour. To her surprise Lady Tamworth
+found herself defending the style, and inveighing against the monotony
+of the fashions of the West End. Nor was this the only occasion on
+which she disagreed with her husband that evening. He launched an
+aphorism across the dinner-table which he had cogitated from the
+report of a divorce-suit in the evening papers. "It is a strange
+thing," he said, "that the woman who knows her influence over a man
+usually employs it to hurt him; the woman who doesn't, employs it
+unconsciously for his good."
+
+"You don't mean that?" she asked earnestly.
+
+"I have noticed it more than once," he replied.
+
+For a moment Lady Tamworth's chivalric edifice showed cracks and
+rents; it threatened to crumble like a house of cards; but only for
+a moment. For she merely considered the remark in reference to the
+future; she applied it to her present wish to exercise an influence
+over Julian. The issue of that, however, lay still in the dark, and
+was consequently imaginable as inclination prompted. A glance at Sir
+Julian sufficed to finally reassure her. He was rosy and modern, and
+so plainly incapable of appreciating chivalric impulses. To estimate
+them rightly one must have an insight into their nature, and therefore
+an actual experience of their fire; but such fire left traces on the
+person. Chivalric people were hollow-cheeked with luminous eyes; at
+least chivalric men were hollow-cheeked, she corrected herself with
+a look at the mirror. At all events Sir John and his aphorism were
+beneath serious reflection; and she determined to repeat her journey
+upon the first opportunity.
+
+The opportunity, however, was delayed for a week and occasioned Lady
+Tamworth no small amount of self-pity. Here was noble work waiting for
+her hand, and duty kept her chained to the social oar!
+
+On the afternoon, then, of the following Friday she dressed with
+what even for her was unusual care, aiming at a complex effect of
+daintiness and severity, and drove down in a hansom to Whitechapel.
+She stopped the cab some yards from the shop and walked up to the
+window. Through the glass she could see Julian standing behind the
+counter. His hands (she noticed them particularly because he was
+displaying some cheap skeins of coloured wool) seemed perhaps a trifle
+thinner and more nervous, his features a little sharpened, and there
+was a sprinkling of grey in the black of his hair. For the first time
+since the conception of her scheme Lady Tamworth experienced a feeling
+of irresolution. With Fairholm in the flesh before her eyes, the task
+appeared difficult; its reality pressed in upon her, driving a breach
+through the flimsy wall of her fancies. She resolved to wait until the
+shop should be empty, and to that end took a few steps slowly up the
+street and returned yet more slowly. She looked into the window again;
+Julian was alone now, and still she hesitated. The admiring comments
+of two loungers on the kerb concerning her appearance at last
+determined her, and she brusquely thrust open the door. A little bell
+jangled shrilly above it and Julian looked up.
+
+"Lady Tamworth!" he said after the merest pause and with no more than
+a natural start of surprise. Lady Tamworth, however, was too taken
+aback by the cool manner of his greeting to respond at once. She had
+forecast the commencement of the interview upon such wholly different
+lines that she felt lost and bewildered. An abashed confusion was the
+least that she expected from him, and she was prepared to increase it
+with a nicely-tempered indignation. Now the positions seemed actually
+reversed; he was looking at her with a composed attention, while she
+was filled with embarrassment.
+
+A suspicion flashed through her mind that she had come upon a fool's
+errand. "Julian!" she said with something of humility in her voice,
+and she timidly reached out her little gloved hand towards him. Julian
+took it into the palm of his own and gazed at it with a sort of
+wondering tenderness, as though he had lighted upon a toy which he
+remembered to have prized dearly in an almost forgotten childhood.
+
+This second blow to her pride quickened in her a feeling of
+exasperation. She drew her fingers quickly out of his grasp. "What
+brought you down to this!" She snapped out the words at him; she had
+not come to Whitechapel to be slighted at all events.
+
+"I have risen," he answered quietly.
+
+"Risen? And you sell baby-linen!"
+
+Julian laughed in pure contentment. "You don't understand," he said.
+For a moment he looked at her as one debating with himself and then:
+"You have a right to understand. I will tell you." He leaned across
+the counter, and as he spoke the eager passion of a devotee began to
+kindle in his eyes and vibrate through the tones of his voice. "The
+knowledge of a truth worked into your heart will lift you, eh, must
+lift you high? But base your life upon that truth, centre yourself
+about it, till your thoughts become instincts born from it! It must
+lift you still higher then; ah, how much higher! Well, I have done
+that. Yes, that's why I am here. And I owe it all to you."
+
+Lady Tamworth repeated his words in sheer bewilderment. "You owe it
+all to me?"
+
+"Yes," he nodded, "all to you." And with genuine gratitude he added,
+"You didn't know the good that you had done."
+
+"Ah, don't say that!" she cried.
+
+The bell tinkled over the shop-door and a woman entered. Lady Tamworth
+bent forward and said hastily, "I must speak to you."
+
+"Then you must buy something; what shall it be?" Fairholm had already
+recovered his self-possession and was drawing out one of the shelves
+in the wall behind him.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed, "not here; I can't speak to you here. Come
+and call on me; what day will you come?"
+
+Julian shook his head. "Not at all, I am afraid. I have not the time."
+
+A boy came out from the inner room and began to get ready the
+shutters. "Ah, it's Friday," she said. "You will be closing soon."
+
+"In five minutes."
+
+"Then I will wait for you. Yes, I will wait for you."
+
+She paused at the door and looked at Julian. He was deferentially
+waiting on his customer, and Lady Tamworth noticed with a queer
+feeling of repugnance that he had even acquired the shopman's trick of
+rubbing the hands. Those five minutes proved for her a most unenviable
+period. Julian's sentence,--"I owe it all to you"--pressed heavily
+upon her conscience. Spoken bitterly, she would have given little heed
+to it; but there had been a convincing sincerity in the ring of
+his voice. The words, besides, brought back to her Sir John's
+uncomfortable aphorism and freighted it with an accusation. She
+applied it now as a search-light upon her jumbled recollections of
+Julian's courtship, and began to realise that her efforts during that
+time had been directed thoughtlessly towards enlarging her influence
+over him. If, indeed, Julian owed this change in his condition to her,
+then Sir John was right, and she had employed her influence to his
+hurt. And it only made her fault the greater that Julian was himself
+unconscious of his degradation. She commenced to feel a personal
+responsibility commanding her to rescue him from his slough, which
+was increased moreover by a fear that her persuasions might prove
+ineffectual. For Julian's manner pointed now to an utter absence of
+feeling so far as she was concerned.
+
+At last Julian came out to her. "You will leave here," she cried
+impulsively. "You will come back to us, to your friends!"
+
+"Never," he answered firmly.
+
+"You must," she pleaded; "you said you owed it all to me."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, don't you see? If you stay here, I can never forgive myself; I
+shall have ruined your life."
+
+"Ruined it?" Julian asked in a tone of wonder. "You have made it." He
+stopped and looked at Lady Tamworth in perplexity. The same perplexity
+was stamped upon her face. "We are at cross-purposes, I think," he
+continued. "My rooms are close here. Let me give you some tea, and
+explain to you that you have no cause to blame yourself."
+
+Lady Tamworth assented with some relief. The speech had an odd
+civilised flavour which contrasted pleasantly with what she had
+imagined of his mode of life.
+
+They crossed the road and turned into a narrow side-street. Julian
+halted before a house of a slovenly exterior, and opened the door. A
+bare rickety staircase rose upwards from their feet. Fairholm closed
+the door behind Lady Tamworth, struck a match (for it was quite dark
+within this passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost
+floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second
+door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here
+and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a
+paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled
+in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his
+companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles
+on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp in the corner of the room. Lady
+Tamworth fancied that unawares she had slipped into fairyland;
+so great was the contrast between this retreat and the sordid
+surroundings amidst which it was perched. It was furnished with a
+dainty, and almost a feminine luxury. The room, she could see, was no
+more than an oblong garret; but along one side mouse-coloured curtains
+fell to the ground in folds from the angle where the sloping roof met
+the wall; on the other a cheerful fire glowed from a hearth of white
+tiles and a kettle sang merrily upon the hob. A broad couch, piled
+with silk cushions occupied the far end beneath the window, and the
+feet sank with a delicate pleasure into a thick velvety carpet. In the
+centre a small inlaid table of cedar wood held a silver tea-service.
+The candlesticks were of silver also, and cast in a light and
+fantastic fashion. The solitary discord was a black easel funereally
+draped.
+
+Julian prepared the tea, and talked while he prepared it. "It is this
+way," he began quietly. "You know what I have always believed; that
+the will was the man, his soul, his life, everything. Well, in the old
+days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to
+crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled
+design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious
+freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which
+made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during
+the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas
+were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death to me."
+
+Lady Tamworth stirred uneasily under a sense of guilt, and murmured
+a faint objection. Julian shook off the occupation of his theme and
+handed her some cake, and began again, standing over her with the cake
+in his hand, and to all seeming unconscious that there was a strain of
+cruelty in his words. "I found out what that meant. My emotions were
+mastering me, drowning the will in me. You see, I cared for you so
+much--then."
+
+A frank contempt stressing the last word cut into his hearer with the
+keenness of a knife. "You are unkind," she said weakly.
+
+"There's no reproach to you. I have got over it long ago," he replied
+cheerily. "And you showed me how to get over it; that's why I am
+grateful. For I began to wonder after that, why I, who had always been
+on my guard against the emotions, should become so thoroughly their
+slave. And at last I found out the reason; it was the work I was
+doing."
+
+"Your work?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Exactly! You remember what Plato remarked about the actor?"
+
+"How should I?" asked poor Lady Tamworth.
+
+"Well, he wouldn't have him in his ideal State because acting develops
+the emotions, the shifty unstable part of a man. But that's true of
+art as well; to do good work in art you must feel your work as an
+emotion. So I cut myself clear from it all. I furnished these rooms
+and came down here,--to live." And Julian drew a long breath, like a
+man escaped from danger.
+
+"But why come here?" Lady Tamworth urged. "You might have gone into
+the country--anywhere."
+
+"No, no, no!" he answered, setting down the cake and pacing about the
+room. "Wherever else I went, I must have formed new ties, created new
+duties. I didn't want that; one's feelings form the ties, one's
+soul pays the duties. No, London is the only place where a man can
+disappear. Besides I had to do something, and I chose this work,
+because it didn't touch me. I could throw it off the moment it was
+done. In the shop I earn the means to live; I live here."
+
+"But what kind of a life is it?" she asked in despair.
+
+"I will tell you," he replied, sinking his tone to an eager whisper;
+"but you mustn't repeat it, you must keep it a secret. When I am in
+this room alone at night, the walls widen and widen away until at last
+they vanish," and he nodded mysteriously at her. "The roof curls up
+like a roll of parchment, and I am left on an open platform."
+
+"What do you mean?" gasped Lady Tamworth.
+
+"Yes, on an open platform underneath the stars. And do you know,"
+he sank his voice yet lower, "I hear them at times; very faintly of
+course,--their songs have so far to travel; but I hear them,--yes, I
+hear the stars."
+
+Lady Tamworth rose in a whirl of alarm. Before this crazy exaltation,
+her very desire to pursue her purpose vanished. For Julian's manner
+even more than his words contributed to her fears. In spite of his
+homily, emotion was dominant in his expression, swaying his body,
+burning on his face and lighting his eyes with a fire of changing
+colours. And every note in his voice was struck within the scale of
+passion.
+
+She glanced about the room; her eyes fell on the easel. "Don't you
+ever paint?" she asked hurriedly.
+
+He dropped his head and stood shifting from one foot to the other, as
+if he was ashamed. "At times," he said hesitatingly; "at times I have
+to,--I can't help it,--I have to express myself. Look!" He stepped
+suddenly across the room and slid the curtains back along the rail.
+The wall was frescoed from floor to ceiling.
+
+"Julian!" Lady Tamworth cried. She forgot all her fears in face of
+this splendid revelation of his skill. Here was the fulfilment of his
+promise.
+
+In the centre four pictures were ranged, the stages in the progress of
+an allegory, but executed with such masterful craft and of so vivid an
+intention that they read their message straightway into the heart of
+one's understanding. Round about this group, were smaller sketches,
+miniatures of pure fancy. It seemed as if the artist had sought relief
+in painting these from the pressure of his chief design. Here, for
+instance, Day and Night were chasing one another through the rings of
+Saturn; there a swarm of silver stars was settling down through the
+darkness to the earth.
+
+"Julian, you must come back. You can't stay here."
+
+"I don't mean to stay here long. It is merely a halting-place."
+
+"But for how long?"
+
+"I have one more picture to complete."
+
+They turned again to the wall. Suddenly something caught Lady
+Tamworth's eye. She bent forward and examined the four pictures with
+a close scrutiny. Then she looked back again to Julian with a happy
+smile upon her face. "You have done these lately?"
+
+"Quite lately; they are the stages of a man's life, of the struggle
+between his passions and his will."
+
+He began to describe them. In the first picture a brutish god was
+seated on a throne of clay; before the god a man of coarse heavy
+features lay grovelling; but from his shoulders sprang a white figure,
+weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a
+spear; and underneath was written, "At last he knoweth what he made."
+In the second, the figure which grovelled and that which sprang from
+its shoulders were plodding along a high-road at night, chained
+together by the wrist. The white figure halted behind, the other
+pressed on; and underneath was written, "They know each other not." In
+the third the figures marched level, that which had grovelled scowling
+at its companion; but the white figure had grown tall and strong and
+watched its companion with contempt. Above the sky had brightened
+with the gleam of stars; and underneath was written, "They know each
+other." In the fourth, the white figure pressed on ahead and dragged
+the other by the chain impatiently. Before them the sun was rising
+over the edge of a heath and the road ran straight towards it in a
+golden line; and underneath was written, "He knoweth his burden."
+
+Lady Tamworth waited when he had finished, in a laughing expectancy.
+"And is that all?" she asked. "Is that all?"
+
+"No," he replied slowly; "there is yet a further stage. It is
+unfinished." And he pointed to the easel.
+
+"I don't mean that. Is that all you have to say of these?"
+
+"I think so. Yes."
+
+"Look at me!"
+
+Julian turned wonderingly to Lady Tamworth. She watched him with a
+dancing sparkle of her eyes. "Now look at the pictures!" Julian obeyed
+her. "Well," she said after a pause, with a touch of anxiety. "What do
+you see now?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" she asked. "Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes! What should I see?" She caught him by the arm and stared
+intently into his eyes in a horror of disbelief. He met her gaze with
+a frank astonishment. She dropped his arm and turned away.
+
+"What should I see?" he repeated.
+
+"Nothing," she echoed with a quivering sadness in her voice. "It is
+late, I must go."
+
+The white figure in each of those four pictures wore her face,
+idealised and illumined, but still unmistakably her face; and he did
+not know it, could not perceive it though she stood by his side! The
+futility of her errand was proved to her. She drew on her gloves and
+looking towards the easel inquired dully, "What stage is that?"
+
+"The last; and it is the last picture I shall paint. As soon as it is
+completed I shall leave here."
+
+"You will leave?" she asked, paying little heed to his words.
+
+"Yes! The experiment has not succeeded," and he waved a hand towards
+the wall. "I shall take better means next time."
+
+"How much remains to be done?" Lady Tamworth stepped over to the
+easel. With a quick spring Julian placed himself in front of it.
+
+"No!" he cried vehemently, raising a hand to warn her off. "No!"
+
+Lady Tamworth's curiosity began to reawaken. "You have shown me the
+rest."
+
+"I know; you had a right to see them."
+
+"Then why not that?"
+
+"I have told you," he said stubbornly. "It is not finished."
+
+"But when it is finished?" she insisted.
+
+Julian looked at her strangely. "Well, why not?" he said reasoning
+with himself. "Why not? It is the masterpiece."
+
+"You will let me know when it's ready?"
+
+"I will send it to you; for I shall leave here the day I finish it."
+
+They went down stairs and back into the Mile-End road. Julian hailed a
+passing hansom, and Lady Tamworth drove westwards to Berkeley Square.
+
+The fifth picture arrived a week later in the dusk of the afternoon.
+Lady Tamworth unpacked it herself with an odd foreboding.
+
+It represented an orchard glowing in the noontide sun. From the
+branches of a tree with lolling tongue and swollen twisted face swung
+the figure which had grovelled before the god. A broken chain dangled
+on its wrist, a few links of the chain lay on the grass beneath, and
+above the white figure winged and triumphant faded into the blue of
+the sky; and underneath was written, "He freeth himself from his
+burden."
+
+Lady Tamworth rushed to the bell and pealed loudly for her maid.
+"Quick!" she cried, "I am going out." But the shrill screech of a
+newsboy pierced into the room. With a cry she flung open the window.
+She could hear his voice plainly at the corner of the square. For a
+while she clung to the sash in a dumb sickness. Then she said quietly:
+"Never mind! I will not go out after all! I did not know I was so
+late."
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12859 ***
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6b6afb8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12859 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12859)
diff --git a/old/12859-8.txt b/old/12859-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..18797a8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/12859-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10038 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ensign Knightley and Other Stories, by A. E.
+W. Mason
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Ensign Knightley and Other Stories
+
+Author: A. E. W. Mason
+
+Release Date: July 9, 2004  [eBook #12859]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER
+STORIES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team.
+
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER STORIES
+
+By
+
+A. E. W. MASON
+
+Author of "The Courtship of Morrice Buckler," "The Watchers,"
+"Parson Kelly," etc.
+
+1901
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY
+THE MAN OF WHEELS
+MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE
+THE COWARD
+THE DESERTER
+THE CROSSED GLOVES
+THE SHUTTERED HOUSE
+KEEPER OF THE BISHOP
+THE CRUISE OF THE "WILLING MIND"
+HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG
+HATTERAS
+THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE
+A LIBERAL EDUCATION
+THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY
+THE FIFTH PICTURE
+
+
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY.
+
+
+It was eleven o'clock at night when Surgeon Wyley of His Majesty's
+ship _Bonetta_ washed his hands, drew on his coat, and walked from the
+hospital up the narrow cobbled street of Tangier to the Main-Guard by
+the Catherine Port. In the upper room of the Main-Guard he found
+Major Shackleton of the Tangier Foot taking a hand at bassette with
+Lieutenant Scrope of Trelawney's Regiment and young Captain Tessin of
+the King's Battalion. There were three other officers in the room, and
+to them Surgeon Wyley began to talk in a prosy, medical strain. Two of
+his audience listened in an uninterested stolidity for just so long as
+the remnant of manners, which still survived in Tangier, commanded,
+and then strolling through the open window on to the balcony, lit
+their pipes.
+
+Overhead the stars blazed in the rich sky of Morocco; the
+riding-lights of Admiral Herbert's fleet sprinkled the bay; and below
+them rose the hum of an unquiet town. It was the night of May 13th,
+1680, and the life of every Christian in Tangier hung in the balance.
+The Moors had burst through the outposts to the west, and were now
+entrenched beneath the walls. The Henrietta Redoubt had fallen that
+day; to-morrow the little fort at Devil's Drop, built on the edge of
+the sand where the sea rippled up to the palisades, must fall; and
+Charles Fort, to the southwest, was hardly in a better case. However,
+a sortie had been commanded at daybreak as a last effort to relieve
+Charles Fort, and the two officers on the balcony speculated over
+their pipes on the chances of success.
+
+Meanwhile, inside the room Surgeon Wyley lectured to his remaining
+auditor, who, too tired to remonstrate, tilted his chair against the
+wall and dozed.
+
+"A concussion of the brain," Wyley went on, "has this curious effect,
+that after recovery the patient will have lost from his consciousness
+a period of time which immediately preceded the injury. Thus a man may
+walk down a street here in Tangier; four, five, six hours afterwards,
+he mounts his horse, is thrown on to his head. When he wakes again to
+his senses, the last thing he remembers is--what? A sign, perhaps,
+over a shop in the street he walked down, or a leper pestering him for
+alms. The intervening hours are lost to him, and forever. It is no
+question of an abeyance of memory. There is a gap in the continuity of
+his experience, and that gap he will never fill up."
+
+"Except by hearsay?"
+
+The correction came from Lieutenant Scrope at the bassette table. It
+was quite carelessly uttered while the Lieutenant was picking up his
+cards. Surgeon Wyley shifted his chair towards the table, and accepted
+the correction.
+
+"Except, of course, by hearsay."
+
+Wyley was a new-comer to Tangier, having sailed into the bay less than
+a week back; but he had been long enough in the town to find in Scrope
+a subject at once of interest and perplexity. Scrope was in years
+nearer forty than thirty, dark of complexion, aquiline of feature, and
+though a trifle below the middle height he redeemed his stature by the
+litheness of his figure. What interested Wyley was that he seemed a
+man in whom strong passions were always desperately at war with a
+strong will. He wore habitually a mask of reserve; behind it, Wyley
+was aware of sleeping fires. He spoke habitually in a quiet, decided
+voice, like one that has the soundings of his nature; beneath it,
+Wyley detected, continually recurring, continually subdued, a note
+of turbulence. Here, in a word, was a man whose hand was against the
+world but who would not strike at random. What perplexed Wyley, on the
+other hand, was Scrope's subordinate rank of lieutenant in a garrison
+where, from the frequency of death, promotion was of the quickest. He
+sat there at the table, a lieutenant; a boy of twenty-four faced him,
+and the boy was a captain and his superior.
+
+It was to the Lieutenant, however, that Wyley resumed his discourse.
+
+"The length of time lost is proportionate to the severity of the
+concussion. It may be only an hour; I have known it to be a day." He
+leaned back in his chair and smiled. "A strange question that for a
+man to ask himself--What did he do during those hours?--a question to
+appal him."
+
+Scrope chose a card from his hand and played it. Without looking up
+from the table, he asked: "To appal him? Why?"
+
+"Because the question would be not so much what did he do, as what may
+he not have done. A man rides through life insecurely seated on his
+passions. Within a few hours the most honest man may commit a damnable
+crime, a damnable dishonour."
+
+Scrope looked quietly at the Surgeon to read the intention of his
+words. Then: "I suppose so," he said carelessly. "But do you think
+that question would press?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Wyley.
+
+Scrope shrugged his shoulders. "I should need an example before I
+believed you."
+
+The example was at the door. The corporal of the guard at the
+Catherine Port knocked and was admitted. He told his story to Major
+Shackleton, and as he told it the two officers lounged back into the
+room from the balcony, and the other who was dozing against the wall
+brought the legs of his chair with a bang to the floor and woke up.
+
+It appeared that a sentry at the stockade outside the Catherine Port
+had suddenly noticed a flutter of white on the ground a few yards
+from the stockade. He watched this white object, and it moved. He
+challenged it, and was answered by a whispered prayer for admission in
+the English tongue and in an English voice. The sentry demanded the
+password, and received as a reply, "Inchiquin. It is the last password
+I have knowledge of. Let me in! Let me in!"
+
+The sentry called the corporal, the corporal admitted the fugitive and
+brought him to the Main-Guard. He was now in the guard-room below.
+
+"You did well," said the Major. "The man has come from the Moorish
+lines, and may have news which will profit us in the morning. Let
+him up!" and as the corporal retired, "'Inchiquin,'" he repeated
+thoughtfully: "I cannot call to mind that password."
+
+Now Wyley had noticed that when the corporal first mentioned the word,
+Scrope, who was looking over his cards, had dropped one on the table
+as though his hand shook, had raised his head sharply, and with his
+head his eyebrows, and had stared for a second fixedly at the wall in
+front of him. So he said to Scrope:
+
+"You can remember."
+
+"Yes, I remember the password," Scrope replied simply. "I have cause
+to. 'Inchiquin' and 'Teviot'--those were password and countersign on
+the night which ruined me--the night of January 6th two years ago."
+
+There was an awkward pause, an interchange of glances. Then Major
+Shackleton broke the silence, though to no great effect.
+
+"H'm--ah--yes," he said. "Well, well," he added, and laying an arm
+upon Scrope's sleeve. "A good fellow, Scrope."
+
+Scrope made no response whatever, but of a sudden Captain Tessin
+banged his fist upon the table.
+
+"January 6th two years ago. Why," and he leaned forward across the
+table towards Scrope, "Knightley fell in the sortie that morning, and
+his body was never recovered. The corporal said this fugitive was an
+Englishman. What if--"
+
+Major Shackleton shook his head and interrupted.
+
+"Knightley fell by my side. I saw the blow; it must have broken his
+skull."
+
+There was a sound of footsteps in the passage, the door was opened
+and the fugitive appeared in the doorway. All eyes turned to him
+instantly, and turned from him again with looks of disappointment.
+Wyley remarked, however, that Scrope, who had barely glanced at the
+man, rose from his chair. He did not move from the table; only he
+stood where before he had sat.
+
+The new-comer was tall; a beard plastered with mud, as if to disguise
+its colour, straggled over his burned and wasted cheeks, but here and
+there a wisp of yellow hair flecked with grey curled from his hood, a
+pair of blue eyes shone with excitement from hollow sockets, and he
+wore the violet-and-white robes of a Moorish soldier.
+
+It was his dress at which Major Shackleton looked.
+
+"One of our renegade deserters tired of his new friends," he said with
+some contempt.
+
+"Renegades do not wear chains," replied the man in the doorway,
+lifting from beneath his long sleeves his manacled hands. He spoke
+in a weak, hoarse voice, and with a rusty accent; he rested a hand
+against the jamb of the door as though he needed support. Tessin
+sprang up from his chair, and half crossed the room.
+
+The stranger took an uncertain step forward. His legs rattled as he
+moved, and Wyley saw that the links of broken fetters were twisted
+about his ankles.
+
+"Have two years made so vast a difference?" he asked. "Well, they were
+years of the bastinado, and I do not wonder."
+
+Tessin peered into his face. "By God, it is!" he exclaimed.
+"Knightley!"
+
+"Thanks," said Knightley with a smile.
+
+Tessin reached out to take Knightley's hands, then instantly stopped,
+glanced from Knightley to Scrope and drew back.
+
+"Knightley!" cried the Major in a voice of welcome, rising in his
+seat. Then he too glanced expectantly at Scrope and sat down again.
+Scrope made no movement, but stood with his eyes cast down on the
+table like a man lost in thought. It was evident to Wyley that both
+Shackleton and Tessin had obeyed the sporting instinct, and had left
+the floor clear for the two men. It was no less evident that Knightley
+remarked their action and did not understand it. For his eyes
+travelled from face to face, and searched each with a wistful anxiety
+for the reason of their reserve.
+
+"Yes, I am Knightley," he said timidly. Then he drew himself to his
+full height. "Ensign Knightley of the Tangier Foot," he cried.
+
+No one answered. The company waited upon Scrope in a suspense so
+keen that even the ringing challenge of the words passed unheeded.
+Knightley spoke again, but now in a stiff, formal voice, and slowly.
+
+"Gentlemen, I fear very much that two years make a world of
+difference. It seems they change one who had your goodwill into a most
+unwelcome stranger."
+
+His voice broke in a sob; he turned to the door, but staggered as he
+turned and caught at a chair. In a moment Major Shackleton was beside
+him.
+
+"What, lad? Have we been backward? Blame our surprise, not us."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Wyley, "Ensign Knightley's starving."
+
+The Major pressed Knightley into a chair, called for an orderly, and
+bade him bring food. Wyley filled a glass with wine from the bottle on
+the table, and handed it to the Ensign.
+
+"It is vinegar," he said, "but--"
+
+"But Tangier is still Tangier," said Knightley with a laugh. The
+Major's cordiality had strengthened him like a tonic. He raised the
+glass to his lips and drank; but as he tilted his head back his eyes
+over the brim of the glass rested on Scrope, who still stood without
+movement, without expression, a figure of stone, but that his chest
+rose and fell with his deep breathing. Knightley set down his glass
+half-full.
+
+"There is something amiss," he said, "since even Captain Scrope
+retains no memory of his old comrade."
+
+"Captain?" exclaimed Wyley. So Scrope had been more than a lieutenant.
+Here was an answer to the question which had perplexed him. But it
+only led to another question: "Had Scrope been degraded, and why?" He
+did not, however, speculate on the question, for his attention was
+seized the next moment. Scrope made no sort of answer to Knightley's
+appeal, but began to drum very softly with his fingers on the table.
+And the drumming, at first vague and of no significance, gradually
+took on, of itself as it seemed, a definite rhythm. There was a
+variation, too, in the strength of the taps--now they fell light, now
+they struck hard. Scrope was quite unconsciously beating out upon the
+table a particular tune, although, since there was but the one
+note sounded, Wyley could get no more than an elusive hint of its
+character.
+
+Knightley watched Scrope for a little as earnestly as the rest.
+Then--"Harry!" he said, "Harry Scrope!" The name leaped from his lips
+in a pleading cry; he stretched out his hands towards Scrope, and the
+chain which bound them reached down to the table and rattled on the
+wood.
+
+There was a simultaneous movement, almost a simultaneous ejaculation
+of bewilderment amongst those who stood about Knightley. Where they
+had expected a deadly anger, they found in its place a beseeching
+humility. And Scrope ceased from drumming on the table and turned on
+Knightley.
+
+"Don't shake your chains at me," he burst out harshly. "I am deaf to
+any reproach that they can make. Are you the only man that has worn
+chains? I can show as good, and better." He thrust the palm of his
+left hand under Knightley's nose. "Branded, d'ye see? Branded. There's
+more besides." He set his foot on the chair and stripped the silk
+stocking down his leg. Just above the ankle there was a broad indent
+where a fetter had bitten into the flesh. "I have dragged a chain, you
+see; not like you among the Moors, but here in Tangier, on that damned
+Mole, in sight of these my brother officers. By the Lord, Knightley, I
+tell you you have had the better part of it."
+
+"You!" cried Knightley. "You dragged a chain on Tangier Mole? For
+what offence?" And he added, with a genuine tenderness, "There was no
+disgrace in't, I'll warrant."
+
+Major Shackleton half checked an exclamation, and turned it into a
+cough. Scrope leaned right across the table and stared straight into
+Knightley's eyes.
+
+"The offence was a duel," he answered steadily, "fought on the night
+of January 6th two years ago."
+
+Knightley's face clouded for an instant. "The night when I was
+captured," he said timidly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The officers drew closer about the table, and seemed to hold their
+breath, as the strange catechism proceeded.
+
+"With whom did you fight?" asked Knightley.
+
+"With a very good friend of mine," replied Scrope, in a hard, even
+voice.
+
+"On what account?"
+
+"A woman."
+
+Knightley laughed with a man's amused leniency for such escapades when
+he himself is in no way hurt by them.
+
+"I said there would be no disgrace in't, Harry," he said, with a smile
+of triumph.
+
+The heads of the listeners, which had bunched together, were suddenly
+drawn back. A dark flush of anger overspread Scrope's face, and the
+veins ridged up upon his forehead. Some impatient speech was on the
+tip of his tongue, when the Major interposed.
+
+"What's this talk of penalties? Where's the sense of it? Scrope paid
+the price of his fault. He was admitted to the ranks afterwards. He
+won a lieutenancy by sheer bravery in the field. For all we know he
+may be again a captain to-morrow. Anyhow he wears the King's uniform.
+It is a badge of service which levels us all from Ensign to Major in
+an equality of esteem."
+
+Scrope bowed to the Major and drew back from the table. The other
+officers shuffled and moved in a welcome relief from the strain
+of their expectancy, and Knightley's thoughts were diverted by
+Shackleton's words to a quite different subject. For he picked with
+his fingers at the Moorish robe he wore and "I too wore the King's
+uniform," he pleaded wistfully.
+
+"And shall do so again, thank God," responded the Major heartily.
+
+Knightley started up from his chair; his face lightened unaccountably.
+
+"You mean that?" he asked eagerly. "Yes, yes, you mean it! Then let it
+be to-night--now--even before I sup. As long as I wear these chains,
+as long as I wear this dress, I can feel the driver's whip curl
+about my shoulders." He parted the robe as he spoke, and showed that
+underneath he wore only a coarse sack which reached to his knees, with
+a hole cut in it for his head.
+
+"True, you have worn the chains too long," said the Major. "I should
+have had them knocked off before, but--" he paused for a second, "but
+your coming so surprised me that of a truth I forgot," he continued
+lamely. Then he turned to Tessin. "See to it, Tessin! Ensign Barbour
+of the Tangier Foot was killed to-day. He was quartered in the
+Main-Guard. Take Knightley to his quarters and see what you can do.
+By the way, Knightley, there's a question I should have put to you
+before. By what road did you come in?"
+
+"Down Teviot Hill past the Henrietta Fort. The Moors brought me down
+from Mequinez to interpret between them and their prisoners. I escaped
+last night."
+
+"Past the Henrietta Fort?" replied the Major. "Then you can help us,
+for that way we make our sortie."
+
+"To relieve the Charles Fort?" said Knightley. "I guessed the Charles
+Fort was surrounded, for I heard one man on the Tangier wall shouting
+through a speaking trumpet to the Charles Fort garrison. But it will
+not be easy to relieve them. The Moors are entrenched between. There
+are three trenches. I should never have crawled through them, but that
+I stripped a dead Moor of his robe."
+
+"Three trenches," said Tessin, with a shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"Yes, three. The two nearest to Tangier may be carried. But the
+third--it is deep, twelve feet at the least, and wide, at the least
+eight yards. The sides are steep and slippery with the rain."
+
+"A grave, then," said Scrope carelessly; "a grave that will hold
+many before the evening falls. It is well they made it wide and deep
+enough."
+
+The sombre words knocked upon every heart like a blow on a door behind
+which conspirators are plotting. The Major was the first to recover
+his speech.
+
+"Curse your tongue, Scrope!" he said angrily. "Let who will lie in
+your grave when the evening falls. Before that time comes, we'll show
+these Moors so fine a powder-play as shall glut some of them to all
+eternity. _Bon chat, bon rat_; we are not made of jelly. Tessin, see
+to Knightley."
+
+The two men withdrew. Major Shackleton scribbled a note and despatched
+it to Sir Palmes Fairborne, the Lieutenant-Governor. Scrope took a
+turn or two across the room while the Major was writing the news which
+Knightley had brought. Then--"What game is this he's playing?" he
+said, with a jerk of his head to the door by which Knightley had gone
+out. "I have no mind to be played with."
+
+"But is he playing a game at all?" asked Wyley.
+
+Scrope faced him quickly, looked him over for a second, and replied:
+"You are a new-comer to Tangier, or you would not have asked that
+question."
+
+"I should," rejoined Wyley with complete confidence. "I know quite
+enough to be sure of one thing. I know there lies some deep matter of
+dispute between Ensign Knightley and Lieutenant Scrope, and I am sure
+that there is one other person more in the dark than myself, and that
+person is Ensign Knightley. For whereas I know there is a dispute, he
+is unaware of even that."
+
+"Unaware?" cried Scrope. "Why, man, the very good friend I fought
+with was Ensign Knightley. The woman on whose account we fought was
+Knightley's wife." He flung the words at the Surgeon with almost a
+gesture of contempt. "Make the most of that!" And once again he began
+to pace the room.
+
+"I am not in the least surprised," returned Wyley with an easy smile.
+"Though I admit that I am interested. A wife is sauce to any story."
+He looked placidly round the company. He alone held the key to the
+puzzle, and since he was now become the centre of attraction he was
+inclined to play with his less acute brethren. With a wave of the hand
+he stilled the requests for an explanation, and turned to Scrope.
+
+"Will you answer me a question?"
+
+"I think it most unlikely."
+
+The curt reply in no way diminished the Surgeon's suavity.
+
+"I chose my words ill. I should have asked, Will you confirm an
+assertion? The assertion is this: Ensign Knightley had no suspicion
+before he actually discovered the--well, the lamentable truth."
+
+Scrope stopped his walk and came back to the table.
+
+"Why, that is so," he agreed sullenly. "Knightley had no suspicions.
+It angered me that he had not."
+
+Wyley leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Really, really," he said, and laughed a little to himself. "On the
+night of January 6th Ensign Knightley discovers the lamentable truth.
+At what hour?" he asked suddenly.
+
+Scrope looked to the Major. "About midnight," he suggested.
+
+"A little later, I should think," corrected Major Shackleton.
+
+"A little after midnight," repeated Wyley. "Ensign Knightley and
+Lieutenant Scrope, I understand, immediately fight a duel, which seems
+to have been interrupted before any hurt was done."
+
+The Major and Scrope agreed with a nod of their heads.
+
+"In the morning," continued Wyley, "Ensign Knightley takes part in a
+skirmish, and is clubbed on the head so fiercely that Major Shackleton
+thought his skull must be broken in. At what hour was he struck?"
+Again he put the question quickly.
+
+"'Twixt seven and eight of the morning," replied the Major.
+
+"Quite so," said Wyley. "The incidents fit to a nicety. Two years
+afterwards Ensign Knightley comes home. He knows nothing of the duel,
+or any cause for a duel. Lieutenant Scrope is still 'Harry' to him,
+and his best of friends. It is all very clear."
+
+He gazed about him. Perplexity sat on each face except one; that face
+was Scrope's.
+
+"I spoke to you all some half an hour since concerning the effects of
+a concussion. I could not have hoped for so complete an example," said
+Wyley.
+
+Captain Tessin whistled; Major Shackleton bounced on to his feet.
+
+"Then Knightley knows nothing," cried Tessin in a gust of excitement.
+
+"And never will know," cried the Major.
+
+"Except by hearsay," sharply interposed Scrope. "Gentlemen, you go too
+fast, Except by hearsay. That, Mr. Wyley, was the phrase, I think. By
+what spells, Major," he asked with irony, "will you bind Tangier to
+silence when there's scandal to be talked? Let Knightley walk down to
+the water-gate to-morrow; I'll warrant he'll have heard the story a
+hundred times with a hundred new embellishments before he gets there."
+
+Major Shackleton resumed his seat moodily.
+
+"And since that's the truth, why, he had best hear the story nakedly
+from me."
+
+"From you?" exclaimed Tessin. "Another duel, then. Have you counted
+the cost?"
+
+"Why, yes," replied Scrope quietly.
+
+"Two years of the bastinado," said the Major. "That was what he said.
+He comes back to Tangier to find--who knows?--a worse torture here.
+Knightley, Knightley, a good officer marked for promotion until that
+infernal night. Scrope, I could turn moralist and curse you!"
+
+Scrope dropped his head as though the words touched him. But it was
+not long before he raised it again.
+
+"You waste your pity, I think, Major," he said coldly. "I disagree
+with Mr. Wyley's conclusions. Knightley knows the truth of the matter
+very well. For observe, he has made no mention of his wife. He has
+been two years in slavery. He escapes, and he asks for no news of his
+wife. That is unlike any man, but most of all unlike Knightley. He has
+his own ends to serve, no doubt, but he knows."
+
+The argument appeared cogent to Major Shackleton.
+
+"To be sure, to be sure," he said. "I had not thought of that."
+
+Tessin looked across to Wyley.
+
+"What do you say?"
+
+"I am not convinced," replied Wyley. "Indeed, I was surprised that
+Knightley's omission had not been remarked before. When you first
+showed reserve in welcoming Knightley, I noticed that he became all at
+once timid, hesitating. He seemed to be afraid."
+
+Major Shackleton admitted the Surgeon's accuracy. "Well, what then?"
+
+"Well, I go back to what I said before Knightley appeared. A man has
+lost so many hours. The question, what he did during those hours, is
+one that may well appal any one. Lieutenant Scrope doubted whether
+that question would trouble a man, and needed an instance. I believe
+here is the instance. I believe Knightley is afraid to ask any
+questions, and I believe his reason to be fear of how he lived during
+those lost hours."
+
+There was a pause. No one was prepared to deny, however much he might
+doubt, what Wyley said.
+
+Wyley continued:
+
+"At some point of time before this duel Knightley's recollections
+break off. At what precise point we are not aware, nor is it of any
+great importance. The sure thing is he does not know of the dispute
+between Lieutenant Scrope and himself, and it is of more importance
+for us to consider whether he cannot after all be kept from knowing.
+Could he not be sent home to England? Mrs. Knightley, I take it, is no
+longer in Tangier?"
+
+Major Shackleton stood up, took Wyley by the arm and led him out on to
+the balcony. The town beneath them had gone to sleep; the streets were
+quiet; the white roofs of the houses in the star-shine descended to
+the water's edge like flights of marble steps; only here and there did
+a light burn. To one of the lights close by the city wall the Major
+directed Wyley's attention. The house in which it burned lay so nearly
+beneath them that they could command a corner of the square open
+_patio_ in the middle of it; and the light shone in a window set in
+that corner and giving on to the _patio_.
+
+"You see that house?" said the Major.
+
+"Yes," said Wyley. "It is Scrope's. I have seen him enter and come
+out."
+
+"No doubt," said the Major; "but it is Knightley's house."
+
+"Knightley's! Then the light burning in the window is--"
+
+The Major nodded. "She is still in Tangier. And never a care for him
+has troubled her for two years, not so much as would bring a pucker to
+her pretty forehead--all my arrears of pay to a guinea-piece."
+
+Wyley leaned across the rail of the balcony, watching the light, and
+as he watched he was aware that his feelings and his thoughts changed.
+The interest which he had felt in Scrope died clean away, or rather
+was transferred to Knightley; and with this new interest there sprang
+up a new sympathy, a new pity. The change was entirely due to that one
+yellow light burning in the window and the homely suggestions which it
+provoked. It brought before him very clearly the bitter contrast: so
+that light had burned any night these last two years, and Scrope had
+gone in and out at his will, while up in the barbarous inlands of
+Morocco the husband had had his daily portion of the bastinado and
+the whip. It was her fault, too, and she made her profit of it. Wyley
+became sensible of an overwhelming irony in the disposition of the
+world.
+
+"You spoke a true word to-night, Major," he said bitterly. "That light
+down there might turn any man to a moralist, and send him preaching in
+the market-places."
+
+"Well," returned the Major, as though he must make what defence he
+could for Scrope, "the story is not the politest in the world. But,
+then, you know Tangier--it is only a tiny outpost on the edges of the
+world where we starve behind broken walls forgotten of our friends. We
+have the Moors ever swarming at our gates and the wolf ever snarling
+at our heels, and so the niceties of conduct are lost. We have so
+little time wherein to live, and that little time is filled with the
+noise of battle. Passion has its way with us in the end, and honour
+comes to mean no more than bravery and a gallant death."
+
+He remained a few moments silent, and then disconnectedly he told
+Wyley the rest of the story.
+
+"It was only three years ago that Knightley came to Tangier. He should
+never have brought his wife with him. Scrope and Knightley became
+friends. All Tangier knew the truth pretty soon, and laughed at
+Knightley's ignorance.... I remember the night of January 6th very
+well. I was Captain of the Guard that night too. A spy brought in news
+that we might expect a night attack. I sent Knightley with the news to
+Lord Inchiquin. On the way back he stepped into his own house. It was
+late at night. Mrs. Knightley was singing some foolish song to Scrope.
+The two men came down into the street and fought then and there. The
+quarter was aroused, the combatants arrested and brought to me....
+There are two faults which our necessities here compel us to punish
+beyond their proper gravity: duelling, for we cannot afford to lose
+officers that way; and brawling in the streets at night, because the
+Moors lie _perdus_ under our walls; ready to take occasion as it
+comes. Of Scrope's punishment you have heard. Knightley I released for
+that night. He was on guard--I could not spare him. We were attacked
+in the morning, and repulsed the attack. We followed up our success by
+a sortie in which Knightley fell."
+
+Wyley began again to wonder at what particular point in this story
+Knightley's recollection broke off; and, further, what particular fear
+it was that kept him from all questions even concerning his wife.
+
+Knightley's voice was heard behind them, and they turned back into the
+room. The Ensign had shaved his matted beard and combed out his hair,
+which now curled and shone graciously about his head and shoulders;
+his face, too, for all that it was wasted, had taken almost a boyish
+zest, and his figure, revealed in the graceful dress of his regiment,
+showed youth in every movement. He was plainly by some years a younger
+man than Scrope.
+
+He saluted the Major, and Wyley noticed that with his uniform he
+seemed to have drawn on something of a soldierly confidence.
+
+"There's your supper, lad," said Shackleton, pointing to a few poor
+herrings and a crust of bread which an orderly had spread upon the
+table. "It is scanty."
+
+"I like it the better," said Knightley with a laugh; "for so I am
+assured I am at home, in Tangier. There is no beef, I suppose?"
+
+"Not so much as a hoof."
+
+"No butter?"
+
+"Not enough to cover a sixpence."
+
+"There is cheese, however." He lifted up a scrap upon a fork.
+
+"There will be none to-morrow."
+
+"And as for pay?" he asked slyly.
+
+"Two years and a half in arrears."
+
+Knightley laughed again.
+
+"Moreover," added Shackleton, "out of our nothing we may presently
+have to feed the fleet. It is indeed the pleasantest joke imaginable."
+
+"In a week, no doubt," rejoined Knightley, "I shall be less sensible
+of its humour. But to-night--well, I am home in Tangier, and that
+contents me. Nothing has changed." At that he stopped suddenly.
+"Nothing has changed?" This time the phrase was put as a question, and
+with the halting timidity which he had shown before. No one answered
+the question. "No, nothing has changed," he said a third time, and
+again his eyes began to travel wistfully from face to face.
+
+Tessin abruptly turned his back; Shackleton blinked his eyes at the
+ceiling with altogether too profound an unconcern; Scrope reached out
+for the wine, and spilt it as he filled his glass; Wyley busily drew
+diagrams with a wet finger on the table.
+
+All these details Knightley remarked. He laid down his fork, he rested
+his elbow on the table, his forehead upon his hand. Then absently he
+began to hum over to himself a tune. The rhythm of it was somehow
+familiar to the Surgeon's ears. Where had he heard it before? Then
+with a start he remembered. It was this very rhythm, that very tune,
+which Scrope's fingers had beaten out on the table when he first
+saw Knightley. And as he had absently drummed it then, so Knightley
+absently hummed it now.
+
+Surely, then, the tune had some part in the relations of the two
+men--perhaps a part in this story. "A foolish song." The words flashed
+into Wyley's mind.
+
+"She was singing a foolish song." What if the tune was the tune of
+that song? But then--Wyley's argument came to a sudden conclusion. For
+if the tune _was_ the tune of that song, why, then Knightley must know
+the truth, since he remembered that song. Was Scrope right after all?
+Was Knightley playing with him? Wyley glanced at Knightley in the
+keenest excitement. He wanted words fitted to that tune, and in a
+little the words came--first one or two fitted here and there to a
+note, and murmured unconsciously, then an entire phrase which filled
+out a bar, finally this verse in its proper sequence:
+
+  "No, no, fair heretick, it needs must be
+    But an ill love in me,
+    And worse for thee;
+  For were it in my power
+  To love thee now this hour
+    More than I did the last,
+  'Twould then so fall
+  I might not love at all.
+  Love that can flow...."
+
+And then the song broke off, and silence followed. Wyley looked again
+at Knightley, but the latter had not changed his position. He still
+sat with his face shaded by his hand.
+
+The Surgeon was startled by a light touch on the arm. He turned with
+almost a jump, and he saw Scrope bending across the table towards him,
+his eyes ablaze with an excitement no less keen than his own.
+
+"He knows, he knows!" whispered Scrope. "It was that song she was
+singing; at that word 'flow' he pushed open the door of the room."
+
+Knightley raised his head and drew his hand across his forehead,
+as though Scrope's whisper had aroused him. Scrope seated himself
+hurriedly.
+
+"Nothing has changed, eh?" Knightley asked, like a man fresh from his
+sleep. Then he stood, and quietly, slowly, walked round the table
+until he stood directly behind Scrope's chair. Scrope's face hardened;
+he laid the palms of his hands upon the edge of the table ready to
+spring up; he looked across to Wyley with the expectation of death in
+his eyes.
+
+One of the officers shuffled his feet. Tessin said "Hush!" Knightley
+took a step forward and dropped a hand on Scrope's shoulder, very
+lightly; but none the less Scrope started and turned white as though
+he had been stabbed.
+
+"Harry," said the Ensign, "my--my wife is still in Tangier?"
+
+Scrope drew in a breath. "Yes."
+
+"Ah, waiting for me! You have shown her what kindness you could during
+my slavery?"
+
+He spoke in a wavering voice, as if he were not sure of his ground,
+and as he spoke he felt Scrope shiver beneath his hand, and saw upon
+the faces of his companions an unmistakable shrinking. He turned away
+and staggered, rather than walked, to the window, where he stood
+leaning against the sill.
+
+"The day is breaking," he said quietly. Wyley looked up; outside the
+window the colour was fading down the sky. It was purple still towards
+the zenith, but across the Straits its edges rested white upon the
+hills of Spain.
+
+"Love that can flow ..." murmured Knightley, and of a sudden he flung
+back into the room. "Let me have the truth of it," he burst out,
+confronting his brother-officers gathered about the table--"the truth,
+though it knell out my damnation. If you only knew how up there, at
+Fez, at Mequinez, I have pictured your welcome when I should get back!
+I made of my anticipation a very anodyne. The cudgelling, the chains,
+the hunger, the sun, hot as though a burning glass was held above my
+head--it would all make a good story for the guard-room when I got
+back--when I got back. And yet I do get back, and one and all of you
+draw away from me as though I were one of the Tangier lepers we
+jostle in the streets. 'Love that can flow ...'" he broke off. "I ask
+myself"--he hesitated, and with a great cry, "I ask you, did I play
+the coward on that night I was captured two years ago?"
+
+"The coward?" exclaimed Shackleton in bewilderment.
+
+Wyley, for all his sympathy, could not refrain from a triumphant
+glance at Scrope. "Here is the instance you needed," he said.
+
+"Yes, did I play the coward?" Knightley seated himself sideways on the
+edge of the table, and clasping his hands between his knees, went on
+in a quick, lowered voice. "'Love that can flow'--those are the last
+words I remember. You sent me, Major, to the Governor with a message.
+I delivered it; I started back. On my way back I passed my house. I
+went in. I stood in the _patio_. My wife was singing that song. The
+window of the room in which she sang opened on to the _patio_. I stood
+there listening for a second. Then I went upstairs. I turned the
+handle of the door. I remember quite clearly the light upon the room
+wall as I opened the door. Those words 'love that can flow' came
+swelling through the opening; and--and--the next thing I am aware of,
+I was riding chained upon a camel into slavery."
+
+Tessin and Major Shackleton looked suddenly towards Wyley in
+recognition of the accuracy of his guess. Scrope simply wiped the
+perspiration from his forehead and waited.
+
+"But how does that--forgetfulness, shall we say?--persuade you to the
+fear that you played the coward?" asked Wyley.
+
+"Well," replied Knightley, and his voice sank to a whisper, "I played
+the coward afterwards at Mequinez. At the first it used to amuse me to
+wonder what happened after I opened the door and before I was captured
+outside Tangier; later it only puzzled me, and in the end it began to
+frighten me. You see, I could not tell; it was all a blank to me, as
+it is now; and a man overdriven--well, he nurses sickly fancies.
+No need to say what mine were until the day I played the coward in
+Mequinez. They set me to build the walls of the Emperor's new Palace.
+We used the stones of the old Roman town and built them up in
+Mequinez, and in the walls we were bidden to build Christian slaves
+alive to the glory of Allah. I refused. They stripped the flesh off my
+feet with their bastinadoes, starved me of food and drink, and brought
+me back again to the walls. Again I refused." Knightley looked up at
+his audience, and whether or no he mistook their breathless silence
+for disbelief,--"I did," he implored. "Twice I refused, and twice they
+tortured me. The third time--I was so broken, the whistle of a cane
+in the air made me cry out with pain--I was sunk to that pitch of
+cowardice--" He stopped, unable to complete the sentence. He clasped
+and unclasped his hands convulsively, he moistened his dry lips with
+his tongue, and looked about him with a weak, almost despairing laugh.
+Then he began in another way. "The Christian was a Portuguee from
+Marmora. He was set in the wall with his arms outstretched on either
+side--the attitude of a man crucified. I built in his arms--his right
+arm first--and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way.
+I was careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his
+face." Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning,
+and hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung
+almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards
+from his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his
+neck. All this while he had been crying out for pity, babbling
+prayers, and the rest of it. When I reached his neck he ceased his
+clamour. I suppose he was dumb with horror. I did not know. All I knew
+was that now I should have to meet his eyes as I built in his face.
+I thought for a moment of blinding him. I could have done it quite
+easily with a stone. I picked up a stone to do it, and then, well--I
+could not help looking at him. He drew my eyes to his like a steel
+filing to a magnet. And once I had looked, once I had heard his eyes
+speaking, I--I tore down the stones. I freed his body, his legs, his
+feet and one arm. When the guards noticed what I was doing I cannot
+tell. I could not tell you when their sticks began to beat me. But
+they dragged me away when I had freed only one arm. I remember seeing
+him tugging at the other. What happened to me,"--he shivered,--"I
+could not describe to you. But you see I had played the coward finely
+at Mequinez, and when that question recurred to me as to what had
+happened after I had opened the door, I began to wonder whether by any
+chance I had played the coward at Tangier. I dismissed the thought as
+a sickly fancy, but it came again and again; and I came back here, and
+you draw aloof from me with averted faces and forced welcomes on your
+lips. Did I play the coward on that night I was captured? Tell me!
+Tell me!" And so the torrent of his speech came to an end.
+
+The Major rose gravely from his seat, walked round the table and held
+out his hand.
+
+"Put your hand there, lad," he said gravely.
+
+Knightley looked at the outstretched hand, then at the Major's face.
+He took the hand diffidently, and the Major's grasp was of the
+heartiest.
+
+"Neither at Mequinez nor at Tangier did you play the coward," said the
+Major. "You fell by my side in the van of the attack."
+
+And then Knightley began to cry. He blubbered like a child, and with
+his blubbering he mixed apologies. He was weak, he was tired, his
+relief was too great; he was thoroughly ashamed.
+
+"You see," he said, "there was need that I should know. My wife is
+waiting for me. I could not go back to her bearing that stigma.
+Indeed, I hardly dared ask news of her. Now I can go back; and,
+gentlemen, I wish you good-night."
+
+He stood up, made his bow, wiped his eyes, and began to walk to the
+door. Scrope rose instantly.
+
+"Sit down, Lieutenant," said the Major sharply, and Scrope obeyed with
+reluctance.
+
+The Major watched Knightley cross the room. Should he let the Ensign
+go? Should he keep him? He could not decide. That Knightley would seek
+his wife at once might of course have been foreseen; and yet it had
+not been foreseen either by the Major or the others. The present
+facts, as they had succeeded one after another had engrossed their
+minds.
+
+Knightley's hand was on the door, and the Major had not decided. He
+pushed the door open, he set a foot in the passage, and then the roar
+of a gun shook the room.
+
+"Ah!" remarked Wyley, "the signal for your sortie."
+
+Knightley stopped and listened. Major Shackleton stood in a fixed
+attitude with his eyes upon the floor. He had hit upon an issue, it
+seemed to him by inspiration. The noise of the gun was followed by ten
+clear strokes of a bell.
+
+"That's for the King's Battalion," said Knightley with a smile.
+
+"Yes," said Tessin, and picking up his sword from a corner he slung
+the bandolier across his shoulder.
+
+The bell rang out again; this time the number of the strokes was
+twenty.
+
+"That's for my Lord Dunbarton's Regiment," said Knightley.
+
+"Yes," said two of the remaining officers. They took their hats and
+followed Captain Tessin down the stairs.
+
+A third time the bell spoke, and the strokes were thirty.
+
+"Ah!" said Knightley, "that's for the Tangier Foot. Well, good luck to
+you, Major!" and he passed through the door.
+
+"A moment, Knightley. The regiment first. You wear Ensign Barbour's
+uniform. You must do more than wear his uniform. The regiment first."
+
+Major Shackleton spoke in a husky voice and kept his eyes on the
+floor. Scrope looked at him keenly from the table. Knightley hardly
+looked at him at all. He stepped back into the room.
+
+"With all my heart, Major: the regiment first."
+
+"Your station is at Peterborough Tower. You will go there--at once."
+
+"At once," replied Knightley cheerfully. "So she would wish," and he
+went down the stairs into the street. Major Shackleton picked up his
+hat.
+
+"I command this sortie," he said to Wyley; but as he turned he found
+himself confronted by Scrope.
+
+"What do you intend?" asked Scrope.
+
+Major Shackleton looked towards Wyley. Wyley understood the look and
+also what Shackleton intended. He went from the room and left the two
+men together.
+
+The grey light poured through the window; the candles still burnt
+yellow on the table.
+
+"What do you intend?"
+
+The Major looked Scrope straight in the face.
+
+"I have heard a man speak to-night in a man's voice. I mean to do that
+man the best service that I can. These two years at Mequinez cannot
+mate with these two years at Tangier. Knightley knows nothing now; he
+never shall know. He believes his wife a second Penelope; he shall
+keep that belief. There is a trench--you called it very properly a
+grave. In that trench Knightley will not hear though all Tangier
+scream its gossip in his ears. I mean to give him his chance of
+death."
+
+"No, Major," cried Scrope. "Or listen! Give me an equal chance."
+
+"Trelawney's Regiment is not called out. Again, Lieutenant, I fear me
+you will have the harder part of it."
+
+Shackleton repeated Scrope's own words in all sincerity, and hurried
+off to his post.
+
+Scrope was left alone in the guard-room. A vision of the trench,
+twelve feet deep, eight yards wide, yawned before his eyes. He closed
+them, but that made no difference; he still saw the trench. In
+imagination he began to measure its width and depth. Then he shook his
+head to rid himself of the picture, and went out on to the balcony.
+His eyes turned instinctively to a house by the city wall, to a corner
+of the _patio_ the house and the latticed shutter of a window just
+seen from the balcony.
+
+He stepped back into the room with a feeling of nausea, and blowing
+out the candles sat down alone, in the twilight, amongst the empty
+chairs. There were dark corners in the room; the broadening light
+searched into them, and suddenly the air was tinged with warm gold.
+Somewhere the sun had risen. In a little, Scrope heard a dropping
+sound of firing, and a few moments afterwards the rattle of a volley.
+The battle was joined. Scrope saw the trench again yawn up before his
+eyes. The Major was right. This morning, again, Lieutenant Scrope had
+the harder part of it.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF WHEELS.
+
+
+When Sir Charles Fosbrook was told by Mr. Pepys that Tangier had been
+surrendered to the Moors, he asked at once after the fate of his
+gigantic mole; and when he was informed that his mole had been, before
+the evacuation, so utterly blown to pieces that its scattered blocks
+made the harbour impossible for anchorage, he forbade so much as the
+mention in his presence of the name of Africa. But if he had done with
+Tangier, Tangier had not done with him, and five years afterwards
+he became concerned in the most unexpected way with certain tragic
+consequences of that desperate siege.
+
+He received a letter from an acquaintance of whom he had long lost
+sight, a Mr. Mardale of the Quarry House near Leamington, imploring
+him to give his opinion upon some new inventions. The value of the
+inventions could be easily gauged; Mr. Mardale claimed to have
+invented a wheel of perpetual rotation. Sir Charles, however, had his
+impulses of kindness. He knew Mr. Mardale to be an old and gentle
+person, a little touched in the head perhaps, who with money enough
+to surfeit every instinct of pleasure, had preferred to live a shy
+secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities
+or the invention of toy-like futile machines. There was a girl too
+whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird elfin creature with extraordinary
+black eyes and hair and a clear white face. Her one regret in those
+days had been that she was not born a horse, and she had lived in the
+stables, in as horse like a fashion as was possible. Her ankle indeed
+still must bear an unnecessary scar through the application of a
+fierce horse-liniment to a sprain. No doubt, however, she had long
+since changed her ambitions. Sir Charles calculated her age. Resilda
+Mardale must be twenty-five years old and a deuced fine woman into the
+bargain. Sir Charles took a glance at his figure in his cheval-glass.
+He had reached middle-age to be sure, but he had a leg that many a
+spindle-shanked youngster might envy, nor was there any unbecoming
+protuberance at his waist. He wrote a letter accepting the invitation
+and a week later in the dusk of a June evening, drove up the long
+avenue of trees to the terrace of the Quarry House.
+
+The house was a solid square mansion built upon the side of a hill,
+and the ground in front of it fell away very quickly from the terrace
+to what Sir Charles imagined must be a pond, for a light mist hung at
+the bottom. On the other side of the pond the ground rose again in a
+steep hill. But Sir Charles had no opportunity at this moment to get
+any accurate knowledge of the house and its surroundings. For apart
+from the darkness, it was close upon supper-time and Miss Resilda
+Mardale must assuredly not be kept waiting. His valet subsequently
+declared that Sir Charles had seldom been so particular in the choice
+of his coat and small-clothes; and the supper-bell certainly rang out
+before he was satisfied with the set of his cravat.
+
+He could not, however, consider his pains wasted when once he was set
+down opposite to Resilda. She was taller than he had expected her to
+be, but he did not count height a fault so long as there was grace
+to carry it off, and grace she had in plenty. Her face had gained in
+delicacy and lost nothing of its brilliancy, or of its remarkable
+clearness of complexion. Her hair too if it was less rebellious, and
+more neatly coiled, had retained its glory of profusion, and her big
+black eyes, though to be sure they were grown a trifle sedate, no
+doubt could sparkle as of old. Sir Charles set himself to make them
+sparkle. Old Mr. Mardale prattled of his inventions to his heart's
+delight--he described the wheel, and also a flying machine and besides
+the flying machine, an engine by which steam might be used to raise
+water to great altitudes. Sir Charles was ready from time to time with
+a polite, if not always an appropriate comment, and for the rest he
+paid compliments to Resilda. Still the eyes did not sparkle, indeed a
+pucker appeared and deepened on her forehead. Sir Charles accordingly
+redoubled his gallantries, he was slyly humorous about the
+horse-liniment, and thereupon came the remark which so surprised him
+and was the beginning of his strange discoveries. For Resilda suddenly
+leaned towards him and said frankly:
+
+"I would much rather, Sir Charles, you told me something of your great
+mole at Tangier."
+
+Sir Charles had reason for surprise. The world had long since
+forgotten his mole, if ever it had been concerned in it. Yet here was
+a girl whose thoughts might be expected to run on youths and ribands
+talking of it in a little village four miles from Leamington as though
+there were no topic more universal. Sir Charles Fosbrook answered her
+gravely.
+
+"I thought never to speak of Tangier and the mole again. I spent many
+years upon the devising and construction of that great breakwater. It
+could have sheltered every ship of his Majesty's navy. It was wife and
+children to me. My heart lay very close to it. I fancied indeed my
+heart was disrupted with the disruption of the mole, and it has at all
+events, lain ever since as heavy as King Charles' Chest."
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," said Resilda.
+
+Sir Charles had vowed never to speak of the matter again. But he had
+kept his vow for five long years, and besides here was a girl of a
+remarkable beauty expressing sympathy and asking for information. Sir
+Charles broke his vow and talked, and the girl helped him. A suspicion
+that she might have primed herself with knowledge in view of his
+coming, vanished before the flame of her enthusiasm. She knew the
+history of its building almost as well as he did himself, and could
+even set him right in his dates. It was she who knew the exact day on
+which King Charles' Chest, that great block of mortised stones, which
+formed as it were the keystone of the breakwater, had been lowered
+into its place. Sir Charles abandoned all reserve, and talked freely
+of his hopes and fears as the pier ran farther out and out into the
+currents of the Straits, of his bitter disappointment when his labours
+were destroyed. He forgot his gallantries, he showed himself the man
+he was. Neither he nor Resilda noticed a low rumble of thunder or the
+beating of sudden rain upon the windows, so occupied were they with
+the theme of their talk; and at last Sir Charles, leaning back in his
+chair, cried out with astonishment and delight.
+
+"But how is it that my mole is so familiar a thing to you? Explain it
+if you please! Never have I spent so agreeable an evening."
+
+A momentary embarrassment seemed to follow upon his words. Resilda
+looked at her father who chuckled and explained.
+
+"Sir, an old soldier years ago came over the hill in front of the
+house and begged for alms. He found my daughter on the terrace in a
+lucky moment for himself. He had all sorts of wonderful stories of
+Tangier and the great mole which was then a building. Resilda was set
+on fire that day, and though the King and the Parliament might shut
+their eyes to the sore straits of that town and the gallantry of its
+defenders, no one was allowed to forget them in the Quarry House. To
+tell the truth I sometimes envied the obliviousness of Parliament,"
+and he laughed gently. "So from the first my daughter was primed with
+the history of that siege, and lately we have had further means of
+knowledge--" He began to speak warily and with embarrassment--"For two
+years ago Resilda married an officer of The King's Battalion, Major
+Lashley."
+
+"Here are two surprises," cried Sir Charles. "For in the first place,
+Madam, I had no thought you were wed. Blame a bachelor's stupidity!"
+and he glanced at her left hand which lay upon the table-cloth with
+the band of gold gleaming upon a finger. "In the second place I knew
+Major Lashley very well, though it is news to me that he ever troubled
+his head with my mole. A very gallant officer, who defended Charles
+Fort through many nights of great suspense, and cleft his way back
+to Tangier when his ammunition was expended. I shall be very glad to
+shake the Major once more by the hand."
+
+At once Sir Charles was aware that he had uttered the most awkward and
+unsuitable remark. Resilda Lashley, as he must now term her, actually
+flinched away from him and then sat with a vague staring look of pain
+as though she had been shocked clean out of her wits. She recovered
+herself in a moment, but she did not speak, neither had Sir Charles
+any words. He looked at her dress which was white and had not so much
+as a black riband dangling anywhere about it.
+
+But there were other events than death which could make the utterance
+of his wish a _gaucherie_. Sir Charles prided himself upon his tact,
+particularly with a good-looking woman, and he was therefore much
+abashed and confused. The only one who remained undisturbed was Mr.
+Mardale. His mind was never for very long off his wheels, or his
+works of art. It was the turn of his pictures now. He had picked up a
+genuine Rubens in Ghent, he declared. It was standing somewhere in the
+great drawing-room on the carpet against the back of a chair, and Sir
+Charles must look at it in the morning, if only it could be found. He
+had clean forgotten all about his daughter it appeared. She, however,
+had a mind to clear the mystery up, and interrupting her father.
+
+"It is right that you should know," she said simply, "Major Lashley
+disappeared six months ago."
+
+"Disappeared!" exclaimed Sir Charles in spite of himself, and the
+astonishment in his voice woke the old gentleman from his prattle.
+
+"To be sure," said he apologetically, "I should have told you before
+of the sad business. Yes, Sir, Major Lashley disappeared, utterly from
+this very house on the eleventh night of last December, and though the
+country-side was scoured and every ragamuffin for miles round brought
+to question, no trace of him has anywhere been discovered from that
+day to this."
+
+An intuition slipped into Sir Charles Fosbrook's mind, and though he
+would have dismissed it as entirely unwarrantable, persisted there.
+The thought of the steep slope of ground before the house and the mist
+in the hollow between the two hills. The mist was undoubtedly the
+exhalation from a pond. The pond might have reeds which might catch
+and gather a body. But the pond would have been dragged. Still the
+thought of the pond remained while he expressed a vague hope that the
+Major might by God's will yet be restored to them.
+
+He had barely ended before a louder gust of rain than ordinary smote
+upon the windows and immediately there followed a knocking upon the
+hall-door. The sound was violent, and it came with so opposite a
+rapidity upon the heels of Fosbrook's words that it thrilled and
+startled him. There was something very timely in the circumstances of
+night and storm and that premonitory clapping at the door. Sir Charles
+looked towards the door in a glow of anticipation. He had time to
+notice, however, how deeply Resilda herself was stirred; her left hand
+which had lain loose upon the table-cloth was now tightly clenched,
+and she had a difficulty in breathing. The one strange point in her
+conduct was that although she looked towards the door like Sir Charles
+Fosbrook, there was more of suspense in the look than of the eagerness
+of welcome. The butler, however, had no news of Major Lashley to
+announce. He merely presented the compliments of Mr. Gibson Jerkley
+who had been caught in the storm near the Quarry House and ten miles
+from his home. Mr. Jerkley prayed for supper and a dry suit of
+clothes.
+
+"And a bed too," said Resilda, with a flush of colour in her cheeks,
+and begging Sir Charles' permission she rose from the table. Sir
+Charles was disappointed by the mention of a strange name. Mr.
+Mardale, however, to whom that loud knocking upon the door had been
+void of suggestion, now became alert. He looked with a strange anxiety
+after his daughter, an anxiety which surprised Fosbrook, to whom
+this man of wheels and little toys had seemed lacking in the natural
+affections.
+
+"And a bed too," repeated Mr. Mardale doubtfully, "to be sure! To be
+sure!" And though he went into the hall to welcome his visitor, it was
+not altogether without reluctance.
+
+Mr. Gibson Jerkley was a man of about thirty years. He had a brown
+open personable countenance, a pair of frank blue eyes, and the steady
+restful air of a man who has made his account with himself, and who
+neither speaks to win praise nor is at pains to escape dislike. Sir
+Charles Fosbrook was from the first taken with the man, though he
+spoke little with him for the moment. For being tired with his long
+journey from London, he retired shortly to his room.
+
+But however tired he was, Sir Charles found that it was quite
+impossible for him to sleep. The cracking of the rain upon his
+windows, the groaning trees in the park, and the wail of the wind
+among the chimneys and about the corners of the house were no doubt
+for something in a Londoner's sleeplessness. But the mysterious
+disappearance of Major Lashley was at the bottom of it. He thought
+again of the pond. He imagined a violent kidnapping and his fancies
+went to work at devising motives. Some quarrel long ago in the crowded
+city of Tangier and now brought to a tragical finish amongst the oaks
+and fields of England. Perhaps a Moor had travelled over seas for his
+vengeance and found his way from village to village like that
+Baracen lady of old times. And when he had come to this point of his
+reflections, he heard a light rapping upon his door. He got out of bed
+and opened it. He saw Mr. Gibson Jerkley standing on the threshold
+with a candle in one hand and a finger of the other at his lip.
+
+"I saw alight beneath your door," said Jerkley, and Sir Charles made
+room for him to enter. He closed the door cautiously, and setting his
+candle down upon a chest of drawers, said without any hesitation:
+
+"I have come, Sir, to ask for your advice. I do not wonder at your
+surprise, it is indeed a strange sort of intrusion for a man to make
+upon whom you have never clapped your eyes before this evening. But
+for one thing I fancy Mrs. Lashley wishes me to ask you for the
+favour. She has said nothing definitely, in faith she could not as you
+will understand when you have heard the story. But that I come with
+her approval I am very sure. For another, had she disapproved, I
+should none the less have come of my own accord. Sir, though I know
+you very well by reputation, I have had the honour of few words with
+you, but my life has taught me to trust boldly where my eyes bid me
+trust. And the whole affair is so strange that one more strange act
+like this intrusion of mine is quite of apiece. I ask you therefore to
+listen to me. The listening pledges you to nothing, and at the worst,
+I can promise you, my story will while away a sleepless hour. If when
+you have heard, you can give us your advice, I shall be very glad. For
+we are sunk in such a quandary that a new point of view cannot but
+help us."
+
+Sir Charles pointed to a chair and politely turned away to hide a
+yawn. For the young man's lengthy exordium had made him very drowsy.
+He could very comfortably had fallen asleep at this moment. But Gibson
+Jerkley began to speak, and in a short space of time Sir Charles was
+as wide-awake as any house-breaker.
+
+"Eight years ago," said he, "I came very often to the Quarry House,
+but I always rode homewards discontented in the evening. Resilda at
+that time had a great ambition to be a boy. The sight of any brown
+bare-legged lad gipsying down the hill with a song upon his lips,
+would set her viciously kicking the toes of her satin slippers against
+the parapet of the terrace, and clamouring at her sex. Now I was not
+of the same mind with Resilda."
+
+"That I can well understand," said Sir Charles drily. "But, my young
+friend, I can remember a time when Resilda desired of all things to be
+a horse. There was something hopeful because more human in her wish to
+be a boy, had you only known."
+
+Mr. Jerkley nodded gravely and continued:
+
+"I was young enough to argue the point with her, which did me no good,
+and then to make matters worse, the soldier from Tangier came over the
+hill, with his stories of Major Lashley--Captain he was then."
+
+"Major Lashley," exclaimed Sir Charles. "I did not hear the soldier
+was one of Major Lashley's men!"
+
+"But he was and thenceforward the world went very ill with me. Reports
+of battles, and sorties came home at rare intervals. She was the first
+to read of them. Major Lashley's name was more than once mentioned. We
+country gentlemen who stayed at home and looked after our farms and
+our tenants, having no experience of war, suffered greatly in the
+comparison. So at the last I ordered my affairs for a long voyage, and
+without taking leave of any but my nearest neighbours and friends, I
+slipped off one evening to the wars."
+
+"You did not wish your friends at the Quarry House good-bye?" said
+Fosbrook.
+
+"No. It might have seemed that I was making claims, and, after all,
+one has one's pride. I would never, I think, ask a woman to wait
+for me. But she heard of course after I had gone and--I am speaking
+frankly--I believe the news woke the woman in her. At all events there
+was little talk after of Tangier at the Quarry House."
+
+Mr. Jerkley related his subsequent history. He had sailed at his own
+charges to Africa; he had enlisted as a gentleman volunteer in The
+King's Battalion; he had served under Major Lashley in the Charles
+Fort where he was in charge of the great speaking-trumpet by which
+the force received its orders from the Lieutenant-Governor in Tangier
+Castle; he took part in the desperate attempt to cut a way back
+through the Moorish army into the town. In that fight he was wounded
+and left behind for dead.
+
+"A year later peace was made. Tangier was evacuated, Major Lashley
+returned to England. Now the Major and I despite the difference
+in rank had been friends. I had spoken to him of Miss Mardale's
+admiration, and as chance would have it, he came to Leamington to take
+the waters."
+
+"Chance?" said Sir Charles drily.
+
+"Well it may have been intention," said Jerkley. "There was no reason
+in the world why he should not seek her out. She was not promised to
+me, and very likely I had spoken of her with enthusiasm. For a long
+time she would not consent to listen to him. He was, however, no
+less persistent--he pleaded his suit for three years. I was dead you
+understand, and what man worth a pinch of salt would wish a woman to
+waste her gift of life in so sterile a fidelity.... You follow me?
+At the end of three years Resilda yielded to his pleadings, and the
+persuasions of her friends. For Major Lashley quickly made himself a
+position in the country. They were married, Major Lashley was not a
+rich man, it was decided that they should both live at the Quarry
+House."
+
+"And what had Mr. Mardale to say to it?" asked Fosbrook.
+
+"Oh, Sir," said Gibson Jerkley with a laugh. "Mr. Mardale is a man of
+wheels, and little steel springs. Let him sit at his work-table in
+that crowded drawing-room on the first floor, without interruption,
+and he will be very well content, I can assure you.... Hush!" and he
+suddenly raised his hand. In the silence which followed, they both
+distinctly heard the sound of some one stirring in the house. Mr.
+Jerkley went to the door and opened it. The door gave on to the
+passage which was shut off at its far end by another door from the
+square tulip-wood landing, at the head of the stairs. He came back
+into the bedroom.
+
+"There is a light on the other side of the passage-door," said he.
+"But I have no doubt it is Mr. Mardale going to his bed. He sits late
+at his work-table."
+
+Sir Charles brought him back to his story.
+
+"Meanwhile you were counted for dead, but actually you were taken
+prisoner. There is one thing which I do not understand. When peace was
+concluded the prisoners were freed and an officer was sent up into
+Morocco to secure their release."
+
+"There were many oversights like mine, I have no doubt. The Moors were
+reluctant enough to produce their captives. We who were supposed to be
+dead were not particularly looked for. I have no doubt there is many
+a poor English soldier sweating out his soul in the uplands of that
+country to this day. I escaped two years ago, just about the time, in
+fact, when Miss Resilda Mardale became Mrs. Lashley. I crept down
+over the hillside behind Tangier one dark evening, and lay all night
+beneath a bush of tamarisks dreaming the Moors were still about me.
+But an inexplicable silence reigned and nowhere was the darkness
+spotted by the flame of any camp-fire. In the morning I looked down
+to Tangier. The first thing which I noticed was your broken stump of
+mole, the second that nowhere upon the ring of broken wall could be
+seen the flash of a red coat or the glitter of a musket-barrel. I came
+down into Tangier, I had no money and no friends. I got away in a
+felucca to Spain. From Spain I worked my passage to England. I came
+home nine months ago. And here is the trouble. Three months after I
+returned Major Lashley disappeared. You understand?"
+
+"Oh," cried Sir Charles, and he jumped in his chair. "I understand
+indeed. Suspicion settled upon you," and as it ever will upon the
+least provocation suspicion passed for a moment into Fosbrook's brain.
+He was heartily ashamed of it when he looked into Jerkley's face. It
+would need, assuredly, a criminal of an uncommon astuteness to come at
+this hour with this story. Mr. Jerkley was not that criminal.
+
+"Yes," he answered simply, "I am looked at askance, devil a doubt of
+it. I would not care a snap of the fingers were I alone in the matter;
+but there is Mrs. Lashley ... she is neither wife nor widow ... and,"
+he took a step across the room and said quickly--and were she known
+for a widow, there is still the suspicion upon me like a great iron
+door between us."
+
+"Can you help us, Sir Charles! Can you see light?"
+
+"You must tell me the details of the Major's disappearance," said Sir
+Charles, and the following details were given.
+
+On the eleventh of December and at ten o'clock of the evening Major
+Lashley left the house to visit the stables which were situated in
+the Park and at the distance of a quarter of a mile from the house. A
+favourite mare, which he had hunted the day before, had gone lame,
+and all day Major Lashley had shown some anxiety; so that there was a
+natural reason why he should have gone out at the last moment before
+retiring to bed. Mrs. Lashley went up to her room at the same time,
+indeed with so exact a correspondence of movement that as she reached
+the polished tulip-wood landing at the top of the stairs, she heard
+the front door latch as her husband drew it to behind him. That was
+the last she heard of him.
+
+"She woke up suddenly," said Jerkley, "in the middle of the night, and
+found that her husband was not at her side. She waited for a little
+and then rose from her bed. She drew the window-curtains aside and by
+the glimmering light which came into the room, was able to read the
+dial of her watch. It was seven minutes past three of the morning. She
+immediately lighted her candle and went to rouse her father. Her door
+opened upon the landing, it is the first door upon the left hand side
+as you mount the stairs; the big drawing-room opens on to the landing
+too, but faces the stairs. Mrs. Lashley at once went to that room,
+knowing how late Mr. Mardale is used to sit over his inventions, and
+as she expected, found him there. A search was at once arranged; every
+servant in the house was at once impressed, and in the morning every
+servant on the estate. Major Lashley had left the stable at a quarter
+past ten. He has been seen by no one since."
+
+Sir Charles reflected upon this story.
+
+"There is a pond in front of the house," said he.
+
+"It was dragged in the morning," replied Jerkley.
+
+Sir Charles made various inquiries and received the most
+unsatisfactory answers for his purpose. Major Lashley had been a
+favourite alike at Tangier, and in the country. He had a winning
+trick of a smile, which made friends for him even among his country's
+enemies. Mr. Jerkley could not think of a man who had wished him ill.
+
+"Well, I will think the matter over," said Sir Charles, who had not an
+idea in his head, and he held the door open for Mr. Jerkley. Both men
+stood upon the threshold, looked down the passage and then looked at
+one another.
+
+"It is strange," said Jerkley.
+
+"The light has been a long while burning on the landing," said Sir
+Charles. They walked on tiptoe down the passage to the door beneath
+which one bright bar of light stretched across the floor. Jerkley
+opened the door and looked through; Sir Charles who was the taller man
+looked over Jerkley's head and never were two men more surprised. In
+the embrasure of that door to the left of the staircase, the door
+behind which Resilda Lashley slept, old Mr. Mardale reclined, with his
+back propped against the door-post. He had fallen asleep at his post,
+and a lighted candle half-burnt flamed at his side. The reason of his
+presence then was clear to them both.
+
+"A morbid fancy!" he said in a whisper, but with a considerable anger
+in his voice. "Such a fancy as comes only to a man who has lost his
+judgment through much loneliness. See, he sits like any negro outside
+an Eastern harem! Sir, I am shamed by him."
+
+"You have reason I take the liberty to say," said Sir Charles
+absently, and he went back to his room puzzling over what he had seen,
+and over what he could neither see nor understand. The desire for
+sleep was altogether gone from him. He opened his window and leaned
+out. The rain had ceased, but the branches still dripped and the air
+was of an incomparable sweetness. Blackbirds and thrushes on the
+lawns, and in the thicket-depths were singing as though their lives
+hung upon the full fresh utterance of each note. A clear pure light
+was diffused across the world. Fosbrook went back to his old idea of
+some vengeful pursuit sprung from a wrong done long ago in Tangier.
+The picture of Major Lashley struck with terror as he got news of his
+pursuers, and slinking off into the darkness. Even now, somewhere or
+another, on the uplands or the plains of England, he might be rising
+from beneath a hedge to shake the rain from his besmeared clothes, and
+start off afresh on another day's aimless flight. The notion caught
+his imagination and comforted him to sleep. But in the morning he woke
+to recognise its unreality. The unreality became yet more vivid to
+him at the breakfast-table, when he sat with two pairs of young eyes
+turning again and again trustfully towards him. The very reliance
+which the man and woman so clearly placed in him spurred him. Since
+they looked to him to clear up the mystery, why he must do it, and
+there was an end of the matter.
+
+He was none the less glad, however, when Mr. Jerkley announced his
+intention of returning home. There would at all events be one pair
+of eyes the less. He strolled with Mr. Jerkley on the terrace
+after breakfast with a deep air of cogitation, the better to avoid
+questions. Gibson Jerkley, however, was himself in a ruminative
+mood. He stopped, and gazing across the valley to the riband of road
+descending the hill:
+
+"Down that road the soldier came," said he, "whose stories brought
+about all this misfortune."
+
+"And very likely down that road will come the bearer of news to make
+an end of it," rejoined Fosbrook sententiously. Mr. Jerkley looked at
+him with a sudden upspringing of hope, and Sir Charles nodded with
+ineffable mystery, never guessing how these lightly spoken words were
+to return to his mind with the strength of a fulfilled prophecy.
+
+As he nodded, however, he turned about towards the house, and a
+certain disfigurement struck upon his eyes. Two windows on the first
+floor were entirely bricked up, and as the house was square with level
+tiers of windows, they gave to it an unsightly look. Sir Charles
+inquired of his companion if he could account for them.
+
+"To be sure," said Jerkley, with the inattention of a man diverted
+from serious thought to an unimportant topic. "They are the windows of
+the room in which Mrs. Mardale died a quarter of a century ago. Mr.
+Mardale locked the door as soon as his wife was taken from it to the
+church, and the next day he had the windows blocked. No one but he has
+entered the room during all these years, the key has never left his
+person. It must be the ruin of a room by now. You can imagine it, the
+dust gathering, the curtains rotting, in the darkness and at times the
+old man sitting there with his head running on days long since dead.
+But you know Mr. Mardale, he is not as other men."
+
+Sir Charles swung round alertly to his companion. To him at all events
+the topic was not an indifferent one.
+
+"Yet you say, you believe that he is void of the natural affections.
+Last night we saw a proof, a crazy proof if you will, but none the
+less a proof of his devotion to his daughter. To-day you give me as
+sure a one of his devotion to his dead wife," and almost before he had
+finished, Mr. Mardale was calling to him from the steps of the house.
+
+He spent all that morning in the great drawing-room on the first
+floor. It was a room of rich furniture, grown dingy with dust and
+inattention, and crowded from end to end with tables and chairs and
+sofas, on which were heaped in a confused medley, pictures, statues of
+marble, fans and buckles from Spain, queer barbaric ornaments, ivory
+carvings from the Chinese. Sir Charles could hardly make his way to
+the little cleared space by the window, where Mr. Mardale worked,
+without brushing some irreplaceable treasure to the floor. Once
+there he was fettered for the morning. Mr. Mardale with all the
+undisciplined enthusiasm of an amateur, jumping from this invention to
+that, beaming over his spectacles. Sir Charles listened with here and
+there a word of advice, or of sympathy with the labour of creation.
+But his thoughts were busy elsewhere, he was pondering over his
+discovery of the morning, over the sight which he and Jerkley had seen
+last night, he was accustoming himself to regard the old man in a
+strange new light, as an over-careful father and a sorely-stricken
+husband. Meanwhile he sat over against the window which was in the
+side of the house, and since the house was built upon a slope of hill,
+although the window was on the first floor, a broad terrace of grass
+stretched away from it to a circle of gravel ornamented with statues.
+On this terrace he saw Mrs. Lashley, and reflected uncomfortably that
+he must meet her at dinner and again sustain the inquiry of her eyes.
+
+He avoided actual questions, however, and as soon as dinner was over,
+with a meaning look at the girl to assure her that he was busy with
+her business, he retired to the library. Then he sat himself down to
+think the matter over restfully. But the room, walled with books upon
+its three sides, fronted the Southwest on its fourth, and as the
+afternoon advanced, the hot June sun streamed farther and farther into
+the room. Sir Charles moved his chair back, and again back, and again,
+until at last it was pushed into the one cool dark corner of the room.
+Then Sir Charles closed his wearied eyes the better to think. But he
+had slept little during the last night, and when he opened them again,
+it was with a guilty start. He rubbed his eyes, then he reached a hand
+down quickly at his side, and lifted a book out of the lowest shelf in
+the corner. The book was a volume of sermons. Sir Charles replaced it,
+and again dipped his hand into the lucky-bag. He drew out a tome of
+Mr. Hobbes' philosophy; Sir Charles was not in the mood for Hobbes; he
+tried again. On this third occasion he found something very much more
+to his taste, namely the second Volume of Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs
+of Count Grammont. This he laid upon his knee, and began glancing
+through the pages while he speculated upon the mystery of the Major's
+disappearance. His thoughts, however, lagged in a now well-worn
+circle, they begot nothing new in the way of a suggestion. On the
+other hand the book was quite new to him. He became less and less
+interested in his thoughts, more and more absorbed in the Memoirs.
+There were passages marked with a pencil-line in the margin, and
+marked, thought Sir Charles, by a discriminating judge. He began to
+look only for the marked passages, being sure that thus he would most
+easily come upon the raciest anecdotes. He read the story of the
+Count's pursuit by the brother of the lady he was affianced to. The
+brother caught up the Count when he was nearing Dover to return to
+France. "You have forgotten something," said the brother. "So I have,"
+replied Grammont. "I have forgotten to marry your sister." Sir Charles
+chuckled and turned over the pages. There was an account of how the
+reprobate hero rode seventy miles into the country to keep a tryst
+with an _inamorata_ and waited all night for no purpose in pouring
+rain by the Park gate. Sir Charles laughed aloud. He turned over more
+pages, and to his surprise came across, amongst the marked passages, a
+quite unentertaining anecdote of how Grammont lost a fine new suit of
+clothes, ordered for a masquerade at White Hall. Sir Charles read the
+story again, wondering why on earth this passage had been marked; and
+suddenly he was standing by the window, holding the book to the light
+in a quiver of excitement. Underneath certain letters in the words of
+this marked passage he had noticed dents in the paper, as though by
+the pressure of a pencil point. Now that he stood by the light, he
+made sure of the dents, and he saw also by the roughness of the paper
+about them, that the pencil-marks had been carefully erased. He read
+these underlined letters together--they made a word, two words--a
+sentence, and the sentence was an assignation.
+
+Sir Charles could not remember that the critical moment in any of his
+great engineering undertakings, had ever caused him such a flutter
+of excitement, such a pulsing in his temples, such a catching of his
+breath--no, not even the lowering of Charles' Chest into the Waters
+of Tangier harbour. Everything at once became exaggerated out of its
+proportions, the silence of the house seemed potential and expectant,
+the shadows in the room now that the sun was low had their message, he
+felt a queer chill run down his spine like ice, he shivered. Then he
+hurried to the door, locked it and sat down to a more careful study.
+And as he read, there came out before his eyes a story--a story told
+as it were in telegrams, a story of passion, of secret meetings, of
+gratitude for favours.
+
+Who was the discriminating judge who had marked these passages and
+underlined these letters? The book was newly published, it was in the
+Quarry House, and there were three occupants of the Quarry House. Was
+it Mr. Mardale? The mere question raised a laugh. Resilda? Never.
+Major Lashley then? If not Major Lashley, who else?
+
+It flashed into his mind that here in this book he might hold the
+history of the Major's long courtship of Resilda. But he dismissed the
+notion contemptuously. Gibson Jerkley had told him of that courtship,
+and of the girl's reluctance to respond to it. Besides Resilda was
+never the woman in this story. Perhaps the first volume might augment
+it and give the clue to the woman's identity. Sir Charles hunted
+desperately through the shelves. Nowhere was the first volume to be
+found. He wasted half-an-hour before he understood why. Of course the
+other volume would be in the woman's keeping, and how in the world to
+discover her?
+
+Things moved very quickly with Sir Charles that afternoon. He had shut
+up the volume and laid it on the table, the while he climbed up and
+down the library steps. From the top of the steps he glanced about the
+room in a despairing way, and his eyes lit upon the table. For the
+first time he remarked the binding which was of a brown leather. But
+all the books on the shelves were bound uniformly in marble boards
+with a red backing. He sprang down from the steps with the vigour of a
+boy, and seizing the book looked in the fly leaf for a name. There was
+a name, the name of a bookseller in Leamington, and as he closed the
+book again, some one rapped upon the door. Sir Charles opened it and
+saw Mr. Mardale. He gave the old gentleman no time to speak.
+
+"Mr. Mardale," said he, "I am a man of plethoric habits, and must
+needs take exercise. Can you lend me a horse?"
+
+Mr. Mardale was disappointed as his manner showed. He had perhaps at
+that very moment hit upon a new and most revolutionary invention.
+But his manners hindered him from showing more than a trace of
+the disappointment, and Sir Charles rode out to the bookseller at
+Leamington, with the volume beneath his coat.
+
+"Can you show me the companion to this?" said he, dumping it down upon
+the counter. The bookseller seized upon the volume and fondled it.
+
+"It is not fair," he cried. "In any other affair but books, it would
+be called at once sheer dishonesty. Here have been my subscribers
+clamouring for the Memoirs for six months and more."
+
+"You hire out your books!" cried Sir Charles.
+
+"Give would be the properer word," grumbled the man.
+
+Sir Charles humbly apologised.
+
+"It was the purest oversight," said he, "and I will gladly pay double.
+But I need the first volume."
+
+"The first volume, Sir," replied the bookseller in a mollified voice,
+"is in the like case with the second. There has been an oversight."
+
+"But who has it?"
+
+The bookseller was with difficulty persuaded to search his list. He
+kept his papers in the greatest disorder, so that it was no wonder
+people kept his volumes until they forgot them. But in the end he
+found his list.
+
+"Mrs. Ripley," he read out, "Mrs. Ripley of Burley Wood."
+
+"And where is Burley Wood?" asked Sir Charles.
+
+"It is a village, Sir, six miles from Leamington," replied the
+bookseller, and he gave some rough directions as to the road.
+
+Sir Charles mounted his horse and cantered down the Parade. The sun
+was setting; he would for a something miss his supper; but he meant to
+see Burley Wood that day, and he would have just daylight enough
+for his purpose. As he entered the village, he caught up a labourer
+returning from the fields. Sir Charles drew rein beside him.
+
+"Will you tell me, if you please, where Mrs. Ripley lives?"
+
+The man looked up and grinned.
+
+"In the churchyard," said he.
+
+"Do you mean she is dead?"
+
+"No less."
+
+"When did she die?"
+
+"Well, it may have been a month or two ago, or it may have been more."
+
+"Show me her grave and there's a silver shilling in your pocket."
+
+The labourer led Fosbrook to a corner of the churchyard. Then upon
+a head-stone he read that Mary Ripley aged twenty-nine had died on
+December 7th. December the 7th thought Sir Charles, five days before
+Major Lashley died. Then he turned quickly to the labourer.
+
+"Can you tell me when Mrs. Ripley was buried?"
+
+"I can find out for another shilling."
+
+"You shall have it, man."
+
+The labourer hurried off, discovered the sexton, and came back. But
+instead of the civil gentleman he had left, he found now a man with a
+face of horror, and eyes that had seen appalling things. Sir Charles
+had remained in the churchyard by the grave, he had looked about him
+from one to the other of the mounds of turf, his imagination already
+stimulated had been quickened by what he had seen; he stood with the
+face of a Medusa.
+
+"She was buried when?" he asked.
+
+"On December the 11th," replied the labourer.
+
+Sir Charles showed no surprise. He stood very still for a moment, then
+he gave the man his two shillings, and walked to the gate where his
+horse was tied. Then he inquired the nearest way to the Quarry House,
+and he was pointed out a bridle-path running across fields to a hill.
+As he mounted he asked another question.
+
+"Mr. Ripley is alive?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It must be Mr. Ripley," Sir Charles assured himself, as he rode
+through the dusk of the evening. "It must be ... It must be ..." until
+the words in his mind became a meaningless echo of his horse's hoofs.
+He rode up the hill, left the bridle-path for the road, and suddenly,
+and long before he had expected, he saw beneath him the red square of
+the Quarry House and the smoke from its chimneys. He was on that very
+road up which he and Gibson Jerkley had looked that morning. Down that
+road, he had said, would come the man who knew how Major Lashley
+had disappeared, and within twelve hours down that road the man was
+coming. "But it must be Mr. Ripley," he said to himself.
+
+None the less he took occasion at supper to speak of his ride.
+
+"I rode by Leamington to Burley Wood. I went into the churchyard."
+Then he stopped, but as though the truth was meant to come to light,
+Resilda helped him out.
+
+"I had a dear friend buried there not so long ago," she said. "Father,
+you remember Mrs. Ripley."
+
+"I saw her grave this afternoon," said Fosbrook, with his eyes upon
+Mr. Mardale. It might have been a mere accident, it was in any case a
+trifling thing, the mere shaking of a hand, the spilling of a spoonful
+of salt upon the table, but trifling things have their suggestions.
+He remembered that Resilda, when she had waked up on the night of
+December the 11th to find herself alone, had sought out her father,
+who was still up, and at work in the big drawing-room. He remembered
+too that the window of that room gave on to a terrace of grass. A man
+might go out by that window--aye and return without a soul but himself
+being the wiser.
+
+Of course it was all guess work and inference, and besides, it must be
+Mr. Ripley. Mr. Ripley might as easily have discovered the secret
+of the Memoirs as himself--or anyone else. Mr. Ripley would have
+justification for anger and indeed for more--yes for what men who are
+not affected are used to call a crime ... Sir Charles abruptly stopped
+his reasoning, seeing that it was prompted by a defence of Mr.
+Mardale. He made his escape from his hosts as soon as he decently
+could and retired to his room. He sat down in his room and thought,
+and he thought to some purpose. He blew out his candle, and stole down
+the stairs into the hall. He had met no one. From the hall he went to
+the library-door and opened it--ever so gently. The room was quite
+dark. Sir Charles felt his way across it to his chair in the corner.
+He sat down in the darkness and waited. After a time inconceivably
+long, after every board in the house had cracked a million times, he
+heard distinctly a light shuffling step in the passage, and after that
+the latch of the door release itself from the socket. He heard nothing
+more, for a little, he could only guess that the door was being
+silently opened by some one who carried no candle. Then the shuffling
+footsteps began to move gently across the room, towards him, towards
+the corner where he was sitting. Sir Charles had had no doubt but that
+they would, not a single doubt, but none the less as he sat there
+in the dark, he felt the hair rising on his scalp, and all his body
+thrill. Then a hand groped and touched him. A cry rang out, but it was
+Sir Charles who uttered it. A voice answered quietly:
+
+"You had fallen asleep. I regret to have waked you."
+
+"I was not asleep, Mr. Mardale."
+
+There was a pause and Mr. Mardale continued.
+
+"I cannot sleep to-night, I came for a book."
+
+"I know. For the book I took back to Leamington to-day, before I went
+to visit Mrs. Ripley's grave."
+
+There was a yet longer pause before Mr. Mardale spoke again.
+
+"Stay then!" he said in the same gentle voice. "I will fetch a light."
+He shuffled out of the room, and to Sir Charles it seemed again an
+inconceivably long time before he returned. He came back with a single
+candle, which he placed upon the table, a little star of light,
+showing the faces of the two men shadowy and dim. He closed the door
+carefully, and coming back, said simply:
+
+"You know."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you find out?"
+
+"I saw the grave. I noticed the remarkable height of the mound. I
+guessed."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Mardale, and in a low voice he explained. "I found the
+book here one day, that he left by accident. On December 11th Mrs.
+Ripley was buried, and that night he left the house--for the stables,
+yes, but he did not return from the stables. It seemed quite clear to
+me where he would be that night. People hereabouts take me for a
+man crazed and daft, I know that very well, but I know something of
+passion, Sir Charles. I have had my griefs to bear. Oh, I knew where
+he would be. I followed over the hill down to the churchyard of Burley
+Wood. I had no thought of what I should do. I carried a stick in my
+hand, I had no thought of using it. But I found him lying full-length
+upon the grave with his lips pressed to the earth of it, whispering to
+her who lay beneath him.... I called to him to stand up and he did. I
+bade him, if he dared, repeat the words he had used to my face, to
+me, the father of the girl he had married, and he did--triumphantly,
+recklessly. I struck at him with the knob of my stick, the knob was
+heavy, I struck with all my might, the blow fell upon his forehead.
+The spade was lying on the ground beside the grave. I buried him with
+her. Now what will you do?"
+
+"Nothing," said Sir Charles.
+
+"But Mr. Jerkley asked you to help him."
+
+"I shall tell a lie."
+
+"My friend, there is no need," said the old man with his gentle
+smile. "When I went out for this candle I ..." Sir Charles broke in
+upon him in a whirl of horror.
+
+"No. Don't say it! You did not!"
+
+"I did," replied Mr. Mardale. "The poison is a kindly one. I shall be
+dead before morning. I shall sleep my way to death. I do not mind, for
+I fear that, after all, my inventions are of little worth. I have left
+a confession on my writing-desk. There is no reason--is there?--why he
+and she should be kept apart?"
+
+It was not a question which Sir Charles could discuss. He said
+nothing, and was again left alone in the darkness, listening to the
+shuffling footsteps of Mr. Mardale as, for the last time, he mounted
+the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE.
+
+
+It was in the kitchen of the inn at Framlingham that Mr. Mitchelbourne
+came across the man who was afraid, and during the Christmas week
+of the year 1681. Lewis Mitchelbourne was young in those days, and
+esteemed as a gentleman of refinement and sensibility, with a queer
+taste for escapades, pardonable by reason of his youth. It was his
+pride to bear his part in the graceful tactics of a minuet, while a
+saddled horse waited for him at the door. He delighted to vanish of a
+sudden from the lighted circle of his friends into the byways where
+none knew him, or held him of account, not that it was all vanity with
+Mitchelbourne though no doubt the knowledge that his associates
+in London Town were speculating upon his whereabouts tickled him
+pleasurably through many a solitary day. But he was possessed both of
+courage and resource, qualities for which he found too infrequent an
+exercise in his ordinary life; and so he felt it good to be free for
+awhile, not from the restraints but from the safeguards, with
+which his social circumstances surrounded him. He had his spice of
+philosophy too, and discovered that these sharp contrasts,--luxury and
+hardship, treading hard upon each other and the new strange people
+with whom he fell in, kept fresh his zest of life.
+
+Thus it happened that at a time when families were gathering cheerily
+each about a single fireside, Mr. Mitchelbourne was riding alone
+through the muddy and desolate lanes of Suffolk. The winter was not
+seasonable; men were not tempted out of doors. There was neither
+briskness nor sunlight in the air, and there was no snow upon the
+ground. It was a December of dripping branches, and mists and steady
+pouring rains, with a raw sluggish cold, which crept into one's
+marrow.
+
+The man who was afraid, a large, corpulent man, of a loose and heavy
+build, with a flaccid face and bright little inexpressive eyes like a
+bird's, sat on a bench within the glow of the fire.
+
+"You travel far to-night?" he asked nervously, shuffling his feet.
+
+"To-night!" exclaimed Mitchelbourne as he stood with his legs apart
+taking the comfortable warmth into his bones. "No further than from
+this fire to my bed," and he listened with enjoyment to the rain
+which cracked upon the window like a shower of gravel flung by some
+mischievous urchin. He was not suffered to listen long, for the
+corpulent man began again.
+
+"I am an observer, sir. I pride myself upon it, but I have so much
+humility as to wish to put my observations to the test of fact. Now,
+from your carriage, I should judge you to serve His Majesty."
+
+"A civilian may be straight. There is no law against it," returned
+Mitchelbourne, and he perceived that the ambiguity of his reply threw
+his questioner into a great alarm. He was at once interested. Here,
+it seemed, was one of those encounters which were the spice of his
+journeyings.
+
+"You will pardon me," continued the stranger with a great assumption
+of heartiness, "but I am curious, sir, curious as Socrates, though
+I thank God I am no heathen. Here is Christmas, when a sensible
+gentleman, as upon my word I take you to be, sits to his table and
+drinks more than is good for him in honour of the season. Yet here are
+you upon the roads to Suffolk which have nothing to recommend them. I
+wonder at it, sir."
+
+"You may do that," replied Mitchelbourne, "though to be sure, there
+are two of us in the like case."
+
+"Oh, as for me," said his companion shrugging his shoulders, "I am on
+my way to be married. My name is Lance," and he blurted it out with
+a suddenness as though to catch Mitchelbourne off his guard.
+Mitchelbourne bowed politely.
+
+"And my name is Mitchelbourne, and I travel for my pleasure, though my
+pleasure is mere gipsying, and has nothing to do with marriage. I
+take comfort from thinking that I have no friend from one rim of
+this country to the other, and that my closest intimates have not an
+inkling of my whereabouts."
+
+Mr. Lance received the explanation with undisguised suspicion, and at
+supper, which the two men took together, he would be forever laying
+traps. Now he slipped some outlandish name or oath unexpectedly into
+his talk, and watched with a forward bend of his body to mark whether
+the word struck home; or again he mentioned some person with whom
+Mitchelbourne was quite unfamiliar. At length, however, he seemed
+satisfied, and drawing up his chair to the fire, he showed himself at
+once in his true character, a loud and gusty boaster.
+
+"An exchange of sentiments, Mr. Mitchelbourne, with a chance
+acquaintance over a pipe and a glass--upon my word I think you are in
+the right of it, and there's no pleasanter way of passing an evening.
+I could tell you stories, sir; I served the King in his wars, but I
+scorn a braggart, and all these glories are over. I am now a man of
+peace, and, as I told you, on my way to be married. Am I wise? I do
+not know, but I sometimes think it preposterous that a man who
+has been here and there about the world, and could, if he were so
+meanly-minded, tell a tale or so of success in gallantry, should
+hamper himself with connubial fetters. But a man must settle, to
+be sure, and since the lady is young, and not wanting in looks or
+breeding or station, as I am told--"
+
+"As you are told?" interrupted Mitchelbourne.
+
+"Yes, for I have never seen her. No, not so much as her miniature.
+Nor have I seen her mother either, or any of the family, except the
+father, from whom I carry letters to introduce me. She lives in a
+house called 'The Porch' some miles from here. There is another house
+hard by to it, I understand, which has long stood empty and I have a
+mind to buy it. I bring a fortune, the lady a standing in the county."
+
+"And what has the lady to say to it?" asked Mitchelbourne.
+
+"The lady!" replied Lance with a stare. "Nothing but what is dutiful,
+I'll be bound. The father is under obligations to me." He stopped
+suddenly, and Mitchelbourne, looking up, saw that his mouth had
+fallen. He sat with his eyes starting from his head and a face grey as
+lead, an image of panic pitiful to behold. Mitchelbourne spoke but got
+no answer. It seemed Lance could not answer--he was so arrested by a
+paralysis of terror. He sat staring straight in front of him, and it
+seemed at the mantelpiece which was just on a level with his eyes. The
+mantelpiece, however, had nothing to distinguish it from a score of
+others. Its counterpart might be found to this day in the parlour of
+any inn. A couple of china figures disfigured it, to be sure, but
+Mitchelbourne could not bring himself to believe that even their
+barbaric crudity had power to produce so visible a discomposure. He
+inclined to the notion that his companion was struck by a physical
+disease, perhaps some recrudescence of a malady contracted in those
+foreign lands of which he vaguely spoke.
+
+"Sir, you are ill," said Mitchelbourne. "I will have a doctor, if
+there is one hereabouts to be found, brought to your relief." He
+sprang up as he spoke, and that action of his roused Lance out of his
+paralysis. "Have a care," he cried almost in a shriek, "Do not move!
+For pity, sir, do not move," and he in his turn rose from his chair.
+He rose trembling, and swept the dust off a corner of the mantelpiece
+into the palm of his hand. Then he held his palm to the lamp.
+
+"Have you seen the like of this before?" he asked in a low shaking
+voice.
+
+Mitchelbourne looked over Lance's shoulder. The dust was in reality a
+very fine grain of a greenish tinge.
+
+"Never!" said Mitchelbourne.
+
+"No, nor I," said Lance, with a sudden cunning look at his companion,
+and opening his fingers, as he let the grain run between them. But he
+could not remove as easily from Mitchelbourne's memories that picture
+he had shown him of a shaking and a shaken man. Mitchelbourne went to
+bed divided in his feelings between pity for the lady Lance was to
+marry, and curiosity as to Lance's apprehensions. He lay awake for
+a long time speculating upon that mysterious green seed which could
+produce so extraordinary a panic, and in the morning his curiosity
+predominated. Since, therefore, he had no particular destination he
+was easily persuaded to ride to Saxmundham with Mr. Lance, who, for
+his part, was most earnest for a companion. On the journey Lance gave
+further evidence of his fears. He had a trick of looking backwards
+whenever they came to a corner of the road--an habitual trick, it
+seemed, acquired by a continued condition of fear. When they stopped
+at midday to eat at an ordinary, he inspected the guests through the
+chink at the hinges of the door before he would enter the room; and
+this, too, he did as though it had long been natural to him. He kept
+a bridle in his mouth, however; that little pile of grain upon
+the mantelshelf had somehow warned him into reticence, so that
+Mitchelbourne, had he not been addicted to his tobacco, would
+have learnt no more of the business and would have escaped the
+extraordinary peril which he was subsequently called upon to face.
+
+But he _was_ addicted to his tobacco, and no sooner had he finished
+his supper that night at Saxmundham than he called for a pipe. The
+maidservant fetched a handful from a cupboard and spread them upon the
+table, and amongst them was one plainly of Barbary manufacture. It had
+a straight wooden stem painted with hieroglyphics in red and green
+and a small reddish bowl of baked earth. Nine men out of ten would no
+doubt have overlooked it, but Mitchelbourne was the tenth man. His
+fancies were quick to kindle, and taking up the pipe he said in a
+musing voice:
+
+"Now, how in the world comes a Barbary pipe to travel so far over seas
+and herd in the end with common clays in a little Suffolk village?"
+
+He heard behind him the grating of a chair violently pushed back. The
+pipe seemingly made its appeal to Mr. Lance also.
+
+"Has it been smoked?" he asked in a grave low voice.
+
+"The inside of the bowl is stained," said Mitchelbourne.
+
+Mitchelbourne had been inclined to believe that he had seen last
+evening the extremity of fear expressed in a man's face: he had now to
+admit that he had been wrong. Mr. Lance's terror was a Circe to him
+and sunk him into something grotesque and inhuman; he ran once or
+twice in a little tripping, silly run backwards and forwards like an
+animal trapped and out of its wits; and his face had the look of a
+man suffering from a nausea; so that Mitchelbourne, seeing him, was
+ashamed and hurt for their common nature.
+
+"I must go," said Lance babbling his words. "I cannot stay. I must
+go."
+
+"To-night?" exclaimed Mitchelbourne. "Six yards from the door you will
+be soaked!"
+
+"Then there will be the fewer men abroad. I cannot sleep here! No,
+though it rained pistols and bullets I must go." He went into
+the passage, and calling his host secretly asked for his score.
+Mitchelbourne made a further effort to detain him.
+
+"Make an inquiry of the landlord first. It may be a mere shadow that
+frightens you."
+
+"Not a word, not a question," Lance implored. The mere suggestion
+increased a panic which seemed incapable of increase. "And for the
+shadow, why, that's true. The pipe's the shadow, and the shadow
+frightens me. A shadow! Yes! A shadow is a horrible, threatning thing!
+Show me a shadow cast by nothing and I am with you. But you might as
+easily hold that this Barbary pipe floated hither across the seas of
+its own will. No! 'Ware shadows, I say." And so he continued harping
+on the word, till the landlord fetched in the bill.
+
+The landlord had his dissuasions too, but they availed not a jot more
+than Mr. Mitchelbourne's.
+
+"The road is as black as a pauper's coffin," said he, "and damnable
+with ruts."
+
+"So much the better," said Lance.
+
+"There is no house where you can sleep nearer than Glemham, and no man
+would sleep there could he kennel elsewhere."
+
+"So much the better," said Lance. "Besides, I am expected to-morrow
+evening at 'The Porch' and Glemham is on the way." He paid his bill,
+slipped over to the stables and lent a hand to the saddling of his
+horse. Mitchelbourne, though for once in his life he regretted the
+precipitancy with which he welcomed strangers, was still sufficiently
+provoked to see the business to its end. His imagination was seized by
+the thought of this fat and vulgar person fleeing in terror through
+English lanes from a Barbary Moor. He had now a conjecture in his mind
+as to the nature of that greenish seed. He accordingly rode out with
+Lance toward Glemham.
+
+It was a night of extraordinary blackness; you could not distinguish
+a hedge until the twigs stung across your face; the road was narrow,
+great tree-trunks with bulging roots lined it, at times it was very
+steep--and, besides and beyond every other discomfort, there was the
+rain. It fell pitilessly straight over the face of the country with a
+continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum. Both travellers
+were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one
+of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down
+parody of a tavern at Glemham, was in an extreme exhaustion. It was no
+more than an ague, said Lance, from which he periodically suffered,
+but the two men slept in the same bare room, and towards morning
+Mitchelbourne was awakened from a deep slumber by an unfamiliar voice
+talking at an incredible speed through the darkness in an uncouth
+tongue. He started up upon his elbow; the voice came from Lance's bed.
+He struck a light. Lance was in a high fever, which increased as the
+morning grew.
+
+Now, whether he had the sickness latent within him when he came from
+Barbary, or whether his anxieties and corpulent habit made him an
+easy victim to disease, neither the doctor nor any one else could
+determine. But at twelve o'clock that day Lance was seized with an
+attack of cholera and by three in the afternoon he was dead. The
+suddenness of the catastrophe shocked Mr. Mitchelbourne inexpressibly.
+He stood gazing at the still features of the man whom fear had, during
+these last days, so grievously tormented, and was solemnly aware of
+the vanity of those fears. He could not pretend to any great esteem
+for his companion, but he made many suitable reflections upon the
+shears of the Fates and the tenacity of life, in which melancholy
+occupation he was interrupted by the doctor, who pointed out the
+necessity of immediate burial. Seven o'clock the next morning was the
+hour agreed upon, and Mitchelbourne at once searched in Lance's
+coat pockets for the letters which he carried. There were only two,
+superscribed respectively to Mrs. Ufford at "The Porch" near Glemham,
+and to her daughter Brasilia. At "The Porch" Mitchelbourne remembered
+Lance was expected this very evening, and he thought it right at once
+to ride thither with his gloomy news.
+
+Having, therefore, sprinkled the letters plentifully with vinegar and
+taken such rough precautions as were possible to remove the taint of
+infection from the letters, he started about four o'clock. The evening
+was most melancholy. For, though no rain any longer fell, there was a
+continual pattering of drops from the trees and a ghostly creaking of
+branches in a light and almost imperceptible wind. The day, too, was
+falling, the grey overhang of cloud was changing to black, except for
+one wide space in the west, where a pale spectral light shone without
+radiance; and the last of that was fading when he pulled up at a
+parting of the roads and inquired of a man who chanced to be standing
+there his way to "The Porch." He was directed to ride down the road
+upon his left hand until he came to the second house, which he could
+not mistake, for there was a dyke or moat about the garden wall. He
+passed the first house a mile further on, and perhaps half a mile
+beyond that he came to the dyke and the high garden wall, and saw the
+gables of the second house loom up behind it black against the sky. A
+wooden bridge spanned the dyke and led to a wide gate. Mitchelbourne
+stopped his horse at the bridge. The gate stood open and he looked
+down an avenue of trees into a square of which three sides were made
+by the high garden wall, and the fourth and innermost by the house.
+Thus the whole length of the house fronted him, and it struck him as
+very singular that neither in the lower nor the upper windows was
+there anywhere a spark of light, nor was there any sound but the
+tossing of the branches and the wail of the wind among the chimneys.
+Not even a dog barked or rattled a chain, and from no chimney breathed
+a wisp of smoke. The house in the gloom of that melancholy evening had
+a singular eerie and tenantless look; and oppressive silence reigned
+there; and Mitchelbourne was unaccountably conscious of a growing
+aversion to it, as to something inimical and sinister.
+
+He had crossed the mouth of a lane, he remembered, just at the first
+corner of the wall. The lane ran backwards from the road, parallel
+with the side wall of the garden. Mitchelbourne had a strong desire
+to ride down that lane and inspect the back of the house before he
+crossed the bridge into the garden. He was restrained for a moment by
+the thought that such a proceeding must savour of cowardice. But only
+for a moment. There had been no doubting the genuine nature of Lance's
+fears and those fears were very close to Mr. Mitchelbourne now. They
+were feeling like cold fingers about his heart. He was almost in the
+icy grip of them.
+
+He turned and rode down the lane until he came to the end of the wall.
+A meadow stretched behind the house. Mitchelbourne unfastened the
+catch of a gate with his riding whip and entered it. He found himself
+upon the edge of a pool, which on the opposite side wetted the house
+wall. About the pool some elder trees and elms grew and overhung, and
+their boughs tapped like fingers upon the window-panes. Mitchelbourne
+was assured that the house was inhabited, since from one of the
+windows a strong yellow light blazed, and whenever a sharper gust blew
+the branches aside, swept across the face of the pool like a flaw of
+wind.
+
+The lighted window was in the lowest storey, and Mitchelbourne, from
+the back of his horse, could see into the room. He was mystified
+beyond expression by what he saw. A deal table, three wooden chairs,
+some ragged curtains drawn back from the window, and a single lamp
+made up the furniture. The boards of the floor were bare and unswept;
+the paint peeled in strips from the panels of the walls; the
+discoloured ceiling was hung with cobwebs; the room in a word matched
+the outward aspect of the house in its look of long disuse. Yet it had
+occupants. Three men were seated at the table in the scarlet coats and
+boots of the King's officers. Their faces, though it was winter-time,
+were brown with the sun, and thin and drawn as with long privation and
+anxiety. They had little to say to one another, it seemed. Each man
+sat stiffly in a sort of suspense and expectation, with now and then a
+restless movement or a curt word as curtly answered.
+
+Mitchelbourne rode back again, crossed the bridge, fastened his horse
+to a tree in the garden, and walked down the avenue to the door. As he
+mounted the steps, he perceived with something of a shock, that the
+door was wide open and that the void of the hall yawned black before
+him. It was a fresh surprise, but in this night of surprises, one more
+or less, he assured himself, was of little account. He stepped into
+the hall and walked forwards feeling with his hands in front of him.
+As he advanced, he saw a thin line of yellow upon the floor ahead of
+him. The line of yellow was a line of light, and it came, no doubt,
+from underneath a door, and the door, no doubt, was that behind which
+the three men waited. Mitchelbourne stopped. After all, he reflected,
+the three men were English officers wearing His Majesty's uniform,
+and, moreover, wearing it stained with their country's service. He
+walked forward and tapped upon the door. At once the light within the
+room was extinguished.
+
+It needed just that swift and silent obliteration of the slip of light
+upon the floor to make Mitchelbourne afraid. He had been upon the
+brink of fear ever since he had seen that lonely and disquieting
+house; he was now caught in the full stream. He turned back. Through
+the open doorway, he saw the avenue of leafless trees tossing against
+a leaden sky. He took a step or two and then came suddenly to a halt.
+For all around him in the darkness he seemed to hear voices breathing
+and soft footsteps. He realised that his fear had overstepped his
+reason; he forced himself to remember the contempt he had felt for
+Lance's manifestations of terror; and swinging round again he flung
+open the door and entered the room.
+
+"Good evening, gentlemen," said he airily, and he got no answer
+whatsoever. In front of him was the grey panel of dim twilight where
+the window stood. The rest was black night and an absolute silence. A
+map of the room was quite clear in his recollections. The three men
+were seated he knew at the table on his right hand. The faint light
+from the window did not reach them, and they made no noise. Yet they
+were there. Why had they not answered him, he asked himself. He could
+not even hear them breathing, though he strained his ears. He could
+only hear his heart drumming at his breast, the blood pulsing in his
+temples. Why did they hold their breath? He crossed the room, not
+knowing what he did, bereft of his wits. He had a confused, ridiculous
+picture of himself wearing the flaccid, panic stricken face of Mr.
+Lance, like an ass' head, not holding the wand of Titania. He reached
+the window and stood in its embrasure, and there one definite,
+practical thought crept into his mind. He was visible to these men who
+were invisible to him. The thought suggested a precaution, and with
+the trembling haste of a man afraid, he tore at the curtains and
+dragged them till they met across the window so that even the faint
+grey glimmer of the night no longer had entrance. The next moment
+he heard the door behind him latch and a key turn in the lock. He
+crouched beneath the window and did not stand up again until a light
+was struck, and the lamp relit.
+
+The lighting of the lamp restored Mr. Mitchelbourne, if not to the
+full measure of his confidence, at all events to an appreciation that
+the chief warrant for his trepidation was removed. What he had with
+some appearance of reason feared was a sudden attack in the dark. With
+the lamp lit, he could surely stand in no danger of any violence at
+the hands of three King's officers whom he had never come across in
+all his life. He took, therefore, an easy look at them. One, the
+youngest, now leaned against the door, a youth of a frank, honest
+face, unremarkable but for a firm set of the jaws. A youth of no great
+intellect, thought Mitchelbourne, but tenacious, a youth marked out
+for a subordinate command, and never likely for all his sterling
+qualities to kindle a woman to a world-forgetting passion, or to tread
+with her the fiery heights where life throbs at its fullest. Mr.
+Mitchelbourne began to feel quite sorry for this young officer of the
+limited capacities, and he was still in the sympathetic mood when one
+of the two men at the table spoke to him. Mitchelbourne turned at
+once. The officers were sitting with a certain air of the theatre in
+their attitudes, one a little dark man and the other a stiff, light
+complexioned fellow with a bony, barren face, unmistakably a stupid
+man and the oldest of the three. It was he who was speaking, and he
+spoke with a sort of aggravated courtesy like a man of no breeding
+counterfeiting a gentleman upon the stage.
+
+"You will pardon us for receiving you with so little ceremony. But
+while we expected you, you on the other hand were not expecting us,
+and we feared that you might hesitate to come in if the lamp was
+burning when you opened the door."
+
+Mitchelbourne was now entirely at his ease. He perceived that there
+was some mistake and made haste to put it right.
+
+"On the contrary," said he, "for I knew very well you were here.
+Indeed, I knocked at the door to make a necessary inquiry. You did not
+extinguish the lamp so quickly but that I saw the light beneath the
+door, and besides I watched you some five minutes through the window
+from the opposite bank of the pool at the back of the house."
+
+The officers were plainly disconcerted by the affability of Mr.
+Mitchelbourne's reply. They had evidently expected to carry off a
+triumph, not to be taken up in an argument. They had planned a stroke
+of the theatre, final and convincing, and behold the dialogue went on!
+There was a riposte to their thrust.
+
+The spokesman made some gruff noises in his throat. Then his face
+cleared.
+
+"These are dialectics," he said superbly with a wave of the hand.
+
+"Good," said the little dark fellow at his elbow, "very good!"
+
+The youth at the door nodded superciliously towards Mitchelbourne.
+
+"True, these are dialectics," said he with a smack of the lips upon
+the word. It was a good cunning scholarly word, and the man who could
+produce it so aptly worthy of admiration.
+
+"You make a further error, gentlemen," continued Mitchelbourne, "you
+no doubt are expecting some one, but you were most certainly not
+expecting me. For I am here by the purest mistake, having been
+misdirected on the way." Here the three men smiled to each other, and
+their spokesman retorted with a chuckle.
+
+"Misdirected, indeed you were. We took precautions that you should be.
+A servant of mine stationed at the parting of the roads. But we are
+forgetting our manners," he added rising from his chair. "You should
+know our names. The gentleman at the door is Cornet Lashley, this
+is Captain Bassett and I am Major Chantrell. We are all three of
+Trevelyan's regiment."
+
+"And my name," said Mitchelbourne, not to be outdone in politeness,
+"is Lewis Mitchelbourne, a gentleman of the County of Middlesex."
+
+At this each of the officers was seized with a fit of laughter;
+but before Mitchelbourne had time to resent their behavior, Major
+Chantrell said indulgently:
+
+"Well, well, we shall not quarrel about names. At all events we all
+four are lately come from Tangier."
+
+"Oh, from Tangier," cried Mitchelbourne. The riddle was becoming
+clear. That extraordinary siege when a handful of English red-coats
+unpaid and ill-fed fought a breached and broken town against countless
+hordes for the honour of their King during twenty years, had not yet
+become the property of the historian. It was still an actual war
+in 1681. Mitchelbourne understood whence came the sunburn on his
+antagonists' faces, whence the stains and the worn seams of their
+clothes. He advanced to the table and spoke with a greater respect
+than he had used.
+
+"Did one of you," he asked, "leave a Moorish pipe behind you at an inn
+of Saxmundham?"
+
+"Ah," said the Major with a reproachful glance at Captain Bassett. The
+Captain answered with some discomfort:
+
+"Yes. I made that mistake. But what does it matter? You are here none
+the less."
+
+"You have with you some of the Moorish tobacco?" continued
+Mitchelbourne.
+
+Captain Bassett fetched out of his pocket a little canvas bag, and
+handed it to Mitchelbourne, who untied the string about the neck, and
+poured some of the contents into the palm of his hand. The tobacco was
+a fine, greenish seed.
+
+"I thought as much," said Mitchelbourne, "you expected Mr. Lance
+to-night. It is Mr. Lance whom you thought to misdirect to this
+solitary house. Indeed Mr. Lance spoke of such a place in this
+neighbourhood, and had a mind to buy it."
+
+Captain Bassett suddenly raised his hand to his mouth, not so quickly,
+however, but Mitchelbourne saw the grim, amused smile upon his lips.
+"It is Mr. Lance for whom you now mistake me," he said abruptly.
+
+The young man at the door uttered a short, contemptuous laugh, Major
+Chantrell only smiled.
+
+"I am aware," said he, "that we meet for the first time to-night, but
+you presume upon that fact too far. What have you to say to this?" And
+dragging a big and battered pistol from his pocket, he tossed it upon
+the table, and folded his arms in the best transpontine manner.
+
+"And to this?" said Captain Bassett. He laid a worn leather powder
+flask beside the pistol, and tapped upon the table triumphantly.
+
+Mr. Mitchelbourne recognised clearly that villainy was somehow
+checkmated by these proceedings and virtue restored, but how he could
+not for the life of him determine. He took up the pistol.
+
+"It appears to have seen some honourable service," said he. This
+casual remark had a most startling effect upon his auditors. It was
+the spark to the gun-powder of their passions. Their affectations
+vanished in a trice.
+
+"Service, yes, but honourable! Use that lie again, Mr. Lance, and I
+will ram the butt of it down your throat!" cried Major Chantrell. He
+leaned forward over the table in a blaze of fury. Yet his face did no
+more than match the faces of his comrades.
+
+Mitchelbourne began to understand. These simple soldier-men had
+endeavoured to conduct their proceedings with great dignity and a
+judicial calmness; they had mapped out for themselves certain parts
+which they were to play as upon a stage; they were to be three stern
+imposing figures of justice; and so they had become simply absurd and
+ridiculous. Now, however, that passion had the upper hand of them,
+Mitchelbourne saw at once that he stood in deadly peril. These were
+men.
+
+"Understand me, Mr. Lance," and the Major's voice rang out firm, the
+voice of a man accustomed to obedience. "Three years ago I was in
+command of Devil's Drop, a little makeshift fort upon the sands
+outside Tangier. In front the Moors lay about us in a semicircle. Sir,
+the diameter was the line of the sea at our backs. We could not retire
+six yards without wetting our feet, not twenty without drowning. One
+night the Moors pushed their trenches up to our palisades; in the dusk
+of the morning I ordered a sortie. Nine officers went out with me and
+three came back, we three. Of the six we left behind, five fell, by my
+orders, to be sure, for I led them out; but, by the living God, you
+killed them. There's the pistol that shot my best friend down, an
+English pistol. There's the powder flask which charged the pistol, an
+English flask filled with English powder. And who sold the pistol and
+the powder to the Moors, England's enemies? You, an Englishman. But
+you have come to the end of your lane to-night. Turn and turn as you
+will you have come to the end of it."
+
+The truth was out now, and Mitchelbourne was chilled with
+apprehension. Here were three men very desperately set upon what they
+considered a mere act of justice. How was he to dissuade them? By
+argument? They would not listen to it. By proofs? He had none to offer
+them. By excuses? Of all unsupported excuses which can match for
+futility the excuse of mistaken identity? It springs immediate to the
+criminal's lips. Its mere utterance is almost a conviction.
+
+"You persist in error, Major Chantrell," he nevertheless began.
+
+"Show him the proof, Bassett," Chantrell interrupted with a shrug of
+the shoulders, and Captain Bassett drew from his pocket a folded sheet
+of paper.
+
+"Nine officers went out," continued Chantrell, "five were killed,
+three are here. The ninth was taken a prisoner into Barbary. The Moors
+brought him down to their port of Marmora to interpret. At Marmora
+your ship unloaded its stores of powder and guns. God knows how often
+it had unloaded the like cargo during these twenty years--often enough
+it seems, to give you a fancy for figuring as a gentleman in the
+county. But the one occasion of its unloading is enough. Our brother
+officer was your interpreter with the Moors, Mr. Lance. You may very
+likely know that, but this you do not know, Mr. Lance. He escaped, he
+crept into Tangier with this, your bill of lading in his hand," and
+Bassett tossed the sheet of paper towards Mitchelbourne. It fell upon
+the floor before him but he did not trouble to pick it up.
+
+"Is it Lance's death that you require?" he asked.
+
+"Yes! yes! yes!" came from each mouth.
+
+"Then already you have your wish. I do not question one word of your
+charges against Lance. I have reason to believe them true. But I am
+not Lance. Lance lies at this moment dead at Great Glemham. He died
+this afternoon of cholera. Here are his letters," and he laid the
+letters on the table. "I rode in with them at once. You do not believe
+me, but you can put my words to the test. Let one of you ride to Great
+Glemham and satisfy himself. He will be back before morning."
+
+The three officers listened so far with impassive faces, or barely
+listened, for they were as indifferent to the words as to the passion
+with which they were spoken.
+
+"We have had enough of the gentleman's ingenuities, I think," said
+Chantrell, and he made a movement towards his companions.
+
+"One moment," exclaimed Mitchelbourne. "Answer me a question! These
+letters are to the address of Mrs. Ufford at a house called 'The
+Porch.' It is near to here?"
+
+"It is the first house you passed," answered the Major and, as he
+noticed a momentary satisfaction flicker upon his victim's face, he
+added, "But you will not do well to expect help from 'The Porch'--at
+all events in time to be of much service to you. You hardly appreciate
+that we have been at some pains to come up with you. We are not
+likely again to find so many circumstances agreeing to favour us, a
+dismantled house, yourself travelling alone and off your guard in a
+country with which you are unfamiliar and where none know you, and
+just outside the window a convenient pool. Besides--besides," he broke
+out passionately, "There are the little mounds about Tangier, under
+which my friends lie," and he covered his face with his hands. "My
+friends," he cried in a hoarse and broken voice, "my soldier-men!
+Come, let's make an end. Bassett, the rope is in the corner. There's a
+noose to it. The beam across the window will serve;" and Bassett rose
+to obey.
+
+But Mitchelbourne gave them no time. His fears had altogether vanished
+before his indignation at the stupidity of these officers. He was
+boiling with anger at the thought that he must lose his life in this
+futile ignominious way for the crime of another man, who was not even
+his friend, and who besides was already dead. There was just one
+chance to escape, it seemed to him. And even as Bassett stooped to
+lift the coil of rope in the corner he took it.
+
+"So that's the way of it," he cried stepping forward. "I am to be hung
+up to a beam till I kick to death, am I? I am to be buried decently in
+that stagnant pool, am I? And you are to be miles away before sunrise,
+and no one the wiser! No, Major Chantrell, I am not come to the end of
+my lane," and before either of the three could guess what he was at,
+he had snatched up the pistol from the table and dashed the lamp into
+a thousand fragments.
+
+The flame shot up blue and high, and then came darkness.
+
+Mitchelbourne jumped lightly back from his position to the centre of
+the room. The men he had to deal with were men who would follow their
+instincts. They would feel along the walls; of so much he could be
+certain. He heard the coil of rope drop down in a corner to his left;
+so that he knew where Captain Bassett was. He heard a chair upset in
+front of him, and a man staggered against his chest. Mitchelbourne had
+the pistol still in his hand and struck hard, and the man dropped with
+a crash. The fall followed so closely upon the upsetting of the chair
+that it seemed part of the same movement and accident. It seemed so
+clearly part, that a voice spoke on Mitchelbourne's left, just where
+the empty hearth would be.
+
+"Get up! Be quick!"
+
+The voice was Major Chantrell's and Mitchelbourne had a throb of hope.
+For since it was not the Major who had fallen nor Captain Bassett, it
+must be Lashley. And Lashley had been guarding the door, of which the
+key still remained in the lock. If only he could reach the door and
+turn the key! He heard Chantrell moving stealthily along the wall upon
+his left hand and he suffered a moment's agony; for in the darkness he
+could not surely tell which way the Major moved. For if he moved to
+the window, if he had the sense to move to the window and tear aside
+those drawn curtains, the grey twilight would show the shadowy moving
+figures. Mitchelbourne's chance would be gone. And then something
+totally unexpected and unhoped for occurred. The god of the machine
+was in a freakish mood that evening. He had a mind for pranks and
+absurdities. Mitchelbourne was strung to so high a pitch that the
+ridiculous aspect of the occurrence came home to him before all else,
+and he could barely keep himself from laughing aloud. For he heard two
+men grappling and struggling silently together. Captain Bassett and
+Major Chantrell had each other by the throat, and neither of them
+had the wit to speak. They reserved their strength for the struggle.
+Mitchelbourne stepped on tiptoe to the door, felt for the key, grasped
+it without so much as a click, and then suddenly turned it, flung open
+the door and sprang out. He sprang against a fourth man--the servant,
+no doubt, who had misdirected him--and both tumbled on to the floor.
+Mitchelbourne, however, tumbled on top. He was again upon his feet
+while Major Chantrell was explaining matters to Captain Bassett;
+he was flying down the avenue of trees before the explanation was
+finished. He did not stop to untie his horse; he ran, conscious that
+there was only one place of safety for him--the interior of Mrs.
+Ufford's house. He ran along the road till he felt that his heart was
+cracking within him, expecting every moment that a hand would be laid
+upon his shoulder, or that, a pistol shot would ring out upon the
+night. He reached the house, and knocked loudly at the door. He was
+admitted, breathless, by a man, who said to him at once, with the
+smile and familiarity of an old servant:
+
+"You are expected, Mr. Lance."
+
+Mitchelbourne plumped down upon a chair and burst into uncontrollable
+laughter. He gave up all attempt for that night to establish his
+identity. The fates were too heavily against him. Besides he was now
+quite hysterical.
+
+The manservant threw open a door.
+
+"I will tell my mistress you have come, sir," said he.
+
+"No, it would never do," cried Mitchelbourne. "You see I died at three
+o'clock this afternoon. I have merely come to leave my letters of
+presentation. So much I think a proper etiquette may allow. But it
+would never do for me to be paying visits upon ladies so soon after
+an affair of so deplorable a gravity. Besides I have to be buried
+at seven in the morning, and if I chanced not to be back in time, I
+should certainly acquire a reputation for levity, which since I am
+unknown in the county, I am unwilling to incur," and, leaving the
+butler stupefied in the hall, he ran out into the road. He heard no
+sound of pursuit.
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Geoffrey," said General Faversham, "look at the clock!"
+
+The hands of the clock made the acutest of angles. It was close upon
+midnight, and ever since nine the boy had sat at the dinner-table
+listening. He had not spoken a word, indeed had barely once stirred in
+the three hours, but had sat turning a white and fascinated face upon
+speaker after speaker. At his father's warning he waked with a shock
+from his absorption, and reluctantly stood up.
+
+"Must I go, father?" he asked.
+
+The General's three guests intervened in a chorus. The conversation
+was clear gain for the lad, they declared,--a first taste of powder
+which might stand him in good stead at a future time. So Geoffrey was
+allowed furlough from his bed for another half-hour, and with his face
+supported between his hands he continued to listen at the table.
+The flames of the candles were more and more blurred with a haze of
+tobacco smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the
+wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a
+strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened
+eyes seemed preternaturally large.
+
+The stories were all of that terrible winter in the Crimea, now ten
+years past, and a fresh story was always in the telling before its
+predecessor was ended. For each of the four men had borne his share
+of that winter's wounds and privations. It was still a reality rather
+than a memory to them; they could feel, even in this hot summer
+evening and round this dinner-table, the chill of its snows, and the
+pinch of famine. Yet their recollections were not all of hardships.
+The Major told how the subalterns, of whom he had then been one, had
+cheerily played cards in the trenches three hundred yards from the
+Malakoff. One of the party was always told off to watch for shells
+from the fort's guns. If a black speck was seen in the midst of the
+cannon smoke, then the sentinel shouted, and a rush was made for
+safety, for the shell was coming their way. At night the burning fuse
+could be seen like a rocket in the air; so long as it span and flew,
+the card-players were safe, but the moment it became stationary above
+their heads it was time to run, for the shell was falling upon them.
+The guns of the Malakoff were not the rifled guns of a later decade.
+When the Major had finished, the General again looked at the clock,
+and Geoffrey said good-night.
+
+He stood outside the door listening to the muffled talk on the other
+side of the panels, and, with a shiver, lighted his candle, and held it
+aloft in the dark and silent hall. There was not one man's portrait upon
+the walls which did not glow with the colours of a uniform,--and there
+were the portraits of many men. Father and son the Faversham's had been
+soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father and son,--no
+steinkirks and plumed hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged
+coats and no high stocks. They looked down upon the boy as though
+summoning him to the like service. No distinction in uniform could
+obscure their resemblance to each other: that stood out with a
+remarkable clearness. The Favershams were men of one stamp,--lean-faced,
+hard as iron--they lacked the elasticity of steel--, rugged in feature;
+confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow
+at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly
+conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men
+of the first-class, but hardly first-class soldiers. Some of their
+faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity. The boy, however, saw none
+of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible;
+and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely
+for forgiveness. The candle shook in his hand.
+
+These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of
+torturers to Geoffrey Faversham. He sat horribly thralled, so long as
+he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.
+For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the
+Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by
+the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome
+gift of imagination. It was visible in his face, marking him off
+unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the
+hall. He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not
+but exercise that capacity. A hint was enough for the boy. Straightway
+he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men
+at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the
+midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he
+quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean
+nights this had been fraught with the most torments.
+
+His father had told a story with a lowered voice, and in his usual
+jerky way. But the gap was easy to fill up.
+
+"A Captain! Yes, and he bore one of the best names in all England.
+It seemed incredible, and mere camp rumour. But the rumour grew with
+every fight he was engaged in. At the battle of Alma the thing was
+proved. He was acting as galloper to his General. I believe, upon my
+soul, that the General chose him for this duty so that the man might
+set himself right. He was bidden to ride with a message a quarter of a
+mile, and that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept. There were enough
+men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come
+through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to
+his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his
+circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if
+he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back
+bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and
+says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's
+the truth, and shrug your shoulders. Queer, incomprehensible things
+happen. There's one of them."
+
+Geoffrey, however, understood only too well. He was familiar with many
+phases of warfare of which General Faversham took little account, such
+as, for instance, the strain and suspense of the hours between the
+parading of the troops and the first crack of a rifle. He took that
+story with him up the great staircase, past the portraits to his bed.
+He fell asleep only in the grey of the morning, and then only to dream
+of a crisis in some hard-fought battle, when, through his cowardice,
+a necessary movement was delayed, his country worsted, and those dead
+men in the hall brought to irretrievable shame. Geoffrey's power to
+foresee in one flash all the perils to be encountered, the hazards to
+be run, had taught him the hideous possibility of cowardice. He was
+now confronted with the hideous fact. He could not afterwards clear
+his mind of the memory of that evening.
+
+He grew up with it; he looked upon himself as a born coward, and all
+the time he knew that he was destined for the army. He could not have
+avoided his destiny without an explanation, and he could not explain.
+But what he could do, he did. He hunted deliberately, hoping
+that familiarity with danger would overcome the vividness of his
+anticipations. But those imagined hours before the beginnings of
+battles had their exact counterpart in the moments of waiting while
+the covers were drawn. At such times he had a map of the country-side
+before his eyes, with every ditch and fence and pit underlined and
+marked dangerous; and though he rode straight when the hounds were
+off, he rode straight with a fluttering heart. Thus he spent his
+youth. He passed into Woolwich and out of it with high honours;
+he went to India with battery, and returned home on a two years'
+furlough. He had not been home more than a week when his father broke
+one morning into his bedroom in a great excitement--
+
+"Geoff," he cried, "guess the news to-day!"
+
+Geoffrey sat up in his bed:--"Your manner, Sir, tells me the news. War
+is declared."
+
+"Between France and Germany."
+
+Geoffrey said slowly:--
+
+"My mother, Sir, was of Germany."
+
+"So we can wish that country all success."
+
+"Can we do no more?" said Geoffrey. And at breakfast-time he returned
+to the subject. The Favershams held property in Germany; influence
+might be exerted; it was only right that those who held a substantial
+stake in a country should venture something for its cause. The words
+came quite easily from Geoffrey's lips; he had been schooling himself
+to speak them ever since it had become apparent that Germany and
+France were driving to the collision of war. General Faversham laughed
+with content when he heard them.
+
+"That's a Faversham talking," said he. "But there are obstacles, my
+boy. There is the Foreign Enlistment Act, for instance. You are half
+German, to be sure, but you are an English subject, and, by the Lord!
+you are all Faversham. No, I cannot give you permission to seek
+service in Germany. You understand. I cannot give you permission," he
+repeated the words, so that the limit as well as the extent of their
+meaning might be fully understood; and as he repeated them, he
+solemnly winked. "Of course, you can go to Germany; you can follow
+the army as closely as you are allowed. In fact, I will give you some
+introductions with that end in view. You will gain experience, of
+course; but seek service,--no! To do that, as I have said, I cannot
+give you permission."
+
+The General went off chuckling to write his letters; and with them
+safely tucked away in his pocket, Geoffrey drove later in the day to
+the station.
+
+General Faversham did not encourage demonstrations. He shook his son
+cordially by the hand--
+
+"There's no way I would rather you spent your furlough. But come back,
+Geoff," said he. He was not an observant man except in the matter of
+military detail; and of Geoffrey's object he had never the slightest
+suspicion. Had it been told him, however, he would only have
+considered it one of those queer, inexplicable vagaries, like the
+history of his coward in the Crimea.
+
+Geoffrey's action, however, was of a piece with the rest of his life:
+it was due to no sudden, desperate resolve. He went out to the war as
+deliberately as he had ridden out to the hunting-field. The realities
+of battle might prove his anticipations mere unnecessary torments of
+the mind.
+
+"If only I can serve,--as a volunteer, as a private, in any capacity,"
+he thought, "I shall at all events know. And if I fail, I fail not in
+the company of my fellows. I disgrace only myself, not my name. But if
+I do not fail--" He drew a great breath, he saw himself waking up one
+morning without oppression, without the haunting dread that he
+was destined one day to slink in forgotten corners of the world a
+forgotten pariah, destitute even of the courage to end his misery. He
+went out to the war because he was afraid of fear.
+
+
+II.
+
+On the evening of the capitulation of Paris, two subalterns of
+German Artillery were seated before a camp fire on a slope of hill
+overlooking the town. To both of them the cessation of alarm was as
+yet strange and almost incomprehensible, and the sudden silence
+after so many months lived amongst the booming of cannon had even a
+disquieting effect. Both were particularly alert on this night when
+vigilance was never less needed. If a gust of wind caught the fire and
+drove the red flare of the flame like a ripple across the grass, one
+would be sure to look quickly over his shoulder, the other perhaps
+would lift a warning finger and listen to the shivering of the trees
+behind them. Then with a relaxation of his attitude he would say "All
+right" and light his pipe again at the fire. But after one such gust,
+he retained his position.
+
+"What is it, Faversham?" asked his companion.
+
+"Listen, Max," said Geoffrey; and they heard a faint jingle. The
+jingle became more distinct, another sound was added to it, the sound
+of a horse galloping over hard ground. Both officers turned their
+faces away from the yellow entrenchment with its brown streak of gun,
+below them and looked towards a roofless white-walled farmhouse on the
+left, of which the rafters rose black against the sky like a gigantic
+gallows. From behind that farmhouse an aide-de-camp galloped up to the
+fire.
+
+"I want the officer in command of this battery," he cried out and
+Geoffrey stood up.
+
+"I am in command."
+
+The aide-de-camp looked at the subaltern in an extreme surprise.
+
+"You!" he exclaimed. "Since when?"
+
+"Since yesterday," answered Faversham.
+
+"I doubt if the General knows you have been hit so hard," the
+aide-de-camp continued. "But my orders are explicit. The officer in
+command is to take sixty men and march to-morrow morning into St.
+Denis. He is to take possession of that quarter, he is to make a
+search for mines and bombs, and wait there until the German troops
+march in." There was to be no repetition, he explained, of a certain
+unfortunate affair when the Germans after occupying a surrendered fort
+had been blown to the four winds. He concluded with the comforting
+information that there were 10,000 French soldiers under arms in St.
+Denis and that discretion was therefore a quality to be much exercised
+by Faversham during his day of search. Thereupon he galloped back.
+
+Faversham remained standing a few paces from the fire looking down
+towards Paris. His companion petulantly tossed a branch upon the fire.
+
+"Luck comes your way, my friend," said he enviously.
+
+Geoffrey looked up to the stars and down again to Paris which with
+its lights had the look of a reflected starlit firmament. Individual
+lights were the separate stars and here and there a gash of fire,
+where a wide thoroughfare cleaved, made a sort of milky way.
+
+"I wonder," he answered slowly.
+
+Max started up on his elbow and looked at his friend in perplexity.
+
+"Why, you have sixty men and St. Denis to command. To-morrow may bring
+you your opportunity;" and again with the same slowness, Geoffrey
+answered, "I wonder."
+
+"You joined us after Gravelotte," continued Max, "Why?"
+
+"My mother was German," said Faversham, and turning suddenly back to
+the fire he dropped on the ground beside his companion.
+
+"Tell me," he said in a rare burst of confidence, "Do you think a
+battle is the real test of courage? Here and there men run away to be
+sure. But how many fight and fight no worse than the rest by reason of
+a sort of cowardice? Fear of their companions in arms might dominate
+fear of the enemy."
+
+"No doubt," said Max. "And you infer?"
+
+"That the only touchstone is a solitary peril. When danger comes upon
+a man and there is no one to see whether he shirks--when he has no
+friends to share his risks--that I should think would be the time when
+fear would twist a man's bowels."
+
+"I do not know," said Max. "All I am sure of is that luck comes your
+way and not mine. To-morrow you march into St. Denis."
+
+Geoffrey Faversham marched down at daybreak and formally occupied the
+quarter. The aide-de-camp's calculations were confirmed. There were at
+the least 10,000 French soldiers crowded in the district. Geoffrey's
+discretion warned against any foolish effort to disarm them; he
+simply ignored their chassepôts and bulging pouches, and searched the
+barracks, which the Germans were to occupy, from floor to ceiling.
+Late in the afternoon he was able to assure himself that his duty was
+ended. He billeted his men, and inquired whether there was a hotel
+where he could sleep the night. A French sergeant led him through the
+streets to an Inn which matched in every detail of its appearance that
+dingy quarter of the town. The plaster was peeling from its walls, the
+window panes were broken, and in the upper storey and the roof there
+were yawning jagged holes where the Prussian shells had struck. In the
+dusk the building had a strangely mean and sordid look. It recalled
+to Faversham's mind the inns in the novels of the elder Dumas and
+acquired thus something of their sinister suggestions. In the eager
+and arduous search of the day he had forgotten these apprehensions to
+which he had given voice by the camp fire. They now returned to him
+with the relaxation of his vigilance. He looked up at the forbidding
+house. "I wonder," he said to himself.
+
+He was met in the hall by a little obsequious man who was full of
+apologies for the disorder of his hostelry. He opened a door into a
+large and dusty room.
+
+"I will do my best, Monsieur," said he, "but food is not yet plentiful
+in Paris."
+
+In the centre of the room was a large mahogany table surrounded by
+chairs. The landlord began to polish the table with his napkin.
+
+"We had an ordinary, Sir, every day before the war broke out. But most
+cheerful, every chair had its regular occupant. There were certain
+jokes, too, which every day were repeated. Ah, but it was like home.
+However, all is changed as you see. It has not been safe to sit in
+this room for many a long month."
+
+Faversham unstrapped his sword and revolver from his belt and laid
+them on the table.
+
+"I saw that your house had unfortunately suffered."
+
+"Suffered!" said the garrulous little man. "It is ruined, sir, and its
+master with it. Ah, war! It is a fine thing no doubt for you young
+gentlemen, but for me? I have lived in a cellar, Sir, under the ground
+ever since your guns first woke us from our sleep. Look, I will show
+you."
+
+He went out from the dining-room into the hall and from the hall into
+the street; Faversham followed him. There was a wooden trap in the
+pavement close by the wall with an iron ring. The landlord pulled
+at the ring and raised the trap disclosing a narrow flight of stone
+steps. Faversham bent forward and peered down into a dark cellar.
+
+"Yes it is there that I have lived. Come down, Sir, and see for
+yourself;" and the landlord moved down a couple of steps. Faversham
+drew back. At once the landlord turned to him.
+
+"But there is nothing to fear, Sir," he said with a deprecatory smile.
+Faversham coloured to the roots of his hair.
+
+"Of course there is nothing," said he and he followed the landlord.
+The cellar was only lighted by the trap-door and at first Faversham
+coming out of the daylight could distinguish nothing at all. He stood,
+however, with his back to the light and in a little he began to see. A
+little truckle-bed with a patchwork counterpane stood at the end, the
+floor was merely hard earth, the furniture consisted of a stove, a
+stool and a small deal table. And as Faversham took in the poverty of
+this underground habitation, he suddenly found himself in darkness
+again. The explanation came to him at once, the entrance to the cellar
+had been blocked from the light. Yet he had heard no sound except the
+footsteps of people in the street above his head. He turned and faced
+the stair steps. As he did so, the light streamed down again; the
+obstruction had been removed, and that obstruction had not been the
+trap-door as Faversham had suspected, but merely the body of some
+inquisitive passer-by. He recognised this with relief and immediately
+heard voices speaking together, and as it seemed to him in lowered
+tones.
+
+A sword rattled on the pavement, the entrance was again darkened, but
+Faversham had just time to see that the man who stooped down wore
+the buttons of a uniform and a soldier's kepi. He kept quite still,
+holding his breath while the man peered down into the cellar. He
+remembered with a throb of hope that he had himself been unable to
+distinguish a thing in the gloom. And then the landlord knocked
+against the table and spoke aloud. At once the man at the head of
+the steps stood up. Faversham heard him cry out in French, "They are
+here," and he detected a note of exultation in the cry. At the same
+moment a picture flashed before his eyes, the picture of that dusty
+desolate dining-room up the steps, and of a long table surrounded
+by chairs, upon which lay a sword and a revolver,--his sword, his
+revolver. He had dismissed his sixty soldiers, he was alone.
+
+"This is a trap," he blurted out.
+
+"But, Sir, I do not understand," began the landlord, but Faversham cut
+him short with a whispered command for silence.
+
+The cellar darkened again, and the sound of boots rang upon the stone
+steps. A rifle besides clanged as it struck against the wall. The
+French soldiers were descending. Faversham counted them by the light
+which escaped past their legs; there were three. The landlord kept
+the silence which had been enjoined upon him but he fancied in the
+darkness that he heard some one's teeth chattering.
+
+The Frenchmen descended into the cellar and stood barring the steps.
+Their leader spoke.
+
+"I have the honour to address the Prussian officer in command of St.
+Denis."
+
+The Frenchman got no reply whatever to his words but he seemed to hear
+some one sharply draw in a breath. He spoke again into the darkness;
+for it was now impossible for any one of the five men in the cellar to
+see a hand's breadth beyond his face.
+
+"I am the Captain Plessy of Mon Vandon's Division. I have the honour
+to address the Prussian officer."
+
+This time he received an answer, quietly spoken yet with an
+inexplicable note of resignation.
+
+"I am Lieutenant Faversham in command of St. Denis."
+
+Captain Plessy stepped immediately forward, and bowed. Now as he
+dipped his shoulders in the bow a gleam of light struck over his head
+into the cellar, and--he could not be sure--but it seemed to him that
+he saw a man suddenly raise his arm as if to ward off a blow. Captain
+Plessy continued.
+
+"I ask Lieutenant Faversham for permission for myself and my two
+officers to sleep to-night at this hotel;" and now he very distinctly
+heard a long, irrepressible sigh of relief. Lieutenant Faversham gave
+him the permission he desired in a cordial, polite way. Moreover he
+added an invitation. "Your name, Captain Plessy, is well known to me
+as to all on both sides who have served in this campaign and to many
+more who have not. I beg that you and your officers will favour me
+with your company at dinner."
+
+Captain Plessy accepted the invitation and was pleased to deprecate
+the Lieutenant's high opinion of his merits. But his achievement none
+the less had been of a redoubtable character. He had broken through
+the lines about Metz and had ridden across France into Paris without
+a single companion. In the sorties from that beleaguered town he had
+successively distinguished himself by his fearless audacity. His name
+and reputation had travelled far as Lieutenant Faversham was that
+evening to learn. But Captain Plessy, for the moment, was all for
+making little of his renown.
+
+"Such small exploits should be expected from a soldier. One brave man
+may say that to another,--is it not so?--and still not be thought
+to be angling for praise," and Captain Plessy went up the steps,
+wondering who it was that had drawn the long sharp breath of suspense,
+and uttered the long sigh of immense relief. The landlord or
+Lieutenant Faversham? Captain Plessy had not been in the cellar at
+the time when the landlord had seemed to hear the chatter of a man's
+teeth.
+
+The dinner was not a pronounced success, in spite of Faversham's
+avoidance of any awkward topic. They sat at the long table in the big,
+desolate and shabby room, lighted only by a couple of tallow candles
+set up in their candlesticks upon the cloth. And the two junior
+officers maintained an air of chilly reserve and seldom spoke except
+when politeness compelled them. Faversham himself was absorbed, the
+burden of entertainment fell upon Captain Plessy. He strove nobly, he
+told stories, he drank a health to the "Camaraderie of arms," he drew
+one after the other of his companions into an interchange of words, if
+not of sympathies. But the strain told on him visibly towards the end
+of the dinner. His champagne glass had been constantly refilled, his
+face was now a trifle overflushed, his eyes beyond nature bright, and
+he loosened the belt about his waist and at a moment when Faversham
+was not looking the throat buttons of his tunic. Moreover while up
+till now he had deprecated any allusions to his reputation he now
+began to talk of it himself; and in a particularly odious way.
+
+"A reputation, Lieutenant, it has its advantages," and he blew a kiss
+with his fingers into the air to designate the sort of advantages to
+which he referred. Then he leaned on one side to avoid the candle
+between Faversham and himself.
+
+"You are English, my Commandant?" he asked.
+
+"My mother was German," replied Faversham.
+
+"But you are English yourself. Now have you ever met in England a
+certain Miss Marian Beveridge," and his leer was the most disagreeable
+thing that Faversham ever remembered to have set eyes upon.
+
+"No," he answered shortly.
+
+"And you have not heard of her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Captain Plessy leaned back in his chair and filled his glass.
+Lieutenant Faversham's tone was not that of a man inviting confidence.
+But the Captain's brains were more than a little fuddled, he repeated
+the name over to himself once or twice with the chuckle which asks for
+questions, and since the questions did not come, he must needs proceed
+of his own accord.
+
+"But I must cross to England myself. I must see this Miss Marian
+Beveridge. Ah, but your English girls are strange, name of Heaven,
+they are very strange."
+
+Lieutenant Faversham made a movement. The Captain was his guest, he
+was bound to save him if he could from a breach of manners and saw no
+way but this of breaking up the party. Captain Plessy, however, was
+too quick for him, he lifted his hand to his breast.
+
+"You wish for something to smoke. It is true, we have forgotten to
+smoke, but I have my cigarettes and I beg you to try them, the tobacco
+I think is good and you will be saved the trouble of moving."
+
+He opened the case and reached it over to Faversham. But as Faversham
+with a word of thanks took a cigarette, the Captain upset the case
+as though by inadvertence. There fell out upon the table under
+Faversham's eyes not merely the cigarettes, but some of the Captain's
+visiting-cards and a letter. The letter was addressed to Captain
+Plessy in a firm character but it was plainly the writing of a woman.
+Faversham picked it up and at once handed it back to Plessy.
+
+"Ah," said Plessy with a start of surprise, "Was the letter indeed in
+the case?" and he fondled it in his hands and finally kissed it with
+the upturned eyes of a cheap opera singer. "A pigeon, Sir, flew with
+it into Paris. Happy pigeon that could be the bearer of such sweet
+messages."
+
+He took out the letter from the envelope and read a line or two with a
+sigh, and another line or two with a laugh.
+
+"But your English girls are strange!" he said again. "Here is an
+instance, an example, fallen by accident from my cigarette-case. M. le
+Commandant, I will read it to you, that you may see how strange they
+are."
+
+One of Plessy's subalterns extended his hand and laid it on his
+sleeve. Plessy turned upon him angrily, and the subaltern withdrew his
+hand.
+
+"I will read it to you," he said again to Faversham. Faversham did
+not protest nor did he now make any effort to move. But his face grew
+pale, he shivered once or twice, his eyes seemed to be taking the
+measure of Plessy's strength, his brain to be calculating upon his
+prowess; the sweat began to gather upon his forehead.
+
+Of these signs, however, Plessy took no note. He had reached however
+inartistically the point at which he had been aiming.
+
+He was no longer to be baulked of reading his letter. He read it
+through to the end, and Faversham listened to the end. It told its own
+story. It was the letter of a girl who wrote in a frank impulse of
+admiration to a man whom she did not know. There was nowhere a trace
+of coquetry, nowhere the expression of a single sentimentality. Its
+tone was pure friendliness, it was the work of a quite innocent girl
+who because she knew the man to whom she wrote to be brave, therefore
+believed him to be honourable. She expressed her trust in the very
+last words. "You will not of course show this letter to any one in the
+world. But I wrong you even by mentioning such an impossibility."
+
+"But you have shown it," said Faversham.
+
+His face was now grown of an extraordinary pallor, his lips twitched
+as he spoke and his fingers worked in a nervous uneasy manner upon the
+table-cloth. Captain Plessy was in far too complacent a mood to notice
+such trifles. His vanity was satisfied, the world was a rosy mist
+with a sparkle of champagne, and he answered lightly as he unfastened
+another button of his tunic.
+
+"No, my friend, I have not shown it. I keep the lady's wish."
+
+"You have read it aloud. It is the same thing."
+
+"Pardon me. Had I shown the letter I should have shown the name. And
+that would have been a dishonour of which a gallant man is incapable,
+is it not so? I read it and I did not read the name."
+
+"But you took pains, Captain Plessy, that we should know the name
+before you read the letter."
+
+"I? Did I mention a name?" exclaimed Plessy with an air of concern and
+a smile upon his mouth which gave the lie to the concern. "Ah, yes,
+a long while ago. But did I say it was the name of the lady who had
+written the letter? Indeed, no. You make a slight mistake, my friend.
+I bear no malice for it--believe me, upon my heart, no! After a dinner
+and a little bottle of champagne, there is nothing more pardonable.
+But I will tell you why I read the letter."
+
+"If you please," said Faversham, and the gravity of his tone struck
+upon his companion suddenly as something unexpected and noteworthy.
+Plessy drew himself together and for the first time took stock of his
+host as of a possible adversary. He remarked the agitation of his
+face, the beads of perspiration upon his forehead, the restless
+fingers, and beyond all these a certain hunted look in the eyes with
+which his experience had made him familiar. He nodded his head once or
+twice slowly as though he were coming to a definite conclusion about
+Faversham. Then he sat bolt upright.
+
+"Ah," said he with a laugh. "I can answer a question which puzzled me
+a little this afternoon," and he sank back again in his chair with an
+easy confidence and puffed the smoke of his cigarette from his mouth.
+Faversham was not sufficiently composed to consider the meaning of
+Plessy's remark. He put it aside from his thoughts as an evasion.
+
+"You were to tell me, I think, why you read the letter."
+
+"Certainly," answered Plessy. He twirled his moustache, his voice had
+lost its suavity and had taken on an accent of almost contemptuous
+raillery. He even winked at his two brother officers, he was beginning
+to play with Faversham. "I read the letter to illustrate how strange,
+how very strange, are your English girls. Here is one of them who
+writes to me. I am grateful--oh, beyond words, but I think to myself
+what a different thing the letter would be if it had been written by
+a Frenchwoman. There would have been some hints, nothing definite you
+understand, but a suggestion, a delicate, provoking suggestion of
+herself, like a perfume to sting one into a desire for a nearer
+acquaintance. She would delicately and without any appearance of
+intention have permitted me to know her colour, perhaps her height,
+perhaps even to catch an elusive glimpse of her face. Very likely a
+silk thread of hair would have been left inadvertently clinging to
+a sheet of the paper. She would sketch perhaps her home and speak
+remorsefully of her boldness in writing. Oh, but I can imagine the
+letter, full of pretty subtleties, alluring from its omissions, a
+vexation and a delight from end to end. But this, my friend!" He
+tossed the letter carelessly upon the table-cloth. "I am grateful from
+the bottom of my heart, but it has no art."
+
+At once Geoffrey Faversham's hand reached out and closed upon the
+letter.
+
+"You have told me why you have read it aloud."
+
+"Yes," said Plessy, a little disconcerted by the quickness of
+Faversham's movement.
+
+"Now I will tell you why I allowed you to read it to the end. I was of
+the same mind as that English girl whose name we both know. I could
+not believe that a man, brave as I knew you to be, could outside his
+bravery be so contemptible."
+
+The words were brought out with a distinct effort. None the less they
+were distinctly spoken.
+
+A startled exclamation broke from the two subalterns. Plessy commenced
+to bluster.
+
+"Sir, do I understand you?" and he saw Faversham standing above him,
+in a quiver of excitement.
+
+"You will hold your tongue, Captain Plessy, until I have finished. I
+allowed you to read the letter, never thinking but that some pang of
+forgotten honour would paralyse your tongue. You read it to the
+end. You complain there is no art in it, that it has no delicate
+provocations, such as your own countrywomen would not fail to use. It
+should be the more sacred on that account, and I am glad to believe
+that you misjudge your country women. Captain Plessy, I acknowledge
+that as you read out that letter with its simple, friendly expression
+of gratitude for the spectacle of a brave man, I envied you heartily,
+I would have been very proud to have received it. I would have much
+liked to know that some deed which I had done had made the world for
+a moment brighter to some one a long way off with whom I was not
+acquainted. Captain Plessy, I shall not allow you to keep this letter.
+You shall not read it aloud again."
+
+Faversham thrust the letter into the flame of the candle which stood
+between Plessy and himself. Plessy sprang up and blew the candle out;
+but little colourless flames were already licking along the envelope.
+Faversham held the letter downwards by a corner and the colourless
+flame flickered up into a tongue of yellow, the paper charred and
+curled in the track of the flames, the flames leapt to Faversham's
+fingers; he dropped the burning letter on the floor and crushed it
+with his foot. Then he looked at Plessy and waited. He was as white as
+the table-cloth, his dark eyes seemed to have sunk into his head
+and burned unnaturally bright, every nerve in his body seemed to be
+twitching; he looked very like the young boy who used to sit at the
+dinner-table on Crimean nights and listen in a quiver to the appalling
+stories of his father's guests. As he had been silent then, so he was
+silent now. He waited for Captain Plessy to speak. Captain Plessy,
+however, was in no hurry to begin. He had completely lost his air of
+contemptuous raillery, he was measuring Faversham warily with the eyes
+of a connoisseur.
+
+"You have insulted me," he said abruptly, and he heard again that
+indrawing of the breath which he had remarked that afternoon in the
+cellar. He also heard Faversham speak immediately after he had drawn
+the breath.
+
+"There are reparations for insults," said Faversham.
+
+Captain Plessy bowed. He was now almost as sober as when he had sat
+down to his dinner.
+
+"We will choose a time and place," said he.
+
+"There can be no better time than now," suddenly cried Faversham, "no
+better place than this. You have two friends of whom with your leave I
+will borrow one. We have a large room and a candle apiece to fight
+by. To-morrow my duties begin again. We will fight to-night, Captain
+Plessy, to-night," and he leaned forward almost feverishly, his words
+had almost the accent of a prayer. The two subalterns rose from their
+chairs, but Plessy motioned them to keep still. Then he seized the
+candle which he had himself blown out, lighted it from the candle at
+the far end of the table and held it up above his head so that
+the light fell clearly upon Faversham's face. He stood looking at
+Faversham for an appreciable time. Then he said quietly,
+
+"I will not fight you to-night."
+
+One of the subalterns started up, the other merely turned his head
+towards Plessy, but both stared at their Captain with an unfeigned
+astonishment and an unfeigned disappointment. Faversham continued to
+plead.
+
+"But you must to-night, for to-morrow you cannot. To-night I am alone
+here, to-night I give orders, to-morrow I receive them. You have your
+sword at your side to-night. Will you be wearing it to-morrow? I pray
+you gentlemen to help me," he said turning to the subalterns, and he
+began to push the heavy table from the centre of the room.
+
+"I will not fight you to-night, Lieutenant," Captain Plessy replied.
+
+"And why?" asked Faversham ceasing from his work. He made a gesture
+which had more of despair than of impatience.
+
+Captain Plessy gave his reason. It rang false to every man in the
+room and indeed he made no attempt to give to it any appearance of
+sincerity. It was a deliberate excuse and not his reason.
+
+"Because you are the Prussian officer in command and the Prussian
+troops march into St. Denis to-morrow. Suppose that I kill you, what
+sort of penalty should I suffer at their hands?"
+
+"None," exclaimed Faversham. "We can draw up an account of the
+quarrel, here now. Look here is paper and ink and as luck will have it
+a pen that will write. I will write an account with my own hand, and
+the four of us can sign it. Besides if you kill me, you can escape
+into Paris."
+
+"I will not fight you to-night," said Captain Plessy and he set down
+the candle upon the table. Then with an elaborate correctness he drew
+his sword from its scabbard and offered the handle of it to Faversham.
+
+"Lieutenant, you are in command of St. Denis. I am your prisoner of
+war."
+
+Faversham stood for a moment or two with his hands clenched. The light
+had gone out of his face.
+
+"I have no authority to make prisoners," he said. He took up one of
+the candles, gazed at his guest in perplexity.
+
+"You have not given me your real reason, Captain Plessy," he said.
+Captain Plessy did not answer a word.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," said Faversham and Captain Plessy bowed
+deeply as Faversham left the room.
+
+A silence of some duration followed upon the closing of the door. The
+two subalterns were as perplexed as Faversham to account for their
+hero's conduct. They sat dumb and displeased. Plessy stood for a
+moment thoughtfully, then he made a gesture with his hands as though
+to brush the whole incident from his mind and taking a cigarette from
+his case proceeded to light it at the candle. As he stooped to the
+flame he noticed the glum countenances of his brother-officers, and
+laughed carelessly.
+
+"You are not pleased with me, my friends," said he as he threw himself
+on to a couch which stood against the wall opposite to his companions.
+"You think I did not speak the truth when I gave the reason of my
+refusal? Well you are right. I will give you the real reason why I
+would not fight. It is very simple. I do not wish to be killed. I know
+these white-faced, trembling men--there are no men more terrible. They
+may run away but if they do not, if they string themselves to
+the point of action--take the word of a soldier older than
+yourselves--then is the time to climb trees. To-morrow I would very
+likely kill our young friend, he would have had time to think, to
+picture to himself the little point of steel glittering towards his
+heart--but to-night he would assuredly have killed me. But as I say I
+do not wish to be killed. You are satisfied?"
+
+It appeared that they were not. They sat with all the appearances
+of discontent. They had no words for Captain Plessy. Captain Plessy
+accordingly rose lightly from his seat.
+
+"Ah," said he, "my good friend the Lieutenant has after all left me my
+sword. The table too is already pushed sufficiently on one side.
+There is only one candle to be sure, but it will serve. You are not
+satisfied, gentlemen? Then--" But both subalterns now hastened to
+assure Captain Plessy that they considered his conduct had been
+entirely justified.
+
+
+
+
+THE DESERTER.
+
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier of the 69th regiment, which belonged to the first
+brigade of the first division of the army of the Rhine, was summoned
+to the Belletonge farm just as it was getting dusk. The Lieutenant
+hurried thither, for the Belletonge farm opposite the woods of
+Colombey was the headquarters of the General of his division.
+
+"I have been instructed," said General Montaudon, "to select an
+officer for a special duty. I have selected you."
+
+Now for days Lieutenant Fevrier's duties had begun and ended with him
+driving the soldiers of his company from eating unripe fruit; and
+here, unexpectedly, he was chosen from all the officers of his
+division for a particular exploit. The Lieutenant trembled with
+emotion.
+
+"My General!" he cried.
+
+The General himself was moved.
+
+"What your task will be," he continued, "I do not known. You will go
+at once to the Mareschal's headquarters when the chief of the staff,
+General Jarras, will inform you."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier went immediately up to Metz. His division was
+entrenched on the right bank of the Mosel and beyond the forts, so
+that it was dark before he passed through the gates. He had never once
+been in Metz before; he had grown used to the monotony of camps; he
+had expected shuttered windows and deserted roads, and so the aspect
+of the town amazed him beyond measure. Instead of a town besieged, it
+seemed a town during a fairing. There were railway carriages, it is
+true, in the Place Royale doing duty as hospitals; the provision
+shops, too, were bare, and there were no horses visible.
+
+But on the other hand, everywhere was a blaze of light and a bustle of
+people coming and going upon the footpaths. The cafés glittered and
+rang with noise. Here one little fat burgher was shouting that the
+town-guard was worth all the red-legs in the trenches; another as
+loudly was criticising the tactics of Bazaine and comparing him for
+his invisibility to a pasha in his seraglio; while a third sprang upon
+a table and announced fresh victories. An army was already on the way
+from Paris to relieve Metz. Only yesterday MacMahon had defeated the
+Prussians, any moment he might be expected from the Ardennes. Nor were
+they only civilians who shouted and complained. Lieutenant Fevrier saw
+captains, majors, and even generals who had left their entrenchments
+to fight the siege their own way with dominoes upon the marble tables
+of the cabarets.
+
+"My poor France," he said to himself, and a passer-by overhearing him
+answered:
+
+"True, monsieur. Ah, but if we had a man at Metz!"
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier turned his back upon the speaker and walked on.
+He at all events would not join in the criticisms. It was just, he
+reflected, because he had avoided the cafés of Metz that he was
+singled out for special distinction, and he fell to wondering what
+work it was he had to do that night. Was it to surprise a field-watch?
+Or to spike a battery? Or to capture a convoy? Lieutenant Fevrier
+raised his head. For any exploit in the world he was ready.
+
+General Jarras was writing at a table when Fevrier was admitted to his
+office. The Chief of the Staff inclined his lamp-shade so that the
+light fell full upon Fevrier's face, and the action caused the
+lieutenant to rejoice. So much care in the choice of the officer meant
+so much more important a duty.
+
+"The General Montaudon tells me," said Jarras, "that you are an
+obedient soldier."
+
+"Obedience, my General, is the soldier's first lesson."
+
+"That explains to me why it is first forgotten," answered Jarras,
+drily. Then his voice became sharp and curt. "You will choose fifty
+men. You will pick them carefully."
+
+"They shall be the best soldiers in the regiment," said Fevrier.
+
+"No, the worst."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier was puzzled. When dangers were to be encountered,
+when audacity was needed, one requires the best soldiers. That was
+obvious, unless the mission meant annihilation. That thought came to
+Fevrier, and remembering the cafés and the officers dishonouring their
+uniforms, he drew himself up proudly and saluted. Already he saw his
+dead body recovered from the enemy, and borne to the grave beneath a
+tricolour. He heard the lamentations of his friends, and the firing
+of the platoon. He saw General Montaudon in tears. He was shaken with
+emotion. But Jarras's next words fell upon him like cold water.
+
+"You will parade your fifty men unarmed. You will march out of the
+lines, and to-morrow morning as soon as it is light enough for the
+Prussians to see you come unarmed you will desert to them. There are
+too many mouths to feed in Metz[A]."
+
+[Footnote A: See the Daily News War Correspondence, 1870.]
+
+The Lieutenant had it on his lips to shout, "Then why not lead us out
+to die?" But he kept silence. He could have flung his kepi in the
+General's face; but he saluted. He went out again into the streets
+and among the lighted cafés and reeled like a drunken man, thinking
+confusedly of many things; that he had a mother in Paris who might
+hear of his desertion before she heard of its explanation; that it was
+right to claim obedience but _lâche_ to exact dishonour--but chiefly
+and above all that if he had been wise, and had made light of his
+duty, and had come up to Metz to re-arrange the campaign with dominoes
+on the marble-tables, he would not have been specially selected for
+ignominy. It was true, it needed an obedient officer to desert! And
+so laughing aloud he reeled blindly down to the gates of Metz. And
+it happened that just by the gates a civilian looked after him, and
+shrugging his shoulders, remarked, "Ah! But if we had a _Man_ at
+Metz!"
+
+From Metz Lieutenant Fevrier ran. The night air struck cool upon him.
+And he ran and stumbled and fell and picked himself up and ran again
+until he reached the Belletonge farm.
+
+"The General," he cried, and so to the General a mud-plastered figure
+with a white, tormented face was admitted.
+
+"What is it?" asked Montaudon. "What will this say?"
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier stood with the palms of his hands extended,
+speechless like an animal in pain. Then he suddenly burst into tears
+and wept, and told of the fine plan to diminish the demands upon the
+commissariat.
+
+"Courage, my old one!" said the General. "I had a fear of this. You
+are not alone--other officers in other divisions have the same hard
+duty," and there was no inflection in the voice to tell Fevrier what
+his General thought of the duty. But a hand was laid soothingly upon
+his shoulder, and that told him. He took heart to whisper that he had
+a mother in Paris.
+
+"I will write to her," said Montaudon. "She will be proud when she
+receives the letter."
+
+Then Lieutenant Fevrier, being French, took the General's hand and
+kissed it, and the General, being French, felt his throat fill with
+tears.
+
+Fevrier left the headquarters, paraded his men, laid his sword and
+revolver on the ground, and ordered his fifty to pile their arms. Then
+he made them a speech--a very short speech, but it cost him much to
+make it in an even voice.
+
+"My braves," said he, "my fellow-soldiers, it is easy to fight for
+one's country, it is not difficult to die for it. But the supreme test
+of patriotism is willingly to suffer shame for it. That test your
+country now claims of you. Attention! March!"
+
+For the last time he exchanged a password with a French sentinel, and
+tramped out into the belt of ground between the French outposts and
+the Prussian field-watch. Now in this belt there stood a little
+village which Fevrier had held with skill and honour all the two
+days of the battle of Noisseville. Doubtless that recollection had
+something to do with his choice of the village. For in his martyrdom
+of shame he had fallen to wonder whether after all he had not deserved
+it, and any reassurance such as the gaping house-walls of Vaudère
+would bring to him, was eagerly welcomed. There was another reason,
+however, in the position of the village.
+
+It stood in an abrupt valley at the foot of a steep vine-hill on the
+summit, and which was the Prussian forepost. The Prussian field-watch
+would be even nearer to Vaudère and dispersed amongst the vines. So
+he could get his ignominious work over quickly in the morning. The
+village would provide, too, safe quarters for the night, since it
+was well within range of the heavy guns in Fort St. Julien, and the
+Prussians on that account were unable to hold it.
+
+He led his fifty soldiers then northwestward from his camp, skirted
+the Bois de Grimont, and marched into the village. The night was dark,
+and the sky so overhung with clouds that not a star was visible. The
+one street of Vaudère was absolutely silent. The glimmering white
+cottages showed their black rents on either side, but never the light
+of a candle behind any shutter. Lieutenant Fevrier left his men at the
+western or Frenchward end of the street, and went forward alone.
+
+The doors of the houses stood open. The path was encumbered with the
+wreckage of their contents, and every now and then he smelt a whiff of
+paraffin, as though lamps had been broken or cans overset. Vaudère had
+been looted, but there were no Prussians now in the village.
+
+He made sure of this by walking as far as the large house at the head
+of the village. Then he went back to his men and led them forward
+until he reached the general shop which every village has.
+
+"It is not likely," he said, "that we shall find even the makeshift of
+a supper. But courage, my friends, let us try!"
+
+He could not have eaten a crust himself, but it had become an instinct
+with him to anticipate the needs of his privates, and he acted from
+habit. They crowded into the shop; one man shut the door, Fevrier
+lighted a match and disclosed by its light staved-in barrels, empty
+cannisters, broken boxes, fragments of lemonade bottles, but of food
+not so much as a stale biscuit.
+
+"Go upstairs and search."
+
+They went and returned empty-handed.
+
+"We have found nothing, monsieur," said they.
+
+"But I have," replied Fevrier, and striking another match he held up
+what he had found, dirty and crumpled, in a corner of the shop. It
+was a little tricolour flag of painted linen upon a bamboo stick, a
+child's cheap and gaudy toy. But Fevrier held it up solemnly, and of
+the fifty deserters no one laughed.
+
+"The flag of the Patrie," said Fevrier, and with one accord the
+deserters uncovered.
+
+The match burned down to Fevrier's fingers, he dropped it and trod
+upon it and there was a moment's absolute stillness. Then in the
+darkness a ringing voice leapt out.
+
+"Vive la France!"
+
+It was not the lieutenant's voice, but the voice of a peasant from the
+south of the Loire, one of the deserters.
+
+"Ah, but that is fine, that cry," said Fevrier.
+
+He could have embraced that private on both cheeks. There was love in
+that cry, pain as well--it could not be otherwise--but above all a
+very passion of confidence.
+
+"Again!" said Fevrier; and this time all his men took it up, shouting
+it out, exultantly. The little ruined shop, in itself a contradiction
+of the cry, rang out and clattered with the noise until it seemed to
+Fevrier that it must surely pierce across the country into Metz and
+pluck the Mareschal in his headquarters from his diffidence. But they
+were only fifty deserters in a deserted village, lost in the darkness,
+and more likely to be overheard by the Prussian sentries than by any
+of their own blood.
+
+It was Fevrier who first saw the danger of their ebullition. He cut it
+short by ordering them to seek quarters where they could sleep until
+daybreak. For himself, he thrust the little toy flag in his breast and
+walked forward to the larger house at the end of the village beneath
+the vine-hill; and as he walked, again the smell of paraffin was
+forced upon his nostrils.
+
+He walked more slowly. That odour of paraffin began to seem
+remarkable. The looting of the village had not occurred to-day, for
+there had been thick dust about the general shop. But the paraffin had
+surely been freshly spilt, or the odour would have evaporated.
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier walked on thinking this over. He found the broken
+door of his house, and still thinking it over, mounted the stairs.
+There was a door fronting the stairs. He felt for the handle and
+opened it, and from a corner of the room a voice challenged him in
+German.
+
+Fevrier was fairly startled. There were Germans in the village after
+all. He explained to himself now the smell of paraffin. Meanwhile he
+did not answer; neither did he move; neither did he hear any movement.
+He had forgotten for the moment that he was a deserter, and he stood
+holding his breath and listening. There was a tiny window opposite to
+the door, but it only declared itself a window, it gave no light. And
+illusions came to Lieutenant Fevrier, such as will come to the bravest
+man so long as he listens hard enough in the dark--illusions of
+stealthy footsteps on the floor, of hands scraping and feeling along
+the walls, of a man's breathing upon his neck, of many infinitesimal
+noises and movements close by.
+
+The challenge was repeated and Fevrier remembered his orders.
+
+"I am Lieutenant Fevrier of Montaudon's division."
+
+"You are alone."
+
+Fevrier now distinguished that the voice came from the right-hand
+corner of the room, and that it was faint.
+
+"I have fifty men with me. We are deserters," he blurted out, "and
+unarmed."
+
+There followed silence, and a long silence. Then the voice spoke
+again, but in French, and the French of a native.
+
+"My friend, your voice is not the voice of a deserter. There is too
+much humiliation in it. Come to my bedside here. I spoke in German,
+expecting Germans. But I am the curé of Vaudère. Why are you
+deserters?"
+
+Fevrier had expected a scornful order to marshal his men as prisoners.
+The extraordinary gentleness of the curé's voice almost overcame him.
+He walked across to the bedside and told his story. The curé basely
+heard him out.
+
+"It is right to obey," said he, "but here you can obey and disobey.
+You can relieve Metz of your appetites, my friend, but you need not
+desert." The curé reached up, and drawing Fevrier down, laid a hand
+upon his head. "I consecrate you to the service of your country. Do
+you understand?"
+
+Fevrier leaned his mouth towards the curé's ear.
+
+"The Prussians are coming to-night to burn the village."
+
+"Yes, they came at dusk."
+
+Just at the moment, in fact, when Fevrier had been summoned to Metz,
+the Prussians had crept down into Vaudère and had been scared back to
+their répli by a false alarm.
+
+"But they will come back you may be sure," said the curé, and raising
+himself upon his elbow he said in a voice of suspense "Listen!"
+
+Fevrier went to the window and opened it. It faced the hill-side, but
+no sounds came through it beyond the natural murmurs of the night. The
+curé sank back.
+
+"After the fight here, there were dead soldiers in the streets--French
+soldiers and so French chassepôts. Ah, my friend, the Prussians have
+found out which is the better rifle--the chassepôt or the needle gun.
+After your retreat they came down the hill for those chassepôts. They
+could not find one. They searched every house, they came here and
+questioned me. Finally they caught one of the villagers hiding in a
+field, and he was afraid and he told where the rifles had been buried.
+The Prussians dug for them and the hole was empty. They believe they
+are still hidden somewhere in the village; they fancy, too, that there
+are secret stores of food; so they mean to burn the houses to the
+ground. They did not know that I was here this afternoon. I would have
+come into the French lines had it been possible, but I am tied here to
+my bed. No doubt God had sent you to me--you and your fifty men. You
+need not desert. You can make your last stand here for France."
+
+"And perish," cried Fevrier, caught up from the depths of his
+humiliation, "as Frenchmen should, arms in hand." Then his voice
+dropped again. "But we have no arms."
+
+The curé shook the lieutenant's arm gently.
+
+"Did I not tell you the chassepôts were not found? And why? Because
+too many knew where they were hidden. Because out of that many I
+feared there might be one to betray. There is always a Judas. So I got
+one man whom I knew, and he dug them up and hid them afresh."
+
+"Where, father?"
+
+The question was put with a feverish eagerness--it seemed to the curé
+with an eagerness too feverish. He drew his hand, his whole body away.
+
+"You have matches? Light one!" he said, in a startled voice.
+
+"But the window--!"
+
+"Light one!"
+
+Every moment of time was now of value. Fevrier took the risk and lit
+the match, shading it from the window so far as he could with his
+hand.
+
+"That will do."
+
+Fevrier blew out the light. The curé had seen him, his uniform and his
+features. He, too, had seen the curé, had noticed his thin emaciated
+face, and the eyes staring out of it feverishly bright and
+preternaturally large.
+
+"Shall I tell you your malady, father?" he said gently. "It is
+starvation."
+
+"What will you, my son? I am alone. There is not a crust from one end
+of Vaudère to the other. You cannot help me. Help France! Go to the
+church, stand with your back to the door, turn left, and advance
+straight to the churchyard wall. You will find a new grave there, the
+rifles in the grave. Quick! There is a spade in the tower. Quick! The
+rifles are wrapped from the damp, the cartridges too. Quick! Quick!"
+
+Fevrier hurried downstairs, roused three of his soldiers, bade one of
+them go from house to house and bring the soldiers in silence to the
+churchyard, and with the others he went thither himself. In groups of
+two and three the men crept through the street, and gathered about
+the grave. It was already open. The spade was driven hard and quick,
+deeper and deeper, and at last rang upon metal. There were seventy
+chassepôts, complete with bayonets and ammunition. Fifty-one were
+handed out, the remaining nineteen were hastily covered in again.
+Fevrier was immeasurably cheered to notice his men clutch at their
+weapons and fondle them, hold them to their shoulders taking aim, and
+work the breech-blocks.
+
+"It is like meeting old friends, is it not, my children, or rather
+new sweethearts?" said he. "Come! The Prussians may advance from
+the Brasserie at Lanvallier, from Servigny, from Montay, or from
+Noisseville, straight down the hill. The last direction is the most
+likely, but we must make no mistake. Ten men will watch on the
+Lanvallier road, ten on the Servigny, ten on the Montay, twenty will
+follow me. March!"
+
+An hour ago Lieutenant Fevrier was in command of fifty men who
+slouched along with their hands in their pockets, robbed even of
+self-respect. Now he had fifty armed and disciplined soldiers, men
+alert and inspired. So much difference a chassepôt apiece had made.
+Lieutenant Fevrier was moved to the conception of another plan; and to
+prepare the way for its execution, he left his twenty men in a house
+at the Prussian end of Vaudère, and himself crept in among the vines
+and up the hill.
+
+Somewhere near to him would be the sentries of the field-watch. He
+went down upon his hands and knees and crawled, parting the vine
+leaves, that the swish of them might not betray him. In a little knoll
+high above his head he heard the cracking of wood, the sound of men
+stumbling. The Prussians were coming down to Vaudère. He lay flat
+upon the ground waiting and waiting; and the sounds grew louder and
+approached. At last he heard that for which he waited--the challenge
+of the field-watch, the answer of the burning-party. It came down to
+him quite clearly through the windless air. "Sadowa."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier turned about chuckling. It seemed that in some
+respects the world after all was not going so ill with him that night.
+He crawled downwards as quickly as he could. But it was now more than
+even inspiration that he should not be detected. He dared not stand
+up and run; he must still keep upon his hands and knees. His arms so
+ached that he was forced now and then to stop and lie prone to give
+them ease; he was soaked through and through with perspiration; his
+blood hammered at his temples; he felt his spine weaken as though the
+marrow had melted into water; and his heart throbbed until the effort
+to breathe was a pain. But he reached the bottom of the hill, he got
+refuge amongst his men, he even had time to give his orders before the
+tread of the first Prussian was heard in the street.
+
+"They will make for the other end of Vaudère. They will give the
+village first as near to the French lines as it reaches and light the
+rest as they retreat. Let them go forward! We will cut them off. And
+remember, the bayonet! A shot will bring the Prussians down in force.
+It will bring the French too, so there is just the chance we may find
+the enemy as silent as ourselves."
+
+But the plan was to undergo alteration. For as Lieutenant Fevrier
+ended, the Prussians marched in single file into the street and
+halted. Fevrier from the corner within his doorway counted them; there
+were twenty-three in all. Well, he had twenty besides himself, and the
+advantage of the surprise; and thirty more upon the other roads, for
+whom, however, he had other work in mind. The officer in command of
+the Prussians carried a dark lantern, and he now turned the slide, so
+that the light shone out.
+
+His men fell out of their rank, some to make a cursory search, others
+to sprinkle yet more paraffin. One man came close to Fevrier's
+doorway, and even looked in, but he saw nothing, though Fevrier was
+within six feet of him, holding his breath. Then the officer closed
+his lantern, the men re-formed and marched on. But they left behind
+with Lieutenant Fevrier--an idea.
+
+He thought it quickly over. It pleased him, it was feasible, and there
+was comedy in it. Lieutenant Fevrier laughed again, his spirits were
+rising, and the world was not after all going so ill with him.
+
+He had noticed by the lantern light that the Prussians had not
+re-formed in the same order. They were in single file again, but the
+man who marched last before the halt, did not march last after it.
+Each soldier, as he came up, fell in in the rear of the file. Now
+Fevrier had in the darkness experienced some difficulty in counting
+the number of Prussians, although he had strained his eyes to that
+end.
+
+He whispered accordingly some brief instructions to his men; he sent
+a message to the ten on the Servigny road, and when the Prussians
+marched on after their second halt, Lieutenant Fevrier and two
+Frenchmen fell in behind them. The same procedure was followed at the
+next halt and at the next; so that when the Prussians reached the
+Frenchward end of Vaudère there were twenty-three Prussians and ten
+Frenchmen in the file. To Fevrier's thinking it was sufficiently
+comic. There was something artistic about it too.
+
+Fevrier was pleased, but he had not counted on the quick Prussian
+step to which his soldiers were unaccustomed. At the fourth halt, the
+officer moved unsuspiciously first on one side of the street, then on
+the other, but gave no order to his men to fall out. It seemed that
+he had forgotten, until he came suddenly running down the file and
+flashed his lantern into Fevrier's face. He had been secretly counting
+his men.
+
+"The French," he cried. "Load!"
+
+The one word quite compensated Fevrier for the detection. The Germans
+had come down into Vaudère with their rifles unloaded, lest an
+accidental discharge should betray their neighbourhood to the French.
+
+"Load!" cried the German. And slipping back he tugged at the revolver
+in his belt. But before he could draw it out, Fevrier dashed his
+bayonet through the lantern and hung it on the officer's heart. He
+whistled, and his other ten men came running down the street.
+
+"Vorwarts," shouted Fevrier, derisively. "Immer Vorwarts."
+
+The Prussians surprised, and ignorant how many they had to face, fell
+back in disorder against a house-wall. The French soldiers dashed at
+them in the darkness, engaging them so that not a man had the chance
+to load.
+
+That little fight in the dark street between the white-ruined cottages
+made Fevrier's blood dance.
+
+"Courage!" he cried. "The paraffin!"
+
+The combatants were well matched, and it was hand-to-hand and
+bayonet-to-bayonet. Fevrier loved his enemies at that moment. It even
+occurred to him that it was worth while to have deserted. After the
+sense of disgrace, the prospect of imprisonment and dishonour, it
+was all wonderful to him--the feel of the thick coat yielding to the
+bayonet point, the fatigue of the beaten opponent, the vigour of the
+new one, the feeling of injury and unfairness when a Prussian he had
+wounded dropped in falling the butt of a rifle upon his toes.
+
+Once he cried, "_Voila pour la patrie_!" but for the rest he fought in
+silence, as did the others, having other uses for their breath. All
+that could be heard was a loud and laborious panting, as of wrestlers
+in a match, the clang of rifle crossing rifle, the rattle of bayonet
+guarding bayonet, and now and then a groan and a heavy fall. One
+Prussian escaped and ran; but the ten who had been stationed on the
+Servigny road were now guarding the entrance from Noisseville. Fevrier
+had no fears of him. He pressed upon a new man, drove him against the
+wall, and the man shouted in despair:
+
+"_A moi_!"
+
+"You, Philippe?" exclaimed Fevrier.
+
+"That was a timely cry," and he sprang back. There were six men
+standing, and the six saluted Fevrier; they were all Frenchmen.
+Fevrier mopped his forehead.
+
+"But that was fine," said he, "though what's to come will be still
+better. Oh, but we will make this night memorable to our friends. They
+shall talk of us by their firesides when they are grown old and France
+has had many years of peace--we shall not hear, but they will talk of
+us, the deserters from Metz."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier in a word was exalted, and had lost his sense of
+proportion. He did not, however, relax his activity. He sent off the
+six to gather the rest of his contingent. He made an examination of
+the Prussians, and found that sixteen had been killed outright, and
+eight were lying wounded. He removed their rifles and ammunition out
+of reach, and from dead and wounded alike took the coats and caps.
+To the wounded he gave instead French uniforms; and then, bidding
+twenty-three of his soldiers don the Prussian caps and coats, he
+snatched a moment wherein to run to the curé.
+
+"It is over," said he. "The Prussians will not burn Vaudère to-night."
+And he jumped down the stairs again without waiting for any response.
+In the street he put on the cap and coat of the Prussian officer,
+buckled the sword about his waist, and thrust the revolver into
+his belt. He had now twenty-three men who at night might pass for
+Prussians, and thirteen others.
+
+To these thirteen he gave general instructions. They were to spread
+out on the right and left, and make their way singly up through
+the vines, and past the field-watch if they could without risk of
+detection. They were to join him high up on the slope, and opposite to
+the bonfire which would be burning at the répli. His twenty-three he
+led boldly, following as nearly as possible the track by which the
+Prussians had descended. The party trampled down the vine-poles,
+brushed through the leaves, and in a little while were challenged.
+
+"Sadowa," said Fevrier, in his best imitation of the German accent.
+
+"Pass Sadowa," returned the sentry.
+
+Fevrier and his men filed upwards. He halted some two hundred yards
+farther on, and went down upon his knees. The soldiers behind him
+copied his example. They crept slowly and cautiously forward until the
+flames of the bonfire were visible through the screen of leaves, until
+the faces of the officers about the bonfire could be read.
+
+Then Fevrier stopped and whispered to the soldier next to him. That
+soldier passed the whisper on, and from a file the Frenchmen crept
+into line. Fevrier had now nothing to do but to wait; and he waited
+without trepidation or excitement. The night from first to last had
+gone very well with him. He could even think of Mareschal Bazaine
+without anger.
+
+He waited for perhaps an hour, watching the faces round the fire
+increase in number and grow troubled with anxiety. The German officers
+talked in low tones staring through their night-glasses down the hill,
+to catch the first leaping flame from the roofs of Vaudère, pushing
+forward their heads to listen for any alarm. Fevrier watched them with
+the amusement of a spectator in a play house. He was fully aware that
+he was shortly to step upon the stage himself. He was aware too that
+the play was to have a tragic ending. Meanwhile, however, here
+was very good comedy! He had a Frenchman's appreciation of the
+picturesque. The dark night, the glowing fire on the one broad level
+of grass, the French soldiers hidden in the vines, within a stone's
+throw of the Germans, the Germans looking unconsciously on over
+their heads for the return of those comrades who never would
+return.--Lieutenant Fevrier was the dramatist who had created this
+striking and artistic situation. Lieutenant Fevrier could not but be
+pleased. Moreover there were better effects to follow. One occurred to
+him at this very moment, an admirable one. He fumbled in his breast
+and took out the flag. A minute later he saw the Colonel of the
+forepost join the group, hack nervously with his naked sword at
+a burning log, and dispatch a subaltern down the hill to the
+field-watch.
+
+The subaltern came crashing back through the vines. Fevrier did not
+need to hear his words in order to guess at his report. It could only
+be that the Prussian party had given the password and come safely back
+an hour since. Besides, the Colonel's act was significant.
+
+He sent four men at once in different directions, and the rest of his
+soldiers he withdrew into the darkness behind the bonfire. He did not
+follow them himself until he had picked up and tossed a fusee into the
+fire. The fusee flared and spat and spurted, and immediately it
+seemed to Fevrier--so short an interval of time was there--that the
+country-side was alive with the hum of a stirring camp, and the rattle
+of harness-chains, as horses were yoked to guns.
+
+For a third time that evening Fevrier laughed softly. The deserters
+had roused the Prussian army round Metz to the expectation of an
+attack in force. He touched his neighbour on the shoulder.
+
+"One volley when I give the word. Then charge. Pass the order on!" and
+the word went along the line like a ripple across a pond.
+
+He had hardly given it, the fusee had barely ceased to sputter, before
+a company doubled out on the open space behind the bonfire. That
+company had barely formed up, before another arrived to support it.
+
+"Load!"
+
+As the Prussian command was uttered, Fevrier was aware of a movement
+at his side. The soldier next to him was taking aim. Fevrier reached
+out his hand and stopped the man. Fevrier was going to die in five
+minutes, and meant to die chivalrously like a gentleman. He waited
+until the German companies had loaded, until they were ordered to
+advance, and then he shouted,
+
+"Fire!"
+
+The little flames shot out and crackled among the vines. He saw
+gaps in the Prussian ranks, he saw the men waver, surprised at the
+proximity of the attack.
+
+"Charge," he shouted, and crashing through the few yards of shelter,
+they burst out upon the répli, and across the open space to the
+Prussian bayonets. But not one of the number reached the bayonets.
+
+"Fire!" shouted the Prussian officer, in his turn.
+
+The volley flashed out, the smoke cleared away, and showed a little
+heap of men silent between the bonfire and the Prussian ranks.
+
+The Prussians loaded again and stood ready, waiting for the main
+attack. The morning was just breaking. They stood silent and
+motionless till the sky was flooded with light and the hills one after
+another came into view, and the files of poplars were seen marching
+on the plains. Then the Colonel approached the little heap. A rifle
+caught his eye, and he picked it up.
+
+"They are all mad," said he. Forced to the point of the bayonet was a
+gaudy little linen tri-colour flag.
+
+
+
+
+THE CROSSED GLOVES.
+
+
+"Although you have not been near Ronda for five years," said the
+Spanish Commandant severely to Dennis Shere, "the face of the country
+has not changed. You are certainly the most suitable officer I
+can select, since I am told you are well acquainted with the
+neighbourhood. You will ride therefore to-day to Olvera and deliver
+this sealed letter to the officer commanding the temporary garrison
+there. But it is not necessary that it should reach him before eleven
+at night, so that you will still have an hour or two before you start
+in which you can renew your acquaintanceships, as I can very well
+understand you are anxious to do."
+
+Dennis Shere's reluctance, however, was now changed into alacrity. For
+the road to Olvera ran past the gates of that white-walled, straggling
+residencía where he had planned to spend this first evening that he
+was stationed at Ronda. On his way back from his colonel's quarters
+he even avoided those squares and streets where he would be likely to
+meet with old acquaintances, foreseeing their questions as to why he
+was now a Spanish subject and wore the uniform of a captain of Spanish
+cavalry and by seven o'clock he was already riding through the Plaza
+de Toros upon his mission. There, however, a familiar voice hailed
+him, and turning about in his saddle he saw an old padre who had once
+gained a small prize for logic at the University of Barcelona, and who
+had since made his inferences and deductions an excuse for a great
+deal of inquisitiveness. Shere had no option but to stop. He broke in,
+however, at once on the inevitable questions as to his uniform with
+the statement that he must be at Olvera by eleven.
+
+"Fifteen miles," said the padre. "Does it need four hours and a fresh
+horse to journey fifteen miles?"
+
+"But I have friends to visit on the way," and to give convincing
+details to an excuse which was plainly disbelieved, Shere added, "Just
+this side of Setenil I have friends."
+
+The padre was still dissatisfied. "There is only one house just this
+side of Setenil, and Esteban Silvela I saw with my own eyes to-day in
+Ronda."
+
+"He may well be home by now, and it is not Esteban whom I go to see."
+
+"Not Esteban," exclaimed the padre. "Then it will be--"
+
+"His sister, the Señora Christina," said Shere with a laugh at his
+companion's persistency. "Since the brother and sister live alone, and
+it is not the brother, why it will be the sister. You argue still very
+closely, padre."
+
+The padre stood back a little from Shere and stared. Then he said
+slyly, and with the air of one who quotes:
+
+"All women are born tricksters."
+
+"Those were rank words," said Shere composedly.
+
+"Yet they were often spoken when you grew vines in the Ronda Valley."
+
+"Then a crowd of men must know me for a fool. A young man may make a
+mistake, padre, and exaggerate a disappointment. Besides, I had not
+then seen the señora. Esteban I knew, but she was a child, and known
+to me only by name." And then, warmed by the pleasure in his old
+friend's face, he said, "I will tell you about it."
+
+They walked on slowly side by side, while Shere, who now that he had
+begun to confide was quite swept away, bent over his saddle and told
+how after inheriting a modest fortune, after wandering for three years
+from city to city, he had at last come to Paris, and there, at a
+Carlist conversazione, had heard the familiar name called from a
+doorway, and had seen the unfamiliar face appear. Shere described
+Christina. She walked with the grace of a deer, as though the floor
+beneath her foot had the spring of turf. The blood was bright in her
+face; her brown hair shone; she was sweet with youth; the suppleness
+of her body showed it and the steadiness of her great clear eyes.
+
+"She passed me," he went on, "and the arrogance of what I used to
+think and say came sharp home to me like a pain. I suppose that
+I stared--it was an accident, of course--perhaps my face showed
+something of my trouble; but just as she was opposite me her fan
+slipped through her fingers and clattered on the floor."
+
+The padre was at a loss to understand Shere's embarrassment in
+relating so small a matter.
+
+"Well," said he, "you picked up the fan and so--"
+
+"No," interrupted Shere. His embarrassment increased, and he stammered
+out awkwardly, "Just for the moment, you see, I began to wonder
+whether after all I had not been right before; whether after all
+any woman would or could baulk herself of a fraction of any man's
+admiration, supposing that it would only cost a trick to extort it.
+And while I was wondering she herself stooped, picked up the fan, and
+good-humouredly dropped me a curtsey for my lack of manners. Esteban
+presented me to her that evening. There followed two magical months in
+Paris and a June in London."
+
+"But, Esteban?" said the padre, doubtfully. "I do not understand. I
+know something of Esteban Silvela. A lean man of plots and devices. My
+friend, do you know that Esteban has not a groat? The Silvela fortunes
+and estate came from the mother and went to the daughter. Esteban
+is the Señora Christina's steward, and her marriage would alter his
+position at the least. Did he not spoil the magic of the months in
+Paris?"
+
+Shere laughed aloud in assured confidence.
+
+"No, indeed," said he. "I did not know Esteban was dependent on his
+sister, but what difference would her marriage make? Esteban is my
+best friend. For instance, you questioned me about my uniform. It is
+by Esteban's advice and help that I wear it."
+
+"Indeed!" said the padre, quickly. "Tell me."
+
+"That June, in London, two years ago--it was by the way the last time
+I saw the señora--we three dined at the same house. As the ladies rose
+from the table I said to Christina quietly, 'I want to speak to you
+to-night,' and she answered very simply and quietly, 'With all my
+heart.' She was not so quiet, however, but that Esteban overheard her.
+He hitched his chair up to mine; I asked him what my chances were, and
+whether he would second them? He was most cordial, but he thought with
+his Spaniard's pride that I ought--I use my words, not his--in some
+way to repair my insufficiency in station and the rest; and he pointed
+out this way of the uniform. I could not resist his argument; I did
+not speak that night. I took out my papers and became a Spaniard; with
+Esteban's help I secured a commission. That was two years ago. I have
+not seen her since, nor have I written, but I ride to her to-night
+with my two years' silence and my two years' service to prove the
+truth of what I say. So you see I have reason to thank Esteban." And
+since they were now come to the edge of the town they parted company.
+Shere rode smartly down the slope of the hill, the padre stood and
+watched him with a feeling of melancholy.
+
+It was not merely that he distrusted Esteban, but he knew Shere, the
+cadet of an impoverished family, who had come out from England to a
+small estate in the Ronda valley, which had belonged to his house
+since the days of the Duke of Wellington in Spain. He knew him for a
+man of tempests and extremes, and as he thought of his ardent words
+and tones, of his ready acceptance of Esteban's good faith, of his
+description of Christina, he fell to wondering whether so sudden and
+violent a conversion from passionate cynic to passionate believer
+would not lack permanence. There was that little instructive accident
+of the dropped fan. Even in the moment of conversion so small a thing
+had almost sufficed to dissuade Shere.
+
+Shere, however, was quite untroubled--so untroubled, indeed, that he
+even rode slowly that he might not waste the luxury of anticipating
+the welcome which his unexpected appearance would surely provoke. He
+rode into the groves of almond and walnut trees and out again into a
+wild and stony country. It was just growing dusk when he saw ahead
+of him the square white walls of the enclosure, and the cluster of
+buildings within, glimmering at the foot of a rugged hill. The lights
+began to move in the windows as he approached, and then a man suddenly
+appeared at his side on the roadway and whistled twice loudly as
+though he were calling his dog. Shere rode past the man and through
+the open gates into the courtyard. There were three men lounging
+there, and they came forward almost as if they had expected Shere. He
+gave his horse into their charge and impetuously mounted the flight of
+stone steps to the house. A servant in readiness came forward at once
+and preceded Shere along a gallery towards a door. Shere's impetuosity
+led him to outstep the servant, he opened the door, and so entered the
+room unannounced.
+
+It was a long, low room with a wainscot of dark walnut, and a single
+lamp upon the table gave it shadows rather than light. He had just
+time to notice that a girl and a man were bending over the table in
+the lamplight, to recognise with a throb of the heart the play of
+the light upon the girl's brown hair, to understand that she was
+explaining something which she held in her hands, and then Esteban
+came quickly to him with a certain air of perplexity and a glance of
+inquiry towards the servant. Then he said:--
+
+"Of course, of course, you stopped and came in of your own accord."
+
+"Of my own accord, indeed," said Shere, who was looking at Christina
+instead of heeding Esteban's words. His unexpected coming had
+certainly not missed its effect, although it was not the effect which
+Shere had desired. There was, to be sure, a great deal of astonishment
+in her looks, but there was also consternation; and when she spoke it
+was in a numbed and absent way.
+
+"You are well? We have not seen you this long while. Two years is it?
+More than two years."
+
+"There have been changes," said Esteban. "We have had war and, alas,
+defeats."
+
+"Yes, I was in Cuba," said Shere, and the conversation dragged
+on impersonal and dull. Esteban talked continually with a forced
+heartiness, Christina barely spoke at all, and then absently. Shere
+noticed that she had but lately come in, for she still wore her hat,
+and her gloves lay crossed on the table in the light of the lamp; she
+moved restlessly about the room, stopping now and then to give an ear
+to any chance noise in the courtyard, and to glance alertly at the
+door; so that Shere understood that she was expecting another visitor,
+and that he himself was in the way. An inopportune intrusion, it
+seemed, was the sole outcome of the two years' anticipations, and
+utterly discouraged he rose from his chair. On the instant, however,
+Esteban signed to Shere to remain, and with a friendly smile himself
+made an excuse and left the room.
+
+Christina was now walking up and down one particular seam in the floor
+with as much care as if the seam was a tight-rope, and this exercise
+she continued. Shere moved over to the table and quite absently played
+with the gloves which lay there, disarranging their position, so that
+they no longer made a cross.
+
+"You remember that night in London," said he, and Christina stopped
+for a second to say simply and without any suggestion that she was
+offended, "You should have spoken that night," and then resumed her
+walk.
+
+"Yes," returned Shere. "But I was always aware that I could not offer
+you your match, and I found, I thought, quite suddenly that evening a
+way to make my insufficiency less insufficient."
+
+"Less insufficient by a strip of brass upon your shoulder," she
+exclaimed passionately. She came and stood opposite to him. "Well,
+that strip of brass stops us both. It stops my ears, it must stop your
+lips too. Where did we meet first?"
+
+"In Paris."
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"At a Carlist--" and Shere broke off and took a step towards her.
+"Oh!" he exclaimed, "I never thought of it. I imagined you went there
+to laugh as I did."
+
+"Does one laugh at one's creed?" she cried violently; and Shere with a
+helpless gesture of the hands sat down in a chair. Esteban had fooled
+him, and why, the padre had shown Shere that afternoon, Esteban had
+fooled him irreparably; it did not need a glance at Christina, as she
+stood facing him, to convince him of that. There was no anger against
+him, he noticed, in her face, but on the contrary a great friendliness
+and pity. But he knew her at that moment. Her looks might soften, but
+not her resolve. She was heart-whole a Carlist. Carlism was her creed,
+and her creed would be more than a creed, it would be a passion too.
+So it was not to persuade her but rather in acknowledgment that he
+said:
+
+"And one does not change one's creed?"
+
+"No," she answered, and suggested, but in a doubtful voice, "but one
+can put off one's uniform."
+
+Shere stood up. "Neither can one do that," he said simply. "It is
+quite true that I sought my commission upon your account. I would just
+as readily have become a Carlist had I known. I had no inclination one
+way or the other, only a great hope and longing for you. But I have
+made the mistake, and I cannot retrieve it. The strip of brass obliges
+me to good faith. Already you will understand the uniform has had its
+inconvenience. It sent me to Cuba, and set me armed against men almost
+of my own blood. There was no escape then; there is no escape now."
+
+Christina moved closer to him. The reticence with which Shere spoke,
+and the fact that he made no claim upon her made her voice very
+gentle.
+
+"No," she agreed. "I thought that you would make that answer. And in
+my heart I do not think that I should like to have heard from you any
+other."
+
+"Thank you," said Shere. He drew out his watch. "I have still some
+way to go. I have to reach Olvera by eleven;" and he was aware that
+Christina at his side became at once very still, so that even her
+breathing was arrested. For her sigh of emotion at the abrupt mention
+of parting he was thankful, but it made him keep his eyes turned from
+her lest a sight of any distress of hers might lead him to falter from
+his purpose.
+
+"You are riding to Olvera?" she asked, after a pause, and in a queer
+muffled voice.
+
+"Yes. So I must say good-bye," and now he turned to her. But she was
+too quick for him to catch a glimpse of her face. She had already
+turned from him and was walking towards the door.
+
+"You must also say good-bye to Esteban," said she, as though to gain
+time. With her fingers on the door-handle she stopped. "Tell me," she
+exclaimed. "It was Esteban who advised the army, who helped you to
+your commission? You need not deny it! It was Esteban," she stood
+silent, turning over this revelation in her mind. Then she added, "Did
+you see Esteban in Ronda this afternoon?"
+
+"No, but I heard that he was there. I must go."
+
+He took up his hat, and turning again towards the door saw that
+Christina stood with her back against the panels and her arms
+outstretched across them like a barrier.
+
+"You need not fear," he said to reassure her. "I shall not quarrel
+with Esteban. He is your brother, and the harm is done. Besides, I do
+not know that it is all harm when I look back in the years before I
+wore the uniform. In those times it was all one's own dissatisfactions
+and trivial dislikes and trivial ambitions. Now I find a repose in
+losing them, in becoming a little necessary part of a big machine,
+even though it is not the best machine of its kind and works creakily.
+I find a dignity in it too."
+
+It was the man of extremes who spoke, and he spoke quite sincerely.
+Christina, however, neither answered him nor heard. Her eyes were
+fixed with a strange intentness upon him; her breath came and went as
+if she had run a race, and in the silence seemed unnaturally audible.
+
+"You carry orders to Olvera?" she said at length. Shere fetched the
+sealed letter out of his pocket.
+
+"So I must go, or fail in my duty," said he.
+
+"Give me the letter," said Christina.
+
+Shere stared at her in amazement. The amazement changed to suspicion.
+His whole face seemed to narrow and sharpen out of his own likeness
+into something foxy and mean.
+
+"I will not," he said, and slowly replaced the letter. "There was a
+man in the road," he continued slowly, "who whistled as I passed--a
+signal, no doubt. You are Carlist. This is a trap."
+
+"A trap not laid for you," said Christina. "Be sure of that! Until you
+spoke of Olvera I did not know."
+
+"No," admitted Shere, "not laid for me to your knowledge, but to
+Esteban's. You were surprised at my coming--Esteban only at the manner
+of my coming. He asked if I had ridden into the gates of my own accord
+I remember. He was in Ronda this afternoon. Very likely it was he who
+told my colonel of my knowledge of the neighbourhood. It would suit
+his purposes well to present me to you suddenly, not merely as an
+enemy, but an active enemy. Yes, I understand that. But," and his
+voice hardened again, "even to your knowledge the trap was laid for
+the man who carries the letter. You have your share in the trick." He
+repeated the word with a sharp laugh, savouring it, dwelling upon it
+as upon something long forgotten, and now suddenly remembered. "A
+murderous trick, too, it seems! I wonder what would have happened if
+I had not turned in at the gates of my own accord. How much farther
+should I have ridden towards Olvera, and by what gentle means should I
+have been stopped?"
+
+"By nothing more dangerous than a hand upon your bridle and an excuse
+that you might do me some small service at Olvera."
+
+"An excuse, a falsity! To be sure," said Shere bitterly. "Yet you
+still stand before the door though you know the letter will not be
+yours. Is the trick after all so harmless? Is there no one--Esteban,
+for instance--in the dark passage outside the door or on the dark road
+outside the gates?"
+
+"I will prove to you you are wrong."
+
+Christina dropped her arms to her side, moved altogether from the
+door, and rang a bell. "Esteban shall come here; he will see you
+outside the gates; he will set you safely on your road to Olvera." She
+spoke now quite quietly; all the panic and agitation had gone in
+a moment from her face, her manner, and her words. But the very
+suddenness of the change in her increased Shere's suspicions. A moment
+ago Christina was standing before the door with every nerve astrain,
+her face white, and her eyes bewildered with horror. Now she stood
+easily by the table with the lighted lamp, speaking easily, playing
+easily with the gloves upon the table. Shere watched for the secret of
+this sudden change.
+
+A servant answered the bell and was bidden to find Esteban. No look of
+significance passed between them; by no gesture was any signal given.
+"No harm was intended to any man," Christina continued as soon as
+the door again was closed; "I insisted--I mean there was no need to
+insist; for I promised to get the letter from the bearer once he had
+come into this room."
+
+"How?" Shere asked with a blunt contempt. "By tricks?"
+
+Christina raised her head quickly, stung to a moment's anger; but she
+did not answer him, and again her head drooped.
+
+"At all events," she said quietly, "I have not tried to trick you,"
+and Shere noticed that she arranged with an absent carelessness the
+gloves in the form of a cross beneath the lamp; and at once he felt
+that her action contradicted her words. It was merely an instinct at
+first. Then he began to reason. Those gloves had been so arranged when
+first he entered the room. Christina and Esteban were bending over the
+table. Christina was explaining something. Was she explaining that
+arrangement of the gloves? Was that arrangement the reason of her
+ready acceptance of his refusal to part with his orders? Was it, in a
+word, a signal for Esteban--a signal which should tell him whether
+or not she had secured the letter? Shere saw a way to answer that
+question. He was now filled with distrust of Christina as half an hour
+back he had been filled with faith in her; so that he paid no heed
+to her apology, or to the passionate and pleading voice in which she
+spoke it.
+
+"So much was at stake for us," she said. "It seemed a necessity that
+we must have that letter, that no sudden orders must reach Olvera
+to-night. For there is some one at Olvera--I must trust you, you see,
+though you are our pledged enemy--some one of great consequence to us,
+some one we love, some one to whom we look to revive this Spain of
+ours. No, it is not our King, but his son--his young and gallant son.
+He will be gone to-morrow, but he is at Olvera to-night. And so when
+Esteban found out to-day that orders were to be sent to the commandant
+there it seemed we had no choice. It seemed those orders must not
+reach him, and it seemed therefore--just so that no hurt might be
+done, which otherwise would surely have been done, whatever I might
+order or forbid--that I must use a woman's way and secure the letter."
+
+"And the bearer?" asked Shere, advancing to the table. "What of him?
+He, I suppose, might creep back to Ronda, broken in honour and with a
+lie to tell? The best lie he could invent. Or would you have helped
+him to the lie?"
+
+Christina shrank away from the table as though she had been struck.
+
+"You had not thought of his plight," continued Shere. "He rides out
+from Ronda an honest soldier and returns--what? No more a soldier than
+this glove of yours is your hand," and taking up one of the gloves he
+held it for a moment, and then tossed it down at a distance from its
+fellow. He deliberately turned his back to the table as Christina
+replied:
+
+"The bearer would be just our pledged enemy--pledged to outwit us, as
+we to outwit him. But when you came there was no effort made to outwit
+you. Own that at all events? You carry your orders safely, with your
+honour safe, though the consequence may be disaster for us, and
+disgrace for that we did not prevent you. Own that! You and I, I
+suppose, will meet no more. So you might own this that I have used no
+tricks with you?"
+
+The appeal coming as an answer to his insult and contempt, and coming
+from one whose pride he knew to be a real and dominant quality,
+touched Shere against his expectation. He faced Christina on an
+impulse to give her the assurance she claimed, but he changed his
+mind.
+
+"Are you sure of that?" he asked slowly, for he saw that the gloves
+while his back was turned had again been crossed. He at all events
+was now sure. He was sure that those crossed gloves were a signal for
+Esteban, a signal that the letter had not changed hands. "You have
+used no tricks with me?" he repeated. "Are you sure of that?"
+
+The handle of the door rattled; Christina quickly crossed towards it.
+Shere followed her, but stopped for the fraction of a second at the
+table and deliberately and unmistakably placed the gloves in parallel
+lines. As the door opened, he was standing between Christina and the
+table, blocking it from her view.
+
+It was not she, however, who looked to the table, but Esteban. She
+kept her eyes upon her brother, and when he in his turn looked to her
+Shere noticed a glance of comprehension swiftly interchanged. So Shere
+was confident that he had spoiled this trick of the gloves, and when
+he took a polite leave of Christina and followed Esteban from the room
+it was not without an air of triumph.
+
+Christina stood without changing her attitude, except that perhaps she
+pushed her head a little forward that she might the better hear the
+last of her lover's receding steps. When they ceased to sound she ran
+quickly to the window, opened it, and leaned out that she might the
+better hear his horse's hoofs on the flagged courtyard. She heard
+besides Esteban's voice speaking amiably and Shere's making amiable
+replies. The sharp hard clatter upon the stones softened into the
+duller thud upon the road; the voices became fainter and lost their
+character. Then one clear "good-night" rang out loudly, and was
+followed by the quick beats of a horse trotting. Christina slowly
+closed the window and turned her eyes upon the room. She saw the lamp
+upon the table and the gloves in parallel lines beneath it.
+
+Now Shere was so far right in that the gloves were intended as a
+signal for Esteban; only owing to that complete revulsion of which the
+padre had seen the possibility, Shere had mistaken the signal. The
+passionate believer had again become the passionate cynic. He saw the
+trick, and setting no trust in the girl who played it, heeding neither
+her looks nor words nor the sincerity of her voice, had no doubt that
+it was aimed against him; whereas it was aimed to protect him. Shere
+had no doubt that the gloves crossed meant that he still had the
+sealed letter in his keeping, and therefore he disarranged them. But
+in truth the gloves crossed meant that Christina had it, and that the
+messenger might go unhindered upon his way.
+
+Christina uttered no cry. She simply did not believe what her eyes
+saw. She needed to touch the gloves before she was convinced, and when
+she had done that she was at once not sure but that she herself in
+touching them had ranged them in these lines. In the end, however,
+she understood, not the how or why, but the mere fact. She ran to the
+door, along the gallery, down the steps into the courtyard. She met no
+one. The house might have been a deserted ruin from its silence.
+She crossed the courtyard to the glimmering white walls, and passed
+through the gates on to the road. The night was clear; and ahead of
+her far away in the middle of the road a lantern shone very red.
+Christina ran towards it, and as she approached she saw faces like
+miniatures grouped above it. They did not heed her until she was close
+upon them, until she had noticed one man holding a riderless horse
+apart from the group and another coiling up a stout rope. Then
+Esteban, who was holding the lantern, raised his hand to keep her
+back.
+
+"There has been an accident," said he. "He fell, and fell awkwardly,
+the horse with him."
+
+"An accident," said Christina, and she pointed to the coil of rope. It
+was no use for her now to say that she had forbidden violence. Indeed,
+at no time, as she told Shere, would it have been of any use. She
+pushed through the group to where Dennis Shere lay on the ground, his
+face white and shiny and tortured with pain. She knelt down on the
+ground and took his head in her hands as though she would raise it on
+to her lap, but one man stopped her, saying, "It is his back, señora."
+Shere opened his eyes and saw who it was that bent over him, and
+Christina, reading their look, was appalled. It was surely impossible
+that human eyes could carry so much hate. His lips moved, and she
+leaned her ear close to his mouth to catch the words. But it was only
+one word he spoke and repeated:--
+
+"Tricks! Tricks!"
+
+There was no time to disprove or explain. Christina had but one
+argument. She kissed him on the lips.
+
+"This is no trick," she cried, and Esteban, laying a hand upon her
+shoulder, said, "He does not hear, nor can his lips answer;" and
+Esteban spoke the truth. Shere had not heard, and never would hear, as
+Christina knew.
+
+"He still has the letter," said Esteban. Christina thrust him back
+with her hand and crouched over the dead man, protecting him. In a
+little she said, "True, there is the letter." She unbuttoned Shere's
+jacket and gently took the letter from his breast. Then she knelt back
+and looked at the superscription without speaking. Esteban opened the
+door of the lantern and held the flame towards her. "No," said she.
+"It had better go to Olvera."
+
+She rode to Olvera that night. They let her go, deceived by her
+composure and thinking that she meant to carry it to "the man of great
+consequence."
+
+But Christina's composure meant nothing more than that her mind and
+her feelings were numbed. She was conscious of only one conviction,
+that Shere must not fail in his duty, since he had staked his honour
+upon its fulfilment. And so she rode straight to the commandant's
+quarters at Olvera, and telling of an accident to the bearer, handed
+him the letter. The commandant read it, and was most politely
+distressed that Christina should have put herself to so much trouble,
+for the orders merely recalled his contingent to Ronda in the morning.
+It was about this time that Christina began to understand precisely
+what had happened.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHUTTERED HOUSE.
+
+
+If ever a man's pleasures jumped with his duties mine did in the year
+1744, when, as a clerk in the service of the Royal African Company
+of Adventurers, I was despatched to the remote islands of Scilly in
+search of certain information which, it was believed, Mr. Robert
+Lovyes alone could impart. For even a clerk that sits all day conning
+his ledgers may now and again chance upon a record or name which
+will tickle his dull fancies with the suggestion of a story. Such a
+suggestion I had derived from the circumstances of Mr. Lovyes. He had
+passed an adventurous youth, during which he had for eight years
+been held to slavery by a negro tribe on the Gambia river; he had
+afterwards amassed a considerable fortune, and embarked it in the
+ventures of the Company; he had thereupon withdrawn himself to Tresco,
+where he had lived for twenty years: so much any man might know
+without provocation to his curiosity. The strange feature of Mr.
+Lovyes' conduct was revealed to me by the ledgers. For during all
+those years he had drawn neither upon his capital nor his interest, so
+that his stake in the Company grew larger and larger, with no profit
+to himself that any one could discover. It seemed to me, in fact,
+clean against nature that a man so rich should so disregard his
+wealth; and I busied myself upon the journey with discovering strange
+reasons for his seclusion, of which none, I may say, came near the
+mark, by so much did the truth exceed them all.
+
+I landed at the harbour of New Grimsey, on Tresco, in the grey
+twilight of a September evening; and asking for Mr. Lovyes, was
+directed across a little ridge of heather to Dolphin Town, which lies
+on the eastward side of Tresco, and looks across Old Grimsey Sound to
+the island of St. Helen's. Dolphin Town, you should know, for all its
+grand name, boasts but a poor half-score of houses dotted about the
+ferns and bracken, with no semblance of order. One of the houses,
+however, attracted my notice--first, because it was built in two
+storeys, and was, therefore, by a storey taller than the rest; and,
+secondly, because all its windows were closely shuttered, and it wore
+in that falling light a drooping, melancholy aspect, like a derelict
+ship upon the seas. It stood in the middle of this scanty village, and
+had a little unkempt garden about it inclosed within a wooden paling.
+There was a wicket-gate in the paling, and a rough path from the gate
+to the house door, and a few steps to the right of this path a well
+was sunk and rigged with a winch and bucket. I was both tired and
+thirsty, so I turned into the garden and drew up some water in the
+bucket. A narrow track was beaten in the grass between the well and
+the house, and I saw with surprise that the stones about the mouth of
+the well were splashed and still wet. The house, then, had an inmate.
+I looked at it again, but the shutters kept their secret: there was no
+glimmer of light visible through any chink. I approached the house,
+and from that nearer vantage discovered that the shutters were common
+planks fitted into the windows and nailed fast to the woodwork from
+without. Growing yet more curious, I marched to the door and knocked,
+with an inquiry upon my tongue as to where Mr. Lovyes lived. But the
+excuse was not needed; the sound of my blows echoed through the house
+in a desolate, solitary fashion, and no step answered them. I knocked
+again, and louder. Then I leaned my ear to the panel, and I distinctly
+heard the rustling of a woman's dress. I held my breath to hear the
+more surely. The sound was repeated, but more faintly, and it was
+followed by a noise like the closing of a door. I drew back from the
+house, keeping an eye upon the upper storey, for I thought it possible
+the woman might reconnoitre me thence. But the windows stared at me
+blind, unresponsive. To the right and left lights twinkled in the
+scattered dwellings, and I found something very ghostly in the thought
+of this woman entombed as it were in the midst of them and moving
+alone in the shuttered gloom. The twilight deepened, and suddenly the
+gate behind me whined on its hinges. At once I dropped to my full
+length on the grass--the gloom was now so thick there was little
+fear I should be discovered--and a man went past me to the house.
+He walked, so far as I could judge, with a heavy stoop, but was yet
+uncommon tall, and he carried a basket upon his arm. He laid the
+basket upon the doorstep, and, to my utter disappointment, turned
+at once, and so down the path and out at the gate. I heard the gate
+rattle once, twice, and then a click as its latch caught. I was
+sufficiently curious to desire a nearer view of the basket, and
+discovered that it contained food. Then, remembering me that all this
+while my own business waited, I continued on my way to Mr. Lovyes'
+house. It was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant's
+Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour. Mr. Lovyes
+was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his
+dining-room--a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took
+to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline.
+I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got far before he
+interrupted me.
+
+"There is a mistake," he said. "It is doubtless my brother Robert you
+are in search of. I am John Lovyes, and was, it is true, captured
+with my brother in Africa, but I escaped six years before he did, and
+traded no more in those parts. We fled together from the negroes, but
+we were pursued. My brother was pierced by an arrow, and I left him,
+believing him to be dead."
+
+I had, indeed, heard something of a brother, though I little expected
+to find him in Tresco too. He pressed upon me the hospitality of his
+house, but my business was with Mr. Robert, and I asked him to direct
+me on my path, which he did with some hesitation and reluctance. I had
+once more to pass through Dolphin Town, and an impulse prompted me to
+take another look at the shuttered house. I found that the basket of
+food had been removed, and an empty bucket stood in its place. But
+there was still no light visible, and I went on to the dwelling of
+Mr. Robert Lovyes. When I came to it, I comprehended his brother's
+hesitation. It was a rough, mean little cottage standing on the edge
+of the bracken close to the sea--a dwelling fit for the poorest
+fisherman, but for no one above that station, and a large open boat
+was drawn up on the hard beside it as though the tenant fished for
+his bread. I knocked at the door, and a man with a candle in his hand
+opened it.
+
+"Mr. Robert Lovyes?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I am he." And he led the way into a kitchen, poor and mean as
+the outside warranted, but scrupulously clean and bright with a fire.
+He led the way, as I say, and I was still more mystified to observe
+from his gait, his height, and the stoop of his shoulders that he was
+the man whom I had seen carrying the basket through the garden. I had
+now an opportunity of noticing his face, wherein I could detect no
+resemblance to his brother's. For it was broader and more vigorous,
+with a great, white beard valancing it; and whereas Mr. John's hair
+was neatly powdered and tied with a ribbon, as a gentleman's should
+be, Mr. Robert's, which was of a black colour with a little sprinkling
+of grey, hung about his head in a tangled mane. There was but a
+two-years difference between the ages of the brothers, but there might
+have been a decade. I explained my business, and we sat down to a
+supper of fish, freshly caught, which he served himself. And during
+supper he gave me the information I was come after. But I lent only
+an inattentive ear to his talk. For my knowledge of his wealth, the
+picture of him as he sat in his great sea-boots and coarse seaman's
+vest, as though it was the most natural garb in the world, and his
+easy discourse about those far African rivers, made a veritable jumble
+of my mind. To add to it all, there was the mystery of the shuttered
+house. More than once I was inclined to question him upon this last
+account, but his manner did not promise confidences, and I said
+nothing. At last he perceived my inattention.
+
+"I will repeat all this to-morrow," he said grimly. "You are, no
+doubt, tired. I cannot, I am afraid, house you, for, as you see, I
+have no room; but I have a young friend who happens by good luck to
+stay this night on Tresco, and no doubt he will oblige me." Thereupon
+he led me to a cottage on the outskirts of Dolphin Town, and of all in
+that village nearest to the sea.
+
+"My friend," said he, "is named Ginver Wyeth, and, though he comes
+from these parts, he does not live here, being a school-master on the
+mainland. His mother has died lately, and he is come on that account."
+
+Mr. Wyeth received me hospitably, but with a certain pedantry of
+speech which somewhat surprised me, seeing that his parents were
+common fisherfolk. He readily explained the matter, however, over a
+pipe, when Mr. Lovyes had left us. "I owe everything to Mrs. Lovyes,"
+he said. "She took me when a boy, taught me something herself, and
+sent me thereafter, at her own charges, to a school in Falmouth."
+
+"Mrs. Lovyes!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," he continued, and, bending forward, lowered his voice. "You
+went up to Merchant's Point, you say? Then you passed Crudge's
+Folly--a house of two storeys with a well in the garden."
+
+"Yes, yes!" I said.
+
+"She lives there," said he.
+
+"Behind those shutters!" I cried.
+
+"For twenty years she has lived in the midst of us, and no one has
+seen her during all that time. Not even Robert Lovyes. Aye, she has
+lived behind the shutters."
+
+There he stopped. I waited, thinking that in a little he would take up
+his tale, but he did not, and I had to break the silence.
+
+"I had not heard that Mr. Robert was ever married," I said as
+carelessly as I might.
+
+"Nor was he," replied Mr. Wyeth. "Mrs. Lovyes is the wife of John.
+The house at Merchant's Point is hers, and there twenty years ago she
+lived."
+
+His words caught my breath away, so little did I expect them.
+
+"The wife of John Lovyes!" I stammered, "but--" And I told him how I
+had seen Robert Lovyes carry his basket up the path.
+
+"Yes," said Wyeth. "Twice a day Robert draws water for her at the
+well, and once a day he brings her food. It is in his house, too, that
+she lives--Crudge's Folly, that was his name for it, and the name
+clings. But, none the less, she is the wife of John;" and with little
+more persuasion Mr. Wyeth told me the story.
+
+"It is the story of a sacrifice," he began, "mad or great, as you
+please; but, mark you, it achieved its end. As a boy, I witnessed it
+from its beginnings. For it was at this very door that Robert Lovyes
+rapped when he first landed on Tresco on the night of the seventh of
+May twenty-two years ago, and I was here on my holidays at the time. I
+had been out that day in my father's lugger to the Poul, which is
+the best fishing-ground anywhere near Scilly, and the fog took us, I
+remember, at three of the afternoon. So what with that and the wind
+failing, it was late when we cast anchor in Grimsey Sound. The night
+had fallen in a brown mirk, and so still that the sound of our feet
+brushing through the ferns was loud, like the sweep of scythes. We sat
+down to supper in this kitchen about nine, my mother, my father, two
+men from the boat, and myself, and after supper we gathered about the
+fire here and talked. The talk in these parts, however it may begin,
+slides insensibly to that one element of which the noise is ever in
+our ears; and so in a little here were we chattering of wrecks and
+wrecks and wrecks and the bodies of dead men drowned. And then, in the
+thick of the talk, came the knock on the door--a light rapping of the
+knuckles, such as one hears twenty times a day; but our minds were
+so primed with old wives' tales that it fairly shook us all. No one
+stirred, and the knocking was repeated.
+
+"Then the latch was lifted, and Robert Lovyes stepped in. His beard
+was black then--coal black, like his hair--and his face looked out
+from it pale as a ghost and shining wet from the sea. The water
+dripped from his clothes and made a puddle about his feet.
+
+"'How often did I knock?' he asked pleasantly. 'Twice, I think. Yes,
+twice.'
+
+"Then he sat down on the settle, very deliberately pulled off his
+great sea-boots, and emptied the water out of them.
+
+"'What island is this?' he asked.
+
+"'Tresco.'
+
+"'Tresco!' he exclaimed, in a quick, agitated whisper, as though he
+dreaded yet expected to hear the name. 'We were wrecked, then, on the
+Golden Ball.'
+
+"'Wrecked?' cried my father; but the man went on pursuing his own
+thoughts.
+
+"'I swam to an islet.'
+
+"'It would be Norwithel,' said my father.
+
+"'Yes,' said he, 'it would be Norwithel.' And my mother asked
+curiously--
+
+"'You know these islands?' For his speech was leisurely and delicate,
+such as we heard neither from Scillonians nor from the sailors who
+visit St. Mary's.
+
+"'Yes,' he answered, his face breaking into a smile of unexpected
+softness, 'I know these islands. From Rosevean to Ganilly, from
+Peninnis Head to Maiden Bower: I know them well.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point Mr. Wyeth broke off his story, and crossing to the
+window, opened it. "Listen!" he said. I heard as it were the sound of
+innumerable voices chattering and murmuring and whispering in some
+mysterious language, and at times the voices blended and the murmurs
+became a single moan.
+
+"It is the tide making on the Golden Ball," said Mr. Wyeth. "The reef
+stretches seawards from St. Helen's island and half way across the
+Sound. You may see it at low tide, a ledge level as a paved causeway,
+and God help the ship that strikes on it!"
+
+Even while he spoke, from these undertones of sound there swelled
+suddenly a great booming like a battery of cannon.
+
+"It is the ledge cracking," said Mr. Wyeth, "and it cracks in the
+calmest weather." With that, he closed the window, and, lighting his
+pipe, resumed his story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It was on that reef that Mr. Robert Lovyes was wrecked. The ship, he
+told us, was the schooner _Waking Dawn_, bound from Cardiff to Africa,
+and she had run into the fog about half-past three, when they were a
+mile short of the Seven Stones. She bumped twice on the reef, and sank
+immediately, with, so far as he knew, all her crew.
+
+"'So now,' Robert continued, tapping his belt, 'since I have the means
+to pay, I will make bold to ask for a lodging, and for this night I
+will hang up here my dripping garments to Neptune.'
+
+    "'Me tabula sacer
+  Votiva paries--'
+
+"I began in the pride of my schooling, for I had learned that verse of
+Horace but a week before.
+
+"'This, no doubt, is the Cornish tongue,' he interrupted gravely, 'and
+will you please to carry my boots outside?'
+
+"What followed seemed to me then the strangest part of all this
+business, though, indeed, our sea-fogs come and go as often as not
+with a like abruptness. But the time of this fog's dispersion shocked
+the mind as something pitiless and arbitrary. For had the air cleared
+an hour before, the _Waking Dawn_ would not have struck. I opened the
+door, and it was as though a panel of brilliant white was of a sudden
+painted on the floor. Robert Lovyes sprang up from the settle, ran
+past me into the open, and stood on the bracken in his stockinged
+feet. A little patch of fog still smoked on the shining beach of Tean;
+a scarf of it was twisted about the granite bosses of St. Helen's; and
+for the rest the moonlight sparkled upon the headlands and was spilled
+across miles of placid sea. There was a froth of water upon the Golden
+Ball, but no sign of the schooner sunk among its weeds.
+
+"My father, however, and the two boatmen hurried down to the shore,
+while I was despatched with the news to Merchant's Point. My mother
+asked Mr. Lovyes his name, that I might carry it with me. But he spoke
+in a dreamy voice, as though he had not heard her.
+
+"'There were eight of the crew. Four were below, and I doubt if the
+four on deck could swim.'
+
+"I ran off on my errand, and, coming back a little later with a bottle
+of cordial waters, found Mr. Lovyes still standing in the moonlight.
+He seemed not to have moved a finger. I gave him the bottle, with a
+message that any who were rescued should be carried to Merchant's
+Point forthwith, and that he himself should go down there in the
+morning.
+
+"'Who taught you Latin?' he asked suddenly.
+
+"'Mrs. Lovyes taught me the rudiments,' I began; and with that he led
+me on to talk of her, but with some cunning. For now he would divert
+me to another topic and again bring me back to her, so that it all
+seemed the vagrancies of a boy's inconsequent chatter.
+
+"Mrs. Lovyes, who was remotely akin to the Lord Proprietor, had come
+to Tresco three years before, immediately after her marriage, and, it
+was understood, at her husband's wish. I talked of her readily, for,
+apart from what I owed to her bounty, she was a woman most sure to
+engage the affections of any boy. For one thing she was past her
+youth, being thirty years of age, tall, with eyes of the kindliest
+grey, and she bore herself in everything with a tender toleration,
+like a woman that has suffered much.
+
+"Of the other topics of this conversation there was one which later I
+had good reason to remember. We had caught a shark twelve feet long at
+the Poul that day, and the shark fairly divided my thoughts with Mrs.
+Lovyes.
+
+"'You bleed a fish first into the sea,' I explained. 'Then you bait
+with a chad's head, and let your line down a couple of fathoms. You
+can see your bait quite clearly, and you wait.'
+
+"'No doubt,' said Robert; 'you wait.'
+
+"'In a while,' said I, 'a dim lilac shadow floats through the clear
+water, and after a little you catch a glimpse of a forked tail and
+waving fins and an evil devil's head. The fish smells at the bait and
+sinks again to a lilac shadow--perhaps out of sight; and again it
+rises. The shadow becomes a fish, the fish goes circling round your
+boat, and it may be a long while before he turns on his back and
+rushes at the bait.'
+
+"'And as like as not, he carries the bait and line away."
+
+"'That depends upon how quick you are with the gaff,' said I.' Here
+comes my father.'
+
+"My father returned empty-handed. Not one of the crew had been saved.
+
+"'You asked my name,' said Robert Lovyes, turning to my mother. 'It is
+Crudge--Jarvis Crudge.' With that he went to his bed, but all night
+long I heard him pacing his room.
+
+"The next morning he complained of his long immersion in the sea, and
+certainly when he told his story to Mr. and Mrs. Lovyes as they sat
+over their breakfast in the parlour at Merchant's Point, he spoke with
+such huskiness as I never heard the like of. Mr. Lovyes took little
+heed to us, but went on eating his breakfast with only a sour comment
+here and there. I noticed, however, that Mrs. Lovyes, who sat over
+against us, bent her head forward and once or twice shook it as though
+she would unseat some ridiculous conviction. And after the story was
+told, she sat with no word of kindness for Mr. Crudge, and, what was
+yet more unlike her, no word of pity for the sailors who were lost.
+Then she rose and stood, steadying herself with the tips of her
+fingers upon the table. Finally she came swiftly across the room and
+peered into Mr. Crudge's face.
+
+"'If you need help,' she said, 'I will gladly furnish it. No doubt you
+will be anxious to go from Tresco at the earliest. No doubt, no doubt
+you will,' she repeated anxiously.
+
+"'Madame,' he said, 'I need no help, being by God's leave a man'--and
+he laid some stress upon the 'man,' but not boastfully--rather as
+though all _women_ did, or might need help, by the mere circumstance
+of their sex--'and as for going hence, why yesterday I was bound for
+Africa. I sailed unexpectedly into a fog off Scilly. I was wrecked in
+a calm sea on the Golden Ball--I was thrown up on Tresco--no one
+on that ship escaped but myself. No sooner was I safe than the fog
+lifted---'
+
+"'You will stay?' Mrs. Lovyes interrupted. 'No?'
+
+"'Yes,' said he, 'Jarvis Grudge will stay.'
+
+"And she turned thoughtfully away. But I caught a glimpse of her face
+as we went out, and it wore the saddest smile a man could see.
+
+"Mr. Grudge and I walked for a while in silence.
+
+"'And what sort of a name has Mr. John Lovyes in these parts?' he
+asked.
+
+"'An honest sort,' said I emphatically--'the name of a man who loves
+his wife.'
+
+"'Or her money,' he sneered. 'Bah! a surly ill-conditioned dog, I'll
+warrant, the curmudgeon!"
+
+"'You are marvellously recovered of your cold,' said I.
+
+"He stopped, and looked across the Sound. Then he said in a soft,
+musing voice: 'I once knew just such another clever boy. He was so
+clever that men beat him with sticks and put on great sea-boots to
+kick him with, so that he lived a miserable life, and was subsequently
+hanged in great agony at Tyburn.'
+
+"Mr. Grudge, as he styled himself, stayed with us for a week, during
+which time he sailed much with me about these islands; and I made a
+discovery. Though he knew these islands so well, he had never visited
+them before, and his knowledge was all hearsay. I did not mention my
+discovery to him, lest I should meet with another rebuff. But I was
+none the less sure of its truth, for he mistook Hanjague for Nornor,
+and Priglis Bay for Beady Pool, and made a number of suchlike
+mistakes. After a week he hired the cottage in which he now lives,
+bought his boat, leased from the steward the patch of ground in
+Dolphin Town, and set about building his house. He undertook the work,
+I am sure, for pure employment and distraction. He picked up the
+granite stones, fitted them together, panelled them, made the floors
+from the deck of a brigantine which came ashore on Annet, pegged down
+the thatch roof--in a word, he built the house from first to last with
+his own hands and he took fifteen months over the business, during
+which time he did not exchange a single word with Mrs. Lovyes, nor
+anything more than a short 'Good-day' with Mr. John. He worked,
+however, with no great regularity. For while now he laboured in a
+feverish haste, now he would sit a whole day idle on the headlands;
+or, again, he would of a sudden throw down his tools as though the
+work overtaxed him, and, leaping into his boat, set all sail and
+run with the wind. All that night you might see him sailing in the
+moonlight, and he would come home in the flush of the dawn.
+
+"After he had built the house, he furnished it, crossing for that
+purpose backwards and forwards between Tresco and St. Mary's. I
+remember that one day he brought back with him a large chest, and I
+offered to lend him a hand in carrying it. But he hoisted it on his
+back and took it no farther than the cottage in which he lived, where
+it remained locked with a padlock.
+
+"Towards Christmas-time, then, the house was ready, but to our
+surprise he did not move into it. He seemed, indeed, of a sudden, to
+have lost all liking for it, and whether it was that he had no longer
+any work upon his hands, he took to following Mrs. Lovyes about, but
+in a way that was unnoticeable unless you had other reasons to suspect
+that his thoughts were following her.
+
+"His conduct in this respect was particularly brought home to me on
+Christmas Day. The afternoon was warm and sunny, and I walked over the
+hill at Merchant's Point, meaning to bathe in the little sequestered
+bay beyond. From the top of the hill I saw Mrs. Lovyes walking along
+the strip of beach alone, and as I descended the hill-side, which
+is very deep in fern and heather, I came plump upon Jarvis Grudge,
+stretched full-length on the ground. He was watching Mrs. Lovyes with
+so greedy a concentration of his senses that he did not remark my
+approach. I asked him when he meant to enter his new house.
+
+"'I do not know that I ever shall,' he replied.
+
+"'Then why did you build it?' I asked.
+
+"'Because I was a fool!' and then he burst out in a passionate
+whisper. 'But a fool I was to stay here, and a fool's trick it was
+to build that house!' He shook his fist in its direction. 'Call it
+Grudge's Folly, and there's the name for it!' and with that he turned
+him again to spying upon Mrs. Lovyes.
+
+"After a while he spoke again, but slowly and with his eyes fixed upon
+the figure moving upon the beach.
+
+"'Do you remember the night I came ashore? You had caught a shark that
+day, and you told me of it. The great lilac shadow which rises from
+the depths and circles about the bait, and sinks again and rises again
+and takes--how long?--two years maybe before he snaps it.'
+
+"'But he does not carry it away,' said I, taking his meaning.
+
+"'Sometimes--sometimes," he snarled.
+
+"'That depends on how quick we are with the gaff."
+
+"'You!' he laughed, and taking me by the elbows, he shook me till I
+was giddy.
+
+"'I owe Mrs. Lovyes everything,' I said. At that he let me go. The
+ferocity of his manner, however, confirmed me in my fears, and, with a
+boy's extravagance, I carried from that day a big knife in my belt.
+
+"'The gaff, I suppose,' said Mr. Grudge with a polite smile when
+first he remarked it. During the next week, however, he showed more
+contentment with his lot, and once I caught him rubbing his hands and
+chuckling, like a man well pleased; so that by New Year's Eve I was
+wellnigh relieved of my anxiety on Mrs. Lovyes' account.
+
+"On that night, however, I went down to Grudge's cottage, and peeping
+through the window on my way to the door, I saw a strange man in the
+room. His face was clean-shaven, his hair tied back and powdered; he
+was in his shirt-sleeves, with a satin waistcoat, a sword at his side,
+and shining buckles to his shoes. Then I saw that the big chest stood
+open. I opened the door and entered.
+
+"'Come in!' said the man, and from his voice I knew him to be Mr.
+Crudge. He took a candle in his hand and held it above his head.
+
+"'Tell me my name,' he said. His face, shaved of its beard and no
+longer hidden by his hair, stood out distinct, unmistakable.
+
+"'Lovyes,' I answered.
+
+"'Good boy,' said he. 'Robert Lovyes, brother to John.'
+
+"'Yet he did not know you,' said I, though, indeed, I could not
+wonder.
+
+"'But she did,' he cried, with a savage exultation. 'At the first
+glance, at the first word, she knew me.' Then, quietly, 'My coat is on
+the chair beside you.'
+
+"I took it up. 'What do you mean to do?' I asked.
+
+"'It is New Year's Eve,' he said grimly. 'The season of good wishes.
+It is only meet that I should wish my brother, who stole my wife, much
+happiness for the next twelve months.'
+
+"He took the coat from my hands.
+
+"'You admire the coat? Ah! true, the colour is lilac.' He held it out
+at arm's length. Doubtless I had been staring at the coat, but I had
+not even given it a thought. 'The lilac shadow!' he went on, with a
+sneer. 'Believe me, it is the purest coincidence.' And as he prepared
+to slip his arm into the sleeve I flashed the knife out of my belt. He
+was too quick for me, however. He flung the coat over my head. I felt
+the knife twisted out of my hand; he stumbled over the chair; we both
+fell to the ground, and the next thing I know I was running over the
+bracken towards Merchant's Point with Robert Lovyes hot upon my heels.
+He was of a heavy build, and forty years of age. I had the double
+advantage, and I ran till my chest cracked and the stars danced above
+me. I clanged at the bell and stumbled into the hall.
+
+"'Mrs. Lovyes!' I choked the name out as she stepped from the parlour.
+
+"'Well?' she asked. 'What is it?'
+
+"'He is following--Robert Lovyes!'
+
+"She sprang rigid, as though I had whipped her across the face. Then,
+'I knew it would come to this at the last,' she said; and even as she
+spoke Robert Lovyes crossed the threshold.
+
+"'Molly,' he said, and looked at her curiously. She stood singularly
+passive, twisting her fingers. 'I hardly know you,' he continued. 'In
+the old days you were the wilfullest girl I ever clapped eyes on.'
+
+"'That was thirteen years ago,' she said, with a queer little laugh at
+the recollection.
+
+"He took her by the hand and led her into the parlour. I followed.
+Neither Mrs. Lovyes nor Robert remarked my presence, and as for John
+Lovyes, he rose from his chair as the pair approached him, stretched
+out a trembling hand, drew it in, stretched it out again, all without
+a word, and his face purple and ridged with the veins.
+
+"'Brother,' said Robert, taking between his fingers half a gold coin,
+which was threaded on a chain about Mrs. Lovyes' wrist, 'where is the
+fellow to this? I gave it to you on the Gambia river, bidding you
+carry it to Molly as a sign that I would return.'
+
+"I saw John's face harden and set at the sound of his brother's voice.
+He looked at his wife, and, since she now knew the truth, he took the
+bold course.
+
+"'I gave it to her,' said he, 'as a token of your death; and, by God!
+she was worth the lie!'
+
+"The two men faced one another--Robert smoothing his chin, John with
+his arms folded, and each as white and ugly with passion as the other.
+Robert turned to Mrs. Lovyes, who stood like a stone.
+
+"'You promised to wait,' he said in a constrained voice. 'I escaped
+six years after my noble brother.'
+
+"'Six years?' she asked. 'Had you come back then you would have found
+me waiting.'
+
+"'I could not,' he said. 'A fortune equal to your own--that was what I
+promised to myself before I returned to marry you.'
+
+"'And much good it has done you,' said John, and I think that he meant
+by the provocation to bring the matter to an immediate issue. 'Pride,
+pride!' and he wagged his head. 'Sinful pride!'
+
+"Robert sprang forward with an oath, and then, as though the movement
+had awakened her, Mrs. Lovyes stepped in between the two men, with an
+arm outstretched on either side to keep them apart.
+
+"'Wait!' she said. 'For what is it that you fight? Not, indeed, for
+me. To you, my husband, I will no more belong; to you, my lover, I
+cannot. My woman's pride, my woman's honour--those two things are mine
+to keep.'
+
+"So she stood casting about for an issue, while the brothers glowered
+at one another across her. It was evident that if she left them alone
+they would fight, and fight to the death. She turned to Robert.
+
+"'You meant to live on Tresco here at my gates, unknown to me; but you
+could not.'
+
+"'I could not,' he answered. 'In the old days you had spoken so much
+of Scilly--every island reminded me--and I saw you every day.'
+
+"I could read the thought passing through her mind. It would not serve
+for her to live beside them, visible to them each day. Sooner or later
+they would come to grips. And then her face flushed as the notion of
+her great sacrifice came to her.
+
+"'I see but the one way,' she said. 'I will go into the house that
+you, Robert, have built. Neither you nor John shall see me, but none
+the less, I shall live between you, holding you apart, as my hands do
+now. I give my life to you so truly that from this night no one shall
+see my face. You, John, shall live on here at Merchant's Point.
+Robert, you at your cottage, and every day you will bring me food and
+water and leave it at my door.'
+
+"The two men fell back shamefaced. They protested they would part and
+put the world between them; but she would not trust them. I think,
+too, the notion of her sacrifice grew on her as she thought of it. For
+women are tenacious of sacrifice even as men are of revenge. And in
+the end she had her way. That night Robert Lovyes nailed the boards
+across the windows, and brought the door-key back to her; and that
+night, twenty years ago, she crossed the threshold. No man has seen
+her since. But, none the less, for twenty years she has lived between
+the brothers, keeping them apart."
+
+This was the story which Mr. Wyeth told me as we sat over our
+pipes, and the next day I set off on my journey back to London. The
+conclusion of the affair I witnessed myself. For a year later we
+received a letter from Mr. Robert, asking that a large sum of money
+should be forwarded to him. Being curious to learn the reason for his
+demand, I carried the sum to Tresco myself. Mr. John Lovyes had died a
+month before, and I reached the island on Mr. Robert's wedding-day.
+I was present at the ceremony. He was now dressed in a manner which
+befitted his station--an old man bent and bowed, but still handsome,
+and he bore upon his arm a tall woman, grey-haired and very pale, yet
+with the traces of great beauty. As the parson laid her hand in her
+husband's, I heard her whisper to him, "Dust to Dust."
+
+
+
+
+KEEPER OF THE BISHOP.
+
+
+For a fortnight out of every six weeks the little white faced man
+walked the garrison on St. Mary's Island in a broadcloth frock-coat,
+a low waistcoat and a black riband of a tie fastened in a bow; and it
+gave him great pleasure to be mistaken for a commercial traveller. But
+during the other four weeks he was head-keeper of the lighthouse on
+the Bishop's Rock, with thirty years of exemplary service to his
+credit. By what circumstances he had been brought to enlist under the
+Trinity flag I never knew. But now, at the age of forty-eight he was
+entirely occupied with a great horror of the sea and its hunger for
+the bodies of men; the frock-coat which he wore during his spells on
+shore was a protest against the sea; and he hated not only the sea but
+all things that were in the sea, especially rock lighthouses, and of
+all rock lighthouses especially the Bishop.
+
+"The Atlantic's as smooth as a ballroom floor," said he. It was a
+clear, still day and we were sitting among the gorse on the top of the
+garrison, looking down the sea towards the west. Five miles from the
+Scillies, the thin column of the Bishop showed like a cord strung
+tight in the sky. "But out there all round the lighthouse there are
+eddies twisting and twisting, without any noise, and extraordinary
+quick, and every other second, now here, now there, you'll notice the
+sea dimple, and you'll hear a sound like a man hiccoughing, and all at
+once, there's a wicked black whirlpool. The tide runs seven miles an
+hour past the Bishop. But in another year I have done with her." To
+her Garstin nodded across from St. Mary's to that grey finger post of
+the Atlantic. "One more winter, well, very likely during this one more
+winter the Bishop will go--on some night when a storm blows from west
+or west-nor'west and the Irish coast takes none of its strength."
+
+He was only uttering the current belief of the islands. The first
+Bishop lighthouse had been swept away before its building was
+finished, and though the second stood, a fog bell weighing no less
+than a ton, and fixed ninety feet above the water, had been lifted
+from its fittings by a single wave, and tossed like a tennis-ball into
+the sea. I asked Garstin whether he had been stationed on the rock at
+the time.
+
+"People talk of lightships plunging and tugging at their cables," he
+returned. "Well, I've tried lightships, and what I say is, ships are
+built to plunge and tug at their cables. That's their business. But it
+isn't the business of one hundred and twenty upright feet of granite
+to quiver and tremble like a steel spring. No, I wasn't on the Bishop
+when the bell went. But I was there when a wave climbed up from the
+base of the rock and smashed in the glass wall of the lantern, and put
+the light out. That was last spring at four o'clock in the morning.
+The day was breaking very cold and wild, and one could just see the
+waves below, a lashing tumble of grey and white water as far as the
+eye could reach. I was in the lantern reading 'It's never too late to
+mend.' I had come to where the chaplain knocks down the warder, and I
+was thinking how I'd like to have a go at that warder myself, when all
+the guns in the world went off together in my ears. And there I was
+dripping wet, and fairly sliced with splinters of glass, and the wind
+blowing wet in my face, and the lamp out, and a bitter grey light of
+morning, as though there never, never had been any sun, and all the
+dead men in the sea shouting out for me one hundred feet below," and
+Garstin shivered, and rose to his feet. "Well, I have only one more
+winter of it."
+
+"And then?" I asked.
+
+"Then I get the North Foreland, and the trippers come out from
+Margate, and I live on shore with my wife and--By the way, I wanted to
+speak to you about my boy. He's getting up in years. What shall I make
+of him? A linen-draper, eh? In the Midlands, what? or something in a
+Free Library, handing out Charles Reade's books? He's at home now.
+Come and see him!"
+
+In Garstin's quarters, within the coastguard enclosure, I was
+introduced to his wife and the lad, Leopold. "What shall we call him?"
+Mrs. Garstin had asked, some fifteen years before. "I don't know any
+seafaring man by the name of Leopold," Garstin had replied, after a
+moment of reflection. So Leopold he was named.
+
+Mrs. Garstin was a buxom, unimaginative woman, but she shared to the
+full her husband's horror of the sea. She told me of nights when she
+lay alone listening to the moan of the wind overhead, and seeing the
+column of the Bishop rock upon its base, and of mornings when she
+climbed from the sheltered barracks up the gorse, with her heart
+tugging in her breast, certain, certain that this morning, at least,
+there would be no Bishop lighthouse visible from the top of the
+garrison.
+
+"It seems a sort of insult to the works of God," said she, in a hushed
+voice. "It seems as if it stood up there in God's face and cried, 'You
+can't hurt me!'"
+
+"Yes, most presumptuous and provoking," said Garstin; and so they fell
+to talking of the boy, who, at all events, should fulfil his
+destiny very far inland from the sea. Mrs. Garstin leaned to the
+linen-drapery; Garstin inclined to the free library.
+
+"Well, I will come down to the North Foreland," said I, "and you shall
+tell me which way it is."
+
+"Yes, if--" said Garstin, and stopped.
+
+"Yes, if--" repeated his wife, with a nod of the head.
+
+"Oh! it won't go this winter," said I.
+
+And it didn't. But, on the other hand, Garstin did not go to the North
+Foreland, nor for two years did I hear any more of him. But two years
+later I returned to St. Mary's and walked across the beach of the
+island to the little graveyard by the sea. A new tablet upon the outer
+wall of the church caught and held my eye. I read the inscription and
+remained incredulous. For the Bishop still stood. But the letters were
+there engraved upon the plate, and as I read them again, the futility
+of Garstin's fears was enforced upon me with a singular pathos.
+
+For the Bishop still stood and Garstin had died on the Christmas Eve
+of that last year which he was to spend upon rock lighthouses. Of how
+he died the tablet gave a hint, but no more than a hint. There were
+four words inscribed underneath his name:
+
+  "And he was not."
+
+I walked back to Hugh Town, wondering at the tragedy which those four
+words half hid and half revealed, and remembering that the tide runs
+seven miles an hour past the Bishop, with many eddies and whirlpools.
+Almost unconsciously I went up the hill above Hugh Town and came to
+the signal station on the top of the garrison. And so occupied was I
+with my recollections of Garstin that it did not strike me as strange
+that I should find Mrs. Garstin standing now where he had stood and
+looking out to the Bishop as he was used to look.
+
+"I had not heard," I said to her.
+
+"No?" she returned simply, and again turned her eyes seawards. It was
+late on a midsummer afternoon. The sun hung a foot or so above the
+water, a huge ball of dull red fire, and from St. Mary's out to the
+horizon's rim the sea stretched a rippling lagoon of the colour of
+claret. Over the whole expanse there was but one boat visible, a
+lugger, between Sennen and St. Agnes, beating homewards against a
+light wind.
+
+"It was a storm, I suppose," said I. "A storm out of the west?"
+
+"No. There was no wind, but--there was a haze, and it was growing
+dark." Mrs. Garstin spoke in a peculiar tone of resignation, with a
+yearning glance towards the Bishop as I thought, towards the lugger as
+I know. But even then I was sure that those last words: "There was a
+haze and it was growing dark," concealed the heart of her distress.
+She explained the inscription upon the tablet, while the lugger tacked
+towards St. Mary's, and while I gradually began to wonder what still
+kept her on the island.
+
+At four o'clock on the afternoon of that Christmas Eve, the lighthouse
+on St. Agnes' Island showed its lamps; five minutes later the red
+beams struck out from Round Island to the north; but to the west on
+the Bishop all was dark. The haze thickened, and night came on; still
+there was no flash from the Bishop, and the islands wondered. Half an
+hour passed; there was still darkness in the west, and the islands
+became alarmed. The Trinity Brethren subsidise a St. Agnes' lugger to
+serve the Bishop, and this boat was got ready. At a quarter to five
+suddenly the Bishop light shot through the gloom, but immediately
+after a shutter was interposed quickly some half-a-dozen times. It was
+the signal of distress, and the lugger worked out to the Bishop with
+the tide. Of the three keepers there were now only two.
+
+It appeared from their account that Garstin took the middle day watch,
+that they themselves were asleep, and that Garstin should have roused
+them to light the lamps at a quarter to four. They woke of their own
+accord in the dark, and at once believed they had slept into the
+night. The clock showed them it was half-past four. They mounted to
+the lantern room, and nowhere was there any sign of Garstin. They lit
+the lamps. The first thing they saw was the log. It was open and the
+last entry was written in Garstin's hand and was timed 3.40 P.M. It
+mentioned a ketch reaching northwards. The two men descended the
+winding-stairs, and the cold air breathed upon their faces. The brass
+door at the foot of the stairs stood open. From that door thirty feet
+of gun-metal rungs let in to the outside of the lighthouse lead down
+to the set-off, which is a granite rim less than a yard wide, and
+unprotected by any rail. They shouted downwards from the doorway,
+and received no answer. They descended to the set-off, and again no
+Garstin, not even his cap. He was not.
+
+Garstin had entered up the log, had climbed down to the set-off for
+five minutes of fresh air, and somehow had slipped, though the wind
+was light and the sea whispering. But the whispering sea ran seven
+miles an hour past the Bishop.
+
+This was Mrs. Garstin's story and it left me still wondering why she
+lived on at St. Mary's. I asked after her son.
+
+"How is Leopold? What is he--a linen-draper?" She shaded her eyes with
+her hand and said:
+
+"That's the St. Agnes' lugger from the Bishop, and if we go down to
+the pier now we shall meet it."
+
+We walked down to the pier. The first person to step on shore was
+Leopold, with the Trinity House buttons on his pilot coat.
+
+"He's the third hand on the Bishop now," said Mrs. Garstin. "You are
+surprised?" She sent Leopold into Hugh Town upon an errand, and as we
+walked back up the hill she said: "Did you notice a grave underneath
+John's tablet?"
+
+"No," said I.
+
+"I told you there was a mention in the log of a ketch."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The ketch went ashore on the Crebinachs at half-past four on that
+Christmas Eve. One man jumped for the rocks when the ketch struck, and
+was drowned. The rest were brought off by the lugger. But one man was
+drowned."
+
+"He drowned because he jumped," said I.
+
+"He drowned because my man hadn't lit the Bishop light," said she,
+brushing my sophistry aside. "So I gave my boy in his place."
+
+And now I knew why those words--"There was a haze and it was growing
+dark"--held the heart of her distress.
+
+"And if the Bishop goes next winter," she continued, "why, it will
+just be a life for a life;" and she choked down a sob as a young voice
+hailed us from behind.
+
+But the Bishop still stands in the Atlantic, and Leopold, now the
+second hand, explains to the Margate trippers the wonders of the North
+Foreland lights.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRUISE OF THE "WILLING MIND."
+
+
+The cruise happened before the steam-trawler ousted the smack from the
+North Sea. A few newspapers recorded it in half-a-dozen lines of
+small print which nobody read. But it became and--though nowadays the
+_Willing Mind_ rots from month to month by the quay--remains staple
+talk at Gorleston ale-houses on winter nights.
+
+The crew consisted of Weeks, three fairly competent hands, and a
+baker's assistant, when the _Willing Mind_ slipped out of Yarmouth.
+Alexander Duncan, the photographer from Derby, joined the smack
+afterwards under peculiar circumstances. Duncan was a timid person,
+but aware of his timidity. He was quite clear that his paramount
+business was to be a man; and he was equally clear that he was not
+successful in his paramount business. Meanwhile he pretended to be,
+hoping that on some miraculous day a sudden test would prove the straw
+man he was to have become real flesh and blood. A visit to a surgeon
+and the flick of a knife quite shattered that illusion. He went
+down to Yarmouth afterwards, fairly disheartened. The test had been
+applied, and he had failed.
+
+Now, Weeks was a particular friend of Duncan's. They had chummed
+together on Gorleston Quay some years before, perhaps because they
+were so dissimilar. Weeks had taught Duncan to sail a boat, and had
+once or twice taken him for a short trip on his smack; so that the
+first thing that Duncan did on his arrival at Yarmouth was to take the
+tram to Gorleston and to make inquiries.
+
+A fisherman lounging against a winch replied to them---
+
+"If Weeks is a friend o' yours I should get used to missin' 'im, as I
+tell his wife."
+
+There was at that time an ingenious system by which the skipper might
+buy his smack from the owner on the instalment plan--as people buy
+their furniture--only with a difference: for people sometimes get
+their furniture. The instalments had to be completed within a certain
+period. The skipper could do it--he could just do it; but he couldn't
+do it without running up one little bill here for stores, and another
+little bill there for sail-mending. The owner worked in with the
+sail-maker, and just as the skipper was putting out to earn his last
+instalment, he would find the bailiffs on board, his cruise would be
+delayed, he would be, consequently, behindhand with his instalment and
+back would go the smack to the owner with a present of four-fifths of
+its price. Weeks had to pay two hundred pounds, and had eight weeks to
+earn it in. But he got the straight tip that his sail-maker would stop
+him; and getting together any sort of crew he could, he slipped out at
+night with half his stores.
+
+"Now the No'th Sea," concluded the fisherman, "in November and
+December ain't a bobby's job."
+
+Duncan walked forward to the pier-head. He looked out at a grey
+tumbled sky shutting down on a grey tumbled sea. There were flecks of
+white cloud in the sky, flecks of white breakers on the sea, and it
+was all most dreary. He stood at the end of the jetty, and his great
+possibility came out of the grey to him. Weeks was shorthanded.
+Cribbed within a few feet of the smack's deck, there would be no
+chance for any man to shirk. Duncan acted on the impulse. He bought a
+fisherman's outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage
+the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went
+throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green
+globes of the Mouse. The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him
+good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o'clock the next night
+far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on
+the Dogger.
+
+The _Willing Mind's_ boat came aboard the next morning and Captain
+Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had
+learnt that the smack was shorthanded.
+
+"I can't put you ashore in Denmark," said Weeks knowingly. "There'll
+be seven weeks, it's true, for things to blow over; but I'll have to
+take you back to Yarmouth. And I can't afford a passenger. If you
+come, you come as a hand. I mean to own my smack at the end of this
+voyage."
+
+Duncan climbed after him into the boat. The _Willing Mind_ had now
+six for her crew, Weeks; his son Willie, a lad of sixteen; Upton,
+the first hand; Deakin, the decky; Rall, the baker's assistant, and
+Alexander Duncan. And of these six four were almost competent. Deakin,
+it is true, was making his second voyage; but Willie Weeks, though
+young, had begun early; and Upton, a man of forty, knew the banks and
+currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks.
+
+"It's all right," said the skipper, "if the weather holds." And for
+a month the weather did hold, and the catches were good, and Duncan
+learned a great deal. He learnt how to keep a night-watch from
+midnight till eight in the morning, and then stay on deck till noon;
+how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel, and how
+to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to
+lee; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it; to gauge the
+leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in
+the compass; above all, he learnt to love the boat like a live thing,
+as a man loves his horse, and to want every scanty inch of brass on
+her to shine.
+
+But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea. He gazed out
+at night across the rippling starlit water, and the smacks nestling
+upon it, and asked of his God: "Is this all?" And his God answered
+him.
+
+The beginning of it was the sudden looming of ships upon the horizon,
+very clear, till they looked like carved toys. The skipper got out his
+accounts and totted up his catches, and the prices they had fetched
+in Billingsgate Market. Then he went on deck and watched the sun set.
+There were no cloud-banks in the west, and he shook his head.
+
+"It'll blow a bit from the east before morning," said he, and he
+tapped on the barometer. Then he returned to his accounts and added
+them up again. After a little he looked up, and saw the first hand
+watching him with comprehension.
+
+"Two or three really good hauls would do the trick," suggested Weeks.
+
+The first hand nodded. "If it was my boat I should chance it to-morrow
+before the weather blows up."
+
+Weeks drummed his fists on the table and agreed.
+
+On the morrow the Admiral headed north for the Great Fisher Bank, and
+the fleet followed, with the exception of the _Willing Mind_. The
+_Willing Mind_ lagged along in the rear without her topsails till
+about half-past two in the afternoon, when Captain Weeks became
+suddenly alert. He bore away till he was right before the wind,
+hoisted every scrap of sail he could carry, rigged out a spinnaker
+with his balloon fore-sail, and made a clean run for the coast of
+Denmark. Deakin explained the manoeuvre to Duncan. "The old man's
+goin' poachin'. He's after soles."
+
+"Keep a look-out, lads!" cried Weeks. "It's not the Danish gun-boat
+I'm afraid of; it's the fatherly English cruiser a-turning of us
+back."
+
+Darkness, however, found them unmolested. They crossed the three-mile
+limit at eight o'clock, and crept close in under the Danish headlands
+without a glimmer of light showing.
+
+"I want all hands all night," said Weeks; "and there's a couple of
+pounds for him as first see the bogey-man."
+
+"Meaning the Danish gun-boat," explained Deakin.
+
+The trawl was down before nine. The skipper stood by his lead. Upton
+took the wheel, and all night they trawled in the shallows, bumping on
+the grounds, with a sharp eye for the Danish gun-boat. They hauled in
+at twelve and again at three and again at six, and they had just got
+their last catch on deck when Duncan saw by the first grey of the
+morning a dun-coloured trail of smoke hanging over a projecting knoll.
+
+"There she is!" he cried.
+
+"Yes, that's the gun-boat," answered Weeks. "We can laugh at her with
+this wind."
+
+He put his smack about, and before the gun-boat puffed round the
+headland, three miles away, was reaching northwards with his sails
+free. He rejoined the fleet that afternoon. "Fifty-two boxes of
+soles!" said Weeks. "And every one of them worth two-pound-ten in
+Billingsgate Market. This smack's mine!" and he stamped on the deck in
+all the pride of ownership. "We'll take a reef in," he added. "There's
+a no'th-easterly gale blowin' up and I don't know anything worse in
+the No'th Sea. The sea piles in upon you from Newfoundland, piles in
+till it strikes the banks. Then it breaks. You were right, Upton;
+we'll be lying hove-to in the morning."
+
+They were lying hove-to before the morning. Duncan, tossing about
+in his canvas cot, heard the skipper stamping overhead, and in an
+interval of the wind caught a snatch of song bawled out in a high
+voice. The song was not reassuring, for the two lines which Duncan
+caught ran as follows--
+
+  You never can tell when your death-bells are ringing,
+  Your never can know when you're going to die.
+
+Duncan tumbled on to the floor, fell about the cabin as he pulled
+on his sea-boots and climbed up the companion. He clung to the
+mizzen-runners in a night of extraordinary blackness. To port and to
+starboard the lights of the smacks rose on the crests and sank in the
+troughs, with such violence they had the air of being tossed up into
+the sky and then extinguished in the water; while all round him there
+flashed little points of white which suddenly lengthened out into
+a horizontal line. There was one quite close to the quarter of the
+_Willing Mind_. It stretched about the height of the gaff in a line of
+white. The line suddenly descended towards him and became a sheet; and
+then a voice bawled, "Water! Jump! Down the companion! Jump!"
+
+There was a scamper of heavy boots, and a roar of water plunging over
+the bulwarks, as though so many loads of wood had been dropped on the
+deck. Duncan jumped for the cabin. Weeks and the mate jumped the next
+second and the water sluiced down after them, put out the fire, and
+washed them, choking and wrestling, about on the cabin floor. Weeks
+was the first to disentangle himself, and he turned fiercely on
+Duncan.
+
+"What were you doing on deck? Upton and I keep the watch to-night. You
+stay below, and, by God, I'll see you do it! I have fifty-two boxes of
+soles to put aboard the fish-cutter in the morning, and I'm not going
+to lose lives before I do that! This smack's mine!"
+
+Captain Weeks was transformed into a savage animal fighting for his
+own. All night he and the mate stood on the deck and plunged down the
+open companion with a torrent of water to hurry them. All night Duncan
+lay in his bunk listening to the bellowing of the wind, the great
+thuds of solid green wave on the deck, the horrid rush and roaring of
+the seas as they broke loose to leeward from under the smack's keel.
+And he listened to something more--the whimpering of the baker's
+assistant in the next bunk. "Three inches of deck! What's the use
+of it! Lord ha' mercy on me, what's the use of it? No more than an
+eggshell! We'll be broken in afore morning, broken in like a man's
+skull under a bludgeon.... I'm no sailor, I'm not; I'm a baker. It
+isn't right I should die at sea!"
+
+Duncan stopped his ears, and thought of the journey some one would
+have to make to the fish-cutter in the morning. There were fifty-two
+boxes of soles to be put aboard.
+
+He remembered the waves and the swirl of foam upon their crests and
+the wind. Two men would be needed to row the boat, and the boat must
+make three trips. The skipper and the first hand had been on deck all
+night. There remained four, or rather three, for the baker's assistant
+had ceased to count--Willie Weeks, Deakin, and himself, not a great
+number to choose from. He felt that he was within an ace of a panic,
+and not so far, after all, from that whimperer his neighbour. Two men
+to row the boat--two men! His hands clutched at the iron bar of his
+hammock; he closed his eyes tight; but the words were thundered out at
+him overhead, in the whistle of the wind, and slashed at him by the
+water against the planks at his side. He found that his lips were
+framing excuses.
+
+Duncan was on deck when the morning broke. It broke extraordinarily
+slowly, a niggardly filtering of grey, sad light from the under edge
+of the sea. The bare topmasts of the smacks showed one after the
+other. Duncan watched each boat as it came into view with a keen
+suspense. This was a ketch, and that, and that other, for there was
+the peak of its reefed mainsail just visible, like a bird's wing, and
+at last he saw it--the fish-cutter--lurching and rolling in the very
+middle of the fleet, whither she had crept up in the night. He stared
+at it; his belly was pinched with fear as a starveling's with
+hunger; and yet he was conscious that, in a way, he would have been
+disappointed if it had not been there.
+
+"No other smack is shipping its fish," quavered a voice at his elbow.
+It was the voice of the baker's assistant.
+
+"But this smack is," replied Weeks, and he set his mouth hard. "And,
+what's more, my Willie is taking it aboard. Now, who'll go with
+Willie?"
+
+"I will."
+
+Weeks swung round on Duncan and stared at him. Then he stared out to
+sea. Then he stared again at Duncan.
+
+"You?"
+
+"When I shipped as a hand on the _Willing Mind_, I took all a hand's
+risks."
+
+"And brought the willing mind," said Weeks with a smile, "Go, then!
+Some one must go. Get the boat tackle ready, forward. Here, Willie,
+put your life-belt on. You, too, Duncan, though God knows life-belts
+won't be of no manner of use; but they'll save your insurance. Steady
+with the punt there! If it slips inboard off the rail there will be a
+broken back! And, Willie, don't get under the cutter's counter. She'll
+come atop of you and smash you like an egg. I'll drop you as close as
+I can to windward, and pick you up as close as I can to leeward."
+
+The boat was dropped into the water and loaded up with fish-boxes.
+Duncan and Willie Weeks took their places, and the boat slid away into
+a furrow. Duncan sat in the boat and rowed. Willie Weeks stood in the
+stern, facing him, and rowed and steered.
+
+"Water!" said Willie every now and then, and a wave curled over the
+bows and hit Duncan a stunning blow on the back.
+
+"Row," said Willie, and Duncan rowed and rowed. His hands were ice, he
+sat in water ice-cold, and his body perspired beneath his oil-skins,
+but he rowed. Once, on the crest of a wave, Duncan looked out and saw
+below them the deck of a smack, and the crew looking upwards at them
+as though they were a horserace. "Row!" said Willie Weeks. Once, too,
+at the bottom of a slope down which they had bumped dizzily, Duncan
+again looked out, and saw the spar of a mainmast tossing just over the
+edge of a grey roller. "Row," said Weeks, and a moment later, "Ship
+your oar!" and a rope caught him across the chest.
+
+They were alongside the cutter.
+
+Duncan made fast the rope.
+
+"Push her off!" suddenly cried Willie, and grasped an oar. But he was
+too late. The cutter's bulwarks swung down towards him, disappeared
+under water, caught the punt fairly beneath the keel and scooped it
+clean on to the deck, cargo and crew.
+
+"And this is only the first trip!" said Willie.
+
+The two following trips, however, were made without accident.
+
+"Fifty-two boxes at two-pound-ten," said Weeks, as the boat was swung
+inboard. "That's a hundred and four, and ten two's are twenty, and
+carry two, and ten fives are fifty, and two carried, and twenties into
+that makes twenty-six. One hundred and thirty pounds--this smack's
+mine, every rope on her. I tell you what, Duncan: you've done me a
+good turn to-day, and I'll do you another. I'll land you at Helsund,
+in Denmark, and you can get clear away. All we can do now is to lie
+out this gale."
+
+Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray
+blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog. The heavy bows of
+the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss--the thud of a
+steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves
+raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away
+in a spume of foam from the ship's keel to lee; and the thrumming and
+screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had
+ever imagined. He clung to the stays appalled. This storm was surely
+the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury. There
+seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to
+wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the
+steady volume of the wind.
+
+Captain Weeks, too, had lost all of a sudden all his exhilaration. He
+stood moodily by Duncan's side, his mind evidently labouring like
+his ship. He told Duncan stories which Duncan would rather not have
+listened to, the story of the man who slipped as he stepped from the
+deck into the punt, and weighted by his boots, had sunk down and down
+and down through the clearest, calmest water without a struggle; the
+story of the punt which got its painter under its keel and drowned
+three men; the story of the full-rigged ship which got driven across
+the seven-fathom part of the Dogger--the part that looks like a man's
+leg in the chart--and which was turned upside-down through the bank
+breaking. The skipper and the mate got outside and clung to her
+bottom, and a steam-cutter tried to get them off, but smashed them
+both with her iron counter instead.
+
+"Look!" said Weeks, gloomily pointing his finger. "I don't know why
+that breaker didn't hit us. I don't know what we should have done if
+it had. I can't think why it didn't hit us! Are you saved?"
+
+Duncan was taken aback, and answered vaguely--"I hope so."
+
+"But you must know," said Weeks, perplexed. The wind made a
+theological discussion difficult. Weeks curved his hand into a
+trumpet, and bawled into Duncan's ear: "You are either saved or not
+saved! It's a thing one knows. You must know if you are saved, if
+you've felt the glow and illumination of it." He suddenly broke off
+into a shout of triumph: "But I got my fish on board the cutter. The
+_Willing Mind's_ the on'y boat that did." Then he relapsed again into
+melancholy: "But I'm troubled about the poachin'. The temptation was
+great, but it wasn't right; and I'm not sure but what this storm ain't
+a judgment."
+
+He was silent for a little, and then cheered up. "I tell you what.
+Since we're hove-to, we'll have a prayer-meeting in the cabin to-night
+and smooth things over."
+
+The meeting was held after tea, by the light of a smoking
+paraffin-lamp with a broken chimney. The crew sat round and smoked,
+the companion was open, so that the swish of the water and the man on
+deck alike joined in the hymns. Rail, the baker's assistant, who had
+once been a steady attendant at Revivalist meetings, led off with a
+Moody and Sankey hymn, and the crew followed, bawling at the top pitch
+of their lungs, with now and then some suggestion of a tune. The
+little stuffy cabin rang with the noise. It burst upwards through the
+companion-way, loud and earnest and plaintive, and the winds caught
+it and carried it over the water, a thin and appealing cry. After the
+hymn Weeks prayed aloud, and extempore and most seriously. He
+prayed for each member of the crew by name, one by one, taking the
+opportunity to mention in detail each fault which he had had to
+complain of, and begging that the offender's chastisement might be
+light. Of Duncan he spoke in ambiguous terms.
+
+"O Lord!" he prayed, "a strange gentleman, Mr. Duncan, has come
+amongst us. O Lord! we do not know as much about Mr. Duncan as You do,
+but still bless him, O Lord!" and so he came to himself.
+
+"O Lord! this smack's mine, this little smack labouring in the North
+Sea is mine. Through my poachin' and your lovin' kindness it's mine;
+and, O Lord, see that it don't cost me dear!" And the crew solemnly
+and fervently said "Amen!"
+
+But the smack was to cost him dear. For in the morning Duncan woke to
+find himself alone in the cabin. He thrust his head up the companion,
+and saw Weeks with a very grey face standing by the lashed wheel.
+
+"Halloa!" said Duncan. "Where's the binnacle?"
+
+"Overboard," said Weeks.
+
+Duncan looked round the deck.
+
+"Where's Willie and the crew?"
+
+"Overboard," said Weeks. "All except Rail! He's below deck forward and
+clean daft. Listen and you'll hear 'im. He's singing hymns for those
+in peril on the sea."
+
+Duncan stared in disbelief. The skipper's face drove the disbelief out
+of him.
+
+"Why didn't you wake me?" he asked.
+
+"What's the use? You want all the sleep you can get, because you an'
+me have got to sail my smack into Yarmouth. But I was minded to call
+you, lad," he said, with a sort of cry leaping from his throat. "The
+wave struck us at about twelve, and it's been mighty lonesome on deck
+since with Willie callin' out of the sea. All night he's been callin'
+out of the welter of the sea. Funny that I haven't heard Upton or
+Deakin, but on'y Willie! All night until daybreak he called, first on
+one side of the smack and then on t'other, I don't think I'll tell his
+mother that. An' I don't see how I'm to put you on shore in Denmark,
+after all."
+
+What had happened Duncan put together from the curt utterances of
+Captain Weeks and the crazy lamentations of Rail. Weeks had roused all
+hands except Duncan to take the last reef in. They were forward by the
+mainmast at the time the wave struck them. Weeks himself was on the
+boom, threading the reefing-rope through the eye of the sail. He
+shouted "Water!" and the water came on board, carrying the three men
+aft. Upton was washed over the taffrail. Weeks threw one end of the
+rope down, and Rail and Willie caught it and were swept overboard,
+dragging Weeks from the boom on to the deck and jamming him against
+the bulwarks.
+
+The captain held on to the rope, setting his feet against the side.
+The smack lifted and dropped and tossed, and each movement wrenched
+his arms. He could not reach a cleat. Had he moved he would have been
+jerked overboard.
+
+"I can't hold you both!" he cried, and then, setting his teeth and
+hardening his heart, he addressed his words to his son: "Willie! I
+can't hold you both!" and immediately the weight upon the rope was
+less. With each drop of the stern the rope slackened, and Weeks
+gathered the slack in. He could now afford to move. He made the rope
+fast and hauled the one survivor on deck. He looked at him for a
+moment. "Thank God, it's not my son!" he had the courage to say.
+
+"And my heart's broke!" had gasped Rail. "Fair broke." And he had gone
+forward and sung hymns.
+
+They saw little more of Rall. He came aft and fetched his meals away;
+but he was crazed and made a sort of kennel for himself forward, and
+the two men left on the smack had enough upon their hands to hinder
+them from waiting on him. The gale showed no sign of abatement; the
+fleet was scattered; no glimpse of the sun was visible at any time;
+and the compass was somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
+
+"We may be making a bit of headway no'th, or a bit of leeway west,"
+said Weeks, "or we may be doing a sternboard. All that I'm sure of
+is that you and me are one day going to open Gorleston Harbour. This
+smack's cost me too dear for me to lose her now. Lucky there's the
+tell-tale compass in the cabin to show us the wind hasn't shifted."
+
+All the energy of the man was concentrated upon this wrestle with the
+gale for the ownership of the _Willing Mind_; and he imparted his
+energy to his companion. They lived upon deck, wet and starved and
+perishing with the cold--the cold of December in the North Sea, when
+the spray cuts the face like a whip-cord. They ate by snatches when
+they could, which was seldom; and they slept by snatches when they
+could, which was even less often. And at the end of the fourth day
+there came a blinding fall of snow and sleet, which drifted down
+the companion, sheeted the ropes with ice, and hung the yards with
+icicles, and which made every inch of brass a searing-iron and every
+yard of the deck a danger to the foot.
+
+It was when this storm began to fall that Weeks grasped Duncan
+fiercely by the shoulder.
+
+"What is it you did on land?" he cried. "Confess it, man! There may be
+some chance for us if you go down on your knees and confess it."
+
+Duncan turned as fiercely upon Weeks. Both men were overstrained with
+want of food and sleep.
+
+"I'm not your Jonah--don't fancy it! I did nothing on land!"
+
+"Then what did you come out for?"
+
+"What did you? To fight and wrestle for your ship, eh? Well, I came
+out to fight and wrestle for my immortal soul, and let it go at that!"
+
+Weeks turned away, and as he turned, slipped on the frozen deck. A
+lurch of the smack sent him sliding into the rudder-chains, where he
+lay. Once he tried to rise, and fell back. Duncan hauled himself along
+the bulwarks to him.
+
+"Hurt?"
+
+"Leg broke. Get me down into the cabin. Lucky there's the tell-tale.
+We'll get the _Willing Mind_ berthed by the quay, see if we don't."
+That was still his one thought, his one belief.
+
+Duncan hitched a rope round Weeks, underneath his arms, and lowered
+him as gently as he could down the companion.
+
+"Lift me on to the table so that my head's just beneath the compass!
+Right! Now take a turn with the rope underneath the table, or I'll
+roll off. Push an oily under my head, and then go for'ard and see if
+you can find a fish-box. Take a look that the wheel's fast."
+
+It seemed to Duncan that the last chance was gone. There was just one
+inexperienced amateur to change the sails and steer a seventy-ton
+ketch across the North Sea into Yarmouth Roads. He said nothing,
+however, of his despair to the indomitable man upon the table, and
+went forward in search of a fish-box. He split up the sides into rough
+splints and came aft with them.
+
+"Thank 'ee, lad," said Weeks. "Just cut my boot away, and fix it up
+best you can."
+
+The tossing of the smack made the operation difficult and long. Weeks,
+however, never uttered a groan. Only Duncan once looked up, and
+said--"Halloa! You've hurt your face too. There's blood on your chin!"
+
+"That's all right!" said Weeks, with an effort. "I reckon I've just
+bit through my lip."
+
+Duncan stopped his work.
+
+"You've got a medicine-chest, skipper, with some laudanum in it--?"
+
+"Daren't!" replied Weeks. "There's on'y you and me to work the ship.
+Fix up the job quick as you can, and I'll have a drink of Friar's
+Balsam afterwards. Seems to me the gale's blowing itself out, and if
+on'y the wind holds in the same quarter--" And thereupon he fainted.
+
+Duncan bandaged up the leg, got Weeks round, gave him a drink of
+Friar's Balsam, set the teapot within his reach, and went on deck. The
+wind was going down; the air was clearer of foam. He tallowed the lead
+and heaved it, and brought it down to Weeks. Weeks looked at the sand
+stuck on the tallow and tasted it, and seemed pleased.
+
+"This gives me my longitude," said he, "but not my latitude, worse
+luck. Still, we'll manage it. You'd better get our dinner now; any odd
+thing in the way of biscuits or a bit of cold fish will do, and then I
+think we'll be able to run."
+
+After dinner Duncan said: "I'll put her about now."
+
+"No; wear her and let her jibe," said Weeks, "then you'll on'y have to
+ease your sheets."
+
+Duncan stood at the wheel, while Weeks, with the compass swinging
+above his head, shouted directions through the companion. They sailed
+the boat all that night with the wind on her quarter, and at daybreak
+Duncan brought her to and heaved his lead again. There was rough sand
+with blackish specks upon the tallow, and Weeks, when he saw it,
+forgot his broken leg.
+
+"My word," he cried, "we've hit the Fisher Bank! You'd best lash the
+wheel, get our breakfast, and take a spell of sleep on deck. Tie a
+string to your finger and pass it down to me, so that I can wake you
+up."
+
+Weeks waked him up at ten o'clock, and they ran southwest with a
+steady wind till six, when Weeks shouted--
+
+"Take another cast with your lead."
+
+The sand upon the tallow was white like salt.
+
+"Yes," said Weeks; "I thought we was hereabouts. We're on the edge of
+the Dogger, and we'll be in Yarmouth by the morning." And all through
+the night the orders came thick and fast from the cabin. Weeks was on
+his own ground; he had no longer any need of the lead; he seemed no
+longer to need his eyes; he felt his way across the currents from the
+Dogger to the English coast; and at daybreak he shouted--
+
+"Can you see land?"
+
+"There's a mist."
+
+"Lie to, then, till the sun's up."
+
+Duncan lay the boat to for a couple of hours, till the mist was tinged
+with gold and the ball of the sun showed red on his starboard quarter.
+The mist sank, the brown sails of a smack thrust upwards through it;
+coastwards it shifted and thinned and thickened, as though cunningly
+to excite expectation as to what it hid. Again Weeks called out--
+
+"See anything?"
+
+"Yes," said Duncan, in a perplexed voice. "I see something. Looks like
+a sort of mediaeval castle on a rock."
+
+A shout of laughter answered him.
+
+"That's the Gorleston Hotel. The harbour-mouth's just beneath. We've
+hit it fine," and while he spoke the mist swept clear, and the long,
+treeless esplanade of Yarmouth lay there a couple of miles from
+Duncan's eyes, glistening and gilded in the sun like a row of dolls'
+houses.
+
+"Haul in your sheets a bit," said Weeks. "Keep no'th of the hotel, for
+the tide'll set you up and we'll sail her in without dawdlin' behind
+a tug. Get your mainsail down as best you can before you make the
+entrance."
+
+Half an hour afterwards the smack sailed between the pier-heads.
+
+"Who are you?" cried the harbour-master.
+
+"The _Willing Mind_."
+
+"The _Willing Mind's_ reported lost with all hands."
+
+"Well, here's the _Willing Mind_," said Duncan, "and here's one of the
+hands."
+
+The irrepressible voice bawled up the companion to complete the
+sentence--
+
+"And the owner's reposin' in his cabin." But in a lower key he added
+words for his own ears. "There's the old woman to meet. Lord! but the
+_Willing Mind_ has cost me dear."
+
+
+
+
+HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG.
+
+
+Norris wanted a holiday. He stood in the marketplace looking
+southwards to the chimney-stacks, and dilating upon the subject to
+three of his friends. He was sick of the Stock Exchange, the men, the
+women, the drinks, the dances--everything. He was as indifferent to
+the price of shares as to the rise and fall of the quicksilver in his
+barometer; he neither desired to go in on the ground floor nor to come
+out in the attics. He simply wanted to get clean away. Besides he
+foresaw a slump, and he would be actually saving money on the veld. At
+this point Teddy Isaacs strolled up and interrupted the oration.
+
+"Where are you off to, then?"
+
+"Manicaland," answered Norris.
+
+"Oh! You had better bring Barrington back."
+
+Teddy Isaacs was a fresh comer to the Rand, and knew no better.
+Barrington meant to him nothing more than the name of a man who had
+been lost twelve months before on the eastern borders of Mashonaland.
+But he saw three pairs of eyebrows lift simultaneously, and heard
+three simultaneous outbursts on the latest Uitlander grievance.
+However, Norris answered him quietly enough.
+
+"Yes, if I come across Barrington, I'll bring him back." He nodded his
+head once or twice and smiled. "You may make sure of that," he added,
+and turned away from the group.
+
+Isaacs gathered that there had been trouble between Barrington
+and Morris, and applied to his companions for information. The
+commencement of the trouble, he was told, dated back to the time when
+the two men were ostrich-farming side by side, close to Port Elizabeth
+in the Cape Colony. Norris owned a wife; Barrington did not. The story
+was sufficiently ugly as Johannesburg was accustomed to relate it, but
+upon this occasion Teddy Isaacs was allowed to infer the details. He
+was merely put in possession of the more immediate facts. Barrington
+had left the Cape Colony in a hurry, and coming north to the Transvaal
+when Johannesburg was as yet in its brief infancy, had prospered
+exceedingly. Meanwhile, Norris, as the ostrich industry declined, had
+gone from worse to worse, and finally he too drifted to Johannesburg
+with the rest of the flotsam of South Africa. He came to the town
+alone, and met Barrington one morning eye to eye on the Stock
+Exchange. A certain amount of natural disappointment was expressed
+when the pair were seen to separate without hostilities; but it was
+subsequently remarked that they were fighting out their duel, though
+not in the conventional way. They fought with shares, and Barrington
+won. He had the clearer head, and besides, Norris didn't need much
+ruining; Barrington could see to that in his spare time. It was, in
+fact, as though Norris stood up with a derringer to face a machine
+gun. His turn, however, had come after Barrington's disappearance, and
+he was now able to contemplate an expedition into Manicaland without
+reckoning up his pass-book.
+
+He bought a buck-wagon with a tent covering over the hinder part,
+provisions sufficient for six months, a span of oxen, a couple of
+horses salted for the thickhead sickness, hired a Griqua lad as
+wagon-driver, and half a dozen Matabele boys who were waiting for a
+chance to return, and started northeastward.
+
+From Johannesburg he travelled to Makoni's town, near the Zimbabwe
+ruins, and with half a dozen brass rings and an empty cartridge case
+hired a Ma-ongwi boy, who had been up to the Mashonaland plateau
+before. The lad guided him to the head waters of the Inyazuri, and
+there Norris fenced in his camp, in a grass country fairly wooded, and
+studded with gigantic blocks of granite.
+
+The Ma-ongwi boy chose the site, fifty yards west of an ant-heap, and
+about a quarter of a mile from a forest of machabel. He had camped on
+the spot before, he said.
+
+"When?" asked Norris.
+
+"Twice," replied the boy. "Three years ago and last year."
+
+"Last year?" Norris looked up with a start of surprise. "You were up
+here last year?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+For a moment or two Norris puffed at his pipe, then he asked slowly--
+
+"Who with?"
+
+"Mr. Barrington," the boy told him, and added, "It is his wagon-track
+which we have been following."
+
+Norris rose from the ground, and walked straight ahead for the
+distance of a hundred yards until he reached a jasmine bush, which
+stood in a bee-line with the opening of his camp fence. Thence he
+moved round in a semicircle until he came upon a wagon-track in the
+rear of the camp, and, after pausing there, he went forward again, and
+completed the circle. He returned to his wagon chuckling. Barrington,
+he remembered, had been lost while travelling northwards to the
+Zambesie; but the track stopped here. There was not a trace of it to
+the north or the east or the west. It was evident that the boy had
+chosen Barrington's last camping-ground as the site for his own, and
+he discovered a comforting irony in the fact. He felt that he was
+standing in Barrington's shoes.
+
+That night, as he was smoking by the fire, he called out to the
+Ma-ongwi boy. The lad came forward from his hut behind the wagon.
+
+"Tell me how you lost him," said Norris.
+
+"He rode that way alone after a sable antelope." The boy pointed an
+arm to the southwest. "The beast was wounded, and we followed its
+blood-spoor. We found Mr. Barrington's horse gored by the antelope's
+horns. He himself had gone forward on foot. We tracked him to a little
+stream, but the opposite bank was trampled, and we lost all sign of
+him." This is what the boy said though his language is translated.
+
+Norris remained upon this encampment for a fortnight. Blue
+wildebeests, koodoos, elands, and gems-bok were plentiful, and once he
+got a shot at a wart-hog boar. At the end of the fortnight he walked
+round the ant-heap early one morning, and of a sudden plumped down
+full length in the grass. Straight in front of him he saw a herd of
+buffaloes moving in his direction down a glade of the forest a quarter
+of a mile away. Norris cast a glance backwards; the camp was hidden
+from the herd by the intervening ant-heap. He looked again towards the
+forest; the buffaloes advanced slowly, pasturing as they moved. Norris
+crawled behind the ant-heap on his hands and knees, ran thence into
+the camp, buckled on a belt of cartridges, snatched up a 450-bore
+Metford rifle, and got back to his position just as the first of the
+herd stepped into the open. It turned to the right along the edge of
+the wood, and the others followed in file. Norris wriggled forward
+through the grass, and selecting a fat bull in the centre of the line,
+aimed behind its shoulder and fired. The herd stampeded into the
+forest, the bull fell in its tracks.
+
+Norris sprang forward with a shout; but he had not run more than
+thirty yards before the bull began to kick. It kneeled upon its
+forelegs, rose thence on to its hind legs, and finally stood up.
+Norris guessed what had happened. He had hit the bull in the neck
+instead of behind the shoulders, and had broken no bones. He fired
+his second barrel as the brute streamed away in an oblique line
+southeastwards from the wood, and missed. Then he ran back to camp,
+slapped a bridle on to his swiftest horse, and without waiting to
+saddle it, sprang on its back and galloped in pursuit. He rode as it
+were along the base of a triangle, whereas the bull galloped from the
+apex, and since his breakfast was getting hot behind him, he wished
+to make that triangle an isosceles. So he jammed his heels into his
+horse's ribs, and was fast drawing within easy range, when the buffalo
+got his wind and swerved on the instant into a diagonal course due
+southwest.
+
+The manoeuvre left Norris directly behind his quarry, and with a long,
+stern chase in prospect. However, his blood was up, and he held on to
+wear the beast down. He forgot his breakfast; he took no more than a
+casual notice of the direction he was following; he simply braced his
+knees in a closer grip, while the distorted shadows of himself and the
+horse lengthened and thinned along the ground as the sun rose over his
+right shoulder.
+
+Suddenly the buffalo disappeared in a dip of the veld, and a few
+moments later came again into view a good hundred yards further to the
+south. Norris pulled his left rein, and made for the exact spot at
+which the bull had reappeared. He found himself on the edge of a tiny
+cliff which dropped twenty feet in a sheer fall to a little stream,
+and he was compelled to ride along the bank until he reached the
+incline which the buffalo had descended. He forded the stream,
+galloped under the opposite bank across a patch of ground which had
+been trampled into mud by the hoofs of beasts coming here to water,
+and mounted again to the open. The bull had gained a quarter of a
+mile's grace from his mistake, and was heading straight for a huge
+cone of granite.
+
+Norris recognised the cone. It towered up from the veld, its cliffs
+seamed into gullies by the rain-wash of ages, and he had used it more
+than once as a landmark during the last fortnight, for it rose due
+southwest of his camp.
+
+He watched the bull approach the cone and vanish into one of the
+gullies. It did not reappear, and he rode forward, keeping a close eye
+upon the gully. As he came opposite to it, however, he saw through the
+opening a vista of green trees flashing in the sunlight. He turned his
+horse through the passage, and reined up in a granite amphitheatre.
+The floor seemed about half a mile in diameter; it was broken into
+hillocks, and strewn with patches of a dense undergrowth, while here
+and there a big tree grew. The walls, which converged slightly towards
+an open top, were robed from summit to base with wild flowers, so that
+the whole circumference of the cone was one blaze of colour.
+
+Norris hitched forward and reloaded the rifle. Then he advanced slowly
+between the bushes on the alert for a charge from the wounded bull;
+but nothing stirred. No sound came to his ears except the soft padding
+noise of his horse's hoofs upon the turf. There was not a crackle
+of the brushwood, and the trees seemed carved out of metal. He rode
+through absolute silence in a suspension of all movement. Once his
+horse trod upon a bough, and the snapping of the twigs sounded like so
+many cracks of a pistol. At first the silence struck Norris as merely
+curious, a little later as very lonesome. Once or twice he stopped his
+horse with a sudden jerk of the reins, and sat crouched forwards with
+his neck outstretched, listening. Once or twice he cast a quick,
+furtive glance over his shoulder to make certain that no one stood
+between himself and the entrance to the hollow. He forgot the buffalo;
+he caught himself labouring his breath, and found it necessary to
+elaborately explain the circumstance in his thoughts on the ground of
+heat.
+
+The next moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse
+for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat
+was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun
+poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in
+blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow,
+every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs
+seemed a mouth breathing heat. He became possessed with a parching
+thirst, and he felt his tongue heavy and fibrous like a dried fig.
+There was, however, one obstacle which prevented him from acting upon
+his impulse, and that obstacle was his sense of shame. It was not so
+much that he thought it cowardly to give up the chase and quietly
+return, but he knew that the second after he had given way, he would
+be galloping madly towards the entrance in no child's panic of terror.
+He finally compromised matters by dropping the reins upon his horse's
+neck in the unformulated hope that the animal would turn of its own
+accord; but the horse kept straight on.
+
+As Norris drew towards the innermost wall of granite, there was a
+quick rustle all across its face as though the screen of shrubs and
+flowers had been fluttered by a draught of wind. Norris drew himself
+erect with a distinct appearance of relief, loosened the clench of his
+fingers upon his rifle, and began once more to search the bushes for
+the buffalo.
+
+For a moment his attention was arrested by a queer object lying upon
+the ground to his left. It was in shape something like a melon, but
+bigger, and it seemed to be plastered over with a black mould. Norris
+rode by it, turned a corner, and then with a gasp reined back his
+horse upon its haunches. Straight in front of him a broken rifle lay
+across the path.
+
+Norris stood still, and stared at it stupidly. Some vague recollection
+floated elusively through his brain. He tried to grasp and fix it
+clearly in his mind. It was a recollection of something which had
+happened a long while ago, in England, when he was at school.
+Suddenly, he remembered. It was not something which had happened, but
+something he had read under the great elm trees in the close. It was
+that passage in _Robinson Crusoe_ which tells of the naked footprint
+in the sand.
+
+Norris dismounted, and stooped to lift the rifle; but all at once he
+straightened himself, and swung round with his arms guarding his head.
+There was no one, however, behind him, and he gave a little quavering
+laugh, and picked up the rifle. It was a heavy lo-bore Holland, a
+Holland with a single barrel, and that barrel was twisted like a
+corkscrew. The lock had been wrenched off, and there were marks upon
+the stock--marks of teeth, and other queer, unintelligible marks as
+well.
+
+Norris held the rifle in his hands, gazing vacantly straight ahead. He
+was thinking of the direction in which he had come, southwest, and of
+the stream which he had crossed, and of the patch of trampled mud,
+where track obliterated track. He dropped the rifle. It rang upon a
+stone, and again the screen of foliage shivered and rustled. Norris,
+however, paid no attention to the movement, but ran back to that
+object which he had passed, and took it in his hands.
+
+It was oval in shape, being slightly broader at one end than the
+other. Norris drew his knife and cleaned the mould from one side
+of it. To the touch of the blade it seemed softer than stone, and
+smoother than wood. "More like bone," he said to himself. In the side
+which he had cleaned, there was a little round hole filled up with
+mould. Norris dug his knife in and scraped round the hole as one
+cleans a caked pipe. He drew out a little cube of mud. There was a
+second corresponding hole on the other side. He turned the narrower
+end of the thing upwards. It was hollow, he saw, but packed full of
+mould, and more deliberately packed, for there were finger-marks in
+the mould. "What an aimless trick!" he muttered vaguely.
+
+He carried the thing back to the rifle, and, comparing them,
+understood those queer marks upon the stock. They were the mark of
+fingers, of human fingers, impressed faintly upon the wood with
+superhuman strength. He was holding the rifle in his hands and looking
+down at it; but he saw below the rifle, and he saw that his knees were
+shaking in a palsy.
+
+On an instant he tossed the rifle away, and laughed to reassure
+himself--laughed out boldly, once, twice; and then he stopped with his
+eyes riveted upon the granite wall. At each laugh that he gave the
+shrubs and flowers rippled, and shook the sunlight from their leaves.
+For the first time he remarked the coincidence as something strange.
+He lifted up his face, but not a breath of air fanned it; he looked
+across the hollow, the trees and bushes stood immobile. He laughed a
+third time, louder than before, and all at once his laughter got hold
+of him; he sent it pealing out hysterically, burst after burst, until
+the hollow seemed brimming with the din of it. His body began to
+twist; he beat time to his laughter with his feet, and then he danced.
+He danced there alone in the African sunlight faster and faster, with
+a mad tossing of his limbs, and with his laughter grown to a yell. And
+as though to keep pace with him, each moment the shiver of the foliage
+increased. Up and down, crosswise and breadthwise, the flowers were
+tossed and flung, while their petals rained down the cliff's face in
+a purple storm. It appeared, indeed, to Norris that the very granite
+walls were moving.
+
+In the midst of his dance he kicked something and stumbled. He
+stopped dead when he saw what that something was. It was the queer,
+mud-plastered object which he had compared with the broken rifle, and
+the sight of it recalled him to his wits. He tucked it hastily beneath
+his jacket, and looked about him for his horse. The horse was standing
+behind him some distance away, and nearer to the cliff. Norris
+snatched up his own rifle, and ran towards it. His hand was on the
+horse's mane, when just above its head he noticed a clean patch of
+granite, and across that space he saw a huge grey baboon leap, and
+then another, and another. He turned about, and looked across to the
+opposite wall, straining his eyes, and a second later to the wall on
+his right. Then he understood; the twisted rifle, the finger marks,
+this thing which he held under his coat, he understood them all. The
+walls of the hollow were alive with baboons, and the baboons were
+making along the cliffs for the entrance.
+
+Norris sprang on to his horse, and kicked and beat it into a gallop.
+He had only to traverse the length of a diameter, he told himself, the
+baboons the circumference of a circle. He had covered three-quarters
+of the distance when he heard a grunt, and from a bush fifty yards
+ahead the buffalo sprang out and came charging down at him.
+
+Norris gave one scream of terror, and with that his nerves steadied
+themselves. He knew that it was no use firing at the front of a
+buffalo's head when the beast was charging. He pulled a rein and
+swerved to the left; the bull made a corresponding turn. A moment
+afterwards Norris swerved back into his former course, and shot just
+past the bull's flanks. He made no attempt to shoot them; he held his
+rifle ready in his hands, and looked forwards. When he was fifty yards
+from the passage he saw the first baboon perched upon a shoulder of
+rock above the entrance. He lifted his rifle, and fired at a venture.
+He saw the brute's arms wave in the air, and heard a dull thud on the
+ground behind him as he drove through the gully and out on to the open
+veld.
+
+The next morning Norris broke up his camp, and started homewards for
+Johannesburg. He went down to the Stock Exchange on the day of his
+arrival, and chanced upon Teddy Isaacs.
+
+"What's that?" asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.
+
+"That?" replied Norris, unfastening the buttons. "I told you I would
+bring back Barrington if I found him," and he trundled a scoured and
+polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.
+
+
+
+
+HATTERAS.
+
+
+The story was told to us by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton
+cutter one night when we lay anchored in Helford river. It was towards
+the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly
+with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a
+dreary look. There was no other boat in the wooded creek and the swish
+of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All the
+circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story but most of
+all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the
+story of a man's loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness
+misled him. However, let the story speak for itself.
+
+Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never schoolmates.
+Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely
+sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance.
+The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be
+visited upon the children, overbore the prophecy. Hatteras, the
+father, disorganised his son's future by dropping unexpectedly through
+one of the trap ways of speculation into the bankruptcy court beneath
+just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to
+Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world
+with a stock in trade which consisted of a school boy's command of the
+classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James
+Walker. The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker,
+whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African
+merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a
+branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
+
+Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone and
+met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident
+did not come to Walker's ears until some time afterwards, nor when he
+heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon
+Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point,
+and so may as well be immediately told.
+
+There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself
+on the swamps of the Forcados river with the mangrove forest closing
+in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put
+Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach.
+Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him,
+but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak
+no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was
+not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his
+traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the
+factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and
+laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation.
+Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they
+wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail
+of a word they said and at last he retired from the din of their
+chatter through the windows of a room which gave on the verandah, and
+sat down to wait for his superior, the agent. It was early in the
+morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In
+the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown
+a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an
+intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came
+in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not
+thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the
+house, so he contemplated the mud-banks and the mud-river and the
+mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet.
+There are few things in the world quieter than a West African forest
+in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not
+let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the
+quietude began to jar on Hatteras' nerves. He was besides very hungry.
+To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.
+
+He walked along the side of the house towards the back, and as he
+neared the back he head a humming sound. The further he went the
+louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so
+metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.
+
+Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this--a shuttered
+window and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming
+outside the window; they streamed in through the lattices of the
+shutters in a busy practical way; they came in columns from the forest
+and converged upon the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the
+room.
+
+Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy just for the sake of company, but,
+at that moment there was not one to be seen. He felt the cold strike
+at his spine, he went back to the room in which he had been sitting.
+He sat again, but he sat shivering. The agent had left no work for
+him.... The Kru boys had been anxious to explain something. The
+humming of the flies about that shuttered window seemed to Hatteras
+to have more explicit language than the Kru boys' chatterings. He
+penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned up the doors.
+He opened one of them ever so slightly, and the buzzing came through
+like the hum of a wheel in a factory, revolving in the collar of
+a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold. The
+atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold upon
+his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved
+himself to enter.
+
+At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a moment, however, he
+made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the
+bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with
+a black, furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in
+defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had
+been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over
+it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so
+vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black, furry rug suddenly lifted
+itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras' face, and dissolved into
+flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor
+half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the
+fever. The agent had died of it three days before.
+
+Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It
+left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense
+of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he
+stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save
+went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he
+served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.
+
+Now the second item in the stock in trade was a gift of tongues and
+about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was
+posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect and with the dialect
+inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the
+west coast, and at the end of six years, Hatteras could speak as many
+of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood;
+because he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service
+under the Niger Protectorate, so that when two years later, Walker
+came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the
+Bonny river, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.
+
+Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny river town to meet the steamer
+which brought his friend.
+
+"I say, Dick, you look bad," said Walker.
+
+"People aren't, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts."
+
+"I know that; but your the weariest bag of bones I've ever seen."
+
+"Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,"
+said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.
+
+"Your factory's next to the Residency," said Hatteras. "There's a
+compound to each running down to the river, and there's a palisade
+between the compounds. I've cut a little gate in the palisade as it
+will shorten the way from one house to the other."
+
+The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few
+months--indeed, more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only
+aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through
+it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. Then he would sit
+for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights in
+Piccadilly-circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a
+comic-opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big
+atlas, and one of Hatteras' chief diversions was to trace with his
+finger a bee-line across the African continent and the Bay of Biscay
+until he reached London.
+
+More rarely Walker would stroll over to the Residency, but he soon
+came to notice that Hatteras had a distinct preference for the factory
+and for the factory verandah. The reason for the preference puzzled
+Walker considerably. He drew a quite erroneous conclusion that
+Hatteras was hiding at the Residency--well, some one whom it was
+prudent, especially in an official, to conceal. He abandoned the
+conclusion, however, when he discovered that his friend was in the
+habit of making solitary expeditions. At times Hatteras would be
+absent for a couple of days, at times for a week, and, so far as
+Walker could ascertain, he never so much as took a servant with him
+to keep him company. He would simply announce at night his intended
+departure, and in the morning he would be gone. Nor on his return
+did he ever offer to Walker any explanation of his journeys. On one
+occasion, however, Walker broached the subject. Hatteras had come back
+the night before, and he sat crouched up in a deck chair, looking
+intently into the darkness of the forest.
+
+"I say," asked Walker, "isn't it rather dangerous to go slumming about
+West Africa alone?"
+
+Hatteras did not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the
+suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant
+question.
+
+"Have you ever seen the Horse Guards' Parade on a dark, rainy night?"
+he asked; but he never moved his head, he never took his eyes from
+the forest. "The wet level of ground looks just like a lagoon and the
+arches a Venice palace above it."
+
+"But look here, Dick!" said Walker, keeping to his subject. "You never
+leave word when you are coming back. One never knows that you have
+come back until you show yourself the morning after."
+
+"I think," said Hatteras slowly, "that the finest sight in the world
+is to be seen from the bridge in St. James's Park when there's a State
+ball on at Buckingham Palace and the light from the windows reddens
+the lake and the carriages glance about the Mall like fireflies."
+
+"Even your servants don't know when you come back," said Walker.
+
+"Oh," said Hatteras quietly, "so you have been asking questions of my
+servants?"
+
+"I had a good reason," replied Walker, "your safety," and with that
+the conversation dropped.
+
+Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African
+mangrove forest at night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that
+ever a man's ears harkened to. And the sounds come not so much from
+the birds, or the soughing of the branches; they seem to come from the
+swamp life underneath the branches, at the roots of trees. There's
+a ceaseless stir as of a myriad of reptiles creeping in the slime.
+Listen long enough and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush
+of innumerable crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again
+a more distinctive sound emerges from the rest--the croaking of a
+bull-frog, the whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras
+would start up in his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room
+that hears another dog barking in the street.
+
+"Doesn't it sound damned wicked?" he said, with a queer smile of
+enjoyment.
+
+Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them
+struck obliquely upon Hatteras' face and slanted off from it in a
+narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves
+of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which ran in Hatteras'
+voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he
+gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth.
+In some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he
+appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus,
+had Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon
+his face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his
+friend. He wondered whether all these months his judgment had been
+wrong. And out of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
+
+"Dick," he said, "this house of mine stands between your house and
+the forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the
+swamp. Is that why you always prefer it to your own?"
+
+Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost
+suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a
+little he said:--
+
+"It's not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you,
+it's the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these
+miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can't get the
+forest and the undergrowth out of my mind. I dream of them at nights.
+I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen,"
+and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forwards. "Doesn't
+it sound wicked?"
+
+"But all this talk about London?" cried Walker.
+
+"Oh, don't you understand?" interrupted Hatteras roughly. Then he
+changed his tone and gave his reason. "One has to struggle against a
+fascination of that sort. It's devil's work. So for all I am worth I
+talk about London."
+
+"Look here, Dick," said Walker. "You had better get leave and go back
+to the old country for a spell."
+
+"A very solid piece of advice," said Hatteras, and he went home to the
+Residency.
+
+
+II.
+
+The next morning he had again disappeared. But Walker discovered upon
+his table a couple of new volumes. He glanced at the titles. They were
+Burton's account of his pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Mecca.
+
+Five nights afterwards Walker was smoking a pipe on the verandah when
+he fancied that he heard a rubbing, scuffling sound as if some one
+very cautiously was climbing over the fence of his compound. The moon
+was low in the sky and dipping down toward the forest; indeed the rim
+of it touched the tree-tops so that while a full half of the enclosure
+was bare to the yellow light that half which bordered on the forest
+was inky black in shadow; and it was from the furthest corner of this
+second half that the sound came. Walker bent forward listening. He
+heard the sound again, and a moment after another sound, which left
+him in no doubt. For in that dark corner he knew that a number of
+palisades for repairing the fence were piled and the second sound
+which he heard was a rattle as some one stumbled against them. Walker
+went inside and fetched a rifle.
+
+When he came back he saw a negro creeping across the bright open space
+towards the Residency. Walker hailed to him to stop. Instead the negro
+ran. He ran towards the wicket gate in the palisades. Walker shouted
+again; the figure only ran the faster. He had covered half the
+distance before Walker fired. He clutched his right forearm with his
+left hand, but he did not stop. Walker fired again, this time at his
+legs, and the man dropped to the ground. Walker heard his servants
+stirring as he ran down the steps. He crossed quickly to the negro
+and the negro spoke to him, but in English, and with the voice of
+Hatteras.
+
+"For God's sake keep your servants off!"
+
+Walker ran to the house, met his servants at the foot of the steps,
+and ordered them back. He had shot at a monkey he said. Then he
+returned to Hatteras.
+
+"Dicky, are you hurt?" he whispered.
+
+"You hit me each time you fired, but not very badly I think."
+
+He bandaged Hatteras' arm and thigh with strips of his shirt and
+waited by his side until the house was quiet. Then he lifted him and
+carried him across the enclosure to the steps and up the steps into
+his bedroom. It was a long and fatiguing process. For one thing Walker
+dared make no noise and must needs tread lightly with his load; for
+another, the steps were steep and ricketty, with a narrow balustrade
+on each side waist high. It seemed to Walker that the day would dawn
+before he reached the top. Once or twice Hatteras stirred in his arms,
+and he feared the man would die then and there. For all the time his
+blood dripped and pattered like heavy raindrops on the wooden steps.
+
+Walker laid Hatteras on his bed and examined his wounds. One bullet
+had passed through the fleshy part of the forearm, the other through
+the fleshy part of his right thigh. But no bones were broken and no
+arteries cut. Walker lit a fire, baked some plaintain leaves, and
+applied them as a poultice. Then he went out with a pail of water and
+scrubbed down the steps.
+
+Again he dared not make any noise, and it was close on daybreak before
+he had done. His night's work, however, was not ended. He had still to
+cleanse the black stain from Hatteras' skin, and the sun was up before
+he stretched a rug upon the ground and went to sleep with his back
+against the door.
+
+"Walker," Hatteras called out in a low voice, an hour or so later.
+
+Walker woke up and crossed over to the bed.
+
+"Dicky, I'm frightfully sorry. I couldn't know it was you."
+
+"That's all right, Jim. Don't you worry about that. What I wanted to
+say was that nobody had better know. It wouldn't do, would it, if it
+got about?"
+
+"Oh, I am not so sure. People would think it rather a creditable
+proceeding."
+
+Hatteras shot a puzzled look at his friend. Walker, however, did not
+notice it, and continued, "I saw Burton's account of his pilgrimage in
+your room; I might have known that journeys of the kind were just the
+sort of thing to appeal to you."
+
+"Oh, yes, that's it," said Hatteras, lifting himself up in bed. He
+spoke eagerly--perhaps a thought too eagerly. "Yes, that's it. I have
+always been keen on understanding the native thoroughly. It's after
+all no less than one's duty if one has to rule them, and since I could
+speak their lingo--" he broke off and returned to the subject which
+had prompted him to rouse Walker. "But, all the same, it wouldn't do
+if the natives got to know."
+
+"There's no difficulty about that," said Walker. "I'll give out
+that you have come back with the fever and that I am nursing you.
+Fortunately there's no doctor handy to come making inconvenient
+examinations."
+
+Hatteras knew something of surgery, and under his directions Walker
+poulticed and bandaged him until he recovered. The bandaging, however,
+was amateurish, and, as a result, the muscles contracted in Hatteras'
+thigh and he limped--ever so slightly, still he limped--he limped
+to his dying day. He did not, however, on that account abandon his
+explorations, and more than once Walker, when his lights were out and
+he was smoking a pipe on the verandah, would see a black figure with
+a trailing walk cross his compound and pass stealthily through the
+wicket in the fence. Walker took occasion to expostulate with his
+friend.
+
+"It's too dangerous a game for a man to play for any length of time.
+It is doubly dangerous now that you limp. You ought to give it up."
+
+Hatteras made a strange reply.
+
+"I'll try to," he said.
+
+Walker pondered over the words for some time. He set them side by side
+in his thoughts with that confession which Hatteras had made to
+him one evening. He asked himself whether, after all, Hatteras'
+explanation of his conduct was sincere, whether it was really a
+desire to know the native thoroughly which prompted these mysterious
+expeditions; and then he remembered that he himself had first
+suggested the explanation to Hatteras. Walker began to feel
+uneasy--more than uneasy, actually afraid on his friend's account.
+Hatteras had acknowledged that the country fascinated him, and
+fascinated him through its hideous side. Was this masquerading as a
+black man a further proof of the fascination? Was it, as it were, a
+step downwards towards a closer association? Walker sought to laugh
+the notion from his mind, but it returned and returned, and here and
+there an incident occurred to give it strength and colour.
+
+For instance, on one occasion after Hatteras had been three weeks
+absent, Walker sauntered over to the Residency towards four o'clock
+in the afternoon. Hatteras was trying cases in the court-house, which
+formed the ground floor of the Residency. Walker stepped into the
+room. It was packed with a naked throng of blacks, and the heat was
+overpowering. At the end of the hall sat Hatteras. His worn face shone
+out amongst the black heads about him white and waxy like a gardenia
+in a bouquet of black flowers. Walker invented his simile and realised
+its appositeness at one and the same moment. Bouquet was not an
+inappropriate word since there is a penetrating aroma about the native
+of the Niger delta when he begins to perspire.
+
+Walker, however, thinking that the Court would rise, determined to
+wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to
+answer to a charge of participation in Fetish rites. The case seemed
+sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its
+conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual
+details--human sacrifice, mutilations and the like, but Hatteras
+pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, and then had candles
+brought into the Court-house. He seemed indeed not so much to be
+investigating the negro's guilt as to be adding to his own knowledge
+of Fetish ceremonials. And Walker could not but perceive that he
+took more than a merely scientific pleasure in the increase of his
+knowledge. His face appeared to smooth out, his eyes became quick,
+interested, almost excited; and Walker again had the queer impression
+that Hatteras was in spirit participating in the loathsome ceremonies,
+and participating with an intense enjoyment. In the end the negro was
+convicted and the Court rose. But he might have been convicted a good
+three hours before. Walker went home shaking his head. He seemed to
+be watching a man deliberately divesting himself of his humanity. It
+seemed as though the white man were ambitious to decline into the
+black. Hatteras was growing into an uncanny creature. His friend began
+to foresee a time when he should hold him in loathing and horror. And
+the next morning helped to confirm him in that forecast.
+
+For Walker had to make an early start down river for Bonny town, and
+as he stood on the landing-stage Hatteras came down to him from the
+Residency.
+
+"You heard that negro tried yesterday?" he asked with an assumption of
+carelessness.
+
+"Yes, and condemned. What of him?"
+
+"He escaped last night. It's a bad business, isn't it?"
+
+Walker nodded in reply and his boat pushed off. But it stuck in his
+mind for the greater part of that day that the prison adjoined the
+Court-house and so formed part of the ground floor of the Residency.
+Had Hatteras connived at his escape? Had the judge secretly set free
+the prisoner whom he had publicly condemned? The question troubled
+Walker considerably during his month of absence, and stood in the way
+of his business. He learned for the first time how much he loved his
+friend and how eagerly he watched for the friend's advancement.
+Each day added to his load of anxiety. He dreamed continually of a
+black-painted man slipping among the tree-boles nearer and nearer
+towards the red glow of a fire in some open space secure amongst the
+swamps, where hideous mysteries had their celebration. He cut short
+his business and hurried back from Bonny. He crossed at once to the
+Residency and found his friend in a great turmoil of affairs. Walker
+came back from Bonny a month later and hurried across to his friend.
+
+"Jim," said Hatteras, starting up, "I've got a year's leave; I am
+going home."
+
+"Dicky!" cried Walker, and he nearly wrung Hatteras' hand from his
+arm. "That's grand news."
+
+"Yes, old man, I thought you would be glad; I sail in a fortnight."
+And he did.
+
+For the first month Walker was glad. A year's leave would make a new
+man of Dick Hatteras, he thought, or, at all events, restore the old
+man, sane and sound, as he had been before he came to the West African
+coast. During the second month Walker began to feel lonely. In the
+third he bought a banjo and learnt it during the fourth and fifth.
+During the sixth he began to say to himself, "What a time poor Dick
+must have had all those six years with those cursed forests about him.
+I don't wonder--I don't wonder." He turned disconsolately to his banjo
+and played for the rest of the year; all through the wet season while
+the rain came down in a steady roar and only the curlews cried--until
+Hatteras returned. He returned at the top of his spirits and health.
+Of course he was hall-marked West African, but no man gets rid of that
+stamp. Moreover there was more than health in his expression. There
+was a new look of pride in his eyes and when he spoke of a bachelor it
+was in terms of sympathetic pity.
+
+"Jim," said he, after five minutes of restraint, "I am engaged to be
+married."
+
+Jim danced round him in delight. "What an ass I have been," he
+thought, "why didn't I think of that cure myself?" and he asked, "When
+is it to be?"
+
+"In eight months. You'll come home and see me through."
+
+Walker agreed and for eight months listened to praises of the lady.
+There were no more solitary expeditions. In fact, Hatteras seemed
+absorbed in the diurnal discovery of new perfections in his future
+wife.
+
+"Yes, she seems a nice girl," Walker commented. He found her upon his
+arrival in England more human than Hatteras' conversation had led him
+to expect, and she proved to him that she was a nice girl. For she
+listened for hours to him lecturing her on the proper way to treat
+Dick without the slightest irritation and with only a faintly visible
+amusement. Besides she insisted on returning with her husband to Bonny
+river, which was a sufficiently courageous thing to undertake.
+
+For a year in spite of the climate the couple were commonplace and
+happy. For a year Walker clucked about them like a hen after its
+chickens and slept the sleep of the untroubled. Then he returned to
+England and from that time made only occasional journeys to West
+Africa. Thus for awhile he almost lost sight of Hatteras and
+consequently still slept the sleep of the untroubled. One morning,
+however, he arrived unexpectedly at the settlement and at once called
+on Hatteras. He did not wait to be announced, but ran up the steps
+outside the house and into the dining-room. He found Mrs. Hatteras
+crying. She dried her eyes, welcomed Walker, and said that she was
+sorry, but her husband was away.
+
+Walker started, looked at her eyes, and asked hesitatingly whether he
+could help. Mrs. Hatteras replied with an ill-assumed surprise that
+she did not understand. Walker suggested that there was trouble. Mrs.
+Hatteras denied the truth of the suggestion. Walker pressed the point
+and Mrs. Hatteras yielded so far as to assert that there was no
+trouble in which Hatteras was concerned. Walker hardly thought it the
+occasion for a parade of manners, and insisted on pointing out
+that his knowledge of her husband was intimate and dated from his
+schooldays. Thereupon Mrs. Hatteras gave way.
+
+"Dick goes away alone," she said. "He stains his skin and goes away at
+night. He tells me that he must, that it's the only way by which he
+can know the natives, and that so it's a sort of duty. He says the
+black tells nothing of himself to the white man--ever. You must go
+amongst them if you are to know them. So he goes, and I never know
+when he will come back. I never know whether he will come back."
+
+"But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has
+always come back," replied Walker.
+
+"Yes, but one day he will not." Walker comforted her as well as he
+could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot
+against him, spoke of risks that every one must run who serve the
+Empire. "Never a lotus closes, you know," he said, and went back to
+the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.
+
+It was no sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that he was
+certain, and he waited--he waited from darkness to daybreak in his
+compound for three successive nights. On the fourth he heard the
+scuffling sound at the corner of the fence. The night was black as the
+inside of a coffin. Half a regiment of men might steal past him and he
+not have seen them. Accordingly he walked cautiously to the palisade
+which separated the enclosure of the Residency from his own, felt
+along it until he reached the little gate and stationed himself
+in front of it. In a few moments he thought that he heard a man
+breathing, but whether to the right or the left he could not tell;
+and then a groping hand lightly touched his face and drew away again.
+Walker said nothing, but held his breath and did not move. The hand
+was stretched out again. This time it touched his breast and moved
+across it until it felt a button of Walker's coat. Then it was
+snatched away and Walker heard a gasping in-draw of the breath and
+afterwards a sound as of a man turning in a flurry. Walker sprang
+forward and caught a naked shoulder with one hand, a naked arm with
+the other.
+
+"Wait a bit, Dick Hatteras," he said.
+
+There was a low cry, and then a husky voice addressed him respectfully
+as "Daddy" in trade-English.
+
+"That won't do, Dick," said Walker.
+
+The voice babbled more trade-English.
+
+"If you're not Dick Hatteras," continued Walker, tightening his grasp,
+"You've no manner of right here. I'll give you till I count ten and
+then I shall shoot."
+
+Walker counted up to nine aloud and then--
+
+"Jim," said Hatteras in his natural voice.
+
+"That's better," said Walker. "Let's go in and talk."
+
+
+III.
+
+He went up the step and lighted the lamp. Hatteras followed him and
+the two men faced one another. For a little while neither of them
+spoke. Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black
+skin, naked except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his
+head was a white man married to a white wife who was sleeping--Nay,
+more likely crying--not thirty yards away.
+
+Hatteras began to mumble out his usual explanation of duty and the
+rest of it.
+
+"That won't wash," interrupted Walker. "What is it? A woman?"
+
+"Good Heaven, no!" cried Hatteras suddenly. It was plain that that
+explanation was at all events untrue. "Jim, I've a good mind to tell
+you all about it."
+
+"You have got to," said Walker. He stood between Hatteras and the
+steps.
+
+"I told you how this country fascinated me in spite of myself," he
+began.
+
+"But I thought," interrupted Walker, "that you had got over that
+since. Why, man, you are married," and he came across to Hatteras and
+shook him by the shoulder. "Don't you understand? You have a wife!"
+
+"I know," said Hatteras. "But there are things deeper at the heart
+of me than the love of woman, and one of those things is the love of
+horror. I tell you it bites as nothing else does in this world. It's
+like absinthe that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can't
+do without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first
+landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now--"
+He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. His voice dropped
+to a passionate whisper, he locked and unlocked his fingers with
+feverish movements, and his eyes shifted and glittered in an unnatural
+excitement.
+
+"It's like going down to Hell and coming up again and wanting to go
+down again. Oh, you'd want to go down again. You'd find the whole
+earth pale. You'd count the days until you went down again. Do you
+remember Orpheus? I think he looked back not to see if Eurydice was
+coming after him but because he knew it was the last glimpse he would
+get of Hell." At that he broke off and began to chant in a crazy
+voice, wagging his head and swaying his body to the rhythm of the
+lines:--
+
+  "Quum subita in cantum dementia cepit amantem
+  Ignoscenda quidem scirent si ignoscere manes;
+  Restilit Eurydicengue suam jam luce sub ipsa
+  Immemor heu victusque animi respexit."
+
+"Oh, stop that!" cried Walker, and Hatteras laughed. "For God's sake,
+stop it!"
+
+For the words brought back to him in a flash the vision of a
+class-room with its chipped desks ranged against the varnished walls,
+the droning sound of the form-master's voice, and the swish of lilac
+bushes against the lower window panes on summer afternoons. "Go on,"
+he said. "Oh, go on, and let's have done with it."
+
+Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man
+breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it.
+He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had
+witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the
+last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a growing
+enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their
+loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. "Stop," he
+said, again, "Stop! That's enough."
+
+Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker's
+presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a
+child will, and here and there he laughed and the mere sound of his
+laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold
+out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.
+
+"Well?" he asked. "Well?"
+
+Walker still offered him the revolver.
+
+"There are cases, I think, which neither God's law nor man's law seems
+to have provided for. There's your wife you see to be considered. If
+you don't take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I
+shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old
+country."
+
+Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered
+it for a little.
+
+"My wife must never know," he said.
+
+"There's the pistol. Outside's the swamp. The swamp will tell no
+tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know."
+
+Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.
+
+"Good-bye, Jim," he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook
+his head, and Hatteras went out on to the verandah and down the steps.
+
+Walker heard him climb over the fence; and then followed as far as the
+verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth
+came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes
+afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol shot broke the silence like
+the tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales.
+Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband's disappearance
+that she knew and returned brokenhearted to England. There was some
+loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy, which makes the English a
+dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.
+
+But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowé river in Congo
+Français. He travelled as far as Woermann's factory in Njole Island
+and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the
+hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for
+a hundred and fifty miles in a little stern-wheel steamer. At that
+point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his
+banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty
+miles. There he ran the boat's nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan
+village and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.
+
+There was a slip of forest between the village and the river bank, and
+while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it
+he heard a noise of lamentation. The noise came from the village and
+was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a
+chorus of discordant howls, low in note and long-drawn out--wordless,
+something like the howls of an animal in pain and yet human by reason
+of their infinite melancholy.
+
+Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock, fronting the palisade
+which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed
+down into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For
+from every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in
+their filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their
+heads shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker
+knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the
+coming of the witch doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural
+death, and, since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the
+Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the
+witch doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village
+was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, since the end of
+those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however,
+politely invited Walker to inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut,
+packed with the corpse's relations, who were shouting to it at the top
+of their voices on the on-chance that its spirit might think better of
+its conduct and return to the body. They explained to Walker that they
+had tried all the usual varieties of persuasion. They had put red
+pepper into the chief's eyes while he was dying. They had propped open
+his mouth with a stick; they had burned fibres of the oil nut under
+his nose. In fact, they had made his death as uncomfortable as
+possible, but none the less he had died.
+
+The witch doctor arrived on the heels of the explanation, and Walker,
+since he was powerless to interfere, thought it wise to retire for
+the time being. He went back to the hillock on the edge of the trees.
+Thence he looked across and over the palisade and had the whole length
+of the street within his view.
+
+The witch doctor entered it from the opposite end, to the beating
+of many drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a
+square-skirted eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded
+knee breeches on his bare legs; the second was that he limped--ever
+so slightly. Still he limped and--with the right leg. Walker felt a
+strong desire to see the man's face, and his heart thumped within him
+as he came nearer and nearer down the street. But his hair was so
+matted about his cheeks that Walker could not distinguish a feature.
+"If I was only near enough to see his eyes," he thought. But he was
+not near enough, nor would it have been prudent for him to have gone
+nearer.
+
+The witch doctor commenced the proceedings by ringing a handbell in
+front of every hut. But that method of detection failed to work.
+The bell rang successively at every door. Walker watched the
+man's progress, watched his trailing limb, and began to discover
+familiarities in his manner. "Pure fancy," he argued with himself. "If
+he had not limped I should have noticed nothing."
+
+Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid.
+The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after
+the other and at each name he lifted the lid. But that plan appeared
+to be no improvement, for the lid never stuck. It came off readily at
+each name. Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have
+to cover who walked across country from Bonny river to the Ogowé, and
+he reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand
+to one that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would
+be eaten on the way.
+
+The witch doctor turned up the big square cuffs of his sleeves, as a
+conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however,
+at each name, he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was
+seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine
+the man's right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him.
+The witch doctor went steadily through the list. Walker rose to his
+feet and took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at
+one particular name, the doctor's hands flew apart and waved wildly
+about him. A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group
+of Fans. The group fell back and left one man standing alone. He made
+no defence, no resistance. Two men came forward and bound his hands
+and his feet and his body with tie-tie. Then they carried him within a
+hut.
+
+"That's sheer murder," thought Walker. He could not rescue the victim,
+he knew. But--he could get a nearer view of that witch doctor. Already
+the man was packing up his paraphernalia. Walker stepped back among
+the trees and, running with all his speed, made the circuit of the
+village. He reached the further end of the street just as the witch
+doctor walked out into the open.
+
+Walker ran forward a yard or so until he too stood plain to see on the
+level ground. The witch doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped
+only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker's direction. Then he
+went on again towards his own hut in the forest.
+
+Walker made no attempt to follow him. "He has seen me," he thought.
+"If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night."
+Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards
+down stream. He himself remained alone in his canoe.
+
+The night fell moonless and black, and the enclosing forest made it
+yet blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head
+like gold spangles on a strip of black velvet. Those stars and the
+glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the
+only lights which Walker had. It was as dark as the night when Walker
+waited for Hatteras at the wicket-gate.
+
+He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted
+lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo and again he
+waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of
+twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on
+his banjo and played a hymn tune. He played "Abide with me," thinking
+that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England's summer
+time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano might flash
+into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank and draw him as with
+cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one
+spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune and
+played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly circus. He had not
+played more than a dozen bars before he heard a sob from the bank and
+then the sound of some one sliding down the clay. The next instant a
+figure shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight
+of a foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.
+
+"Well, what is it?" asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt
+for a match in his pocket.
+
+It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he
+had made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and
+sprang up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of
+his ankle.
+
+"No, you don't," said he, "you must have meant to visit me. This isn't
+Heally," and he jerked the man back into the bottom of the boat.
+
+The man explained that he had paid a visit out of the purest
+friendliness.
+
+"You're the witch doctor, I suppose," said Walker. The other replied
+that he was and proceeded to state that he was willing to give
+information about much that made white men curious. He would explain
+why it was of singular advantage to possess a white man's eyeball, and
+how very advisable it was to kill any one you caught making Itung. The
+danger of passing near a cotton-tree which had red earth at the roots
+provided a subject which no prudent man should disregard; and Tando,
+with his driver ants, was worth conciliating. The witch doctor was
+prepared to explain to Walker how to conciliate Tando. Walker replied
+that it was very kind of the witch doctor but Tando didn't really
+worry him. He was, in fact, very much more worried by an inability to
+understand how a native so high up the Ogowé River had learned how to
+speak trade-English.
+
+The witch doctor waved the question aside and remarked that Walker
+must have enemies. "Pussim bad too much," he called them. "Pussim
+woh-woh. Berrah well! Ah send grand Krau-Krau and dem pussim die one
+time." Walker could not recollect for the moment any "pussim" whom
+he wished to die one time, whether from grand Krau-Krau or any
+other disease. "Wait a bit," he continued, "there is one man--Dick
+Hatteras!" and he struck the match suddenly. The witch doctor started
+forward as though to put it out. Walker, however, had the door of the
+lantern open. He set the match to the wick of the candle and closed
+the door fast. The witch doctor drew back. Walker lifted the lantern
+and threw the light on his face. The witch doctor buried his face in
+his hands and supported his elbows on his knees. Immediately Walker
+darted forward a hand, seized the loose sleeve of the witch doctor's
+coat and slipped it back along his arm to the elbow. It was the sleeve
+of the right arm and there on the fleshy part of the forearm was the
+scar of a bullet.
+
+"Yes," said Walker. "By God, it is Dick Hatteras!"
+
+"Well?" cried Hatteras, taking his hands from his face. "What the
+devil made you turn-turn 'Tommy Atkins' on the banjo? Damn you!"
+
+"Dick, I saw you this afternoon."
+
+"I know, I know. Why on earth didn't you kill me that night in your
+compound?"
+
+"I mean to make up for that mistake to-night!"
+
+Walker took his rifle on to his knees. Hatteras saw the movement,
+leaned forward quickly, snatched up the rifle, snatched up the
+cartridges, thrust a couple of cartridges into the breech, and handed
+the loaded rifle back to his old friend.
+
+"That's right," he said. "I remember. There are some cases neither
+God's law nor man's law has quite made provision for." And then he
+stopped, with his finger on his lip. "Listen!" he said.
+
+From the depths of the forest there came faintly, very sweetly the
+sound of church-bells ringing--a peal of bells ringing at midnight in
+the heart of West Africa. Walker was startled. The sound seemed fairy
+work, so faint, so sweet was it.
+
+"It's no fancy, Jim," said Hatteras, "I hear them every night and at
+matins and at vespers. There was a Jesuit monastery here two hundred
+years ago. The bells remain and some of the clothes." He touched his
+coat as he spoke. "The Fans still ring the bells from habit. Just
+think of it! Every morning, every evening, every midnight, I hear
+those bells. They talk to me of little churches perched on hillsides
+in the old country, of hawthorn lanes, and women--English women,
+English girls, thousands of miles away--going along them to church.
+God help me! Jim, have you got an English pipe?"
+
+"Yes; an English briarwood and some bird's-eye."
+
+Walker handed Hatteras his briarwood and his pouch of tobacco.
+Hatteras filled the pipe, lit it at the lantern, and sucked at it
+avidly for a moment. Then he gave a sigh and drew in the tobacco more
+slowly, and yet more slowly.
+
+"My wife?" he asked at last, in a low voice.
+
+"She is in England. She thinks you dead."
+
+Hatteras nodded.
+
+"There's a jar of Scotch whiskey in the locker behind you," said
+Walker. Hatteras turned round, lifted out the jar and a couple of tin
+cups. He poured whiskey into each and handed one to Walker.
+
+"No thanks," said Walker. "I don't think I will."
+
+Hatteras looked at his companion for an instant. Then he emptied
+deliberately both cups over the side of the boat. Next he took the
+pipe from his lips. The tobacco was not half consumed. He poised the
+pipe for a little in his hand. Then he blew into the bowl and watched
+the dull red glow kindle into sparks of flame as he blew. Very slowly
+he tapped the bowl against the thwart of the boat until the burning
+tobacco fell with a hiss into the water. He laid the pipe gently down
+and stood up.
+
+"So long, old man," he said, and sprang out on to the clay. Walker
+turned the lantern until the light made a disc upon the bank.
+
+"Good bye, Jim," said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he
+stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to
+his shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras
+and he had been at school together.
+
+"Good bye, Dicky," he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the
+boat-side. The blacks down-river were roused by the shot. Walker
+shouted to them to stay where they were, and as soon as their camp was
+quiet he stepped on shore. He filled up the whiskey jar with water,
+tied it to Hatteras' feet, shook his hand, and pushed the body into
+the river. The next morning he started back to Fernan Vaz.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE.
+
+
+The truth concerning the downfall of the Princess Joceliande has never
+as yet been honestly inscribed. Doubtless there be few alive except
+myself that know it; for from the beginning many strange and insidious
+rumours were set about to account for her mishap, whereby great damage
+was done to the memory of the Sieur Rudel le Malaise and Solita his
+wife; and afterwards these rumours were so embroidered and painted by
+rhymesters that the truth has become, as you might say, doubly lost.
+For minstrels take more thought of tickling the fancies of those to
+whom they sing with joyous and gallant histories than of their high
+craft and office, and hence it is that though many and various
+accounts are told to this day throughout the country-side by
+grandsires at their winter hearths, not one of them has so much as a
+grain of verity. They are but rude and homely versions of the chaunts
+of Troubadours.
+
+And yet the truth is sweet and pitiful enough to furnish forth a song,
+were our bards so minded. Howbeit, I will set it down here in simple
+prose; for so my duty to the Sieur Rudel bids me, and, moreover, 'twas
+from this event his wanderings began wherein for twenty years I bare
+him company.
+
+And let none gainsay my story, for that I was not my master's servant
+at the time, and saw not the truth with mine own eyes. I had it from
+the Sieur Rudel's lips, and more than once when he was vexed at the
+aspersions thrown upon his name. But he was ever proud, as befitted so
+knightly a gentleman, and deigned not to argue or plead his honour
+to the world, but only with his sword. Thus, then, it falls to me to
+right him as skilfully as I may. Though, alas! I fear my skill is
+little worth, and calumnies are ever fresh to the palate, while truth
+needs the sauce of a bright fancy to command it.
+
+These columnies have assuredly gained some credit, because with ladies
+my lord was ever blithe and _débonnaire_. That he loved many I do not
+deny; but while he loved, he loved right loyally, and, indeed, it is
+no small honour to be loved by a man of so much worship, even for
+a little--the which many women thought also, and those amongst the
+fairest. And I doubt not that as long as she lived, he loved his wife
+Solita no less ardently than those with whom he fell in after she had
+most unfortunately died.
+
+The Sieur Rudel was born within the castle of Princess Joceliande,
+and there grew to childhood and from childhood to youth, being ever
+entreated with great amity and love for his own no less than for his
+father's sake. Though of a slight and delicate figure, he excelled in
+all manly exercises and sports and in venery and hawking. There was
+not one about the court that could equal him. Books too he read, and
+in many languages, labouring at philosophies and logics, so that had
+you but heard him speak, and not marked the hardihood of his limbs
+and his open face, you might have believed you were listening to some
+doxical monk.
+
+In the tenth year of his age came Solita to the castle, whence no man
+knew, nor could they ever learn more than this, that she sailed out of
+the grey mists of a November morning to our bleak Brittany coast in a
+white-painted boat. A fisherman drew the boat to land, perceiving
+it when he was casting his nets, and found a woman-child therein,
+cushioned upon white satin; and marvelling much at the richness of her
+purveyance, for even the sail of the boat was of white silk, he bore
+her straightway to the castle. And the abbot took her and baptised her
+and gave her Sola for a name. "For," said he, "she hath come alone and
+none knoweth her parentage or place." In time she grew to exceeding
+beauty, with fair hair clustering like finest silk above her temples
+and curling waywardly about her throat; wondrous fair she was and
+white, shaming the snowdrops, so that all men stopped and gazed at her
+as she passed.
+
+And the Princess Joceliande, perceiving her, joined her to the company
+of her hand-maidens and took great delight in her for her modesty and
+beauty, so that at last she changed her name. "Sola have you been
+called till now," she said, "but henceforth shall your name be Solita,
+as who shall say 'you have become my wont.'"
+
+Meanwhile the Sieur Rudel was advanced from honour to honour, until
+he stood ever at the right hand of the Princess, and ruled over her
+kingdom as her chancellor and vicegerent. Her enemies he conquered and
+added their lands and sovereignties to hers, until of all the kings
+in those parts, none had such power and dominions as the Princess
+Joceliande. Many ladies, you may believe, cast fond eyes on him, and
+dropped their gauntlet that he might bend to them upon his knee and
+pick it up, but his heart they could not bend, strive how they might,
+and to each and all he showed the same courtesy and gentleness. For
+he had seen the maiden Solita, and of an evening when the Court was
+feasting in the hall and the music of harps rippled sweetly in
+the ears, he would slip from the table as one that was busied in
+statecraft, and in company with Solita pace the terrace in the dark,
+beneath the lighted windows. Yet neither spoke of love, though loving
+was their intercourse. Solita for that her modesty withheld her, and
+she feared even to hope that so great a lord should give his heart to
+her keeping; Rudel because he had not achieved enough to merit she
+should love him. "In a little," he would mutter, "in a little! One
+more thing must I do, and then will I claim my guerdon of the Princess
+Joceliande."
+
+Now this one more thing was the highest and most dangerous emprise of
+all that he had undertaken. Beyond the confines of the kingdom there
+dwelt a great horde of men that had come to Brittany from the East
+in many deep ships and had settled upon the coast, whence they
+would embark and, travelling hard by the land, burn and ravage the
+sea-borders for many days.
+
+Against these did the Sieur Rudel make war, and gathering the nobles
+and yeomen he mustered them in boats and prepared to sail forth to
+what he believed was the last of his adventures, knowing not that it
+was indeed but the beginning. And to the princess he said: "Lady, I
+have served you faithfully, as a gentleman should serve his queen.
+From nothing have I drawn back that could establish or increase you.
+Therefore when I get me home again, one boon will I ask of you, and I
+pray you of your mercy grant it me."
+
+"I will well," replied the princess. "For such loyal service hath no
+queen known before--nay, not even Dame Helen among the Trojans."
+
+So right gladly did the Sieur Rudel depart from her, and down he
+walked among the sandhills, where he found Solita standing in a hollow
+in the midst of a cloud of sand which the sharp wind whirled about
+her. Nothing she said to him, but she stood with downcast head and
+eyes that stung with tears.
+
+"Solita," said he, "the Princess hath granted me such boon as I may
+ask on my return. What say you?"
+
+And she answered in a low voice. "Who am I, my lord, that I should
+oppose the will of the princess? A nameless maiden, meet only to yoke
+with a nameless yeoman!"
+
+At that the Sieur Rudel laughed and said, "Look you into a mirror,
+sweet! and your face will gainsay your words."
+
+She lifted her eyes to his and the light came into them again, so that
+they danced behind the tears, and Rudel clipped her about the waist
+for all that he had not as yet merited her, and kissed her upon the
+lips and the forehead and upon her white hands and wrists.
+
+But she, gazing past his head, saw the blowing sands beyond and the
+armed men in the boats upon the sea, and "O, Rudel, my sweet lord!"
+she cried, "never till this moment did I know how barren and lonely
+was the coast. Come back, and that soon--for of a truth I dread to be
+left alone!"
+
+"In God's good time and if so He will, I will come back, and from the
+moment of my coming I will never again depart from you."
+
+"Promise me that!" she said, clinging to him with her arms twined
+about his neck, and he promised her, and so, comforting her a little
+more, he got him into his boat and sailed away upon his errand.
+
+But of all this, the Princess Joceliande knew nothing. From her
+balcony in the castle she saw the Sieur Rudel sail forth. He stood
+upon the poop, the wind blowing the hair back from his face, and as
+she watched his straight figure, she said, "A boon he shall ask, but
+a greater will I grant. Surely no man ever did such loyal service but
+for love, and for love's sake, he shall share my throne with me." With
+that she wept a little for fear he might be slain or ever he should
+return; but she remembered from how many noble exploits he had come
+scatheless, and so taking heart once more she fell to thinking of his
+black locks and clear olive face and darkly shining eyes. For, in
+truth, these outward qualities did more enthral and delight her than
+his most loyal services.
+
+But for the maiden Solita, she got her back to her chamber and,
+remembering her lord's advice, spied about for a mirror. No mirror,
+however, did she possess, having never used aught else but a basin of
+clear water, and till now found it all-sufficient, so little curious
+had she been concerning the whiteness of her beauty. Thereupon she
+thought for a little, and unbinding her hair so that it fell to her
+feet in a golden cloud, hied her to Joceliande, who bade her take a
+book of chivalry and read aloud. But Solita so bent her head that her
+hair fell ever across the pages and hindered her from reading, and
+each time she put it roughly back from her forehead with some small
+word of anger as though she was vexed.
+
+"What ails you, child?" asked the princess.
+
+"It is my hair," replied Solita. But the princess paid no heed. She
+heard little, indeed, even of what was read, but sat by the window
+gazing out across the grey hungry sea, and bethinking her of the Sieur
+Rudel and his gallant men. And again Solita let her hair fall upon the
+scroll, and again she tossed it back, saying, "Fie! Fie!"
+
+"What ails you, child?" the princess asked.
+
+"It is my hair," she replied, and Joceliande, smiling heedlessly, bade
+her read on. So she read until Joceliande bade her stop and called to
+her, and Solita came over to the window and knelt by the side of the
+princess, so that her hair fell across the wrist of Joceliande and
+fettered it. "It _is_ ever in the way," said Solita, and she loosed
+it from the wrist of the princess. But the princess caught the silky
+coils within her hand and smoothed them tenderly. "That were easily
+remedied," she replied with a smile, and she sought for the scissors
+which hung at her girdle.
+
+But Solita bethought her that many men had praised the colour and
+softness of her hair--why, she could not tell, for dark locks alone
+were beautiful in her eyes. Howbeit men praised hers, and for Sieur
+Rudel's sake she would fain be as praiseworthy as might be. Therefore
+she stayed Joceliande's hand and cried aloud in fear, "Nay, nay, sweet
+lady, 'tis all the gold I have, and I pray you leave it me who am so
+poor."
+
+And the Princess Joceliande laughed, and replaced the scissors in her
+girdle. "I did but make pretence, to try you," she said, "for, in
+truth, I had begun to think you were some holy angel and no woman, so
+little share had you in a woman's vanities. But 'tis all unbound, and
+I wonder not that it hinders you. Let me bind it up!"
+
+And while the princess bound the hair cunningly in a coronal upon her
+head, Solita spake again hesitatingly, seeking to conceal her craft.
+
+"Madame, it is easy for you to bind my hair, but for myself, I have no
+mirror and so dress it awkwardly."
+
+Joceliande laughed again merrily at the words. "Dear heart!" she
+cried. "What man is it? Hast discovered thou art a woman after all?
+First thou fearest for thy hair, and now thou askest a mirror. But in
+truth I like thee the better for thy discovery." And she kissed Solita
+very heartily, who blushed that her secret was so readily found out,
+and felt no small shame at her lack of subtlety. For many ladies, she
+knew, had secrets--ay, even from their bosom lords and masters---and
+kept them without effort in the subterfuge, whereas she, poor fool,
+betrayed hers at the first word.
+
+"And what man is it?" laughed the princess. "For there is not one
+that deserves thee, as thou shalt judge for thyself." Whereupon she
+summoned one of her servants and bade him place a mirror in the
+bed-chamber of Solita, wherein she might see herself from top to toe.
+
+"Art content?" she asked. "Thus shalt thou see thyself, without
+blemish or fault even for this crown of hair to the heel of thy foot.
+But I fear me the sight will change all thy thoughts and incline thee
+to scorn of thy suitor."
+
+Then she stood for a little watching the sunlight play upon the golden
+head and pry into the soft shadows of the curls, and her face saddened
+and her voice faltered.
+
+"But what of me, Solita?" she said. "All men give me reverence, not
+one knows me for a woman. I crave the bread of love, all day long I
+hunger for it, but they offer me the polished stones of courtesy and
+respect, and so I starve slowly to my death. What of me, Solita? What
+of me?"
+
+But Solita made reply, soothing her:
+
+"Madame," she said, "all your servants love you, but it beseems them
+not to flaunt it before your face, so high are you placed above them.
+You order their fortunes and their lives, and surely 'tis nobler work
+than meddling with this idle love-prattle."
+
+"Nay," replied the princess, laughing in despite of her heaviness,
+for she noted how the blush on Solita's cheek belied the scorn of her
+tongue. "There spoke the saint, and I will hear no more from her now
+that I have found the woman. Tell me, did he kiss you?"
+
+And Solita blushed yet more deeply, so that even her neck down to her
+shoulders grew rosy, and once or twice she nodded her head, for her
+lips would not speak the word.
+
+Then Joceliande sighed to herself and said--
+
+    "And yet, perchance, he would not die for you, whereas men die for
+    me daily, and from mere obedience. How is he called?"
+
+    "Madame," she replied, "I may not tell you, for all my pride in
+    him. 'Twill be for my lord to answer you in his good time. But
+    that he would die for me, if need there were, I have no doubt. For
+    I have looked into his eyes and read his soul."
+
+So she spake with much spirit, upholding Sieur Rudel; but Joceliande
+was sorely grieved for that Solita would not trust her with her
+lover's name, and answered bitterly:
+
+    "And his soul which you did see was doubtless your own image. And
+    thus it will be with the next maiden who looks into his eyes. Her
+    own image will she see, and she will go away calling it his soul,
+    and not knowing, poor fool, that it has already faded from his
+    eyes."
+
+At this Solita kept silence, deeming it unnecessary to make reply. It
+might be as the princess said with other men and other women, but the
+Sieur Rudel had no likeness to other men, and in possessing the Sieur
+Rudel's love she was far removed from other women. Therefore did she
+keep silence, but Joceliande fancied that she was troubled by the
+words which she had spoken, and straightway repented her of them.
+
+"Nay, child," she said, and she laid her hand again upon Solita's
+head. "Take not the speech to heart. 'Tis but the plaint of a woman
+whose hair is withered from its brightness and who grows peevish in
+her loneliness. But open your mind to me, for you have twined about my
+heart even as your curls did but now twine and coil about my wrist,
+and the more for this pretty vanity of yours. Therefore tell me his
+name, that I may advance him."
+
+But once more Solita did fob her off, and the princess would no longer
+question her, but turned her wearily to the window.
+
+"All day long," she said, "I listen to soft speeches and honeyed
+tongues, and all night long I listen to the breakers booming upon the
+sands, and in truth I wot not which sound is the more hollow."
+
+Such was the melancholy and sadness of her voice that the tears
+sprang into Solita's eyes and ran down her cheeks for very pity of
+Joceliande.
+
+"Think not I fail in love to you, sweet princess," she cried. "But I
+may not tell you, though I would be blithe and proud to name him. But
+'tis for him to claim me of you, and I must needs wait his time."
+
+But Joceliande would not be comforted, and chiding her roughly, sent
+her to her chamber. So Solita departed out of her sight, her heart
+heavy with a great pity, though little she understood of Joceliande's
+distress. For this she could not know: that at the sight of her white
+beauty the Princess Joceliande was ashamed.
+
+And coming into her chamber, Solita beheld the mirror ranged against
+the wall, and long she stood before it, being much comforted by the
+image which she saw. From that day ever she watched the ladies of the
+court, noting jealously if any might be more fair than she whom Sieur
+Rudel had chosen; and often of a night when she was troubled by the
+aspect of some fair and delicate new-comer, she would rise from her
+couch and light a taper, and so gaze at herself until the fear of her
+unworthiness diminished. For there were none that could compare with
+her in daintiness and fair looks ever came to the castle of the
+Princess Joceliande.
+
+But of the Sieur Rudel, though oft she thought, she never spake,
+biding his good time, and the princess questioned her in vain. For
+she, whose heart hitherto had lain plain to see, like a pebble in a
+clear brook of water, had now learnt all the sweet cunning of love's
+duplicity.
+
+Thus the time drew on towards the Sieur Rudel's home-coming, and ever
+the twain looked out across the sea for the black boats to round the
+bluff and take the beach--Joceliande from her balcony, Solita from the
+window of her little chamber in the tower; and each night the princess
+gave orders to light a beacon on the highest headland that the
+wayfarers might steer safely down that red path across the tumbling
+waters.
+
+So it fell that one night both ladies beheld two ships swim to the
+shore, and each made dolorous moan, seeing how few of the goodly
+company that sailed forth had got them home again, and wondering in
+sore distress whether Rudel had returned with them or no.
+
+But in a little there came a servant to the princess and told of one
+Sir Broyance de Mille-Faits, a messenger from the neighbouring kingdom
+of Broye, that implored instant speech with her. And being admitted
+before all the Court assembled in the great hall, he fell upon his
+knees at the foot of the princess, and, making his obeisance, said--
+
+    "Fair Lady Joceliande, I crave a boon, and I pray you of your
+    gentleness to grant it me."
+
+    "But what boon, good Sir Broyance?" replied the princess. "I know
+    you for a true and loyal gentleman who has ever been welcome at my
+    castle. Speak, then, your need, and if so be I may, you shall find
+    me complaisant to your request."
+
+Thereupon, Sir Broyance took heart and said:
+
+    "Since our king died, God rest his soul, there has been no peace
+    or quiet in our kingdom of Broye. 'Tis rent with strife and
+    factions, so that no man may dwell in it but he must fight from
+    morn to night, and withal win no rest for the morrow. The king's
+    three sons contend for the throne, and meanwhile is the country
+    eaten up. Therefore am I sent by many, and those our chiefest
+    gentlemen, to ask you to send us Sieur Rudel, that he may quell
+    these conflicts and rule over us as our king."
+
+So Sir Broyance spake and was silent, and a great murmur and
+acclamation rose about the hall for that the Sieur Rudel was held
+in such honour and worship even beyond his own country. But for the
+Princess Joceliande, she sat with downcast head, and for a while
+vouchsafed no reply. For her heart was sore at the thought that Sieur
+Rudel should go from her.
+
+"There is much danger in the adventure," she said at length,
+doubtfully.
+
+"Were there no danger, madame," he replied, "we should not ask Sieur
+Rudel of you to be our leader, and great though the danger be, greater
+far is the honour. For we offer him a kingdom."
+
+Then the princess spake again to Sir Broyance:
+
+"It may not be," she said. "Whatever else you crave, that shall you
+have, and gladly will I grant it you. But the Sieur Rudel is the
+flower of our Court, he stands ever at my right hand, and woe is me if
+I let him go, for I am only a woman."
+
+"But, madame, for his knighthood's sake, I pray you assent to our
+prayer," said Sir Broyance. "Few enemies have you, but many friends,
+whereas we are sore pressed on every side."
+
+But the princess repeated: "I am only a woman," and for a long while
+he made his prayer in vain.
+
+At last, however, the princess said:
+
+"For his knighthood's sake thus far will I yield to you: Bide here
+within my castle until Sieur Rudel gets him home, and then shall you
+make your prayer to him, and by his answer will I be bound."
+
+"That I will well," replied Sir Broyance, bethinking him of the Sieur
+Rudel's valour, and how that he had a kingdom to proffer to him.
+
+But the Princess Joceliande said to herself:
+
+"I, too, will offer him a kingdom. My throne shall he share with me;"
+and so she entertained Sir Broyance right pleasantly until the Sieur
+Rudel should get him back from the foray. Meanwhile she would say
+to Solita, "He shall not go to Broye, for in truth I need him;" and
+Solita would laugh happily, replying, "It is truth: he will not go to
+Broye," and thinking thereto silently, "but it is not the princess who
+will keep him, but even I, her poor handmaiden. For I have his promise
+never to depart from me." So much confidence had her mirror taught
+her, as it ever is with women.
+
+But despite them both did the Sieur Rudel voyage to Broye and rule
+over the kingdom as its king, and how that came about ye shall hear.
+
+Now on the fourth day after the coming of Sir Broyance, the Princess
+Joceliande was leaning over the baluster of her balcony and gazing
+seawards as was her wont. The hours had drawn towards evening, and the
+sun stood like a glowing wheel upon the farthest edge of the sea's
+grey floor, when she beheld a black speck crawl across its globe, and
+then another and another, to the number of thirty. Thereupon, she
+knew that the Sieur Rudel had returned, and joyfully she summoned her
+tirewomen and bade them coif and robe her as befitted a princess.
+A coronet of gold and rubies they set upon her head, and a robe of
+purple they hung about her shoulders. With pearls they laced her neck
+and her arms, and with pearls they shod her feet, and when she saw the
+ships riding at their anchorage, and the Sieur Rudel step forth amid
+the shouts of the sailors, then she hied her to the council-chamber
+and prepared to give him instant audience. Yet for all her jewels and
+rich attire, she trembled like a common wench at the approach of her
+lover, and feared that the loud beating of her heart would drown the
+sound of his footsteps in the passage.
+
+But the Sieur Rudel came not, and she sent a messenger to inquire why
+he tarried, and the messenger brought word and said:
+
+"He is with the maiden Solita in the tower."
+
+Then the princess stumbled as though she were about to fall, and her
+women came about her. But she waved them back with her hand, and so
+stood shivering for a little. "The night blows cold," she said; "I
+would the lamps were lit." And when her servants had lighted the
+council-chamber, she sent yet another messenger to Sieur Rudel,
+bidding him instantly come to her, and waited in great bitterness of
+spirit. For she remembered how that she had promised to grant him the
+boon that he should ask, and much she feared that she knew what that
+boon was.
+
+Now leave we the Princess Joceliande, and hie before her messenger to
+the chamber of Solita. No pearls or purple robes had she to clad her
+beauty in, but a simple gown of white wool fastened with a silver
+girdle about the waist, and her hair she loosed so that it rippled
+down her shoulders and nestled round her ears and face.
+
+Thither the Sieur Rudel came straight from the sea, and--
+
+"Love," he said, kissing her, "it has been a weary waste of days and
+nights, and yet more weary for thee than for me. For stern work was
+there ever to my hand--ay, and well-nigh more than I could do; but for
+thee nought but to wait."
+
+"Yet, my dear lord," she replied, "the princess did give me this
+mirror, wherein I could see myself from top to toe, and a great
+comfort has it been to me."
+
+So she spake, and the messenger from the princess brake in upon them,
+bidding the Sieur Rudel hasten to the council-chamber, for that the
+Princess Joceliande waited this long while for his coming.
+
+"Now will I ask for the fulfilment of her promise," said Rudel to
+Solita, "and to-night, sweet, I will claim thee before the whole
+Court." With that he got him from the chamber and, following the
+messenger, came to where the princess awaited him.
+
+"Madame," he said, "good tidings! By God's grace we have won the
+victory over your enemies. Never again will they buzz like wasps about
+your coasts, but from this day forth they will pay you yearly truage."
+
+"Sir," she replied, rebuking him shrewdly, "indeed you bring me good
+tidings, but you bring them over-late. For here have I tarried for you
+this long while, and it beseems neither you nor me."
+
+"Madame," he answered, "I pray you acquit me of the fault and lay the
+blame on Love. For when sweet Cupid thrones a second queen in one's
+heart beside the first, what wonder that a man forgets his duty? And
+now I would that of your gentleness you would grant me your maiden
+Solita for wife."
+
+"That I may not," returned Joceliande, stricken to the soul at that
+image of a second queen. "A nameless child, and my handmaiden! Sieur
+Rudel, it befits a man to look above him for a wife."
+
+"And that, madame," he answered, "in very truth I do. Moreover, though
+no man knows Solita's parentage and place, yet must she be of gentle
+nurture, else had there been no silk sail to float her hitherwards;
+and so much it liketh you to grant my boon, for God's love, I pray
+you, hold your promise."
+
+Thereupon was the princess sore distressed for that she had given her
+promise. Howbeit she said: "Since it is so, and since my maiden Solita
+is the boon you crave, I give her to you;" and so dismissed the Sieur
+Rudel from her presence, and getting her back to her chamber, made
+moan out of all measure.
+
+"Lord Jesu," she cried, "of all my kingdom and barony, but one thing
+did I hunger for and covet, and that one thing this child, whom of my
+kindness I loved and fostered, hath traitorously robbed me of! Why did
+I take her from the sea?"
+
+So she wept for a great while, until she bethought her of a remedy.
+Then she wiped her tears and gave order that Sir Broyance should come
+to her. To him she said: "To-night at the high feast you shall make
+your prayer to the Lord Rudel, and I myself will join with you, so
+that he shall become your leader and rule over you as king."
+
+So she spake, thinking that when the Sieur Rudel had departed, she
+would privily put Solita to death--openly she dared not do it, for the
+great love the nobles bore towards Rudel--and when Solita was dead,
+then would she send again for Rudel and share her siege with him. Sir
+Broyance, as ye may believe, was right glad at her words, and made him
+ready for the feast. Hither, when the company was assembled, came the
+Sieur Rudel, clad in a green tunic edged with fur of a white fox, and
+a chain set with stones of great virtue about his neck. His hose were
+green and of the finest silk, and on his feet he wore shoes of white
+doeskin, and the latchets were of gold. So he came into the hall, and
+seeing him thus gaily attired with all his harness off, much did all
+marvel at his knightly prowess. For in truth he looked more like some
+tender minstrel than a gallant warrior. Then up rose Sir Broyance and
+said;
+
+"From the kingdom of Broye the nobles send greeting to the Sieur
+Rudel, and a message."
+
+And with that he set forth his errand and request; but the Sieur Rudel
+laughed and answered:
+
+"Sir Broyance, great honour you do me, and so, I pray, tell your
+countrymen of Broye. But never more will I draw sword or feuter spear,
+for this day hath the Princess Joceliande granted me her maiden Solita
+for wife, and by her side I will bide till death."
+
+Thereupon rose a great murmur of astonishment within the hall, the men
+lamenting that the Sieur Rudel would lead them no more to battle, and
+the women marvelling to each other that he should choose so mean a
+thing as Solita for wife. But Sir Broyance said never a word, but got
+him from the table and out of the hall, so that the company marvelled
+yet more for that he had not sought to persuade the Sieur Rudel. Then
+said the Princess Joceliande, and greatly was she angered both against
+Solita and Rudel:
+
+"Fie, my lord! shame on you; you forget your knighthood!"
+
+And he replied, "My knighthood, your highness, had but one use, and
+that to win my sweet Solita."
+
+Wherefore was Joceliande's heart yet hotter against the twain, and she
+cried aloud:
+
+"Nay, but it is on us that the shame of your cowardice will fall. Even
+now Sir Broyance left our hall in anger and scorn. It may not be that
+our chiefest noble shall so disgrace us."
+
+But Sieur Rudel laughed lightly, and answered her:
+
+"Madame, full oft have I jeopardised my life in your good cause, and I
+fear no charge of cowardice more than I fear thistle-down."
+
+His words did but increase the fury of the princess, and she brake out
+in most bitter speech:
+
+"Nay, but it is a kitchen knave we have been honouring unawares, and
+bidding sit with us at table!"
+
+And straightway she called to her servants and bade them fetch the
+warden of the castle with the fetters. But the Sieur Rudel laughed
+again, and said:
+
+"Thus it will be impossible that I leave my dear Solita and voyage
+perilously to Broye."
+
+Nor any effort or resistance did he make, but lightly suffered them
+to fetter him, the while the princess most foully mis-said him. With
+fetters they prisoned his feet, and manacles they straitly fastened
+about his wrists, and they bound him to a pillar in the hall by a
+chain about his middle.
+
+"There shall you bide," she said, "in shameful bonds until you make
+promise to voyage forth to Broye. For surely there is nothing so vile
+in all this world as a craven gentleman."
+
+With that she turned her again to the feast, though little heart she
+had thereto. But the Sieur Rudel was well content; for not for all
+the honour in Christendom would he break his word to his dear Solita.
+Howbeit, the nobles were ever urgent that the princess should set him
+free, pleading the worshipful deeds he had accomplished in her cause.
+But to none of them would she hearken, and the fair gentle ladies of
+the Court greatly applauded her for her persistence--and especially
+those who had erstwhile dropped their gauntlets that Rudel might bend
+and pick them up. And many pleasant jests they passed upon the Sieur
+Rudel, bidding him dance with them, since he was loth to fight. But
+he paid no heed to them, nor could they provoke him by any number of
+taunts. Whereupon, being angered at his silence, they were fain to
+send to Solita and make their sport with her.
+
+But that Joceliande would not suffer, and, rising, she went to
+Solita's chamber and entreated her most kindly, telling her that for
+love of her the Sieur Rudel would not adventure himself at Broye. Not
+a word did she say of how she had mistreated him, and Solita answered
+her jocundly for that her lord had held his pledge with her. But when
+the castle was still, the princess took Solita by the hand and led her
+down the steps to where Rudel stood against the pillar in the dark
+hall.
+
+"For thy sake, sweet Solita," she said, "is he bound. For thy sake!"
+and she made her feel the manacles upon his hands. And when Solita had
+so felt his bonds, she wept, and made the greatest sorrow that ever
+man heard.
+
+"Alas!" she cried, "that my dear lord should suffer in such straits.
+In God's mercy, madame, I pray you let him go! Loyal service hath he
+done for you, such as no other in the kingdom."
+
+"Loyal service, I trow," replied the princess. "He hath brought such
+shame upon my Court that for ever am I dishonoured. It may not be that
+I let him go, without you give him back his word and bid him forth to
+Broye."
+
+"And that will I never do," replied Solita, "for all your cruelty."
+
+So the princess turned her away and gat her from the hall, but Solita
+remained with her lord, making moan and easing his fetters with her
+hands as best she might. Hence it fell out that she who should have
+comforted must needs be comforted herself, and that the Sieur Rudel
+did right willingly.
+
+The like, he would say to me, hath often happened to him since, and
+when he was harassed with sore distress he must needs turn him about
+to stop a woman's tears; for which he thanked God most heartily, and
+prayed that so it might ever be, since thus he clean forgot his own
+sad plight. Whence, meseems, may men understand how noble a gentleman
+was my good lord the Sieur Rudel.
+
+Now when the night was well spent and drawing on to dawn, Solita, for
+very weariness, fell asleep at the pillar's foot, and Rudel began to
+take counsel with himself if, by any manner of means, he might outwit
+the Princess Joceliande. For this he saw, that she would not have him
+wed her handmaiden, and for that cause, and for no cowardice of his,
+had so cruelly entreated him. And when he had pondered a little with
+himself, he bent and touched Solita with his hands, and called to her
+in a low voice.
+
+"Solita," he said, "it is in Joceliande's heart to keep us twain
+each from other. Rise, therefore, and get thee to the good abbot who
+baptised thee. Ever hath he stood my friend, and for friendship's sake
+this thing he will do. Bring him hither into the hall, that he may
+marry us even this night, and when the morning comes I will tell the
+princess of our marriage; and so will she know that her cruelty is of
+small avail, and release me unto thee."
+
+Thereupon Solita rose right joyously.
+
+"Surely, my dear lord," said she, "no man can match thee, neither in
+craft nor prowess," and she hurried through the dark passages towards
+the lodging of the abbot. Hard by this lodging was the chapel of the
+castle, and when she came thereto the windows were ablaze with light,
+and Solita clapped her ear to the door. But no sound did she hear, no,
+not so much as the stirring of a mouse, and bethinking her that the
+good abbot might be holding silent vigil, she gently pressed upon the
+door, so that it opened for the space of an inch; and when she looked
+into the chapel, she beheld the Princess Joceliande stretched upon
+the steps before the altar. Her coronet had fallen from her head and
+rolled across the stones, and she lay like one that had fallen asleep
+in the counting of her beads. Greatly did Solita marvel at the sight,
+but no word she said lest she should wake the princess; and in a
+little, becoming afeard of the silence and of the shadows which the
+flickering candles set racing on the wall, she shut the door quickly
+and stole on tiptoe to the abbot. Long she entreated him or ever she
+prevailed, for the holy man was timorous, and feared the wrath of the
+princess. But at the last, for the Sieur Rudel's sake, he consented,
+and married them privily in the hall as the grey dawn was breaking
+across the sea.
+
+Now, in the morning, the princess bid Solita be brought to her, and
+when they were alone, gently and cunningly she spake:
+
+"Child," she said, "I doubt not thy heart is hot against me for that I
+will not enlarge the Sieur Rudel. Alas! fain were I to do this thing,
+but for the honour of my Court I may not. Bound are we not by our
+wills but by our necessities--and thus it is with all women. Men may
+ride forth and shape their lives with their good swords; but for us,
+we must needs bide where we were born, and order such things as fall
+to us, as best we can. Therefore, child, take my word to heart: the
+Sieur Rudel loves thee, and thou wouldst keep his love. Let my age
+point to thee the way! What if I release him? No longer can he stay
+with us, holding high honour and dignity, since he hath turned him
+from his knightlihood and avoided this great adventure, but forth
+with you must he fare. And all day long will he sit with you in your
+chamber, idle as a woman, and ever his thoughts will go back to the
+times of his nobility. The clash of steel will grow louder in
+his ears; he will list again to the praises of minstrels in the
+banquet-hall, and when men speak to him of great achievements wrought
+by other hands, then thou wilt see the life die out of his eyes, and
+his heart will become cold as stone, and thou wilt lose his love. A
+great thing will it be for thee if he come not to hate thee in the
+end. But if, of thy own free will, thou send him from thee, then shalt
+thou ever keep his love. Thy image will ride before his eyes in the
+van of battles; for very lack of thee he will move from endeavour to
+endeavour; and so thy life will be enshrined in his most noble deeds."
+
+At these words, with such cunning gentleness were they spoken, Solita
+was sore troubled.
+
+"I cannot send him from me," she cried, "for never did woman so love
+her lord--no, not ever in the world!"
+
+"Then prove thy love," said Joceliande again. "A kingdom is given into
+his hand, and he will not take it because of thee. It is a hard thing,
+I trow right well. But the cross becomes a crown when a woman lifts
+it. Think! A kingdom! And never yet was kingdom established but the
+stones of its walls were mortised with the blood of women's hearts."
+
+So she pleaded, hiding her own thoughts, until Solita answered her,
+and said:
+
+"God help me, but he shall go to Broye!"
+
+Much ado had the Princess Joceliande to hide her joy for the success
+of her device; but Solita, poor lass! had neither eyes nor thoughts
+for her. Forthwith she rose to her feet, and quickly gat her to the
+hall, lest her courage should fail, before that she had accomplished
+her resolve. But when she came near to the Sieur Rudel, blithely he
+smiled at her and called "Solita, my wife." It seemed to her that
+words so sweet had never as yet been spoken since the world began, and
+all her strength ebbed from her, and she stood like one that is dumb,
+gazing piteously at her husband. Again Rudel called to her, but no
+answer could she make, and she turned and fled sobbing to the chamber
+of the princess.
+
+"I could not speak," she said; "my lips were locked, and Rudel holds
+the key."
+
+But the princess spoke gently and craftily, bidding her take heart,
+for that she herself would go with her and second her words; and
+taking Solita by the hand, she led her again to the hall.
+
+This time Solita made haste to speak first. "Rudel," she said, "no
+honour can I bring to you, but only foul disgrace, and that is no fit
+gift from one who loves you. Therefore, from this hour I hold you quit
+of your promise and pray you to undertake this mission and set forth
+for Broye."
+
+But the Sieur Rudel would hearken to nothing of what she said.
+
+"No foul disgrace can come to me," he cried, "but only if I prove
+false to you and lose your love. My promise I will keep, and all the
+more for that I see the Princess Joceliande hath set you on to this."
+
+But Solita protested that it was not so, and that of her own will and
+desire she released him, for the longing to sacrifice herself for her
+dear lord's sake grew upon her as she thought upon it. Yet he would
+not consent.
+
+"My word I passed to you when you were a maid, and shall I not keep it
+now that you are a wife?" he cried.
+
+"Wife?" cried the princess, "you are his wife?" And she roughly
+gripped Solita's wrist so that the girl could not withhold a cry.
+
+"In truth, madame," replied the Sieur Rudel, "even last night, in this
+hall, Solita and I were married by the good abbot, and therefore I
+will not leave her while she lives."
+
+Still Joceliande would not believe it, bethinking her that the Sieur
+Rudel had hit upon the pretence as a device for his enlargement; but
+Solita showed to her the ring which the abbot had taken from the
+finger of her lord and placed upon hers, and then the princess knew
+that of a surety they were married, and her hatred for Solita burned
+in her blood like fire.
+
+But no sign she gave of what she felt, but rather spoke with greater
+softness to them both, bidding them look forward beyond the first
+delights of love, and behold how all their years to come were the
+price they needs must pay.
+
+Now, while they were yet debating each with other, came Sir Broyance
+into the hall, and straightway the princess called to him and begged
+him to add his prayers to Solita's. But he answered:
+
+"That, madame, I will not do, for, indeed, the esteem I have for the
+Sieur Rudel is much increased, and I hold it no cowardice that he
+should refuse a kingdom for his wife's sake, but the sweetest bravery.
+And therefore it was that I broke off my plea last night and sought
+not to persuade him."
+
+At that Rudel was greatly rejoiced, and said:
+
+"Dost hear him, Solita? Even he who most has need of me acquits me of
+disgrace. Truly I will never leave thee while I live."
+
+But the princess turned sharply to Sir Broyance. "Sir, have you
+changed your tune?" she said; "for never was a man so urgent as you
+with me for the Sieur Rudel's help."
+
+"Alas! madame," he replied, "I knew not then that he was plighted to
+the maiden Solita, or never would I have borne this message. For
+this I surely know, that all my days are waste and barren because I
+suffered my mistress to send me from her after a will-of-the-wisp
+honour, even as Solita would send her lord."
+
+Thereupon Solita brake in upon him:
+
+"But, my lord, you have won great renown, and far and wide is your
+prowess known and sung."
+
+"That avails me nothing," he replied, "my life rings hollow like an
+empty cup, and so are two lives wasted."
+
+"Nay, my lord, neither life is wasted. For much have you done for
+others, though maybe little for yourself, while for her you loved the
+noise of your achievements must have been enough."
+
+"Of that I cannot tell," he answered. "But this I know: she drags a
+pale life out behind convent walls. Often have I passed the gate with
+my warriors, but never could I hold speech with her."
+
+"She will have seen your banners glancing in the sun," said Solita,
+"and so will she know her sacrifice was good." Thereupon she turned
+her again to her husband. "For my sake, dear Rudel, I pray you go to
+Broye."
+
+But still he persisted, saying he would not depart from her till
+death, until at last she ceased from her importunities, and went sadly
+to her chamber. Then she unbound her hair and stood gazing at her
+likeness in the mirror.
+
+"O cursed beauty," she cried, "wherein I took vain pride for my sweet
+lord's sake--truly art thou my ruin and snare!" And while she thus
+made moan, the princess came softly into her chamber.
+
+"He will not leave me, madame," she sobbed. Joceliande came over to
+her and gently laid her hand upon her head and whispered in her ear,
+"Not while you live!"
+
+For awhile Solita sat silent.
+
+"Ay, madame," she said at length, "even as I came alone to these
+coasts, so will I go from them;" and slowly she drew from its sheath a
+little knife which she carried at her girdle. She tried the point upon
+her finger, so that the blood sprang from the prick and dropped on her
+white gown. At the sight she gave a cry and dropped the knife, and "I
+cannot do it" she said, "I have not the courage. But you, madame! Ever
+have you been kind to me, and therefore show me this last kindness."
+
+"I will well," said the princess; and she made Solita to sit upon a
+couch, and with two bands of her golden hair she tied her hands fast
+behind her, and so laid her upon her back on the couch. And when she
+had so laid her she said:
+
+"But for all that you die, he shall not go to Broye, but here shall he
+bide, and share my throne with me."
+
+Thereupon did Solita perceive all the treachery of Princess
+Joceliande, and vainly she struggled to free her hands and to cry out
+for help. But Joceliande clapped her palm upon Solita's mouth, and
+drawing a gold pin from her own hair, she drove it straight into her
+heart, until nothing but the little knob could be seen. So Solita
+died, and quickly the princess wiped the blood from her breast, and
+unbound her hands and arranged her limbs as though she slept. Then she
+returned to the hall, and, summoning the warden, bade him loose the
+Sieur Rudel.
+
+"It shall be even as you wish," she said to him. Wise and prudent had
+she been, had she ended with that; but her malice was not yet sated,
+and so she suffered it to lead her to her ruin. For she stretched out
+her hand to him and said, "I myself will take you to your wife." And
+greatly marvelling, the Sieur Rudel took her hand and followed.
+
+Now when they were come to Solita's chamber, the princess entered
+first, and turned her again to my Lord Rudel and laid her finger to
+her lips, saying, "Hush!" Therefore he came in after her on tiptoe and
+stood a little way from the foot of the couch, fearing lest he might
+wake his wife.
+
+"Is she not still?" asked Joceliande in a whisper. "Is she not still
+and white?"
+
+"Still and white as a folded lily," he replied, "and like a folded
+lily, too, in her white flesh there sleeps a heart of gold." Therewith
+he crept softly to the couch and bent above her, and in an instant he
+perceived that her bosom did not rise and fall. He gazed swiftly at
+the princess; she was watching him, and their glances met. He dropped
+upon his knees by the couch and felt about Solita's heart that he
+might know whether it beat or not, and his fingers touched the knob of
+Joceliande's bodkin. Gently he drew the gown from Solita's bosom, and
+beheld how that she had been slain. Then did he weep, believing that
+in truth she had killed herself, but the princess must needs touch him
+upon the shoulder.
+
+"My lord," she said, "why weep for the handmaid when the princess
+lives?"
+
+Then the Sieur Rudel rose straightway to his feet and said:
+
+"This is thy doing!" For a little Joceliande denied it, saying that of
+her own will and desire Solita had perished. But Rudel looked her ever
+sternly in the face, and again he said, "This is thy doing!" and at
+that Joceliande could gainsay him no more. But she dropped upon the
+floor, and kissed his feet, and cried:
+
+"It was for love of thee, Rudel. Look, my kingdom is large and of much
+wealth, yet of no worth is it to me, but only if it bring thee service
+and great honour. A princess am I, yet no joy do I have of my degree,
+but only if thou share my siege with me."
+
+Then Rudel broke out upon her, thrusting her from him with his hand
+and spurning her with his foot as she crouched upon the floor.
+
+"No princess art thou, but a changeling. For surely princess never did
+such foul wrong and crime;" and even as he spake, many of the nobles
+burst into the chamber, for they had heard the outcry below and
+marvelled what it might mean. And when Rudel beheld them crowding
+the doorway, "Come in, my lords," said he, "so that ye may know what
+manner of woman ye serve and worship. There lies my dear wife, Solita,
+murdered by this vile princess, and for love of me she saith, for love
+of me!" And again he turned him to Joceliande. "Now all the reverence
+I held thee in is turned to hatred, God be thanked; such is the
+guerdon of thy love for me."
+
+Joceliande, when she heard his injuries, knew indeed that her love was
+unavailing, and that by no means might she win him to share her siege
+with her. Therefore her love changed to a bitter fury, and standing
+up forthwith she bade the nobles take their swords and smite off the
+Sieur Rudel's head. But no one so much as moved a hand towards his
+hilt. Then spake Rudel again:
+
+"O vile and treacherous," he cried, "who will obey thee?" and his eyes
+fell upon Solita where she lay in her white beauty upon the golden
+pillow of her hair. Thereupon he dropped again upon his knees by the
+couch, and took her within his arms, kissing her lips and her eyes,
+and bidding her wake; this with many tears. But seeing she would not,
+but was dead in very truth, he got him to his feet and turned to where
+the princess stood like stone in the middle of the chamber. "Now for
+thy sin," he cried, "a shameful death shalt thou die and a painful,
+and may the devil have thy soul!"
+
+He bade the nobles depart from the chamber, and following them the
+last, firmly barred the door upon the outside. Thus was the Princess
+Joceliande left alone with dead Solita, and ever she heard the closing
+and barring of doors and the sound of feet growing fainter and
+fainter. But no one came to her, loud though she cried, and sorely was
+she afeard, gazing now at the dead body, now wondering what manner of
+death the Sieur Rudel planned for her. Then she walked to the window
+if by any chance she might win help that way, and saw the ships riding
+at their anchorage with sails loose, and heard the songs of the
+sailors as they made ready to cast free; and between the coast and
+the castle were many men hurrying backwards and forwards with all the
+purveyance of a voyage. Then did she think that she was to be left
+alone in the tower, to starve to death in company of the girl she had
+murdered, and great moan she made; but other device was in the mind
+of my ingenious master Lord Rudel. For all about the castle he piled
+stacks of wood and drenched them with oil, bethinking him that
+Solita his wife, if little joy she had had of her life, should have
+undeniable honour in her obsequies. And so having set fire to the
+stacks, he got him into the ships with all the company that had
+dwelled within the castle, and drew out a little way from shore. Then
+the ships lay to and watched the flames mounting the castle walls. The
+tower wherein the Princess Joceliande was prisoned was the topmost
+turret of the building, so that many a roof crashed in, and many a
+rampart bowed out and crumbled to the ground, or ever the fire touched
+it. But just as night was drawing on, lo! a great tongue of flame
+burst through the window from within, and the Sieur Rudel beheld in
+the midst of it as it were the figure of a woman dancing.
+
+Thereupon he signed to his sailors to hoist the sail again, and the
+other ships obeying his example, he led the way gallantly to Broye.
+
+
+
+
+A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
+
+
+"So you couldn't wait!"
+
+Mrs. Branscome turned full on the speaker as she answered
+deliberately: "You have evidently not been long in London, Mr. Hilton,
+or you would not ask that question."
+
+"I arrived yesterday evening."
+
+"Quite so. Then will you forgive me one tiny word of advice? You will
+learn the truth of it soon by yourself; but I want to convince you at
+once of the uselessness--to use no harder word--of trying to revive a
+flirtation--let me see! yes, quite two years old. You might as well
+galvanise a mummy and expect it to walk about. Besides," she added
+inconsistently, "I had to marry and--and--you never came."
+
+"Then you sent the locket!"
+
+The word sent a shiver through Mrs. Branscome with a remembrance of
+the desecration of a gift which she had cherished as a holy thing. She
+clung to flippancy as her defence.
+
+"Oh, no! I never sent it. I lost it somewhere, I think. Must you go?"
+she continued, as Hilton moved silently to the door. "I expect my
+husband in just now. Won't you wait and meet him?"
+
+"How dare you?" Hilton burst out. "Is there nothing of your true self
+left?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+David Hilton's education was as yet in its infancy. This was not only
+his first visit to England, but, indeed, to any spot further afield
+than Interlaken. All of his six-and-twenty years that he could
+recollect had been passed in a _châlet_ on the Scheidegg above
+Grindelwald, his only companion an elderly recluse who had
+deliberately cut himself off from communion with his fellows. The
+trouble which had driven Mr. Strange, an author at one time of some
+mark, into this seclusion, was now as completely forgotten as his
+name. Even David knew nothing of its cause. That Strange was his uncle
+and had adopted him when left an orphan at the age of six, was the
+sum of his information. For although the pair had lived together for
+twenty years, there had been little intercourse of thought between
+them, and none of sentiment. Strange had, indeed, throughout shut his
+nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at
+first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards
+manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his
+embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the
+savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he
+had originally chosen as a solace for his loneliness, became in the
+end the victim of a heartless experiment. Strange's plan was based
+upon a method of training. In the first place, he thoroughly isolated
+David from any actual experience of persons beyond the simple
+shepherd folk who attended to their needs and a few Alpine guides who
+accompanied him on mountain expeditions. He kept incessant guard over
+his own past life, letting no incidents or deductions escape, and fed
+the youth's mind solely upon the ideal polities of the ancients,
+his object being to launch him suddenly upon the world with little
+knowledge of it beyond what had filtered through his books, and
+possessed of an intuitive hostility to existing modes. What kind of a
+career would ensue? Strange anticipated the solution of the problem
+with an approach to excitement. Two events, however, prevented the
+complete realisation of his scheme. One was a lingering illness which
+struck him down when David was twenty-four and about to enter on his
+ordeal. The second, occurring simultaneously, was the advent of Mrs.
+Branscome--then Kate Alden--to Grindelwald.
+
+They met by chance on the snow slopes of the Wetterhorn early one
+August morning. Miss Alden was trying to disentangle some meaning
+from the _pâtois_ of her guides, and gratefully accepted Hilton's
+assistance. Half-an-hour after she had continued the ascent, David
+noticed a small gold locket glistening in her steps. It recalled him
+to himself, and he picked it up and went home with a strange trouble
+clutching at his heart. The next morning he carried the locket down
+into the valley, found its owner and--forgot to restore it. It became
+an excuse for further descents. Meanwhile, the theories were wooed
+with a certain coldness. In front of them stood perpetually the one
+real thing which had surged up through the quiet of his life, and,
+lover-like, he justified its presence to himself, by seeing in Kate
+Alden's frank face the incarnation of the ideal patterns of his books.
+The visits to Grindelwald grew more frequent and more prolonged. The
+climax, however, came unexpectedly to both. David had commissioned a
+jeweller at Berne to fashion a fac-simile of the locket for his own
+wearing, and, meaning to restore the original, handed Kate Alden the
+copy the evening before she left. An explanation of the mistake led to
+mutual avowals and a betrothal. Hilton returned to nurse his adoptive
+father, and was to seek England as soon as he could obtain his
+release. Meanwhile, Kate pledged herself to wait for him. She kept the
+new locket, empty except for a sprig of edelweiss he had placed in
+it, and agreed that if she needed her lover's presence, she should
+despatch it as an imperative summons.
+
+During the next two years Strange's life ebbed sullenly away. The
+approach of death brought no closer intimacy between uncle and nephew,
+since indeed the former held it almost as a grievance against
+David that he should die before he could witness the issue of his
+experiment. Consequently the younger man kept his secret to himself,
+and embraced it the more closely for his secrecy, fostering it through
+the dreary night watches, until the image of Kate Alden became a
+Star-in-the-East to him, beckoning towards London. When the end came,
+David found himself the possessor of a moderate fortune; and with the
+humiliating knowledge that this legacy awoke his first feeling of
+gratitude towards his uncle, he locked the door of the _châlet_, and
+so landed at Charing Cross one wet November evening. Meanwhile the
+locket had never come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Hilton had left, Mrs. Branscome's forced indifference gave way.
+As she crouched beside the fire, numbed by pain beyond the power of
+thought, she could conjure up but one memory--the morning of their
+first meeting. She recollected that the sun had just risen over the
+shoulder of the Shreckhorn, and how it had seemed to her young fancy
+that David had come to her straight from the heart of it. The sound of
+her husband's step in the hall brought her with a shock to facts. "He
+must go back," she muttered, "he must go back."
+
+David, however, harboured no such design. One phrase of hers had
+struck root in his thoughts. "I had to marry," she had said, and
+certain failings in her voice warned him that this, whatever it
+meant, was in her eyes the truth. It had given the lie direct to the
+flippancy which she had assumed, and David determined to remain until
+he had fathomed its innermost meaning. A fear, indeed, lest the one
+single faith he felt as real should crumble to ashes made his resolve
+almost an instinct of self-preservation. The idea of accepting the
+situation never occurred to him, his training having effectually
+prevented any growth of respect for the _status quo_ as such. Nor did
+he realise at this time that his determination might perhaps prove
+unfair to Mrs. Branscome. A certain habit of abstraction, nurtured in
+him by the spirit of inquiry which he had imbibed from his books, had
+become so intuitive as to penetrate even into his passion. From the
+first he had been accustomed to watch his increasing intimacy with
+Kate Alden from the standpoint of a third person, analysing her
+actions and feelings no less than his own. And now this tendency gave
+the crowning impetus to a resolve which sprang originally from his
+necessity to find sure foothold somewhere amid the wreckage of his
+hopes.
+
+From this period might be dated the real commencement of Hilton's
+education. He returned to the Branscomes' house, sedulously schooled
+his looks and his words, save when betrayed into an occasional
+denunciation of the marriage laws, and succeeded at last in overcoming
+a distaste which Mr. Branscome unaccountably evinced for him. To a
+certain extent, also, he was taken up by social entertainers. There
+was an element of romance in the life he had led which appealed
+favourably to the seekers after novelty--"a second St. Simeon
+Skylights" he had been rashly termed by one good lady, whose wealth
+outweighed her learning. At first his gathering crowd of acquaintances
+only served to fence him more closely within himself; but as he began
+to realise that this was only the unit of another crowd, a crowd of
+designs and intentions working darkly, even he, sustained by the
+strength of a single aim, felt himself whirling at times. Thus he
+slowly grew to some knowledge of the difficulties and complications
+which must beset any young girl like Kate Alden, whose nearest
+relation and chaperon had been a feather-headed cousin not so
+many years her elder. At last, in a dim way, he began to see the
+possibility of replacing his bitterness with pity. For Mrs. Branscome
+did not love her husband; he plainly perceived that, if only from the
+formal precision with which she performed her duties. She appeared to
+him, indeed, to be paying off an obligation rather than working out
+the intention of her life.
+
+The actual solution of his perplexities came by an accident. Amongst
+the visitors who fell under Hilton's observation at the Branscomes'
+was a certain Mr. Marston, a complacent widower of some
+five-and-thirty years, and Branscome's fellow servant at the
+Admiralty. Hilton's attention was attracted to this man by the air
+of embarrassment with which Mrs. Branscome received his approaches.
+Resolute to neglect no clue, however slight, David sought Marston's
+companionship, and, as a reward, discovered one afternoon in a Crown
+Derby teacup on the mantel-shelf of the latter's room his own present
+of two years back. The exclamation which this discovery extorted
+aroused Marston.
+
+"What's up?"
+
+"Where did you get this?"
+
+"Why? Have you seen it before?"
+
+The question pointed out to David the need of wariness.
+
+"No!" he answered. "Its shape rather struck me, that's all. The emblem
+of a conquest, I suppose?"
+
+The invitation stumbled awkwardly from unaccustomed lips, but
+Marston noticed no more than the words. He was chewing the cud of a
+disappointment and answered with a short laugh:
+
+"No! Rather of a rebuff. The lady tore her hand away in a hurry--the
+link on the bracelet was thin, I suppose. Anyway, that was left in my
+hand."
+
+"You were proposing to her?"
+
+"Well, hardly. I was married at the time."
+
+There was a silence for some moments, during which Hilton slowly
+gathered into his mind a consciousness of the humiliation which Kate
+must have endured, and read in that the explanation of her words "I
+had to marry." Marston took up the tale, babbling resentfully of
+a nursery prudishness, but his remarks fell on deaf ears until he
+mentioned a withered flower, which he had found inside the locket.
+Then David's self control partially gave way. In imagination he saw
+Marston carelessly tossing the sprig aside and the touch of his
+fingers seemed to sully the love of which it was the token. The locket
+burned into his hand. Without a word he dropped it on to the floor,
+and ground it to pieces with his heel. A new light broke in upon
+Marston.
+
+"So this accounts for all your railing against the marriage laws," he
+laughed. "By Jove, you have kept things quiet. I wouldn't have given
+you credit for it."
+
+His eyes travelled from the carpet to David's face, and he stopped
+abruptly.
+
+"You had better hold your tongue," David said quietly. "Pick up the
+pieces."
+
+"Do you think I would touch them now?"
+
+Marston rose from his lounge; David stepped in front of the door.
+There was a litheness in his movements which denoted obedient muscles.
+Marston perceived this now with considerable discomfort, and thought
+it best to comply: he knelt down and picked up the fragments of the
+locket.
+
+"Now throw them into the grate!"
+
+That done, David took his leave. Once outside the house, however, his
+emotion fairly mastered him. The episode of which he had just heard
+was so mean and petty in itself, and yet so far-reaching in its
+consequences that it set his senses aflame in an increased revolt
+against the order of the world. Marriage was practically a necessity
+to a girl as unprotected as Kate Alden; he now acquiesced in that. But
+that it should have been forced upon her by the vanity of a trivial
+person like Marston, engaged in the pursuit of his desires, sent a
+fever of repulsion through his veins. He turned back to the door
+deluded by the notion that it was his duty to render the occurrence
+impossible of repetition. He was checked, however, by the thought of
+Mrs. Branscome. The shame he felt hinted the full force of degradation
+of which she must have been conscious, and begot in him a strange
+feeling of loyalty. Up till now the true meaning of chivalry had
+been unknown to him. In consequence of his bringing up he had been
+incapable of regarding faith in persons as a working motive in one's
+life. Even the first dawn of his passion had failed to teach him that;
+all the confidence and trust which he gained thereby being a mere
+reflection, from what he saw in Kate Alden, of truth to him. It was
+necessary that he should feel her trouble first and his poignant sense
+of that now revealed to him, not merely the wantonness of the perils
+women are compelled to run, but their consequent sufferings and their
+endurance in suppressing them.
+
+A feverish impulse towards self-sacrifice sprang up within him. He
+would bury the incident of that afternoon as a dead thing--nay, more,
+for Mrs. Branscome's sake he would leave England and return to his
+retreat among the mountains. If she had suffered, why should he claim
+an exemption? The idea had just sufficient strength to impel him to
+catch the night-mail from Charing Cross. That it was already weakening
+was evidenced by a half-feeling of regret that he had not missed the
+train.
+
+The regret swelled during his journey to the coast. The scene he had
+just come through became, from much pondering on it, almost unreal,
+and, with the blurring of the impression it had caused, there rose a
+doubt as to the accuracy of his vision of Mrs. Branscome's distress,
+which he had conjured out of it. His chivalry, in a word, had grown
+too quickly to take firm root. It was an exotic planted in soil not
+yet fully prepared. David began to think himself a fool, and at last,
+as the train neared Dover, a question which had been vaguely throbbing
+in his brain suddenly took shape. Why had she not sent for him? True,
+the locket was lost, but she might have written. The formulation of
+the question shattered almost all the work of the last few hours. He
+cursed his recent thoughts as a child's fairy dreams. Why should he
+leave England after all? If he was to sacrifice himself it should be
+for some one who cared sufficiently for him to justify the act.
+
+There might, of course, have been some hidden obstacle in the way,
+which Mrs. Branscome could not surmount. The revelation of Marston's
+unimagined story warned him of the possibility of that. But the
+chances were against it. Anyway, he quibbled to himself, he had a
+clear right to pursue the matter until he unearthed the truth. Acting
+upon this decision, David returned to town, though not without a
+lurking sense of shame.
+
+A few evenings after, he sought out Mrs. Branscome at a dance. The
+blood rushed to her face when she caught his figure, and as quickly
+ebbed away.
+
+"So you have not gone, after all?" There was something pitiful in her
+tone of reproach.
+
+"No. What made you think I had?"
+
+"Mr. Marston told me!"
+
+"Did he tell you why?"
+
+"I guessed that, and I thanked you in my heart."
+
+David was disconcerted; the woman he saw corresponded so ill with what
+he was schooling himself to believe her. He sought to conceal his
+confusion, as she had once done, and played a part. Like her, he
+overplayed it.
+
+"Well! I came to see London life, you know. It makes a pretty comedy."
+
+"Comedies end in tears at times."
+
+"Even then common politeness makes us sit them out. Can you spare me a
+dance?"
+
+Mrs. Branscome pleaded fatigue, and barely suppressed a sigh of relief
+as she noted her husband's approach. David followed her glance, and
+bent over her, speaking hurriedly:--
+
+"You said you knew why I went away; I want to tell you why I came
+back."
+
+"No! no!" she exclaimed. "It could be of no use--of no help to either
+of us."
+
+"I came back," he went on, ignoring her interruption, "merely to ask
+you one question. Will you hear it and answer it? I can wait," he
+added, as she kept silence.
+
+"Then, to-morrow, as soon as possible," Mrs. Branscome replied, beaten
+by his persistency. "Come at seven; we dine at eight, so I can give
+you half-an-hour. But you are ungenerous."
+
+That night began what may be termed the crisis of Hilton's education.
+This was the second time he had caught Mrs. Branscome unawares. On the
+first occasion--that of his unexpected arrival in England--he did not
+possess the experience to measure accurately looks and movements,
+or to comprehend them as the connotation of words. It is doubtful,
+besides, whether, had he owned the skill, he would have had the power
+to exercise it, so engrossed was he in his own distress. By the
+process, however, of continually repressing the visible signs of his
+own emotions, he had now learnt to appreciate them in others. And
+in Mrs. Branscome's sudden change of colour, in little convulsive
+movements of her hands, and in a certain droop of eyelids veiling eyes
+which met the gaze frankly as a rule, he read this evening sure proofs
+of the constancy of her heart. This fresh knowledge affected him in
+two ways. On the one hand it gave breath to the selfish passion which
+now dominated his ideas. At the same time, however it assured him
+that when he asked his question: "Why did you not send for me?" an
+unassailable answer would be forthcoming; and, moreover, by convincing
+him of this, it destroyed the sole excuse he had pleaded to himself
+for claiming the right to ask it. In self-defence Hilton had recourse
+to his old outcry against the marriage laws and, finding this barren,
+came in the end to frankly devising schemes for their circumvention.
+Such inward personal conflicts were, of necessity, strange to a man
+dry-nursed on abstractions, and, after a night of tension, they tossed
+him up on the shores of the morning broken in mind and irresolute for
+good or ill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Branscome received him impassively at the appointed time. David
+saw that he was expected to speak to the point, and a growing scorn
+for his own insistence urged him to the same course. He plunged
+abruptly into his subject and his manner showed him in the rough, more
+particularly to himself.
+
+"What I came back to ask you is just this. You know--you must
+know--that I would have come, whatever the consequence. Why did you
+not send for me after, after--?"
+
+"Why did I not send for you?" Mrs. Branscome took him up, repeating
+his words mechanically, as though their meaning had not reached her.
+"You don't mean that you never received my letter. Oh, don't say that!
+It can't have miscarried, I registered it."
+
+"Then you did write?"
+
+This confirmation of her fear drove a breach through her composure.
+
+"Of course, of course, I wrote," she cried. "You doubt that? What can
+you think of me? Yes, I wrote, and when no answer came, I fancied
+you had forgotten me--that you had never really cared, and so I--I
+married."
+
+Her voice dried in her throat. The thought of this ruin of two lives,
+made inevitable by a mistake in which neither shared, brought a sense
+of futility which paralysed her.
+
+The same idea was working in Hilton's mind, but to a different end. It
+fixed the true nature of this woman for the first time clearly within
+his recognition, and the new light blinded him. Before, his imagined
+grievance had always coloured the picture; now, he began to realise
+not only that she was no more responsible for the catastrophe than
+himself, but that he must have stood in the same light to her as she
+had done to him. The events of the past few months passed before his
+mind as on a clear mirror. He compared the gentle distinction of her
+bearing with his own flaunting resentment.
+
+"I am sorry," he said, "I have wronged you in thought and word and
+action. The fact is, I never saw you plainly before; myself stood in
+the way."
+
+Mrs. Branscome barely heeded his words. The feelings her watchfulness
+had hitherto restrained having once broken their barriers swept her
+away on a full flow. She recalled the very terms of her letter. She
+had written it in the room in which they were standing. Mr. Branscome
+had called just as she addressed the envelope--she had questioned him
+about its registration to Switzerland, and, yes, he had promised to
+look after it and had taken it away. "Yes!" she repeated to herself
+aloud, directing her eyes instinctively towards her husband's study
+door. "He promised to post it."
+
+The sound of the words and a sudden movement from Hilton woke her to
+alarm. David had turned to the window, and she felt that he had heard
+and understood. The silence pressed on her like a dead weight. For
+Hilton, this was the crucial moment of his ordeal. He had understood
+only too clearly, and this second proof of the harm a petty sin could
+radiate struck through him the same fiery repulsion which had stung
+him to revolt when he quitted Marston's rooms. He flung up the window
+and faced the sunset. Strips of black cloud barred it across, and he
+noticed, with a minute attention of which he was hardly conscious,
+that their lower edges took a colour like the afterglow on a Swiss
+rock mountain. The perception sent a riot of associations through his
+brain which strengthened his wavering purpose. Must he lose her after
+all, he thought; now that he had risen to a true estimation of her
+worth? His fancy throned Kate queen of his mountain home, and he
+turned towards her, but a light of fear in her eyes stopped the words
+on his lips.
+
+"I trust you," she said, simply.
+
+The storm of his passions quieted down. That one sentence just
+expressed to him the debt he owed to her. In return--well, he could do
+no less than leave her her illusion.
+
+"Good-bye," he said. "All the good that comes to us, somehow, seems to
+spring from women like yourself, while we give you nothing but trouble
+in return. Even this last misery, which my selfishness has brought to
+you, lifts me to breathe a cleaner air."
+
+"He must have forgotten to post it," Mrs. Branscome pleaded.
+
+"Yes; we must believe that. Good-bye!"
+
+For a moment he stayed to watch her white figure, outlined against the
+dusk of the room, and then gently closed the door on her. The next
+morning David left England, not, however, for Grindelwald. He dreaded
+the morbid selfishness which grows from isolation, and sought a
+finishing school in the companionship of practical men.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.
+
+
+The surgeon has a weakness for men who make their living on the sea.
+From the skipper of a Dogger Bank fishing-smack to the stoker of a
+Cardiff tramp, from Margate 'longshoreman to a crabber of the Stilly
+Isles, he embraces them all in a lusty affection. And this not merely
+out of his own love of salt water but because his diagnosis reveals
+the gentleman in them more surely than in the general run of his
+wealthier patients. "A primitive gentleman, if you like," Lincott will
+say, "not above tearing his meat with his fingers or wearing the
+same shirt night and day for a couple of months on end, but still a
+gentleman." As one of the innumerable instances which had built up his
+conviction, Lincott will offer you the twenty-kroner story.
+
+As he was walking through the wards of his hospital he stopped for
+a moment by the bed of a brewer's drayman who was suffering from an
+access of _delirium tremens_. The drayman's language was violent and
+voluble. But he sank into a coma with the usual suddenness common to
+such cases, and in the pause which followed Lincott heard a gentle
+voice a few beds away earnestly apologising to a nurse for the trouble
+she was put to. "Why," she replied with a laugh, "I am here to be
+troubled." Apologies of the kind are not so frequently heard in the
+wards of an East End hospital. This one, besides, was spoken with an
+accent not very pronounced, it is true, but unfamiliar. Lincott moved
+down to the bed. It was occupied by a man apparently tall, with a pair
+of remorseful blue eyes set in an open face, and a thatch of yellow
+hair dusted with grey.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Lincott, and the patient explained. He was
+a Norseman from Finland, fifty-three years old, and he had worked all
+his life on English ships. He had risen from "decky" to mate. Then he
+had injured himself, and since he could work no more he had come into
+the hospital to be cured. Lincott examined him, found that a slight
+operation was all the man needed, and performed it himself. In six
+weeks time Helling, as the sailor was named, was discharged. He made a
+simple and dignified little speech of thanks to the nurses for their
+attention, and another to the surgeon for saving his life.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Lincott, as he held out his hand. "Any medical
+student could have performed that operation."
+
+"Then I have another reason to thank you," answered Helling. "The
+nurses have told me about you, sir, and I'm grateful you spared the
+time to perform it yourself."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Lincott.
+
+"Find a ship, sir," answered Helling. Then he hesitated, and slowly
+slipped his finger and thumb along the waist-band of his trousers. But
+he only repeated, "I must find a ship," and so left the hospital.
+
+Three weeks later Helling called at Lincott's house in Harley Street.
+Now, when hospital patients take the trouble, after they have been
+discharged, to find out the doctor's private address and call, it
+generally means they have come to beg. Lincott, remembering how
+Helling's simple courtesies had impressed him, experienced an actual
+disappointment. He felt his theories about the seafaring man begin to
+totter. However, Helling was shown into the consulting-room, and at
+the sight of him Lincott's disappointment vanished. He did not start
+up, since manifestations of surprise are amongst those things with
+which doctors find it advisable to dispense, but he hooked a chair
+forward with his foot.
+
+"Now then, sit down! Chuck yourself about! Sit down," said Lincott
+genially. "You look bad."
+
+Helling, in fact, was gaunt with famine; his eyes were sunk and dull;
+he was so thin that he seemed to have grown in height.
+
+"I had some trouble in finding a ship," he said; and sitting down on
+the edge of the chair, twirled his hat in some embarrassment.
+
+"It is three weeks since you left the hospital?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You should have come here before," the surgeon was moved to say.
+
+"No," answered Helling. "I couldn't come before, sir. You see, I had
+no ship. But I found one this morning, and I start to-morrow."
+
+"But for these three weeks? You have been starving." Lincott slipped
+his hand into his pocket. It seemed to him afterwards simply
+providential that he did not fumble his money, that no clink of coins
+was heard. For Helling answered,
+
+"Yes, sir, I've been starving." He drew back his shoulders and
+laughed. "I'm proud to know that I've been starving."
+
+He laid his hat on the ground, drew out and unclasped his knife, felt
+along the waist-band of his breeches, cut a few stitches, and finally
+produced a little gold coin. This coin he held between his forefinger
+and thumb.
+
+"Forty years ago," he said, "when I was a nipper and starting on
+my first voyage, my mother gave me this. She sewed it up in the
+waist-band of my breeches with her own hands and told me never to part
+with it until I'd been starving. I've been near to starvation often
+and often enough. But I never have starved before. This coin has
+always stood between that and me. Now, however, I have actually been
+starving and I can part with it."
+
+He got up from his chair and timidly laid the piece of gold on the
+table by Lincott's elbow. Then he picked up his hat. The surgeon
+said nothing, and he did not touch the coin. Neither did he look at
+Helling, but sat with his forehead propped in his hand as though he
+were reading the letters on his desk. Helling, afraid to speak lest
+his coin should be refused, walked noiselessly to the door and
+noiselessly unlatched it.
+
+"Wait a bit!" said Lincott. Helling stopped anxiously in the doorway.
+
+"Where have you slept"--Lincott paused to steady his voice--"for the
+last three weeks?" he continued.
+
+"Under arches by the river, sir," replied Helling. "On benches along
+the Embankment, once or twice in the parks. But that's all over now,"
+he said earnestly. "I'm all right. I've got my ship. I couldn't part
+with that before, because it was the only thing I had to hang on to
+the world with. But I'm all right now."
+
+Lincott took up the coin and turned it over in the palm of his hand.
+
+"Twenty kroners," he said. "Do you know what that's worth in England?"
+
+"Yes, I do," answered Helling with some trepidation.
+
+"Fifteen shillings," said Lincott. "Think of it, fifteen shillings,
+perhaps sixteen."
+
+"I know," interrupted Helling quickly, mistaking the surgeon's
+meaning. "But please, please, you mustn't think I value what you have
+done for me at that. It's only fifteen shillings, but it has meant a
+fortune to me all the last three weeks. Each time that I've drawn my
+belt tighter I have felt that coin underneath it burn against my skin.
+When I passed a coffee-stall in the early morning and saw the steam
+and the cake I knew I could have bought up the whole stall if I chose.
+I could have had meals, and meals, and meals. I could have slept in
+beds under roofs. It's only fifteen shillings; nothing at all to
+you," and he looked round the consulting-room, with its pictures and
+electric lights, "but I want you to take it at what it has been worth
+to me ever since I came out of the hospital."
+
+Lincott took Helling into his dining-room. On a pedestal stood a great
+silver vase, blazing its magnificence across the room.
+
+"You see that?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Helling.
+
+"It was given to me by a patient. It must have cost at the least
+£500."
+
+Helling tapped the vase with his knuckles.
+
+"Yes, sir, that's a present," he said enviously. "That _is_ a
+present."
+
+Lincott laughed and threw up the window.
+
+"You can pitch it out into the street if you like. By the side of your
+coin it's muck."
+
+Lincott keeps the coin. He points out that Helling was fifty-three at
+the time that he gave him this present, and that the operation was one
+which any practitioner could have performed.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTH PICTURE.
+
+
+Lady Tamworth felt unutterably bored. The sensation of lassitude, even
+in its less acute degrees, was rare with her; for she possessed a
+nature of so fresh a buoyancy that she was able, as a rule, to extract
+diversion from any environment. Her mind took impressions with the
+vivid clearness of a mirror, and also, it should be owned, with a
+mirror's transient objectivity. To-day, however, the mirror was
+clouded. She looked out of the window; a level row of grey houses
+frowned at her across the street. She looked upwards; a grey pall of
+cloud swung over the rooftops. The interior of the room appeared to
+her even less inviting than the street. It was the afternoon of the
+first drawing-room, and a _debutante_ was exhibiting herself to her
+friends. She stood in the centre, a figure from a Twelfth-Night cake,
+amidst a babble of congratulations, and was plainly occupied in a
+perpetual struggle to conceal her moments of enthusiasm beneath a
+crust of deprecatory languor.
+
+The spectacle would have afforded choice entertainment to Lady
+Tamworth, had she viewed it in the company of a sympathetic companion.
+Solitary appreciation of the humorous, however, only induced in her
+a yet more despondent mood. The tea seemed tepid; the conversation
+matched the tea. Epigrams without point, sallies void of wit, and
+cynicisms innocent of the sting of an apt application floated about
+her on a ripple of unintelligent laughter. A phrase of Mr. Dale's
+recurred to her mind, "Hock and seltzer with the sparkle out of it;"
+so he had stigmatised the style and she sadly thanked him for the
+metaphor.
+
+There was, moreover, a particular reason for her discontent. Nobody
+realised the presence of Lady Tamworth, and this unaccustomed neglect
+shot a barbed question at her breast. "After all why should they?" She
+was useless, she reflected; she did nothing, exercised no influence.
+The thought, however, was too painful for lengthened endurance; the
+very humiliation of it produced the antidote. She remembered that she
+had at last persuaded her lazy Sir John to stand for Parliament. Only
+wait until he was elected! She would exercise an influence then. The
+vision of a _salon_ was miraged before her, with herself in the middle
+deftly manipulating the destinies of a nation.
+
+"Lady Tamworth!" a voice sounded at her elbow.
+
+"Mr. Dale!" She turned with a sudden sprightliness. "My guardian angel
+sent you."
+
+"So bad as that?"
+
+"I have an intuition." She paused impressively upon the word.
+
+"Never mind!" said he soothingly. "It will go away."
+
+Lady Tamworth glared, that is, as well as she could; nature had not
+really adapted her for glaring. "I have an intuition," she resumed,
+"that this is what the suburbs mean." And she waved her hand
+comprehensively.
+
+"They are perhaps a trifle excessive," he returned. "But then you
+needn't have come."
+
+"Oh, yes! Clients of Sir John." Lady Tamworth sighed and sank with a
+weary elegance into a chair. Mr. Dale interpreted the sigh. "Ah! A
+wife's duties," he began.
+
+"No man can know," she interrupted, and she spread out her hands in
+pathetic forgiveness of an over-exacting world. Her companion laughed
+brutally. "You _are_ rude!" she said and laughed too. And then, "Tell
+me something new!"
+
+"I met an admirer of yours to-day."
+
+"But that's nothing new." She looked up at him with a plaintive
+reproach.
+
+"I will begin again," he replied submissively. "I walked down the
+Mile-End road this morning to Sir John's jute-factory."
+
+"You fail to interest me," she said with some emphasis.
+
+"I am so sorry. Good-bye!"
+
+"Mr. Dale!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"You may, if you like, go on with the first story."
+
+"There is only one. It was in the Mile-End road I met the
+admirer--Julian Fairholm."
+
+"Oh!" Lady Tamworth sat up and blushed. However, Lady Tamworth blushed
+very readily.
+
+"It was a queer incident," Mr. Dale continued. "I caught sight of a
+necktie in a little dusty shop-window near the Pavilion Theatre. I
+had never seen anything like it in my life; it fairly fascinated me,
+seemed to dare me to buy it."
+
+The lady's foot began to tap upon the carpet. Mr. Dale stopped and
+leaned critically forward.
+
+"Well! Why don't you go on?" she asked impatiently.
+
+"It's pretty," he reflected aloud.
+
+The foot disappeared demurely into the seclusion of petticoats. "You
+exasperate me," she remarked. But her face hardly guaranteed her
+words. "We were speaking of ties."
+
+"Ah, the tie wasn't pretty. It was of satin, bright yellow with blue
+spots. And an idea struck me; yes, an idea! Sir John's election
+colours are yellow, his opponent's blue. So I thought the tie would
+make a tactful present, symbolical (do you see?) of the state of the
+parties in the constituency."
+
+He paused a second time.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I went in and bought it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Julian Fairholm sold it to me."
+
+Lady Tamworth stared at the speaker in pure perplexity. Then all at
+once she understood and the blood eddied into her cheeks. "I don't
+believe it!" she exclaimed.
+
+"His face would be difficult to mistake," Mr. Dale objected. "Besides
+I had time to assure myself, for I had to wait my turn. When I entered
+the shop, he was serving a woman with baby-linen. Oh yes! Julian
+Fairholm sold me the tie."
+
+Lady Tamworth kept her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up. She
+struck the arm of her chair with her closed fist and cried in a quick
+petulance, "How dare he?"
+
+"Exactly what I thought," answered her companion smoothly. "The
+colours were crude by themselves, the combination was detestable. And
+he an artist too!" Mr. Dale laughed pleasantly.
+
+"Did he speak to you?"
+
+"He asked me whether I would take a packet of pins instead of a
+farthing."
+
+"Ah, don't," she entreated, and rose from her chair. It might have
+been her own degradation of which Mr. Dale was speaking.
+
+"By the way," he added, "I was so taken aback that I forgot to present
+the tie. Would you?"
+
+"No! No!" she said decisively and turned away. But a sudden notion
+checked her. "On second thoughts I will; but I can't promise to make
+him wear it."
+
+The smile which sped the words flickered strangely upon quivering lips
+and her eyes shone with anger. However the tie changed hands, and Lady
+Tamworth tripped down stairs and stepped into her brougham. The packet
+lay upon her lap and she unfolded it. A round ticket was enclosed, and
+the bill. On the ticket was printed, _A Present from Zedediah Moss_.
+With a convulsion of disgust she swept the parcel on to the floor.
+"How dare he?" she cried again, and her thoughts flew back to the
+brief period of their engagement. She had been just Kitty Arlton in
+those days, the daughter of a poor sea-captain but dowered with
+the compensating grace of personal attractions. Providence had
+indisputably designed her for the establishment of the family
+fortunes; such at all events was the family creed, and the girl
+herself felt no inclination to doubt a faith which was backed by the
+evidence of her looking-glass. Julian Fairholm at that time shared a
+studio with her brother, and the acquaintance thus begun ripened into
+an attachment and ended in a betrothal. For Julian, in the common
+prediction, possessed that vague blessing, a future. It is true the
+common prediction was always protected by a saving clause: "If he
+could struggle free from his mysticism." But none the less his
+pictures were beginning to sell, and the family displayed a moderate
+content. The discomposing appearance of Sir John Tamworth, however,
+gave a different complexion to the matter. Sir John was rich, and had
+besides the confident pertinacity of success. In a word, Kitty Arlton
+married Sir John.
+
+Lady Tamworth's recollections of the episode were characteristically
+vague; they came back to her in pieces like disconnected sections of
+a wooden puzzle. She remembered that she had written an exquisitely
+pathetic letter to Fairholm "when the end came," as she expressed it;
+and she recalled queer scraps of the artist's talk about the danger
+of forming ties. "New ties," he would say, "mean new duties, and they
+hamper and clog the will." Ah yes, the will; he was always holding
+forth about that and here was the lecture finally exemplified! He
+was selling baby-linen in the Mile-End road. She had borne her
+disappointment, she reflected, without any talk about will. The
+thought of her self-sacrifice even now brought the tears to her eyes;
+she saw herself wearing her orange-blossoms in the spirit of an
+Iphigeneia.
+
+Sections of the puzzle, however, were missing to Lady Tamworth's
+perceptions. For, in fact, her sense of sacrifice had been mainly
+artificial, and fostered by a vanity which made the possession of a
+broken romance seem to pose her on a notable pedestal of duty. What
+had really attracted her to Julian was the evidence of her power shown
+in the subjugation of a being intellectually higher than his compeers.
+It was not so much the man she had cared for, as the sight of herself
+in a superior setting; a sure proof whereof might have been found in a
+certain wilful pleasure which she had drawn from constantly impelling
+him to acts and admissions which she knew to be alien to his nature.
+
+It was some revival of this idea which explained her exclamation, "How
+dare he?" For his conduct appeared more in the light of an outrage and
+insult to her than of a degradation of himself. He must be rescued
+from his position, she determined.
+
+She stooped to pick up the bill from the floor as the brougham swung
+sharply round a corner. She looked out of the window; the coachman had
+turned into Berkeley Square; in another hundred yards she would reach
+home. She hastily pulled the check-string, and the footman came to the
+door. "Drive down the Mile-End road," she said; "I will fetch Sir John
+home." Lady Tamworth read the address on the bill. "Near the Pavilion
+Theatre," Mr. Dale had explained. She would just see the place this
+evening, she determined, and then reflect on the practical course to
+be pursued.
+
+The decision relieved her of her sense of humiliation, and she nestled
+back among her furs with a sigh of content. There was a pleasurable
+excitement about her present impulse which contrasted very brightly
+with her recent _ennui_. She felt that her wish to do something,
+to exert an influence, had been providentially answered. The task,
+besides, seemed to her to have a flavour of antique chivalry; it
+smacked of the princess undoing enchantments, and reminded her vaguely
+of Camelot. She determined to stop at the house and begin the work
+at once; so she summoned the footman a second time and gave him the
+address. So great indeed was the charm which her conception exercised
+over her, that her very indignation against Julian changed to pity.
+He had to be fitted to the chivalric pattern, and consequently
+refashioned. Her harlequin fancy straightway transformed him into the
+romantic lover who, having lost his mistress, had lost the world and
+therefore, naturally, held the sale of baby-linen on a par with the
+painting of pictures. "Poor Julian!" she thought.
+
+The carriage stopped suddenly in front of a shuttered window. A
+neighbouring gas-lamp lit up the letters on the board above it, _Z.
+Moss_. This unexpected check in the full flight of ardour dropped her
+to earth like a plummet. And as if to accentuate her disappointment
+the surrounding shops were aglare with light; customers pressed
+busily in and out of them, and even on the roadway naphtha-jets waved
+flauntingly over barrows of sweet-stuff and fruit. Only this sordid
+little house was dark. "They can't afford to close at this hour," she
+murmured reproachfully.
+
+The footman came to the carriage door, disdain perceptibly struggling
+through his mask of impassivity.
+
+"Why is the shop closed?" Lady Tamworth asked.
+
+"The name, perhaps, my lady," he suggested. "It is Friday."
+
+Lady Tamworth had forgotten the day. "Very well," she said sullenly.
+"Home at once!" However, she corrected herself adroitly: "I mean, of
+course, fetch Sir John first."
+
+Sir John was duly fetched and carried home jubilant at so rare an
+attention. The tie was presented to him on the way, and he bellowed
+his merriment at its shape and colour. To her surprise Lady Tamworth
+found herself defending the style, and inveighing against the monotony
+of the fashions of the West End. Nor was this the only occasion on
+which she disagreed with her husband that evening. He launched an
+aphorism across the dinner-table which he had cogitated from the
+report of a divorce-suit in the evening papers. "It is a strange
+thing," he said, "that the woman who knows her influence over a man
+usually employs it to hurt him; the woman who doesn't, employs it
+unconsciously for his good."
+
+"You don't mean that?" she asked earnestly.
+
+"I have noticed it more than once," he replied.
+
+For a moment Lady Tamworth's chivalric edifice showed cracks and
+rents; it threatened to crumble like a house of cards; but only for
+a moment. For she merely considered the remark in reference to the
+future; she applied it to her present wish to exercise an influence
+over Julian. The issue of that, however, lay still in the dark, and
+was consequently imaginable as inclination prompted. A glance at Sir
+Julian sufficed to finally reassure her. He was rosy and modern, and
+so plainly incapable of appreciating chivalric impulses. To estimate
+them rightly one must have an insight into their nature, and therefore
+an actual experience of their fire; but such fire left traces on the
+person. Chivalric people were hollow-cheeked with luminous eyes; at
+least chivalric men were hollow-cheeked, she corrected herself with
+a look at the mirror. At all events Sir John and his aphorism were
+beneath serious reflection; and she determined to repeat her journey
+upon the first opportunity.
+
+The opportunity, however, was delayed for a week and occasioned Lady
+Tamworth no small amount of self-pity. Here was noble work waiting for
+her hand, and duty kept her chained to the social oar!
+
+On the afternoon, then, of the following Friday she dressed with
+what even for her was unusual care, aiming at a complex effect of
+daintiness and severity, and drove down in a hansom to Whitechapel.
+She stopped the cab some yards from the shop and walked up to the
+window. Through the glass she could see Julian standing behind the
+counter. His hands (she noticed them particularly because he was
+displaying some cheap skeins of coloured wool) seemed perhaps a trifle
+thinner and more nervous, his features a little sharpened, and there
+was a sprinkling of grey in the black of his hair. For the first time
+since the conception of her scheme Lady Tamworth experienced a feeling
+of irresolution. With Fairholm in the flesh before her eyes, the task
+appeared difficult; its reality pressed in upon her, driving a breach
+through the flimsy wall of her fancies. She resolved to wait until the
+shop should be empty, and to that end took a few steps slowly up the
+street and returned yet more slowly. She looked into the window again;
+Julian was alone now, and still she hesitated. The admiring comments
+of two loungers on the kerb concerning her appearance at last
+determined her, and she brusquely thrust open the door. A little bell
+jangled shrilly above it and Julian looked up.
+
+"Lady Tamworth!" he said after the merest pause and with no more than
+a natural start of surprise. Lady Tamworth, however, was too taken
+aback by the cool manner of his greeting to respond at once. She had
+forecast the commencement of the interview upon such wholly different
+lines that she felt lost and bewildered. An abashed confusion was the
+least that she expected from him, and she was prepared to increase it
+with a nicely-tempered indignation. Now the positions seemed actually
+reversed; he was looking at her with a composed attention, while she
+was filled with embarrassment.
+
+A suspicion flashed through her mind that she had come upon a fool's
+errand. "Julian!" she said with something of humility in her voice,
+and she timidly reached out her little gloved hand towards him. Julian
+took it into the palm of his own and gazed at it with a sort of
+wondering tenderness, as though he had lighted upon a toy which he
+remembered to have prized dearly in an almost forgotten childhood.
+
+This second blow to her pride quickened in her a feeling of
+exasperation. She drew her fingers quickly out of his grasp. "What
+brought you down to this!" She snapped out the words at him; she had
+not come to Whitechapel to be slighted at all events.
+
+"I have risen," he answered quietly.
+
+"Risen? And you sell baby-linen!"
+
+Julian laughed in pure contentment. "You don't understand," he said.
+For a moment he looked at her as one debating with himself and then:
+"You have a right to understand. I will tell you." He leaned across
+the counter, and as he spoke the eager passion of a devotee began to
+kindle in his eyes and vibrate through the tones of his voice. "The
+knowledge of a truth worked into your heart will lift you, eh, must
+lift you high? But base your life upon that truth, centre yourself
+about it, till your thoughts become instincts born from it! It must
+lift you still higher then; ah, how much higher! Well, I have done
+that. Yes, that's why I am here. And I owe it all to you."
+
+Lady Tamworth repeated his words in sheer bewilderment. "You owe it
+all to me?"
+
+"Yes," he nodded, "all to you." And with genuine gratitude he added,
+"You didn't know the good that you had done."
+
+"Ah, don't say that!" she cried.
+
+The bell tinkled over the shop-door and a woman entered. Lady Tamworth
+bent forward and said hastily, "I must speak to you."
+
+"Then you must buy something; what shall it be?" Fairholm had already
+recovered his self-possession and was drawing out one of the shelves
+in the wall behind him.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed, "not here; I can't speak to you here. Come
+and call on me; what day will you come?"
+
+Julian shook his head. "Not at all, I am afraid. I have not the time."
+
+A boy came out from the inner room and began to get ready the
+shutters. "Ah, it's Friday," she said. "You will be closing soon."
+
+"In five minutes."
+
+"Then I will wait for you. Yes, I will wait for you."
+
+She paused at the door and looked at Julian. He was deferentially
+waiting on his customer, and Lady Tamworth noticed with a queer
+feeling of repugnance that he had even acquired the shopman's trick of
+rubbing the hands. Those five minutes proved for her a most unenviable
+period. Julian's sentence,--"I owe it all to you"--pressed heavily
+upon her conscience. Spoken bitterly, she would have given little heed
+to it; but there had been a convincing sincerity in the ring of
+his voice. The words, besides, brought back to her Sir John's
+uncomfortable aphorism and freighted it with an accusation. She
+applied it now as a search-light upon her jumbled recollections of
+Julian's courtship, and began to realise that her efforts during that
+time had been directed thoughtlessly towards enlarging her influence
+over him. If, indeed, Julian owed this change in his condition to her,
+then Sir John was right, and she had employed her influence to his
+hurt. And it only made her fault the greater that Julian was himself
+unconscious of his degradation. She commenced to feel a personal
+responsibility commanding her to rescue him from his slough, which
+was increased moreover by a fear that her persuasions might prove
+ineffectual. For Julian's manner pointed now to an utter absence of
+feeling so far as she was concerned.
+
+At last Julian came out to her. "You will leave here," she cried
+impulsively. "You will come back to us, to your friends!"
+
+"Never," he answered firmly.
+
+"You must," she pleaded; "you said you owed it all to me."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, don't you see? If you stay here, I can never forgive myself; I
+shall have ruined your life."
+
+"Ruined it?" Julian asked in a tone of wonder. "You have made it." He
+stopped and looked at Lady Tamworth in perplexity. The same perplexity
+was stamped upon her face. "We are at cross-purposes, I think," he
+continued. "My rooms are close here. Let me give you some tea, and
+explain to you that you have no cause to blame yourself."
+
+Lady Tamworth assented with some relief. The speech had an odd
+civilised flavour which contrasted pleasantly with what she had
+imagined of his mode of life.
+
+They crossed the road and turned into a narrow side-street. Julian
+halted before a house of a slovenly exterior, and opened the door. A
+bare rickety staircase rose upwards from their feet. Fairholm closed
+the door behind Lady Tamworth, struck a match (for it was quite dark
+within this passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost
+floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second
+door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here
+and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a
+paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled
+in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his
+companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles
+on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp in the corner of the room. Lady
+Tamworth fancied that unawares she had slipped into fairyland;
+so great was the contrast between this retreat and the sordid
+surroundings amidst which it was perched. It was furnished with a
+dainty, and almost a feminine luxury. The room, she could see, was no
+more than an oblong garret; but along one side mouse-coloured curtains
+fell to the ground in folds from the angle where the sloping roof met
+the wall; on the other a cheerful fire glowed from a hearth of white
+tiles and a kettle sang merrily upon the hob. A broad couch, piled
+with silk cushions occupied the far end beneath the window, and the
+feet sank with a delicate pleasure into a thick velvety carpet. In the
+centre a small inlaid table of cedar wood held a silver tea-service.
+The candlesticks were of silver also, and cast in a light and
+fantastic fashion. The solitary discord was a black easel funereally
+draped.
+
+Julian prepared the tea, and talked while he prepared it. "It is this
+way," he began quietly. "You know what I have always believed; that
+the will was the man, his soul, his life, everything. Well, in the old
+days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to
+crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled
+design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious
+freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which
+made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during
+the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas
+were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death to me."
+
+Lady Tamworth stirred uneasily under a sense of guilt, and murmured
+a faint objection. Julian shook off the occupation of his theme and
+handed her some cake, and began again, standing over her with the cake
+in his hand, and to all seeming unconscious that there was a strain of
+cruelty in his words. "I found out what that meant. My emotions were
+mastering me, drowning the will in me. You see, I cared for you so
+much--then."
+
+A frank contempt stressing the last word cut into his hearer with the
+keenness of a knife. "You are unkind," she said weakly.
+
+"There's no reproach to you. I have got over it long ago," he replied
+cheerily. "And you showed me how to get over it; that's why I am
+grateful. For I began to wonder after that, why I, who had always been
+on my guard against the emotions, should become so thoroughly their
+slave. And at last I found out the reason; it was the work I was
+doing."
+
+"Your work?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Exactly! You remember what Plato remarked about the actor?"
+
+"How should I?" asked poor Lady Tamworth.
+
+"Well, he wouldn't have him in his ideal State because acting develops
+the emotions, the shifty unstable part of a man. But that's true of
+art as well; to do good work in art you must feel your work as an
+emotion. So I cut myself clear from it all. I furnished these rooms
+and came down here,--to live." And Julian drew a long breath, like a
+man escaped from danger.
+
+"But why come here?" Lady Tamworth urged. "You might have gone into
+the country--anywhere."
+
+"No, no, no!" he answered, setting down the cake and pacing about the
+room. "Wherever else I went, I must have formed new ties, created new
+duties. I didn't want that; one's feelings form the ties, one's
+soul pays the duties. No, London is the only place where a man can
+disappear. Besides I had to do something, and I chose this work,
+because it didn't touch me. I could throw it off the moment it was
+done. In the shop I earn the means to live; I live here."
+
+"But what kind of a life is it?" she asked in despair.
+
+"I will tell you," he replied, sinking his tone to an eager whisper;
+"but you mustn't repeat it, you must keep it a secret. When I am in
+this room alone at night, the walls widen and widen away until at last
+they vanish," and he nodded mysteriously at her. "The roof curls up
+like a roll of parchment, and I am left on an open platform."
+
+"What do you mean?" gasped Lady Tamworth.
+
+"Yes, on an open platform underneath the stars. And do you know,"
+he sank his voice yet lower, "I hear them at times; very faintly of
+course,--their songs have so far to travel; but I hear them,--yes, I
+hear the stars."
+
+Lady Tamworth rose in a whirl of alarm. Before this crazy exaltation,
+her very desire to pursue her purpose vanished. For Julian's manner
+even more than his words contributed to her fears. In spite of his
+homily, emotion was dominant in his expression, swaying his body,
+burning on his face and lighting his eyes with a fire of changing
+colours. And every note in his voice was struck within the scale of
+passion.
+
+She glanced about the room; her eyes fell on the easel. "Don't you
+ever paint?" she asked hurriedly.
+
+He dropped his head and stood shifting from one foot to the other, as
+if he was ashamed. "At times," he said hesitatingly; "at times I have
+to,--I can't help it,--I have to express myself. Look!" He stepped
+suddenly across the room and slid the curtains back along the rail.
+The wall was frescoed from floor to ceiling.
+
+"Julian!" Lady Tamworth cried. She forgot all her fears in face of
+this splendid revelation of his skill. Here was the fulfilment of his
+promise.
+
+In the centre four pictures were ranged, the stages in the progress of
+an allegory, but executed with such masterful craft and of so vivid an
+intention that they read their message straightway into the heart of
+one's understanding. Round about this group, were smaller sketches,
+miniatures of pure fancy. It seemed as if the artist had sought relief
+in painting these from the pressure of his chief design. Here, for
+instance, Day and Night were chasing one another through the rings of
+Saturn; there a swarm of silver stars was settling down through the
+darkness to the earth.
+
+"Julian, you must come back. You can't stay here."
+
+"I don't mean to stay here long. It is merely a halting-place."
+
+"But for how long?"
+
+"I have one more picture to complete."
+
+They turned again to the wall. Suddenly something caught Lady
+Tamworth's eye. She bent forward and examined the four pictures with
+a close scrutiny. Then she looked back again to Julian with a happy
+smile upon her face. "You have done these lately?"
+
+"Quite lately; they are the stages of a man's life, of the struggle
+between his passions and his will."
+
+He began to describe them. In the first picture a brutish god was
+seated on a throne of clay; before the god a man of coarse heavy
+features lay grovelling; but from his shoulders sprang a white figure,
+weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a
+spear; and underneath was written, "At last he knoweth what he made."
+In the second, the figure which grovelled and that which sprang from
+its shoulders were plodding along a high-road at night, chained
+together by the wrist. The white figure halted behind, the other
+pressed on; and underneath was written, "They know each other not." In
+the third the figures marched level, that which had grovelled scowling
+at its companion; but the white figure had grown tall and strong and
+watched its companion with contempt. Above the sky had brightened
+with the gleam of stars; and underneath was written, "They know each
+other." In the fourth, the white figure pressed on ahead and dragged
+the other by the chain impatiently. Before them the sun was rising
+over the edge of a heath and the road ran straight towards it in a
+golden line; and underneath was written, "He knoweth his burden."
+
+Lady Tamworth waited when he had finished, in a laughing expectancy.
+"And is that all?" she asked. "Is that all?"
+
+"No," he replied slowly; "there is yet a further stage. It is
+unfinished." And he pointed to the easel.
+
+"I don't mean that. Is that all you have to say of these?"
+
+"I think so. Yes."
+
+"Look at me!"
+
+Julian turned wonderingly to Lady Tamworth. She watched him with a
+dancing sparkle of her eyes. "Now look at the pictures!" Julian obeyed
+her. "Well," she said after a pause, with a touch of anxiety. "What do
+you see now?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" she asked. "Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes! What should I see?" She caught him by the arm and stared
+intently into his eyes in a horror of disbelief. He met her gaze with
+a frank astonishment. She dropped his arm and turned away.
+
+"What should I see?" he repeated.
+
+"Nothing," she echoed with a quivering sadness in her voice. "It is
+late, I must go."
+
+The white figure in each of those four pictures wore her face,
+idealised and illumined, but still unmistakably her face; and he did
+not know it, could not perceive it though she stood by his side! The
+futility of her errand was proved to her. She drew on her gloves and
+looking towards the easel inquired dully, "What stage is that?"
+
+"The last; and it is the last picture I shall paint. As soon as it is
+completed I shall leave here."
+
+"You will leave?" she asked, paying little heed to his words.
+
+"Yes! The experiment has not succeeded," and he waved a hand towards
+the wall. "I shall take better means next time."
+
+"How much remains to be done?" Lady Tamworth stepped over to the
+easel. With a quick spring Julian placed himself in front of it.
+
+"No!" he cried vehemently, raising a hand to warn her off. "No!"
+
+Lady Tamworth's curiosity began to reawaken. "You have shown me the
+rest."
+
+"I know; you had a right to see them."
+
+"Then why not that?"
+
+"I have told you," he said stubbornly. "It is not finished."
+
+"But when it is finished?" she insisted.
+
+Julian looked at her strangely. "Well, why not?" he said reasoning
+with himself. "Why not? It is the masterpiece."
+
+"You will let me know when it's ready?"
+
+"I will send it to you; for I shall leave here the day I finish it."
+
+They went down stairs and back into the Mile-End road. Julian hailed a
+passing hansom, and Lady Tamworth drove westwards to Berkeley Square.
+
+The fifth picture arrived a week later in the dusk of the afternoon.
+Lady Tamworth unpacked it herself with an odd foreboding.
+
+It represented an orchard glowing in the noontide sun. From the
+branches of a tree with lolling tongue and swollen twisted face swung
+the figure which had grovelled before the god. A broken chain dangled
+on its wrist, a few links of the chain lay on the grass beneath, and
+above the white figure winged and triumphant faded into the blue of
+the sky; and underneath was written, "He freeth himself from his
+burden."
+
+Lady Tamworth rushed to the bell and pealed loudly for her maid.
+"Quick!" she cried, "I am going out." But the shrill screech of a
+newsboy pierced into the room. With a cry she flung open the window.
+She could hear his voice plainly at the corner of the square. For a
+while she clung to the sash in a dumb sickness. Then she said quietly:
+"Never mind! I will not go out after all! I did not know I was so
+late."
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER STORIES***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 12859-8.txt or 12859-8.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/8/5/12859
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/old/12859-8.zip b/old/12859-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c686c98
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/12859-8.zip
diff --git a/old/12859.txt b/old/12859.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..497c49c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/12859.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10038 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ensign Knightley and Other Stories, by A. E.
+W. Mason
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Ensign Knightley and Other Stories
+
+Author: A. E. W. Mason
+
+Release Date: July 9, 2004  [eBook #12859]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER
+STORIES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team.
+
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER STORIES
+
+By
+
+A. E. W. MASON
+
+Author of "The Courtship of Morrice Buckler," "The Watchers,"
+"Parson Kelly," etc.
+
+1901
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY
+THE MAN OF WHEELS
+MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE
+THE COWARD
+THE DESERTER
+THE CROSSED GLOVES
+THE SHUTTERED HOUSE
+KEEPER OF THE BISHOP
+THE CRUISE OF THE "WILLING MIND"
+HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG
+HATTERAS
+THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE
+A LIBERAL EDUCATION
+THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY
+THE FIFTH PICTURE
+
+
+
+
+ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY.
+
+
+It was eleven o'clock at night when Surgeon Wyley of His Majesty's
+ship _Bonetta_ washed his hands, drew on his coat, and walked from the
+hospital up the narrow cobbled street of Tangier to the Main-Guard by
+the Catherine Port. In the upper room of the Main-Guard he found
+Major Shackleton of the Tangier Foot taking a hand at bassette with
+Lieutenant Scrope of Trelawney's Regiment and young Captain Tessin of
+the King's Battalion. There were three other officers in the room, and
+to them Surgeon Wyley began to talk in a prosy, medical strain. Two of
+his audience listened in an uninterested stolidity for just so long as
+the remnant of manners, which still survived in Tangier, commanded,
+and then strolling through the open window on to the balcony, lit
+their pipes.
+
+Overhead the stars blazed in the rich sky of Morocco; the
+riding-lights of Admiral Herbert's fleet sprinkled the bay; and below
+them rose the hum of an unquiet town. It was the night of May 13th,
+1680, and the life of every Christian in Tangier hung in the balance.
+The Moors had burst through the outposts to the west, and were now
+entrenched beneath the walls. The Henrietta Redoubt had fallen that
+day; to-morrow the little fort at Devil's Drop, built on the edge of
+the sand where the sea rippled up to the palisades, must fall; and
+Charles Fort, to the southwest, was hardly in a better case. However,
+a sortie had been commanded at daybreak as a last effort to relieve
+Charles Fort, and the two officers on the balcony speculated over
+their pipes on the chances of success.
+
+Meanwhile, inside the room Surgeon Wyley lectured to his remaining
+auditor, who, too tired to remonstrate, tilted his chair against the
+wall and dozed.
+
+"A concussion of the brain," Wyley went on, "has this curious effect,
+that after recovery the patient will have lost from his consciousness
+a period of time which immediately preceded the injury. Thus a man may
+walk down a street here in Tangier; four, five, six hours afterwards,
+he mounts his horse, is thrown on to his head. When he wakes again to
+his senses, the last thing he remembers is--what? A sign, perhaps,
+over a shop in the street he walked down, or a leper pestering him for
+alms. The intervening hours are lost to him, and forever. It is no
+question of an abeyance of memory. There is a gap in the continuity of
+his experience, and that gap he will never fill up."
+
+"Except by hearsay?"
+
+The correction came from Lieutenant Scrope at the bassette table. It
+was quite carelessly uttered while the Lieutenant was picking up his
+cards. Surgeon Wyley shifted his chair towards the table, and accepted
+the correction.
+
+"Except, of course, by hearsay."
+
+Wyley was a new-comer to Tangier, having sailed into the bay less than
+a week back; but he had been long enough in the town to find in Scrope
+a subject at once of interest and perplexity. Scrope was in years
+nearer forty than thirty, dark of complexion, aquiline of feature, and
+though a trifle below the middle height he redeemed his stature by the
+litheness of his figure. What interested Wyley was that he seemed a
+man in whom strong passions were always desperately at war with a
+strong will. He wore habitually a mask of reserve; behind it, Wyley
+was aware of sleeping fires. He spoke habitually in a quiet, decided
+voice, like one that has the soundings of his nature; beneath it,
+Wyley detected, continually recurring, continually subdued, a note
+of turbulence. Here, in a word, was a man whose hand was against the
+world but who would not strike at random. What perplexed Wyley, on the
+other hand, was Scrope's subordinate rank of lieutenant in a garrison
+where, from the frequency of death, promotion was of the quickest. He
+sat there at the table, a lieutenant; a boy of twenty-four faced him,
+and the boy was a captain and his superior.
+
+It was to the Lieutenant, however, that Wyley resumed his discourse.
+
+"The length of time lost is proportionate to the severity of the
+concussion. It may be only an hour; I have known it to be a day." He
+leaned back in his chair and smiled. "A strange question that for a
+man to ask himself--What did he do during those hours?--a question to
+appal him."
+
+Scrope chose a card from his hand and played it. Without looking up
+from the table, he asked: "To appal him? Why?"
+
+"Because the question would be not so much what did he do, as what may
+he not have done. A man rides through life insecurely seated on his
+passions. Within a few hours the most honest man may commit a damnable
+crime, a damnable dishonour."
+
+Scrope looked quietly at the Surgeon to read the intention of his
+words. Then: "I suppose so," he said carelessly. "But do you think
+that question would press?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Wyley.
+
+Scrope shrugged his shoulders. "I should need an example before I
+believed you."
+
+The example was at the door. The corporal of the guard at the
+Catherine Port knocked and was admitted. He told his story to Major
+Shackleton, and as he told it the two officers lounged back into the
+room from the balcony, and the other who was dozing against the wall
+brought the legs of his chair with a bang to the floor and woke up.
+
+It appeared that a sentry at the stockade outside the Catherine Port
+had suddenly noticed a flutter of white on the ground a few yards
+from the stockade. He watched this white object, and it moved. He
+challenged it, and was answered by a whispered prayer for admission in
+the English tongue and in an English voice. The sentry demanded the
+password, and received as a reply, "Inchiquin. It is the last password
+I have knowledge of. Let me in! Let me in!"
+
+The sentry called the corporal, the corporal admitted the fugitive and
+brought him to the Main-Guard. He was now in the guard-room below.
+
+"You did well," said the Major. "The man has come from the Moorish
+lines, and may have news which will profit us in the morning. Let
+him up!" and as the corporal retired, "'Inchiquin,'" he repeated
+thoughtfully: "I cannot call to mind that password."
+
+Now Wyley had noticed that when the corporal first mentioned the word,
+Scrope, who was looking over his cards, had dropped one on the table
+as though his hand shook, had raised his head sharply, and with his
+head his eyebrows, and had stared for a second fixedly at the wall in
+front of him. So he said to Scrope:
+
+"You can remember."
+
+"Yes, I remember the password," Scrope replied simply. "I have cause
+to. 'Inchiquin' and 'Teviot'--those were password and countersign on
+the night which ruined me--the night of January 6th two years ago."
+
+There was an awkward pause, an interchange of glances. Then Major
+Shackleton broke the silence, though to no great effect.
+
+"H'm--ah--yes," he said. "Well, well," he added, and laying an arm
+upon Scrope's sleeve. "A good fellow, Scrope."
+
+Scrope made no response whatever, but of a sudden Captain Tessin
+banged his fist upon the table.
+
+"January 6th two years ago. Why," and he leaned forward across the
+table towards Scrope, "Knightley fell in the sortie that morning, and
+his body was never recovered. The corporal said this fugitive was an
+Englishman. What if--"
+
+Major Shackleton shook his head and interrupted.
+
+"Knightley fell by my side. I saw the blow; it must have broken his
+skull."
+
+There was a sound of footsteps in the passage, the door was opened
+and the fugitive appeared in the doorway. All eyes turned to him
+instantly, and turned from him again with looks of disappointment.
+Wyley remarked, however, that Scrope, who had barely glanced at the
+man, rose from his chair. He did not move from the table; only he
+stood where before he had sat.
+
+The new-comer was tall; a beard plastered with mud, as if to disguise
+its colour, straggled over his burned and wasted cheeks, but here and
+there a wisp of yellow hair flecked with grey curled from his hood, a
+pair of blue eyes shone with excitement from hollow sockets, and he
+wore the violet-and-white robes of a Moorish soldier.
+
+It was his dress at which Major Shackleton looked.
+
+"One of our renegade deserters tired of his new friends," he said with
+some contempt.
+
+"Renegades do not wear chains," replied the man in the doorway,
+lifting from beneath his long sleeves his manacled hands. He spoke
+in a weak, hoarse voice, and with a rusty accent; he rested a hand
+against the jamb of the door as though he needed support. Tessin
+sprang up from his chair, and half crossed the room.
+
+The stranger took an uncertain step forward. His legs rattled as he
+moved, and Wyley saw that the links of broken fetters were twisted
+about his ankles.
+
+"Have two years made so vast a difference?" he asked. "Well, they were
+years of the bastinado, and I do not wonder."
+
+Tessin peered into his face. "By God, it is!" he exclaimed.
+"Knightley!"
+
+"Thanks," said Knightley with a smile.
+
+Tessin reached out to take Knightley's hands, then instantly stopped,
+glanced from Knightley to Scrope and drew back.
+
+"Knightley!" cried the Major in a voice of welcome, rising in his
+seat. Then he too glanced expectantly at Scrope and sat down again.
+Scrope made no movement, but stood with his eyes cast down on the
+table like a man lost in thought. It was evident to Wyley that both
+Shackleton and Tessin had obeyed the sporting instinct, and had left
+the floor clear for the two men. It was no less evident that Knightley
+remarked their action and did not understand it. For his eyes
+travelled from face to face, and searched each with a wistful anxiety
+for the reason of their reserve.
+
+"Yes, I am Knightley," he said timidly. Then he drew himself to his
+full height. "Ensign Knightley of the Tangier Foot," he cried.
+
+No one answered. The company waited upon Scrope in a suspense so
+keen that even the ringing challenge of the words passed unheeded.
+Knightley spoke again, but now in a stiff, formal voice, and slowly.
+
+"Gentlemen, I fear very much that two years make a world of
+difference. It seems they change one who had your goodwill into a most
+unwelcome stranger."
+
+His voice broke in a sob; he turned to the door, but staggered as he
+turned and caught at a chair. In a moment Major Shackleton was beside
+him.
+
+"What, lad? Have we been backward? Blame our surprise, not us."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Wyley, "Ensign Knightley's starving."
+
+The Major pressed Knightley into a chair, called for an orderly, and
+bade him bring food. Wyley filled a glass with wine from the bottle on
+the table, and handed it to the Ensign.
+
+"It is vinegar," he said, "but--"
+
+"But Tangier is still Tangier," said Knightley with a laugh. The
+Major's cordiality had strengthened him like a tonic. He raised the
+glass to his lips and drank; but as he tilted his head back his eyes
+over the brim of the glass rested on Scrope, who still stood without
+movement, without expression, a figure of stone, but that his chest
+rose and fell with his deep breathing. Knightley set down his glass
+half-full.
+
+"There is something amiss," he said, "since even Captain Scrope
+retains no memory of his old comrade."
+
+"Captain?" exclaimed Wyley. So Scrope had been more than a lieutenant.
+Here was an answer to the question which had perplexed him. But it
+only led to another question: "Had Scrope been degraded, and why?" He
+did not, however, speculate on the question, for his attention was
+seized the next moment. Scrope made no sort of answer to Knightley's
+appeal, but began to drum very softly with his fingers on the table.
+And the drumming, at first vague and of no significance, gradually
+took on, of itself as it seemed, a definite rhythm. There was a
+variation, too, in the strength of the taps--now they fell light, now
+they struck hard. Scrope was quite unconsciously beating out upon the
+table a particular tune, although, since there was but the one
+note sounded, Wyley could get no more than an elusive hint of its
+character.
+
+Knightley watched Scrope for a little as earnestly as the rest.
+Then--"Harry!" he said, "Harry Scrope!" The name leaped from his lips
+in a pleading cry; he stretched out his hands towards Scrope, and the
+chain which bound them reached down to the table and rattled on the
+wood.
+
+There was a simultaneous movement, almost a simultaneous ejaculation
+of bewilderment amongst those who stood about Knightley. Where they
+had expected a deadly anger, they found in its place a beseeching
+humility. And Scrope ceased from drumming on the table and turned on
+Knightley.
+
+"Don't shake your chains at me," he burst out harshly. "I am deaf to
+any reproach that they can make. Are you the only man that has worn
+chains? I can show as good, and better." He thrust the palm of his
+left hand under Knightley's nose. "Branded, d'ye see? Branded. There's
+more besides." He set his foot on the chair and stripped the silk
+stocking down his leg. Just above the ankle there was a broad indent
+where a fetter had bitten into the flesh. "I have dragged a chain, you
+see; not like you among the Moors, but here in Tangier, on that damned
+Mole, in sight of these my brother officers. By the Lord, Knightley, I
+tell you you have had the better part of it."
+
+"You!" cried Knightley. "You dragged a chain on Tangier Mole? For
+what offence?" And he added, with a genuine tenderness, "There was no
+disgrace in't, I'll warrant."
+
+Major Shackleton half checked an exclamation, and turned it into a
+cough. Scrope leaned right across the table and stared straight into
+Knightley's eyes.
+
+"The offence was a duel," he answered steadily, "fought on the night
+of January 6th two years ago."
+
+Knightley's face clouded for an instant. "The night when I was
+captured," he said timidly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The officers drew closer about the table, and seemed to hold their
+breath, as the strange catechism proceeded.
+
+"With whom did you fight?" asked Knightley.
+
+"With a very good friend of mine," replied Scrope, in a hard, even
+voice.
+
+"On what account?"
+
+"A woman."
+
+Knightley laughed with a man's amused leniency for such escapades when
+he himself is in no way hurt by them.
+
+"I said there would be no disgrace in't, Harry," he said, with a smile
+of triumph.
+
+The heads of the listeners, which had bunched together, were suddenly
+drawn back. A dark flush of anger overspread Scrope's face, and the
+veins ridged up upon his forehead. Some impatient speech was on the
+tip of his tongue, when the Major interposed.
+
+"What's this talk of penalties? Where's the sense of it? Scrope paid
+the price of his fault. He was admitted to the ranks afterwards. He
+won a lieutenancy by sheer bravery in the field. For all we know he
+may be again a captain to-morrow. Anyhow he wears the King's uniform.
+It is a badge of service which levels us all from Ensign to Major in
+an equality of esteem."
+
+Scrope bowed to the Major and drew back from the table. The other
+officers shuffled and moved in a welcome relief from the strain
+of their expectancy, and Knightley's thoughts were diverted by
+Shackleton's words to a quite different subject. For he picked with
+his fingers at the Moorish robe he wore and "I too wore the King's
+uniform," he pleaded wistfully.
+
+"And shall do so again, thank God," responded the Major heartily.
+
+Knightley started up from his chair; his face lightened unaccountably.
+
+"You mean that?" he asked eagerly. "Yes, yes, you mean it! Then let it
+be to-night--now--even before I sup. As long as I wear these chains,
+as long as I wear this dress, I can feel the driver's whip curl
+about my shoulders." He parted the robe as he spoke, and showed that
+underneath he wore only a coarse sack which reached to his knees, with
+a hole cut in it for his head.
+
+"True, you have worn the chains too long," said the Major. "I should
+have had them knocked off before, but--" he paused for a second, "but
+your coming so surprised me that of a truth I forgot," he continued
+lamely. Then he turned to Tessin. "See to it, Tessin! Ensign Barbour
+of the Tangier Foot was killed to-day. He was quartered in the
+Main-Guard. Take Knightley to his quarters and see what you can do.
+By the way, Knightley, there's a question I should have put to you
+before. By what road did you come in?"
+
+"Down Teviot Hill past the Henrietta Fort. The Moors brought me down
+from Mequinez to interpret between them and their prisoners. I escaped
+last night."
+
+"Past the Henrietta Fort?" replied the Major. "Then you can help us,
+for that way we make our sortie."
+
+"To relieve the Charles Fort?" said Knightley. "I guessed the Charles
+Fort was surrounded, for I heard one man on the Tangier wall shouting
+through a speaking trumpet to the Charles Fort garrison. But it will
+not be easy to relieve them. The Moors are entrenched between. There
+are three trenches. I should never have crawled through them, but that
+I stripped a dead Moor of his robe."
+
+"Three trenches," said Tessin, with a shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"Yes, three. The two nearest to Tangier may be carried. But the
+third--it is deep, twelve feet at the least, and wide, at the least
+eight yards. The sides are steep and slippery with the rain."
+
+"A grave, then," said Scrope carelessly; "a grave that will hold
+many before the evening falls. It is well they made it wide and deep
+enough."
+
+The sombre words knocked upon every heart like a blow on a door behind
+which conspirators are plotting. The Major was the first to recover
+his speech.
+
+"Curse your tongue, Scrope!" he said angrily. "Let who will lie in
+your grave when the evening falls. Before that time comes, we'll show
+these Moors so fine a powder-play as shall glut some of them to all
+eternity. _Bon chat, bon rat_; we are not made of jelly. Tessin, see
+to Knightley."
+
+The two men withdrew. Major Shackleton scribbled a note and despatched
+it to Sir Palmes Fairborne, the Lieutenant-Governor. Scrope took a
+turn or two across the room while the Major was writing the news which
+Knightley had brought. Then--"What game is this he's playing?" he
+said, with a jerk of his head to the door by which Knightley had gone
+out. "I have no mind to be played with."
+
+"But is he playing a game at all?" asked Wyley.
+
+Scrope faced him quickly, looked him over for a second, and replied:
+"You are a new-comer to Tangier, or you would not have asked that
+question."
+
+"I should," rejoined Wyley with complete confidence. "I know quite
+enough to be sure of one thing. I know there lies some deep matter of
+dispute between Ensign Knightley and Lieutenant Scrope, and I am sure
+that there is one other person more in the dark than myself, and that
+person is Ensign Knightley. For whereas I know there is a dispute, he
+is unaware of even that."
+
+"Unaware?" cried Scrope. "Why, man, the very good friend I fought
+with was Ensign Knightley. The woman on whose account we fought was
+Knightley's wife." He flung the words at the Surgeon with almost a
+gesture of contempt. "Make the most of that!" And once again he began
+to pace the room.
+
+"I am not in the least surprised," returned Wyley with an easy smile.
+"Though I admit that I am interested. A wife is sauce to any story."
+He looked placidly round the company. He alone held the key to the
+puzzle, and since he was now become the centre of attraction he was
+inclined to play with his less acute brethren. With a wave of the hand
+he stilled the requests for an explanation, and turned to Scrope.
+
+"Will you answer me a question?"
+
+"I think it most unlikely."
+
+The curt reply in no way diminished the Surgeon's suavity.
+
+"I chose my words ill. I should have asked, Will you confirm an
+assertion? The assertion is this: Ensign Knightley had no suspicion
+before he actually discovered the--well, the lamentable truth."
+
+Scrope stopped his walk and came back to the table.
+
+"Why, that is so," he agreed sullenly. "Knightley had no suspicions.
+It angered me that he had not."
+
+Wyley leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Really, really," he said, and laughed a little to himself. "On the
+night of January 6th Ensign Knightley discovers the lamentable truth.
+At what hour?" he asked suddenly.
+
+Scrope looked to the Major. "About midnight," he suggested.
+
+"A little later, I should think," corrected Major Shackleton.
+
+"A little after midnight," repeated Wyley. "Ensign Knightley and
+Lieutenant Scrope, I understand, immediately fight a duel, which seems
+to have been interrupted before any hurt was done."
+
+The Major and Scrope agreed with a nod of their heads.
+
+"In the morning," continued Wyley, "Ensign Knightley takes part in a
+skirmish, and is clubbed on the head so fiercely that Major Shackleton
+thought his skull must be broken in. At what hour was he struck?"
+Again he put the question quickly.
+
+"'Twixt seven and eight of the morning," replied the Major.
+
+"Quite so," said Wyley. "The incidents fit to a nicety. Two years
+afterwards Ensign Knightley comes home. He knows nothing of the duel,
+or any cause for a duel. Lieutenant Scrope is still 'Harry' to him,
+and his best of friends. It is all very clear."
+
+He gazed about him. Perplexity sat on each face except one; that face
+was Scrope's.
+
+"I spoke to you all some half an hour since concerning the effects of
+a concussion. I could not have hoped for so complete an example," said
+Wyley.
+
+Captain Tessin whistled; Major Shackleton bounced on to his feet.
+
+"Then Knightley knows nothing," cried Tessin in a gust of excitement.
+
+"And never will know," cried the Major.
+
+"Except by hearsay," sharply interposed Scrope. "Gentlemen, you go too
+fast, Except by hearsay. That, Mr. Wyley, was the phrase, I think. By
+what spells, Major," he asked with irony, "will you bind Tangier to
+silence when there's scandal to be talked? Let Knightley walk down to
+the water-gate to-morrow; I'll warrant he'll have heard the story a
+hundred times with a hundred new embellishments before he gets there."
+
+Major Shackleton resumed his seat moodily.
+
+"And since that's the truth, why, he had best hear the story nakedly
+from me."
+
+"From you?" exclaimed Tessin. "Another duel, then. Have you counted
+the cost?"
+
+"Why, yes," replied Scrope quietly.
+
+"Two years of the bastinado," said the Major. "That was what he said.
+He comes back to Tangier to find--who knows?--a worse torture here.
+Knightley, Knightley, a good officer marked for promotion until that
+infernal night. Scrope, I could turn moralist and curse you!"
+
+Scrope dropped his head as though the words touched him. But it was
+not long before he raised it again.
+
+"You waste your pity, I think, Major," he said coldly. "I disagree
+with Mr. Wyley's conclusions. Knightley knows the truth of the matter
+very well. For observe, he has made no mention of his wife. He has
+been two years in slavery. He escapes, and he asks for no news of his
+wife. That is unlike any man, but most of all unlike Knightley. He has
+his own ends to serve, no doubt, but he knows."
+
+The argument appeared cogent to Major Shackleton.
+
+"To be sure, to be sure," he said. "I had not thought of that."
+
+Tessin looked across to Wyley.
+
+"What do you say?"
+
+"I am not convinced," replied Wyley. "Indeed, I was surprised that
+Knightley's omission had not been remarked before. When you first
+showed reserve in welcoming Knightley, I noticed that he became all at
+once timid, hesitating. He seemed to be afraid."
+
+Major Shackleton admitted the Surgeon's accuracy. "Well, what then?"
+
+"Well, I go back to what I said before Knightley appeared. A man has
+lost so many hours. The question, what he did during those hours, is
+one that may well appal any one. Lieutenant Scrope doubted whether
+that question would trouble a man, and needed an instance. I believe
+here is the instance. I believe Knightley is afraid to ask any
+questions, and I believe his reason to be fear of how he lived during
+those lost hours."
+
+There was a pause. No one was prepared to deny, however much he might
+doubt, what Wyley said.
+
+Wyley continued:
+
+"At some point of time before this duel Knightley's recollections
+break off. At what precise point we are not aware, nor is it of any
+great importance. The sure thing is he does not know of the dispute
+between Lieutenant Scrope and himself, and it is of more importance
+for us to consider whether he cannot after all be kept from knowing.
+Could he not be sent home to England? Mrs. Knightley, I take it, is no
+longer in Tangier?"
+
+Major Shackleton stood up, took Wyley by the arm and led him out on to
+the balcony. The town beneath them had gone to sleep; the streets were
+quiet; the white roofs of the houses in the star-shine descended to
+the water's edge like flights of marble steps; only here and there did
+a light burn. To one of the lights close by the city wall the Major
+directed Wyley's attention. The house in which it burned lay so nearly
+beneath them that they could command a corner of the square open
+_patio_ in the middle of it; and the light shone in a window set in
+that corner and giving on to the _patio_.
+
+"You see that house?" said the Major.
+
+"Yes," said Wyley. "It is Scrope's. I have seen him enter and come
+out."
+
+"No doubt," said the Major; "but it is Knightley's house."
+
+"Knightley's! Then the light burning in the window is--"
+
+The Major nodded. "She is still in Tangier. And never a care for him
+has troubled her for two years, not so much as would bring a pucker to
+her pretty forehead--all my arrears of pay to a guinea-piece."
+
+Wyley leaned across the rail of the balcony, watching the light, and
+as he watched he was aware that his feelings and his thoughts changed.
+The interest which he had felt in Scrope died clean away, or rather
+was transferred to Knightley; and with this new interest there sprang
+up a new sympathy, a new pity. The change was entirely due to that one
+yellow light burning in the window and the homely suggestions which it
+provoked. It brought before him very clearly the bitter contrast: so
+that light had burned any night these last two years, and Scrope had
+gone in and out at his will, while up in the barbarous inlands of
+Morocco the husband had had his daily portion of the bastinado and
+the whip. It was her fault, too, and she made her profit of it. Wyley
+became sensible of an overwhelming irony in the disposition of the
+world.
+
+"You spoke a true word to-night, Major," he said bitterly. "That light
+down there might turn any man to a moralist, and send him preaching in
+the market-places."
+
+"Well," returned the Major, as though he must make what defence he
+could for Scrope, "the story is not the politest in the world. But,
+then, you know Tangier--it is only a tiny outpost on the edges of the
+world where we starve behind broken walls forgotten of our friends. We
+have the Moors ever swarming at our gates and the wolf ever snarling
+at our heels, and so the niceties of conduct are lost. We have so
+little time wherein to live, and that little time is filled with the
+noise of battle. Passion has its way with us in the end, and honour
+comes to mean no more than bravery and a gallant death."
+
+He remained a few moments silent, and then disconnectedly he told
+Wyley the rest of the story.
+
+"It was only three years ago that Knightley came to Tangier. He should
+never have brought his wife with him. Scrope and Knightley became
+friends. All Tangier knew the truth pretty soon, and laughed at
+Knightley's ignorance.... I remember the night of January 6th very
+well. I was Captain of the Guard that night too. A spy brought in news
+that we might expect a night attack. I sent Knightley with the news to
+Lord Inchiquin. On the way back he stepped into his own house. It was
+late at night. Mrs. Knightley was singing some foolish song to Scrope.
+The two men came down into the street and fought then and there. The
+quarter was aroused, the combatants arrested and brought to me....
+There are two faults which our necessities here compel us to punish
+beyond their proper gravity: duelling, for we cannot afford to lose
+officers that way; and brawling in the streets at night, because the
+Moors lie _perdus_ under our walls; ready to take occasion as it
+comes. Of Scrope's punishment you have heard. Knightley I released for
+that night. He was on guard--I could not spare him. We were attacked
+in the morning, and repulsed the attack. We followed up our success by
+a sortie in which Knightley fell."
+
+Wyley began again to wonder at what particular point in this story
+Knightley's recollection broke off; and, further, what particular fear
+it was that kept him from all questions even concerning his wife.
+
+Knightley's voice was heard behind them, and they turned back into the
+room. The Ensign had shaved his matted beard and combed out his hair,
+which now curled and shone graciously about his head and shoulders;
+his face, too, for all that it was wasted, had taken almost a boyish
+zest, and his figure, revealed in the graceful dress of his regiment,
+showed youth in every movement. He was plainly by some years a younger
+man than Scrope.
+
+He saluted the Major, and Wyley noticed that with his uniform he
+seemed to have drawn on something of a soldierly confidence.
+
+"There's your supper, lad," said Shackleton, pointing to a few poor
+herrings and a crust of bread which an orderly had spread upon the
+table. "It is scanty."
+
+"I like it the better," said Knightley with a laugh; "for so I am
+assured I am at home, in Tangier. There is no beef, I suppose?"
+
+"Not so much as a hoof."
+
+"No butter?"
+
+"Not enough to cover a sixpence."
+
+"There is cheese, however." He lifted up a scrap upon a fork.
+
+"There will be none to-morrow."
+
+"And as for pay?" he asked slyly.
+
+"Two years and a half in arrears."
+
+Knightley laughed again.
+
+"Moreover," added Shackleton, "out of our nothing we may presently
+have to feed the fleet. It is indeed the pleasantest joke imaginable."
+
+"In a week, no doubt," rejoined Knightley, "I shall be less sensible
+of its humour. But to-night--well, I am home in Tangier, and that
+contents me. Nothing has changed." At that he stopped suddenly.
+"Nothing has changed?" This time the phrase was put as a question, and
+with the halting timidity which he had shown before. No one answered
+the question. "No, nothing has changed," he said a third time, and
+again his eyes began to travel wistfully from face to face.
+
+Tessin abruptly turned his back; Shackleton blinked his eyes at the
+ceiling with altogether too profound an unconcern; Scrope reached out
+for the wine, and spilt it as he filled his glass; Wyley busily drew
+diagrams with a wet finger on the table.
+
+All these details Knightley remarked. He laid down his fork, he rested
+his elbow on the table, his forehead upon his hand. Then absently he
+began to hum over to himself a tune. The rhythm of it was somehow
+familiar to the Surgeon's ears. Where had he heard it before? Then
+with a start he remembered. It was this very rhythm, that very tune,
+which Scrope's fingers had beaten out on the table when he first
+saw Knightley. And as he had absently drummed it then, so Knightley
+absently hummed it now.
+
+Surely, then, the tune had some part in the relations of the two
+men--perhaps a part in this story. "A foolish song." The words flashed
+into Wyley's mind.
+
+"She was singing a foolish song." What if the tune was the tune of
+that song? But then--Wyley's argument came to a sudden conclusion. For
+if the tune _was_ the tune of that song, why, then Knightley must know
+the truth, since he remembered that song. Was Scrope right after all?
+Was Knightley playing with him? Wyley glanced at Knightley in the
+keenest excitement. He wanted words fitted to that tune, and in a
+little the words came--first one or two fitted here and there to a
+note, and murmured unconsciously, then an entire phrase which filled
+out a bar, finally this verse in its proper sequence:
+
+  "No, no, fair heretick, it needs must be
+    But an ill love in me,
+    And worse for thee;
+  For were it in my power
+  To love thee now this hour
+    More than I did the last,
+  'Twould then so fall
+  I might not love at all.
+  Love that can flow...."
+
+And then the song broke off, and silence followed. Wyley looked again
+at Knightley, but the latter had not changed his position. He still
+sat with his face shaded by his hand.
+
+The Surgeon was startled by a light touch on the arm. He turned with
+almost a jump, and he saw Scrope bending across the table towards him,
+his eyes ablaze with an excitement no less keen than his own.
+
+"He knows, he knows!" whispered Scrope. "It was that song she was
+singing; at that word 'flow' he pushed open the door of the room."
+
+Knightley raised his head and drew his hand across his forehead,
+as though Scrope's whisper had aroused him. Scrope seated himself
+hurriedly.
+
+"Nothing has changed, eh?" Knightley asked, like a man fresh from his
+sleep. Then he stood, and quietly, slowly, walked round the table
+until he stood directly behind Scrope's chair. Scrope's face hardened;
+he laid the palms of his hands upon the edge of the table ready to
+spring up; he looked across to Wyley with the expectation of death in
+his eyes.
+
+One of the officers shuffled his feet. Tessin said "Hush!" Knightley
+took a step forward and dropped a hand on Scrope's shoulder, very
+lightly; but none the less Scrope started and turned white as though
+he had been stabbed.
+
+"Harry," said the Ensign, "my--my wife is still in Tangier?"
+
+Scrope drew in a breath. "Yes."
+
+"Ah, waiting for me! You have shown her what kindness you could during
+my slavery?"
+
+He spoke in a wavering voice, as if he were not sure of his ground,
+and as he spoke he felt Scrope shiver beneath his hand, and saw upon
+the faces of his companions an unmistakable shrinking. He turned away
+and staggered, rather than walked, to the window, where he stood
+leaning against the sill.
+
+"The day is breaking," he said quietly. Wyley looked up; outside the
+window the colour was fading down the sky. It was purple still towards
+the zenith, but across the Straits its edges rested white upon the
+hills of Spain.
+
+"Love that can flow ..." murmured Knightley, and of a sudden he flung
+back into the room. "Let me have the truth of it," he burst out,
+confronting his brother-officers gathered about the table--"the truth,
+though it knell out my damnation. If you only knew how up there, at
+Fez, at Mequinez, I have pictured your welcome when I should get back!
+I made of my anticipation a very anodyne. The cudgelling, the chains,
+the hunger, the sun, hot as though a burning glass was held above my
+head--it would all make a good story for the guard-room when I got
+back--when I got back. And yet I do get back, and one and all of you
+draw away from me as though I were one of the Tangier lepers we
+jostle in the streets. 'Love that can flow ...'" he broke off. "I ask
+myself"--he hesitated, and with a great cry, "I ask you, did I play
+the coward on that night I was captured two years ago?"
+
+"The coward?" exclaimed Shackleton in bewilderment.
+
+Wyley, for all his sympathy, could not refrain from a triumphant
+glance at Scrope. "Here is the instance you needed," he said.
+
+"Yes, did I play the coward?" Knightley seated himself sideways on the
+edge of the table, and clasping his hands between his knees, went on
+in a quick, lowered voice. "'Love that can flow'--those are the last
+words I remember. You sent me, Major, to the Governor with a message.
+I delivered it; I started back. On my way back I passed my house. I
+went in. I stood in the _patio_. My wife was singing that song. The
+window of the room in which she sang opened on to the _patio_. I stood
+there listening for a second. Then I went upstairs. I turned the
+handle of the door. I remember quite clearly the light upon the room
+wall as I opened the door. Those words 'love that can flow' came
+swelling through the opening; and--and--the next thing I am aware of,
+I was riding chained upon a camel into slavery."
+
+Tessin and Major Shackleton looked suddenly towards Wyley in
+recognition of the accuracy of his guess. Scrope simply wiped the
+perspiration from his forehead and waited.
+
+"But how does that--forgetfulness, shall we say?--persuade you to the
+fear that you played the coward?" asked Wyley.
+
+"Well," replied Knightley, and his voice sank to a whisper, "I played
+the coward afterwards at Mequinez. At the first it used to amuse me to
+wonder what happened after I opened the door and before I was captured
+outside Tangier; later it only puzzled me, and in the end it began to
+frighten me. You see, I could not tell; it was all a blank to me, as
+it is now; and a man overdriven--well, he nurses sickly fancies.
+No need to say what mine were until the day I played the coward in
+Mequinez. They set me to build the walls of the Emperor's new Palace.
+We used the stones of the old Roman town and built them up in
+Mequinez, and in the walls we were bidden to build Christian slaves
+alive to the glory of Allah. I refused. They stripped the flesh off my
+feet with their bastinadoes, starved me of food and drink, and brought
+me back again to the walls. Again I refused." Knightley looked up at
+his audience, and whether or no he mistook their breathless silence
+for disbelief,--"I did," he implored. "Twice I refused, and twice they
+tortured me. The third time--I was so broken, the whistle of a cane
+in the air made me cry out with pain--I was sunk to that pitch of
+cowardice--" He stopped, unable to complete the sentence. He clasped
+and unclasped his hands convulsively, he moistened his dry lips with
+his tongue, and looked about him with a weak, almost despairing laugh.
+Then he began in another way. "The Christian was a Portuguee from
+Marmora. He was set in the wall with his arms outstretched on either
+side--the attitude of a man crucified. I built in his arms--his right
+arm first--and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way.
+I was careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his
+face." Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning,
+and hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung
+almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards
+from his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his
+neck. All this while he had been crying out for pity, babbling
+prayers, and the rest of it. When I reached his neck he ceased his
+clamour. I suppose he was dumb with horror. I did not know. All I knew
+was that now I should have to meet his eyes as I built in his face.
+I thought for a moment of blinding him. I could have done it quite
+easily with a stone. I picked up a stone to do it, and then, well--I
+could not help looking at him. He drew my eyes to his like a steel
+filing to a magnet. And once I had looked, once I had heard his eyes
+speaking, I--I tore down the stones. I freed his body, his legs, his
+feet and one arm. When the guards noticed what I was doing I cannot
+tell. I could not tell you when their sticks began to beat me. But
+they dragged me away when I had freed only one arm. I remember seeing
+him tugging at the other. What happened to me,"--he shivered,--"I
+could not describe to you. But you see I had played the coward finely
+at Mequinez, and when that question recurred to me as to what had
+happened after I had opened the door, I began to wonder whether by any
+chance I had played the coward at Tangier. I dismissed the thought as
+a sickly fancy, but it came again and again; and I came back here, and
+you draw aloof from me with averted faces and forced welcomes on your
+lips. Did I play the coward on that night I was captured? Tell me!
+Tell me!" And so the torrent of his speech came to an end.
+
+The Major rose gravely from his seat, walked round the table and held
+out his hand.
+
+"Put your hand there, lad," he said gravely.
+
+Knightley looked at the outstretched hand, then at the Major's face.
+He took the hand diffidently, and the Major's grasp was of the
+heartiest.
+
+"Neither at Mequinez nor at Tangier did you play the coward," said the
+Major. "You fell by my side in the van of the attack."
+
+And then Knightley began to cry. He blubbered like a child, and with
+his blubbering he mixed apologies. He was weak, he was tired, his
+relief was too great; he was thoroughly ashamed.
+
+"You see," he said, "there was need that I should know. My wife is
+waiting for me. I could not go back to her bearing that stigma.
+Indeed, I hardly dared ask news of her. Now I can go back; and,
+gentlemen, I wish you good-night."
+
+He stood up, made his bow, wiped his eyes, and began to walk to the
+door. Scrope rose instantly.
+
+"Sit down, Lieutenant," said the Major sharply, and Scrope obeyed with
+reluctance.
+
+The Major watched Knightley cross the room. Should he let the Ensign
+go? Should he keep him? He could not decide. That Knightley would seek
+his wife at once might of course have been foreseen; and yet it had
+not been foreseen either by the Major or the others. The present
+facts, as they had succeeded one after another had engrossed their
+minds.
+
+Knightley's hand was on the door, and the Major had not decided. He
+pushed the door open, he set a foot in the passage, and then the roar
+of a gun shook the room.
+
+"Ah!" remarked Wyley, "the signal for your sortie."
+
+Knightley stopped and listened. Major Shackleton stood in a fixed
+attitude with his eyes upon the floor. He had hit upon an issue, it
+seemed to him by inspiration. The noise of the gun was followed by ten
+clear strokes of a bell.
+
+"That's for the King's Battalion," said Knightley with a smile.
+
+"Yes," said Tessin, and picking up his sword from a corner he slung
+the bandolier across his shoulder.
+
+The bell rang out again; this time the number of the strokes was
+twenty.
+
+"That's for my Lord Dunbarton's Regiment," said Knightley.
+
+"Yes," said two of the remaining officers. They took their hats and
+followed Captain Tessin down the stairs.
+
+A third time the bell spoke, and the strokes were thirty.
+
+"Ah!" said Knightley, "that's for the Tangier Foot. Well, good luck to
+you, Major!" and he passed through the door.
+
+"A moment, Knightley. The regiment first. You wear Ensign Barbour's
+uniform. You must do more than wear his uniform. The regiment first."
+
+Major Shackleton spoke in a husky voice and kept his eyes on the
+floor. Scrope looked at him keenly from the table. Knightley hardly
+looked at him at all. He stepped back into the room.
+
+"With all my heart, Major: the regiment first."
+
+"Your station is at Peterborough Tower. You will go there--at once."
+
+"At once," replied Knightley cheerfully. "So she would wish," and he
+went down the stairs into the street. Major Shackleton picked up his
+hat.
+
+"I command this sortie," he said to Wyley; but as he turned he found
+himself confronted by Scrope.
+
+"What do you intend?" asked Scrope.
+
+Major Shackleton looked towards Wyley. Wyley understood the look and
+also what Shackleton intended. He went from the room and left the two
+men together.
+
+The grey light poured through the window; the candles still burnt
+yellow on the table.
+
+"What do you intend?"
+
+The Major looked Scrope straight in the face.
+
+"I have heard a man speak to-night in a man's voice. I mean to do that
+man the best service that I can. These two years at Mequinez cannot
+mate with these two years at Tangier. Knightley knows nothing now; he
+never shall know. He believes his wife a second Penelope; he shall
+keep that belief. There is a trench--you called it very properly a
+grave. In that trench Knightley will not hear though all Tangier
+scream its gossip in his ears. I mean to give him his chance of
+death."
+
+"No, Major," cried Scrope. "Or listen! Give me an equal chance."
+
+"Trelawney's Regiment is not called out. Again, Lieutenant, I fear me
+you will have the harder part of it."
+
+Shackleton repeated Scrope's own words in all sincerity, and hurried
+off to his post.
+
+Scrope was left alone in the guard-room. A vision of the trench,
+twelve feet deep, eight yards wide, yawned before his eyes. He closed
+them, but that made no difference; he still saw the trench. In
+imagination he began to measure its width and depth. Then he shook his
+head to rid himself of the picture, and went out on to the balcony.
+His eyes turned instinctively to a house by the city wall, to a corner
+of the _patio_ the house and the latticed shutter of a window just
+seen from the balcony.
+
+He stepped back into the room with a feeling of nausea, and blowing
+out the candles sat down alone, in the twilight, amongst the empty
+chairs. There were dark corners in the room; the broadening light
+searched into them, and suddenly the air was tinged with warm gold.
+Somewhere the sun had risen. In a little, Scrope heard a dropping
+sound of firing, and a few moments afterwards the rattle of a volley.
+The battle was joined. Scrope saw the trench again yawn up before his
+eyes. The Major was right. This morning, again, Lieutenant Scrope had
+the harder part of it.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF WHEELS.
+
+
+When Sir Charles Fosbrook was told by Mr. Pepys that Tangier had been
+surrendered to the Moors, he asked at once after the fate of his
+gigantic mole; and when he was informed that his mole had been, before
+the evacuation, so utterly blown to pieces that its scattered blocks
+made the harbour impossible for anchorage, he forbade so much as the
+mention in his presence of the name of Africa. But if he had done with
+Tangier, Tangier had not done with him, and five years afterwards
+he became concerned in the most unexpected way with certain tragic
+consequences of that desperate siege.
+
+He received a letter from an acquaintance of whom he had long lost
+sight, a Mr. Mardale of the Quarry House near Leamington, imploring
+him to give his opinion upon some new inventions. The value of the
+inventions could be easily gauged; Mr. Mardale claimed to have
+invented a wheel of perpetual rotation. Sir Charles, however, had his
+impulses of kindness. He knew Mr. Mardale to be an old and gentle
+person, a little touched in the head perhaps, who with money enough
+to surfeit every instinct of pleasure, had preferred to live a shy
+secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities
+or the invention of toy-like futile machines. There was a girl too
+whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird elfin creature with extraordinary
+black eyes and hair and a clear white face. Her one regret in those
+days had been that she was not born a horse, and she had lived in the
+stables, in as horse like a fashion as was possible. Her ankle indeed
+still must bear an unnecessary scar through the application of a
+fierce horse-liniment to a sprain. No doubt, however, she had long
+since changed her ambitions. Sir Charles calculated her age. Resilda
+Mardale must be twenty-five years old and a deuced fine woman into the
+bargain. Sir Charles took a glance at his figure in his cheval-glass.
+He had reached middle-age to be sure, but he had a leg that many a
+spindle-shanked youngster might envy, nor was there any unbecoming
+protuberance at his waist. He wrote a letter accepting the invitation
+and a week later in the dusk of a June evening, drove up the long
+avenue of trees to the terrace of the Quarry House.
+
+The house was a solid square mansion built upon the side of a hill,
+and the ground in front of it fell away very quickly from the terrace
+to what Sir Charles imagined must be a pond, for a light mist hung at
+the bottom. On the other side of the pond the ground rose again in a
+steep hill. But Sir Charles had no opportunity at this moment to get
+any accurate knowledge of the house and its surroundings. For apart
+from the darkness, it was close upon supper-time and Miss Resilda
+Mardale must assuredly not be kept waiting. His valet subsequently
+declared that Sir Charles had seldom been so particular in the choice
+of his coat and small-clothes; and the supper-bell certainly rang out
+before he was satisfied with the set of his cravat.
+
+He could not, however, consider his pains wasted when once he was set
+down opposite to Resilda. She was taller than he had expected her to
+be, but he did not count height a fault so long as there was grace
+to carry it off, and grace she had in plenty. Her face had gained in
+delicacy and lost nothing of its brilliancy, or of its remarkable
+clearness of complexion. Her hair too if it was less rebellious, and
+more neatly coiled, had retained its glory of profusion, and her big
+black eyes, though to be sure they were grown a trifle sedate, no
+doubt could sparkle as of old. Sir Charles set himself to make them
+sparkle. Old Mr. Mardale prattled of his inventions to his heart's
+delight--he described the wheel, and also a flying machine and besides
+the flying machine, an engine by which steam might be used to raise
+water to great altitudes. Sir Charles was ready from time to time with
+a polite, if not always an appropriate comment, and for the rest he
+paid compliments to Resilda. Still the eyes did not sparkle, indeed a
+pucker appeared and deepened on her forehead. Sir Charles accordingly
+redoubled his gallantries, he was slyly humorous about the
+horse-liniment, and thereupon came the remark which so surprised him
+and was the beginning of his strange discoveries. For Resilda suddenly
+leaned towards him and said frankly:
+
+"I would much rather, Sir Charles, you told me something of your great
+mole at Tangier."
+
+Sir Charles had reason for surprise. The world had long since
+forgotten his mole, if ever it had been concerned in it. Yet here was
+a girl whose thoughts might be expected to run on youths and ribands
+talking of it in a little village four miles from Leamington as though
+there were no topic more universal. Sir Charles Fosbrook answered her
+gravely.
+
+"I thought never to speak of Tangier and the mole again. I spent many
+years upon the devising and construction of that great breakwater. It
+could have sheltered every ship of his Majesty's navy. It was wife and
+children to me. My heart lay very close to it. I fancied indeed my
+heart was disrupted with the disruption of the mole, and it has at all
+events, lain ever since as heavy as King Charles' Chest."
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," said Resilda.
+
+Sir Charles had vowed never to speak of the matter again. But he had
+kept his vow for five long years, and besides here was a girl of a
+remarkable beauty expressing sympathy and asking for information. Sir
+Charles broke his vow and talked, and the girl helped him. A suspicion
+that she might have primed herself with knowledge in view of his
+coming, vanished before the flame of her enthusiasm. She knew the
+history of its building almost as well as he did himself, and could
+even set him right in his dates. It was she who knew the exact day on
+which King Charles' Chest, that great block of mortised stones, which
+formed as it were the keystone of the breakwater, had been lowered
+into its place. Sir Charles abandoned all reserve, and talked freely
+of his hopes and fears as the pier ran farther out and out into the
+currents of the Straits, of his bitter disappointment when his labours
+were destroyed. He forgot his gallantries, he showed himself the man
+he was. Neither he nor Resilda noticed a low rumble of thunder or the
+beating of sudden rain upon the windows, so occupied were they with
+the theme of their talk; and at last Sir Charles, leaning back in his
+chair, cried out with astonishment and delight.
+
+"But how is it that my mole is so familiar a thing to you? Explain it
+if you please! Never have I spent so agreeable an evening."
+
+A momentary embarrassment seemed to follow upon his words. Resilda
+looked at her father who chuckled and explained.
+
+"Sir, an old soldier years ago came over the hill in front of the
+house and begged for alms. He found my daughter on the terrace in a
+lucky moment for himself. He had all sorts of wonderful stories of
+Tangier and the great mole which was then a building. Resilda was set
+on fire that day, and though the King and the Parliament might shut
+their eyes to the sore straits of that town and the gallantry of its
+defenders, no one was allowed to forget them in the Quarry House. To
+tell the truth I sometimes envied the obliviousness of Parliament,"
+and he laughed gently. "So from the first my daughter was primed with
+the history of that siege, and lately we have had further means of
+knowledge--" He began to speak warily and with embarrassment--"For two
+years ago Resilda married an officer of The King's Battalion, Major
+Lashley."
+
+"Here are two surprises," cried Sir Charles. "For in the first place,
+Madam, I had no thought you were wed. Blame a bachelor's stupidity!"
+and he glanced at her left hand which lay upon the table-cloth with
+the band of gold gleaming upon a finger. "In the second place I knew
+Major Lashley very well, though it is news to me that he ever troubled
+his head with my mole. A very gallant officer, who defended Charles
+Fort through many nights of great suspense, and cleft his way back
+to Tangier when his ammunition was expended. I shall be very glad to
+shake the Major once more by the hand."
+
+At once Sir Charles was aware that he had uttered the most awkward and
+unsuitable remark. Resilda Lashley, as he must now term her, actually
+flinched away from him and then sat with a vague staring look of pain
+as though she had been shocked clean out of her wits. She recovered
+herself in a moment, but she did not speak, neither had Sir Charles
+any words. He looked at her dress which was white and had not so much
+as a black riband dangling anywhere about it.
+
+But there were other events than death which could make the utterance
+of his wish a _gaucherie_. Sir Charles prided himself upon his tact,
+particularly with a good-looking woman, and he was therefore much
+abashed and confused. The only one who remained undisturbed was Mr.
+Mardale. His mind was never for very long off his wheels, or his
+works of art. It was the turn of his pictures now. He had picked up a
+genuine Rubens in Ghent, he declared. It was standing somewhere in the
+great drawing-room on the carpet against the back of a chair, and Sir
+Charles must look at it in the morning, if only it could be found. He
+had clean forgotten all about his daughter it appeared. She, however,
+had a mind to clear the mystery up, and interrupting her father.
+
+"It is right that you should know," she said simply, "Major Lashley
+disappeared six months ago."
+
+"Disappeared!" exclaimed Sir Charles in spite of himself, and the
+astonishment in his voice woke the old gentleman from his prattle.
+
+"To be sure," said he apologetically, "I should have told you before
+of the sad business. Yes, Sir, Major Lashley disappeared, utterly from
+this very house on the eleventh night of last December, and though the
+country-side was scoured and every ragamuffin for miles round brought
+to question, no trace of him has anywhere been discovered from that
+day to this."
+
+An intuition slipped into Sir Charles Fosbrook's mind, and though he
+would have dismissed it as entirely unwarrantable, persisted there.
+The thought of the steep slope of ground before the house and the mist
+in the hollow between the two hills. The mist was undoubtedly the
+exhalation from a pond. The pond might have reeds which might catch
+and gather a body. But the pond would have been dragged. Still the
+thought of the pond remained while he expressed a vague hope that the
+Major might by God's will yet be restored to them.
+
+He had barely ended before a louder gust of rain than ordinary smote
+upon the windows and immediately there followed a knocking upon the
+hall-door. The sound was violent, and it came with so opposite a
+rapidity upon the heels of Fosbrook's words that it thrilled and
+startled him. There was something very timely in the circumstances of
+night and storm and that premonitory clapping at the door. Sir Charles
+looked towards the door in a glow of anticipation. He had time to
+notice, however, how deeply Resilda herself was stirred; her left hand
+which had lain loose upon the table-cloth was now tightly clenched,
+and she had a difficulty in breathing. The one strange point in her
+conduct was that although she looked towards the door like Sir Charles
+Fosbrook, there was more of suspense in the look than of the eagerness
+of welcome. The butler, however, had no news of Major Lashley to
+announce. He merely presented the compliments of Mr. Gibson Jerkley
+who had been caught in the storm near the Quarry House and ten miles
+from his home. Mr. Jerkley prayed for supper and a dry suit of
+clothes.
+
+"And a bed too," said Resilda, with a flush of colour in her cheeks,
+and begging Sir Charles' permission she rose from the table. Sir
+Charles was disappointed by the mention of a strange name. Mr.
+Mardale, however, to whom that loud knocking upon the door had been
+void of suggestion, now became alert. He looked with a strange anxiety
+after his daughter, an anxiety which surprised Fosbrook, to whom
+this man of wheels and little toys had seemed lacking in the natural
+affections.
+
+"And a bed too," repeated Mr. Mardale doubtfully, "to be sure! To be
+sure!" And though he went into the hall to welcome his visitor, it was
+not altogether without reluctance.
+
+Mr. Gibson Jerkley was a man of about thirty years. He had a brown
+open personable countenance, a pair of frank blue eyes, and the steady
+restful air of a man who has made his account with himself, and who
+neither speaks to win praise nor is at pains to escape dislike. Sir
+Charles Fosbrook was from the first taken with the man, though he
+spoke little with him for the moment. For being tired with his long
+journey from London, he retired shortly to his room.
+
+But however tired he was, Sir Charles found that it was quite
+impossible for him to sleep. The cracking of the rain upon his
+windows, the groaning trees in the park, and the wail of the wind
+among the chimneys and about the corners of the house were no doubt
+for something in a Londoner's sleeplessness. But the mysterious
+disappearance of Major Lashley was at the bottom of it. He thought
+again of the pond. He imagined a violent kidnapping and his fancies
+went to work at devising motives. Some quarrel long ago in the crowded
+city of Tangier and now brought to a tragical finish amongst the oaks
+and fields of England. Perhaps a Moor had travelled over seas for his
+vengeance and found his way from village to village like that
+Baracen lady of old times. And when he had come to this point of his
+reflections, he heard a light rapping upon his door. He got out of bed
+and opened it. He saw Mr. Gibson Jerkley standing on the threshold
+with a candle in one hand and a finger of the other at his lip.
+
+"I saw alight beneath your door," said Jerkley, and Sir Charles made
+room for him to enter. He closed the door cautiously, and setting his
+candle down upon a chest of drawers, said without any hesitation:
+
+"I have come, Sir, to ask for your advice. I do not wonder at your
+surprise, it is indeed a strange sort of intrusion for a man to make
+upon whom you have never clapped your eyes before this evening. But
+for one thing I fancy Mrs. Lashley wishes me to ask you for the
+favour. She has said nothing definitely, in faith she could not as you
+will understand when you have heard the story. But that I come with
+her approval I am very sure. For another, had she disapproved, I
+should none the less have come of my own accord. Sir, though I know
+you very well by reputation, I have had the honour of few words with
+you, but my life has taught me to trust boldly where my eyes bid me
+trust. And the whole affair is so strange that one more strange act
+like this intrusion of mine is quite of apiece. I ask you therefore to
+listen to me. The listening pledges you to nothing, and at the worst,
+I can promise you, my story will while away a sleepless hour. If when
+you have heard, you can give us your advice, I shall be very glad. For
+we are sunk in such a quandary that a new point of view cannot but
+help us."
+
+Sir Charles pointed to a chair and politely turned away to hide a
+yawn. For the young man's lengthy exordium had made him very drowsy.
+He could very comfortably had fallen asleep at this moment. But Gibson
+Jerkley began to speak, and in a short space of time Sir Charles was
+as wide-awake as any house-breaker.
+
+"Eight years ago," said he, "I came very often to the Quarry House,
+but I always rode homewards discontented in the evening. Resilda at
+that time had a great ambition to be a boy. The sight of any brown
+bare-legged lad gipsying down the hill with a song upon his lips,
+would set her viciously kicking the toes of her satin slippers against
+the parapet of the terrace, and clamouring at her sex. Now I was not
+of the same mind with Resilda."
+
+"That I can well understand," said Sir Charles drily. "But, my young
+friend, I can remember a time when Resilda desired of all things to be
+a horse. There was something hopeful because more human in her wish to
+be a boy, had you only known."
+
+Mr. Jerkley nodded gravely and continued:
+
+"I was young enough to argue the point with her, which did me no good,
+and then to make matters worse, the soldier from Tangier came over the
+hill, with his stories of Major Lashley--Captain he was then."
+
+"Major Lashley," exclaimed Sir Charles. "I did not hear the soldier
+was one of Major Lashley's men!"
+
+"But he was and thenceforward the world went very ill with me. Reports
+of battles, and sorties came home at rare intervals. She was the first
+to read of them. Major Lashley's name was more than once mentioned. We
+country gentlemen who stayed at home and looked after our farms and
+our tenants, having no experience of war, suffered greatly in the
+comparison. So at the last I ordered my affairs for a long voyage, and
+without taking leave of any but my nearest neighbours and friends, I
+slipped off one evening to the wars."
+
+"You did not wish your friends at the Quarry House good-bye?" said
+Fosbrook.
+
+"No. It might have seemed that I was making claims, and, after all,
+one has one's pride. I would never, I think, ask a woman to wait
+for me. But she heard of course after I had gone and--I am speaking
+frankly--I believe the news woke the woman in her. At all events there
+was little talk after of Tangier at the Quarry House."
+
+Mr. Jerkley related his subsequent history. He had sailed at his own
+charges to Africa; he had enlisted as a gentleman volunteer in The
+King's Battalion; he had served under Major Lashley in the Charles
+Fort where he was in charge of the great speaking-trumpet by which
+the force received its orders from the Lieutenant-Governor in Tangier
+Castle; he took part in the desperate attempt to cut a way back
+through the Moorish army into the town. In that fight he was wounded
+and left behind for dead.
+
+"A year later peace was made. Tangier was evacuated, Major Lashley
+returned to England. Now the Major and I despite the difference
+in rank had been friends. I had spoken to him of Miss Mardale's
+admiration, and as chance would have it, he came to Leamington to take
+the waters."
+
+"Chance?" said Sir Charles drily.
+
+"Well it may have been intention," said Jerkley. "There was no reason
+in the world why he should not seek her out. She was not promised to
+me, and very likely I had spoken of her with enthusiasm. For a long
+time she would not consent to listen to him. He was, however, no
+less persistent--he pleaded his suit for three years. I was dead you
+understand, and what man worth a pinch of salt would wish a woman to
+waste her gift of life in so sterile a fidelity.... You follow me?
+At the end of three years Resilda yielded to his pleadings, and the
+persuasions of her friends. For Major Lashley quickly made himself a
+position in the country. They were married, Major Lashley was not a
+rich man, it was decided that they should both live at the Quarry
+House."
+
+"And what had Mr. Mardale to say to it?" asked Fosbrook.
+
+"Oh, Sir," said Gibson Jerkley with a laugh. "Mr. Mardale is a man of
+wheels, and little steel springs. Let him sit at his work-table in
+that crowded drawing-room on the first floor, without interruption,
+and he will be very well content, I can assure you.... Hush!" and he
+suddenly raised his hand. In the silence which followed, they both
+distinctly heard the sound of some one stirring in the house. Mr.
+Jerkley went to the door and opened it. The door gave on to the
+passage which was shut off at its far end by another door from the
+square tulip-wood landing, at the head of the stairs. He came back
+into the bedroom.
+
+"There is a light on the other side of the passage-door," said he.
+"But I have no doubt it is Mr. Mardale going to his bed. He sits late
+at his work-table."
+
+Sir Charles brought him back to his story.
+
+"Meanwhile you were counted for dead, but actually you were taken
+prisoner. There is one thing which I do not understand. When peace was
+concluded the prisoners were freed and an officer was sent up into
+Morocco to secure their release."
+
+"There were many oversights like mine, I have no doubt. The Moors were
+reluctant enough to produce their captives. We who were supposed to be
+dead were not particularly looked for. I have no doubt there is many
+a poor English soldier sweating out his soul in the uplands of that
+country to this day. I escaped two years ago, just about the time, in
+fact, when Miss Resilda Mardale became Mrs. Lashley. I crept down
+over the hillside behind Tangier one dark evening, and lay all night
+beneath a bush of tamarisks dreaming the Moors were still about me.
+But an inexplicable silence reigned and nowhere was the darkness
+spotted by the flame of any camp-fire. In the morning I looked down
+to Tangier. The first thing which I noticed was your broken stump of
+mole, the second that nowhere upon the ring of broken wall could be
+seen the flash of a red coat or the glitter of a musket-barrel. I came
+down into Tangier, I had no money and no friends. I got away in a
+felucca to Spain. From Spain I worked my passage to England. I came
+home nine months ago. And here is the trouble. Three months after I
+returned Major Lashley disappeared. You understand?"
+
+"Oh," cried Sir Charles, and he jumped in his chair. "I understand
+indeed. Suspicion settled upon you," and as it ever will upon the
+least provocation suspicion passed for a moment into Fosbrook's brain.
+He was heartily ashamed of it when he looked into Jerkley's face. It
+would need, assuredly, a criminal of an uncommon astuteness to come at
+this hour with this story. Mr. Jerkley was not that criminal.
+
+"Yes," he answered simply, "I am looked at askance, devil a doubt of
+it. I would not care a snap of the fingers were I alone in the matter;
+but there is Mrs. Lashley ... she is neither wife nor widow ... and,"
+he took a step across the room and said quickly--and were she known
+for a widow, there is still the suspicion upon me like a great iron
+door between us."
+
+"Can you help us, Sir Charles! Can you see light?"
+
+"You must tell me the details of the Major's disappearance," said Sir
+Charles, and the following details were given.
+
+On the eleventh of December and at ten o'clock of the evening Major
+Lashley left the house to visit the stables which were situated in
+the Park and at the distance of a quarter of a mile from the house. A
+favourite mare, which he had hunted the day before, had gone lame,
+and all day Major Lashley had shown some anxiety; so that there was a
+natural reason why he should have gone out at the last moment before
+retiring to bed. Mrs. Lashley went up to her room at the same time,
+indeed with so exact a correspondence of movement that as she reached
+the polished tulip-wood landing at the top of the stairs, she heard
+the front door latch as her husband drew it to behind him. That was
+the last she heard of him.
+
+"She woke up suddenly," said Jerkley, "in the middle of the night, and
+found that her husband was not at her side. She waited for a little
+and then rose from her bed. She drew the window-curtains aside and by
+the glimmering light which came into the room, was able to read the
+dial of her watch. It was seven minutes past three of the morning. She
+immediately lighted her candle and went to rouse her father. Her door
+opened upon the landing, it is the first door upon the left hand side
+as you mount the stairs; the big drawing-room opens on to the landing
+too, but faces the stairs. Mrs. Lashley at once went to that room,
+knowing how late Mr. Mardale is used to sit over his inventions, and
+as she expected, found him there. A search was at once arranged; every
+servant in the house was at once impressed, and in the morning every
+servant on the estate. Major Lashley had left the stable at a quarter
+past ten. He has been seen by no one since."
+
+Sir Charles reflected upon this story.
+
+"There is a pond in front of the house," said he.
+
+"It was dragged in the morning," replied Jerkley.
+
+Sir Charles made various inquiries and received the most
+unsatisfactory answers for his purpose. Major Lashley had been a
+favourite alike at Tangier, and in the country. He had a winning
+trick of a smile, which made friends for him even among his country's
+enemies. Mr. Jerkley could not think of a man who had wished him ill.
+
+"Well, I will think the matter over," said Sir Charles, who had not an
+idea in his head, and he held the door open for Mr. Jerkley. Both men
+stood upon the threshold, looked down the passage and then looked at
+one another.
+
+"It is strange," said Jerkley.
+
+"The light has been a long while burning on the landing," said Sir
+Charles. They walked on tiptoe down the passage to the door beneath
+which one bright bar of light stretched across the floor. Jerkley
+opened the door and looked through; Sir Charles who was the taller man
+looked over Jerkley's head and never were two men more surprised. In
+the embrasure of that door to the left of the staircase, the door
+behind which Resilda Lashley slept, old Mr. Mardale reclined, with his
+back propped against the door-post. He had fallen asleep at his post,
+and a lighted candle half-burnt flamed at his side. The reason of his
+presence then was clear to them both.
+
+"A morbid fancy!" he said in a whisper, but with a considerable anger
+in his voice. "Such a fancy as comes only to a man who has lost his
+judgment through much loneliness. See, he sits like any negro outside
+an Eastern harem! Sir, I am shamed by him."
+
+"You have reason I take the liberty to say," said Sir Charles
+absently, and he went back to his room puzzling over what he had seen,
+and over what he could neither see nor understand. The desire for
+sleep was altogether gone from him. He opened his window and leaned
+out. The rain had ceased, but the branches still dripped and the air
+was of an incomparable sweetness. Blackbirds and thrushes on the
+lawns, and in the thicket-depths were singing as though their lives
+hung upon the full fresh utterance of each note. A clear pure light
+was diffused across the world. Fosbrook went back to his old idea of
+some vengeful pursuit sprung from a wrong done long ago in Tangier.
+The picture of Major Lashley struck with terror as he got news of his
+pursuers, and slinking off into the darkness. Even now, somewhere or
+another, on the uplands or the plains of England, he might be rising
+from beneath a hedge to shake the rain from his besmeared clothes, and
+start off afresh on another day's aimless flight. The notion caught
+his imagination and comforted him to sleep. But in the morning he woke
+to recognise its unreality. The unreality became yet more vivid to
+him at the breakfast-table, when he sat with two pairs of young eyes
+turning again and again trustfully towards him. The very reliance
+which the man and woman so clearly placed in him spurred him. Since
+they looked to him to clear up the mystery, why he must do it, and
+there was an end of the matter.
+
+He was none the less glad, however, when Mr. Jerkley announced his
+intention of returning home. There would at all events be one pair
+of eyes the less. He strolled with Mr. Jerkley on the terrace
+after breakfast with a deep air of cogitation, the better to avoid
+questions. Gibson Jerkley, however, was himself in a ruminative
+mood. He stopped, and gazing across the valley to the riband of road
+descending the hill:
+
+"Down that road the soldier came," said he, "whose stories brought
+about all this misfortune."
+
+"And very likely down that road will come the bearer of news to make
+an end of it," rejoined Fosbrook sententiously. Mr. Jerkley looked at
+him with a sudden upspringing of hope, and Sir Charles nodded with
+ineffable mystery, never guessing how these lightly spoken words were
+to return to his mind with the strength of a fulfilled prophecy.
+
+As he nodded, however, he turned about towards the house, and a
+certain disfigurement struck upon his eyes. Two windows on the first
+floor were entirely bricked up, and as the house was square with level
+tiers of windows, they gave to it an unsightly look. Sir Charles
+inquired of his companion if he could account for them.
+
+"To be sure," said Jerkley, with the inattention of a man diverted
+from serious thought to an unimportant topic. "They are the windows of
+the room in which Mrs. Mardale died a quarter of a century ago. Mr.
+Mardale locked the door as soon as his wife was taken from it to the
+church, and the next day he had the windows blocked. No one but he has
+entered the room during all these years, the key has never left his
+person. It must be the ruin of a room by now. You can imagine it, the
+dust gathering, the curtains rotting, in the darkness and at times the
+old man sitting there with his head running on days long since dead.
+But you know Mr. Mardale, he is not as other men."
+
+Sir Charles swung round alertly to his companion. To him at all events
+the topic was not an indifferent one.
+
+"Yet you say, you believe that he is void of the natural affections.
+Last night we saw a proof, a crazy proof if you will, but none the
+less a proof of his devotion to his daughter. To-day you give me as
+sure a one of his devotion to his dead wife," and almost before he had
+finished, Mr. Mardale was calling to him from the steps of the house.
+
+He spent all that morning in the great drawing-room on the first
+floor. It was a room of rich furniture, grown dingy with dust and
+inattention, and crowded from end to end with tables and chairs and
+sofas, on which were heaped in a confused medley, pictures, statues of
+marble, fans and buckles from Spain, queer barbaric ornaments, ivory
+carvings from the Chinese. Sir Charles could hardly make his way to
+the little cleared space by the window, where Mr. Mardale worked,
+without brushing some irreplaceable treasure to the floor. Once
+there he was fettered for the morning. Mr. Mardale with all the
+undisciplined enthusiasm of an amateur, jumping from this invention to
+that, beaming over his spectacles. Sir Charles listened with here and
+there a word of advice, or of sympathy with the labour of creation.
+But his thoughts were busy elsewhere, he was pondering over his
+discovery of the morning, over the sight which he and Jerkley had seen
+last night, he was accustoming himself to regard the old man in a
+strange new light, as an over-careful father and a sorely-stricken
+husband. Meanwhile he sat over against the window which was in the
+side of the house, and since the house was built upon a slope of hill,
+although the window was on the first floor, a broad terrace of grass
+stretched away from it to a circle of gravel ornamented with statues.
+On this terrace he saw Mrs. Lashley, and reflected uncomfortably that
+he must meet her at dinner and again sustain the inquiry of her eyes.
+
+He avoided actual questions, however, and as soon as dinner was over,
+with a meaning look at the girl to assure her that he was busy with
+her business, he retired to the library. Then he sat himself down to
+think the matter over restfully. But the room, walled with books upon
+its three sides, fronted the Southwest on its fourth, and as the
+afternoon advanced, the hot June sun streamed farther and farther into
+the room. Sir Charles moved his chair back, and again back, and again,
+until at last it was pushed into the one cool dark corner of the room.
+Then Sir Charles closed his wearied eyes the better to think. But he
+had slept little during the last night, and when he opened them again,
+it was with a guilty start. He rubbed his eyes, then he reached a hand
+down quickly at his side, and lifted a book out of the lowest shelf in
+the corner. The book was a volume of sermons. Sir Charles replaced it,
+and again dipped his hand into the lucky-bag. He drew out a tome of
+Mr. Hobbes' philosophy; Sir Charles was not in the mood for Hobbes; he
+tried again. On this third occasion he found something very much more
+to his taste, namely the second Volume of Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs
+of Count Grammont. This he laid upon his knee, and began glancing
+through the pages while he speculated upon the mystery of the Major's
+disappearance. His thoughts, however, lagged in a now well-worn
+circle, they begot nothing new in the way of a suggestion. On the
+other hand the book was quite new to him. He became less and less
+interested in his thoughts, more and more absorbed in the Memoirs.
+There were passages marked with a pencil-line in the margin, and
+marked, thought Sir Charles, by a discriminating judge. He began to
+look only for the marked passages, being sure that thus he would most
+easily come upon the raciest anecdotes. He read the story of the
+Count's pursuit by the brother of the lady he was affianced to. The
+brother caught up the Count when he was nearing Dover to return to
+France. "You have forgotten something," said the brother. "So I have,"
+replied Grammont. "I have forgotten to marry your sister." Sir Charles
+chuckled and turned over the pages. There was an account of how the
+reprobate hero rode seventy miles into the country to keep a tryst
+with an _inamorata_ and waited all night for no purpose in pouring
+rain by the Park gate. Sir Charles laughed aloud. He turned over more
+pages, and to his surprise came across, amongst the marked passages, a
+quite unentertaining anecdote of how Grammont lost a fine new suit of
+clothes, ordered for a masquerade at White Hall. Sir Charles read the
+story again, wondering why on earth this passage had been marked; and
+suddenly he was standing by the window, holding the book to the light
+in a quiver of excitement. Underneath certain letters in the words of
+this marked passage he had noticed dents in the paper, as though by
+the pressure of a pencil point. Now that he stood by the light, he
+made sure of the dents, and he saw also by the roughness of the paper
+about them, that the pencil-marks had been carefully erased. He read
+these underlined letters together--they made a word, two words--a
+sentence, and the sentence was an assignation.
+
+Sir Charles could not remember that the critical moment in any of his
+great engineering undertakings, had ever caused him such a flutter
+of excitement, such a pulsing in his temples, such a catching of his
+breath--no, not even the lowering of Charles' Chest into the Waters
+of Tangier harbour. Everything at once became exaggerated out of its
+proportions, the silence of the house seemed potential and expectant,
+the shadows in the room now that the sun was low had their message, he
+felt a queer chill run down his spine like ice, he shivered. Then he
+hurried to the door, locked it and sat down to a more careful study.
+And as he read, there came out before his eyes a story--a story told
+as it were in telegrams, a story of passion, of secret meetings, of
+gratitude for favours.
+
+Who was the discriminating judge who had marked these passages and
+underlined these letters? The book was newly published, it was in the
+Quarry House, and there were three occupants of the Quarry House. Was
+it Mr. Mardale? The mere question raised a laugh. Resilda? Never.
+Major Lashley then? If not Major Lashley, who else?
+
+It flashed into his mind that here in this book he might hold the
+history of the Major's long courtship of Resilda. But he dismissed the
+notion contemptuously. Gibson Jerkley had told him of that courtship,
+and of the girl's reluctance to respond to it. Besides Resilda was
+never the woman in this story. Perhaps the first volume might augment
+it and give the clue to the woman's identity. Sir Charles hunted
+desperately through the shelves. Nowhere was the first volume to be
+found. He wasted half-an-hour before he understood why. Of course the
+other volume would be in the woman's keeping, and how in the world to
+discover her?
+
+Things moved very quickly with Sir Charles that afternoon. He had shut
+up the volume and laid it on the table, the while he climbed up and
+down the library steps. From the top of the steps he glanced about the
+room in a despairing way, and his eyes lit upon the table. For the
+first time he remarked the binding which was of a brown leather. But
+all the books on the shelves were bound uniformly in marble boards
+with a red backing. He sprang down from the steps with the vigour of a
+boy, and seizing the book looked in the fly leaf for a name. There was
+a name, the name of a bookseller in Leamington, and as he closed the
+book again, some one rapped upon the door. Sir Charles opened it and
+saw Mr. Mardale. He gave the old gentleman no time to speak.
+
+"Mr. Mardale," said he, "I am a man of plethoric habits, and must
+needs take exercise. Can you lend me a horse?"
+
+Mr. Mardale was disappointed as his manner showed. He had perhaps at
+that very moment hit upon a new and most revolutionary invention.
+But his manners hindered him from showing more than a trace of
+the disappointment, and Sir Charles rode out to the bookseller at
+Leamington, with the volume beneath his coat.
+
+"Can you show me the companion to this?" said he, dumping it down upon
+the counter. The bookseller seized upon the volume and fondled it.
+
+"It is not fair," he cried. "In any other affair but books, it would
+be called at once sheer dishonesty. Here have been my subscribers
+clamouring for the Memoirs for six months and more."
+
+"You hire out your books!" cried Sir Charles.
+
+"Give would be the properer word," grumbled the man.
+
+Sir Charles humbly apologised.
+
+"It was the purest oversight," said he, "and I will gladly pay double.
+But I need the first volume."
+
+"The first volume, Sir," replied the bookseller in a mollified voice,
+"is in the like case with the second. There has been an oversight."
+
+"But who has it?"
+
+The bookseller was with difficulty persuaded to search his list. He
+kept his papers in the greatest disorder, so that it was no wonder
+people kept his volumes until they forgot them. But in the end he
+found his list.
+
+"Mrs. Ripley," he read out, "Mrs. Ripley of Burley Wood."
+
+"And where is Burley Wood?" asked Sir Charles.
+
+"It is a village, Sir, six miles from Leamington," replied the
+bookseller, and he gave some rough directions as to the road.
+
+Sir Charles mounted his horse and cantered down the Parade. The sun
+was setting; he would for a something miss his supper; but he meant to
+see Burley Wood that day, and he would have just daylight enough
+for his purpose. As he entered the village, he caught up a labourer
+returning from the fields. Sir Charles drew rein beside him.
+
+"Will you tell me, if you please, where Mrs. Ripley lives?"
+
+The man looked up and grinned.
+
+"In the churchyard," said he.
+
+"Do you mean she is dead?"
+
+"No less."
+
+"When did she die?"
+
+"Well, it may have been a month or two ago, or it may have been more."
+
+"Show me her grave and there's a silver shilling in your pocket."
+
+The labourer led Fosbrook to a corner of the churchyard. Then upon
+a head-stone he read that Mary Ripley aged twenty-nine had died on
+December 7th. December the 7th thought Sir Charles, five days before
+Major Lashley died. Then he turned quickly to the labourer.
+
+"Can you tell me when Mrs. Ripley was buried?"
+
+"I can find out for another shilling."
+
+"You shall have it, man."
+
+The labourer hurried off, discovered the sexton, and came back. But
+instead of the civil gentleman he had left, he found now a man with a
+face of horror, and eyes that had seen appalling things. Sir Charles
+had remained in the churchyard by the grave, he had looked about him
+from one to the other of the mounds of turf, his imagination already
+stimulated had been quickened by what he had seen; he stood with the
+face of a Medusa.
+
+"She was buried when?" he asked.
+
+"On December the 11th," replied the labourer.
+
+Sir Charles showed no surprise. He stood very still for a moment, then
+he gave the man his two shillings, and walked to the gate where his
+horse was tied. Then he inquired the nearest way to the Quarry House,
+and he was pointed out a bridle-path running across fields to a hill.
+As he mounted he asked another question.
+
+"Mr. Ripley is alive?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It must be Mr. Ripley," Sir Charles assured himself, as he rode
+through the dusk of the evening. "It must be ... It must be ..." until
+the words in his mind became a meaningless echo of his horse's hoofs.
+He rode up the hill, left the bridle-path for the road, and suddenly,
+and long before he had expected, he saw beneath him the red square of
+the Quarry House and the smoke from its chimneys. He was on that very
+road up which he and Gibson Jerkley had looked that morning. Down that
+road, he had said, would come the man who knew how Major Lashley
+had disappeared, and within twelve hours down that road the man was
+coming. "But it must be Mr. Ripley," he said to himself.
+
+None the less he took occasion at supper to speak of his ride.
+
+"I rode by Leamington to Burley Wood. I went into the churchyard."
+Then he stopped, but as though the truth was meant to come to light,
+Resilda helped him out.
+
+"I had a dear friend buried there not so long ago," she said. "Father,
+you remember Mrs. Ripley."
+
+"I saw her grave this afternoon," said Fosbrook, with his eyes upon
+Mr. Mardale. It might have been a mere accident, it was in any case a
+trifling thing, the mere shaking of a hand, the spilling of a spoonful
+of salt upon the table, but trifling things have their suggestions.
+He remembered that Resilda, when she had waked up on the night of
+December the 11th to find herself alone, had sought out her father,
+who was still up, and at work in the big drawing-room. He remembered
+too that the window of that room gave on to a terrace of grass. A man
+might go out by that window--aye and return without a soul but himself
+being the wiser.
+
+Of course it was all guess work and inference, and besides, it must be
+Mr. Ripley. Mr. Ripley might as easily have discovered the secret
+of the Memoirs as himself--or anyone else. Mr. Ripley would have
+justification for anger and indeed for more--yes for what men who are
+not affected are used to call a crime ... Sir Charles abruptly stopped
+his reasoning, seeing that it was prompted by a defence of Mr.
+Mardale. He made his escape from his hosts as soon as he decently
+could and retired to his room. He sat down in his room and thought,
+and he thought to some purpose. He blew out his candle, and stole down
+the stairs into the hall. He had met no one. From the hall he went to
+the library-door and opened it--ever so gently. The room was quite
+dark. Sir Charles felt his way across it to his chair in the corner.
+He sat down in the darkness and waited. After a time inconceivably
+long, after every board in the house had cracked a million times, he
+heard distinctly a light shuffling step in the passage, and after that
+the latch of the door release itself from the socket. He heard nothing
+more, for a little, he could only guess that the door was being
+silently opened by some one who carried no candle. Then the shuffling
+footsteps began to move gently across the room, towards him, towards
+the corner where he was sitting. Sir Charles had had no doubt but that
+they would, not a single doubt, but none the less as he sat there
+in the dark, he felt the hair rising on his scalp, and all his body
+thrill. Then a hand groped and touched him. A cry rang out, but it was
+Sir Charles who uttered it. A voice answered quietly:
+
+"You had fallen asleep. I regret to have waked you."
+
+"I was not asleep, Mr. Mardale."
+
+There was a pause and Mr. Mardale continued.
+
+"I cannot sleep to-night, I came for a book."
+
+"I know. For the book I took back to Leamington to-day, before I went
+to visit Mrs. Ripley's grave."
+
+There was a yet longer pause before Mr. Mardale spoke again.
+
+"Stay then!" he said in the same gentle voice. "I will fetch a light."
+He shuffled out of the room, and to Sir Charles it seemed again an
+inconceivably long time before he returned. He came back with a single
+candle, which he placed upon the table, a little star of light,
+showing the faces of the two men shadowy and dim. He closed the door
+carefully, and coming back, said simply:
+
+"You know."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you find out?"
+
+"I saw the grave. I noticed the remarkable height of the mound. I
+guessed."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Mardale, and in a low voice he explained. "I found the
+book here one day, that he left by accident. On December 11th Mrs.
+Ripley was buried, and that night he left the house--for the stables,
+yes, but he did not return from the stables. It seemed quite clear to
+me where he would be that night. People hereabouts take me for a
+man crazed and daft, I know that very well, but I know something of
+passion, Sir Charles. I have had my griefs to bear. Oh, I knew where
+he would be. I followed over the hill down to the churchyard of Burley
+Wood. I had no thought of what I should do. I carried a stick in my
+hand, I had no thought of using it. But I found him lying full-length
+upon the grave with his lips pressed to the earth of it, whispering to
+her who lay beneath him.... I called to him to stand up and he did. I
+bade him, if he dared, repeat the words he had used to my face, to
+me, the father of the girl he had married, and he did--triumphantly,
+recklessly. I struck at him with the knob of my stick, the knob was
+heavy, I struck with all my might, the blow fell upon his forehead.
+The spade was lying on the ground beside the grave. I buried him with
+her. Now what will you do?"
+
+"Nothing," said Sir Charles.
+
+"But Mr. Jerkley asked you to help him."
+
+"I shall tell a lie."
+
+"My friend, there is no need," said the old man with his gentle
+smile. "When I went out for this candle I ..." Sir Charles broke in
+upon him in a whirl of horror.
+
+"No. Don't say it! You did not!"
+
+"I did," replied Mr. Mardale. "The poison is a kindly one. I shall be
+dead before morning. I shall sleep my way to death. I do not mind, for
+I fear that, after all, my inventions are of little worth. I have left
+a confession on my writing-desk. There is no reason--is there?--why he
+and she should be kept apart?"
+
+It was not a question which Sir Charles could discuss. He said
+nothing, and was again left alone in the darkness, listening to the
+shuffling footsteps of Mr. Mardale as, for the last time, he mounted
+the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE.
+
+
+It was in the kitchen of the inn at Framlingham that Mr. Mitchelbourne
+came across the man who was afraid, and during the Christmas week
+of the year 1681. Lewis Mitchelbourne was young in those days, and
+esteemed as a gentleman of refinement and sensibility, with a queer
+taste for escapades, pardonable by reason of his youth. It was his
+pride to bear his part in the graceful tactics of a minuet, while a
+saddled horse waited for him at the door. He delighted to vanish of a
+sudden from the lighted circle of his friends into the byways where
+none knew him, or held him of account, not that it was all vanity with
+Mitchelbourne though no doubt the knowledge that his associates
+in London Town were speculating upon his whereabouts tickled him
+pleasurably through many a solitary day. But he was possessed both of
+courage and resource, qualities for which he found too infrequent an
+exercise in his ordinary life; and so he felt it good to be free for
+awhile, not from the restraints but from the safeguards, with
+which his social circumstances surrounded him. He had his spice of
+philosophy too, and discovered that these sharp contrasts,--luxury and
+hardship, treading hard upon each other and the new strange people
+with whom he fell in, kept fresh his zest of life.
+
+Thus it happened that at a time when families were gathering cheerily
+each about a single fireside, Mr. Mitchelbourne was riding alone
+through the muddy and desolate lanes of Suffolk. The winter was not
+seasonable; men were not tempted out of doors. There was neither
+briskness nor sunlight in the air, and there was no snow upon the
+ground. It was a December of dripping branches, and mists and steady
+pouring rains, with a raw sluggish cold, which crept into one's
+marrow.
+
+The man who was afraid, a large, corpulent man, of a loose and heavy
+build, with a flaccid face and bright little inexpressive eyes like a
+bird's, sat on a bench within the glow of the fire.
+
+"You travel far to-night?" he asked nervously, shuffling his feet.
+
+"To-night!" exclaimed Mitchelbourne as he stood with his legs apart
+taking the comfortable warmth into his bones. "No further than from
+this fire to my bed," and he listened with enjoyment to the rain
+which cracked upon the window like a shower of gravel flung by some
+mischievous urchin. He was not suffered to listen long, for the
+corpulent man began again.
+
+"I am an observer, sir. I pride myself upon it, but I have so much
+humility as to wish to put my observations to the test of fact. Now,
+from your carriage, I should judge you to serve His Majesty."
+
+"A civilian may be straight. There is no law against it," returned
+Mitchelbourne, and he perceived that the ambiguity of his reply threw
+his questioner into a great alarm. He was at once interested. Here,
+it seemed, was one of those encounters which were the spice of his
+journeyings.
+
+"You will pardon me," continued the stranger with a great assumption
+of heartiness, "but I am curious, sir, curious as Socrates, though
+I thank God I am no heathen. Here is Christmas, when a sensible
+gentleman, as upon my word I take you to be, sits to his table and
+drinks more than is good for him in honour of the season. Yet here are
+you upon the roads to Suffolk which have nothing to recommend them. I
+wonder at it, sir."
+
+"You may do that," replied Mitchelbourne, "though to be sure, there
+are two of us in the like case."
+
+"Oh, as for me," said his companion shrugging his shoulders, "I am on
+my way to be married. My name is Lance," and he blurted it out with
+a suddenness as though to catch Mitchelbourne off his guard.
+Mitchelbourne bowed politely.
+
+"And my name is Mitchelbourne, and I travel for my pleasure, though my
+pleasure is mere gipsying, and has nothing to do with marriage. I
+take comfort from thinking that I have no friend from one rim of
+this country to the other, and that my closest intimates have not an
+inkling of my whereabouts."
+
+Mr. Lance received the explanation with undisguised suspicion, and at
+supper, which the two men took together, he would be forever laying
+traps. Now he slipped some outlandish name or oath unexpectedly into
+his talk, and watched with a forward bend of his body to mark whether
+the word struck home; or again he mentioned some person with whom
+Mitchelbourne was quite unfamiliar. At length, however, he seemed
+satisfied, and drawing up his chair to the fire, he showed himself at
+once in his true character, a loud and gusty boaster.
+
+"An exchange of sentiments, Mr. Mitchelbourne, with a chance
+acquaintance over a pipe and a glass--upon my word I think you are in
+the right of it, and there's no pleasanter way of passing an evening.
+I could tell you stories, sir; I served the King in his wars, but I
+scorn a braggart, and all these glories are over. I am now a man of
+peace, and, as I told you, on my way to be married. Am I wise? I do
+not know, but I sometimes think it preposterous that a man who
+has been here and there about the world, and could, if he were so
+meanly-minded, tell a tale or so of success in gallantry, should
+hamper himself with connubial fetters. But a man must settle, to
+be sure, and since the lady is young, and not wanting in looks or
+breeding or station, as I am told--"
+
+"As you are told?" interrupted Mitchelbourne.
+
+"Yes, for I have never seen her. No, not so much as her miniature.
+Nor have I seen her mother either, or any of the family, except the
+father, from whom I carry letters to introduce me. She lives in a
+house called 'The Porch' some miles from here. There is another house
+hard by to it, I understand, which has long stood empty and I have a
+mind to buy it. I bring a fortune, the lady a standing in the county."
+
+"And what has the lady to say to it?" asked Mitchelbourne.
+
+"The lady!" replied Lance with a stare. "Nothing but what is dutiful,
+I'll be bound. The father is under obligations to me." He stopped
+suddenly, and Mitchelbourne, looking up, saw that his mouth had
+fallen. He sat with his eyes starting from his head and a face grey as
+lead, an image of panic pitiful to behold. Mitchelbourne spoke but got
+no answer. It seemed Lance could not answer--he was so arrested by a
+paralysis of terror. He sat staring straight in front of him, and it
+seemed at the mantelpiece which was just on a level with his eyes. The
+mantelpiece, however, had nothing to distinguish it from a score of
+others. Its counterpart might be found to this day in the parlour of
+any inn. A couple of china figures disfigured it, to be sure, but
+Mitchelbourne could not bring himself to believe that even their
+barbaric crudity had power to produce so visible a discomposure. He
+inclined to the notion that his companion was struck by a physical
+disease, perhaps some recrudescence of a malady contracted in those
+foreign lands of which he vaguely spoke.
+
+"Sir, you are ill," said Mitchelbourne. "I will have a doctor, if
+there is one hereabouts to be found, brought to your relief." He
+sprang up as he spoke, and that action of his roused Lance out of his
+paralysis. "Have a care," he cried almost in a shriek, "Do not move!
+For pity, sir, do not move," and he in his turn rose from his chair.
+He rose trembling, and swept the dust off a corner of the mantelpiece
+into the palm of his hand. Then he held his palm to the lamp.
+
+"Have you seen the like of this before?" he asked in a low shaking
+voice.
+
+Mitchelbourne looked over Lance's shoulder. The dust was in reality a
+very fine grain of a greenish tinge.
+
+"Never!" said Mitchelbourne.
+
+"No, nor I," said Lance, with a sudden cunning look at his companion,
+and opening his fingers, as he let the grain run between them. But he
+could not remove as easily from Mitchelbourne's memories that picture
+he had shown him of a shaking and a shaken man. Mitchelbourne went to
+bed divided in his feelings between pity for the lady Lance was to
+marry, and curiosity as to Lance's apprehensions. He lay awake for
+a long time speculating upon that mysterious green seed which could
+produce so extraordinary a panic, and in the morning his curiosity
+predominated. Since, therefore, he had no particular destination he
+was easily persuaded to ride to Saxmundham with Mr. Lance, who, for
+his part, was most earnest for a companion. On the journey Lance gave
+further evidence of his fears. He had a trick of looking backwards
+whenever they came to a corner of the road--an habitual trick, it
+seemed, acquired by a continued condition of fear. When they stopped
+at midday to eat at an ordinary, he inspected the guests through the
+chink at the hinges of the door before he would enter the room; and
+this, too, he did as though it had long been natural to him. He kept
+a bridle in his mouth, however; that little pile of grain upon
+the mantelshelf had somehow warned him into reticence, so that
+Mitchelbourne, had he not been addicted to his tobacco, would
+have learnt no more of the business and would have escaped the
+extraordinary peril which he was subsequently called upon to face.
+
+But he _was_ addicted to his tobacco, and no sooner had he finished
+his supper that night at Saxmundham than he called for a pipe. The
+maidservant fetched a handful from a cupboard and spread them upon the
+table, and amongst them was one plainly of Barbary manufacture. It had
+a straight wooden stem painted with hieroglyphics in red and green
+and a small reddish bowl of baked earth. Nine men out of ten would no
+doubt have overlooked it, but Mitchelbourne was the tenth man. His
+fancies were quick to kindle, and taking up the pipe he said in a
+musing voice:
+
+"Now, how in the world comes a Barbary pipe to travel so far over seas
+and herd in the end with common clays in a little Suffolk village?"
+
+He heard behind him the grating of a chair violently pushed back. The
+pipe seemingly made its appeal to Mr. Lance also.
+
+"Has it been smoked?" he asked in a grave low voice.
+
+"The inside of the bowl is stained," said Mitchelbourne.
+
+Mitchelbourne had been inclined to believe that he had seen last
+evening the extremity of fear expressed in a man's face: he had now to
+admit that he had been wrong. Mr. Lance's terror was a Circe to him
+and sunk him into something grotesque and inhuman; he ran once or
+twice in a little tripping, silly run backwards and forwards like an
+animal trapped and out of its wits; and his face had the look of a
+man suffering from a nausea; so that Mitchelbourne, seeing him, was
+ashamed and hurt for their common nature.
+
+"I must go," said Lance babbling his words. "I cannot stay. I must
+go."
+
+"To-night?" exclaimed Mitchelbourne. "Six yards from the door you will
+be soaked!"
+
+"Then there will be the fewer men abroad. I cannot sleep here! No,
+though it rained pistols and bullets I must go." He went into
+the passage, and calling his host secretly asked for his score.
+Mitchelbourne made a further effort to detain him.
+
+"Make an inquiry of the landlord first. It may be a mere shadow that
+frightens you."
+
+"Not a word, not a question," Lance implored. The mere suggestion
+increased a panic which seemed incapable of increase. "And for the
+shadow, why, that's true. The pipe's the shadow, and the shadow
+frightens me. A shadow! Yes! A shadow is a horrible, threatning thing!
+Show me a shadow cast by nothing and I am with you. But you might as
+easily hold that this Barbary pipe floated hither across the seas of
+its own will. No! 'Ware shadows, I say." And so he continued harping
+on the word, till the landlord fetched in the bill.
+
+The landlord had his dissuasions too, but they availed not a jot more
+than Mr. Mitchelbourne's.
+
+"The road is as black as a pauper's coffin," said he, "and damnable
+with ruts."
+
+"So much the better," said Lance.
+
+"There is no house where you can sleep nearer than Glemham, and no man
+would sleep there could he kennel elsewhere."
+
+"So much the better," said Lance. "Besides, I am expected to-morrow
+evening at 'The Porch' and Glemham is on the way." He paid his bill,
+slipped over to the stables and lent a hand to the saddling of his
+horse. Mitchelbourne, though for once in his life he regretted the
+precipitancy with which he welcomed strangers, was still sufficiently
+provoked to see the business to its end. His imagination was seized by
+the thought of this fat and vulgar person fleeing in terror through
+English lanes from a Barbary Moor. He had now a conjecture in his mind
+as to the nature of that greenish seed. He accordingly rode out with
+Lance toward Glemham.
+
+It was a night of extraordinary blackness; you could not distinguish
+a hedge until the twigs stung across your face; the road was narrow,
+great tree-trunks with bulging roots lined it, at times it was very
+steep--and, besides and beyond every other discomfort, there was the
+rain. It fell pitilessly straight over the face of the country with a
+continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum. Both travellers
+were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one
+of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down
+parody of a tavern at Glemham, was in an extreme exhaustion. It was no
+more than an ague, said Lance, from which he periodically suffered,
+but the two men slept in the same bare room, and towards morning
+Mitchelbourne was awakened from a deep slumber by an unfamiliar voice
+talking at an incredible speed through the darkness in an uncouth
+tongue. He started up upon his elbow; the voice came from Lance's bed.
+He struck a light. Lance was in a high fever, which increased as the
+morning grew.
+
+Now, whether he had the sickness latent within him when he came from
+Barbary, or whether his anxieties and corpulent habit made him an
+easy victim to disease, neither the doctor nor any one else could
+determine. But at twelve o'clock that day Lance was seized with an
+attack of cholera and by three in the afternoon he was dead. The
+suddenness of the catastrophe shocked Mr. Mitchelbourne inexpressibly.
+He stood gazing at the still features of the man whom fear had, during
+these last days, so grievously tormented, and was solemnly aware of
+the vanity of those fears. He could not pretend to any great esteem
+for his companion, but he made many suitable reflections upon the
+shears of the Fates and the tenacity of life, in which melancholy
+occupation he was interrupted by the doctor, who pointed out the
+necessity of immediate burial. Seven o'clock the next morning was the
+hour agreed upon, and Mitchelbourne at once searched in Lance's
+coat pockets for the letters which he carried. There were only two,
+superscribed respectively to Mrs. Ufford at "The Porch" near Glemham,
+and to her daughter Brasilia. At "The Porch" Mitchelbourne remembered
+Lance was expected this very evening, and he thought it right at once
+to ride thither with his gloomy news.
+
+Having, therefore, sprinkled the letters plentifully with vinegar and
+taken such rough precautions as were possible to remove the taint of
+infection from the letters, he started about four o'clock. The evening
+was most melancholy. For, though no rain any longer fell, there was a
+continual pattering of drops from the trees and a ghostly creaking of
+branches in a light and almost imperceptible wind. The day, too, was
+falling, the grey overhang of cloud was changing to black, except for
+one wide space in the west, where a pale spectral light shone without
+radiance; and the last of that was fading when he pulled up at a
+parting of the roads and inquired of a man who chanced to be standing
+there his way to "The Porch." He was directed to ride down the road
+upon his left hand until he came to the second house, which he could
+not mistake, for there was a dyke or moat about the garden wall. He
+passed the first house a mile further on, and perhaps half a mile
+beyond that he came to the dyke and the high garden wall, and saw the
+gables of the second house loom up behind it black against the sky. A
+wooden bridge spanned the dyke and led to a wide gate. Mitchelbourne
+stopped his horse at the bridge. The gate stood open and he looked
+down an avenue of trees into a square of which three sides were made
+by the high garden wall, and the fourth and innermost by the house.
+Thus the whole length of the house fronted him, and it struck him as
+very singular that neither in the lower nor the upper windows was
+there anywhere a spark of light, nor was there any sound but the
+tossing of the branches and the wail of the wind among the chimneys.
+Not even a dog barked or rattled a chain, and from no chimney breathed
+a wisp of smoke. The house in the gloom of that melancholy evening had
+a singular eerie and tenantless look; and oppressive silence reigned
+there; and Mitchelbourne was unaccountably conscious of a growing
+aversion to it, as to something inimical and sinister.
+
+He had crossed the mouth of a lane, he remembered, just at the first
+corner of the wall. The lane ran backwards from the road, parallel
+with the side wall of the garden. Mitchelbourne had a strong desire
+to ride down that lane and inspect the back of the house before he
+crossed the bridge into the garden. He was restrained for a moment by
+the thought that such a proceeding must savour of cowardice. But only
+for a moment. There had been no doubting the genuine nature of Lance's
+fears and those fears were very close to Mr. Mitchelbourne now. They
+were feeling like cold fingers about his heart. He was almost in the
+icy grip of them.
+
+He turned and rode down the lane until he came to the end of the wall.
+A meadow stretched behind the house. Mitchelbourne unfastened the
+catch of a gate with his riding whip and entered it. He found himself
+upon the edge of a pool, which on the opposite side wetted the house
+wall. About the pool some elder trees and elms grew and overhung, and
+their boughs tapped like fingers upon the window-panes. Mitchelbourne
+was assured that the house was inhabited, since from one of the
+windows a strong yellow light blazed, and whenever a sharper gust blew
+the branches aside, swept across the face of the pool like a flaw of
+wind.
+
+The lighted window was in the lowest storey, and Mitchelbourne, from
+the back of his horse, could see into the room. He was mystified
+beyond expression by what he saw. A deal table, three wooden chairs,
+some ragged curtains drawn back from the window, and a single lamp
+made up the furniture. The boards of the floor were bare and unswept;
+the paint peeled in strips from the panels of the walls; the
+discoloured ceiling was hung with cobwebs; the room in a word matched
+the outward aspect of the house in its look of long disuse. Yet it had
+occupants. Three men were seated at the table in the scarlet coats and
+boots of the King's officers. Their faces, though it was winter-time,
+were brown with the sun, and thin and drawn as with long privation and
+anxiety. They had little to say to one another, it seemed. Each man
+sat stiffly in a sort of suspense and expectation, with now and then a
+restless movement or a curt word as curtly answered.
+
+Mitchelbourne rode back again, crossed the bridge, fastened his horse
+to a tree in the garden, and walked down the avenue to the door. As he
+mounted the steps, he perceived with something of a shock, that the
+door was wide open and that the void of the hall yawned black before
+him. It was a fresh surprise, but in this night of surprises, one more
+or less, he assured himself, was of little account. He stepped into
+the hall and walked forwards feeling with his hands in front of him.
+As he advanced, he saw a thin line of yellow upon the floor ahead of
+him. The line of yellow was a line of light, and it came, no doubt,
+from underneath a door, and the door, no doubt, was that behind which
+the three men waited. Mitchelbourne stopped. After all, he reflected,
+the three men were English officers wearing His Majesty's uniform,
+and, moreover, wearing it stained with their country's service. He
+walked forward and tapped upon the door. At once the light within the
+room was extinguished.
+
+It needed just that swift and silent obliteration of the slip of light
+upon the floor to make Mitchelbourne afraid. He had been upon the
+brink of fear ever since he had seen that lonely and disquieting
+house; he was now caught in the full stream. He turned back. Through
+the open doorway, he saw the avenue of leafless trees tossing against
+a leaden sky. He took a step or two and then came suddenly to a halt.
+For all around him in the darkness he seemed to hear voices breathing
+and soft footsteps. He realised that his fear had overstepped his
+reason; he forced himself to remember the contempt he had felt for
+Lance's manifestations of terror; and swinging round again he flung
+open the door and entered the room.
+
+"Good evening, gentlemen," said he airily, and he got no answer
+whatsoever. In front of him was the grey panel of dim twilight where
+the window stood. The rest was black night and an absolute silence. A
+map of the room was quite clear in his recollections. The three men
+were seated he knew at the table on his right hand. The faint light
+from the window did not reach them, and they made no noise. Yet they
+were there. Why had they not answered him, he asked himself. He could
+not even hear them breathing, though he strained his ears. He could
+only hear his heart drumming at his breast, the blood pulsing in his
+temples. Why did they hold their breath? He crossed the room, not
+knowing what he did, bereft of his wits. He had a confused, ridiculous
+picture of himself wearing the flaccid, panic stricken face of Mr.
+Lance, like an ass' head, not holding the wand of Titania. He reached
+the window and stood in its embrasure, and there one definite,
+practical thought crept into his mind. He was visible to these men who
+were invisible to him. The thought suggested a precaution, and with
+the trembling haste of a man afraid, he tore at the curtains and
+dragged them till they met across the window so that even the faint
+grey glimmer of the night no longer had entrance. The next moment
+he heard the door behind him latch and a key turn in the lock. He
+crouched beneath the window and did not stand up again until a light
+was struck, and the lamp relit.
+
+The lighting of the lamp restored Mr. Mitchelbourne, if not to the
+full measure of his confidence, at all events to an appreciation that
+the chief warrant for his trepidation was removed. What he had with
+some appearance of reason feared was a sudden attack in the dark. With
+the lamp lit, he could surely stand in no danger of any violence at
+the hands of three King's officers whom he had never come across in
+all his life. He took, therefore, an easy look at them. One, the
+youngest, now leaned against the door, a youth of a frank, honest
+face, unremarkable but for a firm set of the jaws. A youth of no great
+intellect, thought Mitchelbourne, but tenacious, a youth marked out
+for a subordinate command, and never likely for all his sterling
+qualities to kindle a woman to a world-forgetting passion, or to tread
+with her the fiery heights where life throbs at its fullest. Mr.
+Mitchelbourne began to feel quite sorry for this young officer of the
+limited capacities, and he was still in the sympathetic mood when one
+of the two men at the table spoke to him. Mitchelbourne turned at
+once. The officers were sitting with a certain air of the theatre in
+their attitudes, one a little dark man and the other a stiff, light
+complexioned fellow with a bony, barren face, unmistakably a stupid
+man and the oldest of the three. It was he who was speaking, and he
+spoke with a sort of aggravated courtesy like a man of no breeding
+counterfeiting a gentleman upon the stage.
+
+"You will pardon us for receiving you with so little ceremony. But
+while we expected you, you on the other hand were not expecting us,
+and we feared that you might hesitate to come in if the lamp was
+burning when you opened the door."
+
+Mitchelbourne was now entirely at his ease. He perceived that there
+was some mistake and made haste to put it right.
+
+"On the contrary," said he, "for I knew very well you were here.
+Indeed, I knocked at the door to make a necessary inquiry. You did not
+extinguish the lamp so quickly but that I saw the light beneath the
+door, and besides I watched you some five minutes through the window
+from the opposite bank of the pool at the back of the house."
+
+The officers were plainly disconcerted by the affability of Mr.
+Mitchelbourne's reply. They had evidently expected to carry off a
+triumph, not to be taken up in an argument. They had planned a stroke
+of the theatre, final and convincing, and behold the dialogue went on!
+There was a riposte to their thrust.
+
+The spokesman made some gruff noises in his throat. Then his face
+cleared.
+
+"These are dialectics," he said superbly with a wave of the hand.
+
+"Good," said the little dark fellow at his elbow, "very good!"
+
+The youth at the door nodded superciliously towards Mitchelbourne.
+
+"True, these are dialectics," said he with a smack of the lips upon
+the word. It was a good cunning scholarly word, and the man who could
+produce it so aptly worthy of admiration.
+
+"You make a further error, gentlemen," continued Mitchelbourne, "you
+no doubt are expecting some one, but you were most certainly not
+expecting me. For I am here by the purest mistake, having been
+misdirected on the way." Here the three men smiled to each other, and
+their spokesman retorted with a chuckle.
+
+"Misdirected, indeed you were. We took precautions that you should be.
+A servant of mine stationed at the parting of the roads. But we are
+forgetting our manners," he added rising from his chair. "You should
+know our names. The gentleman at the door is Cornet Lashley, this
+is Captain Bassett and I am Major Chantrell. We are all three of
+Trevelyan's regiment."
+
+"And my name," said Mitchelbourne, not to be outdone in politeness,
+"is Lewis Mitchelbourne, a gentleman of the County of Middlesex."
+
+At this each of the officers was seized with a fit of laughter;
+but before Mitchelbourne had time to resent their behavior, Major
+Chantrell said indulgently:
+
+"Well, well, we shall not quarrel about names. At all events we all
+four are lately come from Tangier."
+
+"Oh, from Tangier," cried Mitchelbourne. The riddle was becoming
+clear. That extraordinary siege when a handful of English red-coats
+unpaid and ill-fed fought a breached and broken town against countless
+hordes for the honour of their King during twenty years, had not yet
+become the property of the historian. It was still an actual war
+in 1681. Mitchelbourne understood whence came the sunburn on his
+antagonists' faces, whence the stains and the worn seams of their
+clothes. He advanced to the table and spoke with a greater respect
+than he had used.
+
+"Did one of you," he asked, "leave a Moorish pipe behind you at an inn
+of Saxmundham?"
+
+"Ah," said the Major with a reproachful glance at Captain Bassett. The
+Captain answered with some discomfort:
+
+"Yes. I made that mistake. But what does it matter? You are here none
+the less."
+
+"You have with you some of the Moorish tobacco?" continued
+Mitchelbourne.
+
+Captain Bassett fetched out of his pocket a little canvas bag, and
+handed it to Mitchelbourne, who untied the string about the neck, and
+poured some of the contents into the palm of his hand. The tobacco was
+a fine, greenish seed.
+
+"I thought as much," said Mitchelbourne, "you expected Mr. Lance
+to-night. It is Mr. Lance whom you thought to misdirect to this
+solitary house. Indeed Mr. Lance spoke of such a place in this
+neighbourhood, and had a mind to buy it."
+
+Captain Bassett suddenly raised his hand to his mouth, not so quickly,
+however, but Mitchelbourne saw the grim, amused smile upon his lips.
+"It is Mr. Lance for whom you now mistake me," he said abruptly.
+
+The young man at the door uttered a short, contemptuous laugh, Major
+Chantrell only smiled.
+
+"I am aware," said he, "that we meet for the first time to-night, but
+you presume upon that fact too far. What have you to say to this?" And
+dragging a big and battered pistol from his pocket, he tossed it upon
+the table, and folded his arms in the best transpontine manner.
+
+"And to this?" said Captain Bassett. He laid a worn leather powder
+flask beside the pistol, and tapped upon the table triumphantly.
+
+Mr. Mitchelbourne recognised clearly that villainy was somehow
+checkmated by these proceedings and virtue restored, but how he could
+not for the life of him determine. He took up the pistol.
+
+"It appears to have seen some honourable service," said he. This
+casual remark had a most startling effect upon his auditors. It was
+the spark to the gun-powder of their passions. Their affectations
+vanished in a trice.
+
+"Service, yes, but honourable! Use that lie again, Mr. Lance, and I
+will ram the butt of it down your throat!" cried Major Chantrell. He
+leaned forward over the table in a blaze of fury. Yet his face did no
+more than match the faces of his comrades.
+
+Mitchelbourne began to understand. These simple soldier-men had
+endeavoured to conduct their proceedings with great dignity and a
+judicial calmness; they had mapped out for themselves certain parts
+which they were to play as upon a stage; they were to be three stern
+imposing figures of justice; and so they had become simply absurd and
+ridiculous. Now, however, that passion had the upper hand of them,
+Mitchelbourne saw at once that he stood in deadly peril. These were
+men.
+
+"Understand me, Mr. Lance," and the Major's voice rang out firm, the
+voice of a man accustomed to obedience. "Three years ago I was in
+command of Devil's Drop, a little makeshift fort upon the sands
+outside Tangier. In front the Moors lay about us in a semicircle. Sir,
+the diameter was the line of the sea at our backs. We could not retire
+six yards without wetting our feet, not twenty without drowning. One
+night the Moors pushed their trenches up to our palisades; in the dusk
+of the morning I ordered a sortie. Nine officers went out with me and
+three came back, we three. Of the six we left behind, five fell, by my
+orders, to be sure, for I led them out; but, by the living God, you
+killed them. There's the pistol that shot my best friend down, an
+English pistol. There's the powder flask which charged the pistol, an
+English flask filled with English powder. And who sold the pistol and
+the powder to the Moors, England's enemies? You, an Englishman. But
+you have come to the end of your lane to-night. Turn and turn as you
+will you have come to the end of it."
+
+The truth was out now, and Mitchelbourne was chilled with
+apprehension. Here were three men very desperately set upon what they
+considered a mere act of justice. How was he to dissuade them? By
+argument? They would not listen to it. By proofs? He had none to offer
+them. By excuses? Of all unsupported excuses which can match for
+futility the excuse of mistaken identity? It springs immediate to the
+criminal's lips. Its mere utterance is almost a conviction.
+
+"You persist in error, Major Chantrell," he nevertheless began.
+
+"Show him the proof, Bassett," Chantrell interrupted with a shrug of
+the shoulders, and Captain Bassett drew from his pocket a folded sheet
+of paper.
+
+"Nine officers went out," continued Chantrell, "five were killed,
+three are here. The ninth was taken a prisoner into Barbary. The Moors
+brought him down to their port of Marmora to interpret. At Marmora
+your ship unloaded its stores of powder and guns. God knows how often
+it had unloaded the like cargo during these twenty years--often enough
+it seems, to give you a fancy for figuring as a gentleman in the
+county. But the one occasion of its unloading is enough. Our brother
+officer was your interpreter with the Moors, Mr. Lance. You may very
+likely know that, but this you do not know, Mr. Lance. He escaped, he
+crept into Tangier with this, your bill of lading in his hand," and
+Bassett tossed the sheet of paper towards Mitchelbourne. It fell upon
+the floor before him but he did not trouble to pick it up.
+
+"Is it Lance's death that you require?" he asked.
+
+"Yes! yes! yes!" came from each mouth.
+
+"Then already you have your wish. I do not question one word of your
+charges against Lance. I have reason to believe them true. But I am
+not Lance. Lance lies at this moment dead at Great Glemham. He died
+this afternoon of cholera. Here are his letters," and he laid the
+letters on the table. "I rode in with them at once. You do not believe
+me, but you can put my words to the test. Let one of you ride to Great
+Glemham and satisfy himself. He will be back before morning."
+
+The three officers listened so far with impassive faces, or barely
+listened, for they were as indifferent to the words as to the passion
+with which they were spoken.
+
+"We have had enough of the gentleman's ingenuities, I think," said
+Chantrell, and he made a movement towards his companions.
+
+"One moment," exclaimed Mitchelbourne. "Answer me a question! These
+letters are to the address of Mrs. Ufford at a house called 'The
+Porch.' It is near to here?"
+
+"It is the first house you passed," answered the Major and, as he
+noticed a momentary satisfaction flicker upon his victim's face, he
+added, "But you will not do well to expect help from 'The Porch'--at
+all events in time to be of much service to you. You hardly appreciate
+that we have been at some pains to come up with you. We are not
+likely again to find so many circumstances agreeing to favour us, a
+dismantled house, yourself travelling alone and off your guard in a
+country with which you are unfamiliar and where none know you, and
+just outside the window a convenient pool. Besides--besides," he broke
+out passionately, "There are the little mounds about Tangier, under
+which my friends lie," and he covered his face with his hands. "My
+friends," he cried in a hoarse and broken voice, "my soldier-men!
+Come, let's make an end. Bassett, the rope is in the corner. There's a
+noose to it. The beam across the window will serve;" and Bassett rose
+to obey.
+
+But Mitchelbourne gave them no time. His fears had altogether vanished
+before his indignation at the stupidity of these officers. He was
+boiling with anger at the thought that he must lose his life in this
+futile ignominious way for the crime of another man, who was not even
+his friend, and who besides was already dead. There was just one
+chance to escape, it seemed to him. And even as Bassett stooped to
+lift the coil of rope in the corner he took it.
+
+"So that's the way of it," he cried stepping forward. "I am to be hung
+up to a beam till I kick to death, am I? I am to be buried decently in
+that stagnant pool, am I? And you are to be miles away before sunrise,
+and no one the wiser! No, Major Chantrell, I am not come to the end of
+my lane," and before either of the three could guess what he was at,
+he had snatched up the pistol from the table and dashed the lamp into
+a thousand fragments.
+
+The flame shot up blue and high, and then came darkness.
+
+Mitchelbourne jumped lightly back from his position to the centre of
+the room. The men he had to deal with were men who would follow their
+instincts. They would feel along the walls; of so much he could be
+certain. He heard the coil of rope drop down in a corner to his left;
+so that he knew where Captain Bassett was. He heard a chair upset in
+front of him, and a man staggered against his chest. Mitchelbourne had
+the pistol still in his hand and struck hard, and the man dropped with
+a crash. The fall followed so closely upon the upsetting of the chair
+that it seemed part of the same movement and accident. It seemed so
+clearly part, that a voice spoke on Mitchelbourne's left, just where
+the empty hearth would be.
+
+"Get up! Be quick!"
+
+The voice was Major Chantrell's and Mitchelbourne had a throb of hope.
+For since it was not the Major who had fallen nor Captain Bassett, it
+must be Lashley. And Lashley had been guarding the door, of which the
+key still remained in the lock. If only he could reach the door and
+turn the key! He heard Chantrell moving stealthily along the wall upon
+his left hand and he suffered a moment's agony; for in the darkness he
+could not surely tell which way the Major moved. For if he moved to
+the window, if he had the sense to move to the window and tear aside
+those drawn curtains, the grey twilight would show the shadowy moving
+figures. Mitchelbourne's chance would be gone. And then something
+totally unexpected and unhoped for occurred. The god of the machine
+was in a freakish mood that evening. He had a mind for pranks and
+absurdities. Mitchelbourne was strung to so high a pitch that the
+ridiculous aspect of the occurrence came home to him before all else,
+and he could barely keep himself from laughing aloud. For he heard two
+men grappling and struggling silently together. Captain Bassett and
+Major Chantrell had each other by the throat, and neither of them
+had the wit to speak. They reserved their strength for the struggle.
+Mitchelbourne stepped on tiptoe to the door, felt for the key, grasped
+it without so much as a click, and then suddenly turned it, flung open
+the door and sprang out. He sprang against a fourth man--the servant,
+no doubt, who had misdirected him--and both tumbled on to the floor.
+Mitchelbourne, however, tumbled on top. He was again upon his feet
+while Major Chantrell was explaining matters to Captain Bassett;
+he was flying down the avenue of trees before the explanation was
+finished. He did not stop to untie his horse; he ran, conscious that
+there was only one place of safety for him--the interior of Mrs.
+Ufford's house. He ran along the road till he felt that his heart was
+cracking within him, expecting every moment that a hand would be laid
+upon his shoulder, or that, a pistol shot would ring out upon the
+night. He reached the house, and knocked loudly at the door. He was
+admitted, breathless, by a man, who said to him at once, with the
+smile and familiarity of an old servant:
+
+"You are expected, Mr. Lance."
+
+Mitchelbourne plumped down upon a chair and burst into uncontrollable
+laughter. He gave up all attempt for that night to establish his
+identity. The fates were too heavily against him. Besides he was now
+quite hysterical.
+
+The manservant threw open a door.
+
+"I will tell my mistress you have come, sir," said he.
+
+"No, it would never do," cried Mitchelbourne. "You see I died at three
+o'clock this afternoon. I have merely come to leave my letters of
+presentation. So much I think a proper etiquette may allow. But it
+would never do for me to be paying visits upon ladies so soon after
+an affair of so deplorable a gravity. Besides I have to be buried
+at seven in the morning, and if I chanced not to be back in time, I
+should certainly acquire a reputation for levity, which since I am
+unknown in the county, I am unwilling to incur," and, leaving the
+butler stupefied in the hall, he ran out into the road. He heard no
+sound of pursuit.
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Geoffrey," said General Faversham, "look at the clock!"
+
+The hands of the clock made the acutest of angles. It was close upon
+midnight, and ever since nine the boy had sat at the dinner-table
+listening. He had not spoken a word, indeed had barely once stirred in
+the three hours, but had sat turning a white and fascinated face upon
+speaker after speaker. At his father's warning he waked with a shock
+from his absorption, and reluctantly stood up.
+
+"Must I go, father?" he asked.
+
+The General's three guests intervened in a chorus. The conversation
+was clear gain for the lad, they declared,--a first taste of powder
+which might stand him in good stead at a future time. So Geoffrey was
+allowed furlough from his bed for another half-hour, and with his face
+supported between his hands he continued to listen at the table.
+The flames of the candles were more and more blurred with a haze of
+tobacco smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the
+wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a
+strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened
+eyes seemed preternaturally large.
+
+The stories were all of that terrible winter in the Crimea, now ten
+years past, and a fresh story was always in the telling before its
+predecessor was ended. For each of the four men had borne his share
+of that winter's wounds and privations. It was still a reality rather
+than a memory to them; they could feel, even in this hot summer
+evening and round this dinner-table, the chill of its snows, and the
+pinch of famine. Yet their recollections were not all of hardships.
+The Major told how the subalterns, of whom he had then been one, had
+cheerily played cards in the trenches three hundred yards from the
+Malakoff. One of the party was always told off to watch for shells
+from the fort's guns. If a black speck was seen in the midst of the
+cannon smoke, then the sentinel shouted, and a rush was made for
+safety, for the shell was coming their way. At night the burning fuse
+could be seen like a rocket in the air; so long as it span and flew,
+the card-players were safe, but the moment it became stationary above
+their heads it was time to run, for the shell was falling upon them.
+The guns of the Malakoff were not the rifled guns of a later decade.
+When the Major had finished, the General again looked at the clock,
+and Geoffrey said good-night.
+
+He stood outside the door listening to the muffled talk on the other
+side of the panels, and, with a shiver, lighted his candle, and held it
+aloft in the dark and silent hall. There was not one man's portrait upon
+the walls which did not glow with the colours of a uniform,--and there
+were the portraits of many men. Father and son the Faversham's had been
+soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father and son,--no
+steinkirks and plumed hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged
+coats and no high stocks. They looked down upon the boy as though
+summoning him to the like service. No distinction in uniform could
+obscure their resemblance to each other: that stood out with a
+remarkable clearness. The Favershams were men of one stamp,--lean-faced,
+hard as iron--they lacked the elasticity of steel--, rugged in feature;
+confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow
+at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly
+conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men
+of the first-class, but hardly first-class soldiers. Some of their
+faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity. The boy, however, saw none
+of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible;
+and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely
+for forgiveness. The candle shook in his hand.
+
+These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of
+torturers to Geoffrey Faversham. He sat horribly thralled, so long as
+he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.
+For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the
+Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by
+the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome
+gift of imagination. It was visible in his face, marking him off
+unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the
+hall. He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not
+but exercise that capacity. A hint was enough for the boy. Straightway
+he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men
+at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the
+midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he
+quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean
+nights this had been fraught with the most torments.
+
+His father had told a story with a lowered voice, and in his usual
+jerky way. But the gap was easy to fill up.
+
+"A Captain! Yes, and he bore one of the best names in all England.
+It seemed incredible, and mere camp rumour. But the rumour grew with
+every fight he was engaged in. At the battle of Alma the thing was
+proved. He was acting as galloper to his General. I believe, upon my
+soul, that the General chose him for this duty so that the man might
+set himself right. He was bidden to ride with a message a quarter of a
+mile, and that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept. There were enough
+men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come
+through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to
+his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his
+circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if
+he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back
+bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and
+says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's
+the truth, and shrug your shoulders. Queer, incomprehensible things
+happen. There's one of them."
+
+Geoffrey, however, understood only too well. He was familiar with many
+phases of warfare of which General Faversham took little account, such
+as, for instance, the strain and suspense of the hours between the
+parading of the troops and the first crack of a rifle. He took that
+story with him up the great staircase, past the portraits to his bed.
+He fell asleep only in the grey of the morning, and then only to dream
+of a crisis in some hard-fought battle, when, through his cowardice,
+a necessary movement was delayed, his country worsted, and those dead
+men in the hall brought to irretrievable shame. Geoffrey's power to
+foresee in one flash all the perils to be encountered, the hazards to
+be run, had taught him the hideous possibility of cowardice. He was
+now confronted with the hideous fact. He could not afterwards clear
+his mind of the memory of that evening.
+
+He grew up with it; he looked upon himself as a born coward, and all
+the time he knew that he was destined for the army. He could not have
+avoided his destiny without an explanation, and he could not explain.
+But what he could do, he did. He hunted deliberately, hoping
+that familiarity with danger would overcome the vividness of his
+anticipations. But those imagined hours before the beginnings of
+battles had their exact counterpart in the moments of waiting while
+the covers were drawn. At such times he had a map of the country-side
+before his eyes, with every ditch and fence and pit underlined and
+marked dangerous; and though he rode straight when the hounds were
+off, he rode straight with a fluttering heart. Thus he spent his
+youth. He passed into Woolwich and out of it with high honours;
+he went to India with battery, and returned home on a two years'
+furlough. He had not been home more than a week when his father broke
+one morning into his bedroom in a great excitement--
+
+"Geoff," he cried, "guess the news to-day!"
+
+Geoffrey sat up in his bed:--"Your manner, Sir, tells me the news. War
+is declared."
+
+"Between France and Germany."
+
+Geoffrey said slowly:--
+
+"My mother, Sir, was of Germany."
+
+"So we can wish that country all success."
+
+"Can we do no more?" said Geoffrey. And at breakfast-time he returned
+to the subject. The Favershams held property in Germany; influence
+might be exerted; it was only right that those who held a substantial
+stake in a country should venture something for its cause. The words
+came quite easily from Geoffrey's lips; he had been schooling himself
+to speak them ever since it had become apparent that Germany and
+France were driving to the collision of war. General Faversham laughed
+with content when he heard them.
+
+"That's a Faversham talking," said he. "But there are obstacles, my
+boy. There is the Foreign Enlistment Act, for instance. You are half
+German, to be sure, but you are an English subject, and, by the Lord!
+you are all Faversham. No, I cannot give you permission to seek
+service in Germany. You understand. I cannot give you permission," he
+repeated the words, so that the limit as well as the extent of their
+meaning might be fully understood; and as he repeated them, he
+solemnly winked. "Of course, you can go to Germany; you can follow
+the army as closely as you are allowed. In fact, I will give you some
+introductions with that end in view. You will gain experience, of
+course; but seek service,--no! To do that, as I have said, I cannot
+give you permission."
+
+The General went off chuckling to write his letters; and with them
+safely tucked away in his pocket, Geoffrey drove later in the day to
+the station.
+
+General Faversham did not encourage demonstrations. He shook his son
+cordially by the hand--
+
+"There's no way I would rather you spent your furlough. But come back,
+Geoff," said he. He was not an observant man except in the matter of
+military detail; and of Geoffrey's object he had never the slightest
+suspicion. Had it been told him, however, he would only have
+considered it one of those queer, inexplicable vagaries, like the
+history of his coward in the Crimea.
+
+Geoffrey's action, however, was of a piece with the rest of his life:
+it was due to no sudden, desperate resolve. He went out to the war as
+deliberately as he had ridden out to the hunting-field. The realities
+of battle might prove his anticipations mere unnecessary torments of
+the mind.
+
+"If only I can serve,--as a volunteer, as a private, in any capacity,"
+he thought, "I shall at all events know. And if I fail, I fail not in
+the company of my fellows. I disgrace only myself, not my name. But if
+I do not fail--" He drew a great breath, he saw himself waking up one
+morning without oppression, without the haunting dread that he
+was destined one day to slink in forgotten corners of the world a
+forgotten pariah, destitute even of the courage to end his misery. He
+went out to the war because he was afraid of fear.
+
+
+II.
+
+On the evening of the capitulation of Paris, two subalterns of
+German Artillery were seated before a camp fire on a slope of hill
+overlooking the town. To both of them the cessation of alarm was as
+yet strange and almost incomprehensible, and the sudden silence
+after so many months lived amongst the booming of cannon had even a
+disquieting effect. Both were particularly alert on this night when
+vigilance was never less needed. If a gust of wind caught the fire and
+drove the red flare of the flame like a ripple across the grass, one
+would be sure to look quickly over his shoulder, the other perhaps
+would lift a warning finger and listen to the shivering of the trees
+behind them. Then with a relaxation of his attitude he would say "All
+right" and light his pipe again at the fire. But after one such gust,
+he retained his position.
+
+"What is it, Faversham?" asked his companion.
+
+"Listen, Max," said Geoffrey; and they heard a faint jingle. The
+jingle became more distinct, another sound was added to it, the sound
+of a horse galloping over hard ground. Both officers turned their
+faces away from the yellow entrenchment with its brown streak of gun,
+below them and looked towards a roofless white-walled farmhouse on the
+left, of which the rafters rose black against the sky like a gigantic
+gallows. From behind that farmhouse an aide-de-camp galloped up to the
+fire.
+
+"I want the officer in command of this battery," he cried out and
+Geoffrey stood up.
+
+"I am in command."
+
+The aide-de-camp looked at the subaltern in an extreme surprise.
+
+"You!" he exclaimed. "Since when?"
+
+"Since yesterday," answered Faversham.
+
+"I doubt if the General knows you have been hit so hard," the
+aide-de-camp continued. "But my orders are explicit. The officer in
+command is to take sixty men and march to-morrow morning into St.
+Denis. He is to take possession of that quarter, he is to make a
+search for mines and bombs, and wait there until the German troops
+march in." There was to be no repetition, he explained, of a certain
+unfortunate affair when the Germans after occupying a surrendered fort
+had been blown to the four winds. He concluded with the comforting
+information that there were 10,000 French soldiers under arms in St.
+Denis and that discretion was therefore a quality to be much exercised
+by Faversham during his day of search. Thereupon he galloped back.
+
+Faversham remained standing a few paces from the fire looking down
+towards Paris. His companion petulantly tossed a branch upon the fire.
+
+"Luck comes your way, my friend," said he enviously.
+
+Geoffrey looked up to the stars and down again to Paris which with
+its lights had the look of a reflected starlit firmament. Individual
+lights were the separate stars and here and there a gash of fire,
+where a wide thoroughfare cleaved, made a sort of milky way.
+
+"I wonder," he answered slowly.
+
+Max started up on his elbow and looked at his friend in perplexity.
+
+"Why, you have sixty men and St. Denis to command. To-morrow may bring
+you your opportunity;" and again with the same slowness, Geoffrey
+answered, "I wonder."
+
+"You joined us after Gravelotte," continued Max, "Why?"
+
+"My mother was German," said Faversham, and turning suddenly back to
+the fire he dropped on the ground beside his companion.
+
+"Tell me," he said in a rare burst of confidence, "Do you think a
+battle is the real test of courage? Here and there men run away to be
+sure. But how many fight and fight no worse than the rest by reason of
+a sort of cowardice? Fear of their companions in arms might dominate
+fear of the enemy."
+
+"No doubt," said Max. "And you infer?"
+
+"That the only touchstone is a solitary peril. When danger comes upon
+a man and there is no one to see whether he shirks--when he has no
+friends to share his risks--that I should think would be the time when
+fear would twist a man's bowels."
+
+"I do not know," said Max. "All I am sure of is that luck comes your
+way and not mine. To-morrow you march into St. Denis."
+
+Geoffrey Faversham marched down at daybreak and formally occupied the
+quarter. The aide-de-camp's calculations were confirmed. There were at
+the least 10,000 French soldiers crowded in the district. Geoffrey's
+discretion warned against any foolish effort to disarm them; he
+simply ignored their chassepots and bulging pouches, and searched the
+barracks, which the Germans were to occupy, from floor to ceiling.
+Late in the afternoon he was able to assure himself that his duty was
+ended. He billeted his men, and inquired whether there was a hotel
+where he could sleep the night. A French sergeant led him through the
+streets to an Inn which matched in every detail of its appearance that
+dingy quarter of the town. The plaster was peeling from its walls, the
+window panes were broken, and in the upper storey and the roof there
+were yawning jagged holes where the Prussian shells had struck. In the
+dusk the building had a strangely mean and sordid look. It recalled
+to Faversham's mind the inns in the novels of the elder Dumas and
+acquired thus something of their sinister suggestions. In the eager
+and arduous search of the day he had forgotten these apprehensions to
+which he had given voice by the camp fire. They now returned to him
+with the relaxation of his vigilance. He looked up at the forbidding
+house. "I wonder," he said to himself.
+
+He was met in the hall by a little obsequious man who was full of
+apologies for the disorder of his hostelry. He opened a door into a
+large and dusty room.
+
+"I will do my best, Monsieur," said he, "but food is not yet plentiful
+in Paris."
+
+In the centre of the room was a large mahogany table surrounded by
+chairs. The landlord began to polish the table with his napkin.
+
+"We had an ordinary, Sir, every day before the war broke out. But most
+cheerful, every chair had its regular occupant. There were certain
+jokes, too, which every day were repeated. Ah, but it was like home.
+However, all is changed as you see. It has not been safe to sit in
+this room for many a long month."
+
+Faversham unstrapped his sword and revolver from his belt and laid
+them on the table.
+
+"I saw that your house had unfortunately suffered."
+
+"Suffered!" said the garrulous little man. "It is ruined, sir, and its
+master with it. Ah, war! It is a fine thing no doubt for you young
+gentlemen, but for me? I have lived in a cellar, Sir, under the ground
+ever since your guns first woke us from our sleep. Look, I will show
+you."
+
+He went out from the dining-room into the hall and from the hall into
+the street; Faversham followed him. There was a wooden trap in the
+pavement close by the wall with an iron ring. The landlord pulled
+at the ring and raised the trap disclosing a narrow flight of stone
+steps. Faversham bent forward and peered down into a dark cellar.
+
+"Yes it is there that I have lived. Come down, Sir, and see for
+yourself;" and the landlord moved down a couple of steps. Faversham
+drew back. At once the landlord turned to him.
+
+"But there is nothing to fear, Sir," he said with a deprecatory smile.
+Faversham coloured to the roots of his hair.
+
+"Of course there is nothing," said he and he followed the landlord.
+The cellar was only lighted by the trap-door and at first Faversham
+coming out of the daylight could distinguish nothing at all. He stood,
+however, with his back to the light and in a little he began to see. A
+little truckle-bed with a patchwork counterpane stood at the end, the
+floor was merely hard earth, the furniture consisted of a stove, a
+stool and a small deal table. And as Faversham took in the poverty of
+this underground habitation, he suddenly found himself in darkness
+again. The explanation came to him at once, the entrance to the cellar
+had been blocked from the light. Yet he had heard no sound except the
+footsteps of people in the street above his head. He turned and faced
+the stair steps. As he did so, the light streamed down again; the
+obstruction had been removed, and that obstruction had not been the
+trap-door as Faversham had suspected, but merely the body of some
+inquisitive passer-by. He recognised this with relief and immediately
+heard voices speaking together, and as it seemed to him in lowered
+tones.
+
+A sword rattled on the pavement, the entrance was again darkened, but
+Faversham had just time to see that the man who stooped down wore
+the buttons of a uniform and a soldier's kepi. He kept quite still,
+holding his breath while the man peered down into the cellar. He
+remembered with a throb of hope that he had himself been unable to
+distinguish a thing in the gloom. And then the landlord knocked
+against the table and spoke aloud. At once the man at the head of
+the steps stood up. Faversham heard him cry out in French, "They are
+here," and he detected a note of exultation in the cry. At the same
+moment a picture flashed before his eyes, the picture of that dusty
+desolate dining-room up the steps, and of a long table surrounded
+by chairs, upon which lay a sword and a revolver,--his sword, his
+revolver. He had dismissed his sixty soldiers, he was alone.
+
+"This is a trap," he blurted out.
+
+"But, Sir, I do not understand," began the landlord, but Faversham cut
+him short with a whispered command for silence.
+
+The cellar darkened again, and the sound of boots rang upon the stone
+steps. A rifle besides clanged as it struck against the wall. The
+French soldiers were descending. Faversham counted them by the light
+which escaped past their legs; there were three. The landlord kept
+the silence which had been enjoined upon him but he fancied in the
+darkness that he heard some one's teeth chattering.
+
+The Frenchmen descended into the cellar and stood barring the steps.
+Their leader spoke.
+
+"I have the honour to address the Prussian officer in command of St.
+Denis."
+
+The Frenchman got no reply whatever to his words but he seemed to hear
+some one sharply draw in a breath. He spoke again into the darkness;
+for it was now impossible for any one of the five men in the cellar to
+see a hand's breadth beyond his face.
+
+"I am the Captain Plessy of Mon Vandon's Division. I have the honour
+to address the Prussian officer."
+
+This time he received an answer, quietly spoken yet with an
+inexplicable note of resignation.
+
+"I am Lieutenant Faversham in command of St. Denis."
+
+Captain Plessy stepped immediately forward, and bowed. Now as he
+dipped his shoulders in the bow a gleam of light struck over his head
+into the cellar, and--he could not be sure--but it seemed to him that
+he saw a man suddenly raise his arm as if to ward off a blow. Captain
+Plessy continued.
+
+"I ask Lieutenant Faversham for permission for myself and my two
+officers to sleep to-night at this hotel;" and now he very distinctly
+heard a long, irrepressible sigh of relief. Lieutenant Faversham gave
+him the permission he desired in a cordial, polite way. Moreover he
+added an invitation. "Your name, Captain Plessy, is well known to me
+as to all on both sides who have served in this campaign and to many
+more who have not. I beg that you and your officers will favour me
+with your company at dinner."
+
+Captain Plessy accepted the invitation and was pleased to deprecate
+the Lieutenant's high opinion of his merits. But his achievement none
+the less had been of a redoubtable character. He had broken through
+the lines about Metz and had ridden across France into Paris without
+a single companion. In the sorties from that beleaguered town he had
+successively distinguished himself by his fearless audacity. His name
+and reputation had travelled far as Lieutenant Faversham was that
+evening to learn. But Captain Plessy, for the moment, was all for
+making little of his renown.
+
+"Such small exploits should be expected from a soldier. One brave man
+may say that to another,--is it not so?--and still not be thought
+to be angling for praise," and Captain Plessy went up the steps,
+wondering who it was that had drawn the long sharp breath of suspense,
+and uttered the long sigh of immense relief. The landlord or
+Lieutenant Faversham? Captain Plessy had not been in the cellar at
+the time when the landlord had seemed to hear the chatter of a man's
+teeth.
+
+The dinner was not a pronounced success, in spite of Faversham's
+avoidance of any awkward topic. They sat at the long table in the big,
+desolate and shabby room, lighted only by a couple of tallow candles
+set up in their candlesticks upon the cloth. And the two junior
+officers maintained an air of chilly reserve and seldom spoke except
+when politeness compelled them. Faversham himself was absorbed, the
+burden of entertainment fell upon Captain Plessy. He strove nobly, he
+told stories, he drank a health to the "Camaraderie of arms," he drew
+one after the other of his companions into an interchange of words, if
+not of sympathies. But the strain told on him visibly towards the end
+of the dinner. His champagne glass had been constantly refilled, his
+face was now a trifle overflushed, his eyes beyond nature bright, and
+he loosened the belt about his waist and at a moment when Faversham
+was not looking the throat buttons of his tunic. Moreover while up
+till now he had deprecated any allusions to his reputation he now
+began to talk of it himself; and in a particularly odious way.
+
+"A reputation, Lieutenant, it has its advantages," and he blew a kiss
+with his fingers into the air to designate the sort of advantages to
+which he referred. Then he leaned on one side to avoid the candle
+between Faversham and himself.
+
+"You are English, my Commandant?" he asked.
+
+"My mother was German," replied Faversham.
+
+"But you are English yourself. Now have you ever met in England a
+certain Miss Marian Beveridge," and his leer was the most disagreeable
+thing that Faversham ever remembered to have set eyes upon.
+
+"No," he answered shortly.
+
+"And you have not heard of her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Captain Plessy leaned back in his chair and filled his glass.
+Lieutenant Faversham's tone was not that of a man inviting confidence.
+But the Captain's brains were more than a little fuddled, he repeated
+the name over to himself once or twice with the chuckle which asks for
+questions, and since the questions did not come, he must needs proceed
+of his own accord.
+
+"But I must cross to England myself. I must see this Miss Marian
+Beveridge. Ah, but your English girls are strange, name of Heaven,
+they are very strange."
+
+Lieutenant Faversham made a movement. The Captain was his guest, he
+was bound to save him if he could from a breach of manners and saw no
+way but this of breaking up the party. Captain Plessy, however, was
+too quick for him, he lifted his hand to his breast.
+
+"You wish for something to smoke. It is true, we have forgotten to
+smoke, but I have my cigarettes and I beg you to try them, the tobacco
+I think is good and you will be saved the trouble of moving."
+
+He opened the case and reached it over to Faversham. But as Faversham
+with a word of thanks took a cigarette, the Captain upset the case
+as though by inadvertence. There fell out upon the table under
+Faversham's eyes not merely the cigarettes, but some of the Captain's
+visiting-cards and a letter. The letter was addressed to Captain
+Plessy in a firm character but it was plainly the writing of a woman.
+Faversham picked it up and at once handed it back to Plessy.
+
+"Ah," said Plessy with a start of surprise, "Was the letter indeed in
+the case?" and he fondled it in his hands and finally kissed it with
+the upturned eyes of a cheap opera singer. "A pigeon, Sir, flew with
+it into Paris. Happy pigeon that could be the bearer of such sweet
+messages."
+
+He took out the letter from the envelope and read a line or two with a
+sigh, and another line or two with a laugh.
+
+"But your English girls are strange!" he said again. "Here is an
+instance, an example, fallen by accident from my cigarette-case. M. le
+Commandant, I will read it to you, that you may see how strange they
+are."
+
+One of Plessy's subalterns extended his hand and laid it on his
+sleeve. Plessy turned upon him angrily, and the subaltern withdrew his
+hand.
+
+"I will read it to you," he said again to Faversham. Faversham did
+not protest nor did he now make any effort to move. But his face grew
+pale, he shivered once or twice, his eyes seemed to be taking the
+measure of Plessy's strength, his brain to be calculating upon his
+prowess; the sweat began to gather upon his forehead.
+
+Of these signs, however, Plessy took no note. He had reached however
+inartistically the point at which he had been aiming.
+
+He was no longer to be baulked of reading his letter. He read it
+through to the end, and Faversham listened to the end. It told its own
+story. It was the letter of a girl who wrote in a frank impulse of
+admiration to a man whom she did not know. There was nowhere a trace
+of coquetry, nowhere the expression of a single sentimentality. Its
+tone was pure friendliness, it was the work of a quite innocent girl
+who because she knew the man to whom she wrote to be brave, therefore
+believed him to be honourable. She expressed her trust in the very
+last words. "You will not of course show this letter to any one in the
+world. But I wrong you even by mentioning such an impossibility."
+
+"But you have shown it," said Faversham.
+
+His face was now grown of an extraordinary pallor, his lips twitched
+as he spoke and his fingers worked in a nervous uneasy manner upon the
+table-cloth. Captain Plessy was in far too complacent a mood to notice
+such trifles. His vanity was satisfied, the world was a rosy mist
+with a sparkle of champagne, and he answered lightly as he unfastened
+another button of his tunic.
+
+"No, my friend, I have not shown it. I keep the lady's wish."
+
+"You have read it aloud. It is the same thing."
+
+"Pardon me. Had I shown the letter I should have shown the name. And
+that would have been a dishonour of which a gallant man is incapable,
+is it not so? I read it and I did not read the name."
+
+"But you took pains, Captain Plessy, that we should know the name
+before you read the letter."
+
+"I? Did I mention a name?" exclaimed Plessy with an air of concern and
+a smile upon his mouth which gave the lie to the concern. "Ah, yes,
+a long while ago. But did I say it was the name of the lady who had
+written the letter? Indeed, no. You make a slight mistake, my friend.
+I bear no malice for it--believe me, upon my heart, no! After a dinner
+and a little bottle of champagne, there is nothing more pardonable.
+But I will tell you why I read the letter."
+
+"If you please," said Faversham, and the gravity of his tone struck
+upon his companion suddenly as something unexpected and noteworthy.
+Plessy drew himself together and for the first time took stock of his
+host as of a possible adversary. He remarked the agitation of his
+face, the beads of perspiration upon his forehead, the restless
+fingers, and beyond all these a certain hunted look in the eyes with
+which his experience had made him familiar. He nodded his head once or
+twice slowly as though he were coming to a definite conclusion about
+Faversham. Then he sat bolt upright.
+
+"Ah," said he with a laugh. "I can answer a question which puzzled me
+a little this afternoon," and he sank back again in his chair with an
+easy confidence and puffed the smoke of his cigarette from his mouth.
+Faversham was not sufficiently composed to consider the meaning of
+Plessy's remark. He put it aside from his thoughts as an evasion.
+
+"You were to tell me, I think, why you read the letter."
+
+"Certainly," answered Plessy. He twirled his moustache, his voice had
+lost its suavity and had taken on an accent of almost contemptuous
+raillery. He even winked at his two brother officers, he was beginning
+to play with Faversham. "I read the letter to illustrate how strange,
+how very strange, are your English girls. Here is one of them who
+writes to me. I am grateful--oh, beyond words, but I think to myself
+what a different thing the letter would be if it had been written by
+a Frenchwoman. There would have been some hints, nothing definite you
+understand, but a suggestion, a delicate, provoking suggestion of
+herself, like a perfume to sting one into a desire for a nearer
+acquaintance. She would delicately and without any appearance of
+intention have permitted me to know her colour, perhaps her height,
+perhaps even to catch an elusive glimpse of her face. Very likely a
+silk thread of hair would have been left inadvertently clinging to
+a sheet of the paper. She would sketch perhaps her home and speak
+remorsefully of her boldness in writing. Oh, but I can imagine the
+letter, full of pretty subtleties, alluring from its omissions, a
+vexation and a delight from end to end. But this, my friend!" He
+tossed the letter carelessly upon the table-cloth. "I am grateful from
+the bottom of my heart, but it has no art."
+
+At once Geoffrey Faversham's hand reached out and closed upon the
+letter.
+
+"You have told me why you have read it aloud."
+
+"Yes," said Plessy, a little disconcerted by the quickness of
+Faversham's movement.
+
+"Now I will tell you why I allowed you to read it to the end. I was of
+the same mind as that English girl whose name we both know. I could
+not believe that a man, brave as I knew you to be, could outside his
+bravery be so contemptible."
+
+The words were brought out with a distinct effort. None the less they
+were distinctly spoken.
+
+A startled exclamation broke from the two subalterns. Plessy commenced
+to bluster.
+
+"Sir, do I understand you?" and he saw Faversham standing above him,
+in a quiver of excitement.
+
+"You will hold your tongue, Captain Plessy, until I have finished. I
+allowed you to read the letter, never thinking but that some pang of
+forgotten honour would paralyse your tongue. You read it to the
+end. You complain there is no art in it, that it has no delicate
+provocations, such as your own countrywomen would not fail to use. It
+should be the more sacred on that account, and I am glad to believe
+that you misjudge your country women. Captain Plessy, I acknowledge
+that as you read out that letter with its simple, friendly expression
+of gratitude for the spectacle of a brave man, I envied you heartily,
+I would have been very proud to have received it. I would have much
+liked to know that some deed which I had done had made the world for
+a moment brighter to some one a long way off with whom I was not
+acquainted. Captain Plessy, I shall not allow you to keep this letter.
+You shall not read it aloud again."
+
+Faversham thrust the letter into the flame of the candle which stood
+between Plessy and himself. Plessy sprang up and blew the candle out;
+but little colourless flames were already licking along the envelope.
+Faversham held the letter downwards by a corner and the colourless
+flame flickered up into a tongue of yellow, the paper charred and
+curled in the track of the flames, the flames leapt to Faversham's
+fingers; he dropped the burning letter on the floor and crushed it
+with his foot. Then he looked at Plessy and waited. He was as white as
+the table-cloth, his dark eyes seemed to have sunk into his head
+and burned unnaturally bright, every nerve in his body seemed to be
+twitching; he looked very like the young boy who used to sit at the
+dinner-table on Crimean nights and listen in a quiver to the appalling
+stories of his father's guests. As he had been silent then, so he was
+silent now. He waited for Captain Plessy to speak. Captain Plessy,
+however, was in no hurry to begin. He had completely lost his air of
+contemptuous raillery, he was measuring Faversham warily with the eyes
+of a connoisseur.
+
+"You have insulted me," he said abruptly, and he heard again that
+indrawing of the breath which he had remarked that afternoon in the
+cellar. He also heard Faversham speak immediately after he had drawn
+the breath.
+
+"There are reparations for insults," said Faversham.
+
+Captain Plessy bowed. He was now almost as sober as when he had sat
+down to his dinner.
+
+"We will choose a time and place," said he.
+
+"There can be no better time than now," suddenly cried Faversham, "no
+better place than this. You have two friends of whom with your leave I
+will borrow one. We have a large room and a candle apiece to fight
+by. To-morrow my duties begin again. We will fight to-night, Captain
+Plessy, to-night," and he leaned forward almost feverishly, his words
+had almost the accent of a prayer. The two subalterns rose from their
+chairs, but Plessy motioned them to keep still. Then he seized the
+candle which he had himself blown out, lighted it from the candle at
+the far end of the table and held it up above his head so that
+the light fell clearly upon Faversham's face. He stood looking at
+Faversham for an appreciable time. Then he said quietly,
+
+"I will not fight you to-night."
+
+One of the subalterns started up, the other merely turned his head
+towards Plessy, but both stared at their Captain with an unfeigned
+astonishment and an unfeigned disappointment. Faversham continued to
+plead.
+
+"But you must to-night, for to-morrow you cannot. To-night I am alone
+here, to-night I give orders, to-morrow I receive them. You have your
+sword at your side to-night. Will you be wearing it to-morrow? I pray
+you gentlemen to help me," he said turning to the subalterns, and he
+began to push the heavy table from the centre of the room.
+
+"I will not fight you to-night, Lieutenant," Captain Plessy replied.
+
+"And why?" asked Faversham ceasing from his work. He made a gesture
+which had more of despair than of impatience.
+
+Captain Plessy gave his reason. It rang false to every man in the
+room and indeed he made no attempt to give to it any appearance of
+sincerity. It was a deliberate excuse and not his reason.
+
+"Because you are the Prussian officer in command and the Prussian
+troops march into St. Denis to-morrow. Suppose that I kill you, what
+sort of penalty should I suffer at their hands?"
+
+"None," exclaimed Faversham. "We can draw up an account of the
+quarrel, here now. Look here is paper and ink and as luck will have it
+a pen that will write. I will write an account with my own hand, and
+the four of us can sign it. Besides if you kill me, you can escape
+into Paris."
+
+"I will not fight you to-night," said Captain Plessy and he set down
+the candle upon the table. Then with an elaborate correctness he drew
+his sword from its scabbard and offered the handle of it to Faversham.
+
+"Lieutenant, you are in command of St. Denis. I am your prisoner of
+war."
+
+Faversham stood for a moment or two with his hands clenched. The light
+had gone out of his face.
+
+"I have no authority to make prisoners," he said. He took up one of
+the candles, gazed at his guest in perplexity.
+
+"You have not given me your real reason, Captain Plessy," he said.
+Captain Plessy did not answer a word.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," said Faversham and Captain Plessy bowed
+deeply as Faversham left the room.
+
+A silence of some duration followed upon the closing of the door. The
+two subalterns were as perplexed as Faversham to account for their
+hero's conduct. They sat dumb and displeased. Plessy stood for a
+moment thoughtfully, then he made a gesture with his hands as though
+to brush the whole incident from his mind and taking a cigarette from
+his case proceeded to light it at the candle. As he stooped to the
+flame he noticed the glum countenances of his brother-officers, and
+laughed carelessly.
+
+"You are not pleased with me, my friends," said he as he threw himself
+on to a couch which stood against the wall opposite to his companions.
+"You think I did not speak the truth when I gave the reason of my
+refusal? Well you are right. I will give you the real reason why I
+would not fight. It is very simple. I do not wish to be killed. I know
+these white-faced, trembling men--there are no men more terrible. They
+may run away but if they do not, if they string themselves to
+the point of action--take the word of a soldier older than
+yourselves--then is the time to climb trees. To-morrow I would very
+likely kill our young friend, he would have had time to think, to
+picture to himself the little point of steel glittering towards his
+heart--but to-night he would assuredly have killed me. But as I say I
+do not wish to be killed. You are satisfied?"
+
+It appeared that they were not. They sat with all the appearances
+of discontent. They had no words for Captain Plessy. Captain Plessy
+accordingly rose lightly from his seat.
+
+"Ah," said he, "my good friend the Lieutenant has after all left me my
+sword. The table too is already pushed sufficiently on one side.
+There is only one candle to be sure, but it will serve. You are not
+satisfied, gentlemen? Then--" But both subalterns now hastened to
+assure Captain Plessy that they considered his conduct had been
+entirely justified.
+
+
+
+
+THE DESERTER.
+
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier of the 69th regiment, which belonged to the first
+brigade of the first division of the army of the Rhine, was summoned
+to the Belletonge farm just as it was getting dusk. The Lieutenant
+hurried thither, for the Belletonge farm opposite the woods of
+Colombey was the headquarters of the General of his division.
+
+"I have been instructed," said General Montaudon, "to select an
+officer for a special duty. I have selected you."
+
+Now for days Lieutenant Fevrier's duties had begun and ended with him
+driving the soldiers of his company from eating unripe fruit; and
+here, unexpectedly, he was chosen from all the officers of his
+division for a particular exploit. The Lieutenant trembled with
+emotion.
+
+"My General!" he cried.
+
+The General himself was moved.
+
+"What your task will be," he continued, "I do not known. You will go
+at once to the Mareschal's headquarters when the chief of the staff,
+General Jarras, will inform you."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier went immediately up to Metz. His division was
+entrenched on the right bank of the Mosel and beyond the forts, so
+that it was dark before he passed through the gates. He had never once
+been in Metz before; he had grown used to the monotony of camps; he
+had expected shuttered windows and deserted roads, and so the aspect
+of the town amazed him beyond measure. Instead of a town besieged, it
+seemed a town during a fairing. There were railway carriages, it is
+true, in the Place Royale doing duty as hospitals; the provision
+shops, too, were bare, and there were no horses visible.
+
+But on the other hand, everywhere was a blaze of light and a bustle of
+people coming and going upon the footpaths. The cafes glittered and
+rang with noise. Here one little fat burgher was shouting that the
+town-guard was worth all the red-legs in the trenches; another as
+loudly was criticising the tactics of Bazaine and comparing him for
+his invisibility to a pasha in his seraglio; while a third sprang upon
+a table and announced fresh victories. An army was already on the way
+from Paris to relieve Metz. Only yesterday MacMahon had defeated the
+Prussians, any moment he might be expected from the Ardennes. Nor were
+they only civilians who shouted and complained. Lieutenant Fevrier saw
+captains, majors, and even generals who had left their entrenchments
+to fight the siege their own way with dominoes upon the marble tables
+of the cabarets.
+
+"My poor France," he said to himself, and a passer-by overhearing him
+answered:
+
+"True, monsieur. Ah, but if we had a man at Metz!"
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier turned his back upon the speaker and walked on.
+He at all events would not join in the criticisms. It was just, he
+reflected, because he had avoided the cafes of Metz that he was
+singled out for special distinction, and he fell to wondering what
+work it was he had to do that night. Was it to surprise a field-watch?
+Or to spike a battery? Or to capture a convoy? Lieutenant Fevrier
+raised his head. For any exploit in the world he was ready.
+
+General Jarras was writing at a table when Fevrier was admitted to his
+office. The Chief of the Staff inclined his lamp-shade so that the
+light fell full upon Fevrier's face, and the action caused the
+lieutenant to rejoice. So much care in the choice of the officer meant
+so much more important a duty.
+
+"The General Montaudon tells me," said Jarras, "that you are an
+obedient soldier."
+
+"Obedience, my General, is the soldier's first lesson."
+
+"That explains to me why it is first forgotten," answered Jarras,
+drily. Then his voice became sharp and curt. "You will choose fifty
+men. You will pick them carefully."
+
+"They shall be the best soldiers in the regiment," said Fevrier.
+
+"No, the worst."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier was puzzled. When dangers were to be encountered,
+when audacity was needed, one requires the best soldiers. That was
+obvious, unless the mission meant annihilation. That thought came to
+Fevrier, and remembering the cafes and the officers dishonouring their
+uniforms, he drew himself up proudly and saluted. Already he saw his
+dead body recovered from the enemy, and borne to the grave beneath a
+tricolour. He heard the lamentations of his friends, and the firing
+of the platoon. He saw General Montaudon in tears. He was shaken with
+emotion. But Jarras's next words fell upon him like cold water.
+
+"You will parade your fifty men unarmed. You will march out of the
+lines, and to-morrow morning as soon as it is light enough for the
+Prussians to see you come unarmed you will desert to them. There are
+too many mouths to feed in Metz[A]."
+
+[Footnote A: See the Daily News War Correspondence, 1870.]
+
+The Lieutenant had it on his lips to shout, "Then why not lead us out
+to die?" But he kept silence. He could have flung his kepi in the
+General's face; but he saluted. He went out again into the streets
+and among the lighted cafes and reeled like a drunken man, thinking
+confusedly of many things; that he had a mother in Paris who might
+hear of his desertion before she heard of its explanation; that it was
+right to claim obedience but _lache_ to exact dishonour--but chiefly
+and above all that if he had been wise, and had made light of his
+duty, and had come up to Metz to re-arrange the campaign with dominoes
+on the marble-tables, he would not have been specially selected for
+ignominy. It was true, it needed an obedient officer to desert! And
+so laughing aloud he reeled blindly down to the gates of Metz. And
+it happened that just by the gates a civilian looked after him, and
+shrugging his shoulders, remarked, "Ah! But if we had a _Man_ at
+Metz!"
+
+From Metz Lieutenant Fevrier ran. The night air struck cool upon him.
+And he ran and stumbled and fell and picked himself up and ran again
+until he reached the Belletonge farm.
+
+"The General," he cried, and so to the General a mud-plastered figure
+with a white, tormented face was admitted.
+
+"What is it?" asked Montaudon. "What will this say?"
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier stood with the palms of his hands extended,
+speechless like an animal in pain. Then he suddenly burst into tears
+and wept, and told of the fine plan to diminish the demands upon the
+commissariat.
+
+"Courage, my old one!" said the General. "I had a fear of this. You
+are not alone--other officers in other divisions have the same hard
+duty," and there was no inflection in the voice to tell Fevrier what
+his General thought of the duty. But a hand was laid soothingly upon
+his shoulder, and that told him. He took heart to whisper that he had
+a mother in Paris.
+
+"I will write to her," said Montaudon. "She will be proud when she
+receives the letter."
+
+Then Lieutenant Fevrier, being French, took the General's hand and
+kissed it, and the General, being French, felt his throat fill with
+tears.
+
+Fevrier left the headquarters, paraded his men, laid his sword and
+revolver on the ground, and ordered his fifty to pile their arms. Then
+he made them a speech--a very short speech, but it cost him much to
+make it in an even voice.
+
+"My braves," said he, "my fellow-soldiers, it is easy to fight for
+one's country, it is not difficult to die for it. But the supreme test
+of patriotism is willingly to suffer shame for it. That test your
+country now claims of you. Attention! March!"
+
+For the last time he exchanged a password with a French sentinel, and
+tramped out into the belt of ground between the French outposts and
+the Prussian field-watch. Now in this belt there stood a little
+village which Fevrier had held with skill and honour all the two
+days of the battle of Noisseville. Doubtless that recollection had
+something to do with his choice of the village. For in his martyrdom
+of shame he had fallen to wonder whether after all he had not deserved
+it, and any reassurance such as the gaping house-walls of Vaudere
+would bring to him, was eagerly welcomed. There was another reason,
+however, in the position of the village.
+
+It stood in an abrupt valley at the foot of a steep vine-hill on the
+summit, and which was the Prussian forepost. The Prussian field-watch
+would be even nearer to Vaudere and dispersed amongst the vines. So
+he could get his ignominious work over quickly in the morning. The
+village would provide, too, safe quarters for the night, since it
+was well within range of the heavy guns in Fort St. Julien, and the
+Prussians on that account were unable to hold it.
+
+He led his fifty soldiers then northwestward from his camp, skirted
+the Bois de Grimont, and marched into the village. The night was dark,
+and the sky so overhung with clouds that not a star was visible. The
+one street of Vaudere was absolutely silent. The glimmering white
+cottages showed their black rents on either side, but never the light
+of a candle behind any shutter. Lieutenant Fevrier left his men at the
+western or Frenchward end of the street, and went forward alone.
+
+The doors of the houses stood open. The path was encumbered with the
+wreckage of their contents, and every now and then he smelt a whiff of
+paraffin, as though lamps had been broken or cans overset. Vaudere had
+been looted, but there were no Prussians now in the village.
+
+He made sure of this by walking as far as the large house at the head
+of the village. Then he went back to his men and led them forward
+until he reached the general shop which every village has.
+
+"It is not likely," he said, "that we shall find even the makeshift of
+a supper. But courage, my friends, let us try!"
+
+He could not have eaten a crust himself, but it had become an instinct
+with him to anticipate the needs of his privates, and he acted from
+habit. They crowded into the shop; one man shut the door, Fevrier
+lighted a match and disclosed by its light staved-in barrels, empty
+cannisters, broken boxes, fragments of lemonade bottles, but of food
+not so much as a stale biscuit.
+
+"Go upstairs and search."
+
+They went and returned empty-handed.
+
+"We have found nothing, monsieur," said they.
+
+"But I have," replied Fevrier, and striking another match he held up
+what he had found, dirty and crumpled, in a corner of the shop. It
+was a little tricolour flag of painted linen upon a bamboo stick, a
+child's cheap and gaudy toy. But Fevrier held it up solemnly, and of
+the fifty deserters no one laughed.
+
+"The flag of the Patrie," said Fevrier, and with one accord the
+deserters uncovered.
+
+The match burned down to Fevrier's fingers, he dropped it and trod
+upon it and there was a moment's absolute stillness. Then in the
+darkness a ringing voice leapt out.
+
+"Vive la France!"
+
+It was not the lieutenant's voice, but the voice of a peasant from the
+south of the Loire, one of the deserters.
+
+"Ah, but that is fine, that cry," said Fevrier.
+
+He could have embraced that private on both cheeks. There was love in
+that cry, pain as well--it could not be otherwise--but above all a
+very passion of confidence.
+
+"Again!" said Fevrier; and this time all his men took it up, shouting
+it out, exultantly. The little ruined shop, in itself a contradiction
+of the cry, rang out and clattered with the noise until it seemed to
+Fevrier that it must surely pierce across the country into Metz and
+pluck the Mareschal in his headquarters from his diffidence. But they
+were only fifty deserters in a deserted village, lost in the darkness,
+and more likely to be overheard by the Prussian sentries than by any
+of their own blood.
+
+It was Fevrier who first saw the danger of their ebullition. He cut it
+short by ordering them to seek quarters where they could sleep until
+daybreak. For himself, he thrust the little toy flag in his breast and
+walked forward to the larger house at the end of the village beneath
+the vine-hill; and as he walked, again the smell of paraffin was
+forced upon his nostrils.
+
+He walked more slowly. That odour of paraffin began to seem
+remarkable. The looting of the village had not occurred to-day, for
+there had been thick dust about the general shop. But the paraffin had
+surely been freshly spilt, or the odour would have evaporated.
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier walked on thinking this over. He found the broken
+door of his house, and still thinking it over, mounted the stairs.
+There was a door fronting the stairs. He felt for the handle and
+opened it, and from a corner of the room a voice challenged him in
+German.
+
+Fevrier was fairly startled. There were Germans in the village after
+all. He explained to himself now the smell of paraffin. Meanwhile he
+did not answer; neither did he move; neither did he hear any movement.
+He had forgotten for the moment that he was a deserter, and he stood
+holding his breath and listening. There was a tiny window opposite to
+the door, but it only declared itself a window, it gave no light. And
+illusions came to Lieutenant Fevrier, such as will come to the bravest
+man so long as he listens hard enough in the dark--illusions of
+stealthy footsteps on the floor, of hands scraping and feeling along
+the walls, of a man's breathing upon his neck, of many infinitesimal
+noises and movements close by.
+
+The challenge was repeated and Fevrier remembered his orders.
+
+"I am Lieutenant Fevrier of Montaudon's division."
+
+"You are alone."
+
+Fevrier now distinguished that the voice came from the right-hand
+corner of the room, and that it was faint.
+
+"I have fifty men with me. We are deserters," he blurted out, "and
+unarmed."
+
+There followed silence, and a long silence. Then the voice spoke
+again, but in French, and the French of a native.
+
+"My friend, your voice is not the voice of a deserter. There is too
+much humiliation in it. Come to my bedside here. I spoke in German,
+expecting Germans. But I am the cure of Vaudere. Why are you
+deserters?"
+
+Fevrier had expected a scornful order to marshal his men as prisoners.
+The extraordinary gentleness of the cure's voice almost overcame him.
+He walked across to the bedside and told his story. The cure basely
+heard him out.
+
+"It is right to obey," said he, "but here you can obey and disobey.
+You can relieve Metz of your appetites, my friend, but you need not
+desert." The cure reached up, and drawing Fevrier down, laid a hand
+upon his head. "I consecrate you to the service of your country. Do
+you understand?"
+
+Fevrier leaned his mouth towards the cure's ear.
+
+"The Prussians are coming to-night to burn the village."
+
+"Yes, they came at dusk."
+
+Just at the moment, in fact, when Fevrier had been summoned to Metz,
+the Prussians had crept down into Vaudere and had been scared back to
+their repli by a false alarm.
+
+"But they will come back you may be sure," said the cure, and raising
+himself upon his elbow he said in a voice of suspense "Listen!"
+
+Fevrier went to the window and opened it. It faced the hill-side, but
+no sounds came through it beyond the natural murmurs of the night. The
+cure sank back.
+
+"After the fight here, there were dead soldiers in the streets--French
+soldiers and so French chassepots. Ah, my friend, the Prussians have
+found out which is the better rifle--the chassepot or the needle gun.
+After your retreat they came down the hill for those chassepots. They
+could not find one. They searched every house, they came here and
+questioned me. Finally they caught one of the villagers hiding in a
+field, and he was afraid and he told where the rifles had been buried.
+The Prussians dug for them and the hole was empty. They believe they
+are still hidden somewhere in the village; they fancy, too, that there
+are secret stores of food; so they mean to burn the houses to the
+ground. They did not know that I was here this afternoon. I would have
+come into the French lines had it been possible, but I am tied here to
+my bed. No doubt God had sent you to me--you and your fifty men. You
+need not desert. You can make your last stand here for France."
+
+"And perish," cried Fevrier, caught up from the depths of his
+humiliation, "as Frenchmen should, arms in hand." Then his voice
+dropped again. "But we have no arms."
+
+The cure shook the lieutenant's arm gently.
+
+"Did I not tell you the chassepots were not found? And why? Because
+too many knew where they were hidden. Because out of that many I
+feared there might be one to betray. There is always a Judas. So I got
+one man whom I knew, and he dug them up and hid them afresh."
+
+"Where, father?"
+
+The question was put with a feverish eagerness--it seemed to the cure
+with an eagerness too feverish. He drew his hand, his whole body away.
+
+"You have matches? Light one!" he said, in a startled voice.
+
+"But the window--!"
+
+"Light one!"
+
+Every moment of time was now of value. Fevrier took the risk and lit
+the match, shading it from the window so far as he could with his
+hand.
+
+"That will do."
+
+Fevrier blew out the light. The cure had seen him, his uniform and his
+features. He, too, had seen the cure, had noticed his thin emaciated
+face, and the eyes staring out of it feverishly bright and
+preternaturally large.
+
+"Shall I tell you your malady, father?" he said gently. "It is
+starvation."
+
+"What will you, my son? I am alone. There is not a crust from one end
+of Vaudere to the other. You cannot help me. Help France! Go to the
+church, stand with your back to the door, turn left, and advance
+straight to the churchyard wall. You will find a new grave there, the
+rifles in the grave. Quick! There is a spade in the tower. Quick! The
+rifles are wrapped from the damp, the cartridges too. Quick! Quick!"
+
+Fevrier hurried downstairs, roused three of his soldiers, bade one of
+them go from house to house and bring the soldiers in silence to the
+churchyard, and with the others he went thither himself. In groups of
+two and three the men crept through the street, and gathered about
+the grave. It was already open. The spade was driven hard and quick,
+deeper and deeper, and at last rang upon metal. There were seventy
+chassepots, complete with bayonets and ammunition. Fifty-one were
+handed out, the remaining nineteen were hastily covered in again.
+Fevrier was immeasurably cheered to notice his men clutch at their
+weapons and fondle them, hold them to their shoulders taking aim, and
+work the breech-blocks.
+
+"It is like meeting old friends, is it not, my children, or rather
+new sweethearts?" said he. "Come! The Prussians may advance from
+the Brasserie at Lanvallier, from Servigny, from Montay, or from
+Noisseville, straight down the hill. The last direction is the most
+likely, but we must make no mistake. Ten men will watch on the
+Lanvallier road, ten on the Servigny, ten on the Montay, twenty will
+follow me. March!"
+
+An hour ago Lieutenant Fevrier was in command of fifty men who
+slouched along with their hands in their pockets, robbed even of
+self-respect. Now he had fifty armed and disciplined soldiers, men
+alert and inspired. So much difference a chassepot apiece had made.
+Lieutenant Fevrier was moved to the conception of another plan; and to
+prepare the way for its execution, he left his twenty men in a house
+at the Prussian end of Vaudere, and himself crept in among the vines
+and up the hill.
+
+Somewhere near to him would be the sentries of the field-watch. He
+went down upon his hands and knees and crawled, parting the vine
+leaves, that the swish of them might not betray him. In a little knoll
+high above his head he heard the cracking of wood, the sound of men
+stumbling. The Prussians were coming down to Vaudere. He lay flat
+upon the ground waiting and waiting; and the sounds grew louder and
+approached. At last he heard that for which he waited--the challenge
+of the field-watch, the answer of the burning-party. It came down to
+him quite clearly through the windless air. "Sadowa."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier turned about chuckling. It seemed that in some
+respects the world after all was not going so ill with him that night.
+He crawled downwards as quickly as he could. But it was now more than
+even inspiration that he should not be detected. He dared not stand
+up and run; he must still keep upon his hands and knees. His arms so
+ached that he was forced now and then to stop and lie prone to give
+them ease; he was soaked through and through with perspiration; his
+blood hammered at his temples; he felt his spine weaken as though the
+marrow had melted into water; and his heart throbbed until the effort
+to breathe was a pain. But he reached the bottom of the hill, he got
+refuge amongst his men, he even had time to give his orders before the
+tread of the first Prussian was heard in the street.
+
+"They will make for the other end of Vaudere. They will give the
+village first as near to the French lines as it reaches and light the
+rest as they retreat. Let them go forward! We will cut them off. And
+remember, the bayonet! A shot will bring the Prussians down in force.
+It will bring the French too, so there is just the chance we may find
+the enemy as silent as ourselves."
+
+But the plan was to undergo alteration. For as Lieutenant Fevrier
+ended, the Prussians marched in single file into the street and
+halted. Fevrier from the corner within his doorway counted them; there
+were twenty-three in all. Well, he had twenty besides himself, and the
+advantage of the surprise; and thirty more upon the other roads, for
+whom, however, he had other work in mind. The officer in command of
+the Prussians carried a dark lantern, and he now turned the slide, so
+that the light shone out.
+
+His men fell out of their rank, some to make a cursory search, others
+to sprinkle yet more paraffin. One man came close to Fevrier's
+doorway, and even looked in, but he saw nothing, though Fevrier was
+within six feet of him, holding his breath. Then the officer closed
+his lantern, the men re-formed and marched on. But they left behind
+with Lieutenant Fevrier--an idea.
+
+He thought it quickly over. It pleased him, it was feasible, and there
+was comedy in it. Lieutenant Fevrier laughed again, his spirits were
+rising, and the world was not after all going so ill with him.
+
+He had noticed by the lantern light that the Prussians had not
+re-formed in the same order. They were in single file again, but the
+man who marched last before the halt, did not march last after it.
+Each soldier, as he came up, fell in in the rear of the file. Now
+Fevrier had in the darkness experienced some difficulty in counting
+the number of Prussians, although he had strained his eyes to that
+end.
+
+He whispered accordingly some brief instructions to his men; he sent
+a message to the ten on the Servigny road, and when the Prussians
+marched on after their second halt, Lieutenant Fevrier and two
+Frenchmen fell in behind them. The same procedure was followed at the
+next halt and at the next; so that when the Prussians reached the
+Frenchward end of Vaudere there were twenty-three Prussians and ten
+Frenchmen in the file. To Fevrier's thinking it was sufficiently
+comic. There was something artistic about it too.
+
+Fevrier was pleased, but he had not counted on the quick Prussian
+step to which his soldiers were unaccustomed. At the fourth halt, the
+officer moved unsuspiciously first on one side of the street, then on
+the other, but gave no order to his men to fall out. It seemed that
+he had forgotten, until he came suddenly running down the file and
+flashed his lantern into Fevrier's face. He had been secretly counting
+his men.
+
+"The French," he cried. "Load!"
+
+The one word quite compensated Fevrier for the detection. The Germans
+had come down into Vaudere with their rifles unloaded, lest an
+accidental discharge should betray their neighbourhood to the French.
+
+"Load!" cried the German. And slipping back he tugged at the revolver
+in his belt. But before he could draw it out, Fevrier dashed his
+bayonet through the lantern and hung it on the officer's heart. He
+whistled, and his other ten men came running down the street.
+
+"Vorwarts," shouted Fevrier, derisively. "Immer Vorwarts."
+
+The Prussians surprised, and ignorant how many they had to face, fell
+back in disorder against a house-wall. The French soldiers dashed at
+them in the darkness, engaging them so that not a man had the chance
+to load.
+
+That little fight in the dark street between the white-ruined cottages
+made Fevrier's blood dance.
+
+"Courage!" he cried. "The paraffin!"
+
+The combatants were well matched, and it was hand-to-hand and
+bayonet-to-bayonet. Fevrier loved his enemies at that moment. It even
+occurred to him that it was worth while to have deserted. After the
+sense of disgrace, the prospect of imprisonment and dishonour, it
+was all wonderful to him--the feel of the thick coat yielding to the
+bayonet point, the fatigue of the beaten opponent, the vigour of the
+new one, the feeling of injury and unfairness when a Prussian he had
+wounded dropped in falling the butt of a rifle upon his toes.
+
+Once he cried, "_Voila pour la patrie_!" but for the rest he fought in
+silence, as did the others, having other uses for their breath. All
+that could be heard was a loud and laborious panting, as of wrestlers
+in a match, the clang of rifle crossing rifle, the rattle of bayonet
+guarding bayonet, and now and then a groan and a heavy fall. One
+Prussian escaped and ran; but the ten who had been stationed on the
+Servigny road were now guarding the entrance from Noisseville. Fevrier
+had no fears of him. He pressed upon a new man, drove him against the
+wall, and the man shouted in despair:
+
+"_A moi_!"
+
+"You, Philippe?" exclaimed Fevrier.
+
+"That was a timely cry," and he sprang back. There were six men
+standing, and the six saluted Fevrier; they were all Frenchmen.
+Fevrier mopped his forehead.
+
+"But that was fine," said he, "though what's to come will be still
+better. Oh, but we will make this night memorable to our friends. They
+shall talk of us by their firesides when they are grown old and France
+has had many years of peace--we shall not hear, but they will talk of
+us, the deserters from Metz."
+
+Lieutenant Fevrier in a word was exalted, and had lost his sense of
+proportion. He did not, however, relax his activity. He sent off the
+six to gather the rest of his contingent. He made an examination of
+the Prussians, and found that sixteen had been killed outright, and
+eight were lying wounded. He removed their rifles and ammunition out
+of reach, and from dead and wounded alike took the coats and caps.
+To the wounded he gave instead French uniforms; and then, bidding
+twenty-three of his soldiers don the Prussian caps and coats, he
+snatched a moment wherein to run to the cure.
+
+"It is over," said he. "The Prussians will not burn Vaudere to-night."
+And he jumped down the stairs again without waiting for any response.
+In the street he put on the cap and coat of the Prussian officer,
+buckled the sword about his waist, and thrust the revolver into
+his belt. He had now twenty-three men who at night might pass for
+Prussians, and thirteen others.
+
+To these thirteen he gave general instructions. They were to spread
+out on the right and left, and make their way singly up through
+the vines, and past the field-watch if they could without risk of
+detection. They were to join him high up on the slope, and opposite to
+the bonfire which would be burning at the repli. His twenty-three he
+led boldly, following as nearly as possible the track by which the
+Prussians had descended. The party trampled down the vine-poles,
+brushed through the leaves, and in a little while were challenged.
+
+"Sadowa," said Fevrier, in his best imitation of the German accent.
+
+"Pass Sadowa," returned the sentry.
+
+Fevrier and his men filed upwards. He halted some two hundred yards
+farther on, and went down upon his knees. The soldiers behind him
+copied his example. They crept slowly and cautiously forward until the
+flames of the bonfire were visible through the screen of leaves, until
+the faces of the officers about the bonfire could be read.
+
+Then Fevrier stopped and whispered to the soldier next to him. That
+soldier passed the whisper on, and from a file the Frenchmen crept
+into line. Fevrier had now nothing to do but to wait; and he waited
+without trepidation or excitement. The night from first to last had
+gone very well with him. He could even think of Mareschal Bazaine
+without anger.
+
+He waited for perhaps an hour, watching the faces round the fire
+increase in number and grow troubled with anxiety. The German officers
+talked in low tones staring through their night-glasses down the hill,
+to catch the first leaping flame from the roofs of Vaudere, pushing
+forward their heads to listen for any alarm. Fevrier watched them with
+the amusement of a spectator in a play house. He was fully aware that
+he was shortly to step upon the stage himself. He was aware too that
+the play was to have a tragic ending. Meanwhile, however, here
+was very good comedy! He had a Frenchman's appreciation of the
+picturesque. The dark night, the glowing fire on the one broad level
+of grass, the French soldiers hidden in the vines, within a stone's
+throw of the Germans, the Germans looking unconsciously on over
+their heads for the return of those comrades who never would
+return.--Lieutenant Fevrier was the dramatist who had created this
+striking and artistic situation. Lieutenant Fevrier could not but be
+pleased. Moreover there were better effects to follow. One occurred to
+him at this very moment, an admirable one. He fumbled in his breast
+and took out the flag. A minute later he saw the Colonel of the
+forepost join the group, hack nervously with his naked sword at
+a burning log, and dispatch a subaltern down the hill to the
+field-watch.
+
+The subaltern came crashing back through the vines. Fevrier did not
+need to hear his words in order to guess at his report. It could only
+be that the Prussian party had given the password and come safely back
+an hour since. Besides, the Colonel's act was significant.
+
+He sent four men at once in different directions, and the rest of his
+soldiers he withdrew into the darkness behind the bonfire. He did not
+follow them himself until he had picked up and tossed a fusee into the
+fire. The fusee flared and spat and spurted, and immediately it
+seemed to Fevrier--so short an interval of time was there--that the
+country-side was alive with the hum of a stirring camp, and the rattle
+of harness-chains, as horses were yoked to guns.
+
+For a third time that evening Fevrier laughed softly. The deserters
+had roused the Prussian army round Metz to the expectation of an
+attack in force. He touched his neighbour on the shoulder.
+
+"One volley when I give the word. Then charge. Pass the order on!" and
+the word went along the line like a ripple across a pond.
+
+He had hardly given it, the fusee had barely ceased to sputter, before
+a company doubled out on the open space behind the bonfire. That
+company had barely formed up, before another arrived to support it.
+
+"Load!"
+
+As the Prussian command was uttered, Fevrier was aware of a movement
+at his side. The soldier next to him was taking aim. Fevrier reached
+out his hand and stopped the man. Fevrier was going to die in five
+minutes, and meant to die chivalrously like a gentleman. He waited
+until the German companies had loaded, until they were ordered to
+advance, and then he shouted,
+
+"Fire!"
+
+The little flames shot out and crackled among the vines. He saw
+gaps in the Prussian ranks, he saw the men waver, surprised at the
+proximity of the attack.
+
+"Charge," he shouted, and crashing through the few yards of shelter,
+they burst out upon the repli, and across the open space to the
+Prussian bayonets. But not one of the number reached the bayonets.
+
+"Fire!" shouted the Prussian officer, in his turn.
+
+The volley flashed out, the smoke cleared away, and showed a little
+heap of men silent between the bonfire and the Prussian ranks.
+
+The Prussians loaded again and stood ready, waiting for the main
+attack. The morning was just breaking. They stood silent and
+motionless till the sky was flooded with light and the hills one after
+another came into view, and the files of poplars were seen marching
+on the plains. Then the Colonel approached the little heap. A rifle
+caught his eye, and he picked it up.
+
+"They are all mad," said he. Forced to the point of the bayonet was a
+gaudy little linen tri-colour flag.
+
+
+
+
+THE CROSSED GLOVES.
+
+
+"Although you have not been near Ronda for five years," said the
+Spanish Commandant severely to Dennis Shere, "the face of the country
+has not changed. You are certainly the most suitable officer I
+can select, since I am told you are well acquainted with the
+neighbourhood. You will ride therefore to-day to Olvera and deliver
+this sealed letter to the officer commanding the temporary garrison
+there. But it is not necessary that it should reach him before eleven
+at night, so that you will still have an hour or two before you start
+in which you can renew your acquaintanceships, as I can very well
+understand you are anxious to do."
+
+Dennis Shere's reluctance, however, was now changed into alacrity. For
+the road to Olvera ran past the gates of that white-walled, straggling
+residencia where he had planned to spend this first evening that he
+was stationed at Ronda. On his way back from his colonel's quarters
+he even avoided those squares and streets where he would be likely to
+meet with old acquaintances, foreseeing their questions as to why he
+was now a Spanish subject and wore the uniform of a captain of Spanish
+cavalry and by seven o'clock he was already riding through the Plaza
+de Toros upon his mission. There, however, a familiar voice hailed
+him, and turning about in his saddle he saw an old padre who had once
+gained a small prize for logic at the University of Barcelona, and who
+had since made his inferences and deductions an excuse for a great
+deal of inquisitiveness. Shere had no option but to stop. He broke in,
+however, at once on the inevitable questions as to his uniform with
+the statement that he must be at Olvera by eleven.
+
+"Fifteen miles," said the padre. "Does it need four hours and a fresh
+horse to journey fifteen miles?"
+
+"But I have friends to visit on the way," and to give convincing
+details to an excuse which was plainly disbelieved, Shere added, "Just
+this side of Setenil I have friends."
+
+The padre was still dissatisfied. "There is only one house just this
+side of Setenil, and Esteban Silvela I saw with my own eyes to-day in
+Ronda."
+
+"He may well be home by now, and it is not Esteban whom I go to see."
+
+"Not Esteban," exclaimed the padre. "Then it will be--"
+
+"His sister, the Senora Christina," said Shere with a laugh at his
+companion's persistency. "Since the brother and sister live alone, and
+it is not the brother, why it will be the sister. You argue still very
+closely, padre."
+
+The padre stood back a little from Shere and stared. Then he said
+slyly, and with the air of one who quotes:
+
+"All women are born tricksters."
+
+"Those were rank words," said Shere composedly.
+
+"Yet they were often spoken when you grew vines in the Ronda Valley."
+
+"Then a crowd of men must know me for a fool. A young man may make a
+mistake, padre, and exaggerate a disappointment. Besides, I had not
+then seen the senora. Esteban I knew, but she was a child, and known
+to me only by name." And then, warmed by the pleasure in his old
+friend's face, he said, "I will tell you about it."
+
+They walked on slowly side by side, while Shere, who now that he had
+begun to confide was quite swept away, bent over his saddle and told
+how after inheriting a modest fortune, after wandering for three years
+from city to city, he had at last come to Paris, and there, at a
+Carlist conversazione, had heard the familiar name called from a
+doorway, and had seen the unfamiliar face appear. Shere described
+Christina. She walked with the grace of a deer, as though the floor
+beneath her foot had the spring of turf. The blood was bright in her
+face; her brown hair shone; she was sweet with youth; the suppleness
+of her body showed it and the steadiness of her great clear eyes.
+
+"She passed me," he went on, "and the arrogance of what I used to
+think and say came sharp home to me like a pain. I suppose that
+I stared--it was an accident, of course--perhaps my face showed
+something of my trouble; but just as she was opposite me her fan
+slipped through her fingers and clattered on the floor."
+
+The padre was at a loss to understand Shere's embarrassment in
+relating so small a matter.
+
+"Well," said he, "you picked up the fan and so--"
+
+"No," interrupted Shere. His embarrassment increased, and he stammered
+out awkwardly, "Just for the moment, you see, I began to wonder
+whether after all I had not been right before; whether after all
+any woman would or could baulk herself of a fraction of any man's
+admiration, supposing that it would only cost a trick to extort it.
+And while I was wondering she herself stooped, picked up the fan, and
+good-humouredly dropped me a curtsey for my lack of manners. Esteban
+presented me to her that evening. There followed two magical months in
+Paris and a June in London."
+
+"But, Esteban?" said the padre, doubtfully. "I do not understand. I
+know something of Esteban Silvela. A lean man of plots and devices. My
+friend, do you know that Esteban has not a groat? The Silvela fortunes
+and estate came from the mother and went to the daughter. Esteban
+is the Senora Christina's steward, and her marriage would alter his
+position at the least. Did he not spoil the magic of the months in
+Paris?"
+
+Shere laughed aloud in assured confidence.
+
+"No, indeed," said he. "I did not know Esteban was dependent on his
+sister, but what difference would her marriage make? Esteban is my
+best friend. For instance, you questioned me about my uniform. It is
+by Esteban's advice and help that I wear it."
+
+"Indeed!" said the padre, quickly. "Tell me."
+
+"That June, in London, two years ago--it was by the way the last time
+I saw the senora--we three dined at the same house. As the ladies rose
+from the table I said to Christina quietly, 'I want to speak to you
+to-night,' and she answered very simply and quietly, 'With all my
+heart.' She was not so quiet, however, but that Esteban overheard her.
+He hitched his chair up to mine; I asked him what my chances were, and
+whether he would second them? He was most cordial, but he thought with
+his Spaniard's pride that I ought--I use my words, not his--in some
+way to repair my insufficiency in station and the rest; and he pointed
+out this way of the uniform. I could not resist his argument; I did
+not speak that night. I took out my papers and became a Spaniard; with
+Esteban's help I secured a commission. That was two years ago. I have
+not seen her since, nor have I written, but I ride to her to-night
+with my two years' silence and my two years' service to prove the
+truth of what I say. So you see I have reason to thank Esteban." And
+since they were now come to the edge of the town they parted company.
+Shere rode smartly down the slope of the hill, the padre stood and
+watched him with a feeling of melancholy.
+
+It was not merely that he distrusted Esteban, but he knew Shere, the
+cadet of an impoverished family, who had come out from England to a
+small estate in the Ronda valley, which had belonged to his house
+since the days of the Duke of Wellington in Spain. He knew him for a
+man of tempests and extremes, and as he thought of his ardent words
+and tones, of his ready acceptance of Esteban's good faith, of his
+description of Christina, he fell to wondering whether so sudden and
+violent a conversion from passionate cynic to passionate believer
+would not lack permanence. There was that little instructive accident
+of the dropped fan. Even in the moment of conversion so small a thing
+had almost sufficed to dissuade Shere.
+
+Shere, however, was quite untroubled--so untroubled, indeed, that he
+even rode slowly that he might not waste the luxury of anticipating
+the welcome which his unexpected appearance would surely provoke. He
+rode into the groves of almond and walnut trees and out again into a
+wild and stony country. It was just growing dusk when he saw ahead
+of him the square white walls of the enclosure, and the cluster of
+buildings within, glimmering at the foot of a rugged hill. The lights
+began to move in the windows as he approached, and then a man suddenly
+appeared at his side on the roadway and whistled twice loudly as
+though he were calling his dog. Shere rode past the man and through
+the open gates into the courtyard. There were three men lounging
+there, and they came forward almost as if they had expected Shere. He
+gave his horse into their charge and impetuously mounted the flight of
+stone steps to the house. A servant in readiness came forward at once
+and preceded Shere along a gallery towards a door. Shere's impetuosity
+led him to outstep the servant, he opened the door, and so entered the
+room unannounced.
+
+It was a long, low room with a wainscot of dark walnut, and a single
+lamp upon the table gave it shadows rather than light. He had just
+time to notice that a girl and a man were bending over the table in
+the lamplight, to recognise with a throb of the heart the play of
+the light upon the girl's brown hair, to understand that she was
+explaining something which she held in her hands, and then Esteban
+came quickly to him with a certain air of perplexity and a glance of
+inquiry towards the servant. Then he said:--
+
+"Of course, of course, you stopped and came in of your own accord."
+
+"Of my own accord, indeed," said Shere, who was looking at Christina
+instead of heeding Esteban's words. His unexpected coming had
+certainly not missed its effect, although it was not the effect which
+Shere had desired. There was, to be sure, a great deal of astonishment
+in her looks, but there was also consternation; and when she spoke it
+was in a numbed and absent way.
+
+"You are well? We have not seen you this long while. Two years is it?
+More than two years."
+
+"There have been changes," said Esteban. "We have had war and, alas,
+defeats."
+
+"Yes, I was in Cuba," said Shere, and the conversation dragged
+on impersonal and dull. Esteban talked continually with a forced
+heartiness, Christina barely spoke at all, and then absently. Shere
+noticed that she had but lately come in, for she still wore her hat,
+and her gloves lay crossed on the table in the light of the lamp; she
+moved restlessly about the room, stopping now and then to give an ear
+to any chance noise in the courtyard, and to glance alertly at the
+door; so that Shere understood that she was expecting another visitor,
+and that he himself was in the way. An inopportune intrusion, it
+seemed, was the sole outcome of the two years' anticipations, and
+utterly discouraged he rose from his chair. On the instant, however,
+Esteban signed to Shere to remain, and with a friendly smile himself
+made an excuse and left the room.
+
+Christina was now walking up and down one particular seam in the floor
+with as much care as if the seam was a tight-rope, and this exercise
+she continued. Shere moved over to the table and quite absently played
+with the gloves which lay there, disarranging their position, so that
+they no longer made a cross.
+
+"You remember that night in London," said he, and Christina stopped
+for a second to say simply and without any suggestion that she was
+offended, "You should have spoken that night," and then resumed her
+walk.
+
+"Yes," returned Shere. "But I was always aware that I could not offer
+you your match, and I found, I thought, quite suddenly that evening a
+way to make my insufficiency less insufficient."
+
+"Less insufficient by a strip of brass upon your shoulder," she
+exclaimed passionately. She came and stood opposite to him. "Well,
+that strip of brass stops us both. It stops my ears, it must stop your
+lips too. Where did we meet first?"
+
+"In Paris."
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"At a Carlist--" and Shere broke off and took a step towards her.
+"Oh!" he exclaimed, "I never thought of it. I imagined you went there
+to laugh as I did."
+
+"Does one laugh at one's creed?" she cried violently; and Shere with a
+helpless gesture of the hands sat down in a chair. Esteban had fooled
+him, and why, the padre had shown Shere that afternoon, Esteban had
+fooled him irreparably; it did not need a glance at Christina, as she
+stood facing him, to convince him of that. There was no anger against
+him, he noticed, in her face, but on the contrary a great friendliness
+and pity. But he knew her at that moment. Her looks might soften, but
+not her resolve. She was heart-whole a Carlist. Carlism was her creed,
+and her creed would be more than a creed, it would be a passion too.
+So it was not to persuade her but rather in acknowledgment that he
+said:
+
+"And one does not change one's creed?"
+
+"No," she answered, and suggested, but in a doubtful voice, "but one
+can put off one's uniform."
+
+Shere stood up. "Neither can one do that," he said simply. "It is
+quite true that I sought my commission upon your account. I would just
+as readily have become a Carlist had I known. I had no inclination one
+way or the other, only a great hope and longing for you. But I have
+made the mistake, and I cannot retrieve it. The strip of brass obliges
+me to good faith. Already you will understand the uniform has had its
+inconvenience. It sent me to Cuba, and set me armed against men almost
+of my own blood. There was no escape then; there is no escape now."
+
+Christina moved closer to him. The reticence with which Shere spoke,
+and the fact that he made no claim upon her made her voice very
+gentle.
+
+"No," she agreed. "I thought that you would make that answer. And in
+my heart I do not think that I should like to have heard from you any
+other."
+
+"Thank you," said Shere. He drew out his watch. "I have still some
+way to go. I have to reach Olvera by eleven;" and he was aware that
+Christina at his side became at once very still, so that even her
+breathing was arrested. For her sigh of emotion at the abrupt mention
+of parting he was thankful, but it made him keep his eyes turned from
+her lest a sight of any distress of hers might lead him to falter from
+his purpose.
+
+"You are riding to Olvera?" she asked, after a pause, and in a queer
+muffled voice.
+
+"Yes. So I must say good-bye," and now he turned to her. But she was
+too quick for him to catch a glimpse of her face. She had already
+turned from him and was walking towards the door.
+
+"You must also say good-bye to Esteban," said she, as though to gain
+time. With her fingers on the door-handle she stopped. "Tell me," she
+exclaimed. "It was Esteban who advised the army, who helped you to
+your commission? You need not deny it! It was Esteban," she stood
+silent, turning over this revelation in her mind. Then she added, "Did
+you see Esteban in Ronda this afternoon?"
+
+"No, but I heard that he was there. I must go."
+
+He took up his hat, and turning again towards the door saw that
+Christina stood with her back against the panels and her arms
+outstretched across them like a barrier.
+
+"You need not fear," he said to reassure her. "I shall not quarrel
+with Esteban. He is your brother, and the harm is done. Besides, I do
+not know that it is all harm when I look back in the years before I
+wore the uniform. In those times it was all one's own dissatisfactions
+and trivial dislikes and trivial ambitions. Now I find a repose in
+losing them, in becoming a little necessary part of a big machine,
+even though it is not the best machine of its kind and works creakily.
+I find a dignity in it too."
+
+It was the man of extremes who spoke, and he spoke quite sincerely.
+Christina, however, neither answered him nor heard. Her eyes were
+fixed with a strange intentness upon him; her breath came and went as
+if she had run a race, and in the silence seemed unnaturally audible.
+
+"You carry orders to Olvera?" she said at length. Shere fetched the
+sealed letter out of his pocket.
+
+"So I must go, or fail in my duty," said he.
+
+"Give me the letter," said Christina.
+
+Shere stared at her in amazement. The amazement changed to suspicion.
+His whole face seemed to narrow and sharpen out of his own likeness
+into something foxy and mean.
+
+"I will not," he said, and slowly replaced the letter. "There was a
+man in the road," he continued slowly, "who whistled as I passed--a
+signal, no doubt. You are Carlist. This is a trap."
+
+"A trap not laid for you," said Christina. "Be sure of that! Until you
+spoke of Olvera I did not know."
+
+"No," admitted Shere, "not laid for me to your knowledge, but to
+Esteban's. You were surprised at my coming--Esteban only at the manner
+of my coming. He asked if I had ridden into the gates of my own accord
+I remember. He was in Ronda this afternoon. Very likely it was he who
+told my colonel of my knowledge of the neighbourhood. It would suit
+his purposes well to present me to you suddenly, not merely as an
+enemy, but an active enemy. Yes, I understand that. But," and his
+voice hardened again, "even to your knowledge the trap was laid for
+the man who carries the letter. You have your share in the trick." He
+repeated the word with a sharp laugh, savouring it, dwelling upon it
+as upon something long forgotten, and now suddenly remembered. "A
+murderous trick, too, it seems! I wonder what would have happened if
+I had not turned in at the gates of my own accord. How much farther
+should I have ridden towards Olvera, and by what gentle means should I
+have been stopped?"
+
+"By nothing more dangerous than a hand upon your bridle and an excuse
+that you might do me some small service at Olvera."
+
+"An excuse, a falsity! To be sure," said Shere bitterly. "Yet you
+still stand before the door though you know the letter will not be
+yours. Is the trick after all so harmless? Is there no one--Esteban,
+for instance--in the dark passage outside the door or on the dark road
+outside the gates?"
+
+"I will prove to you you are wrong."
+
+Christina dropped her arms to her side, moved altogether from the
+door, and rang a bell. "Esteban shall come here; he will see you
+outside the gates; he will set you safely on your road to Olvera." She
+spoke now quite quietly; all the panic and agitation had gone in
+a moment from her face, her manner, and her words. But the very
+suddenness of the change in her increased Shere's suspicions. A moment
+ago Christina was standing before the door with every nerve astrain,
+her face white, and her eyes bewildered with horror. Now she stood
+easily by the table with the lighted lamp, speaking easily, playing
+easily with the gloves upon the table. Shere watched for the secret of
+this sudden change.
+
+A servant answered the bell and was bidden to find Esteban. No look of
+significance passed between them; by no gesture was any signal given.
+"No harm was intended to any man," Christina continued as soon as
+the door again was closed; "I insisted--I mean there was no need to
+insist; for I promised to get the letter from the bearer once he had
+come into this room."
+
+"How?" Shere asked with a blunt contempt. "By tricks?"
+
+Christina raised her head quickly, stung to a moment's anger; but she
+did not answer him, and again her head drooped.
+
+"At all events," she said quietly, "I have not tried to trick you,"
+and Shere noticed that she arranged with an absent carelessness the
+gloves in the form of a cross beneath the lamp; and at once he felt
+that her action contradicted her words. It was merely an instinct at
+first. Then he began to reason. Those gloves had been so arranged when
+first he entered the room. Christina and Esteban were bending over the
+table. Christina was explaining something. Was she explaining that
+arrangement of the gloves? Was that arrangement the reason of her
+ready acceptance of his refusal to part with his orders? Was it, in a
+word, a signal for Esteban--a signal which should tell him whether
+or not she had secured the letter? Shere saw a way to answer that
+question. He was now filled with distrust of Christina as half an hour
+back he had been filled with faith in her; so that he paid no heed
+to her apology, or to the passionate and pleading voice in which she
+spoke it.
+
+"So much was at stake for us," she said. "It seemed a necessity that
+we must have that letter, that no sudden orders must reach Olvera
+to-night. For there is some one at Olvera--I must trust you, you see,
+though you are our pledged enemy--some one of great consequence to us,
+some one we love, some one to whom we look to revive this Spain of
+ours. No, it is not our King, but his son--his young and gallant son.
+He will be gone to-morrow, but he is at Olvera to-night. And so when
+Esteban found out to-day that orders were to be sent to the commandant
+there it seemed we had no choice. It seemed those orders must not
+reach him, and it seemed therefore--just so that no hurt might be
+done, which otherwise would surely have been done, whatever I might
+order or forbid--that I must use a woman's way and secure the letter."
+
+"And the bearer?" asked Shere, advancing to the table. "What of him?
+He, I suppose, might creep back to Ronda, broken in honour and with a
+lie to tell? The best lie he could invent. Or would you have helped
+him to the lie?"
+
+Christina shrank away from the table as though she had been struck.
+
+"You had not thought of his plight," continued Shere. "He rides out
+from Ronda an honest soldier and returns--what? No more a soldier than
+this glove of yours is your hand," and taking up one of the gloves he
+held it for a moment, and then tossed it down at a distance from its
+fellow. He deliberately turned his back to the table as Christina
+replied:
+
+"The bearer would be just our pledged enemy--pledged to outwit us, as
+we to outwit him. But when you came there was no effort made to outwit
+you. Own that at all events? You carry your orders safely, with your
+honour safe, though the consequence may be disaster for us, and
+disgrace for that we did not prevent you. Own that! You and I, I
+suppose, will meet no more. So you might own this that I have used no
+tricks with you?"
+
+The appeal coming as an answer to his insult and contempt, and coming
+from one whose pride he knew to be a real and dominant quality,
+touched Shere against his expectation. He faced Christina on an
+impulse to give her the assurance she claimed, but he changed his
+mind.
+
+"Are you sure of that?" he asked slowly, for he saw that the gloves
+while his back was turned had again been crossed. He at all events
+was now sure. He was sure that those crossed gloves were a signal for
+Esteban, a signal that the letter had not changed hands. "You have
+used no tricks with me?" he repeated. "Are you sure of that?"
+
+The handle of the door rattled; Christina quickly crossed towards it.
+Shere followed her, but stopped for the fraction of a second at the
+table and deliberately and unmistakably placed the gloves in parallel
+lines. As the door opened, he was standing between Christina and the
+table, blocking it from her view.
+
+It was not she, however, who looked to the table, but Esteban. She
+kept her eyes upon her brother, and when he in his turn looked to her
+Shere noticed a glance of comprehension swiftly interchanged. So Shere
+was confident that he had spoiled this trick of the gloves, and when
+he took a polite leave of Christina and followed Esteban from the room
+it was not without an air of triumph.
+
+Christina stood without changing her attitude, except that perhaps she
+pushed her head a little forward that she might the better hear the
+last of her lover's receding steps. When they ceased to sound she ran
+quickly to the window, opened it, and leaned out that she might the
+better hear his horse's hoofs on the flagged courtyard. She heard
+besides Esteban's voice speaking amiably and Shere's making amiable
+replies. The sharp hard clatter upon the stones softened into the
+duller thud upon the road; the voices became fainter and lost their
+character. Then one clear "good-night" rang out loudly, and was
+followed by the quick beats of a horse trotting. Christina slowly
+closed the window and turned her eyes upon the room. She saw the lamp
+upon the table and the gloves in parallel lines beneath it.
+
+Now Shere was so far right in that the gloves were intended as a
+signal for Esteban; only owing to that complete revulsion of which the
+padre had seen the possibility, Shere had mistaken the signal. The
+passionate believer had again become the passionate cynic. He saw the
+trick, and setting no trust in the girl who played it, heeding neither
+her looks nor words nor the sincerity of her voice, had no doubt that
+it was aimed against him; whereas it was aimed to protect him. Shere
+had no doubt that the gloves crossed meant that he still had the
+sealed letter in his keeping, and therefore he disarranged them. But
+in truth the gloves crossed meant that Christina had it, and that the
+messenger might go unhindered upon his way.
+
+Christina uttered no cry. She simply did not believe what her eyes
+saw. She needed to touch the gloves before she was convinced, and when
+she had done that she was at once not sure but that she herself in
+touching them had ranged them in these lines. In the end, however,
+she understood, not the how or why, but the mere fact. She ran to the
+door, along the gallery, down the steps into the courtyard. She met no
+one. The house might have been a deserted ruin from its silence.
+She crossed the courtyard to the glimmering white walls, and passed
+through the gates on to the road. The night was clear; and ahead of
+her far away in the middle of the road a lantern shone very red.
+Christina ran towards it, and as she approached she saw faces like
+miniatures grouped above it. They did not heed her until she was close
+upon them, until she had noticed one man holding a riderless horse
+apart from the group and another coiling up a stout rope. Then
+Esteban, who was holding the lantern, raised his hand to keep her
+back.
+
+"There has been an accident," said he. "He fell, and fell awkwardly,
+the horse with him."
+
+"An accident," said Christina, and she pointed to the coil of rope. It
+was no use for her now to say that she had forbidden violence. Indeed,
+at no time, as she told Shere, would it have been of any use. She
+pushed through the group to where Dennis Shere lay on the ground, his
+face white and shiny and tortured with pain. She knelt down on the
+ground and took his head in her hands as though she would raise it on
+to her lap, but one man stopped her, saying, "It is his back, senora."
+Shere opened his eyes and saw who it was that bent over him, and
+Christina, reading their look, was appalled. It was surely impossible
+that human eyes could carry so much hate. His lips moved, and she
+leaned her ear close to his mouth to catch the words. But it was only
+one word he spoke and repeated:--
+
+"Tricks! Tricks!"
+
+There was no time to disprove or explain. Christina had but one
+argument. She kissed him on the lips.
+
+"This is no trick," she cried, and Esteban, laying a hand upon her
+shoulder, said, "He does not hear, nor can his lips answer;" and
+Esteban spoke the truth. Shere had not heard, and never would hear, as
+Christina knew.
+
+"He still has the letter," said Esteban. Christina thrust him back
+with her hand and crouched over the dead man, protecting him. In a
+little she said, "True, there is the letter." She unbuttoned Shere's
+jacket and gently took the letter from his breast. Then she knelt back
+and looked at the superscription without speaking. Esteban opened the
+door of the lantern and held the flame towards her. "No," said she.
+"It had better go to Olvera."
+
+She rode to Olvera that night. They let her go, deceived by her
+composure and thinking that she meant to carry it to "the man of great
+consequence."
+
+But Christina's composure meant nothing more than that her mind and
+her feelings were numbed. She was conscious of only one conviction,
+that Shere must not fail in his duty, since he had staked his honour
+upon its fulfilment. And so she rode straight to the commandant's
+quarters at Olvera, and telling of an accident to the bearer, handed
+him the letter. The commandant read it, and was most politely
+distressed that Christina should have put herself to so much trouble,
+for the orders merely recalled his contingent to Ronda in the morning.
+It was about this time that Christina began to understand precisely
+what had happened.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHUTTERED HOUSE.
+
+
+If ever a man's pleasures jumped with his duties mine did in the year
+1744, when, as a clerk in the service of the Royal African Company
+of Adventurers, I was despatched to the remote islands of Scilly in
+search of certain information which, it was believed, Mr. Robert
+Lovyes alone could impart. For even a clerk that sits all day conning
+his ledgers may now and again chance upon a record or name which
+will tickle his dull fancies with the suggestion of a story. Such a
+suggestion I had derived from the circumstances of Mr. Lovyes. He had
+passed an adventurous youth, during which he had for eight years
+been held to slavery by a negro tribe on the Gambia river; he had
+afterwards amassed a considerable fortune, and embarked it in the
+ventures of the Company; he had thereupon withdrawn himself to Tresco,
+where he had lived for twenty years: so much any man might know
+without provocation to his curiosity. The strange feature of Mr.
+Lovyes' conduct was revealed to me by the ledgers. For during all
+those years he had drawn neither upon his capital nor his interest, so
+that his stake in the Company grew larger and larger, with no profit
+to himself that any one could discover. It seemed to me, in fact,
+clean against nature that a man so rich should so disregard his
+wealth; and I busied myself upon the journey with discovering strange
+reasons for his seclusion, of which none, I may say, came near the
+mark, by so much did the truth exceed them all.
+
+I landed at the harbour of New Grimsey, on Tresco, in the grey
+twilight of a September evening; and asking for Mr. Lovyes, was
+directed across a little ridge of heather to Dolphin Town, which lies
+on the eastward side of Tresco, and looks across Old Grimsey Sound to
+the island of St. Helen's. Dolphin Town, you should know, for all its
+grand name, boasts but a poor half-score of houses dotted about the
+ferns and bracken, with no semblance of order. One of the houses,
+however, attracted my notice--first, because it was built in two
+storeys, and was, therefore, by a storey taller than the rest; and,
+secondly, because all its windows were closely shuttered, and it wore
+in that falling light a drooping, melancholy aspect, like a derelict
+ship upon the seas. It stood in the middle of this scanty village, and
+had a little unkempt garden about it inclosed within a wooden paling.
+There was a wicket-gate in the paling, and a rough path from the gate
+to the house door, and a few steps to the right of this path a well
+was sunk and rigged with a winch and bucket. I was both tired and
+thirsty, so I turned into the garden and drew up some water in the
+bucket. A narrow track was beaten in the grass between the well and
+the house, and I saw with surprise that the stones about the mouth of
+the well were splashed and still wet. The house, then, had an inmate.
+I looked at it again, but the shutters kept their secret: there was no
+glimmer of light visible through any chink. I approached the house,
+and from that nearer vantage discovered that the shutters were common
+planks fitted into the windows and nailed fast to the woodwork from
+without. Growing yet more curious, I marched to the door and knocked,
+with an inquiry upon my tongue as to where Mr. Lovyes lived. But the
+excuse was not needed; the sound of my blows echoed through the house
+in a desolate, solitary fashion, and no step answered them. I knocked
+again, and louder. Then I leaned my ear to the panel, and I distinctly
+heard the rustling of a woman's dress. I held my breath to hear the
+more surely. The sound was repeated, but more faintly, and it was
+followed by a noise like the closing of a door. I drew back from the
+house, keeping an eye upon the upper storey, for I thought it possible
+the woman might reconnoitre me thence. But the windows stared at me
+blind, unresponsive. To the right and left lights twinkled in the
+scattered dwellings, and I found something very ghostly in the thought
+of this woman entombed as it were in the midst of them and moving
+alone in the shuttered gloom. The twilight deepened, and suddenly the
+gate behind me whined on its hinges. At once I dropped to my full
+length on the grass--the gloom was now so thick there was little
+fear I should be discovered--and a man went past me to the house.
+He walked, so far as I could judge, with a heavy stoop, but was yet
+uncommon tall, and he carried a basket upon his arm. He laid the
+basket upon the doorstep, and, to my utter disappointment, turned
+at once, and so down the path and out at the gate. I heard the gate
+rattle once, twice, and then a click as its latch caught. I was
+sufficiently curious to desire a nearer view of the basket, and
+discovered that it contained food. Then, remembering me that all this
+while my own business waited, I continued on my way to Mr. Lovyes'
+house. It was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant's
+Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour. Mr. Lovyes
+was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his
+dining-room--a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took
+to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline.
+I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got far before he
+interrupted me.
+
+"There is a mistake," he said. "It is doubtless my brother Robert you
+are in search of. I am John Lovyes, and was, it is true, captured
+with my brother in Africa, but I escaped six years before he did, and
+traded no more in those parts. We fled together from the negroes, but
+we were pursued. My brother was pierced by an arrow, and I left him,
+believing him to be dead."
+
+I had, indeed, heard something of a brother, though I little expected
+to find him in Tresco too. He pressed upon me the hospitality of his
+house, but my business was with Mr. Robert, and I asked him to direct
+me on my path, which he did with some hesitation and reluctance. I had
+once more to pass through Dolphin Town, and an impulse prompted me to
+take another look at the shuttered house. I found that the basket of
+food had been removed, and an empty bucket stood in its place. But
+there was still no light visible, and I went on to the dwelling of
+Mr. Robert Lovyes. When I came to it, I comprehended his brother's
+hesitation. It was a rough, mean little cottage standing on the edge
+of the bracken close to the sea--a dwelling fit for the poorest
+fisherman, but for no one above that station, and a large open boat
+was drawn up on the hard beside it as though the tenant fished for
+his bread. I knocked at the door, and a man with a candle in his hand
+opened it.
+
+"Mr. Robert Lovyes?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I am he." And he led the way into a kitchen, poor and mean as
+the outside warranted, but scrupulously clean and bright with a fire.
+He led the way, as I say, and I was still more mystified to observe
+from his gait, his height, and the stoop of his shoulders that he was
+the man whom I had seen carrying the basket through the garden. I had
+now an opportunity of noticing his face, wherein I could detect no
+resemblance to his brother's. For it was broader and more vigorous,
+with a great, white beard valancing it; and whereas Mr. John's hair
+was neatly powdered and tied with a ribbon, as a gentleman's should
+be, Mr. Robert's, which was of a black colour with a little sprinkling
+of grey, hung about his head in a tangled mane. There was but a
+two-years difference between the ages of the brothers, but there might
+have been a decade. I explained my business, and we sat down to a
+supper of fish, freshly caught, which he served himself. And during
+supper he gave me the information I was come after. But I lent only
+an inattentive ear to his talk. For my knowledge of his wealth, the
+picture of him as he sat in his great sea-boots and coarse seaman's
+vest, as though it was the most natural garb in the world, and his
+easy discourse about those far African rivers, made a veritable jumble
+of my mind. To add to it all, there was the mystery of the shuttered
+house. More than once I was inclined to question him upon this last
+account, but his manner did not promise confidences, and I said
+nothing. At last he perceived my inattention.
+
+"I will repeat all this to-morrow," he said grimly. "You are, no
+doubt, tired. I cannot, I am afraid, house you, for, as you see, I
+have no room; but I have a young friend who happens by good luck to
+stay this night on Tresco, and no doubt he will oblige me." Thereupon
+he led me to a cottage on the outskirts of Dolphin Town, and of all in
+that village nearest to the sea.
+
+"My friend," said he, "is named Ginver Wyeth, and, though he comes
+from these parts, he does not live here, being a school-master on the
+mainland. His mother has died lately, and he is come on that account."
+
+Mr. Wyeth received me hospitably, but with a certain pedantry of
+speech which somewhat surprised me, seeing that his parents were
+common fisherfolk. He readily explained the matter, however, over a
+pipe, when Mr. Lovyes had left us. "I owe everything to Mrs. Lovyes,"
+he said. "She took me when a boy, taught me something herself, and
+sent me thereafter, at her own charges, to a school in Falmouth."
+
+"Mrs. Lovyes!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," he continued, and, bending forward, lowered his voice. "You
+went up to Merchant's Point, you say? Then you passed Crudge's
+Folly--a house of two storeys with a well in the garden."
+
+"Yes, yes!" I said.
+
+"She lives there," said he.
+
+"Behind those shutters!" I cried.
+
+"For twenty years she has lived in the midst of us, and no one has
+seen her during all that time. Not even Robert Lovyes. Aye, she has
+lived behind the shutters."
+
+There he stopped. I waited, thinking that in a little he would take up
+his tale, but he did not, and I had to break the silence.
+
+"I had not heard that Mr. Robert was ever married," I said as
+carelessly as I might.
+
+"Nor was he," replied Mr. Wyeth. "Mrs. Lovyes is the wife of John.
+The house at Merchant's Point is hers, and there twenty years ago she
+lived."
+
+His words caught my breath away, so little did I expect them.
+
+"The wife of John Lovyes!" I stammered, "but--" And I told him how I
+had seen Robert Lovyes carry his basket up the path.
+
+"Yes," said Wyeth. "Twice a day Robert draws water for her at the
+well, and once a day he brings her food. It is in his house, too, that
+she lives--Crudge's Folly, that was his name for it, and the name
+clings. But, none the less, she is the wife of John;" and with little
+more persuasion Mr. Wyeth told me the story.
+
+"It is the story of a sacrifice," he began, "mad or great, as you
+please; but, mark you, it achieved its end. As a boy, I witnessed it
+from its beginnings. For it was at this very door that Robert Lovyes
+rapped when he first landed on Tresco on the night of the seventh of
+May twenty-two years ago, and I was here on my holidays at the time. I
+had been out that day in my father's lugger to the Poul, which is
+the best fishing-ground anywhere near Scilly, and the fog took us, I
+remember, at three of the afternoon. So what with that and the wind
+failing, it was late when we cast anchor in Grimsey Sound. The night
+had fallen in a brown mirk, and so still that the sound of our feet
+brushing through the ferns was loud, like the sweep of scythes. We sat
+down to supper in this kitchen about nine, my mother, my father, two
+men from the boat, and myself, and after supper we gathered about the
+fire here and talked. The talk in these parts, however it may begin,
+slides insensibly to that one element of which the noise is ever in
+our ears; and so in a little here were we chattering of wrecks and
+wrecks and wrecks and the bodies of dead men drowned. And then, in the
+thick of the talk, came the knock on the door--a light rapping of the
+knuckles, such as one hears twenty times a day; but our minds were
+so primed with old wives' tales that it fairly shook us all. No one
+stirred, and the knocking was repeated.
+
+"Then the latch was lifted, and Robert Lovyes stepped in. His beard
+was black then--coal black, like his hair--and his face looked out
+from it pale as a ghost and shining wet from the sea. The water
+dripped from his clothes and made a puddle about his feet.
+
+"'How often did I knock?' he asked pleasantly. 'Twice, I think. Yes,
+twice.'
+
+"Then he sat down on the settle, very deliberately pulled off his
+great sea-boots, and emptied the water out of them.
+
+"'What island is this?' he asked.
+
+"'Tresco.'
+
+"'Tresco!' he exclaimed, in a quick, agitated whisper, as though he
+dreaded yet expected to hear the name. 'We were wrecked, then, on the
+Golden Ball.'
+
+"'Wrecked?' cried my father; but the man went on pursuing his own
+thoughts.
+
+"'I swam to an islet.'
+
+"'It would be Norwithel,' said my father.
+
+"'Yes,' said he, 'it would be Norwithel.' And my mother asked
+curiously--
+
+"'You know these islands?' For his speech was leisurely and delicate,
+such as we heard neither from Scillonians nor from the sailors who
+visit St. Mary's.
+
+"'Yes,' he answered, his face breaking into a smile of unexpected
+softness, 'I know these islands. From Rosevean to Ganilly, from
+Peninnis Head to Maiden Bower: I know them well.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point Mr. Wyeth broke off his story, and crossing to the
+window, opened it. "Listen!" he said. I heard as it were the sound of
+innumerable voices chattering and murmuring and whispering in some
+mysterious language, and at times the voices blended and the murmurs
+became a single moan.
+
+"It is the tide making on the Golden Ball," said Mr. Wyeth. "The reef
+stretches seawards from St. Helen's island and half way across the
+Sound. You may see it at low tide, a ledge level as a paved causeway,
+and God help the ship that strikes on it!"
+
+Even while he spoke, from these undertones of sound there swelled
+suddenly a great booming like a battery of cannon.
+
+"It is the ledge cracking," said Mr. Wyeth, "and it cracks in the
+calmest weather." With that, he closed the window, and, lighting his
+pipe, resumed his story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It was on that reef that Mr. Robert Lovyes was wrecked. The ship, he
+told us, was the schooner _Waking Dawn_, bound from Cardiff to Africa,
+and she had run into the fog about half-past three, when they were a
+mile short of the Seven Stones. She bumped twice on the reef, and sank
+immediately, with, so far as he knew, all her crew.
+
+"'So now,' Robert continued, tapping his belt, 'since I have the means
+to pay, I will make bold to ask for a lodging, and for this night I
+will hang up here my dripping garments to Neptune.'
+
+    "'Me tabula sacer
+  Votiva paries--'
+
+"I began in the pride of my schooling, for I had learned that verse of
+Horace but a week before.
+
+"'This, no doubt, is the Cornish tongue,' he interrupted gravely, 'and
+will you please to carry my boots outside?'
+
+"What followed seemed to me then the strangest part of all this
+business, though, indeed, our sea-fogs come and go as often as not
+with a like abruptness. But the time of this fog's dispersion shocked
+the mind as something pitiless and arbitrary. For had the air cleared
+an hour before, the _Waking Dawn_ would not have struck. I opened the
+door, and it was as though a panel of brilliant white was of a sudden
+painted on the floor. Robert Lovyes sprang up from the settle, ran
+past me into the open, and stood on the bracken in his stockinged
+feet. A little patch of fog still smoked on the shining beach of Tean;
+a scarf of it was twisted about the granite bosses of St. Helen's; and
+for the rest the moonlight sparkled upon the headlands and was spilled
+across miles of placid sea. There was a froth of water upon the Golden
+Ball, but no sign of the schooner sunk among its weeds.
+
+"My father, however, and the two boatmen hurried down to the shore,
+while I was despatched with the news to Merchant's Point. My mother
+asked Mr. Lovyes his name, that I might carry it with me. But he spoke
+in a dreamy voice, as though he had not heard her.
+
+"'There were eight of the crew. Four were below, and I doubt if the
+four on deck could swim.'
+
+"I ran off on my errand, and, coming back a little later with a bottle
+of cordial waters, found Mr. Lovyes still standing in the moonlight.
+He seemed not to have moved a finger. I gave him the bottle, with a
+message that any who were rescued should be carried to Merchant's
+Point forthwith, and that he himself should go down there in the
+morning.
+
+"'Who taught you Latin?' he asked suddenly.
+
+"'Mrs. Lovyes taught me the rudiments,' I began; and with that he led
+me on to talk of her, but with some cunning. For now he would divert
+me to another topic and again bring me back to her, so that it all
+seemed the vagrancies of a boy's inconsequent chatter.
+
+"Mrs. Lovyes, who was remotely akin to the Lord Proprietor, had come
+to Tresco three years before, immediately after her marriage, and, it
+was understood, at her husband's wish. I talked of her readily, for,
+apart from what I owed to her bounty, she was a woman most sure to
+engage the affections of any boy. For one thing she was past her
+youth, being thirty years of age, tall, with eyes of the kindliest
+grey, and she bore herself in everything with a tender toleration,
+like a woman that has suffered much.
+
+"Of the other topics of this conversation there was one which later I
+had good reason to remember. We had caught a shark twelve feet long at
+the Poul that day, and the shark fairly divided my thoughts with Mrs.
+Lovyes.
+
+"'You bleed a fish first into the sea,' I explained. 'Then you bait
+with a chad's head, and let your line down a couple of fathoms. You
+can see your bait quite clearly, and you wait.'
+
+"'No doubt,' said Robert; 'you wait.'
+
+"'In a while,' said I, 'a dim lilac shadow floats through the clear
+water, and after a little you catch a glimpse of a forked tail and
+waving fins and an evil devil's head. The fish smells at the bait and
+sinks again to a lilac shadow--perhaps out of sight; and again it
+rises. The shadow becomes a fish, the fish goes circling round your
+boat, and it may be a long while before he turns on his back and
+rushes at the bait.'
+
+"'And as like as not, he carries the bait and line away."
+
+"'That depends upon how quick you are with the gaff,' said I.' Here
+comes my father.'
+
+"My father returned empty-handed. Not one of the crew had been saved.
+
+"'You asked my name,' said Robert Lovyes, turning to my mother. 'It is
+Crudge--Jarvis Crudge.' With that he went to his bed, but all night
+long I heard him pacing his room.
+
+"The next morning he complained of his long immersion in the sea, and
+certainly when he told his story to Mr. and Mrs. Lovyes as they sat
+over their breakfast in the parlour at Merchant's Point, he spoke with
+such huskiness as I never heard the like of. Mr. Lovyes took little
+heed to us, but went on eating his breakfast with only a sour comment
+here and there. I noticed, however, that Mrs. Lovyes, who sat over
+against us, bent her head forward and once or twice shook it as though
+she would unseat some ridiculous conviction. And after the story was
+told, she sat with no word of kindness for Mr. Crudge, and, what was
+yet more unlike her, no word of pity for the sailors who were lost.
+Then she rose and stood, steadying herself with the tips of her
+fingers upon the table. Finally she came swiftly across the room and
+peered into Mr. Crudge's face.
+
+"'If you need help,' she said, 'I will gladly furnish it. No doubt you
+will be anxious to go from Tresco at the earliest. No doubt, no doubt
+you will,' she repeated anxiously.
+
+"'Madame,' he said, 'I need no help, being by God's leave a man'--and
+he laid some stress upon the 'man,' but not boastfully--rather as
+though all _women_ did, or might need help, by the mere circumstance
+of their sex--'and as for going hence, why yesterday I was bound for
+Africa. I sailed unexpectedly into a fog off Scilly. I was wrecked in
+a calm sea on the Golden Ball--I was thrown up on Tresco--no one
+on that ship escaped but myself. No sooner was I safe than the fog
+lifted---'
+
+"'You will stay?' Mrs. Lovyes interrupted. 'No?'
+
+"'Yes,' said he, 'Jarvis Grudge will stay.'
+
+"And she turned thoughtfully away. But I caught a glimpse of her face
+as we went out, and it wore the saddest smile a man could see.
+
+"Mr. Grudge and I walked for a while in silence.
+
+"'And what sort of a name has Mr. John Lovyes in these parts?' he
+asked.
+
+"'An honest sort,' said I emphatically--'the name of a man who loves
+his wife.'
+
+"'Or her money,' he sneered. 'Bah! a surly ill-conditioned dog, I'll
+warrant, the curmudgeon!"
+
+"'You are marvellously recovered of your cold,' said I.
+
+"He stopped, and looked across the Sound. Then he said in a soft,
+musing voice: 'I once knew just such another clever boy. He was so
+clever that men beat him with sticks and put on great sea-boots to
+kick him with, so that he lived a miserable life, and was subsequently
+hanged in great agony at Tyburn.'
+
+"Mr. Grudge, as he styled himself, stayed with us for a week, during
+which time he sailed much with me about these islands; and I made a
+discovery. Though he knew these islands so well, he had never visited
+them before, and his knowledge was all hearsay. I did not mention my
+discovery to him, lest I should meet with another rebuff. But I was
+none the less sure of its truth, for he mistook Hanjague for Nornor,
+and Priglis Bay for Beady Pool, and made a number of suchlike
+mistakes. After a week he hired the cottage in which he now lives,
+bought his boat, leased from the steward the patch of ground in
+Dolphin Town, and set about building his house. He undertook the work,
+I am sure, for pure employment and distraction. He picked up the
+granite stones, fitted them together, panelled them, made the floors
+from the deck of a brigantine which came ashore on Annet, pegged down
+the thatch roof--in a word, he built the house from first to last with
+his own hands and he took fifteen months over the business, during
+which time he did not exchange a single word with Mrs. Lovyes, nor
+anything more than a short 'Good-day' with Mr. John. He worked,
+however, with no great regularity. For while now he laboured in a
+feverish haste, now he would sit a whole day idle on the headlands;
+or, again, he would of a sudden throw down his tools as though the
+work overtaxed him, and, leaping into his boat, set all sail and
+run with the wind. All that night you might see him sailing in the
+moonlight, and he would come home in the flush of the dawn.
+
+"After he had built the house, he furnished it, crossing for that
+purpose backwards and forwards between Tresco and St. Mary's. I
+remember that one day he brought back with him a large chest, and I
+offered to lend him a hand in carrying it. But he hoisted it on his
+back and took it no farther than the cottage in which he lived, where
+it remained locked with a padlock.
+
+"Towards Christmas-time, then, the house was ready, but to our
+surprise he did not move into it. He seemed, indeed, of a sudden, to
+have lost all liking for it, and whether it was that he had no longer
+any work upon his hands, he took to following Mrs. Lovyes about, but
+in a way that was unnoticeable unless you had other reasons to suspect
+that his thoughts were following her.
+
+"His conduct in this respect was particularly brought home to me on
+Christmas Day. The afternoon was warm and sunny, and I walked over the
+hill at Merchant's Point, meaning to bathe in the little sequestered
+bay beyond. From the top of the hill I saw Mrs. Lovyes walking along
+the strip of beach alone, and as I descended the hill-side, which
+is very deep in fern and heather, I came plump upon Jarvis Grudge,
+stretched full-length on the ground. He was watching Mrs. Lovyes with
+so greedy a concentration of his senses that he did not remark my
+approach. I asked him when he meant to enter his new house.
+
+"'I do not know that I ever shall,' he replied.
+
+"'Then why did you build it?' I asked.
+
+"'Because I was a fool!' and then he burst out in a passionate
+whisper. 'But a fool I was to stay here, and a fool's trick it was
+to build that house!' He shook his fist in its direction. 'Call it
+Grudge's Folly, and there's the name for it!' and with that he turned
+him again to spying upon Mrs. Lovyes.
+
+"After a while he spoke again, but slowly and with his eyes fixed upon
+the figure moving upon the beach.
+
+"'Do you remember the night I came ashore? You had caught a shark that
+day, and you told me of it. The great lilac shadow which rises from
+the depths and circles about the bait, and sinks again and rises again
+and takes--how long?--two years maybe before he snaps it.'
+
+"'But he does not carry it away,' said I, taking his meaning.
+
+"'Sometimes--sometimes," he snarled.
+
+"'That depends on how quick we are with the gaff."
+
+"'You!' he laughed, and taking me by the elbows, he shook me till I
+was giddy.
+
+"'I owe Mrs. Lovyes everything,' I said. At that he let me go. The
+ferocity of his manner, however, confirmed me in my fears, and, with a
+boy's extravagance, I carried from that day a big knife in my belt.
+
+"'The gaff, I suppose,' said Mr. Grudge with a polite smile when
+first he remarked it. During the next week, however, he showed more
+contentment with his lot, and once I caught him rubbing his hands and
+chuckling, like a man well pleased; so that by New Year's Eve I was
+wellnigh relieved of my anxiety on Mrs. Lovyes' account.
+
+"On that night, however, I went down to Grudge's cottage, and peeping
+through the window on my way to the door, I saw a strange man in the
+room. His face was clean-shaven, his hair tied back and powdered; he
+was in his shirt-sleeves, with a satin waistcoat, a sword at his side,
+and shining buckles to his shoes. Then I saw that the big chest stood
+open. I opened the door and entered.
+
+"'Come in!' said the man, and from his voice I knew him to be Mr.
+Crudge. He took a candle in his hand and held it above his head.
+
+"'Tell me my name,' he said. His face, shaved of its beard and no
+longer hidden by his hair, stood out distinct, unmistakable.
+
+"'Lovyes,' I answered.
+
+"'Good boy,' said he. 'Robert Lovyes, brother to John.'
+
+"'Yet he did not know you,' said I, though, indeed, I could not
+wonder.
+
+"'But she did,' he cried, with a savage exultation. 'At the first
+glance, at the first word, she knew me.' Then, quietly, 'My coat is on
+the chair beside you.'
+
+"I took it up. 'What do you mean to do?' I asked.
+
+"'It is New Year's Eve,' he said grimly. 'The season of good wishes.
+It is only meet that I should wish my brother, who stole my wife, much
+happiness for the next twelve months.'
+
+"He took the coat from my hands.
+
+"'You admire the coat? Ah! true, the colour is lilac.' He held it out
+at arm's length. Doubtless I had been staring at the coat, but I had
+not even given it a thought. 'The lilac shadow!' he went on, with a
+sneer. 'Believe me, it is the purest coincidence.' And as he prepared
+to slip his arm into the sleeve I flashed the knife out of my belt. He
+was too quick for me, however. He flung the coat over my head. I felt
+the knife twisted out of my hand; he stumbled over the chair; we both
+fell to the ground, and the next thing I know I was running over the
+bracken towards Merchant's Point with Robert Lovyes hot upon my heels.
+He was of a heavy build, and forty years of age. I had the double
+advantage, and I ran till my chest cracked and the stars danced above
+me. I clanged at the bell and stumbled into the hall.
+
+"'Mrs. Lovyes!' I choked the name out as she stepped from the parlour.
+
+"'Well?' she asked. 'What is it?'
+
+"'He is following--Robert Lovyes!'
+
+"She sprang rigid, as though I had whipped her across the face. Then,
+'I knew it would come to this at the last,' she said; and even as she
+spoke Robert Lovyes crossed the threshold.
+
+"'Molly,' he said, and looked at her curiously. She stood singularly
+passive, twisting her fingers. 'I hardly know you,' he continued. 'In
+the old days you were the wilfullest girl I ever clapped eyes on.'
+
+"'That was thirteen years ago,' she said, with a queer little laugh at
+the recollection.
+
+"He took her by the hand and led her into the parlour. I followed.
+Neither Mrs. Lovyes nor Robert remarked my presence, and as for John
+Lovyes, he rose from his chair as the pair approached him, stretched
+out a trembling hand, drew it in, stretched it out again, all without
+a word, and his face purple and ridged with the veins.
+
+"'Brother,' said Robert, taking between his fingers half a gold coin,
+which was threaded on a chain about Mrs. Lovyes' wrist, 'where is the
+fellow to this? I gave it to you on the Gambia river, bidding you
+carry it to Molly as a sign that I would return.'
+
+"I saw John's face harden and set at the sound of his brother's voice.
+He looked at his wife, and, since she now knew the truth, he took the
+bold course.
+
+"'I gave it to her,' said he, 'as a token of your death; and, by God!
+she was worth the lie!'
+
+"The two men faced one another--Robert smoothing his chin, John with
+his arms folded, and each as white and ugly with passion as the other.
+Robert turned to Mrs. Lovyes, who stood like a stone.
+
+"'You promised to wait,' he said in a constrained voice. 'I escaped
+six years after my noble brother.'
+
+"'Six years?' she asked. 'Had you come back then you would have found
+me waiting.'
+
+"'I could not,' he said. 'A fortune equal to your own--that was what I
+promised to myself before I returned to marry you.'
+
+"'And much good it has done you,' said John, and I think that he meant
+by the provocation to bring the matter to an immediate issue. 'Pride,
+pride!' and he wagged his head. 'Sinful pride!'
+
+"Robert sprang forward with an oath, and then, as though the movement
+had awakened her, Mrs. Lovyes stepped in between the two men, with an
+arm outstretched on either side to keep them apart.
+
+"'Wait!' she said. 'For what is it that you fight? Not, indeed, for
+me. To you, my husband, I will no more belong; to you, my lover, I
+cannot. My woman's pride, my woman's honour--those two things are mine
+to keep.'
+
+"So she stood casting about for an issue, while the brothers glowered
+at one another across her. It was evident that if she left them alone
+they would fight, and fight to the death. She turned to Robert.
+
+"'You meant to live on Tresco here at my gates, unknown to me; but you
+could not.'
+
+"'I could not,' he answered. 'In the old days you had spoken so much
+of Scilly--every island reminded me--and I saw you every day.'
+
+"I could read the thought passing through her mind. It would not serve
+for her to live beside them, visible to them each day. Sooner or later
+they would come to grips. And then her face flushed as the notion of
+her great sacrifice came to her.
+
+"'I see but the one way,' she said. 'I will go into the house that
+you, Robert, have built. Neither you nor John shall see me, but none
+the less, I shall live between you, holding you apart, as my hands do
+now. I give my life to you so truly that from this night no one shall
+see my face. You, John, shall live on here at Merchant's Point.
+Robert, you at your cottage, and every day you will bring me food and
+water and leave it at my door.'
+
+"The two men fell back shamefaced. They protested they would part and
+put the world between them; but she would not trust them. I think,
+too, the notion of her sacrifice grew on her as she thought of it. For
+women are tenacious of sacrifice even as men are of revenge. And in
+the end she had her way. That night Robert Lovyes nailed the boards
+across the windows, and brought the door-key back to her; and that
+night, twenty years ago, she crossed the threshold. No man has seen
+her since. But, none the less, for twenty years she has lived between
+the brothers, keeping them apart."
+
+This was the story which Mr. Wyeth told me as we sat over our
+pipes, and the next day I set off on my journey back to London. The
+conclusion of the affair I witnessed myself. For a year later we
+received a letter from Mr. Robert, asking that a large sum of money
+should be forwarded to him. Being curious to learn the reason for his
+demand, I carried the sum to Tresco myself. Mr. John Lovyes had died a
+month before, and I reached the island on Mr. Robert's wedding-day.
+I was present at the ceremony. He was now dressed in a manner which
+befitted his station--an old man bent and bowed, but still handsome,
+and he bore upon his arm a tall woman, grey-haired and very pale, yet
+with the traces of great beauty. As the parson laid her hand in her
+husband's, I heard her whisper to him, "Dust to Dust."
+
+
+
+
+KEEPER OF THE BISHOP.
+
+
+For a fortnight out of every six weeks the little white faced man
+walked the garrison on St. Mary's Island in a broadcloth frock-coat,
+a low waistcoat and a black riband of a tie fastened in a bow; and it
+gave him great pleasure to be mistaken for a commercial traveller. But
+during the other four weeks he was head-keeper of the lighthouse on
+the Bishop's Rock, with thirty years of exemplary service to his
+credit. By what circumstances he had been brought to enlist under the
+Trinity flag I never knew. But now, at the age of forty-eight he was
+entirely occupied with a great horror of the sea and its hunger for
+the bodies of men; the frock-coat which he wore during his spells on
+shore was a protest against the sea; and he hated not only the sea but
+all things that were in the sea, especially rock lighthouses, and of
+all rock lighthouses especially the Bishop.
+
+"The Atlantic's as smooth as a ballroom floor," said he. It was a
+clear, still day and we were sitting among the gorse on the top of the
+garrison, looking down the sea towards the west. Five miles from the
+Scillies, the thin column of the Bishop showed like a cord strung
+tight in the sky. "But out there all round the lighthouse there are
+eddies twisting and twisting, without any noise, and extraordinary
+quick, and every other second, now here, now there, you'll notice the
+sea dimple, and you'll hear a sound like a man hiccoughing, and all at
+once, there's a wicked black whirlpool. The tide runs seven miles an
+hour past the Bishop. But in another year I have done with her." To
+her Garstin nodded across from St. Mary's to that grey finger post of
+the Atlantic. "One more winter, well, very likely during this one more
+winter the Bishop will go--on some night when a storm blows from west
+or west-nor'west and the Irish coast takes none of its strength."
+
+He was only uttering the current belief of the islands. The first
+Bishop lighthouse had been swept away before its building was
+finished, and though the second stood, a fog bell weighing no less
+than a ton, and fixed ninety feet above the water, had been lifted
+from its fittings by a single wave, and tossed like a tennis-ball into
+the sea. I asked Garstin whether he had been stationed on the rock at
+the time.
+
+"People talk of lightships plunging and tugging at their cables," he
+returned. "Well, I've tried lightships, and what I say is, ships are
+built to plunge and tug at their cables. That's their business. But it
+isn't the business of one hundred and twenty upright feet of granite
+to quiver and tremble like a steel spring. No, I wasn't on the Bishop
+when the bell went. But I was there when a wave climbed up from the
+base of the rock and smashed in the glass wall of the lantern, and put
+the light out. That was last spring at four o'clock in the morning.
+The day was breaking very cold and wild, and one could just see the
+waves below, a lashing tumble of grey and white water as far as the
+eye could reach. I was in the lantern reading 'It's never too late to
+mend.' I had come to where the chaplain knocks down the warder, and I
+was thinking how I'd like to have a go at that warder myself, when all
+the guns in the world went off together in my ears. And there I was
+dripping wet, and fairly sliced with splinters of glass, and the wind
+blowing wet in my face, and the lamp out, and a bitter grey light of
+morning, as though there never, never had been any sun, and all the
+dead men in the sea shouting out for me one hundred feet below," and
+Garstin shivered, and rose to his feet. "Well, I have only one more
+winter of it."
+
+"And then?" I asked.
+
+"Then I get the North Foreland, and the trippers come out from
+Margate, and I live on shore with my wife and--By the way, I wanted to
+speak to you about my boy. He's getting up in years. What shall I make
+of him? A linen-draper, eh? In the Midlands, what? or something in a
+Free Library, handing out Charles Reade's books? He's at home now.
+Come and see him!"
+
+In Garstin's quarters, within the coastguard enclosure, I was
+introduced to his wife and the lad, Leopold. "What shall we call him?"
+Mrs. Garstin had asked, some fifteen years before. "I don't know any
+seafaring man by the name of Leopold," Garstin had replied, after a
+moment of reflection. So Leopold he was named.
+
+Mrs. Garstin was a buxom, unimaginative woman, but she shared to the
+full her husband's horror of the sea. She told me of nights when she
+lay alone listening to the moan of the wind overhead, and seeing the
+column of the Bishop rock upon its base, and of mornings when she
+climbed from the sheltered barracks up the gorse, with her heart
+tugging in her breast, certain, certain that this morning, at least,
+there would be no Bishop lighthouse visible from the top of the
+garrison.
+
+"It seems a sort of insult to the works of God," said she, in a hushed
+voice. "It seems as if it stood up there in God's face and cried, 'You
+can't hurt me!'"
+
+"Yes, most presumptuous and provoking," said Garstin; and so they fell
+to talking of the boy, who, at all events, should fulfil his
+destiny very far inland from the sea. Mrs. Garstin leaned to the
+linen-drapery; Garstin inclined to the free library.
+
+"Well, I will come down to the North Foreland," said I, "and you shall
+tell me which way it is."
+
+"Yes, if--" said Garstin, and stopped.
+
+"Yes, if--" repeated his wife, with a nod of the head.
+
+"Oh! it won't go this winter," said I.
+
+And it didn't. But, on the other hand, Garstin did not go to the North
+Foreland, nor for two years did I hear any more of him. But two years
+later I returned to St. Mary's and walked across the beach of the
+island to the little graveyard by the sea. A new tablet upon the outer
+wall of the church caught and held my eye. I read the inscription and
+remained incredulous. For the Bishop still stood. But the letters were
+there engraved upon the plate, and as I read them again, the futility
+of Garstin's fears was enforced upon me with a singular pathos.
+
+For the Bishop still stood and Garstin had died on the Christmas Eve
+of that last year which he was to spend upon rock lighthouses. Of how
+he died the tablet gave a hint, but no more than a hint. There were
+four words inscribed underneath his name:
+
+  "And he was not."
+
+I walked back to Hugh Town, wondering at the tragedy which those four
+words half hid and half revealed, and remembering that the tide runs
+seven miles an hour past the Bishop, with many eddies and whirlpools.
+Almost unconsciously I went up the hill above Hugh Town and came to
+the signal station on the top of the garrison. And so occupied was I
+with my recollections of Garstin that it did not strike me as strange
+that I should find Mrs. Garstin standing now where he had stood and
+looking out to the Bishop as he was used to look.
+
+"I had not heard," I said to her.
+
+"No?" she returned simply, and again turned her eyes seawards. It was
+late on a midsummer afternoon. The sun hung a foot or so above the
+water, a huge ball of dull red fire, and from St. Mary's out to the
+horizon's rim the sea stretched a rippling lagoon of the colour of
+claret. Over the whole expanse there was but one boat visible, a
+lugger, between Sennen and St. Agnes, beating homewards against a
+light wind.
+
+"It was a storm, I suppose," said I. "A storm out of the west?"
+
+"No. There was no wind, but--there was a haze, and it was growing
+dark." Mrs. Garstin spoke in a peculiar tone of resignation, with a
+yearning glance towards the Bishop as I thought, towards the lugger as
+I know. But even then I was sure that those last words: "There was a
+haze and it was growing dark," concealed the heart of her distress.
+She explained the inscription upon the tablet, while the lugger tacked
+towards St. Mary's, and while I gradually began to wonder what still
+kept her on the island.
+
+At four o'clock on the afternoon of that Christmas Eve, the lighthouse
+on St. Agnes' Island showed its lamps; five minutes later the red
+beams struck out from Round Island to the north; but to the west on
+the Bishop all was dark. The haze thickened, and night came on; still
+there was no flash from the Bishop, and the islands wondered. Half an
+hour passed; there was still darkness in the west, and the islands
+became alarmed. The Trinity Brethren subsidise a St. Agnes' lugger to
+serve the Bishop, and this boat was got ready. At a quarter to five
+suddenly the Bishop light shot through the gloom, but immediately
+after a shutter was interposed quickly some half-a-dozen times. It was
+the signal of distress, and the lugger worked out to the Bishop with
+the tide. Of the three keepers there were now only two.
+
+It appeared from their account that Garstin took the middle day watch,
+that they themselves were asleep, and that Garstin should have roused
+them to light the lamps at a quarter to four. They woke of their own
+accord in the dark, and at once believed they had slept into the
+night. The clock showed them it was half-past four. They mounted to
+the lantern room, and nowhere was there any sign of Garstin. They lit
+the lamps. The first thing they saw was the log. It was open and the
+last entry was written in Garstin's hand and was timed 3.40 P.M. It
+mentioned a ketch reaching northwards. The two men descended the
+winding-stairs, and the cold air breathed upon their faces. The brass
+door at the foot of the stairs stood open. From that door thirty feet
+of gun-metal rungs let in to the outside of the lighthouse lead down
+to the set-off, which is a granite rim less than a yard wide, and
+unprotected by any rail. They shouted downwards from the doorway,
+and received no answer. They descended to the set-off, and again no
+Garstin, not even his cap. He was not.
+
+Garstin had entered up the log, had climbed down to the set-off for
+five minutes of fresh air, and somehow had slipped, though the wind
+was light and the sea whispering. But the whispering sea ran seven
+miles an hour past the Bishop.
+
+This was Mrs. Garstin's story and it left me still wondering why she
+lived on at St. Mary's. I asked after her son.
+
+"How is Leopold? What is he--a linen-draper?" She shaded her eyes with
+her hand and said:
+
+"That's the St. Agnes' lugger from the Bishop, and if we go down to
+the pier now we shall meet it."
+
+We walked down to the pier. The first person to step on shore was
+Leopold, with the Trinity House buttons on his pilot coat.
+
+"He's the third hand on the Bishop now," said Mrs. Garstin. "You are
+surprised?" She sent Leopold into Hugh Town upon an errand, and as we
+walked back up the hill she said: "Did you notice a grave underneath
+John's tablet?"
+
+"No," said I.
+
+"I told you there was a mention in the log of a ketch."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The ketch went ashore on the Crebinachs at half-past four on that
+Christmas Eve. One man jumped for the rocks when the ketch struck, and
+was drowned. The rest were brought off by the lugger. But one man was
+drowned."
+
+"He drowned because he jumped," said I.
+
+"He drowned because my man hadn't lit the Bishop light," said she,
+brushing my sophistry aside. "So I gave my boy in his place."
+
+And now I knew why those words--"There was a haze and it was growing
+dark"--held the heart of her distress.
+
+"And if the Bishop goes next winter," she continued, "why, it will
+just be a life for a life;" and she choked down a sob as a young voice
+hailed us from behind.
+
+But the Bishop still stands in the Atlantic, and Leopold, now the
+second hand, explains to the Margate trippers the wonders of the North
+Foreland lights.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRUISE OF THE "WILLING MIND."
+
+
+The cruise happened before the steam-trawler ousted the smack from the
+North Sea. A few newspapers recorded it in half-a-dozen lines of
+small print which nobody read. But it became and--though nowadays the
+_Willing Mind_ rots from month to month by the quay--remains staple
+talk at Gorleston ale-houses on winter nights.
+
+The crew consisted of Weeks, three fairly competent hands, and a
+baker's assistant, when the _Willing Mind_ slipped out of Yarmouth.
+Alexander Duncan, the photographer from Derby, joined the smack
+afterwards under peculiar circumstances. Duncan was a timid person,
+but aware of his timidity. He was quite clear that his paramount
+business was to be a man; and he was equally clear that he was not
+successful in his paramount business. Meanwhile he pretended to be,
+hoping that on some miraculous day a sudden test would prove the straw
+man he was to have become real flesh and blood. A visit to a surgeon
+and the flick of a knife quite shattered that illusion. He went
+down to Yarmouth afterwards, fairly disheartened. The test had been
+applied, and he had failed.
+
+Now, Weeks was a particular friend of Duncan's. They had chummed
+together on Gorleston Quay some years before, perhaps because they
+were so dissimilar. Weeks had taught Duncan to sail a boat, and had
+once or twice taken him for a short trip on his smack; so that the
+first thing that Duncan did on his arrival at Yarmouth was to take the
+tram to Gorleston and to make inquiries.
+
+A fisherman lounging against a winch replied to them---
+
+"If Weeks is a friend o' yours I should get used to missin' 'im, as I
+tell his wife."
+
+There was at that time an ingenious system by which the skipper might
+buy his smack from the owner on the instalment plan--as people buy
+their furniture--only with a difference: for people sometimes get
+their furniture. The instalments had to be completed within a certain
+period. The skipper could do it--he could just do it; but he couldn't
+do it without running up one little bill here for stores, and another
+little bill there for sail-mending. The owner worked in with the
+sail-maker, and just as the skipper was putting out to earn his last
+instalment, he would find the bailiffs on board, his cruise would be
+delayed, he would be, consequently, behindhand with his instalment and
+back would go the smack to the owner with a present of four-fifths of
+its price. Weeks had to pay two hundred pounds, and had eight weeks to
+earn it in. But he got the straight tip that his sail-maker would stop
+him; and getting together any sort of crew he could, he slipped out at
+night with half his stores.
+
+"Now the No'th Sea," concluded the fisherman, "in November and
+December ain't a bobby's job."
+
+Duncan walked forward to the pier-head. He looked out at a grey
+tumbled sky shutting down on a grey tumbled sea. There were flecks of
+white cloud in the sky, flecks of white breakers on the sea, and it
+was all most dreary. He stood at the end of the jetty, and his great
+possibility came out of the grey to him. Weeks was shorthanded.
+Cribbed within a few feet of the smack's deck, there would be no
+chance for any man to shirk. Duncan acted on the impulse. He bought a
+fisherman's outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage
+the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went
+throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green
+globes of the Mouse. The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him
+good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o'clock the next night
+far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on
+the Dogger.
+
+The _Willing Mind's_ boat came aboard the next morning and Captain
+Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had
+learnt that the smack was shorthanded.
+
+"I can't put you ashore in Denmark," said Weeks knowingly. "There'll
+be seven weeks, it's true, for things to blow over; but I'll have to
+take you back to Yarmouth. And I can't afford a passenger. If you
+come, you come as a hand. I mean to own my smack at the end of this
+voyage."
+
+Duncan climbed after him into the boat. The _Willing Mind_ had now
+six for her crew, Weeks; his son Willie, a lad of sixteen; Upton,
+the first hand; Deakin, the decky; Rall, the baker's assistant, and
+Alexander Duncan. And of these six four were almost competent. Deakin,
+it is true, was making his second voyage; but Willie Weeks, though
+young, had begun early; and Upton, a man of forty, knew the banks and
+currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks.
+
+"It's all right," said the skipper, "if the weather holds." And for
+a month the weather did hold, and the catches were good, and Duncan
+learned a great deal. He learnt how to keep a night-watch from
+midnight till eight in the morning, and then stay on deck till noon;
+how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel, and how
+to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to
+lee; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it; to gauge the
+leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in
+the compass; above all, he learnt to love the boat like a live thing,
+as a man loves his horse, and to want every scanty inch of brass on
+her to shine.
+
+But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea. He gazed out
+at night across the rippling starlit water, and the smacks nestling
+upon it, and asked of his God: "Is this all?" And his God answered
+him.
+
+The beginning of it was the sudden looming of ships upon the horizon,
+very clear, till they looked like carved toys. The skipper got out his
+accounts and totted up his catches, and the prices they had fetched
+in Billingsgate Market. Then he went on deck and watched the sun set.
+There were no cloud-banks in the west, and he shook his head.
+
+"It'll blow a bit from the east before morning," said he, and he
+tapped on the barometer. Then he returned to his accounts and added
+them up again. After a little he looked up, and saw the first hand
+watching him with comprehension.
+
+"Two or three really good hauls would do the trick," suggested Weeks.
+
+The first hand nodded. "If it was my boat I should chance it to-morrow
+before the weather blows up."
+
+Weeks drummed his fists on the table and agreed.
+
+On the morrow the Admiral headed north for the Great Fisher Bank, and
+the fleet followed, with the exception of the _Willing Mind_. The
+_Willing Mind_ lagged along in the rear without her topsails till
+about half-past two in the afternoon, when Captain Weeks became
+suddenly alert. He bore away till he was right before the wind,
+hoisted every scrap of sail he could carry, rigged out a spinnaker
+with his balloon fore-sail, and made a clean run for the coast of
+Denmark. Deakin explained the manoeuvre to Duncan. "The old man's
+goin' poachin'. He's after soles."
+
+"Keep a look-out, lads!" cried Weeks. "It's not the Danish gun-boat
+I'm afraid of; it's the fatherly English cruiser a-turning of us
+back."
+
+Darkness, however, found them unmolested. They crossed the three-mile
+limit at eight o'clock, and crept close in under the Danish headlands
+without a glimmer of light showing.
+
+"I want all hands all night," said Weeks; "and there's a couple of
+pounds for him as first see the bogey-man."
+
+"Meaning the Danish gun-boat," explained Deakin.
+
+The trawl was down before nine. The skipper stood by his lead. Upton
+took the wheel, and all night they trawled in the shallows, bumping on
+the grounds, with a sharp eye for the Danish gun-boat. They hauled in
+at twelve and again at three and again at six, and they had just got
+their last catch on deck when Duncan saw by the first grey of the
+morning a dun-coloured trail of smoke hanging over a projecting knoll.
+
+"There she is!" he cried.
+
+"Yes, that's the gun-boat," answered Weeks. "We can laugh at her with
+this wind."
+
+He put his smack about, and before the gun-boat puffed round the
+headland, three miles away, was reaching northwards with his sails
+free. He rejoined the fleet that afternoon. "Fifty-two boxes of
+soles!" said Weeks. "And every one of them worth two-pound-ten in
+Billingsgate Market. This smack's mine!" and he stamped on the deck in
+all the pride of ownership. "We'll take a reef in," he added. "There's
+a no'th-easterly gale blowin' up and I don't know anything worse in
+the No'th Sea. The sea piles in upon you from Newfoundland, piles in
+till it strikes the banks. Then it breaks. You were right, Upton;
+we'll be lying hove-to in the morning."
+
+They were lying hove-to before the morning. Duncan, tossing about
+in his canvas cot, heard the skipper stamping overhead, and in an
+interval of the wind caught a snatch of song bawled out in a high
+voice. The song was not reassuring, for the two lines which Duncan
+caught ran as follows--
+
+  You never can tell when your death-bells are ringing,
+  Your never can know when you're going to die.
+
+Duncan tumbled on to the floor, fell about the cabin as he pulled
+on his sea-boots and climbed up the companion. He clung to the
+mizzen-runners in a night of extraordinary blackness. To port and to
+starboard the lights of the smacks rose on the crests and sank in the
+troughs, with such violence they had the air of being tossed up into
+the sky and then extinguished in the water; while all round him there
+flashed little points of white which suddenly lengthened out into
+a horizontal line. There was one quite close to the quarter of the
+_Willing Mind_. It stretched about the height of the gaff in a line of
+white. The line suddenly descended towards him and became a sheet; and
+then a voice bawled, "Water! Jump! Down the companion! Jump!"
+
+There was a scamper of heavy boots, and a roar of water plunging over
+the bulwarks, as though so many loads of wood had been dropped on the
+deck. Duncan jumped for the cabin. Weeks and the mate jumped the next
+second and the water sluiced down after them, put out the fire, and
+washed them, choking and wrestling, about on the cabin floor. Weeks
+was the first to disentangle himself, and he turned fiercely on
+Duncan.
+
+"What were you doing on deck? Upton and I keep the watch to-night. You
+stay below, and, by God, I'll see you do it! I have fifty-two boxes of
+soles to put aboard the fish-cutter in the morning, and I'm not going
+to lose lives before I do that! This smack's mine!"
+
+Captain Weeks was transformed into a savage animal fighting for his
+own. All night he and the mate stood on the deck and plunged down the
+open companion with a torrent of water to hurry them. All night Duncan
+lay in his bunk listening to the bellowing of the wind, the great
+thuds of solid green wave on the deck, the horrid rush and roaring of
+the seas as they broke loose to leeward from under the smack's keel.
+And he listened to something more--the whimpering of the baker's
+assistant in the next bunk. "Three inches of deck! What's the use
+of it! Lord ha' mercy on me, what's the use of it? No more than an
+eggshell! We'll be broken in afore morning, broken in like a man's
+skull under a bludgeon.... I'm no sailor, I'm not; I'm a baker. It
+isn't right I should die at sea!"
+
+Duncan stopped his ears, and thought of the journey some one would
+have to make to the fish-cutter in the morning. There were fifty-two
+boxes of soles to be put aboard.
+
+He remembered the waves and the swirl of foam upon their crests and
+the wind. Two men would be needed to row the boat, and the boat must
+make three trips. The skipper and the first hand had been on deck all
+night. There remained four, or rather three, for the baker's assistant
+had ceased to count--Willie Weeks, Deakin, and himself, not a great
+number to choose from. He felt that he was within an ace of a panic,
+and not so far, after all, from that whimperer his neighbour. Two men
+to row the boat--two men! His hands clutched at the iron bar of his
+hammock; he closed his eyes tight; but the words were thundered out at
+him overhead, in the whistle of the wind, and slashed at him by the
+water against the planks at his side. He found that his lips were
+framing excuses.
+
+Duncan was on deck when the morning broke. It broke extraordinarily
+slowly, a niggardly filtering of grey, sad light from the under edge
+of the sea. The bare topmasts of the smacks showed one after the
+other. Duncan watched each boat as it came into view with a keen
+suspense. This was a ketch, and that, and that other, for there was
+the peak of its reefed mainsail just visible, like a bird's wing, and
+at last he saw it--the fish-cutter--lurching and rolling in the very
+middle of the fleet, whither she had crept up in the night. He stared
+at it; his belly was pinched with fear as a starveling's with
+hunger; and yet he was conscious that, in a way, he would have been
+disappointed if it had not been there.
+
+"No other smack is shipping its fish," quavered a voice at his elbow.
+It was the voice of the baker's assistant.
+
+"But this smack is," replied Weeks, and he set his mouth hard. "And,
+what's more, my Willie is taking it aboard. Now, who'll go with
+Willie?"
+
+"I will."
+
+Weeks swung round on Duncan and stared at him. Then he stared out to
+sea. Then he stared again at Duncan.
+
+"You?"
+
+"When I shipped as a hand on the _Willing Mind_, I took all a hand's
+risks."
+
+"And brought the willing mind," said Weeks with a smile, "Go, then!
+Some one must go. Get the boat tackle ready, forward. Here, Willie,
+put your life-belt on. You, too, Duncan, though God knows life-belts
+won't be of no manner of use; but they'll save your insurance. Steady
+with the punt there! If it slips inboard off the rail there will be a
+broken back! And, Willie, don't get under the cutter's counter. She'll
+come atop of you and smash you like an egg. I'll drop you as close as
+I can to windward, and pick you up as close as I can to leeward."
+
+The boat was dropped into the water and loaded up with fish-boxes.
+Duncan and Willie Weeks took their places, and the boat slid away into
+a furrow. Duncan sat in the boat and rowed. Willie Weeks stood in the
+stern, facing him, and rowed and steered.
+
+"Water!" said Willie every now and then, and a wave curled over the
+bows and hit Duncan a stunning blow on the back.
+
+"Row," said Willie, and Duncan rowed and rowed. His hands were ice, he
+sat in water ice-cold, and his body perspired beneath his oil-skins,
+but he rowed. Once, on the crest of a wave, Duncan looked out and saw
+below them the deck of a smack, and the crew looking upwards at them
+as though they were a horserace. "Row!" said Willie Weeks. Once, too,
+at the bottom of a slope down which they had bumped dizzily, Duncan
+again looked out, and saw the spar of a mainmast tossing just over the
+edge of a grey roller. "Row," said Weeks, and a moment later, "Ship
+your oar!" and a rope caught him across the chest.
+
+They were alongside the cutter.
+
+Duncan made fast the rope.
+
+"Push her off!" suddenly cried Willie, and grasped an oar. But he was
+too late. The cutter's bulwarks swung down towards him, disappeared
+under water, caught the punt fairly beneath the keel and scooped it
+clean on to the deck, cargo and crew.
+
+"And this is only the first trip!" said Willie.
+
+The two following trips, however, were made without accident.
+
+"Fifty-two boxes at two-pound-ten," said Weeks, as the boat was swung
+inboard. "That's a hundred and four, and ten two's are twenty, and
+carry two, and ten fives are fifty, and two carried, and twenties into
+that makes twenty-six. One hundred and thirty pounds--this smack's
+mine, every rope on her. I tell you what, Duncan: you've done me a
+good turn to-day, and I'll do you another. I'll land you at Helsund,
+in Denmark, and you can get clear away. All we can do now is to lie
+out this gale."
+
+Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray
+blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog. The heavy bows of
+the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss--the thud of a
+steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves
+raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away
+in a spume of foam from the ship's keel to lee; and the thrumming and
+screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had
+ever imagined. He clung to the stays appalled. This storm was surely
+the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury. There
+seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to
+wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the
+steady volume of the wind.
+
+Captain Weeks, too, had lost all of a sudden all his exhilaration. He
+stood moodily by Duncan's side, his mind evidently labouring like
+his ship. He told Duncan stories which Duncan would rather not have
+listened to, the story of the man who slipped as he stepped from the
+deck into the punt, and weighted by his boots, had sunk down and down
+and down through the clearest, calmest water without a struggle; the
+story of the punt which got its painter under its keel and drowned
+three men; the story of the full-rigged ship which got driven across
+the seven-fathom part of the Dogger--the part that looks like a man's
+leg in the chart--and which was turned upside-down through the bank
+breaking. The skipper and the mate got outside and clung to her
+bottom, and a steam-cutter tried to get them off, but smashed them
+both with her iron counter instead.
+
+"Look!" said Weeks, gloomily pointing his finger. "I don't know why
+that breaker didn't hit us. I don't know what we should have done if
+it had. I can't think why it didn't hit us! Are you saved?"
+
+Duncan was taken aback, and answered vaguely--"I hope so."
+
+"But you must know," said Weeks, perplexed. The wind made a
+theological discussion difficult. Weeks curved his hand into a
+trumpet, and bawled into Duncan's ear: "You are either saved or not
+saved! It's a thing one knows. You must know if you are saved, if
+you've felt the glow and illumination of it." He suddenly broke off
+into a shout of triumph: "But I got my fish on board the cutter. The
+_Willing Mind's_ the on'y boat that did." Then he relapsed again into
+melancholy: "But I'm troubled about the poachin'. The temptation was
+great, but it wasn't right; and I'm not sure but what this storm ain't
+a judgment."
+
+He was silent for a little, and then cheered up. "I tell you what.
+Since we're hove-to, we'll have a prayer-meeting in the cabin to-night
+and smooth things over."
+
+The meeting was held after tea, by the light of a smoking
+paraffin-lamp with a broken chimney. The crew sat round and smoked,
+the companion was open, so that the swish of the water and the man on
+deck alike joined in the hymns. Rail, the baker's assistant, who had
+once been a steady attendant at Revivalist meetings, led off with a
+Moody and Sankey hymn, and the crew followed, bawling at the top pitch
+of their lungs, with now and then some suggestion of a tune. The
+little stuffy cabin rang with the noise. It burst upwards through the
+companion-way, loud and earnest and plaintive, and the winds caught
+it and carried it over the water, a thin and appealing cry. After the
+hymn Weeks prayed aloud, and extempore and most seriously. He
+prayed for each member of the crew by name, one by one, taking the
+opportunity to mention in detail each fault which he had had to
+complain of, and begging that the offender's chastisement might be
+light. Of Duncan he spoke in ambiguous terms.
+
+"O Lord!" he prayed, "a strange gentleman, Mr. Duncan, has come
+amongst us. O Lord! we do not know as much about Mr. Duncan as You do,
+but still bless him, O Lord!" and so he came to himself.
+
+"O Lord! this smack's mine, this little smack labouring in the North
+Sea is mine. Through my poachin' and your lovin' kindness it's mine;
+and, O Lord, see that it don't cost me dear!" And the crew solemnly
+and fervently said "Amen!"
+
+But the smack was to cost him dear. For in the morning Duncan woke to
+find himself alone in the cabin. He thrust his head up the companion,
+and saw Weeks with a very grey face standing by the lashed wheel.
+
+"Halloa!" said Duncan. "Where's the binnacle?"
+
+"Overboard," said Weeks.
+
+Duncan looked round the deck.
+
+"Where's Willie and the crew?"
+
+"Overboard," said Weeks. "All except Rail! He's below deck forward and
+clean daft. Listen and you'll hear 'im. He's singing hymns for those
+in peril on the sea."
+
+Duncan stared in disbelief. The skipper's face drove the disbelief out
+of him.
+
+"Why didn't you wake me?" he asked.
+
+"What's the use? You want all the sleep you can get, because you an'
+me have got to sail my smack into Yarmouth. But I was minded to call
+you, lad," he said, with a sort of cry leaping from his throat. "The
+wave struck us at about twelve, and it's been mighty lonesome on deck
+since with Willie callin' out of the sea. All night he's been callin'
+out of the welter of the sea. Funny that I haven't heard Upton or
+Deakin, but on'y Willie! All night until daybreak he called, first on
+one side of the smack and then on t'other, I don't think I'll tell his
+mother that. An' I don't see how I'm to put you on shore in Denmark,
+after all."
+
+What had happened Duncan put together from the curt utterances of
+Captain Weeks and the crazy lamentations of Rail. Weeks had roused all
+hands except Duncan to take the last reef in. They were forward by the
+mainmast at the time the wave struck them. Weeks himself was on the
+boom, threading the reefing-rope through the eye of the sail. He
+shouted "Water!" and the water came on board, carrying the three men
+aft. Upton was washed over the taffrail. Weeks threw one end of the
+rope down, and Rail and Willie caught it and were swept overboard,
+dragging Weeks from the boom on to the deck and jamming him against
+the bulwarks.
+
+The captain held on to the rope, setting his feet against the side.
+The smack lifted and dropped and tossed, and each movement wrenched
+his arms. He could not reach a cleat. Had he moved he would have been
+jerked overboard.
+
+"I can't hold you both!" he cried, and then, setting his teeth and
+hardening his heart, he addressed his words to his son: "Willie! I
+can't hold you both!" and immediately the weight upon the rope was
+less. With each drop of the stern the rope slackened, and Weeks
+gathered the slack in. He could now afford to move. He made the rope
+fast and hauled the one survivor on deck. He looked at him for a
+moment. "Thank God, it's not my son!" he had the courage to say.
+
+"And my heart's broke!" had gasped Rail. "Fair broke." And he had gone
+forward and sung hymns.
+
+They saw little more of Rall. He came aft and fetched his meals away;
+but he was crazed and made a sort of kennel for himself forward, and
+the two men left on the smack had enough upon their hands to hinder
+them from waiting on him. The gale showed no sign of abatement; the
+fleet was scattered; no glimpse of the sun was visible at any time;
+and the compass was somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
+
+"We may be making a bit of headway no'th, or a bit of leeway west,"
+said Weeks, "or we may be doing a sternboard. All that I'm sure of
+is that you and me are one day going to open Gorleston Harbour. This
+smack's cost me too dear for me to lose her now. Lucky there's the
+tell-tale compass in the cabin to show us the wind hasn't shifted."
+
+All the energy of the man was concentrated upon this wrestle with the
+gale for the ownership of the _Willing Mind_; and he imparted his
+energy to his companion. They lived upon deck, wet and starved and
+perishing with the cold--the cold of December in the North Sea, when
+the spray cuts the face like a whip-cord. They ate by snatches when
+they could, which was seldom; and they slept by snatches when they
+could, which was even less often. And at the end of the fourth day
+there came a blinding fall of snow and sleet, which drifted down
+the companion, sheeted the ropes with ice, and hung the yards with
+icicles, and which made every inch of brass a searing-iron and every
+yard of the deck a danger to the foot.
+
+It was when this storm began to fall that Weeks grasped Duncan
+fiercely by the shoulder.
+
+"What is it you did on land?" he cried. "Confess it, man! There may be
+some chance for us if you go down on your knees and confess it."
+
+Duncan turned as fiercely upon Weeks. Both men were overstrained with
+want of food and sleep.
+
+"I'm not your Jonah--don't fancy it! I did nothing on land!"
+
+"Then what did you come out for?"
+
+"What did you? To fight and wrestle for your ship, eh? Well, I came
+out to fight and wrestle for my immortal soul, and let it go at that!"
+
+Weeks turned away, and as he turned, slipped on the frozen deck. A
+lurch of the smack sent him sliding into the rudder-chains, where he
+lay. Once he tried to rise, and fell back. Duncan hauled himself along
+the bulwarks to him.
+
+"Hurt?"
+
+"Leg broke. Get me down into the cabin. Lucky there's the tell-tale.
+We'll get the _Willing Mind_ berthed by the quay, see if we don't."
+That was still his one thought, his one belief.
+
+Duncan hitched a rope round Weeks, underneath his arms, and lowered
+him as gently as he could down the companion.
+
+"Lift me on to the table so that my head's just beneath the compass!
+Right! Now take a turn with the rope underneath the table, or I'll
+roll off. Push an oily under my head, and then go for'ard and see if
+you can find a fish-box. Take a look that the wheel's fast."
+
+It seemed to Duncan that the last chance was gone. There was just one
+inexperienced amateur to change the sails and steer a seventy-ton
+ketch across the North Sea into Yarmouth Roads. He said nothing,
+however, of his despair to the indomitable man upon the table, and
+went forward in search of a fish-box. He split up the sides into rough
+splints and came aft with them.
+
+"Thank 'ee, lad," said Weeks. "Just cut my boot away, and fix it up
+best you can."
+
+The tossing of the smack made the operation difficult and long. Weeks,
+however, never uttered a groan. Only Duncan once looked up, and
+said--"Halloa! You've hurt your face too. There's blood on your chin!"
+
+"That's all right!" said Weeks, with an effort. "I reckon I've just
+bit through my lip."
+
+Duncan stopped his work.
+
+"You've got a medicine-chest, skipper, with some laudanum in it--?"
+
+"Daren't!" replied Weeks. "There's on'y you and me to work the ship.
+Fix up the job quick as you can, and I'll have a drink of Friar's
+Balsam afterwards. Seems to me the gale's blowing itself out, and if
+on'y the wind holds in the same quarter--" And thereupon he fainted.
+
+Duncan bandaged up the leg, got Weeks round, gave him a drink of
+Friar's Balsam, set the teapot within his reach, and went on deck. The
+wind was going down; the air was clearer of foam. He tallowed the lead
+and heaved it, and brought it down to Weeks. Weeks looked at the sand
+stuck on the tallow and tasted it, and seemed pleased.
+
+"This gives me my longitude," said he, "but not my latitude, worse
+luck. Still, we'll manage it. You'd better get our dinner now; any odd
+thing in the way of biscuits or a bit of cold fish will do, and then I
+think we'll be able to run."
+
+After dinner Duncan said: "I'll put her about now."
+
+"No; wear her and let her jibe," said Weeks, "then you'll on'y have to
+ease your sheets."
+
+Duncan stood at the wheel, while Weeks, with the compass swinging
+above his head, shouted directions through the companion. They sailed
+the boat all that night with the wind on her quarter, and at daybreak
+Duncan brought her to and heaved his lead again. There was rough sand
+with blackish specks upon the tallow, and Weeks, when he saw it,
+forgot his broken leg.
+
+"My word," he cried, "we've hit the Fisher Bank! You'd best lash the
+wheel, get our breakfast, and take a spell of sleep on deck. Tie a
+string to your finger and pass it down to me, so that I can wake you
+up."
+
+Weeks waked him up at ten o'clock, and they ran southwest with a
+steady wind till six, when Weeks shouted--
+
+"Take another cast with your lead."
+
+The sand upon the tallow was white like salt.
+
+"Yes," said Weeks; "I thought we was hereabouts. We're on the edge of
+the Dogger, and we'll be in Yarmouth by the morning." And all through
+the night the orders came thick and fast from the cabin. Weeks was on
+his own ground; he had no longer any need of the lead; he seemed no
+longer to need his eyes; he felt his way across the currents from the
+Dogger to the English coast; and at daybreak he shouted--
+
+"Can you see land?"
+
+"There's a mist."
+
+"Lie to, then, till the sun's up."
+
+Duncan lay the boat to for a couple of hours, till the mist was tinged
+with gold and the ball of the sun showed red on his starboard quarter.
+The mist sank, the brown sails of a smack thrust upwards through it;
+coastwards it shifted and thinned and thickened, as though cunningly
+to excite expectation as to what it hid. Again Weeks called out--
+
+"See anything?"
+
+"Yes," said Duncan, in a perplexed voice. "I see something. Looks like
+a sort of mediaeval castle on a rock."
+
+A shout of laughter answered him.
+
+"That's the Gorleston Hotel. The harbour-mouth's just beneath. We've
+hit it fine," and while he spoke the mist swept clear, and the long,
+treeless esplanade of Yarmouth lay there a couple of miles from
+Duncan's eyes, glistening and gilded in the sun like a row of dolls'
+houses.
+
+"Haul in your sheets a bit," said Weeks. "Keep no'th of the hotel, for
+the tide'll set you up and we'll sail her in without dawdlin' behind
+a tug. Get your mainsail down as best you can before you make the
+entrance."
+
+Half an hour afterwards the smack sailed between the pier-heads.
+
+"Who are you?" cried the harbour-master.
+
+"The _Willing Mind_."
+
+"The _Willing Mind's_ reported lost with all hands."
+
+"Well, here's the _Willing Mind_," said Duncan, "and here's one of the
+hands."
+
+The irrepressible voice bawled up the companion to complete the
+sentence--
+
+"And the owner's reposin' in his cabin." But in a lower key he added
+words for his own ears. "There's the old woman to meet. Lord! but the
+_Willing Mind_ has cost me dear."
+
+
+
+
+HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG.
+
+
+Norris wanted a holiday. He stood in the marketplace looking
+southwards to the chimney-stacks, and dilating upon the subject to
+three of his friends. He was sick of the Stock Exchange, the men, the
+women, the drinks, the dances--everything. He was as indifferent to
+the price of shares as to the rise and fall of the quicksilver in his
+barometer; he neither desired to go in on the ground floor nor to come
+out in the attics. He simply wanted to get clean away. Besides he
+foresaw a slump, and he would be actually saving money on the veld. At
+this point Teddy Isaacs strolled up and interrupted the oration.
+
+"Where are you off to, then?"
+
+"Manicaland," answered Norris.
+
+"Oh! You had better bring Barrington back."
+
+Teddy Isaacs was a fresh comer to the Rand, and knew no better.
+Barrington meant to him nothing more than the name of a man who had
+been lost twelve months before on the eastern borders of Mashonaland.
+But he saw three pairs of eyebrows lift simultaneously, and heard
+three simultaneous outbursts on the latest Uitlander grievance.
+However, Norris answered him quietly enough.
+
+"Yes, if I come across Barrington, I'll bring him back." He nodded his
+head once or twice and smiled. "You may make sure of that," he added,
+and turned away from the group.
+
+Isaacs gathered that there had been trouble between Barrington
+and Morris, and applied to his companions for information. The
+commencement of the trouble, he was told, dated back to the time when
+the two men were ostrich-farming side by side, close to Port Elizabeth
+in the Cape Colony. Norris owned a wife; Barrington did not. The story
+was sufficiently ugly as Johannesburg was accustomed to relate it, but
+upon this occasion Teddy Isaacs was allowed to infer the details. He
+was merely put in possession of the more immediate facts. Barrington
+had left the Cape Colony in a hurry, and coming north to the Transvaal
+when Johannesburg was as yet in its brief infancy, had prospered
+exceedingly. Meanwhile, Norris, as the ostrich industry declined, had
+gone from worse to worse, and finally he too drifted to Johannesburg
+with the rest of the flotsam of South Africa. He came to the town
+alone, and met Barrington one morning eye to eye on the Stock
+Exchange. A certain amount of natural disappointment was expressed
+when the pair were seen to separate without hostilities; but it was
+subsequently remarked that they were fighting out their duel, though
+not in the conventional way. They fought with shares, and Barrington
+won. He had the clearer head, and besides, Norris didn't need much
+ruining; Barrington could see to that in his spare time. It was, in
+fact, as though Norris stood up with a derringer to face a machine
+gun. His turn, however, had come after Barrington's disappearance, and
+he was now able to contemplate an expedition into Manicaland without
+reckoning up his pass-book.
+
+He bought a buck-wagon with a tent covering over the hinder part,
+provisions sufficient for six months, a span of oxen, a couple of
+horses salted for the thickhead sickness, hired a Griqua lad as
+wagon-driver, and half a dozen Matabele boys who were waiting for a
+chance to return, and started northeastward.
+
+From Johannesburg he travelled to Makoni's town, near the Zimbabwe
+ruins, and with half a dozen brass rings and an empty cartridge case
+hired a Ma-ongwi boy, who had been up to the Mashonaland plateau
+before. The lad guided him to the head waters of the Inyazuri, and
+there Norris fenced in his camp, in a grass country fairly wooded, and
+studded with gigantic blocks of granite.
+
+The Ma-ongwi boy chose the site, fifty yards west of an ant-heap, and
+about a quarter of a mile from a forest of machabel. He had camped on
+the spot before, he said.
+
+"When?" asked Norris.
+
+"Twice," replied the boy. "Three years ago and last year."
+
+"Last year?" Norris looked up with a start of surprise. "You were up
+here last year?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+For a moment or two Norris puffed at his pipe, then he asked slowly--
+
+"Who with?"
+
+"Mr. Barrington," the boy told him, and added, "It is his wagon-track
+which we have been following."
+
+Norris rose from the ground, and walked straight ahead for the
+distance of a hundred yards until he reached a jasmine bush, which
+stood in a bee-line with the opening of his camp fence. Thence he
+moved round in a semicircle until he came upon a wagon-track in the
+rear of the camp, and, after pausing there, he went forward again, and
+completed the circle. He returned to his wagon chuckling. Barrington,
+he remembered, had been lost while travelling northwards to the
+Zambesie; but the track stopped here. There was not a trace of it to
+the north or the east or the west. It was evident that the boy had
+chosen Barrington's last camping-ground as the site for his own, and
+he discovered a comforting irony in the fact. He felt that he was
+standing in Barrington's shoes.
+
+That night, as he was smoking by the fire, he called out to the
+Ma-ongwi boy. The lad came forward from his hut behind the wagon.
+
+"Tell me how you lost him," said Norris.
+
+"He rode that way alone after a sable antelope." The boy pointed an
+arm to the southwest. "The beast was wounded, and we followed its
+blood-spoor. We found Mr. Barrington's horse gored by the antelope's
+horns. He himself had gone forward on foot. We tracked him to a little
+stream, but the opposite bank was trampled, and we lost all sign of
+him." This is what the boy said though his language is translated.
+
+Norris remained upon this encampment for a fortnight. Blue
+wildebeests, koodoos, elands, and gems-bok were plentiful, and once he
+got a shot at a wart-hog boar. At the end of the fortnight he walked
+round the ant-heap early one morning, and of a sudden plumped down
+full length in the grass. Straight in front of him he saw a herd of
+buffaloes moving in his direction down a glade of the forest a quarter
+of a mile away. Norris cast a glance backwards; the camp was hidden
+from the herd by the intervening ant-heap. He looked again towards the
+forest; the buffaloes advanced slowly, pasturing as they moved. Norris
+crawled behind the ant-heap on his hands and knees, ran thence into
+the camp, buckled on a belt of cartridges, snatched up a 450-bore
+Metford rifle, and got back to his position just as the first of the
+herd stepped into the open. It turned to the right along the edge of
+the wood, and the others followed in file. Norris wriggled forward
+through the grass, and selecting a fat bull in the centre of the line,
+aimed behind its shoulder and fired. The herd stampeded into the
+forest, the bull fell in its tracks.
+
+Norris sprang forward with a shout; but he had not run more than
+thirty yards before the bull began to kick. It kneeled upon its
+forelegs, rose thence on to its hind legs, and finally stood up.
+Norris guessed what had happened. He had hit the bull in the neck
+instead of behind the shoulders, and had broken no bones. He fired
+his second barrel as the brute streamed away in an oblique line
+southeastwards from the wood, and missed. Then he ran back to camp,
+slapped a bridle on to his swiftest horse, and without waiting to
+saddle it, sprang on its back and galloped in pursuit. He rode as it
+were along the base of a triangle, whereas the bull galloped from the
+apex, and since his breakfast was getting hot behind him, he wished
+to make that triangle an isosceles. So he jammed his heels into his
+horse's ribs, and was fast drawing within easy range, when the buffalo
+got his wind and swerved on the instant into a diagonal course due
+southwest.
+
+The manoeuvre left Norris directly behind his quarry, and with a long,
+stern chase in prospect. However, his blood was up, and he held on to
+wear the beast down. He forgot his breakfast; he took no more than a
+casual notice of the direction he was following; he simply braced his
+knees in a closer grip, while the distorted shadows of himself and the
+horse lengthened and thinned along the ground as the sun rose over his
+right shoulder.
+
+Suddenly the buffalo disappeared in a dip of the veld, and a few
+moments later came again into view a good hundred yards further to the
+south. Norris pulled his left rein, and made for the exact spot at
+which the bull had reappeared. He found himself on the edge of a tiny
+cliff which dropped twenty feet in a sheer fall to a little stream,
+and he was compelled to ride along the bank until he reached the
+incline which the buffalo had descended. He forded the stream,
+galloped under the opposite bank across a patch of ground which had
+been trampled into mud by the hoofs of beasts coming here to water,
+and mounted again to the open. The bull had gained a quarter of a
+mile's grace from his mistake, and was heading straight for a huge
+cone of granite.
+
+Norris recognised the cone. It towered up from the veld, its cliffs
+seamed into gullies by the rain-wash of ages, and he had used it more
+than once as a landmark during the last fortnight, for it rose due
+southwest of his camp.
+
+He watched the bull approach the cone and vanish into one of the
+gullies. It did not reappear, and he rode forward, keeping a close eye
+upon the gully. As he came opposite to it, however, he saw through the
+opening a vista of green trees flashing in the sunlight. He turned his
+horse through the passage, and reined up in a granite amphitheatre.
+The floor seemed about half a mile in diameter; it was broken into
+hillocks, and strewn with patches of a dense undergrowth, while here
+and there a big tree grew. The walls, which converged slightly towards
+an open top, were robed from summit to base with wild flowers, so that
+the whole circumference of the cone was one blaze of colour.
+
+Norris hitched forward and reloaded the rifle. Then he advanced slowly
+between the bushes on the alert for a charge from the wounded bull;
+but nothing stirred. No sound came to his ears except the soft padding
+noise of his horse's hoofs upon the turf. There was not a crackle
+of the brushwood, and the trees seemed carved out of metal. He rode
+through absolute silence in a suspension of all movement. Once his
+horse trod upon a bough, and the snapping of the twigs sounded like so
+many cracks of a pistol. At first the silence struck Norris as merely
+curious, a little later as very lonesome. Once or twice he stopped his
+horse with a sudden jerk of the reins, and sat crouched forwards with
+his neck outstretched, listening. Once or twice he cast a quick,
+furtive glance over his shoulder to make certain that no one stood
+between himself and the entrance to the hollow. He forgot the buffalo;
+he caught himself labouring his breath, and found it necessary to
+elaborately explain the circumstance in his thoughts on the ground of
+heat.
+
+The next moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse
+for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat
+was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun
+poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in
+blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow,
+every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs
+seemed a mouth breathing heat. He became possessed with a parching
+thirst, and he felt his tongue heavy and fibrous like a dried fig.
+There was, however, one obstacle which prevented him from acting upon
+his impulse, and that obstacle was his sense of shame. It was not so
+much that he thought it cowardly to give up the chase and quietly
+return, but he knew that the second after he had given way, he would
+be galloping madly towards the entrance in no child's panic of terror.
+He finally compromised matters by dropping the reins upon his horse's
+neck in the unformulated hope that the animal would turn of its own
+accord; but the horse kept straight on.
+
+As Norris drew towards the innermost wall of granite, there was a
+quick rustle all across its face as though the screen of shrubs and
+flowers had been fluttered by a draught of wind. Norris drew himself
+erect with a distinct appearance of relief, loosened the clench of his
+fingers upon his rifle, and began once more to search the bushes for
+the buffalo.
+
+For a moment his attention was arrested by a queer object lying upon
+the ground to his left. It was in shape something like a melon, but
+bigger, and it seemed to be plastered over with a black mould. Norris
+rode by it, turned a corner, and then with a gasp reined back his
+horse upon its haunches. Straight in front of him a broken rifle lay
+across the path.
+
+Norris stood still, and stared at it stupidly. Some vague recollection
+floated elusively through his brain. He tried to grasp and fix it
+clearly in his mind. It was a recollection of something which had
+happened a long while ago, in England, when he was at school.
+Suddenly, he remembered. It was not something which had happened, but
+something he had read under the great elm trees in the close. It was
+that passage in _Robinson Crusoe_ which tells of the naked footprint
+in the sand.
+
+Norris dismounted, and stooped to lift the rifle; but all at once he
+straightened himself, and swung round with his arms guarding his head.
+There was no one, however, behind him, and he gave a little quavering
+laugh, and picked up the rifle. It was a heavy lo-bore Holland, a
+Holland with a single barrel, and that barrel was twisted like a
+corkscrew. The lock had been wrenched off, and there were marks upon
+the stock--marks of teeth, and other queer, unintelligible marks as
+well.
+
+Norris held the rifle in his hands, gazing vacantly straight ahead. He
+was thinking of the direction in which he had come, southwest, and of
+the stream which he had crossed, and of the patch of trampled mud,
+where track obliterated track. He dropped the rifle. It rang upon a
+stone, and again the screen of foliage shivered and rustled. Norris,
+however, paid no attention to the movement, but ran back to that
+object which he had passed, and took it in his hands.
+
+It was oval in shape, being slightly broader at one end than the
+other. Norris drew his knife and cleaned the mould from one side
+of it. To the touch of the blade it seemed softer than stone, and
+smoother than wood. "More like bone," he said to himself. In the side
+which he had cleaned, there was a little round hole filled up with
+mould. Norris dug his knife in and scraped round the hole as one
+cleans a caked pipe. He drew out a little cube of mud. There was a
+second corresponding hole on the other side. He turned the narrower
+end of the thing upwards. It was hollow, he saw, but packed full of
+mould, and more deliberately packed, for there were finger-marks in
+the mould. "What an aimless trick!" he muttered vaguely.
+
+He carried the thing back to the rifle, and, comparing them,
+understood those queer marks upon the stock. They were the mark of
+fingers, of human fingers, impressed faintly upon the wood with
+superhuman strength. He was holding the rifle in his hands and looking
+down at it; but he saw below the rifle, and he saw that his knees were
+shaking in a palsy.
+
+On an instant he tossed the rifle away, and laughed to reassure
+himself--laughed out boldly, once, twice; and then he stopped with his
+eyes riveted upon the granite wall. At each laugh that he gave the
+shrubs and flowers rippled, and shook the sunlight from their leaves.
+For the first time he remarked the coincidence as something strange.
+He lifted up his face, but not a breath of air fanned it; he looked
+across the hollow, the trees and bushes stood immobile. He laughed a
+third time, louder than before, and all at once his laughter got hold
+of him; he sent it pealing out hysterically, burst after burst, until
+the hollow seemed brimming with the din of it. His body began to
+twist; he beat time to his laughter with his feet, and then he danced.
+He danced there alone in the African sunlight faster and faster, with
+a mad tossing of his limbs, and with his laughter grown to a yell. And
+as though to keep pace with him, each moment the shiver of the foliage
+increased. Up and down, crosswise and breadthwise, the flowers were
+tossed and flung, while their petals rained down the cliff's face in
+a purple storm. It appeared, indeed, to Norris that the very granite
+walls were moving.
+
+In the midst of his dance he kicked something and stumbled. He
+stopped dead when he saw what that something was. It was the queer,
+mud-plastered object which he had compared with the broken rifle, and
+the sight of it recalled him to his wits. He tucked it hastily beneath
+his jacket, and looked about him for his horse. The horse was standing
+behind him some distance away, and nearer to the cliff. Norris
+snatched up his own rifle, and ran towards it. His hand was on the
+horse's mane, when just above its head he noticed a clean patch of
+granite, and across that space he saw a huge grey baboon leap, and
+then another, and another. He turned about, and looked across to the
+opposite wall, straining his eyes, and a second later to the wall on
+his right. Then he understood; the twisted rifle, the finger marks,
+this thing which he held under his coat, he understood them all. The
+walls of the hollow were alive with baboons, and the baboons were
+making along the cliffs for the entrance.
+
+Norris sprang on to his horse, and kicked and beat it into a gallop.
+He had only to traverse the length of a diameter, he told himself, the
+baboons the circumference of a circle. He had covered three-quarters
+of the distance when he heard a grunt, and from a bush fifty yards
+ahead the buffalo sprang out and came charging down at him.
+
+Norris gave one scream of terror, and with that his nerves steadied
+themselves. He knew that it was no use firing at the front of a
+buffalo's head when the beast was charging. He pulled a rein and
+swerved to the left; the bull made a corresponding turn. A moment
+afterwards Norris swerved back into his former course, and shot just
+past the bull's flanks. He made no attempt to shoot them; he held his
+rifle ready in his hands, and looked forwards. When he was fifty yards
+from the passage he saw the first baboon perched upon a shoulder of
+rock above the entrance. He lifted his rifle, and fired at a venture.
+He saw the brute's arms wave in the air, and heard a dull thud on the
+ground behind him as he drove through the gully and out on to the open
+veld.
+
+The next morning Norris broke up his camp, and started homewards for
+Johannesburg. He went down to the Stock Exchange on the day of his
+arrival, and chanced upon Teddy Isaacs.
+
+"What's that?" asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.
+
+"That?" replied Norris, unfastening the buttons. "I told you I would
+bring back Barrington if I found him," and he trundled a scoured and
+polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.
+
+
+
+
+HATTERAS.
+
+
+The story was told to us by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton
+cutter one night when we lay anchored in Helford river. It was towards
+the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly
+with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a
+dreary look. There was no other boat in the wooded creek and the swish
+of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All the
+circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story but most of
+all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the
+story of a man's loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness
+misled him. However, let the story speak for itself.
+
+Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never schoolmates.
+Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely
+sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance.
+The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be
+visited upon the children, overbore the prophecy. Hatteras, the
+father, disorganised his son's future by dropping unexpectedly through
+one of the trap ways of speculation into the bankruptcy court beneath
+just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to
+Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world
+with a stock in trade which consisted of a school boy's command of the
+classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James
+Walker. The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker,
+whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African
+merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a
+branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
+
+Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone and
+met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident
+did not come to Walker's ears until some time afterwards, nor when he
+heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon
+Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point,
+and so may as well be immediately told.
+
+There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself
+on the swamps of the Forcados river with the mangrove forest closing
+in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put
+Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach.
+Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him,
+but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak
+no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was
+not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his
+traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the
+factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and
+laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation.
+Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they
+wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail
+of a word they said and at last he retired from the din of their
+chatter through the windows of a room which gave on the verandah, and
+sat down to wait for his superior, the agent. It was early in the
+morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In
+the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown
+a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an
+intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came
+in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not
+thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the
+house, so he contemplated the mud-banks and the mud-river and the
+mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet.
+There are few things in the world quieter than a West African forest
+in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not
+let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the
+quietude began to jar on Hatteras' nerves. He was besides very hungry.
+To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.
+
+He walked along the side of the house towards the back, and as he
+neared the back he head a humming sound. The further he went the
+louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so
+metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.
+
+Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this--a shuttered
+window and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming
+outside the window; they streamed in through the lattices of the
+shutters in a busy practical way; they came in columns from the forest
+and converged upon the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the
+room.
+
+Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy just for the sake of company, but,
+at that moment there was not one to be seen. He felt the cold strike
+at his spine, he went back to the room in which he had been sitting.
+He sat again, but he sat shivering. The agent had left no work for
+him.... The Kru boys had been anxious to explain something. The
+humming of the flies about that shuttered window seemed to Hatteras
+to have more explicit language than the Kru boys' chatterings. He
+penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned up the doors.
+He opened one of them ever so slightly, and the buzzing came through
+like the hum of a wheel in a factory, revolving in the collar of
+a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold. The
+atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold upon
+his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved
+himself to enter.
+
+At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a moment, however, he
+made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the
+bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with
+a black, furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in
+defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had
+been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over
+it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so
+vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black, furry rug suddenly lifted
+itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras' face, and dissolved into
+flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor
+half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the
+fever. The agent had died of it three days before.
+
+Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It
+left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense
+of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he
+stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save
+went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he
+served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.
+
+Now the second item in the stock in trade was a gift of tongues and
+about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was
+posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect and with the dialect
+inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the
+west coast, and at the end of six years, Hatteras could speak as many
+of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood;
+because he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service
+under the Niger Protectorate, so that when two years later, Walker
+came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the
+Bonny river, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.
+
+Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny river town to meet the steamer
+which brought his friend.
+
+"I say, Dick, you look bad," said Walker.
+
+"People aren't, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts."
+
+"I know that; but your the weariest bag of bones I've ever seen."
+
+"Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,"
+said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.
+
+"Your factory's next to the Residency," said Hatteras. "There's a
+compound to each running down to the river, and there's a palisade
+between the compounds. I've cut a little gate in the palisade as it
+will shorten the way from one house to the other."
+
+The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few
+months--indeed, more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only
+aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through
+it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. Then he would sit
+for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights in
+Piccadilly-circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a
+comic-opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big
+atlas, and one of Hatteras' chief diversions was to trace with his
+finger a bee-line across the African continent and the Bay of Biscay
+until he reached London.
+
+More rarely Walker would stroll over to the Residency, but he soon
+came to notice that Hatteras had a distinct preference for the factory
+and for the factory verandah. The reason for the preference puzzled
+Walker considerably. He drew a quite erroneous conclusion that
+Hatteras was hiding at the Residency--well, some one whom it was
+prudent, especially in an official, to conceal. He abandoned the
+conclusion, however, when he discovered that his friend was in the
+habit of making solitary expeditions. At times Hatteras would be
+absent for a couple of days, at times for a week, and, so far as
+Walker could ascertain, he never so much as took a servant with him
+to keep him company. He would simply announce at night his intended
+departure, and in the morning he would be gone. Nor on his return
+did he ever offer to Walker any explanation of his journeys. On one
+occasion, however, Walker broached the subject. Hatteras had come back
+the night before, and he sat crouched up in a deck chair, looking
+intently into the darkness of the forest.
+
+"I say," asked Walker, "isn't it rather dangerous to go slumming about
+West Africa alone?"
+
+Hatteras did not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the
+suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant
+question.
+
+"Have you ever seen the Horse Guards' Parade on a dark, rainy night?"
+he asked; but he never moved his head, he never took his eyes from
+the forest. "The wet level of ground looks just like a lagoon and the
+arches a Venice palace above it."
+
+"But look here, Dick!" said Walker, keeping to his subject. "You never
+leave word when you are coming back. One never knows that you have
+come back until you show yourself the morning after."
+
+"I think," said Hatteras slowly, "that the finest sight in the world
+is to be seen from the bridge in St. James's Park when there's a State
+ball on at Buckingham Palace and the light from the windows reddens
+the lake and the carriages glance about the Mall like fireflies."
+
+"Even your servants don't know when you come back," said Walker.
+
+"Oh," said Hatteras quietly, "so you have been asking questions of my
+servants?"
+
+"I had a good reason," replied Walker, "your safety," and with that
+the conversation dropped.
+
+Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African
+mangrove forest at night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that
+ever a man's ears harkened to. And the sounds come not so much from
+the birds, or the soughing of the branches; they seem to come from the
+swamp life underneath the branches, at the roots of trees. There's
+a ceaseless stir as of a myriad of reptiles creeping in the slime.
+Listen long enough and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush
+of innumerable crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again
+a more distinctive sound emerges from the rest--the croaking of a
+bull-frog, the whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras
+would start up in his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room
+that hears another dog barking in the street.
+
+"Doesn't it sound damned wicked?" he said, with a queer smile of
+enjoyment.
+
+Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them
+struck obliquely upon Hatteras' face and slanted off from it in a
+narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves
+of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which ran in Hatteras'
+voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he
+gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth.
+In some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he
+appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus,
+had Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon
+his face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his
+friend. He wondered whether all these months his judgment had been
+wrong. And out of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
+
+"Dick," he said, "this house of mine stands between your house and
+the forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the
+swamp. Is that why you always prefer it to your own?"
+
+Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost
+suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a
+little he said:--
+
+"It's not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you,
+it's the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these
+miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can't get the
+forest and the undergrowth out of my mind. I dream of them at nights.
+I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen,"
+and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forwards. "Doesn't
+it sound wicked?"
+
+"But all this talk about London?" cried Walker.
+
+"Oh, don't you understand?" interrupted Hatteras roughly. Then he
+changed his tone and gave his reason. "One has to struggle against a
+fascination of that sort. It's devil's work. So for all I am worth I
+talk about London."
+
+"Look here, Dick," said Walker. "You had better get leave and go back
+to the old country for a spell."
+
+"A very solid piece of advice," said Hatteras, and he went home to the
+Residency.
+
+
+II.
+
+The next morning he had again disappeared. But Walker discovered upon
+his table a couple of new volumes. He glanced at the titles. They were
+Burton's account of his pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Mecca.
+
+Five nights afterwards Walker was smoking a pipe on the verandah when
+he fancied that he heard a rubbing, scuffling sound as if some one
+very cautiously was climbing over the fence of his compound. The moon
+was low in the sky and dipping down toward the forest; indeed the rim
+of it touched the tree-tops so that while a full half of the enclosure
+was bare to the yellow light that half which bordered on the forest
+was inky black in shadow; and it was from the furthest corner of this
+second half that the sound came. Walker bent forward listening. He
+heard the sound again, and a moment after another sound, which left
+him in no doubt. For in that dark corner he knew that a number of
+palisades for repairing the fence were piled and the second sound
+which he heard was a rattle as some one stumbled against them. Walker
+went inside and fetched a rifle.
+
+When he came back he saw a negro creeping across the bright open space
+towards the Residency. Walker hailed to him to stop. Instead the negro
+ran. He ran towards the wicket gate in the palisades. Walker shouted
+again; the figure only ran the faster. He had covered half the
+distance before Walker fired. He clutched his right forearm with his
+left hand, but he did not stop. Walker fired again, this time at his
+legs, and the man dropped to the ground. Walker heard his servants
+stirring as he ran down the steps. He crossed quickly to the negro
+and the negro spoke to him, but in English, and with the voice of
+Hatteras.
+
+"For God's sake keep your servants off!"
+
+Walker ran to the house, met his servants at the foot of the steps,
+and ordered them back. He had shot at a monkey he said. Then he
+returned to Hatteras.
+
+"Dicky, are you hurt?" he whispered.
+
+"You hit me each time you fired, but not very badly I think."
+
+He bandaged Hatteras' arm and thigh with strips of his shirt and
+waited by his side until the house was quiet. Then he lifted him and
+carried him across the enclosure to the steps and up the steps into
+his bedroom. It was a long and fatiguing process. For one thing Walker
+dared make no noise and must needs tread lightly with his load; for
+another, the steps were steep and ricketty, with a narrow balustrade
+on each side waist high. It seemed to Walker that the day would dawn
+before he reached the top. Once or twice Hatteras stirred in his arms,
+and he feared the man would die then and there. For all the time his
+blood dripped and pattered like heavy raindrops on the wooden steps.
+
+Walker laid Hatteras on his bed and examined his wounds. One bullet
+had passed through the fleshy part of the forearm, the other through
+the fleshy part of his right thigh. But no bones were broken and no
+arteries cut. Walker lit a fire, baked some plaintain leaves, and
+applied them as a poultice. Then he went out with a pail of water and
+scrubbed down the steps.
+
+Again he dared not make any noise, and it was close on daybreak before
+he had done. His night's work, however, was not ended. He had still to
+cleanse the black stain from Hatteras' skin, and the sun was up before
+he stretched a rug upon the ground and went to sleep with his back
+against the door.
+
+"Walker," Hatteras called out in a low voice, an hour or so later.
+
+Walker woke up and crossed over to the bed.
+
+"Dicky, I'm frightfully sorry. I couldn't know it was you."
+
+"That's all right, Jim. Don't you worry about that. What I wanted to
+say was that nobody had better know. It wouldn't do, would it, if it
+got about?"
+
+"Oh, I am not so sure. People would think it rather a creditable
+proceeding."
+
+Hatteras shot a puzzled look at his friend. Walker, however, did not
+notice it, and continued, "I saw Burton's account of his pilgrimage in
+your room; I might have known that journeys of the kind were just the
+sort of thing to appeal to you."
+
+"Oh, yes, that's it," said Hatteras, lifting himself up in bed. He
+spoke eagerly--perhaps a thought too eagerly. "Yes, that's it. I have
+always been keen on understanding the native thoroughly. It's after
+all no less than one's duty if one has to rule them, and since I could
+speak their lingo--" he broke off and returned to the subject which
+had prompted him to rouse Walker. "But, all the same, it wouldn't do
+if the natives got to know."
+
+"There's no difficulty about that," said Walker. "I'll give out
+that you have come back with the fever and that I am nursing you.
+Fortunately there's no doctor handy to come making inconvenient
+examinations."
+
+Hatteras knew something of surgery, and under his directions Walker
+poulticed and bandaged him until he recovered. The bandaging, however,
+was amateurish, and, as a result, the muscles contracted in Hatteras'
+thigh and he limped--ever so slightly, still he limped--he limped
+to his dying day. He did not, however, on that account abandon his
+explorations, and more than once Walker, when his lights were out and
+he was smoking a pipe on the verandah, would see a black figure with
+a trailing walk cross his compound and pass stealthily through the
+wicket in the fence. Walker took occasion to expostulate with his
+friend.
+
+"It's too dangerous a game for a man to play for any length of time.
+It is doubly dangerous now that you limp. You ought to give it up."
+
+Hatteras made a strange reply.
+
+"I'll try to," he said.
+
+Walker pondered over the words for some time. He set them side by side
+in his thoughts with that confession which Hatteras had made to
+him one evening. He asked himself whether, after all, Hatteras'
+explanation of his conduct was sincere, whether it was really a
+desire to know the native thoroughly which prompted these mysterious
+expeditions; and then he remembered that he himself had first
+suggested the explanation to Hatteras. Walker began to feel
+uneasy--more than uneasy, actually afraid on his friend's account.
+Hatteras had acknowledged that the country fascinated him, and
+fascinated him through its hideous side. Was this masquerading as a
+black man a further proof of the fascination? Was it, as it were, a
+step downwards towards a closer association? Walker sought to laugh
+the notion from his mind, but it returned and returned, and here and
+there an incident occurred to give it strength and colour.
+
+For instance, on one occasion after Hatteras had been three weeks
+absent, Walker sauntered over to the Residency towards four o'clock
+in the afternoon. Hatteras was trying cases in the court-house, which
+formed the ground floor of the Residency. Walker stepped into the
+room. It was packed with a naked throng of blacks, and the heat was
+overpowering. At the end of the hall sat Hatteras. His worn face shone
+out amongst the black heads about him white and waxy like a gardenia
+in a bouquet of black flowers. Walker invented his simile and realised
+its appositeness at one and the same moment. Bouquet was not an
+inappropriate word since there is a penetrating aroma about the native
+of the Niger delta when he begins to perspire.
+
+Walker, however, thinking that the Court would rise, determined to
+wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to
+answer to a charge of participation in Fetish rites. The case seemed
+sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its
+conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual
+details--human sacrifice, mutilations and the like, but Hatteras
+pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, and then had candles
+brought into the Court-house. He seemed indeed not so much to be
+investigating the negro's guilt as to be adding to his own knowledge
+of Fetish ceremonials. And Walker could not but perceive that he
+took more than a merely scientific pleasure in the increase of his
+knowledge. His face appeared to smooth out, his eyes became quick,
+interested, almost excited; and Walker again had the queer impression
+that Hatteras was in spirit participating in the loathsome ceremonies,
+and participating with an intense enjoyment. In the end the negro was
+convicted and the Court rose. But he might have been convicted a good
+three hours before. Walker went home shaking his head. He seemed to
+be watching a man deliberately divesting himself of his humanity. It
+seemed as though the white man were ambitious to decline into the
+black. Hatteras was growing into an uncanny creature. His friend began
+to foresee a time when he should hold him in loathing and horror. And
+the next morning helped to confirm him in that forecast.
+
+For Walker had to make an early start down river for Bonny town, and
+as he stood on the landing-stage Hatteras came down to him from the
+Residency.
+
+"You heard that negro tried yesterday?" he asked with an assumption of
+carelessness.
+
+"Yes, and condemned. What of him?"
+
+"He escaped last night. It's a bad business, isn't it?"
+
+Walker nodded in reply and his boat pushed off. But it stuck in his
+mind for the greater part of that day that the prison adjoined the
+Court-house and so formed part of the ground floor of the Residency.
+Had Hatteras connived at his escape? Had the judge secretly set free
+the prisoner whom he had publicly condemned? The question troubled
+Walker considerably during his month of absence, and stood in the way
+of his business. He learned for the first time how much he loved his
+friend and how eagerly he watched for the friend's advancement.
+Each day added to his load of anxiety. He dreamed continually of a
+black-painted man slipping among the tree-boles nearer and nearer
+towards the red glow of a fire in some open space secure amongst the
+swamps, where hideous mysteries had their celebration. He cut short
+his business and hurried back from Bonny. He crossed at once to the
+Residency and found his friend in a great turmoil of affairs. Walker
+came back from Bonny a month later and hurried across to his friend.
+
+"Jim," said Hatteras, starting up, "I've got a year's leave; I am
+going home."
+
+"Dicky!" cried Walker, and he nearly wrung Hatteras' hand from his
+arm. "That's grand news."
+
+"Yes, old man, I thought you would be glad; I sail in a fortnight."
+And he did.
+
+For the first month Walker was glad. A year's leave would make a new
+man of Dick Hatteras, he thought, or, at all events, restore the old
+man, sane and sound, as he had been before he came to the West African
+coast. During the second month Walker began to feel lonely. In the
+third he bought a banjo and learnt it during the fourth and fifth.
+During the sixth he began to say to himself, "What a time poor Dick
+must have had all those six years with those cursed forests about him.
+I don't wonder--I don't wonder." He turned disconsolately to his banjo
+and played for the rest of the year; all through the wet season while
+the rain came down in a steady roar and only the curlews cried--until
+Hatteras returned. He returned at the top of his spirits and health.
+Of course he was hall-marked West African, but no man gets rid of that
+stamp. Moreover there was more than health in his expression. There
+was a new look of pride in his eyes and when he spoke of a bachelor it
+was in terms of sympathetic pity.
+
+"Jim," said he, after five minutes of restraint, "I am engaged to be
+married."
+
+Jim danced round him in delight. "What an ass I have been," he
+thought, "why didn't I think of that cure myself?" and he asked, "When
+is it to be?"
+
+"In eight months. You'll come home and see me through."
+
+Walker agreed and for eight months listened to praises of the lady.
+There were no more solitary expeditions. In fact, Hatteras seemed
+absorbed in the diurnal discovery of new perfections in his future
+wife.
+
+"Yes, she seems a nice girl," Walker commented. He found her upon his
+arrival in England more human than Hatteras' conversation had led him
+to expect, and she proved to him that she was a nice girl. For she
+listened for hours to him lecturing her on the proper way to treat
+Dick without the slightest irritation and with only a faintly visible
+amusement. Besides she insisted on returning with her husband to Bonny
+river, which was a sufficiently courageous thing to undertake.
+
+For a year in spite of the climate the couple were commonplace and
+happy. For a year Walker clucked about them like a hen after its
+chickens and slept the sleep of the untroubled. Then he returned to
+England and from that time made only occasional journeys to West
+Africa. Thus for awhile he almost lost sight of Hatteras and
+consequently still slept the sleep of the untroubled. One morning,
+however, he arrived unexpectedly at the settlement and at once called
+on Hatteras. He did not wait to be announced, but ran up the steps
+outside the house and into the dining-room. He found Mrs. Hatteras
+crying. She dried her eyes, welcomed Walker, and said that she was
+sorry, but her husband was away.
+
+Walker started, looked at her eyes, and asked hesitatingly whether he
+could help. Mrs. Hatteras replied with an ill-assumed surprise that
+she did not understand. Walker suggested that there was trouble. Mrs.
+Hatteras denied the truth of the suggestion. Walker pressed the point
+and Mrs. Hatteras yielded so far as to assert that there was no
+trouble in which Hatteras was concerned. Walker hardly thought it the
+occasion for a parade of manners, and insisted on pointing out
+that his knowledge of her husband was intimate and dated from his
+schooldays. Thereupon Mrs. Hatteras gave way.
+
+"Dick goes away alone," she said. "He stains his skin and goes away at
+night. He tells me that he must, that it's the only way by which he
+can know the natives, and that so it's a sort of duty. He says the
+black tells nothing of himself to the white man--ever. You must go
+amongst them if you are to know them. So he goes, and I never know
+when he will come back. I never know whether he will come back."
+
+"But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has
+always come back," replied Walker.
+
+"Yes, but one day he will not." Walker comforted her as well as he
+could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot
+against him, spoke of risks that every one must run who serve the
+Empire. "Never a lotus closes, you know," he said, and went back to
+the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.
+
+It was no sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that he was
+certain, and he waited--he waited from darkness to daybreak in his
+compound for three successive nights. On the fourth he heard the
+scuffling sound at the corner of the fence. The night was black as the
+inside of a coffin. Half a regiment of men might steal past him and he
+not have seen them. Accordingly he walked cautiously to the palisade
+which separated the enclosure of the Residency from his own, felt
+along it until he reached the little gate and stationed himself
+in front of it. In a few moments he thought that he heard a man
+breathing, but whether to the right or the left he could not tell;
+and then a groping hand lightly touched his face and drew away again.
+Walker said nothing, but held his breath and did not move. The hand
+was stretched out again. This time it touched his breast and moved
+across it until it felt a button of Walker's coat. Then it was
+snatched away and Walker heard a gasping in-draw of the breath and
+afterwards a sound as of a man turning in a flurry. Walker sprang
+forward and caught a naked shoulder with one hand, a naked arm with
+the other.
+
+"Wait a bit, Dick Hatteras," he said.
+
+There was a low cry, and then a husky voice addressed him respectfully
+as "Daddy" in trade-English.
+
+"That won't do, Dick," said Walker.
+
+The voice babbled more trade-English.
+
+"If you're not Dick Hatteras," continued Walker, tightening his grasp,
+"You've no manner of right here. I'll give you till I count ten and
+then I shall shoot."
+
+Walker counted up to nine aloud and then--
+
+"Jim," said Hatteras in his natural voice.
+
+"That's better," said Walker. "Let's go in and talk."
+
+
+III.
+
+He went up the step and lighted the lamp. Hatteras followed him and
+the two men faced one another. For a little while neither of them
+spoke. Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black
+skin, naked except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his
+head was a white man married to a white wife who was sleeping--Nay,
+more likely crying--not thirty yards away.
+
+Hatteras began to mumble out his usual explanation of duty and the
+rest of it.
+
+"That won't wash," interrupted Walker. "What is it? A woman?"
+
+"Good Heaven, no!" cried Hatteras suddenly. It was plain that that
+explanation was at all events untrue. "Jim, I've a good mind to tell
+you all about it."
+
+"You have got to," said Walker. He stood between Hatteras and the
+steps.
+
+"I told you how this country fascinated me in spite of myself," he
+began.
+
+"But I thought," interrupted Walker, "that you had got over that
+since. Why, man, you are married," and he came across to Hatteras and
+shook him by the shoulder. "Don't you understand? You have a wife!"
+
+"I know," said Hatteras. "But there are things deeper at the heart
+of me than the love of woman, and one of those things is the love of
+horror. I tell you it bites as nothing else does in this world. It's
+like absinthe that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can't
+do without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first
+landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now--"
+He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. His voice dropped
+to a passionate whisper, he locked and unlocked his fingers with
+feverish movements, and his eyes shifted and glittered in an unnatural
+excitement.
+
+"It's like going down to Hell and coming up again and wanting to go
+down again. Oh, you'd want to go down again. You'd find the whole
+earth pale. You'd count the days until you went down again. Do you
+remember Orpheus? I think he looked back not to see if Eurydice was
+coming after him but because he knew it was the last glimpse he would
+get of Hell." At that he broke off and began to chant in a crazy
+voice, wagging his head and swaying his body to the rhythm of the
+lines:--
+
+  "Quum subita in cantum dementia cepit amantem
+  Ignoscenda quidem scirent si ignoscere manes;
+  Restilit Eurydicengue suam jam luce sub ipsa
+  Immemor heu victusque animi respexit."
+
+"Oh, stop that!" cried Walker, and Hatteras laughed. "For God's sake,
+stop it!"
+
+For the words brought back to him in a flash the vision of a
+class-room with its chipped desks ranged against the varnished walls,
+the droning sound of the form-master's voice, and the swish of lilac
+bushes against the lower window panes on summer afternoons. "Go on,"
+he said. "Oh, go on, and let's have done with it."
+
+Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man
+breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it.
+He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had
+witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the
+last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a growing
+enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their
+loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. "Stop," he
+said, again, "Stop! That's enough."
+
+Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker's
+presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a
+child will, and here and there he laughed and the mere sound of his
+laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold
+out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.
+
+"Well?" he asked. "Well?"
+
+Walker still offered him the revolver.
+
+"There are cases, I think, which neither God's law nor man's law seems
+to have provided for. There's your wife you see to be considered. If
+you don't take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I
+shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old
+country."
+
+Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered
+it for a little.
+
+"My wife must never know," he said.
+
+"There's the pistol. Outside's the swamp. The swamp will tell no
+tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know."
+
+Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.
+
+"Good-bye, Jim," he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook
+his head, and Hatteras went out on to the verandah and down the steps.
+
+Walker heard him climb over the fence; and then followed as far as the
+verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth
+came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes
+afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol shot broke the silence like
+the tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales.
+Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband's disappearance
+that she knew and returned brokenhearted to England. There was some
+loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy, which makes the English a
+dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.
+
+But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowe river in Congo
+Francais. He travelled as far as Woermann's factory in Njole Island
+and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the
+hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for
+a hundred and fifty miles in a little stern-wheel steamer. At that
+point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his
+banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty
+miles. There he ran the boat's nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan
+village and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.
+
+There was a slip of forest between the village and the river bank, and
+while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it
+he heard a noise of lamentation. The noise came from the village and
+was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a
+chorus of discordant howls, low in note and long-drawn out--wordless,
+something like the howls of an animal in pain and yet human by reason
+of their infinite melancholy.
+
+Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock, fronting the palisade
+which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed
+down into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For
+from every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in
+their filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their
+heads shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker
+knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the
+coming of the witch doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural
+death, and, since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the
+Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the
+witch doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village
+was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, since the end of
+those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however,
+politely invited Walker to inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut,
+packed with the corpse's relations, who were shouting to it at the top
+of their voices on the on-chance that its spirit might think better of
+its conduct and return to the body. They explained to Walker that they
+had tried all the usual varieties of persuasion. They had put red
+pepper into the chief's eyes while he was dying. They had propped open
+his mouth with a stick; they had burned fibres of the oil nut under
+his nose. In fact, they had made his death as uncomfortable as
+possible, but none the less he had died.
+
+The witch doctor arrived on the heels of the explanation, and Walker,
+since he was powerless to interfere, thought it wise to retire for
+the time being. He went back to the hillock on the edge of the trees.
+Thence he looked across and over the palisade and had the whole length
+of the street within his view.
+
+The witch doctor entered it from the opposite end, to the beating
+of many drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a
+square-skirted eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded
+knee breeches on his bare legs; the second was that he limped--ever
+so slightly. Still he limped and--with the right leg. Walker felt a
+strong desire to see the man's face, and his heart thumped within him
+as he came nearer and nearer down the street. But his hair was so
+matted about his cheeks that Walker could not distinguish a feature.
+"If I was only near enough to see his eyes," he thought. But he was
+not near enough, nor would it have been prudent for him to have gone
+nearer.
+
+The witch doctor commenced the proceedings by ringing a handbell in
+front of every hut. But that method of detection failed to work.
+The bell rang successively at every door. Walker watched the
+man's progress, watched his trailing limb, and began to discover
+familiarities in his manner. "Pure fancy," he argued with himself. "If
+he had not limped I should have noticed nothing."
+
+Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid.
+The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after
+the other and at each name he lifted the lid. But that plan appeared
+to be no improvement, for the lid never stuck. It came off readily at
+each name. Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have
+to cover who walked across country from Bonny river to the Ogowe, and
+he reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand
+to one that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would
+be eaten on the way.
+
+The witch doctor turned up the big square cuffs of his sleeves, as a
+conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however,
+at each name, he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was
+seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine
+the man's right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him.
+The witch doctor went steadily through the list. Walker rose to his
+feet and took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at
+one particular name, the doctor's hands flew apart and waved wildly
+about him. A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group
+of Fans. The group fell back and left one man standing alone. He made
+no defence, no resistance. Two men came forward and bound his hands
+and his feet and his body with tie-tie. Then they carried him within a
+hut.
+
+"That's sheer murder," thought Walker. He could not rescue the victim,
+he knew. But--he could get a nearer view of that witch doctor. Already
+the man was packing up his paraphernalia. Walker stepped back among
+the trees and, running with all his speed, made the circuit of the
+village. He reached the further end of the street just as the witch
+doctor walked out into the open.
+
+Walker ran forward a yard or so until he too stood plain to see on the
+level ground. The witch doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped
+only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker's direction. Then he
+went on again towards his own hut in the forest.
+
+Walker made no attempt to follow him. "He has seen me," he thought.
+"If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night."
+Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards
+down stream. He himself remained alone in his canoe.
+
+The night fell moonless and black, and the enclosing forest made it
+yet blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head
+like gold spangles on a strip of black velvet. Those stars and the
+glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the
+only lights which Walker had. It was as dark as the night when Walker
+waited for Hatteras at the wicket-gate.
+
+He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted
+lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo and again he
+waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of
+twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on
+his banjo and played a hymn tune. He played "Abide with me," thinking
+that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England's summer
+time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano might flash
+into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank and draw him as with
+cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one
+spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune and
+played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly circus. He had not
+played more than a dozen bars before he heard a sob from the bank and
+then the sound of some one sliding down the clay. The next instant a
+figure shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight
+of a foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.
+
+"Well, what is it?" asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt
+for a match in his pocket.
+
+It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he
+had made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and
+sprang up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of
+his ankle.
+
+"No, you don't," said he, "you must have meant to visit me. This isn't
+Heally," and he jerked the man back into the bottom of the boat.
+
+The man explained that he had paid a visit out of the purest
+friendliness.
+
+"You're the witch doctor, I suppose," said Walker. The other replied
+that he was and proceeded to state that he was willing to give
+information about much that made white men curious. He would explain
+why it was of singular advantage to possess a white man's eyeball, and
+how very advisable it was to kill any one you caught making Itung. The
+danger of passing near a cotton-tree which had red earth at the roots
+provided a subject which no prudent man should disregard; and Tando,
+with his driver ants, was worth conciliating. The witch doctor was
+prepared to explain to Walker how to conciliate Tando. Walker replied
+that it was very kind of the witch doctor but Tando didn't really
+worry him. He was, in fact, very much more worried by an inability to
+understand how a native so high up the Ogowe River had learned how to
+speak trade-English.
+
+The witch doctor waved the question aside and remarked that Walker
+must have enemies. "Pussim bad too much," he called them. "Pussim
+woh-woh. Berrah well! Ah send grand Krau-Krau and dem pussim die one
+time." Walker could not recollect for the moment any "pussim" whom
+he wished to die one time, whether from grand Krau-Krau or any
+other disease. "Wait a bit," he continued, "there is one man--Dick
+Hatteras!" and he struck the match suddenly. The witch doctor started
+forward as though to put it out. Walker, however, had the door of the
+lantern open. He set the match to the wick of the candle and closed
+the door fast. The witch doctor drew back. Walker lifted the lantern
+and threw the light on his face. The witch doctor buried his face in
+his hands and supported his elbows on his knees. Immediately Walker
+darted forward a hand, seized the loose sleeve of the witch doctor's
+coat and slipped it back along his arm to the elbow. It was the sleeve
+of the right arm and there on the fleshy part of the forearm was the
+scar of a bullet.
+
+"Yes," said Walker. "By God, it is Dick Hatteras!"
+
+"Well?" cried Hatteras, taking his hands from his face. "What the
+devil made you turn-turn 'Tommy Atkins' on the banjo? Damn you!"
+
+"Dick, I saw you this afternoon."
+
+"I know, I know. Why on earth didn't you kill me that night in your
+compound?"
+
+"I mean to make up for that mistake to-night!"
+
+Walker took his rifle on to his knees. Hatteras saw the movement,
+leaned forward quickly, snatched up the rifle, snatched up the
+cartridges, thrust a couple of cartridges into the breech, and handed
+the loaded rifle back to his old friend.
+
+"That's right," he said. "I remember. There are some cases neither
+God's law nor man's law has quite made provision for." And then he
+stopped, with his finger on his lip. "Listen!" he said.
+
+From the depths of the forest there came faintly, very sweetly the
+sound of church-bells ringing--a peal of bells ringing at midnight in
+the heart of West Africa. Walker was startled. The sound seemed fairy
+work, so faint, so sweet was it.
+
+"It's no fancy, Jim," said Hatteras, "I hear them every night and at
+matins and at vespers. There was a Jesuit monastery here two hundred
+years ago. The bells remain and some of the clothes." He touched his
+coat as he spoke. "The Fans still ring the bells from habit. Just
+think of it! Every morning, every evening, every midnight, I hear
+those bells. They talk to me of little churches perched on hillsides
+in the old country, of hawthorn lanes, and women--English women,
+English girls, thousands of miles away--going along them to church.
+God help me! Jim, have you got an English pipe?"
+
+"Yes; an English briarwood and some bird's-eye."
+
+Walker handed Hatteras his briarwood and his pouch of tobacco.
+Hatteras filled the pipe, lit it at the lantern, and sucked at it
+avidly for a moment. Then he gave a sigh and drew in the tobacco more
+slowly, and yet more slowly.
+
+"My wife?" he asked at last, in a low voice.
+
+"She is in England. She thinks you dead."
+
+Hatteras nodded.
+
+"There's a jar of Scotch whiskey in the locker behind you," said
+Walker. Hatteras turned round, lifted out the jar and a couple of tin
+cups. He poured whiskey into each and handed one to Walker.
+
+"No thanks," said Walker. "I don't think I will."
+
+Hatteras looked at his companion for an instant. Then he emptied
+deliberately both cups over the side of the boat. Next he took the
+pipe from his lips. The tobacco was not half consumed. He poised the
+pipe for a little in his hand. Then he blew into the bowl and watched
+the dull red glow kindle into sparks of flame as he blew. Very slowly
+he tapped the bowl against the thwart of the boat until the burning
+tobacco fell with a hiss into the water. He laid the pipe gently down
+and stood up.
+
+"So long, old man," he said, and sprang out on to the clay. Walker
+turned the lantern until the light made a disc upon the bank.
+
+"Good bye, Jim," said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he
+stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to
+his shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras
+and he had been at school together.
+
+"Good bye, Dicky," he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the
+boat-side. The blacks down-river were roused by the shot. Walker
+shouted to them to stay where they were, and as soon as their camp was
+quiet he stepped on shore. He filled up the whiskey jar with water,
+tied it to Hatteras' feet, shook his hand, and pushed the body into
+the river. The next morning he started back to Fernan Vaz.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE.
+
+
+The truth concerning the downfall of the Princess Joceliande has never
+as yet been honestly inscribed. Doubtless there be few alive except
+myself that know it; for from the beginning many strange and insidious
+rumours were set about to account for her mishap, whereby great damage
+was done to the memory of the Sieur Rudel le Malaise and Solita his
+wife; and afterwards these rumours were so embroidered and painted by
+rhymesters that the truth has become, as you might say, doubly lost.
+For minstrels take more thought of tickling the fancies of those to
+whom they sing with joyous and gallant histories than of their high
+craft and office, and hence it is that though many and various
+accounts are told to this day throughout the country-side by
+grandsires at their winter hearths, not one of them has so much as a
+grain of verity. They are but rude and homely versions of the chaunts
+of Troubadours.
+
+And yet the truth is sweet and pitiful enough to furnish forth a song,
+were our bards so minded. Howbeit, I will set it down here in simple
+prose; for so my duty to the Sieur Rudel bids me, and, moreover, 'twas
+from this event his wanderings began wherein for twenty years I bare
+him company.
+
+And let none gainsay my story, for that I was not my master's servant
+at the time, and saw not the truth with mine own eyes. I had it from
+the Sieur Rudel's lips, and more than once when he was vexed at the
+aspersions thrown upon his name. But he was ever proud, as befitted so
+knightly a gentleman, and deigned not to argue or plead his honour
+to the world, but only with his sword. Thus, then, it falls to me to
+right him as skilfully as I may. Though, alas! I fear my skill is
+little worth, and calumnies are ever fresh to the palate, while truth
+needs the sauce of a bright fancy to command it.
+
+These columnies have assuredly gained some credit, because with ladies
+my lord was ever blithe and _debonnaire_. That he loved many I do not
+deny; but while he loved, he loved right loyally, and, indeed, it is
+no small honour to be loved by a man of so much worship, even for
+a little--the which many women thought also, and those amongst the
+fairest. And I doubt not that as long as she lived, he loved his wife
+Solita no less ardently than those with whom he fell in after she had
+most unfortunately died.
+
+The Sieur Rudel was born within the castle of Princess Joceliande,
+and there grew to childhood and from childhood to youth, being ever
+entreated with great amity and love for his own no less than for his
+father's sake. Though of a slight and delicate figure, he excelled in
+all manly exercises and sports and in venery and hawking. There was
+not one about the court that could equal him. Books too he read, and
+in many languages, labouring at philosophies and logics, so that had
+you but heard him speak, and not marked the hardihood of his limbs
+and his open face, you might have believed you were listening to some
+doxical monk.
+
+In the tenth year of his age came Solita to the castle, whence no man
+knew, nor could they ever learn more than this, that she sailed out of
+the grey mists of a November morning to our bleak Brittany coast in a
+white-painted boat. A fisherman drew the boat to land, perceiving
+it when he was casting his nets, and found a woman-child therein,
+cushioned upon white satin; and marvelling much at the richness of her
+purveyance, for even the sail of the boat was of white silk, he bore
+her straightway to the castle. And the abbot took her and baptised her
+and gave her Sola for a name. "For," said he, "she hath come alone and
+none knoweth her parentage or place." In time she grew to exceeding
+beauty, with fair hair clustering like finest silk above her temples
+and curling waywardly about her throat; wondrous fair she was and
+white, shaming the snowdrops, so that all men stopped and gazed at her
+as she passed.
+
+And the Princess Joceliande, perceiving her, joined her to the company
+of her hand-maidens and took great delight in her for her modesty and
+beauty, so that at last she changed her name. "Sola have you been
+called till now," she said, "but henceforth shall your name be Solita,
+as who shall say 'you have become my wont.'"
+
+Meanwhile the Sieur Rudel was advanced from honour to honour, until
+he stood ever at the right hand of the Princess, and ruled over her
+kingdom as her chancellor and vicegerent. Her enemies he conquered and
+added their lands and sovereignties to hers, until of all the kings
+in those parts, none had such power and dominions as the Princess
+Joceliande. Many ladies, you may believe, cast fond eyes on him, and
+dropped their gauntlet that he might bend to them upon his knee and
+pick it up, but his heart they could not bend, strive how they might,
+and to each and all he showed the same courtesy and gentleness. For
+he had seen the maiden Solita, and of an evening when the Court was
+feasting in the hall and the music of harps rippled sweetly in
+the ears, he would slip from the table as one that was busied in
+statecraft, and in company with Solita pace the terrace in the dark,
+beneath the lighted windows. Yet neither spoke of love, though loving
+was their intercourse. Solita for that her modesty withheld her, and
+she feared even to hope that so great a lord should give his heart to
+her keeping; Rudel because he had not achieved enough to merit she
+should love him. "In a little," he would mutter, "in a little! One
+more thing must I do, and then will I claim my guerdon of the Princess
+Joceliande."
+
+Now this one more thing was the highest and most dangerous emprise of
+all that he had undertaken. Beyond the confines of the kingdom there
+dwelt a great horde of men that had come to Brittany from the East
+in many deep ships and had settled upon the coast, whence they
+would embark and, travelling hard by the land, burn and ravage the
+sea-borders for many days.
+
+Against these did the Sieur Rudel make war, and gathering the nobles
+and yeomen he mustered them in boats and prepared to sail forth to
+what he believed was the last of his adventures, knowing not that it
+was indeed but the beginning. And to the princess he said: "Lady, I
+have served you faithfully, as a gentleman should serve his queen.
+From nothing have I drawn back that could establish or increase you.
+Therefore when I get me home again, one boon will I ask of you, and I
+pray you of your mercy grant it me."
+
+"I will well," replied the princess. "For such loyal service hath no
+queen known before--nay, not even Dame Helen among the Trojans."
+
+So right gladly did the Sieur Rudel depart from her, and down he
+walked among the sandhills, where he found Solita standing in a hollow
+in the midst of a cloud of sand which the sharp wind whirled about
+her. Nothing she said to him, but she stood with downcast head and
+eyes that stung with tears.
+
+"Solita," said he, "the Princess hath granted me such boon as I may
+ask on my return. What say you?"
+
+And she answered in a low voice. "Who am I, my lord, that I should
+oppose the will of the princess? A nameless maiden, meet only to yoke
+with a nameless yeoman!"
+
+At that the Sieur Rudel laughed and said, "Look you into a mirror,
+sweet! and your face will gainsay your words."
+
+She lifted her eyes to his and the light came into them again, so that
+they danced behind the tears, and Rudel clipped her about the waist
+for all that he had not as yet merited her, and kissed her upon the
+lips and the forehead and upon her white hands and wrists.
+
+But she, gazing past his head, saw the blowing sands beyond and the
+armed men in the boats upon the sea, and "O, Rudel, my sweet lord!"
+she cried, "never till this moment did I know how barren and lonely
+was the coast. Come back, and that soon--for of a truth I dread to be
+left alone!"
+
+"In God's good time and if so He will, I will come back, and from the
+moment of my coming I will never again depart from you."
+
+"Promise me that!" she said, clinging to him with her arms twined
+about his neck, and he promised her, and so, comforting her a little
+more, he got him into his boat and sailed away upon his errand.
+
+But of all this, the Princess Joceliande knew nothing. From her
+balcony in the castle she saw the Sieur Rudel sail forth. He stood
+upon the poop, the wind blowing the hair back from his face, and as
+she watched his straight figure, she said, "A boon he shall ask, but
+a greater will I grant. Surely no man ever did such loyal service but
+for love, and for love's sake, he shall share my throne with me." With
+that she wept a little for fear he might be slain or ever he should
+return; but she remembered from how many noble exploits he had come
+scatheless, and so taking heart once more she fell to thinking of his
+black locks and clear olive face and darkly shining eyes. For, in
+truth, these outward qualities did more enthral and delight her than
+his most loyal services.
+
+But for the maiden Solita, she got her back to her chamber and,
+remembering her lord's advice, spied about for a mirror. No mirror,
+however, did she possess, having never used aught else but a basin of
+clear water, and till now found it all-sufficient, so little curious
+had she been concerning the whiteness of her beauty. Thereupon she
+thought for a little, and unbinding her hair so that it fell to her
+feet in a golden cloud, hied her to Joceliande, who bade her take a
+book of chivalry and read aloud. But Solita so bent her head that her
+hair fell ever across the pages and hindered her from reading, and
+each time she put it roughly back from her forehead with some small
+word of anger as though she was vexed.
+
+"What ails you, child?" asked the princess.
+
+"It is my hair," replied Solita. But the princess paid no heed. She
+heard little, indeed, even of what was read, but sat by the window
+gazing out across the grey hungry sea, and bethinking her of the Sieur
+Rudel and his gallant men. And again Solita let her hair fall upon the
+scroll, and again she tossed it back, saying, "Fie! Fie!"
+
+"What ails you, child?" the princess asked.
+
+"It is my hair," she replied, and Joceliande, smiling heedlessly, bade
+her read on. So she read until Joceliande bade her stop and called to
+her, and Solita came over to the window and knelt by the side of the
+princess, so that her hair fell across the wrist of Joceliande and
+fettered it. "It _is_ ever in the way," said Solita, and she loosed
+it from the wrist of the princess. But the princess caught the silky
+coils within her hand and smoothed them tenderly. "That were easily
+remedied," she replied with a smile, and she sought for the scissors
+which hung at her girdle.
+
+But Solita bethought her that many men had praised the colour and
+softness of her hair--why, she could not tell, for dark locks alone
+were beautiful in her eyes. Howbeit men praised hers, and for Sieur
+Rudel's sake she would fain be as praiseworthy as might be. Therefore
+she stayed Joceliande's hand and cried aloud in fear, "Nay, nay, sweet
+lady, 'tis all the gold I have, and I pray you leave it me who am so
+poor."
+
+And the Princess Joceliande laughed, and replaced the scissors in her
+girdle. "I did but make pretence, to try you," she said, "for, in
+truth, I had begun to think you were some holy angel and no woman, so
+little share had you in a woman's vanities. But 'tis all unbound, and
+I wonder not that it hinders you. Let me bind it up!"
+
+And while the princess bound the hair cunningly in a coronal upon her
+head, Solita spake again hesitatingly, seeking to conceal her craft.
+
+"Madame, it is easy for you to bind my hair, but for myself, I have no
+mirror and so dress it awkwardly."
+
+Joceliande laughed again merrily at the words. "Dear heart!" she
+cried. "What man is it? Hast discovered thou art a woman after all?
+First thou fearest for thy hair, and now thou askest a mirror. But in
+truth I like thee the better for thy discovery." And she kissed Solita
+very heartily, who blushed that her secret was so readily found out,
+and felt no small shame at her lack of subtlety. For many ladies, she
+knew, had secrets--ay, even from their bosom lords and masters---and
+kept them without effort in the subterfuge, whereas she, poor fool,
+betrayed hers at the first word.
+
+"And what man is it?" laughed the princess. "For there is not one
+that deserves thee, as thou shalt judge for thyself." Whereupon she
+summoned one of her servants and bade him place a mirror in the
+bed-chamber of Solita, wherein she might see herself from top to toe.
+
+"Art content?" she asked. "Thus shalt thou see thyself, without
+blemish or fault even for this crown of hair to the heel of thy foot.
+But I fear me the sight will change all thy thoughts and incline thee
+to scorn of thy suitor."
+
+Then she stood for a little watching the sunlight play upon the golden
+head and pry into the soft shadows of the curls, and her face saddened
+and her voice faltered.
+
+"But what of me, Solita?" she said. "All men give me reverence, not
+one knows me for a woman. I crave the bread of love, all day long I
+hunger for it, but they offer me the polished stones of courtesy and
+respect, and so I starve slowly to my death. What of me, Solita? What
+of me?"
+
+But Solita made reply, soothing her:
+
+"Madame," she said, "all your servants love you, but it beseems them
+not to flaunt it before your face, so high are you placed above them.
+You order their fortunes and their lives, and surely 'tis nobler work
+than meddling with this idle love-prattle."
+
+"Nay," replied the princess, laughing in despite of her heaviness,
+for she noted how the blush on Solita's cheek belied the scorn of her
+tongue. "There spoke the saint, and I will hear no more from her now
+that I have found the woman. Tell me, did he kiss you?"
+
+And Solita blushed yet more deeply, so that even her neck down to her
+shoulders grew rosy, and once or twice she nodded her head, for her
+lips would not speak the word.
+
+Then Joceliande sighed to herself and said--
+
+    "And yet, perchance, he would not die for you, whereas men die for
+    me daily, and from mere obedience. How is he called?"
+
+    "Madame," she replied, "I may not tell you, for all my pride in
+    him. 'Twill be for my lord to answer you in his good time. But
+    that he would die for me, if need there were, I have no doubt. For
+    I have looked into his eyes and read his soul."
+
+So she spake with much spirit, upholding Sieur Rudel; but Joceliande
+was sorely grieved for that Solita would not trust her with her
+lover's name, and answered bitterly:
+
+    "And his soul which you did see was doubtless your own image. And
+    thus it will be with the next maiden who looks into his eyes. Her
+    own image will she see, and she will go away calling it his soul,
+    and not knowing, poor fool, that it has already faded from his
+    eyes."
+
+At this Solita kept silence, deeming it unnecessary to make reply. It
+might be as the princess said with other men and other women, but the
+Sieur Rudel had no likeness to other men, and in possessing the Sieur
+Rudel's love she was far removed from other women. Therefore did she
+keep silence, but Joceliande fancied that she was troubled by the
+words which she had spoken, and straightway repented her of them.
+
+"Nay, child," she said, and she laid her hand again upon Solita's
+head. "Take not the speech to heart. 'Tis but the plaint of a woman
+whose hair is withered from its brightness and who grows peevish in
+her loneliness. But open your mind to me, for you have twined about my
+heart even as your curls did but now twine and coil about my wrist,
+and the more for this pretty vanity of yours. Therefore tell me his
+name, that I may advance him."
+
+But once more Solita did fob her off, and the princess would no longer
+question her, but turned her wearily to the window.
+
+"All day long," she said, "I listen to soft speeches and honeyed
+tongues, and all night long I listen to the breakers booming upon the
+sands, and in truth I wot not which sound is the more hollow."
+
+Such was the melancholy and sadness of her voice that the tears
+sprang into Solita's eyes and ran down her cheeks for very pity of
+Joceliande.
+
+"Think not I fail in love to you, sweet princess," she cried. "But I
+may not tell you, though I would be blithe and proud to name him. But
+'tis for him to claim me of you, and I must needs wait his time."
+
+But Joceliande would not be comforted, and chiding her roughly, sent
+her to her chamber. So Solita departed out of her sight, her heart
+heavy with a great pity, though little she understood of Joceliande's
+distress. For this she could not know: that at the sight of her white
+beauty the Princess Joceliande was ashamed.
+
+And coming into her chamber, Solita beheld the mirror ranged against
+the wall, and long she stood before it, being much comforted by the
+image which she saw. From that day ever she watched the ladies of the
+court, noting jealously if any might be more fair than she whom Sieur
+Rudel had chosen; and often of a night when she was troubled by the
+aspect of some fair and delicate new-comer, she would rise from her
+couch and light a taper, and so gaze at herself until the fear of her
+unworthiness diminished. For there were none that could compare with
+her in daintiness and fair looks ever came to the castle of the
+Princess Joceliande.
+
+But of the Sieur Rudel, though oft she thought, she never spake,
+biding his good time, and the princess questioned her in vain. For
+she, whose heart hitherto had lain plain to see, like a pebble in a
+clear brook of water, had now learnt all the sweet cunning of love's
+duplicity.
+
+Thus the time drew on towards the Sieur Rudel's home-coming, and ever
+the twain looked out across the sea for the black boats to round the
+bluff and take the beach--Joceliande from her balcony, Solita from the
+window of her little chamber in the tower; and each night the princess
+gave orders to light a beacon on the highest headland that the
+wayfarers might steer safely down that red path across the tumbling
+waters.
+
+So it fell that one night both ladies beheld two ships swim to the
+shore, and each made dolorous moan, seeing how few of the goodly
+company that sailed forth had got them home again, and wondering in
+sore distress whether Rudel had returned with them or no.
+
+But in a little there came a servant to the princess and told of one
+Sir Broyance de Mille-Faits, a messenger from the neighbouring kingdom
+of Broye, that implored instant speech with her. And being admitted
+before all the Court assembled in the great hall, he fell upon his
+knees at the foot of the princess, and, making his obeisance, said--
+
+    "Fair Lady Joceliande, I crave a boon, and I pray you of your
+    gentleness to grant it me."
+
+    "But what boon, good Sir Broyance?" replied the princess. "I know
+    you for a true and loyal gentleman who has ever been welcome at my
+    castle. Speak, then, your need, and if so be I may, you shall find
+    me complaisant to your request."
+
+Thereupon, Sir Broyance took heart and said:
+
+    "Since our king died, God rest his soul, there has been no peace
+    or quiet in our kingdom of Broye. 'Tis rent with strife and
+    factions, so that no man may dwell in it but he must fight from
+    morn to night, and withal win no rest for the morrow. The king's
+    three sons contend for the throne, and meanwhile is the country
+    eaten up. Therefore am I sent by many, and those our chiefest
+    gentlemen, to ask you to send us Sieur Rudel, that he may quell
+    these conflicts and rule over us as our king."
+
+So Sir Broyance spake and was silent, and a great murmur and
+acclamation rose about the hall for that the Sieur Rudel was held
+in such honour and worship even beyond his own country. But for the
+Princess Joceliande, she sat with downcast head, and for a while
+vouchsafed no reply. For her heart was sore at the thought that Sieur
+Rudel should go from her.
+
+"There is much danger in the adventure," she said at length,
+doubtfully.
+
+"Were there no danger, madame," he replied, "we should not ask Sieur
+Rudel of you to be our leader, and great though the danger be, greater
+far is the honour. For we offer him a kingdom."
+
+Then the princess spake again to Sir Broyance:
+
+"It may not be," she said. "Whatever else you crave, that shall you
+have, and gladly will I grant it you. But the Sieur Rudel is the
+flower of our Court, he stands ever at my right hand, and woe is me if
+I let him go, for I am only a woman."
+
+"But, madame, for his knighthood's sake, I pray you assent to our
+prayer," said Sir Broyance. "Few enemies have you, but many friends,
+whereas we are sore pressed on every side."
+
+But the princess repeated: "I am only a woman," and for a long while
+he made his prayer in vain.
+
+At last, however, the princess said:
+
+"For his knighthood's sake thus far will I yield to you: Bide here
+within my castle until Sieur Rudel gets him home, and then shall you
+make your prayer to him, and by his answer will I be bound."
+
+"That I will well," replied Sir Broyance, bethinking him of the Sieur
+Rudel's valour, and how that he had a kingdom to proffer to him.
+
+But the Princess Joceliande said to herself:
+
+"I, too, will offer him a kingdom. My throne shall he share with me;"
+and so she entertained Sir Broyance right pleasantly until the Sieur
+Rudel should get him back from the foray. Meanwhile she would say
+to Solita, "He shall not go to Broye, for in truth I need him;" and
+Solita would laugh happily, replying, "It is truth: he will not go to
+Broye," and thinking thereto silently, "but it is not the princess who
+will keep him, but even I, her poor handmaiden. For I have his promise
+never to depart from me." So much confidence had her mirror taught
+her, as it ever is with women.
+
+But despite them both did the Sieur Rudel voyage to Broye and rule
+over the kingdom as its king, and how that came about ye shall hear.
+
+Now on the fourth day after the coming of Sir Broyance, the Princess
+Joceliande was leaning over the baluster of her balcony and gazing
+seawards as was her wont. The hours had drawn towards evening, and the
+sun stood like a glowing wheel upon the farthest edge of the sea's
+grey floor, when she beheld a black speck crawl across its globe, and
+then another and another, to the number of thirty. Thereupon, she
+knew that the Sieur Rudel had returned, and joyfully she summoned her
+tirewomen and bade them coif and robe her as befitted a princess.
+A coronet of gold and rubies they set upon her head, and a robe of
+purple they hung about her shoulders. With pearls they laced her neck
+and her arms, and with pearls they shod her feet, and when she saw the
+ships riding at their anchorage, and the Sieur Rudel step forth amid
+the shouts of the sailors, then she hied her to the council-chamber
+and prepared to give him instant audience. Yet for all her jewels and
+rich attire, she trembled like a common wench at the approach of her
+lover, and feared that the loud beating of her heart would drown the
+sound of his footsteps in the passage.
+
+But the Sieur Rudel came not, and she sent a messenger to inquire why
+he tarried, and the messenger brought word and said:
+
+"He is with the maiden Solita in the tower."
+
+Then the princess stumbled as though she were about to fall, and her
+women came about her. But she waved them back with her hand, and so
+stood shivering for a little. "The night blows cold," she said; "I
+would the lamps were lit." And when her servants had lighted the
+council-chamber, she sent yet another messenger to Sieur Rudel,
+bidding him instantly come to her, and waited in great bitterness of
+spirit. For she remembered how that she had promised to grant him the
+boon that he should ask, and much she feared that she knew what that
+boon was.
+
+Now leave we the Princess Joceliande, and hie before her messenger to
+the chamber of Solita. No pearls or purple robes had she to clad her
+beauty in, but a simple gown of white wool fastened with a silver
+girdle about the waist, and her hair she loosed so that it rippled
+down her shoulders and nestled round her ears and face.
+
+Thither the Sieur Rudel came straight from the sea, and--
+
+"Love," he said, kissing her, "it has been a weary waste of days and
+nights, and yet more weary for thee than for me. For stern work was
+there ever to my hand--ay, and well-nigh more than I could do; but for
+thee nought but to wait."
+
+"Yet, my dear lord," she replied, "the princess did give me this
+mirror, wherein I could see myself from top to toe, and a great
+comfort has it been to me."
+
+So she spake, and the messenger from the princess brake in upon them,
+bidding the Sieur Rudel hasten to the council-chamber, for that the
+Princess Joceliande waited this long while for his coming.
+
+"Now will I ask for the fulfilment of her promise," said Rudel to
+Solita, "and to-night, sweet, I will claim thee before the whole
+Court." With that he got him from the chamber and, following the
+messenger, came to where the princess awaited him.
+
+"Madame," he said, "good tidings! By God's grace we have won the
+victory over your enemies. Never again will they buzz like wasps about
+your coasts, but from this day forth they will pay you yearly truage."
+
+"Sir," she replied, rebuking him shrewdly, "indeed you bring me good
+tidings, but you bring them over-late. For here have I tarried for you
+this long while, and it beseems neither you nor me."
+
+"Madame," he answered, "I pray you acquit me of the fault and lay the
+blame on Love. For when sweet Cupid thrones a second queen in one's
+heart beside the first, what wonder that a man forgets his duty? And
+now I would that of your gentleness you would grant me your maiden
+Solita for wife."
+
+"That I may not," returned Joceliande, stricken to the soul at that
+image of a second queen. "A nameless child, and my handmaiden! Sieur
+Rudel, it befits a man to look above him for a wife."
+
+"And that, madame," he answered, "in very truth I do. Moreover, though
+no man knows Solita's parentage and place, yet must she be of gentle
+nurture, else had there been no silk sail to float her hitherwards;
+and so much it liketh you to grant my boon, for God's love, I pray
+you, hold your promise."
+
+Thereupon was the princess sore distressed for that she had given her
+promise. Howbeit she said: "Since it is so, and since my maiden Solita
+is the boon you crave, I give her to you;" and so dismissed the Sieur
+Rudel from her presence, and getting her back to her chamber, made
+moan out of all measure.
+
+"Lord Jesu," she cried, "of all my kingdom and barony, but one thing
+did I hunger for and covet, and that one thing this child, whom of my
+kindness I loved and fostered, hath traitorously robbed me of! Why did
+I take her from the sea?"
+
+So she wept for a great while, until she bethought her of a remedy.
+Then she wiped her tears and gave order that Sir Broyance should come
+to her. To him she said: "To-night at the high feast you shall make
+your prayer to the Lord Rudel, and I myself will join with you, so
+that he shall become your leader and rule over you as king."
+
+So she spake, thinking that when the Sieur Rudel had departed, she
+would privily put Solita to death--openly she dared not do it, for the
+great love the nobles bore towards Rudel--and when Solita was dead,
+then would she send again for Rudel and share her siege with him. Sir
+Broyance, as ye may believe, was right glad at her words, and made him
+ready for the feast. Hither, when the company was assembled, came the
+Sieur Rudel, clad in a green tunic edged with fur of a white fox, and
+a chain set with stones of great virtue about his neck. His hose were
+green and of the finest silk, and on his feet he wore shoes of white
+doeskin, and the latchets were of gold. So he came into the hall, and
+seeing him thus gaily attired with all his harness off, much did all
+marvel at his knightly prowess. For in truth he looked more like some
+tender minstrel than a gallant warrior. Then up rose Sir Broyance and
+said;
+
+"From the kingdom of Broye the nobles send greeting to the Sieur
+Rudel, and a message."
+
+And with that he set forth his errand and request; but the Sieur Rudel
+laughed and answered:
+
+"Sir Broyance, great honour you do me, and so, I pray, tell your
+countrymen of Broye. But never more will I draw sword or feuter spear,
+for this day hath the Princess Joceliande granted me her maiden Solita
+for wife, and by her side I will bide till death."
+
+Thereupon rose a great murmur of astonishment within the hall, the men
+lamenting that the Sieur Rudel would lead them no more to battle, and
+the women marvelling to each other that he should choose so mean a
+thing as Solita for wife. But Sir Broyance said never a word, but got
+him from the table and out of the hall, so that the company marvelled
+yet more for that he had not sought to persuade the Sieur Rudel. Then
+said the Princess Joceliande, and greatly was she angered both against
+Solita and Rudel:
+
+"Fie, my lord! shame on you; you forget your knighthood!"
+
+And he replied, "My knighthood, your highness, had but one use, and
+that to win my sweet Solita."
+
+Wherefore was Joceliande's heart yet hotter against the twain, and she
+cried aloud:
+
+"Nay, but it is on us that the shame of your cowardice will fall. Even
+now Sir Broyance left our hall in anger and scorn. It may not be that
+our chiefest noble shall so disgrace us."
+
+But Sieur Rudel laughed lightly, and answered her:
+
+"Madame, full oft have I jeopardised my life in your good cause, and I
+fear no charge of cowardice more than I fear thistle-down."
+
+His words did but increase the fury of the princess, and she brake out
+in most bitter speech:
+
+"Nay, but it is a kitchen knave we have been honouring unawares, and
+bidding sit with us at table!"
+
+And straightway she called to her servants and bade them fetch the
+warden of the castle with the fetters. But the Sieur Rudel laughed
+again, and said:
+
+"Thus it will be impossible that I leave my dear Solita and voyage
+perilously to Broye."
+
+Nor any effort or resistance did he make, but lightly suffered them
+to fetter him, the while the princess most foully mis-said him. With
+fetters they prisoned his feet, and manacles they straitly fastened
+about his wrists, and they bound him to a pillar in the hall by a
+chain about his middle.
+
+"There shall you bide," she said, "in shameful bonds until you make
+promise to voyage forth to Broye. For surely there is nothing so vile
+in all this world as a craven gentleman."
+
+With that she turned her again to the feast, though little heart she
+had thereto. But the Sieur Rudel was well content; for not for all
+the honour in Christendom would he break his word to his dear Solita.
+Howbeit, the nobles were ever urgent that the princess should set him
+free, pleading the worshipful deeds he had accomplished in her cause.
+But to none of them would she hearken, and the fair gentle ladies of
+the Court greatly applauded her for her persistence--and especially
+those who had erstwhile dropped their gauntlets that Rudel might bend
+and pick them up. And many pleasant jests they passed upon the Sieur
+Rudel, bidding him dance with them, since he was loth to fight. But
+he paid no heed to them, nor could they provoke him by any number of
+taunts. Whereupon, being angered at his silence, they were fain to
+send to Solita and make their sport with her.
+
+But that Joceliande would not suffer, and, rising, she went to
+Solita's chamber and entreated her most kindly, telling her that for
+love of her the Sieur Rudel would not adventure himself at Broye. Not
+a word did she say of how she had mistreated him, and Solita answered
+her jocundly for that her lord had held his pledge with her. But when
+the castle was still, the princess took Solita by the hand and led her
+down the steps to where Rudel stood against the pillar in the dark
+hall.
+
+"For thy sake, sweet Solita," she said, "is he bound. For thy sake!"
+and she made her feel the manacles upon his hands. And when Solita had
+so felt his bonds, she wept, and made the greatest sorrow that ever
+man heard.
+
+"Alas!" she cried, "that my dear lord should suffer in such straits.
+In God's mercy, madame, I pray you let him go! Loyal service hath he
+done for you, such as no other in the kingdom."
+
+"Loyal service, I trow," replied the princess. "He hath brought such
+shame upon my Court that for ever am I dishonoured. It may not be that
+I let him go, without you give him back his word and bid him forth to
+Broye."
+
+"And that will I never do," replied Solita, "for all your cruelty."
+
+So the princess turned her away and gat her from the hall, but Solita
+remained with her lord, making moan and easing his fetters with her
+hands as best she might. Hence it fell out that she who should have
+comforted must needs be comforted herself, and that the Sieur Rudel
+did right willingly.
+
+The like, he would say to me, hath often happened to him since, and
+when he was harassed with sore distress he must needs turn him about
+to stop a woman's tears; for which he thanked God most heartily, and
+prayed that so it might ever be, since thus he clean forgot his own
+sad plight. Whence, meseems, may men understand how noble a gentleman
+was my good lord the Sieur Rudel.
+
+Now when the night was well spent and drawing on to dawn, Solita, for
+very weariness, fell asleep at the pillar's foot, and Rudel began to
+take counsel with himself if, by any manner of means, he might outwit
+the Princess Joceliande. For this he saw, that she would not have him
+wed her handmaiden, and for that cause, and for no cowardice of his,
+had so cruelly entreated him. And when he had pondered a little with
+himself, he bent and touched Solita with his hands, and called to her
+in a low voice.
+
+"Solita," he said, "it is in Joceliande's heart to keep us twain
+each from other. Rise, therefore, and get thee to the good abbot who
+baptised thee. Ever hath he stood my friend, and for friendship's sake
+this thing he will do. Bring him hither into the hall, that he may
+marry us even this night, and when the morning comes I will tell the
+princess of our marriage; and so will she know that her cruelty is of
+small avail, and release me unto thee."
+
+Thereupon Solita rose right joyously.
+
+"Surely, my dear lord," said she, "no man can match thee, neither in
+craft nor prowess," and she hurried through the dark passages towards
+the lodging of the abbot. Hard by this lodging was the chapel of the
+castle, and when she came thereto the windows were ablaze with light,
+and Solita clapped her ear to the door. But no sound did she hear, no,
+not so much as the stirring of a mouse, and bethinking her that the
+good abbot might be holding silent vigil, she gently pressed upon the
+door, so that it opened for the space of an inch; and when she looked
+into the chapel, she beheld the Princess Joceliande stretched upon
+the steps before the altar. Her coronet had fallen from her head and
+rolled across the stones, and she lay like one that had fallen asleep
+in the counting of her beads. Greatly did Solita marvel at the sight,
+but no word she said lest she should wake the princess; and in a
+little, becoming afeard of the silence and of the shadows which the
+flickering candles set racing on the wall, she shut the door quickly
+and stole on tiptoe to the abbot. Long she entreated him or ever she
+prevailed, for the holy man was timorous, and feared the wrath of the
+princess. But at the last, for the Sieur Rudel's sake, he consented,
+and married them privily in the hall as the grey dawn was breaking
+across the sea.
+
+Now, in the morning, the princess bid Solita be brought to her, and
+when they were alone, gently and cunningly she spake:
+
+"Child," she said, "I doubt not thy heart is hot against me for that I
+will not enlarge the Sieur Rudel. Alas! fain were I to do this thing,
+but for the honour of my Court I may not. Bound are we not by our
+wills but by our necessities--and thus it is with all women. Men may
+ride forth and shape their lives with their good swords; but for us,
+we must needs bide where we were born, and order such things as fall
+to us, as best we can. Therefore, child, take my word to heart: the
+Sieur Rudel loves thee, and thou wouldst keep his love. Let my age
+point to thee the way! What if I release him? No longer can he stay
+with us, holding high honour and dignity, since he hath turned him
+from his knightlihood and avoided this great adventure, but forth
+with you must he fare. And all day long will he sit with you in your
+chamber, idle as a woman, and ever his thoughts will go back to the
+times of his nobility. The clash of steel will grow louder in
+his ears; he will list again to the praises of minstrels in the
+banquet-hall, and when men speak to him of great achievements wrought
+by other hands, then thou wilt see the life die out of his eyes, and
+his heart will become cold as stone, and thou wilt lose his love. A
+great thing will it be for thee if he come not to hate thee in the
+end. But if, of thy own free will, thou send him from thee, then shalt
+thou ever keep his love. Thy image will ride before his eyes in the
+van of battles; for very lack of thee he will move from endeavour to
+endeavour; and so thy life will be enshrined in his most noble deeds."
+
+At these words, with such cunning gentleness were they spoken, Solita
+was sore troubled.
+
+"I cannot send him from me," she cried, "for never did woman so love
+her lord--no, not ever in the world!"
+
+"Then prove thy love," said Joceliande again. "A kingdom is given into
+his hand, and he will not take it because of thee. It is a hard thing,
+I trow right well. But the cross becomes a crown when a woman lifts
+it. Think! A kingdom! And never yet was kingdom established but the
+stones of its walls were mortised with the blood of women's hearts."
+
+So she pleaded, hiding her own thoughts, until Solita answered her,
+and said:
+
+"God help me, but he shall go to Broye!"
+
+Much ado had the Princess Joceliande to hide her joy for the success
+of her device; but Solita, poor lass! had neither eyes nor thoughts
+for her. Forthwith she rose to her feet, and quickly gat her to the
+hall, lest her courage should fail, before that she had accomplished
+her resolve. But when she came near to the Sieur Rudel, blithely he
+smiled at her and called "Solita, my wife." It seemed to her that
+words so sweet had never as yet been spoken since the world began, and
+all her strength ebbed from her, and she stood like one that is dumb,
+gazing piteously at her husband. Again Rudel called to her, but no
+answer could she make, and she turned and fled sobbing to the chamber
+of the princess.
+
+"I could not speak," she said; "my lips were locked, and Rudel holds
+the key."
+
+But the princess spoke gently and craftily, bidding her take heart,
+for that she herself would go with her and second her words; and
+taking Solita by the hand, she led her again to the hall.
+
+This time Solita made haste to speak first. "Rudel," she said, "no
+honour can I bring to you, but only foul disgrace, and that is no fit
+gift from one who loves you. Therefore, from this hour I hold you quit
+of your promise and pray you to undertake this mission and set forth
+for Broye."
+
+But the Sieur Rudel would hearken to nothing of what she said.
+
+"No foul disgrace can come to me," he cried, "but only if I prove
+false to you and lose your love. My promise I will keep, and all the
+more for that I see the Princess Joceliande hath set you on to this."
+
+But Solita protested that it was not so, and that of her own will and
+desire she released him, for the longing to sacrifice herself for her
+dear lord's sake grew upon her as she thought upon it. Yet he would
+not consent.
+
+"My word I passed to you when you were a maid, and shall I not keep it
+now that you are a wife?" he cried.
+
+"Wife?" cried the princess, "you are his wife?" And she roughly
+gripped Solita's wrist so that the girl could not withhold a cry.
+
+"In truth, madame," replied the Sieur Rudel, "even last night, in this
+hall, Solita and I were married by the good abbot, and therefore I
+will not leave her while she lives."
+
+Still Joceliande would not believe it, bethinking her that the Sieur
+Rudel had hit upon the pretence as a device for his enlargement; but
+Solita showed to her the ring which the abbot had taken from the
+finger of her lord and placed upon hers, and then the princess knew
+that of a surety they were married, and her hatred for Solita burned
+in her blood like fire.
+
+But no sign she gave of what she felt, but rather spoke with greater
+softness to them both, bidding them look forward beyond the first
+delights of love, and behold how all their years to come were the
+price they needs must pay.
+
+Now, while they were yet debating each with other, came Sir Broyance
+into the hall, and straightway the princess called to him and begged
+him to add his prayers to Solita's. But he answered:
+
+"That, madame, I will not do, for, indeed, the esteem I have for the
+Sieur Rudel is much increased, and I hold it no cowardice that he
+should refuse a kingdom for his wife's sake, but the sweetest bravery.
+And therefore it was that I broke off my plea last night and sought
+not to persuade him."
+
+At that Rudel was greatly rejoiced, and said:
+
+"Dost hear him, Solita? Even he who most has need of me acquits me of
+disgrace. Truly I will never leave thee while I live."
+
+But the princess turned sharply to Sir Broyance. "Sir, have you
+changed your tune?" she said; "for never was a man so urgent as you
+with me for the Sieur Rudel's help."
+
+"Alas! madame," he replied, "I knew not then that he was plighted to
+the maiden Solita, or never would I have borne this message. For
+this I surely know, that all my days are waste and barren because I
+suffered my mistress to send me from her after a will-of-the-wisp
+honour, even as Solita would send her lord."
+
+Thereupon Solita brake in upon him:
+
+"But, my lord, you have won great renown, and far and wide is your
+prowess known and sung."
+
+"That avails me nothing," he replied, "my life rings hollow like an
+empty cup, and so are two lives wasted."
+
+"Nay, my lord, neither life is wasted. For much have you done for
+others, though maybe little for yourself, while for her you loved the
+noise of your achievements must have been enough."
+
+"Of that I cannot tell," he answered. "But this I know: she drags a
+pale life out behind convent walls. Often have I passed the gate with
+my warriors, but never could I hold speech with her."
+
+"She will have seen your banners glancing in the sun," said Solita,
+"and so will she know her sacrifice was good." Thereupon she turned
+her again to her husband. "For my sake, dear Rudel, I pray you go to
+Broye."
+
+But still he persisted, saying he would not depart from her till
+death, until at last she ceased from her importunities, and went sadly
+to her chamber. Then she unbound her hair and stood gazing at her
+likeness in the mirror.
+
+"O cursed beauty," she cried, "wherein I took vain pride for my sweet
+lord's sake--truly art thou my ruin and snare!" And while she thus
+made moan, the princess came softly into her chamber.
+
+"He will not leave me, madame," she sobbed. Joceliande came over to
+her and gently laid her hand upon her head and whispered in her ear,
+"Not while you live!"
+
+For awhile Solita sat silent.
+
+"Ay, madame," she said at length, "even as I came alone to these
+coasts, so will I go from them;" and slowly she drew from its sheath a
+little knife which she carried at her girdle. She tried the point upon
+her finger, so that the blood sprang from the prick and dropped on her
+white gown. At the sight she gave a cry and dropped the knife, and "I
+cannot do it" she said, "I have not the courage. But you, madame! Ever
+have you been kind to me, and therefore show me this last kindness."
+
+"I will well," said the princess; and she made Solita to sit upon a
+couch, and with two bands of her golden hair she tied her hands fast
+behind her, and so laid her upon her back on the couch. And when she
+had so laid her she said:
+
+"But for all that you die, he shall not go to Broye, but here shall he
+bide, and share my throne with me."
+
+Thereupon did Solita perceive all the treachery of Princess
+Joceliande, and vainly she struggled to free her hands and to cry out
+for help. But Joceliande clapped her palm upon Solita's mouth, and
+drawing a gold pin from her own hair, she drove it straight into her
+heart, until nothing but the little knob could be seen. So Solita
+died, and quickly the princess wiped the blood from her breast, and
+unbound her hands and arranged her limbs as though she slept. Then she
+returned to the hall, and, summoning the warden, bade him loose the
+Sieur Rudel.
+
+"It shall be even as you wish," she said to him. Wise and prudent had
+she been, had she ended with that; but her malice was not yet sated,
+and so she suffered it to lead her to her ruin. For she stretched out
+her hand to him and said, "I myself will take you to your wife." And
+greatly marvelling, the Sieur Rudel took her hand and followed.
+
+Now when they were come to Solita's chamber, the princess entered
+first, and turned her again to my Lord Rudel and laid her finger to
+her lips, saying, "Hush!" Therefore he came in after her on tiptoe and
+stood a little way from the foot of the couch, fearing lest he might
+wake his wife.
+
+"Is she not still?" asked Joceliande in a whisper. "Is she not still
+and white?"
+
+"Still and white as a folded lily," he replied, "and like a folded
+lily, too, in her white flesh there sleeps a heart of gold." Therewith
+he crept softly to the couch and bent above her, and in an instant he
+perceived that her bosom did not rise and fall. He gazed swiftly at
+the princess; she was watching him, and their glances met. He dropped
+upon his knees by the couch and felt about Solita's heart that he
+might know whether it beat or not, and his fingers touched the knob of
+Joceliande's bodkin. Gently he drew the gown from Solita's bosom, and
+beheld how that she had been slain. Then did he weep, believing that
+in truth she had killed herself, but the princess must needs touch him
+upon the shoulder.
+
+"My lord," she said, "why weep for the handmaid when the princess
+lives?"
+
+Then the Sieur Rudel rose straightway to his feet and said:
+
+"This is thy doing!" For a little Joceliande denied it, saying that of
+her own will and desire Solita had perished. But Rudel looked her ever
+sternly in the face, and again he said, "This is thy doing!" and at
+that Joceliande could gainsay him no more. But she dropped upon the
+floor, and kissed his feet, and cried:
+
+"It was for love of thee, Rudel. Look, my kingdom is large and of much
+wealth, yet of no worth is it to me, but only if it bring thee service
+and great honour. A princess am I, yet no joy do I have of my degree,
+but only if thou share my siege with me."
+
+Then Rudel broke out upon her, thrusting her from him with his hand
+and spurning her with his foot as she crouched upon the floor.
+
+"No princess art thou, but a changeling. For surely princess never did
+such foul wrong and crime;" and even as he spake, many of the nobles
+burst into the chamber, for they had heard the outcry below and
+marvelled what it might mean. And when Rudel beheld them crowding
+the doorway, "Come in, my lords," said he, "so that ye may know what
+manner of woman ye serve and worship. There lies my dear wife, Solita,
+murdered by this vile princess, and for love of me she saith, for love
+of me!" And again he turned him to Joceliande. "Now all the reverence
+I held thee in is turned to hatred, God be thanked; such is the
+guerdon of thy love for me."
+
+Joceliande, when she heard his injuries, knew indeed that her love was
+unavailing, and that by no means might she win him to share her siege
+with her. Therefore her love changed to a bitter fury, and standing
+up forthwith she bade the nobles take their swords and smite off the
+Sieur Rudel's head. But no one so much as moved a hand towards his
+hilt. Then spake Rudel again:
+
+"O vile and treacherous," he cried, "who will obey thee?" and his eyes
+fell upon Solita where she lay in her white beauty upon the golden
+pillow of her hair. Thereupon he dropped again upon his knees by the
+couch, and took her within his arms, kissing her lips and her eyes,
+and bidding her wake; this with many tears. But seeing she would not,
+but was dead in very truth, he got him to his feet and turned to where
+the princess stood like stone in the middle of the chamber. "Now for
+thy sin," he cried, "a shameful death shalt thou die and a painful,
+and may the devil have thy soul!"
+
+He bade the nobles depart from the chamber, and following them the
+last, firmly barred the door upon the outside. Thus was the Princess
+Joceliande left alone with dead Solita, and ever she heard the closing
+and barring of doors and the sound of feet growing fainter and
+fainter. But no one came to her, loud though she cried, and sorely was
+she afeard, gazing now at the dead body, now wondering what manner of
+death the Sieur Rudel planned for her. Then she walked to the window
+if by any chance she might win help that way, and saw the ships riding
+at their anchorage with sails loose, and heard the songs of the
+sailors as they made ready to cast free; and between the coast and
+the castle were many men hurrying backwards and forwards with all the
+purveyance of a voyage. Then did she think that she was to be left
+alone in the tower, to starve to death in company of the girl she had
+murdered, and great moan she made; but other device was in the mind
+of my ingenious master Lord Rudel. For all about the castle he piled
+stacks of wood and drenched them with oil, bethinking him that
+Solita his wife, if little joy she had had of her life, should have
+undeniable honour in her obsequies. And so having set fire to the
+stacks, he got him into the ships with all the company that had
+dwelled within the castle, and drew out a little way from shore. Then
+the ships lay to and watched the flames mounting the castle walls. The
+tower wherein the Princess Joceliande was prisoned was the topmost
+turret of the building, so that many a roof crashed in, and many a
+rampart bowed out and crumbled to the ground, or ever the fire touched
+it. But just as night was drawing on, lo! a great tongue of flame
+burst through the window from within, and the Sieur Rudel beheld in
+the midst of it as it were the figure of a woman dancing.
+
+Thereupon he signed to his sailors to hoist the sail again, and the
+other ships obeying his example, he led the way gallantly to Broye.
+
+
+
+
+A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
+
+
+"So you couldn't wait!"
+
+Mrs. Branscome turned full on the speaker as she answered
+deliberately: "You have evidently not been long in London, Mr. Hilton,
+or you would not ask that question."
+
+"I arrived yesterday evening."
+
+"Quite so. Then will you forgive me one tiny word of advice? You will
+learn the truth of it soon by yourself; but I want to convince you at
+once of the uselessness--to use no harder word--of trying to revive a
+flirtation--let me see! yes, quite two years old. You might as well
+galvanise a mummy and expect it to walk about. Besides," she added
+inconsistently, "I had to marry and--and--you never came."
+
+"Then you sent the locket!"
+
+The word sent a shiver through Mrs. Branscome with a remembrance of
+the desecration of a gift which she had cherished as a holy thing. She
+clung to flippancy as her defence.
+
+"Oh, no! I never sent it. I lost it somewhere, I think. Must you go?"
+she continued, as Hilton moved silently to the door. "I expect my
+husband in just now. Won't you wait and meet him?"
+
+"How dare you?" Hilton burst out. "Is there nothing of your true self
+left?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+David Hilton's education was as yet in its infancy. This was not only
+his first visit to England, but, indeed, to any spot further afield
+than Interlaken. All of his six-and-twenty years that he could
+recollect had been passed in a _chalet_ on the Scheidegg above
+Grindelwald, his only companion an elderly recluse who had
+deliberately cut himself off from communion with his fellows. The
+trouble which had driven Mr. Strange, an author at one time of some
+mark, into this seclusion, was now as completely forgotten as his
+name. Even David knew nothing of its cause. That Strange was his uncle
+and had adopted him when left an orphan at the age of six, was the
+sum of his information. For although the pair had lived together for
+twenty years, there had been little intercourse of thought between
+them, and none of sentiment. Strange had, indeed, throughout shut his
+nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at
+first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards
+manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his
+embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the
+savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he
+had originally chosen as a solace for his loneliness, became in the
+end the victim of a heartless experiment. Strange's plan was based
+upon a method of training. In the first place, he thoroughly isolated
+David from any actual experience of persons beyond the simple
+shepherd folk who attended to their needs and a few Alpine guides who
+accompanied him on mountain expeditions. He kept incessant guard over
+his own past life, letting no incidents or deductions escape, and fed
+the youth's mind solely upon the ideal polities of the ancients,
+his object being to launch him suddenly upon the world with little
+knowledge of it beyond what had filtered through his books, and
+possessed of an intuitive hostility to existing modes. What kind of a
+career would ensue? Strange anticipated the solution of the problem
+with an approach to excitement. Two events, however, prevented the
+complete realisation of his scheme. One was a lingering illness which
+struck him down when David was twenty-four and about to enter on his
+ordeal. The second, occurring simultaneously, was the advent of Mrs.
+Branscome--then Kate Alden--to Grindelwald.
+
+They met by chance on the snow slopes of the Wetterhorn early one
+August morning. Miss Alden was trying to disentangle some meaning
+from the _patois_ of her guides, and gratefully accepted Hilton's
+assistance. Half-an-hour after she had continued the ascent, David
+noticed a small gold locket glistening in her steps. It recalled him
+to himself, and he picked it up and went home with a strange trouble
+clutching at his heart. The next morning he carried the locket down
+into the valley, found its owner and--forgot to restore it. It became
+an excuse for further descents. Meanwhile, the theories were wooed
+with a certain coldness. In front of them stood perpetually the one
+real thing which had surged up through the quiet of his life, and,
+lover-like, he justified its presence to himself, by seeing in Kate
+Alden's frank face the incarnation of the ideal patterns of his books.
+The visits to Grindelwald grew more frequent and more prolonged. The
+climax, however, came unexpectedly to both. David had commissioned a
+jeweller at Berne to fashion a fac-simile of the locket for his own
+wearing, and, meaning to restore the original, handed Kate Alden the
+copy the evening before she left. An explanation of the mistake led to
+mutual avowals and a betrothal. Hilton returned to nurse his adoptive
+father, and was to seek England as soon as he could obtain his
+release. Meanwhile, Kate pledged herself to wait for him. She kept the
+new locket, empty except for a sprig of edelweiss he had placed in
+it, and agreed that if she needed her lover's presence, she should
+despatch it as an imperative summons.
+
+During the next two years Strange's life ebbed sullenly away. The
+approach of death brought no closer intimacy between uncle and nephew,
+since indeed the former held it almost as a grievance against
+David that he should die before he could witness the issue of his
+experiment. Consequently the younger man kept his secret to himself,
+and embraced it the more closely for his secrecy, fostering it through
+the dreary night watches, until the image of Kate Alden became a
+Star-in-the-East to him, beckoning towards London. When the end came,
+David found himself the possessor of a moderate fortune; and with the
+humiliating knowledge that this legacy awoke his first feeling of
+gratitude towards his uncle, he locked the door of the _chalet_, and
+so landed at Charing Cross one wet November evening. Meanwhile the
+locket had never come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Hilton had left, Mrs. Branscome's forced indifference gave way.
+As she crouched beside the fire, numbed by pain beyond the power of
+thought, she could conjure up but one memory--the morning of their
+first meeting. She recollected that the sun had just risen over the
+shoulder of the Shreckhorn, and how it had seemed to her young fancy
+that David had come to her straight from the heart of it. The sound of
+her husband's step in the hall brought her with a shock to facts. "He
+must go back," she muttered, "he must go back."
+
+David, however, harboured no such design. One phrase of hers had
+struck root in his thoughts. "I had to marry," she had said, and
+certain failings in her voice warned him that this, whatever it
+meant, was in her eyes the truth. It had given the lie direct to the
+flippancy which she had assumed, and David determined to remain until
+he had fathomed its innermost meaning. A fear, indeed, lest the one
+single faith he felt as real should crumble to ashes made his resolve
+almost an instinct of self-preservation. The idea of accepting the
+situation never occurred to him, his training having effectually
+prevented any growth of respect for the _status quo_ as such. Nor did
+he realise at this time that his determination might perhaps prove
+unfair to Mrs. Branscome. A certain habit of abstraction, nurtured in
+him by the spirit of inquiry which he had imbibed from his books, had
+become so intuitive as to penetrate even into his passion. From the
+first he had been accustomed to watch his increasing intimacy with
+Kate Alden from the standpoint of a third person, analysing her
+actions and feelings no less than his own. And now this tendency gave
+the crowning impetus to a resolve which sprang originally from his
+necessity to find sure foothold somewhere amid the wreckage of his
+hopes.
+
+From this period might be dated the real commencement of Hilton's
+education. He returned to the Branscomes' house, sedulously schooled
+his looks and his words, save when betrayed into an occasional
+denunciation of the marriage laws, and succeeded at last in overcoming
+a distaste which Mr. Branscome unaccountably evinced for him. To a
+certain extent, also, he was taken up by social entertainers. There
+was an element of romance in the life he had led which appealed
+favourably to the seekers after novelty--"a second St. Simeon
+Skylights" he had been rashly termed by one good lady, whose wealth
+outweighed her learning. At first his gathering crowd of acquaintances
+only served to fence him more closely within himself; but as he began
+to realise that this was only the unit of another crowd, a crowd of
+designs and intentions working darkly, even he, sustained by the
+strength of a single aim, felt himself whirling at times. Thus he
+slowly grew to some knowledge of the difficulties and complications
+which must beset any young girl like Kate Alden, whose nearest
+relation and chaperon had been a feather-headed cousin not so
+many years her elder. At last, in a dim way, he began to see the
+possibility of replacing his bitterness with pity. For Mrs. Branscome
+did not love her husband; he plainly perceived that, if only from the
+formal precision with which she performed her duties. She appeared to
+him, indeed, to be paying off an obligation rather than working out
+the intention of her life.
+
+The actual solution of his perplexities came by an accident. Amongst
+the visitors who fell under Hilton's observation at the Branscomes'
+was a certain Mr. Marston, a complacent widower of some
+five-and-thirty years, and Branscome's fellow servant at the
+Admiralty. Hilton's attention was attracted to this man by the air
+of embarrassment with which Mrs. Branscome received his approaches.
+Resolute to neglect no clue, however slight, David sought Marston's
+companionship, and, as a reward, discovered one afternoon in a Crown
+Derby teacup on the mantel-shelf of the latter's room his own present
+of two years back. The exclamation which this discovery extorted
+aroused Marston.
+
+"What's up?"
+
+"Where did you get this?"
+
+"Why? Have you seen it before?"
+
+The question pointed out to David the need of wariness.
+
+"No!" he answered. "Its shape rather struck me, that's all. The emblem
+of a conquest, I suppose?"
+
+The invitation stumbled awkwardly from unaccustomed lips, but
+Marston noticed no more than the words. He was chewing the cud of a
+disappointment and answered with a short laugh:
+
+"No! Rather of a rebuff. The lady tore her hand away in a hurry--the
+link on the bracelet was thin, I suppose. Anyway, that was left in my
+hand."
+
+"You were proposing to her?"
+
+"Well, hardly. I was married at the time."
+
+There was a silence for some moments, during which Hilton slowly
+gathered into his mind a consciousness of the humiliation which Kate
+must have endured, and read in that the explanation of her words "I
+had to marry." Marston took up the tale, babbling resentfully of
+a nursery prudishness, but his remarks fell on deaf ears until he
+mentioned a withered flower, which he had found inside the locket.
+Then David's self control partially gave way. In imagination he saw
+Marston carelessly tossing the sprig aside and the touch of his
+fingers seemed to sully the love of which it was the token. The locket
+burned into his hand. Without a word he dropped it on to the floor,
+and ground it to pieces with his heel. A new light broke in upon
+Marston.
+
+"So this accounts for all your railing against the marriage laws," he
+laughed. "By Jove, you have kept things quiet. I wouldn't have given
+you credit for it."
+
+His eyes travelled from the carpet to David's face, and he stopped
+abruptly.
+
+"You had better hold your tongue," David said quietly. "Pick up the
+pieces."
+
+"Do you think I would touch them now?"
+
+Marston rose from his lounge; David stepped in front of the door.
+There was a litheness in his movements which denoted obedient muscles.
+Marston perceived this now with considerable discomfort, and thought
+it best to comply: he knelt down and picked up the fragments of the
+locket.
+
+"Now throw them into the grate!"
+
+That done, David took his leave. Once outside the house, however, his
+emotion fairly mastered him. The episode of which he had just heard
+was so mean and petty in itself, and yet so far-reaching in its
+consequences that it set his senses aflame in an increased revolt
+against the order of the world. Marriage was practically a necessity
+to a girl as unprotected as Kate Alden; he now acquiesced in that. But
+that it should have been forced upon her by the vanity of a trivial
+person like Marston, engaged in the pursuit of his desires, sent a
+fever of repulsion through his veins. He turned back to the door
+deluded by the notion that it was his duty to render the occurrence
+impossible of repetition. He was checked, however, by the thought of
+Mrs. Branscome. The shame he felt hinted the full force of degradation
+of which she must have been conscious, and begot in him a strange
+feeling of loyalty. Up till now the true meaning of chivalry had
+been unknown to him. In consequence of his bringing up he had been
+incapable of regarding faith in persons as a working motive in one's
+life. Even the first dawn of his passion had failed to teach him that;
+all the confidence and trust which he gained thereby being a mere
+reflection, from what he saw in Kate Alden, of truth to him. It was
+necessary that he should feel her trouble first and his poignant sense
+of that now revealed to him, not merely the wantonness of the perils
+women are compelled to run, but their consequent sufferings and their
+endurance in suppressing them.
+
+A feverish impulse towards self-sacrifice sprang up within him. He
+would bury the incident of that afternoon as a dead thing--nay, more,
+for Mrs. Branscome's sake he would leave England and return to his
+retreat among the mountains. If she had suffered, why should he claim
+an exemption? The idea had just sufficient strength to impel him to
+catch the night-mail from Charing Cross. That it was already weakening
+was evidenced by a half-feeling of regret that he had not missed the
+train.
+
+The regret swelled during his journey to the coast. The scene he had
+just come through became, from much pondering on it, almost unreal,
+and, with the blurring of the impression it had caused, there rose a
+doubt as to the accuracy of his vision of Mrs. Branscome's distress,
+which he had conjured out of it. His chivalry, in a word, had grown
+too quickly to take firm root. It was an exotic planted in soil not
+yet fully prepared. David began to think himself a fool, and at last,
+as the train neared Dover, a question which had been vaguely throbbing
+in his brain suddenly took shape. Why had she not sent for him? True,
+the locket was lost, but she might have written. The formulation of
+the question shattered almost all the work of the last few hours. He
+cursed his recent thoughts as a child's fairy dreams. Why should he
+leave England after all? If he was to sacrifice himself it should be
+for some one who cared sufficiently for him to justify the act.
+
+There might, of course, have been some hidden obstacle in the way,
+which Mrs. Branscome could not surmount. The revelation of Marston's
+unimagined story warned him of the possibility of that. But the
+chances were against it. Anyway, he quibbled to himself, he had a
+clear right to pursue the matter until he unearthed the truth. Acting
+upon this decision, David returned to town, though not without a
+lurking sense of shame.
+
+A few evenings after, he sought out Mrs. Branscome at a dance. The
+blood rushed to her face when she caught his figure, and as quickly
+ebbed away.
+
+"So you have not gone, after all?" There was something pitiful in her
+tone of reproach.
+
+"No. What made you think I had?"
+
+"Mr. Marston told me!"
+
+"Did he tell you why?"
+
+"I guessed that, and I thanked you in my heart."
+
+David was disconcerted; the woman he saw corresponded so ill with what
+he was schooling himself to believe her. He sought to conceal his
+confusion, as she had once done, and played a part. Like her, he
+overplayed it.
+
+"Well! I came to see London life, you know. It makes a pretty comedy."
+
+"Comedies end in tears at times."
+
+"Even then common politeness makes us sit them out. Can you spare me a
+dance?"
+
+Mrs. Branscome pleaded fatigue, and barely suppressed a sigh of relief
+as she noted her husband's approach. David followed her glance, and
+bent over her, speaking hurriedly:--
+
+"You said you knew why I went away; I want to tell you why I came
+back."
+
+"No! no!" she exclaimed. "It could be of no use--of no help to either
+of us."
+
+"I came back," he went on, ignoring her interruption, "merely to ask
+you one question. Will you hear it and answer it? I can wait," he
+added, as she kept silence.
+
+"Then, to-morrow, as soon as possible," Mrs. Branscome replied, beaten
+by his persistency. "Come at seven; we dine at eight, so I can give
+you half-an-hour. But you are ungenerous."
+
+That night began what may be termed the crisis of Hilton's education.
+This was the second time he had caught Mrs. Branscome unawares. On the
+first occasion--that of his unexpected arrival in England--he did not
+possess the experience to measure accurately looks and movements,
+or to comprehend them as the connotation of words. It is doubtful,
+besides, whether, had he owned the skill, he would have had the power
+to exercise it, so engrossed was he in his own distress. By the
+process, however, of continually repressing the visible signs of his
+own emotions, he had now learnt to appreciate them in others. And
+in Mrs. Branscome's sudden change of colour, in little convulsive
+movements of her hands, and in a certain droop of eyelids veiling eyes
+which met the gaze frankly as a rule, he read this evening sure proofs
+of the constancy of her heart. This fresh knowledge affected him in
+two ways. On the one hand it gave breath to the selfish passion which
+now dominated his ideas. At the same time, however it assured him
+that when he asked his question: "Why did you not send for me?" an
+unassailable answer would be forthcoming; and, moreover, by convincing
+him of this, it destroyed the sole excuse he had pleaded to himself
+for claiming the right to ask it. In self-defence Hilton had recourse
+to his old outcry against the marriage laws and, finding this barren,
+came in the end to frankly devising schemes for their circumvention.
+Such inward personal conflicts were, of necessity, strange to a man
+dry-nursed on abstractions, and, after a night of tension, they tossed
+him up on the shores of the morning broken in mind and irresolute for
+good or ill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Branscome received him impassively at the appointed time. David
+saw that he was expected to speak to the point, and a growing scorn
+for his own insistence urged him to the same course. He plunged
+abruptly into his subject and his manner showed him in the rough, more
+particularly to himself.
+
+"What I came back to ask you is just this. You know--you must
+know--that I would have come, whatever the consequence. Why did you
+not send for me after, after--?"
+
+"Why did I not send for you?" Mrs. Branscome took him up, repeating
+his words mechanically, as though their meaning had not reached her.
+"You don't mean that you never received my letter. Oh, don't say that!
+It can't have miscarried, I registered it."
+
+"Then you did write?"
+
+This confirmation of her fear drove a breach through her composure.
+
+"Of course, of course, I wrote," she cried. "You doubt that? What can
+you think of me? Yes, I wrote, and when no answer came, I fancied
+you had forgotten me--that you had never really cared, and so I--I
+married."
+
+Her voice dried in her throat. The thought of this ruin of two lives,
+made inevitable by a mistake in which neither shared, brought a sense
+of futility which paralysed her.
+
+The same idea was working in Hilton's mind, but to a different end. It
+fixed the true nature of this woman for the first time clearly within
+his recognition, and the new light blinded him. Before, his imagined
+grievance had always coloured the picture; now, he began to realise
+not only that she was no more responsible for the catastrophe than
+himself, but that he must have stood in the same light to her as she
+had done to him. The events of the past few months passed before his
+mind as on a clear mirror. He compared the gentle distinction of her
+bearing with his own flaunting resentment.
+
+"I am sorry," he said, "I have wronged you in thought and word and
+action. The fact is, I never saw you plainly before; myself stood in
+the way."
+
+Mrs. Branscome barely heeded his words. The feelings her watchfulness
+had hitherto restrained having once broken their barriers swept her
+away on a full flow. She recalled the very terms of her letter. She
+had written it in the room in which they were standing. Mr. Branscome
+had called just as she addressed the envelope--she had questioned him
+about its registration to Switzerland, and, yes, he had promised to
+look after it and had taken it away. "Yes!" she repeated to herself
+aloud, directing her eyes instinctively towards her husband's study
+door. "He promised to post it."
+
+The sound of the words and a sudden movement from Hilton woke her to
+alarm. David had turned to the window, and she felt that he had heard
+and understood. The silence pressed on her like a dead weight. For
+Hilton, this was the crucial moment of his ordeal. He had understood
+only too clearly, and this second proof of the harm a petty sin could
+radiate struck through him the same fiery repulsion which had stung
+him to revolt when he quitted Marston's rooms. He flung up the window
+and faced the sunset. Strips of black cloud barred it across, and he
+noticed, with a minute attention of which he was hardly conscious,
+that their lower edges took a colour like the afterglow on a Swiss
+rock mountain. The perception sent a riot of associations through his
+brain which strengthened his wavering purpose. Must he lose her after
+all, he thought; now that he had risen to a true estimation of her
+worth? His fancy throned Kate queen of his mountain home, and he
+turned towards her, but a light of fear in her eyes stopped the words
+on his lips.
+
+"I trust you," she said, simply.
+
+The storm of his passions quieted down. That one sentence just
+expressed to him the debt he owed to her. In return--well, he could do
+no less than leave her her illusion.
+
+"Good-bye," he said. "All the good that comes to us, somehow, seems to
+spring from women like yourself, while we give you nothing but trouble
+in return. Even this last misery, which my selfishness has brought to
+you, lifts me to breathe a cleaner air."
+
+"He must have forgotten to post it," Mrs. Branscome pleaded.
+
+"Yes; we must believe that. Good-bye!"
+
+For a moment he stayed to watch her white figure, outlined against the
+dusk of the room, and then gently closed the door on her. The next
+morning David left England, not, however, for Grindelwald. He dreaded
+the morbid selfishness which grows from isolation, and sought a
+finishing school in the companionship of practical men.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.
+
+
+The surgeon has a weakness for men who make their living on the sea.
+From the skipper of a Dogger Bank fishing-smack to the stoker of a
+Cardiff tramp, from Margate 'longshoreman to a crabber of the Stilly
+Isles, he embraces them all in a lusty affection. And this not merely
+out of his own love of salt water but because his diagnosis reveals
+the gentleman in them more surely than in the general run of his
+wealthier patients. "A primitive gentleman, if you like," Lincott will
+say, "not above tearing his meat with his fingers or wearing the
+same shirt night and day for a couple of months on end, but still a
+gentleman." As one of the innumerable instances which had built up his
+conviction, Lincott will offer you the twenty-kroner story.
+
+As he was walking through the wards of his hospital he stopped for
+a moment by the bed of a brewer's drayman who was suffering from an
+access of _delirium tremens_. The drayman's language was violent and
+voluble. But he sank into a coma with the usual suddenness common to
+such cases, and in the pause which followed Lincott heard a gentle
+voice a few beds away earnestly apologising to a nurse for the trouble
+she was put to. "Why," she replied with a laugh, "I am here to be
+troubled." Apologies of the kind are not so frequently heard in the
+wards of an East End hospital. This one, besides, was spoken with an
+accent not very pronounced, it is true, but unfamiliar. Lincott moved
+down to the bed. It was occupied by a man apparently tall, with a pair
+of remorseful blue eyes set in an open face, and a thatch of yellow
+hair dusted with grey.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Lincott, and the patient explained. He was
+a Norseman from Finland, fifty-three years old, and he had worked all
+his life on English ships. He had risen from "decky" to mate. Then he
+had injured himself, and since he could work no more he had come into
+the hospital to be cured. Lincott examined him, found that a slight
+operation was all the man needed, and performed it himself. In six
+weeks time Helling, as the sailor was named, was discharged. He made a
+simple and dignified little speech of thanks to the nurses for their
+attention, and another to the surgeon for saving his life.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Lincott, as he held out his hand. "Any medical
+student could have performed that operation."
+
+"Then I have another reason to thank you," answered Helling. "The
+nurses have told me about you, sir, and I'm grateful you spared the
+time to perform it yourself."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Lincott.
+
+"Find a ship, sir," answered Helling. Then he hesitated, and slowly
+slipped his finger and thumb along the waist-band of his trousers. But
+he only repeated, "I must find a ship," and so left the hospital.
+
+Three weeks later Helling called at Lincott's house in Harley Street.
+Now, when hospital patients take the trouble, after they have been
+discharged, to find out the doctor's private address and call, it
+generally means they have come to beg. Lincott, remembering how
+Helling's simple courtesies had impressed him, experienced an actual
+disappointment. He felt his theories about the seafaring man begin to
+totter. However, Helling was shown into the consulting-room, and at
+the sight of him Lincott's disappointment vanished. He did not start
+up, since manifestations of surprise are amongst those things with
+which doctors find it advisable to dispense, but he hooked a chair
+forward with his foot.
+
+"Now then, sit down! Chuck yourself about! Sit down," said Lincott
+genially. "You look bad."
+
+Helling, in fact, was gaunt with famine; his eyes were sunk and dull;
+he was so thin that he seemed to have grown in height.
+
+"I had some trouble in finding a ship," he said; and sitting down on
+the edge of the chair, twirled his hat in some embarrassment.
+
+"It is three weeks since you left the hospital?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You should have come here before," the surgeon was moved to say.
+
+"No," answered Helling. "I couldn't come before, sir. You see, I had
+no ship. But I found one this morning, and I start to-morrow."
+
+"But for these three weeks? You have been starving." Lincott slipped
+his hand into his pocket. It seemed to him afterwards simply
+providential that he did not fumble his money, that no clink of coins
+was heard. For Helling answered,
+
+"Yes, sir, I've been starving." He drew back his shoulders and
+laughed. "I'm proud to know that I've been starving."
+
+He laid his hat on the ground, drew out and unclasped his knife, felt
+along the waist-band of his breeches, cut a few stitches, and finally
+produced a little gold coin. This coin he held between his forefinger
+and thumb.
+
+"Forty years ago," he said, "when I was a nipper and starting on
+my first voyage, my mother gave me this. She sewed it up in the
+waist-band of my breeches with her own hands and told me never to part
+with it until I'd been starving. I've been near to starvation often
+and often enough. But I never have starved before. This coin has
+always stood between that and me. Now, however, I have actually been
+starving and I can part with it."
+
+He got up from his chair and timidly laid the piece of gold on the
+table by Lincott's elbow. Then he picked up his hat. The surgeon
+said nothing, and he did not touch the coin. Neither did he look at
+Helling, but sat with his forehead propped in his hand as though he
+were reading the letters on his desk. Helling, afraid to speak lest
+his coin should be refused, walked noiselessly to the door and
+noiselessly unlatched it.
+
+"Wait a bit!" said Lincott. Helling stopped anxiously in the doorway.
+
+"Where have you slept"--Lincott paused to steady his voice--"for the
+last three weeks?" he continued.
+
+"Under arches by the river, sir," replied Helling. "On benches along
+the Embankment, once or twice in the parks. But that's all over now,"
+he said earnestly. "I'm all right. I've got my ship. I couldn't part
+with that before, because it was the only thing I had to hang on to
+the world with. But I'm all right now."
+
+Lincott took up the coin and turned it over in the palm of his hand.
+
+"Twenty kroners," he said. "Do you know what that's worth in England?"
+
+"Yes, I do," answered Helling with some trepidation.
+
+"Fifteen shillings," said Lincott. "Think of it, fifteen shillings,
+perhaps sixteen."
+
+"I know," interrupted Helling quickly, mistaking the surgeon's
+meaning. "But please, please, you mustn't think I value what you have
+done for me at that. It's only fifteen shillings, but it has meant a
+fortune to me all the last three weeks. Each time that I've drawn my
+belt tighter I have felt that coin underneath it burn against my skin.
+When I passed a coffee-stall in the early morning and saw the steam
+and the cake I knew I could have bought up the whole stall if I chose.
+I could have had meals, and meals, and meals. I could have slept in
+beds under roofs. It's only fifteen shillings; nothing at all to
+you," and he looked round the consulting-room, with its pictures and
+electric lights, "but I want you to take it at what it has been worth
+to me ever since I came out of the hospital."
+
+Lincott took Helling into his dining-room. On a pedestal stood a great
+silver vase, blazing its magnificence across the room.
+
+"You see that?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Helling.
+
+"It was given to me by a patient. It must have cost at the least
+L500."
+
+Helling tapped the vase with his knuckles.
+
+"Yes, sir, that's a present," he said enviously. "That _is_ a
+present."
+
+Lincott laughed and threw up the window.
+
+"You can pitch it out into the street if you like. By the side of your
+coin it's muck."
+
+Lincott keeps the coin. He points out that Helling was fifty-three at
+the time that he gave him this present, and that the operation was one
+which any practitioner could have performed.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTH PICTURE.
+
+
+Lady Tamworth felt unutterably bored. The sensation of lassitude, even
+in its less acute degrees, was rare with her; for she possessed a
+nature of so fresh a buoyancy that she was able, as a rule, to extract
+diversion from any environment. Her mind took impressions with the
+vivid clearness of a mirror, and also, it should be owned, with a
+mirror's transient objectivity. To-day, however, the mirror was
+clouded. She looked out of the window; a level row of grey houses
+frowned at her across the street. She looked upwards; a grey pall of
+cloud swung over the rooftops. The interior of the room appeared to
+her even less inviting than the street. It was the afternoon of the
+first drawing-room, and a _debutante_ was exhibiting herself to her
+friends. She stood in the centre, a figure from a Twelfth-Night cake,
+amidst a babble of congratulations, and was plainly occupied in a
+perpetual struggle to conceal her moments of enthusiasm beneath a
+crust of deprecatory languor.
+
+The spectacle would have afforded choice entertainment to Lady
+Tamworth, had she viewed it in the company of a sympathetic companion.
+Solitary appreciation of the humorous, however, only induced in her
+a yet more despondent mood. The tea seemed tepid; the conversation
+matched the tea. Epigrams without point, sallies void of wit, and
+cynicisms innocent of the sting of an apt application floated about
+her on a ripple of unintelligent laughter. A phrase of Mr. Dale's
+recurred to her mind, "Hock and seltzer with the sparkle out of it;"
+so he had stigmatised the style and she sadly thanked him for the
+metaphor.
+
+There was, moreover, a particular reason for her discontent. Nobody
+realised the presence of Lady Tamworth, and this unaccustomed neglect
+shot a barbed question at her breast. "After all why should they?" She
+was useless, she reflected; she did nothing, exercised no influence.
+The thought, however, was too painful for lengthened endurance; the
+very humiliation of it produced the antidote. She remembered that she
+had at last persuaded her lazy Sir John to stand for Parliament. Only
+wait until he was elected! She would exercise an influence then. The
+vision of a _salon_ was miraged before her, with herself in the middle
+deftly manipulating the destinies of a nation.
+
+"Lady Tamworth!" a voice sounded at her elbow.
+
+"Mr. Dale!" She turned with a sudden sprightliness. "My guardian angel
+sent you."
+
+"So bad as that?"
+
+"I have an intuition." She paused impressively upon the word.
+
+"Never mind!" said he soothingly. "It will go away."
+
+Lady Tamworth glared, that is, as well as she could; nature had not
+really adapted her for glaring. "I have an intuition," she resumed,
+"that this is what the suburbs mean." And she waved her hand
+comprehensively.
+
+"They are perhaps a trifle excessive," he returned. "But then you
+needn't have come."
+
+"Oh, yes! Clients of Sir John." Lady Tamworth sighed and sank with a
+weary elegance into a chair. Mr. Dale interpreted the sigh. "Ah! A
+wife's duties," he began.
+
+"No man can know," she interrupted, and she spread out her hands in
+pathetic forgiveness of an over-exacting world. Her companion laughed
+brutally. "You _are_ rude!" she said and laughed too. And then, "Tell
+me something new!"
+
+"I met an admirer of yours to-day."
+
+"But that's nothing new." She looked up at him with a plaintive
+reproach.
+
+"I will begin again," he replied submissively. "I walked down the
+Mile-End road this morning to Sir John's jute-factory."
+
+"You fail to interest me," she said with some emphasis.
+
+"I am so sorry. Good-bye!"
+
+"Mr. Dale!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"You may, if you like, go on with the first story."
+
+"There is only one. It was in the Mile-End road I met the
+admirer--Julian Fairholm."
+
+"Oh!" Lady Tamworth sat up and blushed. However, Lady Tamworth blushed
+very readily.
+
+"It was a queer incident," Mr. Dale continued. "I caught sight of a
+necktie in a little dusty shop-window near the Pavilion Theatre. I
+had never seen anything like it in my life; it fairly fascinated me,
+seemed to dare me to buy it."
+
+The lady's foot began to tap upon the carpet. Mr. Dale stopped and
+leaned critically forward.
+
+"Well! Why don't you go on?" she asked impatiently.
+
+"It's pretty," he reflected aloud.
+
+The foot disappeared demurely into the seclusion of petticoats. "You
+exasperate me," she remarked. But her face hardly guaranteed her
+words. "We were speaking of ties."
+
+"Ah, the tie wasn't pretty. It was of satin, bright yellow with blue
+spots. And an idea struck me; yes, an idea! Sir John's election
+colours are yellow, his opponent's blue. So I thought the tie would
+make a tactful present, symbolical (do you see?) of the state of the
+parties in the constituency."
+
+He paused a second time.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I went in and bought it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Julian Fairholm sold it to me."
+
+Lady Tamworth stared at the speaker in pure perplexity. Then all at
+once she understood and the blood eddied into her cheeks. "I don't
+believe it!" she exclaimed.
+
+"His face would be difficult to mistake," Mr. Dale objected. "Besides
+I had time to assure myself, for I had to wait my turn. When I entered
+the shop, he was serving a woman with baby-linen. Oh yes! Julian
+Fairholm sold me the tie."
+
+Lady Tamworth kept her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up. She
+struck the arm of her chair with her closed fist and cried in a quick
+petulance, "How dare he?"
+
+"Exactly what I thought," answered her companion smoothly. "The
+colours were crude by themselves, the combination was detestable. And
+he an artist too!" Mr. Dale laughed pleasantly.
+
+"Did he speak to you?"
+
+"He asked me whether I would take a packet of pins instead of a
+farthing."
+
+"Ah, don't," she entreated, and rose from her chair. It might have
+been her own degradation of which Mr. Dale was speaking.
+
+"By the way," he added, "I was so taken aback that I forgot to present
+the tie. Would you?"
+
+"No! No!" she said decisively and turned away. But a sudden notion
+checked her. "On second thoughts I will; but I can't promise to make
+him wear it."
+
+The smile which sped the words flickered strangely upon quivering lips
+and her eyes shone with anger. However the tie changed hands, and Lady
+Tamworth tripped down stairs and stepped into her brougham. The packet
+lay upon her lap and she unfolded it. A round ticket was enclosed, and
+the bill. On the ticket was printed, _A Present from Zedediah Moss_.
+With a convulsion of disgust she swept the parcel on to the floor.
+"How dare he?" she cried again, and her thoughts flew back to the
+brief period of their engagement. She had been just Kitty Arlton in
+those days, the daughter of a poor sea-captain but dowered with
+the compensating grace of personal attractions. Providence had
+indisputably designed her for the establishment of the family
+fortunes; such at all events was the family creed, and the girl
+herself felt no inclination to doubt a faith which was backed by the
+evidence of her looking-glass. Julian Fairholm at that time shared a
+studio with her brother, and the acquaintance thus begun ripened into
+an attachment and ended in a betrothal. For Julian, in the common
+prediction, possessed that vague blessing, a future. It is true the
+common prediction was always protected by a saving clause: "If he
+could struggle free from his mysticism." But none the less his
+pictures were beginning to sell, and the family displayed a moderate
+content. The discomposing appearance of Sir John Tamworth, however,
+gave a different complexion to the matter. Sir John was rich, and had
+besides the confident pertinacity of success. In a word, Kitty Arlton
+married Sir John.
+
+Lady Tamworth's recollections of the episode were characteristically
+vague; they came back to her in pieces like disconnected sections of
+a wooden puzzle. She remembered that she had written an exquisitely
+pathetic letter to Fairholm "when the end came," as she expressed it;
+and she recalled queer scraps of the artist's talk about the danger
+of forming ties. "New ties," he would say, "mean new duties, and they
+hamper and clog the will." Ah yes, the will; he was always holding
+forth about that and here was the lecture finally exemplified! He
+was selling baby-linen in the Mile-End road. She had borne her
+disappointment, she reflected, without any talk about will. The
+thought of her self-sacrifice even now brought the tears to her eyes;
+she saw herself wearing her orange-blossoms in the spirit of an
+Iphigeneia.
+
+Sections of the puzzle, however, were missing to Lady Tamworth's
+perceptions. For, in fact, her sense of sacrifice had been mainly
+artificial, and fostered by a vanity which made the possession of a
+broken romance seem to pose her on a notable pedestal of duty. What
+had really attracted her to Julian was the evidence of her power shown
+in the subjugation of a being intellectually higher than his compeers.
+It was not so much the man she had cared for, as the sight of herself
+in a superior setting; a sure proof whereof might have been found in a
+certain wilful pleasure which she had drawn from constantly impelling
+him to acts and admissions which she knew to be alien to his nature.
+
+It was some revival of this idea which explained her exclamation, "How
+dare he?" For his conduct appeared more in the light of an outrage and
+insult to her than of a degradation of himself. He must be rescued
+from his position, she determined.
+
+She stooped to pick up the bill from the floor as the brougham swung
+sharply round a corner. She looked out of the window; the coachman had
+turned into Berkeley Square; in another hundred yards she would reach
+home. She hastily pulled the check-string, and the footman came to the
+door. "Drive down the Mile-End road," she said; "I will fetch Sir John
+home." Lady Tamworth read the address on the bill. "Near the Pavilion
+Theatre," Mr. Dale had explained. She would just see the place this
+evening, she determined, and then reflect on the practical course to
+be pursued.
+
+The decision relieved her of her sense of humiliation, and she nestled
+back among her furs with a sigh of content. There was a pleasurable
+excitement about her present impulse which contrasted very brightly
+with her recent _ennui_. She felt that her wish to do something,
+to exert an influence, had been providentially answered. The task,
+besides, seemed to her to have a flavour of antique chivalry; it
+smacked of the princess undoing enchantments, and reminded her vaguely
+of Camelot. She determined to stop at the house and begin the work
+at once; so she summoned the footman a second time and gave him the
+address. So great indeed was the charm which her conception exercised
+over her, that her very indignation against Julian changed to pity.
+He had to be fitted to the chivalric pattern, and consequently
+refashioned. Her harlequin fancy straightway transformed him into the
+romantic lover who, having lost his mistress, had lost the world and
+therefore, naturally, held the sale of baby-linen on a par with the
+painting of pictures. "Poor Julian!" she thought.
+
+The carriage stopped suddenly in front of a shuttered window. A
+neighbouring gas-lamp lit up the letters on the board above it, _Z.
+Moss_. This unexpected check in the full flight of ardour dropped her
+to earth like a plummet. And as if to accentuate her disappointment
+the surrounding shops were aglare with light; customers pressed
+busily in and out of them, and even on the roadway naphtha-jets waved
+flauntingly over barrows of sweet-stuff and fruit. Only this sordid
+little house was dark. "They can't afford to close at this hour," she
+murmured reproachfully.
+
+The footman came to the carriage door, disdain perceptibly struggling
+through his mask of impassivity.
+
+"Why is the shop closed?" Lady Tamworth asked.
+
+"The name, perhaps, my lady," he suggested. "It is Friday."
+
+Lady Tamworth had forgotten the day. "Very well," she said sullenly.
+"Home at once!" However, she corrected herself adroitly: "I mean, of
+course, fetch Sir John first."
+
+Sir John was duly fetched and carried home jubilant at so rare an
+attention. The tie was presented to him on the way, and he bellowed
+his merriment at its shape and colour. To her surprise Lady Tamworth
+found herself defending the style, and inveighing against the monotony
+of the fashions of the West End. Nor was this the only occasion on
+which she disagreed with her husband that evening. He launched an
+aphorism across the dinner-table which he had cogitated from the
+report of a divorce-suit in the evening papers. "It is a strange
+thing," he said, "that the woman who knows her influence over a man
+usually employs it to hurt him; the woman who doesn't, employs it
+unconsciously for his good."
+
+"You don't mean that?" she asked earnestly.
+
+"I have noticed it more than once," he replied.
+
+For a moment Lady Tamworth's chivalric edifice showed cracks and
+rents; it threatened to crumble like a house of cards; but only for
+a moment. For she merely considered the remark in reference to the
+future; she applied it to her present wish to exercise an influence
+over Julian. The issue of that, however, lay still in the dark, and
+was consequently imaginable as inclination prompted. A glance at Sir
+Julian sufficed to finally reassure her. He was rosy and modern, and
+so plainly incapable of appreciating chivalric impulses. To estimate
+them rightly one must have an insight into their nature, and therefore
+an actual experience of their fire; but such fire left traces on the
+person. Chivalric people were hollow-cheeked with luminous eyes; at
+least chivalric men were hollow-cheeked, she corrected herself with
+a look at the mirror. At all events Sir John and his aphorism were
+beneath serious reflection; and she determined to repeat her journey
+upon the first opportunity.
+
+The opportunity, however, was delayed for a week and occasioned Lady
+Tamworth no small amount of self-pity. Here was noble work waiting for
+her hand, and duty kept her chained to the social oar!
+
+On the afternoon, then, of the following Friday she dressed with
+what even for her was unusual care, aiming at a complex effect of
+daintiness and severity, and drove down in a hansom to Whitechapel.
+She stopped the cab some yards from the shop and walked up to the
+window. Through the glass she could see Julian standing behind the
+counter. His hands (she noticed them particularly because he was
+displaying some cheap skeins of coloured wool) seemed perhaps a trifle
+thinner and more nervous, his features a little sharpened, and there
+was a sprinkling of grey in the black of his hair. For the first time
+since the conception of her scheme Lady Tamworth experienced a feeling
+of irresolution. With Fairholm in the flesh before her eyes, the task
+appeared difficult; its reality pressed in upon her, driving a breach
+through the flimsy wall of her fancies. She resolved to wait until the
+shop should be empty, and to that end took a few steps slowly up the
+street and returned yet more slowly. She looked into the window again;
+Julian was alone now, and still she hesitated. The admiring comments
+of two loungers on the kerb concerning her appearance at last
+determined her, and she brusquely thrust open the door. A little bell
+jangled shrilly above it and Julian looked up.
+
+"Lady Tamworth!" he said after the merest pause and with no more than
+a natural start of surprise. Lady Tamworth, however, was too taken
+aback by the cool manner of his greeting to respond at once. She had
+forecast the commencement of the interview upon such wholly different
+lines that she felt lost and bewildered. An abashed confusion was the
+least that she expected from him, and she was prepared to increase it
+with a nicely-tempered indignation. Now the positions seemed actually
+reversed; he was looking at her with a composed attention, while she
+was filled with embarrassment.
+
+A suspicion flashed through her mind that she had come upon a fool's
+errand. "Julian!" she said with something of humility in her voice,
+and she timidly reached out her little gloved hand towards him. Julian
+took it into the palm of his own and gazed at it with a sort of
+wondering tenderness, as though he had lighted upon a toy which he
+remembered to have prized dearly in an almost forgotten childhood.
+
+This second blow to her pride quickened in her a feeling of
+exasperation. She drew her fingers quickly out of his grasp. "What
+brought you down to this!" She snapped out the words at him; she had
+not come to Whitechapel to be slighted at all events.
+
+"I have risen," he answered quietly.
+
+"Risen? And you sell baby-linen!"
+
+Julian laughed in pure contentment. "You don't understand," he said.
+For a moment he looked at her as one debating with himself and then:
+"You have a right to understand. I will tell you." He leaned across
+the counter, and as he spoke the eager passion of a devotee began to
+kindle in his eyes and vibrate through the tones of his voice. "The
+knowledge of a truth worked into your heart will lift you, eh, must
+lift you high? But base your life upon that truth, centre yourself
+about it, till your thoughts become instincts born from it! It must
+lift you still higher then; ah, how much higher! Well, I have done
+that. Yes, that's why I am here. And I owe it all to you."
+
+Lady Tamworth repeated his words in sheer bewilderment. "You owe it
+all to me?"
+
+"Yes," he nodded, "all to you." And with genuine gratitude he added,
+"You didn't know the good that you had done."
+
+"Ah, don't say that!" she cried.
+
+The bell tinkled over the shop-door and a woman entered. Lady Tamworth
+bent forward and said hastily, "I must speak to you."
+
+"Then you must buy something; what shall it be?" Fairholm had already
+recovered his self-possession and was drawing out one of the shelves
+in the wall behind him.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed, "not here; I can't speak to you here. Come
+and call on me; what day will you come?"
+
+Julian shook his head. "Not at all, I am afraid. I have not the time."
+
+A boy came out from the inner room and began to get ready the
+shutters. "Ah, it's Friday," she said. "You will be closing soon."
+
+"In five minutes."
+
+"Then I will wait for you. Yes, I will wait for you."
+
+She paused at the door and looked at Julian. He was deferentially
+waiting on his customer, and Lady Tamworth noticed with a queer
+feeling of repugnance that he had even acquired the shopman's trick of
+rubbing the hands. Those five minutes proved for her a most unenviable
+period. Julian's sentence,--"I owe it all to you"--pressed heavily
+upon her conscience. Spoken bitterly, she would have given little heed
+to it; but there had been a convincing sincerity in the ring of
+his voice. The words, besides, brought back to her Sir John's
+uncomfortable aphorism and freighted it with an accusation. She
+applied it now as a search-light upon her jumbled recollections of
+Julian's courtship, and began to realise that her efforts during that
+time had been directed thoughtlessly towards enlarging her influence
+over him. If, indeed, Julian owed this change in his condition to her,
+then Sir John was right, and she had employed her influence to his
+hurt. And it only made her fault the greater that Julian was himself
+unconscious of his degradation. She commenced to feel a personal
+responsibility commanding her to rescue him from his slough, which
+was increased moreover by a fear that her persuasions might prove
+ineffectual. For Julian's manner pointed now to an utter absence of
+feeling so far as she was concerned.
+
+At last Julian came out to her. "You will leave here," she cried
+impulsively. "You will come back to us, to your friends!"
+
+"Never," he answered firmly.
+
+"You must," she pleaded; "you said you owed it all to me."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, don't you see? If you stay here, I can never forgive myself; I
+shall have ruined your life."
+
+"Ruined it?" Julian asked in a tone of wonder. "You have made it." He
+stopped and looked at Lady Tamworth in perplexity. The same perplexity
+was stamped upon her face. "We are at cross-purposes, I think," he
+continued. "My rooms are close here. Let me give you some tea, and
+explain to you that you have no cause to blame yourself."
+
+Lady Tamworth assented with some relief. The speech had an odd
+civilised flavour which contrasted pleasantly with what she had
+imagined of his mode of life.
+
+They crossed the road and turned into a narrow side-street. Julian
+halted before a house of a slovenly exterior, and opened the door. A
+bare rickety staircase rose upwards from their feet. Fairholm closed
+the door behind Lady Tamworth, struck a match (for it was quite dark
+within this passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost
+floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second
+door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here
+and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a
+paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled
+in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his
+companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles
+on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp in the corner of the room. Lady
+Tamworth fancied that unawares she had slipped into fairyland;
+so great was the contrast between this retreat and the sordid
+surroundings amidst which it was perched. It was furnished with a
+dainty, and almost a feminine luxury. The room, she could see, was no
+more than an oblong garret; but along one side mouse-coloured curtains
+fell to the ground in folds from the angle where the sloping roof met
+the wall; on the other a cheerful fire glowed from a hearth of white
+tiles and a kettle sang merrily upon the hob. A broad couch, piled
+with silk cushions occupied the far end beneath the window, and the
+feet sank with a delicate pleasure into a thick velvety carpet. In the
+centre a small inlaid table of cedar wood held a silver tea-service.
+The candlesticks were of silver also, and cast in a light and
+fantastic fashion. The solitary discord was a black easel funereally
+draped.
+
+Julian prepared the tea, and talked while he prepared it. "It is this
+way," he began quietly. "You know what I have always believed; that
+the will was the man, his soul, his life, everything. Well, in the old
+days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to
+crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled
+design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious
+freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which
+made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during
+the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas
+were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death to me."
+
+Lady Tamworth stirred uneasily under a sense of guilt, and murmured
+a faint objection. Julian shook off the occupation of his theme and
+handed her some cake, and began again, standing over her with the cake
+in his hand, and to all seeming unconscious that there was a strain of
+cruelty in his words. "I found out what that meant. My emotions were
+mastering me, drowning the will in me. You see, I cared for you so
+much--then."
+
+A frank contempt stressing the last word cut into his hearer with the
+keenness of a knife. "You are unkind," she said weakly.
+
+"There's no reproach to you. I have got over it long ago," he replied
+cheerily. "And you showed me how to get over it; that's why I am
+grateful. For I began to wonder after that, why I, who had always been
+on my guard against the emotions, should become so thoroughly their
+slave. And at last I found out the reason; it was the work I was
+doing."
+
+"Your work?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Exactly! You remember what Plato remarked about the actor?"
+
+"How should I?" asked poor Lady Tamworth.
+
+"Well, he wouldn't have him in his ideal State because acting develops
+the emotions, the shifty unstable part of a man. But that's true of
+art as well; to do good work in art you must feel your work as an
+emotion. So I cut myself clear from it all. I furnished these rooms
+and came down here,--to live." And Julian drew a long breath, like a
+man escaped from danger.
+
+"But why come here?" Lady Tamworth urged. "You might have gone into
+the country--anywhere."
+
+"No, no, no!" he answered, setting down the cake and pacing about the
+room. "Wherever else I went, I must have formed new ties, created new
+duties. I didn't want that; one's feelings form the ties, one's
+soul pays the duties. No, London is the only place where a man can
+disappear. Besides I had to do something, and I chose this work,
+because it didn't touch me. I could throw it off the moment it was
+done. In the shop I earn the means to live; I live here."
+
+"But what kind of a life is it?" she asked in despair.
+
+"I will tell you," he replied, sinking his tone to an eager whisper;
+"but you mustn't repeat it, you must keep it a secret. When I am in
+this room alone at night, the walls widen and widen away until at last
+they vanish," and he nodded mysteriously at her. "The roof curls up
+like a roll of parchment, and I am left on an open platform."
+
+"What do you mean?" gasped Lady Tamworth.
+
+"Yes, on an open platform underneath the stars. And do you know,"
+he sank his voice yet lower, "I hear them at times; very faintly of
+course,--their songs have so far to travel; but I hear them,--yes, I
+hear the stars."
+
+Lady Tamworth rose in a whirl of alarm. Before this crazy exaltation,
+her very desire to pursue her purpose vanished. For Julian's manner
+even more than his words contributed to her fears. In spite of his
+homily, emotion was dominant in his expression, swaying his body,
+burning on his face and lighting his eyes with a fire of changing
+colours. And every note in his voice was struck within the scale of
+passion.
+
+She glanced about the room; her eyes fell on the easel. "Don't you
+ever paint?" she asked hurriedly.
+
+He dropped his head and stood shifting from one foot to the other, as
+if he was ashamed. "At times," he said hesitatingly; "at times I have
+to,--I can't help it,--I have to express myself. Look!" He stepped
+suddenly across the room and slid the curtains back along the rail.
+The wall was frescoed from floor to ceiling.
+
+"Julian!" Lady Tamworth cried. She forgot all her fears in face of
+this splendid revelation of his skill. Here was the fulfilment of his
+promise.
+
+In the centre four pictures were ranged, the stages in the progress of
+an allegory, but executed with such masterful craft and of so vivid an
+intention that they read their message straightway into the heart of
+one's understanding. Round about this group, were smaller sketches,
+miniatures of pure fancy. It seemed as if the artist had sought relief
+in painting these from the pressure of his chief design. Here, for
+instance, Day and Night were chasing one another through the rings of
+Saturn; there a swarm of silver stars was settling down through the
+darkness to the earth.
+
+"Julian, you must come back. You can't stay here."
+
+"I don't mean to stay here long. It is merely a halting-place."
+
+"But for how long?"
+
+"I have one more picture to complete."
+
+They turned again to the wall. Suddenly something caught Lady
+Tamworth's eye. She bent forward and examined the four pictures with
+a close scrutiny. Then she looked back again to Julian with a happy
+smile upon her face. "You have done these lately?"
+
+"Quite lately; they are the stages of a man's life, of the struggle
+between his passions and his will."
+
+He began to describe them. In the first picture a brutish god was
+seated on a throne of clay; before the god a man of coarse heavy
+features lay grovelling; but from his shoulders sprang a white figure,
+weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a
+spear; and underneath was written, "At last he knoweth what he made."
+In the second, the figure which grovelled and that which sprang from
+its shoulders were plodding along a high-road at night, chained
+together by the wrist. The white figure halted behind, the other
+pressed on; and underneath was written, "They know each other not." In
+the third the figures marched level, that which had grovelled scowling
+at its companion; but the white figure had grown tall and strong and
+watched its companion with contempt. Above the sky had brightened
+with the gleam of stars; and underneath was written, "They know each
+other." In the fourth, the white figure pressed on ahead and dragged
+the other by the chain impatiently. Before them the sun was rising
+over the edge of a heath and the road ran straight towards it in a
+golden line; and underneath was written, "He knoweth his burden."
+
+Lady Tamworth waited when he had finished, in a laughing expectancy.
+"And is that all?" she asked. "Is that all?"
+
+"No," he replied slowly; "there is yet a further stage. It is
+unfinished." And he pointed to the easel.
+
+"I don't mean that. Is that all you have to say of these?"
+
+"I think so. Yes."
+
+"Look at me!"
+
+Julian turned wonderingly to Lady Tamworth. She watched him with a
+dancing sparkle of her eyes. "Now look at the pictures!" Julian obeyed
+her. "Well," she said after a pause, with a touch of anxiety. "What do
+you see now?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" she asked. "Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes! What should I see?" She caught him by the arm and stared
+intently into his eyes in a horror of disbelief. He met her gaze with
+a frank astonishment. She dropped his arm and turned away.
+
+"What should I see?" he repeated.
+
+"Nothing," she echoed with a quivering sadness in her voice. "It is
+late, I must go."
+
+The white figure in each of those four pictures wore her face,
+idealised and illumined, but still unmistakably her face; and he did
+not know it, could not perceive it though she stood by his side! The
+futility of her errand was proved to her. She drew on her gloves and
+looking towards the easel inquired dully, "What stage is that?"
+
+"The last; and it is the last picture I shall paint. As soon as it is
+completed I shall leave here."
+
+"You will leave?" she asked, paying little heed to his words.
+
+"Yes! The experiment has not succeeded," and he waved a hand towards
+the wall. "I shall take better means next time."
+
+"How much remains to be done?" Lady Tamworth stepped over to the
+easel. With a quick spring Julian placed himself in front of it.
+
+"No!" he cried vehemently, raising a hand to warn her off. "No!"
+
+Lady Tamworth's curiosity began to reawaken. "You have shown me the
+rest."
+
+"I know; you had a right to see them."
+
+"Then why not that?"
+
+"I have told you," he said stubbornly. "It is not finished."
+
+"But when it is finished?" she insisted.
+
+Julian looked at her strangely. "Well, why not?" he said reasoning
+with himself. "Why not? It is the masterpiece."
+
+"You will let me know when it's ready?"
+
+"I will send it to you; for I shall leave here the day I finish it."
+
+They went down stairs and back into the Mile-End road. Julian hailed a
+passing hansom, and Lady Tamworth drove westwards to Berkeley Square.
+
+The fifth picture arrived a week later in the dusk of the afternoon.
+Lady Tamworth unpacked it herself with an odd foreboding.
+
+It represented an orchard glowing in the noontide sun. From the
+branches of a tree with lolling tongue and swollen twisted face swung
+the figure which had grovelled before the god. A broken chain dangled
+on its wrist, a few links of the chain lay on the grass beneath, and
+above the white figure winged and triumphant faded into the blue of
+the sky; and underneath was written, "He freeth himself from his
+burden."
+
+Lady Tamworth rushed to the bell and pealed loudly for her maid.
+"Quick!" she cried, "I am going out." But the shrill screech of a
+newsboy pierced into the room. With a cry she flung open the window.
+She could hear his voice plainly at the corner of the square. For a
+while she clung to the sash in a dumb sickness. Then she said quietly:
+"Never mind! I will not go out after all! I did not know I was so
+late."
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER STORIES***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 12859.txt or 12859.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/8/5/12859
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/old/12859.zip b/old/12859.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ac947b5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/12859.zip